ArtReview November 2024 by ArtReview

Sucked into the discourse since 1949

Critique

Francis Alÿs, Untitled (Study for ‘Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River’), 2006-2008. © Francis Alÿs:

Francis Alÿs

The Gibraltar Projects

David Zwirner

November 7–December 14, 2024 525 West 19th Street

HOWARDENA PINDELL

20 November 2024 – 8 January 2025

White Cube, 50 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong Howardena Pindell, Tesseract #17 (detail), 2024 © the artist. Courtesy White Cube and Garth Greenan Gallery

ArtReview vol 76 no 8 November 2024

Here endeth the lesson Recently someone was giving ArtReview a lecture about what art is supposed to do. ArtReview knows! There’s no need to say it! ArtReview is the one who does the lecturing! But that doesn’t stop every Thomasina, Dick and Harry it encounters from trying to tell it what it (and art) should be doing. At great length. ArtReview is surrounded by clowns! Clowns calling themselves experts! But fear not. At seventy-five years old ArtReview is practically deaf to all kinds of lectures in any case. OK, it will concede that that’s a choice rather than a decrepitude, but let’s keep that between us. So, the lecturer, who ArtReview could not hear, was banging on about how all art was politics and that the more central (for which they seemed, really, to mean the more obvious) the politics was to the art, the better the art was. The point seemed to be that abstract painters, for example, were fresh out of luck. Or, more simply, bad artists. And it didn’t stop there (otherwise it would have been a remark not a lecture, and ArtReview tends to hear remarks). The lecturer went on to say that the artworks (that were shown in commercial galleries or institutions – of the sort that are mainly focused on decolonising themselves these days, with exhibitions being an amusing sideline to, perhaps even light-relief from the main business of self-reflection and the avoidance of any meaningful action in the world of restitution) would have an actual, measurable political and civic effect. Say, on the current ‘situation’ (or genocide) in the Middle East. Or on the economic and social prospects of victims of various class systems worldwide, or those immersed in slavery and serfdom, or on those who were not free to speak their mind. There would be an effect, they insisted (ArtReview got the impression that they, on the other hand, viewed this bit as their ‘argument’), because the facts of these injustices would have been ‘aired’ in some way, that it would now be demonstrably part of the civic consciousness of… well…

Horror

art fairs, biennials and exhibitions people had to pay actual money to go and see. Not the people who were affected by any of these injustices or violences or bombs; but those in places with active art galleries or biennials. By which they meant, largely, places that were home to the global minority, the old-fashioned ‘West’. Or places to which people from those places could easily travel and stay in a nice hotel, venturing out occasionally to see some art about the ‘real’ world, rather than actually being a part of that world. The lecturer probably said something like that, but as ArtReview said earlier, it wasn’t really listening as a result of its advanced age and deafness. As it said earlier, ArtReview doesn’t really listen to lectures. Unless the lectures are by Pankaj Mishra (he’s an Indian essayist and novelist) or Arundhati Roy (she’s an Indian essayist and novelist), both of whom were in London (well, the former lives there) a few weeks ago to give lectures – during the same week as art people were hanging out in a tent in the centre of town celebrating ‘freedom of expression’ while being cajoled by gallerists to spend large sums of money on art that would help them get a ‘better’ perspective on the real world – that touched on the censorship and self-censorship, and general cowardice that stops people speaking out about the obvious iniquities of the world. Which made ArtReview think about the fact that both of the Indian essayists and writers had taken risks in the pursuit of what they deemed to be truths. Risks such as general cancellation, death threats and in the case of Roy, a real threat of imprisonment. Risks, ArtReview went on to think, that might not be present when it comes to putting on a show in a polite, ‘western’ art gallery. Which further led it to wonder about how many times an installation had stopped someone being bombed. And then how artists such as Hans Haacke had reminded art institutions to think carefully about where they trod. ArtReview

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Pam Evelyn, Mourning Greys (detail), 2024 © Pam Evelyn

Pam Evelyn

Frame of Mind

New York

pacegallery.com

Bruma M, Olga de Amaral, 2014. Photo © Diego Amaral Graphic Design © Agnès Dahan Studio

Art Observed

The Interview Harminder Judge by Finn Blythe 20

Identity Politics by Ilaria Maria Sala 30 Alt-Religion by Nathaniel Budzinski 33

The Endurance of Tableau Photography by Dorrell Merritt 29

Art Against Populism by J.J. Charlesworth 34

page 29 Jeff Wall, Boy falls from tree, 2010, lightjet print, 226 × 305 cm. © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube

Art Featured

Hans Haacke Interview by Liam Gillick 38

Saule Suleimenova by Tyler Coburn 54

Scott Burton by Jenny Wu 48

The Art Review: Case Studies by Gaby Cepeda, Oliver Basciano, Martin Herbert, Thu-Huong Ha 61

page 71 Google review of Shake Shack Shibuya, Tokyo

Art Reviewed

EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 76 PST ARt, by Jenny Wu Le’Andra LeSeur, by Zoë Hopkins Angelica Mesiti, by Naomi Riddle Manifesta 15, by Digby Warde-Aldam Gisele Vienne, by Emily May Marlene Smith, by Tendai John Mutambu Electric Op, by Charlotte Kent 17th Lyon Biennale, by Martin Herbert Energies, by Emeline Boehringer Hyeree Ro, by Emily Chun PST ARt, by Claudia Ross 15th Baltic Triennial, by Jennifer Teets Sophia Al-Maria & Lydia Ourhamane, by Madeleine Jacobs Alison Wilding, by Ella Nixon Udomsak Krisanamis, by Martin Herbert Apophenia, Interruptions: Artists and Artificial Intelligence at Work, by Clara Young Kenji Ide, by Sofia Hallström PST ARt, by Angella D’Avignon

The Spirit of Hope, by Byung-chul Han, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Book of games, by Carsten Höller, reviewed by Fi Churchman In Writing, by Hattie Crisell, reviewed by Orit Gat Set My Heart On Fire, by Izumi Suzuki, reviewed by Nirmala Devi The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power, by Amy Sall, reviewed by Sarah Jilani The Use of Photography, by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang comic by walter scott 110

pages 76 John Cooper, Planet City Spoils Mobile Architecture Platform, 2024 (workshop view), mixed-media installation. Courtesy SCI-Arc, Los Angeles

Amy Sherald, Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons) (detail), 2024, oil on linen, each panel: 128 × 68 × 2 ½ in © Amy Sherald.

Issue 11 on sale 2 November

Art Observed

Up 19

Photo: Sorina Reiber. Courtesy the artist and The Sunday Painter, London

ArtReview

The Interview by Finn Blythe

Harminder Judge

“Everything that exists has existed as matter since forever, and will continue existing as matter forever”

Harminder Judge had almost given up making art. Five years of wrestling with being a performance artist had taken a physical and emotional toll when he stumbled across the material that would redirect his career. The unexpected turning point came in 2014, when the British artist purchased a derelict house on the edge of the Peak District, close to his hometown of Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Over the next three years Judge set about rebuilding the house himself (aided by the occasional YouTube tutorial), inadvertently amassing a wealth of material knowledge. In plastering, he experienced something like a revelation: a sculptural material that he could use like a painter. Its viscous physicality – together with repetitive, rhythmic application – offered, he found, a form of cathartic meditation. Channelling the knowledge he’d accrued via building, Judge developed a highly technical

artistic process. Mixing layers of pigment and wet plaster, he casts energetic abstract compositions that fuse the dynamism of lyrical abstraction with the spontaneous and improvisational gestures of Abstract Expressionism. The resulting works appear to erupt from a central fissure into nebulous forms that evoke both granular and planetary scales. Through their symmetrical alignment and strong meditative qualities, meanwhile, Judge also references elements of neo-tantric art, a movement conceived in India during the 1960s that combines ancient tantric diagrams – used to facilitate a union between the individual and the cosmos – with contemporary abstraction. Following shows at Galerie PCP in Paris in 2021, Pace in New York in 2023 and, earlier this year, a dual exhibition across Matt’s Gallery and The Sunday Painter in London, Judge is now preparing for his first major institutional

November 2024

show, which opens in January at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Meanwhile, his current exhibition, Cliff and Cleft, at Gathering, Ibiza, presents a series of his cast-panel works alongside two sculptures. Untitled (rock risen cleft) (2024) is vertical and totemic, reminiscent of a giant body or tree; Untitled (rock risen cleft cliff ) (2024), which covers a 7 × 5 m area of the gallery’s floorspace, is like a primordial slab of rock hewn from deep within the Earth’s crust. Judge’s wall-based works here, produced either as small-scale tablets or imposing diptychs, are exquisite feats of alchemy that transform everyday construction materials into something equally elemental. Their glossy, highly polished surfaces seething with colour and movement suggest a passage between liminal realms of consciousness, inviting viewers to access transcendental, cosmic energies.

A Self-Sustaining Practice ArtReview How did you develop the technical aspect of your work? Harminder Judge I wanted a self-sustaining practice after leaving art school, having relied so heavily on the institution in the past [for funding]. So I only wanted to use my own tools, things I accumulated rebuilding the house: sanders, mixers, drills, big flexi-buckets, roofing sheets. I knew my limitations, not wanting to make things too unwieldy, so that I could work without anyone else or any expensive machinery. Within those parameters, I basically just messed around with plaster for a year and a half until these works arose out of studio play. And then eventually, things emerged that had a really strong aesthetic value; I could look at them and be quite entranced. The thing I love about neo-tantric works is that they’re not really paintings – they masquerade as paintings, but they’re actually more diagrammatic and schematic. They’re aids to meditation, you

make one so you can look at it while you meditate. I talk a lot about portals; you don’t look at a work, you look through it, to think about meaning or the ineffable. So when that started to happen, I thought, ‘there might be a practice here’. AR A work like Untitled (fluted opening) (2024), recalls the natural form of a waterfall or cyclone but still feels firmly rooted in abstraction. What’s the process for making your two-panel works? HJ I start with a big, flat casting-surface of polypropylene plastic on top of a roofing sheet. I’ll build a clay wall around the edges, which stops the plaster just pouring everywhere, and then I mix buckets of plaster with polymer to give it strength, and cement pigments, which have a very high pigment content, to give it a really strong, saturated colour. Sometimes I’ll make separate buckets of pigments that are ready to go. I’ll mix in some retarder which buys me about 40 minutes, and pour all of those buckets into what are essentially massive moulds. I then lift those moulds, move them,

Untitled (story XXX), 2024, plaster, polymer, pigment, scrim, oil, 24 × 23 × 4 cm. Photo: Blythe Thea Williams. Courtesy Gathering, Ibiza & London

ArtReview

jerk them around, and everything I do on one panel, I immediately mirror on the other to achieve some sort of symmetry. After that first layer sets, I add consecutive layers of scrim and plaster to give it strength. Once they’re fully dry, I can put the panels together to see what kind of compositional harmony has been achieved out of this chaotic process. When they really work, they tell me. When they don’t, I break the plaster down, put it into a big pestle and mortar, smash it into aggregate and then throw that into the next work. All the little specks and dots are several failed works making their way into a new one. So it’s cyclical. When they’re sanded and polished, that surface almost disappears and suddenly they become slightly less tangible as objects; they start to become portals. So as soon as you can look into them, you’re drawn into them. Painting, as it’s understood by the majority of people, is the application of something onto something else, whereas these are really much more like sculptures. Everything is contained within the material itself.

Untitled ( fluted opening), 2024, plaster, polymer, pigment, scrim, oil, 235 × 226 × 4 cm. Photo: Blythe Thea Williams. Courtesy Gathering, Ibiza & London

November 2024

Untitled (bended rib), 2024, plaster, polymer, pigment, scrim, oil, 203 × 198 × 4 cm (consisting of 200 × 100 × 4 cm panels). Photo: Blythe Thea Williams. Courtesy Gathering, Ibiza & London

Untitled (crept upon leg), 2024, plaster, polymer, pigment, scrim, oil 203 × 198 × 4 cm. Photo: Blythe Thea. Courtesy Gathering, Ibiza & London

Psychedelic Funeral AR Clearly, this is a process that embraces chance and uncertainty. Is there any part of it that’s planned? And if so, do those plans come from emotion or memory? HJ Some things are very planned, in the sense that the things I’m thinking about tend to underpin my entire practice. One of the defining moments of my life was taking part in my great uncle’s funeral in India when I was fourteen. I travelled to a small village in Punjab where a lot of my family still live, and we collected my granddad’s body from a morgue and took him back in a taxi with us. I was holding his legs, which I remember being a strange relief against the stifling heat outside because he was so frozen. We stripped his body, washed him, combed his hair, dressed him in his best clothes and tied his turban. Then we carried his body around the village so that everyone who knew him could see him, and then to our family’s farm, where we built a funeral pyre. My dad and I tended his body throughout the night, which was one of the most psychedelic, trippy,

incredible experiences I’ve ever had underneath the night sky. In the morning, we collected his ashes, his bone fragments, jewellery and teeth. So when I talk about ideas of material becoming immaterial, I’m essentially talking about that. Conceptually, that’s what underpins not only my work but how I see the universe: the fact that everything that exists has existed as matter since forever, and will continue existing as matter forever. But because I work with plaster, I have to work very quickly, in quite an intuitive, fastpaced, emotional way. So it’s quite childlike, quite naive and playful. The forms you see in the panel works come from agitating the material while it’s on the surface, and I can only approximate through movement what I’m trying to achieve in my head, so I have to feel my way there.

The Interesting Thing About Sculpture AR Do you conceive of the panel works as two-dimensional surfaces, or, because of their depth and multiple layers of material, as three-dimensional objects?

Harminder Judge: Cliff and Cleft, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Blythe Thea Williams. Courtesy Gathering, Ibiza & London

ArtReview

HJ I definitely think about them as threedimensional objects. I think about all the depth in that plaster and colour. That’s why I was so eager to start making sculpture. I found it really hard for two, three years, but the interesting thing about the sculptures is that they’re made from exactly the same material as the wall works and yet they project themselves in a very different way, and I think that’s really alchemical. AR There’s a big contrast in scale in this show, as there was at your two-site exhibition at Matt’s Gallery and The Sunday Painter earlier this year. You spoke about the slightly frantic adrenaline that accompanies the making of the larger works due to the concrete’s setting time – do the smaller works feel like you’re using a different set of muscles? HJ I think a lot about the micro/macro, it’s in all my work, really. When I was collecting those ashes, I wasn’t only thinking about how that body had been shrunk down into this handful of material, but about how those materials are essentially particles that make

up absolutely everything, the grand and the minuscule. And I think when the work is successful, the larger works can feel allencompassing, or very small in terms of their composition, and the small works can look massive. You’re not sure if you’re looking at an enormous event or a cell in a body. It can slip between scales. There’s a nice performance element about scale that can either pull the viewer closer or push them further away. AR The sculpture you’ve made for this show feels like an extension of A ghost dance (lifted out), (2024), which you presented at Matt’s Gallery and which resembled a tree-stump or elephant’s leg. Untitled (rock risen cleft) feels equally totemic and anthropomorphic – is it a continuation of the same thread? HJ That’s only my third sculpture, so it’s a very early thread. But I’m enjoying thinking a bit more about their form and the physicality because I have a bit more control over them, they have less of the chaotic element that the panel works have. I’ve been thinking about

their shape, because the shapes in really good abstraction or tantric painting always have some reference to the body. And in the neo-tantric works, those abstract forms are nearly always the deconstructed body in the cosmos. So with the sculptures, I’m thinking a lot about the forms that are in the wall-hung works. AR Tantric art represents a vast iconographic lexicon, but I was interested to hear more about your personal relationship to it as a British Sikh and how it shapes your work. HJ I’m not necessarily someone who has a tantric practice, but what I really enjoy about tantra is that it’s huge and sprawling and nebulous and tricky to define. What’s interesting about it is that it’s always based within your body – this idea of the divine feminine and masculine residing in everybody and everything and that duality within it, dividing the world into two halves of the same thing. And then, of course, I love the neo-tantric painters. I think that’s some of the best painting that’s ever been made, but I find an equal amount of spiritual

and aesthetic fulfilment in the work of Agnes Pelton as I do in that by Mark Rothko. I don’t see a huge divide between them. AR Your work embraces spirituality as well as tantric traditions. I read you talking about how these alternative belief systems can offer a counterpoint to conservative, reactionary politics. Could you expand on what you meant? HJ I think that’s why a lot of creative beings are returning to alternative bodies of knowledge, because there’s rebellion in tantra and witchcraft that is somehow counter to what happens when deeply divisive populist ideas take hold. When I was first making art, it was difficult to address this stuff. The artworld was in a very different place, people didn’t really want to talk about the soul or love or spirituality. But because the world is kind of fucked at the moment and people are sick of it, artists have come back to it in a big way. Cliff and Cleft is on view at Gathering, Ibiza, through 22 December

Untitled (story XXXI), 2024, plaster, polymer, pigment, scrim, oil, 24 x 23 × 4 cm. Photo: Blythe Thea Williams. Courtesy Gathering, Ibiza & London

November 2024

It was while sitting in the waiting area of a now-closed branch of NatWest bank in Wembley Park that I discovered the works of Canadian photography pioneer Jeff Wall. I was reading Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2004). Images such as Insomnia (1994) are hard to forget, distressing and impressing in equal measure: a man lies down on a kitchen floor in a quasi-foetal position in the dead of night, slumped underneath a dining table, the kitchen’s imposing teal cabinets illuminated by a stark overhead light. It’s a definitive image within Wall’s oeuvre: one with which to begin examining his work, while also questioning what exactly a photograph can, or should, be. With an exhibition of Wall’s work at London’s White Cube fast approaching, marking 30 years of the artist and gallery working together, it’s worth reflecting on the place of staged, or tableau photography within the context of contemporary art. Despite its popularity between the 1980s and 2000s by way of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Justine Kurland, Sam TaylorJohnson, Sarah Dobai and Wall himself, and with a modest resurgence in the last decade – the stylistic approach has largely remained in the shadow of styles rooted in documentary traditions. In an age where the success of an image is dependent on its immediate ability to compel, entertain, and its capacity to be shared (all the while being subjected to algorithms and now, in some cases, AI), it seems about time to question the relevance of a photographic genre anchored to imitation and designed for the archaic confines of the gallery wall. Despite my reverence for the genre, its flaws are not lost on me. Tableau photography gratuitously deceives by way of an already dishonest medium, mocking the famed ‘decisive moment’ – the visual climax of an observed scene’s action – in the name of creative expression. Grandiosely preconceived images – products of cable-shutter releases, ambitious lighting, makeup artists and location scouts – seek to imitate what is earned by the mastery of documentarians. They are conveniently conjured images, by way of mood boards, popular culture references, sociopolitical stances and ideologies – the list goes on. It would be reasonable to call them faddish, overly sentimental, aesthetic-heavy, and far

Staged Reality

Does tableau photography deserve to survive? asks Dorrell Merritt

too often they siphon hackneyed traits from art history movements (Impressionism and the Pre-Raphaelites to name but two). You only have to look to the use of Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52) as a reference for British artist Tom Hunter’s The Way Home (2000) alongside American Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (2001) to eyeroll at the narrowness of source material; or, seeing Hannah Starkey’s Untitled – May 1997 images alongside Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women (both 1997), to cringe at the outdated use of mirrors as plot devices, or female vanity as entertainment, in spite of their modern, subversive intentions. This doesn’t even consider the genre’s reliance on the gallery to accommodate the sheer scale of these stylistically typical images, printed at colossal dimensions simply to make the otherwise mundane seem like Jeff Wall, Insomnia, 1994, transparency in lightbox, 172 × 214 cm. © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube

November 2024

a remotely remarkable spectacle. When compared with other genres such as fashion, portraiture, documentary or still-life – genres primed for the digital age, occasionally derivative in their own respects, but easily digestible and arresting in their directness and ability to entertain – the tableau image can often feel rightfully ready to be consigned to the history books. Yet the genre’s redeeming qualities outweigh its shortcomings. It permits artists to give pause, offering a contemplative space beyond the constraints of the fleeting snapshot, in which the nature of ideas and aesthetics can be explored without the fanfare, frills or formality of other genres. Within the tableau image, the subject needn’t confront the camera; the artist needn’t frantically snap away, in the hope of capturing the one. Consider Deutsche Börse recipient Mohamed Bourouissa’s Périphérique series (2005–08) for example, in which the artist portrays his suburban Parisian community – loitering, conversing, passing time – in compositions reminiscent of history paintings but set in housing estates, thus presenting an alternative narrative of marginalised people through visual codes usually reserved for bourgeois, high-brow art; or Yinka Shonibare’s five compositions in Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), in which the boundaries of history, race and privilege are blurred by way of a fictionalised character, challenging the place of blackness within Victorian society. In using the tableau image to navigate complex, divisive and often uncomfortable issues, an artist beholds the image’s potential to mimic, instil change, educate, and to challenge the parameters set in the objective world; to reimagine and rewrite, with modern takes on the genre by British artist Juno Calypso and Norwegian Tobjorn Rødland doing just that. “If it survives, it’ll be because people want it to,” said Wall, when I asked him back in 2020 about the future of his genre, and given the increasing renewed interest, he may just be right. At its core, the tableau image – one ever-adapting and still enthralling – is one whose popularity may ebb and flow, but whose tenacity, appeal and boundless potential has earned its right to as much respect as its contemporaries. Dorrell Merritt is an artist, writer and publisher based in London

The whole of China has been busy for months with the celebrations, on 1 October, of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and Hong Kong has been no exception. What with the numerous red flags decorating the city, the fireworks, various events and special discounts on the day of the anniversary itself, the Hong Kong government has been setting the scene for months. The August opening of the National Security Exhibition Gallery inside the Museum of History (where the Permanent Exhibition is still under renovation) is a case in point. The gallery greets visitors with a large slogan that reads: ‘National Security is the bedrock of national rejuvenation. Social stability is a prerequisite for building a strong and prosperous China.’ Nearby, at the Science Museum, an exhibition titled Glorious Voyage: Splendid Achievements of the People’s Republic of China in Its 75 Years opened just in time for the anniversary celebrations, with sections like ‘Leapfrog Development’, ‘Scientific Breakthroughs’ and ‘Era of Intelligence’ that showcase ‘the patriotic spirit and steadfast beliefs of Chinese scientists, while emphasising the brilliant accomplishments and key technological breakthroughs of the new China’. The language on display is still unusual for Hong Kong, even four years after the passing of the National Security Law (introduced at the end of June 2020). To quote just a few examples: ‘Over the splendid 75 years

