How do you feel?
Javier TĂŠllez Kemang Wa Lehulere, Vincent Fecteau
Daniel RichteR
i ShoulD have known betteR lonDon SeptembeR 2018 Ropac.net
lonDon paRiS SalZbuRG
K e m a ng Wa L e hu L e r e not even the departed stay grounded
marian goodman gallery
london
13 sep tember – 20 oc tober 2018
NEW YORK
Hugh Hayden Border States
Contemporary Follower of Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1515 (detail). Oil on panel transferred to canvas. 72 1/4 × 67 7/8 × 1 5/8 inches (183.5 × 172.5 × 4 cm). Private Collection.
Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art September 12–October 27, 2018 Presented in collaboration with Nicholas Hall
David Zwirner
New York
PAULO MONTEIRO The Empty Side
September 15 - October 13, 2018
ZENO X GALLERY
GODTSSTRAAT 15 2140 ANTWERP BORGERHOUT BELGIUM +32 3 216 16 26 INFO@ZENO-X.COM WWW.ZENO-X.COM
How likely is it that only I am right in this matter? (b), 2018 (detail).
Wolfgang Tillmans September 13–October 20, 2018
David Zwirner
New York
Brussels Paloma Bosquê Otobong Nkanga 06/09 – 20/10 2018
São Paulo New York Patricia Leite 12/09 – 15/10 2018
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Lucas Arruda Paulo Nazareth 18/08 – 04/11 2018
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, 2nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info@mendeswooddm.com Image: Patricia Leite
Simon Fujiwara Empathy I August 31 – September 30, 2018 We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette
Potsdamer Strasse 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com
Torsgatan 19 | Stockholm | bonnierskonsthall.se Éva Mag, Embossment - point lace, 2018. Photo: Jean-Baptiste BÊranger
What do you dream of? The Mohole Flower and other tales group show curated by Magali Arriola Marcel Duchamp Pierre Huyghe Laura Lima e Zé Carlos Garcia Marie Lund David Medalla Cildo Meireles Theo Michael Gabriel Sierra
Wesley Duke Lee Jean Harlow – The Zone: Life and Death
21 August - 27 October, 2018
Rua Padre João Manuel, 755, São Paulo, Brasil
MIKA ROTTENBERG 7 SEP — 4 NOV 2018 GOLDSMITHS CCA
CHINA GUARDIA N
Prev i Auct ew: 30 Se ion: 2 p Venu -3 Oc tember e –1O Cont : Hong K tober ctob act: o er +852 ng Conv vitac e hen@ 2 n cgua 815 2269 tion and ｜cca rdian Exhi @ b .com .hk｜ cguardia ition Cen www t .cgu n.com.hk re ardia n.co m.hk
Yoshitomo Nara (b.1959) Submarines in Girl Acrylic on canvas 100 x 150 cm. Painted in 1992
HONG KONG Estimate：HKD 10,000,000 – 15,000,000
Kaws (b.1974) Four Foot Companion 127 x 55.9 x 35.6cm Plastic (FRP), cast vinyl painted sculptures Executed in 2007 Edition: 23/100
Estimate： HKD 450,000 – 650,000
Yoshitomo Nara (b.1959) Kai-Ten
AUTUMN AUCTION S 201
Acrylic on canvas, mounted on fibreglass reinforced plastic 55 x 55 x 10 cm. Painted in 2001
Estimate：HKD 5,000,000 – 8,000,000
CHINA GUARDIAN HK
GLENN BROWN The Revolutionary Corps of Teenage Jesus, 2005 Sold to benefit Teiger Foundation for the support of contemporary art
AUCTION LONDON 5 OCTOBER EXHIBITION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 29 SEPTEMBER – 5 OCTOBER 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5401 ALEX.BRANCZIK@SOTHEBYS.COM SOTHEBYS.COM/TEIGER #SOTHEBYSTEIGER © GLENN BROWN
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ArtReview vol 70 no 6 September 2018
Sterility ArtReview recently had to visit a sick relative (don’t worry, it wasn’t ArtReview Asia). That sick relative had had a long life, but had, by then, been ill for some time – this meeting was likely to be the last. ArtReview was determined to build up some tears in order to have some to hide when the time came. That same day, however, by a cosmic fusion of misfortune and bad planning, ArtReview also had to see a couple of exhibitions; even though it might seem callous to admit that ArtReview wasn’t going to let a soon-to-be-ex relative get in the way of seeing the shows it was planning to review. Nonetheless it (the seeing of the exhibitions) proved cathartic. That said, when it came time to write up said reviews, ArtReview was faced with a further dilemma, because inevitably every artwork ArtReview saw, it read (and possibly misread) as being undeniably concerned with finitude or decay. Should ArtReview include this in its review, an interpretation no doubt imbued with the heightened sense of emotion it was feeling while looking at these shows and trying to summon some tears, or should it close off, ignore its own pain and reach for some art theory or history into which it could hermetically seal the objects in the gallery away from the infection of the world outside? Of course, ArtReview has stumbled into debating Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetic theory with itself. (When it was a child, ArtReview’s relative had warned it that what with all its “daydreaming” it would not get far: but who’s laughing now?) To what extent should an artwork deal with the world outside itself? For his part, Herr Immanuel would have it that the judgement of taste is not based on preordained concepts or rules, but ‘the beautiful is that which without any
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concept is cognized as the object of a necessary satisfaction’. Yet walk round any major shows you care to mention (Manifesta, reviewed herein, for example, or some of the museum exhibitions explored in Berlin in the Under the Paving Stones feature) and there is a sense that not to address the outside world in art is negligent at best: stuck in one’s ivory tower, fiddling while Rome burns and any other metaphor you might like to mix. There is a conundrum in all this, however. We want art to deal with the world, but we get pretty uncomfortable, as J.J. Charlesworth finds in his feature on corporate funding, when the world – that is, the big sick capitalist world we actually live in – starts to deal with art. Given that we are unlikely to escape capitalism anytime soon (easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, etc, etc), ArtReview felt it should take a look at this sickness head-on (and yes, you’ll have noticed by this point that ArtReview is no purist in these matters itself). Oliver Basciano reports on the stricken state of Brazilian politics in a preview of the Bienal de São Paulo, which opens exactly a month before the country’s presidential election, while elsewhere looking at how artist Kemang Wa Lehulere processes the trauma of South African apartheid in his work. Nina Power fights fire with fire, in a new essay surveying how illness – and those inhabiting ‘the kingdom of the sick’, as Susan Sontag would have it – might be the antidote to a mad world; hers is a radical reimagining of the notional order of things that Louise Darblay also touches on in her profile of artist Javier Téllez (whose work appears on the cover), and his collaborations with the residents of mental health institutions over the past two decades. So, this issue is about art in the messy real world, a magazine that should be as at home in the doctor’s waiting room as the gallery. Now wash your hands. You might have touched ArtReview inappropriately. ArtReview
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Loie Hollowell Dominant / Recessive 28 August – 20 September 2018
6 Burlington Gardens
LONDON
`
ESTRATEGIAS CONCEITUAIS
Organized by Ricardo Sardenberg and Bergamin & Gomide august 25th - october 20th 2018
UNTITLED, 2005. MIXED MEDIA ON BL ACKBOARD. 122 CM X 122 CM
HOMMAGE À PER KIRKEBY 28/08–20/10/18 CHART ART FAIR, 31/08–02/09/18 / ART BERLIN, 27/09–30/09/18
GBB_sept_100818.indd 1
10/08/2018 14.22
aicongallery N E W Y O R K
L O N D O N
Fritz Lang: Frau im Mond, 1929. Photo: Horst von Harbou / Deutsche Kinemathek
Louisianas Main Corporate Partners:
Art Previewed
Previews by Martin Herbert 31
Under the Paving Stones: Berlin by Mark Rappolt 47
On the Eve of the Bienal by Oliver Basciano 38
Vincent Fecteau Interview by Ross Simonini 54
Sculpture Park by Mark Rappolt 42 Art Featured Artist, Heal Thyself! by Nina Power 66
Aesthetic Judgement by J.J. Charlesworth 80
Kemang Wa Lehulere by Oliver Basciano 74
Javier TĂŠllez by Louise Darblay 86
page 34  Peter Saul, Government of California, 1969. Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale
September 2018
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Art Reviewed
Pascale Marthine Tayou, by Charmaine Picard Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, by Mark Rappolt FRONT International, by Sam Korman
Exhibitions 98 Manifesta 12, by Ben Eastham Other Mechanisms, by Max L. Feldman Uptown High Rise No 2, by Nathaniel Budzinski Julia Scher, by Moritz Scheper Titus Schade, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Paul Chan, by David Trigg Glenn Ligon, by Izabella Scott Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, by Emily McDermott Goran Trbuljak, by Martin Herbert Teresa Burga, by Olga Stefan Julie Becker, by Ben Eastham Jennet Thomas, by J.J. Charlesworth Liverpool Biennial, by Mark Rappolt
Books 116 The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, by Isabelle Graw Plagues and the Paradox of Progress, by Thomas J. Bollyky Brazil: A Biography, by Heloisa M. Starling and Lilia M. Schwarcz A History of Pictures for Children, by David Hockney and Martin Gayford last words 122
page 98 Tania Bruguera, Article 11, 2018, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Wolfgang Träger. Courtesy the artist and Manifesta 12, Palermo
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ArtReview
Art Previewed
When the world turns its attention to a new tragedy, or to the latest celebrity breakup or tweet‌ 29
CHART Art Fair
Andersen’s (DK) Galleri Andersson/Sandström (SE) Andréhn-Schiptjenko (SE) Galerie Anhava (FI) Belenius (SE) BERG Contemporary (IS) Galleri Bo Bjerggaard (DK) Galleri Brandstrup (NO) Cecilia Hillström Gallery (SE) Christian Andersen (DK) Croy Nielsen (AT) Edition Copenhagen (DK) ELASTIC Gallery (SE) Galerie Forsblom (FI/SE) Gether Contemporary (DK) Golsa (NO) Galleria Heino (FI) Helsinki Contemporary (FI) Hverfisgallerí (IS) i8 Gallery (IS) Galleri Magnus Karlsson (SE) Martin Asbæk Gallery (DK) Galleri Nicolai Wallner (DK) Niels Borch Jensen Gallery & Editions (DK/DE) Nils Stærk (DK) Galerie Nordenhake (SE) OSL Contemporary (NO) SPECTA (DK) Gallery Steinsland Berliner (SE) Galleri Susanne Ottesen (DK) Gallery Taik Persons (DE) V1 Gallery (DK)
CHART Design Fair
Adorno (DK) Berg Gallery (SE) Dansk Møbelkunst (DK) Etage Projects (DK) Galleri Feldt (DK) Galleri Format Oslo (NO) Køppe Contemporary Objects (DK) Jacksons (SE) Gallery Lemmetti (FI) LOKAL (FI) RAM Galleri (NO) stockholmmodern (SE)
Talks
Alain Servais (BE) Thomas Lommée (BE) John Kørner (DK) Sam Jacob (UK) Beatrice Galilee (US) Ekaterina Degot (RU) FOS (DK) Luís Silva & João Mourão (PT) Christine Buhl Andersen (DK) Alistair Hudson (UK) Daniel McClean (UK) Nav Haq (UK)
Film
Steina “Lilith” (1987) Dodda Maggý “Étude Op. 88, No. 1” (2017) Perttu Saksa “Animal Image” (2018) Trine Lise Nedreaas “Pulse” (2014) Theo Bat Schandorff “Heavy” (2018) - a mockumentary about Toni R. Toivonen (FI)
Curated exhibitions
Rune Bering (DK) Ane Fabricius Christiansen (DK) Siren Dversnes Dahle (NO) Jonas Edvard (DK) Sigrid Esperlien (NO) Eunju Kang (NO) Evelina Kollberg (SE) Matias Liimatainen (FI) Lotta Mattila (FI) Anna Nordström (SE) Rasmus Nossbring (SE) Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen (DK) Yola Maria Tsolis (NO) L M Salling (DK) Helena Lund Ek (SE) Urd Pedersen (NO) Jin Mustafa (SE) & Natalia Rebelo (SE/BR)
Music
Perel, DJ (DE) Justin Strauss, DJ (US) Alexander Tovborg & Cæcilie Trier, DJ (DK) Blå Time: Albert Grøndal & Emma Rosenzweig, DJ (DK) Esben Weile Kjært, DJ (DK) Denzel Himself (UK) King Larry B (UK) KhalilH2OP (DJ, posh issolation) (DK)
31 August - 2 September 2018 Copenhagen, Denmark
Performances Alice Anderson (UK/FR) Pearla Pigao (NO) The Rodina (CZ) Malin Bülow (SE)
chartartfair.com
Previewed In the post-Watergate USA of the 1970s, cultural Haacke, Cady Noland, Trevor Paglen, Raymond activity was inflected by a collapse of trust in Pettibon, Sue Williams and Jim Shaw – trace governments and politicians, leading, in cinema an arc of diversifying world-weariness from for example, to a brief golden age for the conJFK’s assassination to the recent past (eg 9/11), spiracy thriller. We can’t quite say – cough – alternating between works that diagnose, why a comparable sense of disenchantment uncover and intuit covert webs of power, and should exist right now, but look at the art ones that ‘dive into the fever dreams of the disafmuseums, even the most august ones. At the fected’. That the show pointedly stops short of the last American presidential election and its 1 Met, Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy collates a half-century of artists peering, as the aftermath is perhaps only to be expected. Then institution gracefully summarises it, at the again, maybe the title says it all, and this is the ‘hidden operations of power and the symbiotic Met’s way of quietly trolling the White House. suspicion between the government and its In Spain, Black Light: Secret Traditions in Art 2 citizens’. Made between 1969 and 2016, the Since the 1950s approaches the clandestine from 70 works here – by 30 artists, including Hans a less politicised angle, constructing an approx-
imately chronological mixture of some 350 works that add up to a thesis on deceptive surfaces and hermetic content. That, and the curatorial need to periodically refresh the art we think we know. The show declares that canonical figures such as Antoni Tàpies, Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin, and other cross-generational luminaries such as William Burroughs, Joan Jonas, Francesco Clemente and Goshka Macuga, have all made work underscored by the notion of art as an entryway to higher cognitive planes, whether said artists are (or were) focused on abstraction, films, installations or whatever. Alchemy, psychedelics, mythology, Gurdjieffstyle mysticism: such subtexts can apparently
1 Sue Williams, Hill and Dale, Black-Ops, 2013, oil and acrylic on canvas, 137 × 163 cm. © the artist. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
2 Francesco Clemente, Cartes del Tarot: La sacerdotessa, 2009–11, watercolour, gouache, ink and pencil on paper, 48 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist
1 Jim Shaw, Martian Portraits, 1978, gelatin silver prints, 36 × 28 cm (each). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo
September 2018
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now be paraded without shame, releasing practices and artistic legacies previously mired in dull consensus. Aside from this, pondering why such magical and almost escapist thinking should be of current interest, writer/curator Enrique Juncosa points to, well, how the world is these days, and the fact that a lot of contemporary art is ‘rather boring’. Preach. And in this respect it’s no surprise when 3 galleries take a backward glance. In True Stories: A Show Related to an Era – The Eighties, selected externally by veteran Austrian curator Peter Pakesch, Max Hetzler’s Berlin gallery rewinds to the titular decade from the purportedly clearer, though perhaps also nostalgic, perspective of
today. The archival work brought together here, by 37 Germans, Austrians and Americans, is situated in a temporal context between two flashpoints, 1968 and 1989 – the apex of the Cold War and its end, respectively – and as being made amid what’s described here as the liberating ‘end of the End of Art’, where artists stopped worrying about Modernism running out of road and either picked up paintbrushes or began addressing consumer society anew. In the process, Pakesch suggests, and between Cologne, New York, Los Angeles and Vienna, they wrung productive tension out of vouchsafing fervent individualism at a postmodern point where the individual as a concept was
being undermined, at least by theorists. You can take all this on, or just browse a grouping that makes room for Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger et al, and also rewardingly elliptical figures such as Reinhard Mucha, Robert Gober, Liz Larner, Clegg & Guttmann and plenty more. The 12th Gwangju Biennale may not be the 4 first such event to reference ‘borders’, the subject being understandably everywhere these days. But it can claim some kind of precedence. The current subtitle, Imagined Borders, harkens back to the inaugural 1995 edition, Beyond the Borders – in the days when Borders was still a read-and-feed
4 Choe Chang Ho, A Worker, 2014, chosonhwa (North Korean ink painting on rice paper), 98 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale
3 Richard Prince and Christopher Wool, My Act, 1988, enamel and Flashe on aluminium. © Christopher Wool. Courtesy the artists, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Paris & London
4 Shu Lea Cheang, UKI, virus rising, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale
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ArtReview
6 Fiona Connor, Untitled, 2018, cast resin, paint, 67 × 234 × 3 cm. Courtesy the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles
5 Amy Sillman, ein Paar, 2017 (installation view Capitain Petzel, Berlin, 2017). Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist. Courtesy Capitain Petzel, Berlin
bookshop. In those days there was some expectaSomething simpler? How about a solo feature a site-specific, made-to-fit installation tion that globalisation, of which global biennials 5 show by a painter. But then if we choose Amy involving double-sided canvases. Similarly were a symptom, would undo borders. Yet here Sillman’s first British institutional exhibition, to Laura Owens, who also works in conversawe are. (Meanwhile, Amazon undid Borders.) straightforwardness is out. The Detroit-born tion with digital media and the prospects for Art’s role now, the overseers reckon, is to move artist’s 30 new works here will tour her knotty painting it’s crowbarred open, Sillman is an away from grand narratives and singular authoryet suave approach to painting, which syntheartist whose fundamental inventiveness and ship and return to ‘the complexities of multiple sises postwar abstraction, sultry echoes of verve make questions of the medium’s validity voices and perspectives’. Here, its purpose is South-of-France Matisse, hints of psychedelia, evaporate as you look. She’s also, gallingly, also to emphasise the artistic imaginary. Seven fragments of figuration and a general sense a very good critical writer. Go see. shows by individual curators (or groups of them) of the bodily. But that’s not the complicated Fiona Connor similarly won’t be boxed 6 do that spadework, moving via 153 artists from bit. Sillman is also materially heterodox, venin. The New Zealander, now in her mid-thirties 41 countries between everything from individual turing out not only into printmaking but video and resident in Los Angeles for some years, has boundaries transgressed in daily life, to the animations and zines (her entire back catalogue cofounded one gallery, made an art project out constrained art of North Korea, to the history of these, plus a takeaway new one, will be of converting her LA apartment into a project of the Gwangju Biennale itself. included here), and this show will additionally space and initiated a newspaper reading group
September 2018
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7 Marco Palmieri, Untitled (Penumbral Leaves), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 135 × 105 cm. Courtesy the artist and Brand New Gallery, Milan
8 Nina Beier, China, 2016, hand-painted porcelain, 80 × 38 × 33 cm (dog), 123 × 33 × 33 cm (vase). Courtesy the artist and GL Strand, Copenhagen
as well as a loose collective that meets yearly in an old house in Northern Italy. Technically she’s an artist, but her artworks themselves often overlap with the real world, as in the series of meticulously recreated community noticeboards she showed at 1301PE in 2015. Noticeboards being, of course, something of a relic themselves these days. Her latest show at the same gallery is, we know, called Direct Address, and that’s currently all we know; but what’s clear about Connor, for all her dodging and weaving, is that she’s consistently focused on something the digital sphere is doing its best to make obsolete: real-world interactions between people,
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remaining in (what used to be called) meatspace the phrase ‘historical androgyny’ to suggest in general, and all the unpredictable outcomes that an artwork can contain the essence of that can arise. several eras at once. The result, faintly melanWe were talking of Italy a moment ago; cholic but also contagiously pleasurable, is like wandering through the vestiges of the 7 back there we go. Marco Palmieri, who studied in England but now lives in Rome, draws the Roman empire on a summer’s day. In her 2013 series Greens, Nina Beier iconography of his restrained paintings from 8 pressed palm saplings flat so that they become, package-holiday brochures and the bill of goods effectively, an image. This transition is characthey aim to sell: palm trees, statues from teristic of the Danish artist’s work, and so antiquity, seashells, etc. On canvas, the classical is the work’s controlled brutality. Here things and the leisurely are levelled as Palmieri reduces are always shuttling, deliberately confusedly, everything in his compositions to clean, wispy between objecthood and representation. Beier lines reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s pre-Pop has used human hair to make wigs that are, illustration or old New Yorker cartoons, stranding again, pressed flat and made imagelike, live his subject matter further out of time – he’s used
ArtReview
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material gone dead (she compares this to the process where peasant women would sell their hair to survive). She’s taken Chinese-made porcelain sculptures (of dogs, etc) and punched unlovely holes in them. She’s found stock images online, had them made into little sculptures and drowned them in resin-filled glassware. What the result means might be less important than all the things it could mean: ‘empty and open metaphors are created’, the artist said in a 2015 interview. But the outcome, as the ‘large coherent installation’ in this latest institutional show ought to reaffirm, is definitely an art of ingresses, where formerly fixed categories undo themselves and the
viewer wanders, cued by a worldly ambience of violence, in the space between. And, finally, a third artist using palm trees: we didn’t plan this, but associations have a habit 9 of arising from thin air, as Marcel Broodthaers well knew. It feels almost superfluous to recommend a retrospective by the Belgian poet/artist/ filmmaker; though the fact that, 42 years after his death, it’s his first solo show in Russia feels notable. Broodthaers’s work, albeit in a delayed manner, shifted the axis of art production, particularly his undoing of museological categories in his sectional ‘conceptual museum’, Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles (1968) and his mutable Décors (1974–76), late-period proposals
that created fragmentary narratives from pieces of his earlier work. Any cryptic assembly of objects adding up to something like a domestic space has some Broodthaers in it; so, really, does any artistic practice that moves fluidly between film, two-dimensional work and installation. (Though few are the artists nowadays who were poets until they were forty, and fewer still those who’d ceremonially ditch that practice by embedding 44 published volumes in plaster, as in Pense-Bête (Reminder), 1964.) If you want to wander through spaces you can’t quite trust, with language’s relation to the real world falling apart in front of you, go to Moscow. Martin Herbert
9 Marcel Broodthaers, Cinéma Modèle, 1970, vacuum-formed plastic, 85 × 120 cm. © estate of the artist
1 Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 18 September – 6 January 2 Black Light: Secret Traditions in Art Since the 1950s Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona through 21 October 3 True Stories: A Show Related to an Era – The Eighties Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin 14 September – 27 October
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4 Gwangju Biennale, various venues 7 September – 11 November 5 Amy Sillman Camden Arts Centre, London 28 September – 6 January 6 Fiona Connor 1301PE, Los Angeles 8 September – 27 October
ArtReview
7 Marco Palmieri Brand New Gallery, Milan September – October 8 Nina Beier Kunstforeningen GL Strand, Copenhagen 15 September – 20 January 9 Marcel Broodthaers Garage Museum, Moscow 29 September – 3 February
In 1967, on the eve of the opening of the 9th Bienal de São Paulo, police entered the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Parque and removed a box sculpture by Cybele Varela, inside of which was a map of Brazil and a picture of a military general, and a series of paintings by Quissak Jr that featured the Brazilian flag. Both were deemed unpatriotic; both were eventually destroyed. Varela was questioned by the DOPS, the secret police, narrowly avoiding arrest. The move by Brazil’s military government, then in its infancy, caused an outcry in the local press. Three years prior, generals from the army and navy (with a nod from the CIA) had overthrown the democratically elected government of João Goulart, and the incursion on the biennial was a small but early sign of how increasingly despotic the regime would become. By the end of 1968 censorship had become enshrined in the constitution through Institutional Act n. 5 (the most infamous of 17 such decrees that were issued by the military dictatorship, overruling the constitution and denying any recourse to judicial review), and in December, the month this new edict was delivered, authorities stormed the Bienal de Bahia to remove work deemed politically offensive or immoral. In May the following year police closed down an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, which was showing selected works from the 6th Biennale de Jeunes in Paris, deeming the art overly erotic in nature. The curators of the 1969 edition of São Paulo’s biennial were warned in writing that there would be trouble if they
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On the eve of the Bienal by
Oliver Basciano
both images 10 Bienal de São Paulo, 1969. © Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo
ArtReview
showed anything the regime deemed unacceptable: with many of Brazil’s artists now in exile, word spread internationally, and over 80 percent of the artists invited, both Brazilian and international, refused to take part in the tenth edition. The Brazilian association of art critics went on strike around the same time, and by 1970 the American curator Kynaston McShine (who died earlier this year) was lamenting, ‘If you are an artist in Brazil, you know at least one friend who is being tortured’. In August, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and other international luminaries wrote an open letter protesting an arrest warrant issued for the critic Mário Pedrosa. This historic attack on artistic rights was the canary in the coal mine for the far greater crimes committed by the regime afterwards. Institutional Act n. 5 ushered in the so-called Years of Lead. Congress was disbanded and arbitrary arrests, imprisonment without trial, kidnapping and torture (which included rape and castration) dramatically increased. This year’s edition of the biennial comes at a particularly nervous time for liberal and/or left-leaning citizens of Brazil (to which politics the majority of the country’s artworld subscribes). The past two years have seen a resurgence in rightwing activism, the latest wave of which has repeatedly targeted the country’s art scenes, in part emboldened by the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the new presidency of conservative Michel Temer. In October, artist Wagner Schwartz was forced to flee the country after threats on his life following a nude perform-
ance that took place at the MAM de São Paulo. The work, La Bête (2017), called for audience participation, and Schwartz caught the attention of social conservatives (particularly members of the Movimento Brasil Livre, a rightwing pressure group run by charismatic twenty-twoyear-old Kim Kataguiri) after an online video documented the presence of children among the crowd. When it was picketed by conservative and religious activists in October, Santander Cultural closed Queermuseu: Cartografias da Diferença na Arte Brasileira, an exhibition at the bank’s cultural centre in Porto Alegre that surveyed work by the country’s LGBT artists. In November a crowd gathered outside a lecture given by Judith Butler and burned an effigy of the American theorist. It is in this climate, which exists alongside Operation Car Wash, a massive corruption scandal that has led to indictments of politicians from all parties, and rising inequality as the economy tumbles, that the country will go to the polls on 7 October for a general election (exactly a month after the doors to the biennial pavilion open). With former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in prison for corruption (but still running for election), Jair Bolsonaro, a candidate on the far right, is predicted to pick up between 19 and 22 percent of the votes, making him a favourite for the highest office
Still from an online video documenting La Bête by Wagner Schwartz performed at MAM São Paulo in October 2017. Courtesy Paulo Sergio / YouTube
September 2018
(Temer, whose popularity is at an unprecedented low, ruled himself out of the race in February). Last year the controversy surrounding Queermuseu was brought up on a talkshow on which Bolsonaro appeared. Repeating his point three times, the candidate said he thought it “necessary to shoot” those involved in the exhibition. Bolsonaro is a politician who knows how to gain and game attention (in August his son was photographed meeting Steve Bannon in New York, and there is a suggestion that he might hold Donald Trump as a role model in this respect). He definitely plans to disband the Ministry of Culture, moving some of its responsibilities to the education department. At a campaign meeting in Curitiba, in front of 2,000 supporters, many uniformed and armed, he railed against “big-time artists” and promised to reform the Rouanet Law, through which companies can pay some of their taxes into cultural initiatives, a mechanism without which most of Brazil’s public museums and theatres are unlikely to survive. This is a minor worry, of course, compared to what else a Bolsonaro presidency might bring. The politician has claimed Portuguese slavetraders “never set foot in Africa” and has vowed to cancel affirmative-action laws designed to help black and indigenous Brazilians in
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a country that is already racially divided. He is antiabortion, anti-gay rights and in favour of loosening gun-control laws. In August he appointed Antônio Hamilton Mourão as his running mate, an army general who has previously claimed the military should seize power if Brazil’s courts do not root out corruption or deal with a murder rate that in 2017 was the highest ever recorded in the country. In his statements trailing this year’s biennial, the curator of the 2018 edition, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, the director of the New York and Caracas-based Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, has eschewed direct commentary on Brazil’s politics, although he does note that he hopes the show will investigate ideas of ‘presence, attention and the way that the environment influences our experience’. What is obvious however is his desire to widen the conversation beyond the domestic situation, with the Spaniard inviting five international artists – Alejandro Cesarco (born in Uruguay), Antonio Ballester Moreno (Spain), Claudia Fontes (Argentina), Mamma Andersson (Sweden)
and Wura-Natasha Ogunji (US) – as well as Brazilians Waltércio Caldas and Sofia Borges to each curate their own mini-exhibition under the biennial title Affective Affinities. There is no reason why Pérez-Barreiro should necessarily engage in local politics, and indeed the exhibition might prove a welcome respite for its domestic visitors during an intense time for the Brazilian public (Ariane Roder, a political scientist at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University’s business school told Bloomberg News that, for whoever won the presidential election, ‘bringing calm to society will be the challenge’). It will however be a biennial whose success is to be measured, at least in Brazil, against the backdrop of the country’s current troubles. You might deem it naive to think, in times of trouble, that art, however political its message, can be anything but the victim of autocratic regimes, but the Bienal de São Paulo is not a niche affair: the 2016 edition saw a footfall of 900,000; it is the second oldest biennial in the world and commands international attention. These factors give it a certain amount of power. Pérez-
Protesters picket a talk by theorist Judith Butler at Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo, on 7 November 2017. Photo: Fernando Bizerra Jr. Courtesy EFE/Alamy
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ArtReview
Barreiro’s exhibition should not illustrate the news, but it could offer a space in which the artworld, both at home and abroad, can prepare for battles ahead. Much work has already been done. Artists, gallerists and curators from the country issued an open letter in October last year calling on ‘all democratic forces’ to mobilise against the looming threats to social and cultural freedom ‘in the streets, in the legislative houses, in the courts of justice and in all the available means of communication’. The biennial offers one such platform for action. Writing in 1973, recalling Brazil’s first dictatorship under Getúlio Vargas during the 1930s and 40s, Mário Pedrosa wrote: ‘A tepid mood set in. The monotonous, suffocating days of the dictatorship were prolonged. Exhibitions of this or that by greater or lesser talents opened and closed, only to disappear without leaving behind so much as an echo.’ Pedrosa’s point was that there are moments at which the types of exhibitions we are making matter more than they do at others. Not even necessarily for the present, but for the art history of the future.
