ArtReview October 2023 by ArtReview

Lost in a forest, all alone since 1949

Rirkrit Tiravanija

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ACCELERATING IDEAS

LEARN MORE AT CHANEL .COM

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NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

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envisioning new futures with THE Centre Pompidou, PARIS Reframing Narratives with THE National Portrait Gallery, LONDON FOSTERING GLOBAL DIALOGUE with THE Leeum Museum of Art, SEOUL

ADVANCING CULTURE Elevating Underrepresented Voices with THE Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Exploring Craft and Architecture with THE Power Station of Art, SHANGHAI

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New York

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Hong Kong

Seoul

London

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Liu Ye, Phoebe, 2021 © Liu Ye

Liu Ye

Naive and Sentimental Painting

David Zwirner

10 October–18 November 2023 24 Grafton Street, London

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Daniel Richter Stupor

Daniel Richter, (Not Yet Titled) (detail), 2023 Photo: Eric Tschernow. © Daniel Richter / VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2023

London October—November 2023

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Simeon Barclay

At Home, Everywhere and Nowhere

06 October - 11 November 2023

5 Warwick St, London W1B 5LU

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50 Mortimer St, London W1W 7RP

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ArtReview vol 75 no 7 October 2023

It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it Back in the old days ArtReview used to go to museums and galleries for entertainment, for fun. How it would laugh when it saw Picasso’s latest smudgy portraits at a Cork Street gallery, or Yoko’s unfinished paintings over at the ‘groovy’ space in Mason’s Yard. Art galleries used to be just for aesthetic delectation. Now they’re increasingly repurposed as sites of care. Literally in some cases during the recent pandemic. Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall opened as a popup vaccine spot, as did the cavernous Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Turin. Imagine being vaccinated in the middle of Anselm Kiefer’s Seven Heavenly Palaces (2004–15), with its towering concrete impersonations of corrugated iron shacks stacked one atop the other. Some people are probably still haunted by it. But what’s more likely lurking over your shoulder at a gallery these days is an installation providing some kind of instruction or access to the sorts of things that healthcare providers, psychologists and social workers used to do. Sometimes ArtReview wonders if art is the glue in the social contract – the one by which people willingly come together to thrash out a collective will or a state – binding the whole thing together when in reality it’s falling apart. Or maybe art is the horse from which the glue is made… Either way – we all need a bit of help sometimes, and respite for sure. Once the floodgates of the autumn artworld ‘season’ reopen (yeah – that link to an elitist social vibe persists in the artworlds of Europe and the US, in fact it’s pretty much what the whole shebang is founded upon), it all gets a bit much. A great big helping of other people, served with a side of big gallery openings and a cold dressing of polite chatter, and that extra serving of COVID you didn’t order but that keeps showing up anyway.

Hug-a-Picasso

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It’s OK, this is a safe space – you can use ArtReview as a way to escape the overcrowded art fair or opening you’ve been trying to leave for three hours now, to cover your face to hide from that curator who thinks that videos of a bunch of people loafing and larking is still interesting, or just to divert yourself for a moment from pretending to be interested in so-and-so’s latest turn to figurative painting. ArtReview is a place where we can meet, and share a silent scream into the void. Or at least take a long, hard look at it, studiously scrutinising what might be on the other side. Of the assembling. Of the turn towards ‘care’. And trying in one way or another to work out what that might tell us about the world. Not just the artworld, fairgoers, but the ‘real’ world too. Because isn’t that why we look at art these days? To locate ourselves. To know where we stand. It’s not like people can figure this out for themselves. Otherwise why would you need a magazine like ArtReview’s? Taking a page out of Faith No More’s book, ArtReview cares a lot about you people. ArtReview cares about making sure you people take the time to care about you other people. ArtReview cares about conversation, as long as it’s not the boring art kind. ArtReview cares about finding the small threads winding through the crowds that lead to the unexpected. ArtReview cares about not being so serious. Yes, it thinks there is still room or entertainment in art. Just as much as there is for it in life. As Faith No More insists, ArtReview still cares about Garbage Pail Kids, maybe not so much Transformers anymore, but definitely you people. For sure. ArtReview cares about care. You bet it cares a lot, yeah. ArtReview

That’s-a-nuff-hugging-Mario

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Jules de Balincourt Sam Gilliam Loie Hollowell Robert Irwin & Mary Corse Sui Jianguo William Monk Paulo Monteiro Yoshitomo Nara Robert Nava Julian Schnabel

Scan here to see our exhibitions

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Art Observed

The Interview Emilie L. Gossiaux by Emily McDermott 30 Writing Practice by Adam Thirlwell 39

Feeding the Rich by Amber Husain 40 Politics of Hate by Deepa Bhasthi 41 Tortuous Tunes by Jamie Sutcliffe 43

Emilie L. Gossiaux, True Love Will Find You in the End, 2021 (installation view, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, New York, 2023). Courtesy the artist

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Art Featured

Rirkrit Tiravanija by Jessica Lanay 50

Rory Pilgrim & Helen Cammock by Marv Recinto 68

Mike Kelley by Chris Fite-Wassilak 58

Art & Medicine by John Quin 74

Performing Care by William Gass 64

Harry Smith by Martin Herbert 78

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CMY

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Art Reviewed

EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 90 35th Bienal de São Paulo, by Oliver Basciano Ugly Painting, by Claudia Ross Etel Adnan & Simone Fattal, by Jasmine Reimer Gabriel Massan & Collaborators, by J.J. Charlesworth Pam Evelyn, by Tom Morton Neo Rauch, by Digby Warde-Aldam Iannis Xenakis, by Athanasios Argianas Tolia Astakhishvili, by Martin Herbert cameron clayborn, by Jenny Wu Converge 45, Jonathan Griffin Dominik Lang, by Max L. Feldman My Past is a Foreign Country, by Carlos Kong Blakytna Trojanda, by Phoebe Blatton How Many Worlds Are We?, by Max Crosbie-Jones Suchitra Mattai, by Jenny Wu Rebecca Moss, by Lara Pawson Trust Me, by Cassie Packard Sola Olulode, by Madeleine Jacob Inventing the Rest, by Salena Barry

Socorro!, by Lucy Raven, reviewed by Fi Churchman The Variations, by Patrick Langley, reviewed by Alexander Leissle The Upside-Down World, by Benjamin Moser, reviewed by Oliver Basciano The Future Future, by Adam Thirlwell, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Viewing Velocities, by Marcus Verhagen, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now, edited by Rebecca Morrill and Maia Murphy, reviewed by Oliver Basciano Arbuckle ’s Amazing Adventures 122

page 92 Jana Euler, rider / horse switch under observation ride thrown off, 2018, oil on canvas, 170 × 200 cm. © the artist

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Size: Full page trim 235mm x 300mm, Full page bleed 245mm x 310mm

Unique Experiences at Every Turn

A global destination for creative expression, SCAD MOA presents awe-inspiring exhibitions and events with internationally renowned contemporary artists. 601 Turner Blvd.

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Downtown Savannah

scadmoa.org

@scadmoa

#SCADMOA

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OCT 3, 2023—JAN 14, 2024 | nyuad-artgallery.org New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE

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karrabing film collective 07 oct 202314 jan 2024

esteban jefferson 07 oct 202314 jan 2024

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Art Observed

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Courtesy the artist

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The Interview by Emily McDermott

Emilie L. Gossiaux

“Understanding how to communicate with a dog and get in the mind of a dog has taught me a lot about empathy – instead of getting frustrated, I empathise. And that bleeds into a lot of things, like empathy for other people and other relationships”

Upon entering the exhibition Crip Time at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst in 2021, visitors immediately found themselves between two sculpted lifesize dogs standing on their hindlegs facing each other, paws outstretched. Seeming to be frozen in action, the animals looked like they could step or spring towards each other – or the viewer – at any moment; visitors navigated the space according to the dogs’ placements. The work is called Dancing with London (2021) and was created with polystyrene foam, Celluclay and epoxy putty by New York-based artist Emilie L. Gossiaux with exactly this intention: “When I make sculptures,” she says, “I think about the choreography of them in relation to how the viewers will approach and interact with the work.” Beyond their positioning with the audience, the sculptures also represent the daily choreography between Gossiaux and her guide dog: London

is a recurring visual motif in her practice, and, for the past ten years, has been a constant companion in her life. Since Gossiaux lost her vision in an accident in 2010, she and London have built a relationship that the artist described earlier this year in The Paris Review as being ‘like a marriage’. Although her sculptures, drawings and paintings prior to 2020 explored interpersonal relationships through the lens of memories and dreams, nary a human – aside from herself and her partner, Kirby – has been seen in her work since then. Rather, she now translates her and Kirby’s kinships with London to visually explore the potential of interspecies relationships: what humans can learn from animals and how to think about our existence from an antiAnthropocentric perspective. When I call Gossiaux, who received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York, and MFA

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in sculpture from Yale, New Haven, she is preparing for her first institutional solo exhibition, at the Queens Museum in New York. The show, opening later this year and titled Other-Worlding, will revolve around The Whitecane Maypole Dance (2023), an installation that, she explains, will feature “three lifesize Londons dancing on their hindlegs holding onto ribbons that are dog leashes attached to a maypole, which I drew to resemble my white cane. They are in a valley with trees behind them. In the sky, a sun and a crescent moon hang side by side.” Before talking about the symbiology in the installation, which is based on her drawing London, Midsummer 1 (2022), we go back to the beginning: why London features so prominently in her work, Gossiaux’s decision to leave the human figure largely behind in favour of creating “super-beings” and how she adjusted her practice after losing her vision.

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The Human-Animal World In works like The Valley of Magic (2018), a line drawing showing the butts of two naked people who are lying side by side on their stomachs, Gossiaux explored interpersonal relationships. “Since I lost my vision, I always had this longing for community,” she says. She also explored community by way of collective memory: in recreating Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in a 2018 diptych painting of the same name, “I was playing with people’s memories of recognising something, and my memory too,” she says. But during grad school her practice shifted away from interpersonal relations and towards interspecies relationships. It was at this time that Gossiaux “first started to consider how deeply important my relationship with London is”. So, I ask, what made you start to consider your relationship with London in an artistic way? “In New Haven, being in a new place with new people, there was a feeling of isolation, and London became a constant. In my apartment my bed was close to the ground, so London would walk up onto the bed every night. I would wake up with her head on my hips, my shoulders or the same pillow next to me. I was craving that kind of closeness and intimacy, and I really began to appreciate London as a person.” But then, in 2018, London got sick: she began losing teeth and bleeding in the gums; a vet found tumours growing in her mouth. When

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waiting for the biopsy results (they were negative), Gossiaux remembers, “I couldn’t even talk on the phone I was crying so hard. It was difficult to imagine and understand London’s mortality – it hit me like when you’re a kid and think about death for the first time and realise it happens to everyone. This was the first time I realised how much she meant to me, and what not having a companion would be like. That’s when I began to draw in my sketchbook these memories of us dancing together: when we came home from the studio at night, London and I would dance together in the apartment.” Shortly thereafter Gossiaux made her first Dancing with London sculpture, based on one of those drawings from her sketchbook, and London has frequently appeared dancing ever since. Why is London almost always seen dancing? “There’s something about an animal walking upright, to me, that is very significant,” Gossiaux says. “I talk about hierarchies in relationships between animals and humans, and breaking down that hierarchy or at least blurring it, so that the animals and humans are both walking upright. So, it’s about London having that movement, that action, of dancing and being so free. That’s also how I think about dancing personally: I love dancing. That freedom of movement is really significant to me.” Alligatorgirl, 2022 (installation view, Significant Otherness, 2022, Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY)

From then on, her subjects oscillated between the animal and human worlds, with works like the 2019 series E.L.G. Familial Archives (Outerspace) exploring familial relationships and memories by way of sculpting body parts in clay and inscribing them with her tattoos, her dad’s and her sister’s as she remembers them. But come 2020, she and Kirby became the only two humans to be depicted – and always with an animal. Was it a conscious decision to leave other human figures behind? “It did become a conscious decision, especially during the pandemic. Prepandemic, London had grown used to me sometimes going out without her, so when all of a sudden Kirby and I rarely left the house, the connection between us became more intense. Also, going back to nature, I would have dreams of being outside with London in forests, among trees and dirt and grass, the sky and the bugs, and it created a sensation of longing. London, as an animal, drew me closer to that feeling of longing, that imagination and that dreamworld.” In the ten years you’ve been together, how has your relationship with London affected your understanding or perception of the world? “Since London and I first met, I have begun to understand the animal world more. Sometimes I put myself in her perspective or in her body, trying to understand what it’s like to be a dog or an animal; to get in tune with her pleasures

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and desires. Understanding how to communicate with a dog and get in the mind of a dog has taught me a lot about empathy – instead of getting frustrated, I empathise. And that bleeds into a lot of things, like empathy for other people and other relationships.”

Creating ‘Super-Beings’ Being in sync with the animal world led Gossiaux to create what she called “super-beings” in an interview with Platform. One such example is her 2021 sculpture True Love Will Find You in the End: comprising two figures holding hands, one figure has London’s body and Gossiaux’s head; on the other, the body parts are reversed. “I morphed our bodies together as a selfportrait,” she says. “When I had this idea, I had just read Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation [2017], by Sunaura Taylor. It felt like [it encompassed] everything I had been thinking about with my relationship to London, with the animal world more generally and with nature.” What really stood out to you in the book? “The chapter that has stuck with me most is about circus performers at the beginning of the twentieth century. The performers had disabled or disfigured bodies with physicalities similar to animals – like seal arms or chicken feathers, or skin that looked like an alligator’s. Instead of feeling exploited, the performers embraced

their identities and loved being on display; it was a joyous experience. That’s interesting to me, because when I walk around with London, she becomes part of my identity as well. It’s like, ‘When Emilie shows up, you can expect London will be at the party too.’ But I don’t think about myself or my relationship with London as ‘I’m dependent on the dog’, or ‘the dog is leading me’. That I’m wholly dependent on the dog for getting around is a misconception that people have about a guide dog and a handler’s working relationship with each other, and this misconception takes away my sense of agency. “So, I started to think, ‘Is this how people see me?’ And at the same time I started to really appreciate Sunaura talking about how, when she was younger, she would pretend to be a dog and bark at strangers; how she always wanted to be an animal, and that we are all animals fundamentally. After I read that book, I started to think about other aspects of my identity that I share with animals.” The following year, Gossiaux created Alligatorgirl (2022), a series of drawings and sculptures merging human figures with alligators. Did Sunaura’s book also inspire your Alligatorgirl works? “Yes, but that character came from a lot of different things. I’m from New Orleans, True Love Will Find You in the End, 2021 (installation view, Sharing the Same Breath, 2023, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI)

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and across the street from my house was a canal where I often saw alligators. I loved going there and getting really close to the water to look at the turtles and alligators. The alligator then gained new significance after Hurricane Ida in 2021, when I read articles about alligators moving freely around the suburbs because there was so much water. There was one really big alligator and officials found the remains of a man inside it. “At the same time, I was also thinking about climate change and the ways humans have continuously destroyed natural habitats through deforestation and building homes and cities around forests, swamps and wetlands. For better or for worse – obviously for worse – the alligators are becoming closer to human environments. I’ve read other stories where people are completely ignorant of that, and they interact with alligators in dumb ways. It’s like, ‘It’s your fault you got eaten by an alligator.’ So, my sculpture Alligatorgirl has a human face inside an alligator’s mouth and it’s like, ‘Did she eat the human? Or are the human and the alligator becoming a single being?’ It’s dark, but that’s my sense of humour.”

A Tactile Process Gossiaux’s working process, primarily with drawing and sculpture, relies on tactility.

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above Outerspace, 2019 (installation view, Memory of a Body, 2019, Green Hall Gallery, New Haven) preceding pages Dancing with London, 2021 (installation view, Crip Time, 2021, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt)

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She draws with ballpoint pen on an instrument called a Sensational Blackboard, which raises the lines as she draws so she can feel the image in real time; she then colours the raised-line drawings with Crayola crayons – which are organised in envelopes with braille labels to indicate colours – due to their waxy surfaces. But this wasn’t always the case. How has your drawing practice changed over the years? “Drawing used to be a struggle for me,” Gossiaux says. “I really did not like drawing classes in high school, but I loved printmaking and etching. Drawing in that way, with just one line, became a lot clearer. So, when I got to Cooper [Union], before I lost my vision, I developed my style by making cartoony and kind of childish line drawings. That became a practice I enjoyed for myself – I could be on a tiny page in a little world and draw cartoony. When I lost my vision, I struggled to find that satisfaction in drawing again. I didn’t get it until I picked up the Sensational Blackboard, pen and paper – that was around 2018, and it clicked instantly. Drawing in that way allows me to draw the way I’ve always drawn in my sketchbooks.” Ceramics only entered her practice after she attended a class in Minneapolis, while she was at BLIND, Incorporated, which she describes as a “kind of bootcamp for blind people to get their independence back”. Why did you start working with clay?

“I had always hesitated to work with clay because I thought of the medium as having limitations, or that classes would be about making teapots and mugs. But I took a class in Minnesota anyway, and I had a great teacher who was very perceptive when I wanted to make sculptures of animals and body parts – and then it clicked.” It clicked not only because of a helpful teacher but also because Gossiaux found that elements of working with clay related to painterly processes – and before losing her vision, painting was her “thing”, she recalls. “With painting, if I didn’t like it, I could paint over it or wipe it out,” she explains. “And with clay, if I didn’t like it,” she says, “I could start over or I could amend it.” Were there other similarities you experienced between the mediums? “There are also wonderful painting techniques that can be applied to the surface of clay, and I hadn’t thought about colour in a long time. Colour, to me, in sculpture was not important. But using colour in clay made it more of a sculptural technique than a craft or technical skill. And I don’t think of myself as being technically skilled in clay – it’s something I approach as a sculpture or a painting.”

London, Midsummer 1, 2022, ballpoint pen and crayon on paper, 58 × 89 cm all images Courtesy the artist

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London, Midsummer Returning to her forthcoming exhibition, we’ve already addressed London dancing, so, I ask, what’s the significance of midsummer? “The maypole and midsummer dance are a celebration of summer, which has its own symbiology as a celebration of femininity, or the maiden’s dance. And personally I think of femininity, the divine and nature as being connected. When thinking about nature, I also think of London, because I feel more connected to nature and the animal world through her. This also leads me to autonomy and agency: London is my guide dog; she gives me autonomy, and so does my white cane. “So, with this installation, and three drawings that will also be on view, I am thinking about London and the birth of summer as a celebration of femininity and nature. I have taken the midsummer maypole icon as my own, turning it into a white cane, and the three Londons dancing as a symbol of freedom. It’s about London’s agency and my freedom of movement.” Other-Worlding is on show at the Queens Museum, New York, from 6 December to 7 April Emily McDermott is a writer and editor based in Berlin and Munich

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Contemporary African Art Fair London 12–15 October 2023 Somerset House Marrakech 8–11 February 2024 La Mamounia 1-54.com

Gustavo Nazareno, Exu, 2023, Oil On Linen, 200 x 170cm. Courtesy Of Portas Vilaseca Galeria.

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I always like trying to map mutual escape routes between the artworld and the world of literature. Lately I’ve been reading and rereading Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (1982), a book that is also an artwork. But how to describe this work to someone who does not know it? I can hardly describe it to myself. It’s about gender and colonial war and therefore multiple processes of subjugation, but what maybe makes it unique is the way it operates in more than one language, just as it uses more than one medium. It’s a text that is all about (or maybe partly about) voice and how voice can be represented. And the method it likes to use is translation. This title DICTEE in one sense comes from dictation, and the text opens – or at least almost opens, after an image of scribbled or scraped characters, and a page with some lines from Sappho and another page with a list of the classical muses – with what looks like a passage of dictation, first in French, then in English. So this strange word ‘DICTEE’, if read as a French word, could be understood first to mean the practice of dictation, but also increasingly to mean a woman who is spoken, who does not speak as herself. Or if it is an English word then this gender is no longer present and the word would become anyone who is dictated to, a universal dictee, but this seems less likely given how important gender is to this novel/poem, just as it’s important that the first subtitle or chapter title we come across is the equally strange word ‘DISEUSE’, a French word for a woman who speaks. But at the same time, however much a French meaning might be the primary meaning, English meanings can’t be repressed – as if diseuse is really a strangely misspelled version of either disuse or disease. DICTEE is a text that oscillates between languages – sometimes within a single word but also sometimes using mirrored sequences. It exists in a continual state of uncertain translation. Some sections develop the opening model of dictation exercises and alternate French and English on facing pages, as if the two are equivalent, except that small phrases seem to escape that do not exist in the other language; other sections look like they are doing the same thing, until you realise that the text isn’t to be read across two pages but as a single unfurling thing, sometimes in English, sometimes in French, where the English will sometimes replicate earlier passages in French, but sometimes won’t, and then passages will also intervene in Korean and Chinese. Biographically, this isn’t so surprising. Cha, who made performances and videos as well as texts before being horrifically

Writing Practice I. Translation

In (re)reading an experimental novel, Adam Thirlwell finds a productive gap between utterance and meaning murdered aged thirty-one, was born in South Korea during the Korean War; her family then moved to America when she was twelve. At high school she continued language learning, becoming fluent in French. Her life was an example of how often and how contingently multiple languages inhabit a person – and sometimes also how violently: her parents grew up in Manchuria during the period of Japanese occupation, with the Japanese language imposed on them. In everything Cha did – whether performance or video or text – the presence of the viewer or the audience was made central but also problematic. In her texts

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix, 1975 (performance view). Photo: Trip Callaghan. Courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

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this problem was often posed in the form of multilingual wordplay, so that the meaning for the reader seems to oscillate or puzzle. Maybe this kind of puzzling is why translation feels so useful to me as a concept, for both writing and for art? It’s so moody, translation! I used to think that one beauty of translation was its way of demonstrating that meaning was only imperfectly embodied in a single work – that it proved the existence of some always-receding universal. But maybe the puzzling that happens in Cha’s DICTEE is more important, and demonstrates the opposite: the uniquely specific and opaque nature of our attempts to make meaning. Or in fact, both communication and the difficulty of communication are inextricable, which is why translation is so exciting. However familiar it might feel, it’s always constructing a bridge from its own materials, and is therefore always revealing limit cases: whether the translation is being done between two dominating languages, or between a coloniser and a colonised people, or between different species, or even between a human and a hypothetical alien. Back in the mid-twentieth century, the philosopher W.V.O. Quine came up with a thought experiment: if an anthropologist were to encounter a people whose language she did not know and who did not know her language, how would she be able to give a meaning to the sounds ‘gavagai’, uttered by a speaker when seeing a rabbit emerge from some undergrowth. What I love about this scene is that really all of us continue to be both the anthropologist and the person saying ‘gavagai’. Translation is a practice that makes that gap visible at the same moment as it seems to dissolve it. It’s like – just thinking about Cha’s word diseuse for a final moment – what Samuel Beckett once did with disease in a miniature translation he made of an aphorism by Nicolas Chamfort, an eighteenth-century writer. Beckett was translating three French sentences – ‘Vivre est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les seize heures. C’est un palliatif. La Mort est le remède.’ Which I guess could roughly be translated as: ‘Living is an illness relieved by sleep every 16 hours. It’s a temporary solution. Death is the cure.’ But this is Beckett’s inspired version, a poem of nine compacted words: sleep till death healeth come ease this life disease Adam Thirlwell’s new novel, The Future Future, is out now

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According to the film critic A.S. Hamrah, television is inherently mindless. A stream of replaceable, empty nonsense: ‘It’s all eating in restaurants, driving cars, looking at computer screens’. Despite the closeness of this description to the contents of FX’s series The Bear (2022–), critics responded to the show’s second series as though its streams of culinary imagery were somewhat more cerebral. The Bear is not to be binged – it is prestige dining, to be masticated slowly. Why, then, I wondered this summer, did I nonetheless binge it steadily to the point of my own gelatinisation? How could I so easily enjoy what was seemingly supposed to challenge my overcoddled brain? The answer might at first seem obvious, given, after all, this is a show about chefs – classically entertaining, delectable, if you will. For those who have to date remained pure, The Bear follows Carmy, an Italian-American masterchef, as he returns to his hometown of Chicago to head up his family’s neighbourhood sandwich joint. Barrelling into The Original Beef fresh from a fancy career in New York, where he worked in what seems to be accepted as The Best Restaurant in the World, Carmy spends season one mostly annoying the café’s staff by failing to keep it real. By season two he has won them all over, and an unexpected windfall sees both him and his newly ambitious colleagues attempt to transform The Original Beef into The Bear, a fine-dining restaurant for the likes of a more discerning clientele. Gone will be the fat, tasty sandwiches, soaked in gravy and rich with grease; in will be a potpourri of gimmicky riffs on tradition, styled with tweezers. The Bear, to some extent, has managed to remain your typical Show About Chefs – a thrilling cascade of stoveside brutality sweetened with doughnuts and love. To watch is to experience that familiar cycle of hot cortisol baths, cooled by generous scoopings of comedy and palate-cleansing food porn. There remains the requisite bunch of Olympically self-serious cooks yelling decontextualised nouns and prepositions over each other; there are still, in season two, the sparkling shots of salt-studded dough and emulsion-swaddled spaghetti. But the doughnuts are now microscopic, the pizza encoded with ‘basil gel’; there is so much indecipherable green in basically every dessert. Concurrently, the kitchen clamour is periodically hushed, punctured by wordless gestures of mutual understanding and respect. Here we find the novelty at the heart of The Bear season two – the nub of sophistication that sent the critics wild. The more hybrid the cuisine, it would seem at least, the subtler the message. No longer are these chefs just trying to make a buck, nor (in Carmy’s case) tending raw ambition. These are artists attempting a subtle marriage of entrepreneurship and heart.