Identity Politics

As Hong Kong gets swept up in anniversary celebrations for the People’s Republic of China, Ilaria Maria Sala reports on ‘good days, awkward days’ in museum and gallery programming

ongoing attempt to make Hong Kong people identify more with the mainland, and also feel more pride in its achievements. Other institutions around town are not as explicitly patriotic, but the main shows that can be visited at the moment tend to prioritise artists with strong links to the Chinese mainland: at M+ there is the inaugural museum retrospective of Guo Pei, China’s first haute couture designer, titled Fashioning Imagination, with some of her most famous creations, including the yellow dress that Rihanna wore at the Met Gala in 2015. In the gallery next

to this is Life is Architecture, an exhibition celebrating seven decades of I.M. Pei’s architecture – although Pei was international, and M+ does highlight that. The nearby Palace Museum has inaugurated a 110-object exhibition titled The Origins of Chinese Civilization, a major archaeological exhibition of ancient artefacts from 14 different sites in order to explore ‘the origins and development of Chinese civilisation’. Tai Kwun Contemporary too is showcasing a solo exhibition of a mainland artist,

since the establishment of new China, the nation’s technological endeavours have leaped from non-existence to global prominence,’ it says. The exhibition glorifies a place that is most commonly linked with the Cultural Revolution and its push for heroic industrial advances, the Daqing Oil Field. ‘A Chip-driven Patriotic Heart’, the last part of the exhibition, on the other hand, ‘focuses on the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors’. These highly institutional shows are part of an

top View of the I.M. Pei-designed Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation Centre, Singapore, in a c. 1976 photo from Hong Kong’s M+ exhibition on the Chinese-American architect. © BEP Akitek above Glorious Voyage: Splendid Achievements of the People’s Republic of China in Its 75 Years, 2024 (installation view, Science Museum, Hong Kong) right An object from the 2024 exhibition The Origins of Chinese Civilization, Palace Museum, Hong Kong

ArtReview

Tao Hui (although no patriotic overtones are to be detected in his rather gloomy vision of contemporary alienation). While all this is ongoing, the local ecosystem has been evolving too, getting more opulent thanks to the opening of the glitzy new Asia Pacific headquarters of Christie’s, now occupying four floors of Zaha Hadid Architects’ latest building, The Henderson. Not far away, at the Landmark Chater, is the new Sotheby’s Maison, designed by MVRDV, with two floors dedicated to rotating exhibitions of pieces from all eras and places – from Banksy’s shredded Girl Without Balloon (2021) to Korean ceramics and prehistoric fossils, to ancient European and Chinese furniture. Both these grand openings are meant to tap into the Chinese collectors’ market and, to some extent, the regional one, in spite of lacklustre sales due to a slowing economy. And while local blue-chip galleries continue with variegated offerings, bringing to Hong Kong international artists like Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (on show at David Zwirner) or Lee Jin Woo (recently exhibited at White Cube), the work of local artists on display elsewhere is stubbornly concentrated on Hong Kong itself, exploring all the possible variations of memory, nostalgia and celebrations of the

city’s uniqueness. Yeung Hok Tak, whose See You There at Kiang Malingue is a solo show of 19 acrylic paintings with street scenes of Hong Kong (pastiches of real and invented landscapes) and cartoonlike portraits of imaginary characters, explains that this obsession with Hong

Kong itself “is a way to cherish our beloved city. Our good days, and our awkward days.” Other established artists, like Chow Chun Fai, are exploring this same theme. His acrylic

top Chow Chun Fai, As Tears Go By 1988 at Mahjong School Portland Street, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 166 × 200 cm. Courtesy Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong

paintings mix past and present street scenes – in a place constantly reshaped by demolition and new construction – adding, in his two most recent shows at Tang Contemporary Art, movie stars picked from the most beloved and successful Hong Kong movies. By reimagining cinematic moments engraved in most Hongkonger’s imaginations in different settings, from iconic movies such as A Better Tomorrow (1986), Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) or Infernal Affairs (2002), he creates new stories, like new possibilities, in a city that is still trying to gauge its new reality. These are mostly very large pieces in a bright, slightly acidic palette that recalls the ubiquitous neon signs that used to illuminate Hong Kong, and have now been mostly taken down due to new city regulations. Debe Sham, a multimedia artist who has recently been recreating traditional Hong Kong toys – such as little whistles that used to be found in laundry powder, windmills and the type of seesaw that is common in local housing estates – with soldered metal, explains to me that the rules of any game “are restrictions, of course, yet they force our creativity to develop in spite of them, so it can be an interesting exercise”. Read in this what you will. In many artists’ work, anything too overtly political is better left out entirely, or just hinted at for those who get it. “Everything political that you see in my paintings”, says an artist who requested anonymity, “is what you are seeing. You are free to decide if it is there or not.”

above Yeung Hok Tak, Junior Lion Dancing Club, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 76 × 61 cm. Courtesy Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong

Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer and journalist based in Hong Kong

November 2024

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25/10/2024 17:43

“Place your forehead against the tree’s trunk… If the tree wants to interact intimately with you, then ask for consent…” I’m sitting on a bench in Roskilde Hospital’s Sankt Hans Gardens, looking out over the fjord that bounds the small Danish city’s eastern edges. The sun is high and a mild late-summer breeze rustles the woods behind me. Looping on speakers hidden in those trees is Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens and Dann Disciglio’s We Love You Forest (2024): a collaborative, three-part, ten-minute sound work, an arboreal erotics of whispers, moans and giggles. The part I’m listening to is titled ‘How To Make Love To Trees’, an instruction manual of sorts, and the most recent iteration of Sprinkle and Stephens’s ongoing ‘Eco-sex Movement’ project (2008–). We Love You Forest is part of I mørket beder vi solen huske os (In the Darkness, We Ask the Sun to Remember Us), a group exhibition organised by Roskilde’s Museet for Samtidskunst that installs works by 13 artists around the psychiatric hospital’s sprawling gardens. Running from late summer until the winter solstice on 21 December, the show plays with ideas of nature, seasonal transformation and cycles. Maria Finn and Jacob Kamp’s Miracle (after Josef Frank) (2017/24) consists of a tendrillike shape formed by leaving an area of unmown grass to grow from one of the garden’s lawns, allowing it to change with the weather: flattened by rain one day, sun-baked another. Elsewhere, Johanne Hestvold’s sculpture made from a fungi-based composite, Isolation (The Humble Administrator’s Garden) (2021), has already started to decompose into the flowerbed where it was placed a month previous. If you’ve experienced a dark, bone-chilling Danish winter, you might find the exhibition title especially meaningful. It comes from a section in Heksens håndbog (Witch’s Handbook), a 1987 publication by the late self-proclaimed witch Dannie Druehyld. “Most Danish teenage girls in the 1990s would have read this book, or at least heard of it,” the show’s curator, Lotte Løvholm, tells me. In the book, Druehyld, a founder of the 1970s økofeministerne (eco-feminist) movement in Denmark, described her rituals and lifestyle as she tried to live in tandem with nature and its cycles as a practising witch. Heksens håndbog remains in print, and In the Darkness… is just the latest in a number of recent Danish exhibitions and projects looking at the country’s pagan history. In Ribe, in the southwest, there’s the recently opened (and seemingly family-friendly) HEX! Museum of Witch Hunt. In Copenhagen, Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s 2021 group exhibition, Witch Hunt, reassessed

Alt-Religion

Is it the season of the witch? In the face of ‘polycrises’, Nathaniel Budzinski considers whether the cultural turn towards the pagan and the occult is really just escapism

from top Tabita Rezaire & Yussef Agbo-Ola, IKUM – Drying Temple, 2022; Sidsel Bonde, Grødegejster, agerånder (installation view, In the Darkness, We Ask the Sun to Remember Us, 2024), 2022. Photo: Brian Kure / GRAYSC. Courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde

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sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Nordic witchcraft through contemporary art. Beyond obvious ties to 1960s and 70s folklore revivalism and the concurrent ‘Earth Goddess’ strand of second-wave feminism, In the Darkness uses the writings of feminist theorist Silvia Federici – especially Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018) and Caliban and the Witch (2004) – as a critical backdrop, looking at witchhood in terms of “women who were too radical to fit into society”, as Løvholm describes it. All of this, in turn, is part of a broader, international revisiting of pre-Christian and alternative religious traditions: 2023’s The Occult in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections in Madrid and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s 2022 Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity in Venice are just a couple among numerous international exhibitions, conferences and artist-run initiatives in recent years. It’s a cluttered grab-bag of intentions and ideas. But this alt-religious tendency is also a widespread counternarrative to the catastrophist ‘polycrisis’ narrative of climate change, war and chaos – a story so complex it’s disempowering. Back in Roskilde, I walk through Tabita Rezaire and Yussef Agbo-Ola’s IKUM – Drying Temple (2022), a long, tentlike structure of colourful textiles stretched over a wooden frame, like psychedelic animal hides set out to dry. Little loops in the fabric allow visitors to affix bouquets of the weeds and wildflowers that grow around the prospective temple. The dead and drying plants will hang there until winter – whimsical reminders that everything works in cycles; some biological, some cultural. In the Darkness feels fleeting as a Scandinavian summer. But in a broader context, there’s escapism too in all this back-to-nature rhetoric; as if moving to some remote forest to escape modern society (which Druehyld did) and playing witch means anything beyond hiding from the maws of our progress-obsessed world. I put this to Løvholm and she returns to Druehyld: “I think it’s important not to overdefine the whole narrative of what it means to be a witch… It’s maybe a silly example, but I heard from one of Danni’s friends that she used to drink a tonne of Pepsi Max… I don’t think she thought she was escaping. She created a different way of living in the world, for herself.” Beverage preferences aside, I’m sceptical of this individualism and how it quickly becomes selfregarding and holier-than-thou. But we clearly need new ways to live in our world; and, in that regard, this current cycle of alt-religious revivalism doesn’t lack for novel ideas. Nathaniel Budzinski is a writer based in Copenhagen

Peering down from the womenswear floor into the atrium of the opulent Graz department store Kastner & Öhler, our tour group sees, in the basement, glimpsed between the escalators, a hardy woodcutter, in stout boots and waistcoat, chopping logs. His axe rings out from the depths, while mountain birdsong and the sound of running streams tinkle via the in-store PA. As we climb each floor, in the menswear, two older men in traditional Styrian hunting garb, rifles poised, are stalking cautiously through the stacked accessories. As we are ushered past them by our guide, a fresh-faced young woman in a feathered hat, with knapsack and hiking gear strides by, on her way to the lederhosen section ahead. This satirical vision of a bucolic, traditionalist Austria, spliced into contemporary Austria’s wealthy (but anxious) present, was Thomas Verstraeten’s performance Wanderlust Warenhaus (2024). It was emblematic of this year’s edition of Steirischer Herbst, Graz’s long-running annual arts festival, this year ominously titled Horror Patriae. Conflating the Latin for ‘homeland’ with ‘horror vacui’ – ‘fear of emptiness’ – the festival, centred on a major exhibition at the Neue Galerie Graz, sought to examine the ‘darker side of patriotism’, and, as chief curator Ekaterina Degot

Art against populism

It’s time for largescale exhibitions to address the realities of general audiences, says J.J. Charlesworth, rather than catering to the interests of the curatorial class

Thomas Verstraeten, Wanderlust Warenhaus, 2024, performance (rehearsal). Photo: Johanna Lamprecht. Courtesy Steirischer Herbst, Graz

ArtReview

declares in her curatorial introduction, ‘to expose the constructed, artificial character of any national identity’. With this edition, Degot writes, ‘steirischer herbst turns against the normalized mild xenophobia celebrated in the form of roots and traditions,’ while asserting that ‘migration, exile, displacement, dissidence and nonbelonging are cornerstones of human society.’ Degot’s formula for the festival (it started in 1968, she took over in 2018) has been notable for its political responsiveness to current events, chafing against the rise of nationalism in Europe and beyond. (Her first edition was provocatively titled Volksfronten, while in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2022 took A War in the Distance as its theme.) It’s an approach that doesn’t shy away from using the art exhibition as polemical tool. Horror Patriae’s autumn timing meant that it opened ten days before Austria’s legislative elections, in which the rightwing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), got the most votes. A party founded in the 1950s by former Nazis, in 2024 the fpö has been campaigning for curbs on immigration and asylum seekers, as well as pledging to cut taxes on small businesses and scrap environmental levies. Its manifesto was titled Fortress Austria: Fortress of Freedom. So, Horror Patriae was a conscious rebuff to another rightward shift in Austrian politics, but rather than a direct address to contemporary populism, its curatorial approach sought to analyse and dismantle what it saw as the historical roots of a politics often couched in ideas of cultural identity. Historical works that embodied Austrian culture’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fascination with folk culture, the notion of ‘Heimat’ and ideologies of a ‘greater German’ culture, found themselves alongside contemporary works that continually probed the construction of national and nationalist identity. Austrian and Styrian identity, it suggested, was always an evolving creation subject to the political demands of each historical moment: from the grandiose epoch of nineteenth-century nation-building and the end of Austro-Hungarian Empire through to the volkish alignment with Nazi ideas of Germanic culture and the tainted retention of prewar folkloric ideals in the postwar period. That national identities might be ‘confected’ was made literal in Pablo Bronstein’s fantastical confectionary architectural model, a galleryfilling, fantasy museum of disparate historical architectural styles – neoclassical, German Baroque and twenty-first century high-tech. For many of the contemporary works here, the very notion of identity was suspect, an issue entertainingly distilled in Jakub Jansa’s zany video Pumpkinville (2024), depicting a bizarrely

synthetic world inhabited by vegetable-based humanoids and its protagonist Celeriac, a sort of root-vegetable private detective. Celeriac’s investigations satirise contemporary culture’s demand for authentic experience, where individualism and wellness culture intersect with reality TV and atavistic ideas of cultural roots. As Celeriac tails the naïve reality-show celebrity Pumpkin (pumpkins are a big deal in Styria), he concludes that desires for authentic identity are merely the delusion of a commodified culture, nothing more than a vast manipulation by the shadowy forces of globalism and neoliberalism. But although there’s a truth to the argument that national identities are never really the eternal embodiments of an unchanging and rooted ‘people’, Horror Patriae struggled to get beyond the dismissive idea that all national identities are in some way fictive, lacking the authenticity claimed by their adherents. It’s easy to dismiss cultural and national identities as a delusion, but deconstructing the idea of identity as such, into a state of endless hybridity, difference and nonbelonging doesn’t replace it with anything more secure. Such deconstructive views of identity tend to miss the point of how recent identitarian politics aren’t simply backward-looking

fictions but become the forms through which are expressed real divisions and conflicts within and between societies. ‘Identity’ reflects people’s political realities – whether they are people living in the countries of their birth, or migrants far from home, a question with which Horror Patriae had trouble addressing. There were, after all, eloquent works that spoke to the difficulty of the migrant ever really finding their way ‘home’, particularly

top Assaf Gruber, Miraculous Accident (still), 2024, 4K video, b&w, sound, 30 min. Courtesy the artist above Jakub Jansa, Pumpkinville (Club of Opportunities, Episode 9) (detail), 2024, video installation. Courtesy the artist

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poignantly evoked in Assaf Gruber’s subtle and moving film Miraculous Accident (2024), a semifictional story about a Moroccan student, Nadir, who attends a film academy in 1960s Communist Poland and is taught by – and becomes the lover of – a Jewish film professor, Edyta. Switching between past and present, it follows their subsequent separate lives, post-1968, in lonely, disconsolate exile. Here, belonging isn’t a fiction, but something lost, yearned for – and irretrievable. As I walked to Kastner & Öhler – a store founded by Austrian Jews in 1873 and whose descendants fled the Nazis in 1939, following the Nazi annexation of Austria the year before – Graz’s main square was taken up by a large pro-Palestine protest. Identities may be constructed, but they are latched to political realities. In Austria and elsewhere in Europe, voters are siding with parties that have sensed their anxieties about the gradual disintegration of their communities, jobs, public services and economies, while established political parties, often of the centre and left, seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it. As a consequence, secure ideas of collective ‘identity’ are coming apart, while the backlash is often felt by immigrant communities. On this, however, Horror Patriae had little to say, preferring to cling to a sort of abstract morality tale in which everything national, local and rooted is bad – poking fun at the supposed backwardness and absurdity of Styrian traditionalism – while everything hybrid, migratory and ‘nonbelonging’ was good. Discovering in current political frustrations only the zombielike revival of earlier histories of nationalist sentiment may make sense from the point of view of the increasingly internationalised and cosmopolitan culture of curators and artists. But attacking the cultural symptoms of what are more profound social and economic dislocations does little to make sense of the political realities of people – whether they are arriving migrants or people living in the countries of their birth. That kind of art has little to say to other people who, whether they’ve been here for generations, or just arrived, might still need to work out how to live together, and figure out whether living in common together – in something that might be a ‘homeland’ – can ever be possible.

Calida Rawles, Thy Name We Praise, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin. © Calida Rawles

powering the world of art

Art is honor

Miami Beach Convention Center December 6 - 8, 2024

Art Featured

To 37

In Conversation Hans Haacke and Liam Gillick

above Sky Line, 1967, C-print on aluminium, 152 × 100 cm, edition 1/3. © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York facing page, top Photographic Notes, documenta 2, 1959, 26 b/w photographs selection, 17 × 25 cm each, edition 2/3. © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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Born in Cologne just before the Second World War, Hans Haacke has created works of unparalleled clarity that repeatedly remind us of the continual fight to preserve memory while exposing the social and political substructures of the cultural superstructure of the present. Making use of sculpture, photography and written documentation, his installations have long addressed issues of ecology and institutional frameworks. In 1959 Haacke worked as an installer and invigilator at II. documenta, the second edition of the documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany. In 2020 it was established that at least ten of the first documenta’s 21 organisers had been Nazis, and Werner Haftmann, who co-directed II. documenta, had been a member of the Nazi paramilitary Sturmabteilung group. The retrospective of Haacke’s work at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurtam-Main (that travels to the Belvedere in Vienna in 2025) includes the photographs that the then twenty-three-year-old Haacke took at documenta between July and October 1959 – capturing visitors encountering the new international art on display. By photographing the visitors Haacke unwittingly gives us insight into the context of the recent revelations. It’s a gesture of socio-political observation within the cultural field that can be traced through his work from those early years to the present. Liam Gillick I went to see your 2019 exhibition, All Connected, at the New Museum in New York a number of times. I think it needed to be seen quite

a few times: there were so many layers and so many shifts in the work. Do the new exhibitions take a starting point from that one? Hans Haacke The new exhibitions are a retrospective too. But different to the New Museum. There will be many works that I have produced in Germany over the years [that were not on show in New York]. LG I first came across your work when I was living in England and still a teenager. Your project A Breed Apart (1978) referred to Leyland cars and trucks, and exposed the relationship between British vehicle production and the system of apartheid in South Africa.

Large Condensation Cube (detail), 1963–67, clear acrylic, distilled water and climate in area of display, 76 × 76 × 76 cm. Photo: Dario Lasagni. © the artist / ARS, New York / DACS, London 2024. Courtesy the artist and New Museum, New York

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This had a very direct effect on me and was one of the reasons I joined the nightly vigil outside South Africa House. A little later in life I saw a small version of your Condensation Cube (1963–67) at [art collector] Jack Wendler’s house in London – and it has always fascinated me that the same person could make these two works. HH I remember Jack; I visited him a few times in London. But I already knew him from before that time, when he was living in New York. I filled some water into transparent plastic containers of simple stereometric shapes and sealed them ... After a day, a dense blanket of clearly distinguishable drops has formed, all of which reflect light. As the condensation progresses, individual drops reach such a size that their weight overcomes the adhesive forces and they run down the wall, leaving a trace. This trace begins to grow over again. After weeks, a diverse juxtaposition of tracks has formed, each of which has a different droplet size according to its age. The condensation process never ends. The conditions are comparable to a living organism that reacts flexibly to its environment. The constellation of the drops cannot be predicted exactly. Within static limits, it changes freely. I love this freedom. Hans Haacke, speaking in 1965 on his Condensation Cube (1963–67). (All quotes drawn from Hans Haacke. Retrospektive, the publication accompanying the current exhibition.)

LG After spending more time in the USA creating works that presented systems that melded the scientific and the artistic, as a member of the Zero group, there is a distinct turn towards investigating the United States as a political-cultural machine in your work that takes place during the late 1960s. It seems to reflect something of philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse’s demands that artists turn towards new forms of critical practice. I only recently discovered that he gave a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969. In it he makes quite a distinct claim that art should refuse to be integrated with the institution. It seems like you were punished by institutions for exposing the machinations of the system of art rather than sticking to our relationship with natural forms and ecosystems. I remember reading you on this subject – that some important museum directors never worked again after defending your work. HH I had a lot of problems with museums. I am still not welcome at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but others are more open [to my work] now. The Shapolsky real estate group, headed by Harry Shapolsky and comprising around 70 companies, bought, sold and mortgaged properties in 1971, often within the group ... The 142 documented properties were located primarily on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, slum areas in New York in 1971, and formed the largest concentration of real estate under the control of a single group. The information for this work was

taken from publicly available files of the New York Land Registry. Thomas Messer, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, rejected this work and two other works that had been produced for a solo exhibition at the museum. When the artist refused to withdraw the controversial works, Messer canceled the exhibition six weeks before it was due to open. Haacke, in 2006, on Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971)

LG I always found your work useful – meaning literally useful. A toolbox for analysing systems. You wrote in the past about how you were trying to ‘do a job’. Looking back, you have done so much and addressed so many layers of society. It is such an extraordinary body of work. How do you feel about these big exhibitions? They are not easy to do. HH In terms of the idea of a retrospective I am not able to do anything new with that any more. But I am in constant communication with the curators. LG The work in the exhibition is not only about the compromised institutional framework. I think these Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971, b/w photographs, typewritten maps, 21 × 31 cm (each diptych), edition 2/2. Photo: the artist. © MACBA Collection, MACBA Foundation / Whitney Museum of American Art, Hans Haacke / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024

ArtReview

new exhibitions will help people understand how many things you have dealt with. The work is not only about the relationship between the artist and the museum, but also about the artist’s relationship to the world and their political position – the degree to which we are all implicated. No one can operate outside of the system. HH Yes. Yes. LG The fact that there will be early work will help people understand that there is not so much of a contradiction between looking at an ecological system or a political system. They are an extension of the same thing. HH Yes. You are right. LG Could you talk about Vienna, to where this show will travel, a little bit? Your own relationship with Austria? HH I made a remarkable exhibition in Graz in the 1980s. And also later on in Vienna at the Generali Foundation. Since 1968, Graz has hosted the annual Steirischer Herbst, or ‘Styrian Autumn’, a publicly funded cultural festival. The festival’s 20th anniversary in 1988 coincided with the 50th anniversary of the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938. For the 1988 edition, artists were invited to create temporary installations in public places that had played a significant role in the Nazi era. One of these places was the Marian Column in the city centre, a column

Und ihr habt doch gesiegt (And You have Won After All), 1988, reconstructed obelisk at the Iron Gate. Photo: Angelika Gradwohl. © Generali Foundation / VG-Bild-Kunst, Bonn 1988 / DACS, London 2024. Courtesy the artist and Steirischer Herbst, Graz

November 2024

GERMANIA, 1993 (installation view, German Pavilion, 45th Venice Biennale). © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Photo: the artist. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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crowned with a gilded statue of the Madonna that was erected towards the end of the seventeenth century to commemorate the Austrian victory over the Turks. When Hitler awarded the city the title of ‘City of the People’s Uprising’ on July 25, 1938, the celebration took place at the foot of the Marian Column. For the occasion, the column was hidden under a red obelisk decorated with the Nazi insignia and the inscription ‘And you have won after all.’ The claim referred to a failed Nazi putsch in Vienna on July 25, 1934. Graz was a Nazi stronghold in Austria from early on. The obelisk was reconstructed for the Styrian Autumn in 1988 as a memorial to the victims of the Nazis with the addition of an inventory: The defeated in Styria. 300 Gypsies killed, 2,500 Jews killed, 8,000 political prisoners killed or died in custody, 9,000 civilians killed in the war, 12,000 missing, 27,900 soldiers killed. One week before the end of the exhibition, the monument fell victim to a nighttime arson attack in which the bronze statue of the Virgin Mary was badly damaged. Within a week, the perpetrator and the instigator of the attack, a well-known 67-year-old

Nazi, were arrested. In a trial, they were sentenced to two and a half years and one and a half years in prison respectively. Haacke, in 2006, on Und ihr habt doch gesiegt (And You have Won After All), (1988)

the Pompidou way back then, and was a Swede and not French, invited me along with other people to make a proposal for the Palais Bourbon and I am still proud of what I proposed. It was the proclamation ‘We all are the people’, but in Arabic.

