ArtReview April 2019

Out of order

Andrea Fraser

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VISIT MUSEOCHILLIDALEKU.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION Zabalaga farmhouse, 16th century. © Zabalaga Leku. New York, ARS, 2019. Estate of Eduardo Chillida and Hauser & Wirth. Photo Mikel Chillida.

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Spencer Finch No Ordinary Blue

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Lisson Gallery Shanghai opening 2019 March 22 Inaugural exhibition Love is Metaphysical Gravity Marina Abramović Shirazeh Houshiary Richard Long Tatsuo Miyajima

里森画廊

ArtReview vol 71 no 3 April 2019

What’s the point?

Emerging from its 70th anniversary celebrations last month – sober, ArtReview promises – this issue asks what art can do, as much as tells you what such-and-such an artist has done. And because it is in a reflective mood (though ArtReview assures you it is not hungover, it has no truck with that kind of thing), it is also wondering what art cannot do or should not do. Of course, there’s an argument that ‘should not’ is anathema to art, the value of which depends on its independence from the powers that shape the rest of society. Which means, confusingly, that by the same argument it ‘should not’ countenance compromises to that autonomy. So, J.J. Charlesworth speaks to Andrea Fraser – whose work has interrogated the way that art is thought of, and what it means, for thirty years – about art’s political, economic and ideological entanglements in the age of private patronage, Donald Trump and the Sackler controversy.

You might argue that only deluded artists and writers believe in art’s freedom; from the outside it might seem more like an eccentric hobby or an odd form of entertainment or asset class for the rich. The incompatibility of those two visions is apparent in mainstream depictions of the artworld: see for example Netflix’s hammy horror flick Velvet Buzzsaw, in which the only thing less convincing than the contemporary artworks’ capacity to come alive and murder collectors are the expensive suits worn by the lead character, an art critic. The truth lies in the middle, as the discussion between novelist and critic Marina Warner and art historian T.J. Clark, which takes for a starting point the relationship between art, mythology and the afterlife, reveals.

That’s the beauty of art, if we’re allowed to mention beauty: a Renaissance painting can be a transcendental vision of the afterlife at the same time as it is the bauble of a wealthy patron and an instrument of propagandist power. The marriage of heaven and hell, perhaps.

Heaven

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Talking of hell on earth – and what is and isn’t art – three exhibitions of war photography in London got Oliver Basciano thinking about the purpose served by putting such traumatic scenes into a gallery. What happens to images of the real world when they enter the museum, and how does that change the way that we receive them? And talking of heaven on earth, the British ‘new town’ of Milton Keynes… OK, that might be a stretch, but that settlement was the product of a particularly utopian streak in 1960s British urban planning and, what’s more, it has a freshly renovated and genuinely progressive art gallery. Mark Rappolt met with its director, architect and collaborating artists to talk about how such institutions can break down the barriers separating the everyday lives of residents from the culture they are invited to appreciate and participate in, all the while satisfying the demand on every new public building to be instantly Instagrammable and conducive to skateboarders.

Finally, ArtReview was sincerely saddened by news of the death of Okwui Enwezor, who sought to counter the artworld’s biases by curating ‘beyond the canon’ but ‘within culture’. The two monographic profiles in this issue look to artists whose works exists outside the canon but which capture the societies in which they live: Ross Simonini meets Yuji Agematsu, who has for decades retrieved and carefully conserved detritus from the rapidly changing streets of New York, while Jeppe Ugelvig discusses the work of Chinese-American artist Tishan Hsu, who in the 1980s pioneered a new kind of painting heavily influenced by cybernetics and virtual reality. You might say that art is ultimately (to paraphrase another plunderer of New York’s streets, Robert Rauschenberg) whatever you say it is. Or, following the great theorist of the information age, Marshall McLuhan, whatever you can get away with. But ArtReview can perhaps give you a few pointers, in either case. ArtReview

Hell

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Prabhavathi Meppayil Recent Works 26 April – 25 May 2019

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Art Previewed Previews

by Martin Herbert 23

A Foreign Country: South East Indian Art (1961)

by G.M. Butcher 38

Yuji Agematsu Interview by Ross Simonini 30 Art Featured Andrea Fraser Interview by J.J. Charlesworth 42

Milton Keynes: Anthony Spira, Tom Emerson and Nils Norman Interview by Mark Rappolt 68

The Function of Art

by Marina Warner and T.J. Clark 48

Tishan Hsu

by Jeppe Ugelvig 76

Conflict Photography in the Gallery

by Oliver Basciano 58

Aerial view of Milton Keynes.

Photo: Iwan Baan

April 2019

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Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 86

Books 100

Tracey Emin, by Fi Churchman Jessie Homer French, by Martin Herbert Arthur Jafa, by Max Feldman Nicolas Deshayes, by Louise Darblay Anne Imhof, by Alex Quicho Projections NE Commissions, by Ben Eastham Carey Young, by J.J. Charlesworth Anthea Hamilton, by J.J. Charlesworth Rasmus Nilausen, by Scott Indrisek Jeffrey Gibson, by Ben Eastham Sarah Charlesworth, by Megan Liberty The 9th Asia Pacific Triennal of Contemporary Art, by Adeline Chia

Publishing Manifestos, edited by Michalis Pichler Ai Weiwei: Beijing Photographs 1993–2003,

by Ai Weiwei, Stephanie H. Tung and John Tancock Im Heung-soon: Toward a Poetics of Opacity and Hauntology, edited by Lee Jungmin Modern Art, by J.K. Huysmans Behind the Headlines 106

James Richards, Uncontrollable Universe (still), 2019, video, 4 min 57 sec. Courtesy the artist (as seen in Projections NE Commissions)

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ArtReview

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Art Previewed

He gradually forsook them to make the acquaintance of literary men, in whom he thought he might find more interest and feel more at ease. This, too, proved disappointing 21

Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 26-28.04.2019 / artmontecarlo.ch

Previewed 1 The Setouchi Triennale has an unfair advantage over most biennales and triennales: it’s set on a scattering of islands in Japan’s picturesque Seto Inland Sea (aka Setouchi), plus the mainland ports that ring it. In 1934, part of this verdant clime became Japan’s first national park, and the triennale’s website justifiably warbles about scenic beauty, rice paddies, cherry blossoms, elegant lighthouses, white sandy beaches, pine groves, shrines, etc. But as with many art projects in farflung spots nowadays, this one exists at least partly as a regeneration scheme. While Setouchi as a whole is isolated enough to have maintained its own traditions and cultures, during Japan’s speedy industrial advancement in the 1960s it was hit hard by environmental

2 de Tokyo. The Liberated Voice – Sound Poetry pollution (the isle of Teshima was the site of Japan’s worst-ever case of illegal waste dumping). tracks the continuum of art that employs spoken The exhibition, accordingly, ‘aims to revitalise word from the postwar era to the present; as such, from a period where the avant-garde the island communities that once thrived in this beautiful natural environment and to transused verbalisation in incongruous, sometimes form the region into a Sea of Hope’. The dozen incomprehensible ways in order to rattle mainlocations range from Naoshima, with its cluster stream sensibilities, to one in which – thanks, of Tadao Ando-designed buildings and museums digital culture – we live primarily in a babbling (and a museum for Lee Ufan) to the narrow lanes stream of words. The list of contributors, drawn and high prospects of Ogijima island. And from 30 countries on five continents, finds room the artists alchemising hope, on a list carefully for (of course) Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, John balanced between Japanese and international Giorno, Ferdinand Kriwet and Brion Gysin, but figures, include Mariko Mori, Koo Jeong A, also figures you mightn’t associate with sound Olafur Eliasson, Alicja Kwade and Pipilotti Rist. poetry – such as Carolee Schneemann – and a From island-hopping in Japan, let’s now bundle who, unless you’re an aficionado of the segue suavely to an exhibition in Paris’s Palais genre, may previously have eluded you. In this

1 Keisuke Yamaguchi, Walking Ark, 2016. Photo: Kimito Takahashi.

Courtesy Setouchi Triennale

2 Adriano Spatola, Reading in Como, 1979, four b/w photographs by F. Garghetti, 28 × 70 cm.

Courtesy Fondazione Bonotto, Molvena

April 2019

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case, though, it’s possible to gen up even from afar, as the Palais de Tokyo is making the show’s audio programme and catalogue downloadable, gratis. Given that this whole year-in-the-making project is designed to deploy language as not only an affirmation of humanity but also ‘an exercise in freedom’, this policy seems, well, sound.

In 2017, artists James Richards and Leslie Thornton shared a residency at CERN, the storied particle physics lab near Geneva: unlike with some artists’ residencies, they actually 3 did a bit of work. One outcome was SPEED 2, an exhibition at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart last year, now being recast in Malmö. Another, more specific, was that their shared curatorial project is threaded with themes of ‘manic energy,

a recurring fascination with X-rays and radioac- 4 Now in his early eighties, Peter Campus tivity, mind-altering rituals, and a systematic – or peter campus, as the American artist likes archiving and documentation that echoes the to style himself, ee cummings fashion – is, as methodology of scientific research’. A third is his retrospective at the Bronx Museum denotes, that Richards and Thornton also swapped ideas at the victory-lap stage of his career. During the and sensibilities in terms of making art, with 1970s, having acquired his first video camera at the age of thirty-three, he used multiple cameras the result that while their recent works here – Richards’s ‘video mural’ Phrasing, Thornton’s and chromakey sequences to explore identity film Cut from Liquid Snake (both 2018) – are construction and deconstruction – in Third Tape credited to themselves, the works avowedly arise (1976) Campus filmed a performer throwing small mirrored tiles onto a table, shattering his from contingent mind-melding. Additional to reflected self-image – and he went on to turn the this, they’ve curated a show-within-a-show that camera on the viewer in closed-circuit installademonstrates a catholic interest in artistry, from tions, seeking to fracture their habitual percepoutsider figure Horst Adelmeit to Bruce Conner tions of self. During the 1980s, though, feeling (and his alter-ego Emily Feather), Vi Khi Nao and overwhelmed by interior searching, Campus Thomas Zummer. Given the title, it behoves us to note that Sandra Bullock will not be involved. gave up videoing and began photographing

3 James Richards, Phrasing, 2018, three-channel digital projection, continuous loop.

Photo: Frank Kleinbach. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Cabinet Gallery, London; and Rodeo, London & Piraeus

4 Peter Campus, Third Tape (still), 1976, video, colour, sound, 5 min 6 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York

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ArtReview

6 Liu Xiaodong, Nuka and his Brothers and Sisters, 2017, oil on canvas, 220 × 260 cm.

Courtesy Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen & Beijing

5 Joan Snyder, Proserpina, 2013, oil, acrylic, papier-mâché, poppies, rice paper, dirt and charcoal on canvas, 122 × 305 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blain / Southern, London & Berlin

nature; towards the end of the decade he took up computer imaging; during the mid-90s the restless artist returned to (digital) video, making installations that reflected on loss, death and the passing of time, among other themes; and during the mid-00s he began making static, HD ‘videographs’ of his Long Island environs, bespeaking an intense and penetrating connection to site. Expect all these sincere swerves to be tracked here.

Joan Snyder first found success in the 5 New York artworld of the early 1970s with her ‘stroke paintings’, which in some ways split the difference between Minimalism and Colour Field abstraction by arranging discrete, organic brushstrokes in grids. These were beautiful things that also reflected Snyder’s sardonic

unease with the male-dominated artworld of the time (she recalls that she called male artists ‘the boys’), and soon enough her politics were coming to the fore – canvases began to be exhibited slashed – before Snyder moved onto the first of several larger stylistic changeups, incorporating steadily more text and symbolism into her work, connecting her art to ancient rites and mythology. Throughout this, she’s remained a fascinating, ornery and influential figure, to the point where Hyperallergic noted in 2010 that her recent work, for all its vivacity, was somewhat blunted by the extent to which Snyder had been imitated. Put that out of your mind and go see the real, refulgently colourful deal.

Liu Xiaodong has been appropriately 6 described as a ‘painter of modern life’: his work

April 2019

addresses, frequently through the filter of portraiture, what it feels like to live in the world now, particularly under environmental anxiety.

And ‘the world’ for the footloose, socialist-realist trained Chinese artist can mean anywhere from the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River – the world’s largest dam project, which has displaced a couple of million people – to Greenland. For this show in Denmark, Liu ventured, in 2017, to Uummannaq, where he met locals and made paintings on the spot, like a nineteenth-century landscape painter, and as such his work makes a general case for painting as a still-relevant mode of response to the world. His portraits (particularly of children, and specifically of those who live in the world’s northernmost orphanage), though, with their

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8 Michaela Eichwald, Die Unsrigen sind fortgezogen, 2014, acrylic, spraypaint, lacquer and ball paint on pleather, 330 × 138 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

7 Latoya Ruby Frazier, Aunt Midgie and Grandma Ruby (from the series The Notion Of Family), 2007, gelatin silver print, 41 × 51 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

ominous backgrounds of icebergs and oil not only by her more recent work (eg Flint is drums, could only date from our ecologically Family, 2019, looking at the grim water crisis catastrophic present. (Or as the Danish instituin Flint, Michigan), but by the series that tion understatedly has it, our ‘often slightly accompany The Notion of Family at MUDAM. comfortless modern world’.)

For Et des terrils un arbre s’élèvera (2016–17), she The person who wrote that might want to collaborated with former miners and their families near Mons in Belgium, while On the visit Braddock, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh: a former steel capital in terminal Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017) sees her collaborating with the eponymous decline, an erstwhile industrial hub that has not photographer and writer who documented bounced back as, say, Detroit has. Between 2001 7 and 2014 Latoya Ruby Frazier took a swathe the collapse of the steel industry in Pittsburgh.

German artist Michaela Eichwald’s show of monochrome photographs documenting 8 Braddock’s rusting away, using the optic of three at Maureen Paley’s outpost in Hove, UK, opens generations of her family: her grandmother, six days before the country is, at the time of her mother, herself. This series, called The Notion writing, set to Brexit. It may be just a coinciof Family, established Frazier (born 1982) as a dence, then, that the advance image for the deeply cogent voice among her artistic generashow is of a massive, smoke-belching bonfire tion; as she’s been at pains to point out, there are – the photograph appears to have been taken Braddocks everywhere now. That’s reaffirmed in Germany – or it may not. Eichwald’s genreless 9

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ArtReview

paintings are more a conflagration of historical painting styles: you see in them scraps of modernist abstraction, clumps of body parts (and the occasional related text work, eg one that reads HALLO PINKIE), lachrymose faces and, as LA critic Christopher Knight has noted, echoes of the Japanese painting aesthetic Gutai. (His New York counterpart Roberta Smith discerned ‘Miró, Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Eva Hesse, and Julian Schnabel’.) All of which is to say that her art (as someone once said of someone else) has too much art in it to be about art. Eichwald’s brazenness, amid all this, is not to be weighed down by art history or comment on it but simply to carry on making knotted, multi-mood paintings, grubby things you want to look at.

Staying with the complex theme of ‘bits of bodies’, in the Arsenale at the 2013 Venice Biennale Berlinde De Bruyckere exhibited

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– as you may remember, as you may not be able by smaller wax sculptures, stretching out to forget – Cripplewood, a huge, ominous and into a wild little secret garden that the gallery normally doesn’t use for exhibitions, and gnarled sculpture, tinted pink and grey, that tonally tilted by De Bruyckere’s attention to looked like a mixture of petrified tree, bone and tendon, swaddled in cloths tied with cords. soft lighting.

It was not, let’s say, a fun work: rather an By my estimation, the last Gallery Week10 end Berlin was a couple of months ago. But no, operatic meditation on inevitable decay and it’s been a year, and your writer is merely sinking collapse. The Ghent-based De Bruyckere – whose father’s work involved slaughterhouses into a comfortable decrepitude. So, here we go – evolves her aesthetic language slowly, but also again: time for ridiculous evenings at the Grill her approach seems darkly suited to our times, Royal where invitees must invariably slink past and so it’s perhaps not surprising that her show the dinners they turned down to get to the one at Galleria Continua’s San Gimignano space is they accepted; time for the city’s galleries to put out their wares and gamely try to entice the city’s in conversation with Cripplewood, augmented

elusive collector base to spend. For those who don’t have to worry about that, it’s likely to be a treat. Some 45 galleries are involved, many of them fielding the safe-but-smart: Jana Euler at Neu, Ryan Gander at Esther Schipper, Math Bass at Tanya Leighton, Axel Hütte at Daniel Marzona, Richard Long at Konrad Fischer, Michael Krebber at Buchholz. Trip over in Mitte, Charlottenburg or Kreuzberg and you’ll likely land somewhere classy; meanwhile, this correspondent is also looking forward to Matt Saunders at Borch and William N. Copley and Saul Steinberg at Friese. But this, as noted, is because he’s old. Martin Herbert

9 Berlinde De Bruyckere, -009-, 2011-2012 , 2012, wood, glass, iron, rope, textile, 325 × 235 × 398 cm. Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith.

Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano

10 Math Bass, Newz!, 2018, gouache on canvas, 112 × 107 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

1 Setouchi Triennale Seto Inland Sea 26 April – 26 May (Spring Encounters segment)

4 Peter Campus Bronx Museum through 22 July

8 Michaela Eichwald Morena di Luna, Hove through 19 May

2 The Liberated Voice – Sound Poetry Palais de Tokyo, Paris through 12 May

5 Joan Snyder Blain / Southern, London 4 April – 11 May

9 Berlinde De Bruyckere Galleria Continua, San Gimignano 27 April – 1 September

3 SPEED 2 (curated by James Richards and Leslie Thornton) Malmö Konsthall through 26 May

6 Liu Xiaodong Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek through 10 June

10 Gallery Weekend Berlin 26–28 April

7 Latoya Ruby Frazier MUDAM, Luxembourg 27 April – 29 September

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ArtReview

Interview

Yuji Agematsu

by Ross Simonini

“Each person has a different behaviour.

This is my behaviour” 30

ArtReview

Yuji Agematsu’s Brooklyn studio is unmarked and offers no doorbell. When I visited, I buzzed one of his neighbours, who agreed to knock on his door for me – a request this neighbour seemed to have fielded many times before.

A few minutes later, Agematsu appeared, a cigarette wagging from his lips and a shuffle to his gait. He lit up and we spoke about the weather and the changing Dumbo skyline around us. Then he dropped the butt, smashed it into the sidewalk, and we headed upstairs.

Before we entered his studio, I could hear the light tinkle of Morton Feldman’s spare piano work For Bunita Marcus (1985) coming from his stereo inside. This piece would continue to play on repeat for our entire two-hour conversation, a loop-based approach to listening that Agematsu often uses while working.

Inside, the room was filled from floor to near-ceiling with stacked grids of white boxes. Even the vast, wall-sized windows had been occluded, leaving only a thin crescent of daylight to peek through at the top. On closer inspection, I noticed that each box was marked with the date, time and, sometimes, location where Agematsu had collected the treasures inside.

In contrast to this stark ambience were several discreet piles of filthy street debris, a mixture of chewed candy, strips of tar, dirt clods, hairballs, dead bugs, used wrappers from all varieties of products. Some of these objects were unidentifiable masses of pulp; some were organised by type, like rubber bands and cupcake wrappers; and a few “very rare objects”, as Agematsu called them, had been separated and studied.

These included a ragged sheet of plastic, half of a used pill casing and a strip of mouldy newspaper.

This sundry urban jetsam had all been carefully hand-selected by the artist on his daily walks through streets of New York, which are the central activity of his 30-year practice.

Soon he will place all these findings in a smooth, clean box and slide it atop the towering archives that surround him. This is the beautiful paradox of Agematsu’s work: some of the most foul, ephemeral objects in contemporary art are also the most meticulously documented. He sketches them, describes their shape – ‘cobra’, he wrote beside one – and, as he’s collecting, he notes the colour of the sky, the temperature, and maps the walking path that led him there.

His goal, it seems, is to document the sensorial totality of a moment.

When he displays his objects, he often arranges them in the clear cellophane sleeves – ‘zips’, he calls them – from the cigarette packs he’s smoked, creating miniature terrariums of decaying, organic curiosities. The exhibitions are elegant and tender, each one a gesture of compassion toward the city and the consumerism that drives it.

But Agematsu hesitates to think of himself as an artist. He didn’t show his work until the early 90s, and then waited until 2012, when he was fifty-six years old, to exhibit again. He sees his activities closer to the tradition of experimental, improvisational music, which he studied with the free jazz drummer Milford

of his voice, the way he regularly dropped the unnecessary articles of English. He repeatedly mentioned the difficulties he’s had in communicating in the States, which is perhaps why he’s turned inward to create a private vocabulary of notation and materials. Agematsu has spent decades documenting American life, but to do so he’s remained resolutely apart, from the artworld, the language and even technology, so he can stay in touch with the culture everyone else has forgotten.

Ross Simonini Are you always collecting?

Yuji Agematsu Oh, yes. Anytime. Anywhere.

It’s a reaction between my brain and an object. I select: this one is good, this one is bad.

Like practice. It’s related to my daily life. I always carry a bag. I encounter the object and start to collect.

RS It’s improvisation.

YA Accidentally. Spontaneously.

I like spontaneous music. Free music. Noise. This is like noise music.

I’m collecting the noise of the city.

Sometimes I make field recordings to pick up the noise. I like the feeling, sensing the city’s skin. So I don’t wear gloves. Nothing.

RS How does touching the dirty ground affect you?

YA I’m fine, but I lost my teeth.

Because I’m always touching the objects and then smoking cigarettes.

I got mould in my teeth.

RS The work has physically transformed you.

YA Mould is everywhere.

RS Are you more careful now?

Graves and Tokio Hasegawa (of Taj Mahal Travellers). He continues to work with sound, in the form of field recordings – perhaps the aural equivalent of his documentarian objects and occasional photographs – which play on loop in his exhibitions.

