ArtReview October 2019 by ArtReview

Popping up all over the place since 1949

Pope.L

There are only symptoms

Ai Weiwei Roots

neugerriemschneider, Berlin 7 September – 19 October Lisson Gallery, London 2 October – 2 November

Nate Lowman October 1, 2017

Nate Lowman, Picture 1, 2019 (detail)

2 Octoberâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;9 November 2019

David Zwirner London

Mend e s Wood DM

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

ArtReview vol 71 no 7 October 2019

Belonging Having settled into a seaside deckchair last weekend (it does have a life outside the artworld, you know), ArtReview watched a small human throw itself repeatedly down a series of sand dunes before, inevitably, damaging itself and bursting into tears. Reflecting over the course of its Mr Whippy on an allegorical play about the human condition apparently staged for its benefit, ArtReview came to the conclusion (not for the first time) that humans are fundamentally ignorant creatures doomed to repeat their mistakes in never-ending cycles of selfdestruction. Although it should concede that this rather downbeat interpretation might have been coloured by an earlier conversation with the vendor of said Mr Whippy. Asked, “Where are you from?”, ArtReview had replied with the name of the city from which it had escaped that day. But the vendor was not satisfied and, holding the soft-serve hostage, instigated a silent battle of wills. This wearying impulse to categorise and differentiate is something that must be negotiated when attempting to figure out if you ‘belong’ in the place you call home, what it means to ‘belong’ and indeed whether the very concept of ‘belonging’ is a means of creating communal feeling or reasserting inequality (as the work of our featured artists, Pope.L and Mark Bradford, explores), and whether those two functions can be separated. That exercise of separating out who ‘belongs’ where finds its roots in a long history of ethnographic categorisation predominantly instigated via the white male gaze.In seeking conveniently to classify the human species, the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus identified five categories by tethering ill-defined physical traits to even more nebulous psychological

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characteristics: the Americanus: stubborn, zealous, free; the Europeanus: gentle, acute, inventive; the Asiaticus: severe, haughty, greedy; the Afer or Africanus: crafty, sly, lazy, cunning, lustful, careless. Oh, and the Monstrosus, which ArtReview will leave to your imagination. Two hundred fifty years later, the kind of thinking that defines individuals through adjectives, and thus strips them of their ‘nounhood’, not only persists but is on the rise. Which ArtReview takes as further evidence of the importance of language (and, by extension, of publications devoted to exploring how words can be used to describe, conceptualise and shape the phenomenal world, like, for example… you guessed it). ArtReview had read somewhere that to dissuade seagulls looking to steal hotdogs right out of your hand, you’re advised to give them, like adopted Londoner Paddington Bear, a ‘good hard stare’. So ArtReview applied the same technique in its confrontation with the ice cream salesperson. The ice cream drooped in its cone; seagrass rustled in the breeze; a customer tapped their foot. “But where are you really from?” he said. Really? ArtReview

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Song Dong Same Bed Different Dreams October 1 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; November 5, 2019 London

GEORGES MATHIEU

FRIEZE MASTERS BOOTH C15 OCTOBER 3 − 6, 2019

Georges Mathieu, La bataille de Gilboa, 1962. Oil on canvas. Unframed: 200 x 200 cm | 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in. Photogrpher: Pierre Antoine. © Georges Mathieu / ADAGP Paris & DACS London, 2019

Roman Ondak Perfect Society September 13 – October 26, 2019

Potsdamer Strasse 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com

Join the campaign FairShareForArtists.org

Art Previewed Breakfast with... Gabriel Kuri 22

#Europe London’s loss is Paris’s gain by Louise Darblay 32

Tall Tales Poussin’s fingerprints by Ben Street 26

The Interview Gerasimos Floratos by Ross Simonini 34

The Shape of Things Walls and borders by Sam Jacob 28

Coming Up Ten shows to see this month by Martin Herbert 40

Sounding Off Tuning in to dissonance by Patrick Langley 30

Art Featured Pope.L by Ben Eastham 50

Nam June Paik by Juliet Jacques 62

On the legacy of Nam June Paik by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Aleksandra Domanović, Haroon Mirza, Jae-Eun Choi, Gregory Zinman, Ho Tzu Nyen, Lawrence Abu Hamdan 58

Mark Bradford Interview by Mark Rappolt 72

page 26 Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time, 1634–36, © The Wallace Collection, London

October 2019

Art Reviewed exhibitions 82 Istanbul Biennial, by Ben Eastham Aichi Triennale, by Max Crosbie-Jones Chris Kraus, by Stefanie Hessler Pippa Garner, by Andrew Berardini Aneta Grzeszykowska, by Phoebe Blatton Ola Vasiljeva, by Moritz Scheper Garden of Earthly Delights, by Emily McDermott Helmut Federle, by Jurriaan Benschop Mick Peter, by Tess Denman-Cleaver Lee Krasner, by Martin Herbert Simon Starling, by J.J. Charlesworth Shin Egashira, by David Terrien Wong Ping, by Louise Darblay Paul Mpagi Sepuya, by Rahel Aima Rosebud, by Cat Kron Brian Jungen Friendship Centre, by Bill Clarke Hanna Saarikoski, by Mike Watson Gina Beavers, by Rob Goyanes

books 108 Don’t Look Back in Anger, by Daniel Rachel, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Insurrecto, by Gina Apostol, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Model City: Pyongyang, by Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić, reviewed by Oliver Basciano In Print: a roundup of new releases, digested by Oliver Basciano back page 114

page 103 Howardena Pindell, Video Drawings: Track, 1975, c-print, 20 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (as seen in Rosebud, Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles)

ArtReview

Teotihuacan stone mask Classic, A.D. 450-650 Estimate €125,000–175,000*

AUCTION PARIS 30 OCTOBER EXHIBITION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 26 – 29 OCTOBER 76 RUE DU FAUBOURG SAINT-HONORÉ 75008 PARIS ENQUIRIES +33 1 53 05 52 67 ALEXIS.MAGGIAR@SOTHEBYS.COM +1 212 894 1312 STACY.GOODMAN.CONSULTANT@SOTHEBYS.COM SOTHEBYS.COM AGRÉMENT N°2001-002 DU 25 OCTOBRE 2001 COMMISSAIRE-PRISEUR HABILITÉ CYRILLE COHEN

Breakfast with

Gabriel Kuri Two melon wedges, huevos rancheros with refried beans, warm corn tortillas, black tea Huevos rancheros are normally two sunny-side-up eggs on a pair of warm corn tortillas (very lightly oiled so they keep warm longer) topped with a copious amount of salsa

I prefer papaya, but melon abounds through the European summer

I like my black refried beans a little runny, and if I can add epazote leaves to the mush, all the better (canned beans are OK if you are in northern countries)

Warm corn tortillas should always wait in the basket to scoop up – never use wheat flour tortillas

Huevos rancheros speak for themselves. I don’t need to say any more, other than they are a basic human right. No human being should ever be deprived of freedom, dignity, justice, clean drinking water and huevos rancheros

The Mexico-born, Belgium-based artist is the subject of a retrospective titled sorted, resorted, at Wiels contemporary art centre in Brussels (through 5 January). Presented over two floors and organised, as though for recycling, by material, it’s a mix of new and existing works that neatly sidesteps constraints of chronology

ArtReview

Modern & Contemporary African Art New Bond Street, London | 3 October 2019 Online Sale | 4-18 October 2019

Bonhams 101 New Bond Street London W1S 1SR

ENQUIRIES +44 20 7468 8355 macaa@bonhams.com bonhams.com/macaa

* For details of the charges payable in addition to the final hammer price, please visit bonhams.com/buyersguide

DUMILE FENI-MHLABA (ZWELIDUMILE MXGAZI) (SOUTH AFRICAN, 1942-1991) Head Â£40,000 - 60,000 *

Art Previewed

Can’t you fools see I’m watching television? 25

Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time (detail), 1634–36. © The Wallace Collection, London

ArtReview

Tall Tales

Ben Street recalls the time a leading art historian called in the police to test the truth of art history

One day in 1975, Commander Gerald Lambourne of Scotland Yard’s Fingerprint Department was called upon to investigate an object brought to him by Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Writing much later in Fingerprint Whorld, the international journal of The Fingerprint Society, Lambourne asserted, in the compelling prose for which fingerprint specialists are known, that ‘it is a brave person who can say with all honesty and sincerity that a standard which is generally recognised as excellent, correct or acceptable is not required for the ultimate in personal identification’. The Blunt object in question was a recently restored painting by Nicolas Poussin owned by the Wallace Collection. Prior to its acquisition in 1845 by Richard Seymour-Conway, the 4th Marquess of Hertford, whose private collection formed the basis of that museum’s holdings, A Dance to the Music of Time (1634–36) had only two previous owners: the family of its commissioning patron, Giulio Rospigliosi, later Pope Clement ix, and, after travelling to France in 1806, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, uncle of Napoleon Bonaparte. Following the cardinal’s death, and the sale of his collection in Rome, SeymourConway returned to London and hung his purchase in his house on Manchester Square, where it remains today. The painting would leave its own mark on British cultural history when Anthony Powell took its title for his famous series of novels. Gerald Lambourne had been instrumental in collecting the fingerprints that were used to convict members of the Great Train Robbery gang in 1964, most famously by dusting the robbers’ Monopoly set. Given his experience of unusual cases, the police commander may not have been surprised when Blunt unwrapped a painting on his desk in Scotland Yard. A little over 80 centimetres high by about a metre wide, Poussin’s composition shows four figures in flowing robes dancing in a circle, holding hands and facing outwards. Other characters observe

from the sidelines: a nude old man with wings plucking a harp; a couple of babies playing with small symbolic objects; and fragments of classical architecture, including a marble post topped with two busts facing in opposite directions. Above all this, and far away in the distance, is another troupe of figures dancing behind a horse-drawn chariot, on top of a bank of dark clouds. ‘The cleaning of the painting’, wrote Blunt in The Burlington Magazine in 1976, ‘has provided the occasion for examining a technical feature which has long puzzled students of Poussin.’ Lambourne’s examination confirmed that the painting was, as Blunt and his colleagues suspected, stamped across its entire surface with fingerprints made in the very early stages of the painting’s manufacture. Lefthand thumbprints, to be precise, pressed into the wet priming layer, and visible underneath the allegorical scene Poussin painted, like an eddying stream. Were they Poussin’s own prints? ‘It would be unwise to be too affirmative,’ was Blunt’s opinion. He certainly never used that technique anywhere else. ‘It would be unwise to be too affirmative.’ Case closed. ‘The exact meaning of the composition is not known.’ This, from the Wallace Collection’s website, is the standard line on this and many other paintings by Poussin. Putting aside its implied assumption that ‘exact meanings’ might be knowable (or desirable) in any work of art, this kind of text performs important work in the service of academic employment, maintaining a steady flow of symposia, catalogue essays and book reviews by keeping closure at bay. It is, in that sense, very Blunt. The former director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and author of a definitive monograph on Poussin, had himself benefited from the constructive ambiguity of the artist’s paintings, much as he had benefited from the same characteristic in the British and Soviet secret services, for whom he worked as a spy for 20 years, a fact revealed four years after

October 2019

his meeting with Lambourne. This Poussin was remade in his own image, a refracted self-portrait: a still and silent point at the centre of a whirl of scholars and connoisseurs. ‘I who make a profession of mute things,’ as Poussin had described himself in a rare statement on his own work. It has Blunt’s thumbprints all over it. The dancing figures in Poussin’s painting have been made, over the years, to represent a variety of abstract concepts: the four seasons, say, or Poverty, Labour, Wealth and Luxury. Few readings of the painting are intuitive, aside from the entry-level symbolism of the hourglass or the baby blowing bubbles, but every reading is a reading, a treatment of the painting as substitute text, like a foreign-language film in need of subtitling. Its classical friezelike arrangement is very like a written sentence, and its title is almost a complete sentence too, despite not being Poussin’s original (it was given to the painting in the early twentieth century, and its first title is lost). In his article, Blunt pictures a circle of cognoscenti in Rospigliosi’s palazzo (which might as well be in the Courtauld, for that matter: only the costumes change) gathered around the latest acquisition and parsing its meanings. All the while, the painting watches itself being watched through a female face turned smilingly to the viewer, like the camera on a laptop. The circle is closed. What Poussin, or whoever’s thumb made those impressions, had in mind by pressing their body’s weight into the work’s surface seems beyond the guesswork of art historians. Perhaps it was a simple technical strategy, as has been suggested: some experimental way of building a ground. But the history of commentary – from his biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori to André Félibien to the unrecorded interpretations of visitors to the various palaces in which the painting hung – can occlude as well as elucidate. The disjunction between the painting’s surface and the descriptive marks of the brush splits its register. The body’s trace speaks too. Sometimes, it’s wise to be affirmative.

Maybe it was all the recent talk of walls and borders. Maybe the sensation of edges and boundaries reinscribing themselves around us. Or perhaps it was the hope that following a single simple instruction for a week might give some sweet relief from all of the above. Whatever it was, we found ourselves in a Travelodge in a flimsily regenerated zone in Newcastle ready to walk the length of Hadrian’s Wall. The wall was, as you probably know, the northernmost border of the Roman Empire, the hightide mark of a long-ago-receded ambition, Rome’s enthusiasm for subjugation having petered out just beyond Carlisle. Still, garrisons were established to dramatise this edge-of-empire: first as a turf mound, then as a complex set of ditches and finally a 3.5m-high stonewall. The wall stretches 135km: it runs from (almost) the eastern coast of England to an estuary in the west. In its nation-crossing scale and its singular purpose of articulating the threshold between ‘in’ and ‘out’, it is architecture in its purest form – both a simple wall and an ideology imposing its will on the natural world. At least, that’s what it once was.

The Shape of Things

Walking an old border, Sam Jacob takes comfort in ruination

Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland National Park. Photo: David Taylor / Alamy Stock Photo

ArtReview

Large parts of it are no longer in place; they exist as little more than a dotted line on a map and a set of well-maintained signposts. In other places its presence is hyperreal, a broad dark mass that snakes abstractly over the jagged topography of Northumberland. But whether present or absent physically, it is always there conceptually: a triple whammy of the fantasies of radical architecture collective Superstudio, British ‘walking artist’ Richard Long and us President Donald Trump. Long divorced from the geopolitics that dictated its construction, the wall has shifted from military infrastructure to heritage-assetslash-leisure-industry: no longer a north–south border, but an east–west route. A historic line that now offers a random slice through contemporary Britain: starting in the abandoned shipyards of the Tyne, full of postindustrial buddleia, through the stag- and hen-nightpacked centre of Newcastle, out through call centres, car dealerships and suburbs, before eventually opening up into the vast landscapes of Northumberland National Park. Even out here the line reveals territories as it cuts through different conservation regimes.

Mostly, when cared for by the National Trust, walking on the wall is forbidden. In English Heritage’s section you are forced to walk on it. When you remember that English Heritage was a Thatcherite invention intended to monetise conservation, a kind of independent television to the National Trust’s bbc, it sort of makes sense. Draw a line on a map and something strange happens. The tip of the pen leaves a trail of ink staining the symbols and contours on the page. There’s no tripping or stumbling. The line glides across this surface with the frictionless freedom of abstraction, not getting snagged in the undergrowth, caught on crags or bogged down in marsh. With such apparent ease, the graphic reorganises the geographic. You would think that, as an architect, I would be used to this kind of thing. But I’m not. Every time I look at a floorplan, I am consumed by the ambiguity of the mark. Is the width of the line real? Is the real line in the middle of the drawn line? Is the authority of the line the actual mark or the concept to which it refers? Maybe there’s always a confusion between the map and the territory. Sometimes that space even becomes something: houses have been built on the territory covered by the thickness of a line on a map, interpreting the width of the boundary of some form of no-man’s land

between the owned territories it was intended to describe. Back on the wall, there’s always a tension between its authority and its dissolution: in moments such as the encounter with a still-standing arch that retains its power as a gateway between civilisation and the free folk (or however else you want to characterise it), or when contemplating the stones plundered to take on new lives as farmhouses, huts or other structures, or which sank back into the earth, or have been taken home as souvenirs in Gore-Tex pockets. In all those ways the abstract order of the wall has been smudged, smeared and finally returned to the landscape. That offers some comfort in our borderobsessed times: even the most extreme gestures dissolve; every authority is susceptible to ruin. Sam Jacob is an architect

top Remains of Castle Nick along Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland National Park. Photo: John Davidson / Alamy Stock Photo above The changing room of the Roman Baths, Chesters Roman Fort, Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland National Park. Photo: James Emmerson / Alamy Stock Photo

October 2019

A friend once described sex with a violinist as being “like music”. I understood what she was trying to say – it had been harmonious, their bodies in sync – and I congratulated her on getting laid. But the comparison irked me. It reminded me of the misuse of ‘poetic’ in earnest exhibition reviews or the ‘artistic’ that crops up when critics get flummoxed by that film director who uses languid closeups of Spanish moss or a janitor washing his hands. Music can be awful, filled with terror and unspeakable pain, I thought. Had their intercourse evoked Schubert, or something equally tender, as my friend’s doe eyes implied? Or was it closer to Schoenberg, Skrillex, the Spice Girls? Music is under no obligation to be enjoyable. It’s pleasant when it is, but it’s often most affecting when it’s not. ‘You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say,’ Frank Zappa remarked, ‘so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.’ Here was a composer who understood the limits not only of euphony but of what so often passes for seriousness: sometimes you need a Trojan ungulate stuffed with aerated absurdity to communicate a feeling that would elude more conventional forms of expression. Sometimes you need to scream. Creamy giraffes and their sonic counterparts were on my mind when sitting on the bum-numbing steps of the ica’s sunken first-floor gallery in August. Sound and light were spilling into the notoriously leaky space through the dusky entrance-hall-slash-bookshop and wafting all the way to the bar at the hall’s far end, where patrons, starkly outlined against the white walls, nibbled deepfried arancini and suckled pints of Asahi. The audience settled in rows of chairs in front of me, facing a projection screen. I was here to see Elaine Mitchener’s free-jazz trio The Rolling Calf perform live soundtracks to a series of films by, or about, their predecessors in the black avant-garde: Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Donald Rodney. The three musicians stood on the floor to the right of the audience, surrounded by wires and effects pedals. A projector whirred to life behind me and threw onto the screen the image of a lifesize cutout of a woman afloat in shallow waves or propped in dense forest. She looked lost, fragile, frozen. I grew tense and afraid. And later, sure enough, she was set alight, curling up to flame and smoke. The Rolling Calf channelled the film’s menace and alienation through sheets of dissonance. Mitchener’s mouth-clicks, howls and flickery whispers were accompanied by washes of noise from the bowed double bass and piercing screeches

Sounding Off

Patrick Langley struggles to tune in the dissonance

Listening station, part of Black Quantum Futurism: Temporal Deprogramming (2019) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Photo: Myah Jeffers. Courtesy ica, London

ArtReview

from the saxophone. A frenzied recording of a Sun Ra concert filled the screen. The music was relentlessly abrasive. I caught myself hoping the film would end soon, then chided myself: pay attention. It felt vital that I subject my ears to flagellation by something approaching pure noise. Yes, I could instead have wandered into a building site. But I wanted a dose of free jazz, a genre I’ve often dismissed as a po-faced musical tantrum for chin-stroking, latter-day beatniks, the unbridled discordance of which, in Mitchener’s hands, served an altogether more powerful purpose. By invoking a form that, when it emerged during the mid1950s from the black avant-garde, amplified the anguish and hope of the civil rights movement, the trio brought a question to bear on the present: how much has changed? And if the answer is ‘not nearly enough’, how might you even begin to express the scale of that injustice without making a tremendous racket? I glanced at the bar. The contrast between the adjacent spaces was comically stark. Bright politeness in one, shadowy howls in the other. The bar was a different world, but sounds were trafficking across the divide. I wondered, with more self-righteousness than I’d like to admit, how annoying it must have been for the patrons to raise their voices against the gut-wrenching din from next door – music that spoke of pain and rage when all they wanted was a glass of house red. I began to feel that I was sitting in a metaphor for how easy it can be to live with, or ignore, the horror and discord of history – or the tumult and dread of the present. A disconcerting comparison came to mind. In his experiments at Yale, Stanley Milgram used an ugly sound – specifically, the sound of a person screaming behind a partition – to measure the extent of our ability to inflict pain on others when told to do so. Most people, Milgram discovered, ignored the screams and kept hitting the button they were told would administer shocks to the unseen person. I wondered to what extent people who look to culture for catharsis, myself included, could be accused of a similar negligence: of hearing screams leaking through the partitions of race or class but finding it easier to sit in darkened rooms for determined periods, electively punishing our ears, than pay proper attention to those more troubling sounds. The final film ended: free jazz relaxed into applause. I returned to the dusk, the trio’s music echoing in my ears and mixing with traffic in the darkening city. Almost without thinking, I put my headphones on, opened Spotify on my phone and selected a song I knew would lift my dark mood as I walked to the station.