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Feeding the Rich

Is The Bear a success because it stimulates our hibernating palates, asks Amber Husain, or have we been seduced into enjoying what is little more than our just deserts? Central to The Bear’s most recent instalment are two nice ideas: that ambition need not savage human relations; that feeding the rich need not be a fundamentally elitist pursuit. Sure, Carmy and his chef-de-cuisine, Sydney, are determined to acquire ‘a Star’ for their new venture, but only one little Star, which will apparently keep them ‘low to the ground’. When Richie, who will work front-of-house at The Bear, is sent in preparation to do work experience at the Best Restaurant in the World, his scepticism as to why he must polish forks ’til he practically bleeds is softened by a lecture in the value of ‘acts of service’.

His manager has learned the requisite wisdom via the process of getting sober. “I just like being able to serve other people,” he explains, comparing this to working in a hospital. “Restaurants and hospitals use the same word”, he declares to settle the absurdity: “hospitality”. Richie is silenced. Is there not an important difference, we might wonder, between service and care? Perhaps not, in a world where even healthcare is privatised, turning hospitals into service providers catering only to those who can afford to pay. Yet The Bear’s star chefs and their lackeys persist in attempting to convey the idea that what drives them is more than the bounty and prestige that collects around cash. “Every night you make someone’s day,” claims the three-starred restaurant’s maître d’, referring to whichever unlikely customer that night has been saving up for years for the occasion. It is strange that the justification for one’s entire career should be precisely the exception to its rules. Not content to make an art out of feeding normal people as a matter of course, these chefs must get their thrills from patronising those rare and pitiable normals who dare to lurk among celebs. A corrupted discourse of ‘care’ has left us unable to distinguish between different kinds of feeding – between nourishing those around us and serving those who have paid; between nourishing each other and exploiting each other’s love. It is a cloudy kind of care that makes a man polish forks for days in the name of ‘respect’; that has us refer to our colleagues as ‘family’ but disown them when we find them with drugs. It is telling that The Bear’s refrains around teamwork and respect are frequently traceable to military authorities, as though war – a refuge from the market after all – were truly a site in which all was fair and, truly, as the saying suggests, adjacent in some way to love. Much as we might thrill to the notion that The Bear is out to nuance our perception of the service economy, it, like so many art objects to reach our senses via Disney+, was of course itself made for a subscription service. ‘Streaming’, writes Hamrah, ‘is a utility. Television is an appliance.’ We wanted to hold up this show as an artful riposte to such sweeping statements. And yet, it has been crafted precisely to appease our most predictable appetites – our simple yen for the aesthetics of a bumpy arc towards being ‘the best’. It is difficult not to enjoy a helping of The Bear, yet hard to feel sated by the whole. It is hard to be nourished by afterthoughts, humanist ‘profundities’ heaped on greed. It is easy, however, given the palatable glamour of it all, to feel we have been given what we want. It is easy enough to see we have been well and truly served. Amber Husain is a writer based in London

ArtReview

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By the time this column (written in early August) is printed (in October), one can be certain that the litany of mob lynchings, rapes, murders, hate speeches and open calls to ‘free’ India of Muslims will have grown longer. General elections are less than a year away, and nothing appeases the proliferating Hindutva militancy – whether it dons the garb of the politician or the foot soldier on the street or the trolls on social media – as much as horrific violence against Muslims. Daily, relentlessly, they remind us that Hindus, Hindu culture and Hindu women are in grave danger of being overtaken in number by the Muslim hordes, of being erased and/or Islamised, or trapped by a ‘Love Jihad’ perpetrated by predatory Islamic Romeos (who supposedly use love as a hook to capture and convert innocent but love-hungry Hindu women). Note, though, that about 80 percent of Indians identify as belonging to one or the other caste or category that falls under the broad umbrella of Hinduism, while Muslims, the largest minority community, account for about 15 percent of the population. Dalits (formerly the ‘untouchables’, the lowest of the low on the caste ladder), the queer community, tribal and other sexual and religious minorities have never been spared institutionalised othering in India. But this present cycle of hate and violence – which is state-sponsored via policy changes, law amendments and memoricide – targets Indian Muslims in particular. Genocide Watch, calling Islamophobia a ‘statemanufactured ideology’ under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – the Hindu nationalist party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi – declared the country’s genocide ‘alert status’ to be an ‘emergency’ earlier this year. According to the human rights organisation’s country report, the BJP ‘threatens India’s secularist constitution and its future as a democratic nation. Modi’s Hindu nationalist “Hindutva” agenda promotes intolerance counter to India’s pluralistic traditions.’ It goes on to list recent ideology-driven policies and practices, including the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, anticonversion laws, open calls for genocide of Muslims and the horrific case of the early release of 11 men (notably all upper caste) sentenced to life in prison for gang rape and murder during the 2002 Gujarat riots. The constant stress of this impending danger of being persecuted just because of their religious beliefs, which has

Politics of Hate

As a recent publication details the impacts of Islamophobia in India, Deepa Bhasthi asks if it’s already too late

Antiminority posters in Kolkata, 2017. Photo: Saikat Paul / Pacific Press / Alamy Live News

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been built into a ‘crisis of belonging’, as architect, activist and writer Sara Ather terms it, has taken a severe toll on the mental health of Muslims. Bebaak Collective, an informal association of grassroot activists advocating primarily for Muslim women’s rights, recently released a report on the mental health of Indian Muslims, researched over six months in six states including Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. Steering away from following strict clinical parameters (often borrowed from Western psychology practices) to determine the extent of fear, depression, anxiety, anger and PTSD that Muslims face in a postviolence context, the study looks instead at lived experience and the changes Muslims have been forced to make in terms of how they live, what they wear and eat, etc. It recognises that there is no ‘post’ in a PTSD case when, too often, survivors of communal violence have to live in locations of chronic political conflict and continue to be exposed to traumas that are repetitive and ongoing. It must be noted that inaccessibility to any kind of postviolence relief is not restricted to India, or to Muslims. Continual trauma arising from persecution is seen in Palestinians, the Tamils in post-civil war Sri Lanka and several other oppressed groups across the world, extending to lived experience even after they are displaced. The architecture of targeted violence against Muslims, the Bebaak study reports, ‘creates an environment where Muslims are victimised through economic boycotts, vigilante violence, destruction of property, unfair arrests, and imprisonment’. Hate speeches in India by rightwing politicians call upon non-Muslims to avoid doing business with Muslims, economically alienating them. Among the most vicious of othering in recent times has been the demolition of homes and businesses of Muslims, mostly on whimsical grounds, in Uttar Pradesh, a state led by a Hindu monk. In another travesty of justice, the activist Umar Khalid has been in jail for over 1,000 days on trumped-up charges, while those openly calling for genocide get away with barely a rap on the wrist, if that. The fear that begins to define everyday life for the persecuted community leads, often, to radicalism and in turn retaliation against the majority, spiralling into a systemised cycle of trauma that becomes harder and harder to break. This is hardly restricted to India, though. What is especially chilling is the concurrent rise

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of religious extremism across the larger South Asian region, home to some two billion people, where institutionalised violence against minorities is ‘often a function of politics’, as detailed in the book Politics of Hate: Religious Majoritarianism in South Asia (2023), edited by the scholar and activist Farahnaz Ispahani. The essays, written by academics, journalists, political analysts and researchers, examine how extremism in the region almost follows a template in the way minorities are persecuted, creating a cyclical crisis of violence. India is the giant, both in terms of geographical expanse and population numbers. Other countries in the region – Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and smaller nations like Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives – share complicated histories and many cultural similarities. The diplomatic relationship between each country is often complicated, though perhaps none as contentious as that between India and Pakistan. Interestingly, the essays in Politics of Hate analyse majoritarian extremism, its causes and impact only in the larger four nations above. Ispahani reasons this choice by saying that Pakistan, founded on the basis of religion, has long suppressed its religious minorities, while India, founded on secular nationalism, has been sliding towards religious nationalism in the last few years. She goes on to point out that communal majoritarianism has been on the increase in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as well. The decision to include case studies from just these four nations was perhaps driven by the size of their population, because it is not as if the smaller countries in the region have been spared extremism, however underreported they may be in comparison to their bigger neighbours. The case studies included several focus points: how mainstream media, almost all of it owned by business empires in India, has been fuelling the fire of Hindutva militancy and manufacturing hate in exchange for profit; Islamophobia in predominantly SinhaleseBuddhist Sri Lanka, with the precarious situation of Tamils thrown into the mix; the alienation of Pakistan’s many minority communities within the increasingly hardline Islamic nation; and the move towards a more radical form of Islam in Bangladesh, a country that is constitutionally secular. Reading the book alongside the Bebaak Collective report illustrates the long-term effects of religious extremism. The report uses ‘social suffering’

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Politically motivated destruction of the residence of a leading figure in protests against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Nupur Sharma, 2022. Photo: Anil Shakya / Alamy Live News

as its main parameter for measuring social hatred and state persecution faced by Indian Muslims, defining the term as an ‘assemblage of human problems that have their origins and consequences in the devastating injuries that social force can inflict on human experience’. The interviewees in the study share stories about the sudden change in familial dynamics in postviolence situations; after, for example, a family member is arrested or killed and justice is sought via a legal system that for Muslims is reduced ‘from a concrete means of ensuring their dignity and rights to a mere “spectacle”’, where complaints may be ignored or not investigated impartially, and pending cases prematurely closed due to political pressure. Economic disempowerment and social division follows, along with the threat of sexual violence for women where rape, molestation and assault are used to control and shame a community. This intersects with more general patriarchal attempts ‘to limit women’s mobility and participation within the public sphere’. The report notes forced changes to Muslims’ everyday lives and interactions with other communities – from not dressing in traditional attire and not being ‘visibly Muslim’, to eating beef (cows are considered holy by Hindus and their slaughter is banned in several states, even though several non-Muslim communities also eat beef), to the kind of education they have access to, which in turn determines the kind of careers open to them – breed further mistrust and a sense of betrayal. Nationalist governments, like the BJP in India, cultivate this crisis of belonging and helplessness, worsening the alienation and othering of Muslims by hyping up a narrative of Hindus being in danger, using social media extensively to spread such fake news. In India, this religionbased divide-and-rule policy has been especially useful for the BJP to avoid addressing issues of inflation, rising unemployment and corruption charges. The writers and political scientists contributing to Politics of Hate and the Bebaak report suggest various resistance tactics to counter the politics of intolerance, even as they recognise that in most cases the rot has sunk in so deeply that any evolution towards syncretism has to now be a long-term, polity-driven process. Breaking the cycle could well be an intergenerational process of reckoning before there is any reconciliation. Deepa Bhasthi is a writer based in Kodagu

ArtReview

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Animated cartoons are serious tricksters. Not only do they revel in unbounded play and plasmatic possibility, enticing us with fluid acts of transmutation and dazzling metamorphosis, they course with their own dark and deceptive magic while they’re at it, troubling the relation between life and image. I’m not talking about the fundamental spark of animism that enlivens all animation – the irreducible mystery that inspired Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein to gloss so ecstatically on the films of Walt Disney, suggesting that ancient beliefs of a distributed ‘soul’ might reside in the act of bringing drawings ‘to life’ with modern movie cameras – but rather something a little more mundane. A slippery sleight of hand perhaps, or a crude displacement of attention. While anarchic toons have long waged war for freedom from the tyranny of time and space, reshaping themselves into improbable new forms and punching impressive holes into our fundamental laws of physics, the process of animation itself perpetrates an inverse restraint on the bodies of its animators. Every time Road Runner disappeared into a trompel’œil tunnel, Tasmanian Devil evaporated into a scratchy cyclonic gust or Wile E. Coyote rebounded from injury with the immortal elasticity of a bestial Rasputin, you can be sure that something contrastingly static and arduous was happening behind the scenes. For the people hunched over the drawing boards, tirelessly compositing acetates and linking the key frames that bring forth animation’s mesmerising approximation of life, making pictures move has always been a dastardly and tedious procedure, and one often fraught with difficult labour relations. You’d be surprised to think so while watching Disney’s short documentary 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree, originally aired on US television in 1958. With sorcerous wisdom, Walt introduces his loyal team of animator-apprentices, explaining how their unique styles are merged miraculously in the melting pot of studio cohesion. He’s so keen to prove it, in fact, that he dispatches four of them into the wilderness, tasked with capturing the likeness of a gnarled old oak in styles that range from eldritch expressionism to bombastic vorticist eruption. It’d be a perfectly delightful glimpse into the harmonious environs of Disney’s dream factory if it weren’t for the knowledge that its host

Torturous Toons

As cartoons and animated bodies stretch, splat and spin, Jamie Sutcliffe asks what contortions of labour are going on behind the scenes

top Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (still), 2023, dir Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson. © Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation above Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (still), 2023, dir Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears. © Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon

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was an aggressive union buster and FBI informant, a rabid anticommunist who had keenly reported the indignation of overworked and underpaid animators to the House Un-American Activities Committee during McCarthyism’s Red Scare. This summer’s biggest animated blockbusters, Sony’s SpiderMan: Across the Spider-Verse and Paramount’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, betray just how persistent the turbulent conditions of commercial animation production remain. Both films promised to melt the eyeballs of the entire family with their gorgeous, multilayered and visually complex cartoons. While Spider-Verse’s plurality of worlds required a style so richly textured with lysergic oddness that it risked attaining narcotic status, TMNT’s focus on the tactility of bodily mutation required a joyfully bamboozling technique that left viewers questioning what they were really looking at: thickly daubed 2D crayon renderings or a sculpted reptilian menagerie worthy of Jan Švankmajer’s janky stop-motion weirdness? The human costs of such radical innovations have been widely discussed, with Sony downplaying the demoralising effect of directorial mismanagement that saw

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animators required to revise or fully scrap intricately rendered scenes, and Paramount approached directly by director Jeff Rowe and writer-producer Seth Rogen to ensure that overwork and burnout weren’t aspects of the filmmaking process for technical staff. It’s worth asking how these issues scale to the more modest and solitary conditions of art production, a scene in which artistanimators usually work in isolation without the armature of a production studio and creative team. Despite technological advances, intergenerational voices from Lisa Crafts and Sally Cruikshank to Sophie Koko Gate continue to express how painfully involving animation can be, its production placing huge constraints on time and patience in a broader industry metabolised by immediacy and the rapid turnover of content. For Hungarian artist Petra Szemán, a self-proclaimed ‘video gremlin’ whose animated films and videogames poignantly explore the multiplanar transmigration of identity between bodies and screens, it is a practice of mitigating bodily strain with ergonomic ingenuity. “It’s a constant negotiation between my body and the body I’m animating,” they’ve suggested, noting how the use of customised gloves and production tools are necessary supports when meeting the demands of crafting fluidly animated avatars. “My physical body seems to disintegrate the smoother and fuller the animated one gets; pleasing animation and bodily comfort appear to be inversely proportional to one another.” Perhaps less visible to most of us are the discomforts experienced by the video creators of the digital gig economy who are routinely commissioned by established artists to produce work in game engines and graphics applications such as Unity, Unreal or Autodesk 3Ds Max – the programs delivering that nowubiquitous, gamelike, cinematic, sciencefiction polish. This work carries the desired visual charge of big-budget studio animation, but it often requires its freelance labourers to sacrifice parts of their own budget on outsourced rendering tasks in order to meet tight deadlines and even tighter institutional projection specifications. The units of computational labour purchased in such instances are known, quite macabrely, as ‘render slaves’, and render slaves work – you guessed it – on ‘render farms’. I’m not exactly sure where the ease with which such processes both employ and normalise the language of subjection leaves us, but it demonstrates a dynamic of servitude and hardship that remains integral to the manufacture of the animated image. Have animators always been so uneasily tethered to their creations? In legendary 1950s

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Looney Tunes shorts such as Duck Amuck (1953) and Rabbit Rampage (1955), Chuck Jones would frequently give his unruly characters hell, his paintbrush or draughtsman’s pencil tearing through the fourth-wall into the Technicolor locales of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, scrambling everything with a playful simulation of industrial sabotage. As animation production evolves, visualising increasingly enchanting and improbable universes, we’d do well to observe the shadow world it leaves in its wake, and hope it’s not one in which animators are pressed into the same impossible contortions as their cartoon offspring. Jamie Sutcliffe is writer based in London

Duck Amuck (stills), 1953, dir Chuck Jones. © Warner Bros

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Art Featured

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Blow Up the Museum Rirkrit Tiravanija at MoMA PS1 by Jessica Lanay

Photo: Mark Blower

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Rirkrit Tiravanija is a creator of purposeful playfulness and critical changes the gathering to be unique to the setting. This is not always thinking whose work explores how use creates meaning. During smooth, or even positive: in the catalogue for Tiravanija’s MoMA PS1 the 1990s the Argentina-born Thai artist constructed an oeuvre that survey, for example, curator Ruba Katrib writes about an audience was best known for its extempore participatory aspect: inviting the member unexpectedly responding to Tiravanija’s untitled 1992 (who public to eat pad thai he cooks, as seen in various iterations of untitled comes first) by throwing eggs and ‘acting out’ in a way that ‘frightened’ 1990 (pad thai); inviting it to rest, as seen in untitled 1993 (sleep / winter), artist Elizabeth Peyton, who witnessed the event. for which he provided straw mats and foam mattresses in art spaces Circulating between the values of previous art movements such so that visitors might sleep; or even untitled 1996 (tomorrow is another as Fluxus and Dada and the relational aesthetics mode with which day), for which he faithfully reconstructed his East Village apartment he was associated during the 1990s, Tiravanija’s body of gatherings and offered the public 24-hour access to take advantage of the work- invites audiences to challenge the boundary between everyday reality ing fridge, cooking range and bed. These works furnished much- and institutional reality, to undermine unquestioned patterns of needed services, even if limited by resources and time, to a public living and relating – such as how societies consume, often without experiencing the economic fallout of the 90s during which time questioning the how and why of what is available. His method of creaunemployment almost doubled in New York City and Cologne, tivity is rooted to Wittgenstein’s idea that ‘meaning is use’, and across where untitled 1996 (tomorrow is another day) opened. They were, in short, his interdisciplinary body of work Tiravanija seeks to incite audiences a response to their immediate time and a way to track how a prepon- to consider the use of objects he recreates and displaces, to think critiderance of meaning emerges from human engagement. cally about the systems that create or abate access to resources. This MoMA PS1’s synopsis of the 100-plus-work exhibition, titled A LOT method stress-tests the very capacity of the museum to capture the OF PEOPLE, promises what it calls ‘“demonstrations” of key participa- life of the object it displays through categorisation and deracination. tory works’; the exhibition announcement also refers to ‘restagings’. Tiravanija’s offerings suggest a path towards institutional obsolesWithout much more context, it is yet to be seen if the effectivity of cence – or at least the obsolescence of the encyclopaedic museum that extemporaneous response will continue. Tiravanija is known for his PS1’s parent institution, the Museum of Modern Art, represents. For constant travel, his declarative choice to ‘never work’ and his ability the artist, such institutions should be community-mandated, -owned to think fluidly from an interdisciplinary standpoint. From screen- and -directed, and able to hold quotidian life. printing, to cooking, to sculpting, to film – there is not a creative Who owns what? And when? And how? And where did they get it distance that impedes Tiravanija asking the questions he desires to from? Tiravanija disassembles those questions to pose yet another: how ask. Change, spontaneous response and gathering people into a partic- does the concept of ownership function? What are its consequences? ipatory space are necessary to activating his works. He mutually trans- It was while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and witnessing forms art spaces and his artworks with his voracious curiosity for how its display of historic Thai art objects that Tiravanija began to quesaudience interaction will change the situations he initiates. tion how beautifully rendered everyday items for storing oil or rice, Tiravanija’s gatherings are site-specific in for cooking or for worshipping lost their living Tomorrow is the Question, 2019 (installation view, that every new place in which they are exhibessence by becoming static, unused and sepaRemai Modern, Saskatoon, 2019). Photo: Blaine rated from their places of origin by violent ited, and every new audience that participates, Campbell. Courtesy Remai Modern, Saskatoon

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untitled 1990 (pad thai), 1990 (performance view, Paula Allen Gallery, New York, 1990). Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija Archive

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untitled 1996 (tomorrow is another day), 1996 (installation view, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1996). Courtesy the artist

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global processes like colonisation. For Tiravanija, the loss of use is the gestures are a testament to the artist’s understanding of the zeitgeist. loss of meaning. There is perhaps not a better summation of Tiravanija’s Both untitled 1987 (text in red and black) and untitled 1987 (permanently attitudes towards institutions that emerged from colonial archival removed for display) highlight the ways that larger systems normalise practices than a quote from Israeli academic and curator Ariella Aïsha seemingly harmless standards for our everyday perceptions of labour Azoulay, writing, in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), about and display, while suggesting Tiravanija’s later trajectory of continued the museum as archive: ‘The archive is first and foremost a regime that institutional and societal critique. Untitled 1990 (pad thai) and untifacilitates uprooting, deportation, coercion, and enslavement, as well tled 1993 (sleep/winter) demonstrate how this practice is furthered by as the looting of wealth, resources, and labor’. Tiravanija using institutional spaces to address social inequities when Azoulay suggests that modernity arises from the displacement of it comes to sustenance, rest and even platonic intimacy (like sharing people and resources; those displacements generate vulnerabilities a meal). His commentary on labour is often subtextual, implied in the that are exploited on massive scales, fuelling a form of economy that subjects he undertakes, such as how the labour exploitation implicit requires such exploitation to survive. In 1987 the conceptual creator in colonial projects is how museums gain sometimes illicit access to the items it displays. Yet over 30 or provocateur or activist or artist (or whatever audiences might want years Tiravanija has also made more Tiravanija’s gatherings are hubs for to call Tiravanija) created untitled pithy and direct commentary, in audiences actively to engage our actions such as having audiences 1987 (permanently removed for display) enmeshed dependency on nature and for his thesis project. Untitled 1987 screenprint their own souvenirs (permanently removed for display) was with phrases like ‘NEVER WORK’, the vulnerability of our consciousness ‘THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY is arranged in a small room underneath the museum’s Asian galleries, the walls lined with empty panels NUMBERED’ and ‘RICH BASTARDS BEWARE’. The same phrases have that in their lower-right-hand corners stated ‘works permanently appeared in collage works where Tiravanija superimposes them over removed for display at the Art Institute of Chicago’. After this thesis Thai newspapers, as in untitled 2009 (the days of this society is numbered, show (and winning an unexpected award from Gordon Matta-Clark’s september 21, 2009), and ping pong tables, as in untitled 2019 (tomorrow is estate), Tiravanija staged a related piece called untitled 1987 (text in red the question); and stencils them into steel, as in untitled 2013 (rich bastards and black). In a dimly lit empty room he displayed on the wall a barely beware) (stencil). legible text: ‘WE DEMAND THE RETURN OF OUR CULTURAL ARTIFACTS Tiravanija’s gatherings are hubs for audiences actively to engage IN THE MUSEUM OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO. OTHERWISE our enmeshed dependency on nature and the vulnerability of our WE WILL BLOW IT UP.’ During the course of that exhibition, hundreds consciousness. More than that, Tiravanija asks if our everyday lives and systems function in the ways most critof Thai and Thai-American demonstrators untitled 2020 (we are not your pet), 2023, solar dust screenstaged a protest at the Art Institute to demand ical to sustaining human interconnectedness; the return of a lintel to a restored temple in print and archival digital print on paper; thermochromic such questioning also encompasses a perspecscreenprint and archival digital print on paper (diptych), Thailand. The timeliness of the unexpected tive on environmentalism. In artworks like presented in a copper clamshell frame, 71 × 59 × 4 cm. meeting of the protests and Tiravanija’s untitled 1990 (endless column), the artist takes Courtesy the artist and STPI, Singapore