Agematsu was born in Japan in 1956 and left for America in 1980, but his accent remains thick and at times hard to parse. As we spoke, I became transfixed by the pacing and tone above Detail from Yuji Agematsu’s studio, New York. Photo: Ross Simonini facing page Yuji Agematsu in his studio.

Photo: Ross Simonini

April 2019

YA My teeth are already gone.

I don’t care. I don’t care. A long time ago, in the 1990s, I had a show at a small gallery, and a guy came in and he said to me: you’re collecting the germs and viruses of New York City. He was researching for the AIDS virus. He said, don’t stop, because you’re building up your own immune system.

RS You’re documenting the history of New York’s bacterial community.

YA I would like to collaborate with specialists and donate pieces to the laboratory someday.

My activities aren’t just art. You see people who are always trying to maintain art materials, but I’m challenging the conservation. With me, conservators throw their hands up.

RS Almost all your walks are in New York, right?

31

YA Most of them. I go to South Bronx, which is kind of nice these days. Brooklyn is over but South Bronx still feels like the early 80s. Very interesting. I hate the East Village now. I used to like it. I like Chinatown. But I came here from another country and my English is very bad. It was so hard to communicate. How could I survive in this city? So I started to collect objects, because I realised where I belong to. Just as a human being.

YA Yeah, ’cause it has to be fun. You have to hear the other person’s opinion.

Whatever they say [laughs]. I’m an ordinary man and I have to deal with person-to-person. But having a show is not bad. I’m not a sociable person, but sometimes it’s good to talk with someone through my objects. I just don’t want to compete. No competition.

RS When you say you’re an ordinary man…

YA Just a human being.

RS It’s a way of touching the place.

RS Do you see your collecting as ordinary?

YA But it also collapses nations. My main language is Japanese but I haven’t been to Japan in a long time. I have an American passport. All the time, we identify each other as German, Japanese, American.

I just want to create as a human being.

I don’t even like my name.

YA Each person has a different behaviour. This is my behaviour.

RS When you were a boy, you did the same thing, collecting, but those were natural materials.

RS Would you ever show anonymously?

YA But I would still have a gallery, which has its [own] name. It’s hard to break through our existence. Or the institutions: MoMA! Whitney! They define art. But I’m a little bit out. I’d like to be more understandable for people – what I’m doing. It takes time.

RS You began as a musician, far outside the artworld, studying with the percussionist Milford Graves.

YA Milford said, you have to know your own heartbeat. That’s your fundamental thing.

You have to know yourself. That’s why I started walking around the city and touching the ground. Instead of playing the musical instrument, I wanted to be expansive. But I like texture, you know. Each object has a sound.

RS What’s the noise of these cupcake wrappers over here?

YA Sandy [makes sandy noise]. It used to be a wet sound, but then it dried.

RS So your street activities came out of music.

YA I guess so, yeah. I have to keep moving.

Walking means moving. Milford always said, Dance or die. Keep moving. Don’t think too much before you move.

RS How much time do you spend in the studio?

YA Eight hours, these days. At least five.

Including walking, it’s nine hours. I start

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from my apartment in Crown Heights and walk to the studio. Or I take the subway and get off at 42nd Street. Then I go into the studio. Always doing something.

RS Do you see art as a fulltime job?

YA I’m trying. I quit my job last June. I’d been a fulltime worker for a long time but I’m sixty-two now and I have a lot of things to do, so I decided to be fulltime for myself.

RS How’s that going?

YA Ah, you know. Totally no stress. Relaxed.

I’m happy to just sit here and listen to music and draw. I’m really happy to be up here.

RS You’ve been consistently making work since the 80s, but not showing.

YA It’s been continuous. But having a show is a secondary thing. Getting to society. Having a show is secondary. It’s collaborative work, with the gallery, but fundamentally, I do my own self. Motivation for each person is different.

But ultimately: do something. You have to have a job.

RS Does it affect the work when you show it? no time, no location, 2011, ball bearings, dried grease, hair, tampon and mixed-media on mat board, 36 × 26 × 8 cm (framed). Photo: Thomas Müller

ArtReview

YA I was born in the seaside, so there were lots of shells and interesting objects. Each area has its own objects.

RS But now, everything you touch in the city is made by humans.

YA It’s all commodity. Gadgets. It’s the consumption of our own life. We spend money and in exchange we get gadget materials and the object collapses and we throw them away. That’s the cycle. It’s ordinary. People call this trash but I’m always confused: who is going to decide what is trash? People are interested in trash. This is trash, they say, but that’s totally wrong. I try to avoid the term ‘trash’. I’m just observing details very carefully. People don’t want to see trash.

We don’t want to look back. Not think about it. But why not look one more time?

RS Are you intending to document human consumption?

YA Totally. It’s crazy consumption. We used to use paper. Now it’s all plastic. To me, it’s still beautiful, though. Human beings are good at creating consumption. This is my lifework.

RS Do you think much about other art being shown in the world?

YA It’s too fast. Moves too fast. I don’t pay attention. I used to hang around galleries.

But not now. Now I totally belong to my own activities. Art is secondary. I don’t even know what art means. There is only art history. I guess

top Yuji Agematsu, 2015 (installation view, Real Fine Arts, New York)

above Self-Portrait, 2017 (installation view, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York). Photo: Thomas Müller

April 2019

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top Self-Portrait, 2017 (installation view, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York). Photo: Thomas Müller

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above Yuji Agematsu, 2012 (installation view, Real Fine Arts, New York)

ArtReview

art is a function of how you communicate with the people. It’s how you get into society.

the Situationists would walk against the design of a city, to subvert it.

RS But you don’t reject society.

YA I know the Situationists. Really respect.

Very cool. But I’m totally wandering. It’s hard to break through the structure of the city. I was arrested one time. Right after 9/11 the city was so crazy. I was just shooting video. They say, ‘trespassing’, but I don’t know about that.

I just wanted to get in. My eyes became like a camera lens. These days, the undercover cops know me well.

YA No, no. I’m just a human being. Most important thing is to find out ourselves.

Who am I? RS Collecting helps you to understand yourself.

YA Yes. I’m encountering another existence.

RS When you find an object, will you change it?

Or do you try to preserve it, maintain its integrity?

[Agematsu opens a second notebook, the size of his palm, filled with scribbled drawings.]

YA I try not to manipulate. But when I grab the object, I’m already starting the fabrication.

When I touch, my finger makes a shape. It’s impossible to not change it when you put it in the bag. You’re shaping things always.

RS When are you making these?

YA I always draw very fast. The key is how to transfer all my information from the brain.

RS You sometimes note the location, but not always.

RS It looks like musical notation.

YA Yes, when an object is very interesting to me. When it’s rare, and specific to me. Very important. Then I’m very careful. It’s a special moment to me.

YA Correct.

RS With a lot of writing, in both Japanese and English.

YA I like a mix of drawing and writing.

RS Which is why you record the time, as well.

YA I realise what I’m doing, standing there on the corner, wherever I am. I realise that my ear is getting open. I hear the street noise.

I know what’s going on in this neighbourhood.

It’s a realisation of my environment. It makes me aware of where I belong to.

RS Is that a moment when you’d make a field recording?

YA Recordings are purposeful. I go there to make a recording. I can’t do both. Dealing with a machine is different than the picking up. I can’t record automatically. I’m not good with the machine. I don’t want to use the iPhone.

I don’t have an iPhone. I can’t use computers.

I used to use a DAT [Digital Audio Tape]. So easy.

Just push it on. I have a nice digital recorder now but I don’t know how to use it.

RS You’ve used these cigarette sleeves for years, so that your own trash is also a part of the work.

YA Yes. Very fragile, thin material. Like a skin, you know. I smoke a pack a day of cigarettes and it’s a kind of recycling. I didn’t have enough money to buy art materials. And now cigarettes are so expensive.

RS Do you read much?

RS You’ve made your smoking a part of your work.

YA I don’t care if smoking is good or bad. I’m not afraid of smoking. We’re going to pass over one day. Health insurance is very expensive, though. That’s why people have to take care of their health.

RS Do you have a fear of death?

YA I don’t know. Just let it go. I try not to think about it. I think about health insurance because I’m looking for an inexpensive one. I’m fine now but I don’t want to bother people.

[Agematsu opens up a sealed plastic bag, pulls out a notebook and begins flipping through his daily maps.]

RS When you walk, are you trying to engage with the city in a specific way? I’m thinking of the way refrigerator work: 2001 . . . 2013, 2001–13, mixed media on four glass shelves, refrigerator, 170 × 52 × 47 cm. Photo: Stephen Faught all images Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

April 2019

YA The same book. Over and over again. By the Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata. He created his own style and his writing is very interesting and fun for me to read. It’s like Beckett. Slow to read. It erases my own existence to read that kind of book. You can’t memorise what’s going on.

What happened? It’s almost impossible to understand. You’re suspended. Totally confused.

RS You read on a loop, like the music we’re listening to.

YA What is the difference between seeing and reading? In my writing there is no meaning.

I write a Japanese character but it’s more like drawing. Reading is to get information, to build up the knowledge.

RS Is your work a way of building knowledge?

YA Yes. I’m able to read these objects. I came from another country. Kind of strange to transfer languages, so I don’t use language that much.

I just look at the sky. How can I describe it?

What kind of blue is that? It’s impossible to transcribe. I like just seeing.

Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California

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Contemporary Art Fair

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A Foreign Country

It’s a cliché of literary criticism to state that writing the future – through science fiction, for example – is a way of thinking about the present. Several months of trawling through 70 years of the print archive has confirmed to ArtReview that writing from the past serves much the same function. The past may be fixed in a way that the future isn’t, but the present is a subject position from which we see both.

Yet the other thing that trawling through the archives taught ArtReview is that while it’s always possible to find evidence to support established narratives, if you’re forced to read everything (and ArtReview was forced to read everything) then you’ll inevitably find counterexamples that will – at the very least – complicate your preconceived ideas about what people thought at the time. This strikes ArtReview as being the point of studying historical sources: they provide case studies that reward contradictory interpretations, present different perspectives on the world and carry political meaning into the present by analogy.

Like art, you might say.

The crisis now engulfing the United Kingdom, with the country divided into two entrenched and mutually disdainful camps, drove ArtReview back into the archives in search of some peace and, perhaps, enlightenment. Back to 1961, in fact, after Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s announcement that the country would apply to join the European Economic Community, precursor to the European Union.

And it was curious to find, in the pages of this magazine’s predecessor

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The Arts Review, a review by G.M. Butcher (a regular contributor and The Guardian’s art critic) of an exhibition of work by South Asian artists at the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Macmillan had promised that the United Kingdom would not enter the Common Market without assurances that its ‘obligations’ to the Commonwealth – the organisation formed out of the ashes of the British Empire – would not be compromised. Butcher takes this as starting point for a piece that extols the cultural exchange made possible by free movement across national borders. London’s (recently acquired) status as one of the ‘metropolitan magnets in the world of art’ was made possible because it was a ‘home away from home’ for those who believe that it might be possible to belong in two places at the same time, without having to declare allegiance to one at the expense of the other.

L.P. Hartley famously wrote that ‘the past is a foreign country’, which shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s beyond reach or comprehension. Indeed, the movement across borders – between here and there, past and present – strikes ArtReview as essential to the production of culture. The issue that Butcher identifies as facing these South Asian artists – how to be modern while at the same time preserving the cultural tradition of their homelands – has paralysed the country to which they came. Their lesson is that the two need not be mutually exclusive.

ArtReview

G.M. Butcher South Asian Artists First published 4–18 November, 1961

Whatever effects the Common Market may have upon short-range Commonwealth economic relations, the Commonwealth idea, as an intercultural concept, has a tremendous future before it. There is needed only the will, and a relatively modest financial commitment.

In at least one limited field, that of painters and sculptors from Ceylon, India and Pakistan, the reality of the Commonwealth link has been increasing year by year over the past decade.

There are now more than twenty artists from South Asia living and working in the London area. They have received singularly little official support; but they have chosen to come here, despite the rival attractions of Paris, because London is, for them, the obvious ‘home away from home’. Of course, there are neither the language nor the employment difficulties associated with living in France; and it is a fortunate chance that London has become, along with New York and Paris, one of the three ‘metropolitan magnets’ in the world of art.

To draw a parallel, there are certain similarities between the situation of South Asian artists now in London, and that of American painters before and during the war. Just as the Americans migrated to Paris in the twenties and thirties, so, many of the younger South Asians are choosing London – or Paris – in the fifties and sixties. No one can foresee how quickly this interchange will produce generally important results. One hopes there will be no occasion for European artists to become refugees in South Asia – as they did so significantly, in America during the last war. On the other hand, the pace of development, in so many activities, seems to accelerate day by day.

It must not be thought, however, that the presence of South Asian artists in London implies the loss of their national characters.

Post-war New York painting looks very little like pre-war French painting. In the same way, even though the South Asians are still at work in our midst, the best of their paintings and sculptures look quite unlike their British counterparts. Although there is a great deal of technical and theoretical influence, it is, in most instances, undergoing a profound adaptation to the various strands of South Asian sensibility.

It is as a convenient ‘progress report’ that the Bear Lane Gallery, of Oxford, has conceived its November exhibition. Twenty-one artists are included, in order to give a certain breadth, and

also to indicate the volume of activity taking place. But there is no intention of implying the existence of any ‘school’. Each artist is working as an individual; and many are quite unknown to each other. It is also, of course, the intention to mount as good an exhibition as possible.

This might, in principle, have been better achieved had the number of exhibitors been limited – but at the cost of a considerable portion of the exhibitions ‘situational’ interest.

Some of the artists included are already well established, like Avinash Chandra and F. N. Souza. Others are first-rate artists who, for one reason or another, have not yet made their mark upon the London scene. Perhaps the two best examples of this are Tyeb Mehta,

There are certain similarities between the situation of South Asian artists now in London, and that of American painters before and during the war. Just as the Americans migrated to Paris in the twenties and thirties, so, many of the younger South Asians are choosing London in the fifties and sixties. No one can foresee how quickly this interchange will produce generally important results from India, and Ivan Peries, from Ceylon. At the other extreme of status are those who are just emerging from their student years. This is not reflected as closely by age as one might think; for most are obliged to earn their livings in fields other than art.

As for the paintings and sculptures themselves – and I write before the exhibition has been hung – there are certainly a few things of very high quality. Price alone, however, is not a direct criterion of value. Souza’s Crucifixion at 570 guineas is the most expensive picture in the show, as well as being the most compelling facing page The Arts Review (as it was then called), 4–18 November, 1961

April 2019

work; but good things can also be had at prices from five to twelve guineas. Yet, however interesting the price opportunities for collectors may be, there is the added incentive of the Commonwealth idea. Just as the provinces tend to look kindly on the work of local artists, and Bond Street, on the work of British artists, so might the time have come for the public to particularly encourage Commonwealth artists.

This is a ‘provincial’ and extra-artistic appeal, I know, but it is at least a wider provincialism.

And yet, is it just a matter of provincialism?

For the whole point is that the encounter between the artistic traditions of South Asia – as personified in these twenty-one human sensibilities – and the contemporary standards of artistic achievement in Europe, is on the edge of producing a great movement of painting and sculpture which will enrich us all. The imminence of this achievement would naturally have been more apparent if it had been possible to choose South Asian artists from New York and Paris, and from Ceylon, India and Pakistan as well. Let us hope this may one day be possible.

But it is worth noting that the Bear Lane’s exhibition is, so far as I can discover, the first of its kind ever to have been held anywhere.

It can be objected that there is very little in common between, say, Ceylon and Pakistan.

This might be true were it not for their common share in the traditions of Greater India. For example, Ranil Deraniyagala, from Ceylon, is at this moment painting a figure subject with a reproduction of one of the wall paintings from Ajanta propped up beside him. And M.J. Iqbal Geoffrey, from Pakistan, has just completed a picture in which the symbolism has been interpreted in the emotional manner of Indian miniature painting. I should like to go on with example after example of certain common traits underlying the surface of apparently very disparate works; but as this is not possible, I can only suggest that the visitor take careful note of the colour harmonies of these painters, of their propensity for flat patterns and black outlines, and of their resistance to the loss of the human image. For in this exhibition, one may reflect for himself upon some of the problems facing the artist who tries to be both modern, and a projection of the traditions of his homeland.

Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford 1–30 November, 1961

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Some kind of animal by S. R. Jimmy

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Phyllida Barlow cul-de-sac

Until 23 June 2019 Friends of the RA go free Lead support Phyllida Barlow RA, untitled: tilt (lintel); 2018 (detail).

Cement, hessian scrim, PVA, plywood, polyurethane foam, spray paint, steel, 362 x 344 x 604.5 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Phyllida Barlow. Original photo: Genevieve Hanson

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Frans Xaver Winterhalter, King Edward VII when Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, 1846, Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018

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Art Reviewed

He reached the conclusion that the world, for the most part, was composed of scoundrels and imbeciles 41

Andrea Fraser Follow the money Interview by J.J. Charlesworth

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ArtReview

How art gets tangled in the web of interests that sustain the artworld – political, economic and ideological – has been Andrea Fraser’s subject over a thirty-year career. Her performance-based works have confronted issues including the privileging role of the museum, the power of the art market and how artists become complicit in reinforcing the idea of art’s special cultural status. Fraser’s long engagement with these problems in many ways anticipated the growing attention paid to how power and influence now operates in the artworld. ArtReview asked her about art, power and patronage after Donald Trump...

ArtReview Your work has often focused on the way in which the art ‘institution’ tends to promote the various changing discourses of art’s (and the artist’s) freedom and autonomy, while suppressing its implication in economic and political interests.

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of your performance Museum Highlights, which took apart the connections between the ideology of cultural philanthropy, political power and economic interest. It’s seen today as a key work of ‘institutional critique’. How have you seen the place of art in relation to the interests of power and wealth change in the intervening three decades – in the era of the rise of the mega-museum and the globalised art market?

Andrea Fraser I understand the institution of art, in [Pierre] Bourdieu’s terms, as a relatively autonomous social field – that is, autonomous relative to other social fields to the extent that it can impose its own values, norms and constraints within its boundaries.

Historically, that autonomy was often identified with the rejection of the norms and values of political and economic fields. What we have seen over the past few decades is the erosion of that autonomy as market values increasingly overtake values that might be described as specifically artistic. This is not just a matter of megamuseums or any other art ‘institutions’ in the narrow sense. At this point, one sees virtually no resistance to the market or market values among artists and critics in the mainstream artworld, beyond purely discursive formulations of ‘critique’ that are never applied to the economic conditions of the artworks they are evoked to justify. Artistic success has become increasingly identified with market success.

AR Would you say that it’s been too easy for ‘critique’ to end up a commodity? If I’m being pessimistic, there was always a risk that critical art practice could be contained for as long as it ignored the limits of its own field. And, perhaps, there’s the question of why so many should abandon that resistance to the market…

AF One of the fundamental premises of institutional critique as I understand it is that the effectiveness of critique is always limited to a particular moment of intervention. Beyond that moment, it always must be rethought and renewed. If critique is to remain critique, critique itself must be subject to continual critique. But by the same token, totalising critiques of critique as commodified – or coopted or contained – fail to meet that standard of specificity. Most often they appear to me as excuses for a lack of rigour and a lack of reflexivity, and as symptoms of a conflicted investment in critique or its object.

I’ve written about how what we take as critical negation in art discourse often function as defensive negation in a psychoanalytic sense: a way of distancing and disowning the parts of

our own practices, interests and institutions we judge as bad, which also enables us to persist in them. That’s why I increasingly see critique as only a first step, and certainly not an end in itself. It must be pursued with a concrete vision of change, which must necessarily include a change in our own investments, both financial and affective, in the structures we judge as bad.

AR There’s a new urgency in your recent work, since Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. Last year you published 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, a monumental piece of data research listing all the above Book cover of 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, 2016. Courtesy The MIT Press facing page Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, performance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo: Photo: Kelly & Massa Photography. Courtesy the artist

April 2019

reported political contributions made by the trustees of 128 museums across the US during the 2016 US election cycle and its aftermath. In analysing the data, you note that many art galleries and museums, even those in ‘left-leaning’ states, have trustees who lean politically to the right, including many who support politicians with radical rightwing agendas. Maybe this requires too much speculation, but I wanted to ask you: why do think such trustees would support both rightwing politicians and a cultural sector that – ostensibly – tends towards the ‘progressive’, left or liberal side of politics?

AF Just after the election a museum director told me that she knew a number of art patrons who voted for Trump for one reason: they thought he would lower their taxes. They might even have persuaded themselves that this is a good thing for art and the institutions they support: it leaves them more money to spend on art and give to museums. I would not be surprised to find art dealers, museum directors and fundraisers who agree. This is the cynical calculation of plutocratic elites and those who depend on them.

As I write in my introduction to 2016, I don’t think that many of the museum trustees who supported Trump and the party of Trump ascribe to the racist, xenophobic, misogynist and homophobic politics that brought them to power.

I think they are willing to overlook the evils of these politics because these politicians serve their economic interests.

Their philanthropic activities may help them to justify those economic interests as somehow compensating for those political evils. However, I think that many of these trustees probably do share with rightwing politicians a fundamentally antidemocratic, if not autocratic, sense of their own right to power and privilege.

This sense also may be bolstered by their roles in philanthropic institutions, which are not remotely democratic and where their support is secured, in part, by flattering their ‘visionary leadership’ and so on.