Per Kirkeby

Brick Sculptures Until 22 February 2020

Axel Vervoordt Gallery

‘Brexit won’t change anything,’ Thaddaeus Ropac confidently declared as he announced the opening of a London branch back in 2017. Moving in the opposite direction, David Zwirner cited Brexit as a ‘game-changer’ when confirming in July that Paris would join London, Hong Kong and his adoptive city of New York (where he has three spaces) as host to one of his global network of galleries. In the wake of Britain’s departure, the London space will, he said, become merely ‘a British gallery, not a European one’. Zwirner is not the first megadealer to move to the French capital – Ropac set up there in 1990, Gagosian has kept an elegant townhouse in the 8th arrondissement and a vast hangar in Le Bourget since 2010, and rumours persist that Hauser & Wirth is next on the list – but with Brexit looming, every relocation reads like a statement on its implications. This is not just a sentimental, pro-European gesture by the son of a Cologne dealer, but a strategic move in uncertain times (like the many Britons claiming European passports via a forgotten Irish or Austrian grandparent). Six weeks away from a deadline for exiting the European Union that the prime minister insists (antidemocratically if not illegally) is fixed, and with little prospect of a deal, it is almost impossible to forecast the effects on an industry so reliant on the free movement of artworks and people across borders. If there’s one beneficiary of this tragedy, it is France – and specifically the French artworld. The newly released Artnet Intelligence Report reveals that in the first half of this year the uk’s auction sales plummeted 24 percent (‘its lowest level in more than six years’), a downward trend that is likely to continue as shipping companies warn of added costs, paperwork and delays in the event of no deal being struck. Auction sales in France, meanwhile, gained 13 percent. With an attractive vat rate on imported artworks of 5.5 percent (close to the uk’s current rate of 5 percent, though who knows what will happen), and a president set on creating tax incentives that will keep the rich in the country, the French capital’s appeal for galleries and collectors alike is becoming more and more obvious. From the perspective of younger or midsize galleries native to Paris, however, it might seem that you need to be a global dealership to afford the exorbitant rents attached to any reasonably sized exhibition space in the city centre. So while Zwirner is opening in the space previously occupied by iconic dealer

#Europe

London’s loss is Paris’s gain, says Louise Darblay

Yvon Lambert in Le Marais, a group of local gallerists has taken a different approach, banding together and joining the new Komunuma art complex in the close suburb of Romainville. This joint venture with a utopian ring (the name translates as ‘commune’ or ‘community’ in Esperanto) fills an 11,000sqm pharmaceuticallab-turned-cultural-venue by real-estate developer and cultural foundation Fiminco. Now, it might not be your classic anticapitalist utopia, but in the context of the Parisian artworld it certainly feels otherworldly. The four galleries involved are Air de Paris and In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc, both of which are moving in permanently, and Galerie Sator and Jocelyn Wolff, who will maintain their respective spaces in the 3rd and 20th arrondissements. Indeed the project is one part of a larger collaborative experiment: as tenants of Fiminco, the galleries will cohabit with the foundation’s artists-inresidence and the artist cooperative Jeune Création; the final part of the project, a bespoke building set to open in 2020 and bought by the Île-de-France region, will welcome the public

Representatives of Komunuma at the complex’s building site, Romainville. Photo: Axelle Poison. © and courtesy Fondation Fiminco

ArtReview

collections of the frac (the regional art fund already has spaces in Belleville and at the Château de Rentilly, but will use this one for the storage, conservation and presentation of its collections to the public). The whole Komunuma complex, designed by French studio Freaks Architects (who were involved in redesigning another frac in Bordeaux), will converge around communal spaces such as a café and an auditorium. This kind of partnership between public and private might seem natural to Swiss visitors to Zürich’s Löwenbräukunst arts complex, but in a French cultural landscape shaped by public money and historically suspicious of private patronage, it’s a new step. In the case of Komunuma, as gallerist Vincent Sator explains, it was facilitated by the city’s urban masterplan for ‘Grand Paris’, started in 2007 to better connect Paris ‘intramuros’ – outlined by the ring road built during the 1970s on the site of the city’s nineteenth-century fortifications – and its suburbs to create a more sustainable, less economically divided metropolitan area. (The arrival of the 2024 Olympic Games has lent the project a new level of urgency.) Komunuma is also reminiscent of another city-led initiative of the 1990s, when President François Mitterrand’s Grand Travaux project sought to attract young contemporary galleries to the newly developed Rue Louise Weiss in the 13th arrondissement. If some of these new tenants were successful commercially (among them Perrotin and Almine Rech), the anticipated regeneration of the district as a new urban hub never really took off, and most of them eventually moved out to bigger spaces in livelier quartiers. And now Air de Paris, the last bastion of the original cluster, is migrating north. However the presence of galleries including Ropac (who opened a monumental space in the neighbouring banlieue of Pantin in 2012) supports Fabienne Leclerc’s claim that “it will be easier for collectors to come by car to Romainville than to the Marais”, and offers hope that emerging galleries can find a way to survive in a city that has suddenly become more attractive to the global power players. More space will be made available for other galleries to join in coming years, though as Vincent Sator says, these newcomers would have to share the vision: “It would make no sense to see Hauser & Wirth set up at Komunuma”, he explains by way of example. But who knows in the current climate: when the game changes, you have to be ready for the next move…

LARI PITTMAN

Declaration of Independence

Sep 29, 2019–Jan 5, 2020

1 MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA @hammer_museum | FREE ADMISSION

LARI PITTMAN, TRANSUBSTANTIAL AND NEEDY, 1991. ACRYLIC AND ENAMEL ON MAHOGANY. 82 × 66 IN. (208.3 × 167.6 CM). PRIVATE COLLECTION, COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES. © LARI PITTMAN, COURTESY OF REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES

Gerasimos Floratos on Fire Island. Photo courtesy the author

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Gerasimos Floratos

“I want to be able to have a vision and get it on canvas as soon as possible”

At the end of August, Gerasimos Floratos came out to stay with me on Fire Island, where I’d been spending the summer. We’d had similar vacation encounters before – at my home in the California redwoods, and on the Greek island of Kefalonia, where Floratos occasionally lives and works. While he and I often meet in little paradises, Floratos has spent most of his life in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, just a few blocks from the urban jungle of Times Square. He calls it “the centre of the centre”, the pounding heart of capitalist society, throbbing with hungry tourists, Broadway musicals, glowing advertisements and candy-coloured chain stores. Born in 1986, he grew up here, working at his family’s deli, making sandwiches and selling Lotto tickets. He continues to live and work in the neighbourhood, in a studio he affectionately calls his “concrete dungeon”. Down there, he smokes, blasts trap music and jams his paintings with

the frenetic buzz of the city. He attacks his surfaces with his own personal symbology – the rabbit, the sneaker, the cigarette, the skyscraper, the globe – carving his images with fat paintsticks and a style that riffs on graffiti and cartoons, brand logos and teenage notebook drawings. To add some extra “personality”, he hangs the canvases loose atop irregular stretchers, giving them a sculptural slouch, not unlike the baggy-eyed slackers who loiter within his paintings. Floratos also does a bit of curating, and this autumn he put together a group show, Heavy Sauce, at Fountain House Gallery, the programme of which features artists living with mental illness. The space is also in Hell’s Kitchen and gave him some of his earliest art-viewing experiences. For the show, he provided artists with a prompt in the form of a Lee Lozano quote, which equally evokes

October 2019

his own work: ‘Every day thousands of pounds of paint are applied to buildings in nyc, signs, benches, etc., which can only mean that the city is getting heavier and heavier’. Last year, Floratos and I curated a show together (Guerneville at niad in Richmond, California), and we’ve been discussing art for years, long before his first solo exhibition at White Columns in 2016 and a brisk professional ascent that might be attributed to the intensity he brings to his work and to his relentlessly entrepreneurial mind. He came to the island to take a break from artmaking and the city, where he’d been finishing a new show for Tanya Leighton’s gallery in Berlin. For two days, he forced himself to relax, and we spoke while drawing on the deck, strolling and soaking in the hot tub on a cloudy afternoon. The following interview is his first published conversation.

ross simonini You’ve been pushing pretty hard these last few years. gerasimos floratos I don’t know any other way to be. I still can’t believe this life is an option. But I don’t ever want to take it for granted. So when I have the opportunity to share what I’ve been working on, it makes me want to go deeper, to give more of my time, of myself. rs And yet we often cross paths on vacation spots like this. gf There’s the myth of someone who spends every waking minute giving to their craft… But that’ll kill you. rs On the other hand, even this talk is a form of work for us both. gf Honestly, it’s all the same to me now. My mind is always in the studio, even when I’m not. rs Do you think there’s some validity to the myth of the fully obsessive artist? gf Sure, but there’s the opposite of that, too, the other myth: the Midas touch. The artist who does very little but everything they touch turns to genius. I also think you can create the illusion of that by showing very little. rs Which painters have the Midas touch? gf [Antoni] Tàpies. His stuff is real fast. In his paintings, it’s like he’s really trying to get the fuck out of the room, like he’s trying to finish the job as soon as possible. rs Do you think these myths are problems for artists? gf Personally, I don’t subscribe to either. You got to be both. But it’s 100 percent all good when other artists identify with one of these myths. It’s all performance.

Martial art rs But you have a bit of your own myth, right? The Greek-American Deli Boy of Times Square. Your origin story. gf It’s there. It’s both conscious and unconscious. Myths can be perpetuated, sure, but I just try to stay conscious of my position. rs Another part of your history is capoeira. You were committed to that for years. gf I was very physical as a kid. I did gymnastics and acrobatics and I did capoeira from eight until I was about eighteen. The school I was a part of was called abadá capoeira. It was one of the biggest in the world. My teacher was this very small lady who could hold her own against these six-foot jacked men. She taught me everything. She took me under her wing

and I got obsessed – it’s a whole philosophy, a lifestyle, a music. You have to learn the instruments, how to sing it, how to play the instruments. I had a nickname, tomate, because my face would get so red when I practised. I was fully involved. I wanted to spend my life as a capoeirista. rs Were you drawing back then? gf I was drawing signs for the deli and the capoeira flyers, but I didn’t really think about being an artist. rs Are you physical with your work now? gf I don’t think I could do the scale of painting I’m doing without having trained in capoeira. I have friends who can’t touch their toes. If I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t paint like this. I paint on the ground. To do that, and to work on something that’s 6 x 8 feet, without stepping all over it, you have to get on the ground and be like this [props himself on his arms, rotating his body over an imaginary painting]. You have to be able to reach over the painting and not ruin the wet part you just painted. There are very few

“My teacher was this very small lady who could hold her own against these six-foot jacked men. She taught me everything. She took me under her wing and I got obsessed” ways to do that. It’s hard to get to the middle of the work, unless you create some kind of Mission Impossible system. Or I have to be able to sit for mad-long to paint. Like this [gets into a crouch]. I’m a little better at some of that stuff because I’m so flexible. My flexibility is what allowed me to get into capoeira and acrobatics. I didn’t have to stretch as much. But being flexible is also how I hurt myself. rs What did you hurt? gf My shoulder, knee and hip. I was eighteen and my body was breaking down. rs Is that why you stopped capoeira? gf Partly. I could do these holds, these handstands where your feet hang over your body and you’re hyperextending. It’s beautiful and amazing, and you spend hours and hours on it, and then one day, something just pops. rs Do you ever get pain from painting? gf My wrists definitely do. I push hard when I paint. Also some back pain. And my hips get

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sore from sitting in the studio for hours. rs On a couch? gf Yeah, and a La-Z-Boy. My problem is, I love to lean over, to hunch on a couch and draw on a coffee table for long periods of time. It’s my favourite thing, but it’s the worst. Or I’ll lean on my side. I’m really starting to notice these bad habits.

A beach beneath the street rs So no major studio injuries yet. gf Well, I’ve slipped on paint can lids. I’ll fall back on my hands and it kills my wrists. And I get paint all over me. Takes a whole case of baby wipes to get it off. I also pulled my back recently when I had a flood in my studio. I had a bunch of paintings on the ground and I had to get them all up super quick. rs What flooded? gf I work in the basement and a sewage pipe beneath my stuff got clogged. rs How do you address pain like this? gf I don’t meditate much but sometimes when I have pain, I’ll close my eyes and picture my body as an empty shell and there will be this intense colour in the places that are causing me stress or pain. And I’ll just picture that flowing out of my fingertips or my head, and it helps. I’ll visualise all the tendons and ligaments, and I’ll remember that while I’m painting. Sometimes I’m trying to describe that in the paintings. rs Do you enjoy working in a basement? gf I love it. It’s my beach under the sidewalk. It’s windowless and the building extends under the sidewalk, so I hear every footstep. I feel connected to every person who walks by. I take a little bit of energy from each of them. rs Your studio is right down the street from your family’s deli, where you worked for a long time. The family business seems to affect your relationship to the financial side of art. gf Yeah, some of my New York instinct comes out around money. I have no problem in roleplaying as the person who wants money. When you want to share your work, you have to interact with galleries, so you’re going to have to think about this stuff, whether you like it or not. So how I deal with that is when it comes down to the business side of things, I’m business about it. rs You’re one of the few artists I know willing to dive into that subject, which is refreshing. Most people seem scared of money or refuse to talk about it.

Untitled, 2019, oil and acrylic on canvas, 168 Ă&#x2014; 163 cm. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

October 2019

Gerasimos Floratosâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s New York studio. Photo courtesy the author

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gf Artists need to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. They need to think about money. I think it’s good to have a lack of shame in that department. Not talking about money is how people get taken advantage of. But I think that shame around money comes from the top, not from the bottom. Money is how artists are able to continue working, and I look at it as an essential function of this machine.

Getting real rs Another myth: the starving artist. gf The myth that all artists are anticapitalist. I think capitalism is built into a lot of Pop art, for instance. But I think wealthy people want to imagine that artists hate money because then they have access to something they are not. rs The exotic artist. gf But it’s a detriment to the artist. It makes artists feel they have to be overly passionate diehard rebels. But guess what? If you’re broke, you work for someone. At least in the us. Unless you have your own money. You want to be free, you got to work for it. It’s a complex, fucked-up situation. I just don’t want to feel owned by any gallerist or collector. So I have to take care of my shit so I don’t owe anyone anything. I don’t need to buy new Lululemon track trainers every month. I don’t want to have to think, should I call that person I don’t really know who offered to buy a painting? rs And if you’re showing in galleries, then money is inherently part of the work, even if you refuse to acknowledge it. gf My reality is health insurance and rent. My reality is making work in the face of all my bills. Everyone loves the things that money brings. I don’t think money is a path to anything on its own, but surviving is just as important as making the work. If the artist isn’t around to make the work, nothing else matters. It’s a little cynical, I guess, but ultimately I’d like to fuck off and not have to make money. rs You probably experience that when you spend time in Kefalonia.

I had to be a part of the conversation organically. And once you do that, all those other people – galleries, curators, collectors, museums – they just want to document you. They won’t tell you how to paint. They’re documentarians. You have to show them your vision. rs And how did you do that? gf So how I did that is I was cold emailing people when I was younger. That’s how I met a lot of people. I’d sincerely write people and say, “Hey, will you have me over? I’m a fan.” rs That’s how we met. You asked to come to my studio. gf That’s how we met! And it worked. I’m a huge fan of cold emails. You have to be an advocate of your work. rs You have a lot of confidence. gf It’s sickening [laughs]. But it’s not based on myself being a great person or being super smart. I just really believe in the paintings. I think they are great. People see that I blindly believe in my work and that makes them confident. I think it’s important to express your belief in the work,

“The thing is, you can’t try and make them wonky. That’ll look like a shaped canvas. What you have to do is know how shitty things are built and perfect that by making it shittier” especially if you are making work that isn’t seen so easily. Because if you can’t believe in the work, nobody else will. But still, it takes time, which is all I had. Plus I had the ego for it. And that’s what I started with. I was working like a dog at the deli and I knew I had to make work about my experience. That’s when the work just flowed. During that time – 2015 – I feel like I didn’t make enough paintings. I should have made hundreds. I didn’t have to think. rs Do you ever show work that you’re not confident about?

rs You didn’t go to art school, for instance.

gf I’ve done it. Part of the confidence comes out of the fact that I did everything I could to make this thing mine. Whether that’s sitting in front of it for two days, two months… It’s my connection to the work. But I’ve made the mistake of letting go of the work without having that feeling. And even if the work is well received, I never get over it.

gf I talked a lot about getting involved in communities. I knew if I wanted to show my work

rs Do you spend most of your time alone in the studio?

gf And I could do that because I was selling paintings. I wasn’t showing. I was just working. It’s a sensitive subject, even for me, but I did a talk [for the Syllabus programme at Studio Voltaire] on it some years ago, about alternative ways of entering the artworld.

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gf Yeah. I was an only child. Plus I don’t have assistants. rs Do you want any? gf Naw. I don’t want people to know my shit. I want to be alone in there. My studio environment feeds my impulses. I want to be able to have a vision and get it on canvas as soon as possible. For me that means not having things in perfect places: blues in this corner, reds in that corner. I don’t want any obstructions. My studio is like my bedroom. If you make your space and touch all those items, I feel I might be making a place where I can get some personal magic. Sometimes I use assistants for cleaning or making stretchers, but that’s it.

Making mistakes rs Are your stretchers still pretty wonky? gf The thing is, you can’t try and make them wonky. That’ll look like a shaped canvas. What you have to do is know how shitty things are built and perfect that by making it shittier. You have to enter the mind of a very lazy person who wants to get the job done fast so he can go have a beer. rs Are you like that? gf I just know from that. I know people like that. Repetition kills it though. It’s about innovation. Making mistakes is closer to innovation than repetition. It’s quick, economic. I rush through it and glue and nail and staple it together as fast as possible. And if I work with someone, if I’m too lazy to do the work, I’ll hover over them like an asshole and scream, “Faster! Faster! What are you doing? Just finish it! Soak it in glue!” and that pressure gets it done right. But don’t try to make it wonky or you’ll look like Frank Stella. rs Are the canvases hanging pretty loose these days? gf They get loose because I’m aggressive, not soft. I kick them and slide them and my hands are like jaws that crush the paintings. You can’t fake a touch. I want to see it bend. I want character. I think it’s silly when it’s all tight – unless you’re all about the flatness, if that’s your thing. Some people are great with that, like Rothko. But for me, I think that imperfection is so much more telling about a mood. rs The painting is falling apart. gf They are hanging on to survive. It’s a joke, almost. But it’s also sincere. It’s complex. Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California

1 Bridget Riley, Movement in Squares, 1961, synthetic emulsion on board, 123 × 121 cm. © the artist

2 Stanley Whitney, Stay Song 54, 2019, oil on linen, 102 × 102 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai

3 Charlotte Posenenske, Vierkantrohre Serie D (Square Tubes Series D), 1967–18. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York

ArtReview

Coming up by Martin Herbert

Throwing down geometries; a celebration of sex; dinner parties you’re not invited to; and what will it take for an artist to turn in their grave?

Hayward Gallery, London, It’s a truism that paintAcross town at Lisson, meanwhile, another 3 Charlotte Posenenske 23 October MACBA, quit the artworld in 1968, ings don’t really work in master abstrac– 26 January Barcelona, Lisson Gallery, London, 1 reproduction. Bridget but the artworld won’t quit tionist treads the 18 October 2 October – 2 November her. The German sculptor, who Riley’s do: onscreen, their perceptual shimmer 2 boards. Stanley – 8 March Whitney has geometry and colour in comtook up social work after being can make static images feel like animated gifs. But they’re even better in reality, where one mon with Riley, but that’s about it. For years unable to square her conscience with the art market, only made work for 12 years, but it was can be engulfed by their scale. As her first he’s doggedly pursued one format, stacks of London retrospective in 16 years will reconfirm, enough for her to invent a profound, processual building-block squares on thick horizontals, Riley’s work is also resistant to time. Early Op format. The modular arrangements of squarish wrapped up in sociably loose handling and eye-popping yet nuanced tonalities. Whitney’s breakthroughs like 1961’s Movement in Squares steel tubes for which she’s best known resemble work is heavy on pleasure, but also complication. – a chequerboard pattern emerging from or heating ducts: they’re pointedly industrial, art In these Afternoon Paintings, smaller than he usudisappearing into a vertical abyss, painted for workers, in a way; were sold at cost; and are ally works, he’s tended to begin with a single manufacturable in unlimited editions. New ones when she was thirty – have lost none of their Apollonian dazzle; such works scent of the 60s, are still being made, which seems to have been black square, a sort of weight in the painting for sure, but also operate in a perpetual present. approximately in line with Posenenske’s wishes. around which he improvises. (His work often The Hayward show will track the stately shifts The owners, meanwhile, were free to rearrange invokes comparisons to jazz.) His instinctive in her art, from her increasing use of colour after them however they liked, making Posenenske’s process sets in motion ours: there’s a feeling, in the work, of great stability that licences the the mid-60s, to her compositional innovations: art an equalisation of authorship between artist, eye’s wandering happily from one colour to its the vertical stripes of the 70s, the almost digitalmanufacturer and owner, as well as a merger of feeling gridded parallelograms of the 90s, the complementary or contrasting neighbour, and conceptual, minimal and performance art. That interlocking Matissean shapes of the early a strange sense of event in the works’ offbeat she had second thoughts about her retirement is attested to by the fact that, just before her death 2000s. Those paintings dance, and Riley, now modulations through a rainbow of tones and nearly ninety, may be unparalleled among living in 1985, aged fifty-five, she agreed in principle scalar shifts within the approximate grid. As painters in her grasp of visual rhythm. This the title suggests, Whitney can apparently comto an exhibition, so it’s hard to really cry foul show, accordingly, will be a lift, and – tricked out plete one of these in a few hours, after which that she’s been so widely revived – in this case, as it is with her early figurative paintings, works he’s done for the day, coming back tomorrow through a Jessica Morgan- and Alexis Lowryon paper, recent wall paintings and Riley’s only both knowing and not knowing what he’s curated retrospective that includes both her sculpture, Continuum (1963/2018) – an education. going to do. This man has life figured out. original prototypes and newly made pieces.