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untitled 2014 (the days of this society is numbered / December 7, 2012), 2014, oil and newspaper on linen, 221 × 215 cm. Photo: Thomas Griesel. © the artist. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York

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untitled 2006 (palm pavilion), 2006 (installation view, 27th Bienal de São Paulo, 2006). Courtesy the artist

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detritus from his gatherings (food waste, beer bottles, cups, etc) and disables empathetic interactions and gentle recognition of our interstacks them in plastic bins as a sculptural commentary on excess. In dependence with each other and nature. In a riff on the 1974 film an interview with STPI gallery accompanying this summer’s exhi- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the title phrase – ‘Fear eats the soul’ – crops up bition We Don’t Recognise What We Don’t See, he states, ‘extinction has throughout Tiravanija’s body of gatherings and exhibitions. Taking already started’. The show centred the effects of human conquest, place in Germany, months after the Munich massacre, the film follows both of ourselves as a species and other animal life, via appearing and a love story between Ali, who is a Moroccan guestworker, and a German disappearing images of animals in juxtaposition to reprints of five Old widower as they face social and familial judgement and alienation as a Master paintings. In the video that accompanies the interview, there are result of their relationship. Their access to one another, their human details of art by seventeenth-century-painter Jan Brueghel the Elder in intimacy, is barred by the racism, xenophobia and misogyny in their which Tiravanija erases the depictions of animals, making them only society. The plot rigorously embodies the fear among our species of visible under UV light. The intersection of the history of the reprinted becoming the other; of living like how we perceive the other to live; master paintings with Tiravanija’s artistic commentary, specifically in or of being confused for the other in contexts where the othered inBrueghel’s The Temptation in the Garden of Eden (c. 1600), speaks to a pat- dividual has become symbolic of something negative. Throughout tern throughout history of human ideology justifying the exploitation Tiravanija’s career his commentary on othering is connected to the of nature as well as colonial processes. We Don’t Recognise What We Don’t ways he has reprised Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, even to the extent of filming See echoes the causality between colonisation, globalisation and the a remake, titled untitled 2017 (skip the bruising of the eskimos to the exquisite erosion of stable environmental systems in untitled 2006 (palm pavilion), words vs. if I give you a penny you can give me a pair of scissors). which Tiravanija arranged for the 2006 Bienal de São Paulo. In this When I look at certain gatherings organised by Tiravanija, they installation he and his collaborators reconstructed housing designed in a sense provide access to the horrifically lacking basic dignities of for French colonies in Africa, in order to retrace the corporate colonisa- living: eating well, resting well, being well together and learning. tion of sites for growing palm oil and the industry’s connection to envi- Despite his cool self-representation with regard to the impacts of his ronmental and human devastation. In many ways the mundane and gatherings, Tiravanija simmers in his focused curiosity for human platitudinous ideas we commit ourselves to and how we commit (with habits, and our conflictual desire to be together but also exploit one vague statements like ‘save the animals’) are a collective decision about another. His artworks are equally sites for inquiry, joy and practising how we are comfortable with dying. Tiravanija’s oeuvre is among the trust. Yet Tiravanija’s demand remains the same since 1987, even if it few that actually foregrounds that collective comfort by using situa- requires an edit: give us equal access to resting well, eating well and tional and interactive settings to test his audience’s acumen for prac- being well together – otherwise we will blow up the museum. ar tising the attributes most likely to make a change in how we relate to our environments. Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE is on show at MoMA PS1, New York, from 12 October to 4 March In my encounters with Tiravanija’s work, and speaking to him, I was profoundly activated by the artist’s ability, as untitled 2017 ( fear eats the soul) (white flag), 2017, a maker of situations and places, to demand Jessica Lanay is a writer and poet from Key West and flag, 183 × 320 cm. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. that we (humans) acknowledge the fear that author of the poetry collection am•phib•ian (2020) Courtesy the artist and Creative Time, New York

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Mike Kelley

by Chris Fite-Wassilak

Raphael Fonseca, who is cocurating Videobrasil, calls the Global South “a fictional idea of community, knowledge and creators that can contrast with the hegemonic North”

More than a decade after his death, the artist continues to unsettle, judge, mock and disappoint – and we can’t get enough of it 58

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Monstrous worms made up of the knotted limbs of faded stuffed- – making comics and scraps of video and not writing very much – animals, the room-high stretch of their bodies an uneven patchwork I chanced on a book on Kelley’s work in a library, and reading his words of old polyester fluff dotted with dozens of wide, cartoonish eyes came with the woosh of a first-time-sensing that ‘art’ – the stuff shown staring blankly out at us. Interminable films featuring amateur actors in hushed galleries and written about in hefty tomes – might hold in outlandish costumes – a witch, a devil, a farmer – running through some connection to actual life and possibilities that felt relevant and the motions of some rambling script, the narrative too cryptic to hold alive. Art could hold music and comics and film and explode outward prolonged attention. Crude line-drawings of disproportionate, odd- still. I didn’t get all the references that he crammed into the texts limbed figures, often with faces that are much more scrupulously or the art, but I could feel the crawling suburban unrest and rightdetailed than the rest of their bodies. (In my head, these, more than eous petulance rising out of it all like the muck that Kelley depicted anything, mostly convey a sneer of disappointment, or just unal- steaming out of his own nose in the Ectoplasm Photographs series (1978/2009). I didn’t get what might link Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, loyed disgust.) Encounters with Mike Kelley’s artworks always feel partial, frag- Lincoln’s Profile, as one 1985 exhibition was titled; but seeing an image mented, unsettled; you sense that those creatures are judging your of the painting Exploring (1985), a large black-and-white depiction incomprehension, judging your feeling that something was missing of a stalactite- and stalagmite-riddled cave, rendered in a shadowfrom the work, judging your inability to tell what was missing and heavy style reminiscent of the drawings of Charles Burns, with it, what, exactly, was staring you in the I could imagine seeing punk’s contraface. It’s been over a decade since dictory impulses – its own snarled, Kelley’s apparent suicide, and this spitting, voguing and subjugating in the name of egalitarianism – play out autumn his second posthumous retrospective (his last began at Amsterdam’s as a three-dimensional funhouse. The Stedelijk Museum in 2012, and travpainting, infamously installed with a elled to the Pompidou Centre, MOCA gap beneath it, blocked visitors from LA and New York’s MoMA PS1 over accessing another area of the show the course of the following two years) unless they followed it’s diktat to begins its slow journey around the ‘CRAWL WORM!!’ museums of Europe, dredging up the At other times, I turn with a shudder to the Kelley that might be an possibilities of more quixotic and erinverse: the Postpunk Kelley, worldratic encounters with his work. And as is usual with such largescale outweary, apparently accepting of his ings, the inevitable bluster: ‘one of place in an art-market star-system, celebrated by museums and showing America’s most influential artists’, the like clockwork with blue-chip galleries blurb for this latest show touts, as his work gets parcelled into broad themes such as Gagosian. The solo shows such as ‘memory’, ‘social classes’ and I finally got a chance to see were flat, sterile, with none of the energy that ‘the abject’. Don’t believe the hype. the writings claimed for the work; Despite my unease, I return to gleaming with an overproduced shine, Kelley continuously. Or perhaps there emboldened with theatricality withare several Mike Kelleys to which I out direction, screaming silently into return continuously. The first is Protooversize rooms, as if held in the punk Kelley: spikey, alert, ready for vacuum of the bell jars he was incesrupture and twigged to the nuances santly displaying. I distinctly rememof confrontation. Offered the conventional slot for a conventional bio at the back of a catalogue of his work ber a photo portrait that accompanied one of the show announcements: in 1991, he instead wrote a tongue-in-cheek portrait of himself in Kelley wearing a purple trenchcoat and wide sunglasses, looking fragments: ‘Some Aesthetic High Points’ recounted winning a high- for all intents and purposes like a latter-day Van Morrison, swollen, school art-prize for a deliberately botched painting, then waxed excit- leering and aloof. There might’ve been a joke in there somewhere, edly on the manipulative skills of Sun Ra and Iggy Pop. ‘He played the but the veneer of art-establishment dignity killed any irony. audience like a fish,’ he gushes about Iggy repeatedly playing Louie, For a long time I took that as a lesson about the gap between talk and walk; an instruction to be wary of artists’ overinterpreting Louie to a bar full of disgruntled bikers. It was through his writing that I first encountered Kelley, so of their own output. As Controlfreak Kelley put it in the preface to course this punk persona was my first impression, as the antiauthor- the anthology of his writing Foul Perfection (2003), his words were ‘a response to my dissatisfaction with the itarian and sceptic he projected throughout above Ectoplasm Photograph 13 (detail), 1978/2009, the diarrhoeic and incessant discourse about way my work was being written about critset of 15 c-print photographs, 36 × 25 cm each. his own work. Later, when editors would ask ically’. I have found that letdown goes © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles. both ways: encounters with standalone me what art critics I enjoyed, Kelley was always All rights reserved. © Adagp, Paris, 2023 one of the first names that would spring, Kelley works remain an experience defined facing page Portrait of Mike Kelley as The Banana Man, unbidden, to mind. As a driftwood student by disappointment. c. 1983. © Jim McHugh

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EAPR #9 (Farm Girl) (still), 2004–05, video, colour, sound, 4 min 22 sec. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles. All rights reserved. © Adagp, Paris, 2023. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

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Mobile Homestead, 2010, public sculpture, dimensions variable. Photo: MOCAD, Detroit

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When I actually encountered Exploring in person, as part of Kelley’s is a total failure… The work could become just another ruin in a city first posthumous retrospective in its Centre Pompidou incarnation, full of ruins,’ he wrote in 2011.) in 2013, there was no crawl space underneath it; it was just hung Day Is Done (2005–06) is his most sprawling, patchy and distracting among a bunch of other paintings, salon style. The painting’s exhor- body of work, extended from an understanding of schools and education tation seemed hollowed out, cutesy. But that exhibition introduced institutions as both perpetual prisons and memory palaces. But from me properly to Disingenuous Kelley: a Janus-faced entity happy to that acute insight, the project holds an unfathomable set of 365 videos, present one thing while doing another; which used photos of student plays and performances from old yearbooks as going through the motions, powered scripting starting-points, enmeshed, by spite, weaving a wide-spanning, immersive web of dismay. The sheer as if that wasn’t enough, with Kelley’s kaleidoscope of actions and attempts, personal memories and pop-culture moments. Extravagantly dressed and performance remnants next to deadend doors; birdhouses that offered their correspondingly stiff actors creepingly act out mumbling scenes, amidst props inhabitants two entrances: ‘the easy and installations that brought some of road’ and ‘the hard road’; splotchy intesthe yearbook scenes to uncertain life. The tinal paintings; faux-naïf cartoon scenes project becomes, in some form, an approalongside interviews with musicians and priate monument to suburbia, a fragmentfilmmakers. He may have worked with ed tribute to the flimsy activities made up any medium that came to hand, from to pass the time and to the pasts we’ve tried paint to PA systems, but it was all part of one big installation. Each part of it, each work, to forget. Which is to say, it becomes its own was a deliberate failure, as if to acknowledge the museum, yet another educational instituabsurdity of how art attempts both to embody tion. Forming a central part of this current and to mess with the hierarchies of cultural influtouring retrospective, Day Is Done is an almost ence. Which means, to put that into the corporatetoo accurate portrait of the dead ends of youth: tech terms used these days (just to spite Kelley), awkward, limping, painful to watch. Though I’m still not sure if that keeps it from slipping that the disappointment is a feature, not a bug. into the authoritative framing that a museum At other points, I’m struck by Kelley the unreretrospective creates, as if trying to nail Kelley pentant Freudian, working with heavy-handed metaphors of hidden encounters and longinto one coffin, labelled Canonical Artist. suppressed memories, and ever quick to roll out the psychiatric Something between the works and his writings still kicks up dust. There is no resolving these several Kelleys; and I’m sure all lingo. Kelley seemingly treated every aspect of American culture, those who experienced the work or knew him, or other errant from school plays to discarded toys, as evidence of repressed memreaders, have other Kelleys to which they turn. I’m weary of any ory syndrome, that all around us were signs of oppression and institution claiming a Kelley singular, as if there’s a coherent whole denial. Even hiding in plain sight in the urban-drive-by mundane were weighty symbols of oppression. I can’t tell you how many to grasp. Perhaps I’m just a rube taken in by the deliberate personae times I’ve thought about Peter Schjeldahl’s offhand comment of a Dungeonmaster Kelley, controlling behind the scenes; though in his 2012 obituary of Kelley, about how a set of his early white I take some kind of consolation in the something – elusive and rectangular paintings were reflective of how graffiti was painted heartfelt – that still slips out between all of Kelley’s postures. And perhaps what a retrospective like this provides isn’t so much the over: ‘For Kelley, these were ciphers of repression both social and, chance to meet these Kelleys, or even for a flush encounter with by a formal association, aesthetic – indicting abstract painting Kelley’s restless and patently ridiculous work. What it might for a similar denial of raw feeling, on a historical, grand scale’. give is a chance to return to, and refract, some of the questions Highway-side graffiti, or an adolescent basement bedroom, or an elementary school auditorium stage, or even Superman’s I feel Kelley left behind and that his work continues to pose: can you destroyed home-planet, Krypton: all were primal scenes, sites make big, ‘serious’ art about subcultures, or is that just a douchewhere youth acted out its formative moments and endured its baggy oxymoron? Are the suburbs even worth the paean that Kelley foundational pressures and traumas. These sites were Kelley’s has made for them? All while taking it in in yawning museum halls, launchpads, onto which he would then overload an excess of yet more wings of the educational complex he was so obsessed with issuances and outbursts that would become the work. Most mapping. So is it even possible to call bullshit on the sanctimonious emblematically Freudian, his Mobile Homestead (2010) recreated puffery complex in which the museum plays a part? In the end, his childhood home in Detroit. On the surface it was an openI can’t decide if it’s the work itself I’m looking forward to seeing use community centre, complete with a hidden, subterranean again (in yet another configuration), or just the people walking out warren of chambers, accessible only to invited artists, that of the show, with spit in their eyes and fish on their faces. ar mirrored the above-ground suburban layout. (He was, publicly at least, damning about the project: ‘As public Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is on show Janitorial Banner, 1984, wood, felt, 125 × 31 × 51 cm. at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, art, intended to have some sort of positive Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles. © Paris, from 13 October to 19 February effect on the community in proximity to it, it All rights reserved. © Adagp, Paris, 2023

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Ghost in the Ward

by William Gass

Drawn to medicine following studies in art criticism, a nurse reconsiders care in the ‘postpandemic’ present 64

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A ghost of me clocks in every day and tries to corporealise. The ghost support groups within the healthcare world because they tells jokes to the patients and professional colleagues. It fulfils the role instinctively understand the emotional and physical demands of a nurse, it is a nurse, and it never betrays this secret: some days, I feel of the roles they work in. like my empathy is gone. Professional burnout is not limited to the healthcare profesSince 2016 I’ve worked in a teaching hospital in St Louis, Missouri. sions, but it seems increasingly to be a topic of conversation among On my journey I’ve seen great love and concern for the sick and infirm my nursing colleagues. It’s a testament to how established the roles from nurses, doctors and families. I’ve also seen patients needlessly of healthcare professionals are that I can come into work looking like suffer from medical futility, perpetuated by impatient surgeons and dogshit and the public still thinks I’m a nurse. That I can perform deaf, obstinate relatives. I’ve liberated people from life support; I’ve the functions of a nurse. In short, that they see me and expect to be also wrapped them in plastic and sent them to the morgue. I’ve been nursed. A uniform with a badge reel with cards for employee idena beacon for my patients by guiding them through the unpredictable tification, stroke guidelines, emergency medications, MRI scanning ordeal of hospitalisation, though lately it feels as if a shadow lingers privileges, festooned with pens and markers, certainly helps with over all that I do as a nurse. I have a burning desire to help and care, yet the illusion. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, even though we were I feel that our system of healthcare and our culture in the United States urgently busy, our professional lives never felt emaciated. We had is incongruous with being healthy. As a result, I feel disenchanted a reliable source of experienced nurses and doctors. In spite of obvious with my chosen profession. I’ve lost sight of who I am. My under- inequalities in American healthcare, it still felt like we could connect graduate studies in visual culture and art criticism partly prompted with the sick and bring respite. me to become a nurse. I was drawn to nursing as an analogue to the Strangely enough, the time my coworkers and I regard as the most social conventions of the art critic, whose creative output is formed peaceful on the ward was probably during the height of the COVID-19 by a pathological endeavour to interpret and justify. In my mind, that Omicron surge. The treatment of last resort for gross hypoxia latter reflects the way in which the nurse-doctor dichotomy is similar secondary to COVID-19 pneumonia is extracorporeal membrane to art criticism-art history. Recently I’ve felt estranged from my initial oxygenation, or ECMO. ECMO is a form of life support in which blood intentions, and I’ve definitely forgotten my liberal-arts education. is pumped out of the body, infused with oxygen and returned. It A hospitalised patient meets dozens of different professionals can support both heart and lungs when these organs have failed. In essence, patients have PVC tubing over the course of their stay (from adCaregiving is a kind of performance. jammed into major blood vessels mittance at reception to the emergency connected to a complicated centridepartment, to the ultrasound specialYou learn a few tricks: like how to fuge that spins oxygen into the ist or the cafeteria staff). In the ICU, ill phrase your words for maximum patients often require longer stays, and blood. The tubing loops of an elaboresonance so as to teach your patients they, their families, the nurses (and rate ECMO configuration connected housekeepers, nutritionists, physical to the human body reminds me and their families. You want your therapists, chaplains) get to know one of Bruce Nauman’s Neon Templates diction to stick in their minds of the Left Half of My Body Taken at another deeply. Over the course of these patients’ experiences, the time my coworkers and I would spend with Ten Inch Intervals (1966) – a wall-based sculpture made up of stacked them was rich, meaningful and all-consuming. I could aggressively neon bars, the ends of each connected by looping wires to the next regulate continuous IV medications to prevent acute heart failure and bar above. Increasingly, I find associations between visual phenomena witness the improvement in a patient’s cardiac output in real time. in the hospital and artworks that I came across while studying. I could just sit with a patient and talk about journaling as a method In our little hole-in-the-wall ICU with no windows, more than two of combatting their post-heart attack depression. I could be there thirds of our beds possessed patients requiring ECMO life support. when a patient finally sits on the side of the bed for the first time in COVID-19 patients could be on ECMO for weeks, or months even. two months. During the lockdown, the hospital had a strict no-visitors policy, and Caregiving is a kind of performance. As an ICU nurse, you learn I withdrew life support on many patients over video conference with a few tricks: like how to tell the same joke six different ways because their families. A unit with no family support and sedated patients the family isn’t ready to withdraw care today; how to phrase your without rapid improvement in health, while a pandemic is raging words for maximum resonance so as to teach your patients and their throughout the outside world, is left in a mostly quiet limbo, somefamilies about medical procedure and postcare health management where between life and death. The silver lining is that my fellow day(you want your diction to stick in their minds); you also want to time nurses and I could now be flexible in timing the required bedside have fun reciting these patient instructions, because you will repeat tasks of patient care (bathing, oral care, shaving, skincare, changing yourself liberally; you make mantras out of the maxims of heart- wound dressings, changing linens, tidying up patient rooms). For failure management. Despite these tricks, you will still find your- everyone who wasn’t able to see their loved ones during this time, self dreaming about your patients and dreading returning to the I promise you, we made them beautiful. hospital, which increasingly feels like a Las Vegas attraction: a loud, I was an ICU nurse for approximately seven years. After a ‘postcolourful sensory overload that runs every hour, seven days a week, pandemic’ year of navigating an increase in chronically ill patients 365 days a year. You are on autopilot, operating on muscle memory. whose conditions worsened because they weren’t able to get regular This is the nurse’s life, and also the reason care during the pandemic, I changed departSeventeenth-century Hindu watercolour of a patient for forming what we call ‘healthcare famiments as a result of physical exhaustion. in the care of a physician, nurse and servant. lies’. Medical professionals form unofficial (Currently I work in interventional radiology Wellcome Collection, London

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William Blake, Pity, c. 1795, colour print, ink and watercolour on paper, 43 × 54 cm. Tate, London

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with cancer patients.) Someday I may return to the ICU. Many of my doesn’t have to suffer the results of that court decision, I became coworkers have devoted their lives to that type of direct patient care. profoundly depressed. Rather than solely being a nurse, I needed to And many took early retirement shortly after the pandemic emerged. be something else and find someplace I could try to be something else. The pandemic created an obvious need for more nursing support, Providence came in the form of an artificial sun lamp, which made the so my friends picked up jobs through nursing agencies because the windowless ICU more tolerable. In that literal ‘lightbulb moment’, money was better (my hospital, in an effort to retain senior staff, gave I decided to join an acting class, to relearn how to inhabit my body across-the-board raises to reflect the demand about two years after the and use my voice. In acting, you learn to be physically aware of what pandemic began). Many colleagues started families or went back to your body is doing. You learn how your body can affect the timbre of school out of a sense of self-preservation or a need to enrich their lives your voice, and you realise you can gesticulate and speak didactically outside of the hospital ward. With the loss of experienced senior staff in creative ways. I keep thinking about what the French writer, actor and theatre director Antonin Artaud in our unit came a deficit in nurses How could I convince myself that who could manage the complex lifewrote in his 1935 essay ‘An Emotional support machines, like those used Athleticism’: ‘In order to make use of I’m helping people if I keep perceiving for ECMO. It fell to the remaining one’s emotionality the way a wrestler the superstructures around me nurses to give the growing continutilizes his musculature, one must as regressive and hypercapitalist? see the human being as a Double, as gent of temporary staff a crash course the Ka of Egyptian Mummies, as a in mechanical circulatory support. Although we were thankful for these fresh legs on the field, they could perpetual specter illuminated by the forces of emotionality’. I now never replace our nurses who regularly worked with these machines understand that to be ‘spectral’ is to be emotionally ‘fluid’. If I’m going to feel half-alive and exhausted by not feeling I can give everyand understood our department’s expectations. I learned that in my pursuit of becoming a nurse I had made it thing my patients need, then I will regard it as a positive thing I can the locus of my existence. In the end, there wasn’t an obvious trigger be aware of and utilise. I will learn new ways of using my body and in the hospital that made me step away from direct patient care. voice so that when I am needed as a nurse it will feel more genuine to However, hearing about the leaked Supreme Court opinion that ulti- me. And if I’m going to be a ghost, it will be because it’s a creative act, mately overturned federal abortion rights in 2022 took an emotional one of many emotions and consciousnesses I can use to connect with toll, adding to my physical exhaustion. How could I convince myself people. My face has the biggest smile. ar that I’m helping people if I keep perceiving the superstructures around me as regressive and hypercapitalist? Though my own body William Gass is a nurse based in St Louis

St Marylebone Infirmary, London, ward with nurses and patients, 1910, photograph. Wellcome Collection, London

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What’s Art Got to Do with It? by Marv Recinto

Members of Green Shoes Arts, collaborators in Rory Pilgrim’s 2022 videowork RAFTS. Photo: Jessica Emovon

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Rory Pilgrim and Helen Cammock are among an increasing number of UK artists focusing their practices on care work. Is this symptomatic of a welfare system in collapse, or something more hopeful?