AR One of your key themes is that of complicity (and in some sense self-delusion) among those who work in the art field. Your essay ‘Towards a Reflexive Resistance’, published last year, took on the issue of how those working in the artworld and others with access to significant ‘cultural capital’, often associated with education, are blind to the privilege that accrues from this, since they often see themselves as acting in political opposition to the more dominant forms of economic privilege. As a consequence, they have fallen into the trap of dismissing the ‘populist’ reaction as that of the ‘irrational’ voter, in contrast to their own ‘rational’ take on things. It seems to suggest an element of estrangement among the liberal and left-leaning artworld

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constituency towards those attitudes and constituencies who don’t share their cultural outlook. You’ve written that ‘the most culturally dominated members of society may see these struggles for what they often are: competition for power among the powerful from which they are excluded.’ Do you see that there’s any way through this?

AF I try to avoid terms like ‘complicity’ or ‘selfdelusion’. They suggest that the problem is one of moral or ethical failing, or of another kind of irrationality. I think the blindness of intellectuals to the power of cultural capital is more fundamental than that. It is fundamental to our belief in the political right of our own fields and in our own meritorious right to our relative privileges. To the extent that cultural capital can be wielded to contest other forms of domination, its power can indeed serve some of the progressive aims espoused in the art field, as it has in struggles over identity-based and colonial domination. But to the extent that cultural capital is allied with economic capital in the art market and in plutocratic philanthropic institutions, it serves to shore up the power of economic capital, not contest it, including by identifying economic power and privilege with those progressive aims. In these institutions, cultural domination becomes increasingly identified with identity-based domination and divorced from economic domination, and with that, from any association with social class, whether defined in terms of economic or cultural capital.

As an intellectual, I guess I am disposed to imagine that critical analysis can help get us out of this, especially a reflexive analysis of class, which has all but disappeared from art discourse. But it will take much more than that.

It will require that holders of cultural capital break out of their dependence on holders of economic capital in the art market and philanthropic institutions and redefine their interests to ally themselves with the economically as well as culturally dominated.

AR Why do you think that an awareness of economic domination and cultural domination have become so ‘out of sync’, so to speak? Were artists ever so securely allied to the economically dominated?

AF No, not securely. In Bourdieu’s analysis, such alliances mostly have been based on what he describes as homologies of position across radically different and even opposing social conditions. To the extent that the cultural power held by artists and intellectuals is dominated by economic power, they may share an experience of economic domination, and a resentment of economic power, with those who are both economically and culturally dominated. But identifications based on such homologies are

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often superficial and transitory. The real secret to most instances of institutional ‘co-optation’ is that the radical positions sometimes taken by young artists are mostly rooted in exclusions and impoverishments related to a particular stage in a career trajectory. If they achieve success, these positions become increasingly symbolic and divorced from their social and material conditions. If they don’t achieve success, they lose their voice in the field and capacity to contest its values. The massive influx of wealth into the art field in the past few decades and other structural changes, like increasingly expensive and privatised art education, have identified artistic success with art market success to such a degree that even temporary and symbolic alliances with economic struggles became rare. However, we may be seeing some shift now. As more and more artists and intellectuals, even established ones, are recognising themselves as members of the debt-entrapped precariat, we are seeing

I don’t think that many of the museum trustees who supported Trump and the party of Trump ascribe to the racist, xenophobic, misogynist and homophobic politics that brought them to power. I think they are willing to overlook the evils of these politics because these politicians serve their economic interests more and more labour organising in higher education and museums and even among artists with initiatives like W.A.G.E. AR Discussing 2016 in recent interviews, you’ve speculated on alternatives in institutions whose governance is skewed by big financial interests – for boards to take on artist trustees, community representatives and people of colour, and for more fundamentally different constitutional models for arts organisations. But you seem sceptical about how much this can achieve. Is there an inexorable pressure in the financial lures of big patronage – among curators, directors and artists? Are we all ‘part of the system’? If so, where’s the scope for agency?

AF I finished my research for 2016 with one basic recommendation: create a clear boundary between patronage and governance in nonprofit organisations, first of all by eliminating personal financial-contribution requirements for board service. I found studies indicating that over 75 percent of all nonprofit organisations in the US require personal financial contributions from

ArtReview

board members. At the largest art museums this can be as much as $10 million to join and $250,000 annually. This basically renders nonprofit governance ‘pay-to-play’. In all but the smallest organisations, this system also renders nonprofit governance fundamentally plutocratic, as only the very wealthy can afford to pay board dues. It also tends to limit racial and ethnic diversity on museum boards. In any other arena, this kind of system would be called corrupt. Nevertheless, it has been completely normalised in the nonprofit sector, which I believe also contributes to its normalisation in the public sector.

The problem is that, in the absence of public funding, most museums in the US rely on board dues for a significant portion of their budgets.

At many museums, these dues are virtually the only reliable source of revenues. So before museums can even start to consider that kind of shift, they have to completely rethink their financial structure. They either have to develop other sources of revenue or dramatically cut costs. There might be a third option, which would be to eliminate the financial-contribution requirement and diversify their governing boards while creating other patron groups without a role in governance. I think that would be feasible, given that board service really is a chore and that many museums now offer perks to nonboard patron groups that are similar to those offered board members.

However, the problem of plutocracy in the nonprofit sector is not only a problem of the influence of wealthy pay-to-play patrons, but also of a total lack of democratic process outside of internal voting by self-selected and self-perpetuating boards. To address that, museum must democratise, for example, by creating elected staff councils and artist councils with board representation to participate in governance.

But, as you suggest, artists, curators and museum directors also play a role in maintaining this system. In the US we talk about the ‘donor class’ of wealthy political contributors, which my book reveals are also contributors to cultural nonprofits. But the power of this donor class depends on their influence among what I call the donee class of political and nonprofit professionals who are constantly asking them for money. In the art field, it is important to stress that this system was put into place, to a large extent, not by wealthy art patrons, but by museum and art professionals who have seen government and public funding, and even democratic process itself, as a larger threat to their autonomy than the influence of wealthy patrons. In many ways, it is convenient for museum professionals to have a patron board with a primarily financial role, just as

2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, 2018 (installation view, SITElines: Casa tomada, SITE Santa Fe).

Photo: Eric Swanson. Courtesy the artist

April 2019

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2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (detail), 2018, archival digital pigment print, 152 Ă— 175 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Westreich Wagner Publications

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ArtReview

it is convenient for artists to have wealthy patrons. The most fundamental structural challenge is the fact that the enormous global expansion of the art field in the past decades was enabled by the massive influx of highly concentrated private wealth. The artworld is not sustainable at its current scale without that wealth and would not be even if public funding were restored to peak, postwar and pre-austerity levels.

AR To come back to your point about economics and identity: identity politics now looms large in the debates over the role of cultural institutions in the US, the UK and elsewhere. They seem constantly to be apologising for their shortcomings in not being inclusive or representative enough, or not able to respond to the new ethical demands being made of them. Is there a risk in expecting art and artists and institutions not to have some kind of autonomy – distance, difference – from the political controversies raging outside?

AF The autonomy of the art field and its participants has only ever been a relative autonomy.

It is a historical product of constantly shifting boundaries between the art field and other fields.

It has always been partial and deeply contradictory. To a large extent, the sense of autonomy in the art field has depended on the degree to which the interests of artists and other art professionals have been homologous with those of their patrons and consumers, even when they appear to challenge those interests. So, for example, artists and art patrons once shared what Bourdieu called ‘an interest in disinterestedness’, which manifested a homologous negation of economic necessity born of radically different economic conditions but joined in a shared contempt for the petite bourgeoisie. In the postwar era, artists and capitalist democratic states shared an interest in free expression associated with radically different politics, but joined in a common fear of the authoritarian state.

In the last 30 years, from the rise of multiculturalism in the US through the period of globalisation to our current struggle with rightwing populism, artists and other arts professionals, identity-based emancipatory movements and globalised cosmopolitan financial elites all have shared an interest in diversity.

While these interests are, again, rooted in radically different agendas, they have in many ways redefined the function and meaning of artistic autonomy as the freedom to contest cultural and identity-based inequities and exclusions. I certainly wouldn’t say that that implies less autonomy than under normative constraints of high modernist aestheticism, which also represented a very specific ethos.

What worries me about contemporary identity politics is the tendency to essentialise social identities while at the same time reducing

structural inequities to representation and other purely cultural forms. I’m also troubled that the politics of identity-based domination often seem to preclude any recognition of other forms of domination and privilege.

AR Though your criticism is deadly serious, your works often use humour and sex to confront their subject, and gender is an explicit fault-line. The female protagonist is a shape-shifting, self-empowering troublemaker – how might that continue to that work in the wake of #MeToo? AF I sometimes describe my work as an investigation of what we want from art – ‘we’ being everyone who participates in the art field. At one extreme, that has involved exploring social, economic and political interests, often through research that draws on social science. At the other extreme, it has meant exploring our sometimes very intimate, emotional investments in the field through research that draws on psychoanalysis and group relations, including introspective research into what

In the art field, it is important to stress that this system was put into place, to a large extent, not by wealthy art patrons, but by museum and art professionals who have seen government and public funding, and even democratic process itself, as a larger threat to their autonomy than the influence of wealthy patrons I myself want from the field. For me, that approach is rooted fundamentally in feminism and feminist investigations of how subjectivity and identity, including gender identity, are formed in social institutions in ways that are deeply invested and infused with desire and enacted in and through fantasy. I remain deeply committed to feminist traditions that insist on the social construction of identity and the fundamental bisexuality of subjectivity, both in terms of gender identity and object choice, as well as on the complexity of desire and sexuality. The #MeToo movement has been built by incredibly courageous women who have succeeded, finally, in starting to change the culture of sexual violence where so many other efforts have failed. That kind of effective mobilisation often requires a certain amount of polarisation, which can be seen in aspects of the representations of gender as well as some of the political positioning around #MeToo. I hope that art can remain a place where we can

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continue to explore the complexity of gender identity and sexuality. I hope that I can continue to contribute to those feminist traditions.

AR In recent weeks the scandal surrounding the opioid crisis in the US, the place of the drug Oxycontin in that, and the implication of the art philanthropy of the Sackler family (whose wealth has accrued through their ownership of the drug’s parent company, Purdue Pharma) has finally exploded in the UK. Driven in large part by the campaigning of artist Nan Goldin, who threatened to pull an upcoming retrospective from the National Portrait Gallery, it’s led to that gallery turning down previously promised Sackler funds, and now the Tate has declared it won’t seek further funding from the Sacklers. What are your thoughts on this?

AF I have enormous respect for Nan Goldin’s activism on this issue. Not only has she increased public awareness of the corporate criminality that has driven the opioid epidemic in the United States, she also has challenged art institutions to consider where their money comes from. Beyond the Sacklers, art institutions need to develop clear policies on when the political and business activities of patrons and board members undermine their mission and values.

The question museum people always ask me is, but where are we supposed to draw the line?

The implication is that if they go down that road, they won’t have any patrons or board members left. They would have to cut costs and even downsize, and they remind me that this would hurt artists like me and initiatives like W.A.G.E., which advocates for artists’ fees.

In fact, the fundraising priorities of the largest museums in the US are not driven by need, but by the ambitions of top staff with upper six-figure and even seven-figure salaries to pursue starchitect expansion plans and milliondollar acquisitions. So where do they draw the line? Autocrats, kleptocrats and white-collar criminals are welcome, but we draw the line at parties to mass addiction and overdoses?

And what about patrons and board members of museums committed to diversity and inclusion who finance radical rightwing ethno-nationalist politicians whose policies directly threaten the missions of the institutions they serve? But we need to ask the same question of artists, who are rarely more particular than museums about their patrons. Where do we draw the line? ar 2016 in Museums, Money and Politics was published by The MIT Press in 2018. Andrea Fraser will show her 2012 video installation Men on the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK,1972 and present a new performance at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 18 May – 15 September; her work is currently included in Post Institutional Stress Disorder at Kunsthal Aarhus, through 3 February 2020

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‘Things more apparent than words’

Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 × 360 cm.

Courtesy Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice

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ArtReview

Marina Warner in conversation with T.J. Clark

Rachel Kneebone, The Dance Project, 2018, performance at Touchstones Rochdale. Photo: Len Grant.

Courtesy the artist and Touchstones Rochdale

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Marina Warner is a writer of cultural history and fiction. In her most recent book, Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (2018), she reflects on the interactions between art, religion and the imagination since the Renaissance. Art historian and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, T.J. Clark is a self-professed ‘realist at heart’. His latest book, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018), looks at how artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Paolo Veronese have imagined the world transformed, and argues that their vision of a down-to-earth utopia still has much to teach us.

ArtReview listened in on a conversation between the two writers – who had never sat down together to discuss their work previously – which took place in Warner’s North London sitting room.

Marina Warner Your recent book Heaven on Earth and my own preoccupations converge on the questions: what are people seeing in works of art, and if something is being shown in them, what is it? I’m interested in myths: deconstructing and demythologising them, because as a Catholic I was brought up by the language that paintings or holy images were carrying. I rebelled against those messages, but their beauty remained.

It’s important to find that space where one is free from the moral didacticism of images, so that something like Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin [1516–18] is no longer, as it were, telling the twelve-year-old me that I am ‘impure’, ‘sinful’ and ‘inferior’ because there’s only one woman who ever achieved sublimity: the Virgin Mary. To prise that painting loose from propaganda is very hard.

T.J. Clark Titian is a wonderful example, because as you say, the dogmatic framework for the Assumption couldn’t be clearer: it has behind it a set of beliefs and instructions which are quite chilling. John Ruskin worried about this work because he understood that.

As a culture he loved Venice – Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, that cluster of artists – but he knew that their paintings speak to a range of human experiences which is hardly contained by the dogmas that they supposedly illustrate.

Trying to work out the relationship of visual art to the stories, truths and established beliefs of religion goes along with trying to think about visual art in relation to the stories of politics: the various instituted and powerful, but also dangerous, belief systems within which we all operate. I stake an enormous amount on the belief that depictions enable us to work with those beliefs. Art isn’t a parallel universe, and you’re able to detect within an artist’s visual discourse all the resources of language

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and tradition – but they are ‘resources’, not ‘givens’, and they’re being altered and questioned as well as being called on, depended on.

MW On the one hand, there’s the way the artist fulfils a public contract, for a painting in a church or a patron’s commission for a palace: there is a patent design upon the audience. And on the other hand, there are latent things: when you’re looking at a Manet, as you have done so memorably with his Olympia [1863], it’s not the same as looking at a Renaissance commission.

Those latent things are triangulated from many different areas of reception and creation, and it’s in that area that we can find the freedom to move.

It’s very important, if you’re interested in how art can exist in the world, that we believe in that space, that we believe that art can break free of ideology.

Roland Barthes in Mythologies [1957] didn’t really believe that. He believed you couldn’t get out of the frame of the imposed ideological meanings. Being alert and alive critically – and trying to pass that on to students – does make it possible to open that space.

“I’m interested in myths: deconstructing and demythologising them, because as a Catholic I was brought up by the language that paintings or holy images were carrying. I rebelled against those messages, but their beauty remained” TJC I agree that Barthes did believe there was no way out of the ideological frame, but then in Camera Lucida [1980] he comes up with the idea of the punctum, of which there are so many interpretations. He seems to be on the verge of saying that there’s something that’s striking you from the image, occurring to you directly: so is it really ideologically prepared and framed?

The word punctum doesn’t necessarily sum it all up for me, but there are dimensions to the visual imagining of a scene which the artist can lose hold of in the act of putting them all together.

The artist begins to question what is happening – to accept that ‘losing hold’ is indispensable to imagining in full.

MW I do think the idea of the punctum is too much anchored to the idea of a detail. But it’s interesting in facing page Paolo Veronese, Unfaithfulness, ca. 1575, oil on canvas, 190 × 190 cm.

Courtesy National Gallery, London

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two respects: one is that this sharp point – the detonation – happens in time. The punctum also gestures towards something that Barthes writes about very beautifully in A Lover’s Discourse [1977], which is emotion: the punctum transforms your metabolism, it’s physical. That is very important in terms of this promise that you could call beauty, which you outline in Heaven on Earth. How do we imagine politics here? And aesthetic politics, too?

TJC Returning to the Assumption for a moment: to some extent, thinking of yourself in critical relation to the dogmas of the Catholic church, you came to Titian’s picture prepared to dissent.

MW If you’re a Catholic child, you’re surrounded by such images. I could feel them telling me moral precepts that were particularly coded for women. It was all to do with why we menstruated and why we should sleep with our hands on the covers. It was this idea that, since Eve and the apple, we – women – are impure.

In the essay on Hans Baldung Grien I try to express the power of this story of the Fall over time, and my fury, when I was young, that paintings of the Madonna, Eve’s opposite, had the power to move me at all, that the Titian was so magnificent, sublime and beautiful.

And I began to want to know how we rescue the aesthetic for what we do want to foster and make possible.

When you were growing up, what was your relationship to imagery?

TJC I am a confirmed member of the Church of England! But I lost my faith round the age of sixteen and was never tempted back, so that kind of relationship never even crystallised for me. I had a lower-middle-class upbringing in South Lancashire and the suburbs of Bristol and our churches were not ‘high’ – they were so dull visually and architecturally. I do remember one dreadful stained glass window in our parish church in Bristol where the kings were casting down their golden crowns around a glassy sea.

I loved the idea – the idea in the image. And that’s the side of religion I still value: its investment in vision, in the icon.

MW That’s interesting, because I think aniconism is coming back quite strongly, partly because the world of representations and images is so polluted by advertising’s claims on our attention, as well as by pornography and other things. Obviously artists are responding now to this aspect as well, through figurative critiques. But there is an interest in nonfiguration as a place of safety from this problem of what the art is saying and what designs it has on you.

But then aniconism also has a lot of ideology!

TJC Yes, a lot, and of the worst kind! You said it’s nice not to hear so much of ‘impurity’ now, but one of the things I go on wanting to work with in our inheritance of the religious attitude is the idea of imperfection. It drives me mad that in our present ideological world, which of course

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is fundamentally irreligious, the imperfections of man are not faced, not really allowed into the realm of representation.

MW Plath’s lines are brilliant: ‘Perfection is terrible/it cannot have children.’ There’s a further countervailing movement in contemporary art – towards abolishing the hierarchical distinctions between humans, living creatures and even inorganic materials as a statement of interest in humility, equality of species and coexistence. You see this in the work of Joan Jonas and Kiki Smith, for instance. The ecological movement is committed to a similar project. Also, artists are expressing strong resistance to current policies against immigration, and against racists who think of society as diluted or corrupted by people who are not the same.

TJC We’re in a situation where so many of the established truths of our society have to be resisted and argued against, and I hear you saying that you are more and more interested in artists raising political and social issues directly. Artists who produce works of art in which the sheer strangeness of this culture’s past, and what it has repressed of that past, is given form, and thought about in complex ways.

MW I would never really propose that an artist should be an overt activist. I’m not against it, but I don’t think that’s how it happens. I think it’s much more inadvertent. There’s a parallel with writing: I don’t think writers, novelists or poets should necessarily set out to be chroniclers of their times, but some of the greatest are. The artist can suggest another angle from which to look at things. Like Cristina Iglesias and her three fountains in Toledo [Tres Aguas, 2014], which suggest the three-cornered lost traditions in that city’s culture – Christianity, Islam and Judaism. By digging down into the ground, she implies that that past is now coming to the surface.

TJC This digging down speaks to your belief in art as a form of archaeology. You often like art that includes acts of retrieval.

MW But the way you look at art is reparatory, or invites redress. I never liked Veronese’s Allegories of Love in the National Gallery, London [ca. 1570], and I’m astonished by your essay [on the subject, in Heaven on Earth], because it’s made me see them very differently. I didn’t like them for some of the reasons you do: the raked angles and bizarre relationships, the looming, almost trompe l’oeil effect – I found them theatrical and forced. But in performing an act of redress on the pictures as paintings, you’ve brought out a different meaning in the works. I particularly like what you say about the Disinganno, which you translate as ‘disabused’ [it has more traditionally been translated as ‘scorn’], which is, in a sense, what one is trying to do. To disabuse of assumptions, conventions and prejudice.

TJC Working on Heaven on Earth, I began to realise that in the back of my mind were two aphorisms. One of them is in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [1793], by William Blake: ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ But then there’s Arthur Rimbaud: ‘True life is elsewhere’ [La vraie vie est ailleurs]. It’s the tension between those two things that tells us we must go on thinking life differently: there must be a real life that we haven’t got to, or that we’ve lost.

It’s just an indelible human aspiration, suspicion, regret… ‘Eternity’ or ‘real life’ or ‘heaven’ is always going to be in love with the productions of time, it’s always going to be a reforming of the world that we have. That’s where I put my trust in visual art. That it continually recalls us to the this-thereness, the presence and substance of the world.

MW I think that’s why Tate Modern, for instance, draws such crowds. In the world of representations, to be in contact with the phenomenal – to have a relation with something made in that moment –

“Visual arts escape language.

It’s a wonderful freedom to be in a place that’s really hard to put into language. Yet it is partly the business of people writing about art, like ourselves, to do just that!

To put it into language.

And still it escapes” has become very important to people. It might explain the popularity of performance art, which happens in one moment and will never happen again that way. Take Marina Abramović and The Artist is Present (2010). She just sat in a chair for hours and hours [at MoMA, New York], and attracted crowds of people because it was like watching time itself.

She was present as a piece out of time in real time.

I had problems with the work, as we were made to collude with an appalling physical ordeal – as in Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ – but it showed that a new relationship to temporality is something people want from art.

TJC I’m sure that one main power of art is that it stops the flow of experience, or slows it down. Some of the best videowork is premised not on bringing things to a halt, obviously, but facing page Paolo Veronese, Respect, ca. 1575, oil on canvas, 186 × 194 cm.

Courtesy National Gallery, London

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having them linger and dilate, giving reality a different pace – in a society governed by total continual flow. I also agree that performance art can collude with the idea of ‘force of personality’.

When I register that it’s a personality being performed, not a person, I tend to switch off.