October 2019

What Posenenske may not have liked so much sculptural bust Sex-Paralysappeal (1936) – with is the excavation of her inchoate early art, as has its female figure facially adorned with a painted penis, rope and wine glasses – and forward to been seen in gallery shows lately and which may the fourth-wave feminism of the present day. reappear in this show. But she can’t do anything At its centre, addressed via works by artists about that now, and it’s surely for the better that Posenenske’s oeuvre is still operating in the including Betty Tompkins, Tom of Finland, world: tough and principled, shapeshifting, Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter, Lawrence Weiner and valie export, is – as one might illuminating an alternative path. In 1969 Denmark became the first country expect – the question of how the shifting rules on what is legal to depict inflect artistic practice, to make pornography legal, which simultanefrom Annie Sprinkle’s and Jeff Koons’s hybrids ously expanded what artists were able to show of art and porn to, more psychologically, Monica in galleries. That, of course, is 50 years ago now, and the anniversary is being marked by the Bonvicini’s 2016 neon reading ‘no more masturbation’. (An image of which might usefully go expansive, hot-blooded, decades-spanning 4 group exhibition Art & Porn, which debuted on artists’ studio walls alongside Peter Fischli at aros in Aarhus and David Weiss’s How to Work Better, 1991.) Kunsthal Charlottenborg, earlier this year and Also in 1969, Peter Hujar witnessed the 5 Copenhagen, now fetches up at the Stonewall riots 5 October – 12 January Jeu de Paume, Paris, Kunsthal Charlottenborg in New York’s 15 October – 19 January in Copenhagen. Sixty-nine, as it were, is merely West Village, the midpoint of the show, which tracks back which have received their own share of halfcentury commemoration this year. At the to the 1930s via Wilhelm Freddie’s surrealist

time, he’d been a professional artist for two years and was little-known, despite having appeared in a Warhol film. Through the 70s, though, he cemented a reputation as a documenter, in sumptuous monochrome and rich chiaroscuro reflecting his background in commercial photography, of downtown marginal types: figures who lived on their wits and artistry and clung to their individuality, from Candy Darling to Quentin Crisp to Hujar’s lover David Wojnarowicz. In a professional life backed by the aids crisis and underwritten by transience – he died of aids-related causes in 1987 – Hujar graced his subjects with formal dignity both in life and in death. But he’s only been canonised and recognised as a great American photographer lately, the adulation peaking with Speed of Life, this retrospective, which was inaugurated in 2017 and now comes to Paris. Right, enough 1969. In 1979, Judy Chicago made her canonical work The Dinner Party, a kind of stilled celebration of 39 women from

Wilhelm Freddie, Sex-Paralysappeal, 1936, plaster, wood, glass, suede, natural fibre, paint, 78 × 34 × 34 cm. Courtesy Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen 5 Peter Hujar, Candy Darling on her Deathbed, 1973, gelatin silver print. © Peter Hujar Archive, llc. Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York, MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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7 Shirin Neshat, Untitled (Women of Allah), 1996. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

8 Katinka Bock, Sechs Flächen und ein Raum, 2008, clay, 280 × 160 cm. Photo: Olivier Dancy. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris

antiquity to the then-present, their names has an annual, highly The Broad, inscribed on ceramic plates. Forty years later, questionable blackface Los Angeles, 6 Dutch artist/activist Patricia Kaersenhout festival, Zwarte Piet, the 19 October – is giving Chicago’s format location seems apropos. 16 February De Appel, 7 a twist, an expansion. Guess Shirin Neshat has Amsterdam, Who’s Coming to Dinner Too?, been exiled from Iran for most of her 30-year 5 October – career, but the country has never been far from its title referencing the 1967 1 December her mind, not least since she returned there Stanley Kramer-directed comedy about interracial marriage, is an instalin 1990 after 12 years away and was disturbed lation of over 50 glass vessels, intended as a to find the restrictions the Islamic Revolution form of ‘dining with the dead’ and honouring had wrought – as her largest exhibition yet 38 women of colour who were also ‘heroines of will confirm. Across eight ‘immersive’ video resistance’. This is a work in progress, so where installations and some 320 photographs, it a 2017 iteration featured beaded table-runners, tracks Neshat’s poetic, emotive engagement here Kaersenhout adds sculptural glassware with displacement and identity inside and outside of her native land. Here, a viewer will rooted in African, Latin American and Asian tableware, while the project was led up to by a move from the compound symbolism (guns, ‘stitch-in’ to make more table settings, intended texts, veils) of her 1994 Women of Allah photoas a consciousness-raising exercise and featuring graphic portraits, through gender-dividing Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for multiscreen videoworks such as Rapture (1999), the Black Panther Party. Given that Holland still where the centralised viewer cannot observe

October 2019

the active male and passive female protagonists at once; pivot on her 2001 collaboration with Phillip Glass, Passage, into works dealing with the post-9/11 world and the Arab Spring, and arrive at a major new work, Land of Dreams (2019), combining photography and video. Needless to say, in a country currently riven by intolerance and sexism (not to mention the omnipresent tension between the us and Iran), all of this ought to feel utterly timely. Displacement is also 8 the engine of Katinka Lafayette Anticipations, Bock’s work, though in an Paris, 9 October – 5 January entirely different manner. Long resident in Paris but not showing there until now, the German sculptor has a modus operandi based, often, around transferring materials from architecture or from nature into the gallery, and on a respectful approach to sculpting that more often involves placement and bending than cutting or heavy reshaping.

Her show for Lafayette Anticipations draws on the restoration of a copper-domed building in Hanover, the Anzeiger-Hochhaus, in whose basement two important German weeklies, Der Spiegel and Der Stern, were birthed. While the dome is being renewed, Bock has made off with some of the old, green-patinated copper in a suspended installation in the building’s central tower, and which summarises a movement – from basement creativity upward and outward – that Bock sees analogised in the Rem Koolhaas/oma-designed Lafayette Anticipations building, with its hydraulic floors that literally rise towards the rooftop. Galerie Isabella Katinka Bock has a Bortolozzi, Berlin, great, onomatopoeic 17 September name, but it might be – 2 November 9 bettered by Diamond Stingily’s. The Chicago artist and poet (not 10 to mention podcaster), named one of Forbes

magazine’s ‘30 under 30’ in 2017, is still in her twenties and has established herself as a force in the artworld: in 2014 she announced herself with Forever in Our Hearts, an entrance-as-exit that simulated the artist’s death via funerary materials; later works, incorporating hair barrettes and beads, locked doors, baseball bats and chainlink fences and videos, homed in on racial violence. Her show late last year at Freedman Fitzpatrick in Paris, offered an array of schematic, black-headed dolls – some with two heads – and a background narrative about an unnamed place with culture impenetrable to outsiders, part of it based on the giving of, indeed, two-headed dolls. What she’ll do in Berlin is as yet unknown and unknowable, an increasingly rare quality in itself. Two good handles, then. And, in one of the cornier links in this column’s chequered history, Haegue Yang’s MoMA, New York, 21 October – Spring

solo show at moma is called, indeed, Handles. Handles, for the Korean artist, are ‘points of attachment and material catalysts for movement and change’. Appropriately, then, the six sculptures here, a diversity of geometric forms sprouting the titular appendages and surrounded by son et lumière aspects, are there to be activated. Performers wheel them on casters, whence they make rattling, bell-like sounds, and the space is additionally alive with the sound of birdsong, a seemingly peaceable noise that was actually recorded in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea during the 2018 summit. As such, underlying the idealist vibe of this work, with its sonic equanimity and visual references to twentieth-century modernism (especially Sophie Taeuber-Arp) and the mysticism of gi Gurdjieff, is both an ambient tension and a pointer towards the possibility of renewal.

9 Diamond Stingily, Off Kedzie, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

10 Haegue Yang, Sonic Coupe Copper – Enclosed Unity from the installation Handles, 2019, powder-coated steel frame, mesh, and handles, ball bearing, casters, copper plated bells, metal rings, 212 × 110 × 110 cm. © and courtesy the artist

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It’s unbelievable! It’s a miracle! It’s a tv dinner! 49

Pope.L Acting Out by Ben Eastham

How Much is that Nigger in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl, New York, 1991, digital c-print on gold fibre silk paper, 25 Ă&#x2014; 39 cm

ArtReview

‘Black people are the window and the breaking of the window,’ says, even if they were initially undertaken alone, because “I was the reads Pope.L’s 2004 text drawing of the same title. ‘Purple people’, only one I could depend on to do it”. Yet their apparent expression of according to another work in his ‘Skin Set’ series (1997–2011), ‘are solidarity through self-abasement is provocative (a word one comes the end of orange people’, who elsewhere are defined as ‘god when across a lot in researching these works), with early iterations drawing She is shitting’. At Documenta 14 in Kassel, a selection of these works criticism from members of the public who read the performances raised the dilemma (acute for the exhibition’s predominantly white as reinforcing racist stereotypes. The artist has previously stated, in European audience) of how to respond to the patent absurdity of such an interview in bomb magazine, that ‘I crawl to remember’, and the statements as White People Are the Cliff and What Comes After or Black action seems, like much of his work, to explore the space between felt People Are the Wet Grass at Morning (both 2001–02). The irresistible experience (of suffering, of abjection) and the abstract definitions impulse to laugh is quickly overtaken by a commingled shame and that shape people’s realities (for example, that one loosely identified anxiety. Isn’t it true, after a moment’s reflection, that historic in- group of people is superior to another). When pressed on what it was justices have been perpetrated in the name of racial definitions he was trying to call to mind on these crawls, he resists the implication no less preposterous for having been that these social and collective memosupported by pseudosciences like phreries can ever neatly be articulated: “I am For his latest piece of absurdist nology or, let’s not forget, racist histotrying to remember things I don’t want open-air theatre, the artist and 140 ries of art? And that equally imbecilic to forget and things – possibly things – volunteers will wriggle two-andthings maybe I know but don’t know I statements underpin the strain of identitarian politics that seems not only to know”. a-half kilometres across Manhattan persist in Europe and the United States Which calls to mind both Socrates’s but to be in the ascendant? And that people are dying as a conse- equation of wisdom with awareness of one’s own ignorance and Donald quence? So why was I laughing? Rumsfeld’s coining of the (unfairly maligned, in epistemological if not ‘The friendliest black artist in America©’, as Pope.L’s business card ethical terms) phrase ‘known unknowns’. This question of what it is puts it, clearly relishes the discomfiting effects of charged language. even possible to articulate underpins works like Circa (2015), a series When in our email correspondence I ask him, with perhaps excessive of 24 small paintings. Bearing the influence of language-based artists decorum, whether member, the title of his forthcoming retrospective such as Joseph Kosuth, they combine the word ‘fuchsia’ with associat the newly reopened moma, gestures at the same time to constit- ated words drawn from a rap rhyme generator. That the paintings are uent parts of society and the body (it also derives from a 1996 walk rendered in a colour only vaguely resembling fuchsia, and that the through Harlem, the full title of which is Member a.k.a. Schlong Journey, word itself is consistently misspelled, firstly draws attention to the for which he strapped a four-metre-long white pole to his crotch), he space between word and object and then posits it as a place – if you’ll says that “it sounds funnier coming from you” before clarifying that forgive the lapse into the kind of ten-dollar language that the artist is his “original title of the exhibition was How Much Is That Nigger In The apt to satirise – of free play outside the symbolic order. Which is to say Window”. moma, perhaps unsurprisingly, “had concerns”. Factor in a space outside the definitions through which people are kept ‘in their the unconventional nom de plume (a first name, William, has been place’: “When people insist on a specific meaning,” he writes to me, dropped), and the impression is that words matter to this artist not “nine times out of ten, it’s a struggle for power… people use language to do things, to get things done, like say, enslave and control people”. because they are fixed but because they can be manipulated. A mistrust of categorical distinctions also characterises a body of The relationship between knowledge, language and power is work – now showcased in a new installation for the Whitney and a explored in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), in which American civilisation is threatened by a deadly collaborative performance supported by If conventional language is a means epidemic of black culture closely the Public Art Fund, as well as the moma resembling jazz. Attempts to restore exhibition, which focuses on a selecof classifying and dividing, then it is order are led by an eight-hundredtion of key performances – that moves across painting, writing, theatre, video the responsibility of writers and artists year-old white European Crusader and leader of the Atonist cult (it’s and sculpture. Yet the artist remains (and Pope.L is both) to disrupt it complicated), who is accused by the most closely associated with a series of public performances, including the early Times Square Crawl (1978) novel’s protagonist of perpetuating the myth ‘that all Negroes and Tompkins Square Crawl (1991), for which he dragged himself on experience the world the same way’ in order to prevent ‘them’ his belly across crowded New York communal spaces. Reading as a from breaking through ‘the ceiling above which no slave would be protest against the city’s inequalities, a critique of the American dream allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds’. The and a reminder of the physical suffering that underpins progress as novel’s title plays on the corruption of the name of a West African measured in a capitalist society, The Great White Way, 22 miles, 9 years, god worshipped by early American slaves, which has come in 1 street (2001–09) saw the artist don a Superman outfit, strap a skate- English to denote meaningless or irrational speech. The categories board to his back and, across a series of crawls spanning the first enshrined in words – whether ‘Negroes’ or its more pejorative corrupdecade of the twenty-first century, heave himself along Broadway. tion – are the means by which minorities are not only ‘othered’ but For his latest piece of absurdist open-air theatre, titled Conquest and subjugated. Meaning that it is a responsibility of writers and artists supported by the Public Art Fund, the artist and 140 volunteers will (and Pope.L is both) to disrupt the language of power. wriggle two-and-a-half kilometres across Manhattan. One means of contesting the truth values contained in those These actions always had at their heart the social collective, Pope.L words is to perform them, which is why we most closely associate the

October 2019

Member a.k.a. Schlong Journey New York, 1996, digital c-print on gold fibre silk paper, 39 Ă&#x2014; 25 cm

ArtReview

Green People Are Flavouring, 2011, mixed media on vellum, 31 Ã&#x2014; 23 cm

October 2019

Rebus, 2017–18, acrylic, ballpoint, chalk, felt, graphite, grommets, ink, marker, painter’s tape, paper, Post-its, oil stick and towel on linen, 235 × 305 cm

ArtReview

Pilgrims, 2018, acrylic, oil, charcoal, ink and paper towel on wood panels with aluminium support, 244 Ă&#x2014; 245 Ă&#x2014; 13 cm

October 2019

acting out of language with legal speech and its theatrical disputes and unity. But the artist warns that while the titles of the works over the meaning of laws written in black and white. Another (and “frame them as knowable… their construction does not”. So visitors one often taken by those denied equal access to the law) is, in the shouldn’t expect any easy answers. artist’s description, to “act out”, which he describes as “to misbehave, Nor should they expect solutions. ‘When you mix art + politics,’ usually in a childish way”. This Dadaist refusal to conform to socially reads a line in Rap Street Journal (1992), ‘you always end up treating and linguistically determined expectations of the individual – by, for the symptoms.’ Which, bearing in mind that this is the artist responexample, chaining oneself to a bank using a three-metre-long string sible for the 11m-long, pointedly tattered Stars and Stripes (Trinket, of sausage while wearing only a skirt made out of dollar bills (atm 2008/15) that flapped behind Kendrick Lamar as he performed at the Piece, 1997) – “is always done to be witnessed. One acts out for and Black Entertainment Television Awards in 2015, begs the question of whether or not art can ever address the underlying causes of the against an other.” It is easy to find comparisons between Pope.L’s highly literary prac- social injustice that his work protests. But, the artist responds, the tice (he teaches writing and performance at the University of Chicago) question might be the wrong one: “Maybe after all there are only and works such as Toni Morrison’s ever symptoms”. Beloved (1987), which also formalises If, as he goes on to suggest, “origins The artist warns that while the titles the breakdown of order in the collapse and causes are just distractions and of the works “frame them as knowable… of language by giving voice to a ghost. fantasies”, then it’s as misguided to their construction does not”. So visitors look for fundamental causes as it is to Which is to say, a repressed voice that breaks in unpredictable ways into the look for underlying truths of the kind shouldn’t expect any easy answers collective consciousness. This impulse that have historically been used to to amplify invisible and unacknowledged voices haunts Pope.L’s underpin power differentials. If the world is as we represent it, then Whispering Campaign (2017), which installed speakers in public spaces the way we use language and images (which is to say art) is the means across Kassel and Athens so that residents would unexpectedly over- by which we create reality. But, once again, this thought only prompts hear snatches of stories in a variety of languages. The effect is to alert a second take: are not such grandiose statements guilty of the same passersby to how many stories there are in the world that do not, hubris – the belief that it is possible to grasp a whole truth, articulate because the speech of some is privileged over others, reach an audience. a simple solution, apply abstract systems universally – that the artist These histories from below are also the subject of a new installa- has spent four decades undermining? “It’s kind of depressing isn’t tion for the Whitney, which is, according to the advance information, it?” Pope L. writes at the end of our correspondence. “Uncertainty, ‘inspired by the fountain, the public arena, and John Cage’s concep- contradiction, confusion! Ignorance is a virtue.” ar tion of music and sound’. Like Whispering Campaign, the title of Choir both reflects the communal turn of these new works and suggests Member: Pope.L 1978–2001 is on show at moma, New York, analogies between sound and society; where the former implies the 21 October – January 2020; the performance Conquest took place in spiteful and targeted dissemination of misinformation to destroy a New York on 21 September; Choir is on show at the Whitney Museum reputation, the latter carries associations of harmony, collaboration of American Art, also in New York, 10 October – Winter 2020

ArtReview

facing page Whispering Campaign, 2017, sound installation at Documenta 14, Athens. Photo: Freddie Faulkenberry

above Times Square Crawl a.k.a. Meditation Square Pieces, New York, 1978, digital c-print on gold fibre silk paper, 25 Ă&#x2014; 39 cm

October 2019

all images ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

On the eve of Nam June Paik’s retrospective at Tate Modern, London, ArtReview asked artists and an academic to respond to the Korean artist’s legacy ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, How did you first encounter the work of Nam June Paik? Paik accosted us in Paris, on the rue de Seine, in front of his hotel, La Louisiane, during the open market. Then he ran up to his room and brought us back a catalogue of his current show. Do you have a favourite work? Vidéo tricolore (1982) for its African-flavoured music soundtrack. Has his work influenced your own work directly or indirectly? Yes. It tells us that it’s perilous to work with a chaebol. Do you see his work as having an influence more widely today? Yes, as you can see. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge) are artists based in Seoul

ArtReview

The first works by Nam June Paik I came across were perhaps not the obvious ones. I was studying graphic design in Vienna but we had a course on video. Of course, this is Austria, so Fluxus dominated. Our teacher showed us this black-and-white documentation of a musical performance Paik did which was totally crazy, the band were on the floor; at one point he jumped off the stage, grabbed hold of John Cage, poured shampoo in his hair and cut off his tie. I recently saw the video synthesisers he made with Shuya Abe, at HKW in Berlin, in which there’s also this total sense of freedom, something I think we have lost in a lot of art today. My favourite work however is Magnet TV, from 1965, in which an industrial magnet is placed on top of a television set so as to interfere with the signal. It’s so direct as it unveils the meta-reality of technology; it hits you in the stomach like a bullet. To reveal how technology works, you need to break it. Obviously technology has moved on since he was working, but I don’t think our relationship with it has really changed that much. Growing up when Yugoslavia, itself an unfinished utopia, was collapsing, I found it obvious that technology was neither intrinsically good or bad. My 2013 film .yu and .me is about the beginning of the internet in Yugoslavia. In the 1990s it promised to be a tool for freedom, but only because it was under the control of mathematicians and scientists; the more dominant technology of the time was television, however, and that was the enemy of the people, ´ because it was entirely in the hands of Miloševic. As a consequence, it was impossible to get real information back then; television was a mechanism for filtering out the truth. Tech is like the sun: we need it, but it can cause an incredible amount of damage. ´ is Aleksandra Domanovic an artist based in Berlin

October 2019

I first saw Nam June Paik in his Guggenheim show in 2000 whilst on an art-school trip. It was a wonderfully installed show with many works, including collaborative pieces with Merce Cunningham. There were also lasers. At the time I remember wondering how one of the artworks qualified as art, yet having an overwhelming feeling of reassurance that it was in a museum. It was a piece called Random Access (1963/2000), which consisted of seemingly randomly placed strips of magnetic tape adhered to the white gallery wall. There was also a tape head hanging next to it, and one could rub it against the tape to audibly reveal what was encoded on there. I think it is very clear my work is influenced by Paik. I would say that he is one of the undisputed godfathers of media art: art that is made with mass-media technologies of the twentieth century. He’s also super interesting because he introduced an Eastern ideology to the West, and so as my recent collaborator Victor Wang would argue, it was a Korean that invented media art – not an American. I think living in New York with people like Marshall McLuhan around him really paved the way for a new genre in art to emerge. Haroon Mirza is an artist based in London

ArtReview

In 1986 I saw Nam June Paik’s performance with Joseph Beuys at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. It was around the time I was starting my career as a young artist in Japan. Since then our paths coincided at two significant national art events of Korea. We were both invited to show at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in commemoration of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and then also at the Taejon Expo in 1993. We became close friends as artists working mainly outside of our motherland. I particularly like his works Bye Bye Kipling (1986) and Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984). Witnessing the collaborative production process of Bye Bye Kipling in Japan was a shocking lesson for me, and his audacious will to connect the world through his art back then is still a powerful inspiration today. Paik taught me to love Korean culture and be bold in scale. He believed that the peculiar shamanistic culture of Korea, what he referred to as ‘phantasm’, allowed Korean artists to fantasise and dream in largescale. I have been developing a collaborative project around the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) in Korea for the past five years. Every time I run into a wall, I ask myself, “What would Nam June Paik have done?” Although he is not here with us today, he is my spiritual teacher for the DMZ project. Nam June Paik was a pioneer. He had already lived a world that we are only now learning to see. Jae-Eun Choi is an artist based in Seoul

October 2019

tv Personality by Juliet Jacques

Could Nam June Paikâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s utopian experiments in global broadcasting show us how to counter the divisive effects of digital media culture? 62

ArtReview

these and preceding pages Good Morning Mr. Orwell (stills), 1984, single-channel video, colour, sound, 30min. ÂŠ the estate of the artist. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (eai), New York

October 2019

On New Year’s Day 1984, using a conference link between a pbs station from which were turned into visual line formations by an integrated in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and in collaboration sound-frequency amplifier. with broadcasters in Germany and Korea, Nam June Paik broadcast Paik was a craftsman in his medium – during the late 1960s he built Good Morning, Mr. Orwell to 25 million people across the world. Now a video synthesiser with tv technician Shuya Abe that allowed him to accessible via YouTube, the hourlong television programme was, in mix seven different colours received from seven cameras into a single the artist’s own words, a compilation of ‘positive and interactive uses image – as much as a media theorist, famously coining the phrase of global media, which Mr. Orwell, the first media prophet, could never ‘electronic superhighway’ in 1974. These experiments advanced the have predicted’. Testament to Paik’s belief (contra Orwell’s 1984, 1949) potential of telecommunications as a two-way system and challenged that art could break down geographical and cultural barriers, this the top-down, one-to-many structures of cinema and television. variety show combined live and recorded sections and showcased The Korean artist, who died in 2006 (after having moved to New musicians such as Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel alongside York in 1964), lived to witness the invention of the Internet and the Salvador Dalí, Joseph Beuys and Paik’s mentor, John Cage. The effect rise of broadband, but never made work specifically for distribution was to take the avant-garde out of the gallery and onto a medium more via digital networks. Still, it feels appropriate that his videos have been commonly associated with mass entertainment, the revolutionary made easily available on a platform like YouTube, as well as downpotential of which was dismissed by social loadable via UbuWeb – the avant-garde theorists including Guy Debord, who, in repository started by Kenneth Goldsmith Paik’s experiments advanced the Panegyric (1989), called television a weapon in 1996 in response to the marginal distripotential of telecommunications for the ‘constant reinforcement of the bution of experimental and underground and challenged the top-down conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds”’. art, films and texts. But the potential for Televisions had featured heavily in structures of cinema and television television to deliver art to a mass audience Paik’s work since the beginning of his that Paik identified has remained largely career as part of the Fluxus movement in West Germany (to which he unrealised. In the uk, Channel 4 continues to commission approxhad moved from Tokyo, the city to which his family had emigrated imately 50 short artist films each year through their Random Acts during the Korean War, to study music history) alongside Wolf strand, and artists including Grayson Perry and Jeremy Deller have Vostell, another pioneer of the medium. In Exposition of Music – recently presented documentary series on the subjects of, respecElectronic Television (1963), he laid 13 ‘prepared’ tvs on their sides, their tively, the British class structure and rave culture. Yayoi Kusama reception detuned so that the static was presented as a constantly designed T-shirts for Nippon tv’s annual 24-hour charity fundraiser shifting work of audiovisual art. The work displayed the influence in 2013, and also participated in Peter Gabriel’s music and art videoof Cage in encouraging its audience to attend to images and sounds game experiment eve (1996). But these initiatives invite artists to that they would normally disregard, while the composer’s advice that work within existing televisual formats rather than invent new ones, Paik explore Buddhist philosophies in his work can be identified in as Paik and his contemporaries Laurie Anderson and Robert Ashley, Zen for tv (1963), which reduced the tv picture to a wavering vertical with his 1984 tv opera Perfect Lives, strove to do; they do not aim to jolt line. Participation tv (1963/98), meanwhile, made the medium inter- the viewer with any formal strangeness like the brief, unannounced active, allowing viewers to modify a set of lines that appeared on microdramas that Stan Douglas inserted between programmes on the screen by speaking into an attached microphone, the signals Canadian television between 1987 and 88.