Helen Cammock, Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience, 2022 (performance view, Barking Town Hall, London). Photo: Jimmy Lee. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London

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The opening refrain of artist Rory Pilgrim’s Turner Prize-nominated exhausted, offering a compassionate personal connection and testioratorio RAFTS (2022) has taken up residence in my head these last few fying to the importance of interpersonal relationships as networks of weeks: “Safe, only safe I feel / When free, free to truly be / When rain support and care: “So just bring me your flowers / I’ll keep them safe falls slow / Around”, singer Declan Rowe John’s graceful voice lilts like you”, Kayden Fearon sings in Flowers. alongside the simple strums of Pilgrim playing the harp. The lyrics For Pilgrim, who has been a caregiver to a terminally ill person speak to a sense of quietude, of moments with no expectations in and whose parents are carers by vocation (in ministry and differentwhich one can simply be oneself. As the song reaches a crescendo, Rowe needs education), sustenance from and for a community has been a John is joined by an orchestra and choir as she intones, “For it’s time to formative part of their life. Pilgrim approaches the idea of ‘care’ as a figure out / To figure out how to stay around / So we can dream aloud / notion informed by the junctions between feminism, activism and Dream aloud / And squeeze it / And breath it / Alive, alive, alive”. The social engagement, but one ultimately resting on a sense of compassong, titled Tomorrow’s Gentle Rain, is the first composition in the hour- sion. Pilgrim’s emphasis on providing and facilitating a space for that long RAFTS, a videowork that has also within their artistic practice attests to a growing mobilisation within been translated into a onetime live “That was the beginning of being in British contemporary art, in which performance and installation of the a setting that spoke to everything that some artists have visibly taken on a same name. The symphonic work is I felt emotionally, socially, politically, caring impetus and used their platvulnerable and hopeful as it depicts – forms to highlight the systemic failin seven original songs interspersed and about how to care and be cared for” ures of social welfare and care by with stories and poetry – metaphoric reflections of emotional and personal vulnerabilities by the artist creating art that responds to this breakdown with their own socially and their various collaborators, including musicians and members of engaged projects. social-work organisations. In another song Pilgrim’s frequent collabThe British welfare state has been in crisis since the introducorator Robyn Haddon croons, “So release it, release it / Don’t leave it, tion of neoliberal policies in the latter half of the twentieth century. don’t leave it / And don’t take fires on board”; these symbolic lines Margaret Thatcher’s leadership during the 1980s initiated a regime of encourage the listener, with their own personal experiences of ‘fires’, austerity and mass privatisation that continues to influence policies today. Following the 2007–08 global financial crisis the UK governto place themselves within the music and heed such warnings. The rafts, which appear lyrically and visually in drawings ment implemented austerity policies that deliberately sought to minithroughout the work, symbolise a system of support that might mise the welfare state in an effort to reduce the government budget be precarious, but one that stays afloat and “takes us somewhere”, deficit. Pilgrim tells me that in the wake of this crisis, which took place rather than remaining metaphorically stagnant, as Pilgrim tells me. during their early twenties, they “became fixated on thinking about Pilgrim traces the early origins of RAFTS to a care in relation to economics”. In response to Rory Pilgrim, RAFTS (still), significant breakup, and the work’s collabspiking unemployment rates across Europe 2022, HD video, 1 hr 7 min. orative and sympathetic nature feels like a and in particular Spain, the artist develCourtesy Maureen Paley, London, much-needed embrace for the emotionally oped a live musical performance piece called and andriesse~eyck galerie, Amsterdam

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Care (2012), presented in Madrid. The work featured performers One of Cammock’s first jobs in social work was at a centre where lamenting that their desire to care for others was limited by dwin- she specialised in working with families and local communities. dling bank accounts and emotional exhaustion. One says, in Spanish, “That was the beginning,” Cammock recalls, “of being in a setting “I’m worried about humanity… that those concerned with materiality that spoke to everything that I felt emotionally, socially, politically, just want more and more and more.” Back in the UK, austerity policies and about how to care and be cared for.” However, national cuts to were implemented to save the economy, but the effect has made the welfare programmes during the 1990s affected her job: Cammock act of asking for or admitting to the need for care shameful, altering tells me that towards the end of her career in social care she was told society to the extent that many Britons have become convinced that by her boss to take a vulnerable young teenage girl to a police station such matters shouldn’t concern the state, that they are for the indi- but to avoid taking her inside, as doing so would mean social services vidual to resolve. This very real shunning of what should be a common would have to pay for a place for her to sleep. If the police took the concern of caring for one another, in favour of productivity and girl inside the station themselves, they would be responsible for the lodging. “It got to a point where economic value, has resulted in a sort of state-sanctioned callousness that I thought, I can’t work within these “The systems within which social artists like Pilgrim, Helen Cammock, parameters. I refuse to.” This realisacare offers care have become more Ilona Sagar, Grace Ndiritu and collection led her to think about working impoverished, and artists have become “with people in a different way” that tives Gentle/Radical and Hospital Rooms are attempting to counterbrought her to art. more integral within those systems” act by returning ‘care’ to the public Cammock’s film Bass Notes and sphere through art, exploring its many definitions and meanings in SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience (2022) organises and documents group sessions with care receivers its seeming absence within the government. RAFTS was first presented in the 2022 exhibition Radio Ballads at and caregivers from a charity called Pause – which works with women the Serpentine Galleries, London. The exhibition came out of a two- who have had (or are at risk of having) a child removed from them – year project of the same name, for which artists Pilgrim, Sonia Boyce, as the group of woman sing, dance and compose a song together. Sagar and Cammock were commissioned to work with ‘social workers, Most of the women are not professional singers, nor do they seem to carers, organisers and residents’ of the London Borough of Barking know one another very well, but by making an effort to sing in front of and Dagenham to ‘explore stories of labour and who cares for who and each other and knowing strangers will later view the videowork, they in what way’. Like Pilgrim, Cammock (who shared the 2019 Turner demonstrate a willingness to share their vulnerabilities. They also Prize with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani in express to the camera their personal struggles with mental health. a gesture of ‘commonality, multiplicity and solidarity’ in the face of One caregiver admits that she witnesses and absorbs a lot of sadness in her profession, and though that in turn a politically fracturing Britain) has direct Helen Cammock, Bass Notes and SiteLines: affects her own mental wellbeing, she has experience of the exigencies of looking after The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site been trying to give herself time and space to others, having spent ten years as a social-care of Resilience (production still), 2022, video, 39 min. reflect on and accept this anguish. Cammock worker in England earlier in her working life. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London

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Helen Cammock, Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience (still), 2022, video, 39 min. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London

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relates these meditations to moments of silence between song, speech and other miscellaneous sound, where silence symbolically acts like the absence of care, or what she refers to as a “numbness”. In the video, Cammock’s voice speaks over moving images of London: “And we discussed what music and what sound can do to this numbness, to bury and furrow the notes that allow a seepage of connection. To joy, pain, remembrance. They enable a wholeness to be felt in these moments, even if only in these moments.” Bass Notes and SiteLines advocates for the real and metaphoric moments of silence just as much as it does moments of sound; ultimately one can’t be truly appreciated without the other. Cammock continues to engage in social work, but she explains that being an artist affords her a “fluidity” and “risk-taking” that was impossible in her former career. “Artists have been working in ways that social workers would always have wanted to,” she tells me. “The systems within which social care offers care have become more impoverished, and artists have become more integral within those systems – by coming in, for example, with projects that have been funded by the arts [and in the case of Radio Ballads, local government] that they can then bring into particular areas of social work.” In doing so, those artists are making care a more visible concern in the face of an increasingly privatised welfare state and beyond the secretive realms in which it might usually occur. Cammock’s work proposes that care, caring for others and for oneself, can happen at all times. She says it’s about “being able to see and be seen, being able to hear and be heard”. Pilgrim echoes this sentiment, as they tell me that care “can happen in many ways, but inherently it is something that should already be in the world”. The ability to be cared for or to offer care also depends on the ability to communicate. In their work, Pilgrim and Cammock often turn to music as an alternative way to communicate, offering what Cammock calls a “liminal space between word and meaning”. With

elements such as the group singing sessions and Pilgrim’s earnest songs, Pilgrim and Cammock facilitate moments of vulnerability, celebrating them in their unwieldy complexity and, through sharing, start to unpick notions that needing care is a locus of seclusion and shame. Both RAFTS and Bass Notes and SiteLines feel like a musical call and response between artist and viewer, caregiver and care receiver – a “reciprocal dialogue”, as Pilgrim refers to it, that might go on to affect the viewer’s life, as Cammock hopes of her practice. These articulations and gaps in the works, in which Cammock and Pilgrim express their own and their collaborators’ sensitivities and vulnerabilities, in turn gently encourage us to feel comfortable with our own emotional states. Perhaps, as Cammock notes, the increasing presence of artists in care work is not simply a symbol of a declining welfare system, but a chance for new forms of support. These artists’ practices, in their social work-oriented collaborations, present alternative models of community care that directly impact those involved, and perhaps those viewing the completed artworks, by appealing to the mutual need for kindness. There’s a real joy in Cammock and Pilgrim’s works undeterred by their accounts of struggle; in fact, these depicted vulnerabilities augment the mirth: at the end of BassNotes and SiteLines, we see the women’s newfound ease with each other, and RAFTS’s swelling symphony imparts an emotional sense of excitability and wonderment for life in general: “I think to create space for such joy is one of the most caregiving things you can do,” Pilgrim says with a smile. ar Rory Pilgrim’s RAFTS is on view in the Turner Prize 2023 exhibition, at Towner Eastbourne through 14 April. The winner of the 2023 Turner Prize will be announced on 5 December Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul can be seen at the Rivers Institute, New Orleans, 14 October – 17 December

Rory Pilgrim, RAFTS (still), 2022, HD video, 1 hr 7 min. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London, and andriesse~eyck galerie, Amsterdam

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Differential Diagnoses The practices of both art and medicine rely on people asking the right questions. So, might the challenges offered when trying to decipher artworks have a relation to those encountered during medical diagnosis? Going further, can video art inform healthcare? A physician presents the case by John Quin

You’re a young physician on a nightshift. You’re admitting patients, taking their histories. Now dawn has broken. You’re tired, exhausted, but you must tell your bosses on the ward round about the new cases. You crowd around a specific patient’s bed. You read the notes that you’ve written: ‘This man was complaining of chest pain going down his left arm and so I diagnosed new onset angina.’ Your boss asks the patient to go through his story again. You’re gobsmacked when the man says he hasn’t got any chest pain. He’s got a tummy ache. You’ve got it wrong; wasted everyone’s time. Was it your fault for taking a poor history? Has the patient had a change of symptoms or a change of their description? Or should that last bit be the other way around? The mutability of truth is an everyday experience for physicians. As a former doctor, I’ve often wondered whether or not certain artworks might facilitate improvements in healthcare and medical education. In particular I’ve been thinking about whether video art might prepare medical workers for challenges like the one above. So, here are three zones of clinical expertise and three examples (among many) in which work by video artists could have a significant impact on healthcare practice. Communication skills are key to exemplary healthcare. Anri Sala’s Intervista (Finding the Words) (1998) is a work that might prepare carers for inconsistencies and denial. The work is about Anri’s mother, Valdet. In it, she is confronted with film footage of herself recorded many years earlier in Albania, during the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha. She’s reading subtitles of what she said at the time and she’s incredulous – “I don’t believe this”. As with our patient with chest pain, she’s changed her history: “I never said that!” ‘Unreliable historian’: a phrase used regularly by doctors on ward rounds to describe patients. As one former boss of mine had it, the real unreliable historian is usually the person taking the history. Valdet concludes Sala’s video by saying that she thinks we “should always

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question the truth”: a credo relevant to both artistic and medical practice. Healthcare workers must challenge ‘truths’ if the evidence base is weak. Informed scepticism is essential to the scientific method: we have seen too many disasters in medicine (birth defects as a result of thalidomide treatment, the Oxycontin misuse scandal, the recent conviction of British nurse Lucy Letby for murdering several babies) that occur because healthcare workers and managers have not asked enough questions. Sala’s video is a powerful tool to teach carers about the sheer insidious power of denial. More obviously, there are several artists making videoworks that relate to specific diseases. To pick just one specialty – like neurology – there are those that deal with common illnesses, such as stroke, and others addressing much rarer conditions. The latter works are potentially helpful in medical teaching given the fact that trainees may wait decades to directly encounter such cases. Christine Borland’s Endless Walk (1999) is one such work. Here an animated video is projected onto screens in two corners of an otherwise empty room. Most of the time the screens are blank, and then suddenly a young figure is seen slowly crawling from the side of one of the screens to the other. The figure disappears only to reappear on the screen in the opposite corner. The child is not a toddler, they are much older. The crawl is not normal: bent over, they use their hands to pull up and move their feet. The duration of this ‘walk’ is accentuated, deliberately stressed for our observation. This is known as Gowers’s sign and it’s how a child with Duchenne muscular dystrophy ‘walks’. For carers, this video illustrates – graphically – the serious impact of this disability, making you see and sit with the problem, rather than imagining it from a textbook description. Another genetic inherited disorder with neurological sequelae is myotonic dystrophy, a condition that leads to muscle weakness and wasting. This has been the subject of work by Jacqueline Donachie.

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Anri Sala, Intervista (Finding the Words) (still), 1998, video projection, colour, stereo sound, screen dimensions variable, 26 min. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & Los Angeles

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Erik van Lieshout, René Daniëls (still), 2021, HD video, colour, sound, 49 min. © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

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The condition affects her immediate family: her sister and brother a more positive attitude in viewers, providing scientific evidence that have it – she does not. In Hazel (2015) we see a split screen with other videos can improve empathy scores in carers and in the general public. affected families; five sets of siblings in all – one has inherited the In Candice Breitz’s Love Story (2016) we hear the testimonies of gene, the other has not. The work stresses the diversity of the condi- six refugees on six separate video screens all stigmatised in various tion, as well as identity issues regarding altered facial appearance. ways. In a neighbouring room the actors Alec Baldwin and Julianne Geneticists caring for those patients have documented their admira- Moore alternately ‘act’ out the words of the refugees. The verbal tone tion for this aspect of the work – thus we have a definitive example of and facial expressions of the actors are deliberately heightened and an artwork influencing carers themselves. dramatised, in contrast to the more deadpan nontheatrical presenErik van Lieshout’s video portrait of a fellow artist, René Daniëls tations by the refugees. The work asks if actorly reenactment and (2021), focuses on a much more common neurological condition, manipulation is more effective at inspiring empathy than the real account by the refugee. And in turn someone suffering from a cerebroHis lack of sentimentality is a model of might this undermine or perpetvascular accident (CVA) or stroke. Daniëls has been left with a severe exuate stigmatisation? We hypothesise interaction that stroke carers would pressive dysphasia but he still paints. that a formal scientific study of the do well to study closely, given its deep The two artists have an unusual form impact of watching Breitz’s work on insights into the empathy required carers might replicate the results of of communication that revolves around Daniëls answering Lieshout’s the Canadian paper. for optimal management of patients sometimes complicated and subtle These are only three topics where questioning about painting with only the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Van video art may help inform carers. At Brighton and Sussex Medical Lieshout’s patience, his lack of sentimentality, are a model of inter- School we are setting up a module to enable undergraduates to action that stroke carers would do well to study closely, given its study video art available on social media. Access will be predomideep insights into the empathy required for optimal management of nantly via YouTube and other online outlets, but museum visits will patients. Also featuring Marleen Gijsen, Daniëls’s then-girlfriend and also be included. The aim of the module is for students to acquire now-carer, the video gives us a fine example of post-CVA management an interest in contemporary video art, with the hope that some may at home. be inspired to engage in further academic study on its potential My last example of the potential use of video art in healthcare benefits in improving healthcare and in the development of video focuses on the amelioration of stigma. Stigma, as social psychol- as both educational tool and art form. I’ll keep you posted as the ogist Erving Goffman underlines, is encountered everywhere in programme develops. ar medicine, in those with ill health and those with physical deformity. One Canadian study has looked at the impact of watching an educaJohn Quin is a writer based in Brighton and Berlin. For more than three decades he was an NHS physician specialising in endocrinology tional video made by people with mental illness, which helped create

Candice Breitz, Love Story (stills), 2016, seven-channel video installation and seven hard drives, featuring Julianne Moore (top) and Shabeena Francis Saveri, Sarah Ezzat Mardini, Mamy Maloba Langa (bottom, left to right). Courtesy the artist

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What to Make of Harry Smith? Anthropologist, occultist, music historian, filmmaker, artist, paper-airplane collector, greeting-card designer, shamanin-residence, consecrated bishop, gnostic saint and all-round hipster, he defied convention and any kind of categorisation – and now he’s the subject of a major museum retrospective by Martin Herbert

Harry Smith, Untitled [Study for Inkweed Studios greeting card], c. 1952, India ink on scratchboard, 20 × 15 cm. Private collection

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If you’ve never heard of Harry Smith, then perhaps the most obvious Harry Everett Smith, who was born in 1923 and died in 1991, was a entry point is Anthology of American Folk Music. Released in 1952, this lot of things. Wikipedia describes him first as a polymath, then as an six-album collection of 84 blues, folk, country and gospel records ‘artist, experimental filmmaker, bohemian, mystic, record collector, was drawn from the then-twenty-nine-year-old, Oregon-born Smith’s hoarder, student of anthropology and a Neo-Gnostic bishop’. The own obsessive, itinerant and effortful stockpiling of obscure and out- title of an unbridled oral history that Semiotext(e) published in 1996, of-print commercial 78s. (Moe Asch of Folkways Records convinced meanwhile, rolls all his roles into the phrase American Magus. Does any Smith to compile the album after the latter came to him, characteris- of that help to articulate what Smith was? Perhaps not, but there is tically broke, attempting to hawk his collection for cash.) Anthology’s the promise of a clearer reflection in New York’s Whitney Museum of release was hugely catalytic: it led directly to the folk revival in 1950s American Art’s upcoming retrospective exploration of Smith’s manyAmerica, thence to young people listening to politicised lyrics; from sided activity, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith. (This here, one can argue – as Allen Ginsberg has – that it led to a raising year marks the centenary of Smith’s birth, and the publication of John of political consciousness and the explosion of the counterculture. F. Szwed’s new biography, Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Indeed, Smith himself claimed to expect as much: ‘I felt social Smith, was clearly timed to fit; the museum’s exhibition, however, has changes would result,’ he stated succinctly in 1968. This might seem been in the making for around a decade, due to various false starts and presumptuous, but Smith was nothing if not an egomaniac. But note rethinkings, and wasn’t deliberately planned for this year: as with that the cover of Anthology, which features an illustration – from a many things in Smith’s life, strange forces were at work.) Indeed, a simple outline of some of the items in the show suggests book on mysticism by Elizabethan-era English physician and occultist Robert Fludd – of a musical instrument called a ‘celestial monochord’ the bewildering range possessed of this obstreperous hipster-Zelig, being tuned by the hand of God; its three double albums are colour- who was known equally for spectacular erudition and for loudly coded red, green and blue to reference the dynamic elements (fire, chewing out his friends and, on occasion, smashing up his own work. water, air), and the songs themselves were dispatches from a fogbound If Smith’s self-characterisation was primarily as an anthropologist – the lost world, full of ghosts, murders and spooky cockeyed meanings due discipline in which he trained – and a preserver of cultural artefacts, to folk lyrics changing over time. Anthology, music critic Greil Marcus we see on display documentation of his teenage recordings of Lummi wrote when the records were reissued during the 1990s, was ‘an occult Native American rituals and dances on a reservation in Washington document disguised as an academic treatise on stylistic shifts within during the early 1940s. Around the same time, he began collecting string figures, seeing in them evidence – the an archaic musicology’. It testified in its very Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Harry Smith [ST314] (still), 1964, same coded designs showing up in wildly packaging not only to the various levels on 16mm film transferred to digital video, b/w, silent, which its compiler was thinking and working, 4 min. © and courtesy Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, different places – of mass migrations that but also to the cosmic power of culture. eluded the history books. Meanwhile, he was a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved

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Harry Smith, Film No. 12 (Heaven and Earth Magic Feature) (stills), c. 1957–62, 16mm film, b/w, sound, 1 hr 6 min. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives, New York

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Harry Smith, Untitled, c. 1950–51, casein and paint on board, 60 × 60 cm. Harry Smith Archives, Los Angeles

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Harry Smith, Film No. 18: Mahagonny (stills), 1970–80, 16mm film transferred to digital video, colour, sound, 2 hr 21 min. © and courtesy Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Harry Smith Archives, Los Angeles; and Harry Smith Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

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starting to make paintings and hand-painted films; by the late 1940s, Whitney puts it in the show’s press release, he ‘created a life and practice living in San Francisco, a city that was then rather more avant-garde largely outside of institutions and capitalism’, though another way of than New York, he was creating films to accompany bebop musicians; putting that is that he expected support from others for his genius he then began making patterned abstract paintings, full of circles, and existed in constant financial chaos and, after much of his work was loops, connecting lines, paisley blots and ladderlike forms, based on stolen – seemingly by film-production creditors in 1964 – disconsothe improvisations of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk et al. late drunkenness. In his last years, he was ‘Shaman-in-Residence’ at the In New York, where Smith lived from the 1950s onwards, he met Buddhist-inclined Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg (who became a longstanding supporter); began studying This apparent diversity of interests and freewheeling mode of mysticism in earnest, particularly Kabbalah and the works of Aleister living – much of Smith’s compulsive material practice has been ‘found’ Crowley; and alongside other pursuits (meticulous scratchboard illus- in the apartments of people with whom he couch-surfed, and some trations and drawings; amassing a vast collection of found paper only exists in photographic documentation – looks like it could prove airplanes) made increasingly ambitious and intricate films. Some of a challenge to curators, and equally result in a dry, archival show. But these, like the black-and-white Fragments of a Faith Forgotten is unMuch of Smith’s compulsive material animation using cutouts from Viclikely to be that; first because its torian catalogues to depict a series exhibition designer and cocurator practice has been ‘found’ in the apartments of alchemical transformations, is the artist Carol Bove, a longtime of people with whom he couch-surfed Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Smith aficionado (“Harry Smith is (1957–62), were supposedly meant to run for six hours (the existing cut my religion,” she once said to me), whose involvement with his praconly lasts for one). Others, like Film No. 18: Mahagonny (1970–80, rarely tice began when she incorporated a display of Smith and Ziprin’s seen outside of this show), were ensnared in production difficulties, collaborative work into a 2013 exhibition of hers. Bove has driven the and the various custodians of Smith’s work have strong opinions present show forward since its inception, liaised between the various on how they should best be shown. (Smith himself at one point wanted parties who claim stewardship over Smith’s archives, turned up to present this work on a tipped-up boxing ring, referring back to a new research, given shelter to multiple fragile archives and also 1920s staging of the Brecht/Weill opera from which his film’s title is designed what she describes as “exhibition furniture” for the exhibiborrowed.) Amid all this, he made (during the 1950s) Kabbalistic designs tion’s scenography. while working at an adventurous greetings-card company founded Additionally, Fragments very much looks like it’s going to present by poet Lionel Ziprin, collected huge numbers of tarot cards, popup a take on Smith. In researching, Bove says, she discovered that contrary books, gourds, Seminole textiles and Ukrainian painted Easter eggs, to his constant self-presentation as a ‘holy fool’ separate from – or among other things, and studied myriad languages and dialects. As the above – the avant-garde of his time, which he professed to disdain

Harry Smith, String figure, 1960, string, glue and poster board, 20 × 50 cm. Collection Rufus Cohen, Putnam Valley NY

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and be outside of, Smith was in dialogue with and responsive to the some obscure energies. (In keeping with this, as Bove suggested to me, artistic currents around him. That, apparently unknown until Bove strange things start to happen when you engage with Smith’s work. quizzed the right people, he’d seen Jackson Pollock’s pre-Abstract A week after I began researching this text, a visitor to my home, whom Expressionist work at SFMOMA in 1945, and his own paintings’ highly I’d never met, turned out to have come directly from spending time similar aesthetics weren’t produced in a vacuum. That his mid-50s with her friend Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives. paintings based on jazz improvisations, meanwhile, which might be It wouldn’t be too hard, equally, to imagine this show’s protracted framed as backwards-looking post-Surrealism at the time, were more gestation being due to Smith meddling irately from his cloud.) likely a cranky rebuttal of fashionable Ab-Ex aesthetics at a moment Approach Fragments how you will, then. On one level, as is acknowlwhen the collectors’ market was developing in New York, and ‘selling edged by the show giving upwards of a quarter of its floorspace to a listening environment for Anthology, Harry Smith preserved some great out’ was first an issue. old records, to galvanising effect; as At the same time, though, and He ‘created a life and practice largely he said when accepting a Grammy despite this show being located in award for Lifetime Achievement in an art museum, Bove and the other outside of institutions and capitalism’, 1991, he was “glad to say my dreams curators don’t seek to reclassify Smith though another way of putting came true. I saw America changed as ‘merely’ an artist (something he that is that he expected support from by music.” He was one of the great himself resisted) and thus reduce his wider ambits. His largescale collecavant-garde filmmakers of his time others for his genius and existed tions of artefacts, and his habitual (and knew it: in one of his scattered in constant financial chaos fashioning of links between apparnotes, he placed himself third behind ently disconnected things (sound and image, for example, or ethno- Warhol – whose 1964 Screen Test of Smith is in the show – and Kenneth graphic artefacts from seemingly different cultures), Bove sees as the Anger). He’s part of a lineage of unclassifiable mystics, however much outsize, one-man service of preserving a library, at least in microcosm; his cantankerousness and grandiosity might have obscured it. It’s preserving human culture, even. And given that Smith studied hermet- 32 years since Smith died; he always said, characteristically, that his icism to a very high level – he was a consecrated bishop in the Ecclesia work wouldn’t be understood for at least 50. Now, in his old homeGnostica Catholica, the ecclesiastical wing of the secret society the town, Smith is here again, but he’s also quite probably waiting for us Ordo Templi Orientis, who said a gnostic mass for him after his death, around the bend. ar and canonised him this year as a ‘gnostic saint’ alongside William Blake, Giordano Bruno and others – it’s apparent that Smith had Fragments of a Faith Forgotten is on show at the Whitney Museum higher-than-human aspirations for self-realisation, and was courting of American Art, New York, from 4 October to 28 January

Harry Smith, Untitled 3-D Greeting Card [“are you looking for the third dimension?”], 1953, silkscreened ink on paper, 15 × 15 cm. Estate of Jordan Belson, San Francisco

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Arabic Poetry in Global Culture You’ve turned vain, now that by your love I’m slain Whatever you command, my heart shall obey -Imru’ al-Qais

poetry was evident when he said: “No nation was hit with the talent of divine poetry like the Arabs have been.” As Europe was witnessing its medieval periods, or Dark Ages as they term them, the Arab civilization in Andalusia and Sicily was at the peak of its prosperity. Cordoba, Toledo and Granada were centers of knowledge and a destination for Europeans to study science, philosophy, and literature.