MW There are two points I’d like to pick up on: one is the point about ideology and allegory. I resisted the Allegories, but you show in your account of those paintings how much isn’t part of some ideological scheme that tells us what love is. This takes us to something important, which is that visual arts escape language. It’s a wonderful freedom to be in a place that’s really hard to put into language. Yet it is partly the business of people writing about art, like ourselves, to do just that! To put it into language.

And still it escapes.

TJC Somebody asked me a few weeks ago why, if I felt this way about the ineffability of the visual, did I write about it all the time? It was a perfectly fair question. But pictures anticipate the world of words of which they are going to be part – certain artists have dreamt of a wordless world, but they are rare, and fool themselves.

And it’s an entirely ordinary human activity, to find words for things seen. We do it all the time. That’s why I am so fascinated by Ruskin.

With all the problematic and pathetic aspects of him, he’s still a giant in terms of thinking about ways in which language can invite one to look.

MW His amazing power of expression – the richness of his vocabulary, the intricacy of his syntax – corresponds to his belief in craftsmanship. That idea of virtuosity, of technical competence, is another place where the power of art gathers. Of course it’s not quite the case now in contemporary art, because the flipside is that we value work that, being awkward rather than slick, seems to have escaped the condition of the commodity.

TJC That goes way back, to a point which is central to Modernism. The idea of a seemingly unskilled directness – MW Childlike, spontaneous, getting away from the superb power of commodity in our times – TJC Right – unfinished.

MW But this noncommodification still has a relationship to the market, which sets conditions you can’t escape. One example would be Rose Wylie, who is seemingly very spontaneous and unsophisticated, and deliberately so. But she’s become valuable. And the new interest in Art Brut or Outsider Art – artists like Henry Darger – outliers who haven’t come through the system, who have worked perhaps in their basements or in their institutions, whether hospitals, prisons, asylums, refugee camps or detention centres, have made their works highly prized. They may be already dead when they’re discovered, and I’m not against them making

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money (especially when they are still alive!), but the artworld is always looking for ways to validate itself by finding sources of transcendence beyond the current mainstream, which it can pull in to purify itself.

TJC In Outliers and American Vanguard Art at LACMA [2018–19, having travelled from the National Gallery of Art, Washington] I remember looking at these astonishing, profound works of James Castle, who attended a school for the deaf and blind and made work from his own spittle. He’s using the most rudimentary materials, but as you tune into what he’s doing, you realise it’s a specific complex idiom: it’s a set of materials he knows intimately. He’s pushing it towards a certain vision of what the world’s like, and it’s not like any vision anyone else knows, but it has an intensity and a will to form that is quite ruthless.

MW Because they’re often reclusive or not seen, or because of their institutional circumstances, such artists don’t have a conscious intention to communicate something to the outer world. Because they don’t actually wish to act upon us, although it seems like it, their work has an effect that we consent to.

We feel that their originality, intricacy and craftsmanship are imbued with this true power of artistry for itself alone.

To put this in a theoretical context, I’m very persuaded by [anthropologist] Alfred Gell’s theory of art and agency. He made the case that the greater the degree of virtuosic technology, the more enchanting power the artefact has. He did his fieldwork in New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, so he took for his example the Maori war canoe, which has a prow of immense dimensions with masses of intricate scrolling which is impossible to reproduce – impossible to commit to memory, impossible to photograph in your mind. And that makes it strictly unique – irreproducible. In the Maori worldview, such unique complexity constitutes a powerful charm to stun and frighten and repel enemies.

Gell says we should think of objects of anthropological interest in the same way as we think of art in the West.

We should submit the same critical approaches we have towards artefacts to art. A religious icon, for example, is attempting to mobilise the same kinds of invisible powers, to act upon believers and adversaries.

TJC I would dissent just a little from this: I’m not sure that Gell’s approach speaks to the strange moment we’re in, where we’re not quite clear whether art has agency or not. This might even be a way in which you and I differ. You look much more intensely at contemporary art than I do. I look at contemporary art in a somewhat random way and, to be honest, I’m always prepared to be disappointed. The title of your book – Forms of Enchantment – suggests a powerful idea, that some of the artists you admire the most are in some sense trying to re-enchant the world, or at least to retrieve those aspects

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of the world that once gave it fluidity, depth, strangeness. They’re trying to get back into a world of myths, stories and magic.

MW I saw a very strange and moving piece at Rachel Kneebone’s recent exhibition The Dance Project at Touchstones in Rochdale. In collaboration with a choreographer and dancers, she worked with local women – including refugees and women who had suffered domestic abuse – who, dressed in white like vestal virgins, danced in response to her porcelain sculptures and to the accompaniment of a cello. It was moving, resistant and powerful, a real example of contemporary art as a secular ritual. Nothing was invoked, no gods, no supernatural. It was these women in their solid flesh expressing sympathy with one another and sensuality in relation to these sculptures, affirming their own corporeality and its possibilities. And although I don’t think art should be socially useful or set out to be a therapy, you could say that this created a moment of re-enchantment.

TJC I think you’ll agree that we’ve had enough

“What sticks in my mind about the artists I mentioned is that they seem to be trying for a Realism that’s not denunciatory – that deliberately holds back from adopting an ‘attitude’ to what is depicted.

I guess I should confess: I still look around me for forms of ‘contemporary realism’” high claims for art as a form of reinvesting the world with religious aura or significance.

I’ll never forget seeing Magiciens de la Terre [at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989]. I thought it was dreadful! It was dominated by the word ‘shamanism’; everyone was a ‘shaman’.

I thought, by contrast, that the moment in your book where you talk about shamanism did really address the special character of magic as a practice, and you seemed to me to be telling us that magic is an extraordinarily important part of the human, the history and the continuing reality of the human; and that as such it is both wonderful and dangerous. And those artists you care about are working with this dimension in a way that understands it’s dangerous too. facing page Jonas Dahlberg, Invisible Cities (still), 2004, single-channel installation, HD video, colour, silent, 47 min 22 sec (loop).

Courtesy the artist

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MW The trouble is that we’ve had an important period where people sought to resist magic. Magic is about the relationship of language to reality, of course. Language is both off-kilter from reality and at the same time formative of it, so that it keeps on shaping reality.

We’re seeing two forms of word-magic swirling in this country and in Trump’s America. The Mexico wall is a perfect example of language turning into materiality and causing chaos. And I’d add that destroying images, pulling down statues to change the story of the past, is another.

TJC It occurred to me as I was thinking about Forms of Enchantment that I once wrote a book called Farewell to an Idea, which circled around this wonderful phrase that Max Weber borrowed from Schiller: ‘Modernity is the disenchantment of the world.’ I was thinking about the moment when, in 1915, Kazimir Malevich put his Black Square up in the corner of the room in the place normally reserved for the icon. What’s he doing there? Saying that the Black Square is a substitute for, or continuation of, the numinous? Or that it is the annihilation of the numinous? That’s an unresolvable question, and he knew it would be.

MW That suspension, that contrariness, is important.

Only a limited rationalist would wish it to be one or the other, but unless Malevich is in the room telling you his intention – and even if he told you his intention – your response to it might be different.

TJC It comes right back to the relation between the word and the image. I am very fond of a remark Nicolas Poussin made at the end of a letter to one of his patrons: ‘Well, I’ve said enough, it’s time for me to go back to devoting myself to choses plus apparentes que les paroles’ [things more apparent than words]. And I think that is Malevich’s motto as well. The Black Square is something more apparent than words, and words will always try to touch it, to contain it, to give it meaning, but it’s never going to be captured.

My response to contemporary art is patchy, as I’ve said, but there are a few things I return to. Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series [October 18, 1977, 1988], for instance, and Jonas Dahlberg’s video Invisible Cities [2004], in which he moves through a profoundly ‘nowhere’ set of suburban spaces in the world’s endless unknown big cities. These are examples of artists who are truly trying to represent the space and pace of our world, it seems to me. What they choose to show us is bleak, for sure. In some sense it’s a New Realism.

MW Mika Rottenberg presents a similarly dystopic view of contemporary urban life. She shows the terrifying underworlds that lie behind, for example, the beauty industry. She mixes real and shot footage, and it all looks real but is heightened through digital media into a terrifying, consumerist Mondo Cane.

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Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze, 2010, single-channel video installation, 20 min, dimensions variable. Š the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York

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It makes me shudder to remember some of her images of the women trafficked to become pedicurists in rich suburbs. It doesn’t look like agitprop – because it’s glossy and smooth and digital – but it is.

TJC Yes, but it doesn’t have to be polemical.

What sticks in my mind about the artists I mentioned is that they seem to be trying for a Realism that’s not denunciatory – that deliberately holds back from adopting an ‘attitude’ to what is depicted. It is not a world of outright horror they’re showing, although you do realise that there’s something horrible, certainly unheimlich, about it. I guess I should confess: I still look around me for forms of ‘contemporary realism’. And there are aspects of modernity – many aspects – that seem to me still radically underdescribed.

MW Isn’t your ‘heavenly’ rather material and realist in some ways? Isn’t part of the argument that we make heaven on earth through the medium of art?

TJC Sometimes I’m tempted to think that imagining the world radically otherwise simply is our way of thinking hard about what the world is.

At the heart of Heaven on Earth is Bruegel’s astonishing Land of Cockaigne [1567], which is a peasant myth of the afterlife as a place where you don’t have to work and are full of food. You could not have a more materialist idea of heaven. It’s not even ‘the world upside down’; it’s the world the same way up but only more so. So yes – I am a realist at heart.

MW To return to where we started, I don’t believe we should think in terms of art having a function;

it implies too much intention and objective. I would hold out for saying that the freedom of art is also freedom from function.

TJC Suppose we restrict ourselves to visual depiction: from very early on with Homo sapiens there seems to have been a tremendous social investment in depiction – on the walls of the caves, and so on – and it seems to have become a prestigious, specialised activity roughly at the same time that the language function is accelerating and crystallising.

So depiction and language seem to be two species-defining characteristics, and heaven knows what depiction was for, exactly. I resist the idea that it was all for fertility, or hunting success; though obviously it had something to do with the world of animals, because they were the first main subjects, and depiction was clearly bound up with hunter-gatherer culture.

Did depiction offer some ‘other space’ to be human in? These are deep, intransigent questions about the very nature of the human, to which any answer can only be speculative, aware of its distance from the long-ago series of events. So I agree that to put the stress on function is wrong. Or, at least, we are wrong to pose the question of function in simplistic terms – as if we knew what ‘human’ priorities were at Chauvet and Altamira. And here’s my other thought: there’s a poignant moment in Ruskin’s great final volume of Modern Painters [1843–60] where he finds himself unsure not only about what art is, but about whether it has effects that he should approve of, because he has become more and more aware that art

and luxury go together in human history. His misery at the nature of the nineteenth century gradually deepens over the course of his career.

His disciple William Morris in the end said about himself: ‘I spend my life in ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.’ It’s an unsolvable problem.

MW But Morris was trying not to minister to the rich.

He was trying to revive a more egalitarian craftsmanship. I want to turn it around because we are talking about artists who are skilled and how this skill becomes a luxury. But there is the other angle, which is the way children draw. Children simply enjoy drawing, even though they are driven away from it by the demand to be skilled.

TJC Yes, and you can see the ‘natural’ progression in the child, that the child at the beginning hardly sees the crayons, they are just pure instrumentality to get the dandelion on paper, but a few months later, the crayon and the touch and the mark is coming into being for the child.

The child begins the dialectic between the markmaking and what the mark is of.

MW We are a making species. It’s about knowledge.

You can look at a dandelion and draw it, and you know the dandelion. That deepens your whole sense of being in the world. ar Heaven and Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, by T.J. Clark, and Forms of Enchantment: Writing on Art and Artists,

by Marina Warner, are both published by Thames & Hudson

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Land of Cockaigne, 1567, oil on panel, 52 × 78 cm.

Courtesy Alte Pinakothek, Munich

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Our Full Attention

by Oliver Basciano

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Does conflict photography belong in a gallery?

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preceding pages Don McCullin, East Germans Looking Into West Berlin, 1961, gelatin silver print on paper, 32 × 48 cm. Courtesy the artist

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above Don McCullin, Northern Ireland, The Bogside, Londonderry, 1971, gelatin silver print on paper, 29 × 42 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Don McCullin, The Battle for the City of Hue, South Vietnam, US Marine Inside Civilian House, 1961, gelatin silver print, 50 Ă— 33 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Reading the texts that adorn the walls of Don McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain in London, one can sense the institutional nervousness. This is a show, after all, in which a white, male, Western war photographer turns his lens on the destitute, the embattled, the starving, the injured, the dying and the dead. Many of these subjects, whether they suffered the famine of Biafra in the late 1960s or were slain in the Vietnam War, are people of colour. All are vulnerable. The museum is at pains to stress McCullin’s ‘empathy’, that these signature high-contrast black-and-white images, captured over forty years of newspaper assignments to warzones across the world, were taken ‘with great respect’ and aimed ‘to create a voice for the people in those pictures’. And yet the fear of reviving recent controversies around the representation of others’ suffering by artists including Dana Schutz and Luke Willis Thompson echoes through these statements.

Ethical debates around the representation of atrocity in photography have a long history. In her 1981 essay ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on documentary photography)’ the artist Martha Rosler noted that the medium carries ‘information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful… the liberal documentary assuages any stirrings of conscience in its viewers the way scratching relieves an itch and simultaneously reassures them about their relative wealth and social position.’ The presentation of photography from conflict zones in a gallery will always work across an uncomfortable power differential: the stricken have given their image (whether with explicit consent or otherwise) for the better understanding and perhaps even the ultimate improvement of their circumstances (notwithstanding ‘the disappointed belief in a straight line… between perception, affection, comprehension and action’ that Jacques Rancière identifies at the root of our contemporary scepticism about images with a social agenda).

In one starkly titled photograph, Starving 24 year old mother with child, Biafra (1968), a baby pulls uselessly at a woman’s empty breast.

The heads of both mother and child are grossly oversized to their emaciated bodies, and even to describe such a scene from the comfort of an office, warm and fed, feels barbaric. A few days later I visited the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Hung in a room at The Photographers’ Gallery is the shortlisted work of Susan Meiselas, which includes harrowing images of the mass graves of Kurdish Iranians executed in the First Gulf War. Publication of such photographs in the news media serves a basic journalistic function, but what does showing them in a gallery achieve?

McCullin’s work – and the hang of the Tate show – goes a long way towards confronting questions of ‘privilege’ by asserting a basic humanism, without the need for supplementary special pleading.

The exhibition opens with his earliest photographs, of the postwar streets of the artist’s North London neighbourhood (I peer into

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them, wondering if I might catch a glimpse of my dad, a kid in the 1950s growing up in Finsbury Park’s Italian immigrant community).

Those depicted may not be starving, but there is poverty and this isn’t, for much of Tate Britain’s audience, some exotic ‘other’ but a Britain within living memory and indeed, after the UK government’s recent policies of austerity, not far removed from the streets of today.

McCullin’s images of Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall, taken in 1961 on his first professional assignment, remind us that this kind of curiosity about our fellow beings is instinctive: a photo of West Berliners peering over the wall at their brethren is hung next to a shot of a similarly inquisitive crowd on the GDR side. Motifs of looking abound: a man peers across the border through binoculars; when a little girl is pictured surrounded by soldiers, a gent in the background brandishes a camera. Collectively they convey a sense that to look is to familiarise oneself with an ‘other’, that to familiarise is to empathise.

McCullin’s photographs at the Tate were almost entirely the result of newspaper assignments, most notably for The Sunday Times, and yet are presented shorn of the written reportage that originally accompanied the images. In many ways this is a return to the first mode of distribution for conflict photography. Over at the Queen’s Gallery, an institution neighbouring Buckingham Palace and showing works from the Royal Collection, a small exhibition tells the story behind one of the earliest war photographers, Roger Fenton, and his images from the conflict in Crimea (1853–56).

The war with the Russian Empire had caught the imagination of the public, despite condemnation in the press of Britain’s involvement, and Prince Albert, a patron of Fenton, encouraged the photographer to travel to the battlefield.

He arrived on the scene in 1855, too late for most of the action and burdened by his equipment: one photograph shows the horse-drawn cart that doubled as the lab in which Fenton prepared the glass plates before going out in the field and where he later processed them. His images are tame in comparison to McCullin’s – the long exposure meant Fenton’s subject matter had to be perfectly still (or dead, as in Mathew Brady’s corpse-littered images of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863) – and it wasn’t until the Boer War (1899–1902) and the RussoJapanese War (1904–05) that the white heat of battle was captured on film. Yet there was enough danger for Fenton to have taken the picture of the wagon, which he feared would be destroyed by an offensive the next day. Writing to his wife from the siege of Sevastopol, Fenton described a near miss. ‘I did not see as a shell came over about the same spot, knocked it [sic] fuse out & joined the mass of its brethren without bursting. It was plain that the line of fire was upon the very spot I had chosen.’

The morbid romanticism of the Victorian public was evidenced by the popularity of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s perversely triumphant Crimean paean, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854) and the

ArtReview

facing page Roger Fenton, Wounded Zouave and Vandiere, 5 May 1855, 1855, albumen print, 17 × 16 cm. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Courtesy Royal Collection Trust

above Roger Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death, 23 April 1855, 1855,albumen print, 26 × 35 cm. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Courtesy Royal Collection Trust

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Susan Meiselas, Villagers watch exhumation at a former Iraqi military headquarters outside Sulaymaniyah, Northern Iraq, 1991, chromogenic print, 40 × 54 cm. © the artist

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Susan Meiselas, Photographs of 20-year-old Kamaran Abdullah Saber are held by his family at Saiwan Hill cemetery. He was killed in July 1991 during a student demonstration against Saddam Hussein, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq, 1991. Š the artist

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Susan Meiselas, Taymour Abdullah, 15, the only survivor of village execution, shows his bullet wound, Arbil, Northern Iraq, 1991. © the artist

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publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons, Fenton’s sponsors on the trip, These queries prompted her to record the testimony of witnesses had hoped to capitalise on it through print sales of the photographs and collaborate with the subjects of her images, and so she searched direct to the public (some of the images did end up published in the out vernacular photos representing Saddam Hussein’s campaigns Illustrated Evening News). One depicts a wounded soldier: the man lies against Iraq’s Kurdish population and the violent struggle for Kurdish with his head resting on the lap of a comrade, his gun lying on the recognition more generally, from personal collections in Iraq, Turkey ground parallel to his exhausted body. A vivandière, a nurse who would and Iran as well as those stored in Western archives. On a visit to have travelled with the regiment, administers a glass of dark medi- Tehran, Meiselas came across a photography studio run by a Kurdish cine, or perhaps just a stiff drink. The image is beautifully composed, man. In the intertitles she explains that, intrigued, she asked if she and Fenton wrote that the subjects ‘enjoyed’ having their photograph could leaf through his archives: his most treasured image dated from taken, so it is unclear whether what we are witnessing is natural or 1900 and showed a group of men hoisting up spikes on each of which staged. While today we value a particular idea of authenticity – in a is impaled the head of a Kurd. The man kept the picture to remind wall text McCullin notes that he only once staged an image, placing himself of the suffering that had beset his people. Like the Tehrani the treasured possessions of a dead Viet Cong soldier, which had been studio manager, we need to face horrific images. Not because it will scattered during looting, next to the man’s body – for Fenton, the end necessarily galvanise change (though it might, on a local level) but to result was more important. understand what people are capable of.

The most affecting pictures in this small exhibition are those of There is no doubt that we are suffering from atrocity fatigue. As the landscape after battle. An image dated 23 April 1855 shows a vista far back as 1964 Dorothea Lange, a giant of twentieth-century docuin which rocky, dusty inclines meet at the faintest semblance of a path. mentary photography, complained that ‘it takes a lot to get full attenFenton borrowed his title for the work, tion to a picture these days, because we Valley of the Shadow of the Death, from are bombarded by pictures every waking In a slide projection populated Psalm 23. Humanity is physically absent, hour, in one wielding a bullwhip form with further images – her own or another, and transitory images seen, but every cannonball on this miserable and found – Meiselas questions her unconsciously, in passing, from the bit of land seems to call up the ghosts of the slain. This photograph, and two corner of our eyes, flashing at us, and this role through a series of intertitles: more murky landscapes which show in business where we look at bad images – ‘I began to wonder about all the the foggy distance Sevastopol, a city in impure. I don’t know why the eye doesn’t photographs that had been made present-day Russian-occupied Ukraine, get calloused as your knees get calloused reminded me of the final room of the or your fingers get calloused.’ In the and taken from Kurdistan,’ reads McCullin retrospective. The latter’s digital age, such images of suffering are one; ‘I can’t escape the tradition most recent photographs capture simimore readily available than ever. of the colonial foreigner,’ acknowllarly foggy meadows in England’s West Susan Sontag argues, in ‘Regarding Country where the photographer, now the Pain of Others’, that to hang an image edges another. This is a body of in his eighties, lives. Likewise, it feels in a gallery automatically renders it art work versed in the problematic as if the spectres of McCullin’s memory ‘whatever the disclaimers’. I am minded ethics of the medium. Yet Meiselas to agree. While she also argues that this haunt that more bucolic landscape. aestheticisation of trauma is problemAn American photojournalist best also celebrates the power of images atic and that the space of the gallery or known for her reporting from the drug wars of Nicaragua, Susan Meiselas’s presentation in London derives the museum is ultimately one of leisure, it nonetheless remains true from an invitation by Human Rights Watch to document the organ- that such institutions provide an enclave from the rest of the world in isation’s work uncovering unmarked mass graves in Iraq. Three which the act of looking is primary. We cannot ignore the picture on photographs grouped together set the solemn tone: a young man lifts the wall; we cannot pretend we did not see. There are no newspaper up the back of his jumper to reveal the scars of torture; a group of adverts, no server tabs to rescue us. Perhaps we need these images to Kurdish villagers crowd to watch an exhumation; a forensic anthro- be presented as such – to be aestheticised, in the sense that they are pologist stands in a hole in Erbil, clutching the blindfolded skull of quarantined from the distractions of the world – if they are to gain an executed teenager. And though it also acts as a monument to the our full attention. The horrors of the three shows I saw within a week victims of war, Meiselas’s work might offer a more complex vision of each other spanned 150 years: this suffering is not an aberration of the role of conflict photography than McCullin’s more straight- particular to our age. This is us. And if galleries are not places in which forward documentary. In a slide projection populated with further we can confront and attempt to better understand the human condiimages – her own and found – Meiselas questions her role through a tion, then it is hard to know what they are for. ar series of intertitles: ‘I began to wonder about all the photographs that had been made and taken from Kurdistan,’ reads one; ‘I can’t escape Don McCullin’s retrospective is on view at Tate Britain, London, through 6 May; Susan Meiselas’s work is included in the Deutsche the tradition of the colonial foreigner,’ acknowledges another. This is Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2019 on through 2 June a body of work versed in the problematic ethics of the medium. Yet at The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Roger Fenton’s photographs Meiselas also celebrates the power of images. Given the persecution can be viewed at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, through of the Kurdish people in Iraq, she notes, ‘Even a family portrait is an 26 April expression of identity and could be deemed subversive.’