Victoria Crowe
Blue Snow and Fiery Trees Limited edition artist print £245
THE
PROJECT
After The Future 28 September – 21 October 2018 Plymouth, UK Artists: Nilbar Güreş, Tommy Støckel, Liu Chuang, Yan Wang Preston, Hito Steyerl, Vermeir & Heiremans, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Donald Rodney, Shezad Dawood, Postcommodity, Ryoji Ikeda, Carl Slater, SUPERFLEX, Uriel Orlow, Jane Grant & John Matthias, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Chang Jia, Ursula Biemann, Bryony Gillard, Space Interface Curated by Tom Trevor
www.theatlantic.org @AtlanticPlym
HORIZON
Victoria Crowe, Blue Snow and Fiery Trees, 65 x 80cm, signed and numbered by the artist, Giclée printed on Somerset Enhanced 100% cotton rag, edition of 150, unframed and unmounted.
Exclusive to the National Galleries of Scotland Available to buy online and in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery shop now nationalgalleries.org 0131 626 6494 National Galleries of Scotland Trading Company Limited. Registered in Scotland SC312797
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There are times during a life in art when you wonder whether or not you’re simply an asshole surrounded by other assholes. That’s what I was thinking while failing to find the entrance through the vaguely Lilliputian white picket fence on the edge of London’s Regent’s Park that served to separate VIPs from mere persons at the launch of this year’s Frieze Sculpture Park in early July. The thought arose not because of my failure to cross the border by simply lifting my foot over it (after all, the fence looked like something that had been borrowed from the Smurf village – more a symbolic deterrent or reassuring signifier of some happy pastoral utopia than an aggressively preventive measure), but because I was prepared to cross it at all. And, more pressingly, because I could overhear a speaker (the Victoria & Albert Museum’s director, Tristram Hunt) lecturing an audience of Ruinart-swilling artloafers about how the sculpture park represented a kind of ‘democracy’ and a form of ‘generosity’. Asshole. There was clapping going on, but it might as well have been the sound of ‘important’ art people slapping their own backs as they frolicked together in this stage-set-like summer idyll
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Sculpture park by
Mark Rappolt
Antoine Watteau, The Feast of Love, c. 1718, oil on canvas, 61 × 75 cm. Courtesy Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
ArtReview
– the modern-day equivalent of one of Watteau’s fêtes galantes. But instead of the ruins of classical sculptures poking through an elegantly overgrown tree canopy, here was a pre-ruined sculpture by Bharti Kher (a bronze called The Intermediary Family, 2018, featuring a mildly Frankensteinian pairing of two divine avatars – one half of one stitched to one half of the other – of the type that might litter a Hindu temple, albeit massively enlarged for the sculpture park) plonked on a manicured lawn. Indeed, the whole event took place in a section of the park called the English Gardens – some designer’s idea (originally John Nash’s) of elegant horticultural sophistication: the manufactured landscape of a Victorian-era English country house reduced for public consumption and littered with bins and tarmacked paths. Were the English Gardens being internationalised as they transformed into a sculpture park full of the works of international artists? I wondered. Was there some sort of ironic Brexit commentary going on here? I dodged some kids spilling ice cream all over themselves and the greenery; hopped over a plastic bag containing Marks & Spencer picnic treats. Another round of applause, and I decided there wasn’t: like most art fools I was overthinking things. There was something by Conrad Shawcross. All of it so very polite. I found the entrance, grabbed the wristband that was thrust towards me and headed for the champagne, feeling that somehow I’d earned it. (Perhaps that first line could have been something about a hypocrite surrounded by other hypocrites.) So there I was, drinking from the trough in a private event to celebrate a public (at least public-facing) project on a plot of land owned by the monarchy that the public are permitted to use according to the grace and favour of the Crown (the only actual rights of access the public have are rights of way through the park). Perhaps that’s what is really English about the garden. Not its plant life, but its sense of quiet, deferential compliance: constructed, manipulated, managed, utterly artificial but apparently free. People lap this crap up.
In eighteenth-century France, under the monarchy, public sculpture worked like this: the king would drive through your town; he would be stuck or inconvenienced by the narrowness of your streets, the poverty of your road maintenance and your hometown’s shocking lack of any kind of sensible urban planning. Sometime later, his court would be in touch to voice his majesty’s displeasure and to offer his assistance in solving your problems. But effectively this would be him telling you to sort things out. He would suggest that you apply for permission to construct a royal square in your town, in order to improve the easeful circulation of through-traffic, clean things up a bit: to generally civilise the place. Naturally, it would have a sculpture of him in the centre in case you forgot to whom you should be grateful, and so that your town could remember it had been touched by royalty. You would apply. He would accept your request. Then he would tax you for the work. And his sculpture would remain to remind you of the person to whom
you paid the bills. During the reign of Louis XV (who, hilariously, gave himself the sobriquet ‘le bien aimé’) it was not uncommon for angry (and presumably newly impoverished) townsfolk to stone the sculptures as they were being constructed. This would give the king the opportunity to tax you further so that the sculpture could have an armed guard. While there’s a notion of it being ‘curated’, it’s really galleries who put the things in the sculpture park. The galleries who will be selling things at Frieze once the tent pops up elsewhere in the park. Perhaps they’ll even be selling the things in the English Gardens. But to the public today, peering like a bunch of Gargamels over the Smurf village’s fence, the galleries are improving things. And being generous to boot. At some point I met an artist friend who was not there to celebrate the official unveiling of one of her works in the park. Indeed, it wasn’t really clear why she was there at all except to run into people like me. That this was really a networking event was confirmed by the
Augustin de Saint-Aubin, The Inauguration of the Statue of Louis XV, 1766, etching and engraving, 21 × 32 cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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appearance of one of the art-fair organisers skipping around excitedly and bumping into artists in order to arrange visits to their studios for another set of VIPs who would be attending the fair proper in October. What does ‘democracy’ mean here? Not ‘here’ in the English Gardens, but here in the artworld. “But I might not be here in October,” one of the artists (who also didn’t have any works in the sculpture park) replied nonchalantly. The organiser’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “You’re joking, of course!” she tittered nervously as she wandered off in search of a more compliant victim. Once she had safely disappeared into the throng the artist muttered that of course he was. Asshole. Perhaps out of boredom, the artist friend asked me if I had a favourite work in the park. I indicated that the split personality offered up by the Bharti Kher was resonating a lot. She looked at me as if I’d just transformed into some sort of Tibetan singing bowl. “You see what they’ve done to you?” she exclaimed, her finger pointing at my chest. “They made you lower your standards!” I muttered something and tried to find a squirrel to stare at. “The whole sculpture park is terrible: however ‘good’ any of the parts might be, the whole is just a series of random objects dumped in someone’s garden! There’s nothing here to even be critical about!” she continued, with the kind of cool anger that made me feel like I’d just jumped feet-first into an elaborate trap. “I have my standards; I know what they are. I’m keeping them at exactly the level at which I decided to place them,” she carried on accusingly. During the early part of her life, this artist had grown up in a country that was under the governance of a particularly censorious and oppressive political regime. Consequently, when she talks about personal standards and maintaining one’s own moral and ethical position, I tend to take her seriously. Just like any self-respecting, morally upright art person would. Even if she’s talking nonsense. So she can get away with stuff (although, as she would perhaps point out, if I had any
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standards this wouldn’t be the case). Indeed, right now, part of me felt like she might have a point on the standards thing. Had I been simply staring at the highlight of a bad lot? Weren’t these kind of art events all about applying a touch of gilding to a bunch of dull metals? Who was I? Why was I here? At a certain point it wasn’t clear to me whether it was she or I who was now the asshole. Probably we both were. At least there’s some democracy in that.
Edmé Bouchardon, equestrian statue of Louis XV in Paris, illustration from Pierre Patte, Monuments Érigés en France à la Gloire de Louis XV, 1765
ArtReview
Venues│Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall, Asia Culture Center, Select Locations in Gwangju Metropolitan City
H o st s │Gwangju Biennale Foundation˙Gwangju Metropolitan City www.gwangjubiennale.org
문화재단
Under the Paving Stones
Berlin says hello by Mark Rappolt
from left Friedrich Carl Albert Schreuel, Portrait of Raden Saleh, c. 1840, oil on canvas, 107 × 85 cm, courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, licensed under public domain; portrait of Raden Saleh Sjarif Boestaman, c. 1872, photo: Woodbury & Page. Neither work is included in Hello World: Revising a Collection, 2018, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
The idiot ‘Don’t be too hasty in trying to find a definition of the town; it’s far too big and there’s every chance of getting it wrong,’ wrote the Frenchman Georges Perec when addressing issues of scale and the human occupation of space. ‘I don’t have a lot to say about the country: the country doesn’t exist,’ he continued, moving things up a notch. ‘What can we know of the world?’ he opined. ‘To cover the world, to crisscross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory… out beyond the panoramas too long anticipated and discovered too late, and the accumulations of stones and the accumulations of works of art, it will be three children perhaps running along a bright white road.’ What an idiot. He should have got out of Paris a bit more; gone to Berlin.
Down with retrospectives; up with retrospective vision! There’s something slightly hysterical about the foreword to the catalogue for the Hamburger Bahnhof’s Hello World: Revising a Collection. It’s written by Hortensia Völckers and Alexander Farenholz, artistic director and administrative director respectively, of the German Federal Cultural Foundation: ‘Contra North Atlantic navel-gazing!’ they squeal in the opening paragraph. ‘Out of the hallucinating chambers of Western self-referentiality and into the laboratory of the “Global Museum”!’ they shriek. Before then going on to speculate about what the National-
galerie collection (which spans five venues: the Alte Nationalgalerie, home to the collection of nineteenth-century art; the Neue Nationalgalerie, currently being refurbished, but normally home to twentieth-century art; the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, more twentieth-century art; the Hamburger Bahnhof, contemporary art; and the Friedrichswerder Church, currently closed due to structural damage, but previously home to nineteenth-century sculpture) might have looked like were it not for the Cold War turning its curators’ eyes away from the East, or if those same curators had worked with their counterparts in Cairo, New Delhi and Dakar to mine the seams of multiple modernisms rather than just the one that was being pushed by the Anglocentric artworld. Naturally Croatian conceptualist Mladen Stilinović’s banners bearing the slogan An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist (1992) feature prominently in the show, but despite that, the fact that the dynamic duo from the Federal Cultural Foundation (a funding arm of the German state) has a little trouble translating gedankenexperiment (their term for what Hello World is performing for the national collection, and the one German word in their English-language introduction) as, say, ‘thought experiment’, or anything for that matter, gives one hint as to where the sticking points of this exercise might lie. Of course, India, as it is currently constituted, gained independence at the beginning of the Cold War and didn’t establish a national gallery until 1954. In the Pacific that same year, the US was running nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll, Nasser was taking over in Egypt and stirring the pot of a wider pan-Islamic movement (while also keeping US interests onside), France was losing battles to the Viet Minh and more generally losing the First Indochina War, Vietnam was being split in two and the US was committing increasing resources to influence conflicts in the region.
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In short, and as the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s (HKW’s) hugely impressive Parapolitics exhibition (which traced the global dispersion of CIA funding and interests in the arts during the Cold War era and was on show in Berlin until this past January) demonstrated, the fingers of the West were all over the globe, its south and the east included. One of the underlying questions posed by Parapolitics concerned to what extent art can be truly committed to freedom of expression when it also accommodates (knowingly or not) ideological principles. Underlying Hello World is the fact that museums themselves are the products of ideologies or specific worldviews, and that ideologies glide (or at times crash) in and out of fashion over time (there’s a nod to work in the Nationalgalerie’s collection that was considered ‘degenerate’ by the National Socialists and subsequently expunged, among them a contribution by Rabindranath Tagore), with the result that museums need to review or revise their collections in order to stay relevant to living audiences. There’s no time like the present! Unless it’s the past!
The uncertainty principle
Leading the way It’s a conundrum that’s elegantly and poetically, if not exactly conclusively, explored in extracts from Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono’s 1948 text ‘We Know Where We Will Be Taking Indonesian Art’, excerpted in Hello World’s catalogue. It begins: ‘As Indonesians, we admit that the art we make here nowadays has a Western style. Nevertheless, to say that this is not also an Indonesian style is not accurate…’ before going on to suggest that fundamentally artforms develop in relation to changing worldviews, rather than via processes of formal inheritance or imitation. In the context of the wider Berlin art scene, such questions of time and its relation to place were perhaps more emphatically, but no less problematically, tackled in another of HKW’s wonderfully exhaustive megaproductions, Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present c. 1930 (on view following Parapolitics during the spring and summer, it contained over 500 exhibits, many of them books and texts), this time based around the work of the German cultural critic (and anti-Nazi) Carl Einstein. All of which merely adds to the sense that in Berlin, at least, the programme at HKW is what’s leading the way.
Joking aside, the exhibition is divided into 13 thematic sections covering a little over two centuries of artist production Indian Anish and incorporates a large number of loans from outside the Nationalgalerie’s So, as opposed to the kind of concrete fixes holdings. The fact that a number of these the Federal Cultural Foundation presumcome from the collections of Berlin’s ably envisioned when it launched the ethnographic museums, and that they span not just photographs, as you might initiative, Hello World is interesting more expect, but paintings created as recently for the way in which it highlights as the 1990s (by the octogenarian Balinese the problems inherent in attempting a Kamasan-style painter Ni Made Suciarmi, retroactive global-art narrative. It wants for example), highlights some of the ways to acknowledge the ongoing efforts of in which traditional Western museology artists, critics and curators in, say, the coalesces artistic modernity around an various countries that make up East and aesthetics generated by the rise of Southeast Asia, to establish national or modernist art in the West. Ethnography regional narratives of modernity over the is bracketed as culturally and geographipast few decades, while at the same time reabsorbing these into an expanded canon. cally specific, while modern and contemThe result is that while trying to disinvest porary art are fundamentally global and itself of its own sense of nationalism, the nonspecific. It’s a structure that roughly corresponds to the German physicist display at the Bahnhof admits others. In Werner Heisenberg’s theories of quantum one peculiar example, 1000 Names (1980– particles: if you know where you are, 84) by Anish Kapoor (born, as it happens, you can’t know when you are. In the in 1954), who left India as a teenager, going various sections of Hello World, ‘where?’ on to train and work as an artist in Britain, is often a matter of an artistic heritage but who is here unequivocally listed as an (because you need to acknowledge local Indian artist in the wall caption beside the Carl Einstein, theses for Art Reference Book, 1930s, paper modernisms) and ‘when?’ is a matter work, is included in a section of the show fragments on a flag. © Carl Einstein Archiv. Courtesy Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin of the specifics of global exchange titled Arrival, Incision: Indian Modernism (within a framework, in this exhibition, as Peripatetic Itinerary. When chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, Kapoor stated ‘I am Indian of colonial, postcolonial or political ideologies). In the section of the exhibition devoted to Indian modernism and its exchanges with Berlin but to see everything in terms of nationality is limiting. I don’t see myself – which, among other things (of which more later), juxtaposes the works as an Indian artist; neither do I see myself as a British artist. I am an artist who works in Britain’, and while Hello World is certainly an exhibition of George Grosz and the Bengali painter and cartoonist Gaganendranath Tagore (Rabindranath’s nephew) – this results in what’s described as about international exchange and discourse, its thrusting desire to ‘be’ global means that the nuances of such positions are sometimes lost a ‘non-linear itinerary’.
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ArtReview
In Brussels this September BRUSSELS GALLERY WEEKEND
ART ON PAPER
A PERFORMANCE AFFAIR
6-9 September
6-9 September
7-9 September
brusselsgalleryweekend.com artonpaper.be aperformanceaffair.com
with the active support of
Osman Hamdy Bey, Türkische Straßenszene, 1888, oil on canvas, 60 × 122 cm. Photo: Andres Kilger. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie
in its rush to map out a territory. Although given the speculative nature of this show, that’s not to say that Nationalgalerie director Udo Kittelmann and the various internal and external curators involved in its production are, on the basis of the catalogue more than the exhibition itself, unaware of this.