Self-Portrait, 2005, single-channel video installation with 10’’ lcd colour monitor, 35 × 46 × 50 cm. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel. Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

ArtReview

The live global broadcast that made Good Morning, Mr. Orwell so artist films and videos may occasionally spring into the feeds of those distinctive at the time is now easily replicated through the Internet, who have not followed them, but these very rare intermissions have but the sense of event that accompanies a huge audience watching nothing like the reach provided by television. Indeed, despite the simultaneously at a determined time has been diluted, if not early enthusiasm for the Internet’s democratising potential in relacompletely destroyed. What has been lost is something of the element tion to new art, it can feel that the digital revolution of recent decades of chance encounter that is so important to Paik’s practice. The gener- has ended up reinforcing boundaries between popular entertainment ative potential of unpredicted meetings is apparent in Good Morning, and works of art or communal events of the kind produced by Paik, Mr. Orwell, which brought disparate artists and musicians together, rather than eroding them. In addition, large social-media platforms via satellite if not in person, in new creative relationships. In a similar tend not just to hide artists’ work from the wider public, but also to spirit, many of my most powerful encounters with artist films and censor them, illustrating the amount of power these companies now videos, as when I channel-flicked onto a Man Ray film on bbc Four wield and making both Paik’s optimism and the techno-utopianism many years ago, were made more memorable by their unexpectedness, of early Internet adopters hard to sustain. their formal experimentation exposing the conventions of the vast It is not hard to imagine a contemporary equivalent of Paik proposmajority of television programming. YouTube’s algorithms may, over ing a showcase of contemporary artists and musicians to a streamtime, throw up an occasional surprise for ing platform such as Amazon Prime or Netflix. The political implications would those who have trained them by watching Interplay between Internet and be different to Paik’s use of American hours of avant-garde film (though even television broadcasters has the public-access television, or uk artists’ colthen it may just default to alt-right ideopotential to break through the logues), but will not bring such works to laboration with the publicly funded bbc, a general audience; indispensable though not to mention that such companies ‘filter bubble’ of social media it is, UbuWeb is daunting for the uninimight baulk at such largescale and potentiated, with its Film & Video index providing no more than an alpha- tially unprofitable projects, even if the artists had no ethical qualms betised list of names for visitors to click through. about cooperating with them (a situation which in the current context Social media has, it’s true, allowed for a sense of occasion to be seems unlikely). International coordination between large, nationally created around works such as John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, funded arts organisations could allow the creation of new works with Texas) (2017), a real-time, computer-generated simulation of the site similar scope to the New Year’s celebration, with the added bonus in Texas where a massive oil-gusher announced the dawn of the of operating in Paik’s spirit of working across national and cultural modern oil industry. The simulation ran online for a year but broke barriers. If the sense of event generated for Good Morning, Mr. Orwell unannounced onto national television broadcasts on Earth Day in could be recaptured, it might even be that the comments section of April 2017, creating the kind of disruption that Douglas had achieved YouTube and the generation of memes and social media chatter could in Canada three decades earlier. This interplay between Internet and create more audience interaction than even Paik could have imagined. television broadcasters has the potential to break through the filter Something that might, with borders hardening all over the world, give bubble of social media, according to which algorithms limit our cause for a little more technological optimism. ar exposure to new information by guiding us towards things that our browsing history suggests we already ‘like’. Specialist accounts for Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London

tv Garden 1974–1977, 2002, single-channel video installation with live plants and television monitors (colour, sound). Courtesy Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

October 2019

Nam June Paik’s Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984) is made of contradictions. Like the exposed wires cluttering his studios, in Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, Paik lays out a mess of dialectical tangles for the viewer to braid together. Here are four of them. Onceness/repetition For Paik, the allure of the satellite broadcast was bound up in what he dubbed ‘onceness’ – the unique and unrepeatable nature of the televisual event. Through live TV, onceness yoked media to the human condition. Writing a year after GMMO, Paik enthused: ‘Through LIVE video art, we are finally able to deal very concretely with the central problems of human existence (chance, hazard, bet, venture). Pascal and Sartre would be very jealous of video artists!!!’ In these lines, as in the work itself, Paik transferred the transgressive and performative energy of his Fluxus action pieces to the putatively mechanically reproducible art of video. His valorisation of the fleeting moment is only more deeply felt today, in a media culture of nearly limitless capture and playback. Ephemerality/Accumulation Onceness elided the machinations of the art market. In its broadcast to millions of homes via public television stations, Paik presented an artwork that could not be bought, auctioned or owned. The emphasis was on communication, rather than accumulation. Nevertheless, the material seen in the broadcast, along with the images produced for Paik’s other satellite works, Bye Bye Kipling (1986) and Wrap Around the World (1988), provided Paik with the raw material that would populate the robots, installations and video walls that followed. Paik regularly returned to these works, repurposing the satellite works in a proliferating act of selfremix, signalling an early awareness of the cultural shift toward a media ecology in which a surfeit of images would be decontextualised and recontextualised as they circulated through various media platforms.

ArtReview

Collaboration/Power GMMO’s utopian depiction of cross-cultural collaboration and expression could only be marshalled via satellite, a territorialised media technology largely available only to governments and powerful corporates. Developed at the same time as the technologies that would make up the internet, satellites brandished a similar promise of expansive networked communication that was ultimately circumscribed by systems of capital and power, which would employ satellite technology for real-life Orwellian remote sensing and military surveillance. Yet while Paik initially bemoaned the numerous technical gaffes and glitches on display in GMMO’s original broadcast, his willingness to embrace failure as a generative mode reminds us of the dangers of placing trust in imagined failsafes that will keep our precarious information, political and economic systems running without a hitch. Multiplicity/Singularity Museumgoers can still see GMMO, but what they are seeing is an edit of the original – Paik, working with video artist Paul Garrin, trimmed the hourplus programme down to a tighter 38-minute edition, distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. While this later version was briefly made available by Sony as a limited-edition VHS tape, and while various institutions have played with installing the singlechannel version of the work across multiple screens, it is impossible to see the original broadcast as it went out over the airwaves. This is perhaps Paik’s greatest conceptual gambit with GMMO – there is no definitive version of the piece. Rather than insist that we identify an original, it demands that we consider it relationally, as a source for the creation of other artworks altogether. Gregory Zinman is an academic and writer. His book We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik, edited with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, is published by The MIT Press this month

October 2019

I can’t remember exactly when, or where, I first came across the work of Nam June Paik, but I am almost completely sure it was in print, when I was a student. Without a doubt, however, my favourite work of his is TV Buddha – which manages with the simplest of elements and the clearest of structure to evoke an unending chain of associations in its cybernetic recursivity. It is at once devout and ironic, spiritual and base, of the past and the present. While I do not recall ever having consciously thought of Nam June Paik’s work in relation to my own, his works have become something like air… and I guess I don’t really think very often about the air I breathe, except in those rare moments I stop to meditate, like the camera looking at the Buddha looking at the television looking back at the Buddha. The field of Nam June Paik’s activities were so wide and so far-reaching that I think they have gone beyond influence to becoming some kind of necessity that we had to pass through. Ho Tzu Nyen is an artist based in Singapore

ArtReview

I do not remember the first time I encountered the work of Nam June Paik, but I think it involved a piano. Nixon (1965/2002) is one of the best examples of a work in which form and content are collapsed; conjoined so concisely and beautifully that the political claim and the technological intervention are inseparably intertwined. I think I took a lot from his work as a formalisation of what I took from Marshall McLuhan. That is a foundational encounter with the understanding that mediation itself is an aesthetic practice. His work made me attuned to the politics of amplification, network and broadcast. By now his influence has reached a level that is so pervasive to artists working with the politics of technology that it has become invisible. Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist based in Beirut

October 2019

Mark Bradford This is Not America Interview by Mark Rappolt

ArtReview

ArtReview caught up with Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford in Shanghai at the launch of an exhibition titled Los Angeles, a ten-year survey of his painting, sculpture and videowork at the Long Museum, West Bund. It includes largescale sculptures such as Mithra (2008), an arklike structure created for Prospect.1 in New Orleans as a sign of potential renewal in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and a new series of paintings referencing the Watts Rebellion, which took place in Los Angeles in 1965. While many of the works draw on the particular conditions of the urban experience in the us, other works respond specifically to the Long Museum’s industrial architecture or, in the case of a series of suspended globes (in which the African continent holds a more dominant position than it does in traditional projections), look to a wider perspective. Beyond his own creative production, Bradford cofounded the la-based nonprofit Art + Practice, in 2013, which is a hybrid exhibition space and social services centre for young adults who are on the point of exiting the foster-care system. In 2017, as part of his presentation at the us Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he included a training programme for local prisoners. Back in Shanghai it is July and the city is at its hottest and most humid. Even the coolest of cucumbers is sweating, and the flowers that marked the exhibition’s opening the night before are starting to wilt. artreview There’s a big sign outside this museum… mark bradford …that says ‘Los Angeles’. ar I think that there is something very architectural, perhaps more specifically urban, about the surface and skin of your paintings. mb Yes, which I’ve always been kind of obsessed with: architecture, skin, grids, repetition. ar Are you conscious of an audience here in Shanghai that might not be familiar with LA, that might not speak English and not be able to piece together the context for some of the works? mb I’d say that they would probably be less familiar with the complexity of AfricanAmerican culture, because everyone has some form of YouTube or WeChat or Instagram, so unfortunately we’re broadcasting stereotypes all over the world. People are like, “Oh, I know you!” It’s horrible. It’s just shameless, right? I think it’s actually doing us a disservice in some ways. People saying, “Oh, I know. I’ve seen you on YouTube. I’ve seen you on Instagram. I’ve seen you on Vine.” And I’m like, “ok. Wow, all right.” ar Are you conscious then about the focus being on your person – your height, your being an African American in China – as much as your art?

mb In this instance, I made a T-shirt that said, ‘Yes, I am two metres, seven centimetres’ [in Chinese and on sale in the gift shop]. Every once in a while, I decide to play with it. Sometimes I’ll just say, “I don’t feel like being an object. I think I’ll be a subject playing with an object.” It’s not going away. It comes up in almost every article – they just comment on my physicality. What I hope comes through is a reaction like, “Huh? ok, this is not the blackness that I’m familiar with”. That’s all you want: plurality. ar That is the interesting thing about having a place as the title of the show – and I mean, more specifically, a place that is not where the show is – because it already embeds a context as a subject matter that is not about your identity. mb That’s what I wanted to do. ar Is that something that’s a struggle these days?

“Los Angeles is a myth that’s lodged in our collective memory. It’s nowhere and everywhere. It’s that California sunshine – ‘Hollywood’. I love how in the artworld they’re always saying, ‘la is the place, la is the place. Everyone is moving there.’ But la has always been the same. It’s manufactured. It’s very dystopian. It’s almost a new Las Vegas” mb No. I think that me and the things that I’m interested in, and Mark Bradford, are two separate conversations. What I really try to do is be very straightforward about the things I’m interested in and very clear when I’m talking. ar What are you interested in now? mb I’m interested in public education. If we look at the practitioners in the artworld and what schools they come from, are we developing practitioners from state schools that come out of university owing a modest amount? Or are we constantly going back to the Ivy Leagues? I’m fascinated by that. I’ve been doing a lot more work than just with state schools. Because if we’re asking different questions, but we’re still going to the same groups, isn’t that a way that economic facing page Dancing in the Street (stills), 2019, video, 2 min 50 sec. © the artist

October 2019

and power hierarchies are built in? There are very few African-American gallery directors. There are certain things that are just built-in, and so on a social level, it’s something I’m fascinated by. ar How do you feel when you look back at an older work? Do you ever wonder, “What was I thinking at the time?” Or is it always clear that you knew exactly where you were and what you were thinking? mb I would say that all the works are like a relationship. I do the best I can when I’m in it. And when I’m out of it, I look back, and I’m like, “Well, I could have done a little better”. ar Do you ever do that? mb Go back and reenter it? No, when it’s done, it’s done. I really know and understand that I can control what’s in my studio. I do know that. I can’t control a lot of stuff – less and less, actually – but I sure as hell can control that. Nobody gets to my studio, not a gallery, not a collector, no one is telling me what to do. I do that. I decide. ar How accepting of letting go are you once a work has left the studio? mb You have to let it go. Some artists get crazy with it, but you have to let it go. I think that if you’ve done everything that you can, and you’ve answered everything that you can, then you should be able to let it go. There’s nothing more that I could do. My maturity level is not the same as it was 20 years ago, but 20 years ago, I did the best that I could at that level. I’ve grown. I can look at my own work and I can see the growth. ar How effective do you think art can be as a vehicle for commenting on social, political, racial issues? mb That’s a real slippery slope. At the end of the day, it’s just a painting. I’m very clear it’s a painting. You can construct things around it. There are much more direct ways of dealing with activist work. ar You tend to do a bit of both. mb I blur it. But then it’s always been blurred for me, because if I keep my mouth shut, maybe nobody’s going to pick up that I’m gay, but I’m always going to be black. There can be no, “I’m just an artist in the world”, it’s impossible. As soon as I step outside, I see the police, they see me, and they drive in the back of my car really fast and check me. I’m aware that the black body is always political. Blurring is the easiest thing in the world for me. ar Sometimes it feels that art is always doomed to stop at representation, both literally and in terms of society, rather than going directly to the heart of any problems it might seek to tackle.

Gatekeeper, 2019, mixed media on canvas, 353 Ã&#x2014; 572 cm. Photo: Joshua White

ArtReview

mb You know what, I always stayed away from representation because I just wasn’t comfortable representing anything. I don’t think anything’s a model, that’s my problem. Saying something like, “I will represent black culture” – that’s a model. ar Do you get to choose to represent that or do other people choose that for you? mb They try to choose it for me, but I have developed a practice for me that gives me space, that’s all. It’s ‘Los Angeles’, but it’s not Los Angeles – it’s my version of whatever I think it is. ar What do you think Los Angeles is? mb Los Angeles is a myth that’s lodged in our collective memory. It’s nowhere and everywhere. It’s that California sunshine – ‘Hollywood’. I love how in the artworld they’re always saying, “la is the place, la is the place. Everyone is moving there.” But la has always been the same. It’s manufactured. It’s very dystopian. It’s almost a new Las Vegas. ar I always think of Las Vegas as an extension of la because so many of my friends keep ‘popping’ over there for the weekend. mb Totally. And I’m comfortable in a place that eats its young. I like those spaces that are wilder.

ar Do you think those kinds of spaces are still going to be wild or do you think they get better known and the wildness stops? mb Well, do you know what happens now? There are these ‘alternative sites’ or ‘underground sites’, but nothing lasts for more than 24 hours before somebody discovers it, uploads it to Instagram and it becomes a ‘thing’. There are no weird spaces because we all have these communication devices. You know what I think is going to happen? I think people are going to turn back and say, “You know what? We’ve had enough of that.” Those little hashtags are getting a little tired. ar Do you tend to experience places by car, by foot? mb Both. A car if I’m seeing how things have changed in general. And if I really need to micro, I’ll stop and walk so I can really look, and think like, “What was here before? Yes, it was that. Oh, that’s interesting. I haven’t seen this before.” New companies pop up because the need is always there. It’s just basically some type of parasitic lender or some parasitic company. A five thousand year old laugh, 2019, mixed media on canvas, 183 × 244 cm. Photo: Joshua White

October 2019

If a company says, ‘We will get rid of bedbugs in 24 hours’, you know the bedbugs are already there. Or, ‘We will buy your home, fast cash in 24 hours’ – they already know you’re losing your home. The biggest one – now that we’ve gone through the bedbugs and we’ve gone through the quick loans, divorce and custody – that I see now is car title loans in ‘five minutes or less’. ar I was thinking of la as a place of circulation. mb It’s not, it’s very segregated. The freeways are the cutoff for race and economics. The West and North are more affluent. In the South and East it becomes much more mixed, more working class. There are some affluent pockets, of course. ar In his 1971 book on la, the architecture critic Reyner Banham has a great passage where he talks about how coming off the freeway is the transition between private and public space, because that’s where a woman starts to apply her makeup. mb That’s great. That’s exactly where I am. I’ve seen much more culture, and more emigration in my neighbourhood. I see street vendors more, I see policing more. You just see it more. You optically see it more.

ArtReview

ar Do you try and take that way of seeing into the paintings? mb I think it seeps in. ar I think there’s a way that your paintings present themselves as a complete whole that then gets atomised the more you look at it, into gestures or signs… mb Yes. I take material from social things like that, but you know what else I think I do? I try to take it from somewhere and then I try to scrub it as if nobody’s going to know where I got it from. It’s silly, right? It’s like a palimpsest. I guess I don’t know why I do that, I just do. Who cares where it came from? ar Do you see yourself as part of the continuum of this ever-growing palimpsest? That at some point, people see your work and contextualise it completely differently, and it becomes part of a different story? mb Yes. It seems like I’ve been a part of two or three stories thus far. It seems like I’ve been ‘the hairdresser’, and then I was ‘the urban kind of person’, and then I’ve become ‘the Jackson Pollock of our age’ [a headline for an Artnet.com report on Bradford’s project for the us Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale]. But that stuff just doesn’t touch me. ar You can’t control it. mb No, you can’t control it. That stuff just stays out of the studio. It really does. I’ve always been a reader. I’ve always been very curious, and I tend to follow whatever I’m interested in and I do a lot of research. I just kind of do that. ar Why did you become interested in visual arts generally, and painting specifically? mb Why did I do visual arts? It never was this lightning-bolt thing. I never really thought of myself as being an artist. When you come from a working-class family, you don’t think of being an artist as something to make money at, especially if your mother is a merchant. Well, you know what, my mom was a hairdresser and I was a hairdresser. She was like, “Look, you’ve got to have a gig to make money. I guess your gig is hair. So do whatever you want.” In some ways, it was kind of freeing. I always felt like I could do whatever I want. But being a visual artist, I always knew I needed something that I could do every day. I knew I’d like to have a studio practice. I like going to a site, and that might come out of being a stylist. You get into your car, you go to a place, you open shop. There’s a part of me that likes that. I’m really a shopkeeper. I knew I wanted something studio-based, not poststudio. Other than that, and going to clubs, travelling and working in a hair salon, it’s like art was the only thing that held my interest. When

I started taking classes at the community college it was the only class that I passed and would show up for. Because I had a very long history, from sixth grade until I sort of graduated, of not showing up, not finishing the papers, being in the back – I was that boy. I was surprised that in art class I sat in the front. When the teacher was talking, I actually understood what he was saying and I was engaged. I thought, “Oh, this has never happened.” I’ll take another class, and another one. Then I looked up and I said, “Well, I’ll be damned, I’ve finished a whole semester – with decent grades”. That was unheard of. I would study, and I was like, “Oh, wait a minute, this is a whole new me”. So really, it was just incremental. Then somewhere along the line I said, “I’ll be damned, maybe I’m an artist”. But that was a really small voice, because I was still going to clubs and still working in the hair salon. I was really basically going to the community college. Everything was slow. I bumped into myself.