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Playing with History Interview by Mark Rappolt

The new MK Gallery, 2019.

Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

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ArtReview

The MK Gallery’s architect and director, along with an artist involved in its redesign and expansion, describe their intentions to turn a storied but out-of-the-way museum into a destination

Auditorium, MK Gallery, 2019, designed by 6a Architects in collaboration with Nils Norman and Gareth Jones.

Photo: Johan Dehlin. Courtesy MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

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Twenty years after opening as Milton Keynes Gallery, the newly renamed and significantly expanded MK Gallery reopened to public acclaim in spring 2019 following a major expansion overseen by architecture firm 6a.

Taking design cues from the history of Milton Keynes, a ‘New Town’ in South East England conceived in 1967 as part of an ambitious programme of urban planning, the renovated building includes larger gallery spaces, an auditorium, education facilities, a café and City Club, a major commission by artists Gareth Jones and Nils Norman that incorporates the design of three public spaces around the gallery.

ArtReview’s Mark Rappolt sat down with Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery, Tom Emerson, cofounder of 6a, and Nils Norman to discuss what a municipal art gallery might mean in the twenty-first century.

also artists without commercial representation – because I believed our role was to show things that weren’t familiar. But when we spoke to local audiences, we kept hearing that “contemporary art isn’t always our thing”.

A straight-up contemporary art kunsthalle is really only for devotees – the most common complaint was that we didn’t have a café – so the idea of creating a social space was very high on the agenda. That happens through the café, through the shop, through the events and learning programmes and all the public spaces in and around the building. One commenter said the new gallery feels like a church or town hall in an older city, somewhere you can take the pulse of the city, a meeting place. That idea was there right from the beginning.

MARK RAPPOLT Did you think of this extension as a way of reinventing the gallery rather than simply making it bigger?

TOM EMERSON Enlarging the galleries, more or less doubling them in size, was also a way of opening up the possibilities of what could be done with the exhibitions programme. You could have two shows on at the same time, for instance.

ANTHONY SPIRA To be completely honest, we weren’t getting enough visitors. We were doing what I thought were important exhibitions – midcareer surveys of people like Andrea Büttner, Melanie Smith and Daria Martin, and exhibitions of overlooked figures like Nasreen Mohamedi, Peter Dreher, Hariton Pushwagner,

AS And make it much more varied. The gallery is a destination: we’re not on a busy high street so people have to want to go there, and we needed more substantial exhibitions. People drive for up to an hour to go to the theatre next door, so we know that people will go to cultural events if we can convince them that it’s worth their while.

MK Gallery exterior, 2019.

Photo: 6a Architects. Courtesy MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

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MR It is a bold move to make the space bigger if the problem is visitor numbers.

AS Only to make the exhibition spaces bigger would have been a mistake, but this allows us to present more substantial and varied programmes.

We now have environmental controls, which means we are eligible for the government indemnity scheme [a scheme enabling organisations to display vulnerable or valuable work], which means we can put on historical exhibitions alongside the contemporary. There is nothing like this organisation until you get to Oxford, Cambridge or Birmingham, so we have a broad cultural and social responsibility. It’s not just about visitor numbers, it’s also about finding a purpose in the city.

MR Behind your and Gareth Jones’s contributions, Nils, there also seems to be an idea of bringing ‘play’ and ‘fun’ into the equation.

NILS NORMAN What interests me about this project is the level of transdisciplinary and immersive collaboration that developed as it unfolded. As an artist who works often with architects and public realm projects, I’m usually invited quite late in the process, and it isn’t really a collaboration. This project offered a unique opportunity to work collaboratively from a very early stage. With regard to the element of play, Gareth and I came upon City Club [a

proposal, dating from the 1970s, for a massive, block-sized leisure centre in central Milton Keynes featuring wave pools, souks, rodeos, theatres and an art gallery], and that became the starting point for our interest. [Jones and Norman’s City Club incorporates the design of public space around the gallery following an interim programme of site-specific works and residencies conducted while the gallery was under construction.] Play allows you to look at public spaces in a different and inclusive way.

AS The idea of play is key. Early Milton Keynes was described as a playground for architects.

We wanted to create a new model for an art gallery, but the Arts Council’s capital funding was only available for renovations and extensions. We did think, at one point, that it might have been easier and more cost-effective to knock the whole thing down and start again. But we didn’t do that, and ultimately the idea of turning some of the awkwardness of the old building into the strengths of the new building, into exuberant aesthetic features, was very exciting.

MR Do you think it affects the psychology of a visitor if they see evidence of play?

NN I think it softens the experience of going to a gallery with conceptual or hard-to-access art in it. We’ve introduced a playground, which I think is a workable proposition in this context.

It encourages kids and parents to come, which changes a space.

MR In the design and deployment of signs, for instance, you’re also taking a local and vernacular language and remixing it, reinventing it. It means things feel familiar before you get to the unfamiliar, if you like.

NN We wanted to create new public artworks that revisited designs from the 1970s but changing them, or updating them to make them more contemporary. In the playscape is a climbing structure called the Small Walkway, which, while a little bigger, is almost the same design as the original. There is also an original lamppost that we have made climbable, and a hurdlelike structure that we have reimagined as a strikingly patterned mound called the Tri-stack Labyrinth. These are all visible and important parts of the gallery’s outdoor space and not fenced off or hidden.

MR Some of the pieces that have been written about the renovation are infused with nostalgia. It’s got almost nothing to do with the building and everything to do with the current political situation. I wonder if this is something you can’t control?

AS We are all desperate for optimistic visions for the future. Milton Keynes emerged from the heyday of the welfare state; how can you not hark back to a time when public, civic life

really was valued and believed to be the best way forward? The founders of Milton Keynes genuinely believed that quality of life and quality of design were connected. We wanted to celebrate that impetus and remember how urgent it is to hold on to those values.

TE Interestingly, Milton Keynes in the 1960s and 70s was also nostalgic. The designers were obsessed with ley lines being preserved and the archaeology, prehistoric settlements, landforms, a mythical past. Campbell Park couldn’t have happened without bringing a West Country druidic attitude, for instance.

[When construction began on the town during the 1970s, the lead architect, Derek Walker, shifted the city plan a few degrees from its planned north–south and east–west axes so that the direction of the streets would align with the sun on the summer solstice.]

MR It’s interesting to consider the relationship between the site and the programme, and the role a contemporary art gallery serves. I think that while the building might be about grounding the gallery in a particular place, an exhibition programme can also be about liberating it from that place.

AS The emphasis on place-making was so important at this point of reinvention, but that will change in the future. There seems to be a fear of globalisation, of the homogenisation of culture,

Architectural Design, special edition, August 1974, featuring a cover image

by Brian Tattersfield. Courtesy MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

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top Performers in the City Club Playscape,

by Gareth Jones and Nils Norman, MK Gallery, 2019.

Courtesy the artists

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above Café Bar, MK Gallery, 2019, designed by 6a Architects in collaboration with Nils Norman and Gareth Jones.

Photo: Johan Dehlin. Courtesy MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

ArtReview

a fear that nothing makes us unique or distinct, original or different. Local people are passionate about Milton Keynes, but the perception from the outside is often very negative. So it’s important to our stakeholders – the local authority, communities and so on – to help turn that around. Hotels in Milton Keynes are full during the week but quiet at the weekends. How do you help build a visitor economy, and how do you continue to attract people to come and live and work in a new city? As a publicly funded arts organisation, we not only have a duty, but also a desire, to serve our constituents. And what’s important about our inaugural exhibition [The Lie of the Land, a group show that looks at the effect of leisure on the English landscape, from Capability Brown’s gardens at Stowe through to Milton Keynes New Town] is that it helps to contextualise that. It shows many great precedents to the New Towns Movement but not in an uncritical way.

MR To what extent do you see the remodelling of MK Gallery as something generated by the specific context of Milton Keynes, or is it an approach that could be applied to other spaces and other places?

NN Milton Keynes is very particular in that it’s a New Town, and as such, it produced a lot of very seductive drawings and posters and plans in order to sell itself. I grew up in Bexhill, where

you couldn’t generate comparable archival material. Our approach was quite specific to Milton Keynes and driven by the rich archival material we found.

TE The archive doesn’t produce the vision, but it does produce a social history that you can draw on. So methodologically I think you could do it, but it’s just very difficult to have all the right conditions, as they were here.

AS From my perspective, it is absolutely specific to Milton Keynes. I don’t think it could have happened anywhere else, and the people involved were invited because of their interest in the sociopolitical history and design behind Milton Keynes.

NN You also need an institution that is willing to take a risk and is willing to trust the interdisciplinary collaborative process. Building projects don’t usually support this type of process, or it’s not part of their culture.

AS This all leads to a really important point that many boundaries have been broken down in this project. Between civic and cultural space, between art, design and architecture, between culture, learning and play, between public art and urban infrastructure... There are sculptures that are meant to be climbed on. It’s not just

that the distinctions between practitioners are blurred, it’s also about the use of things.

NN Working across disciplines and connectedness is important in that context. Looking at a piece of street furniture as a play object opens up the possibility of transforming public space. You can see this happening in Copenhagen, where the dominance of cars is being designed out of the city. This 20-year project has made it possible to develop large open-play areas for children.

MR Do you think, in general, that people think of art galleries as public spaces?

AS We hope that this new building has a sensibility that is informal and accessible, so it’s not like other galleries where you climb up stairs and ascend to a higher plane. There was the great series of advertisements for the Victoria & Albert Museum with the tagline, ‘V&A: An ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached’ [published in 1988, it was produced by Paul Arden and Jeff Stark for Saatchi & Saatchi]. I couldn’t be happier if people start saying that about us.

The same applies to the cinema upstairs, run with Curzon. It’s the first time the city has a permanent home for independent film, and some people will think, ‘There’s a great cinema and it’s got some exhibitions on downstairs’.

Nils Norman, Gareth Jones and 6a Architects, City Club conceptual model, 2015 (installation view, The Lie of the Land, MK Gallery, 2019). Courtesy the artists

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Signage for the new MK Gallery, 2019.

Courtesy Nils Norman and Gareth Jones

Original hand gate designed by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, 1970s. Courtesy Nils Norman and Gareth Jones

City Club Playscape, MK Gallery, 2019.

Courtesy Nils Norman and Gareth Jones

City Club exterior, MK Gallery, 2019. Courtesy Nils Norman and Gareth Jones

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Or kids might think, ‘Let’s go to the playground’, and again there’s an exhibition and café around it. There are these multiple entry points and activities, so we can have a traditional exhibition in the galleries and some experimental things going on upstairs at the same time. To have lots of different registers and energies and activities is important.

TE England is quite bad at public spaces. The country just doesn’t quite know how to do them: it doesn’t know how to design them, let alone use them.

MR And it doesn’t have a lot.

TE No. The structure of London is essentially mercantile.

MR And aristocratic.

TE Whereas European cities like Paris or Rome are extremely public and representational. In the past few decades, public space and private space have merged in galleries, so it’s become quite difficult, in cases, to tell a commercial gallery from a museum. A common architectural language has emerged, and in this project we wanted to find a language that feels like public space. Something quite un-English, that feels explicitly public. We wanted people to feel that it was theirs. Recently some museums have been built that prompt the feeling of, ‘Wow, I’m being given access to something quite privileged’.

MR And yet the layout and attention given to the toilets, for instance, where Gareth and Nils’s colour scheme comes to the fore, the way that they are privileged as a site of humour and conversation, felt very English.

TE That’s true. The Milton Keynesian-ness of it is super English, in the sense that only in England would somebody try to lay out LA in that way. But England is a country of imports: its architects go to Italy and bring back Palladianism, go to France and bring back Modernism and later Brutalism. Even a sash window feels like somebody half-remembered the Netherlands. These imports are always slightly corrupted. But the idea of public space is the driving spirit of the whole gallery.

A typical hierarchy in a building project would be one of high-value spaces like galleries, auditorium, café, and then the kind of low-value elements that are toilets, back of house, loading bays and stuff like that; in this case there’s a flat hierarchy, so conceptually the decisions you’re making in the auditorium are no more or less significant than the ones you’re making in the toilets, or the loading bay door, which is also part of the building. What Gareth and Nils brought to the project was an erasure of any feeling that, since ‘people don’t go there’, a space falls off the

back of the architectural attention. You’re spending as much time on the accessible loo on the second floor as you are in the bigger spaces.

NN One of the things Gareth and I looked at was [Danish artist] Poul Gernes’s work at Herlev Hospital in Copenhagen, where he painted every surface of the hospital a variety of striking colours – inside the elevator, the doors and door trims, light switches, signage, skirting boards – everything had a colour component to it.

MR Historically the idea of installing a playground at an art gallery would be considered an afterthought.

The traditional thinking would have been: why would people bring their kids if not to learn rather than play? Or conversely that the playground would exist because the kids can’t appreciate art. But this is much more integrated, it suggests we should transition smoothly from the playground into the ‘learning space’ of the gallery, opening up any limited idea of knowledge production but also making one aware of the traditional antithetical relationship between work and play.

The skateboarders will damage the playscape, of course they will, why wouldn’t they? But that would show that the facilities are being used – and hopefully loved at the same time AS A few weeks after I started at the gallery [in 2009], there were letters from anonymous local artists to the local newspaper saying how unwelcoming, how uninviting, how intimidating the gallery building was, how people felt they would walk in and feel stupid and scruffy. That gave us a real desire to address that and reverse it. All of these developments have, in a way, been triggered by a desire to make that right. So, creating a space that is accessible, playful and engaging and also a place for learning, which functions on different levels simultaneously, was crucial.

MR How responsible do you feel to the local art scene?

AS Very. It’s really important. My predecessors were brilliant at putting the gallery on the artworld map – and did an excellent job in many respects – but they studiously avoided local art.

I felt when I got there that the gallery had enough confidence to be a bit more open. We’ve done a series of open-submission exhibitions for artists with a connection to Milton Keynes, with about 80 artists in each, encompassing

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performance, spoken word and film as well as more traditional media. When the gallery was closed we turned it into a tattoo parlour for an evening, and hosted baking lessons.

Creativity in the broadest sense is very much part of the mission.

MR How do you think the gallery is going to be in five years’ time? Do you see it as evolving or static? The look, or the use?

AS One of the most exciting things is actually seeing people using the building. We wanted the spaces to be as flexible as possible and are expecting to adapt. For example, we temporarily boarded up a doorway between the café and galleries just to keep options open. I hope our parent and toddler sessions will spill out into the playscape and that the café will be extended into the garden. The programmes and use of the building will definitely evolve according to demand. More immediately, I have some fears for wear and tear. The skateboarders will damage the playscape, of course they will, why wouldn’t they? But that would show that the facilities are being used – not necessarily as intended – and hopefully loved at the same time.

TE It really depends on how the city takes the gallery and the spaces to heart. That determines how things are looked after and how much they change. At this point, we’ve done as much as we can.

AS I wonder about how things will last in another way, because a lot of people have been saying, ‘Oh, this is so of the moment’.

That makes me a bit nervous.

TE Well I’m not worried about that because the only thing it can be is of the moment. Even classicism has its moments. British museums over the past 15 years have been ‘concerned with the classical tradition’, and now that decorum and refinement feels dated.

MR History is always written in the present, not the past. Those things are always moving.

AS There’s also the political situation we find ourselves in. Hopefully somehow the inclusive, accessible and appealing elements feel appropriate for the current situation.

TE We don’t really know what the architecture of the moment is, because we’re still in it! But inevitably it will emerge, and then it will feel dated because something new is going on…

NN But the idea of public ownership makes the idea of ‘being of the moment’ redundant.

If people are going to the place and using it, then it doesn’t matter. ar The Lie of the Land is on view at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, through 26 May

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Tishan Hsu

by Jeppe Ugelvig

Double Ring, 2019, UV prints on Dibond, silicone, 97 × 284 cm

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Technology figures as tool, site and condition in the paintings and sculptures of Tishan Hsu. Since emerging in 1980s New York, the Chinese-American artist has pioneered new ways of representing the interface between physical and virtual worlds

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Boating Scene GREEN 1, 2019, UV prints on Dibond, silicone, 170 × 229 cm

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QMH 1, 2019, UV prints on Dibond, silicone, 102 Ă— 135 cm

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Tishan Hsu’s early work provokes a strange corporeal response that Hsu’s emphasis on affect, indeed, couldn’t be further from the speaks directly to the particular experience of inhabiting a body in cold simulationism of his contemporaries: the work is intimate, a digital age. The unidentifiable orifices, limbs and proxy-organs personal and in continuous dialogue with the body. As a graduate, in his paintings of the 1980s and 90s fuse seamlessly with glitchy Hsu worked as a word processor at one of the city’s earliest office cybernetic grids, while the sleek ergonomic curvature of his sculp- jobs involving a computer, and it is this now-ubiquitous experience tures evokes body parts, computer screens and office furniture. – existing in front of a monitor – that would produce the conceptual Hsu’s works could be considered bodies in their own right, but also basis for much of his work. Bodies morphing into hardware can be assert an almost corporate objectseen in works such as Lip Service (1997), hood when you encounter them in in which TV screens become a part of Hsu proposes a radically alternative person (that corporate and corporeal a larger corporeal entity. Inversely, in Virtual Flow (1990–2018), bodies are cognate only makes the status of approach to the body and its politics, appear as silkscreened medical imthese objects as physical things – to beyond the boundaries of what we ages (sourced from hospitals) within be sold or inhabited – more ambivunderstand as ‘physical’ and ‘virtual’, clinical glass boxes on a steel cart, alent). By rendering technology as the interface where representation mutated by skin-toned craters and carbon and silicone, flesh and soul lumps. That the unsettling strucand abstraction intersect in both art and life, Hsu proposes a radically ture – half medical cabinet, half body alternative approach to the body and its politics, beyond the bound- – extends to a standard electrical socket brings the trope of being aries of what we understand as ‘physical’ and ‘virtual’, carbon and ‘plugged in’ to an abject extreme. silicone, flesh and soul. This perspective makes 1980s works such The appearance of white noise, glitches and dislodged body parts as Head (1984) – an eerie flesh-toned, wall-based landscape of bodily adrift in the grid is reminiscent of the ‘cyberpunk’ aesthetics of the holes rendered in lumpy Styrofoam and acrylic – and Ooze (1987) – early 1990s, which similarly worked to articulate anxieties and fantaan imposing and alien interior rendered in turquoise tiles – seem sies about an uncertain digital future. But while much cybernetic hyper-contemporary more than three decades after their comple- thinking from this era imagined the web as a form of life privileging tion, at a time when digital systems have encroached further into the immaterial mind (and thus doing away with the body), Hsu’s the experience of being human, and techno-bodies such as cyborgs, work insists on the fundamental corporeality of our encounter with robots and avatars are being created, debated and politicised with such virtual systems. The body figures here not as some disposable prosthetic, but as a kind of interface, a place that connects various ever greater speed.