Bad Raden
travelled to Indonesia in 1923, hooked up first with Javanese aristocracy before swapping that refinement for the more ‘real’ landscape of Bali. There he became a supporter and preserver of Balinese culture, dabbling in ethnology, photographing local customs and traditions, helping the development of Balinese painting (founding groups like Pita Maha, which are still active today), promoting the art trade, introducing Western artists, filmmakers and writers to local histories and traditions (advising, for example, filmmaker F.W. Murnau, whose heavily exoticised, Spies-influenced Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, 1931, is included here), but in doing so masked Dutch atrocities behind the facade of a happy eternal idyll, and retarded wider developments in Balinese art by imprisoning it in its past (‘museumifying’ it, to use the curators’ words). That’s how quickly celebration can turn into self-flagellation; bad Raden, bad Germans (decades after Spies’s death, in 1942, accusations that his love of Bali was connected with predatory homosexuality and paedophilia also surfaced), bad colonialism: as to the Dutch, who were actually occupying the place… well, in this show they seem to be little more than travel agents and get off scot-free. Perhaps that’s because Germany barely had enough Asian colonies to feel properly guilty about; it’s ok for it to borrow one or two. Walter Spies, Rehjagd (Deerhunt), 1932,
The nineteenth-century Arab-Javanese painter Raden Saleh, whose work is included in a section titled Making Paradise: Places of Longing, From Paul Gauguin to Tito Salina (the latter is a contemporary Indonesian artist, here given an equivalence to… while reclaiming… yeah, you get it) travelled from the Dutch East Indies to study in Europe in 1829 (going on to live in Dresden for a time). He arrived wearing the clothes of a Western dandy, but by the time he left he had transformed his outfit into that of a stereotypical Oriental in order, it is presumed, to better market his paintings of stereotypical Oriental scenes (Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion, 1877, is included here). As the first non-European artist to study in the European academies (and paint in that manner), he is considered a founding figure of modern Indonesian oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm. Photo: Adrian Vickers. painting and, at the same time and for Courtesy Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin the same reasons, as a colonial lackey and Heroes imitator and all-round sellout (obliquely, for example, in S. Sudjojono’s 1948 essay and more notably by the novelist But enough about problems! (Albeit still a firm ‘no’ to solutions.) Perhaps Pramoedya Ananta Toer writing in 1988 about the buildup to Indonesian the most intriguing effect of the exhibition is that of constructing independence). That contradiction is why he’s included in this section of ‘globalisation’ and international exchange among artists as something the show. Raden is a title indicating that Saleh was a Javanese aristocrat of that is not a contemporary development, but rather part of an ongoing the class that the Dutch bolstered in order to rule their colony more process. That Joseph Beuys’s engagement with Argentine Land artist conveniently; it was the Dutch who sent Saleh to Europe. Conversely, the Nicolás García Uriburu (a collaborative and an intellectual exchange) Russia-born German artist Walter Spies (who was educated in Dresden)
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ArtReview
27-30 September 2018 Marx Halle Vienna
viennacontemporary International Art Fair
www.viennacontemporary.at
seems like old hat; that Neue Slowenische Kunst was the dominant Potential German force in art during the 1980s is natural; Barnett Newman? Totally All of this is to say that what’s been happening in the Berlin art scene over about Native American art. For this (the debunking of globalisation, the past six months is fascinating: to some extent it’s collectively a revealnot the heavy promotion of NSK) Hello World does seem like a breath ing portrait of our times and contemporary of fresh air. Still, you can’t help wondering attitudes to the history, distribution and whether or not the curators of this summer’s ideologies of art. And more so of how we seek Berlin Biennale, We don’t need another hero, to assert our present on the past (and cities are directed by Gabi Ngcobo, played down the always built on their pasts, both literally and biographical and geographical contextualisametaphorically). Writing this from the point tion of its exhibits (generally leaving viewers of view of someone who is from more than to make of it what they would) because this one culture (a British citizen of Asian origin was a subject on which other parts of the city’s who’s currently applying for German citizenart scene had so thoroughly gone to town. ship on the grounds that one set of grandparWhen it comes to rethinking an institution, ents were exiled German Jews), perhaps none Philippe Parreno’s stunning solo exhibition of it is as much under the paving stones as it (which closed early August) at the Gropius is under the skin. Bau takes a totally different form. Influence is presented to the viewer as a matter of atmosphere, light, movement and sound Frenchman (as those elements are influenced by architecture, visitors and exhibits). Window blinds The French idiot (Perec not Parreno) open and close seemingly at random, inflatable concluded his advice about measuring the fish float around the gallery (chased by a man world like this: ‘And with these [the accumuwith a pole whose job seems to be to make sure lation of a few remembered details of the they do not leave their designated room). The world], the sense of the world’s concreteness, entire building becomes a strangely animate irreducible, immediate, tangible, of someform. The whole thing is seamless. Inside der thing clear and something closer to us: of Bau, as part of a more conventional exhibition Lene Berg, Stalin by Picasso or the world, no longer as a journey having component of the show, fireflies have been Portrait of Woman with Moustache, 2008, constantly to be remade, not as a race withdrawn by the artist because they are beautiful, facade banner. Courtesy the artist out end, a challenge having constantly to ephemeral and a physical manifestation of most be met, not as one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the of the environmental forces listed above. Everything is connected! illusion of a conquest, but as a rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving Again. But this time it doesn’t come accompanied by a massive thesis; that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten it doesn’t need one. Maybe some things seem logical while others do that we ourselves are the authors’. not; either you feel it or you don’t.
Philippe Parreno, 2018 (VR installation view, Gropius Bau, Berlin). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Pilar Corrias, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels; and Esther Schipper, Berlin
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ArtReview
Fair for Modern and Contemporary Art
27 – 30 September 2018
Flughafen Tempelhof Hangar 5 and 6 Tempelhofer Damm 45 12101 Berlin U6 ParadestraĂ&#x;e
Interview
Vincent Fecteau “I like the idea of the grand gesture that’s made with the humblest stuff” by Ross Simonini
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ArtReview
In the summer I visited Vincent Fecteau at his home in San Francisco, the city in which he’s spent his entire career as an artist. His walls feature works by B. Wurtz and Peter Saul, as well as an ecstatic finger-painting by a little-known local named Tomiko Ishiwatari. Fecteau serves as a volunteer art teacher at a long-term’care facility and Ishiwatari had been one of his most enthusiastic students. Fecteau takes pleasure in resisting the conventions of the professional art life – where he lives, what he looks at, how he thinks and when he works. Born in 1969 in the town of Islip on Long Island, New York, he majored in painting at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and then quickly walked away from two-dimensional media. Even now he doesn’t draw, not even as preparatory work. He says he prefers the tactility of sculpture and the slippery nature of the 360-degree object, which can’t fully be perceived from any single perspective. Fittingly, he spent several years working as a florist. In the mid-1990s, when he began exhibiting, his work was primarily rooted in collage: small dioramas of haunted domestic interiors. Soon after, he developed his characteristic sculptures. These compact, evocative forms are built up slowly, in layers of papier-mâché, and painted in rich, matt colours. While his objects are relatively uniform in size and material, they can look alternately dense and fluid, architectural and corporeal. In all his work, Fecteau embraces the impermanence of ordinary stuff and has maintained a remarkable consistency throughout his career. With humble materials – shoeboxes, found photos, wicker baskets – he makes the kind of bold, modernist gestures that are usually cast in heavy metals. While the work can appear austere, Fecteau’s process is torturous and emotionally draining. To maintain his sanity, he likes to keep his production level low: usually no more than eight works every 18 months. Fecteau and I spoke in his studio, a bedroomsize space in the basement of his home. When I arrived, the room was tidy and bare, with two large worktables and little else. He had recently sent his newest body of work (dark, monochromatic, almost gothic sculptures) for a show at Greengrassi in London; but other than some drippings on the floor, there was no sign of art. This seemed to please him. “An empty studio”, he told me, “is the best time in the studio.” ROSS SIMONINI Living in San Francisco, you’re separated from the mainstream artworld. Was that a choice? Vincent Fecteau It wasn’t initially, but I don’t think I could live in New York now. Growing up on Long Island I always assumed
I’d eventually live in Manhattan, but when I moved there for a summer, to intern for Hannah Wilke, I couldn’t handle it… It was just too much for me. Sometimes I even think this city is too much. RS You came straight here from Wesleyan. VF Yeah. I’ve lived here since 1991. RS Do you have an art community here? VF I do. There are a lot of great artists here. RS It’s significant that you stayed in the Bay Area. Most artists can’t maintain a career here. They leave. VF I was able to do it because I got early support from people outside of the Bay Area: Hudson [the founder of Feature Inc.] in New York and Cornelia Grassi in London. I have plenty of friends who have left, because it can be difficult to show outside of San Francisco if you live here. And it’s very difficult to have a sustaining ‘career’ if you don’t show outside of San Francisco.
“I experience the process as flailing, searching blindly in the dark, hoping that something starts to make sense. When it does, it usually comes as a surprise, like it didn’t come from me… and then I know it’s finished” RS The Bay Area creates singular artists – Bruce Conner, David Ireland, Lutz Bacher… VF When I first moved here, I came to do AIDS activism with ACT UP. And then I realised why San Francisco was so appealing: it was a bit off the radar, which interested me, it was close to amazing natural beauty and it had a high tolerance for freaks and difference of all kinds. I worked for Nayland Blake for a while, but I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be an artist. Honestly, I’m still always looking for the thing that will be more suitable for me than being an artist. RS Has anything come close? VF For several years I’ve been volunteering with an art programme at a local hospital and rehabilitation centre in San Francisco, which I find very rewarding. RS What would that job be?
facing page Vincent Fecteau
September 2018
VF I don’t know… psychiatric nurse? Or something like that. I had no idea I was interested in that kind of work until I started spending time at the centre. The art programme I work with is more about facilitating the making of work than teaching it. I’m really interested in art that needs to be made and the artists that, despite sometimes sizeable obstacles, make it. For some of these artists, there’s no bigger goal than creating. They may not care about the finished product or even think of these objects as art, but they are completely and totally engaged. I think for some people with compromised communication abilities it becomes their primary way of expressing their internal experience and engaging with the world around them. It’s inspiring. RS Do you feel that way, making art? VF Sometimes I do. But there’s so much outside noise that can get in the way when artmaking starts looking more like a career. I actually think the job of the artist is to try to protect the real or true creative act from all the other stuff. RS: What’s the real part? VF [long pause] I don’t know. RS The thing you can’t talk about. VF Yes. Maybe. I find it almost impossible to articulate. If I understood why, maybe I wouldn’t have to make anything. Sometimes I find it helpful to think of the work as simply evidence of an intention, or a desire, or an impulse. The end result is not that important. Maybe it’s that impulse that is the real or true part. RS Does your process start with a feeling, or – VF Always a feeling. I’m completely interested in one’s intuition and the unconscious. My experience of my mind is that it’s an incredibly chaotic place. Although the end result, the sculpture, is finite and very specific, that’s not my experience of the making of it. Which might be why I don’t really have strong attachments for pieces after they are finished. I don’t necessarily recognise them. That said, they must somehow always feel ‘true’ in the end. I’ve thrown away stuff even after working on it for months because it starts to feel false. RS Do you throw away finished work? VF No. If I show something, it is finished, and I accept it for what it is. It would feel dishonest to deny this thing that I once felt to be true. As embarrassing as it may be, it’s still true. Things don’t always turn out ‘great’, but that’s kind of irrelevant.
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RS Greatness is a small sliver of the human experience. It would be a shame if that’s all art could depict. VF I recently went to Amsterdam and saw the Van Gogh Museum for the first time. I was so inspired to see all the missteps and experiments, the complexity of this relatively short artistic life. Of course there are those amazing moments but also many things that were full of difficulty and struggle and even failure. RS Have you ever shown work you thought was a failure at the time? VF No. Not at the time. In hindsight, of course… but I’m way too self-conscious to do that. I know they’re not all perfect, but I believe they are good enough so as not to completely humiliate me. RS Do you feel humiliated when you show? VF Always. RS Every show? VF Yes. RS Me too. I hoped it would go away. VF I think it gets worse. For me, the desire to be recognised, to be seen, is inherently embarrassing. This last show was very painful. The work in the studio happens over a long period of time in almost complete privacy,
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and then all of a sudden it’s on public view. And I’m on public view! It’s shocking. RS But it has to be done. VF I fantasise about having a regular job, where I don’t have to obsess about what I do when I come home. It’s much less about ‘talent’ than having a drive or obsessiveness that won’t let up. It takes a real intensity. Every artist I know is intense. RS And all this psychological noise is impossible for a nonartist to understand, probably. VF There’s that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss sculpts Devils Tower out of the mashed potatoes, and the wife and kids are looking at him, freaked out and crying. And he says something like, “I know Daddy’s been acting strange recently… I’m sorry… I can’t help it… It’s really important.” That scene really resonated with me. It’s the best description of being an artist that I’ve ever seen in a film. And that’s what it’s like: you’re doing a ridiculous thing, you don’t know why, but you have to. RS Is your work dealing directly with that conflict? above Untitled, 1998, foamcore, collage, ink, 10 × 24 × 10 cm. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles
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VF Yes, I never really feel like I have a handle on the situation. I experience the process as flailing, searching blindly in the dark, hoping that something starts to make sense. When it does, it usually comes as a surprise, like it didn’t come from me… and then I know it’s finished. RS It’s a funny idea, that an artwork has to feel alien to you. It has to be not you. You’d think artists would feel that the object should be a pure expression of their self, but it’s the opposite. It’s about erasing yourself. VF In a way, but of course it’s still really you. You can run but you can’t hide. RS You’re working with vast, abstract ideas, and yet the materials you use are so modest. VF Well, on the one hand, it’s just the mashed potatoes. You use what’s in front of you. And I like that these little things already exist in the world. I like the idea of the grand gesture that’s made with the humblest stuff. RS It’s easy. VF And it’s – relatively – easy. I’m not interested in fighting a medium. Some artists find meaning in the technical process. I don’t. It’s hard enough. I’m interested in why something is made more than how. The sculptures change constantly, sometimes almost violently, so I’m not really thinking about engineering or construction.
above Untitled, 2015, mixed-media collage, 32 × 24 × 12 cm. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles
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above Untitled, 1999, foamcore, collage, plastic, 10 × 43 × 38 cm. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles
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ArtReview
above Untitled, 2000, papier-mâché, burlap, acrylic, pushpin, toilet paper roll, 32 × 65 × 41 cm. Courtesy Greengrassi, London
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RS Has your work ever fallen apart after an exhibition? VF No. I mean, the collage works are made with magazine pages, so those are light-sensitive, but the papier-mâché seems pretty stable. RS Was collage your first work? VF Yes. I was interested in all the references already packed into an art-directed image, and as a material it was readily available. But I think spatially, so although I started with collages, I was soon arranging them in space. I used foamcore because it was easy and cheap, and then when I wanted to make the forms larger and more complex I started using papier-mâché. RS From the outside, there seems to be such a consistent development in your work through the years. VF I don’t think about ‘development’. I don’t believe in the linearity of that kind of thinking. The thing I was looking for 25 years ago is the same thing I’m looking for now. In the end, I think we are relatively simple beings. RS Do you think in terms of improvement?
VF I’ve tried to stop thinking in terms of good and bad when working. I’m convinced that the only relevant judgement to make is whether or not it’s true. I’m never going to get beyond my brain or my abilities. My job is to embrace that fact and dive in.
VF Not really. There’s another step involved, which is that of the viewer. For the viewer, it’s all about them. What I respond to in a work might not have anything to do with what the artist thought they were doing. I think who the artist is becomes irrelevant at a certain point.
RS Are you are the same person you’ve always been?
RS You mentioned the word ‘spirit’. Is art sacred to you?
VF I think my essential self is the same. One can change, of course, but I think what is at one’s core is consistent. A truth? A spirit, maybe?
VF I think about art and religion a lot. I think they are very similar. I’m very interested in what it means to have faith. I grew up Catholic, although I don’t consider myself religious in any typical sense. I think the problems with religion, like art, come from the institutions that are created around them. These institutions were established with the intent of protecting, but eventually end up compromising that very thing they were trying to protect. I think both faith and art are simultaneously, maybe paradoxically, incredibly fragile and resilient. And, ultimately, indestructible.
RS Do you see older artists coming to a greater understanding of themselves in their work? VF I’m not sure it’s an understanding as much as acceptance and maybe celebration. There’s a lot we can do with what we have. It’s a beautiful thing to embrace and celebrate one’s limitations. RS Do you tend to like artists if you enjoy their work? VF Not necessarily. There are definitely people whose work I liked but have been disappointed when I actually met them. RS Does that seem like a contradiction, if the work is an expression of their interior?
above Vincent Fecteau, 2018 (installation view at Greengrassi, London). Courtesy the artist and Greengrassi, London
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ArtReview
An exhibition of work by Vincent Fecteau is on view at Matthew Marks North Orange Grove, Los Angeles, through 29 September Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California
above Untitled, 2010, papier-mâché, acrylic paint, 76 × 71 × 43 cm. Courtesy the artist and Greengrassi, London
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Palexpo / 31.01 - 03.02.2019
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GALERIE 100 KUBIK, COLOGNE • ADDAUX, BIELEFELD • GALERIE SUSANNE ALBRECHT, BERLIN • GALERIE JUDITH ANDREAE, BONN • ART MÛR BERLIN, BERLIN / MONTREAL • (AV17) GALLERY, VILNIUS • GALERIE BORN, BERLIN • BRENNECKE FINE ART, BERLIN • GALERIE BURSTER, BERLIN • ANTONELLA CATTANI CONTEMPORARY ART, BOLZANO • LUISA CATUCCI GALLERY, BERLIN • C&K GALERIE, BERLIN • GALERIE COMMETER | GALERIE PERSIEHL & HEINE, HAMBURG • CHRISTOPHER CUTTS, TORONTO • DAVISKLEMMGALLERY, WIESBADEN • GALERIE HORST DIETRICH, BERLIN • KUNSTHANDEL DRAHEIM, ELTVILLE • GALERIE ROBERT DREES, HANOVER • GALERIE DREI RINGE, LEIPZIG • DR. JULIUS | AP, BERLIN • GALERIE EIGENHEIM, BERLIN / WEIMAR • EXGIRLFRIEND, BERLIN • JOSEF FILIPP GALERIE, LEIPZIG • GALERIE FLOSS & SCHULTZ, COLOGNE • GALERIE THOMAS FUCHS, STUTTGART • GALERIE GERKEN, BERLIN • GRÄFE ART.CONCEPT, BERLIN • GALERIE GREULICH, FRANKFURT AM MAIN • HOLTHOFF-MOKROSS, HAMBURG • GALERIE HÜBNER & HÜBNER, FRANKFURT AM MAIN • JARMUSCHEK+PARTNER, BERLIN • GALERIE ANJA KNOESS, COLOGNE • GALERIE INGA KONDEYNE - RAUM FÜR ZEICHNUNG, BERLIN • GALERIE KREMERS, BERLIN • GALERIE KUCHLING, BERLIN • KUNKEL FINE ART, MUNICH • GALERIE KUNST2 - STEFANIE BOOS, HEIDELBERG • LACHENMANN ART, FRANKFURT AM MAIN / CONSTANCE • GALERIE ULF LARSSON, COLOGNE • LORCH+SEIDEL CONTEMPORARY, BERLIN • GALERIE REINHOLD MAAS, REUTLINGEN • GALERIE MÄDER, BASEL • MAKSLA XO, RIGA • MARKE.6, WEIMAR • MAUS CONTEMPORARY, BIRMINGHAM (USA) • MENO NIŠA GALLERY, VILNIUS • MENO PARKAS, KAUNAS / DUSSELDORF • GALERIE MARTIN MERTENS, BERLIN • MIANKI.GALLERY, BERLIN • KUNSTHANDLUNG OSPER, COLOGNE • OQBO - RAUM FÜR WORT BILD UND TON, BERLIN • GALERIE PETERS-BARENBROCK, AHRENSHOOP • POLARRAUM, HAMBURG • GALERIE POLL, BERLIN • GALERIE NANNA PREUSSNERS, HAMBURG • RASCHE RIPKEN, BERLIN • SANDAU & LEO GALERIE, BERLIN • SCHENK.MODERN, ROTTACH-EGERN • PETER C. SCHLÜSCHEN - PREIS FÜR SPORTFOTOGRAFIE, AACH • SCHMALFUSS BERLIN CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS, BERLIN • GALERIE HUBERT SCHWARZ, GREIFSWALD • SEMJON CONTEMPORARY, BERLIN • GALERIE HEIKE STRELOW, FRANKFURT AM MAIN • STIFTUNG TELEFONSEELSORGE BERLIN, BERLIN • GALERIE TAMMEN & PARTNER, BERLIN • GALERIE VAN CAUWELAERT, BERLIN • VIJION GALLERY, ORTISEI • GALERIE VON&VON, NUREMBERG • WESTPHAL BERLIN, BERLIN • WHITE SQUARE GALLERY, BERLIN • WICHTENDAHL GALERIE, BERLIN • XC.HUA GALLERIES, BERLIN / BEIJING • GALERIE Z22, BERLIN
Drawing by Ronan Bouroullec.