“I was surprised that in art class I sat in the front. When the teacher was talking, I actually understood what he was saying and I was engaged. I thought, ‘Oh, this has never happened.’ I’ll take another class, and another one. Then I looked up and I said, ‘Well, I’ll be damned’” I wasn’t one of those people that just knew what they wanted to be. I bumped into it. Even though the signs were always there. I was always creative, I was always making stuff. I was doing stuff for my mom, and just didn’t put the dots together. When I was a little boy, I used to collect models of airplanes, and I’d put them on strings all in my bedroom. I’d look at the airplanes flying around. I didn’t know years later I was going to travel. I never connected. People would say, “Mark, you want to travel the world?” And I said, “No, no, I’m just making – I just like making airplanes”. facing page, top Mithra, 2008, mixed media, 726 × 1963 × 635 cm. Photo: jjyphoto facing page, bottom He would see this country burn if he could be king of the ashes, 2019, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: jjyphoto all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

October 2019

ar So what are you planning for your show Cerberus in London this October? mb A series of paintings. There is a video [Dancing in the Street, 2019]. I’ve been working on these for about two years. Some of them are based on one of the paintings here and then it just goes where it goes. ar Does it always go where it goes? mb Unfortunately. ar But that can be good: the worrying thing for a lot of people is that it goes nowhere. mb You know, I grew up in a very unstructured environment; I grew up in a fluid environment. My mother was an orphan very young – at three. She was raised by family members. So she has a very organic, ‘go with the flow’ kind of thing, and when she had me, we went with the flow. I think that whatever you naturally have, you always look for a little bit of the other. So structure was something I was always trying for – well, I was kind of fake-looking for it. ar You never have a moment when you get into the studio and nothing happens? mb No. Jesus Christ, no. It goes, it always goes. I’m always trying to structure. ar So you have a structure? mb It’s like, “Holy shit: hold it!” The flow I can do, but the structuring, I really need to pump the brakes. That’s what I’m telling myself all the time, “Mark, pump the brakes, pump the brakes”. ar Do you exhaust places? Do they stop intriguing you? mb Sometimes what I get less and less intrigued by are just white boxes. ar Interchangeable ones. mb Yes, interchangeable white boxes sometimes. One thing I like about being here [in Shanghai] is you see history stretch out a little bit more than just the West, where all cultures started in the Greco-Roman, and that for me is super exciting. I think it’s healthy for a [Western] artist to get out of the West sometimes and see that they don’t need us. Just because you walk in, doesn’t mean that the room always turns to read you. That’s really exciting, because it opens up how you think about Asia, how you think about Africa. You think about all these different people and cultures that we’re taught are, at best, second-class citizens in our school. ar Los Angeles is on show at the Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai, through 13 October. Admission is free. Cerberus is on show at Hauser & Wirth, London, from 2 October to 21 December

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She makes it

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Raqib Shaw Fireflies and Faces

Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski

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Second Nature

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Regent’s Park 4–6 October 2019 Preview 2 & 3

PITIN_inzerce_ArtReview_200x131_EN.indd 1

04.09.19 11:23

Art Reviewed

Boy, what a great show 81

16th Istanbul Biennial The Seventh Continent Various venues, Istanbul 14 September – 10 November You might think that the curator of a major international exhibition would shy away from comparisons with Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), in which a European rubber baron works a cast of indigenous labourers to death in order to realise his dream of an opera house in the Amazon. Particularly when the exhibition takes for its subject the ecological catastrophe set in motion by the exploitation of natural resources and proposes that we should look beyond the systems of knowledge enshrined in canonical Western art. So eyebrows were raised when Nicolas Bourriaud, speaking at the opening of the 16th Istanbul Biennial, chose a film famous for the catalogue of disasters that dogged its shoot as analogy for his experience of putting the show together. Beyond its focus on capitalism’s impact on the environment (the titular ‘seventh continent’ describes the vast island of discarded plastic floating around in the Pacific), the biennial’s most obvious parallel to a story about hauling a steamship over a mountain is the last-minute relocation of more than 40 projects from a site in the Istanbul Shipyards that was found to be riddled with asbestos. The replacement is a waterfront warehouse in the final stages of its transformation into the Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, a maze of steel walkways and purposefully sterile spaces in the institutional style. The impacts of this chaotic resettlement are not immediately apparent, as visitors are welcomed into the exhibition by Dora Budor’s minimalist installation of three standing glass chambers clouded by different shades of prettily coloured fog. Closer inspection of the interior of Origin iii (Snow Storm) (2019) reveals small geysers that intermittently puff out tinted dust particles

into its sealed atmosphere, the eruptions of which are determined (according to a wall text) by noise from neighbouring construction works. The work successfully dramatises ideas that the visitor might expect to become motifs of an exhibition addressed to art in the Anthropocene: the aestheticisation of climate change (the colours allude to the skies painted by J.M.W. Turner, their dramatic hues later attributed to atmospheric pollution); the transgression of boundaries separating art from the world, which is to say nature from culture; the partial surrender of authorship to environmental factors beyond the artist’s control. And yet this promising start, indebted in formal and conceptual terms to the ever-more influential work of Pierre Huyghe, is not followed up. Moving through the building, the visitor encounters different ways of encoding a disorderly world in art – among them Agnieszka Kurant’s Conversions (2019), an lcd screenpainting that likewise outsources its compositional intelligence and calls to mind (although it suffers by the comparison) Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment (1965) – but the overwhelming impression is of branching paths that soon peter out. Reorganising the show to fit a different architecture at such short notice is bound to upset any curatorial scheme, but the intellectual framework for the exhibition is so broadly defined (‘a relational anthropology,’ says Bourriaud, ‘which endeavours to account for all of the existing modes of thought or life’) as to be unaccountable. There is little sense of the coordination of ideas into a coherent proposition, even a ‘relational’ one, though interesting themes emerge in isolation. Take for an example the patchwork monster at the centre of Eva

facing page, top Agnieszka Kurant, Conversions #1, 2019, liquid crystal ink on copper plate, Peltier elements, Arduino, custom programming, transistors, 125 × 94 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

Kot’átková’s Machine for Restoring Empathy (2019), a room-size installation and functioning sewing workshop, which could be read as suggesting that recycling unsettles the fixed identities on which a consumerist society depends. Which is to say that if you can get used to the idea that materials can serve different purposes – can be rehabilitated and reincorporated into new things – then you are less likely to see the world as a collection of discrete objects, organisms and people with a finite shelf-life, like all those single-use bottles clogging up the ocean. The transfer of materials and energies is also a subject of Jonathas De Andrade’s O Peixe (2016), which films Amazonian fishermen at their work. Each of these vignettes concludes with a barechested man clutching a fish to his chest, seeming to comfort the animal through its passage into the next life (and, one presumes, his belly). The impulse to well up over this interspecies empathy is tempered by the lurking suspicion that the artist is playing with the liberal pieties of his audience, but the film suggests a way of life that does not privilege the individual human subject even as it parodies the artworld’s tendency to fetishise anything resembling ‘authentic indigeneity’. Elsewhere, the inclusion of artists such as Suzanne Husky – whose New Age-y film Earth Cycle Trance (or Tree Cycle) (2019) follows a witch, priestess and sacred earth activist named Starhawk – feels like a gesture towards non-Enlightenment traditions of thought to which the show as a whole does not subscribe. Indeed, it can be argued that the anthropocentrism rejected by Husky finds its highest expression in the designation of our geological era as the Anthropocene, a word sprinkled liberally through the exhibition literature.

facing page, bottom Dora Budor, Origin iii (Snow Storm), 2019, custom environmental chamber, organic and synthetic pigments, diatomaceous earth, fx dust, felt, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Basel

ArtReview

October 2019

ArtReview

The transdisciplinary Feral Atlas Collective draws attention – through case studies into the environmental effects of major infrastructural projects – to some of the controversies surrounding the artworld’s latest pet term. A three-part installation of videos, poems and reports demonstrates how the notion that humanity has unilaterally shaped the biosphere implies the possibility of control over it, and how misleading is the assumption that humans could ever be the guardians (and by extension masters) of nature. That delusion was contradicted at the dawn of the Industrial Era by the Romantic experience of the natural world, a state which Deniz Aktaş’s monumental drawings (such as Independent Variable, 2018) flips on its head. A vast heap of tyres suggests something like an artificial sublime in which nature, in an inversion of the landscapes of Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, is overwhelmed by humanity. Yet talk of undermining the division of nature and culture led me to expect an exhibition that did more in its staging to upset conventions of inside and outside, for all that individual works by Suzanne Treister and Korakrit Arunanondchai challenge the separations of self and other. It is perhaps revealing that the symbol chosen for ecological crisis is a distant ‘seventh continent’ – which most of us will never glimpse – rather than the credit card of plastic that each of us now ingests every week, with who knows what consequences. An exception to the lingering feeling that the art was on the whole too thoroughly insulated from the world, tucked away safely in institutional spaces, was provided by Hale Tenger’s Appearance (2019), the pick of several works stationed on Büyükada Island in the Sea of Marmara. Set in the grounds of a handsomely ruined palace, this sound installation featuring

a poem by the artist was complemented by mirrored obsidian sculptures dotted around a scruffy garden. I can’t speak for the poem, but the artist’s provision of a space in which to reflect on the creative potential of overgrowth, decay and nonintervention was welcome. There has recently been a tendency in the artworld, apparent in the sf craze of recent years, to confuse alternative ways of thinking with the creation of fictional realities. Visitors to the Pera Museum, the biennial’s third and final venue, will have an abundance of time to reflect on this false equivalence. Again the presentation starts promisingly: a large part of the third floor is occupied by a display of artefacts from the Llhuroscian civilisation dreamed up by Norman Daly and preserved in devotional objects that closely resemble mid-twentieth-century hand tools (such as the Icon of Shoor-noo from the Temple of Phallus at Draikum, a wood clamp dated to the civilisation’s ‘middle period’), alongside similarly droll assemblages, catalogue entries, poems and quasi-archaic marble carvings. The appeal of the fantasy world created by Daly, who was from 1942 to 1999 a teacher at Cornell University, is that it does not seem designed to carry any allegorical weight beyond its own witty and entirely consistent internal logic. The consequence is that it’s possible, counterintuitively, to invest it with all kinds of speculative significances that seem pertinent to the biennial’s theme: it is revealing of the human compulsion to build worlds; plays on the relationship between the status of an object and its framing narrative; and pokes fun at the conventions of anthropology and the designation of nonWestern cultural products as artefacts rather than art. By comparison, the dystopian island society imagined by Charles Avery’s superficially similar The Islanders (2004–) feels more like

facing page, top Hale Tenger, Appearance, 2019, black obsidian mirrors, iron, epoxy resin, paint, water, audio-spotlight speaker, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Galeri Nev, Istanbul

a vehicle through which to deliver a message. As one walks through the museum’s three floors, an apparently endless series of works (including Paul Sietsema’s trompe l’oeil films and the paintings of Piotr Uklański) seem designed to lure viewers into misreading the presented information, only to then ‘surprise’ them with the unexpected news that knowledge is fallible and history is fabricated. My frustration at being so repeatedly beaten over the head was exacerbated by reacquaintance (in a curated exhibition at Arter, not part of the biennial) with Jonas Mekas’s short film Reminiszenzen aus Deutschland (Recollections of Germany, 1971/1993, edited 2012). This account of the Lithuanian filmmaker’s wartime incarceration in German labour camps offered a reminder of how it is possible formally to communicate the ways in which history is constructed – through montage, stills and voiceover, in Mekas’s case – while at the same time contributing to the memorialisation of an event that must not be forgotten. I was left with the question of what it means – in a city where artists and journalists who draw attention to inconvenient historical truths risk imprisonment – for this exhibition to focus instead on alternative realities or, as they have elsewhere been called, facts. It’s hard to escape the feeling that a comparable suspicion of authority (whether scientific or historical) underpins denial of the climate disaster that the biennial affects to protest, and beyond that to speculate on precisely how much carbon and plastic was produced in the process of making it. This isn’t to take a position on ethical issues that aren’t easily resolved, but rather to propose that a biennial that recognises the ‘end of the separation between nature and culture’ could foreground its own implication in the complex problems it identifies. Ben Eastham

facing page, bottom Norman Daly, Civilization of Llhuros (detail), 1972, artefacts, sounds, texts, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist’s estate

October 2019

Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion Various venues, Nagoya & Toyota City 1 August – 14 October That old adage about the quiet type being the most dangerous type came to mind during the tragicomic opening days of the fourth Aichi Triennale. Before it had even begun, rightwing sections of the Japanese media were questioning the inclusion of Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung’s lifesize statue of a socalled comfort woman (Statue of Peace, 2011), an unassuming tribute to the Korean victims of Japanese military sex-slavery before and during the Second World War. On day three, the official denouncements and terrorist threats resulting from the presence of the taciturn girl with fists clenched led to the closure of After ‘Freedom of Expression?’, a microexhibition within the main exhibition made up of works recently censored or deemed taboo in Japan. By week three, 11 additional artists had withdrawn or altered their own work in solidarity. Conservative outrage and historical revisionists: one; reasoned debate and sanctity of the art object: nil. Or perhaps not. Media-activistturned-artistic-director Daisuke Tsuda, his five curators and 90 artists were rightly dismayed at the kneejerk closure, but the on-the-ground reality is that this full-blooded triennale has not been disproportionately vandalised by it. Indeed, if, as Tsuda explained, it is designed to flow and feel like a magazine, then After ‘Freedom of Expression?’ was always a bonus pullout section: arguably superfluous, deliciously incendiary. Moreover, the rest of Taming Y/Our Passion – an issues-based festival that seeks to address, ironically it now seems, ‘the sensationalisation of media that at present plagues and polarises people around the world’ and ‘to speak to our compassion’ in the hope of ‘solving this predicament’ – plays the role of mature intermediary more persuasively. In service of this right-on mission, it smartly exploits the semantic ambi( , or jō guities of the Japanese title in kanji, can apparently mean emotion, information or compassion, none of which are in short supply here), and in contrast to the 2016 edition, which celebrated the creativity and manufacturing industry of Aichi Prefecture, traffics mainly in hard realities, not reveries. At the main venues, the Aichi Arts Center and Nagoya City Art Museum, the feel is more scrapbook than neatly edited magazine, but in a good way. Themes and mediums are circuitously explored, looped around. So it is that you might find yourself deflecting the suave

advances of Dora Garcia’s dishy male interlopers (The Romeos, 2019) while admiring exonemo’s posthumanist sculpture of two screens kissing (The Kiss, 2019). Or kneeling down to survey the unearthly terrain of Imamura Yohei’s scale model-like sculpture made from repeating the silkscreen printing process thousands upon thousands of times (tsurugi No.1, 2016) one minute, gazing up at Yuan Goang-Ming’s drone footage of deserted Taipei streets during the annual martial law drill (Everyday Maneuver, 2018; suspended as of writing) the next. A fair proportion of works, such as Ugo Rondinone’s Vocabulary of Solitude (2014–16), a room filled with 45 contemplative clowns squatting, lying or kneeling, pair a showstopping scale with a terse punchline. Another is Takamine Tadasu’s Anti-thesis: Gazing up at the endless blue // stained forever by its color // I have ceased to be myself (2019), for which a section of an old swimming pool located near the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art has been flipped 90 degrees skyward. Cutting deeper are the works I can imagine Tsuda and his team classifying as of the cutout-and-keep variety: research-driven multidisciplinary projects that either already have a life beyond the festival or, failing that, have the potential to achieve it. In addition to welltravelled series, such as Taryn Simon’s Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) – photographs of impossible floral centrepieces paired with political accords, contracts, treaties and decrees – new ones in this ruminative vein include a roomful of letters, Psicomagia (2019), relating to a form of let-it-all-out psychotherapy developed by Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and his wife, artist Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky. Other new commissions tease out the topical dichotomies that are this staunchly left-leaning triennale’s bread and butter: discrimination and tolerance, machines and humans, collective memory and amnesia. Among them, Koki Tanaka’s Abstracted / Family (2019) explores the suburban milieu and misgivings of mixed-race Japanese families through abstract paintings, family photos, documentary and notes. And Ho Tzu Nyen’s Hotel Aporia (2019) tackles the anguish of unresolved history in a more lyrical manner than the didactic and hectoring After ‘Freedom of Expression?’ section. Projected on walls and screens in a late Meiji-period inn over in

facing page, top Mónica Mayer, The Clothesline, 1978– (installation view). Photo: Yorita Akane. Courtesy Aichi Triennale

Toyota City, his phantasmagoric video shorts comprise Yasujirō Ozu movie-clips that indirectly touch on war, and feature faces smoothed out to a searing nothingness. Back at the Aichi Arts Center, the implications of cutting-edge tech – a pertinent topic for a nation with an ageing population and a bad case of Galápagos syndrome – are broached in Goro Murayama’s The portrait to Umwelts & Programs (2016), which juxtaposes photographs of people pulling funny faces that aren’t picked up by facial-recognition ai with paintings of abstracted facelike patterns that are; and Decoy Walking (2019), a tv studio setup that is intended to dupe gait detection software. A few rooms on, Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s chilling Stranger Visions (2012–13) is a series of 3D-printed faces, each hovering above cigarette butts, hairs or chewing gum – the New York street-trash from which dna samples were scraped to create them. This is a supple, stimulating triennial (other subthemes, such as Nagoya’s South American migrant communities, are circled around, and the separate film and performing-art strands are similarly piquant) shot through with Tsuda’s liberal sensibility: it strives, on paper at least, to challenge regressive conservatism and bigotry of all stripes. I salute his idealism, but given the rocky start and the allegations of censorship surfacing since, I must also wonder: will it end well? After ‘Freedom of Expression?’s closure may have succeeded at exposing the limits of freedom of expression in Japan, but on the other hand, trolling the country’s vociferous right wing and then capitulating to their demands (ostensibly on ‘risk management’ grounds) has backfired spectacularly. How else can one square a situation whereby, for example, Mónica Mayer’s ongoing participatory project The Clothesline (1978–), a simple yet emancipatory work that invites visitors to write notes about their experience of sexual harassment or violence against women and pin them up for others to read, has been silenced until the shutdown is reversed? One of these anonymous messages, now torn up and tossed across the floor by Mayer in protest, unwittingly captures the demoralised tone that prevails in the messy aftermath of those miserable opening days: ‘Sometimes, in the street, when men have yelled at me, I wish I had gone back and confronted them. I have not done it out of fear.’ Max Crosbie-Jones

facing page, bottom exonemo, The Kiss, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Ito Tetsuo. Courtesy Aichi Triennale

ArtReview

October 2019

Chris Kraus films before and after Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm 1 June – 13 October “Are we going to have to kill him?” “I hope not here.” The dialogues in Chris Kraus’s films, such as this exchange from Sadness at Leaving (1992) – an adaptation of Erje Ayden’s pulp spy novel from 1989 – are piercing. The acting is heightened in a way that makes the characters feel slightly off. Self-conscious and often selfdeprecating awkwardness is a key ingredient in Kraus’s writing and her moving-image oeuvre, evoked in the latter by alienated dramaturgy, theatrical sound effects and harsh cuts. At Index, all nine films that Kraus made, between 1982 and 95, are on view. Like the writing in her art-theory-injected novels, the movies sway from documentary to essay film to footage of performances, the last of these made with collaborators in the New York art scene before Kraus moved to Los Angeles. Each loops on a monitor, propped on a large wooden platform installed at knee height in the centre of the space. Most of the films are between 5 and 30 minutes long: for instance, How to Shoot a Crime (1987), which Kraus made with her ex-husband, Sylvère Lotringer, who infamously

features in her novel I Love Dick (1997), and which includes interviews with the dominatrix Mademoiselle Victoire and the artist Brian Weil, who notoriously documented homicide scenes in Miami. The film discusses violence, death, desire and the role of the spectator, both in person and through technologies increasingly deployed for surveillance. In Traveling at Night (1991), Kraus joins a group of elementary-school children on a fieldtrip as they learn about the Underground Railroad. Then there’s the feature-length Gravity & Grace (1996), titled after Simone Weil’s compendium of writings. The movie centres on two young women who are involved in a cult in New Zealand, following one of them as she leaves to ‘make it’ in the New York artworld (and eventually fails). The ascetic install is in stark contrast to the content of the films: they speak unabashedly about sex, gender dynamics and politics. Installed on wall-mounted shelves are seven of Kraus’s books, and next to them is an enlarged printout of a page from each in which she refers to her filmmaking. In Aliens & Anorexia (2000), for example, Kraus discusses what she saw as the

failure of Gravity & Grace, which was rejected several times at the Berlin Film Festival and never attained the success for which she had hoped. The display points to her practice of moving between writing and filmmaking, between theory and practice, the whole imbued with autobiographical experience and wider feminist concerns. The austere exhibition display, meanwhile, with its sparse editorialising, equates to a gesture of merely making the films available to the public (although most of them are also online on UbuWeb), perhaps trying to grant them the attention Kraus bemoans that they never received. Considering that she refers to her films as failures, the show seems more like an archival attestation of their existence than an attempt at curatorial unpacking. films before and after, then, relies on the enigma surrounding Kraus as a cultural icon in order to let the works speak for themselves, years and decades after their making. As an archive, it works. As an exhibition, it leaves us longing for more. Stefanie Hessler

Gravity & Grace (still), 1996, dir Chris Kraus, 90 min. Courtesy Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm

ArtReview

Pippa Garner A Shadow of My Future Self O-Town House, Los Angeles 3 August – 24 August Arrayed in the harlequin of a medieval jester and strapped into a machine converted from exercise equipment to human marionette, the artist Pippa Garner let herself be manipulated by members of the audience from the controls of a rather sinister Exercycle. Two levers controlled her arms, the pedals directed her legs and a lever attached to a belled jester’s cap nodded her head with a plaintive jingle-jangle at the whim of the operator of Action Figure (2019). James and Bobby Purify’s I’m Your Puppet (1966) played over and over, the repetitions letting a certain amount of weirdness creep over the whole performance. “Pull the string and I’ll wink at you, I’m your puppet / I’ll do funny things if you want me to, I’m your puppet.” As a separate performance a room away that same opening evening, on a video mounted above a peekaboo window, Garner relays her impending mortality and thus her desire to preserve her torso for future generations as an artwork. Her torso, painted silver, is on view through the window, above which, in glittery letters, reads the word ‘Torsomat’; the audience is invited to have a touch. These two openingnight performances at O-Town House, presented

in conjunction with fellow la gallery Redling Fine Art, possess a puckish humour along with a shadow or three on mortality and control. (And evidence from both remained for the duration of the exhibition.) For over 40 years, Garner has created hilarious meditations on bodies and machines in installations, performances, and most especially quirky illustrations exploring gadgets, gizmos, and how they interact with our fragile and mutable anatomy. Born Phillip Garner in 1942, the artist had a robust career in comic illustration, authoring many books and promoting them in cameos on The Tonight Show and articles in Vogue before transitioning to a woman. In an interview Garner described part of her impetus in transitioning as an ‘art project to create disorientation in my position in society, and sort of balk any possibility of ever falling into a stereotype again’. Displaying the particular moxie of American entrepreneurial ingenuity (“It slices! It dices!”), the drawings that accompany Garner’s performances gather selections the artist’s illustrations, focusing on the years between 1976 and 85. In Vibrator (1982), the titular sex toy grows four legs and a wind-up key to become

a ‘Vibragator’, another dildo becomes a coinoperated ride for children and a third has a solar panel mounted to it to become the pleasure accessory of choice for those particularly hot for renewable energy. In another drawing, a kit demonstrates How to Make It with Women (1982), illustrating precisely how to arrange plastic, interlocking naked ladies into a bridge, a cabin and a wall. And a personal favourite, Variation on Sinking Room (1977), outlines a plan for an exhibition where metal rings are mounted on a wall, to which the first ten people to visit are chained, and who then become the exhibition. But for this current show, Pippa chained only herself. In doing so for Action Figure, she joined together in practice a motif witnessed throughout her career: the false duality of humans and machines, art and artist, male and female. She gleefully muddles the phrase “body of work”. Her humour and grace make pulling the levers less an act of control by the audience over the performer (though that shadow remains) and more the action of a deft artist directing us to see that she and we and all our machines were always in this together. Andrew Berardini

Action Figure, 2019, mixed-media installation and performance. Photo: Riccardo Banfi. Courtesy the artist, O-Town House and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles

October 2019

Aneta Grzeszykowska Mama Raster, Warsaw 25 May – 14 September Aneta Grzeszykowska’s Mama presents 25 photographs of her eight-year-old daughter, Franciszka, interacting with a realistic silicone model, cast from the waist up, of the artist’s body. Shot during 2018 in locations ranging from domestic interiors to rural landscapes, the scenes are variously macabre and tender: a particularly unnerving image is of Franciszka grinning with relish as she tapes back the lips of her ‘mama’ to expose dentures that are reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s gruesome mouths. Grzeszykowska was inspired to shoot the series when her daughter discovered the model wrapped up in her mother’s studio (it having been used in a previous project, Model, 2017) and began to play with it. That she is the child of artists who work with the body, and has grown up with such odd things ‘about the house’, might explain why she does not read them as memento mori. This is suggested by a photograph taken in a typically bourgeois living room, in which Franciszka props her ‘mama’ on a piano stool flanked by a potted succulent and monographs including one on Francesca Woodman, also the daughter of artists. Nevertheless, Franciszka’s apparent ease with this uncanny ‘mama’ seems shocking. Other photographs lean more predictably into horror, suggesting a postapocalyptic

scenario in which the child roams feral in the countryside, bathing her synthetic mother in an abandoned summerhouse before carting her down to the river and taking her out on a dinghy comically branded with the name Relax–21. But what we are actually witnessing, given that the ‘real’ Grzeszykowska is present with her camera at these encounters, is a transformative kind of play between mother and child. Just as expectant mothers were once handed a doll with which they could practise motherhood, the doll in this case aids an exercise in the role-reversal that most of us will experience. The risk (and valuable play carries a degree of risk) is that the mother figure is exposed as replaceable. That the child can enjoy a relationship with the stand-in destabilises the sanctity of motherhood and shifts the dynamic of power towards the child. This speaks to Poland’s repressive abortion laws, in which a woman’s body is principally valued as a receptacle for new life, and adds a sinister dimension to these images of a daughter approaching puberty. Despite frequently using her body to explore what she calls a ‘theory of nonexistence’ (notably in an untitled series of Photoshopped portraits of ‘nonexistent’ people from 2005–06), Grzeszykowska is ambivalent about describing her art as feminist. This chimes with an obvi-