While echoing the historical preoccupations of much cyber- systems of reality. “I have always had certain doubts about the ‘trannetic art of the past 30 years, Tishan Hsu has remained outside its sition’ from the body to the virtual,” Hsu tells me in his Brooklyn canon. Born in Boston and raised in Switzerland and Wisconsin to studio. “There is a tendency to default to the image of the body we Shanghainese immigrant parents, he started making art in his teens have inherited, but what we experience ontologically and cognitively but chose to study architecture at MIT before moving to New York opposes that quite directly.” In the Interface series of inkjet prints in 1975. There he encountered Pat from 2002, for example, Hsu began Hearn, the Boston ex-punk and to present body parts in warping grid The body figures here not as some emerging gallerist, who had just systems, forming a kind of skin that set up shop in the East Village. As resembled a digital screensaver. He disposable prosthetic, but as a kind part of a programme including describes it as an attempt to “explore of interface. “I have always had certain Milan Kunc, Peter Schuyff and a different kind of ‘embodiment’ doubts about the ‘transition’ from Philip Taaffe, he inevitably became than art, Western or non-Western, affiliated with the resurgence of had portrayed” that could reflect “the the body to the virtual,” Hsu tells me painting of the 1980s variously impact of technology on how the known as neo-geo, neo-pop or postbody located itself in the world”. abstraction – genres generally shunned by the critical art establishThis bodily discourse – stripped of markers such as gender, sexument, who saw them as cynically reducing abstraction to pure decor, ality and race – is a far cry from the representational identity politics to kitsch. But while evoking a politics of simulation similar to that of the 1990s. Hsu’s posthuman approach to the body echoes the work of, say, Taaffe, Hsu’s work aligns more closely with predecessors such of more recent scholarship by theorists including Rachel C. Lee, who as Bridget Riley, concerned with examining the effect of the body in her 2014 book The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America veers away from a moving through and across optical planes – such as paintings, for conventional biological understanding of race to explore a more fragexample, or computer screens. mented and distributed material sense of Asian American identity,

facing page, top Virtual Flow, 1990–2018, ceramic tile, silkscreen on glass, wood, plastic, silicone, dimensions variable

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facing page, bottom Lip Service, 1997, solkscreen on canvas, 122 × 89 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Domus Collection, Beijing

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above Head, 1984, acrylic, concrete, Styrofoam, oil, enamel on wood, 91 × 61 cm

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all images but one Courtesy the artist and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

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informed by chemical, informatic and cybernetic flows. While one of work simulated a digitisation of the image, his new work emerges the few successful Chinese-American artists of his time, Hsu never directly from it. “The whole reason I could do this project is because joined its roster of names in the canon of American art-history, in of technology, because of the Internet,” he points out. By mining a part, perhaps, because his art did not foreground his ethnic iden- lost experience of familial trauma through digital communication – tity (one could think of Simon Leung, for example, a contemporary email, Skype and Whatsapp exchanges with his Shanghai family – and of Hsu, who also started at Pat Hearn Gallery). In fact, his prophetic by processing the material remnants through digital image-making biocybernetic perspective struggled to find its audience. After a few and editing, Hsu again renders technology as a space in which to years in Cologne during the late negotiate identity, the body and his1980s, Hsu, disillusioned, retreated tory. “Somewhat ironically, it is the While his early work simulated a digfrom the commercial artworld and technology of photography in the acquired tenure as a professor in twenty-first century that is not only itisation of the image, his new work fine arts at Sarah Lawrence College enabling me to make any connection emerges directly from it. “The whole outside New York City. to but in fact has made me aware of reason I could do this project is because the absence in the first place.” This The death of his mother in 2013 absence – this personal data loss caused Hsu to reconsider his heritage of technology, because of the Internet” – speaks to how cultural memory and its relevance to his artistic praclives, dies and recoups itself, even in tice. Perusing her possessions, Hsu discovered a collection of letters between his mother and her family in today’s photo-saturated, digital and seemingly ‘connected’ culture.

China dating back to the 1950s and 60s. Separated by the communist Through the suggestive aesthetic of tech, familiar diaspora themes revolution of 1949, which prohibited Hsu’s parents from returning such as cultural memory, trauma and social histories are rethought to Shanghai, the letters spoke of persecution, suicide and survival as through digital and technological metaphors. “It’s kind of about well as the more mundane aspects of everyday life; a winding social information and the personal,” he adds. “And how the personal regishistory of which Hsu had been totally unaware. So he set out to track ters through technology; what is coded, stored, and what is not.” down and reconnect with the extended families of his late parents.

While evoking the critical strategies of quintessential identityTaking up residence in Shanghai for three, then five, then six months based art practice – memory, trauma, personal archaeology – Hsu at a time, Hsu became absorbed by this newly discovered social and regards The Shanghai Project as an extension of his life’s practice, historical context and spent several years examining its material although its reference to Asian bodies is, he acknowledges, a ‘radical remnants, particularly the family’s rich image archive (a result of his step’. After consulting its local artworld, Hsu estimated that showing this more personal body of work in Shanghai would be too politically great uncle’s passion for photography).

Elements of this archive appear in Hsu’s rounded aluminium risky due to the contentious status of the history of the revolution. print Boating Scene – Delete (2019), part of a new body of work Hsu believed that first showing the work in the US would entail its referred to simply as The Shanghai Project, featuring a bucolic boating being read, against the artist’s wishes, as a statement bound up in idenscene with an impeccably dressed family, a rare document of pre- tity politics, so for some time it seemed likely that the project would revolution Shanghai from the 1930s. remain permanently in storage. But Double Ring – Absence (2016), also an when an opportunity arose in Hong By mining a lost experience of Kong, it seemed to make sense. aluminium print, features scanned The Chinese Civil War of the 1940s pages of a photo album, with many familial trauma through digital resulted in mass immigration from of its images seemingly ripped out. communication, Hsu again renders China to the then-British colony; This pictorial absence speaks to technology as a space in which to negoeven now a large part of the city’s the rigorous governmental censorship of the time, as any representapopulation is of Shanghainese origin. tiate identity, the body and history tion of bourgeois life was carefully “This resonates with my own posiand systematically erased by the tion as an Asian American who is city’s Red Guards, as well as the absence of this family history from showing work for the first time in Asia,” he concludes. “I am an Hsu’s own life. Hsu labours these images or absent spaces through in-between, a hybrid of being inside of the outside in China and a variety of present-day scanning, editing and digital reproduction outside of the inside in America, if you will.” ar techniques, accentuating their eeriness as alien historical documents: the layers of affect, lost and retrieved over time.

Tishan Hsu: Delete is on view at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, from 26 March through 25 May How does genealogy and family history translate into data?

As always, it is the circulated information embedded in the virtual Jeppe Ugelvig is an independent curator and critic that constitutes the actual ‘material’ of Hsu’s practice. While his early

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Spring ART FAIR 18 & 19 MAY 2019 10am - 5pm

Ferry Road, Teddington, TW11 9NN www.landmarkartscentre.org 020 8977 7558 LandmarkArts landmarkartfairs Image: Nadia Day

Registered Charity No: 1047080

Art Reviewed

Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity 85

Tracey Emin A Fortnight of Tears White Cube Bermondsey, London 6 February – 7 April Lynn Barber was right when she made this observation of Tracey Emin: ‘If a wound shows any signs of healing, she’ll pick the scab until it starts bleeding again.’ I am reluctant to write this review, because the form tends towards objectivity, and however much I try to separate the critical perspective from the personal, in this case I can’t. When it strikes home, Emin’s work makes it difficult to separate analytical from instinctive responses.

One of the galleries at White Cube’s vast Bermondsey space, rechristened the Ashes Room, hosts a series of paintings in black and watereddown blue acrylic. Dated between 2016 and 2018, they depict the artist’s grief in the immediate aftermath of her mother’s death. Her scrawled lonely figures are accompanied by plangent titles – Emin has said that words give her paintings an ‘edge’ – like Left Ice cold (2018) and Bye Bye Mum (2018). But it was the phrase I was too young to be carrying your Ashes (2017–18) that got to me.

Throughout her career, Emin has made a spectacle of her life and demanded a reaction from her audience, and I was naive enough to think that the traumas she chose to share – her rape, her abortion – could always be viewed from a safe critical distance. But in that moment, in front of that painting and its title, I did not sympathise with Emin. Instead I felt an old rage resurface against the bloated blood-

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red figure carrying the outline of a box, and against the language she uses to describe her pain and mine. It felt the opposite of cathartic – antagonising, even – but at the same time reminded me that anger can be a catalyst for productivity. I watched the other visitors, wondering which of them share Emin’s experiences, whether they resist or embrace her paintings; who might be wearing the same carefully impassive face as me as they circle the vitrines of archive sketches and texts or watch The Ashes (2018), a three-minute film shot in Emin’s dining room, which settles on a wooden box at the head of the table.

Preceding the Ashes Room is an installation of 50 unframed large-format self-portrait photographs, covering all four walls of the smaller of the two ‘south galleries’, where Emin, from the tilt of her camera, stares down at you through bleary, sleepless eyes. On a wall-text outside the room: ‘A deep, deep relentless exhaustion comes over me… No release – every mistake, every minor note of guilt comes back to haunt me.’ Looking at the insomnia etched around her eyelids, I think about how differently we react during periods of grief and mourning, and the kinds of language we use to express our anger, love, desolation. It seems from paintings like I Could Feel You (2018), in which a blue figure looking towards a window that frames the edge

ArtReview

of a church, and I wanted to go with you – to Another world (2018), where a female figure painted in black acrylic wears a cross and a halo, that Emin sometimes turns to religion.

Or at least to religious art: I Prayed (2017) is a small, simple painting that – in the sketched figure kneeling, the one standing and the line that divides the two – calls to mind Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation (1437–46).

Yet Emin is devoted to the physical body, in its capacity to bear as much pain as love, as seen in a second series of paintings lining the corridor and the largest gallery space. Brought together by a vibrant, umbilical-cord palette of pinks, reds, purples and blacks, they nonetheless suffer in the monumental presence of her bronze sculptures. The Mother (2017) occupies her own room, kneeling, head bent, her moulded body bearing the same rough marks of a soft material manipulated and cast as I lay here for you (2018) and When I Sleep (2018). The contrast between the cold density of When I Sleep’s materials and the pathos of its subject, a crumpled figure in the foetal position, makes me soften. I want to lie down, because I am tired. Among the prostrate nudes, violent painterly gestures, provocative titles and theatrical allusions, When I Sleep presents an image of solitude in mourning, and shows how the sharpest edges lie in that silence where language can no longer operate. Fi Churchman

facing page A Fortnight of Tears, 2019 (installation view).

Photo: Ollie Hammick. © the artist / all rights reserved, DACS 2017.

Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

above I was too young to be carrying your Ashes, 2017–18, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 183 × 122 cm. © the artist / all rights reserved, DACS 2017.

Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

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Jessie Homer French Paintings 1978–2018 Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin 27 February – 27 April Jessie Homer French is a half-hidden treasure.

Born in 1940, a consummate Los Angeleno (she and her husband worked in Hollywood on the agency side and apparently knew everyone) and avowed ‘regional narrative painter’, until recently she’s made art below the radar of non-cognoscenti. That Ed Ruscha has admired and collected her work might be deduced from Urban Wildlife (2013), a California panorama stretched to ultra-widescreen dimensions, replete with silhouetted palms and consumed by ruddy wildfire flames. The West’s combustibility has evidently preyed lengthily on Homer French’s mind – see the greyed-out, smokeladen woodland in Prescription Burn 1 (1993), whose burning seems not accidental but preemptive – but so have many other aspects of her locale. Subtly rapturous rhythms of nature, for instance, as evidenced in the spidery traceries of black tree branches that spread abstractedly in front of a pristine white building and deep blue skies in Condo Gothic (2004), or the redemptive aspects of proximity to mortality, as in the pulsing gridded speckle of grey gravestones across a cemetery’s plush hillside in Funeral (1978), with its simple, childlike figures

standing stiffly, staring at a coffin heaped roundly with white and multicoloured flowers in a greensward of death.

Homer French doesn’t usually scout for big subject matter or even an unusual day, rather finding grand dimensions and something like perennialism – usually heralded by a deepseated aptness of composition – in the local, the transitory. Her fondness for angling pulses through Dawn Trout on Rosachi Ranch – East Walker Nevada (1991), with its little school of quicksilver brown fish shimmying leftward amid reeds below lavender-coloured flowers, maybe hollyhocks. The painting instinctively appeals because, in its schematic of stacked levels of nature, it has the innocence and immediacy of a children’s illustration yet is backed up by abstraction-inclined compositional nous. The visible world in these paintings appears continually to be collapsing into conversing pictorial elements, even in the many cases where mankind appears as an intruder, a toxic interference in nature, such as the trio of Stealth Bombers wheeling above a windfarm in Airforce (2014).

Here as elsewhere Homer French pitches her brushwork, which has the calm and guile-

less orderliness of Henri Rousseau, as the signature of a relative naïf; this redoubles both her quietude and distress at human invasiveness. A pair of wall-mounted cutouts of dogs, one of which cradles a skunk in its mouth – Homer French apparently paints other people’s hounds for them, then keeps a duplicate for herself – scans like Alex Katz turning his attention away from people and trees for once, and underscores the air of sylvan civility, not to mention privilege.

But their maker is also capable of beguiling orchestral complexity: Berenice, Montecito Heights (2017) is an aerial view of roadwaystrafed Californian landscape to put up against David Hockney’s Mulholland Drive canvases, an intricate distribution of thoroughfares and low-rise buildings burrowing into bumpy green foliage while a hoary cityscape rises up behind. Cars tootle up one freeway, sodium lights glower on another, the perspective lurches and bucks and you’re here, on a relatively uneventful day, in a Los Angeles half of reality and half of the mind: the painter is clearly devoted to this place, but not blindly. Martin Herbert

Berenice, Montecito Heights, 2017, oil on plywood, 61 × 90 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin & London

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ArtReview

Arthur Jafa A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague 17 January – 31 March This presentation of Arthur Jafa’s touring exhibition, which moves through the Rudolfinum’s horseshoe-shaped first floor, opens with his best-known work: Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016). Already an iconic artwork of its era, this seven-minute film contains short clips from silent movies and later Hollywood films, marches, concerts and sports events, news stories, police dashcams, citizen journalism and Jafa’s own home movies, cut to the sound of Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam (2016). The focus on the materiality of black bodies, as a means of making the seemingly paradoxical political assertion that black people are more than just things, is implied by other works in the show, including Jonathan, Black Flag and Pledge of Allegiance 1848 (all 2017). Each places images of black bodies in white spaces or stories in order, Jafa explains in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in the exhibition catalogue, to produce ‘contextual dissonance’.

Jonathan is a huge, wall-length black-andwhite photograph of the 1970 Marin County Courthouse incident. A nervous, boyish-looking Jonathan Jackson tries to negotiate freedom for his brother George, the Marxist Black Panthersupporting author, by abducting Judge Harold

Haley. George was part of the Soledad Brothers group accused of killing a white prison guard in retaliation for the deaths of three black prisoners some three days earlier. The resulting shootout left four dead, including Jonathan and Haley. Black Flag, a hand-sewn Confederate Flag painted matt black, has the look and feel of a monochrome painting. The flag’s crossand-stars pattern is only revealed, like a hideous secret code, when the viewer adjusts their bodily position. Pledge of Allegiance 1848, meanwhile, is an archival photograph from 1900 showing a group of African-American children collectively saluting the Stars and Stripes as it is held up by a classmate.

In the light of the 841 images featured in the videowork Apex (2013), Black Flag and Pledge… appear as the histories preceding everyday violence against black bodies in the present.

Set to a pounding techno soundtrack where the synth bleeps and bass-drum hits are just out of time with the image sequence, Apex rapid-fires images of fashion shoots, autopsies, celebrities, lynchings, dancers, cartoon characters and outer space, clocking in at a gruelling eight minutes. In London and New York, this exhibition makes viewers reflect on the history of the representation of black lives from the

Atlantic Slave Trade through emancipation, the Civil Rights movement, to ongoing racism and police brutality. The Czech context adds new historical contingencies.

The Czech Republic is founded on a history of suffering under Austro-Hungarian, Nazi and Soviet empires, but a 2015 EQUINET survey showed that its citizens were the least tolerant in the EU towards black people. As in other European countries, though, ‘blackness’– particularly as mediated via hip-hop – forms a part of the accepted popular culture; widespread consumption of images of black bodies and style trends thus coexists with uneasiness about living with real black people. In Prague Jafa’s work produces a new nationally or regionally specific version of contextual dissonance. Here, Black Flag, Love Is the Message… and Apex force the viewer to confront their own, perhaps limited, assumptions about black lives by recirculating the very images that shape those perceptions in a context where they do not have quite the same political significance. The current climate in Hungary, Poland or Slovakia, meanwhile, means this exhibition is unlikely to tour there; just by showing it here, the Rudolfinum is taking a stand. Max L. Feldman

Apex, 2013 (installation view).

Photo: Martin Polák. © Galerie Rudolfinum

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Nicolas Deshayes Swans Modern Art, Vyner Street, London 12 January – 16 February The revelation of hidden structures – of a city, of a body – is something of a red herring in the work of Nicolas Deshayes. His previous show at Modern Art saw him pump hot water through a network of wall-mounted pipes interrupted in places by foamy, intestineshaped sculptures that functioned as heaters (the title, Thames Water, pointed to his channelling of London’s public water supply). The slick, shiny surfaces of the 25 small earthenware sculptures in this new show, installed on waist-high plinths or hung at eye-level, pushes the investigation into the lavatorial realm, summoning the kitschy, intimate world of a private bathroom.

A quick scan of the room reveals familiar shapes, some evoking functional appliances – sinks, toilet covers, hand dryers, a tissue box – and others suggesting body parts – buttocks, breasts, a bloated belly – with the occasional surprise inclusion, such as a large, ripe-green avocado half. But on closer inspection things are not quite as easily categorised: a recurring

disjunction with the expected colours, forms and textures messes with one’s first assumptions. Hung by the gallery entrance, the twopart Fresh Towels (all works 2018) looks initially like casts of the front and back of a wall-mounted hand dryer, yet in that flesh colour, they also suggest the curves of a body, the back part of the cast in particular evoking a pair of cheeks on a Playmobil doll. A standing sculpture resembling a protruding belly might – on second thoughts, and after looking up its title (Spud) – simply recreate the shape of a potato.

The sculptures were all made using slipcasting, a technique associated with the mass production of ceramics, in which liquefied clay is poured into a plaster mould: when the defining outline has dried, the remaining clay is poured out. In Deshayes’ recourse to industrial or mass production techniques and materials, as well as in the pared-down aesthetics of the works and their presentation, there’s a distant echo of Minimalism’s formalist approach (a lineage perhaps intentionally hinted at

by the gallery’s concurrent presentation of Charlotte Posenenske’s cardboard modules in the upper gallery). Yet the works’ sensuality, taunting playfulness and referencing of the most basic details of our daily lives feel refreshingly free of deadening conceptual rigour and rigid principles.

If anything, displayed neatly against the pristine walls of the gallery, these objects seem to deliver a tongue-in-cheek comment on our contemporary obsession with cleanliness – and its inherent relegation of bodily functions to the abject, to be concealed – by elevating and celebrating the objects’ triviality. The titular pair of Swans – each reduced to a white ovoid base, with a long tubular neck resting on top of it – occupy an isolated plinth, flaunting their immaculateness. Another such sculpture, painted in warm brown, seems to have had its purity compromised; Kensington reads the title, suddenly conjuring the chic tint of leather – beauty is a matter of expectation.

Louise Darblay

Fresh Towels, 2018, glazed slip-cast earthenware, 9 × 64 × 40 cm. Photo: Ben Westoby. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art, London

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ArtReview

Anne Imhof Sex Tate Modern, London 22–31 March ‘This is how you make the meaning, you take two things and try to define the space between them,’ writes Richard Siken in ‘You Are Jeff’ (2008), a poem linking motorcycle crashes with sex and death. I think of these lines during Anne Imhof’s Sex (2019), a four-hour performance across Tate Modern’s vast subterranean tanks, not only because of the motorcycle helmets scattered about, or the duochrome paintings in the yellow-andblack of a speedway, or the lingering scent of oil in a dark antechamber, but also because, watching two of the fifteen performers joined in an after-hours waltz, I find myself considering the energies that join opposing forces.

At the onset of the event, the crowd moves anxiously through these circular ex-industrial spaces, hunting out performers. A long pier cleaves the first tank in two, raising the audience above the action. Distant club music resounds, strobe shatters the atmosphere, and three white beds mounted atop thick beams act as stages and resting places, hosting Eliza Douglas as she delivers an opening dirge. At the room’s exit is a photograph of black mountains and a burning horizon, tipped on its side. The unearthly, vulvar image anchors Imhof’s inquiry into the physical and psychological properties of the sublime.

In the second tank, the audience roams below another pier as if trawling Brighton Beach, but the steel catwalk, security turnstiles, and encircling glass partition creates an atmosphere of incarceration rather than leisure. The score shifts between the two spaces: composed by Billy Bultheel and Ville Haimala, with contributions by Imhof and Douglas, it lilts into meadowy folk song or dips down into liturgical chanting. Some actions seem spontaneous – one performer smothering another below a gutterlike steel sculpture – while others – a slow whirl or a vicious, twisting dance – recur.

At intervals, members of the company seem to swarm as if controlled by a collective intelligence. Choreographed in part by iMessages sent by Imhof, who circles the performance incognito, the play between direction and improvisation combines with constantly shifting sightlines to heighten our awareness of power as imposed, received or wrested back.

Everyday objects – things that spritz, foam, burn and catalyse – litter the space. Squeezy bottles of Heinz tomato ketchup, cans of London Pride and a graveyard of cracked iPhones create the sense of having entered into a videogame where enchanted items lie

awaiting activation. For all that they suggest the raw possibilities of fucking, these objects imbue Sex’s spectacle with a sense of intimacy.

From another elevated bed, a woman pours a ribbon of sugar between the legs of a boy vaping cotton-candy smoke below. Lifting a burning bouquet like a tired Olympian, Josh Johnson – identifiable from Imhof’s celebrated performance of Faust at the Venice Biennale in 2017 – pauses his loose jog around the room’s glassed-in perimeter to drink deeply from a can of Guinness, using the remainder of its contents to extinguish the flame.

From the three-act Angst (2016) to Faust, Imhof’s performances have been marked by their overarching sense of dread and eroticism, and Sex is unexpectedly melancholic. Engaged in sliding eye-contact and glancing blows, circling before coupling, her performers bring to mind missed connections and dead relationships, intimacies as brittle as they are sweet.

As the troupe wars with padded poles and Bultheel wields a bullwhip dressed in business casual, Sex, it seems, is violence. Yet, as the performance unfolds, an underlying softness is revealed. Emotion surrounds politics like the bloom around a bruise. Alex Quicho

Sex, 2019, performance and mixed-media installation, Tate Modern, London. Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York

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Projections NE Commissions Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle 22 February – The migration of experimental film from the cinema to the gallery has significantly altered – whether for better or worse – the forms that it takes, the histories in which it participates and the audiences that receive it. An innovative programme by Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema seeks to partially redress that balance by smuggling four short moving image works (none running longer than six minutes) into the trailers preceding the screening of featurelength films at cinemas across the country this summer.