London Regent’s Park 4–7 October 2018
Art Featured
When the people and organizations that rushed in to help find they have other responsibilities or that the problem is too big for them to handle‌ 65
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Artist, Heal Thyself! As ill-health is increasingly linked to questions of identity and politics, what would a collective, artistic attitude to sickness look like? by Nina Power
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never not had health insurance, and whose importance to In a capitalist society, fitness is nothing other than a measure of the society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that extent to which you are capable of serving capital. According to a society; whose importance and care dominates that society, at recent report by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, the average number of sickness-absence days that UK workers took in 2017 has the expense of everyone else. almost halved since records began in 1993. The report speculates We see the flip side to Hedva’s coin in contemporary art’s handwringthat this is a result of improved healthy life-expectancy, or, altering admission of guilt on all these fronts. In a recent interview, Ed natively, because private-sector workers won’t be paid for ill-health Atkins sums up this reflective misery, at once generative and impotent: related absences. Stuck then between improved overall health and I am a man and I am white and middle-class and Western. ‘presenteeism’ – a phenomenon in which people struggle to work The category that need not be named. I am privilege. But through sickness – contemporary understandings of health have I also want to be able to speak, found it hard to decide upon a diagContemporary understandings of I suppose. But being all these nosis. Are we, as is suggested by those categories, I want to speak negastatistics, fitter than ever? Or, as many health have found it hard to decide tively – to undo speech as well. of today’s critics suggest, are we in fact upon a diagnosis. Are we fitter than A gesture that sucks it back – sicker – mentally, existentially, physiothough of course that’s imposlogically? When the Socialist Patients’ ever? Or are we in fact sicker – mentally, sible. I don’t want to speak for Collective during the early 1970s existentially, physiologically? anyone else. My work should declared that ‘to be healthy means to have as much emotional autobiographical feeling as I can put be expropriated and exploitable’, it is clear that the era of the total into it without being explicitly about me in any way. capture of the body by capital has long been upon us, and that illness today must be seen as a weapon against capitalism, insofar as it operAtkins’s simultaneous embrace and disavowal of identity reopens ates as a form of labour-sabotage. No longer can artists romantically an older, literary question, from Beckett by way of Foucault: ‘What exit the everyday or reach ‘the unknown’ via the ‘derangement of all does it matter who is speaking, someone said, what does it matter the senses’ that Rimbaud described in 1871: illness, induced or acciwho is speaking?’ Only today, it appears to very much matter ‘who’ is dental, is a spanner in the works, but cannot, any longer, be separated speaking, hence the double bind Atkins finds himself in. But he neverfrom the machine. theless wants to speak. Is this too a kind of sickness, a kind of compulThe way we understand sickness today can itself be seen symptosion? What happens when it is illness that wants to speak through us, matically, that is to say, as an indicator of deeper questions lying just when sickness becomes the voice itself? Can illness somehow speak beneath the battered dermis of life in general. We can ask: what is sickout against the conditions that produce it? Capitalism – or a certain ness, what makes us sick and what kind of subjects are we when we image thereof – is, in many contemporary analyses, frequently posiidentify with our sickness? It is not surprising that there is a current tioned as the rotten root at the base of a whole range of contemporary tendency for people, dominated by regimes of consumerism, private ills, from obesity, diabetes and cancer to anxiety, depression, stress, property and identity, to ‘own’ their illnesses, and to become coterdevelopmental disorders and general malaise. These ailments, reputminous with them as a central feature of their identity, and to create edly caused by today’s equivalent to William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic in-groups and out-groups on this basis: those who do not have an mills’ – now our ‘whitish mildly-demonic personal computers’, autism or an ADHD diagnosis, for example, are now described as perhaps – are to be laid like burnt offerings at the feet of a reified, ‘neurotypical’ or ‘allistic’, normative categories that mark out differmonstrous, ineradicable beast: Capital. All days become sick days ence through comparison and separation. under the chthonic demiurge of capiKorean-American artist Johanna talism. It is perhaps in the work of the What happens when it is illness Hedva, author of the 2016 essay late Mark Fisher that the argument that wants to speak through us, when ‘Sick Woman Theory’, suggests that that mental illness is an intentional belonging to the illness club is a sickness becomes the voice itself? form of class war reaches its zenith: matter of an elective affinity: ‘You Can illness somehow speak out against We must understand the fatalknow who you are, even if you’ve not istic submission of the UK’s the conditions that produce it? been attached to a diagnosis: one of population to austerity as the the aims of Sick Woman Theory is to consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression… Collecresist the notion that one needs to be legitimated by an institution, tive depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubso that they can try to fix you’. Contemporary sickness thus becomes ordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted a pathological attachment, backed up by a theory of domination. the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act. Hedva continues: The Sick Woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence – or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence – of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and ablebodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has
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Fisher advises ‘converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger’, restoring the category of action to the subjects sickened to death (actually so in some cases) by austerity. We must admit, though, that this is an extraordinarily difficult project, seeing as its starting point is the acceptance of a direct if generic causal relation between capitalism
ArtReview
above Poster issued by the UK Ministry of Health, lithograph by Henry Mayo Bateman, c. 1950. © Wellcome Collection, London
preceding pages Photo: Pamila Payne
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and sickness. Is this assumption not itself potentially politically incasleeps 6 hours a night, works under fluorescent lights pacitating? Is there no differentiated individual residual resistance to in a cubicle. collective depression, and do our individual illnesses, addictions and Doc: “Here, have some of these pills.” mental health problems not play out in different ways? And might our response to these differences then inform a strong collective response The tough talk that invokes a sense of personal responsibility for one’s to exploitation? When it comes to sickness, we do not know where to health, and, by extension, one’s way of being in the world with others reveals, by its absence, a passive acceptance on the political left of a place the subject, individual or communal. The recent rise to prominence of Canadian psychologist Jordan certain kind of collective defeated misery. Any suggestion that selfB. Peterson and his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) has led improvement or personal responsibility for mental or physical illto derision and suspicion from those who see him as an apologist health is a positive step is liable to be met with accusations of ‘gatefor the resurgent far right. At base, however, Peterson’s bestselling keeping’, ‘ableism’, ‘fatphobia’ or ‘body-fascism’. Though capitalism is book presents a series of simple rules for improving one’s lot: ‘Stand to ‘blame’ for our sicknesses, there seems to be little exit from capiup straight with your shoulders back’, ‘Treat yourself like someone talist ‘solutions’ (in the form of overmediation, and the overconsumption of harmful foods and substances), you are responsible for helping’ and There are thinkers, such as Franco despite repeated identification by ‘Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie’. the left of capitalism as the apparent ‘We must have something to set against ‘Bifo’ Berardi in his 2017 essay ‘After source of the sickness. the suffering that is intrinsic to Being,’ the European Union’, who attempt But all is not fair in love and war, he writes. This strange and syncretic to tie poor mental-health and legal and in sickness and in health. Beyond fusion of evolutionary theory, Christianity, Jung, Schopenhauer and 1950s illegal drug use to a political situation medication, there are contemporary ‘cures’ in the form of the various patrician ideas of self-responsibility ‘self-care’ industries, where diet, cleaning and sleep all somehow proves to be highly irresistible to people tired (sick, perhaps) of sitting in bedrooms looking for someone else to blame. Glancing at the become ‘lifestyle choices’, as opposed to basic techniques of suste‘Manosphere’ reveals a heavy interest in self-improvement, an end nance and hygiene. Here we see the feminised counterpart to the to ‘whining’ and the consumption of vast quantities of meat. Fitness Manosphere’s emphasis on meat and muscle – the bubble-bathifiguru P. D. Mangan (‘I teach how to eat right, get strong, live long, cation of the female, the retreat into comfort and candles accompaand win, with science-based health and fitness’) posts motivational nied by the fantasy that this is some kind of radical gesture. As Anne tweets about diet that also function as pithy critiques of consumer Dufourmantelle, who died in 2017 trying to save two children from drowning, puts it in Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living: capitalism and mental health: ‘Theories of self-improvement and pursuit of happiness particiYou: “Doc, I’m depressed.” pate in spite of themselves in this grand preceding pages Activists dressed as zombies dancing to marketplace of “well-being” that refuses Also you: eats junk food drinks soda, Michael Jackson’s Thriller in front of the bank of England, to enter into negativity and confusion and plays video games, 30 pounds overweight, 2011. Photo: Mario Mitsis / Alamy Stock Photo
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film Revisiting Genesis (2016) offers an unusually nuanced take on death, dying and disease, in an art context that has an often rather impoverished relation to such questions (let’s not speak of Damien Hirst’s longterm pharmacophilia). Here, Ashery mingles fictional dialogues with real interviews with those with life-limiting conditions, subjects who ruminate on questions of digital existence: what might our digital legacy be? How can we reconcile the viscerally embodied aspects of illness and dying with the clean bureaucracy of a networked culture? Regarding the context of Revisiting Genesis, Ashery said in a 2017 interview with The Guardian that ‘there is a sense that partial withdrawal can be a response to artistic overproduction and the culture that drives us so hard. Artists can never stop. You always have to self-present. You are always “on”. If you are not, it is as though you are dead.’ The undead artworld might be The parts of society where Trump The undead artworld is a zombie thought of as a zombie juggernaut transtriumphed in the USA are the porting various sicknesses from gallery to juggernaut transporting various same ones where psychic misery gallery, reinforcing identities here, posisicknesses from gallery to gallery, is most devastating. The deprestions there and structures everywhere. sion epidemic and the deluge reinforcing identities here, positions In that sense, then, it does no more than of opioids, heroin consumption reflect back the confused state of sickness there, and structures everywhere increasing fivefold in a decade, the and health in our thinking (and living) spike in suicides: such is the material condition of the so-called more generally. But what would a collective, artistic attitude to sickAmerican middle class, the workers squeezed like lemons, and ness and health that tackled exploitation head-on, and avoided neothe unemployed devastated by their powerlessness. liberal ‘solutions’ as much as it did lethal drug epidemics, look like? Self-medication as a form of self-care in a devastated world becomes We can start by imagining a position that avoids reduction to either pure self-destruction, and there is little to differentiate political acts mere identity or pure will, that neither pins us to structure nor isolates from pharmacological ones. If, as Kierkegaard wrote in The Sickness Unto us as individuals fighting to survive in a hostile universe. We might not Death (1849), ‘the torment of despair is precisely this inability to die’, ultimately be able to avoid illness, at least not forever, but we do not that is to say, our sickness is existential, rather than merely a biological have to exactly coincide with it: in this sense, then, contemporary art or historical fact, we must wonder what ‘death’ means today, in an era of can potentially serve as a diagnostic of both the causes and the cure – to technological life-extension for some, and mere depersonalise illness without rendering it purely above and facing page perishing for others. Jarman Award-winner Oreet abstract, and to identify malign forces and causes Oreet Ashery, Revisiting Genesis (stills), 2016, Ashery’s 12-part web series and feature-length without falling entirely prey to them. ar web series, 12 episodes. Courtesy the artist
fear as essential human elements, paralysing the future as well as the present’. The good neoliberal subject is subject to his or her apps and avoids risk and excess at all costs: the heart is an organ whose valves must be kept free of love as much as of fat. We are very far, today, from Foucault’s resurrection of Greek practices and techniques in his late work on ‘the care of the self’, and even further from any form of collective mass-mobilisation towards health that would directly take as its target both imposed sicknesses and their useless and expensive cures. Misery loves (drug) companies. There are thinkers, such as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi in his 2017 essay ‘After the European Union’, who attempt to tie poor mental-health and legal and illegal drug use to a political situation that explains Trump’s appeal:
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Signs of the Times Kemang Wa Lehulere’s archaeology of the contemporary by Oliver Basciano
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School desks, worn by students’ elbows and carved with graffiti, have political situation. All of this is peppered with stories: how a friend long featured in Kemang Wa Lehulere’s work. There are two in Dear or family member helped him with a particular work, the sources Chieko Shiomi (2015), for example. The wooden lids have been removed for the works’ narratives, how objects entered his artmaking not on from their hinges and attached to a waist-high steel frame. Standing an academic or theoretical vector, at least not initially, but through behind this construction are nine porcelain Alsatian dogs, each also a memory of growing up in Gugulethu, a township close to Cape around a metre tall. Apart from colouring (three are grey and the rest Town’s airport, where many of the artist’s family and friends still live. blonde), these mass-produced ornaments are identical. A tenth hound The desks, for example, were dumped outside the artist’s old (blonde) stands on the far side of the desk-construction, as if addressing primary school during renovations, and Wa Lehulere says that he her canine class. Desks appear in My Apologies to Time (2017) too. Here thinks of the graffiti as messages written to the future. Yet cutting through such romance is the artist’s a taxidermied African grey parrot confirmation that when he started is perched atop one, birds being The tyre-and-crutches work recalls both another feature of the artist’s work. happy days messing around on the streets using these objects in 2015, the Rhodes This desk, missing two of its legs, Must Fall campaign – in which of Gugulethu and the way that suspected is attached to another metal frame, students rallied against the statue larger this time, onto which four police informants were executed by ‘neck- to Cecil Rhodes at the University of birdhouses have also been secured. lacing’ – the placing and subsequent torch- Cape Town, spurring a wider moveAnd now Wa Lehulere plans to ment to ‘decolonise’ education – was ing of a petrol-soaked tyre around the create a wall of these desktops: an also on his mind. Graffiti and muralimposing freestanding structure victim’s body – during the apartheid years making have long been of interest to be shown as part of his forthto the artist as vernacular modes of coming exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in London. Inside artmaking in South Africa, as media apart from the academic (and the upturned desks will sit a series of plaster casts of hands making mostly European) narratives of modern and contemporary art. The gestures found in international sign language. Another new work tyre-and-crutches work recalls both happy days messing around on will comprise a desk, a dog and a music stand, this last also a recurring the streets of Gugulethu and the way that suspected police inforobject in the South African artist’s work. There will be chalk-on-black- mants were executed by ‘necklacing’ – the placing and subsequent board drawings, a medium that Wa Lehulere has used since gradu- torching of a petrol-soaked tyre around the victim’s body – during ating from Wits University’s fine arts course in 2011 (which taught the apartheid years. The ornamental dogs are emblems of cute European narratives of art; Wa Lehulere doesn’t say it, but Joseph domesticity and aspirations of the working class, but Alsatians are Beuys’s and Lutz Bacher’s use of blackboards will not have escaped also ingrained in every black South African’s mind as weapons of him). A series of as-yet-untitled sculptures made from metal piping the racist state. While Wa Lehulere returns repeatedly to particular will also feature, including one in which short lengths of pipe and a objects, the meaning attached to them is in constant flux: dark puns pair of old wooden crutches have been attached to the edge of a tyre, develop as they double up their reference points; meanings accumuforming a kind of handle, the result resembling a toy Wa Lehulere and late as the objects move from being triggers of personal memory to his friends used to fashion as kids. those for a collective remembering. On speaking of a particular work, Wa That the artist returns to moWhile Wa Lehulere returns repeatedly tifs of childhood and education to particular objects, the meaning attached Lehulere might reference a literary or is perhaps understandable given historical figure – from the Japanese his biography. Born in 1984 to a to them is in constant flux: dark puns devel- Fluxus artist Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi, white Irish father and black South op as they double up their reference points; for example, to South African essayist African mother, Wa Lehulere was meanings accumulate as the objects move Nat Nakasa – but these inspirations the product of a union considremain opaque in the end-object. from being triggers of personal memory What is clearer is how much the ered illegal under the apartheid regime. Both had died by the time artist’s personal experience is poured to those for a collective remembering he was twelve, when the boy went into the work. I ask Wa Lehulere about to live with an aunt. His primary school headmaster told him he’d the plaster hands that will feature in the new desk work. He tells me never make it past eighth grade, and though he was encouraged by that they are cast from his aunt, explaining a bit about her persona teacher in secondary school, he felt out of place on the art course ality and how, during South Africa’s student uprisings of 1976, she at the predominantly white Wits. Unsurprisingly then, as we sit in was shot by police. She survived, but the trauma was such that she his busy studio, in a small industrial park in the Goodwood area of has refused to speak about the event since. This work, in a way, is the Cape Town, the significance that the artist attaches to the objects we artist’s method of challenging that trauma, both public and private, discuss shifts back and forth between the personal and political. As Wa without speaking of it directly. Lehulere’s studio manager prepares a communal lunch in the office, The next day Wa Lehulere suggests we visit Gugulethu. In 2006 and the sound of hammering filters through from the workshop next Wa Lehulere and several friends from the area started Gugulective, an art group featuring artists, musicians, writers, door, the conversation veers this way and that, from preceding pages DJs, rappers and poets who met in Kwa-Malmli’s, a a book-exchange project Wa Lehulere set up a few Sincerely yours, 2015 (installation local shebeen, tapping into the historic connection years back to how the artist’s assemblages might view, Gasworks, London, 2015). speak of South Africa’s ugly history and current between informal drinking spots in South African Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist
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top Dear Chieko Shiomi, 2015, blackboard, salvaged school desks (wood and steel), ceramic dogs, 70 × 230 × 103 cm. Courtesy the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town & Johannesburg
above Work in progress at Wa Lahulere’s Cape Town studio. © the artist. Photo: Lerato Madun. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London
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Detail of new work. Š the artist. Photo: Lerato Maduna. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery New York, Paris & London
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and radical black politics. There they staged discussion groups, readings, parties and exhibitions for the local community. These events addressed the social problems apparent in South Africa’s postapartheid political landscape, particularly questions of how free the black population is in a country rife with economic inequality. In 2007 for example, for a project titled Indaba Ludabi (a Xhosa expression translating roughly as ‘the news is the war’), members of the collective produced leaflets in the style of those commonly handed out by witchdoctors, replacing the descriptions of faith healing with political messages. One read, ‘White supremacy is a creator of our catastrophic lives. Land distribution: No more shacks’. The shebeen is now closed, and the group has disbanded (though Wa Lehulere still works with many of those who took part), yet the building retains the mural of the journalists of Drum, a magazine that emerged during the 1950s to chronicle township life, that Gugulective had painted in the courtyard. It is not this that we were here to see however. On the day before our visit, Wa Lehulere had spoken of his fascination with another artist who had grown up in Gugulethu, Gladys Mgudlandlu, who died in 1979, in her early sixties. Wa Lehulere’s interest had been piqued when, a few years back, a neighbour from the township gave him a book about Mgudlandlu’s landscape painting. On being shown the book, Wa Lehulere’s aunt said that she had visited the artist’s house as a child, while running errands for Wa Lehulere’s grandmother. His aunt went on to say she could remember that Mgudlandlu had painted murals throughout her home. Investigating further, Wa Lehulere located the property a few streets away from his own childhood street. It was this squat house, hastily built during the establishment of Gugulethu during the 1960s, after the Group Areas Act forcibly removed black South Africans from the centre of Cape Town, that Wa Lehulere wanted to show me. In 2015, unable to trace the owner, the artist created a work in which he exhibited chalk drawings – simple and illustrative – by his aunt based on her vague memories of the wall paintings, alongside prints by Mgudlandlu that Wa Lehulere had managed to acquire at auction. That memory is Wa Lehulere’s primary resource in his art, both in terms of personal nostalgia and references composted in the making process, is perhaps understandable. Wa Lehulere’s work acknowledges the importance that remembering has played in a country that established its current degree of democratic normalcy through the truth and reconciliation process of the late 1990s. In 2010 he cofounded the Center for Historical Reenactments with the curators Gabi Ngcobo (the curator of the current Berlin Biennale) and Sohrab Mohebbi (now associate curator at the Sculpture Center,
New York), inaugurating the initiative with an exhibition and series of discussions held at 80 Albert Street in Johannesburg, the site of the former Pass Office, which issued ID cards, complete with racial categories, during apartheid. A project space in Johannesburg followed, through which the Center for Historical Reenactments explored the agency of historical legacies, and how art might have a hand in the act of revealing traumas and teasing out lost narratives. These earlier collective actions have a strong bearing on his present studio work. Last year Wa Lahulere managed to at last track down the current occupier of Mgudlandlu’s former home – a former fighter with the MK, the old militant wing of the ANC – and ask him to let the artist excavate the wall and uncover sections of mural. Permission was granted on the condition that Wa Lahulere only dug into the wall where the man had hung pictures, or where a TV and mirror stood. When we arrive the owner is out, but a builder, currently extending the tiny, bare abode, lets us in. A single bed fills the bedroom, old mags lie on the living toom table, the TV plays a daytime soap. Wa Lahulere walks over to a framed print to the left of the sofa and unhooks it from the nail upon which it hangs. Behind is a delicate, faint painting of a bird, the first thing the artist discovered after scraping away at the layers of paint and plaster that had built up over time. Wa Lahulere tells me that birds fascinated Mgudlandlu. Elsewhere, behind the mirror, part of a landscape can be found. As we drive back into town, past the tin-roofed slums that have since extended the edges of this township, more often populated by refugees from elsewhere on the continent, I ask Wa Lahulere if, as an artist living in 1960s South Africa, Mgudlandlu ever made work about the political circumstances. Wa Lahulere shakes his head. He says, however, that while it might not have been the artist’s intention, he sees her landscapes as inherently political: for him they talk of who might own that land. Back at the studio, Wa Lahulere shows me the final work he’s making for the London show: a series of birdboxes that will hang in a line on the gallery’s wall, each structure missing two walls and thus exposing the shelter’s interior. As with so much of what Wa Lahulere does, there is an openness to the work: the houses act as easy symbols of homemaking, while their would-be occupants reference freedom. Yet, as is Wa Lahulere’s frequent modus operandi, the directness hides many narratives, from the story of Mgudlandlu to the history of South Africa. ar An exhibition of work by Kemang Wa Lehulere is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery, London, from 13 September to 20 October
Detail of a mural by Gladys Mgudlandlu, uncovered in Gugulethu, Cape Town, by Wa Lehulere in 2017. Photo: Mario Todeschini. Courtesy Kemang Wa Lehulere
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Aesthetic Judgement by J.J. Charlesworth
Does a focus on political, social and moral values within the structures of art mean that we’ve lost sight of the value of art itself? 80 
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In late July, artists included in Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–18, at London’s Design Museum, published an open letter denouncing the museum’s decision to rent out one of its spaces to Leonardo – a major aerospace and weapons manufacturer – for a private function that took place during the Farnborough Airshow, a leading UK showcase and networking event for the aerospace (and defence) business. In their letter, the signatories, calling themselves ‘Nope to Arms’, challenged the museum on its apparent indifference to the ethics of fundraising in the arts sector, declaring:
led BAE – a significant employer in the north of England – to withdraw its sponsorship. On the other side of the Atlantic, photographer Nan Goldin has led protests against the philanthropy of members of the ultrarich Sackler family, for its lucrative ownership of Purdue Pharma, the company that brought the opioid painkiller OxyContin to market. OxyContin, introduced in 1996 and marketed aggressively by Purdue as a wonder drug, turned out to be highly addictive, and is considered a contributing factor to the opioid epidemic in the US, which currently kills 115 users a day by overdose. Artists, then, are no longer prepared to tolerate their work being By hosting an event for – and taking money from – an industry used as a ‘reputational whitewash’ for corporate interests with which that many other arts institutions quite rightly see as beyond they disagree. But in the last few years the ‘ethical red line’ between the an ethical red line, you have made a very clear statement that display of contemporary art and corpoyou do not share these concerns and rate patronage has moved beyond the are happy to let war profiteers use The moral taint is not just in big busifocus on big business’s direct sponsoryour spaces if the price is right. ness, but the artworld’s self-hating ship of museums and shows. IncreasThe artists demanded that the museingly, the less direct engagements realisation that it isn’t as radical as it um take down and return their work between art institutions and the inwould like to think. We are all impli– about a third of the works on show – terests of corporations whose activcated, we are all guilty, is the message by the end of the month. The works ities don’t mirror the opinions of were removed. increasingly activist and campaigning Direct sponsorship, of course, continues to be an issue: long- artists have been drawn into controversy. In December 2017, South running campaigns by artist-activists to get Tate to drop its sponsor- African artist Candice Breitz took the step of changing the title of her ship deal with big-oil company BP (which also sponsors other high- 2016 Love Story (a multiscreen videowork about the experience of refuprofile London cultural institutions such as the British Museum and gees, then being presented at the National Gallery of Victoria as part of Royal Opera House) presumably contributed to BP’s decision to end its NGV Triennial), to Wilson Must Go, in protest over the NGV hiring secuthe agreement last year (though BP insisted it was only because the rity staff from the firm Wilson Security – a company that has overseen current sponsorship had run its term). And, in the wake of big oil, immigrant detention centres controversially set up by the Australian it is arms manufacturers and ‘big pharma’ that have been the object government, and whose staff faced abuse allegations from detainees. of protesters’ anger: in March, artists and musicians scheduled to Breitz’s action picks up from the protests against the 2014 Biennale of take part in the UK’s Great Exhibition of the North began to withdraw Sydney, from which artists withdrew to remonstrate against the bienin protest over the involvement of one of the event’s lead sponsors, nial’s sponsorship by Transfield (since renamed Broadspectrum), the British defence giant BAE Systems. The ensuing bad publicity another major contractor hired to manage Australia’s detention centres.
facing page Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–18, 2018 (installation view, Design Museum, London). © Ben Terrett / licensed under Creative Commons
above Protest outside the Design Museum, London, 2018. Courtesy BP or not BP?