This year, Saudi Arabia is celebrating Arabic poetry, a beautiful form of the Arabic language that has spread its charm across the world and influenced global languages and arts. The Kingdom has declared 2023 as the Year of Arabic Poetry to recognize its vast history and showcase its beauty. The studies and scientific research haven’t stopped looking into the effect of Arabic poetry on the birth of modern European poetry. One such work was

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compiled by Hamilton Gibb under the title Literature, which enabled him to author the book The Legacy of Islam.

We can see the impact that the Arabic language had on Italian poetry during the medieval periods and understand the important role Arabic poetry played as well as its impact on renowned Italian poets.

Gibb dedicated his research to studying the impact of Arabic literature on European literature to conclude that “The greatest favor done by Islamic literature on European literature is that through its Arabic culture, it influenced the spread of poetry in the Medieval Ages.” The Spanish poet Francisco Villaespesa’s infatuation with Arabic

The Kingdom’s celebration of Arabic poetry as a tool of wisdom, knowledge, and connection showcases its commitment to preserving cultural heritage and shines a light on emerging talent and celebrates the liveliness of Arabic poetry that inspired poets, writers, artists, and scientists across ages.

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35th Bienal de São Paulo Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo 6 September – 10 December This is a show constructed on the scorched earth that colonialism left in its wake. It is a message ably delivered by Ibrahim Mahama, the Ghanaian artist tasked with opening Choreographies of the Impossible, as the biennial is titled. Amid a derelict landscape of upturned ceramic pots, a railway track – its sleepers dirty, its tracks rusting – leads the visitor into an exhibition that wears its visceral anger with pride. It is the first time the 72-year-old biennial, the biggest art event in a Black-majority country, has been led by a group of Blackmajority curators, and Manuel Borja-Villel, Grada Kilomba, Diane Lima and Hélio Menezes refuse to let their white audience off the hook. Railway lines were, after all, just one of the many ‘civilising’ methods with which the white world conquered and exploited countries in Africa, Asia and South America, the continents from which the majority of the 121 participating artists are from. A reflection of such infrastructure and industrial ‘progress’, the extractivist purpose for which was barely disguised, can be found in the works encountered at the end of Mahama’s line. Thuë pihi kuuwi (A woman thinking, 2023), by Aida Harika, Edmar Tokorino and Roseane

Yariana, all Yanomami, is typical of an emerging generation of Indigenous filmmakers whose work is ostensibly documentary but records both this world and the world of the spirits, without division. Here we witness the preparations for when the village shamans will contact the xapiri gods. In its steady narration, the film condemns the ongoing genocide of the Yanomami through deforestation and mining. It is a message present too in Killing us Softly… with their SPAMS… (Songs, Prayers, Alphabets, Myths, Superheroes…) (2023), a vast walk-through installation by Kidlat Tahimik, made in collaboration with traditional Filipino wood carvers. The charming, roughly hewn finish of the statues belies the extreme violence they portray, in which invading military, armed with chainsaws, swarm from a boat; figures are strung up and lynched; Captain America rides a missile; and a Trojan horse is wheeled in. In a wall text, the artist (who is better known as a film director) describes his intention as ‘cinematic’, and sure enough, in among this chaos is a wood-carved man filming with a wood-carved camera. It asks, how do we mediate historic and neocolonial violence? If the overt politicking of the opening sequence laid out by curators was maintained,

the exhibition would soon run out of rails, but it gets cleverer than that. There are plenty more bombastic installations over the proceeding two floors of the Bienal’s curving, modernist, Oscar Niemeyerdesigned home. There’s Igshaan Adams’s pearl and bead carpets and ceiling-hung wire sculptures (Desire Lines, 2022) and Daniel Lie’s vast boughs of chrysanthemums and textiles (Non-Negotiable Condition, 2021), a work made, Lie says, with ‘beyond human forces’ such as ‘bacteria, fungi… spirits, ancestors’. Both help pace a show of over 1,000 objects with their great scale, but add little in and of themselves: they feel too self-conscious in their desire to make a splash. Rather, it is often in the quietest moments, though no less confrontational, that the exhibition exudes its power. Nicaraguaborn Rolando Castellón’s biomorphic drawings in mud on graph paper, with their subtle use of nature as material, have a religious quality, a faith found in nature, not against it (something the pictorial paintings of Denilson Baniwa suggest of missionary Christianity). Tadáskía, an artist several generations Castellón’s junior and easily one of Brazil’s most interesting young artists, follows suit

Ibrahim Mahama, Parliament of Ghosts, 2023 (installation view, 35th Bienal de São Paulo). Photo: Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

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ArtReview

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in her templelike gallery, with its painted psychedelic ceiling and wall mural. In a storm of swirling pink, pastel green and red, what might be sperm meet eggs, and attached to the painted walls are a series of pithy poems by the artist, collectively titled Mystical Black Bird (2022), in which she imagines herself as the titular animal. One reads, ‘Our winged transformation, I know I’m not on the right lines’, another, ‘my beak is a flower’: enigmatic, they feel like the holy text of some animist religion. Questions of physical transformation and mutability of form continue in the artist’s building of three small bamboo pyres on the floor (with the potential of the wood to reduce to ash), each surrounded by offerings of fruit (already beginning to shrivel). In her essay for the Bienal’s catalogue Diane Lima writes about the ‘impossible… ontology of Black women’, and how a sense of constant movement and transformation of the type Tadáskía conjures is the best – perhaps the only possible– means of ‘revolt against the compulsory condition’ (be it racism, patriarchy, capitalist or state violence, or any other of the ills visited by the majority on the fragmented minority). If the Bienal occasionally feels like a powder keg of different woes, it has a conceptual framework to back up that scattershot approach. Its twists, turns and twirls form a methodology through which to break down the edifice of the colonial world. In this light,

delivering the exhibition’s greatest gut punch is François Pain and Min Tanaka’s 1986 collaboration, in which the French filmmaker invited the Japanese dancer to perform at La Borde, the psychiatric clinic in France where Félix Guattari worked and with which Pain had a long association. It is a work of sublime beauty and terrifying anguish, a vision of the body in both its monstrous fragility and enduring ability. To the soundtrack of Joseph Canteloube’s operatic folksong Baïlèro (1923–30), Tanaka stumbles past the clinic’s residents, dressed in rags; his body contorts and spasms as if in an advanced neurodegenerative state; he kicks off his old boots, and his feet, horribly bent inwards, don’t seem to work. This ongoing seizure eventually leaves the dancer in a state of pitiful collapse. If some unknown force is attacking Tanaka’s body, it becomes symbolic of so many of the other bodies in this show that have been attacked. Within an impossible state of violence, as Tanaka’s movement demonstrates, beauty can still be choreographed. Indeed, Lima continues in her essay, invoking one of the oldest art historical ideas possible, ‘beauty became a synonym of escape for me’. A similar effect emanates from two other dance works: Ukrainian-born filmmaker Maya Deren’s 1948 Meditation on Violence, in which actor Chao-Li Chi moves between gracefully fluid movement of the arms and gestures of rigid defence; and Corbeaux (Crows, 2014),

by Bouchra Ouizguen, in which half a dozen women in black gowns and white headbands line up in a deserted quarry. By some unknown force, as if in a kind of angry prayer, their heads bow in aggressive unison, by which we might read the patriarchy pushing them to genuflection. The constrained body, the attacked body, the body as a material: these are themes resurrected in Judith Scott’s room of fibrewrapped objects. In one meaty work (all untitled and made during the 1990s), red threads appear like capillaries of blood rising to the surface; in another work, a child’s form is mummified in red, yellow and orange string. Scott was born with Down’s syndrome and deaf; though the work is not defined by this fact, there is a sense of claustrophobia perhaps born of society’s disabling of the artist. Most artists are exhibiting several works. Sidney Amaral, a Black Brazilian painter who died young in 2017, has one painting in the show. On the bottom left corner of the canvas is a figure, likely the artist – portly, stripped to his waist and leaning on a stick – walking through a great monochrome of black paint. Above him, dwarfing him, filling the upper half of the canvas, are the huge spiralling ramps of the Bienal’s iconic pavilion. With pathos, Amaral titled the painting The Foreigner (2011). Foreign no more, the work by artists excluded for so long are now inside the building, blowing up the canon. Oliver Basciano

Sidney Amaral, O estrangeiro (The Foreigner), 2011, acrylic on canvas, 210 × 138 cm. Photo: João Liberato

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Ugly Painting Nahmad Contemporary, New York 26 June – 16 September Jana Euler paints every hair in Ed Sheeran’s beard. She also, in one work included at this show, outlines the bulbous nose and ear of an eerily familiar face attached to a Quarter Horse’s anthropomorphised torso. Euler’s monstrous, detailed depictions of recognisable figures force reckonings with standards of beauty and the obscene nature of celebrity culture; her paintings, in brief, are ugly, both in content and in form. Here Manhattan-based critic Dean Kissick and art adviser Eleanor Cayre, both popular for their irreverent approaches to contemporary art, explore ugliness as a challenge to ‘the decorative, polite, [and] conservative’, a pursuit that results, as they write in their press release, in the ‘powerful, moving, and even sublime’. The works on view follow in Euler’s footsteps, but they don’t always accomplish the transcendence Cayre and Kissick hope for: this collection oscillates between apt social commentary and carnivalesque trope. Ugliness often manifests in fraught encounters between bodies and the gaze of the outside world. In Rita Ackermann’s Dos and Donts Nurses (United) (2009), clusters of

gesticulating hands and anguished faces emerge from a collaged background of women’s fashion magazine clippings featuring dos and don’ts for dieting and clothing. Ackermann’s gestural brushstrokes and gendered critique pair well with Shuriya Davis’s Eventually, We Come to Exist (2021), a mother-and-child portrait with a haunting twist: at the canvas’s edge, a child’s disembodied, translucent hand covers an adult figure’s fearful face. Euler’s rider/horse switch under observation ride thrown off (2018) shows an overly muscular human-animal hybrid rearing its legs for a group of cowboys; in Euler’s hands, the rodeo becomes a theatre that objectifies and personifies its oppressed participants at will. These paintings are ugly because they render grotesque experiences grotesquely, utilising unconventional modes to appropriately discomfiting effect. Other artists walk a precarious line between representations of abjection and mere voyeurism, wittily aestheticising the ugliness of their ideas. Peter Saul’s Woman Artist Painting Three Pictures at Once (2021) features a female painter punching one male onlooker and shooting bright enamel onto another;

the work’s cartoonish composition reads more like a takedown of women’s ambition than a commentary on artworld patriarchy. Other works offer similar caricatures with little insight to match: in Connor Marie’s Pork (2023), a slickly rendered young girl poses next to a pig who adopts her same posture; Mathieu Malouf recasts the female prostitutes of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) as weed-smoking penguins, his painting styled with childlike, deskilled strokes (Untitled, 2023). While not ‘polite’, these do feel ‘conservative’ in their recitations of political cliché, foregoing the innovations of their peers for parodies that relish in their subjects’ debasement. There is satisfaction in satire, but rarely the sublime. Moments of revelation – Jared Madere’s psychedelic, AI-generated You gotta speak with the new generation they crazy (2023) is another standout – feel destabilised by the simpler methods on view, which poke fun at the banal evils of aesthetic convention and art historical monolith but fail to eclipse them. Cayre and Kissick probe and eventually reach the limits of their subgenre; ugliness, like beauty, proves quick to cruelty. Claudia Ross

Jared Madere, You gotta speak with the new generation they crazy, 2023, digital image, Duratrans UV print, aluminium, steel and rope, 264 × 194 cm. © the artist

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Etel Adnan & Simone Fattal Voices without borders KINDL, Berlin 27 August – 1 January In Voices without borders, Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal’s personal, creative and political connections play out in textiles, paintings, etchings, sculptures and writing – what the artists might call intersecting ‘orbits’. (Life partners, they shared a love of interstellar travel and the American space programme, and Adnan saw astronauts as martyrs.) Most intriguing, this show suggests, is their mutual exploration of the role of the witness via ephemeral and material entities: as colour, text and form, as the sun. Adnan, who died in 2021, was a formalist; a lover of colour, of shape and its relationship to space. Two small oil paintings, Satellites 18 and 22 (both 2020), and the larger Composition dans l’espace (1960s/2003), clarify the LebaneseAmerican artist and writer’s aesthetic upfront. Brightly coloured geometric shapes hover, intersect and nest within each other, referencing modernist abstract paintings and childlike drawings of suns in skies; they’re joyful in their apparent straightforwardness, spirited in their gravitation towards the cosmos. Across the room, under glass, five minimal but equally energetic etchings (all 2020) by the Syrianborn Fattal indicate her own take on space and form. These works assume a bird’s-eye view

referencing earth rather than sky, looking down. At first, Fattal’s gestures read as evidence or strange lingual marks to be followed like prints in sand. Closer, they become soldiers, buildings, bodies, bodies of water, forests, the titles suggesting an Arab cavalry, a mountain, a river in Damascus and a pre-Islamic Arab clan. Echoing Fattal’s scratchy etched lines, Adnan’s poem ‘The Arab Apocalypse’ (published in 1980 in response to the Lebanese Civil War) awaits viewers in a dimmed anteroom. In handwriting transposed to the wall, an excerpt exposes the work as a formal hybrid: of poetry, visual art and translation. A yellow sun / A green sun / a yellow sun / A red sun / a blue sun…, Adnan writes. Through constant described changes in colour and form, she decentres the reader amidst the volatile cycles of violence and time. A sun lying on the highway a sheriff checking its heart. Have a good laugh. ???, reads another line; nearby, Adnan writes, and circles for emphasis, ‘torching’. Here, just as Fattal’s earth-toned etchings change with observation, Adnan’s sun – usually taken for granted as stable – transforms from witness to subject and back again. Scribbled over and crossed out, Adnan’s poem is constructed and deconstructed just as Beirut has fallen and risen,

prey to the unpredictable machinations of war. As Aditi Machado wrote in poetry website Jacket2, ‘the text becomes a disaster in the process of witnessing [a] disaster’. How language intersects with the visual in the show (eg a list of publications by Fattal’s experimental publishing house, The PostApollo Press; Adnan’s self-made alphabet framed as a sketch) reinforces the work of each artist as forms of intimate documentation. This feeling stands in sharp contrast to the overly clean, commercial-style installation of the exhibition space. In Deena Charara’s video interview here, Adnan says, “A martyr’s primary sense is to witness”. Both she and Fattal, by focusing on the act of distancing via perspective and astronomical space, sacrifice the self for the sake of the voyage (the art). The artists, positioning themselves as witnesses to their Lebanese and Syrian roots, to war, to colonisation, to displacement, provocatively challenge the very idea of stability. Rather than solidify narrative via documentation or memory, Adnan and Fattal make and eradicate form, obscure and reveal identities, gestures, and histories. Jasmine Reimer

Voices without borders, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Jens Ziehe. © Simone Fattal / The Estate of Etel Adnan / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2023. Courtesy Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

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Gabriel Massan & Collaborators Third World: The Bottom Dimension Serpentine North, London 23 June – 22 October The phrase ‘third world’, once used by Westerners to describe the world beyond Europe and North America, has long been dismissed as pejorative, reflecting nothing more than the assumed superiority of the ‘first’ and ‘second’ worlds. Subsequent terms – the ‘developing world’ and, more recently, the ‘Global South’ – have replaced it. Lying between those two more recent terms, though, is a tension that fringes the worldview of Gabriel Massan’s exhibition: that to talk of less industrialised countries as ‘developing’ insinuates that industrial society – in an age of heightened ecological concerns – is a model worth ‘developing’ towards in the first place. Third World includes the work of five African-diaspora Brazilian artists alongside Massan, who are also figured as ‘collaborators’ on the artist’s eye-popping, eponymous videogame platform that forms the centrepiece of the show. If you believe the gallery text’s breathless, somewhat overweening assertions, it’s a ‘decolonial game’ exploring ‘Black Brazilian experience as it intersects with the ramifications of colonialism across physical and digital realities’. Installed in the two gloomy central spaces of Serpentine North, players seated in hairy fake-fur gaming chairs get to navigate Massan’s various avatars through surrealistic natural landscapes and biomes, seeking out energy crystals and avoiding bizarre monsters. Massan’s long-limbed creatures are alienlike hominids, bodies the texture and contours of coral or bone, coloured as if decorated in polychrome mosses or fungi and painted in mysterious glyphs. So: it’s a first-person shooter. With a difference. The player’s journey – starting with directives issues from a squeaky-voiced, vaguely malevolent representative of a corporate-sounding ‘Headquarters’ – begins with a mission to ‘extract’ two mythical

objects, which turn out to be intimately linked to the fragile ecological equilibrium of Massan’s virtual world, Igba Tingbo. Lush with swaying plants and shimmering lagoons, populated by sprites and lumbering giant biomorphs, it’s a mesmerising gameworld. Even so, it soon slips into polemical mode, with characters explaining that taking the objects – the ‘bag of infinite seeds’ and the ‘air artifice’ – will destroy this idyllic world. Take them and you suddenly find yourself under attack; leave them be and you get to play further levels. From the initial ‘explorer’ character, one becomes an ‘invader’. Led by glowing arrows from one benignly condescending eco-spirit entity to another, the player is told they need to be ‘cured of their greed’. For all its hypnotic and at times breathtaking visual imagination, Third World leads its player towards a set of political tropes that link ‘extractivism’ to colonialism, and to the destruction of an otherwise harmonious environment; its inhabitants are connected to all other living things via a collective ‘energy’, and in which the invading player is meant to see the error of their ways. Ultimately it’s little different to such mainstream fare as James Cameron’s Avatar films (2009–), and no less simplistic as a morality tale. Through its biomorphic aesthetic and reference to the various diaspora traditions of Massan’s collaborators, Third World equates traditional cultural outlooks (by implication precolonial and un-Western) with a more symbiotic, nonindustrialised relationship to the environment. It’s a fashionable cultural currency. But it reduces economic development to little more than pernicious industrial ‘extractivism’. It’s odd, for example, to read the exhibition text conflate Brazil with ‘non-industrialised, developing nations’, as if Brazil was not the tenth biggest economy in the world.

facing page, top Third World: The Bottom Dimension, 2023 (installation view, Serpentine North, London). Photo: Hugo Glendinning. © Serpentine, London

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Not that this seems to be much of a concern for Massan’s coexhibitors. Ventura Profana’s photomontage Untitled II (2020) stages an image of Brazil’s terrible Mariana dam disaster of 2015 under the ‘hands touching’ detail from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (1508–12), apparently to remind us of the ‘destructive ideologies’ of ‘human tradition and religion’ (the dam was attached to a mining operation). Other works sit, awkwardly installed, around the gallery’s perimeter circuit: Novíssimo Edgar’s painted cement masks and sewn found-textile hangings offer jubilant fusions of Afro-Brazilian religious icons with Brazilian pop culture; Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s installation Attitudes of Time I (2023) stands tall logs on imposing rectangles of earth, the white cloths nailed to them purportedly signifying the ‘spiritual world, wisdom and transmutation’. Though as a sculpture viewed in a Western art gallery this last is a rather inert experience. Aligning indigenous and Black diaspora traditions (and, with the artists in the show, queer identities) in opposition to colonial history makes sense. But putting a question mark over ‘development’ serves no one in the Global South, or anywhere else. In the notes, Massan cites the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s important book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) as an influence, and Third World hums with Freire’s understanding of the necessity of opposing ‘cultural invasion’: ‘Cultural conquest leads to the cultural inauthenticity of those who are invaded’, Freire wrote. But then he was also concerned with the authentic, self-governed economic development of ‘Third World’ societies. One wonders what he would have thought of Third World’s slanted privileging of traditional identities and ecology over modern societies of the Global South and the prospects for their future. J.J. Charlesworth

facing page, bottom Gabriel Massan, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Novíssimo Edgar & LYZZA and collaborators, Third World: The Bottom Dimension (still), 2023, videogame. © the artists. Courtesy Gabriel Massan

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Pam Evelyn A Handful of Dust Pace, London 6–30 September In Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘Youth’ (1898), the ageing narrator recalls his twenties, when he experienced ‘the feeling that will never come back… the heat of life in the handful of dust’ that made up his then seemingly immortal body, and ‘the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim’. We might wonder whether this passage inspired the twenty-seven-year-old British painter Pam Evelyn to name her solo exhibition A Handful of Dust (the phrase also appears in T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, and served as the title of a 1934 novel by Evelyn Waugh). If Conrad was her source, then his words speak eloquently to how she transforms particles of pigment into vast, vigorously worked abstract canvases, which brim and burst with painterly joie de vivre. While Evelyn is alert to the history of her medium – these paintings draw lessons from figures including Chaïm Soutine, Karel Appel and Leon Kossoff – there’s little sense that she’s attempting to formulate what more self-conscious (and self-defensive) painters might term a ‘position’. Rather, she seems

content to discover where her paint will lead her. Given Evelyn’s abundant technical gifts, her sure sense of atmosphere and her youth, this is – for now at least – all to the good. Deluge (2023) is Evelyn at her most diffuse. Much of the picture plane is a dense squall of bright, primary coloured brushmarks, which rain down like tickertape against a dark, bruised-looking ground. Spatters of frog-green paint add to the blustery chaos, and the closest thing we get to form is two long boomerangshaped sections of raw, plum-stained canvas, on the far right of the work. These do not frame Deluge’s excessive pictorial energies, but rather ride them, like gusts of wind or cresting waves. Traced Train Windows (2023) is similarly restless. As its title suggests, the painting recalls the experience of travelling in a railway carriage, and watching the landscape outside speed by through a grease-smeared pane of glass, its features blurring into streaks of colour and vague, amorphous shapes. If one of Evelyn’s concerns is how time and motion inflect our

sense of perception, then Mirage – A Glaze of Mischief (2023) might be interpreted as an attempt to translate a fleeting, weightless phenomenon, a sudden spill of light, into the permanence of heavy, impasto paint. Raking luminescent brushstrokes fan out from the top of the canvas, before appearing to snag, bend and splinter. The result resembles a flash-frozen waterfall. The triptych Hidden Scene (2022), which at first glance appears to depict a brooding forest, is the closest Evelyn gets to figuration. Here, long treelike strips of raw canvas, licked with thin black marks, are glued onto the work’s surface, largely obscuring a kaleidoscopic abstract composition, in which fields of chalky blues and pinks are juxtaposed with pooling yellows and reds. Given how Evelyn’s paintings often push everything to the foreground, it’s intriguing to see her holding so much back. Whatever secrets lurk in the dark wood of Hidden Scene, I suspect they may, in time, prove crucial to her work. Tom Morton