LG We both did the German Pavilion in the Venice Biennale. I was at your 1993 opening. HH You were? Ha! LG I did mine in 2009 right after the ‘financial crisis’ and we had a lot of problems with sponsorship as the big German corporations couldn’t be seen to be wasting money. So I asked if we could approach a supermarket or something more basic. I never got a good answer. They needed high-class sponsors. The processing of awareness never ends. I was rereading your book with the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu – Free Exchange (1995). It is such an interesting book. It addresses so many questions that many people think they have only just discovered, about identity and class in relation to culture. You wrote an appreciation of him in October when he died, where you ask, why would an institution like the Pompidou do a memorial for Pierre Bourdieu? How did you end up in this working friendship? HH I remember that the first time we met was at a restaurant in Paris – the conversation started there and continued. I am also very fond of the cover of the book, it shows Calligraphie (1989). That was my proposal for the Palais Bourbon – which of course was not executed. But it was remarkable that Pontus Hulten, who was at

The members of the French Parliament are each to contribute a piece of stone from their constituency. The stones are assembled, worked and polished to form a perfect cone. A gilded, raised inscription on the surface proclaims the motto of the French Republic in Arabic calligraphy: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. A jet of water shoots up from the top of the cone. The water runs down its surface, then flows to the middle of a balustrade and falls through a breach it seems to have made in it into the main courtyard below, on which a large area in the shape of the map of France spreads out. In a four-year cycle, crops native to France are grown there: wheat, corn, rapeseed, cabbage, sunflowers, beans, peas and potatoes. In the fourth year, the field is left fallow. The water is channelled in a shallow channel with a slight gradient around the planted area towards the farm gate, where it disappears into an opening in the ground. All of the water is reused. Haacke, in 2004 on Calligraphie (1989)

Calligraphie (detail), 1989–2011, architectural model, two colour photographs, one b/w photograph and text panel, dimensions variable. © the artist / ARS, New York / DACS, London 2024. Courtesy the artist and New Museum, New York

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Hans Haacke: For Real, Works 1959–2006, (installation view, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, 2006; foreground: Grass Grows (Gras wächst), 1969; background: Die Fahne hoch! (Raise the Flag!), 1991). © the artist / ARS, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / DACS, London 2024. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Der Pralinenmeister (The Chocolate Master), 1981, collage of multicolour silkscreen prints, photographs, chocolates, and chocolate wrappers, 100 × 70 cm each. Photo: Sabrina Walz. © and courtesy the artist, Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_d048571_1 / Museum Ludwig Köln, Grafische Sammlung / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024

LG This is still powerful and very necessary. I remember at the time thinking, ‘this is going to cause trouble’. Even if it was never realised – the work still lives, though, on the cover of the book. HH You know my proclamation ‘We (All) Are the People’ has been turned into a poster with the phrase in 12 languages and shown in many, many countries, including in the Middle East and the US. [In 1989, demonstrators chanted ‘We are the people’ at the People’s Police during protests in the former GDR. This contributed to the fall of the repressive regime and the reunification of East and West Germany.] When I was invited to take part in a competition in 2003 to create a permanent installation in Leipzig to commemorate these events, the originally emancipatory slogan had been appropriated by xenophobic groups during demonstrations against new arrivals and refugees. I therefore proposed projecting an inclusive ‘We (all) are the people’ onto the walls of Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church, where the demonstrators had gathered in 1989.

LG Your earlier works A Breed Apart (1978) and Der Pralinenmeister (1981) exposed the role of collector and chocolate manufacturer Peter Ludwig and his wife in their use of low-wage labour while garnering tax breaks for their collection – these works got into the nitty gritty of how cultural systems work to mask the operations of advanced capitalism. And now this has all finally led to the statement ‘We (All) Are The People’. I think that was always there in your exposure of the way art is controlled from behind a veneer. I think you asserting ‘We (All) Are the People’ via detailed work in the past has made it more difficult to hide in plain sight. More difficult for powerful people to escape the scrutiny of critical cultural practice. HH I made a related work at the Bundestag, the German parliament. In 1997 there was a rededication of the phrase ‘Dem Deutschen Volke’ on the western facade of the building. That was originally a revolutionary gesture in relation to Kaiser Wilhelm. But by then the use of the word ‘Volk’ sounded somewhat nationalistic, and therefore I produced a dedication

to the population instead, ‘Der Bevölkerung’ which opened in 2000. The Bundestag had accepted a thematically related proposal of mine by a narrow majority. In reference to the dedication ‘TO THE GERMAN PEOPLE’ above the portal of the Reichstag building, my dedication ‘TO THE POPULATION’ was installed as a permanent installation in one of the two inner courtyards of the Reichstag building. Haacke, in 2017 on To the Population, 2000 (1999)

LG People were invited to fill the area around the large floor-based text installation with soil from their own communities. This eventually produced a melded ecosystem. It is a work that seems to bring together both central aspects of your work. The early interest in ecosystems that have their own logic, and what is now your universal reminder that we are all connected in ways we cannot control but we must restate and reaffirm. When you go back and read Jack Burnham’s writings on Systems Esthetics, and systems theory more generally, his ideas seem find resolution in this ‘To the Population’. More potently, in today’s Germany and beyond, the work carries a forceful assertion of acceptance. ar Hans Haacke’s retrospective will be on view at SCHIRN Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 8 November – 9 February

Haacke, in 2017 on We (All) Are the People (2003–2017)

DER BEVÖLKERUNG (TO THE POPULATION), 2000, (installation view, the Reichstag Building, Berlin, 2008), 232 × 178 cm. Photo: Stefan Müller. © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

ArtReview

We (All) Are the People, 2003/2017, banners and posters, dimensions variable. Photo: Steven Probert. © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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background Roy Lichtenstein, Mural with Blue Brushstroke, 1986, acrylic, oil, graphite pencil on canvas mounted to wall, 21 × 8 m. Collection of 787 Seventh Avenue, NY. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

ArtReview

No Longer Hiding in Plain Sight The afterlife of Scott Burton’s sculpture, Atrium Furnishment, now on show as part of a larger installation, raises questions about how we preserve public art by Jenny Wu

foreground Scott Burton, Atrium Furnishment, 1986, semicircular verde larissa marble bench with four onyx lights and inset brass floor element surrounding a verde larissa marble circular table with a fountain (later a planter); opposite the bench was originally a complimentary semicircular grove of conifer trees (later faux bamboo). Overall installation 12 m (diameter), originally commissioned by Equitable Life Assurance Society, NY. This work has since been dismantled and is now in the collection of 787 Seventh Avenue, NY. © 2024 Estate of Scott Burton. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, NY

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A light flickers overhead in SculptureCenter’s main gallery. It comes people cruising in potentially hostile public spaces. In 1980 Burton from the inside of a largescale metal and plexiglass sculpture, resem- wrote that he wanted to make art that ‘place[s] itself not in front bling a dropped ceiling in a corporate office, that stretches over of, but around, behind, underneath (literally) the audience – in an Álvaro Urbano’s installation TABLEAU VIVANT (2024–25). The flickers operational capacity’. Accordingly, he devoted the final years of his occasionally swell into flashes of LED lightning that illuminate, first life, which was cut short by HIV-related illness, to cultivating new in amber, then cool white, silhouettes of dead leaves, some swept into ways for art to be inclusive and relevant to a wide audience. Getsy calls piles, others motorised and dancing in circles. The floor is littered Burton’s public sculptures ‘demotic’ and ‘all-embracing’. They were with cigarette butts and boasts an array of botanical life – magnolias, not actually meant to register as art, and this, in theory, allowed them morning glories, rhododendrons and more – among which red apples to carry out their colloquial objectives. lie, bitten and discarded. When one realises that these flowers and Since public seating does not strike most people as a form of pieces of fruit are in fact hyperreal sculptures fabricated from metal art, Atrium Furnishment was in practice deprived of the specialised care afforded to objects in museums and paint, the Berlin-based artist’s Although Burton was openly gay, and private collections. The original exhibition starts to feel like an approximation of nature – a fantasy, even. 12-metre-wide, multiton verde larissa he studied and deployed visual codes Within the installation, suggessculpture comprised a circular table in his works that rendered it and curved bench, which stood, surtive of a stage set, are several polished selectively visible, like people cruising rounded by four pink onyx light stone benches carved from green fixtures, in the lobby of Equitable marble on which visitors can sit and in potentially hostile public spaces observe this artificial garden. Their Life Assurance Company’s corporate edges are rounded, but their disposition is hefty and austere. These headquarters (now the AXA Building) in Midtown Manhattan for architectural segments have been taken from Atrium Furnishment over 30 years. The work was slated for demolition during building (1986), a decommissioned artwork by the American postminimalist renovations in 2020 and would have been scrapped had it not been Scott Burton (1939–89). Burton, who was born in Greensboro, for curator Jeremy Johnston, who has managed the corporation’s Alabama, moved to New York City in 1959. There he began his career substantial collection of Pop and Minimalist art for more than as a playwright, critic and performance artist but became better a decade. With the aid of an anonymous sponsor, Johnson rushed known during the 1980s for designing public sculptures in cities in and transported the sculpture piecemeal in September 2020 from across the United States, Canada and the UK. the Equitable building into a non-climate-controlled storage facility These sculptures doubled – or, rather, camouflaged themselves – in Westchester, New York, where the work still sits disassembled as functional furniture. In a monograph on the artist, historian David on wooden pallets, while Johnston attempts to find an institution J. Getsy attributes their ‘self-effacing’ and ‘dissembling’ qualities to willing to receive it as a donation. Burton’s ‘deep understanding of how queer possibility could hide in In 2023 a few components of Atrium Furnishment were brought plain sight’: although the artist was openly out of storage and exhibited in a group show Álvaro Urbano, TABLEAU VIVANT, 2024–25 gay, he studied and deployed visual codes in in Manhattan organised by Johnston, which (installation view, SculptureCenter, New York). his work that rendered it selectively visible. explored permanence vis-à-vis queer historPhoto: Charles Benton.Courtesy the artist Burton’s sculptures, Getsy argues, behave like ies. Urbano highlights similar thematic and and SculptureCenter, New York

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Álvaro Urbano, studio image, 2024. Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza. Courtesy the artist; ChertLüdde, Berlin; and Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara, Madrid & Mexico City

November 2024

Scott Burton, Atrium Furnishment, 1986, semicircular verde larissa marble bench with four onyx lights and inset brass floor element surrounding a verde larissa marble circular table with a fountain (later a planter); opposite the bench was originally a complimentary semicircular grove of conifer trees (later faux bamboo). Overall installation 12 m (diameter). Originally commissioned by Equitable Life Assurance Society, NY. This work has since been dismantled and is now in the collection of 787 Seventh Avenue, NY. © 2024 Estate of Scott Burton. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, NY

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historical concerns with his restaging but does so by taking two discursive sites – the Equitable office building and a popular cruising spot in Central Park called the Ramble – and connecting them by way of Burton’s work and biography. Urbano visualises this connection by interspersing about half of Atrium Furnishment’s original elements with some 1,300 fabricated fruits and flowers modelled after species found in the Ramble. It is common for artists to cite one another, as well as to manipulate and reactivate the work of others in new contexts, and Urbano’s adoption of Burton’s sculpture aligns with the long-established practice of artists using visual quotations to memorialise and mine artistic legacies that have been minimised within dominant historical narratives. Yet TABLEAU VIVANT reveals the complications that are inherent within such citational practices. Urbano’s vision is at odds with Burton’s aim and risks obfuscating the dissembling and demotic spirit of latter’s public art. Whether the late artist’s original intent remains alive and legible in re-presentations of his work will determine, in large part, if it and his legacy have been stewarded or usurped. Atrium Furnishment may never again be assembled in its original form. For Johnston, who has charged himself with finding a new home for the work, conserving it in accordance with Burton’s intentions has been an ongoing guessing game. If anything, the sculpture’s time away in storage has opened it up to new interpretations. The wall text at SculptureCenter claims that Burton’s work was ‘rescued’ from falling ‘victim to a renovation’ and that Urbano’s installation ‘draws out interiority and desire from Burton’s seemingly impersonal disassembled work’. This reading of Burton’s work isn’t exactly unfounded: in his own criticism, Burton tapped into the expressive potential of seemingly affectless minimalist sculpture, such as Tony Smith’s Die (1962), which he likened to ‘a scream so high it can no longer be heard’. Works by Burton such as Pastoral Chair Tableau (1971–74) featured chairs positioned like people at a party, two groups facing away from a lone chair placed in the centre. However, the rescue narrative personifies Atrium Furnishment at this present time, soliciting the sympathy of viewers due to its ‘uncertain future’.

Conceptually, the memorial as a visible, sympathetic artefact stands at odds with the everyday ways in which marginalised groups negotiate visibility, as Burton did regarding his sexuality. Urbano does not out Burton, but by making the latter’s sculpture appear in a gallery setting, he denudes it of its contextual camouflage. This misalignment between Urbano’s homage and Burton’s intention that the sculptures be used unknowingly by people in public spaces around New York, whether the waterfront plaza in Battery Park City or the street just outside the former Equitable building, speaks to broader issues regarding conservation and efficacy. Immersive environments that mimic atria don’t alter the amenities outside of the art institution that are becoming increasingly hostile by design. All around New York, for instance, one notices seats missing from subways, or spikes and bumps dotting the pavement where the ground once was flat. Amid these changes to the built environment, the afterlife of Atrium Furnishment actualises a conundrum: some sculptures must indeed disappear into the urban landscape in order to perform a civic function, but often stewardship – by private corporations, curators and institutions – becomes necessary to ensure their longevity. Such stewardship, however, risks neutralising the works’ productive ambiguity by treating them primarily as art, which limits the audience they can serve. Within ten minutes of my entering SculptureCenter, two visitors were admonished for touching Urbano’s metal sculptures. One incident dragged on because the visitor had picked up an apple and carried it several paces, and there was confusion among the staff about where the apple had originally been (on the floor behind the dogwoods) and how it was positioned (bite mark facing up). To be sure, the visitors’ confusion was justified since others were walking in and plopping down on the Burton settee. Given the mercurial whims of the art-viewing demos, preserving any work may prove more difficult than we think. ar Álvaro Urbano’s TABLEAU VIVANT installation is on view at SculptureCenter, New York, through 24 March

Scott Burton, Pastoral Chair Tableau, 1971–74 (installation view, Artists Space, New York, 1975). Courtesy Artists Space, New York

November 2024

Saule Suleimenova Returning again and again to an archival photograph, the Khazakh artist has deployed modest means to write women, as well as others marginalised by patriarchal regimes, into history by Tyler Coburn

In the early 2000s, Saule Suleimenova was browsing a book of archival photographs of Kazakhs compiled by scholar Alkey Margulan. One picture, dating to the pre-Soviet era, shows three brides in traditional attire betraying little emotion about this pivotal moment in their lives. The women stare at the camera, but for Suleimenova, it was as though they were looking directly at her. “The image was a portal, a channel,” the Kazakh artist told me when we spoke in June. “I had the feeling that these girls are also me, my mother, my grandmothers, my ancestors, my daughters, and my future granddaughters.” Suleimenova has recreated this photograph many times over the last two decades, with each successive version marking a new stage in her practice. The artist first captured the figures in 2002 using grattography, a technique in which she coats a sheet of paper with paint, covers it with hot wax, paints other colours on the surface, then engraves with knives and sticks. After 2008, as she started to paint on top of her photographs of contemporary urban spaces, the three brides hovered over bulletin boards and concrete walls streaked with graffiti: ancestral spirits (or aruakhs in Kazakh) keeping a watchful eye over everyday life. From 2014, when Suleimenova began making collages out of salvaged plastic bags – an ingenious, laborious process of cutting and fusing cellophane with silicone glue – the brides’ headdresses and garments hosted logos and modern colours. Created with the help of volunteers, one bride floated like a canopy above the streets of Almaty for the 2015 ARTBAT Fest (Kelin, 2015). When it comes to historical photographs of Kazakhs, Suleimenova observes, “the names of adult men are usually noted, but for women and children, only their region or aul would be written”. The artist searches the State Archives of the East Kazakhstan

Region, the Smithsonian Institution website, and other places for these unknown people marginalised by patriarchal histories. The children and families featured in her series Kazakh Chronicle (2004 – ongoing) could not be further away from Bogenbay Batyr and other historic Kazakh warriors monumentalised in the postSoviet era. Suleimenova characterises these monuments as a “lie”: mythmaking sanctioned by the young independent state. “I’m trying to find a realistic way to show true Kazakhness. For me, it’s a decolonial practice.” Suleimenova’s ‘way’ is also modest, empathetic and at times satirical. The series No Cultural Value (2014) reflects on a common status that contemporary Kazakh artworks receive when exported abroad: in order to leave the country, they are stamped as having ‘no cultural value’. The insult extends, at least in Suleimenova’s case, to the archival photographs she recreates for the series. To stress the absurdity of this situation, she paints the people from these photographs over Photoshop collages of various bureaucratic documents she has been issued in her life – including the export stamps. In effect, she pre-empts the Kazakh state’s devaluation of her art by devaluing it herself. One work in No Cultural Value shows Suleimenova’s own grandmother Mariam with two friends, all of whom were held at ALZHIR – a camp for wives of traitors to the Soviet Union – during Stalin’s repressions in the 1940s. Bimash, the ‘traitor’ in question, was at that point serving 15 years in the KarLag labour camp due to his statistical research into victims of the Asharshylyk. (We now know that this famine, brought on by the sedentarisation and collectivisation of nomadic Kazakhs, took approximately 1.5 million lives from 1930 to 1933.)

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Three Brides, 2014, giclée print and acrylic on canvas, 100 × 140 cm. Courtesy the artist

November 2024

Aul at Spring, from the series Somewhere in the Great Steppe, 2017, plastic bags on polycarbonate, 105 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist

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During her time at ALZHIR, Mariam gave birth to Suleimenova’s Even when subjected to state censorship or historical revisionism, father Timur; upon release, they lived near KarLag alongside other some trace will always persist. families with husbands at the camp. Suleimenova collected parts of Residual Memory into a small book In Suleimenova’s take on this photograph of Mariam and her published earlier this year, which concludes with a piece about the friends, documents lurk in the background. The text of the export 1986 uprising. Protesting the replacement of an ethnic Kazakh party stamp hovers above their heads like a threat. “Authoritarianism,” leader with a Russian stooge, tens of thousands took to the streets she remarks, “is when a piece of paper is more valuable than human of Almaty and beyond. Teenage Suleimenova, defying her mothlife or art.” The original photograph dates to the late 1920s mak- er’s wishes, joined to read her poetry about Kazakh endurance, link arms with fellow demonstrators and ing it both poignant and painful to Plastic bags, which choke the steppe shout ‘Viva Kazakh!’ Though eventuacknowledge: the women have no idea what history has in store for them. ally suppressed by KGB security troops and terraform our oceans, may seem Like the brides, they open portals in and police, the uprising was one of to cheapen the subjects at hand, Suleimenova’s practice, and she has the first in a wave of resistance movebut Suleimenova draws an unsettling visited them many times. ments across the republics that helped Since 2018, Suleimenova has been bring an end to the Soviet Union. The link between them at work on Residual Memory, a series particular events in Almaty, which that explores how “a common history is also a family history”: the largely occurred at what was then called Brezhnev (now Republic) trauma of colonisation and the struggle for self-determination Square, seemed to presage the recent social unrest that Suleimenova are both felt within and across generations. The artist begins with has begun documenting in her work. archival images – including the one of Mariam – then recreates Following the 2019 resignation of Kazakhstan’s first presithem using plastic bags often obtained from friends and colleagues. dent Nursultan Nazarbayev, Suleimenova recalls, “everyday there Echoing her former painting practice, she layers this material to was something important that happened”: an oil worker’s strike in achieve subtle shifts of colour, light and shadow. Plastic bags, which Aktau, the renaming of the capital from Nur-sultan to Astana, the choke the steppe and terraform our oceans, may seem to cheapen the arrest of journalist Svetlana Glushkova, a proposed referendum by subjects at hand, but Suleimenova draws an unsettling link between the incoming president to build a nuclear power plant near Lake Balkhash. With Plastic Diary of Changes (2019), them. “We prefer not to remember someKelin, 2015 (installation view, ARTBAT Fest, Suleimenova adapted her slow, demanding thing traumatic,” she reflects. “We’d prefer to Almaty), plastic bags, polycarbonate sheet, cellophane technique to meet the moment. throw it away, but like plastic, it remains.” 600 × 400 cm. Courtesy the artist

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“I didn’t have time to analyse or choose,” she says. “I was trying to work based on a photograph from this time, shows demonstrators holding impressionistically: one day, one piece.” The results, which capture a banner stating, ‘We are NOT terrorists, we are ordinary people!!!’ these incidents as well as everyday scenes from her surroundings, Set in silhouette on a foggy winter’s day, they could stand in for any of us. According to the artist, this picture was taken just moments have the urgency of journalism and the intimacy of an artist’s touch. Suleimenova soon expanded this ‘socially oriented’ way of before the forces began shooting. working. In the large cellophane triptych One Steppe Forward These days, Republic Square has few traces of the events of (2019), demonstrators from Hong Kong, Ukraine, Turkey, France, Bloody January. On the slope beside the restored City Government Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia and elsewhere gather on one of three Building is a memorial hastily erected by the president – a bid to polyethylene sheets. The words ‘FOREVER’ and ‘AGAIN’ emerge from control the narrative. As visitors ascend, squat steles of black slate and granite give way to slender, white sweeping landscapes on the other One of the demonstrators in marble slabs. Their surfaces present two. Artist Almagul Menlibayeva has quotes by Kazakh luminaries: medidescribed how the steppe ‘is such a big One Steppe Forward holds up a mirror, tations on fear and death mark the and empty space; it forces a dialogue capturing the security forces darker ones, and exhortations about on you’. Its capaciousness allows for lurking just beyond. Suleimenova assembly, which to Suleimenova is the national unity grace the lighter. No first step in building solidarity and mention is made of the hundreds who believes she has a similar role to play practicing civic activism. lost their lives in the fray, or of those In January 2022, a protest in the town of Zhanaozen against since detained, arrested and tortured. rising fuel prices quickly grew in scale and scope. Thousands came One of the demonstrators in One Steppe Forward holds up a mirror, together in Almaty’s Republic Square, scholar Diana T. Kudaibergen capturing the security forces lurking just beyond the edge of the writes in her book The Kazakh Spring (2024), to demand ‘political work. In the face of state repression and obfuscation, Suleimenova changes, the resignation of the government, the return of the demo- believes she has a similar role to play. “My name Saule”, she observes, cratic constitution, and the improvement of economic conditions’. “means a beam of sun that we can see reflected in water. So I’m Kazakh state security forces and CTSO (Collective Security Treaty nothing. I’m just a mirror. I need to polish my soul to reflect this Organization) troops – most of whom Russia sent – were ordered by world in all its beauty and pain. If I don’t, the life goes out of me.” ar President Tokayev to suppress these ‘terrorists’ and ‘shoot without warning’. Suleimenova’s cellophane Tuman. Qandy Qantar (2023), Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer and teacher based in New York

Forever, from the series One Steppe Forward, 2019 plastic bags on polyethylene, 130 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Civil Registration Center #3, 2017 plastic bags on polycarbonate sheet, 105 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist

November 2024

What’s in a name? by ArtReview

Contemporary life is cushioned in evaluation: suggested routes to walk or drive, which products work best, where to eat, what to watch or listen to. Inundated by product reviews on social media, for every transaction constantly asked to ‘leave a review!’ Reviews offer a way to navigate the overwhelming stuff of the world. Because it’s so big and so vast and so full of stuff to engage with or look at that no one could possibly cope with it on their own. Broadly speaking, ArtReview was founded, 75 years ago, to deal with much the same problem. In relation to the world of art. Its purpose, back then, was both to record the breadth and variety of art exhibitions being staged, in venues ranging from purpose-built galleries and museums, to pubs and private homes, in London (which, for a little while, constituted the ‘artworld’ as far as ArtReview was concerned), and to tell its readers which ones were worth the trouble of schelpping through the bombed-out capital to see in the flesh. There was also a side-gig in tracking the ‘new’ (after all the idea, post-Second World War, was that a new world was being built out of the ashes of the old), punctuated by the odd reminder that the old (long-dead painters such as John Constable) was still great and shouldn’t be chucked out with the rest of the rubble. The main point, perhaps, was that culture was as essential to the construction of a new society as anything else. That still needs to be argued for today. The art review has acquired its own purview of the terrain; often published after an exhibition has come and gone, not offering so much an assessment of how you spend your time or money as an attempt at offering up implications: how you might be inspired or ignited, and why. Though in today’s world, of aggregate reviews and entertaining influencers, the job of the art critic is often

mistaken to be the job of simply amplifying the art. Which, in the age of celebrities and influencers, more often than not, means the voice of the artist. In short, there’s some confusion about what a review is supposed to do. Given that that’s ArtReview’s name, it thought that it might be useful to offer some insights into what a review can be. In the interests of establishing something of a personality behind the name. Or making itself more interesting than its name might suggest. That’s what everyone else does every day, after all. And ArtReview is nothing else but a person of the people, just like everyone else. What are reviews and why do we produce them? Why do we value some things more than others? In the interest of finding out, ArtReview asked its contributors to re-view the review, with a series of case studies in what reviews can do, and in looking beyond their usual subjects and habits. In a sense, what follows pushes against the constraints of the review. Whether a comprehensive trawl of Mexico City’s San Miguel Chapultepec neighbourhood, reviewing everything within a half-kilometre radius; repeated looking at a solo show in Berlin of Maja Ruznik’s paintings, again and again to see if anything changes from one reviewing session to the next; reviewing a rural Brazilian rodeo, examining something that you wouldn’t necessarily call art, but might be more popular, more engaging and more relevant than art; or in Tokyo it’s to look at the role of the review itself and how cultural difference may determine differing reviewing etiquettes. What the review can be is still a matter to be endlessly critiqued. The point, perhaps, is to make you think about reviews as more open systems, full of potential. And perhaps you’ll look at the usual reviews section differently after that.