Mama #45, 2018, pigment ink on cotton paper, 36 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and Raster, Warsaw

ArtReview

ously influential figure, Cindy Sherman, whose Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) Grzeszykowska referenced for her suite of the same title, made in Poland in 2006. Sherman looms over Mama, with the suggestion of narrative, nostalgic monochromes and saturated colours, the lens’ ability to both distance and make intimate. It is in this space that the very real issues of the day collide. On the afternoon of my visit, I read Jacek Dehnel’s account of the recent Pride parade in Białystok and the simultaneous ‘family picnic’, organised by the local authorities, at which lgbtq+ people were not welcome. The latter surely contributed to the homophobic violence that erupted at the former, most acutely drawn in Dehnel’s description of ‘a woman with a toddler, aged about two or three, both of whose tiny hands she was posing to show the middle finger… while she chanted: “Fuck-off-fag-gots!”’ Viewing Mama, I couldn’t help but think of the woman’s manipulation of the child, the coercion of the innocent by that holiest of Polish symbols, the mother, as she also struggles with a ‘theory of nonexistence’: her own precarious sense of self twisted into hatred of a vulnerable ‘enemy’. Grzeszykowska plays with similar tensions between mother and child, but in doing so, subverts dread into something brave and questioning. Phoebe Blatton

Ola Vasiljeva Haus der F. Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld 29 March – 15 September The idea of inviting an artist to introduce a new and nonacademic perspective on a collection has, in recent years, been pursued ad nauseam by museum curators. Still, this familiar measure can sometimes succeed beautifully, as with Ola Vasiljeva’s Haus der F. Working with the museum’s opulent Werkbund collection, the Latvia-born artist references a 1914 exhibition in Cologne, Haus der Frau (House of Woman), in which the female designers of the Deutscher Werkbund presented their work as equal to that of their male colleagues. Though Vasiljeva combines objects from the collection with her own furniture pieces, the exhibition as a whole is unmistakeably her own: as is typical of her work, the space appears as a stage filled with props that carry private and suggestive references. This stage is waiting, surely, for a chamber play or Kammerspielfilm. An open wall unit, a dresser and a desk (all works untitled) – these designed by Vasiljeva in the Werkbund style, functional with occasional excessive ornamentation – structure the space. In some places oversize knitted items of clothing are draped over the furniture; some stand scarecrowlike in the space. These doffed giants’ garments (a recurring motif of the artist’s) open up a

dialogue with the playing-card and bookcover designs of Werkbund designers Lucian Bernhard, Mela Köhler-Broman, Hans Kalmsteiner and Rudolf Kalvach, which hang on the walls or on Vasiljeva’s furniture props. Because the majority of works chosen from the collection by this female artist are by men, Haus der F. responds to gender inequality just as Haus der Frau did a century before. A subtle sense of humour guides the central placement of a beautiful advertising poster by Lucian Bernhard from 1908, which shows an elegant woman’s shoe with a bow and the company name Stiller. The German word also means ‘quieter’, and the quieter presence of the women of the Werkbund is addressed through the woman’s shoe motif. Vasiljeva uses it in a chalk sketch on the inside of a wall unit; it’s more clearly decipherable, though, in one of her large metal lattice works in a corner. On it are two cartoonish figures that, while distorted, can still be identified as man and woman: he is plainly kicking her in the butt. Vasiljeva depicts patriarchal society as not so much brutal as ridiculous and highlights the absurdity of early-twentiethcentury male designers writing off their female colleagues as incompetent, and constructing

various ‘glass ceilings’, even as the company’s products addressed a predominantly female clientele. All of this also functions as an acknowledgement of debt to the women who have struggled for equality in the creative industries. Vasiljeva’s own work benefits from her engagement with the collection. It is still noticeable how well designed her works are, but their openness to narrative interpretation stands out more clearly in their juxtaposition with objects designed to fulfil a function. As props for an imaginary play, her works also seem to be designed to be used, and the intimacy of the staging tickles our voyeurism. Most explicitly, on the desk sits a paperweight made of black porcelain: it holds a letter (sealed with a stamp, showing the woodcut Frauenportrait by Dutch artist Bernard Essers from 1923), a crossword puzzle and other papers. Since the exhibition invites you to regard every object – at least initially – as a piece of design, it takes a few turns of the head to notice that the paperweight is modelled on a penis, the letters balanced between glans and testicles. Set against the marginalisation of the Werkbund’s female designers, it’s a covert but certainly appropriate punchline. Moritz Scheper

Haus der F., 2019 (installation view). Photo: Dirk Rose. Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseen Krefeld

October 2019

Garden of Earthly Delights Gropius Bau, Berlin 26 July – 1 December I first visited Garden of Earthly Delights with my mother, a professional gardener. She identified the potted plants in Rashid Johnson’s Antoine’s Organ (2016) – a largescale installation made of a black metal structure also hosting four videos playing on small screens, soft shea-butter sculptures of abstract shapes and faceless busts, and various books important to African-American race relations and discourse (W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, Richard Wright’s Native Son, 1940, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, 2015, among others). Shortly thereafter she stood in awe in front of what appeared to be Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (which turned out to be a replica made by the School of Bosch around 50 years later, during the mid-sixteenth century) and sat down gleefully on a woven cushion to participate in Zheng Bo’s Fern as Method (2019), which provides visitors with a piece of paper, pencil and clipboard to draw one of the 22 ferns growing in the room. Her fascination with and knowledge of the life surrounding us was impressive, but it remained unclear to me whether the larger interwoven themes addressed by each of these works made an impression – maybe because of her vested interest in plants and gardens themselves, but also perhaps in part due to structural flaws. The vast majority of the 22 artists and collectives in this sprawling exhibition, curated by the institution’s director, Stephanie Rosenthal, receive their own room, and each can supposedly be located within one (or two) of five thematic areas: ‘Pairidaeza, Paradise, Utopia, Dystopia’, ‘Anthropocene, Chthulucene’, ‘Urban Gardening’, ‘Garden as a System / Structure of Thought’, and ‘Colonialism, Migration, Botany’. Johnson’s installation is slotted into the fifth, the show’s titular work into the first and third, and Zheng’s into the second and fifth. Among his

living, drawable ferns are four screens playing Pteridophilia 1–4 (2016–19), which show naked men sensually interacting with ferns in a forest; they moan and pant while devouring thick stems, or lick and caress leaves. On a wall hangs Survival Manual II (Hand-Copied 1945 “Taiwan’s Wild Edible Plants”) (2016), a series of drawings that identify plants normally deemed ‘weeds’ as useful and edible. This collection of works uses plants to form a utopian vision of the human relationship with the natural world, reframing our anthropocentric perspectives to ones that treat plants as living beings worthy of respect. Elsewhere, Pipilotti Rist’s hypnotic installation Homo Sapiens Sapiens (2005) and Heather Phillipson’s built environment Mesocosmic Indoor Overture (2019) continue this thread. Rist’s kaleidoscopic, colour-saturated film – projected onto an oval screen suspended from the ceiling to be viewed by lying on the ground among a serpentine array of pillows – depicts two nude women as they explore the artist’s Garden of Eden. In this wonderland, no sin is committed; the two Eves are one with nature, no hierarchical status is in play, no temptations nor male figures stand in their way. Meanwhile, Phillipson’s immersive installation is composed of tree trunks supporting speakers disguised as birdhouses, screens and mulch – complete with the stench of manure – carpeting the floor. In three videos, humanoid eyes appear on bright yellow plants that gaze at the fourth, glitched video. In it, fragmented worms compost biodegradable material and excrete humus where seeds can germinate; in this posthuman era, a new kind of life is born, with a mechanic voice in the background reminding visitors that this is a digital scene in a mesocosm of a world in which we, human beings, do not exist. While other inclusions, such as Tacita Dean’s 28-minute film Michael Hamburger (2007) and

facing page, top Heather Phillipson, Mesocosmic Indoor Overture (detail), 2019, multichannel video installation, dimensions variable. © the artist

Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), pick up Johnson’s themes of colonialism, migration and (botanic) displacement, only one work in the exhibition explicitly broaches the topic of urban gardening – and it comes as a shock to the system. Remnants of Victory Gardens, a largescale urban agriculture project carried out in San Francisco from 2007 to 2009 by the organisation Futurefarmers, are presented like a bland scientific archive: photos and explanatory captions sit in a vitrine underneath two large photographs of an action in front of City Hall. In an adjacent room, Lungiswa Gqunta’s Lawn I (2019) – an array of broken glass CocaCola bottles fixed on a platform – speaks to the defences surrounding gardens in cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town (literally ‘urban gardens’) as a commentary on South Africa’s race relations: gardens are typically owned by white inhabitants and the broken glass barriers enact violence against the black citizens who dare enter the zones from which they are barred. Specific works also supposedly fit within ‘Garden as a System / Structure of Thought’, but it’s easy to argue that every artwork in this exhibition proposes a way to see the world anew, a way to restructure our relationship to nature, an alternative to the status quo. Such thematic groupings serve to give the viewer a broad understanding of the subject at hand, but they are also so vast that the definitions, as well as their allegories and overlaps, quickly become muddled, at times even tangential. Instead of the show presenting a maze of forking paths, some of which lead to dead ends, I left wondering: why not focus on two or three central paths lined with benches that allow the visitor to not only stop and smell the flowers along the way, but to stop, sit and also consider the entire garden from within? Emily McDermott

ArtReview

October 2019

Helmut Federle 19 e. 21st St., Six Large Paintings Kunstmuseum Basel 25 May – 15 September The first thing that strikes one about the six large paintings on display here and made over a span of 25 years, beginning in 1980, is that their scale feels American. Few artists paint this monumentally in Europe. Yet the sensibility of Helmut Federle’s work is also European, melancholic in tone and subtle in its application of paint. Even though these notions are generalised, they lead to an important transatlantic quality of Federle’s painting. The Swiss-born artist, based in Vienna and in his mid-seventies, has travelled the globe often and eagerly. He has absorbed notions about scale and colour, values and beliefs, from different cultures. As is suggested by these grand canvases and this exhibition’s Manhattan-centric title, a four-year stay in the us from 1979 onwards was important to his development, just as the discovery of postwar abstract American painting made an impact, during the 1960s, on the very museum in which his work is now showing. You can spend a long time looking at these works without getting a clear idea as to what they are ‘about’. In Untitled (1990) a large dark circle appears against a background of grey brushstrokes, half transparent. A tilted U-shape

enters the right side of the painting, delivering a second formal focus. A greenish-yellow light shines, as if the work was lit from behind. Without any narrative or action, this and the other canvases refuse to be boiled down to any specific subject matter or statement. They’re just there, as presences you want to be with: complex characters with conflicting parts. They are not necessarily pleasing or beautiful, most are rather dark in atmosphere, but they appear sincere and dynamic. The uneven paint application, as well as the play of layers, invite one to keep wandering over the canvas. Some forms are clear and decisive, like the circle; other areas are vague and unfinished. The division between yellow and grey in Untitled (1980) feels strict and firm, while the repetitive pattern of lines in Death of a Black Snake (1999) is subtle and mysterious. Collectively, with all their contradictions, these seem like existential paintings: this is how it feels to be conscious, to be human, to have fear and hope, highs and lows. Asian Sign (1980) produces a push and pull between negative and positive form. Are the grey blocks in the foreground? Just as this appears to be the case, they recede, and disappear behind

19 e. 21st St., Six Large Paintings, 2019 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Basel

ArtReview

the yellow, meandering bands. The yellow is bright and enlightening here, more than in other paintings. The fact that the painting, acquired by the museum in 1982, created public uproar – it depicts a swastika – indicates that people did think there was a subject matter or statement in the work. More particularly, an evil one, even though the symbol is not presented clockwise, as the Nazis used it, but counterclockwise and thus, according to a Hindu interpretation, stands for the setting sun. Of course it can raise eyebrows to discover such a form, huge as a flag, that mirrors (not depicts) a symbol appropriated by fascists. The real question, though, is whether or not Federle’s work should be taken as symbolic at all. An auxiliary selection of works on paper shows further engagement with signs and symbols, but they are not about reproducing fixed meanings. Rather they spring from an interest in seeing form free from preconceived ideas. What kind of expression does this produce? Amid its push and pull, Asian Sign is a work concerned with the moment that form becomes meaning, just as Federle’s work in general is about the moment that form becomes a manifestation of inner life. Jurriaan Benschop

Mick Peter To Me, To You Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 24 May – 22 September The opening room of Mick Peter’s To Me, To You at Baltic is filled by an immersive line drawing of a gallery office realised in lifesize cutouts, complete with disorganised archival shelves, whiteboard schedule of exhibitions, hr paperwork and a poster for a 1961 exhibition of Ossip Zadkine’s cubist sculptures at Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery. A cutout curator – complete with oversize earrings and Breton top – is holding a Skype call with a cartoon artist. In the centre of the institution’s fourth floor, Peter has installed another three-dimensional comic strip of rooms depicting an artist’s studio, a sequence that follows the finishing and transportation of a sculpture to a contemporary art gallery. The title is an allusion to the catchphrase of two famously incompetent removals men in a much-loved children’s programme on British television. The show offers the pleasure of scouring a picture book to discover hidden visual jokes, such as the amusing unfinished figurative works or the broken window installed on the ground floor. Peter’s jovial line-drawn scenarios are reminiscent of Doonesbury, Calvin and Hobbes or Viz (whose founder Chris Donald created the po-faced art lover hell-bent on interpretation, Art Carbuncle, as a response to the opening of Baltic in the North East). Peter’s exhibition is animated by the audience inadvertently

becoming components of the composition, and the narrative is all the more pleasing for being a comedic version of the gallery you are in. This fulfils one of the joys of cartoons: we recognise the familiar and are in on the joke. The central character in Peter’s strip is the sculpture we see moving through the different rooms that serve as comic-book cells. Standing out from its monochrome context, the sculpture is a cutout colour photograph of a stone shape resembling a simplified Barbara Hepworth. It serves as a stand-in for modernist abstraction and, as such, both a prop for Peter’s commentary on how modern and contemporary art has been presented to the wider public as inscrutable and a satire on the authority of the finished object (the ‘real’ version of which is eventually glimpsed through the window of the cartoon art gallery that concludes the comic strip installation). Peter draws Baltic as a shabby shopfront gallery on a rundown high street, reminiscent of an artist-led space rather than a purposebuilt arts centre. This depiction of Baltic (a gallery that receives one of the largest annual Arts Council England grants outside of London) seems to reference the fact that we are a threeminute walk away from a dilapidated high street of bargain stores and disused furniture

outlets, as well as Gateshead’s own artist-run gallery, The Newbridge Project. The illustrated gallery becomes a send-up of what Peter describes, in a video interview installed beside the entrance to the exhibition, as the ‘ludicrousness’ of making a show, the rarefied object cast as grotesque beside the derelict shopfronts. In a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip dating from February 1990, Calvin explains to Hobbes that a snow sculpture he has made, which like Peter’s (and Hepworth’s) has a circle cut through its centre, is a response to the ‘inadequacy of traditional imagery and symbols to convey meaning in today’s world’. The joke lies in Hobbes’s highlighting that, while ‘moving into abstraction’, Calvin must still work within the material limitations of his medium (snow), as well as the form’s figurative potential as a cat with a hole shot through its belly (Hobbes is a tiger). While Calvin and Hobbes author Bill Watterson directs us to question notions of abstraction as independent of material reality and social context, the function of the joke in Peter’s comic-strip installation is not clear. The show’s indiscriminate punchlines define Peter’s as a very British quip: cast at the expense of all involved, it rouses scepticism and evades commitment to any position on the value of contemporary art. Tess Denman-Cleaver

To Me, To You, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy the artist and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

October 2019

Lee Krasner Living Colour Barbican Art Gallery, London 30 May – 1 September Press coverage of Lee Krasner’s first European retrospective in half a century has almost uniformly invoked the name of the famous painter she married, typically as a way of summarising her longstanding and wrongheaded professional eclipse. If you somehow don’t know who that man was and you’re interested, look it up; and then be apprised that Krasner’s survey is simultaneously more consistent and adventurous than the last one he had in London, at Tate Modern, where this show should have been. Nor need we dwell lengthily on the background impetuses for Krasner’s overlooking and latter-day elevation, inarguable quality aside: think Cedar Tavern machismo, ‘difficult woman’ clichés and the current art-market’s need for new inventory and new (even if dead) heroes, and belated semi-rebalancing of gender inequality. The main thing to note, in terms of critical duty, is that Living Colour is the best big painting show in London for a fair while; I saw painters emerge open-mouthed. The gallery’s split-level layout – a warren of upstairs nooks and expansive, modular downstairs spaces – mostly suits Krasner’s oeuvre, which divides here into the big, shape-shifting Abstract Expressionist and post-Ab Ex vistas of her 1950s–70s maturity, and a panoply of smaller early works and instructive ventures into medium-sized canvases and collages as she went along. Krasner’s earliest self-portraits, with their compositional echoes of Van Gogh, preserve her lifelong, penetrating, take-no-shit stare; in her unimpressed Self-Portrait (1928), painted

when she was twenty, her face sits on the surface while her sombre eyes recede a foot deep, as if seeing what was coming. By her mid-thirties, after passing through an obligatory cubist phase that emerged, seemingly, from densely worked and steadily abstracting life drawing, she’d already grasped how to make a small canvas pass for big. Untitled (1946) is a polychrome square field of pinks, blues and yellows covered with short, scratchy marks rotating hyperactively in all directions; there’s a sense of luminous event that’s disproportionate to its tightly bounded space. It’s around eight years later, though, that Krasner arrived at real greatness, first in works like Bird Talk (1955), tachisme crossed with Matisse’s cutouts: a tumble of torn-looking, overlapping shapes in a weird, dreamlike palette of tangerine, fuchsia and tan, their arrangement looking about to fly apart. A year later, circa Prophecy (1956) and its cousins, she was beating Willem de Kooning at his own game – if that game was fervid, wracked and taut abstractions of the body expressed through brutal architectonic composition and a deep affinity for soft shades of pink. At this point in the approximately chronological show, we’re still upstairs. Krasner has not gotten hold of big canvases. When we get there, specifically to Cinemascope works like The Eye is the First Circle (1960) – which suggests an outsize, abstracted Chinese ink drawing, a symphony of encircling brownish swirls and, in associative terms, several vortexes having a fight – the effect is almost comical. Here and in

facing page, bottom Another Storm, 1963, oil on canvas, 239 × 448 cm. © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York

facing page, top Blue Level, 1955, oil, paper and burlap collage on canvas. © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Courtesy private collection

paintings like the same year’s levitating Polar Stampede, its tumult of purplish-brown strokes shot through with arctic fanfares of white, the musical analogy would be finding a clutch of lost, peak-period Beatles songs. Except Krasner was never really lost, certainly not on her own terms. She just didn’t stay in a known place. The serene Kufic (1965), with its shapely palimpsest of mushroomcoloured loops and penumbra on a lighter ground, cleanly anticipates Brice Marden. By 1971’s Palingenesis, a flat and gnomic convocation of standalone green and pink shapes suggesting an uncrackable code, she’d arrived somewhere else entirely; by Olympic (1974), with its tidy graphic mix of arrowhead shapes and broken circles, somewhere else again. Two years later, eight years before her death, she was encouraged to revisit some old drawings: inventively and without nostalgia, she sliced them up into vividly shattered neo-cubist collages like Future Indicative (1976). What’s clear is that she was never held down by whatever ‘Abstract Expressionism’ might mean; she seemed in fact to float above it. The wild thing about Living Colour is that, for a belated full salute stretching to nearly 100 works, it still feels too small: particularly in the later phases, there is a sense of getting one or two sentences from a whole radiant chapter, and it cuts off in the mid-1970s. But this can be rectified later, maybe in subsequent stages of this touring show’s run; in terms of the painting pantheon, Krasner is now where she always belonged. Martin Herbert

ArtReview

October 2019

Shin Egashira Beautifully Incomplete Betts Project, London 8 June – 27 July Comprising a handful of architectural drawings, a map and three wood-and-steel sculptural works loosely arranged around this small space off London’s Old Street, Beautifully Incomplete is an exhibition that baits the visitor (and reviewer) with both title and content. Take Bed Machine: dating from the late 1980s to the early 90s, the project is developed here across a map of London and six graphite-on-tracing-paper drawings that detail, in plan, cross section and axonometric projection, a record-player-like structure and related wheel-mounted mechanisms labelled, variously, ‘Bed’, ‘Fish Pond’, ‘Cat Man Tel’ and ‘Player’, each driven by belts, pulleys and hidden motors. Running around the outside edge of what, if Bed Machine were a functioning turntable, would be the platter are the opening lyrics to the blues standard ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’. In one of these drawings, an elevation showing the tone arm of this would-be phonograph as a daggerlike extension labelled ‘male’ penetrating a circular object labeled ‘female’, the title is elaborated as Bed Machine (Baby Please) (1992). Visual- and wordplay aside, Bed Machine, while fantastically detailed, is most likely

unworkable as a music player, a device for sleeping or a polite request to mate, and yet the technical precision of its presentation challenges the viewer to work out what it does do, or at least where it’s coming from. Its parts are separated into 69 discrete objects and presented in accompanying drawings that look like pages from a manual for technical illustration: bracket, cable, electrical switch, spring, lever, chair, window and other less identifiable but no less carefully rendered items. Through their numbering, which is indexed to the map of London, we might assume that these parts were sourced from or have an affective connection to areas of the city, perhaps as notional found objects, with particularly large clusters of numbers linked to Bloomsbury and Lambeth, and secondary groupings further east. The smudging of pencil on ageing, browning tracing paper, combined with the obscure inventiveness of the objects represented, bring to mind the notebooks of a fifteenth-century polymath, but given that the Japanese-born Egashira is an artist and an architect of the present time (having worked as an architect

in Tokyo, Beijing and New York, he moved to London in 1987 and has taught at the Architectural Association since 1990, while exhibiting internationally at the Tsumari International Art Triennial in 2000, as well as other venues), a closer kinship may be found in Le Corbusier’s notion of the house as a ‘machine for living in’ – a formulation that in Egashira’s work manifests as both the mechanical nature of beings and the human traits of machines. This symbiosis is made more explicit in another series of drawings, titled Beauty of Our Pain (1995), in which a medieval torture device evolves into a universal weight machine. In Parallel Garden (1993), a residential environment is again populated by machines: a ‘Rice Driven Automobile’ and ‘Double (Cross) Globes’. This last work appears to have been the inspiration for one of the only recently created works in this exhibition, a wood-and-steel sculpture featuring two globes that is, much like the drawings, at once technically rigorous and artfully handcrafted, a whimsical, notquite-functional evocation of the poetry of living spaces. David Terrien

Bed Machine (window), 1992, tape, graphite on tracing paper, 34 × 57 cm. Courtesy the artist and Betts Project, London

ArtReview

Wong Ping Heart Digger Camden Arts Centre and 5–6 Cork St, London 5 July – 15 September The scene in Camden Arts Centre’s garden might have come straight out of the gory cult-internet cartoon Happy Tree Friends (1999–): the body of a gigantic inflatable giraffe appears to have been exhumed from a heart-shaped grave, its neck ending in bare bone, its head missing. An accompanying text by the artist responsible, Wong Ping, offers a ‘back story’ (as well as an example of the Hong Kong-based artist’s taste for fantasy and the absurd): while digging a grave for his future lover, he uncovered this poor beast, whose neck was being used as an escape tunnel by Hong Kong’s chief executive and officials to flee the sar, thus solving the mystery of their ‘disappearance’ since Hong Kong-wide antiextradition-bill protests started escalating in June. The upper part of the neck and head is ‘hidden’ in a storage facility on Mayfair’s Cork Street (this show’s second venue), Wong tells us, to trap the fugitives so that ‘they can have a taste of the suffering they’ve put hundreds of thousands through’: a metaphor, perhaps, of wishful thinking for a political separation between mainland China and Hong Kong. Organic Smuggling Tunnel (2019), like the twisted and darkly humorous animations for which Wong is best known (and which earned him this show, as the winner of Camden’s inaugural Emerging Artist Prize), borrows from educational and moral narratives to describe

the absurdity and alienation of life in a capitalist world. Two recent examples of Wong’s idiosyncratic digital-animation work, contrasting playful technicolour aesthetics with tales of fucked-up domesticity populated by decaying, sex-obsessed characters, are installed in Camden’s galleries. Playing on a giant led screen at the bottom of which lie thousands of gold-toothed toy dentures, Dear, Can I Give You a Hand? (2018) tells the story of a widower who is seen in turn stealing his daughter-in-law’s dirty underwear, attacked by flesh-eating ants (sent to plague him by his dead wife) and buried under gold dentures (the only legacy left behind by his ex-spouse). Trapped in a posthuman ‘online cemetery’, his avatar eventually escapes and infiltrates a porn server, where he can masturbate happily ever after. Here, as is the case with most of Wong’s narratives (delivered in deadpan Cantonese with English subtitles), everything revolves around sex: the character’s life is defined by endless loops of despair and pleasure, which feed into his pessimistic reflections about existence, desires and mortality in times of capitalism – his cynicism at times offset by some ironic situations (at one point the character resolves to throw his porn videos discreetly out in the street, but is lectured by a young woke woman on how best to recycle them).