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Breitz’s protest and the Design Museum debacle signal that the extended economies of art institutions have now become part of the ethics of an increasingly radicalised artworld, which often go beyond the economy of sponsorship ‘endorsement’ into making evaluations of an art institution’s commercial and institutional behaviour in terms of the ‘company it keeps’. This poses problems for institutions. Responding to the Nope to Arms protest, the Design Museum defended its position by arguing that it was a charity with a commitment to fundraising for its programmes, and that ‘this was a private event of which there was no endorsement by the museum’. The Nope to Arms signatories poured scorn on this, replying, ‘Museums are not neutral spaces – every decision about what is displayed, how it is labelled and how it is funded is political, and reveals something about the underlying values of the institution’. It’s clear that what is really at stake is not so much that artworld institutions defend their ‘neutrality’, but rather that they do the opposite: that they act and make choices in a partisan way – preferably along the political and ethical lines with which those whose works they exhibit agree. In one sense, this attitude – that everything is connected and that we cannot see ourselves as ‘neutral’, disinterested or independent – is a direct descendant of the institutional critique of the 1980s. If artists such as Hans Haacke conducted an often fraught interrogation of the political limits and blind spots of the institutions of art in relation to their sponsors, theirs was an attempt not merely to signal the risks of corporate involvement in the sponsorship of art but to make
the broader point that the worlds of culture and capital are anyway irrevocably intertwined. Take Haacke’s seminal work MetroMobiltan (1985). Didactically ironic, it comprises three advertising banners hanging from a replica classical cornice mimicking the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade in New York. Two carry statements by the oil giant Mobil justifying its continued involvement in apartheid South Africa (this was 1985). The central banner appears to promote an exhibition titled Treasures of Ancient Nigeria, ‘supported by a grant from Mobil’. Behind the pomp of the banners, and their colonial aestheticisation of timeless ‘primitive’ art, is concealed a larger documentary image of a funeral procession of black South Africans. Haacke’s point is to connect Mobil’s refusal to take political action through withdrawing its services from the apartheid state to its glamorisation of the wonders of African artistic heritage, and the Met’s complicity in this. Everything, whether you like it or not, is connected, is Haacke’s message. But what are the political and artistic implications of accepting that ‘everything is connected’? The problem of ‘endorsement’ has been at the heart of arguments over corporate sponsorship of the arts that have raged ever since the 1980s, because the sentiment on which endorsement stands is the opposition between purity and impurity. Capital is dirty, culture is pure; and yet they cannot be disentangled. As Haacke put it in a talk at the College Art Association in New York in 1990: ‘Corporations know that only high-visibility, noncontroversial art events that pack in the crowds yield what they are looking for. Events with high entertainment value are best suited to the sponsor’s desire to bask in the glow
Human Cost, a performance by Liberate Tate in the Duveen Gallery, Tate Britain, London, 2011. Photo: Amy Scaife. Courtesy Liberate Tate
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of culture, at peace with the world.’ In the artworld since the 1980s, but it has spent the peace increasingly confused about where it’s headed. After all, many of the problems of the world – inequality, capital desires culture, and culture can do nothing to resist it. Why does business want to bask in the ‘glow of culture’? It is not war and ruined environment – are, by definition, now exclusively just about a cynical manipulation of public relations. Perhaps there of its making. There is no one else to blame. The history of corpois a more oblique, retrospective irony embedded in MetroMobiltan. rate sponsorship of the arts is driven, in part, by an apologetic and Mobil’s corporate statement (published to shareholders in 1980), defensive sense that what capitalism does is reprehensible, and that which Haacke’s work quotes, declares that ‘denial of supplies to business must ‘give back’. the police and military force of a host country is hardly consistent Corporate culture also sees itself, in some obscure, contradictory with an image of responsible citizenship in that country’. For multi- but deeply felt way, to be dirty. Someone continues to pump the oil, national capitalism, responsible citizenship means guaranteeing manufacture the arms, manage the immigration centres, make the smooth and profitable trade, even to drugs. It’s perhaps why the ultraIt’s a culture of self-policing, and rich, especially those with wealth oppressive regimes. sourced from vast commercial conBut the concept of responsible the policing of art institutions, according glomerates of which they happen citizenship has come to preoccupy to an ethics of behaviour that turns out global capitalism in a different way to be the lucky beneficiaries, seek to be indifferent to the content of the in the years that followed. Since the to transform that wealth into a 1980s, ‘corporate social responsibipatronage of art. It is ethical tranart and the effects of its institutions substantiation. It is why Elizabeth lity’ (CSR) has become a mainstay of how big business justifies itself in the eyes of the public and govern- A. Sackler, another major arts philanthropist of the Sackler dynasty ment. And a major part of CSR has been philanthropy, especially and founder of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the cultural philanthropy. Brooklyn Museum, felt it necessary to make clear, following Goldin’s The history of corporate sponsorship and endorsement, then, protest, that she didn’t belong to that branch of the Sackler family – isn’t just a story of cynical corporates trying to whitewash their bad the Sacklers with a governing interest in Purdue Pharma. Elizabeth practices and lack of ethics through the sponsorship of art, preying A. Sackler wanted her name to remain untainted. But even then, the on vulnerable cultural institutions faced with creeping privatisa- taint of connection remains. ‘She’s not off the hook,’ Goldin told The tion. Underlying the rise of CSR is the sense of how genuinely uncer- Guardian in an interview in January. tain big business has become about how to justify itself to society. But there is a flipside to the taint. It is that many artists and This has something to do with the changing political climate since institutions no longer see what they do as having any distinction or the end of the Cold War. Capitalism may have won the Cold War, meaning beyond the hollow workings of the cultural institutions
Hans Haacke, MetroMobiltan, 1985, fibreglass construction, three banners, photomural, 365 × 610 × 152 cm. Photo: Fred Scruton. © the artist / DACS, London. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
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to produce exhibitions that might, despite it, be of value to its audience and to the public. As the museum’s directors put it, ‘The outcome of these protests will be to censor the exhibition, curtail free speech and prevent the museum from showcasing a plurality of views’. The decision by artists to remove their work – especially when that work itself pursues political effect on its audience – reveals the paradox of maintaining one’s own refusal to be tainted by association: it might mean that your work never reaches an audience in the first place. These are moral contradictions and political dilemmas. Making decisions about what exchanges to make, whose money to take and how to subsist depends very much on how valuable you think what you are trying to accomplish is. If artists want to show their work in untainted circumstances, they might need to examine how to produce economies and institutions that are free of the possibility If our only choice is to particiof tainted associations. That would mean actively attempting selfpate in this economy or abandon the art field entirely, at least organised, self-resourced artistic and institutional forms, and that we can stop rationalizing that participation in the name of presents the challenge of how to carve out independence within critical or political art practices or – adding insult to injury the system, as opposed to a passive withdrawal from it. Yet what is – social justice. Any claim that we represent a progressive currently offered is neither: it’s a culture of self-policing, and the social force while our activities are directly subsidized by the policing of art institutions, large and small, according to an ethics engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of behaviour that, since it is about denouncing the system to be of that inequality – the (not so) new legitimation function of absolved of responsibility for being involved in it – to avoid being art museums. tainted by it – turns out to be indifThe moral taint, then, is not just ferent to the content of the art and in big business, but the artworld’s the effects of its institutions. It is self-hating realisation that it isn’t staying in the system, while loudly as radical as it would like to think. rejecting it. Worse still, its biggest Fraser’s sharp conclusion is that consequence is enclavism – the self‘the only “alternative” today is to reinforcing insistence that only recognize our participation in that one set of political perspectives, or economy and confront it in a direct one set of cultural attitudes, can and immediate way in all of our be tolerated. It does not have to institutions, including museums, produce any good art, since that is and galleries, and publications’. beside the point. We are all implicated, we are Self-purification is an indulall guilty, is the message. But why gence. It is a demonstration of one’s is there ‘no alternative’ to the one personal virtue. But in their obsesFraser prescribes, and which, on sion with demonstrating that they the evidence, many artists now seek are free of corruption, of being to enact? The self-loathing and guilt many artists express about tainted, many in the artworld, paradoxically, reveal that they betheir ‘privilege’ suggests that many see the art they make and the lieve what it does is worth nothing more. To turn Fraser’s desulinstitutions that support it as having little positive value; that they tory statement into a question: could art represent a progressive have no artistic, cultural and (eventually) social value in their own social force even if its activities are subsidised by the engines of right – or at least not enough that it would outweigh the connec- inequality? Art was supposed to be valuable for all kinds of reasons tions and exchanges they make with an uneth– it was supposed to beautify, or celebrate, or top Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London. ical capitalism. inspire, or move, or expand people’s under© Geographer / licensed under Creative Commons Yet that is the defence the Design Museum standing of themselves and their world, and above Sackler Center for Arts Education, Solomon nevertheless held to – that it has the right to make how they might act in it. Maybe it isn’t any R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © Carolina a decision about how to use private fundraising longer. Maybe it should be. ar Zamora / licensed under Creative Commons and markets that are the direct product of an amoral capitalism. This has something to do with the pessimistic sense that there is no escape from ‘the system’, that there is no ‘outside’. It’s a position frequently argued by Andrea Fraser, one of the more prominent of a generation of artists influenced by institutional critique. In her 2011 essay ‘L’1%, c’est moi’, Fraser unpicks how growing income disparities have run in parallel with the growth of the ultrarich, which has in turn fuelled the ‘enormous expansion in the past few decades of museums, biennial exhibitions, studio art and art related degree programs, art publications, art residencies and awards’. ‘How can we continue to rationalize our participation in this economy?’ Fraser asks, while concluding, ‘In the United States, it is difficult to imagine any arts organization or practice that can escape it’. There is a strong sense of self-loathing in Fraser’s account:
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Photodocumentation of Nan Goldin and P.A.I.N.’s opioids protest in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Sackler Wing, New York. Photos, from top left: JC Bourcart (1); Thomas Pavia (2–4); Michael Quin (5); Noemi Bonazzi (6). Courtesy Nan Goldin
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Javier Téllez complicates sanity by Louise Darblay
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From the beginning of the postwar era, when Africans in the French institution willing to take part, introduces his volunteer particicolonies were still prohibited by the Laval Decree from making films, pants to the work being adapted (Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex in combinaFrench cinematographer and anthropologist Jean Rouch sought to tion with the Western-movie genre, for instance, in Oedipus Marshall, ‘return the colonial gaze’. Working collaboratively with African actors 2006) and develops the script through collaborative workshops with and technicians, who improvised most of the plot and dialogue, he the group, who then perform it for the camera. (Téllez often shoots his explored the limits of the self and the other. While Rouch is often work on film, preferring the materiality of the medium, even if he’ll cited as the founding father of Nigerien cinema, and his subversive then transfer it to video for practical reasons.) and darkly humorous works are celebrated by members of the French Architecture and the Foucauldian dynamics of space and power New Wave, others see his output as deeply problematic. Far from are recurring themes of Téllez’s work. The sinister hospital pandecolonising African experiences, this white Frenchman, who had opticon in O Rinoceronte de Dürer (Dürer’s Rhinoceros, 2010), which up originally arrived in Niger as a colonial engineer, stands accused of until the year 2000 formed part of the Miguel Bombarda Hospital in recolonising them. Portugal, is one striking example: in this 40-minute film, day patients That Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez would align himself with from the hospital imagine and perform what life would be like under Rouch’s work, as he has done on many occasions, is both understand- the extreme restrictions suggested by the building’s design. Téllez able (the latter’s humour, subversion and most of all dialogic method- sometimes extends those environments into the space in which his videos are shown, creating installology are essential to Téllez’s work) The artist remembers a yearly festival and liable to put him in an equally ation versions of the works (a circus tent for One Flew Over the Void (Bala delicate position. Téllez’s films aspire held at the hospital where his father to destigmatise mental illness in the Perdida), 2005, or a grottolike cinema worked, in which patients would exchange for La Conquista de México, 2012). Yet eyes of the self-proclaimed ‘sane’, their uniforms with the doctors and while critiquing the institutional these often feel unnecessary, and are system that underpins its diagperhaps here to ground the films’ nurses, as a defining experience presence in an art gallery. (Indeed, nosis and treatment. In works such as La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Rozelle Hospital) (2005), which frames the these are works that deserve a wide audience, and it would be interpersonal stories of female psychiatric patients within the drama of esting to see Téllez’s work move outside the ‘safe’ space of the gallery Joan of Arc, Téllez treads a fine line, creating unsettling films without and into cinema auditoriums.) (in most cases) falling into either exploitation or do-goodism. Téllez is the son of psychiatrists and, because his father conducted Téllez started collaborating with residents of mental health insti- sessions in the family home, sometimes with his son in the room, was tutions at the beginning of the 2000s. Featuring patients as actors and surrounded from a young age by their patients. The artist remembers coproducers, the films riff on classic works of cinema, visual art and a yearly festival held at the hospital where his father worked, in which literature (most of his titles are either direct or slightly twisted quota- patients would exchange their uniforms with the doctors and nurses, tions from the canon), their stories more or less modified depending as a defining experience. This carnivalesque reversal informs much on his collaborators. Mixing the familiar with the unfamiliar, he of Téllez’s work, most evidently his 12-minute One Flew Over the Void complicates fixed definitions of madness and sanity, normality and (Bala Perdida). For that project, part of a commission for the 2005 InSite pathology using a consistent methodology: the artist receives a com- biennial on the Tijuana/San Diego border, Téllez collaborated with a mission from an international institution, finds a local psychiatric group of patients from a psychiatric institution on the Mexican side
above Shadow Play, 2014, 35mm film projection, 10 min 56 sec
facing page, both images Oedipus Marshall (stills), 2006, single-channel projection, Super 16mm film transferred to HD video, 30 min, colour, sound
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above and facing page Caligari und der Schlafwandler (Caligari and the Sleepwalker) (stills), 2008, Super 16mm film transferred to HD video, b/w, sound, 27 min 7 sec
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to organise a protest-cum-carnival that questioned ideas of borders, and the Sleepwalker), an adaptation of Robert Wiene’s 1920 silent physical and mental, by staging their transgression. Onscreen, horror classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari commissioned by Berlin’s demonstrators led by a trumpeter brandish placards protesting their Haus der Kulturen der Welt for the Rational / Irrational exhibition own marginalisation and marching down the street towards a stage, (2008). Wiene’s film was one of the earliest attempts to represent erected on a beach in front of a wall that marks the border. A crowd insanity on screen, and as such belongs to the larger corpus of works watches as the protesters don animal masks and, accompanied by responsible for shaping our perception of mental illness that Téllez a fanfare, pass through a hoop held by a man dressed as a ringmaster, sets out to challenge. Téllez’s 27-minute film, then, developed with a whip in his other hand. The film culminates with David Smith, patients from the Viviantes Klinik in Berlin, retains the film’s key a human cannonball, climbing into a monumental blue cannon, role-reversal between psychiatrist and patient, sane and insane, but which, with a bang, propels him into the air and over the border wall. shifts away from horror (in Wiene’s film, Caligari is a mad hypnotist who uses one of his patients to commit murders) to a more poetic The crowd goes wild. Analysing the work of Rabelais in relation to folk traditions, relationship in which Caligari attempts to ‘wake’ the sleepwalker, who claims to come from a planet Mikhail Bakhtin described the The festivities conceal a strategy of where everyone is mentally ill. transgressive power of carnival as a communal event in which conven(There are even comic moments, control, and it’s that ambiguity in the such as the quirky geography lesson tional boundaries are broken down power dynamics underpinning Téllez’s during which each country on the through displays of excess and grocollaborations that triggers unease map is identified according to its tesqueness, and the line separating most prescribed drugs: ‘The United falsehood from truth is contested. in the viewer – is this exploitation? States of Prozac’, ‘Atozil’, ‘Socialist But the carnival is also a political esvent, seen by the established order to provide the popular catharsis Republic of Diazepam’, etc.) Téllez insinuates another level of ‘reality’ necessary to maintain the status quo. The festivities conceal a strategy through footage of the Viviantes patients in a movie theatre watching of control, and it’s that ambiguity in the power dynamics underpin- Wiene’s film, while their words can be heard occasionally as voiceoning Téllez’s collaborations that triggers unease in the viewer – is this vers throughout the film – “I know I’m having a psychotic episode exploitation? Are the participants aware of the implications of their when I feel I’m in a different film,” one confesses – and ultimately Caligari’s effect stems from the confusion it creates within the viewbeing cast as circus performers? This idea of a world turned upside-down – where beggars can er’s mind as to who’s really ‘awake’. become kings and the mentally ill are celebrated for their wisdom – Over the years, Téllez has expanded his interest in alternative is also at play in the 2008 work Caligari und der Schlafwandler (Caligari perspectives by engaging with other marginalised groups: borrowing
above Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (still), 2007, Super 16mm film transferred to HD video, b/w, sound, 27 min 36 sec
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facing page, all images One Flew Over The Void (Bala Perdida) (stills), 2005, single-channel video projection, colour, sound, 11 min 30 sec
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its title from a work by philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot, and based on an ancient Indian parable, Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (2007) films six sight-impaired participants as they encounter an elephant for the first time, each describing their experience based on familiar references (the skin is alternately described as an ‘old warm tyre’, ‘a hairy couch material’ or ‘thick lizard skin’); Shadow Play (2014, which lends its title to the artist’s current exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao) was developed with refugees, and is a poetic narration of the experience of exile using the symbolic language of shadow play. Most recently Téllez worked with the Tarahumara in the sierra of Chihuahua, in Mexico, for To Have Done with the Judgment of God (2016), in which members of the indigenous group are filmed going about their everyday lives as they listen to a translated version of Antonin Artaud’s 1946 radio piece by the same name. Nothing much else happens, however, and the work soon feels more like an ethnographic film than a collaborative project, in which Western narratives are superimposed onto a non-Western culture. A critique of colonialism, seen in parallel to the institutionalisation of the mentally ill – as a form of subjugation of the ‘other’, legitimised through the theorisation of racial (or intellectual) superiority – runs through La Conquista de México. Commissioned for Documenta 13, the 45-minute film stars outpatients from a psychiatric hospital in Mexico City, who alternate between playing the parts of interned patients in that same institution (whose holding conditions are more akin to a prison) and historical characters in a reenactment of the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1519, filmed on the pyramids of Teotihuacán. The work was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s 1934 critique (from which Téllez’s work derives its title) of the subjugation of the Aztec people in a play originally intended
for the former’s Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud was himself institutionalised for long stretches of his adult life, and is a totemic presence in Téllez’s films). It culminates in a speech by one of the characters, who, standing on a theatre stage wearing a suit, condemns the absolute authority of psychiatry over the lives and freedom of the ‘mad’, contending that what is called ‘mental illness’ should be treated as an equally legitimate concept of reality to that labelled ‘sanity’. The dramatic intensity drops, however, as the camera zooms out to reveal an empty room; in the final scene, the patient is walked back to his bunk by a nurse. That no one is there to hear the compelling case made for a change of attitudes towards mental illness seems deplorable – yet ultimately, it is the gallery audience that the film (and the speech) were intended to reach. Theatre – to quote Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ (1933) – should ‘succeed in organically reinvolving man, his ideas about reality, and his poetic place in reality’. This belief that art should aim for the spiritual transformation of man, not so much by ‘raising awareness’ as by unsettling established ideas and perceptions in the mind of its audience, lies at the core of Téllez’s work. His extensive quoting and referencing of the myths of our contemporary culture, then, falls within this approach. Proposing a form of critical subversion, Téllez hijacks and twists assimilated narratives and motifs, using their familiarity to the benefit of less familiar stories and perspectives. And in a society increasingly wary of the imagined ‘other’, Téllez’s aspiration to a less binary, more complex understanding of different realities is welcome. ar
La Conquista de México (still), 2012, single-channel video projection, colour, sound, 43 min 38 sec
all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Peter Kilchmann Galerie, Zürich, and Koenig & Clinton, New York
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Javier Téllez: Shadow Play is on view at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, through 18 November. His work will also be included in the Busan Biennale, 8 September – 11 November
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Exhibitors 2018 1857, Oslo
Deborah Schamoni, Munich
mother’s tankstation, Dublin|London
A Thousand Plateaus, Chengdu
Emalin, London
Norma Mangione, Turin
Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico DF
Federico Vavassori, Milan
Öktem Aykut, Istanbul
Antoine Levi, Paris
Fons Welters, Amsterdam
Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles
Bodega, New York
Gianni Manhattan, Vienna
Project Native Informant, London
BQ, Berlin
Gregor Staiger, Zurich
Reserve Ames, Los Angeles
Carlos Ishikawa, London
Horizont, Budapest
ROH Projects, Jakarta
Chapter, New York
Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Simone Subal, New York
Christian Andersen, Copenhagen
Joseph Tang, Paris
Southard Reid, London
Company, New York
Koppe Astner, Glasgow
Stereo, Warsaw
Crèvecoeur, Paris
Kristina Kite, Los Angeles
Sultana, Paris
Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Marfa’, Beirut
Union Pacific, London
Damien & the Love Guru, Brussels
Max Mayer, Dusseldorf
Wschód, Warsaw
Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw
Misako & Rosen, Tokyo
XYZ collective, Tokyo
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December 6 – 9, 2018 The Wolfsonian–FIU, Miami Beach
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Manifesta 12 The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence. Various venues, Palermo 6 June – 4 November The sunlight that has settled into an empty room of Palermo’s Palazzo Butera, one of the venues for the 12th edition of Manifesta, is disturbed by the flurry of a pigeon through an open window. After briefly touring the exhibition, the bird perches on a doorframe and casually defecates onto the ceramic tiles of Renato Leotta’s floorwork Giardino (2018), the pockmarked surface of which records the fall of lemons onto the ground beneath citrus trees. After shooing the invader out of the space, the invigilators decide against clearing up the mess, and so visitors pick their way delicately around it. The intervention dramatises the questions shaping the latest edition of the peripatetic European biennial, which takes ‘the garden’ for its theme: who’s allowed in, what’s excluded and who gets to decide? The curators adopt the garden as both a model for the presentation of contemporary art and an allegory for a Palermitan society defined by the combination of Arab, European and African civilisations. The exhibition is divided into three strands and hosted by spaces that in their faded grandeur, syncretic architectures and immersion in the city’s bustle offer their own evidence of how art interacts with the world and how cultures intersect with each other. Yet the basic principle of a garden is that it is bounded, and the works most directly engaged with the political implications of borders – citizenship, sovereignty and migration – are gathered under the bathetic title ‘Out of Control Room’. Setting the tone, Laura Poitras and Tania Bruguera draw attention to a US military base in the Sicilian countryside: the former through a video installation (Signal Flow, 2018) made in collaboration with local filmmakers, the latter (in Article 11, 2018) by documenting residents’ protests against its construction. In both cases the artists align themselves with the defence of sovereignty disregarded by, for example, the US military’s drone strikes or, as touched upon by Trevor Paglen’s series of photographic portraits as biometric data sets (It Began as a Military Experiment, 2017), its surveillance programme. The freedom to transgress borders is not equally distributed, as John Gerrard’s Untitled (near Parndorf Austria) (2018) makes clear. The cold digital precision of this virtual portrait of the roadside on which 71 migrants suffocated in the back of an abandoned truck, and the inhuman steadiness of the circling perspective