November 2024

Case Study 1

Mexico City (the posh bit) by Gaby Cepeda

Accessibility issues I usually avoid the San Miguel Chapultepec neighbourhood of Mexico City. Not for any particular reason; but because it’s not so easily accessible via my preferred form of public transport. One recent morning, however, I was at Mari Gold, an over-hyped ‘IndoMexa’ breakfast-lunch spot right in the middle of an area crawling with contemporary art galleries. The food was fine, I guess – papaya with pistachios is always a good choice, but the sopes with minilla were more like Tostito-sized snacks for the price of what a whole meal would have been in a humbler spot a few blocks over. It’s my fault for straying from my usual stomping grounds and into an area ruled by two types of establishment: Frida-Coyoacán-kitsch or greige-minimalist-overpriced. For that, there was no one else to blame but myself. Afterwards, I got on with my assignment for the day: to look at every single art gallery, good or bad, within a halfkilometre radius of kurimanzutto, the apparent centre of the CDMX art universe. I had picked the area precisely because I don’t frequent it, only work can drag me here, and I was anxious about what I would find: if some of the best-known galleries are here; so are some of those you might politely describe as ‘fillers’. My first stop was RGR, a very serious looking gallery in a corner building that it seemed to occupy in its entirety. I had been here before, I think I saw some Carlos Cruz-Diez ‘chromointerferent’ Op-art pieces recently? This time, the gallery was showing O Vento Experimenta o que irá fazer com sua liberdade (The Wind Experiments With What It Will Do With Its Freedom) by Brazilian Marcelo Cidade, which was a nice surprise. Ansiosa ansiedade (Anxious Anxiety, 2024), the central work, was his take on a kinetic sculpture, a Barbie-pink garage bay-door cyclically rolling down and then back up with characteristic noisiness. Sitting in a corner was Resíduo privado de um corpo laboral explotado (Private Residue from an Exploited Labor Force, 2024), an object that is omnipresent in the crevices of my beautiful city: a plastic Coca-Cola bottle filled with a suspicious yellow liquid, a pithy gesture that cleverly encapsulated Cidade’s gift for the aesthetic observation of the urban environment.

In defence of Glissant My second stop, at Le Laboratoire, materialised every fear and prejudice I have about San Miguel galleries and the real reason I evade them: extraneous formal experiments, mostly by men

from top Marcelo Cidade, Ansiosa ansiedade, 2024, iron door, iron structure, motor, 350 x 300 cm; Resíduo privado de um corpo laboral explotado, 2024, urine, 600ml plastic Coca-Cola bottle, 25 × 7 × 7 cm. Courtesy Galería RGR, Mexico City

of a certain age. It was an indecipherable four-person group show; a veritable snoozefest. ‘Stuff’ was everywhere: the best looking was 7 Islas (7 Islands, 2007), geography-inspired cowhide floor-sculptures by Gabriela Gutiérrez Ovalle; then there was Árbol y Escorpión (Tree and Scorpion, 2024), six ugly chunks of wood encrusted with vinylrecord chips by Guillermo Santamarina; and also a lot of Carlos Aguirre’s minimalist, black canvases completed by metal rods coming off the wall, from the series Extensiones y tensiones espaciales desde el plano pictórico (Spatial Extensions and Tensions from the Pictorial Plane, 2024). There were so many more works, I simply

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do not have the stamina to keep on describing. Naturally, this mish-mash of art objects was crowded under the title Archipiélagos (Archipelagoes), force-fitting a Glissant quote under pretexts so vague, so slippery, that I really thought: ‘What did he ever do to you?’ Also a little cramped was Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM), a historical locale once run by legendary gallerist Inés Amor: Rivera, Toledo, Siqueiros, Tamayo and Carrington are still on its roster. They were showing Structure? by British sculptor Luke Hart. ChainLink Twist III: Half Ellipse (2024) consisted of 21 sizable carbon-steel beams held together by interconnected orange clamps. The sequence was arranged dynamically, the two ends lying on the floor so that the middle section fanned haphazardly, in precarious equilibrium. Bar Arrangement I (2024) performed a similar trick but with less beams and in more chaotic angles. It felt slightly redundant, especially since the pieces were far too big for the space and one could never get a wide, unobstructed view of them to admire their industrially produced simplicity. An excessive amount of text on the poster-sized handout also drowned the otherwise straightforward work. Nevertheless, undaunted, I kept going and dropped by Patricia Conde Galería, dedicated to contemporary Mexican photography. It was showing Crecí a la sombra de los árboles (I Grew Up in the Trees’ Shadow), dozens of small-format prints by Cristina Kahlo (yes, great-niece of). I will only say that most of them looked like what the bigwig at a publisher who underestimates women readers would pick as the cover of the new Elena Ferrante novel. A couple blocks down, I tried to visit Lizbeth Mitty’s painting show at Adhesivo Contemporary but the door was locked and no one was there to open it. There was a dark-hued triptych that looked intriguing from the other side of their glass doors.

Jimena Chávez Delion, Montaña, 2024. Courtesy Galería Enrique Guerrero, Mexico City

Danh Vo, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Gerardo Landa / Eduardo Lopez (glr studio). Courtesy Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

Post-Post-Internet, readymade-ish exercises After that I strolled to Galería Enrique Guerrero, a spot that also enjoyed a sparkly moment in the early 2000s, back when they showed Teresa Margolles, Guillermo Kuitca and Julian Schnabel. Nowadays… well, I haven’t really visited in a while, but I was pleasantly surprised by Peruvian Jimena Chávez Delion’s show Aferrarse a los márgenes (Hanging on to the Margins). Hers is kind of a post-Post-Internet, readymade-ish sculptural exercise that leaves behind that movement’s cynicism to opt for a more regionally empathetic critique. A highlight was Montaña (2024), a Jenga-like tower of white sneaker-soles rising to a few meters in height. It imitated the way migrant workers pile the many bootleg sneaker soles they hand-paint daily in Lima, the artist’s home city, for sale in its many markets dedicated to ‘piratería’. As documented in Chávez Delion’s charming video Despertar el pulso (Awakening the Pulse, 2023), many of those workers arrive from nearby provinces and neighbouring countries. The artist’s eye and tact when recording the women workers felt very refreshing, unlike so much of the current victimisation and dehumanisation of such people, which is, unfortunately, the prevailing image perpetuated by mass media. I was particularly taken by the part when a young girl, while painting a sneaker sole, talks about her dream: to make enough money to go back to Venezuela and study fine art. Soon enough, I got to the crown jewels of San Miguel Chapultepec: Kurimanzutto and Labor. At Kuri there was an eponymous show by Danh Vo, his second in five years, which is quick return for a gallery representing the number of artists it does. It wasn’t as perfect as the 2019 Danh Vo, but it was pretty good. There was a wooden

November 2024

space-within-a-space holding up 47 framed lithographs of different closeups of Renaissance paintings, lightly overlaid with Fraktur type that read ‘lick me lick me’, which was also the title of the entire piece. The best was at the very end: Untitled (2024) was a graceful little setup that included a sleek Angelo Mangiarotti grey-stone console with some plants, flowers and animal bones. Hanging above it, a crumpled replica of an early 13 Colonies American flag veiling a tiny, almost completely invisible, sixteenth-century Flemish painting of a Madonna Lactans. Vo’s historical-conceptual games of hide-and-seek continue to be amusing, and I imagine the 47 small prints flew off the shelves.

Lessons learned In a nice full-circle moment for my tour, another Brazilian artist was showing at Labor: Raphaela Melsohn’s Cortando linha se faz espaço (Cutting Lines Makes Space). She too showed at RGR earlier this year, in their Después del edén (After Eden) group show, but this was her first solo show in the city. There were a lot of big ceramic pieces, quite beautiful, though maybe a little cramped – an ongoing trend, apparently. They were white and voluptuous, their curves had curves: textured, bearing the marking and smoothing patterns of the artist’s fingers, they huddled in a huglike formation (De novo e de novo passo meus dedos para construir lugar, Again and Again, I Trace with My Fingers to Create Space, 2024), laid about like intestines in a butcher shop (Nó, 2024), or stood up, alert, like organic periscopes (Tipping Point, 2024). The best part was the ‘cutters’: Cut #1 and #2 (2024), large, heavy steel walls, bisected in the middle and standing near the entrance and in the back like exaggerated space dividers. Delightfully, the walls gave in to one’s touch, they were meant to be swung on their axis, cutting into the space in different ways. They reminded me of Hart’s steel works at GAM, which simulated flexibility and possibility; Melsohn’s enacted this. Anonymous Gallery gets an honorary mention. Circulación Espectral (Spectral Circulation) was a group show about money with works by well-known locals Paloma Contreras Lomas and Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, along with a couple of foreigners, Ignacio Gatica from Chile and Adriana Martínez Barón from Colombia. Gatica had Preface for an Automated Stratosphere UMSCA (2024), one of his now

A critic’s self-reflection in Ignacio Gatica’s Peregrinación Bursátil (México) (2024) at Anonymous Gallery. Courtesy the author

Raphaela Melsohn, de novo e de novo, passo meus dedos para construir lugar, 2024, ceramic and paint, 114 × 95 × 89 cm.Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy the artist and Labor, Mexico City

recognisable LED-tickers processing financial information live; and Peregrinación Bursátil (México) (Stock Market Pilgrimage [Mexico], 2024), a lovely silver chain with a pendant in the style of the souvenirs from la Basilica de Guadalupe, but with the Mexican Stock Market Exchange building instead, exhibited inside a delicate vitrine. Martínez Barón had quite a few pieces, a favourite was her money-loving vitrine, Arco Iris (2015), an orderly rainbow of colours created by a thick roll of bills wrapped in an elastic band. She also had Prophecy (2024), a small and intricate origamilike sculpture of three birds standing atop of each other, made out of very pretty but worthless – because of dramatic devaluation – Venezuelan bills. I believe this exhaustive art tour of the San Miguel Chapultepec area taught me two things: one, is that young South American artists are producing excellent work, and the local scene is finally catching up to them – surprising in a city that doesn’t show enough of our regional brethren, unless they’re living here and we personally like them. And two, is that aside from the last three galleries, which are on my usual rotation, maybe I should drop by some of the other ones sporadically as well. Maybe I should not judge the book by its cover (Instagram-posted documentation) every single time; perhaps I’ll turn the critique inwards and admit that I can afford to reexamine the preconceptions and habits I’ve fallen into after years on the local criticism beat. I will be brunching elsewhere though.

ArtReview

Case Study 2

My First Rodeo by Oliver Basciano

a blur of muscle and sweaty fur as it twisted in circles. It ran full pelt towards us, a couple of metal bars between beast and our oblivion. The rider was good; a previous champion we later found out. The requisite eight seconds passed, and he was still on the bull’s back. 9, 10, 11, 12, thir- and he’s thrown into the air. The boy – and he really looked like just a boy – expertly rolls and lands a little distance away; he grabs his fallen hat and climbs the perimeter bars away from the bull’s lunges. The gate swings back open and the heaving animal bolts inside to its temporary stable.

A car or a sum of money

Hi-NRG The track was pitch black and we only had the vaguest idea where we were heading. Still, the car’s headlights were picking out numerous people walking through the mud in the same direction. Then, round the bend, floodlights appeared; parking up, they illuminated a great metal cage around which thronged an eager crowd in jeans and Stetsons, clutching beer and pastel. The music started up: a high energy, unstoppable mix of song excerpts, no track lasting more than ten seconds before blasting into the next, or segueing into the frenetic commentary of the MC. This is the first rodeo of the season in my newly adopted hometown in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, far from the galleries and artist studios of São Paulo. This is the cultural fare available to me now. My friends and I got a beer and found the slightest of gaps in the crowd: the first rider was lowering himself onto a colossal bull behind a gate at the far side of the cage, the animal snorting and spitting as the young man wiggled himself into position. And then the gate swung open. The bull roared forth, back legs flicking up,

The first night of the rodeo has a feverish energy to it: my neighbours and I are excited for the next few days. We will drink, there will be music, there will be hangovers that will be shaken off by doing the whole thing again. It struck me that this was a carbon copy ofthe rituals of the artworld I’d left behind: the fair-week excesses, the stamina needed for biennial openings. There is the slowly building momentum behind a particular rider that seems analogous to the whispers propelling a hotly tipped artist; except at the rodeo, opinion is less open to manipulation. The score sheet isn’t rigged as often happens the artworld, where gallery reps hype a new name until exhibition-goers begin to repeat it as if it were their own finely judged opinion. For the rider, rodeo week is as high stakes as an art fair can be for an artist. The crowning champion will win a car or a sum of money equivalent to six months wages; the artist knows that a sellout booth will steady their career for a similar duration. There’s a uniform too: here, the linen suits of the art-fair crowd (or the gaudy wacky dress of the European biennial denizens) are replaced with jeans, boots and belt buckles. On hats, stickers proliferate: the Brazilian flag, the state flag, the Monster energy drink logo, cartoon cows and chilli peppers. These are the real markers of a ritual gathering: a bucking cow or the installation of art is just the excuse. As the months drift by, the nature of the event changes, but the same sense of a community exercising its social bonds endures. During carnival the usually quiet central street erupts into an orgy of dancing and drinking, buses and Toyota pickups arriving from across the hills crammed with kids from neighbouring towns and villages (the tipple being horrifying pints of red wine and condensed milk). During the town’s saint’s festival, the church in the central square holds a service every night. If salvation wasn’t a big enough

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pull, a marquee is set up for bingo. Every night for a week, after the priest’s final blessing, the faithful and many more beside sit down for five hours of high-speed number-calling. I win an air fryer. There is a motocross rally in August (apparently only semilegal, but I spot the mayor of the town, currently up for reelection and keen to be seen, on a bike himself); there’s an ox parade in October (the cows, cute as they are, turn out not to be the highlight of the cow parade; rather it’s the wagons they pull, wooden carts, great sanded logs strung together with leather rope, intricately woven baskets atop); monthly night markets and the annual rodeo-queen contest.

The artworld’s town square Art has long since shifted beyond the object, entering what might be termed the experience economy: it has become a space of social performance that replicates the traditional community structure evident here. The bad collector buys a painting to go with the couch, the good collector is deemed so because she immerses herself in the network of the artworld (though she buys the same painting as her bad counterpart): the first day at the fair, the dinner, the museum patron’s event. Art creates relations that, unlike the rodeo or church bingo, are untethered from geography, their base only the presence of capital. The favourite bar of gallery weekend becomes the artworld’s town square, the queue to the restaurant outside the biennial the place of gossip and bonding. This dematerialisation of art – in which meaning, and a prevailing culture, is carved out by two-way discourse alone – was a fact recognised by the relationalaesthetics brigade during the 1990s, but that has since devoured the entire circuit. Art is no longer a sculpture or painting but a social mechanism. Performance programmes, parties, talk series: pity those who don’t want to play.

all images Courtesy the author

It took me a while not to imagine the fun my neighbours were having – gatherings that were initially strange and alien to me – through the secondary gaze of the seasoned gallerygoer. The rodeo looked like it might appear in some videowork I could have encountered. An interpretation label would have talked of masculinity and economics, it might have name-checked Donna Haraway as it made curatorial face-saving nods to animal ethics. The endurance of the bingo players feels akin to Doug Aitken’s obsession with auctioneers or something Rirkrit Tiravanija might have come up with to play out in a museum plaza as an ersatz spectacle of sociability (in the style of his ping-pong tournaments). Yet one tribal affiliation replaces another and when I did go back to the city, I found myself increasingly ambivalent to the noise around the art object. Can the artwork be read beyond the ritual that surrounds it, the one that shines its aura? Perhaps a topicality is lost, but beyond the noise, I’d argue, a certain clarity is born. High up in the mountains of Minas Gerais, where the rituals of community and culture are still tied to place, things feel less performed, less mediated and more personal.

ArtReview

Case Study 3

Groundhog Day by Martin Herbert

Maja Ruznic, Mutter, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

You don’t, though How many times do you typically visit a given exhibition? For people who aren’t critics, the answer is probably ‘once’. For those who are, it’s maybe twice or thereabouts, unless the show is uncommonly big. Then there’s looking: how long, how close? The late critic Dave Hickey reckoned you should be able to spend as long in an exhibition as it took to get there. Scaling up, T.J. Clark’s 2006 book The Sight of Death records the art historian’s daily returning, for months, to two Poussin landscapes in Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, and the granular revelations they disclosed under patient scrutiny. You don’t, though, typically find critics placing comparative temporal pressure on contemporary art. Is that down to the art, the writers, diminished or altered artistic ambitions, digitally broken attention spans, all the above? To begin finding out, I decided to keep revisiting one show until I couldn’t take anymore. I chose Maja Ruznic’s show at

Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, because on a quick first visit during a gallery tour it seemed a useful test case: this one, I thought, might have hidden depths, or might not. (As a critic you need to be open to both possibilities.) The Bosnia-Herzegovinaborn, New Mexico-based artist’s show comprised 14 figurative paintings with modernist overtones, bathed in a jewel-box palette: the kind of display where you walk in, your brain goes ‘ah yes, more figurative painting with modernist overtones, bathed in a jewelbox palette’, and maybe you move on, dimly aware that you haven’t given the work a chance, that you’ve barely seen it. So, I thought, let’s try to see it. Doing this, it turned out, involved almost as much unseeing as seeing. Facing viewers upon entry was Azmira & Maja (2023–24), featuring an adult and child against a gauzy yellow-green landscape: I thought immediately of Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother (c. 1942), a double portrait, based on a 1912 photograph, of artist and parent staring plaintively out of the past, unaware

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Ruznic and her mother, it turns out, fled the Bosnian war of the early 1990s when the artist was nine, displacing first to a refugee camp in Austria and later to the US. The double portrait is, indeed, of her and her mother, from a photo taken at the Austrian camp; its green colour scheme, Ruznic said in a recent interview, forever reminds her of Bosnia. Her grandmother, who stayed behind, died in 2017; Grandmother was apparently a deliberate attempt not to romanticise her. That Ruznic, of late, has gotten interested in shamanism meanwhile seemed germane to two paintings titled The Helpers (both 2023–24), which feature wraithlike figures in gravity-free space: in The Helpers II, keyed to deep greens and watery purples, a half-dozen facial profiles surround a female-looking figure with arms outstretched and a deadpan, cartoonish, frowny

Sea People, 2023–24, oil on linen, 229 × 178 cm

of what life, and specifically the Armenian genocide, will do to them. (Checking later, Ruznic’s composition is substantially different, but the vibe – memory, displacement – is comparable.) Amid the interlocking composition of faces and profiles in the peach, pink and toothpaste green Sea People (2023–24), I hallucinated both Edvard Munch and vague 1970s memories of Eastern European cartoons on BBC2. Afore other canvases I wondered if the gallery was actively seeking to replace its ex-artist Tal R, whose work has a comparable spooky, sometimes cartoonish, art history-inflected vibe. Some smaller paintings skewed more abstract and decorative. That’s probably all I got in half-looking, half-scouting mode.

Call of duty The next day I dutifully went back, while wondering if I should have chosen a gallery that isn’t on the far side of town. In morning light, Sea People was paler and glimmering, raking sunlight emphasising the interior glow caused by Ruznic’s signature stippling; its compositional structure, rippling both vertically and horizontally, was newly clear. Grandmother (2024), too, implied a figure in water: a hunched, almost cronelike woman inhabiting a multicoloured lake while fireworks of dots and lines erupt around her. Her face looks like a crosseyed lion’s and is marked by outwardly radiating lines that, I saw, repeat on the mother’s shield-shaped face in Azmira & Maja, an aspect that felt significant, inscrutable: ciphered. At this point, though, a gallerist appeared and, because I didn’t protest in time, gave me the spiel; illuminating, if narrowing, anecdotes tying art to life arrived.