Over in Cork Street are a series of four animated Fables (2018–), shown on two led screens, the space-cum-construction-site dressed up with a few inflatable structures to look at or sit on. Here, the widower has been replaced by equally messed-up animal protagonists, including a deviant three-headed rabbit and a formerly activist cow turned capitalist successstory; short and bittersweet, they each culminate in nihilistic teachings: ‘Striving for your own happiness by all means is already better than suffering together with your family’ one reads after one of the three rabbit-headed brothers, driven by jealousy and ambition, succeeds in killing his ‘siblings’. Yet these new works feel less cutting, as if the recourse to another layer of abstraction (the anthropomorphised animals as well as the geometrical simplification of the animation-style deployed by Wong) flattens the tragicomic effect delivered by works like Dear… Leaving the exhibition, I notice what look like spiders feasting on glass turtle-shells; checking the exhibition handout for a title, I find Wong’s trenchant irony again: A luxury faeces cocktail bar owned by a middle-class fly after gentrification pushed some of the poorest turtles out of their shells (2019). In desperate times, perhaps the best way to cope with the futility of existence is with a healthy dose of cynical humour. Louise Darblay

October 2019

Simon Starling a–a’, b–b’ The Modern Institute, Glasgow 7 September – 26 October Because a painting by Rococo master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (The Finding of Moses, c. 1730) was once cut into two separate paintings, a 1968 Fiat 125 Special has been cut into two unequal pieces. The smaller of the two parts of the Tiepolo painting (representing a proud halberdier, afterwards known as A Halberdier in a Landscape) is present in lifesize reproduction, on the gallery wall. Where the rest of the painting would be is a sheet of clear acrylic, cut to the same size as the absent painting. Aligned to the vertical division between the two parts of the Tiepolo painting, the Fiat 125 has been sliced through, the rear part removed, leaving its internal spaces and surfaces open to view: down through the rear window, the section cleaves past the faded upholstered burgundy of the rear seating and into the grey vinyl lining of the booth, and then down through the rear axle and tyres. Because Simon Starling’s show a–a’, b–b’ consists of two parts – the first show here in Glasgow and the other directly following it at Galleria Franco Noero in Turin (home, also, of the Fiat car company) – the Turin show will present the absent portions of the painting and the car. Simon Starling’s show a–a’, b–b’ is a tangle of improbable connections. Starling’s cut dramatises distance, across space and time, joining things and events through history, in fortuitous, wilful associative leaps. Because what connects the painting by Tiepolo and the Fiat is, so the notes tell us, that the painting was once owned by another Giovanni – the fabulously wealthy Italian industrialist Giovanni Agnelli and owner of Fiat, who, local legend has it, used to make a point of driving around Turin in his own standard-model navy blue 125. Stitching together the sundered Tiepolo with the act of chopping up an antique Italian car would be a whimsical gesture, if it ended there. But Starling leads us on, Pied Piper-like,

to the text of playwright Dario Fo’s 1981 play Trumpets and Raspberries, a political satire in which Agnelli is kidnapped, badly disfigured in a car crash and then mistaken for an ordinary Fiat factory worker, Alberto. A copy of Trumpets is present nearby, held in the gloved hand of a rebar-metal mannequin whose head is made of a Japanese Noh theatre mask in the likeness of Agnelli, which, hollow-eyed, gazes at the text with an air of puzzlement. Starling’s playful, connect-the-dots method generates these idiosyncratic, exquisitely produced artefacts, which are tied together by nothing more than the pleasure of finding (or making) these unlooked-for associations. The work, if it exists anywhere, is in this constellation of artefacts, facts and events, which Starling here stretches from Scotland to Italy (since, in another happy coincidence, The Finding of Moses happens to be in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh). Art becomes a portal back into the history of art’s entanglements with society – a recurring theme in Starling’s work, as with his 2010 Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima): The Mirror Room, which traced its way through Cold War history and the making of the atom bomb, by way of a Henry Moore sculpture produced first for Chicago and then Hiroshima, in which the key historical protagonists figure as Noh masks. Masks and masquerade are the other axis of a–a’, b–b’: in the Noh-mask renderings of Agnelli, and another interpreting the face of Tiepolo’s Halberdier; in the scene lifted from Fo’s play, which dwells on the bandaged face of Agnelli following his injuries; in Agnelli’s reputed habit of driving his own ordinary 125 in Turin – motivated, perhaps, by the desire for anonymity when political kidnappings were a frequent event in Italy during the 1970s; and a kind of theatricality and artifice underpins Tiepolo’s absurdly fashionable rendering of

The Finding of Moses, as the Biblical characters of Ancient Egypt are presented as sumptuously dressed European aristocrats and their servants. Social class, then, is tangled in this present masquerade, though it’s hard to conclude that Starling presents this as overt comment or critique. As a dramatic device, the transgressing of social-class boundaries through mistaken identity has long roots, going back, for example, to Shakespearean comedies like Twelfth Night (1602). In the end, though, class order is always restored. Baroque and Rococo art never got far past aristocratic self-regard. Still, if it makes no comment, a–a’, b–b’ sets these questions up for a fall. Picking up on the greyhounds depicted in Tiepolo’s painting, Starling has taken pains to photograph pedigree greyhounds in a photography studio in Turin habitually used for the photographing of cars. Racing dogs with an ambiguous relationship to privilege, greyhounds were once the preserve of nobility, later to become a working-class sporting pastime. This transposition of identities and perspectives is something artists – having a foot in opposing camps, so to speak – are often best place to articulate. This is perhaps what also underpins Starling’s opposition of industrial manufacture and artisan handmaking that inflects much of this show (and the associated minishow by Zürich-based graphic designers Norm, who present a project based on their discovery of a graphic design rebranding proposal for a now-untraceable Italian industrial concern, sometime during the 1970s). Ultimately, beyond any more-direct political and historical agency, it’s the nature of the artist as a kind of nomadic, self-authorising reinventor of historical space, and of art’s unstable appearance and reappearance within it, that a–a’, b–b’ claims as its subject. J. J. Charlesworth

facing page, top a–a’, b–b’, 2019 (installation view) facing page, bottom The artist, wearing a mask of the former Fiat supremo Giovanni Agnelli, reads an aside from Dario Fo’s political satire Trumpets and Raspberries (1974) in which a disfigured Agnelli has his face reconstructed in the image of a Fiat worker in whose jacket he is found, following a near-fatal kidnapping attempt, 2019, wood, gesso, paint, horsehair, leather, Jesmonite, steel, paper, 175 × 58 × 35 cm both images Photo: Patrick Jameson. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya Contemporary Art Museum St Louis 17 May – 18 August You don’t take a photograph, you make it. Never has that silvery old Ansel Adams bromide been so apparent as in Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis. With 40 works spanning from 2006 to 2018, the untitled show provides the first comprehensive look at his portraiture practice. Throughout, there is an emphasis on construction: of queer identity, of the studio environment and of the photographic image itself. Judicious use of mirrors (Sepuya appears in most images) in need of Windexing and smudgy fingerprints on lenses make the artifice more visible. There’s collapse, too, between the controlled studio and the messiness of the outside world, and between photographer, subject and sometimes camera equipment, which form man–machine hybrids. Refreshingly, works are not arranged chronologically but are grouped into series. The oldest photographs on view feature airy, stonewashed and linen-scented portraits of friends and lovers, mostly seen lounging nude in bed. There’s such a lovely lightness to these small portraits, dialled up by their wide mat frames. I think of touch tests for steak doneness, in which you compare your bit of beef to the fleshy pad of your palm below the thumb. An open palm corresponds to raw meat, while

bringing your index finger and thumb together tightens the palm to rare; subsequent fingers take it through medium rare, medium well and well done. Moving through the show suggests a similar tightening sensation: prints get larger and more compositionally complex, but teeter on the precipice of becoming overwrought. Over time, Sepuya’s lens shifts from depicting homosociality and queer tendresse to capturing the space of making photographs itself. Studio portraits become portraits of the artist’s studio. Figures are relegated to the background of these images, appearing in miniature as black-and-white inkjet printouts of photographs. Particularly affecting is Robert, March 24 (2014), in which a hand lingers over a printout of another white hand on a table, as if cupping an invisible computer mouse. Sometimes there is a slow stop-motion zoom, as with Studio, March 2 (Part 1) (2014), a shot of artist Sam McKinniss next to another of a cigarette being ashed into a Mason jar. In Studio, March 12 (2014), the same image is seen from some distance, taped high on the studio wall next to a ballet-pink length of clothing (a kimono, a bed jacket perhaps?) with a slightly unfocused table in the foreground. There are so many ‘dirty shots’ – distanced, over-the-shoulder framing

– but the end result is as gorgeously intimate as it is ‘by us for us’. More recent series further fragment the body, which is decapitated, blown up and printed across several sheets of paper, or layered and arrayed into beguiling collages that are then photographed. Faces give way to tangles of torsos and muscled limbs, black and white skin often intertwined for contrast, but there’s never any doubt that the hands holding the camera or adjusting the lens are Sepuya’s. The black velvet drapes of traditional portraiture studios further insist on blackness as a technology – the darkroom and the dark rooms of queer clubs, yes, but also an unabashed black queer gaze. Two installations – or are they props? – further extend the studio into the space of the museum. In one corner, Studio Work (2010–11) features a display case filled with various printed matter and other studio detritus, including stationery, desiccated orange peels, packaging materials and an unsolicited letter. Elsewhere, a wooden shipping crate is filled with tomes including a number of Virginia Woolf novels, books about Mapplethorpe and black male nudes, and Cecil Beaton’s Self Portrait with Friends (1979), the latter a fitting sentiment for the show. Rahel Aima

Study for friendship, d.c.s. and f.c. (2016), 2015, archival pigment print, 122 × 86 cm. Courtesy the artist; Document, Chicago; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; and Team Gallery, New York

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Rosebud Matthew Marks, North Orange Grove and Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles 13 July – 24 August Abstraction, like the garden weed, is a matter more of judgement than strict taxonomy. With the summer group show Rosebud, curator Beau Rutland considers the landscape of contemporary abstraction – and the less-than-strictlyformal impulses shaping it. Twenty-one works by ten artists span the gallery’s two adjacent Los Angeles spaces. Some bear titles that hint at their subject matter, which often skews cuttingly political. Tomashi Jackson’s 2019 collage Redefined Redline (Seneca Village, Arturo Shomburg, Mr. Dorce) (Requiem for my Adams Blvd.) refers to the mass displacement of a primarily AfricanAmerican community, the homes of whom were dismantled to carve out New York’s Central Park in the mid-nineteenth century. Slavery was not fully outlawed in the state until 1827, and many freed slaves later settled in (comparatively) safe enclaves, including the work’s titular Seneca Village. Other pieces, like Nikita Gale’s ambiguously titled, towering grey Jacob’s Ladder-like chains, all dubbed Fixed Loop (2019), leave viewers to make inferences on their own without the aid of titles. This ominous trio of concrete-dipped-terrycloth-on-steel, wall-mounted works was, upon subsequent research, revealed to be spurred

by the ad hoc barricades erected during civil uprisings throughout time. Kahlil Robert Irving, meanwhile, embeds within gloms of urban detritus newspaper headlines referencing the pervasive, racially motivated police brutality in the artist’s hometown of St Louis and beyond. With scraps of tabloid rags adhered to stoneware and mottled black porcelain that recalls tar on cement, Irving’s sculpture Street Cans & Coils: Memorial Pack – als 2011 (2018) called to my mind the view Staten Islander Eric Garner perhaps had during the violent final moments of his life in 2014, as he was held down by police forces and choked until he suffocated. Other inclusions are both less damning and more sentimental. Ellsworth Kelly’s two blackand-white photographs, Highway Marker, Hudson and Rooftop, Ghent, both printed in 1972 and among the oldest works in this show, are spare but legible depictions of their eponymous subjects. These photographs provide insight into the observational strategies behind the painter’s iconic Colour Field abstractions, while establishing a through-line between more typical examples of abstraction and the pieces on view here. Adjacent to these are Guy de Cointet’s My husband left me… and Drowned

in the bayou, both 1978. Despite their evocative titles, like Gale’s work they ask that the viewer look further to fully grasp their resonance. De Cointet’s delicate drawings in coloured pencil on paper grounds are greatly enhanced by knowledge of the artist’s performance works of the 1970s and early 80s, in which actors recited similarly oblique and suggestive statements to tease out kaleidoscopic narratives, all veiled allusions to the French-born artist’s interests – among them soap-operatic melodrama, cryptography and the Delphic writer and proto-Surrealist Raymond Roussel. The drawings’ softly pencilled-in shapes are allegedly translations of the works’ titles rendered in a code of de Cointet’s own devising. These paintings, sculptures and photographs cumulatively create the sense that one has come upon a cache of treasure. Each additionally refers to outside concerns far removed from the formalist ‘purity’ of Abstraction with a capital ‘A’. One who takes the time to study these works – their titles, the clues embedded within their designs, their respective places within the oeuvres of their makers – might come away enriched and flush with the feeling of discovery, however light or dark the revelations. Cat Kron

Guy de Cointet, My husband left me..., 1978, coloured pencil on paper, 65 × 102 cm. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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Brian Jungen Friendship Centre Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 20 June – 25 August For more than 20 years, Brian Jungen has been producing sculptural works that transform Western consumer goods into objects representative of traditional Indigenous culture in Canada. Many of the 80 artworks featured in this midcareer survey were created before the tone of discussions around reconciliation and colonialism’s effects on Indigenous communities came to feel so urgent. Given that the tenor of contemporary Indigenous art has also changed dramatically in recent years, how does Jungen’s earlier work hold up given the current political environment? As other Indigenous Canadian artists create works addressing issues directly and viscerally – Rebecca Belmore’s responses to the high levels of violence faced by Indigenous women, for example, or Kent Monkman’s undermining of stereotypical images of Indigenous people by queering them – might Jungen’s earlier work now come across as too polite? Jungen’s practice appears to come from a less angry place than that of the other artists mentioned. The show’s title suggests how welcoming – at least on the surface – his art appears. It is also, according to exhibition materials, inspired by the name of an Indigenous community centre Jungen frequented as a youth, prompting ago curator Kitty Scott to envision the first exhibition hall as a basketball court, with lines on the floor and nets suspended at either end. Twenty sculptures from Jungen’s breakthrough series Prototypes for New Understanding (1998–2005) are among the artworks arranged around the space like

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players. The Prototypes consist of black, red and white Nike Air Jordans that the artist took apart and then restitched into new configurations, so that they resemble West Coast ceremonial masks in the forms of trickster ravens and other mythical creatures. Mounted on metal rods affixed to stands placed on plinths, their presentation replicates the deadening quality of typical Western anthropological museum display and hints at the calls for restitution of pilfered cultural artefacts. Towering over the Prototypes are six ‘totem poles’ made of multicoloured nylon golf bags (all 2007), each titled with the first year of a decade, beginning with 1960, which without further explanation viewers might not know was the year Indigenous people obtained the right to vote in Canadian elections. Moving forward through Indigenous Canadian history, the totem titled 1990 marks the year of the ‘Oka Crisis’, a 78-day standoff northwest of Montreal between police and army officers and Indigenous protesters opposing the expansion of a golf course onto land containing a Mohawk burial ground. By replicating one culture’s fetishised artefacts (masks, totem poles) in the materials of another (sneakers and golf bags), Jungen gives form to the conflict that arises when values clash. Also notable are the sculptures My Decoy, Eero and Walking Heart (all 2011), in which Jungen has encased the frames of iconic modernist chairs by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames in rawhide, transforming them into ceremonial drums. These works lack the political bite of the earlier pieces, speaking

ArtReview

rather to Jungen’s interest in modernism and its failed promise of a better future for all through design. The second gallery houses the exhibition’s centrepiece, Cetology (2002), an enormous sculpture of a whale skeleton made from white plastic chairs. Hanging from the ceiling as in a natural history museum, it’s a reminder of Indigenous people’s historic reliance on whale meat for food, and ties into current concerns about plastics in the ecosystem. Adjacent is the five-screen Modest Livelihood (2012/2019), a leisurely paced video showing Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater, Jungen and Jungen’s uncle tracking a moose though picturesque Dane-zaa Treaty Lands in an area east of the Rocky Mountains. (Jungen’s mother was Dane-zaa; his father’s family background was Swiss.) The film’s title quotes a 1999 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that stated Indigenous peoples could hunt and fish, but only enough to maintain a ‘moderate livelihood’ for themselves. Such restrictions now seem part of a concerted effort, similar to the government- and church-sponsored residential schools, to suppress Indigenous culture by denying native Canadians the ability to practice or profit from it. Much of this work now feels prescient. Although formal aspects often take precedence over explicit political statements, Jungen was at the forefront of creating work through a postcolonial lens before the term was commonly used, suggesting that Western culture’s dominance has been, for too long, an insidious and destructive force. Bill Clarke

facing page Brian Jungen Friendship Centre, 2019 (installation view). © Brian Jungen. Courtesy the artist and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

above 1980, 1970, 1960, 2007, polyester, metal, painted wood on paper sonotube, 396 × 122 × 91 cm (each). © Brian Jungen. Courtesy the artist and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

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Hanna Saarikoski Galerie Anhava, Helsinki 8 August – 1 September Hanna Saarikoski’s first solo show at Galerie Anhava combines elements of drawing, video art, installation and performance in a solitary video, which depicts the artist wearing a yetilike costume made of charcoal. Projected in the gallery’s basement space, Anhava Underground, C (2019) invites the viewer to reflect on a material – carbon – that is fundamental to both art history and the natural environment. Carbon, stored in rocks, water, the atmosphere, plants and fossil fuels, is of course responsible for the recent rapid rise in the earth’s temperature, leading to alarm at the wildfires in Brazil’s rainforests. Those largely manmade fires both release carbon into the atmosphere and destroy the plant life that would otherwise help absorb it via photosynthesis. Given this context, Saarikoski’s six-minute film, titled after carbon’s periodic symbol, has an added poignancy. Its depiction of the artist walking circles in her empty studio symbolises

the finite supply of a natural resource that has historically been so fundamental to drawing, the foundation of artistic activity. As she moves, the subtle scratching and clinking of her charcoal suit provides the soundtrack to the slow emergence of a circle drawn as the bottom of the costume, around the artist’s feet, drags across the otherwise clean white floor. This repetitive circular passage, carried out first jauntily, then solemnly and then almost sarcastically, as the artist takes sullen slouching steps, evokes a sense of the inevitability of the ruin of nature’s cycles. (And also, one might note, the work of Bruce Nauman and Janine Antoni.) This representation of resignation, Beckettian in its simplicity, would appear to suggest the futility of any attempt to halt climate catastrophe. However, in line with Beckett’s injunction to ‘fail better’, one can always keep trying to challenge the basically bleak fate we as humans face, if only to fail better each time. Which is arguably the basic premise of art.