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on it, might be seen in isolation to fulfil the Kantian principle that pleasure in the beautiful is predicated on disinterest. Yet the contextualising information makes any such suspension of interest impossible, and so Gerrard captures the tension inherent to any work of art that protests the unequal systems of power in which it is, as the product of a specific economy, implicated. That this ambiguity is implicit does not diminish the work. Indeed, the felt need to signpost to the audience that the curators are aware of the disputed line between highlighting and exploiting suffering characterises the biennial’s clumsiest moments. To juxtapose Kader Attia’s The Body’s Legacies. The Post-Colonial Body (2018), in which a speaker laments that white people take pleasure from musical forms such as the blues and hiphop that are rooted in black suffering, beside Forensic Oceanography’s Liquid Violence (2018), a reconstruction of the botched rescue of African migrants from the Mediterranean, has troubling implications. Either that the latter is served up for a sadistic and presumptively white audience as entertainment; or that there is a meaningful equivalence between engaging with experiences sublimated through culture and watching documentary footage of people drowning as a consequence of racist European immigration policies. This does no justice to either work. How it might be possible to generate solidarities between diverse constituencies is the subject of ‘Garden of Flows’ at the Botanical Gardens, whose heterogeneous ecosystem offers a template. The idea, eloquently illustrated by Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings of West African people and objects in Italy (Scenes of Exchange, 2018), is appealing but risks seeming selective: for all the cross-pollination, peaceful coexistence and productive admixture, the botanical garden also expresses the colonial impulse to uproot, assimilate and systematise. So the Molotov cocktails scattered through Lungiswa Gqunta’s installation in an empty hothouse (Lituation – The Gardener’s Revenge, 2018), while seeming to incite rebellion, also read like a welcome reminder of the violence of certain dislocations. The question, here as elsewhere, is not whether movement across borders is per se a good or bad thing, but how inequalities of power dictate the consequences of those movements. The curators’ adoption of Gilles Clément’s description of the world as a ‘planetary garden’
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preempts such reservations by reframing the garden as global commons, and Uriel Orlow’s Wishing Trees (2018) makes a powerful case against a constructed ‘local culture’ being used to justify exclusionary policies. But gardens are by definition local and manmade – the exception being Eden, which we also ruined – and the conflation of the garden with the planet implies that humanity should be its superintendent. Which plays into the anthropocentric assumption that because we are alone responsible for destroying the planet, we are singlehandedly capable of fixing it. Works including Jelili Atiku’s Festival of the Earth (Alaraagbo XIII) (2018) and Melanie Benajo’s Night Soil (2014–2018) are among many to caution against the selfaggrandising assumption that humanity can remove itself from, and thus oversee, nature; OMA’s Palermo Atlas (2018), a study of the flows of people and capital across the city, disputes whether we can ever fully grasp the complex systems of which we are a part and the consequences of our interventions into them. Rather than impose totalising systems on the world, horticultural or otherwise, the implication is that we should acknowledge our own entanglement in wider patterns. Part of the ‘City on Stage’ strand, Roberto Collovà’s architectural proposal for Palermo’s southern coastline (Giardino di Giardini. Azioni sulla Costa Sud, 2018) laments that wildflowers on the rubble left by the disastrous postwar urban redevelopment known as the Sack of Palermo are now carefully preserved. By pointing out that nature would thrive without our guiding hand, its pioneer plants replaced by hardier and betteradapted species, he suggests that the impulse to preserve the world is only another expression of the urge to master it that created the desolate landscape in the first place. As Pangloss learns in Voltaire’s Candide (1759) – to which the exhibition’s subtitle alludes – that ‘human grandeur is very dangerous’, so Manifesta proposes that living ethically means adapting to local conditions, relinquishing a degree of control over the world of which we are part and recognising the virtues of pragmatism. Collovà’s installation includes a desk on which a sheet of paper offers a set of definitions of archaeology that might equally describe the impression left by the biennial: ‘WHAT REMAINS’; ‘WHAT RESISTS OR CAN RESIST’; ‘A PLACE FROM WHICH YOU CAN REALISTICALLY RESTART’. Ben Eastham
top Renato Leotta, Notte di San Lorenzo, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy the artist and Manifesta 12, Palermo
above Jelili Atiku, Festival of the Earth (Alaraagbo XIII), 2018, processional performance, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Simone Sapienza. Courtesy the artist and Manifesta 12, Palermo
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Other Mechanisms Secession, Vienna 29 June – 2 September In his catalogue essay, curator Anthony Huberman explains that the works in this exhibition ‘reflect on what it could mean to contest the regime of the machine’. That is, they question the worship of usefulness in modern scientific civilisation, which is refused or even ridiculed by each piece on show. It’s a strong concept, and potentially extends to how the works are placed in the labyrinthine space of the Secession. If the point is to produce friction, then the disorganisation of Other Mechanisms – the inability of its parts to add up to a coherent whole – is a paradoxical form of success. Huberman’s text suggests he thinks of each work as a ‘machine’ in the expanded sense described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – not just tools to realise a purpose, but a social ensemble comprising its makers and user. The wall texts describe each work clearly, and Huberman’s catalogue contains some inspired choices for philosophical passages to go with them (including examples by Jacques Ellul, Maurizio Lazzarato, Meredith Meredith and Lewis Mumford). These extracts further illuminate some already compelling individual works and let the viewer make visual and thematic connections thwarted in the exhibition’s organisation. A ‘complete’ viewing experience of an exhibition is barely possible, and catalogues shouldn’t try to achieve it, but rarely are they as vitally appropriate as this one. The rusted antique animal traps making up Danh Vo’s Twenty-Two Traps (2012) are machines for maiming living things – for pest control or
food – but they could just as easily be instruments of torture. Though they now appear pockmarked with age, the metal gnarled and corroded, their implied threat is not lessened since they are placed directly on the floor and set up with the potential to snap at our heels. Similar violent yearnings appear in a different context in Harun Farocki’s Serious Games III: Immersion (2009). This two-channel video shows how the virtual reality software used to train soldiers before they go to war is recycled as part of therapy for their damaged psyches once they return home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Vo’s traps once met the basic need for human survival, but Farocki’s video suggests that soldiers are integrated into a closed system that meets two needs at once: training people for destruction and rebuilding them when they’re broken. Zarouhie Abdalian’s Joint (ii) and Nairy Baghramian’s Scruff of the Neck (UL 11, F) (both 2016) have the sharp and clinical look of medical equipment, but in each case their intertwining shapes make them more like fantasies of impracticality. Abdalian assembles small, interconnected heaps of mirrored, nickel-plated hand tools, placing them on plinths. They are arranged so delicately that they sometimes collapse under pressure, in stark contrast to the exaggerated scale of Baghramian’s twisting polished aluminium sculptures. Hanging on the wall, these drooping structures – like confused forms from dental-phobic nightmares – are the first pieces you see when entering the main exhibition
Other Mechanisms, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Peter Mochi. Courtesy Secession, Vienna
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space. The ridiculous white tooth at the base, complete with yellow plaque spot, nevertheless gives them a comic edge. Placed on the museum’s moveable walldividers in the main space, Lutz Bacher’s Untitled (Chalk Board) and Chalkboard (Space) (both 2015) are chalkboards marked with routines, calendars and to-do lists. They aren’t just relics nostalgic for ways of organising ourselves before computerisation, such as dusty, iPad-free classrooms or hectic stock exchanges. Rather, they remind us that bureaucratic rationality is a machine for the administration of lives and bodies. This demands not only that we have the personal discipline to turn ourselves into willing slaves of a system in which we are disposable, but that ascetic self-denial – refusing anything that distracts from labour and profit-turning – is performed for its own sake. If Other Mechanisms makes an argument, it’s that some things have intrinsic value, transcending and even forestalling human resource and data management. The exhibition thus interferes with the deliriously optimistic history of the future as Silicon Valley is writing it, reinforcing a healthy scepticism about the myth of technologically guaranteed progress, giving us the conceptual resources to separate technical from general human advancement and criticising the idea that technical ‘optimisation’ is an end in itself. Though it stops short of offering a compelling new narrative, it is nevertheless a valuable intimation of a conflict yet to come. Max L. Feldman
Uptown High Rise No. 2 Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen 5 May – 16 June The artist-run gallery Vermilion Sands opened in the traditionally working class and immigrant district of Nørrebro, a short cycle ride north of Copenhagen’s tourist-friendly old city, in 2016. Named after J.G. Ballard’s 1971 collection of science-fiction short stories, the gallery’s open and explorative programme is not normally beholden to the author’s tastes. But this group show dovetails neatly with some of his fascinations, specifically urban life, alienation and contemporary architecture. The exhibition’s titular high-rise – itself an echo of Ballard’s 1975 High-Rise novel – refers to Uptown Nørrebro, a student housing complex that’s being constructed near the gallery, now renamed simply Nordbro (Northbridge in English). Slick promotional imagery makes it clear that Nordbro is a luxury student-housing solution, a symbol of the neighbourhood’s gentrification. The show features work by a roster of Copenhagen-based and international artists, Mette Hammer Juhl and Lorenzo Tebano, Henning Lundkvist, Tessa Lynch, Asta Lynge and Heine Thorhauge Mathiasen. Mathiasen’s butternutbottomup. betternot (2018) takes up most of one wall, involving what look to be four large reclaimed desktops with two intersecting black and red circles satisfyingly routed into the soft, discoloured fibreboard underbelly of each. Lynch’s Umbrellas (Remembered) (2016)
– umbrella frames that the artist has interpreted in weld-marked metal, turning street refuse into vibrant, insectlike clusters – dots the gallery floor. The sculpture series is accompanied by a video, The Wave Machine & The Flâneuse (2016), projected onto the white wall. Here, faint scrolling text relates a fragmented discussion between two women, taking in architecture, parenthood, Jacques Rancière and ultrasound therapy, among other subjects. I was unable to visit Lynge’s Real Estate Trick (2018) in situ – installed in a finished, private room in Nordbro itself – but the video has been published online. In it, a pitch-shifted voice reads out text simultaneously shown onscreen. Peppy orchestral library music plays in the background, as the cheesily anonymised voice speaks about playing the Sims videogame: “choose the evict button and throw out your users out here on the street…” Lundkvist’s Old Plans (2018), meanwhile, is a series of exhibition maps on A4 paper, with enigmatic doodles and markings on some of them. Placed humbly on the floor in a corner is a small pile of Lundkvist’s publication Planned Obsolescence – A Retrospective (2018). Narrating his thoughts on the abjection and poverty of the artist’s life under late capitalism, it’s as self-reflexive as his maps, but less fey and far funnier. Mette Hammer Juhl and Lorenzo Tebano’s Are you still here (2018) is a videowork experienced
during a car ride around Nørrebro. Screens set into the back of the car’s headrests show a collage of found images of buildings collapsing and closeups of organic, gutlike matter, as well as shots of locations along the journey, while ominous synth pads sweep and drone underneath. Inevitably our trip falls in and out of sync with our surroundings, creating a dreamy feeling. The ride ends in a dramatic climax as the car climbs to the top of a hospital carpark. It’s a melodramatic but effective moment when the engine shuts off to a view of Copenhagen’s subdued skyline, spiked by numerous church spires and a few newer tower blocks creeping up towards the clouds. Vermilion Sands didn’t offer much in the way of exhibition literature, so viewers – at least those who might not live in Copenhagen – have to navigate the show’s different strands without much help. It’s confusing to start with, but also offers permission to slip away into the pieces, their shared rhythms and cross-dissolves. As a result, this is a strikingly cohesive group exhibition, leaving the viewer with a feeling for the show holistically, each work’s sensuality – fading, used material, half-remembered objects, displaced and disjointed voices and journeys – intersecting with and complementing the others in representing the loss accompanying gentrification. Nathaniel Budzinski
Heine Thorhauge Mathiasen, butternutbottomup. betternot, 2018, flocking on hardboard, steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen
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Titus Schade Plateau Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig 29 June – 26 August Last year Titus Schade’s 2012 painting Der Kiosk came to life, turning into the full-size stage set now standing at a diagonal in the middle of the darkened gallery space. Created by Schade alongside theatre designer Marialena Lapata for a production of Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek’s 1988 play Wolken.Heim, the set has previously been walked over by actors, voices bouncing around its timber frame. Audiences have gazed upon it, briefly participating in the illusion that it is a world unto itself. Here, an audio recording of a performance spills out from a concealed speaker, but now the stage set is unmistakably lifeless, much like the nocturnal scenes characteristic of the Leipzig painter’s work. Plateau gathers Der Kiosk along with 14 other paintings made between 2011 and 2018. Generally bodily in scale, these are dark screens, disquiet microcosms of another unpeopled world. First performed in 1988, before Germany was unified, Jelinek’s difficult text fuses citations from the works of Martin Heidegger, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Hölderlin and other canonical German thinkers, alongside less easily reconcilable groups like the Red Army Faction. Uniting her handling of these sources is the question of German national identity, which, not least through a reverb-heavy refrain of ‘We’, becomes some-
thing entirely unstable and cacophonous. Schade’s exacting paintings, likewise, consistently feature diverse and perhaps still irreconcilable symbols of a German collective past (thatched cottages, pretty churches, windmills, GDR apartment blocks, clouds, the Romantic sublime), with these arrangements always bearing the mark of their construction and instability. His architectural scenes are themselves theatrical, unfurling on stacks or stagelike platforms. Outer limits are sharply defined, jutting out starkly from flat black or gradient voids. Precipitating a sense of vague but highly palpable dread, what exceeds or operates these limits remains unclear. While Wolken.Heim lends itself constructively to Plateau, the inclusion of the stage set means the exhibition’s installation nears literalness. Schade’s paintings are dominated by ideas of theatricality, artifice and representation, but there is little need for them to be exhibited in a darkened theatrical space, or lit dramatically from above. Walking through the stage set, which we are invited to do, we actually become the actors deliberately and consistently excluded from Schade’s world. In place of human life, there small, uneasy details recur – orderly bonfires, bright moons, lighting candles, stacks of timber ready to
be burnt – which give the sense of a strangely inhuman, symbolic language at work. As with a computer simulation or an architectural model, these appear included in an attempt to create a more ‘lived-in’ naturalism, which never quite takes. Throughout Plateau, Schade’s distinct painterly style, a kind of 3D-printing hyperreal, is countered by a collagist’s handling of space, through which representation itself appears in a state of disassembly. Ominous flat geometric forms, for example in Die große Kultstätte (2012), emerge to shock pictorial space, disrupting any straightforward apprehension of the scene. Another small, seemingly incongruous painting included here, Regal Bauhaus (2011), shows a shallow shelving case, evocative of the letter cases (Setzkästen) traditionally gifted to German children for storing and displaying trinkets. Much like in Jelinek’s treatment of national identity, here identity is a careful process of inclusion and exclusion. What fails to make the cut, what doesn’t fully align, is just as important as the image that is finally offered up. Parsing for meaning in Schade’s strange pictorial language is then perhaps the wrong move. Probably the real issue is that other worlds, other pictures and arrangements, feel so close to hand. Rebecca O’Dwyer
Die Aufstellung, 2011, oil and acrylic on canvas, 100 × 160 cm. Photo: Uwe Walter. Courtesy Sammlung Kunsthalle der Sparkasse Leipzig. © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2018
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Paul Chan Odysseus and the Bathers NEON at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens 5 July – 14 October Unlike other Ancient Greek heroes, Odysseus is renowned not for his courage or physical prowess but his hoodwinking and chicanery. In the Odyssey these questionable qualities coalesce around the word polytropos, which translator Stephen Mitchell renders as ‘infinitely cunning’. Paul Chan identifies closely with Homer’s wily protagonist, and in particular polytropos, suggesting in his Los Angeles Review of Books essay ‘Odysseus as Artist’ (2017) that cunning and adaptability are essential traits for artists, especially those attempting to influence social change. It’s an eccentric metaphor but one that seems apropos in Athens, where it underpins Chan’s handsome exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art, presented by the city’s NEON foundation and guest-curated by Nottingham Contemporary’s Sam Thorne. Populating the museum’s modest groundfloor galleries are the American artist’s kinetic ‘breather’ sculptures – tubular nylon figures that flail and jerk as air from modified industrial fans fill their bodies. There are versions here of Odysseus, his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus. Like less frenzied versions of the spasmodic ‘sky dancers’ seen at car dealerships, they gently animate the low-ceilinged spaces. For this exhibition Chan has recast them as ‘bathers’, resurrecting a familiar art-historical
trope against a backdrop of anxieties regarding the European migrant crisis. This is most overt in Les Baigneurs (suitors as fugees as suitors) (all works 2018), where a gangling blue ‘bather’ stands alongside two more figures that sit holding hands. While its title alludes to the suitors that invade Penelope’s home in the Odyssey, a foil emergency blanket and orange life preserver at the bathers’ feet evoke the recent horror of bodies washed ashore on Mediterranean beaches. Prejudice against migrants, refugees and, indeed, anyone identified as ‘other’ is more subtly addressed by Chan’s vibrant towel paintings. These unstretched canvases draped over domestic towel rails are daubed straight from the tube with colourful forms echoing those of his squirming sculptures. Reminiscent of Matisse’s cut-outs, the slapdash paintings are intended as an indictment of the politics of suspicion currently dividing Chan’s native US (significantly, none of the shapes touch or integrate). Hard-hitting, politically charged works defined the artist’s early career, but these appear surprisingly tentative. Conversely, the show’s most salient moment is La Baigneur 7 (Teenyelemachus), a convulsing, wraithlike figure surrounded by concrete-filled shoes connected with suicide cables. Conceivably an emo version of Telemachus, the gasping jet-black character
more closely recalls the Grim Reaper, serving as a metaphor for a death-wish culture choking on its own hubris. While Chan’s theories surrounding polytropos are eloquently articulated in his writings, it’s hard to grasp how the notion of cunning as manifest in Odysseus actually applies to these sculptures and paintings. The answer seems as elusive as the precise meaning of that Ancient Greek word (‘resourceful’, ‘inventive’, ‘versatile’ and ‘many-turning’ being among the copious proposals). While Chan’s multilayered works likewise invite multiple readings, many share an underlying anxiety about art’s capacity to offer meaningful alternatives to current social reality. This is best exemplified by Poordysseus, the show’s final work, which transforms the Greek hero into a billowing yellow shapeshifter caught inside a glass vitrine. Here, Odysseus the cunning artist is rendered impotent, entrapped by the goddess Calypso’s carnal pleasures; his floundering frame perhaps admonishing contemporary artists correspondingly seduced by the market. With the exhibition culminating in a literal dead end, you exit by retracing your steps; it’s a truly cunning device whereby viewers experience the works twice. Sometimes the route to progress requires a renegotiation of the past. David Trigg
Les Baigneurs (suitors as fugees as suitors), 2018, nylon, fans, artificial grass, emergency blanket, 190 × 271 × 218 cm. Photo: Panos Kokkinias. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
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Glenn Ligon In poetry, a solution to everything Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples 24 April – 28 July In 1961 Pier Paolo Pasolini conceived of an experimental ethnographic film titled Notes for a Poem on the Third World. Never completed – and, though well-meaning, guilty of naive colonialist attitudes – the cycle of five episodes was to be shot in India, Africa, Latin America, the Arab states and the ‘black ghettos’ of the United States. The filmmaker and poet is ever-present in Glenn Ligon’s first solo show in Italy, wherein the American conceptualist explores race, identity and the afterlife of slavery. The exhibition includes two neons, paintings from the ongoing Stranger series (2000–) and three new silkscreens. A black neon outline of Ligon’s hands, drawn by stencil and then enlarged, occupies the first room. Titled Notes for a Poem on the Third World (chapter one) (2018), and speaking directly to Pasolini, Ligon’s hands might be held in greeting, surrender or protest. It’s hard not to think of recent documents of police brutality in Pasolini’s so-called ghettos of the US. Following the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in 2014, Black Lives Matter, a movement for which Ligon has become a figurehead, adopted the slogan ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’. Another neon, Untitled (Siete Ospiti) (2018), occupies the next room. The only work here featuring colour – acid blue – it reproduces its subtitle, a softly threatening slogan that translates as ‘You are guests’ and was held up by Neapolitan fans at a recent away football
game against Bologna at which they outnumbered the local supporters. In relation to the theme of hospitality, the exhibition’s title is a line from Pasolini’s 1986 poem ‘But It Was a Naked and Swarming Italy’: in the context of the current immigration crisis, these words have a renewed and disquieting resonance. Despite over three million Italians immigrating to the US during the early 1900s alone, solidarity is in short supply, as shown in June when the Aquarius rescue vessel, holding 629 migrants, was forced to dock in Spain after Italy denied entry. Ligon’s work often begins by examining texts, abstracting language to draw out new meaning or pushing words into inscrutability. In Stranger #90 (2018), extracts from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ have been stencilled onto canvas using oil stick coated in a layer of coal dust. Baldwin’s essay reflects on Europe’s false innocence when it comes to race, and his experience in a ‘European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger’. In Ligon’s rendering, Baldwin’s words are estranged from meaning. Shards of coal stick to the letters, like iron filings to a magnet. They are difficult to read and charged with an acute, graphic density, as if the words take on a single purpose. Ligon moves further into abstraction with two largescale silkscreens and one etching, from the series Debris Field (2018). Faintly
gothic letters, selected randomly, are silkscreened onto the canvas twice, so that the letters overlap and blur. In Debris Field #5, black letters fall across a white background, like words broken into their raw parts. In Debris Field #2, Ligon works into the negative space with an ink marker pen, in precise and laboured strokes that give the canvas a texture like skin. Suspended between language and abstraction, the letters are held in a kind of middle passage, an oblique commentary on Europe’s original sin – colonialism, its ensuing slavery and the abstraction of the black human body into material commodity. The atrium is left empty, save for a small framed poster advertising an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, held in Naples in 1984. Mapplethorpe’s tender, pornographic images of black men, many of whom were his lovers, were bound to cause a stir in 1980s Italy. In the poster’s black-andwhite image, a muscular black nude holds five white flowers in his hand, his cock pointing south, fists gripping the stems. Shocking in their time for celebrating the black body, Mapplethorpe’s images remain uncomfortably objectifying. Taken together, Ligon’s works examine the difficulty of creating solidarity across difference, and at the same time, maintain the importance of doing so in Italy right now. Izabella Scott
Notes for a Poem on the Third World (chapter one), 2018, neon, paint, 213 × 394 cm. Photo: Francesco Squeglia. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London & Naples
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Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA) Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More Various venues, Riga & Jūrmala 2 June – 28 October A small black-and-white photomontage depicting a female scientist hangs on the wall in the entrance corridor of the former Faculty of Biology at the University of Latvia. A similar image appears, with a corresponding plaque, just before the second room I enter. Having breezed past these pictures, I only realise midway through the venue’s maze of rooms and stairwells that the series is, in fact, part of the exhibition rather than a remnant of the building’s past. In seven images and accompanying texts, Kerstin Hamilton’s The Science Question in Feminism (2018) brings female physicists, chemists and biologists to the fore and tells their stories, often highlighting gender inequality within science. Lidija Liepina, for example, helped develop the first Russian gas masks during the First World War and became the first Latvian woman to receive a PhD as well as the first woman to become a professor in the USSR. Like Hamilton’s project, the first edition of RIBOCA – which showcases over 90 international artists and spans seven further venues in Riga and Jūrmala – has women at the helm: founder Agniya Mirgorodskaya and chief curator Katerina Gregos. Gender equality is only one of many subtopics presented within the overarching theme of ‘change’ that Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More aims to explore. The Faculty of Biology addresses the human relationship to the natural world; the ex-
residence of Kristaps Morbergs, a twentiethcentury Latvian patron of the arts, investigates the collective historical memory; a disused factory, which now hosts tech startups, considers the presence of unseen technologies. Each location might have a narrower focus than the whole, but for an exhibition that deals with change, and so might be expected to disrupt the status quo, the thematic groupings and their placements appear all too literal. Projected onto the front wall of a classroom in the Faculty of Biology, Mindy, the protagonist of Sven Johne’s video A Sense of Warmth (2015), talks about how she escaped the capitalist, digital workforce to become an ornithologist. Although Johne’s work addresses ecological shifts caused by human action, when placed in this context it could also be seen as an instructional video on how to track birds’ migration patterns in order to capture and dissect them. Similarly, peeling wallpaper in Morbergs’s apartment partially reveals images of Soviet landscapes. An unfinished and abandoned viewing tower in Anaklia, Georgia, looms adjacent to one doorway, while fragmented missiles launch above another and illegible red graffiti covers a wall. Titled Lost Territories Archive (2016–18) by the collective Sputnik Photos, the site-specific installation shows the dilapidation and transformation of post-Soviet regions, yet might appear as