ArtReview

top Grandmother, 2024, oil on linen, 203 × 152 cm above The Helpers, 2023–24, oil on linen, 229 × 178 cm

Azmira & Maja, 2023–24, oil on linen, 229 × 178 cm

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face; above her, a spreading light fitting or an inverted, long-haired figure’s head. Maybe Ruznic’s grandmother is in this halfwayconsoling realm somewhere, maybe mine too. One visit later, I approached a kind of spectatorial sweet spot: the stress-free pleasures of repetition offset by a low pulse of fresh discoveries and realignments. The pressed-together elongated figures in The Child’s Throat (2024) had initially felt offputtingly Klimt-indebted: pattern recognition in action again. But Ruznic’s askew mix of warm browns, verdant greens and lasers-in-thejungle electric blue kept drawing me back into a progressively unnerving composition whose emotional fulcrum is a bent-backwards, big-headed, sacrificial child figure: a stabbing cipher of oblique pain, surrounded by gangly phantoms. Next time around, feeling familiar with the show’s broad strokes, I was gravitating towards its murkiest, least resolved elements: the dense, flickering purple otherworld of The Helpers (2023–4), into which the mother from Azmira & Maja now appeared to have crossed over; the scattering of smaller near-abstractions that punctuate the big canvases. After three visits and closer inspection, these little works still didn’t do much; Ruznic, I decided, was one of those painters who can’t scale down. I kept planting myself in front of the harlequinpatterned Cells (2024) with its nice harmonies of midnight blue, red and orange; it kept giving me mild, brushy tastefulness.

It didn’t quite jigsaw Time to stop doing this, my feet told my eyes. Parts of the show still didn’t quite jigsaw together beyond the past being only halfway accessible, the hope that our lost loved ones still hover, watching and supporting, in the ether, but the doubt itself felt emotionally true.

top The Helpers II, 2023–24, oil on linen, 229 × 178 cm above Cells, 2024, oil on linen, 36 × 28 cm all images © Maja Ruznic.Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, and Karma, New York

The Child’s Throat, 2024, oil on linen, 203 × 152 cm

Much more rote returning, though, and all this might boomerang into frustration. Meanwhile, a lesson learned, or relearned: the categorising eye and mind and the energy-conserving human organism want us off the hook of close looking, yet that’s where everything substantial about art viewing resides: pleasure, undoing, complication, judgment, surprise. I’d begun by putting a painter in a box: neomodernist, spiritualist space cadet, playing dress-up with lingeringly fashionable themes and aesthetics; I found, later, a sincere artist chasing vocabularies for bruising experiences. As it turned out, this show’s approach to articulation was right there in its title, Mutter: German for ‘mother’, English for saying something that requires effort to hear.

ArtReview

Case Study 4

Local Flavours by Thu-Huong Ha

The inferior taste of tourists As an expat living in Tokyo, I’m expected to provide all kinds of local wisdom when friends (and cousins and former colleagues of former college friends) come to town. There are a number of rote tips I rattle off to well-meaning hipster tourists thirsty for some semblance of an ‘authentic’ experience in this city that’s been thoroughly picked over by influencers and vloggers, but there’s one that takes so much explanation that I sometimes hesitate to give it: never trust the Google reviews. 4.5 stars for conveyer belt sushi in Shibuya? Useless. 4.8 stars for a Tokyo station izakaya with an English menu? Better off just getting in a random line on the street. This is not simply, as it may seem, a comment on the inferior tastes of tourists; it reflects a clash of review cultures. Japanese reviewers do not give 5 out of 5 stars for a service or establishment that is good. If it’s solid, it gets a 3. If it’s really good, it gets a 4. Nothing gets a 5. Japanese reviewers grade harshly on dimensions of service, cleanliness, ‘cosu pa’ or ‘cost performance’, the etiquette of other customers. At a soba shop near my house, low stars are given for the colour of the tempura (black), the smell (ammonia) and the presence of ashtrays (one for each table). On Tabelog, a Japanese Yelp for restaurants, if I see 3.49 stars, it gives me a little thrill. A typical review might read something like, ‘Food was super delicious. Perfect night. The server had messy hair. 2 stars.’ It’s why Shake Shack has 4.5 stars on Google and the best udon you’ve ever had in your life has 3.8: tourists love grade inflation. For this Vietnamese–American raised on New York bagels and pizza, further nuances and dialects are required to interpret the language of local reviews. When I moved to my current apartment and needed to find a reliable neighborhood bakery, I looked askance at the mostly Japanese reviews on Google maps. The Japanese palate favours soft and bouncy fuwa fuwa textures – nobody is on the hunt for a crusty sourdough or a crackling baguette. (To my dismay, the search for good bread is still ongoing, six months later.) Similarly, Japanese spice tolerance has got to be one of the lowest in Asia, with employees trained to ask if customers are OK with wasabi, and whether they want their curry ‘spicy’ or ‘Japanese spicy’. Our world of apps, algorithms and e-commerce is heavily saturated with user-generated reviews. Whether 5-star review culture symbolises the democratisation of taste or the demise of expertise, it’s too late to turn back to a time before everyone was a critic. But contending with bots, click farms, incentivised reviews,

top Tabelog review of a Tokyo restaurtant above Street scene, Tokyo. Courtesy the author

not to mention all those people – like me – who only leave reviews for excellent or awful experiences, how do we make sense of this abundance of text? When criticism is aggregated and flattened to a scale of five yellow stars, meaning breaks down. Every platform has its own internal language and culture. A 2021 study found, for example, that Google Maps restaurant reviews are on average 0.7 stars higher than those on Yelp. Uber and other peer-to-peer rating systems are susceptible to what researchers call ‘reputation inflation’, in which users leave 5 stars by default and dock stars only when something has gone terribly wrong.

Ethnographic delights Meanwhile the review sections for books on Amazon and Goodreads have become hotbeds for cancel culture across the political spectrum,

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a place where users can quickly organise to bring down books and authors. In 2017, Amazon had to delete at least 900 fake reviews from people leaving one star for Hilary Clinton’s book about the 2016 US presidential election; it got so bad that later the company instated restrictions on select controversial items so that users couldn’t leave reviews at all without a verified purchase. In subsequent years YA novels deemed racist by early reviewers and social media critics were targeted with one-star ratings on Goodreads, and multiple titles have been pulled before they ever hit the shelves. But as one becomes more fluent in any particular system, the culture reveals itself. No longer a tourist in Japan, I find a certain ethnographic delight in plumbing the depths of sub-review cultures that remain relatively homogenous, like neighbourhood pharmacies, laundromats and tailors. I read the user-generated reviews for a nearby funeral home and crematorium like I would an art show I’ll never see – and like the best criticism, it offers a kind of artwork unto itself. You’d think the appraisals would be full of highly sensitive and emotional reactions to how beloved family members were treated after death. Yet here in the Google reviews for this funeral home, in this very specific sliver of internet, I find a surprising number of things at work: nationalism, pastoral nostalgia, budgetary concerns, hunger, pride, grief. There is of course the requisite ‘It’s very beautiful’ with a picture of a pretty decent looking teishoku set. (3 stars.) ‘It seemed like we were being rushed, like we should hurry up and do it quickly because we have so much to do, without immersing ourselves in the sadness.’ (1 star.) One reviewer is surprised that there is nowhere to get a drink and you have to use the vending machines outside. (1 star.) There are several complaints about the bones being handled directly by the hands of the staff without gloves, and how

rushed it feels, compared to the countryside, where more care and patience are given to the ceremony. A lot of comments are about where the parking is, how much it costs, where the smoking section is, and how hard the roads are to navigate. A couple of reviewers use this opportunity to give screeds against the Chinese, as the for-profit funeral home has been reportedly bought by a Chinese parent company. A few mention that imperial family members and other celebrities have been cremated here. It turns out, once we learn to search the sweep of stars with careful eyes, patterns and stories reveal themselves. One person is only in the Google reviews to say rest in peace to their best friend of half a century.

above left View of a funeral home, Tokyo. Courtesy the author above right Google review of a Tokyo funeral home

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OCEAN HIGHWAY N e w Yo r K - Pa ri s - ST BA RTS

Fine Art Shipping

www.ocean-highway.com 5 5 E 5 9th Str eet, 8t h F l . NEW YO RK NY 10022 – 64 6 9 80 642 2

OCEAN HIGHWAY-23.indd 1

18/10/2023 15:37

MÁRTON NEMES I AM THE ENERGY I DESIRE TO ATTRACT

2 NOVEMBER - 14 DECEMBER 2024

Márton Nemes’ work is included in the with his solo presentation Techno Zen at the Hungarian Pavilion, open through November 24, 2024.

68 Lok Ku Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

Art Reviewed

Dream 75

PST ART Art and Science Collides Various venues, Los Angeles 15 September – 16 February With Art and Science Collide, Getty attempts to make a name for Los Angeles as a global art capital. This fourth iteration of what was previously dubbed Pacific Standard Time in 2011–12, 2013 and 2017–18 coalesces around ‘art and science’, a theme responded to by over 70 museums, research institutions and galleries across Southern California. Supporting a range of interdisciplinary and collaborative projects with $20 million in grants, Getty has shaped Art and Science Collide into something of an Expo – those immense exhibitions that showcase achievements in technology, cultural exchange and social progress. What results is an eventful regional fair whose strength, like those in Philadelphia and Chicago where the telephone and the dishwasher made their debut, lies in the novelty of the prototypes it ushers into public consciousness. Before entering Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a survey of collaborations that took place in the mid-twentieth century, one is greeted by a white fibreglass dome moving imperceptibly across the Getty Center’s courtyard. It is one of seven motorised sculptures Robert Breer made for Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, where he exhibited with E.A.T., a nonprofit founded in 1966 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer. Inside, viewers queue before a display case housing Jean Dupuy’s Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust) (1968), for a chance to hold a doctor’s stethoscope to their chests and watch their heartbeats launch dust the colour of blood from a rubber membrane into the air. Dupuy’s interactive sculpture, made in cooperation

with engineers Ralph Martel and Harris Hyman for a competition sponsored by E.A.T., shows why the nonprofit’s founders sought to promote partnerships between artists and scientists, and why Getty, too, has jumped on the ‘art and science’ bandwagon. Cutting-edge multimedia projects not only draw crowds but also push their creators out of their professional siloes to produce work that speaks to a wideranging audience. An array of genuinely thought-provoking contemporary prototypes are pitched to visitors in Art and Science Collide. In the Hammer Museum’s group exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, Michael Joo, Danil Krivoruchko and Snark.art introduce their work-in-progress, Organic Growth: Crystal Reef (OG:CR) (2021), with an eye-catching display of AI-edited videos and suspended resin sculptures. The collaborators envision ‘growing’ a physical mass of crystals via digital processes, by letting 10,000 NFT seeds transform virtually in accordance with organic crystal behaviour and metadata from their owners’ crypto wallets. Parts of the sculpture can be 3D printed and displayed as public art or attached to ocean reefs, allowing scientists to study how fish populations react to different coral configurations. Forty minutes south by car, in Free the Land! Free the People! at Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), an exhibition of video interviews, schematics and ephemera documents CDM’s efforts toward ‘prototyping and building’ what the exhibition materials call ‘abolitionist pods’ – solar-powered gardens housed in geodesic domes. One of these pods stands on the parking lot behind the former milk shop, a far cry from the Getty Center’s

$1.3 billion mountaintop view, and is used to host health and wellness workshops for the surrounding community. Historically, many ideas have failed to take off (like the underwater hotel proposed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair). Fortunately, for us, they often live on in miniature. In the first room of Gustav Metzger: And Then Came the Environment at Hauser & Wirth, one sees Earth Minus Environment (Model) (1992), a maquette full of toy cars that was rejected from the same year’s UN ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro. Metzger, an artist who was also an environmental activist, had planned for 120 cars to funnel their fumes into a transparent receptacle shaped like a capital E (the project was later realised, in other forms, in Lund and Sharjah). Across the street, at SCI-Arc, is one half of Views of Planet City, a group show centred on Liam Young’s speculative film Planet City (2021–), the remainder of which is installed at Pacific Design Center Gallery. Composed of panoramic shots of dusky vertical villages – the inverse of sunbaked, sprawling LA – Planet City models an improbable fever dream: a multicultural megalopolis housing Earth’s ten billion inhabitants while surrounding lands are rewilded. Immersive and interactive works by the four other artists in the show, which Young curated, further illustrate and actualise his proposition rather than stand on their own. Like Art and Science Collide, the bold visual argument in Views of Planet City raises awareness of pressing issues – such as the environmental impact of urban architecture – but points behind its back to the ambition of its initiator. This ambivalence lingers long after the spectacle subsides. Jenny Wu

Robert Breer’s Floats (1970) photographed by Shunk-Kender, archival inkjet print from negative. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Courtesy Robert Breer; Kate Flax; and GB Agency, Paris

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Liam Young with Ane Crabtree, Courtney Mitchell and Driely S., Costume Portraits, I–III: Beekeper, 2021, chromogenic prints. Courtesy the artist

November 2024

Le’Andra LeSeur Monument Eternal Pioneer Works, New York 6 September – 15 December Gravity is at the centre of Le’Andra LeSeur’s solo show, which pivots on the seven-minute film Monument Eternal (2024): standing on top of Stone Mountain, an isolated rock hill 20-some kilometres east of Atlanta – where LeSeur grew up – the artist repeatedly falls towards the mountain’s top surface in achingly slow motion. In doing so, she suspends us in the friction between Black corporeality, spirituality and land, between the actual and metaphysical ground of Blackness. LeSeur’s performance is filmed above the colossal equestrian relief carved on the mountain’s north face (begun in 1915, completed in 1972), which commemorates Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Confederate leaders who fought to maintain slavery in the United States. The camera confronts the brute fact of the monument, lingering on it for several seconds. As it slowly zooms out – revealing more of the hulking mountain face, trees and sky – the monument becomes both grand and diminutive. Against such vast and ancient geology, the relative newness of white supremacy’s semiotic order is brought into sharp relief, appearing desperate and jarringly anachronistic.

The initial mood is set by a gospel rendition of ‘Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen’. Flush with the baroque yet melancholic aesthetics of Black religiosity, the song lends a churchly valence to the film’s overture. After this, a title frame flashes, and we find ourselves on top of the mountain looking up, for a moment, at the unobstructed sky and then at the back of LeSeur’s head. The music shifts to a spare drum beat, as LeSeur reads her poetry in voiceover: “I am a sanctuary that has been dancing to someone else’s rhythm,” she proclaims. “We can soften over time, we can float, we don’t have to break.” One might argue, given LeSeur’s position above the stone carving, that the film is attempting to flip the hierarchies that the monument reifies. But as the artist begins her fall, she invites a more complicated reading. As the camera focuses on her shoulders, hair and folds of her simple white T-shirt, LeSeur surrenders her body to the air and the approaching rock-hard mountaintop, seemingly trusting that the land will catch her in spite of what the mountain has come to represent. She prompts us to ask: what does a ‘free fall’ imply when the ground also holds the history of your unfreedom?

Do you know this place since your breath is no longer here, 2024, glass, 35 × 18 × 17 cm. Photo: Olympia Shannon. Courtesy Pioneer Works, New York

ArtReview

Despite its compressed runtime, the film reads like a kind of durational performance. The visual surprise of the fall lies in the lack of acceleration: it is difficult, at first, to discern whether LeSeur is falling or hovering, her movement so slow as to be imperceptible. The film ends before her drift does, cutting to black just as LeSeur’s head is about to hit the rock: we never see the impact, inviting us to recall LeSeur’s insistence that “we don’t have to break”. Perhaps the ‘eternity’ invoked in the film’s title is not in the stony invention of white supremacy but rather in the abiding expression of Black countergravity. A stained glass window is installed opposite the film projection. A soft place to land… (2024) is one of a number of works – including drawings and paintings – that complement the video. During the day, the window refracts a subtle gold light while the song plays. As this ethereal shine meshes with the fraught representations on the screen, we are reminded that Black spirituality cannot be disentangled from sites like Stone Mountain, from the land and the violent politics that have overwritten it, from the ‘trouble’ and ‘sorrow’ that so many bodies have seen. Zoë Hopkins

Angelica Mesiti The Rites of When Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 21 September – 11 May Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When (2024), an ambitious seven-channel sound and video installation, offers a world in which we might realign with nature by revelling in seasonal celebration and communal ritual. It’s a utopic vision, filled with many lush and arresting scenes, but the broadness of its speculative approach tempers its impact. Presented in the Tank – a subterranean fuel bunker constructed during the Second World War – the 34-minute work is displayed on seven enormous screens around the edges of the space. Each screen is purported to represent one of the seven brightest stars of the constellation Pleiades (considered a sign of the changing seasons); other elements, such as the crescent-moon sofa in the centre, reference the Nebra Sky Disc, a Bronze Age artefact thought to be the earliest depiction of the constellation. The film itself comprises two main sections bookended by telescopic cosmic sequences. Each section appears on all seven screens, whether as an array of different camera angles or a single shot spliced between them. The first, titled ‘Hibernal Solstice: The Longest Night’, begins with aerial shots of a snow-covered

forest, before cutting to a carnival procession in an anonymous urban setting, where one participant clutches a mask made of branches and another adorns themselves with a crown of wheat. The second, ‘Aestival Solstice: The Longest Day’, offers a more abstract honouring of the summer harvest – footage of a combine harvester reaping a wheatfield is followed by a single-take shot of a group of performers who lift one individual after another, surrounded by a luminous gradient background. It’s the transportive sonic world that’s the standout feature here: the polyphonic chanting of La Mòssa (an all-women musical ensemble from the South of France), which accompanies footage of the midwinter circle dance and bonfire, transforms the Tank into a pagan cathedral. A midsummer rain sequence, which a group of performers produces entirely from the percussive sounds of their bodies, makes you feel as if you’re in a torrential downpour. The Rites of When expands on many of Mesiti’s long-standing preoccupations, particularly the collective joy of dance. The strobing finale of the second movement, for instance, with its static glimmers of dancers midflight, is a homage

to the kind of cathartic release found in the nightclub or the rave. Yet, while Mesiti’s previous works are often culturally specific, the focus on ritual here is more open-ended. And although the work still draws on traditional and contemporary rituals to inform its speculation, something is lost in the transposition. In reaching for the all-embracing and the universal, The Rites of When becomes more detached. Such generalising heightens the feeling that the rituals onscreen are performances, the scenes planned and edited. The result is luscious imagery, but it’s a gentler, almost comfortable retelling that somewhat blunts any transgressive possibilities. One appeal of collective ritual is in the thrill and danger of exceeding the self, of spinning into oblivion in the crowd. (Stravinsky’s 1913 The Rite of Spring, alluded to in Mesiti’s title, is, after all, a dance to the death, a work so filled with desire, ecstasy, sacrifice and violence that it incited a riot at its premiere.) Mesiti’s work skirts the edges of this sentiment, but it never fully arrives. If there was more of a sensation of risk in The Rites of When, then this might have added a little more heft to the installation’s beautiful flights of transcendence. Naomi Riddle

The Rites of When (still), 2024, seven-channel digital video installation (colour, sound), 30 min. © the artist. Courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

November 2024

Manifesta 15 Various venues, Barcelona 8 September – 24 November The industrial landmark repurposed as palace of culture makes for a potent symbol. Such spaces, often spectacular in scale, function as signifiers of holistic intent: here, a relic of an earlier era is transformed into a demonstration of the regenerative power of the arts, and usually underscored with socially and environmentally-conscious agendas. Art, in this context, is something akin to an agent for cultural rewilding, or an alternative cure-all for society’s ailments. The current iteration of Manifesta, stretching across the Barcelona metropolitan area, leans in hard on this formula. Its central exhibition, housed in the colossal Sant Adrià de Besòs power plant just beyond the city limits that has been shuttered and fenced off since 2011, deploys the 21 installations scattered throughout its

interior and around its periphery as a demonstration of this kind of cultural reclamation. And yet the participating artists frequently take a pessimistic view of their own power to effect such change. The power station itself, its three towering chimneys visible from across the region, has become a local landmark since it was built in the 1970s. The curatorial subtheme here – ‘Imagining Futures’ – focuses on the ecological consequences and afterlives of industry in the developed world. Art’s role in the promotion of industrial infrastructure is acknowledged with a projection of Dziga Vertov’s 1928 film The Eleventh Year, an avantgarde propaganda tool for the young Soviet Union’s modernisation programme. That Sant Adrià represented a pillar of Franco’s

Asad Raza, Prehension, 2024 (installation view, Three Chimneys, Sant Adrià de Besòs). © the artist. Photo: Ivan Erofeev. Courtesy Manifesta 15, Barcelona Metropolitana

ArtReview

industrial strategy goes unmentioned, but the totalitarian parallels add a depth of complexity to the mix. Elsewhere, proceedings are solidly contemporary, tending towards the dystopian. See, for example, Kiluanji Kia Henda’s The Frankenstein Tree (2024), an eerie installation featuring wood salvaged from a nearby forest fire, bolted back together to form a dense thicket set within a recess on the ground floor. The artist may be able to ‘heal’ to an extent, but the ugly cartoon rivets holding the charred organic material in place remind that efforts to do so may be worse than futile. Outside, Mike Nelson exploits the power plant’s monolithic qualities with Un Intruso (uninvited, into chaos) (2024), a shack created from discarded construction materials found

in the vicinity. Inside, the title’s suggestion of intrusion becomes manifest: there is no ornament, just an iron bed frame and a tiny coal stove, which you half-expect to be still warm to the touch. A rudimentary window gives a view towards the chimneys, its frame isolating them and reinforcing the building’s strangeness. You could be looking at the cover of a progressive rock record or a 1970s sci-fi novel. What, we are left to speculate, is the ‘chaos’ alluded to in the title? It offers shades of Russell Hoban’s 1980 postapocalyptic novel Riddley Walker: are we to imagine ourselves as refugees from an environmental catastrophe, regarding the ruins of a civilisation for which we have lost all context? Beyond the relatively concise and inherently interesting limits of the power station, the biennale is distinctly short on focus. Its other subthemes – ‘Balancing Conflicts’ and ‘Cure and Care’ – lack any distinct curatorial stamp, a conscious (and perhaps unwise) decision on the part of its chief ‘creative

mediator’, Filipa Oliveira. If one of Manifesta 15’s key aims is to safeguard the Sant Adrià site as an artistic forum, another is to leave a lasting cultural infrastructure linking Barcelona’s satellite towns, ultimately intended to redistribute cultural clout from the crowded city centre to its periphery. Twelve municipalities participate, commandeering a number of venues, which include defunct textile factories, a panoptic prison, medieval churches, a seminary-turned-museum and a covered market, each harbouring either a solo presentation or loosely themed grouping of a dozen or so artists. Yet the themes, and indeed many of the exhibits, feel somewhat underdeveloped; you sense in spreading itself across so immense a region, the Manifesta format may have stretched itself (and its budget) rather thin. There are arresting moments: in Granollers, Italian collective MASBEDO’s berserk Ghost Soldier (2024) simulates a rave within the confines of a Civil War-era air-raid shelter,

replete with strobe lighting, hardcore soundtrack and excerpts from Civil Defence films showing the aftermath of bombing raids. But in a venue such as the Casa Gomis, a private modernist villa immediately bordered by the runway of El Prat Airport, the showing appears perfunctory, scattered politely throughout the rooms to leave preexisting artefacts undisturbed. Nor do the old industrial venues offer much in terms of spectacle, with many works hidden away in darkened corners. The publications composing Manifesta 15’s official literature are peppered with references to ‘healing’, a slippery catchall that has become commonplace in the lingua franca of contemporary curating: it’s possible to conclude that this kind of curative language, imperceptible or unconvincingly expressed through its exhibits, is as platitudinous as it seems. In the grand scheme of culture-driven regeneration, art is often an afterthought – and this biennale does little to challenge such scepticism. Digby Warde-Aldam