C (still), 2019, 4k video, colour, sound, 6 min 16 sec. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Anhava, Helsinki

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The costume, which is also on display, is testament to such creative resolve. It is fashioned from charcoal sticks that Saarikoski made by heating branches from a deciduous tree in an environment deprived of oxygen, another of life’s sources. In this process, the wood is charred rather than fully burnt, conveying how humankind’s early control of the elements gave rise to artistic works. The form of the costume evokes mythic creatures as much as pagan ceremonial dress, in both cases signalling how primordial artistic endeavour bid to mimic and control nature. Above all, this fragile material, the coming together of two incompatible elements causing fire damage, can leave profound creative marks. Though at this point in the progress of global warming it is unclear whether art might achieve much else. For now, deploying its interpretive function, Saarikoski gives pause for reflection. Mike Watson

Gina Beavers The Life I Deserve moma ps1, New York 31 March – 2 September Gina Beavers’s paintings draw a direct line from Saint Lawrence, patron saint of cooks, to Guy Fieri, celebrity chef and apostle of American culinary excess. Her exhibition at moma ps1 connects the history of food painting with the contemporary, digital circulation of food imagery. The food still life, up until its golden age in seventeenth-century Europe, carried symbolic meanings that were often religious: the apple as original sin, the pomegranate as desire, the cracked egg as impotence. But as the West entered the Enlightenment and adjusted to capitalism, food came to serve different allegorical purposes: signalling luxury and abundance, or as elegiac reminder of human impermanence. Beavers’s paintings harbour no freshly baked loaves of bread, no seedy melons, no halved nuts or bunched grapes. Pulled from social-media images, many of which, the exhibition materials tell us, Beavers found by searching the tag #foodporn, they depict marbled slabs of meat

(Local Pasteurized Beef, 2014), a huge plate of French fries with 20 paper ramekins of ketchup (Who Loves French Fries?, 2019) and a breakfast of pancakes, bacon and sunny-side-up eggs plated on someone’s ass (English Breakfast, 2015). Neither do these works participate in the realist traditions of Caravaggio or Joos van Cleve. Acrylic is laboriously layered and smeared, like nightmarish frosting or unhinged-clown makeup, into a high relief that is almost sculptural. The translation of social-media images of food into objects renders a mind-spinning take on the commodification of cuisine. These foods are symbols of psychotic excess, both gustatory and painterly. The mind’s mouth waters at these images, but its stomach turns. The same effect is apparent in the depiction of subjects besides food, including male bodybuilders and online makeup how-tos. Works like Smokey Eye Tutorial (2014) show a time-lapsed application of eyeliner and shadow; Jack Shredded (2016) renders the selfie of a man showing off

his abs. It’s clear that Beavers is interested in how people aestheticize themselves, but her more compelling work concerns how people aestheticise, and sexualise, what they eat. Unlike Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of pies in more-or-less everyday settings, Beavers’s Cake (2015) shows a slice being removed from the ass of a human-shaped cake. On Instagram there are more than 200 million posts carrying the #foodporn hashtag. Like actual pornography, food porn renders real experience into a stream of signifiers. Beavers’s paintings got me thinking about today’s visual culinary culture – glistening, glamourised, exoticised – and how it reinforces certain bourgeois tastes and power dynamics. What would a more progressive #foodporn look like? How might one represent food in a way that upends those fuckedup structures that produce and circulate it? Beavers’s paintings don’t show us, but they’re nice to indulge in. Rob Goyanes

Cake, 2015, acrylic on canvas panel. Courtesy the artist

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Books Don’t Look Back in Anger by Daniel Rachel, Trapeze, £20 (hardcover) This might be the month the United Kingdom finally leaves the European Union. Or – given the political chaos now engulfing the British political system, including a parliament in open war with a prime minister supposedly committed, ‘do or die’, to leaving on 31 October – it might not. For many in the Remain camp, the choice by voters (predominantly in England) in the 2016 referendum to leave must have been motored by various forms of xenophobia, racism, ‘Little Englander’ mindset and a nostalgia for the bygone era of British imperial greatness. Whether one agrees with those views or not, there is little doubt that the three years since the Brexit vote have been marked by a renewed focus on the question of cultural ‘identity’ defined on national lines. Along with Donald Trump’s election as us president, Brexit is supposed to represent the rejection of a more cosmopolitan, multiculturalist outlook, as much as it might be a protest against two decades of neoliberal globalisation. If the state we’re in now is a product of the society that emerged during the 1990s, the last time ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ became a vivid part of the cultural zeitgeist, it’s perhaps worth taking another look at that decade. Daniel Rachel’s Don’t Look Back in Anger – The rise and fall of Cool Britannia, told by those who were there does just that: it’s a remarkable compilation of interviews offering a vividly detailed chronicle of the extraordinary burst of cultural energy – across pop music, fashion, fiction, tv, film contemporary art and football – that characterised the 90s, from the perspective of some of the key artistic and political figures of the time. Damon Albarn, Noel Gallagher, Tracey Emin, Irvine Welsh and Tony Blair are just a few of the huge cast of Rachel’s subjects. Rather than present each interview separately, Rachel intercuts his chorus of subjects according to particular moments or topics. It’s a sophisticated and useful literary device, and what emerges is a decade in ‘three acts’: the decrepit, Tory, recession-hit Britain of the late 80s and early 90s, and the catalysing, hedonistic experience of rave in youth culture; the aftermath of rave and emergence of broke-but-can-do creative people across fashion, art and music, and their growing success in the anarchic, drug-fuelled party atmosphere of mid-90s London, epitomised

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by ‘Britpop’; and the rapid deflation of the ‘Cool Britannia’ bubble after the election of Blair’s New Labour in 1997, via the death of Princess Diana and the global shock of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Britpop drives the narrative, but then it was the Britpop bands that were most vividly implicated in mining British cultural history, in their return to 60s-inflected guitar-pop. As Ocean Colour Scene frontman Simon Fowler puts it, ‘Maybe it’s an age thing. Everyone suddenly realised how exciting the sixties were. What would their relationship be with the sixties? Their parents’ record collection.’ That return to songmaking was also in reaction to the dominance of American pop: Suede’s Brett Anderson argues, in a swipe at Nirvana, that ‘if there was anything good that came out of Britpop and Cool Britannia, it was a rejection of American cultural imperialism’. As many of the interviewees point out, the Union Jack-waving bit of Britpop was the media’s reductive take on these bands’ more ambiguous explorations. Albarn explains that Blur’s breakthrough albums, Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993) and Parklife (1994), were a ‘satirical look at the erosion of an Englishness and the emergence of a new mid-Atlantic, post-European weirdness’. But while it may have been ironic, that turn back to an older cultural iconography still resonated with a generation of listeners in their twenties. Don’t Look Back in Anger isn’t sociological analysis, it’s oral history, but the accounts highlight how cultural iconography and attitude were embedded in social class. Vulgarity, hedonism, bad taste, comedy, sex, drugs and drinking became the cultural vocabulary of the rejection of the repressive, censorious and hypocritical culture of Britain under Margaret Thatcher. As Emin cheerfully recalls of the merchandise she and Sarah Lucas made while running their collaborative ‘shop’, ‘I did a T-shirt that said “have you wanked over me yet”. And Sarah’s T-shirt was “i’m so fucky”. We were years ahead of Loaded magazine and laddism and ladettes.’ Or as Welsh succinctly puts it, ‘Margaret Thatcher was a lower-middle-class bigot who hated working-class plebs… She was an arsehole’. Don’t Look Back in Anger evokes how Britpop, Young British Art, style-magazine culture, the ‘New Lad’ (and ‘Ladette’) culture and football culture celebrated hedonism and called back,

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past the Thatcher 80s, to a hazily remembered memory: of the last time youth culture was in the ascendant, tinged with nostalgic attachment to working-class culture. Though, as comedian Meera Syal and Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh rightly point out, it was inevitably a predominantly white culture that was being called back to. The celebratory mood of a ‘New Britain’ embedded in a renewed love of football and beer-drinking struck some as nothing more than a risky retreading of nationalistic jingoism. But in truth, much of the harking-back to working-class attitudes and pre-Thatcher British culture was a kind of depoliticised eulogy for the destruction of working-class life during the 80s. Similarly, the revival of a distinctly British cultural iconography was less jingoistic nationalism than the surfacing anxiety among ‘Thatcher’s children’ that they didn’t really know what kind of country they now lived in. As a substitute for those destroyed solidarities, there was hedonism and drugs and – the worst innovation of the 90s – the fake togetherness of mass emotionalism, which crystallised in the public grief at the death of Diana. As Jeremy Deller points out, ‘It was a form of hysteria. People could express their own unhappiness with the world… and it became this self-generating thing.’ As the 90s became the 2000s, many gained from neoliberal economic globalisation, and nationalism – and the nation state – were no longer political in the way they had been. In the European Union that took shape in the 90s, European nation states became more integrated. The financial crash of 2008 threw a spanner into these works, and the dereliction of many English communities outside of the big cities – the same communities that were first wasted by deindustrialisation, and from which many young creatives left during the late 80s – has become critical. It was these regions where most voted to leave. It’s hard to detect a major resurgence of ‘Little Englander’ cultural nationalism today. Ironically, many commentators forget that the twenty- and thirtysomethings of the 90s – the Britpop generation – are the fortyand fiftysomethings of today, a demographic that tended towards Leave in the referendum. In some sense, that generation is looking back in anger. J.J. Charlesworth

The last time ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ became a vivid part of the cultural zeitgeist October 2019

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Insurrecto by Gina Apostol Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) The 1901 Balangiga Massacre was the bloodiest event of the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). On that there is no disagreement. But how bloody it was, and who was massacring whom, depends on your point of view. On the one hand the designation refers to the killing of 48 us soldiers (or perhaps fewer, estimates differ) by townspeople and revolutionaries on Samar Island. In response us General Jacob H. Smith, tasked with pacifying Samar, infamously ordered that the island’s interior be turned into a ‘howling wilderness’, subsequently instructing his troops to ‘kill anyone over ten’. The result was an estimated 2,500 civilians dead – the actual figure remains unknown and might be as much as 50,000. So, on the other hand, this is the real massacre. History, as Gina Apostol’s fourth novel demonstrates, is a fabrication formed of opinion and interpretation, combined with the force of their projection, as much as it is of dates, statistics and what might be tentatively pushed forward as facts. Balangiga, and its manifold interpretations, is the event around which Insurrecto circles. Apostol herself is a usbased, Philippines-born writer who has won prizes for her work, which is written in English, in both her native and adopted homes. But as much as it revolves around history, the novel also turns on the role of women in those histories: primarily Chiara,

an American filmmaker who is writing a script about the massacre and whose father disappeared while shooting a movie in Samar; and Magsalin, her translator and guide, who is additionally writing her own script, ostensibly to ‘correct’ the inventions of the foreigner. They’re travelling through Rodrigo Duterte’s present-day Philippines in search of their differing notions of truths about a past that, as one timeline bleeds into another, seems to be formed of anything other than history. Or, as Apostol puts it towards the end of the book, this is a tale about the stories these women ‘wish to tell’. Not least among them is a version of Balangiga in which the revolution was led by women. As the novel flips between the two women’s narratives and their contrasting national perspectives, a multitude of other stories are drawn into a whole in which fact, fiction, supposition, hearsay and theories of varying degrees of outlandishness merge (among them that nineteenth-century Filipino painter Juan Luna – who killed his wife while living in Paris – might be Jack the Ripper). As narratives are gathered and generated through digressions into film and literary theory, internet searching and archival research, there are times when all you can see are the knowing ways in which the whirling plot is being constructed, deconstructed

and reconstructed, again and again, by the author. It’s just about saved from becoming a wholly irritating exercise in metafiction by the fact that history, and perhaps life itself, works in this way too. As Magsalin puts it, ‘Everybody is messed up and occupied by others! Even if you are not Filipino! We are all creatures of translation, parallel chapters repeating in a universal void!’ One digression, for example, evokes Vietnam war films shot in locations other than Vietnam and a bridge dynamited by the Japanese in 1943 that was left in ruins until 1976, when it was rebuilt for a movie, so that it could be blown up again. Fundamental to this novel is the way in which history and identity is mediated: here, a massacre ‘witnessed’ by Americans through photographs (and more-or-less accurate captions) and then retold to their victims through cinema, who in turn get involved in debates about which (American) soundtrack provides the most accurate soundtrack to Philippine history. ‘There was something both engrossing and pathetic about it,’ Apostol writes, ‘about reconstructing the trauma of whole countries through a movie’s palimpsest.’ And yet Insurrecto is not simply a demonstration of the dangers of pathetic passivity, but rather of the ways in which agency can be claimed, even if identity is an often comic process of occupation, translation and all that comes with it. Nirmala Devi

Model City Pyongyang by Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić Thames & Hudson, £19.95 (hardcover)

In the preface to this new photobook by Beijingbased architect Cristiano Bianchi, which documents North Korea’s capital, travel writer Pico Iyer writes ‘I am often shocked at how little most of us in the West know about daily life in this nation of 25 million’. It’s a weird comment, given the glut of similar publications. The reader could turn, for example, to a book, published by Taschen earlier this year, by Oliver Wainwright, a British architecture critic who also contributes an essay here; or recent titles by Nick Bonner, who helped facilitate Bianchi’s trip, or even the copious

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articles by Iyer himself. Pyongyang is many things, but underexposed is not one of them (it is even the subject of a 2018 travelogue by Monty Python star Michael Palin). This however is, as Iyer puts it, a ‘neutral’ study of the architecture in the hermit state. This translates as photos of pristine modern and postmodern architecture, given a pastelhued colour grade, followed by easily the book’s most original element: a series of architectural plans of these buildings by Belgrade-based designer Kristina Drapić. Personally, I’d have liked more detail as to

ArtReview

how ‘On Architecture’, a 170-page treatise written in 1991 by Kim Jong Il, the father of North Korea’s current leader, which the various essayists touch on, fitted with Juche, the all-pervasive ideology laid down by Kim Il-sung, the father of the nation. Yet for more pointed lessons in North Korean urban design, the reader might be better overall to study the 2016 aerial photographs obained by Amnesty International of two of the country’s kwan-li-so, the penal colonies crammed with those who have fallen foul of the regime. Oliver Basciano

In Print A roundup of new and recent publications in art, propaganda and moon architecture Most artists, even the most ardently political or outspoken, are unlikely to have a petrol bomb thrown at their studio. But then most artists don’t lead a country or make their work in the seat of its government. Edi Rama’s artmaking predates his political career as mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011 and then, from 2013, as prime minister of Albania. The bomb came earlier this year from opposition supporters protesting government corruption, but Rama’s day job proves more than just a dramatic hook to his drawing and sculpture, as his new monograph, Work (Hatje Cantz, €29), proves. With a nod to biomorphic surrealism, colourful watercolours are joined by abstract sketches frequently doodled during meetings, often over working documents: records, perhaps, of the subconscious that sit uneasily alongside the official minutes. Rama’s work as an artist certainly gains him positive media attention (well, it counts in his favour in ArtReview, at least), which by Jonas Staal’s reckoning means mission accomplished. The Dutch artist’s Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (mit Press, $29.95/£22.50) dislodges any belief that this kind of art is only to be found in obviously totalitarian regimes. ‘The very idea that one could stand outside of propaganda, recognize it, and as such resist it, merely because one lives in a democracy, is itself the product of propaganda,’ Staal writes. This is an engrossing overview from an artist whose projects include the New World Summit, a ‘parliament’ in which blacklisted organisations including the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the Kurdish Women’s Movement are given space for discussion. Along the way we encounter figures such as Phil Strub, an ‘entertainment liaison’ at the us Department of Defense since 1989 whose credits include the tv series 24 (2001–14) and the Transformers franchise (2007–), and Vladimir Surkov, a theatre director and adviser to Russia’s President Putin. The economic precarity of socially engaged art is the subject of Leigh Claire La Berge’s Wages Against Artwork (Duke University Press, $26.95), an analysis of alternative economic systems set up by artists (with an odd digression into the use of animals and children as fee-free performers). Among them is Renzo Martens’s provocation, in his 2008 film Enjoy Poverty, that the poor of Congo should benefit from their destitution by selling their own images of it rather than giving away this ‘resource’ free to Western photographers. This led ArtReview, not unnaturally, to a more critical evaluation of a new photobook by Ivor Prickett, End of the Caliphate (Steidl, €45),

in which the New York Times photojournalist documents his time on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the isis regime crumbled. His images remain incredibly powerful, showing a society, but crucially not a people, in desolation. Voyaging Out by Carolyn Trant (Thames & Hudson, £24.95, pictured below) fills the gaps in a British art history written by men (as we are on the topic of not being paid enough and operating outside the dominant order) by profiling women in the artworld, stretching from the fight for suffrage and the ‘noisy feminists’ of surrealism to artists such as Sheila Fell who refused to be defined by gender. What would they have made of a new compendium titled, in have-cakeand-eat-it fashion, Great Women Artists (Phaidon, £39.95)? Standard coffee-table fare, it provides big images and small blurbs for 500 artists across a broad generational and geographical range, from Tomma Abts to Fahrelnissa Zeid, including Liliane Lijn, Ana Mendieta and Lygia Pape. For a much more in-depth study of their work, alongside that of Javier Téllez, Gego and Aubrey Williams, among others, turn to The Crossing of Innumerable Paths (Ridinghouse, £25/$30), a new collection of essays by Guy Brett. The driving force behind the groundbreaking Signals gallery and magazine during the early 1960s, the British curator has long been a champion of artists from Africa and, particularly, Latin America. Brett was ahead of the curve. Today, ‘a Eurocentric view in a major international art event or exhibition… would be, if not a downright embarrassment, then certainly a point of consternation and critique’, writes curator Simon Sheikh in Curating after the Global: Roadmaps for the Present (mit Press, $39.95/£30.00), a new reader tackling the pitfalls of the globalised artworld. Yet, given this necessary internationalism, how does art stop itself from being sucked into the homogenising systems of global capital? Not a new question (in his book, Brett argues for an ‘individuality in collectivity’), but one made urgent as disorientated and uprooted communities turn to strongmen offering to restore ‘the lure of the local’ (as Lucy Lippard, who is quoted by Sheikh, had it). Among those offering a route out of this conundrum is Hajnalka Somogyi of Budapest’s grassroots off-Biennale, the first of which was staged without any state or corporate funding. The

October 2019

curator notes wryly that ‘self-exploitation never felt so good’. A celebration of the local is behind Paris and Santiago (both Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities, £4.50 and £10.90), anthologies of stories edited by Andrew Hodgson and Jessica Sequeira respectively. They are the latest in a so-far 22strong list of works related to particular cities and gathered through open submissions. ‘What is a city?’ asks Sequeira in her introduction. ‘It is built up of desire, horror, dream, tranquillity, memory, domesticity, grit…’ If this imprint seeks to map the literature of a place (and a place in literature), then a new series of foldout maps from a Romania-based group of architecture enthusiasts provide expert introductions to a city’s Soviet-era built environment. The latest, Socialist Modernist Architecture in Chişinău (Bureau for Art and Urban Research, €20.20), follows an earlier guide to Bucharest. On its next visit to Moldova, ArtReview looks forward to checking into the once-grand Hotel Cosmos, with its ‘expressive’ facade, even if ‘today it no longer functions at full capacity nor answers the requirements of a comfortable stay’. If you think the Cosmos’s ‘dire state, in urgent need of repairs’ doesn’t sound particularly hospitable (lightweights, where’s your sense of adventure?), it might still be more relaxing than a trip into the actual cosmos. If a journey into space appeals to you, however, make sure to pack Architecture Guide: Moon (dom publishers, €38) by Berlin-based ‘3D artist, Roboticist, illustrator, neighborhood painter, outer space expert’ Paul Meuser, which charts every human-designed object to have landed by the Sea of Tranquillity in the last 60 years. Cosmic. Oliver Basciano

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Art, like any good breakfast, escapes the mark of timeâ&#x20AC;Ś

Courtesy Gabriel Kuri (see page 22)

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ArtReview spends a lot of its time explaining to friends who work in different industries that the artworld is not, contrary to its representation in the popular media, a playground for ageing practical jokers, black market for opportunistic profiteers or laundry facility for the reputations of the superrich but a forum for the expression of diverse experiences of the world and the contestation of radical ideas. Moreover, that ArtReview’s job is not confined to sipping prosecco at gallery openings (although seriously, it ‘has’ to do this sometimes) but is rather about reflecting on how contemporary visual culture shapes the societies in which we live. So you can imagine how ArtReview felt when waking up at the weekend to learn that the latest contemporary art-related news story to break into the public consciousness – the previous being when Banksy ‘shocked’ the artworld’s countless Captain Renaults by shredding a picture in an auction house and, prior to that, the sale of a dubious Leonardo for several hundred million dollars to the Saudi Arabian crown prince now better known for (allegedly!) ordering the dismemberment of a critical Washington Post journalist in Istanbul – was the theft of a solid gold toilet from the palace where Winston Churchill was born. The artwork at large is fifty-eight-yearold Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2018), plundered from the Italian artist’s retrospective at Blenheim Palace, a British country house attempting to subsidise its upkeep by hosting blockbuster contemporary art exhibitions. It’s easy to pontificate on the symbolic potential of the work, which is, after all ArtReview’s real job. Obviously indebted to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), Cattelan’s khazi can be read as a comment on the vulgarity of contemporary culture, the expansion of the field of art to include (among other things) the weak repetition of a joke made a century ago and confusion around how the combination of material cost and immaterial (which is to say, artistic) worth translates into financial value. The work, precisely because its allegorical function is so unambiguous, also serves as a neat one-liner about privilege (as the curators at Blenheim Palace surely recognised): when

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Trying to give a shit

Maurizio Cattelan, America, 2016 (installation view, Blenheim Palace, 2019). Photo: Tom Lin. Courtesy Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire

ArtReview

President Donald Trump requested the loan of Landscape with Snow (1888) to the White House from the Guggenheim’s collection, its senior curator, Nancy Spector, proposed America instead. Which ArtReview must confess it found, when it was in a better mood, pretty punkish and funny. But it’s also getting a bit tired of the kind of rhetorical hoop-jumping that is used to justify, on the grounds that it is art, the existence of solid gold toilets. When Duchamp, apparently on the advice of his friend Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven, submitted a urinal to the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, he was exploiting a contractual double bind. The society’s board of directors were bound by its constitution to accept any submission to the exhibition made by one of its members, a clause introduced by the founders (including Duchamp) in order to legislate against personal taste becoming a factor in the selection process. Conscious that the rules of the game dictated that the board must affirm whatever he put forward as art, Duchamp selected an object that was manifestly not art. This reductio ad absurdum depends on the principle that the urinal fails any universally applicable definition of what art is: if you accept that a ceramic piece of toiletware with a scrawled signature is an artwork simply because it’s in an exhibition or because the history books say so, then the joke is on you. Fountain doesn’t break down the boundaries separating art from the world but seeks to exploit the undefinable and ‘infrathin’ space between them. There is inevitably speculation, given that the trickster Cattelan has previous experience in this kind of thing, that the theft is an orchestrated prank. ArtReview prays to whichever household god is tasked with preserving its dignity with those aforementioned friends that this is not the case, while also noting that Duchamp’s original was lost because no one at the time thought the material vehicle for a conceptual provocation worth preserving. If it turned up now, it’s fair to assume that it would be worth considerably more to its owner than even the $6 million that Blenheim Palace will be claiming on America’s insurance. ArtReview begins to think it better that neither is found. ar