Deluge, 2023, oil on linen, 321 × 300 cm. Photo: Robert Glowacki. © the artist. Courtesy Pace, London

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Neo Rauch The Dream of Reason MO.CO., Montpellier 8 July – 15 October Several years ago, Neo Rauch engaged in a public spat with a leading German critic who called his political stance into question. ‘This man, from the West, who doesn’t know socialism, is trying to bring these ideas back... to me, who does,’ the Leipzig-born painter told The New Yorker shortly afterwards. Now sixty-three and a blue-chip artist for the best part of two decades, he clearly does not enjoy moral lectures. In the more recent of over 40 canvases included in this retrospective, it’s not uncommon to see figures brandishing microphones or loudhailers: newfound symbols, in Rauch’s pictorial lexicon, of ideological compulsion. You could perhaps read these incidences as attacks on political correctness – other critics have identified similar tendencies in his work – but culture-war polemic is otherwise absent from The Dream of Reason. Rather, it is a thoughtful survey that at least initially takes as its theme Rauch’s complex relationship to his East German youth and his difficulties adjusting to the upheaval that followed. For a good part of its chronological course, the show manifests as a kind of visual identity crisis, one acknowledged by the artist in the catalogue text: in 1989, we learn, Rauch – a successful painter by DDR standards – hit a barrier of his own. Though

desperate to ‘be part of post-war modernity’, he struggled to assert an artistic identity in the new Germany. Caught between abstraction and figuration, the earliest works here are visibly listless. Der Gärtner (1990), for instance, sees murky washes of blue and green enveloping vaguely disturbing forms that liberally raid from Francis Bacon’s inventory of nightmarish imagery. Elsewhere Rauch fields a series of largescale representations of industry and infrastructure, interspersed with passages of discordant abstraction. In several paintings, notably Zwei Klassen (1995), elevated sections of motorway end abruptly in midair: quite aside from the suggestion of its title – possibly an allusion to the injustices of reunification – you could read the latter as an articulation of the artist’s own temporarily stalled career trajectory. Yet flawed as the earlier works are, they are brimful with ideas. The second half of the show provides diminishing returns. Around the millennium, Rauch stopped worrying about his place in relation to ‘post-war modernity’ and returned to the purely figurative techniques he learned at Leipzig’s rigorously academic art school. The new work was monumental and heavily

populated, containing a strong but neverexplained sense of narrative direction. Within a single passage, a painting might borrow from Symbolism, Surrealism and Romanticism, accompanied by an incongruous dose of kitsch. Their maker has ploughed much the same furrow since, and it has paid off: almost from the moment Rauch adopted his signature style, collectors have been paying close attention. While the initial effect of all this in the show is thunderous, it begins to resemble an inflexible formula. Attention-grabbing details (spinning tops, hot pink signs, Converse sneakers) have become increasingly present in the work, as have superfluous paraphrases of artistic forebears. While some paintings justify their gargantuan size – notably 2012’s Nest, with its cast of paintbrush-wielding paramilitaries and battling stag beetles – others rely on historicist scale alone to assert themselves. Intimations of the uncanny, meanwhile, get ever-louder. If Rauch’s pictures of 20 years ago could be described as ‘mildly unsettling’, recent efforts, replete with monstrous mutant-creatures and dystopian authority figures, stray into Hammer Horror territory. The result is possibly a lot more camp than he realises. Digby Warde-Aldam

Der Übergang, 2018, oil on canvas, 300 × 250 cm. Photo: Uwe Walter. © ADAGP, Paris 2023

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Iannis Xenakis Sonic Odysseys EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens 29 June – 7 January Since his centenary last year, the name of Greek composer, architect and engineer Iannis Xenakis has resounded loudly. There have been festivals and compilations of his music, books about his influence and inventiveness, and here a museum show. The multifarious nature of Xenakis’s practice, though, raises the question of what ‘curating’ it entails. His work can be as large as an architectural pavilion or as small as a circuit board. It can comprise a choreography of laser beams mounted on custom-designed tracks across the ceiling of a Roman baths (Polytope of Cluny, 1971), a multilocational durational event in and around an ancient ruin (Polytope de Mycènes, 1978) or a piece of music (Nomos gamma, 1967–68), all these included in some form in this show. So how to organise and reflect these vastly divergent scales and temporalities, their documentations, their representations? A possible answer lies in Xenakis’s artistic language. His modernism was not gridded and reductive but synthetic and synaesthetic. His work is a weather system, made up of natural forms broken down into a fluid spectrum. His music and architecture were vectoral, made in the shape of clouds, clusters, branching curves, grains of sound, like lightning and thunder, waves and swarms. This is not a poetic description but a pragmatic one. When at least three adjacent tones in a scale are sounded at once, clusters form; Xenakis’s Keqrops (1986) is full of them. He’s considered the inventor of granular synthesis, a technique for generating new sounds based on ‘grains’ of recorded sound, and he made music from the shape of tree branches developing a concept he called

‘Arborescences’, notably in his piece for solo piano Evryali (1973). And yet you enter Sonic Odysseys and are greeted by a stiff exhibition design that flatly ignores all of the above. Instead, the all-grey, super-orderly, almost two-dimensional scenography – equidistant office lighting, grids, austere horizontal cabinets – refers, the press release says, to a lab environment. The aesthetic seems influenced by monochrome biographical footage of Xenakis in his working environments, rather than the overall irregularity and dynamism of his work – for example his multicoloured Polytope events (from 1967–84, literal bombardments of light, like an acid disco beamed back from the future), or the branching patterns of Evryali. Fortunately, though, if you persist, curatorial acumen starts to break out of the boxes. Documents range from personal letters with both political and emotive gravitas (for example Xenakis’s hand-drafted letter asking to be accepted back into Greece after his long selfimposed exile due to his leftwing activism during the Greek Civil War) to a great selection of lesser-known graphic scores and drawings, placed alongside scores for early and now seminal compositions like Metastaseis (1953–54) and Pithoprakta (1955). The condition of exile and the nostalgia apparent in Xenakis’s deep love of Greek antiquity – through his idiomatic use of Ancient Greek and mythology in his titles and concept-naming – are here brought subtly face-to-face. Other cabinets are dedicated to drafts and plans for various Polytope works, a self-invented format for making an event witnessed from one

place but taking place in many (the name fuses ‘many’ and ‘place’), each revealing a separate formal assembly, like a multipanelled painting where each segment is in a different vocabulary. This is an endearing insight into how intuitive and unsystemic Xenakis’s work really was, something often overshadowed by the maths he employed to compose music and synthesise sound. Another grid, formed from cubic shelving, presents objects from the composer’s home. The curators balance these intimate effects and documents against others of wider significance, and their coexistence feels unforced and natural. A Triton’s trumpet shell, African masks, a tambour, books and records on Xenakis’s contemporaries, a flint nodule, a Cycladic figurine copy, etc, backdrop two unenclosed objects: a model of the Pavillon Philips by Xenakis and Le Corbusier for Expo 58 in Brussels, and one of Diatope (Polytope de Beaubourg), another multimedia pavilion, created and presented at Paris’s recently inaugurated Centre Pompidou in 1978. In spite of an exhibition design that could have better emphasised the innate dynamics of Xenakis’s career – personal vision and trauma, artistry and political strife – his wealth of ideas remains visible here. Yet these grey Pandora’s boxes, brimming with rich fuel for the imagination, leave one hoping that Sonic Odysseys is merely a preamble to another exhibition where their condensed worlds expand into the physical and sonic space they fully deserve: a whole floor of a museum, with media-rich, durational representations, to celebrate this unique restless spirit and his huge, still-germinating legacy. Athanasios Argianas

Metastasis, 1953–54, graphic score, bars 309 to 314, 7 minutes. © Collection Xenakis family

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Diatope (Polytope de Beaubourg), 1977 (installation view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1978). Photo: Pascal Dusapin

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Tolia Astakhishvili The First Finger (chapter II) Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 23 June – 24 September The phrase The First Finger refers to a situation most people would prefer to avoid. In extreme cold, blood flows protectively from the extremities to the organs; at some point, frozen digits start to break off, and the human body reduces itself to what this exhibition’s booklet guide calls ‘a life-sustaining core’. That ‘core’ twists metaphoric as you navigate Tolia Astakhishvili’s show, a sequel of sorts to a recent one at Bonner Kunstverein, which mixes the Tbilisi-born artist’s orphaned junk installations, paintings and drawings with collaborations and standalone artworks by 12 other artists and writers. The century-old Haus am Waldsee was once a manufacturing magnate’s villa and, as its name suggests, still feels somewhat domestic. Here, it pointedly offers asylum to artworks across its two floors but doesn’t make ‘home’ synonymous with safety; at points, this show proffers the most unsettling pseudo-dwelling space this side of a Gregor Schneider installation. On entering, you’re plunged into Astakhishvili’s I am the secret meat (2022), a darkened room whose inset Plexiglas windows are smeared with shit-brown acrylic and scratched with gnomic abstract marks; propped

raw plasterboard suggests we’re interrupting someone’s haywire internal renovations. In the main ground-floor space – past an untitled and undated Judith Scott sculpture (of aquamarine and lavender wool wrapped around a big bushel of twigs) that turns crocheting monstrous – we reach Ser Serpas’s oil-on-unstretched-jute painting Untitled (2022): a nude torso, seen from the rear, bloodred paint splattered across it, the figure’s arms folded behind it as if for execution, head decapitated by canvas edge. Oblique bad stuff happening turns out to be one of the show’s leifmotifs: upstairs, Astakhishvili’s collaboration with Dylan Peirce, I have no constraints, the only limit is me (2023), presents a large corrugated-metal box from which emanates an eight-channel, 50-minute audio installation of portentous abstract clanks, metallic scrapings, rumbles, hisses, etc. Elsewhere, several deceptively artless installations by Astakhishvili suggest a deceased person’s effects that the living don’t know what to do with: unruly rows of model boats laid out on windowsills, stained footballs, things that look like beekeepers’ and falconers’ gear, blank architectural models.

But if this isn’t a happy homestead, it’s one in which disquiet, pain and imperfection coexist with the fact of shelter. See, also, the crumbling Manhattan piers repurposed as a cruising ground in Alvin Baltrop’s glimmering monochrome photographs (undated, 1975–86), which preserve, after a fashion, a now-gone secret holdout and are preserved in turn here; or a classically anguished archival drawing by Antonin Artaud (Untitled, 1947). The existential instability in the standalone works spreads, like Astakhishvili’s various sporelike interventions on the walls in watercolour and coffee, to infect everything else. Architecture and artwork collapse together, one-person-show becomes group show, viewers are invited to laminate their own speculative narratives on the makeshift, gap-speckled miseen-scène. In Astakhishvili and James Richards’s collaborative work I Remember (Depth of Flattened Cruelty) (2023), a ten-minute video walkthrough of The First Finger (chapter I) becomes an artwork via weird, fearful distorted views and a fractured soundtrack. As with everything here in some sense, it’s not what it was – it’s the original show deformed, missing a few parts – but, for now, it’s still alive. Martin Herbert

The First Finger (wintergarden), 2023 (installation view). Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy the artist and LC Queisser, Tbilisi

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cameron clayborn Private Property Morán Morán, Los Angeles 29 July – 25 August A childlike figure – a doll cameron clayborn found and coated in paraffin wax, plaster and acrylic – leans with its head against the wall in one of two rooms at Morán Morán housing the artist’s solo show, as if it were put in a timeout. Titled Lullaby #4 (all works 2023), the figure’s body is dark, purplish and pitted, its buttocks giving way to streaks of red, suggesting the aftermath of violence. (On a wall across the room hangs another wax-coated object, titled a belt #2.) Private Property features four of clayborn’s Lullaby sculptures. Lullaby #2 resembles a long, gnarled leg flanked by shorter hollow forms reminiscent of pillar coral. On the back of the leg is a palm-size patch – waxy and yellow – that seems to infect the dark limb on which it festers. Lullaby #1 is similarly biomorphic: a one-legged torso that, at two metres tall, looms over most viewers, and has armature penetrating its thigh. Raw and knotted, this appendage resembles at once a bone and a branch. Wounds – particularly those associated with ‘private’, domestic space – are central to the exhibition, in which intimations

of a family’s chequered past are scattered like clues and, in lieu of overexposing their troubling implications, left to the viewer to infer. These wounds at times verge on body horror. From the childlike figure’s navel in Lullaby #4 sprouts a lumpy umbilical cord that trails on the floor and terminates in two distended bulbs shaped like sperm heads. Such forms evoking insemination, gestation and birth repeat throughout the exhibition, appearing also, for instance, in the sculpture group family portrait (with you, against you, away from you). This work consists of four fibre-filled canvas vessels arranged on either side of a black photography curtain for a ‘family portrait’. Here, five sperm heads issue from the side of one of the soft corpuses and lie gathered on a kitchen stool, beneath whose legs a severed arm dangles. The vessels’ spillage and corporeal fragmentation contradict the stoic autonomy of the other sculptures. The ‘family’ seems aloof to what is amiss among them. Family secrets are insinuated differently in clayborn’s Reliquary series, three canvas

reliefs that hang like chrysalises and vestments, some fully and others partially folded in on themselves. Reliquary #2 and Reliquary #3, whose interiors can be glimpsed through gaps in their stiff outer shells, have stitched inside them photo transfers of residential facades: windows, blinds and brick. The blinds are shut tight, and a couple of lunette windows are upside-down, suggesting that something is again awry. The hidden windows in the Reliquary series allude to the exhibition’s title. ‘Property’, in this case, refers to a house: according to the gallery statement, the artist titled the show in relation to a house their grandparents once occupied in the American South. The phrase ‘private property’, here, suggests guarded reticence and implies ‘no trespassing’. The discomforting sense of voyeurism one feels, treading lightly through clayborn’s exhibition, highlights the complexity of the sculptures, positioned as they are, simultaneously, as ciphers, confessions and indictments. Jenny Wu

Reliquary #1, 2023, dyed paraffin wax, oil pastel, photo transfer on canvas, metal push pins, sand, 163 × 61 × 30 cm. Courtesy Morán Morán, Los Angeles

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Converge 45 Various venues, Portland 24 August – 15 December The Lloyd Center shopping mall, across the Willamette River from downtown Portland, has seen better days. Even before the pandemic, businesses were struggling, but now it seems that more than half the shopfronts are shuttered. Its central atrium, however, still encloses a public ice rink, and it was into this perfect white ellipse that artist Amanda Ross-Ho glided, just a little unsteadily, on a recent Friday morning. Ross-Ho was performing as part of this year’s edition of Converge 45, the Portland biennial that has operated, irregularly, since 2016, and which is not to be confused with the Portland Biennial, which has run since 1949 but which focuses exclusively on Oregon artists. Converge 45 takes its name from the 45th parallel north, a circle of latitude around the Earth to symbolise the biennial’s global reach. (Oddly, however, the parallel does not quite run through Portland itself.) Conceived in order to draw the city’s art spaces into collegial and productive conversation, Converge 45 seems more of a civic endeavour than a curatorial one. This year’s

edition is guest-curated by New York-based writer and curator Christian Viveros-Fauné, who outfitted it with its rather baggy title, borrowing from his own 2018 book, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art. The varied works across Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship allow for disparate interpretations of what political art might entail, and scant consensus over how to assess their relative merit. Ross-Ho’s project, for instance, could be construed as political, but lands most convincingly as a blend of autobiography, cultural history and material investigation. Her performance was part of an exhibition of related sculptural installations and wall works at the commercial gallery ILY2; its press release discloses that Ross-Ho was a competitive figure skater as a teenager. Anecdotally, I gleaned she had only once put skate to ice in the three decades since. Also anecdotal was the story I heard about how the disgraced ice skater Tonya Harding would practise at the Lloyd Center during the 1990s, with passing shoppers stopping to boo and jeer.

For her performance Untitled Figure (THE CENTER OF IT ALL) (2023), Ross-Ho scratched two wide circles in the ice with a telescopic compass (a ‘scribe’, in skating terminology), then attempted to trace the circles, on one skate then the other. This imperfect – and, once or twice, heart-stoppingly wobbly – action was given extra pathos by Ross-Ho’s skeleton-printed bodysuit, an oversize version of which, titled SKIN AND BONES (2023), hangs at ILY2, alongside artfully composed relics from the world of skating: a gold scribe tucked inside leg-warmers; a majorette’s outfit; a stack of plastic top hats. Observations about ambition and discipline (artistic or otherwise) faded behind the rawness of this middle-aged woman reckoning, in public, with the vestiges of her girlhood. When Ross-Ho finished tracing the circles – which, together, resembled the sign for infinity, and which echoed stacks of cut fabric disks at ILY2 – she took laps around the rink, a victor’s grin on her face, and it felt like she had conquered death itself. The success of the presentations in Converge 45 ascends in inverse proportion

Amanda Ross-Ho, Untitled Figure (THE CENTER OF IT ALL), 2023 (performance view, Lloyd Center, Portland). Photo: Mario Gallucci. Courtesy Converge 45, Portland

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to the number of artists involved. The biggest exhibitions, such as the group show Assembly, featuring 13 artists divided over three venues, are a muddle. Most rewarding, almost without exception, are the solo exhibitions. Some, like Ross-Ho’s, shake loose from any useful designation as political art at all (although isn’t the personal always political?). At the Cooley Gallery at Reed College, a selection of refulgent abstract paintings by Jesse Murry, painted before his death of AIDS in 1993, is movingly curated by his friend Lisa Yuskavage and the writer Jarret Earnest. At the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Rodrigo Valenzuela presents a tight series of black-and-white photographs, Garabatos, of white clay or plaster sculptures derived from gestures the artist had seen in films and photographs of 1970s and 80s punks in Latin America. Valenzuela, born in Chile in 1982, notes that these subcultures emerged in response to the United States’ cooperation with military regimes to quash socialism in the region; the uncanny atmospherics of the pictures are in no way reliant on this information. South of the city, Richard Mosse’s stirring film Broken Spectre (2018–22) is installed at the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College. The multichannel installation, with thunderous

soundtrack by composer Ben Frost, is an epic testament to the destruction of the Amazon. Lest viewers feel guilty about the sensorial pleasures of the film, near the exit a QR code enables them to send Paypal donations directly to an indigenous Yanomami tribe. It’s a well-meaning gesture I feel deeply conflicted about. As with Viveros-Fauné’s biennial at large, Broken Spectre points to the political heft of aesthetics, but also the futility – not to mention self-satisfied tokenism – of much individual action. Symbolic representation alone can seem disingenuous, like the painting in Assembly by Irish artist Brian Maguire of a soup kitchen, apparently done from a photograph. (How to provide for Portland’s chronically unhoused seems as insurmountable as the global climate crisis.) By contrast, Mosse’s QR code might be seen as heroic. The New Zealand artist Sam Hamilton (who also goes by Sam Tam Ham) presented at Oregon Contemporary multimedia works related to their project Te Moana Meridian (2020), in which they propose the relocation of the prime meridian from Greenwich, London, across the globe to the South Pacific. It’s a poignant piece of symbolism, upending the enduring hegemony of the former British

Empire, but Hamilton is entirely sincere, and is lobbying the United Nations General Assembly to this end. At the Center for Native Arts and Cultures, the Seneca-enrolled artist Marie Watt presents a large neon billboard, Chords to Other Chords (Relative) (2023), which illuminates in glorious red the words ‘TURTLE ISLAND AND’ – a reference to an indigenous name for North America. I understand the work is meant for a public setting, which would endow it with more power to confuse and disrupt; inside this Native-run institution, it seems to reiterate what people already know. Like Ross-Ho’s performance in the mall, the best work in Converge 45 feels uninsulated from the world outside. At SE Cooper Contemporary, a tiny gallery run by Converge 45’s artistic director, Derek Franklin, in his garden, I lay silently and listened on headphones to a work by Malcolm Peacock. As chickens clucked and birds chirruped outside, Peacock delivered a winding narrative – recorded while running – about Black men travelling on foot across America, and falling in love. The piece is intimate and raw, modest and generous, personal and – yes – political. And it asks its listener for nothing in return. Jonathan Griffin

Sam Hamilton, -S51.4779925, 180.00 (still), 2020–22, part of the Te Moana Meridian project, 8 min 42 sec, HD video. Courtesy the artist

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Dominik Lang Let’s go outside, even if it rains! Hunt Kastner, Prague 4 May – 24 June For Let’s go outside, even if it rains!, Dominik Lang took over and rebuilt the patch of land behind Hunt Kastner’s Žižkov space, transforming it into a public garden during the show’s run. Edith Jeřábková’s text, available on the gallery’s website, warned that viewers arriving before the end would likely see process rather than completion: rubble, heaps of soil and builders’ sand, tools and materials covered in tarpaulin, broken footpaths. Inside, blueprints covered in the Prague-born Lang’s jottings hung on the walls, while a long table displayed unearthed objects (broken pottery, soggy football, tatty doll’s head) shown like finds from an archaeological dig. Jeřábková’s text also implied that viewers could make repeat visits to see how the work changed over time, and that Lang would be there to explain what was going on to mitigate any feelings of dissatisfaction. Even at the stated completion of the project a month later, though, it still felt unfinished. The dunes of earth, grit and debris were still

there, now looking like forbidding pyramids exposed to a menacing overcast sky; a shattered slab of concrete leaned against a cylindrical concrete plant-pot and a huge stone sphere against one of the piles of sand. Anyone expecting the dazzling ‘reveal’ of a horticultural makeover show would have been disappointed; but at least the concrete walkways had been filled in, and the plants were nestled in handmade beds of soil. Lang’s intervention doesn’t attempt to relitigate theoretical debates about Land art or relational aesthetics but allows us to rethink some of their implications for Prague’s urban space. He isn’t asking what a ‘site’ is; nor is he making any bold claims for art’s social impact. Rather, he’s making a refusal, and the context matters: today’s Prague is a former backwater rebranded as an emerging, if ‘peripheral’, global art market context, a luxury tourist destination and an opportunity for foreign investors lured by rising property values. Financial assets always refer to something outside themselves, the

‘value’ of real things; and Lang’s project suggests that they and artworks typically share a conceptual structure, art also tending to operate allegorically, signifying something externalised. Let’s go outside, conversely, tries to sidestep this, emphasising itself as primarily an act of labour. Lang’s action of digging, mixing concrete and planting ferns is also tied to the specifics of the gallery’s location, situated as it is at the top of a steep hill, making it a good place to rest. The unfinished-feeling outdoor space might thus be read as something of a protest against, and a respite from, the financial deformation of artistic abstraction, stressing the labour that went into the work, its location and the communal act of watching the artist’s labour. The result, nevertheless, is that those bleak sandy piles seem as much a product and echo of the general sense of cultural weariness – partly driven by economic conditions – as they are an invitation to take part in the collective rebuilding of our societies, ‘even if it rains’. Max L. Feldman

Let’s go outside, even if it rains!, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Michal Czanderle. Courtesy the artist and Hunt Kastner, Prague

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My Past is a Foreign Country DEO Projects, Chios 8 July – 28 August Amid migration, pasts can become foreign countries instantly, as homelands are renounced in departure and exile. The Greek island of Chios, situated in the eastern Aegean, west of Turkey, is a microcosm of the past’s otherness. Ruled in turn by Byzantines, Genovese, Ottomans and then Greeks, it witnessed mass migrations through war and population exchanges between Greece and present-day Turkey, leaving behind still-abandoned villages and a palimpsestic architectural heritage. My Past is a Foreign Country, organised by local art nonprofit DEO Projects, excavates Chios’s pluralistic pasts through site-specific commissions by artists from Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon and Iran. The works engage the island’s multilayered identity to forge transregional perspectives on migration and historical change in the eastern Mediterranean. The show’s two venues – the Temenos Hamidiye, a deconsecrated mosque, and the Ottoman Baths, a former hammam, both located within Chios’s walled castle – reflect the island’s Ottoman past. Each building housed refugees from Asia Minor during the 1923 Greek–Turkish population exchanges, while recent migrants have temporarily settled in the castle’s nearby trenches. Within the mosque, Avish Khebrehzadeh’s crimson-toned ‘Red Paintings’ (2014) depict Iranian political

prisoners, some with eyes closed, all in states of dreamlike calm. Their collective presence alludes to spectres of dispossession embedded within the site, which resonate too in Maro Michalakakos’s To All of Us (2023), a colossal braid woven out of bloodred velvet and hung from an upper window. Its monumental structure thins into the shapes of veins and tree roots, conjuring how territorial and psychic uprootedness endure as affective inheritances. Several new commissions in the Ottoman Baths reimagine the building’s past function. In An Ode To A Distant Spring (2023), Hera Büyüktaşcıyan drapes blue fabric topped with cubes of soap from the building’s water taps, gesturing to the flows now absent in the defunct hammam. Aykan Safoğlu has arranged his Sweat Poems (1st Variation) (2023), a Turkish-language poem printed onto glass tiles, along the border of the hammam’s marble floor. The poem invokes the transfigurations of queer desire; its montaged lettering pattern is composed of photographs the artist took of body-sweat prints on a blue surface, underscoring the building’s original use for purification and pleasure. Installed within the former water tank, Yorgos Petrou’s Body Knows That Too (2023), a flat silicone sculpture of coloured spills coagulated into a human silhouette, further captures the porous bounds of community and history.