Mike Nelson, Un Intruso (uninvited, into chaos), 2024 (installation view, Three Chimneys, Sant Adrià de Besòs). © the artist / VEGAP, Barcelona. Photo: Ivan Erofeev. Courtesy Manifesta 15, Barcelona Metropolitana

November 2024

Gisèle Vienne This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 12 September – 12 January Puppets are made to be manipulated: they only come to life when animated by a puppeteer who, much like an authoritarian or abuser, dictates their every movement, word and emotion. It’s not surprising, then, that puppets are a key feature of French-Austrian artist, choreographer and director Gisèle Vienne’s 25-year practice: their innately submissive personalities are the perfect metaphor through which to explore themes of personal relationships, violence and trauma – particularly as experienced by children and adolescents. Vienne predominantly works onstage, where her lifesize puppets perform alongside human actors and dancers. But in this show (part of a wider Berlin-based showcase of her art and staged work), the anthropomorphic creations are motionless. Staged in an eerie tableau, captured in a photographic series and displayed like specimens in a line of glass vitrines, the puppets’ arrangements are intended – as the show’s title suggests – to evoke the experience of faltering awareness, and what may cause it to occur. Much of Vienne’s work here references her theatrical repertoire: the key scene in the tableau, for example, draws from and is titled after her 2021 production L’Etang (The Pond), an interpretation of eponymous short story

(c. 1902) by Robert Walser, in which a boy stages his suicide to test his mother’s love. It resembles a teen house party. Dressed in sleeveless denim jackets, purple galaxy T-shirts and sneakers, surrounded by beer cans, jelly sweets and a CD player, a pair of puppets recline rigidly on a bed, the boy’s arm reaching suggestively over the girl’s stomach as her head turns uncomfortably away from him. Close by, another couple sits curled on the floor, staring blankly at the empty white room in front of them – the audience views the whole scene from a distance and is prohibited from entering either space – in which an identical replica of one half of the duo lies dejectedly on the floor. While this could represent a staged suicide, the scene is more effective as a depiction of dissociation: while physically present at the party, the puppet’s emotional self is elsewhere, floating in an abyss disconnected from their uncomfortable reality. Like Geppetto, who brought his puppet Pinocchio to life, Vienne seems to be playing with levels of reality, splitting one of her characters in two and causing psychological turmoil in the process. The success of this vignette lies in the puppets’ stiff body language and vacant gazes, highlighting how, even when working with inanimate objects, Vienne takes a choreographic

approach to demonstrate the expressive potential of movement and bodily gesture. This is also evident in 63 colour photographs of her puppets taken between 2003 and 2024 (63 Portraits 2003–2024). By placing their heads at subtly different angles, Vienne imbues these lifeless figures with emotions of shame, fear and anxiety. The way that their faces are painted enhances this effect, flushed tones and glossy finishes creating the illusion of streaming tears. It feels as if Vienne is training us to listen to the stillness and silence of her puppets, to become more attuned to signs of suffering in everyday life. If there’s any doubt about what has caused her puppets’ distress, look closer at the dolls encased in glass boxes on the ground floor. While they project confidence in sportswear and spiked punk armbands, closer inspection reveals blood-flecked hands, bandaged wrists and bruised legs hidden under sheer white tights. (The show’s final room is strewn with bloodstained shipping boxes, suggesting injuries sustained during the violent journey to their current location.) Here Vienne implicitly urges us to take time to notice these unsettling details and reflect on how paying more attention could improve our understanding of the unspoken struggles of those around us. Emily May

This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy Haus am Waldsee, Berlin

ArtReview

Marlene Smith Ah, Sugar Cubitt, London 22 August – 18 October In Marlene Smith’s exhibition the titular substance is the metaphorical ground upon which personal and communal histories are imprinted. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists have considered how sugar connects histories of the slave trade and indentured servitude to racial capitalism’s neocolonial ventures (and misadventures) as endured today. Smith has confected, from fondant icing rolled into thin slabs of irregular shape, a suite of sculptures named after members of her family. In these sheets are the impressions of embroidered and crocheted objects – doilies, table runners, vase covers – inherited from the artist’s mother. All 14 of the sculptures are presented on grey metallic tables of varying heights arranged across the gallery. Some of the sculptures might resemble 3D-printed silicone, but closer inspection reveals, amid some of the pieces’ complex networks of peaks and grooves, powdery residue and tiny bits of fondant dislodged in their making. In a few, small sections have broken off, others have folded in on themselves; several are warped or raised off the table’s surface in idiosyncratic ways. Miss Eva (all works 2024) sits on a stand tall enough to afford a view of its uneven profile, while several of the sculptures’ raw edges suggest fragments ripped from a larger whole, their roughness

contrasting with the works’ quaint curlicues (as in Sa Golda) and tidy grids (Auntie Josette). With these uniquely patterned pieces Smith orchestrates a synthesis of opposites: the manual and the (seemingly) automated, which is to say the historical and the contemporary, presence and absence, uniformity and individuality. The doily’s namesake, a seventeenth-century cloth merchant, once described his eponymous crocheted garments as ‘affordable’ and ‘genteel’. It is this contradiction that later made the item an ideal accoutrement in the ‘West Indian’ front room, a space that, according to the theorist Stuart Hall – a Jamaican émigré to Britain, like Smith’s parents – telegraphed the aspirations of Caribbean migrants. But the home is not only a space where the pageantries of respectable working- and middle-class life are conducted. For Smith, it has previously functioned as a studio, and a source of potential mediums and themes: from her mother’s crocheted vase jacket in Art History (1987), evoking the history of black women’s creative labour, to Good Housekeeping III’s (1985/2023) chicken wire, jay cloth and house plaster sculpture of Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce, who was shot by police at the entrance to her home in 1985, the domestic sphere is, for Smith, a microcosm of the world.

How, then, to connect the accompanying eight black-and-white photographs (all untitled) of Smith taken by friend and longtime collaborator Ajamu, none of which seem immediately related to the objects made of fondant icing or the domestic as a theme? One way is through the satin dressing gown Smith wears in these, evoking the private ritual of dressing and undressing. Another is the sugarcane paper on which the photographs have been printed, taking us back to the fraught substance of the exhibition’s title. In using this finely textured support and leaving a painterly border for expressive effect, Ajamu directs our attention from an exercise of meaning-making (which can be all too easily inferred from the work of Black, women and queer artists) towards a consideration of the formal and manual processes through which the work has been created. Smith’s body and hair, too, have been cropped and captured up close to highlight the materiality and physicality of their form: fleshy folds and smooth skin, the soft texture of her voluminous curls. So we have, from both parts of the exhibition, an invitation to consider how the sensuous and the symbolic are conjoined in the act of transforming life’s bittersweet raw material into works of art. Tendai Mutambu

Ah, Sugar, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Kadeem Oak. Courtesy the artist and Cubitt Gallery, London

November 2024

Electric Op Buffalo AKG Art Museum 27 September – 27 January In 1965 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now Buffalo AKG Art Museum) opened the landmark exhibition Since Art Today: Kinetic and Op Art, and has since staged exhibitions such as The Eye’s Pop (1998) and Op Art Revisited (2008). Now, Electric Op repositions this movement in relation to current digital culture. Amid arguments over nature of the embodied human spectator versus the objective gaze of machine vision, the exhibition troubles these oppositions by exposing the systems that mediate how we see in the digital age. Presenting over 90 works spanning six decades, the exhibition opens with the perceptual impact of Op art: the moiré effect (when overlapping lines create interference patterns that make a work seem to tremble) is mobilised by Yaacov Agam’s threedimensional Free Standing Painting (1971),

whose alternating, brightly coloured vertical slats create an effect that feels like a cross between a Mondrian painting and a game of Tetris. As audiences walk around it, it establishes the role of the body in perception. Martha Boto’s wall sculpture Interférences Optiques (Optical Interferences) (1965) broadens this effect to kinetic and electric media: points of light seem to move within a four-by-four array of loosely shuttered cylinders inserted into a black wooden square, as if riffing on vintage camera boxes and lenses. Elsewhere, Op art’s flair for manipulating depth perception is highlighted in works by artists ranging from computer-art pioneer Georg Nees and kinetic art trailblazer Carlos Cruz-Diez to colour theorist Josef Albers, represented here by an engraving on black laminated plastic of an unfolding origamilike

Francis Michael Celentano, Kinetic Painting III, 1967, acrylic on Masonite with motor, 122 cm (diameter). © Estate of Francis Michael Celentano. Photo: Brenda Bieger. Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum

ArtReview

structure (Structural Constellation F.M.E. #3, 1962). Al Held’s canvas Piero’s Piazza (1982) startles with a lurid, neon green upright grid moving through a fever-dream space of colour-clashing hoops, grids and cuboids, which nevertheless pays homage to Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca’s use of singlepoint perspective. Many works suggest genealogical affinities between Op art and contemporary digital art. Casey Reas’s METASOTO (2022) responds to Jesús Rafael Soto’s Bois-tiges de Fer (1964) on an adjacent wall. Soto’s work, a rectangular piece of painted Masonite, has been inserted with metal rods from which hang translucent nylon threads that barely move and cast faint shadows, glimpsed as the viewer moves past the work. Though a computer screen might not seem endowed with a similar visual

subtlety, Reas’s work shows how an algorithm can produce delicate distinctions in simple white lines against a black background, discovered as visitors use a mouse to click through its permutations. If Pop art recognised the media image as our new ‘nature’ and Minimalism was an art of phenomenological sensibility, Electric Op proposes perception as an artifact of relations among biological, material, technological and intellectual systems. More challenging yet are our relations with that which we cannot see, or don’t yet know how to see. A wall installation presents Rosa Menkman’s strange web-based work The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021). She invited physicists and others to posit an image that cannot actually exist, which she then generated as various abstractions, located within a black and white immersive online space that is unexpectedly entrancing. Popup windows provide some sense of what prompted the particular abstractions, but the project emphasises the challenges of visualising conceivable but

unavailable phenomena as we reconcile ourselves with advances in contemporary physics and computer science. Electric Op suggests we recognise patterns of interference in the material as well as social conditions of bodies, software and hardware. Laura Splan’s Squint (2016) is a greyscale Jacquard-loom tapestry of abstract wave forms that are based on her own facial expressions, recorded via facial electrodes. The data appeared as wave patterns that she then used as the basis for her weaving process. The loom’s historic relevance to computing gets woven into a narrative of developments linking body and technology. Software quite literally programmes how we see. Rafaël Rozendaal’s net art project Abstract Browsing (2014) here presented on a large screen, where audiences can observe a scroll of vivid rectangular forms. The result of Rozendaal’s web browser plug-in, free for anyone to download, it represents the effect of losing all text and symbols in a website and reveals that the loss of text doesn’t impact

a user’s recognition or navigation of the website, reinforcing the importance of design. Jason Salavon’s real-time animation Everything, All At Once (Part III) (2005) is a technical feat: local live broadcast television, shown on a monitor in the corner of the room, is also processed through Salavon’s own software, the colour palette and sounds of the TV image coded into concentric coloured rings that shift in hue and distribution as they are projected on the gallery wall. The performativity of such works, reactivating our generally pacified interactions with media, calls for an awareness of the myriad forces that impact how we see, think and move. Electric Op presents a genealogy for digital art distinct from the art, design or new-media lineages that are now well established. The show’s cybernetic phenomenology challenges a Newtonian cause-and-effect worldview, proposing a more complex system of relations and perspectives increasingly relevant to the tangled ecological, political and technological situations we face globally. Charlotte Kent

François Morellet, Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory, 1960, oil on canvas, 103 × 103 cm. © Estate of François Morellet / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

November 2024

17th Lyon Biennale Various venues, Lyon 21 September – 5 January The theme of the latest Lyon Biennale sounds like what you’d get if you typed ‘safe biennale theme 2024’ into ChatGPT. Subtitled ‘Crossing the Water’, this edition – guest-curated by Alexia Fabre, director of Paris’s Beaux-Arts art school – ‘has invited artists to give their own vision and experience of human relationships and being open to the Other, their sense of the things that unite and disunite us’. One might generously construe this as true to a moment in which the far right is winning elections across Europe by demonising foreigners, the European Union is drifting apart and the planet is in ecological meltdown. These factors, though, aren’t specifically imaged in the nine-site, 78-artist (many of them French), multigenerational show, such that the biennale seems at once well intentioned

and adrift in a sea of vague, can’t-we-all-getalong metaphor. One practical upside of this event, as with previous editions, is that it’s doable in a day and a half. The new flagship venue, a former train-manufacturing and maintenance site called Les Grandes Locos (shorthand, the catalogue suggests, for ‘repair’), is an epic pair of hangars full of space-eating but often impressive sculpture, installation and video; it requires some legwork, but the work itself – some new, some extant and repurposed – often hits fast. The reparative aspect is capsuled by Michel de Broin’s Mortier Fati – Lignes de lumière (2024): patched areas in the vaulted ceiling outlined in neon, glowing lines resembling an as-yet-unreadable, aleatory script. Pilar Albarracín’s blackly comical

Pilar Albarracín, Marmites enragées, 2010, installation with sound and smoke. © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Courtesy Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris

ArtReview

Marmites enragées (2006), suggesting the long history and latent possibility of a unified revolt, modifies some 50 pressure cookers to whistle (approximately) the socialist anthem The Internationale. Pavel Büchler’s audio installation LIVE (1999), installed in the big and beautiful communal workers’ bathrooms, consists of applause taken from 351 jazz, rock, pop, folk and classical records: here, it’s a spectral cheer for a vanished industrial age, and maybe the power of organised labour. At the Musée d’Art Contemporain (macLyon), the thematic of support, tolerance, recognition and so on dilates, sometimes towards incoherence. Chantal Akerman’s 1971 16mm film (now video) In the Mirror, featuring an undressed woman finding fault with her body, abjures us to not do that to ourselves or

others. Robert Gabris’s installation of dramatically spotlit sculpture plus video projection Asylum – A Poem of Unrest (2024) narrates intersectionality (he’s Roma and queer) and dissolving boundaries through costumes and video featuring human-insect hybrids. The late Sylvie Fanchon’s paintings fuse gestural abstraction with text phrases culled from the voice-assistant app Cortana and repeated URLs for the artist’s website; they’re punchy and funny and I don’t know why they’re here. Meanwhile, the show’s aquatic subtitle is box-ticked via Nadav Kander’s photograph Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic) (2006), from a series of images taken along the 6,300km connecting tributary of the Yangtze River prior to the completion of the Three Gorges Dam; here, a family ‘adapt’ by picnicking beside the rubble of demolished homes. Over at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne, northeast of the city, a fusion is attempted: showcasing ten emerging artists while maintaining coherence. Evidently a wide

range of artistic approaches can be made to fit the biennale’s therapeutic lean: Nadežda Kirćanski’s sparse and disconsolate installation, replicating a medical environment via furniture and projected photos of hospital doors and an unmanned desk, asks for empathy with the sick and vulnerable in Serbia, or the powerless generally (nista spec 1.0 / nothing special 1.0, 2018–24). In affective terms the standout is Matthias Odin, whose Vortex aEra Player (2024) memorialises people who’ve given him somewhere to stay by making quietly intense strip-lit vitrines housing bits of their furniture and personal effects; a further cramped walk-in installation mirrors the tiny dimensions of the smallest legal domicile in France. Meanwhile, the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie de Lyon – Grand HôtelDieu, a former hospital and now a chef’s school (‘hospitality’, ‘care’) pivots into classic ‘biennial art’: Annette Messager’s Eux et nous, nous et eux (2024), creepy stuffed toys bursting from seventeenth-century wooden cupboards,

and Christian Boltanski’s video Animitas (blanc) (2017), a snowy field in which 800 Japanese bells tinkle in the wind, abjuring us to remember the dead too. All of this inevitably skirts what used to be called compassion fatigue; here there’s nary a subset of society that it isn’t incumbent on us to understand, remember, sympathise with and support. Meanwhile, in a country where Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is in a potential kingmaker position in government, references to surging fascism are scant to invisible, certainly less present than those to shamanic rituals, even. Of course, art is famously keyed to questions rather than answers, but for all the broadly interesting and well-intentioned art on show here, the Lyon Biennale and the curatorial mindset it advertises suggests a deer-in-the-headlights approach to present strife. The shit is already all over the fan, and blandly exhorting people to care more about everyone and everything in sight isn’t enough. Martin Herbert

Annette Messager, Eux et nous, nous et eux, 2024 (installation view, Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie, Lyon). © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo: Jair Lanes. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & Los Angeles

November 2024

Energies Swiss Intitute, New York 11 September – 5 January In a photograph from 1976, a wind turbine rises over New York’s Lower East Side neighbourhood. A young technician scaling its scaffold gazes up at its delicate blades, like an airman making sure his ride doesn’t take off without him. The turbine, operated by a grassroots organisation called the 11th Street Movement, stood atop its sweat equity co-op at 519 E 11th Street, feeding energy back into the grid. Looming in the background of the photo are the smokestacks of Con Edison, a utility giant that was at the time locked in a legal battle against the co-op, whose improbable victory, due in part to support it received from a former attorney general, lies at the heart of Energies. The exhibition at Swiss Institute places a newly assembled archive that documents the historic wind turbine in dialogue with contemporary art that explores energy’s political, ecological and social uses. Throughout the 1970s, the largely Puerto Rican and working-class inhabitants of the Lower East Side fought to stave off real estate speculation and displacement. Energy was a resource and weapon in their multifront war against landlords who forced residents out by neglecting boilers in winter and ignoring fires that ravaged entire blocks. Symbols of DIY power and community-built architecture became a key part of local movements’ visual

language. Among the historical ephemera displayed on the exhibition’s first floor, a 1982 painting by activist and 11th Street resident Ruth Nazario shows the neighbourhood streets from a bird’s-eye view. Between the two World Trade Center towers in the city’s imposing financial hub, a brightly dressed crowd gathers around a geodesic dome – a reference to the structures actually built by the Nuyorican community group CHARAS during the early 1970s. In a suite of 1980s watercolours nearby, Becky Howland, cofounder of the art and activism centre ABC No Rio, shows wildflowers and weeds engaged in a David-and-Goliath struggle against power plants and toxic waste barrels. In the more recent works, a DIY aesthetic refracts through complex global stories of disruption, extraction and extinction. From a small room opposite the 11th Street ephemera, a battery on a pallet jack – Vibeke Mascini’s Instar (3.9 kWh) (2024) – releases an ozone scent charged by burnt cocaine confiscated at an international shipping point. Up above, Haroon Mirza’s sci-fi-inspired solar panels, Oscillations for Caduceus (2024), power his rooftop sound installation and the refrigerator housing Ash Arder’s Consumables (11092024) (2024), a car key-shaped piece of shea butter, on the second floor. Arder’s installation references the collapse of the American automobile industry

Wind turbine at 519 E 11th Street with the Con Edison power plant in the background, 1976. Courtesy The News New York’s Picture Newspaper

ArtReview

and, like many other works on view, considers the negative ramifications of the green energy industry. Twenty-first-century energy is mutable, mired in supply chains that mystify exploitation and pain, so ecological awareness becomes increasingly urgent and commensurably elusive. A battery in Agnieszka Kurant’s Living Currency (2014) stores the power generated when visitors open a gallery door, a microcosmic gesture of capture that points both to the possibilities of utilising our own excesses and to the anxiety of unbounded systems of exchange. Who will use that energy next, and for what? Gordon Matta-Clark’s Energy Tree drawings (1970–75) embody the exchange between the utopianism of the 1970s and the ambivalence of contemporary morphologies. Dots of colour zoom around the pages like Nazario’s vividly clad Lower East Siders. In one drawing, the activity of the mass appears to be organised organically along roots. In another, bright ink sprays across the page like atoms exploded by a particle accelerator. The scribbly diagrams are simultaneously coherent and incoherent, caught between certainty and doubt. This tension germinates in Energies, which reveals less about the resources humans consume than about human resourcefulness itself. Emeline Boehringer

Hyeree Ro Niro Canal Projects, New York 27 September – 7 December When the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard visited the United States in the 1980s, he was both alarmed and mesmerised by the cars that crammed the freeways of Los Angeles: ‘All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from an anthropology of its driving behaviour,’ he declared in his book America (1986). The automobile is central to American life, of course, understood as a practical necessity in a vast country with poor public transit systems, and consequently functioning as a symbol of freedom and mobility. Perhaps with this in mind, New York-based artist Hyeree Ro makes the car the focal point of Niro (2024), using it to unravel a deeply personal narrative. In a gallery about the size of a carport sits the skeleton of a Kia Niro, the car model driven by the artist’s late father, from whom she was estranged for 13 years. The intricate structure is made of wood and aluminium and attached to a metal base on ball castors. Placed precariously inside the scaffolding of Niro (2024) is an assortment of smaller sculptures and objects, such as stones, shells and cone-shaped mounds of clay, which are initially difficult to make out within all the intersecting beams. Wispy pieces

of white paper hang limply from some of the beams like laundry, lending a skinlike quality, and a delicate touch to an otherwise rigid armature. Projected onto the gallery’s back wall is a video of various bodies of water – waterfalls, ocean waves – that includes audio recordings of interviews Ro conducted with friends about their experiences of crossing the Pacific Ocean (the artist herself grew up between Seoul and LA). Alongside this is another soundscape of the artist’s reflections recorded during a 14-hour road trip to Niagara Falls this summer. Roughly scaled to a Kia Niro’s actual proportions, Niro looks more like a raft than an automobile, devoid of polish and pretension. It looks to have been constructed in segments and indeed can be easily disassembled thanks to a series of metal latches, as the artist demonstrated during a series of performances than ran alongside the show. During the first of these, Ro painstakingly moved the wooden car and its accompanying objects around the gallery – sometimes sundered in thirds, sometimes intact – while she narrated the aftermath of her father’s unexpected passing. Oscillating between clipped English and Korean words and phrases, Ro’s splintered monologue rehashed

previous conversations with her father, as well as her phone calls with various administrators to close his bank accounts, clear his apartment and retrieve his Niro. The screeches made by the metal castors as the structure was moved around by Ro added to the overriding impression of the difficulty of it all – of the unwillingness of the sculpture to be moved, and, by extension, of Ro’s burdened relationship with her father. Once activated through such a performance, though, Niro becomes autonomous, with the sculpture disregarding the viewer, who must scurry out of its way. Cars, like any technology, can serve a prosthetic purpose, by compensating for the natural limitations of the human body. In the case of Niro, the car also functions as a sort of psychological prosthetics, a site for some of the artist’s most meaningful experiences with her father and thus a temporary substitution of a home they never shared. As an intensely private and enclosed space that is situated in the impersonal, public realm, the car here analogises the dynamics of closeness and distance between Ro and her father, reincarnating these dynamics as gestures, as force, as hiccuped movement. Emily Chun

Niro, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Issy Leung. Courtesy the artist and Canal Projects, New York