The more successful of these four commissions, which I saw at a special screening, work consciously with or against the contexts in which they will be seen. Nestled amidst bombastic adverts for superhero films and vapid Hollywood romcoms, James Richards’s Uncontrollable Universe (all works 2019), with its suffocating attention to symbols of mortality, is liable to unsettle. Opening with a digital animation of a dying white lily, the camera scans across a long, collaged patchwork of black-and-white images hinting at loss or absence – X-rays, medical equipment, old photographs – to the soundtrack of a (seemingly) human voice straining to sing a set of notes.

In its concentrated attention on human fallibility, the work undermines the state

of passive reception of the reassuring fables (of human heroism, inevitable redemption and enduring love) upon which mainstream cinema depends. While Richards is able to draw the spectator into a contemplative state at odds with expectations of the multiplex experience, Evan Ifekoya’s Contoured Thoughts only seems ill-adapted to the form. The work tiles shots of the artist immersed to their neck in a body of water as if they were overlaid windows on a computer desktop, a trope of digital video that makes less sense at the different scale of a cinema screen. The work points – in its formal properties and through a sampled soundtrack – to issues of identity, subjectivity and affirmation, but does little to develop them. Given that these works will reach audiences beyond the small communities that regularly attend art galleries, it felt like an opportunity missed.

The five-minute promotional video is as much the province of popular music as contemporary cinema, and Susie Green & Simon Bayliss’s Big Talk plays like a chirpier cousin to David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes (1980). Based in the North East, the pair (who together make music as Splash Addict) has created a pop video laden with kitschy special effects, in which they seem to move from the audience onto a stage, for a dance track driven by tinny synthesiser effects.

As a work of art the production is slight, but

the urge to transform the cinema into a concert hall and to incite in the spectator even the smallest urge to get up and dance makes for a gentle critique of our addiction to screens (of which cinema was, perhaps, the precursor).

The punkish DIY aesthetic – as far removed from the airbrushed, CGI unreality of Hollywood cinema – is itself a reminder of the fact that culture belongs to, and can be made by, anyone.

The endangerment of communal culture by the Internet and tourism underpins Sophio Medoidze’s Xitane, set in Tusheti in northeast Georgia, a region recently connected to the world by the national government’s implementation of Wi-Fi. The film uses footage of Atengenoba, a traditional festival from which women are largely excluded (and which the artist must therefore shoot from a distance) to consider how progress and progressive principles are at odds with the indigenous cultures that Western tourists (and we can count artists and art audiences among them) are apt to fetishise.

The artist’s ambition strains against the time allotted to the work, and indeed Medoidze reveals in a discussion after the screening that this is itself a trailer for a longer film for which she is fundraising. Like the commissioning project of which it is a part, Medoidze’s work leaves the impression of significant promise yet to be fulfilled. Ben Eastham

Susie Green & Simon Bayliss, Big Talk (still), 2019, video, 6 min 5 sec.

Courtesy the artists

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Carey Young Palais de Justice Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne 17 February – 2 June Carey Young has a talent for appropriating the forms and mannerisms of corporate and institutional culture, turning them back on themselves with absurdist acuity – this is an artist who, in 2001, engaged a corporate speaking coach to train her to be more convincing in delivering the phrase ‘I am a revolutionary’. In recent years her work has turned from corporate culture, via investigations into the legal form of the contract, to the nature of the law itself. The London-based Young hasn’t had a solo show in the UK for some years, so the showing of her 2017 video Palais de Justice is well overdue, especially since, in the two years since it was made, the question of whether sexism is culturally and institutionally ingrained (post-Weinstein and #MeToo) has become a flashpoint.

Palais de Justice starts out in sober documentary mode; projected floor-to-ceiling it opens onto the internal vistas of a vast, neoclassical official building (Brussels’s monumental Law Courts): long static shots, in the echoing ambience of distant footsteps and indistinct voices, of grey marbled halls and grandiose staircases, through which hurry black-gowned figures while security guards stand around.

Soon, though, we find ourselves peering through the portholelike windows of courtroom doors, to witness stern-faced judges listening impassively to the arguments of barristers.

These judges all happen to be women. Given the solemn documentary style up to this point, there’s something out of kilter about this peeping view of an all-female judiciary (Young shot all the footage onsite without official permission) – a deft stroke of selective editing which pitches us from the present into some alternative reality, in which women appear to be in charge of the law to the exclusion of men.

Young’s twisting of reality offers an ironic over-identification with the social justice rhetoric of positive discrimination; most judges are still men, after all, so why not turn the tables – the law run by the matriarchy, not the patriarchy – at least as a fictional thought experiment? But it’s an ambiguous experience.

There’s a certain demeanour to these judges – middle aged, well-groomed, listening intently or impatiently questioning the barristers, who hang on their word or are seen hovering outside courtrooms, waiting to be admitted.

The authority of the law styles people, makes them embodiments of abstracted authority.

Later, Young’s lens focuses on these barristers – younger, confident-looking women – and lingers on their hair, fiddled with or rearranged in idle moments of introspection.

What makes Palais de Justice buzz isn’t so much the dishabituating, therapeutic experience of role-reversal, but the realisation that it may solve nothing. Sure, any complacent male privilege in a viewer gets what it deserves – emasculated and infantilised. But Palais de Justice carries a more ambiguous subtext about the nature of authority and submission to it, more in keeping with Franz Kafka’s strange parable ‘Before the Law’ (1915), which Young references in a photoseries made alongside the video (not exhibited here). These female judges and barristers still carry the aura of the professional, educated elite, regardless of their sex (or race: Young opens her sequence with a shot of a young black female barrister, caught in a moment of impassioned advocacy). But class distinctions and social inequality – which the law makes invisible even as it lays claim to justice – are what lie disavowed behind the distant and silent glamour of these empowered figures. The face of the law may have changed, but it’s still the law. J.J. Charlesworth

Palais de Justice (still), 2017, single-channel HD video, colour, quadraphonic sound, 17 min 58 sec. © the artist. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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Anthea Hamilton Prude Thomas Dane Gallery, London 7 March – 18 May In black-and-white photographs, a naked young man lolls about a modernist domestic interior.

He’s almost part of the furniture, standing calmly beyond a dining table, or with a leg propped at right angles on the rail of a balcony, or slumped on a sofa, or decorating himself with a set of shiny metallic discs (RPD 9, 8, 7 and 2, all 2019). He’s neither macho nor effeminate, just passive: inertia’s his thing.

Inertia is somehow also the key to Anthea Hamilton’s mischievous, witty complication of gender with sculpture’s potency or restraint, in a show that spans Thomas Dane’s two London galleries. In the first (where the photographs hang) are totemlike sculptures on plinths. Carved in fine wood or marble, these are cartoon profiles of a block-heeled chunky shoe or boot, below a wavy-outlined leg (Walnut Wavy Wizened Boot and Wavy Socks and Sandals Boot, both 2019). It might be a woman’s platform-soled boot from the 1970s – it’s certainly no Allen Jones-style fetish stiletto heel. And as the wooden one riffs on Constantin Brancusi’s wavy columns, it’s about as erect as

things get around here; everything else tends towards the soft and the supine.

Hamilton’s comedy of sculptural dysfunction isn’t straightforward. In both galleries are butterfly wing-shaped soft sculptures made of stuffed textile printed with wing designs (Folded Wing Moth, 2019, and Peacock, 2018).

Transposed Lime Butterfly (2019) fragments the image of a whole insect into a kind of kaleidoscopic mosaic. In the larger gallery, another giant butterfly slumps up against the hard angles of a slanted, brushed-steel partition, whose silvery tartan tessellation is repeated around the walls of the gallery as a vinyl, overlaid with bright orange African daisies.

At each turn, then, every claim to the straightforwardly literal presence of solid sculpture is corrupted and messed with, by the infectious presence of imagery printed on soft materials, making a mockery of the sober uprights, verticals and geometrics. Slumping, sagging and sitting win out over solemn postminimalist stiffness; three ceramic-tiled, Tetris-block-like sculptures imply a function as bench, chair and, lastly, sedan

chair – that absurd baroque vehicle in which lazy aristos would be raised on two poles and carried about by hapless flunkies. Even these rigid forms become theatrical pastiches of their dour ancestors.

That this burlesque has some bearing on gender stereotypes is reaffirmed by the show’s giant overseer – a wall-vinyl reproduction of one of cartoonist Robert Crumb’s fantasy-Amazonian women. Fur-covered and grinning as she strides forward in a short white dress, chunky sandal heels and white socks, she’s anything but passive, or asexual, and might be the wearer of the sculptural boots seen earlier.

But Prude’s effect isn’t really a teach-in about imploding gender binaries. Instead Hamilton manages a more sceptical quizzing of the overearnestness of any single aesthetic assertion, of concepts bereft of experience, or, conversely, of the risk of valuing feeling more than thinking – hence the tangle of cliché, digital fakery, domestication and failure at play. If Hamilton is playing the prude, it’s a masquerade against the priggishness of ‘serious’ art. J.J. Charlesworth

The Prude, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Andy Keate. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London & Naples

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ArtReview

Rasmus Nilausen Eye Dialect Team Gallery, New York 24 January – 2 March The Danish artist’s debut outing in New York is a deft, sneakily skilled attempt to prove an uncommon hypothesis: that written punctuation can achieve the status of heroic drama.

Along with a painter’s more familiar tactics and tricks (messy drips, washy brushstrokes), Nilausen smuggles in an editor’s understanding of the gestural power of the parenthesis and quotation mark. Treating the canvas as a page, Nilausen fancies himself a sort of writer – the motif of a disembodied hand bearing a quill recurs throughout – making Eye Dialect’s eight works read like an essay on what it takes to construct an image.

The best appear deceptively provisional, rough drafts improved by the absence of polish and fuss. Signorina Buonasera (all works 2018) is a deep marine-blue rectangle surrounded by a thin red border, two white quotation marks resting at opposing sides of the canvas.

If quotation marks are meant to hold language, Nilausen’s are happily pointless: this pair bounds an ocean of silence. Buried beneath the blue are the outlines of an earlier, aban-

doned composition. It’s hard to make out, but the effaced imagery appears to be a cousin to the nearby Saliva, with its tangle of shapes suggesting chopped-off tongues. That work’s oblique title speaks volumes: a desire to communicate, and a frustration in the face of the blank and mute.

In Dorian’s Dream we get more punctuation unmoored from the words it’s meant to accent and organise. A mismatched set of parentheses hovers in space – wonkily rendered, more like shoddy chevrons or boomerangs – above three dark circles in a row. Such an ellipsis, in ordinary usage, operates in several ways: it can be used to signify that words have been elided from a quote, or it can act in a more loaded manner, trailing off into ambiguous terrain. (Consider the difference between receiving a text message from a friend that reads ‘I’m fine’ versus one that reads ‘I’m fine…’) Here, Nilausen’s painterly usage of the ellipsis suggests the latter – a petering out, a shrug, a suggestion to turn the page.

The stunted, writerly allusions are more explicit in Reflex Edit, which depicts a blank

‘.docx’ Word file glowing on an enormous screen that is held up by two muscled arms. Tiziano Said presents another figure bearing a similarly empty screen, which casts a cone of light across an abstract landscape populated by two anthropomorphic quotation marks (tweaked to resemble a curious set of eyes and a dainty nose). On Writing II, the show’s tiniest work, is a hand grasping for an old-fashioned ink quill that floats tantalisingly out of reach. And if we’re reading this exhibition left to right, as its own sentence, Ghost Writer is a fitting period. (Its whited-out ground struggles to fully obscure the apparently failed, original painting beneath it.) Against this cloudy background another hand appears, using a quill to make a single drippy, inexpert line across the canvas. In the end, Eye Dialect takes its time in winding up a subtle visual pun (the show’s title is itself a layered joke; it’s a close cousin to ‘idiolect’, meaning the idiosyncratic verbal tics a person possesses). Nilausen presents the artist as tongue-tied, totally stuck, yet finding everything he needs in those speechless expanses and pregnant pauses. Scott Indrisek

Reflex Edit, 2018, oil on linen, 200 × 160 cm.

Courtesy Team Gallery, New York

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Jeffrey Gibson The Anthropophagic Effect New Museum, New York 13 February – 9 June Over a raised platform that curves around the L-shaped space of the New Museum’s fifth floor, backdropped by a geometric mural in neopsychedelic colours, five ornate garments are suspended. The stitched tunics are adorned with patterned beads, quills and rattles while slogans including ‘Don’t make me over’ and ‘Stand your ground’ are printed in fluorescent letters onto their wide breasts. The stage suggests that these textiles are costumes for performance as much as artworks for display, which tallies with the literature’s description of The Anthropophagic Effect as a residency as much as an exhibition.

Part of a season investigating the theme of ‘inheritance’, Jeffrey Gibson’s engagement with the museum includes regular performances, photoshoots and lectures alongside objects produced using techniques learned over its course. The process is as much a part of the work as the product, which seems appropriate for a residency-exhibition named after a theory premised on the cannibalisation, digestion and regurgitation of colonial cultures by indigenous practitioners. Among those products are three elaborate ‘helmets’ (according to their listing in the catalogue) exhibited on shelves to one side of the hanging garments, their sweeping

architectural forms built from thatched strips of split reed and artificial sinew.

That the stacked squares on which they are presented call to mind a minimalist sculpture set against a Neo-Geo wall painting is indicative of the cross-pollination of forms and traditions in Gibson’s work (a shifting soundtrack combining pipes, drums and chanting is another).

Alongside the disregard for conventional disciplinary boundaries – between art and craft, artefact and artwork, exhibition and performance – this is further evidence of an attitude towards the interplay of cultures which is fluid, interlinked and fundamentally alive.

Gibson identifies as Choctaw and Cherokee but, having grown up outside those communities, here expresses an idiosyncratic and richly hybridised vision that celebrates heritage while resisting strictly essentialist categorisations of culture and belonging.

Around the corner, in two vitrines, are examples of traditional indigenous handicrafts made during the residency – baskets, necklaces, moccasins and beaded belts – over which hang a small family of what look to my untrained eye like pioneer costumes: prairie dresses and brightly coloured embroidered shirts with full

sleeves and frilled cuffs. The implication seems to be that these emblems of settler culture borrowed techniques from native handicrafts, and thus serve as examples of how those crafts influenced what is now misrepresented as a quintessentially white American inheritance.

The work reasserts that the idea of a monolithic American culture is deliberately misleading – and that it is used to serve nefarious political ends – which isn’t to say that those cultural exchanges haven’t been predicated on violence.

In her catalogue essay, Hélène Cixous draws on Shakespeare’s The Tempest – a play fraught with the issues of art and colonialism – to describe Gibson’s work as effecting a kind of transubstantiation of historical suffering into a new and visionary artform, offering a reminder that culture is at the same time something that we inherit and that we create.

These works also call to mind the doubleedged insight of Virginia Woolf’s statement that it is ‘clothes that wear us and not we them’, namely that while the cultures that art and fashion express might shape our experience of the world we are also able to try them on, adjust them to fit and – if we find them constrictive – change them. Ben Eastham

The Anthropophagic Effect, 2019 (installation view).

Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio. Courtesy the artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, and Roberts Projects, Culver City, CA

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ArtReview

Sarah Charlesworth Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 23 February – 23 March In Paula Cooper’s show of Sarah Charlesworth’s prints from the late-1970s to the mid-1980s is a room of muted explosions: black-and-white scenes of ruptured skies, lone lightning bolts and blast clouds, printed at roughly the scale of a human body. The images both depict these events and mimic them: each torn up and cut into pieces in such a way as to allude to what is represented.

Explosion (1981) presents a reassembled photograph of black smoke and debris clouds on a black mount, each fragment of the original image revealing the rough edges of violent tearing. The work alongside it, Lightning (1981), shows a web of white lighting in an unnaturally black sky: the image is cut into three vertical wedges with a zigzag slice down the centre like a lightning bolt. The effect would blend completely into the photograph except that the edges of the reconstructed print don’t quite line up, leaving an uneven gap that skews the boundary of the picture against a white border.

These details reveal the images to also be objects, handled, torn and manipulated, betraying Charlesworth’s process. Like other artists of the Pictures Generation that emerged in New York at the beginning of the 1980s, Charlesworth (who died in 2013) considered photography as

a problem her work confronted rather than simply the medium in which it was realised.

The exhibition focuses on the series InPhotography (1981–82) – named in reference to Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) – and Red Collages (1983–84), smaller works named for their bright-coloured backgrounds.

Charlesworth often used found imagery to make silhouettes, stencils she’d place against other pictures, reading images through each other to enhance or reframe the original source material, a practice she refined with In-Photography. Café Aubette (1982), for example, depicts the winding staircase in the Strasbourg café redecorated by Theo van Doesburg, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp. The stairway is only visible through a construction of blocklike blue, red, yellow and orange rectangles, which together make up the outline of Vilmos Huszár’s gouache-on-cardboard Figure Composition for a Mechanical Theatre (1923). The coloured shapes glued onto the surface of the print and matching coloured frame – also evoking the De Stijl movement of which van Doesburg was a founder – give the already layered print its tactile heft. Red Collages furthered this practice, using clipped images from newspapers and magazines, hand-cutting,

cropping and collaging the pieces into pasteups with backgrounds of commercial graphic papers commonly used for magazine layouts.

One of the most striking, Rider (1983–84), shows actress Natalie Wood through the outline of the Marlboro Man, an icon of masculinity.

Grouped together, the Red Collages demonstrate the power of appropriated commercial images and graphics.

In her 1982 artist’s book In-Photography, which includes both Explosion and Lightning, Charlesworth queries the notion that photography impartially documents the world by asking, ‘Or did a person create the infinite perfect just-so-ness of the world that arranges itself before its avid lens?’ Paula Cooper’s spotlight on two lesser-known series, with the addition of examples from her popular Modern History (1977–79) and Stills (1980) series, illustrates her early engagement with questions of photography’s objectivity, a concern that remained throughout the artist’s career. By scattering works from In-Photography throughout the space, this exhibition shows how Charlesworth integrated emerging media and photographic theory into works replete with visual references, colour relations and conceptual problems. Megan N. Liberty

Construction, 1983–84, cibachrome with lacquered wood frame, 52 × 40 × 3 cm. © the estate of the artist.

Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 24 November – 28 April It would be easy to miss them: a windmillshaped sculpture not much bigger than a clothing hook suspended from a high corner of the gallery; small metal balls balanced on narrow ledges, visible only if you lean over a parapet; under a flight of stairs, a pile of purple sticks.

Slight, light as air and near invisible, Peter Robinson’s 18 metal sculptures (This place displaced, 2018) are scattered throughout the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, which hosts the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT).

They are subtle either in form or placement.

Those in plain sight are so slender that it takes a moment to figure out if they are wires leaning against walls or painted black lines. Others draw attention to forgotten nooks: a mezzanine, a corner, a window ledge. At first glance, these works resemble purely formal concerns with perception and activating new relationships with space. But given their subtle takeover of a state institution, and Robinson’s background as a New Zealander artist of Maori descent interested in bicultural identity, they also carry a more political message: how the minimal and marginal can reframe, disrupt or resist.

Unobtrusive, even self-effacing, these artworks could be a metaphor for APT’s curatorial ethos. The event historically forsakes a theme and aims, simply, to create ‘a space for engagement with the contemporary art of the region’, according to the catalogue’s lead essay, by head curator Zara Stanhope. This is a vague, low-key formulation. Retiring, even. But not entirely directionless.

The first APT was launched in 1993 to foster economic and cultural ties between Australia and the Asia Pacific, and its geographical reach remains broad, featuring more than 400 works by 82 artists and artist collectives from more than 30 countries. These include abstract paintings by Mongolian artist Enkhbold Togmidshiirev incorporating horse dung and sheepskin; largescale woodcut prints from a punk-rock-loving art collective based in Sabah, West Malaysia, called Pangrok Sulap; and from Arnhem Land, in North Australia, we have Margaret Rarru’s bathi mul, sooty woven baskets coloured with a rare black dye.

To an extent, the absence of an explicit theme is refreshing. Its hands-off humility marks a change from the flashy, high-concept curatorial auteurship that seeks to characterise a period or a region in a certain way. Audiences

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may feel freer to interpret the artworks free of an overarching theoretical framework, and at its best the show generates its own leitmotifs.

For example, Zahra Imani’s handstitched fabric portraits and Aisha Khalid’s depiction of the Quran’s gardens of paradise showcase the subversive potential of textile art. Imani captures funky, private moments with female protagonists that upend conservative mores in Iran, such as a panel showing a woman dancing in front of blindfolded male musicians (Raqs No. 2, 2016), in apparent defiance of the country’s Islamic laws. Suspended from the ceiling, Khalid’s Water has never feared the fire (2018) looks, from the front, like an exquisite five-metrehigh, three-panel tapestry with elaborate gold embroidery of dragons and phoenixes. Yet its verso reveals that the motifs are not made by gold thread but rather by the heads of thousands of long gold-plated pins that pierce the fabric, creating rugs at once sculptural and dangerous.

The show interrogates its own position without ever being incendiary. Contemporary power structures are interrogated in Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s oil-on-linen mind map exposing political and financial flows between the military, state agencies and corporations in his native Myanmar (Myanmar Peace Industrial Complex No. III, 2018); Vincent Namatjira’s portraits of the seven richest people in Australia (The Richest, 2016), the seven past prime ministers (Prime Ministers, 2016) and seven elders from the Aboriginal local government area where he lives, Anangu ¯ Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (Seven Leaders, 2016), expose the place of Australia’s First Peoples in these hierarchies.