the work of trespassing vandals. The residence itself is figured as a site of change. Inside the repurposed factory, now named Sporta2, hang ten photographs by Trevor Paglen depicting undersea cables covered in algae and grime, making visible the obscure infrastructure of our global network. These are perpendicular to Ivar Veermäe’s nine-channel video installation, Center of Doubt (2012–16/2018), which similarly traces the transmission of digital information by presenting satellite images of data-storage centres for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. The works here shed light on subjects normally kept in the shadows, but when considering the hypernetworked startups headquartered next door, they could be seen as didactic visuals for young developers. Ecological, political and societal changes, particularly those aided by technology, as Gregos writes in a catalogue essay, might begin as novelties but quickly become integral to daily life. Their effects, however, ‘are both too profound and too fast for us to really grasp… without great stress and anxiety’. And, indeed, the biennial traverses topics so vast that the treatment of each appears rushed and anxious. This isn’t to say that the artworks in and of themselves aren’t thought-provoking, but rather that the curatorial aim was perhaps too broad. Emily McDermott
Sputnik Photos, Lost Territories Archive (detail), 2016, site-specific installation of inkjet archival prints, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists
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Goran Trbuljak Before and After Retrospective Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva 30 May – 19 August Zagreb, 1 July 1972. A man in his mid-twenties works the pavement, carrying out an impromptu poll. Offering passersby voting cards that claim ‘An artist is anyone who is given the opportunity to be one’, he asks them to decide whether ‘Goran Trbuljak’ is an artist. (Trbuljak is the pollster, though virtually nobody would know him.) Out of 500 votes, 259 are positive and 204 negative, and Trbuljak is in theory legitimated; meanwhile, from an elevated vantage, someone takes photographs. In 2006, having created the impish, darkly humorous, endlessly sincere works tabulated in his first retrospective for 22 years, he begins a series of text-driven silkscreen prints. One of them reads: ‘OLD AND DEPRESSIVE ANONYMOUS IS LOOKING FOR A PERMANENT DISPLAY PLACE IN SOME NICE NEW ART MUSEUM SPACE’. In 2008 he makes another text work, again in loud caps, entitled Old and Bald I Search for a Gallery. Trbuljak, for all that his work recalls elusive figures such as David Hammons and Maurizio Cattelan and compares favourably to many first-wave conceptual artists, hasn’t had a starry career. Though if he had, he might not have had any material to work with. Like Hammons, Trbuljak sometimes elected to work directly on the street or in public space generally, essaying a deliberately minor art. During the early 1970s he photographed a metal pipe that, when struck, produced a different
sound to the neighbouring pipes; covered up traffic signs; threw a picture frame into the sea. All these he photographed, and then didn’t show the photos for years. Invited to exhibit in Zagreb’s Student Centre Gallery in 1971, he presented only the work that opens this show: a photographic self-portrait in sensual chiaroscuro, underwritten with the Douglas Huebler-esque phrase ‘I do not wish to show anything new and original’. In 1977, apparently intimidated by an invitation to exhibit at a Venice gallery, he showed enlargements of the gallery’s stellar history of shows (Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Jean Dubuffet, etc) and temporarily changed the gallery’s name and address on the publicity materials. Such japes are of course part of a conceptual tradition of dematerialisation, but Trbuljak even managed to get something out of that fact. In 1972, when he had a catalogue published, a friend claimed that everything Trbuljak did had been done by the French artist Ben Vautier, aka Ben. Trbuljak went to Nice and showed Ben the catalogue. The latter annotated it, either denying the duplication or writing ‘same interest’ – and it’s now here as art. Meanwhile, when the wheels came off Conceptualism during the late 1970s and artists turned to painting, he was ahead of them, if not getting any paintings out of it. In 1974, noticing that an art-supply store displayed a blank canvas in its window, he went there on
Sundays when the store was shut and painted on the window in front of the white rectangle, photographing the result and annoying the owner, who had to remove the daubs of this ‘Sunday painter’ every Monday morning. During the 1980s Trbuljak kept at painting, characteristically from a critical distance. Continuing to be hands-off, he pushed paint through the canvas from the back after blocking off areas with sheets of wood. He produced affectless paintings that doubled as tambourines. And he made pseudo-monochromes involving, instead of canvas, lighting gels wrapped around the stretcher bars. All of which could read as coldly smart, but not when nearly everything else here, as curator Andrea Bellini writes in his catalogue essay, ‘strikes the heart’ – not least a series of vitrined sketchpads that, seemingly as a way of closing down his own thoughts, the artist compulsively fills with dots and lines. In 2000 Trbuljak made a letterpress print announcing ‘the 30th Anniversary of Unhappiness in the Art’. For all his puckishness, you wouldn’t doubt his sincerity. The artworld is not an easy place for those who see it as a mechanism for processing artists, a system that is more decisive in creating meaning and significance than are those artists. Trbuljak, endlessly tightrope-walking being here and being gone, evidently can’t see it any other way and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Martin Herbert
Sunday Painting, 1974, three gelatin silver prints, 40 × 30 cm (each). Photo: Mathilda Olmi. Courtesy Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva
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Teresa Burga Aleatory Structures Migros Museum, Zürich 26 May – 12 August Teresa Burga’s first retrospective in Switzerland covers an impressive range of work: from relatively conventional modernist paintings to playful Pop, from non-object-oriented interdisciplinary projects to work on paper, video, installation and sculpture. Born in 1935, this Peruvian conceptualist is a multifaceted, intellectual artist whose practice intersects with and draws on social science, architecture and mathematics. The four projects in the exhibition that most clearly exemplify her important contributions to the art of her country are Perfil de la Mujer Peruana (Profile of the Peruvian Woman, 1980–81), 4 Mensajes (4 Messages, 1974), Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe 9.6.72 (Self-portrait. Structure. Report 9.6.72, 1972) and Borges (1974/2017), all of which pursue an experimental scientific methodology, turning traditional aesthetics on their head by giving artistic form to data, while questioning, if not rejecting, authorship in favour of a collaborative approach found primarily in research contexts. Burga’s international success has come relatively late, starting in 2011 with institutional solos in Europe and the US. As has been the trend in recent years, conceptual artists from the 1960s and 70s working in non-Western countries – Burga included – have been reclaimed for the art-historical canon, a familiar narrative being crafted about the difficult political conditions in which they produced groundbreaking work. This narrative has permitted Western institutions to read the work as resistant to dictatorial
regimes, whether on the left or the right – art as freedom, a favourite mantra of contemporary art historians. This lack of distinction concerning the true nature of the Peruvian administration is illustrated in the oft-repeated moniker for the period of 1968–80, from which much of this work is drawn, as a ‘nationalist dictatorship’: a term that appears in the majority of press releases and discussions of Burga’s work, insinuating that her lack of artistic renown in her own country is the result of the period’s politically repressive character. However, her most impressive and political work, Profile of the Peruvian Woman, was completed in 1981, after the government of Francisco Morales-Bermúdez (1975–80) had begun to move the country towards democracy following the socialist military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75). Profile… is a ‘sociological research project produced with psychotherapist Marie-France Cathelat on the role and the ways of participation of middle-class women in the city’. Burga presents the results of their study via coloured graphs, a mannequin representing the size of the average woman and various other forms of writings on paper and charts, the latter mostly exhibited under glass and as a book originally published in 1981. And even during Velasco’s regime, Burga exhibited Self-portrait. Structure. Report. 9.6.72, a medical analysis of herself, also mostly composed of charts and graphs as well as a few photographs, which according to a 2014 interview ‘was attended by the ministers them-
selves, General Velasco’s wife, my mum, my aunt, they were all there, under State Security’. According to a 1974 report by the Council on Foreign Affairs, after a few years of positive social transformations in the economy and education by ‘a generally unrepressive’ government that nationalised land and water-rights, a drastic change took place in national values, including the promotion of ‘the new Peruvian man’, dedicated to ‘solidarity, not individualism’. Burga’s Conceptualism, heavily influenced by her years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she went on a Fulbright in 1968, and her avant-garde activity in the Peruvian Arte Nuevo group from 1966 to 68, was more closely linked with characteristics of individualism than solidarity, despite the collaborative nature of some of her later projects. Conceptualism was a difficult language for the public to access, and remained elitist. It redefined the form that art took, subverting objecthood and traditional aesthetics in favour of ideas. It would have also been challenging for Peruvian officials – intent on developing a more equitable society, promoted through a universal democratic art – to see national value in these dematerialised forms; and accordingly they didn’t promote Burga’s work at the state level. Ironically, though, it is when dealing with Peruvian and Latin American themes, challenging perceptions of the role of women in society and revealing systems at work, that her works are most essential. Olga Stefan
Teresa Burga, Autorretrato (Einladungskarte) / Self-portrait (Invitation Card), 1972, print on cardboard (punch card), 8 × 19 cm. Courtesy Migros Museum, Zürich
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Julie Becker I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent ICA, London 8 June – 12 August The installations, drawings, texts and videos in Julie Becker’s first retrospective – surveying a career cut short by the Los Angeles-based artist’s suicide in 2016 – are preoccupied by correspondence, in both senses: as communication between different parties and a means of identifying hidden patterns in, and thus codebreaking, the world. Over three purpose-built interconnecting stage-sets on the ICA’s ground floor, the architectural installation Researchers, Residents, A Place To Rest (1993–96) riffs on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), a narrative propelled by thwarted creativity, the return of the repressed and manifold failures to communicate. An antechamber is decked out as a bland office waiting-room: engraved desk nameplates (‘Entertainment Agency’, ‘Real Estate Agent’, ‘Psychiatrist’) suggest the different functions served by this makeshift building, while newspaper clippings show female switchboard operators making connections. A framed floorplan and copy of TV Guide illustrated with a scene from the film foreshadow a sprawling scale-model of the haunted Overlook Hotel that dominates the next room. Several scenes in this intricately realised dollhouse are recognisable from the film – through Jack Torrance’s writing room are strewn tiny, crumpled cans of Coors and sheaves of paper from his novel-in-progress – while others seem to be speculations by the artist on the past or future life of the hotel – in a backroom assembling a hoard of objects from
the hotel, a selection of guests are categorised by psychological type and given written backstories. That there are no people present other than via evidence of their having attempted to communicate with each other and the world outside – Lilliputian letters and diaries, typewriters and telephones, radio sets and a Ouija board – reinforces the impression of a crime scene littered with clues that, once the hidden links between them are revealed, will resolve the question of what, precisely, is going on. Yet that desire to uncover esoteric connections – between people, events and things – is repeatedly frustrated. The video installation Transformation and Seduction (1993–2000) twins found cinematic footage of a girl running innocently through woodland with a voiceover adapting the opening of Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair (1934), in which the unreliable narrator encounters a doppelgänger in the woods that he then plots to kill. Yet, as no one else can see the resemblance between the narrator and his supposed double, it’s difficult in Becker’s splice to reconcile the narratives described by sinister words with innocent images without wilfully misinterpreting the latter as menacing, against their ostensible function. The work plays on the viewer’s preparedness to misread one dataset in order to reconcile it with another, and to pursue any tenuous link between the two that might justify that reconciliation. Given that the voiceover was, in the original version of the film, written and delivered by the artist’s father, for example, the title might allude to the biological
I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and ICA, London
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processes of transformation and transduction by which genetic information is passed on. But it probably doesn’t. These doublings, delusions and misrecognitions are one recurring theme – the shared frailties of physical and psychological architectures are another – of Becker’s drawings, which line the walls of the ICA’s upper galleries. The most startling is I Am Am I? (2003), in which a pencil drawing of a mirror frame is filled in with reflective foil, returning to the viewer a crumpled and uncanny self-image. It hangs beside a video installation that in isolation appears conceptually slight: Suburban Legend (1999) reproduces the teenage experience of watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on headphones. A text in which the artist lists the supposed synchronicities preempts the viewer’s disillusion: when you’re not stoned, it’s clear that these ‘karmic correspondences’ are nothing more than coincidence. The narrators of both The Shining and Despair are self-identifying artists who, harbouring delusions of grandeur, perceive in the surrounding world hidden messages that lead them to murder. The negative revelation of I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent – that hidden connections rarely materialise, that paper trails don’t necessarily lead anywhere and that complex sets of relations do not conceal a simple unifying truth – feels, in the midst of an era shaped by conspiracy theories, paranoid delusion and quasi-mystical cults, like a valuable type of disenchantment. Ben Eastham
Jennet Thomas Animal Condensed>Animal Expanded Tintype, London 14 June – 14 July It’s a mistake to think that Jennet Thomas’s eye-boggling, comic, sinister, techno-folkloric videos are ‘about’ something. They are, but it does them an injustice to say that they’re about nothing more. Set in motion by some recognisable bit of subject-matter, Thomas’s narrative spins kaleidoscopically, ideas tumbling out, other ideas spooling out of those. At Tintype, the first two parts of a projected trilogy are present – 2016’s Animal Condensed>Animal Expanded #1, and 2018’s Animal Condensed>>Animal Expanded #2, shown on monitor and projection screen respectively. What these are ‘about’ is something to do with animal life and technology. In the arid, black-and-white-striped virtual landscape of #1 (echoed in the decor Thomas has conceived for the gallery), we find a forlorn, oversize humanoid chicken figure in dialogue with a faceless entity dressed in a sort of primitivist wicker cage. Chicken explains its misery to this being – which calls itself Authenticity Fetish – through gesture and halting subtitles. Among shots of hanging chicken carcasses streaming endlessly along industrial conveyors, it communicates that it is suffering from “Animal Expanded”, its true ‘animal’ nature corrupted, “animal enhanced… animal suspended… animal abstracted”. CGI versions of Chicken warp, collapse and melt like “animal cake”. “Release me from this,” it pleads. What to make of this? Beyond animal rights or intensive farming, Chicken is the victim of a situation in which materiality, or the distinctness
of an object or being, seems to be unravelling, dislocated from its original identity. If animals appear as the ostensible subject, it might be because their industrialisation serves as metaphor for the loss of an original behind the systematic mediation and unmooring of reality that now defines networked digital culture. It’s this opposition, between the virtual and the material, that really drives Thomas’s hallucinatory, spiralling narrative. So Animal Condensed> >Animal Expanded #2 takes us into the midcenturymodern lifestyle interior of an urbanite male, who explains, in tones at once measured and evangelical, the benefits of his family’s ingestion of a course of “Animal Condensed”. This neoliberal paterfamilias is the epitome of means-ends rationality – “My family is an indoor harvest,” he declares, smugly. “We are self-improving systems.” His young daughter, meanwhile, plays iPad games in which piglets proliferate digitally and Peppa Pig has her teeth extracted. #2 unpacks the idea that human identity and self-presence are embodied, and that this corporeal and cognitive site is threatened, invaded and expropriated by instrumental, economic power. It’s also a retort, of sorts, to Hito Steyerl’s influential How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), and its relentlessly narrow meditation on the politics of visibility in the age of digital surveillance. Thomas robs Steyerl’s video of various elements – the catatonic
male-female voice-synthed narrators, the facerecognition disruption patterns and calibration targets – and hands them to a female antagonist, a dystopian freedom-fighter who, dressed in leaf camouflage and hiding in the forest, explains how she evaded those who want to impose “Animal Expanded” on everyone, after the “acceptance vote”. Thomas’s critical skill lies in how her fables – fashioned, stream-of-consciousness-style, out of the detritus of pop-cultural neologism – tie everyday experience, through their use of the bizarre, to far bigger political and philosophical questions. Part of that skill is to do with how half-recognised elements from our current social and psychic landscape wander in and out, triggering connections: taking the Donald Trump rubber mask offered to it by Authenticity Fetish, Chicken pulls from the mask’s mouth a strip of paper, on which is scrawled ‘COMPLEXITY IS FRAUD’. But complexity is what is most needed right now. Authenticity – a hankering after the simple, the back-tobasics and the materially unadulterated – are indeed fetishistic reactions to the obliterating indifference of the networked world, but it’s a retrenchment Thomas refuses to take sides with. What instead comes through is more complicated; an intuition about reclaiming active, collective human agency – in the guerrilla’s fractured near-future syntax, “expel fake animal, reopen the face”. J.J. Charlesworth
Animal Condensed>Animal Expanded, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Cameron Leadbetter. © the artist. Courtesy Tintype, London
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Liverpool Biennial Beautiful world, where are you? Various venues, Liverpool 14 July – 28 October It seems ridiculous to say that it was only when I encountered a freakish display of teeth (human and nonhuman), together with historic tools and implements associated with them, alongside a no-less-weird but perhaps more banal display of objects from the National Pipe Archive (that’s the smoking type of pipe), that any overall sense of the 2018 Liverpool Biennial began to coalesce. Ridiculous because neither the teeth nor the pipes were part of the biennial itself; rather they are among the permanent displays at Liverpool University’s Victoria Gallery & Museum. And ridiculous because the Victoria Gallery was one of the last stops of my tour through the venues hosting this tenth edition of the UK’s ‘largest festival of contemporary visual art’. Until that point, my experience had been marked by what felt like a series of disparate encounters with individual artworks (made by 40 different artists, hailing from 22 different countries): something from everywhere that made their surroundings feel like nowhere. That’s not to say that I didn’t see any works that stuck in the mind or were affective in their own right. At Tate Liverpool, a micro-exhibition of Annie Pootoogook’s stark, direct drawings of everyday life in the Inuit community of Kinngait (it’s in Cape Dorset, Canada: I had to look that up) compare the bleak hostility of the landscape with the bleak emptiness of the domestic interiors (which often appear as little more than minimally decorated boxes with all the permanence of a stage set) and the struggles of the people who inhabit both. There’s an undertone of violence and struggle lurking beneath the apparent banality of almost every image. In Bringing Home Food (2003–04), for example, the groceries include a box of Lipton tea and a dead seal; Memory of My Life: Breaking Bottles (2001–02) features a woman energetically smashing glass bottles on the rocky ground by the back of a plasterboard house – to what end is not clear; other works show liquor stores, threatening polar bears, arguments and attempts to recuperate the excitement of daytime TV. Indeed, the sense of mundanity that Pootoogook conveys through her images – via their basis on narrative and their simple execution and geometry – overcomes a sense of their being intrinsically remote or exotic. That the artist died in unresolved circumstances in 2016 only increases the
poignancy (and perceived honesty) of what we’re encouraged to see as autobiographical works. At Open Eye Gallery, Madiha Aijaz’s These Silences Are All The Words (2017–18) is a subtle and moving videowork that documents the decline of the public libraries of Karachi, and the rich heritage of Urdu textbooks and literature they hold, as a means of describing the decline of Urdu in Pakistan as a whole. Although it’s the national language of Pakistan (Hindi, the rival Hindustani language, is the national language of India and both relate to religious identity) Urdu is one of two official languages of the country (English is the other); by 2006, it was a first language for less than ten percent of the population. Underlying the work is a record of a shift in identity (from religious to secular and from tradition to some form of modernity), a shift in aspiration (from the local to the global) and a decoupling of language and geography. But that only emphasises the degree to which parts of this biennial seem decoupled from Liverpool itself (at a little below 14 percent, the proportion of people who identify as other than ‘white British or Irish’ in the city is lower than the national average, and at least half of that 14 percent speak English as their first language). Similarly, Retu Sattar’s Harano Sur (Lost Tune) (2017–18), a video recording of a performance by harmonium players (intended to highlight a disappearing culture in Bangladesh) that originally took place at this year’s Dhaka Art Summit (having previously been staged at the 2017 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan) and is now on show in The Playhouse Theatre, comes across as little more than a record of something that happened (albeit effectively) at another time and in another place. Meanwhile, back at Tate Liverpool, Haegue Yang’s fusion of Korean and British folk traditions – maypole and Morris dancing, harvest festivals, indications of various forms of animist practice – in an installation that adapts her ongoing The Intermediates (2015–) series, appears to be as direct an attempt as there is here to bridge those kinds of gaps, and something upon which other, less sitespecific works in the same venue that attempt to deal with the confrontation of local custom and global capital, including Kevin Beasley’s adaptation of NATO-issued gas masks and
facing page, top Madiha Aijaz, These Silences Are All The Words (still), 2017–18, video, 5 min, colour, sound. Courtesy the artist
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Brian Jungen’s Cheyenne-style headdresses made from chopped-up Nike trainers, depend. Where Yang seeks to explore some sort of convergence, Beasley’s and Jungen’s efforts never escape from their literal approach and spectacular oddness. While works by Ryan Gander and Rehana Zaman and to a point Ari Benjamin Meyers, whose somewhat overlong film Four Liverpool Musicians (2018) presents portraits of local heroes Bette Bright, Budgie, Ken Owen and Louisa Roach (pushing a more general theme of music and sound that pervades the biennial), feature a direct form of community engagement, this biennial never gives you a fixed sense of where you are. Which is ironic given the extent to which geography and identity form the overarching theme of so many of the works on show. But perhaps that’s the condition of the contemporary global biennial: its ability to turn a specific place into a nonplace. Back at the Victoria Museum, artworks on display as part of the biennial include Aslan Gaisumov’s film People of No Consequence (2016), a portrait of a group of elderly men and women, survivors of the 1944 Soviet deportation of Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia, who shuffle into a room and sit, facing the viewer, before leaving again; a selection from Francis Alÿs’s ongoing series of paintings Age Piece (1982–), comprising delicate postcardsize depictions of more-or-less banal landscape scenes painted on his travels (while scouting locations for film projects, some of them in zones of contemporary conflict or political unrest); and Songs without Words (2018), Joseph Grigley’s collection of photographs of musicians and singers from the pages of The New York Times, their captions erased. If these are works that reveal something extraordinary beneath the ordinary, they resonate strongly with the museum’s more bizarre displays of quotidian objects from the past rendered surreal in the present, to the extent that the whole place seems rigged to prove L.P. Hartley’s famous quip: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. In the biennial itself difference is something that remains unresolved and perhaps unbridgeable too. There’s a sense in which it never moves beyond repeatedly reiterating the second part of the question it posed itself: where are you? Mark Rappolt
facing page, bottom Annie Pootoogook, Eating Seal at Home, 2001, wax pastel and ink on paper. Courtesy Feheley Fine Arts, Toronto
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Pascale Marthine Tayou Colorful Line Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York 2 May – 22 August This exhibition, its title a play on words by the Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou, celebrates the fluidity of ideas and languages across geographic boundaries while referencing both historic and enduring racial divides. Adapted from a term used by abolitionist Frederick Douglass and popularised by the writer and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois to describe racial segregation following the Civil War (‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea’, the latter wrote in 1903), here it headlines a comprehensive, 40-piece survey that pays homage to cultural hybridity and a world in flux. A familiar face on the international biennial and art-fair circuit, Tayou is nonetheless relatively unknown in the United States. His last New York showing took place nearly 15 years ago, at Lombard Freid Gallery. And while he exhibited in Miami at the Bass Museum in 2017 and at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2014, his work is largely unrepresented in the permanent collections of major US institutions. Tayou’s monumental Code Noir (2018), a sevenpanel installation, represents African figures as airport-art carvings silhouetted across what look like giant consumer-packaging barcodes.
The Code Noir, passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France, outlined, among other points, the laws (which remained in effect until 1848) governing slavery in the French colonies. Tayou’s title also makes reference to the Black Codes, or laws passed by southern US states following the abolition of slavery. Under these codes, blacks were prevented from owning property, leasing land, conducting business or moving freely in public places. Tayou’s panels, each close to three metres in width, point to the lasting impact of the transatlantic slave trade, its legacy of racial inequality and the ongoing relevance of the ‘color line’ to this day. Cultural clashes and hybrids define all of Tayou’s works. His Bogo Bear (2018), a giant teddy bear, is dressed in Bogolan textiles traditionally worn as camouflage and for protection by male hunters in Mali, as well as by young women following excision rituals and childbirth. The cloth, imbued with energy and power, is associated with initiation into adulthood, while the stuffed bear is a symbol commonly linked to a European or American childhood. Tayou’s amalgam emphasises the adaptability of established codes while focusing on the importance of childhood and coming-of-age, and the commonality of human experience.