November 2024

PST ART Art and Science Collide Various venues, Los Angeles 15 September – 16 February In the early 1960s, Fred Eversley was an engineer at then-Los Angeles-based Wyle Laboratories, a science and technology contractor for NASA’s nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the US Department of Defense. By 1967, he had quit his job, moved to Venice Beach and become an artist – one of a number in LA who would later be dubbed members of the ‘Light and Space’ movement. Access to the region’s STEM institutions and companies – and cheap, available land – allowed Light and Space artists to drastically increase the scale of their sculptures and installations and contend with the East Coast industrial Minimalism of Robert Morris and Donald Judd. Midcentury artists in LA such as Eversley and Helen Pashgian worked with cutting-edge materials and technologies to produce new perceptual experiences – ones enabled by the region’s aerospace and defence industry. From Caltech to Raytheon, this sector continues to haunt the Light and Space movement and its contemporary iterations, many of which are on view in Art and Science Collide. At first glance, the Light and Space works on view feel refreshingly apolitical. As part of the Getty initiative’s collateral gallery programme, David Kordansky Gallery mounted Cylindrical Lenses, a solo exhibition of Eversley’s recent sculptures. The show features eleven two- to three-metre tall polyurethane monoliths that employ parabolic lenses infused with teal, orange, blue and other shades, their curvatures distorting and refracting the surrounding room. In Caltech’s exhibition Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, Pashgian lofts a temporary installation of Untitled (2023), a radiant, round pink disc with a concave centre

that warps views of the surrounding gallery like a fisheye camera. These works’ pastel shades evoke LA’s soothing candy-coloured sunsets, encouraging meditative optical encounters within the spacious galleries. Their materials and structures, though, illuminate the ways in which military technology has catalysed one thread of California Minimalism, shaping the foundations of perceptual art. Eversley’s rocketlike, columnal lenses were made from polyurethane resin initially used for military purposes, and many of Eversley’s sculptures are crafted on a 1940sera ‘turntable’ that originally casted nuclear bomb components; Pashgian’s Untitled was formed from volatile polymer compounds to which she first gained access in 1969 as a resident at Caltech. The lens shape these works utilise echoes the structure of both optical lenses and the high-explosive lens, a component of nuclear implosion bombs that concentrates explosive waves through a concave centre point. In this dark (art) history, new perceptual experiences were made possible by war. More recent artists merge the fundamentals of the Light and Space movement with spectacular, cinematic technologies, sometimes at the expense of critical approaches. At Pomona College’s Benton Museum of Art, contemporary artist Xin Liu expertly combines film and aerospace history in The White Stone (2021), a singlechannel video that explores the ominous results of single-minded, expensive aerospace endeavours; in it, drone shots of impoverished, apocalyptic landscapes alternate with a narrator’s fruitless search for rocket fragments in southwest China. Downtown, Olafur Eliasson’s

takeover of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary in Olafur Eliasson: OPEN feels grandiose in comparison to Liu’s critique. Four floor-to-ceiling conical structures fill the large museum, prompting viewers to look up into them; in Device for seeing potential solar futures (2024), a small, dark enclosure features a shifting orb of light encircled by mirrors that refract the shape and its surrounding environment, creating an illusory black abyss. These works, called ‘viewing machines’, echo Eversley and Pashgian’s lenses, but the results seem to obscure more than they reveal. At their best, Light and Space artists – and their contemporary descendants – prove a difficult point: art has been and is still influenced by military-related industry, from nuclear bombs to telescopic lenses. (This feels especially true in California, which employs the most federal defence personnel of any state and where the sector generates $190bn in gross economic output annually.) The morbidness of this claim, though, may have gone unnoticed if not for artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s controversial ‘explosion event’ at USC’s Memorial Coliseum (We Are, 2024), which served as Art and Science Collide’s official launch. The daytime fireworks show utilised any defence company’s most primordial material – gunpowder – alongside its future weapons: a fleet of AI-programmed drones flew over the stadium, buzzing eerily. Getty has since apologised for the noisy, fiery spectacle, which resulted in a few attendees requiring first aid treatment. But between ear-splitting detonations and clouds of smoke, I felt a wave of relief that someone was finally saying the quiet part loud. Claudia Ross

Fred Eversley: Cylindrical Lenses, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

ArtReview

Cai Guo-Qiang, WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART, Act i: “Dimensionality Reduction”, 2024 (performance view, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum). Photo: Kenryou Gu. Courtesy the artist

November 2024

15th Baltic Triennial Same Day Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius 6 September – 12 January The first time I tried to experience Andrius Arutiunian’s Armen (2023) I missed my ride. The three early-1990s Mercedes Benzes that convey participants (and drivers) through the artist-composer’s 42-minute performance cruised past me from the dingy sculpture-yardturned-temporary-parking-lot of Vilnius’s Contemporary Art Centre (CAC). I was luckier later, at sunset. Arutiunian’s piece was among a series of performances organised by curatorial team Tom Engels and Maya Tounta to mark the opening of the 15th Baltic Triennial, Same Day. Timed to match the two sides of a cassette tape

that plays during the journey, the work entailed a petrol-infused dérive across the city while listening to a mix of diasporic Armenian pop, disco and chanson trumpeting from the ageing taxi’s sound system. The sensation was mind altering, and in retrospect the ride summarised my experience of the 50-artist show – a moody, winsome, dizzying spin. Same Day is an antitheme exhibition indebted to the legacy of experimental practices in the Baltics that functions as a call to experience aliveness and ‘the everyday’. At a press conference last year, Engels and Tounta

described the show as one attuned to the “sensitising capacities of poetic experience in its material, gestural and written forms”. On the ground, this approach requires some unpacking. Unlike previous editions, this international and intergenerational exhibition is held exclusively at the CAC, where no scenography or labels are offered, only a guidebook and floorplan, but this minimalist approach works in the curators’ favour. Artworks punctuate the space in discreet albeit lively ways, drawing visitors towards intersections of private life and dynamic motion. After all, poetry is a praxis.

Same Day, 2024 (installation view, featuring an installation by Jason Dodge). Photo: Kristien Daem. Courtesy Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

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Take the visual rhythms that dot the main hall, including Kitty Kraus’s Untitled (2024), a menacing, spinning trolley handle on a motor that hangs at eye level, the handle stolen from Lithuania’s largest retail chain, Maxima; Kazimierz Bendkowski’s Centre (1973), a film that spellbinds with its cityscape of flashing neons and cacophonic sounds; Matt Browning’s I Still Believe in Your Eyes (2024), freestanding, interlocking chains carved from Douglas fir; and Villu Jōgeva’s Blue (1973/2004), a quirky kinetic object that reverbs into the hall. Some of the most arresting pieces are the smallscale ‘free drawings’ by self-taught artist Elene Chantladze from the last two decades, made from gouache, product packaging, copy paper, cardboard, abandoned hospital documents, matchsticks, food extracts and coffee stains.

The fast brushstrokes straddle abstraction and figuration, shedding light on the artist’s personal life while working in health centres and sanatoriums. Engels and Tounta were tasked with opening the exhibition at the end of the CAC’s three-year refurbishment, some of which coincidentally resonates here: Toine Horvers’s performance Rolling 1 (1986/2024) consists of an eight-person snare drum sequence whose volume is aligned with the strength of the daylight in the room and lasts from 5.30am until last light. From a distance it sounds like a malfunctioning industrial air-conditioning unit, enveloping the entire exhibition in a sonic cloud. In a nearby room, Marina Xenofontos’s installation Control Board #1 & #2 (2023–24) consists of lengths of copper pipe attached to

the wall, rotating on their axes through a synchronised motor. When the piece was shown at a previous venue, a system of sound and motion sensors connected to control boards maintained its structural integrity; here, it’s no longer responsive to those and is bound to break. These instances complexify the relational lifespan of said artworks – some live for a day or collapse along the way. While the curators’ intent is to take time and stretch it across a hypothetical day, some of the works, such as the performances, leave no trace. But maybe that’s the point; the emphasis on time offers an interval unavailable in other large international shows. In Same Day, the minutiae of daily life are met with gentle grandeur, revealing that there is more to the surface of the everyday than meets the eye. Jennifer Teets

Same Day, 2024 (installation view, featuring Matt Browning’s I Still Believe In Your Eyes, 2024, in the foreground, and Marina Xenofontos’s Control Board, 2023–24, in the background). Photo: Kristien Daem. Courtesy Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

November 2024

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane Grey Unpleasant Land Spike Island, Bristol 28 September – 19 January Tattered, tired, just about salvageable, ignoring the faint stains in the chamber pot. This is England, as conjured in Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane’s set of collaborative multimedia works. Both artists have previously used research-based approaches to critique Middle Eastern cultures and colonial histories; here, they examine ‘the myth of England as a nation’. The colossal critical purview stretches the show thin, but with English nationalism rife it’s a crucial subject to broach. Al-Maria and Ourahmane’s allusive works conjure a variety of down-and-out Englishnesses, but these are not convincing exegetes and their ambition doesn’t extend to proposals for reform or repair. The artists invoke an England dressed in folkloric, medieval(ish) historical costume. In the ceiling-hung stained-glass installation A Blessing and A Betrayal (2024), the panes are crowded with gothic blackletter and mock marginalia. A Blessing’s AI-generated ‘scriptural’ verse produces a visionary dream for the biblical Esau, passed over by God in favour of his nationfounding brother Jacob in Genesis 28. Framing Device I and II (2024) display the National

Gallery’s archival frames and wall text for the late-fourteenth-century Wilton Diptych, a portable altarpiece depicting Richard II with angels bearing St George’s Cross. The National Gallery’s curatorial text glosses the absent work’s symbolism. But the artists aren’t particularly interested in the history of English self-fashioning. Instead, they’re after the present-day processes which delimit national histories. Elsewhere we find the literally, prosaically English: Fly Tip (2024) is furniture salvaged by the artists from Bristol’s skips, vacuumpacked in crimp-sealed silver-foil pouches. Discernible inside the plastic: a mattress and loveseat. The work’s label indicates that dirt and hair are also concealed within. As emblems of Englishness, they exaggerate a culture of ‘sweeping things under the rug’. The artists pair these salvaged things with the inherited, intimating their equivalence: Job Lot (1750– 1799/2024), which contains an inheritance of 240 chamber pots, neighbours Curtains (2024), a lush, mauve pair of velvet drapes retrieved from a Belgravia skip. It’s a faintly pejorative

connection. And perhaps we deserve it – for the mind-numbing merriness of low-budget terrestrial TV programmes involving nostalgia, antique trinkets and minor celebrities, at least. The artists do take aim at the economic structures that shape English self-conception. Terra Nullius (2024) is an advert taken out in an issue of the politically conservative Spectator magazine: ‘Seeking English landowners burdened by carrying costs to participate in an endeavour of artistic significance.’ The work’s seductive euphemisms, and its title – meaning ‘nobody’s land’ – suggest a desire to catfish the English landowning class for redistributive purposes. As the gallery assistant tells me when I ring the listed number, the artists are looking for someone to give them some land for free. Suddenly, the show seems more like an acquisitive project than a fully-fanged critique. In Grey Unpleasant Land Al-Maria and Ourahmane act as the artist-radicals against a regressive tradition, but alternative versions of English identity and history, crowded as it is with utopian thinkers and social reformers, are disappointingly absent. Madeleine Jacob

Fly Tip, 2024, scavenged possessions, loose fibres, latent prints, trace evidence (hair, paint chips, insects etc.), miscellaneous residues (cigarette ash, arsenic contaminants, urine etc.), aluminium bag, impulse seal, vacuum pack. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Spike Island, Bristol

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Alison Wilding Testing the Objects of Affection Alison Jacques, London 20 September – 26 October Beautiful, deadly things inspire Alison Wilding. Some of her art objects lean towards ethereality. A delicate, orb-like Gobstopper 5 (2020) made of silver-gold wire, floats, suspended from the ceiling on a transparent thread. Others are earthbound. Hocus Pocus (2022) features a rusty orb atop a serrated disc-like form fixed to the wall. Dirty, dark, dangerous. If the first orb is beauty, the second is death. This relationship between other-worldly and earthbound objects, between symbolism and materiality, is one of the structuring principles in this retrospective show of the British artist. Wilding rose to prominence in the 1980s as one of the artists associated with ‘New British Sculpture’, a group styled by critics and curators that included contemporaries such as Richard Deacon, Shirazeh Houshiary and Anish Kapoor. Reacting against the predominance of Minimalism and conceptual art, theirs was an alternative approach to sculpture characterised by an eclecticism of materials and methods. Through the 23 works presented, Wilding manipulates the interaction between viewer and sculpture, continually varying the height of floor-based and wall-mounted works. Belvedere (2011) resembles a water-well made from onemetre-high white zig zag walls, from which a curious purple sphere peeps. From another position the sphere turns out to be a fibreglass

balloon propped up on a gnarled silver-painted twig. Whereas Belvedere contains space, Breaker (1985), a matt-black freestanding steel trapezoid, fractures it. Vertical and mostly flat, it is curled slightly at the edges, propped up by a curious flipper visible only from behind. The closest Wilding gets to a plinth is a selection of six small sculptures arranged on a table. Several hint towards stalled motion and flight. Killjoy (2015) comprises a bleached pheasant feather threaded through a darkgrey orb. Once used in flight, the feather is now bound to heavy iron, laid to rest atop a bowl-like iron base. The themes of weight and flight are again evoked through Badapples (2014). Two bronze apples are fused at their bases, grounded on the surface, provoking thoughts of Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. Like the object of its title, Solenoid (2015), the sculpture resembles an electromagnet, a sort of dark oblong bobbin, but is set in iron and wax, stifling any possibility of electricity or motion. Two dark, cylindrical, vase-like receptacles, Pair (1994), preside over this curious selection. Wing-like shapes protrude from the top, guardian angels watching over the two hand-sized alabaster cuboids that sit at their feet. These latter works, Press 1 and Press 2 (2006), are marbled in shades of coffee, clouded cream and sienna, their earthen colours inviting quiet reflection,

pausing the rhythm of the room, much like the stalled flight to which many works hint. In the second gallery, artificial light floods down from the ceiling, a stark contrast to the sombre works that possess the space. The stand-out work here is Terrestrial (2003). Two prisms rise from the floor to shin-height. Dark, shifting masses from afar, these are made of hundreds of interlocking triangular and trapezoid transparent plastic slats. Shadows shift through their transparent grey and brown planes, absorbing light into them. Drowned (1993) is the other alien presence in the room. Like Terrestrial, it produces an uncanny sense of silent presence, altering with each changed perspective. Shiny, almost black, its conical shape is made of deep-green acrylic. Raised slightly off the ground, it appears to levitate, an eerie green halo at its base. Wilding takes seriously how different forms affect our sense of physical presence, provoking visitors to orient themselves in relation to the changing moments of visibility and concealment in her works. Leaving back through the first room, you confront the wall piece Ahem (2020), hung at face height. Its alabaster body and foam cone arms, finished with a spherical head, resemble a crucifix. This final work confirms what one suspects of the exhibition: underneath the playfulness, materials dance between worlds. Ella Nixon

November 2024

Udomsak Krisamanis light my way Neugerriemschneider, Berlin 11 September – 9 November Udomsak Krisanamis’s origin story is well rehearsed by now, but since it continues to inflect his art, let’s spell it out again. In 1991, when the Thai artist arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago in his mid-twenties, after studying in his home city of Bangkok, he barely spoke a word of English. Krisanamis began to learn the language by reading American newspapers, pencilling out the words he knew and looking up the remaining mysteries. This meticulous process, which led to pagefuls of darkness glimmering with luminous unknowns, led in turn to the redaction aesthetic of his early works. These collage-paintings, reminiscent of a star field, featured crisscrossing blacked-out strips of newsprint stippled with white dots, underneath all of which lay another, legible language. This stylistic undergirding has lingered in Krisanamis’s practice even as he’s overlaid it with different compositional structures, whether grids, wobbly verticals and oceanic horizontal ripples, clear-cut circles or nearmonochromes. Perhaps not surprisingly, a baseline of newsprint collage structures several of the 14 paintings in the artist’s first show with Neugerriemschneider. In the eponymous, horizontal-format Light My Way (2024), for example, a tactile expanse of pasted-down, dotted black stripes is intricately divided by wavering white lines that, together, suggest flaking tree-bark or painterly craquelure, flecked with flashes of primary colour and interrupted here and there by waveformlike regions of unpainted newsprint,

rhythmically pulsing with printed sixes and nines. A faint row of largish outlined black circles, or zeroes, marches across the canvas’s upper half. Step right back and you could be looking at something organic. Or perhaps be reminded of a painting by Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still – references to whom, seemingly as a shorthand for the history of abstraction, are more explicit elsewhere. See, for instance, the jagged contours within 2023’s Too Fast to Handle, painted on a surface that has been crisscrossed with heavyweight packing tape. Move in on Krisanamis’s work and the sense of abstraction all but dissolves, leaving you in a matrix of numbers and codification. Numbers, in our world (and maybe beyond it), underlie everything. This sustained tension or would-be rapprochement between abstraction and information flows has been Krisanamis’s basecamp for a long time, likely because it’s an unplumbable well: the viewer receives the high-end pleasures of art without feeling cut off from quotidian reality, as well as recognising that painting still has the potential to develop through material innovations. You can construe, here, a narrative of creative immigrant adaptation in the approach to language learning, language bending; or enjoy the febrile pleasures of modernist aesthetics updated and globalised. In I Wish I Knew (2024), Krisanamis paints overlapping, Pop-flavoured black ovals – with callbacks, in the handling, to both Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein – on a doorlike side of an art transit case, outlining and

light my way, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin

ArtReview

highlighting the ‘FRAGILE’ warnings. Bright painted swathes of tomato red and cerulean have been added, and, for good measure, the phrase ‘POCAHONTAS + ZARATHUSTRA’ is stencilled next to a Venn diagram at the bottom. You might, here, get caught up in trying to connect Native American land rights and Friedrich Nietzsche, though only if you’re not aware of the eponymous, wackily named art-handling company. In the back room, perhaps in a nod to the art-design-architecture hybrids of longtime gallery artist Jorge Pardo, Krisanamis further blurs painting with everything else. He drapes the walls with Warhol-ish silvery material and suspends a sculptural cluster of lamps from the ceiling, below which are a trio of hand-painted checkers sets – decorated with Thai script, with bottlecaps for pieces – sat on German beer crates and ringed by little chairs cheerily and cheaply patterned with striped tape. It all suggests a modest but quite cool bar, perhaps serving Thais here in Berlin. Two more dark-toned tickertape paintings hang on the rumpled walls; a third, full of scruffy Cubist patterning and with a pattern of colourful, circular plastic plates attached, is casually propped. This scenario, taken in sum, suggests an analogue to Krisanamis’s painting practice: a convocation of competing energies and still-circulating ghosts, and a reminder that for him abstract painting never stops, dreaming of formalist autonomy, at its edges. It moves through the world while the world moves through it. Martin Herbert

Too Fast to Handle, 2023, acrylic and mesh tape on lacquered metal, 137 × 97 cm. Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin

November 2024

Apophenia, Interruptions: Artists and Artificial Intelligence at Work Centre Pompidou, Paris 25 September – 6 January As an exhibition – a collaboration between Centre Pompidou and KADIST – that explores how artificial intelligence informs the creation of art, it would be tempting to dismiss the works in Apophenia as a collection of AI party tricks. What is Éric Baudelaire’s three-way AI conversation, Tales of Narrativelessness (2024), if not a less entertaining version of the quarrelling chatbots devised by research students at Cornell University in 2011? But like many of the pieces in this exhibition, it serves as an experiment: if I feed this to the machine, what will come out of it? Agnieszka Kurant used GPT2 and GPT3 write-ups based on her work to produce holographic 3D animations. Among the AI’s

imaginings of what Kurant’s future work might look like is a hologram of a heat pump sprinkling water onto a pewter tree trunk (Errorism, 2021). Auriea Harvey’s Black Ship (2024) consists of a 3D-printed sculpture of a ship propelled through the waves by enslaved Africans, accompanied by a mural representing the sculpture’s shadow, and a geolocated augmented reality experience. The work is a result of conversations about slavery and slave ships Harvey conducted with an early version of the AI image generator Midjourney before the word ‘slave’ (among many others) was banned as a prompt word. As experiments, then, these works are about the art-making process, specifically what

Auriea Harvey, Black Ship, 2024, 3D model, AR. Courtesy the artist

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instigates it. John Cage tossed coins to make his music of chance. André Breton went into trances. The grab-bag of associations that AI models conjure out of vast quantities of datasets they’ve been trained on is the new surrealist collage, and the artistic divine spark now lies in the black box of artificial neural networks – at least that is what Apophenia would have us think. If the new horizon of AI is, paraphrasing Hito Steyerl, the ‘uncensored irruption of new links, irregular inference and problem-solving insights’, then what might it mean to learn that, in 1958, psychiatrist Klaus Conrad chose to name early-stage schizophrenia ‘apophenia’?