Another grouping of artworks in the same venue explores interconnected Mediterranean migrations. Nikomachi Karakostanoglou and Maria Tsagkari, both descendants of the Greek-Turkish population exchange, address this collective migration history. To produce Cross Section (2023), Karakostanoglou sculpts womblike ceramic orbs, then bisects them to visualise the remains of separation. Tsagkari sought permission from a Piraeus priest to remove and replace the glass protecting an Orthodox church’s icons, which refugees from Asia Minor historically brought to Greece. In One Day (2023), Tsagkari displays the panes as sculptures without their icons, revealing the prints of kisses left on their surfaces from ritual use. At the entrance, three textbased stone sculptures spell out ‘Waves Whisper Woes’ in Petros Moris’s installation Sphinx (Waves Whisper Woes) (2023). The alliterative phrase forms a counter-monument to the migrant lives lost at sea in perilous Mediterranean crossings and pushbacks. Sensitively juxtaposed with heritage sites, the new commissions in this exhibition open connections between past and present migrations, challenging the region’s fortified borders by reinscribing the locality of Chios into a dialogue beyond national divides. Carlos Kong

My Past is a Foreign Country, 2023 (installation view, Ottoman Baths, Chios Castle). Photo: Nikos Alexopoulos. Courtesy DEO Projects, Chios

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Blakytna Trojanda Hos Gallery, Warsaw 15 June – 15 July At the entrance to Blakytna Trojanda, in which five artists and collectives reflect on the situation of the LGBTQ+ community in Ukraine, white roses stand in chlorine-blue water, petals tinted by its hue. This is a nod by the Ukrainian curators Taras Gembik and Vlad(a) to the 1896 play that shares the show’s title, translated as ‘The Blue Rose’, by writer/activist Lesya Ukrainka. In it, a flower already imbued with romantic meaning acquires greater symbolism via its ‘unnatural’ colour; if such a rarity could exist, could not love, corporeality, society itself be so transformed? Indeed, writers and words abound here. Slogans graffitied throughout Kyiv by activist group Rebel Queers, declaring ‘Queers Against

Kremlin’ and subverting the spelling of ‘Ruzzia’, are frenziedly recreated across the walls. Copies of Queer Ukraine, an anthology compiled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, are available to read. Therein, Maksym Eristavi extols Ukrainka’s ‘unapologetic and anti-colonial queerness … [which] speaks powerfully to Ukrainians generations down the line’. Next to the roses are a stack of blue-dusted envelopes containing a letter from the writer Oleksii Kuchanskii, articulating the complexity of being an LGBTQ+ Ukrainian during wartime. While acknowledging the indisputable ‘opposition between the defence and the aggressor’, Kuchanskii calls out ‘the limitations of binary divisions of the militarized imaginary’ that

make one ‘either a soldier or a woman, a victim or an enemy, a Ukrainian speaker or pro-Russian…’ This resounds in Rebel Queers’ video testimonies, Ukrainian Queer Fighters for Freedom (2022). Ukrainian queer discourse frequently defines the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights as indivisible from decolonial action, claiming that many homophobic laws and attempts at queer erasure stemmed from periods of Russian rule. With only clouds as backdrop and the camera’s under-the-chin angle suggesting a snatched, straight-to-phone moment, a Territorial Defence Forces fighter describes deciding to go to war; “I didn’t know what else I could do for the society I want to live in”, they say, suggesting

AtelierNormalno, reproduction Calendar, 2023. Courtesy the artists

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that “living in [a de facto] Russia despising yourself or living abroad and spending money on therapy just to not kill yourself” would be intolerable. I was told that the exhibition is missing some artworks that were too difficult to send from Ukraine, namely by members of AtelierNormalno, a dozen-strong Kyiv-based collective, half of whose members have Down’s syndrome. The poignancy of the situation is embraced: a mere two reproduction pages from AtelierNormalno’s take on an erotic calendar occupy walls previously reserved for paintings. Announcing the calendar’s publication on Instagram, AtelierNormalno reflected on its appropriateness, ‘but quickly stopped thinking, because erotics, love and the body now have even more power for us than ever’. The pages’ drawings, by a homosexual man, depict a blocky frontal figure with an abstract protuberance between his legs. Underneath, the word ‘Gay’

is followed by a scrawled list of days and numbers that scramble the legibility of conventional calendars: a peal of queer disorder. Elsewhere, Lviv-born artist and filmmaker Jan Bačynsjkyj’s wall-mounted artworks fashion old furs, feathers, broken toys, beads and textiles into masks, Madonnas and cute-meets-Krampus roadkills. In an interview, Bačynsjkyj described these works as being ‘parasitic on traditional forms’, recalling a now familiar trope of artmaking that taps folk practices for queer customs and radical potential. Menacing yet hilarious, they thrum with engrossment and an eye for sifting through dreck for alternative totems, especially felt during wartime, when material and spiritual life is laid to waste. A patchworking process echoes in Oksana Kazmina’s split-screen videowork Mutation. Neither a Fairy Tale nor a Musical (2020), wherein dialogues from an online residency conducted during the pandemic via the messaging service Telegram accompany

various scenes; a beaming ballroom dancer’s fluid movement becomes increasingly convulsive; a semi-naked masked figure frolics through a rural landscape; a group of queers, not especially young or ‘sexy’, retell dreams with deadpan delivery in a studio in Mariupol, now surely destroyed. Each absorbing segment leans into the title’s ‘neither/nor’, refuting the full bloom of a musical or fairytale’s course, yet somehow tingling with alternative magic. Blakytna Trojanda nurtures such expansiveness, clearly curious about a regional discussion of queerness beyond Ukraine’s metropolitan centres, and certainly beyond dominant Western articulations. To return to Kuchanskii, it reminds fellow travellers that we must strive ‘to communicate with our own differences’; a sentiment shared with Audre Lorde, who also knew that ‘without community, there is no liberation’. Our most deadly enemies will always target this fragile truth. Phoebe Blatton

Jan Bačynsjkyj, Mama (detail), 2022, textiles, found materials. Photo: Adam Gut. Courtesy the artist

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How Many Worlds Are We? Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok 20 July – 29 October In Jonathas de Andrade’s O Peixe (The fish, 2016), fresh catch dies in the arms of bare-chested fishermen. For 37 mesmeric minutes, the camera pans along northeast Brazil’s São Francisco River, drinks in the open skies and sun-dappled mangroves, before settling on these displays of interspecies intimacy. During each encounter, the fishermen’s wrestling with the flapping fish gives way to hugs, strokes, even gentle kisses. Initially, this cradling of kill – communicated through leering closeups of tanned skin and glistening scales – seems to denote a genuine connection to the natural world that we lack. But as the act is repeated, again and again, de Andrade’s dialogue-free film comes to seem too sultry, too seductive, too fetishistic. Gradually the work reveals itself to be an

exquisite hoax about an elusive harmony (the ritual is a fiction conceived by de Andrade), and a sendup of Western documentary makers’ propensity to exoticise their ethnographic subjects. How de Andrade’s unnervingly tender work bolsters How Many Worlds Are We? – a group show comprising ten works from Brazil, Myanmar, Angola, Portugal, Cambodia and Thailand – is less clear: this roving survey, focused predominantly on Latin America and Southeast Asia, is, according to its Lisbon-based curator, Alexandre Melo, not ecological or anthropological in a strict sense. Instead, his wall text floats ‘nature’, ‘forest’ and ‘spirit’ as ‘main topics’ steering an exhibition that aims to ‘gather a diversity of contemporary artists active in these regions’ and ‘search for the possibility of confrontation

between different ways of relating to notions like nature, spirituality or humanity’. The obvious shortcomings of these wide, woolly goals are ameliorated by a couple of stimulating dialogues. Nearby, de Andrade’s flailing fish find unlikely bedfellows in the African grey parrot and white elephant of Wantanee Siripattananuntakul’s Making the Unknown Known (2020–22), a three-channel installation in which footage of these two animals pacing and stirring bookends the gently flowing Mekong River. On one level, Siripattananuntakul’s new work elicits a sense of pathos at ecological imbalances caused by dams and the exotic animal trade; but more stealthily it also gestures towards the issue of territorial and political sovereignty, of both the

Jonathas de Andrade, O Peixe (still), 2016, 16mm film transferred to 2K video, 37 min. Courtesy the artist

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land and the individual, within Thailand. Near the end, a disembodied male voice speaks of the white elephant – an onerous gift in the Western imagination, an auspicious aberration in the Thai consciousness – being “a holy creature”, “a political weapon”, while a female voice remarks that “The sky was the only boundary that mattered”. These are oblique references to the Kingdom’s monarchy, as white elephants were traditionally royal property, and the Thai word for ‘sky’ can refer to kings and their offspring. While these and other works use animal motifs to give body and heft to abstract cultural notions and traditions, the larger gallery next door offers a more open-ended and heuristic experience. Drawing attention to the politics of public space is Vuth Lyno’s pulsating wall of paper tiles (Vibrating Park-Forest, 2023), each printed to resemble forest foliage and flapping in the breeze of a rotating floor fan. Peeling back these ‘leaves’ reveals either a rectangle of blank wall or a pencil drawing. The act of

stumbling across these scenes – monks protesting, kids flying kites near Phnom Penh’s Royal Palace – or instead finding an empty space actively involves us in the sphere of urban parks, which are sites of contestation and refuge in Lyno’s native Cambodia (where land grabs are commonplace). It finds a quiet resonance in Vasco Araújo’s video O Percurso (The path, 2006), in which a nomadic man and boy traipse across the undulating plains of Andalucía, search for new lands, to passionately enunciated flamenco poetry (“We do not stop in this land that is not ours”). But the rest of the room is discombobulating, with works veering wildly from Araújo’s Exoticism (2014) sound sculpture (from headphones tethered to a potted bamboo palm, exaggerated voices scream “Oh it’s so exotic!… So exotic!”) to a hanging satellite made from Chinese porcelain and antique lampshades (Torlarp Larpjaroensook’s Space Station, 2023), and a video of Afro-Brazilians from Brazil’s

Bahia performing an African dance ritual (Ayrson Heráclito’s Ijó Mimó, 2019). These works each have a story to share, but aside from de Andrade’s and Siripattananuntakul’s sympatico films, I don’t sense many sparks flying or shared solidarities among them. As a result, the exhibition’s ‘decentering of geocultural perspectives’ (and platforming of the Global South) is unpersuasive. Attempting to bridge far and near regions that share cultural affinities and dynamics, to distance us from traditional binary oppositions (namely East and West) and to explode notions of the “so exotic”, this gathering of earthy viewpoints is a plucky experiment in decolonisation and remapping (for another, seek out the National Gallery Singapore’s Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America, which lands in November). Hard to shake, though, is the conviction that many of these practices, and localities, still feel foreign to one another, if not worlds apart. Max Crosbie-Jones

Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, Making the Unknown Known (detail), 2020–22, three-channel video installation, 15 min 20 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Suchitra Mattai In the absence of power. In the presence of love Roberts Projects, Los Angeles 15 July – 26 August The eclectic patterns, tasselled fabrics and intricate embroidery in Suchitra Mattai’s exhibition deliver a striking first impression. A handful of the artist’s largescale works dominate the three rooms of Roberts Projects housing her show. The most prominent of these is a group of massive, hanging soft-sculptures collectively titled phala ( fruit) (all works 2023). These oversize ornaments are connected to the ceiling by silver chains and gold cords; some are spherical, and others are teardrop shaped. Each is wrapped in a mesh of saris woven so tightly it is almost impossible to tell where individual garments begin and end. Throughout the exhibition, Mattai’s sumptuous works offer a rich array of hues: gold, mother-of-pearl, succulent green, peacock-blue and – most of all – a bold, sweet shade of magenta. Faithful to the maximalist aesthetic for which she is known, the artist employs vivid colours and high contrasts in ways that evoke a hot summer afternoon in Los Angeles – where she is now based after having lived elsewhere, including, importantly, in Georgetown, Guyana. In the nineteenth

century her Indian great-grandparents were taken to Guyana as indentured workers by the British following the abolition of slavery in the South American colony. Drawing from Indian miniature painting and Guyanese carnival traditions in her work, Mattai reimagines histories of migration and labour, sublimating colonial exploitation into a visual language of material abundance. Over time, one becomes acquainted with not only the works’ spectacular surface-level appeal but also their subtle quirks – frayed fibres, frenetic stitches – and the exhibition’s carnivalesque veneer gives way to the sense of being inside a cosy fabric-store whose clutter puts buyers at ease. Across from phala ( fruit) in the main gallery, a seven-metre-long tapestry titled a cosmic awakening hangs asymmetrically on the wall. Here, again, saris tessellate in a shimmering mass, but there is something slack, unfussy and homelike in the way the work’s midsection sags. For all its lively colours and patterns, a cosmic awakening hangs like a well-worn, sloughed-off shawl. This mood of relaxed ease amid a frenzy of visual intrigue

permeates the exhibition. Mattai’s patterns, textures and figurative tableaux beckon with their familiarity, enveloping viewers in signifiers of surplus and of leisure once denied to colonial labourers such as the artist’s great-grandparents, who inspired what the curatorial statement calls her process of ‘brown reclamation’. Indeed, throughout the gallery, liberated brown figures appropriate the idle poses European colonial elites often adopted in eighteenth-century rococo paintings. In future perfect, Mattai takes a vintage needlepoint tapestry depicting Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1769 oil painting Young Girl Reading and retouches the girl’s face and hands with three shades of brown embroidery floss. To the French rococo painter’s upper-class tableau, Mattai adds her own ornaments: a magenta tassel on the seat cushion, freshwater pearls around the girl’s head and beads that spell the word ‘future’ across the pages of her book. Using the original image’s sumptuousness as imaginative fodder, Mattai draws up the iconography of a spectacular future made by and for people of colour. Jenny Wu

future perfect, 2023, embroidery floss, found objects, freshwater pearls and trim on vintage needlepoint, 64 × 48 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Rebecca Moss Unstable Condition Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea 28 June – 16 September A balloon filled with water hangs by a rope from a window. A fluffy cat lies on a duvet on a bed. It rests on the end of the rope, its tail twitching. Outside, a woman sits upright on a chair, knees together, gaze unblinking. With her hands joined on her lap, she might be meditating or even in prayer. Back to the cat, now stretching on its back, one paw reaching out to the pillow, the other clawing the rope. Outdoors again, a wider shot. We see that the woman’s chair is directly beneath the balloon. Animal Cruelty (2016) lasts just 75 seconds. Each shot is only a few seconds long. The suspense is excruciating. We all know where it is going, but not when it will get there. It is one of six video projections in the Essex-born artist’s first institutional solo show in the UK. Apart from Chitter Chatter (2019), which stars a set of windup teeth and a wooden mallet (and ends on a surprisingly melancholic note), Moss performs in each. Echoing early Laurel and Hardy films and Moss’s declared inspiration, Buster Keaton, she is entirely focused on whatever bizarre challenge she has set herself: dropping a pair of concrete slabs from a high wall onto a four-tier cake;

attempting the tablecloth trick using a boulder and a piece of rope; or walking the plank dressed as a pirate. The shortest video, Shark (2019), is just eight seconds. Wearing a shark outfit and lying on a skateboard, Moss rolls down a concrete slipway towards a group of swans resting at the water’s edge. Laughing uncontrollably, I sit watching this loop after loop after loop. Unlike Keaton and other male comedians, Moss performs stunts that never put her at any real physical risk. The female Moss is as unambitious and unostentatious as the mundane landscape and occasional buildings in which her works are filmed. She contrives situations which see her body become another object within the Essex landscape. It invites laughter but leaves a lingering sadness too. 23 Days at Sea (2023) documents what initially appears to be a more serious endeavour. A video monitor and archive materials tell the tale of Moss’s journey from Vancouver to Tokyo aboard a vast container ship. What seems to have begun as an inquiry into a multibillion-dollar industry becomes a voyage into absurdity when the boat is denied permission to dock. Along with the crew and a decidedly odd North American

couple, Moss is stuck at anchor for an extra 15 days. She records strange conversations about the supply of Nutella and an invitation to go fishing from the deck. When one of her fellow passengers yells, “We’re fucking stuck in a corporate madhouse! And they won’t let us out!” the comedy of their experience speaks back to Moss’s slapstick performances exhibited next door. The final element of the show, Skydrop (2023), is in the large front window of the gallery. Viewed from the square outside, this is a playful window display of fibreglass and plastic icecream sculptures, which Moss bought on eBay and Facebook Marketplace. Some hang as if halted in mid-drop, while below them others stand inverted in their own creamy waste on the floor. The windows’ reflections of the gallery’s seaside town bring the work to life. Seagulls fly, screeching. As I stand gazing in, an elderly couple passes by. The woman is chuckling and enthusing, “Now that’s clever, that’s very clever.” Beside her, the old man looks bemused. And then I notice that one of Moss’s giant ice-creams appears to be falling, quite perfectly, on to his reflected head. Lara Pawson

Unstable Condition, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Anna Lukala. Courtesy the artist and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea

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Trust Me Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 19 August – February Writing in Camera Lucida (1981), theorist Roland Barthes lingered on the photograph’s punctum, an affecting point of attention that he described as ‘the accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’. As Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu have argued in Feeling Photography (2014), Barthes’s text is an important precursor of contemporary forms of photographic analysis that fold feeling into their critical frameworks, often elucidating the connective tissue between photographer, subject and viewer. Trust Me, which assembles photographs from the Whitney’s collection by 11 artists who foreground intimacy, care and connection in their work, makes a strong case for the place of feeling in photography, as both a mode of analysis and a means of making. An exhibition that featured a lesser selection of artists might have fallen flat amid a spate of COVID-era shows presented in a similar emotional register, but this fiercely tender grouping holds its own. Intimate exchange and collaboration are integral to these works, down to their material construction. Take the titular piece, Moyra Davey’s 16-part installation Trust Me (2011). Tacked to the wall in two neat lines, Davey’s photographic vignettes expose miniscule traces of time’s unsightly passage: a blue bottle depleted of its contents; dust accumulating in a nondescript corner; the uneven pattern formed by waterlogged tiles and grout. Each photograph bears evidence of having passed through the postal system: creases from folding, green tape, postage stamps and the address of writer Lynne Tillman, the artist’s friend. Receiving

the photos from Davey, Tillman appended evocative fragments of text from her 2006 novel American Genius: A Comedy to each, determining the images’ order. The work becomes a protracted conversation. Likewise, Genesis Báez’s Crossing Time (2022) is formally predicated on intimacy. In the inkjet print, Báez’s mother holds up one end of a taut thread; its parabolic shadow, cast on the wall, is taken up by the artist’s shadow at the other end. A picture of intergenerational connection in a diasporic family, this intricately staged scene necessitated that the women physically collaborate – each trusting that the other would hold up her end. Much of the portraiture on view not only reflects care, but also in a sense administers it by forging a space for underrepresented subjects to see themselves. Barbara Hammer’s silver gelatin print Barbara & Terry (1972) depicts the artist with her then partner Terry Sendgraff, both nude and entwined among tall fingers of grass. The couple’s vulnerable gesture – their exposure – is all the more generous in light of the lack of self-defined images of lesbian intimacy around the time of the photo’s creation. Lola Flash’s nearby portrait Untitled, Provincetown, MA (1990) depicts a figure wearing a phallus-emblazoned T-shirt, who meets the viewer’s gaze from under a corona of leaves. The colours – all saturated and inverted – are the product of Flash’s ‘crosscolour’ technique, which they developed as an art student during the 1980s by printing onto negative photo paper. As it challenged conventional notions of a ‘good’ photograph, which were trailed by conventional notions of a ‘good’

life, this technique also rendered Flash’s subjects – often queer people of colour – anonymous, conferring a degree of protection and critical visibility at the same time. Archives can be powerful sites of connection and repositories of feeling, and rephotography can convey the intensity of that encounter for the photographer. To make X post facto (6.7) (2009–13), a sweeping inkjet print in which a dark screw protrudes from hazy strata of grey, Muriel Hasbun rephotographed one of the dental X-rays that her father, a dentist and photographer, took to identify those who died during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–92). Enlarged to the point of abstraction, the intimate space of a stranger’s mouth becomes an expansive, layered memorial: to the artist’s late father; to the deceased individual, whose dental implant is pictured; and to the 75,000 reported dead from the brutal civil war. Also feeling (and appropriating) their way through the archive, Mary Manning used their deceased father’s old camera to rephotograph some of the photos he regularly snapped of roadside wildflowers. A simple elegy comprising two floral pictures mounted on board, His Estate (2022) reproduces their father’s creative output and celebrates his desire to attend to, and photograph, everyday beauty. We can’t know what Barthes would have thought of this work – whether a punctum might have surfaced for him, particularly with the death of his mother, which shaped his thinking on photography, on his mind – but we might return to his words: ‘The suspension of images must be the very space of love, its music’. Cassie Packard

Moyra Davey, Trust Me, 2011, c-prints, collaged printed labels, tape, cancelled postage stamps and fibre-tipped pen, each sheet 46 × 31 cm. © the artist

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Sola Olulode Burning, like the star that showed us to our love Ed Cross, London 10 August – 16 September Most of the 28 paintings on canvas in Burning depict black bodies in moments of intimacy, backlit by yellow sunbursts. All are figurative and executed in a bold, illustrative graphic style and a range of materials including dye, ink, wax, oil paint, pastel, acrylic, charcoal and batik. Moreover, the walls in the larger of the two rooms that make up Ed Cross are hung floor-to-ceiling with hand-dyed blue fabrics. While the overall effect of this staging disappoints – the installation is half-patchwork, half-boudoir – it does make the paintings appear even more like a document of the cycles of the sun. And that in turn brings to mind a phonetic echo – solar – of the British Nigerian artist’s first name and a sense that what we are witnessing doesn’t stray too far outside of Sola Olulode’s personal orbit. The paintings almost uniformly depict joyful intimacy, yet there’s a compelling friction on their surfaces and between the different materials deployed. In Sunlight (2019), translucent sheets of blue wax overlap to make up

the clothing adorning two bodies. A thick black outline surrounds each, while the backdrop’s yellow paint has been etched with tiny circles. The central figures’ faces are neighboured by pale floating heads, where the batik process has masked the canvas. The figures don’t look as content as some of Olulode’s other couples – they have fugitive facial features, after all. But the work is an example of the show at its best: when works foreground their materiality in this way; when the paintings’ materials accrue emotional resonance and become significant to what they depict. For instance, the two hugging figures in She walked up to me in the street and embraced me (2023) are outlined in soft, gritty charcoal – a porous boundary for their paired bodies. Does intimacy make us more vulnerable? Expressive golden rays appear to pass through the transparent bodies painted in In the Bubble of Your Love (2023) and The heat of your love radiates through me (2023). If we believe their titles, it’s love that seems to have swept away their insides. Send Nudes (2023)

features a single figure – the only painting to do so – taking a nude mirror-selfie. The globular acrylic outline of the woman’s body is just discernible – by means of the change in texture – against the dyed yellow canvas. Moreover it appears to have multiple adjacent edges, which in turn encourages an intimate back-and-forth as the viewer’s eye searches for the boundary of her body. For the most part, Olulode’s depictions of intimate moments (there’s a suggestion but perhaps not quite insistence that these moments are queer) feel as if they’ve been restrained from intimacy’s usual dynamism. Even at their most dynamic, the paintings remain scenic: between In the Bubble’s two joyful, dancing figures is a nearly-camouflaged drawing of two women kissing – perhaps a memory, perhaps a premonition. Dispersed across the painting, black circles reminiscent of bubbles suggest just how late we come to Olulode’s scenes: it looks as if these bubbles have burst and dried-up. Which reminds us, perhaps, that romance doesn’t stay fresh forever. Madeleine Jacob