Included in this presentation are Tayou’s playful Graffiti Neon (2018) and Series ‘Love Letters’ (2015), where amorous and graphic scenes that look hastily drawn in neon, a medium typically reserved for commercial signage, are juxtaposed with similar, more poetic images of paired couples created using traditional materials like straw, nails, charcoal powder and Bogolan textiles. Also on view is a selection of six Poupées Pascale (2010–15) – European hand-blown crystal in the form of tribal statues, embellished with beads, feathers, grass and plastic fruits and vegetables, creating opulent and dissonant textures that merge European and African artmaking traditions. The idea of the ‘other’ and of the ‘exotic’ cuts both ways in Tayou’s works. Photographs of African children wearing superhero and cartoon masks in Kids Masquerade (2009) is a satirical take on the West’s cultural appropriation of African art. The fusion of visual forms that straddle geographic and cultural borders is not a new phenomenon. Yet in the US, as the Trump administration seeks to reinforce the southern border wall and to implement travel bans from seven predominantly Muslim countries, Tayou’s vision is a timely reminder emphasising the humanist aspect of migration, the natural porosity of boundaries and the reciprocal benefits of transgression. Charmaine Picard
Code Noir (detail), 2018, paint on seven wooden panels, 150 × 290 cm (each). Photo: Shark Senesac. Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, and Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York
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ArtReview
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané A Transparent Leaf Instead of the Mouth CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson 23 June – 14 October A wall caption tells us that the largescale glass vivarium (A Transparent Leaf Instead of the Mouth, 2017) at the metaphorical centre of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s first institutional show in the US features local flora combined with foreign stick and leaf insects. The insects are so well camouflaged as to be hard to find (to the extent that the act of finding them can become something of a compulsive game: the vivarium was surrounded by children when I was there). So while we’re told that the environment is, to some extent, freakish or impure, our eyes tell us that it is a seamless whole. (In the spirit of the times, and to distinguish it from anything actually Frankensteinian, the wall caption also includes a lengthy explanation of how the artist produced this unnatural slice of nature in consultation with professionals: Bard’s horticultural staff; the artist had wanted to be a botanist at one point, but desires don’t count.) He goes on to further fuck about with our perception in Spiral Forest (2017), a 16mm film
shot using a custom-built camera-rig (titled Spiral Forest Gimbal, 2014–15, and also on display, like a discarded Sputnik or abandoned theodolite, as part of the installation) that careens around a 360-degree axis according to a score devised by the artist. Watch the film, however, and the results appear more random than choreographed, offering a dizzying vision (both onscreen and in your eyeballs) of the tropical habitat: almost as if you’re experiencing multiple and simultaneous perspectives on the place. The effect is slightly psychotropic, and when it comes to divining a precise purpose behind Steegmann Mangrané’s offerings, things become a little hazy as well. Certainly there’s a commentary here on ideas connected with surveying, measuring and recording environments – a case of the Alexander von Humboldts, if you like – but there’s a poetry in Steegmann Mangrané’s work, in part produced by the shifts in scale and perspective, that balances any sense that this is simply about cod-science.
With Elegancia y renúncia (2011), we move from the forest to a single leaf. It’s dried, flattened and held upright by an elegant metal stand as if it were some prize botanical specimen (it’s from a rubber plant). On closer inspection it becomes clear that a pattern of circular bubbles has been cut into the leaf through which a projector, lined up opposite, beams light. There are holography plates (featuring hands, twigs, leaves and bugs), a wall drawing of a cellular structure (Morfogenesis – cripsis, 2013) and, as you enter the main exhibition space, Systemic Grid (Window) 17 (2015), a thick glass sheet (security and ornamental glass) inserted into a square concrete base. You’re not quite sure whether to look at it (during the process of which the concrete support or display structure becomes the apparent subject of the work) or straight through it (it’s transparent) and at all the distorted people and objects on the other side. Once again Mangrané’s got you looking two ways at once. Mark Rappolt
Elegancia y renúncia, 2011, leaf, wireframe, video projector. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, New York & Brussels
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FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art Various venues, Cleveland, Akron and Oberlin 14 July – 30 September I ate two hot dogs a day in Cleveland. Street vendors were ubiquitous, and the local brands insinuated themselves into my diet. I’d eventually connect my tally of Polish Boys with the three times I cried on my last day in town. The whole episode started in the lobby of the Cleveland Clinic, a hospital where I had gone in search of Sharon Lockhart’s Little Review (2017), a photo-essay on Polish adolescence, and Wall Painting No. 464 (2018), a mural by Jan van der Ploeg, as part of the inaugural FRONT International triennial. But none of the art adequately buffered the parting I witnessed between an IV-wheeling teenager and her father. It was brief, there in the sterile, well-lit hospital lobby. A dad crying really gets to me. So does a child’s stoic resignation. FRONT, helmed by Milwaukee-based Michelle Grabner, is not a roadmap to Cleveland’s private side, though. The title evokes anything from the city’s lakefront to frontiers to fronts for dubious financial transactions, but its subtitle, ‘An American City’, sounds the dog whistle for me, a native of the region, and conveys the nuances of an underlying Midwestern insecurity. A triennial, to my seventeen-year-old self, would have signalled the region’s return to fortune (neighbouring Buffalo, my hometown, once boasted the most millionaires in the world – back in 1900). Yet, in the name of revitalisation, FRONT tends to overlook how multiple generations have actually dealt, for better or for worse, with the effects of deindustrialisation. Also to blame for the overall self-consciousness is the exhibition’s rather baroque structure, which divvies up Cleveland into ‘Eleven Cultural Exercises’ to shim together more than a hundred predominantly visiting artists. The subsections only signalled to me the city’s shoddy public transportation. To see this whole show I’d need a car. Or, as happened, a series of Lyft drivers. So it is remarkable that I landed on the doorstep of Julie Ezelle Patton’s place in Glenville that same afternoon. Grabner’s vision of ‘horizontality’ didn’t exactly help me in this, nor did the project’s initial omission from the events guide. Through ‘The Glenville Exchanges’ exercise, FRONT nonetheless mines the African-American neighbourhood for a social experiment by
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renovating two historically important properties into education and public-programme centres and residency apartments. Other artists sought content and venues there, too. Conversations with elder residents form the heart of Johnny Coleman’s oral history project Reflections from Here (2018), recordings of which play at two venues located on either side of the invisible East–West line that separates predominantly white from predominantly black communities in one of the most segregated cities in the US. During a talk about biennial ethics, I suddenly needed some air. A local curator happened to be outside and, aware of Patton’s omission, arranged for my visit. A poet and artist in her own right, Patton stewards the Let It Bee Ark Hive, a hundred-year-old brownstone apartment building that her late mother, Virgie, transformed into a live-in art cooperative. For FRONT, Patton made three floors accessible to the public and installed her mother’s artwork throughout the living areas: a lifesize painting of a reclining nude levitating above a couch, for example, a roomful of collages comprising family photos, and a poster of the Mona Lisa repurposed to celebrate a black model. Virgie was tirelessly thrifty and had no shortage of people to sketch. Dozens of figure studies depict her extended ‘family’, including artists and other types who rented rooms and contributed to the cooperative’s upkeep. She added a massive garden, built on the community-supported agriculture model, through easements on neighbouring abandoned property, and made sure the house had a meditation area: the bathroom’s pink porcelain tub, surrounded with doodahs and other attractive fragments. That Virgie came to own the house during the 1940s followed a trend in Glenville, one of the few neighbourhoods that permitted black homeownership. Though she could have sold the house after her mother’s death in 2015 – tempting in light of rising property values linked to the recent expansion of nearby medical campuses – she set up a joint LLC to allow other residents a stake instead. Without wishing to belittle, I am tempted to describe the whole household as Virgie’s artwork. Here’s the thing, the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce will be happy. By the time
ArtReview
I eventually caught a midnight bus to Buffalo, coaxing a crying single mom onboard after she had to leave her kid in Cleveland, giving up my seat so lesbian teenage runaways could sit together on their way to some more tolerant grandmother’s house, and crying again myself, I could no longer connect it to any person or reason – yes, by this time, I could, believe it or not, report on a city deserving of attention and accolades. Cleveland’s architecture in particular provided a compelling backdrop for FRONT, and it was women engaging this history who achieved the best results. Top among them: Barbara Bloom’s hilarious takedown of Robert Venturi’s Italianate Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. Though quite dry in its own right, THE RENDERING (H × W × D =) (2018) plunks schematic measurements throughout the entire space, as if a self-guided tour or renovation plan. To subdivide the gallery into more bizarre subsections, grey-painted MDF panels mock up a modestly decorated bedroom and patio. Venturi celebrated surface, but Bloom’s quite literal use of architectural tools (schematics, mockups) illustrates what an awkward space the architect designed. To cause some additional brouhaha, she levied the museum’s collection and designed display cases that censor all but a painting’s architectural subjects. At its best, FRONT exposes how Cleveland comes to terms with its history, and projects surrounding food expose how central eating was to questions of civic identity. To snap into the grilled casing of a Cleveland Curry Kojiwurst, which the artist John Riepenhoff developed with Larder, a local Jewish deli that specialises in fermentation, is to shift the nostalgia surrounding regional American sausage pride. Food also lent significant force to A Color Removed (2017–18), Michael Rakowitz’s indictment of the 2014 police shooting of eleven-year-old Tamir Rice, who had been playing with a toy gun when he was killed. In this outcome of his ongoing collaboration with Tamir’s mother, Samaria, Rakowitz served Rice’s favourite foods, making clear that Rice had been denied the possibility of maturing past chicken nuggets and pizza. Crying artists really get me, too. By whatever means necessary, Rust Belt, own your barbarism. Feeding people is a good start. Sam Korman
Barbara Bloom, THE RENDERING (H × W × D =), 2018 (installation view, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin). Photo: Field Studio. Courtesy the artist and David Lewis, New York
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Books The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium by Isabelle Graw Sternberg Press, €25 (softcover) The title of Isabelle Graw’s essential new book scatters anachronisms (‘love’, ‘success’) like mousetraps. While her definitions of such terms are both historically contingent and only ever cautiously meant, that wilful dissonance with the standard critical language of art is characteristic of her book’s unorthodox proposals on what painting might mean today. Even more striking is the cover itself, a wraparound reproduction of Antoine Watteau’s 1720 The Shop Sign of Gersaint, details of which are studded through the book, choruslike, as chapter divisions. Graw’s book situates painting as a nexus of commercial and conceptual interests, just as Watteau’s paintingas-shop-sign served as both representation of the picture trade and its embodiment. The eighteenth century, during which both ‘painting’ and ‘love’ became institutionalised through art academies and Romantic discourses respectively, serves as one of the book’s historical touchstones. For Graw, it’s the portability of the painted canvas that makes it an ideal commodity, though of a special kind, whose uniqueness finds a perverse echo in the market for luxury goods. Structurally, The Love of Painting embodies its own discursive strategy. Citing the significance of social networks for the authors of the medium’s ur-texts – from Leon Battista Alberti to Giorgio Vasari and André Félibien – Graw’s
book intersperses interviews with prominent living artists (among others Charline von Heyl, Merlin Carpenter and Jutta Koether), previously published reviews and new essays. The implication of all this is to restage Renaissance notions of painting as a distinctively intellectual practice. There’s no chance, however, of Graw being taken for a traditionalist. The term ‘painting’, here, is framed as a Foucauldian formation, in other words a historical structure that changes over time, despite retaining certain essential and unchanging characteristics. Painting’s ability to absorb itself into elements of the very media that get blamed for its murder (photography, installation, Conceptualism and so on) makes it both definitionally slippery and culturally and commercially vital. For Graw, it’s a two-way street, with ‘painting’ turning up, Zelig-like, as a rhetorical device in other media, whether it’s a tableau format in a video, or applied colour in threedimensional work by Isa Genzken or Rachel Harrison. That this somewhat belies the term ‘medium’ in the title is of a piece with her positioning of painting as gathering force through contradiction. All of which begs a question that Graw herself repeatedly addresses to her interlocutors: what exactly is painting? Central to her analysis is her discussion of the medium’s ‘vitalistic fantasies’
from which its singular commercial and conceptual powers derive. This ‘impression of animation’ is, as Graw argues, the real reason for painting’s regenerative abilities. From the quality of liveliness strived for by painters of the Renaissance, to the high modernist trope of the painting that paints itself, these effects of life force are, in a way, just that: mere effects that impute liveliness into dead matter. Yet Graw goes further, asking the ‘yes, but’ question that is the book’s crucial divergence from orthodoxy. Given that painting’s liveliness is mere effect, what accounts for its success? It’s in her analyses of ostensibly affectless painting practices, such as Wade Guyton’s and Gerhard Richter’s, that Graw’s argument is teased out most compellingly, as paintings tend to trigger vitalistic projections regardless of the artist’s intentions. Attempts to point up the deadness of the medium are, in other words, doomed to fail, due to the pesky viewer and her vitalistic fantasies. These, of course, are especially helpful in the market, and it’s a credit to this book that the lessons of commerce are brought to bear on Graw’s analysis, since the medium’s history is unthinkable without them. Painting’s illusions of vitality illustrate the capitalist fantasy of a commodity’s intrinsic value: that it is somehow alive. After all, it’s not a painting you’re buying, it’s ‘a Richter’. It’s love, I suppose, that makes it feel that way. Ben Street
Plagues and the Paradox of Progress by Thomas J. Bollyky The MIT Press, £22/$27.95 (hardcover) Sometimes I ‘cheer’ myself with the thought that we will sicken the planet so profoundly that it sheds us: one cosmic expunging, and a bad case of Anthropocene is no more, leaving Earth to bounce back into rude health. Plagues and the Paradox of Progress is just the companion for such moods, presenting human history in a way that finds both the apocalypse and a silver lining in every mosquito-, rat- or waterborne disease. The good news, sort of, is that plagues are, for the time being, quiescent (this entertaining academic study is highly conditional, opening with a dedication that falls short of robust faith in a human-oriented future for the author’s loved ones). The bad news is that the
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conditions that would once have enabled countries to capitalise on, or even cope with, the ‘demographic dividend’ that follows disease-eradication are gone. No longer, Bollyky states, can impoverished nations raise their citizenry into the middle class through manufacture – that route was cut off decades ago by countries such as China; cities, once drivers of opportunity and innovation, now limit both through their sheer scale and misery; military-style health campaigns directed from abroad have done little to encourage homegrown medical and other infrastructures. With governments’ ability to organise opportunity and manage demand for meaningful lives so reduced, the risks
ArtReview
of political instability and mass migration rise. Climate change and automation intensify these pressures in ways that will affect us all. So we had better get working on fixes, right? Bollyky doesn’t have much to offer on this front, and what he does propose has none of the swashbuckling élan surrounding early vaccination campaigns. But providing solutions isn’t his aim; what he wants us to see are the unintended consequences of astonishing advances in the treatment of disease and their impact on human lifespan, the better to motivate us to find ways to accommodate all that life. And if not? Then planet Earth will get a well-deserved breather. David Terrien
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Brazil: A Biography by Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling Allen Lane, £30 (hardcover) Just a few years ago, it was possible to believe that Brazil had shaken off its turbulent history. The country had seemingly emerged into the clear waters of a globalised world, and many thought that it would swim forward from there: with regular elections, moderate social justice improvements and an embrace of the free market. Of course, this didn’t work out. Like a monster from the depths, Brazil’s past has resurfaced. The country is now run by former vice president Michel Temer, who rose to power by turning on President Dilma Rousseff, a onetime leftist guerrilla, and betraying their joint campaign promises, creating an unfathomably unpopular, conservative crony-capitalist government in the wake of her impeachment. This October, the country may well elect a hard-right apologist for the 1964–85 dictatorship, with a running mate who has said the country inherited its “laziness” from indigenous Brazilians and its “criminality” from the blacks. For most of the twenty-first century such a statement from a major candidate would have been unthinkable. But if we step back and take a look at Brazil’s history, we’re quickly reminded that they are the attitudes that have been held by most of the men that have run the place for five centuries. This seems a good time to take stock then, and the translation of Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling’s Brazil: A Biography offers Englishlanguage readers an opportunity to learn about the history of the country from its ‘discovery’ and the complex interactions between European
explorers and cannibal natives, to its colonial role as brutal supplier for the world’s sugar addiction, a Wild West of gold mining and regional rebellions, through the strange period of empire (with king, court and all) in the New World and into the modern era of populist dictatorship, democracy, murderous military dictatorship and wobbly transition back to democracy. This is an imperfect but breezy translation of the bestselling 2015 original, which came out as Brazil was in freefall but had yet to hit the rock bottom of Dilma’s impeachment. The authors pay particular attention to the institution of slavery and the violence it relied upon; to political leaderships frequently characterised by backroom negotiations among friends and family; and to intermittent explosions of popular discontent – all legacies that have recently reemerged. They also pay due attention to the crucial role that diverse aesthetic movements played in Brazil’s struggles, from indigenous-exalting Romanticism, apolitical bossa nova, the Tropicália new left and the explosion of revolutionary rap. This is an 800-page book written by Brazilians for Brazilians, but its consequent areas of focus can be doubly revealing, rather than alienating, for Brazil-curious foreign readers as the authors address various misconceptions widely held among their compatriots. They dispel the myths that slavery in Portuguese America, though more widespread, was somehow less cruel than in North America – the stomach-turning description of ‘iron masks
that prevented the slaves from eating earth as a way of provoking a slow and painful death’, the earth-eating a method of suicide, is enough to convince otherwise – and that Princess Isabel somehow benevolently granted abolition to the country, when it was the consequence of bottom-up agitation, international pressure and heroic slave rebellion. Their deeply Brazilian approach is also reflected in a tendency – common to most countries this large – to downplay the influence of the outside world. The country’s successes or failures are attributed to Brazilian decisions and their ethics, or lack thereof. This is not incorrect – it is true that the murderous military dictatorship was Brazilian-built – but it is one-sided. That similar regimes popped up all over South America at the same time was due to larger Cold War forces, not because everyone happened to make the same mistakes. But perhaps an emphasis on personal morality and historical contingency is the best way to confront Brazil’s past, identifying its monstrous side as well as the opportunities the past opens. As the impeachment of Rousseff proceeded over the past two years, educated Brazilians, shocked by the snowballing support for another military coup, often relied on variations of a slogan – on the street and in heated online arguments – aimed at those who didn’t know what the horrors of the previous regime entailed. “Vai ler um livro de história!” – go read a history book. Vincent Bevins
A History of Pictures for Children by David Hockney and Martin Gayford, illustrated by Rose Blake Thames & Hudson, £14.95 (hardcover) There are many ways of seeing the world. We all see the world in our own way. It’s all good. As long as you learn how to draw. Let the games begin! Art reflects how we see the world and allows others to see it as we do. From a different point of view. David has made works combining photographs of desert highways taken from all kinds of perspectives in order to demonstrate this. Picturemaking is the ur-language. Cave painting! Using rock dust to trace the outline of your hands! Reflection is a big thing in picture-making too. Look at Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) or Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Art imitates the world and artists imitate other artists. Imitation is an important form of practice and practice is
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something you need to do if you want to make art. Rembrandt was influenced by Chinese ink paintings; Van Gogh by Japanese prints. But great artists find new ways of picturing the world. Walt Disney is a great American artist. David: ‘Drawing has always been part of the history of moving pictures. You can understand more about how an elephant walks from looking at the Disney animation The Jungle Book (1967) than you could from a photograph.’ And, btw, the notion of something being a ‘photographic’ representation precedes the invention of the photograph. Caravaggio, Vermeer, Ingres – they were all at it! Mirrors, projections, lenses, camera obscuras, camera lucidas… Has anyone tried
ArtReview
to make a drawing using a camera lucida? David has. It’s not as easy as you’d think. But in the end it’s the same as working without one: you still have to make choices, decisions… Today, taking selfies makes you ‘start to see your surroundings as a certain kind of picture’, Martin says, moving things along. Pictures act as a form of memory. But we are now surrounded by so many pictures that we don’t have time to look at them, David slyly points out. So, as it is with memories, most of the pictures we take will be lost. Unless it’s the world that’s lost. So much for ‘progress’! So much for ‘history’! Nothing changes. Just the artist’s tools. You’ll read it and want to breath an ‘Om’. Mark Rappolt
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Art and photo credits
Text credits
on the cover Javier Téllez, Oedipus Marshall, 2006 (still), singlechannel projection, Super 16mm film transferred to HD video, 30 min, colour, sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Peter Kilchmann Galerie, Zürich, and Koenig & Clinton, New York
Words on the spine and on pages 31, 67 and 97 come from The Tapping Solution Foundation homepage (tappingsolutionfoundation.org)
on pages 117 and 120 photography by Mikael Gregorsky
September 2018
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Last Words September 2018 As ArtReview mentioned in its editorial, many of the artworks featured which we rely but are conditioned to ignore. Those with existenin this issue – from Kemang Wa Lehulere’s subaltern voices to Javier tialist leanings (ArtReview has gone back to its diaries) might identify Téllez’s subversive parodies, Johanna Hedva’s protests against exclu- this acute self-consciousness as itself a kind of sickness, in the sense sion to Hans Haacke’s institutional critique – aim to disrupt the that it raises troubling questions (about one’s own precarious established order of things. If we adopt the body as a being in the world) that are not always conducive to fulfilling the basic functions of remaining alive metaphor for society, and physical or psychological illness for its breakdown, then we might and blithely passing on one’s genes. But if the conclude that by seeking to unsettle the defining characteristic of humanity is not intersecting systems – the artworld, its mindless planet-killing proliferacapitalism, colonialism, patriarchy or tion but instead its inherent capacity for reflection and self-appraisal, psychiatry – in which they are implithen art’s interrogation of what cated, these works dramatise sickit means to be alive is among its nesses in the bodies that host them. Which is, coming from more worthwhile activities. ArtReview, not so much a backThe point that ArtReview is handed compliment as a badge trying laboriously to make, then, of honour. When society is sick, is that contemporary art (or at least the strain of it that has come then to align with sickness is to to the fore in this issue) can’t be be healthy, if ArtReview rememrelied upon to make you feel better bers the findings of its teenage journals correctly. To take the obvious or to make your life easier. It is instead example, when the Third Reich labelled liable to keep bringing up things that it the cultural achievements of the era prewould be easier to forget, to contaminate ceding its own substantially-briefer-thanany vision of the good predicated on blissful advertised epoch ‘degenerate art’, its propaignorance. Indeed, when the ideal of a ‘good life’ gandists weren’t, in respect of their relation to seems increasingly coextensive with off-thethe fascist body politic, wrong. The ideas transshelf physical perfection, the acquisition of a mitted by modernist culture were liable to state of nonthinking through meditation and corrupt a totalitarian society. Not least the insulation from society made possible because work condemned as showing by material wealth, it is perhaps unsur‘nature as seen by sick minds’ proprising that so much art should now embrace bodily dysfunction, vokes reflection on whether the psychological derangement and world is really as power represents it, an invitation to critphysical participation. ical thought that constitutes a And so the infection of art by the world that ArtReview threat to the credulity on which touched upon in its editorial Nazism depends. And so rather has as its correlate the infection than drawing a line between sickness and health and ruthof the world by art. This is somelessly policing it, progressive thing to be celebrated by anyone art (and art criticism) invites us with any remaining faith in the to dispute it. (‘Works of art which capacity of culture to effect change; cannot be understood in themselves to presume that it cannot survive but need some pretentious instrucimmersion in the systems it challenges tion book to justify their existence’, is to take a dim view of art’s hardiness. pronounced Hitler with characteristic forePer Adorno (still flicking through the old sight, ‘will never again find their way to the diaries, here), no concept can be translated into a work of art without being transformed by the process German people.’ ArtReview is, incidentally, quite taken into something slippery and multifaceted, and so an artwork will by the idea of itself as a pretentious instruction book.) As that persistent ache in your kidneys reminds you that your always resist instrumentalisation by the forces that would approexistence is dependent on the operation of a mystifyingly complex priate it and the body that would assimilate it. If ‘language is like set of pumps and tubes upon which it is not reassuring a virus from outer space’, as William Burroughs put it, R. Muir, to dwell, so passages in this issue may have reminded the then art is like a virus in that it is always in transmission, Bacteriological Atlas, 1927 reader of the unjust political and economic systems upon always taking new forms, always resistant.
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