Apophenia is a condition whereby one makes meaningful links and patterns between unrelated things. More than humans prompting machines, Apophenia posits that machines’ neural-networked delusions might prompt humans to be creative. Some works in the exhibition are serendipities produced wholesale from commercial generative AI models. But Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst take their artmaking down into the engine room of AI by training them with their own carefully cultivated datasets. From this methodical yet still aleatory process arises the moving images that billow and flicker across a monitor screen to Herndon’s spoken memory of a coma (I’m Here 17.12.2022 5:44, 2023). When Herndon says that she thought that she had died, the AI responds with an image of her head and body parts strewn over an arid,

Salvador Dalí-like landscape. To a lesser degree, the collective Interspecifics also gets under the hood of its AI model in Volcanic Studies (2023). Prepping it with carefully defined historical databases, the group asked their generative model to simulate materials documenting an ancient volcano eruption in Mexico. Texts, maps, charts and surveys of the invented volcano seem real and archival, their fictiveness oddly brought to the fore by the claim that the photolithographic plates were printed using real volcano ash. The ash in the ink is falsified evidence of something that never happened – a glitch in the transposition between the fiction and ‘fact’ of a volcano explosion. Are all our memorialising processes as fragile? And, how much of our own history is made up of an invented past? Ho Rui An worries more about a dismembered history than a fictionalised one:

in ingesting and mashing up historical images, AI can produce confabulations drained of meaning and value. His installation, lecture and film Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence (2024) spin cybernetics, colonialist strategy, late capitalism and the history of the Malay peninsula around Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the ‘Global Village’, the cultural condition of an electronically interconnected world. The largescale backdrop to Ho’s two-screen video is a mistily airbrushed barn which looks like it is about to fall over and is surrounded by crooked horses casting nonsense shadows under a full-moon sun. It’s an image out of joint. In his lecture, Ho speculates about the beginnings of an artificial neural network breaking down, an AI so overburdened by representation that the best course of action might be to no longer try to represent anything at all. Clara Young

Ho Rui An, Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence, 2024, work-in-progress image. Courtesy the artist

November 2024

Kenji Ide Some other times Władysław Broniewski Museum of Literature, Warsaw 26 September – 26 October In the modest, state-assigned two-bedroom home in which Władysław Broniewski lived with his wife from 1951 until his death in 1962, the poet’s bedroom remains untouched, preserved exactly as it was. Now the house is his museum. A dark-wood walking stick still leans against his single bed, beside a chair and a simple bedside cabinet. The setting is utilitarian, a space marked by pragmatism and restraint. On his cushioned chair rests a book, A Fool’s Life (1927) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, open to a passage titled ‘Self’, which reads: ‘Seated with his elder at a café table, he was smoking roll-ups non-stop. He hardly opened

his mouth. But he listened to his elder’s words.’ This page is not randomly open; it’s an intentional choice by Tokyo-based artist Kenji Ide, whose small sculptures discreetly inhabit Broniewski’s space in the exhibition Some other times, forging a dialogue that transcends the time that separates the artist from the poet. Ide’s works invite a slow, meticulous viewing. His sculptures, often small enough to be mistaken for found objects, are subtly integrated into the house’s corners and ledges, placed under tables, stairwells and on windowsills. They are primarily made of hand-carved lauan wood, a type of plywood typically found

Some other times, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Władysław Broniewski Museum of Literature, Warsaw

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in Japan, subtly hinting at his Japanese heritage, and creating a presence that suffuses Broniewski’s home. On the dining room table, the exhibition’s titular piece (all works 2024) is composed of thin pinewood strips forming three delicate rectangular posts, each capped with tiny spheres. Suspended between two of the posts are two carved shapes gently sloping downwards, resembling inverted crescent moons. Reading Ide’s notes in the accompanying gallery text about his sense of relationship to Broniewski, one might imagine one moon representing Ide, the other Broniewski, bridging cultural and temporal distances,

inviting viewers to reflect on the fluidity of time, history and memory. Each of Ide’s sculptures crystallises fragments of personal memory and experience; the forms are whimsical, with small boots, collections of found objects – coins, plastic wrapping, leaves and tiny gathered fabric balls – scattered across different surfaces. Driving in shape, a square wooden block with a carvedin pathway, lies flat on the hallway side-table, the channel a meditation on the artist’s long drives and walks that inspire much of his work. Here, the pathway embodies the reflective slowness that pervades the exhibition. This work, like others, slows down our perception of time. Rather than capturing a single moment, it suggests an ongoing process. Ide’s work reflects a commitment to documenting the intimate, the microcosmic,

in a time that feels marked by global rupture. Tangential dam, a small, varnished wooden L-shaped sculpture placed on a window ledge, is supported by two slender wedges and features a single match-thin pole topped with a white sphere. It reads as a figure, delicate and vulnerable, standing alone in a larger, indifferent universe. Our experience of physical time is refracted through memory, a process at once entropic and generative. Ide’s work seeks to crystallise this inherent chaos, and by doing so, charting how memory reshapes and reproduces our understanding of the world. As Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space (1957), a home is more than shelter; it is a ‘topography of our intimate being’. Ide’s works extend this notion to Broniewski’s home as quiet, reverent interventions that respond to the emotional

resonance of a place marked by memory. Rather than adorning Broniewski’s house, Ide’s sculptures engage with it, transforming each surface into a site of reflection. Through this quiet dialogue, Ide’s work heightens our awareness of space and memory, tracing the contours of lives – those of Broniewski, Ide and the viewer – through gestures that are both intimately personal and universally resonant. The simple elegance of Ide’s work – its unadorned quality and humble materials – evokes a sense of immediacy. Ide’s delicate engagement with time, memory and life’s impermanence, produces an experience that draws viewers away from their daily rhythms and immerses them in a sensory, introspective world. Here, time unfolds quietly, allowing for contemplation and an invitation to feel, to notice anew. Sofia Hallström

Some other times, 2024 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Władysław Broniewski Museum of Literature, Warsaw

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PST ART Art and Science Collide Various venues, Los Angeles 15 September – 16 February Colonial narratives will tell you that earth can be possessed, but when brought indoors – into artists’ studios, exhibition spaces and research institutions – natural materials such as rocks, wood, water and soil often evade capture. The intractability of nature is one of the main themes in Getty’s PST ART, Art and Science Collide. In Lita Albuquerque’s solo exhibition Earth Skin, presented at Michael Kohn Gallery (many of LA’s commercial galleries are participating in PST ART), one sees buttery yellow and bloodred handprints dragged across canvases, on grounds of bright cobalt blue. These paintings, marked by traces of the artist’s body, evince a speculative and ancient process of creation, one that evokes both transcendence and tactile intimacy. Two from 2024 subtitled A Poem for A.M. pay homage to Ana Mendieta’s Body Tracks (1982), a performance in which the Cuban artist coated her hands in perhaps the most visceral fluid available in the natural world – animal blood – and ran them over white paper. As if to emphasise the direct connection between Albuquerque’s process and the natural world, a thin layer of pulverised granite has been brought in to cover three quarters of the floor in one room. While Albuquerque, a Land artist in her late seventies who has exhibited internationally but has been unduly eclipsed by artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, seems fully in control of her paint, the presence of the enormous ochre field of ground-up rock in the gallery, against which viewers’ bodies and the surrounding canvases shrink in comparison,

calls into question whether we can ever fully bring a natural material under our dominion. In Objects for a Heavenly Cave, at Marta, 13 artists explore the subject of the Renaissance grotto. The works are all distinctly textured, asymmetric and imperfect, their outer surfaces conflating the tactile qualities of surfaces ranging from cave walls to human skin. The three-room exhibition includes the collaborative duo A History of Frogs’s scaly aluminium sconces; Masaomi Yasunaga’s grogged and roughhewn shell-spackled vases; Emily Endo’s arrangements of sleek and silky glass perfume bottles and pale volcanic rock; and Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi’s drippy, borosilicate glass vessels. These objects reiterate, in their own way, the indoor-outdoor tensions insinuated in Albuquerque’s exhibition. Each one is an attempt to meld organic forms with design, and in each one the organic can be seen wrestling and oozing its way out of human-imposed strictures of geometric form. At Morán Morán in East Hollywood, Oscar Tuazon presents mementos from the site of the Los Angeles Water School (LAWS), a public art workshop that Tuazon established in an empty lot near the Los Angeles River to educate the public about water protection and water activism. The works on view include six stolid totemic sculptures; one is made from a found water pump while the other five are made from Douglas firs, evergreens native to western North America. On the gallery walls, enchantingly inscrutable paintings – composed of marbling

ink and enamel spray on canvases, industrial tarps and topographical maps – attest to the unpredictability of water as an artistic material and collaborator. In works like Water Laws (2024), Fun Addiction (2024) and Agua Caliente (2024) one can see how water moved on the paintings’ surfaces, creating various translucencies and opacities, striations and smudges, pooling pigment into some areas and leaving others untouched. At California State University’s Luckman Gallery, the group exhibition Sinks: Places We Call Home addresses soil contamination in neighbourhoods across Los Angeles County that have historically been treated as ‘sinks’, or reservoirs of pollution. Here, the chemistturned-artist Maru García presents Prospering Backyards, a project that combines soil testing, environment building and community workshops. It stands out as one of PST ART’s most successful examples of a work that meaningfully combines ecology and art: García calls out the Exide battery plant in Vernon, a city a few kilometres south of Downtown LA, explicitly naming the source of the ongoing pollution in the city. Working directly and practically, García developed through fieldwork and laboratory research a compound that leaches contaminants from soil and has introduced it to the soil in Vernon, yielding real-world outcomes. Instead of extracting from the natural world, projects like García’s attempt to heal it, by adding to it the fruits of humans’ intellectual and collaborative labour. Angella d’Avignon

Lita Albuquerque, She Brought Us To The Pacific Ocean And Said, “Here, This Is Where You Were Born.”, 2024, pigment on canvas, diptych, 198 × 549 cm (overall). Courtesy the artist and Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

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Oscar Tuazon, Cedar Spring Water School Window, 2018/2023, enamel on glass, plywood, steel, aluminium and Douglas fir, 192 × 59 × 32 cm. Courtesy the artist and Morán Morán, Los Angeles

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Books

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The Spirit of Hope by Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steuer Polity, £14.99 (hardcover) Burnout, depression, ADHD – not to mention the various ways in which we voluntarily enslave ourselves to capitalist culture by believing that we need, above all else, to be creative, productive citizens, all of the time: Byung-Chul Han’s reflections on these subjects have made him one of the most popular philosophers of the current era. That and a writing style that machine-guns aphorisms at a fully automatic rate (the perfect mode of thinking for the social media age, even if that age is one that Han frequently decries). It is something of a surprise, then, to see the Berlin-based philosopher moving into a more positive gear with the latest of his books to be translated into English: a brief sermon on the benefits of hope. He does start off, though, by painting a bleak picture of our current times, suggesting that our society is founded on fear, whether of raging pandemics, all-out war or climate apocalypse. Still, the picture conjured by Han is not nearly as bleak as the dumbly lumpen accumulations of paint, straw and clay by Anselm Kiefer that decorate the book throughout (it’s never made clear why the illustrations have been included, the first of which Kiefer has dedicated to Han, though it’s presumably an effort to make his own work, by some sort of osmotic alchemy, seem ‘deep’). Han justifies his overriding tone of bummery by arguing that ‘the more hopeless the situation, the firmer the hope’. He arrives at the even more

self-serving conclusion that only those who are negative can be hopeful. Hope, he contends, is the ability to imagine possible (rather than necessary) futures. ‘Poetry is a language of hope,’ he fires. ‘In the information society, language loses all auratic distance and becomes shallow information. Digital hyper-communication makes us speechless.’ That doesn’t stop Han presenting his own information, citing other people’s thoughts on hope as recorded in literature and philosophy, from Ingeborg Bachmann and Hannah Arendt to Franz Kafka and Gilles Deleuze, which in turn might alert you to the fact that, unlike some of his recent publications (notably Absence, 2023), the Korean-born philosopher’s focus here is exclusively on Western ideas. By buttressing his thoughts on the present by citing the past, Han plays a similar game to Kiefer, manufacturing authority by collaging himself in among ‘established’ wisdoms. Han cartwheels through three centuries of (largely) hopeful (and mostly dead) thinkers across three breathless pages touching on Czech poet and dissident Václav Havel, German philosophers Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, Romanian–French poet Paul Celan, Marxist thinker Ernst Bloch, German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the British philosopher and literary critic Terry Eagleton. Hope is a faith, a quasi-religious experience, as Han has it. And so on to Anselm of Canterbury

(a Benedictine monk) and Martin Luther. Faith means trusting others, yet ‘in our narcissistic society, the movement of blood is, in fact, limited to the narrow circulation within our egos. It no longer flows out into the world.’ Resist! Trust! Hope is how society might be healed. Along the way Han takes an unconvincing sideswipe at AI (thinking has a bodily dimension – the blood gets stirred, the flesh goosebumps – without which there can be no real knowledge) and a slightly more convincing big-up for art (more than making up for the Kiefer debacle). He quotes philosopher Theodor Adorno: ‘art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth’, implying that art has the capacity to embrace thought without limit, the kind of thinking that leads to hope, freed from the logic of a world that the philosopher has already established as being pretty shitty anyway. There’s just space left for Han to establish that, contrary to popular opinion (which has them all down as bores), philosophers are in fact great eroticists (in that they are lovers of truth), and to pick a quick fight with Heidegger, who was, according to Han, obsessed by death (the root cause of the world’s anxiety) when he should have been focused on birth (of new, hopeful ideas). All this leaves you wondering why Han has been so obsessed with accounting for ideas of the past when he claims to be addressing the present, via a boundless event horizon of hope. Mark Rappolt

Book of Games by Carsten Höller Taschen, £40 (hardcover) Perhaps you’re bored, waiting at the bus stop. ‘Bring your two outstretched index fingers together in front of your eyes until the fingertips touch. Focus on the background. You will see a sausage between your fingertips. Make the sausage float by moving your fingers apart.’ The sausage does indeed float. This is the sort of brief – if to others slightly nutty-looking – respite from the tedium of the everyday that this second, expanded edition of Carsten Höller’s Book of Games offers. (The first, a pocket-sized book, was published 25 years ago as a result of the artist having to attend his own gallery dinner, which turned out to be terribly dull.) The compact tome comprises 336 games that are

accompanied by images from varying sources including the artist himself and works by other artists such as Rachel Rose, Julien Creuzet and Wolfgang Tillmans. The book is divided into six sections featuring games to play alone and to play with others, games for two to play and two to play with others, and games for multiple players and multiple players to play with others. The ‘others’, here, are the unwitting participants and observers of a series of games that might variously be considered pranks, or ‘sport’, or performance, etc. So, while with one other player you might decide to ‘without touching each other make your shadows interact in sexual positions,’ you may also choose, with that same person, to streak

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through a crowded public space. And see what happens. You might also read the entire book as a series of social experiments, perhaps guided by the fact that that Höller’s work frequently explores how people think, behave and interact with their surroundings. Book of Games continues this enquiry by inviting players to explore their everyday experiences via sensory and psychological manipulation. A personal favourite, a game for one, ‘Dead Beetle’ (or, how to escape from an excruciating social interaction or event such as post-Christmas family lunch, once safe topics of conversation have run dry and intrusive questioning begins): ‘Play dead. Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t blink.’ Fi Churchman

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In Writing: Conversations on Inspiration, Perspiration and Creative Desperation by Hattie Crisell Granta Books, £16.99 (hardcover) So many interviews with writers dwell on the mythical props and settings of a writer’s life: their legal pads and fountain pens, writing sheds in gardens or cafés where jittery laptop dwellers order multiple drinks. Hattie Crisell’s In Writing is an edited volume of conversations with writers talking about where ideas come from, their successes and failures, and a general overview of a writing life. Early on, novelist Meg Mason describes how anyone who could have their desk under a window and chooses not to is ‘slightly sociopathic’. The next interviewee, newspaper columnist Hugo Rifkind, describes the glorious view out of his home office. He sits with his back to it. For the record, I’m writing this at a desk in front of a window overlooking the quaint street on which I live. But who reads books about writing? The first (the obvious) answer would be, well, other writers. Those who will nod at comments about agents and readers, and who will smile at screenwriter Georgia Pritchett describing how she always wanted to write, how her first ‘book’ (scare-quotes in the original) was a biography of her hamster. Then there are would-be writers who, too, may have written biographies of their pets but have yet to be published and want to learn about other writers’ processes. Why do books about writing keep getting published? Stephen King’s On Writing (2000) is a classic; critic James Wood wrote the

almost-guide How Fiction Works (2008); Annie Dillard reflected on The Writing Life (1989). They’re very different books about writing and reading, but books on the subject keep getting published because they promise that view through the window and insight into the lore around the writer’s oh-so-quiet world. But I would like to suggest another reason to read them: that against the legend and myth of typewriters and fountain pens, is novelist Anna Hope telling Crisell how, ‘9:47 a.m. is a perfectly good time to start writing’. That is to say, thinking about writing as not some ideal flight of fancy, but as a job. Not an especially easy or hard one, compared to driving a train or teaching children or any other job. But a job nonetheless. In Writing draws on a podcast of the same name featuring longform conversations with writers. In the book version, Crisell poses the same ten questions to more than 50 writers, then picks and organises their responses. She also introduces each theme – on language, on rewrites, where ideas come from and what’s hard and so joyous about it all – with a short essay of her own. None of it feels particularly revelatory, perhaps because Crisell talks to writers about their practice rather than what they have produced, and the revelation is often in the work itself. Still, it’s a nice reminder of just how normal a writing career

can get, beyond the lore and those desks-bywindows. (Crisell herself on receiving edits: ‘Although some of the experiences here might fill the aspiring writer with dread, the important point is that everyone survived and kept on writing.’) My favourite book about writing is actually a book about reading: George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), in which Saunders analyses short stories by four Russian writers. It’s a loving and warm account of a lifetime of engaging with work that came before you. Crisell includes Saunders here as an interviewee, and cites A Swim in a Pond in her conclusion, which is no surprise: it’s the kind of book that reasserts the idea that we read in the hopes of finding something that lasts, that we want books to endure over time, that we look to our contemporaries, and to our predecessors, too. That we learn from other people. Crisell’s book is meant to give a view behind the veil, combined with advice; something you wouldn’t get from only reading someone’s work. Its assertion that writing is a job breaks through the typewriters and mythology. And it reflects the simple challenge of writing, of creative work – that it takes a whole lot of faith to put something in the world that no one has ever asked for. But what I take from Crisell’s conversations are those simple facts of the work itself: it’s 9:47 am and everyone survives. Orit Gat

Set My Heart On Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Helen O’Horan Verso, £11.99 (softcover) ‘You’re pretty fucking weird.’ That’s how the narrator of this book, twentysomething Izumi, is described by her friend Etsuko. And she is. Izumi Suzuki’s first novel to be translated into English (the Japanese original was published posthumously in 1996, following the author’s suicide, at the age of thirty-six, in 1986) is about the people and culture that made up Tokyo’s alternative club and music scenes during the 1970s. And it’s about a central character, only in her twenties but by midway through the novel struggling to hold on to what she perceives of as youth, whose own desires only surface gradually from a fog of casual sex, drunkenness, apathy and ennui. And a more general measuring-up of the differences between deep love and superficial attractions.

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Suzuki is best known as a writer of sci-fi stories. A pop-cultural icon, she had previously been a model and actress, featuring in photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki. Her life has been the subject of novels and films but her work has lingered in the shadows, only appearing in English in recent years. The book is divided into thirteen chapters, each named after a song of the time (among them, The Moody Blues’s Nights in White Satin and Brenton Wood’s Gimme Little Sign, both 1967). She encounters rebels and oddballs who are into Western music but can’t get hard unless the girl is at least half Japanese. Indeed, in a reversal of the gender stereotypes of the time, her men are sensual, occasionally sexually freakish, but not much

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beyond that. ‘Most of what Landi said made little sense,’ she writes of one. ‘But so what? His penetrating, metallic voice and clear-cut pronunciation alone had a powerful enough effect.’ Izumi (the character, although there are biographical overlaps with the author) is attracted to musicians who are thin, beautiful, creative and famous, but is nevertheless conscious of wanting to be more than an appendage hidden in the shadow of their genius. ‘Who needs love if it means losing yourself inside it?’ she remarks. What follows is a remarkable quest for love and agency in a world that seems to dictate that achieving the former requires a woman to surrender the latter. Nirmala Devi

The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power by Amy Sall Thames & Hudson, £45 (hardcover) The 1983 documentary Camera d’Afrique includes an interview with Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, often called the father of African cinema. Leaning forward, pipe in hand, he looks confident yet impatient. “Are your films understood in Europe?” asks someone off camera. “Let’s be very clear,” Sembène replies, exasperated. “Europe is not my centre. Europe is on the outskirts.” The Cannes glitterati to whom Sembène was indirectly speaking must have clutched their pearls. How could a burgeoning African filmmaker be indifferent to Western accolades? Sembène’s words did not merely impart a personal perspective but were grounded in reality. African filmmakers have never had to play catch-up with their counterparts in Europe or the US in terms of creativity and cultural impact, even establishing themselves while facing significant obstacles, ranging from the 1934 Laval Decree that prohibited Africans in French colonies from making films, to the censorship exercised by postcolonial nation-states. Amy Sall’s new book examines this history of African lens-based practices from the 1930s to the current day, presenting a picture of projects that are autonomous, poetic and pluralistic in character. Sall is a researcher and collector-archivist of Senegalese heritage based in New York. Guided by a ‘pan-African intent’ and an ‘ethic of care’, the photographs and films cited in the book defy the derogatory imagery found in both colonial

ethnography and genres relating to ‘humanitarian appeal’. Materials were sourced by Sall from artists or their families, and the book includes original interviews conducted with Nigerian-Cameroonian photographer Samuel Fosso and Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé. It is, foremost, Sall’s sensitive, intentional scholarship that stands in stark opposition to the extractive violence often felt in previous attempts to visually record Africa. African photographers were active before the mid-twentieth century. Among them were Solomon Osagie Alonge, the only commercial photographer working in Benin City during the 1930–40s (he developed his glass plate negatives under kerosene lamps), and the Senegalese pioneer Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, the first sub-Saharan African to make a film (Afrique-surSeine, a 1955 feature about the diaspora in Paris). The arresting portraiture of the Bamako school, whose members included Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, also features, while those who Sall designates as ‘ambulatory’ photographers, such as Sanlé Sory and Philippe Koudjina, vivaciously capture the heady days of independence. Although Sall emphasises that we cannot speak of one ‘type’ of African cinema, there are affinities between its practitioners, including a desire to depict the realities of African life and draw from oral storytelling traditions, while excavating ideas of cultural identity

and nationhood. From the anti-imperialist stance of directors like Sarah Maldoror, Ahmed Bouanani, Haile Gerima and Flora Gomes, who dramatise decolonisation struggles, to canonical names like Sembène, Med Hondo and Cissé, who question the future of African sovereignty, many cineastes understood that ‘making film is a political act’, in the words of Burkinabé director Fanta Régina Nacro (one of the few prominent women in African filmmaking – like all global film industries, Sall acknowledges the dominance of men in the African context, too). Yet political consciousness never comes at the expense of experimentation, beauty, drama and intimacy – attributes that are abundant in the films of Idrissa Ouédraogo, Abderrahmane Sissako and Youssef Chahine, and in the photography of Jean Depara, Lazhar Mansouri and Adama Sylla. This mutual interdependence, in what may be called an aesthetics of liberation, bolsters Sall’s argument that getting behind and in front of the lens is ‘a collective claiming of a right to look as a right to be, and to be seen’. The African Gaze goes beyond charting how Africans have resisted the fetishisation and othering of their continent by the West. Instead, it chooses to illustrate what that resistance has created: powerful modes of visual storytelling that are up to the world-changing task of helping people to be certain of who they are and from where they wish to speak. Sarah Jilani

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated by Alison L. Strayer Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) ‘I realize that I am fascinated by photos in the same way I’ve been fascinated, since childhood, by blood, semen and urine stains on sheets, or old mattresses, discarded on pavements; by the stains of wine or food embedded in the wood of sideboards, the stains of coffee or greasy fingers on old letters – the most material and organic kinds of stains.’ So writes Annie Ernaux in her recently translated memoir, The Use of Photography, coauthored with her then lover Marc Marie in 2003 (and first published in French in 2005), when Ernaux was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. Comprising 14 analogue photographs of thrown-off clothes in the different places where the couple met during their affair, along with their written reflections on each

image, the resulting book meditates on the material traces of love and endurance. In the snapshots, clothes are metonyms for bodies. At times, they encode and narrate the actions and movements of desires: a photograph of a crushed cigarette and a pair of glasses on the kitchen counter preserves ‘the first gestures of a myopic smoker who is about to make love’; the distance between a pair of overturned boots reflects ‘the force with which they were flung off’. In others, clothes are eerily human. When the couple went to clear the house of Marie’s late mother, it was her clothes that ‘remained suffused with the smell of the eau de cologne she used to excess’ and preserved the humanity that was otherwise lost. Shed from the bodies

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on whose shapes it is modelled, an item of clothing lingers between phantom and carcass, an artefact of impermanence, a memento mori to our vulnerable, corporeal being. ‘I don’t expect life to bring me subjects but rather unknown structures for writing,’ Ernaux writes. The book’s format is informed by a period of time in which passion and mortality are like two sides of the same coin – or the positive and negative of a photograph. Here, taking a photograph reads like an aspiration to preserve, and, written retrospectively, the text bears witness to that act of preservation – the time bracketed in between the two kinds of recordkeeping is a testament to her survival, when death loiters just around the corner. Yuwen Jiang

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Text credit Words on the spine and on pages 27, 45 and 87 are Bryan Ferry, ‘Slave to Love’, 1985

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