It niggles that some of the selections are conservative, perhaps because the museum has one eye on acquiring its commissions. How many people, I wonder, want to see another Qiu Zhijie map, a series so long-running and institutionally adaptable each iteration seems generated by algorithm? Another issue is APT’s strong sense of centralised control and a lack of bold strokes, compared to the edgier, roving, multivenue, grassroots biennales that have sprung up in the region (Jakarta Biennale and Bangkok Biennale, for example). The perception that the triennial is more interested in fair representation and diplomacy than making provocative statements isn’t helped by the clean-cut, World Expo-type display of artefacts.

ArtReview

But the event is saved from piety by its spirit of discovery. Gems include joyful and racy photographs by Okinawa’s Mao Ishikawa, now in her sixties, documenting the postwar American occupation of the Japanese island.

Her boldest subjects are the local women working in the segregated bars for black US servicemen during the 1970s, captured in bed with their African-American boyfriends, dancing or cheerfully flashing a boob or two. South Korean dancer and choreographer Jeong Geumhyung, meanwhile, crosses fitness or rehabilitation machines with humanlike forms to create uncanny hybrids: these become her partners in videos in which she performs as nurse, trainer or sexual partner.

Nor is APT’s inclusion of crafts and aesthetic expressions from diverse locales dutiful, sentimental or tokenistic. Instead, it often engages meaningfully with underrepresented regions.

Take the multifaceted spotlight on Bougainville, an autonomous region in Papua New Guinea ravaged by a ten-year civil war and with barely any cultural infrastructure. Part of the more conventional country showcase is on notable artists from the islands: Herman Somuk (1901–65) and Gregory Dausi Moah (1911–88), whose paintings capture the experiences of indigenous rituals, colonialism and social change. But another prong of the engagement is the collaborative Women’s Wealth project with women from Bougainville and some Solomon Islands. In workshops starting in 2017, the participants created ceremonial hoods, mats, bags and baskets, and the final display is a show of cultural resilience and the outcome of a sustained process of engagement with the community.

Credit should be given to APT’s long-term vision of a free exchange of ideas, culture and community; a certain old-fashioned neighbourly spirit. As the pioneering largescale regular event to focus on Asian art and to group it with the Pacific, it lacks eye-catching flourishes such as an immoderate number of curators or a novelty theme – but who knows? This old venerable might undergo a snazzy makeover in future.

For now, at the risk of sounding kumbaya, during these shouty, fractious times of rising nationalisms and trade wars, I appreciate its attempt to connect to different communities and practices, and to bring them under one roof in an atmosphere of quiet hospitality. Adeline Chia

top Peter Robinson, This place displaced (detail), 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Natasha Harth.

Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne

above Mao Ishikawa, Red Flower: The Women of Okinawa (detail), 1975–77, gelatin silver print, 15 × 23 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Nap Gallery, Tokyo

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Books Publishing Manifestos Edited by Michalis Pichler The MIT Press and Miss Read, $29.95/£24 (hardcover) A manifesto must, by definition, be published to qualify as a manifesto. Otherwise it’s just a particularly insistent note-to-self. So it follows that a manifesto published by a publisher should be the conceptual pinnacle of the form: Publishing Manifestos, an anthology of 77 artoriented publishers’ manifestos spanning over a hundred years, puts this to the test.

The book is an expanded version of a catalogue of sorts for the tenth anniversary of Berlin’s Miss Read art fair in 2018. Supplementing statements from participants in the fair with historical examples of the form, the book is a patchwork of perspectives on contemporary printing, book-making and artist ephemera. This isn’t, it should be noted, a comprehensive guide, but a loose chain of influences, running from Gertrude Stein to artists currently involved in publishing such as Mariana Castillo Deball, via Riot grrrl and the Situationists, sprouting countless other references and footnotes on the way. Such collections typically include a few witty aphorisms, like John Baldessari on why artists should publish: ‘Every artist should have a cheap line. It keeps art ordinary and away from being overblown.’ His entry appears within a poll of artists’ opinions on books, first published in 1976 by Art-Rite, and

one of the retrospective highlights of this anthology. Elsewhere, Constant Dullaart offhandedly sums up some of the underlying problems in what’s at stake, in publishing online and off: ‘To select what we want to have read, and by whom, is our greatest challenge rly.’

Publishing Manifestos is presented chronologically, which means that the more considered reflections on the philosophy of publishing come first, followed by a deluge of rushed responses to editor Michalis Pichler’s call for contributions. Pichler’s choices locate the defining concerns of contemporary art publishing in issues of appropriation: publishing is after all a medium of reproduction, and so the endless replications of the Internet are a natural extension of DIY and self-publishing possibilities. The Conceptualists loom over the book – not only because Lawrence Weiner and several reworkings of Sol LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1969) feature here, but more in its focus on written texts as the primary form of artist publishing.

This is nonetheless a good start for the disoriented art reader, capturing a set of perspectives among the proliferation of transient artists’ publications. It throws up gems like Tan Lin’s ‘Disco as Operating System’ (2008), which play-

fully suggests the sampling and endless rhythm of disco as a methodology. The inclusion of Hito Steyerl’s ‘In Defence of Poor Images’ (2009) and Seth Price’s ‘Dispersion’ (2002), however, seems misplaced – not simply because both essays can readily be found online, but because that means of free distribution was part of their point, in part betrayed by ossification in this kind of cataloguing endeavour.

Pichler makes clear in his introduction that the history of publishing is defined more by exclusion than anything else. That feels like it’s intended, in part, to deflect criticism that this collection keeps largely to Western perspectives and known histories, beyond the inclusion of groups such as Egypt’s Mosireen, Bombay Underground and Cassava Republic, an Africafocused publisher of novels by authors such as Teju Cole, as well as children’s books. But if we’re enlisting more traditional publishers, then why stop there? Yet rather than comprehensiveness, the book drives towards the everreceding horizon of publishing’s potential, which no manifesto can or should contain.

Or as Jorge Luis Borges states in his ‘On the Cult of Books’ (1946), included here, the ‘incessant book is the only thing in the world: more exactly, it is the world.’ Chris Fite-Wassilak

Ai Weiwei: Beijing Photographs 1993–2003 Ai Weiwei, Stephanie H. Tung and John Tancock The MIT Press, £58 / $75 (hardcover) It’s hard not to be cautious about celebrations of famous living artists, and easy to be sceptical of a book whose subject declares in the opening quote that ‘books are easy to handle, there’s an intimacy of scale to them’ when the book itself weighs in at a coffee table-straining three kilograms.

But if there’s a hint of self-mythologisation to Ai Weiwei: Beijing Photographs 1993–2003, its 613 photographs retain the value and interest of historical documentary. If you had to come up with a more evocative title, it would probably be Becoming Ai Weiwei. Because Beijing Photographs brackets the decade in which Ai, returning from his desultory self-exile in the US in the 1980s, would establish himself as a key player and

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interlocutor in the embryonic network of Chinese artists trying to make sense of how to make art in the years after Tiananmen Square. It’s the story of Ai mediating the conceptual and critical rigour of the Western art he had encountered with the restless desire for political change and greater cultural freedom at home.

Selected from some 40,000 images in Ai’s archive, they illustrate a narrative set out in two (somewhat deferent) essays and an illuminating and forthright in-conversation with the artist. The contrasting aspects of Ai’s life are dramatic – snaps of Ai’s ailing father, the Communist intellectual Ai Qing, persecuted throughout his life by the party yet cared for

ArtReview

in a hospital for its high-ups; images of extreme body performances by Zhang Huan, chained to the rafters, dripping blood; shots of Ai giving everything the finger (the Study of Perspective series) and smashing antique Chinese urns; visits by architects Herzog & de Meuron (with whom Ai would collaborate on Beijing’s ‘Bird’s Nest’ Olympic stadium), curator Harald Szeemann and other enthusiastic Westerners. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young iconoclast: energetic, ambitious, critically self-aware and (though this is never acknowledged) peculiarly well connected, at a moment in Chinese art when everything was up for grabs, for those ready to go for it.

J.J. Charlesworth

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Im Heung-soon: Toward a Poetics of Opacity and Hauntology edited by Lee Jungmin National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, KRW 20,000 / €20 (softcover) In ‘learning to live’ we must ‘learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship… To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with-them,’ explains Jacques Derrida in the lecture that would come to define the concept of hauntology. ‘Being-with spectres’ is about paying respects to ‘a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’, and taking the responsibility of ‘those who are not there, of those who are no longer’.

Filmmaker Im Heung-soon weaves together the experiences and stories, recollections and ghosts, of a contemporary Korean society defined by its commitment to ‘being-with’ its collective past traumas of war, colonisation, uprising and dictatorship. For Im, this state of perpetual mourning, this preoccupation with memory and the payment of respect to Korea’s ghosts (the dead, whose histories have been buried, and the living, who are unseen or forgotten), is a symptom of the unresolved divide between North and South. And so hauntology has become a way for the filmmaker to understand and record this trauma through ruptures in time: interviews with survivors of war are set along-

side dreamlike reenactments by actors (often women), as in his latest film, Things That Do Us Part (2017), which tells the story of four grandmothers who lived through the 1945 partition.

This monograph is the first in a series of ‘Artist Studies’ published by the Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, in which academics, artists and curators contribute essays and interviews on a single artist’s oeuvre.

Addressing his influences, academic Moon Young Min identifies Im as a ‘Post-Minjung’ artist – that is, positioned somewhere between the socially engaged Minjung Movement’s two offshoots: that which glorified the common people and gained institutional recognition, and that which criticised the first as naive and complicit. Seo Dongjin characterises the films as a combination of mnemonic and historical documentary, and notes, pertinently, the function of two Korean words related to memory: gyeongheom, the function of retrieving data stored in the unconscious; and cheheom, memory triggered by the senses.

The concept of opacity describes, in relation to Im’s works, the scenes in which memory fails or is distorted and things remain unclear.

The failure of fragments of interviews, shots of landscapes and objects, reenactments and found footage to resolve in a coherent narrative requires that the viewer piece them together. Yet as artist and curator George Clark paraphrases Édouard Glissant, ‘to understand a thing is not to make it transparent’, and Im’s commitment to the opacity of personal memory is also noted by Osaka Koichiro, for whom the artist ‘assumes the role of a careful listener to his subjects’.

But isn’t the opacity that Im’s films maintain threatened by such a comprehensive study of his work? A fictional interview with the artist sees filmmaker Park Chan-kyong not only ventriloquise Im’s answers to his questions but also speculate on what he must be thinking in the course of the interview: ‘The artist thinks that this talk has gotten too conceptual.’ It’s a satisfying way to treat an artist who inhabits the voices of those who are forgotten as a way of ‘being-with’ them, and to reveal his anxieties over whether his work is seen to use ‘moral authenticity’ as a means of justification: ‘All at once, the artist can forgive all of those inhospitable questions. He is sincerely thankful. He feels a sense of relief.’ Fi Churchman

Modern Art

by J.K. Huysmans, translated by Brendan King Dedalus Books, £10.99 (softcover) Ambitious young writers have always used art criticism to carve out their own reputations.

The trick is to identify an artist early and stake your claim, hoping to advance and then bask in the glory of their fame (which is why artists, too, are advised to court ambitious young critics).

As the romantic era shaded into the modern, Parisian novelist J.K. Huysmans was looking for the artist who might express a rapidly industrialising, increasingly urban society: Émile Zola had already pinned his colours to Édouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire, who introduced the search for a ‘painter of modern life’, had plumped for Constantin Guys. To make absolutely clear where he stood, Huysmans was also eager to broadcast his disdain for the official culture of kitschy mythological paintings, ‘miraculously banal’ panoramas and ‘deplorably sentimental’ portraiture showcased each year at the Salon de Paris.

So it’s fun to walk with him, in this collection of his reviews, around the ‘official salons’

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of 1879 (‘I hate with all my might the majority of paintings exhibited’), 1880 (‘mediocrity is in operation this year, more furiously than ever’), 1881 (‘even more laughable than those of previous years’) and 1882 (‘I will restrict myself to citing a few works that cannot be confused with the worm-eaten fruits of this bargain basement’).

And difficult, even with the benefit of hindsight, to disagree with the invective he pours all over academic painters that few outside the dustiest art history departments any longer remember.

More illuminating of modern art’s early years, if less straightforwardly entertaining, are the chapters devoted to the satellite events now known as the fifth, sixth and seventh Impressionists exhibitions. Huysmans is an enthusiastic if not unqualified supporter of its experiments, confidently diagnosing Impressionism’s wilder colour schemes as symptomatic of a ‘sickness of the retina’. Yet in his descriptions of Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas – whose

ArtReview

The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (ca. 1880) is ‘the only really modern attempt at sculpture I know’, and who is Huysmans’s pick in the horserace for best French artist of the era – is a reminder of how radical this work was, and how writers contributed to its ultimate acceptance.

Huysmans writes of how much he hates the ‘mystifications of great art, those bags of hot air’ and the most enduring lesson of this volume is how valuable it is to resist the received wisdoms of academic art – whatever form it takes – and celebrate creative expressions that may be less thoroughly theorised but are nonetheless more compelling. In 1880, aggravated by the official salon’s bromides, he instead directs the reader onto the streets to admire Jules Chéret’s designs for the Folies Bergère, finding ‘a thousand times more talent in the least of these posters than in the majority of pictures I’ve had the sad privilege of reviewing here’. For all that his peers may have taken this for hyperbole, the judgment is vindicated by history. Ben Eastham

Ă— Conversations with Zach Blas, Marc Davis, Shezad Dawood, Stefanie Hessler, Sebastien Noel, Lucia Pietroiusti, Samuel Solnick, Marina Warner, Wendy Wheeler modernforms.artreview.com

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery

Words on the spine and pages 21, 41 and 85 are from Against Nature (À Rebours, 1884), by J.K. Huysmans

Talk, 1989, performance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo: Kelly & Massa Photography. Courtesy the artist

on pages 101 and 104 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

April 2019

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Behind the headlines On 1 October 1960, the Federation of Nigeria gained independence from the United Kingdom. The edition of Art News and Review (then fortnightly) that came out on 24 September made no mention of the imminent event. Its front page was a hymn of praise to British painter Alan Reynolds, who had recently summoned the ‘moral courage’, as writer Pierre Rouve put it, to move from landscape painting to abstraction, despite the popular and critical acclaim those landscapes had garnered him. As Nigeria turned its back on the Empire (but not on the Queen, who remained head of state), Reynolds was turning his back on his admirers. In a curious way it tells you everything you need to know about why art and politics don’t mix. And yet, tucked away on page five of the issue was a review of an exhibition at Victor Musgrave’s hip and happening Gallery One in London. ‘Susanne Wenger is a European artist’, began Dennis Duerden, ‘and yet for ten years she has been quite at home in Nigeria. This is a very paradoxical situation…’

He went on to compare Wenger’s experience to Paul Gaugin’s in Tahiti and Emil Nolde’s in New Guinea, arguing that Wenger had done better ‘by meeting some outstanding personalities in Yoruba culture who are as conscious of a decline in their values in their society as European artists are conscious of the neglect they suffer in their own’. In the cult of Obatala, Wenger had found ‘a society in which art, everyday life and religion are inextricably mixed’. Duerden never mentioned that Wenger might have been ‘quite at home’ for the past decade because Nigeria had been colonised by Europeans since the nineteenth century.

And he never mentioned its impending independence.

This was not because he was ignorant of any of this. Born in 1929, Duerden had, for some time, served as an education officer in the Nigerian colonial service, becoming assistant curator at the Jos Museum in central Nigeria during the mid-1950s, before returning to Britain to head the Hausa section of the BBC World Service. He published several books on West African art and culture, and built an important audio archive of interviews with African writers, artists and musicians (the majority of which is in the collection of the British Library, London). This was linked to the CIA-financed Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF, founded in 1950, a brainchild of the US National Security Council), which aimed to be a gathering point for (anticommunist) European

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intellectuals during the cultural Cold War. A National Security Council directive on propaganda claimed that it was most effective ‘when the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own’. (How much artists and editors knew about the source of the CCF’s funds has not yet been fully established.)

Duerden had been approached by Melvin Lasky, the American editor of the CIA-financed London literary magazine Encounter, about broadcasting English-language material from London to Africa as part of the CCF’s propaganda mission. Duerden reported that there was not a high level of trust in the CCF in Africa and that the success of such a venture might be limited. The CIA nevertheless committed to funding it on a minimal level via Duerden’s Transcription Centre (which he had founded in 1962 to provide tapes featuring dialogues between writers, musicians and artists for African radio stations).

Located next to the ICA in London, it developed into a key meeting point for African artists and intellectuals. During the course of the 1960s, funding became more difficult as the US focused its attention on perceived communist threats in Europe and Southeast Asia, and by 1970 Duerden departed for an extended sabbatical, going on to write more books and lecture on African arts and artmaking in general. He died in 2006.

Born in Graz in 1915, Wenger had studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. When she published her surreal drawings in Otto Basil’s journal PLAN, in 1943–44, they were denounced as the work of a ‘mentally abnormal person’. She went on to design the first cover of the communist children’s magazine Unsere Zeitung in 1946. In 1949 she met and married the linguist Ulli Beier, following him, when he got a job as a phoneticist, to Ibadan, Nigeria. By 1959 she had divorced Beier (who had founded the literary magazine Black Orpheus in 1957, also funded by the CCF and at one point edited by future Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka, a close friend of Duerden’s), joined the Yoruba religion (which, by then, was declining in popularity thanks to the efforts of Christian missionaries to wipe it out), married a local drummer named Ayansola Oniru, become a priestess and a notable restorer of sacred shrines. As Nigeria divested itself of Europe, Wenger was becoming increasingly invested in Yoruba tradition. She founded the New Sacred Art movement, which aimed at expressing the holistic, animistic worldviews of the religion and preserving traditional craft techniques. A staunch environmentalist, she went on to become a protector of the neglected Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove on the banks of the Osun River, which became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. Wenger, who had adopted the name Adunni Olorisha, died in 2009.

In 2002 the curator Okwui Enwezor included her work in the exhibition The Short Century – Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, finally placing Wenger in a context that Duerden, for whatever reason, was unable to. ar

Photograph taken at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

Participating Galleries # 303 Gallery 47 Canal A A Gentil Carioca Miguel Abreu Acquavella Air de Paris Juana de Aizpuru Helga de Alvear Andréhn-Schiptjenko Applicat-Prazan The Approach Art : Concept Alfonso Artiaco B von Bartha Guido W. Baudach elba benítez Bergamin & Gomide Berinson Bernier/Eliades Fondation Beyeler Daniel Blau Blum & Poe Marianne Boesky Tanya Bonakdar Bortolami Isabella Bortolozzi BQ Gavin Brown Buchholz Buchmann C Cabinet Campoli Presti Canada Gisela Capitain carlier gebauer Carzaniga Casas Riegner Pedro Cera Cheim & Read Chemould Prescott Road Mehdi Chouakri Sadie Coles HQ Contemporary Fine Arts Continua Paula Cooper Pilar Corrias Chantal Crousel

D Thomas Dane Massimo De Carlo dépendance Di Donna E Ecart Eigen + Art F Konrad Fischer Foksal Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Fraenkel Peter Freeman Stephen Friedman Frith Street G Gagosian Galerie 1900-2000 Galleria dello Scudo gb agency Annet Gelink Gladstone Gmurzynska Elvira González Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Bärbel Grässlin Alexander Gray Richard Gray Howard Greenberg Greene Naftali greengrassi Karsten Greve Cristina Guerra H Michael Haas Hauser & Wirth Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Herald St Max Hetzler Hollybush Gardens Hopkins Edwynn Houk Xavier Hufkens I Invernizzi Taka Ishii J Bernard Jacobson Alison Jacques Martin Janda Catriona Jeffries Annely Juda

K Kadel Willborn Casey Kaplan Karma International kaufmann repetto Sean Kelly Kerlin Anton Kern Kewenig Kicken Peter Kilchmann König Galerie David Kordansky KOW Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Nicolas Krupp Kukje / Tina Kim kurimanzutto L Lahumière Landau Simon Lee Lehmann Maupin Tanya Leighton Lelong Lévy Gorvy Gisèle Linder Lisson Long March Luhring Augustine Luxembourg & Dayan M Jörg Maass Kate MacGarry Magazzino Mai 36 Gió Marconi Matthew Marks Marlborough Mayor Fergus McCaffrey Greta Meert Anthony Meier Urs Meile Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Massimo Minini Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash

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Mnuchin Modern Art The Modern Institute Jan Mot mother‘s tankstation Vera Munro N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nagel Draxler Richard Nagy Edward Tyler Nahem Helly Nahmad Neu neugerriemschneider Franco Noero David Nolan Nordenhake Georg Nothelfer Nathalie Obadia O OMR P P.P.O.W Pace Pace/MacGill Maureen Paley Alice Pauli Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Francesca Pia Plan B Gregor Podnar Eva Presenhuber ProjecteSD R Almine Rech Reena Spaulings Regen Projects Rodeo Thaddaeus Ropac S Salon 94 Esther Schipper Rüdiger Schöttle Thomas Schulte Natalie Seroussi Sfeir-Semler Jack Shainman ShanghART Sies + Höke Sikkema Jenkins Skarstedt

SKE Skopia / P.-H. Jaccaud Société Pietro Spartà Sperone Westwater Sprovieri Sprüth Magers St. Etienne Nils Stærk Stampa Standard (Oslo) Starmach Christian Stein Stevenson Luisa Strina T Take Ninagawa Tega Templon Thomas Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Tornabuoni Travesía Cuatro Tschudi Tucci Russo V Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Van de Weghe Annemarie Verna Susanne Vielmetter Vitamin W Waddington Custot Nicolai Wallner Barbara Weiss Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube Barbara Wien Jocelyn Wolff Z Thomas Zander Zeno X ZERO...

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