Bathing in the light of your love, 2023, batik, ink and acrylic on canvas, 80 cm (diameter). Photo: Rocio Chacon. Courtesy the artist and Ed Cross, London

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18/09/2023 13:45

Inventing the Rest: New Adventures in Clay Maximillian William, London 29 June – 14 September In this three-person show, Anina Major, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre and Adebunmi Gbadebo use clay to bridge between the temporal poles of the future and the past. Each artist has a different method of referencing history – personal, communal or natural – and then expressing its importance as time inevitably progresses. The works also have a strong sense of place. Each draws on a unique element of the locations where their stories are set: from the origins of materials used, to depictions of local fauna. By going on the journeys these objects offer, we can gain clarity about our own timelines. Gbadebo’s pots, with their smooth bulging bodies and imperfect surfaces, were created with clay, animal bones and rice all originating from the True Blue in South Carolina, a former plantation where her ancestors are buried in the cemetery. Some of them were slaves who worked on the site’s plantation to harvest rice, till the soil (from which her clay derives) and work alongside animals. The history of the materials in Gbadebo’s works underscores their capacity beyond serving as physical containers. They hold space for reapproaching her family’s

ongoing relationship to the land their predecessors were forced to work and inhabit – and by extension those of others descended from enslaved Africans. In doing this on her own terms, instead of in relation to an external narrative, perhaps some peace with this painful past can be reached. Major’s ceramics initially appear more abstract, but their plaited strips of clay reference forms of straw weaving created by local artisans to sell to tourists in her native Bahamas. The basket-like forms are completed by a cluster of cylindrical fingers, which resemble the wires used to give straw woven materials form and cascade from a central point like an umbrella. Their shape enhances the suggestion that these objects are designed to shield what is contained within them from whatever is without. By recreating straw-work in clay, she adds weight, literally and figuratively, to this practice. In the process, she asserts that despite straw’s ubiquity and inexpensiveness, these techniques of manipulating it, which date back to the island’s indigenous Arawak

peoples, are precious and worth preserving beyond the tourist trade. Colombian artist Monzón-Aguirre’s two works titled Égida (Jaguar) and Égida (Gallina Ciega) (both 2023), which translates as ‘aegis’ or protection, depict endangered animals from the artist’s homeland: the jaguar and nightjar. Both glazed stoneware works have three identical animal heads, evoking gargoyles whose functional and symbolic purpose is to protect. However, they don’t have the spouts that give gargoyles their usual architectural function. Instead, they remind viewers of our duty to preserve the creatures and environment alongside which humans exist. In their explorations of the past, these artists’ works reflect on loss. For Gbadebo, it is the deep, multi-faceted void left by slavery – knowledge, lives, freedom. Major considers the loss of cultural practices outside of commercial incentive and Monzón-Aguirre reflects on the existential threat of extinction. Yet, ultimately, these artworks are reminders to preserve and protect for the future, all moulded in a material perfectly suited to the task. Salena Barry

Andrés Monzón-Aguirre, Bodegón (coca), 2023, glazed earthenware, 48 × 35 × 32 cm. Photo: Deniz Guzel. © and courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London

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Books Socorro! by Lucy Raven ‘What am I looking at?’ asks American cultural critic David Levi Strauss in the opening sentence to his essay ‘The Aesthetics of Unknowing’ – one of two texts that accompany multidisciplinary artist Lucy Raven’s large-format photobook Socorro! It’s a good question, because leafing through the pages of shadowgrams that make up the titular series is as much an exercise in trying to understand what the images depict as it is in interrogating our own impulse to decipher the unknown. Each of the 60 shadowgrams, which visualise flow patterns and are made from imprints on photosensitive paper, is marked by smudges that drift across its grey surface. Some depict faint grids that bloom from different parts of the images, while others appear to be marred by stains. Many of the images are pocked with bright white specks, which on closer examination are revealed to be holes in the original shadowgram. This last detail presents a physical punctuation of the ephemeral, dreamlike quality of the images, and in doing so, draws attention to the materiality of their making. Not knowing what the subject of these images is allows for abstracted – almost meditative –

Mack Books, £65 (hardcover)

looking. Yet there’s also an underlying sense of violence, both in the way the photographic paper is physically pierced and how the smudges visibly appear to force their way across the page. It’s this dual effect of reading Socorro! that will most excite epistemology nerds (those of us who are endlessly fascinated by questions around knowledge production – basically, how do we know what we know? – and, as Strauss puts it, ‘the examination of the right to our beliefs. Are the beliefs we hold justified or not?’). Fortunately, though, readers aren’t doomed to remain in the limbo of the unknown. Alongside Strauss’s essay (which, besides a reflection on the epistemic qualities of photography, offers a concise and accessible history of shadowgrams and other forms of photography used specifically to record movement), art historian Pamela M. Lee’s text, ‘The Sound of Falling Bodies’, dives into the technological aspects of the shadowgram and how these were used to study ballistics, resulting in the advancement of such fields as weapons manufacture, crime-scene forensics and aerodynamics. The title of Lee’s essay is a reminder that beyond the apparent

silence of shadowgrams, the end result of much of the research for which they are deployed – which benefits bullets, missiles and bombs – is dead people. The shadowgrams were produced at New Mexico Tech (located in the town after which the series is titled). Between 2021 and 2022 Raven enlisted the help of the ballistic sciences lab to construct a black-box room out of sheet rock, and proceeded to fire 3D-printed projectiles filled with magnesium, aluminium and gravel into the space, recording the motion of those materials on photographic paper. Like much of Raven’s work – which also spans video, installation art, performance, animation and soundworks – these shadowgrams are a continuation of the artist’s interrogation of Manifest Destiny, an American mythology that owes much of its success to the invention and development of firearms (which led to the deaths and displacement of native peoples across the American West). In the manner in which it exists in a zone between science and art, Socorro! is photography in its purest sense: the capture of light on paper, collapsing shadows present and past. Fi Churchman

The Variations by Patrick Langley Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99 (softcover) Patrick Langley’s quasi-fantasy novel begins at ‘Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children’, a refuge and academy for those living with ‘the gift’ – a hereditary affliction that results in the affected subject hearing voices (known and unknown) from the past. The hospice itself exists within the mundane world we recognise, a gothic residence for these human palimpsests – some of whom live with their condition, while others are broken by it. One evening Ellen, ageing dean of the hospice, takes in Wolf, a boy who has been rendered catatonic by the gift. He is the grandson of Selda, a renowned composer, hospice alumna and enigmatic figure in the novel whose mysterious death – found prone in the

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snow in a stunning callback to Robert Walser – has set alight a number of disembodied voices who speak to Ellen and Wolf. Langley’s three-part episodic structure interweaves his characters’ actions and thoughts with the voices supplied by the gift (which are italicised and in verse), resulting in frequent temporal and locational shifts; the effect is like slipping through a hypothetical wormhole in which all events are seemingly joined in the present moment.You’d be forgiven for feeling as disoriented as Langley’s characters evidently do. Theme and tone rarely settle in a cohesive manner – shifting, instead, between fantasy, the gothic and a study of grief. Nevertheless, the syntax and rhythms of Langley’s writing

can at times feel plodding: he tends to overlabour imagery, and the dialogue can often feel wooden. Yet the novel’s fundamental weakness – a lack of focus – can also be its strength: discursive detours into music theory (John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg and Felix Mendelssohn); politics as seen through musical dynamics (Fascism is ‘all pattern, arbitrary and inflexible… an intolerance of tension’); or the ‘variations’ of heredity (‘some variable is always unpredictable, changing, mutating’) trigger Langley’s most effective and explorative prose. Such moments of inspiration, however, eventually grow to be tired and dispirited, as if the narrative and characters of The Variations are no more than chores to which the author must inevitably return. Alexander Leissle

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The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters by Benjamin Moser Benjamin Moser intended to write a history of the so-called Golden Age of Dutch art: the period during the seventeenth century when the Dutch empire was at its most powerful. He would sketch out the lives and work of preeminent figures, such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals, alongside those less well known, roughly in mimicry of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the sixteenthcentury work by Italian Giorgio Vasari, commonly cited as the first art historian. This was always going to be a fan’s guide, however, not an academic treatise. Moser would take the reader by the hand and, in a prose that slides between the elegiac and the chummy, point out the books he’d read, the paintings he’d seen and the museums he’d gone to as he discovered his subject. For Moser, who is American and had arrived in the Netherlands (for love) at the age of twenty-five, this immersion in art, he writes, was him ‘trying to find his footing in a new country’. This is that book; but something else too. While many an art historian has delved into the private lives of artists for the purposes of adding colour to the criticism (from Vasari onwards), Moser’s book is a treatise on ambition. Artistic, yes; but worldly too. ‘How much political skill, how much backroom manoeuvring, is involved in an artist’s success?’ he asks. ‘The talent for moving in society is the dirty secret of many

Allen Lane, £30 (hardcover)

artistic careers,’ he states, and it’s as much true of artists today as it is of those from the past. The secret is ‘dirty’, of course, because no artist wants to come across as materialistically minded. Moser makes an example of Gerard ter Borch, ‘a middle-class boy from Zwolle’ with an ease for glad-handing who, on arriving in London, ‘quickly, and as usual, rose to high positions’. Compare this to ter Borch’s father, a man with similar artistic ambitions, but who never left the northeast Netherlands and worked in the tax office for 40 years. Then there’s Rembrandt, whose early success waned as he insisted on painting darkness and the everyday, not the elevated beauty patrons wanted. Compare his trajectory to that of painters Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck, who energetically changed their style to match the fashions of the day and consequently died rich and seemingly contented. Two hundred years after their deaths, however, measured next to Rembrandt, the pair were dismissed by critic Louis Viardot as ‘simple satellites, lost in the rays of the central luminary’. Moser and his own career trajectory also come into focus. He is no slouch, with two biographies under his belt, one of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, whose work he has also helped translate from Portuguese to English (and who died poor), a second of American

theorist Susan Sontag (a consummate social climber among New York’s intelligentsia). For the latter he won the Pulitzer Prize, and there’s a sense that this level of recognition, and the pushback that sometimes comes with it (in the award’s wake, Moser received criticism from a fellow Portuguese translator and other Lispector biographers over acknowledgement) has spurred self-reflection. He realises this is a risky venture: ‘any intrusion of the biographer will be quickly whacked down by chastising reviewers’. But it allows him to ask what catalyses people to write (or make art), and to write (or make art) the way they do. The answers are myriad, of course. And Moser is careful never to let his own ambition off the hook. There’s a hunger for wealth and privilege, like Flinck and Bol; there are those who are restless and obsessive in their creativity, like Paulus Potter and his endless paintings of cows; but then there are those – most of us engaged in such creative professions, really – for whom making art and making a name for oneself (why haven’t I won the Pulitzer!) are endlessly entangled: a helpless zeal to be seen and applauded. Does such ambition ever get sated? There’s something melancholic about this and the book Moser ended up writing; a shadow over the prose as dark as a Rembrandt, and as good in its gloom for it. Oliver Basciano

The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell Jonathan Cape, £18.99 (hardcover) Despite the insistence of its title, the future is not the first subject that pops into mind while reading Adam Thirlwell’s new novel. Even though it includes rocketships, space travel, aliens and interplanetary relations. In fact, main plot aside, the book as a whole has an insistent feeling of asynchronicity, as if it were set up to deny any sense of time from the off. Which might come across as odd, because the novel is definitely set in eighteenth-century France, as enlightened thinkers, literati, dandies and revolutionaries phase out Louis XVI and, after a brief but violent republican lull, phase in the emperor Napoleon. Thirlwell’s history centres around a woman named Celine, newly married into ‘society’, and almost instantly the subject of salacious pamphlets falsely suggesting that she’s party to a raucous sex life. For the rest

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of the novel she wrestles, against various ambitious artists, socialites, bureaucrats, lovers and dictators, to find her own voice in order to get her own message out there. Once she’s worked out what the latter is. The whole book is studded with anachronisms (characters message each other, people are fascists, the world is full of freeways and takeouts). So, as if to convince us that all Thirlwell narrates might actually have happened, ‘real’ historical characters such as Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Marie Antoinette, Toussaint Louverture and Napoleon himself keep popping up to remind us of when the book is set (even if their ‘real’ histories are not always respected). Which, curiously, has the opposite effect: making what’s ‘real’ seem like a stage set and what’s invented seem real.

In other ways the novel is very firmly set in the present. Ours. The issues raised – the pressures and violences of a world saturated in social media and dominated by patriarchal systems, the relationship between old worlds and new worlds, the human and nonhuman worlds, and frequent references to mycelia, which bring to mind the work of contemporary anthropologists such as Anna L. Tsing – come across like a shopping list of current concerns, all expressed in the language of now. That’s not to say that the eighteenth-century setting is irrelevant, but perhaps that Thirlwell is intent on bringing the problems of the present to confront their Enlightenment roots, simultaneously reminding us of the truth that all histories are contingent and reflect the concerns of the times in which they are written. The overall effect is simultaneously dazzling and unnerving. Mark Rappolt

ArtReview

18/09/2023 15:33

Viewing Velocities: Time in Contemporary Art by Marcus Verhagen How we use our time – at work, in our leisure or even in the art gallery – can never be a politically or socially neutral question. London-based critic Marcus Verhagen’s new book offers a lucid and capacious analysis of how contemporary art has, over the last three decades or so, addressed our society’s troubled experience with the speed and pace of life under capitalism, particularly in relation to its supposed antithesis, the world of work. ‘We pay a high price’, he writes, when ‘work is increasingly organised around the rhythms not just of markets but of new technological interfaces’. Art’s value is often proposed by many in the artworld as ‘an exception to the rule of speed’, with galleries now increasingly understood as ‘sanctuaries from the pace and agitation of modern living’. But Verhagen knows that this is not so straightforward, and the book’s key theme is to examine how art – rather than standing aloof from everyday existence within its own particular form of ‘temporality’ – is more interesting when it gets its hands dirty by messing with the kinds of temporality we encounter elsewhere. The first part of Viewing Velocities concentrates on those artists who have incorporated forms of encounter and presentation more tuned to participation, rather than contemplation, since museums and galleries are similarly shifting away from the traditional ideals

Verso, £16.99 (softcover)

of the contemplative museum, towards a more overtly commodified experience. ‘When critics lament the intrusion of entertainment,’ Verhagen observes, ‘they are in effect suggesting that the temporality of the museum visit has changed.’ Challenges to the museum’s ideological seclusion and cultural exclusivity gathered pace in contemporary art during the 1990s, so it’s unsurprising that artists such as Carsten Höller, Philippe Parreno and Christian Marclay (notable for his wildly popular 24-hour film The Clock, 2010) figure prominently in Verhagen’s case study-led chapters; such immediacy-defined practices he defines as ‘vitalist’, a concept broad enough to include the never-documented performances of Tino Sehgal, as well as crowdwowing immersive-art outfits like Superblue. Much of the art Verhagen favours, however, tends to draw critical attention to the temporality it creates, even while exploiting its effects. Disrupting the gallery’s institutional norms can also be viewed in terms of labour and labourtime, and Verhagen pays particular attention to works such as Maria Eichhorn’s 2016 project 5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours, in which the work comprised the closure of the gallery, and its staff ceasing all work and staying away, for the duration of the ‘show’. Along with such ‘art strikes’, artists’ deployment of interruption

likewise becomes a way of revealing the dominant norms of socially conditioned time. Even waiting can be repurposed, as Verhagen points out in his review of Roman Ondak’s Good Feelings in Good Times (2003), in which the artist choreographed queues of people apparently outside a gallery; such interventions release the time of waiting from its subordination to ‘instrumentality and striving, from the forward drive of efficient activity’, potentially pointing to a more sociable and authentic use of time. Verhagen is critical of the ‘Slow Movement’ of the last few decades (the fashion for ‘slow food’, ‘slow travel’ and so on), while noting its influence among artists and critics. The cultural trend for ‘slowing down’, he rightly points out, often ending up as an individuated ‘curative personal reaction to what were actually societywide issues’. But where Viewing Velocities seems uncertain is on how it sees the potential of artworks to disrupt capitalist ‘clock-time’ in ways that go beyond the personal reaction of audiences in ‘gallery-time’. Actually disrupting clocktime would mean a real disruption – in the sites of employment, labour-time and economy. The question remains whether the art Verhagen examines finally turns out to be a compensatory activity, for an era that otherwise seems to have given up on the more radical temporality of political and social change. J.J. Charlesworth

Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now by Phaidon Editors Phaidon, £49.95 (hardcover) The mainstay of Phaidon’s output is the packaging of a few hundred pages of artist profiles under an easily digestible theme. Great Women Artists! Korean Art! Great Women Painters! If there has been little unease about the reductive nature of this approach in Phaidon HQ , then the entertaining introductory essay here by Raphael Fonseca offers some home truths. The Brazilian curator notes that to organise ‘visual arts production by geographical focus is a fallacy’, before tearing apart the notion of ‘Latin’ (if it is a geographic notion, why include Cubans such as Carlos Garaicoa and Coco Fusco and not Haitian, Surinamese and Trinidadians and Tobagonians in the book? If it’s cultural, how do you explain the absence of South American-heritage artists from elsewhere, particularly North America?) and

‘America’ (the name perpetuating the colonial legacy of Amerigo Vespucci). While they are to be commended for allowing Fonseca free rein, the Phaidon editors’ much shorter preface tries to dodge this issue entirely. The notion of a continent, they write, is ‘a contested concept with roots in Classical Greece’; the book is ordered alphabetically, as the organisation of art by chronology is ‘critiqued for its exclusionary and oversimplifying tendencies’. Once we get on to the definitely-notoversimplified 200-word summaries of artists’ practices, there’s some brilliant work alluded to, but it’s unclear what reading about, say, Claudia Andujar’s disturbing documentary photographs of a 1980s indigenous vaccination programme has to do with a blurb on Mexican artist Julieta Aranda’s concept-driven art a spread later.

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The A–Z methodology obscures historic racism and sexism, and misses interesting art historical and political themes. We don’t see the rise and fall of abstraction, nor the pervasiveness of performance come the 1960s. Jumping 200 years from page to page we miss the positive influence of Jewish European immigration and the negative meddling of North American cultural diplomacy. With indigenous artists scattered across the pages, we don’t understand the shared and contrasting cosmological uses of art amid colonised communities. Only the index hints at the dominance of Brazil in the wider imagination of Latin American art (over 50 page-references, compared to, say, Colombia’s nine). Given the cost of the book, any reader is likely to feel shortchanged. Oliver Basciano

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AN ATLAS OF ES DEVLIN ‘With Es, there’s no “No”. She creates a whole universe’ Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye ‘Es is like superstring theory, at least eleven dimensions’ Hans Ulrich Obrist

A boxed sculptural volume of 900 pages, including foldouts, cut-outs, and a range of paper types, documenting 120 projects spanning 30 years. Includes a die-cut print from an edition of 5000.

thamesandhudson.com

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ArtReview is printed in the United Kingdom. Reprographics by The Logical Choice. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, ISSN No: 1745-9303, (uSpS No: 21034) is published by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y OTH, England, United Kingdom. Subscription records are maintained at ArtReview Subscriptions, Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne PE10 9PH, United Kingdom. The paper used within this publication is sourced from chain-of-custody certified manufacturers, operating within international environmental standards. This ensures sustainable sourcing of the raw materials and sustainable production.

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On the cover Rirkrit Tiravanija, 2021. Photo: Daniel Dorsa. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Words on the spine and on pages 29, 49 and 89 are by Public Enemy, Louder than a Bomb, 1988 (James Henry Boxley III / Eric T. Sadler / Carlton Douglas Ridenhour)

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Jon Arbuckle’s amazing adventures in Art Land Episode 3: The Outcast Dead Sunday. The Crossbones Graveyard, Borough. A ceremony of remembrance for the estimated 15,000 outcast ‘paupers’ (mostly children, prostitutes and the disabled) buried beneath this unconsecrated, derelict ground. It lies a stone’s throw from what, in Medieval times, was ‘The Liberty’, an area licensed for prostitution by the Bishop of Winchester. The ‘Winchester Geese’, as such prostitutes were called, were not eligible for a Christian burial despite helping to swell the coffers of the Church. A decade ago, the place was a disused bit of postindustrial concrete, but since then it has been gradually claimed by the local counter-cultural artistic community as a shrine and garden of remembrance. A movement inspired by the visions of poet and playwright John Constable (aka John Crow, author of The Southwark Mysteries), who was led to the graveyard (so he claims) by the spirit of The Goose. I’d been invited the night before by an artist acquaintance I’d bumped into (along with her boyfriend) in the pub. She was a painter of mythical alternative realities. He described himself as an outcast from the Left-Liberal artistic main stream, whom various ‘WokeFascists’ had tried to cancel. He was also looking, so he said, for the nine gates to the Kingdom of Darkness. Thus far his quest had revealed three gates, in Haiti, Mongolia and Croydon. Apparently, he alone possessed the power to perceive these mythical gates and his mission was crucial to humanity’s enlightenment and survival come The End of Days (which were, he claimed, upon us). This Crossbones Graveyard might contain one such gate. This Sunday service was the latest incarnation of a now-yearly event in which the clergy of nearby Southwark Cathedral came and

apologised for the historical sins of the Church with regard to these long-dead paupers. The ceremony involved sprinkling holy water, swinging incense, a hymn or two and various sermons, several of which mentioned Mary Magdalene. As, by some interpretations, she was a whore whom Jesus had forgiven and thereby saved. After the ceremony the artist and I found ourselves wandering around the garden-graveyard, discussing matters, while her boyfriend looked for his magic gate. The artist’s feeling was that the assembled clergy, most of them men, hadn’t been authentically repentant enough. And she chalked it up to the inherently patriarchal attitudes of the Church. With the likes of Mary Magdalene still being portrayed as a ‘penitent whore’ turned ‘fangirl’, saved and healed by Jesus’s holy charms (a bit like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman). When in fact, historically speaking, it was women who were healers. And Mary M wasn’t actually a whore, it being more likely that she was a wealthy supporter, leader and visionary of the early Christian movement. All of which, the artist felt, could be seen very starkly in the life of the recently deceased singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor. Who, back in the late 1980s and early 90s, had used her newfound pop fame to speak truth to patriarchal power (before such things had become commonplace and fashionable in the pop industry). Most famously tearing up a photo of the Pope at the end of her performance on America’s Saturday Night Live, to protest the ongoing abuses of the Catholic Church (from which she’d suffered growing up). She also rejected, early on in her career, attempts by the music industry to turn her into a stereotypical, childless, feminine sex object. Thereby becoming a trailblazer for a queered, more androgynous, individual, femininity. And rather like Jesus she’d suffered for her truth, effectively being cancelled by the media for speaking out. The modern equivalent of being burnt at the stake as a witch. An outcast, who’d dared to rebel against the patriarchy, and the related expectations surrounding her gender. A few hours later, we reassembled for an evening vigil, by the long gate of vertical metal bars, at one edge of the graveyard site, to which are tied a great array of ribbons, beads and other such offertories. We’d joined a crowd from the local Crossbones community, led by the aforementioned John Constable, who had the air of a man possessed by something or other. He soon embarked on a theatrical reading from his Mysteries, to the rhythm of his drum – summoning the spirit of The Goose, which would appear via a portal to the dead, opening within the actual metal gate. To my eyes nothing much had happened. But the boyfriend said he’d seen the glimmering eyes of Satan (or some such), inside the portal, making wild love to a goose. “Another gate down, only five more to go!” I said. He glared at me, from beneath the rim of his fedora, not liking my tone. “It’s OK,” I ventured, “I’ve been on a quest to find a mythical creature, whom I first encountered on a dating website, for years!” He looked even angrier. “Your quest is futile!” he declared. “How dare you trivialise my journey!” And with that he was gone, into the dusk.

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QUIET NO MORE

Britain’s family of style pioneers since 1882

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