ArtReview Summer 2020

Wiping away the tears since 1949

Tai Shani

Solidarity Mark Manders Queer Mail

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PS81E STEFAN BERTALAN, MARTIN BOYCE, MATTI BRAUN, AA BRONSON AND REIMA HIRVONEN, ANGELA BULLOCH, NATHAN CARTER, ETIENNE CHAMBAUD, JEAN-PASCAL FLAVIEN, CEAL FLOYER, SIMON FUJIWARA, RYAN GANDER, GENERAL IDEA, FRANCESCO GENNARI, LIAM GILLICK, ANDREW GRASSIE, ANN VERONICA JANSSENS, GABRIEL KURI, JAC LEIRNER, ARI BENJAMIN MEYERS, ROMAN ONDAK, PHILIPPE PARRENO, UGO RONDINONE, CHRISTOPHER ROTH, ANRI SALA, KARIN SANDER, JULIA SCHER, DANIEL STEEGMANN MANGRANÉ, TAO HUI JUNE 16 – JULY 25, 2020 TUE – SAT 11 AM – 6 PM POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

ArtReview vol 72 no 4 Summer 2020

Goo goo g’joob Isolation. Solidarity. Civic duty. Self-preservation. Social responsibility. Social distancing. These are some of the words that have been bouncing around like tennis balls hitting the walls of ArtReview’s isolation chamber these past couple of months. Always careening off along a series of seemingly random trajectories. They’re hard to escape. The word-balls. They boom through the TV screen, scream from the radio and squawk on social media. None of them are new.

What’s new is to see them bundled together, in a continuum, in which they all somehow coalesce to mean the same thing. Saving myself means saving other people. Whom I should in any case avoid. Saving myself means saving the health service. Which is nevertheless there in case I need it to save me. Which to some degree implies that I am the health service, or more generally that we are all in this together. Even as it emerges that some of us are not. Not that ArtReview is a person, of course. It’s an idea. More precisely, a collection of ideas.

The rarefied world of art has also been quick to adopt a rhetoric of togetherness, expressed, at its best, with charitable schemes such as Between Bridges’s 2020Solidarity project, various grant and funding schemes, and a rather belated embrace of the digital sphere that has seen, among other things, huge amounts of videowork made available online. Digitisation means democracy. At the same time as it means VIP previews of virtual or digital art fairs. Whatever they are.

For more on the digital stuff, you’ll be wanting to check out ArtReview’s brand new website (if you haven’t, shame on you), which is now home to movie clubs, exclusive columns, musings on art’s handbrake turn to the digital and the

Coping

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virtual, video reports, highlights from the archive and much, much more. Truth be told, you can get lost in it for hours. This, however, is for those of you whose eyes are tired of the screen. Feel the weight of the paper in your hands. Feel the sunlight on your face, and… well, anyway, it’s good to be out again.

The different trajectories of the word-balls never seem to make any coherent sense (and, let’s face it, everyone is interpreting them differently, dictionaries are being rewritten, definitions stretched), which is often the way when you try to make sense of the present. Unless, of course, you can connect it to the past. Or, at least, try to figure out how the tennis balls got put in motion in the first place.

And the answer to that, ArtReview would like to point out, is not simply ‘Wuhan’.

But answers, of course, are not why we look to art. At least, they’re not why we look to art again and again. If it does anything, art gathers us round a thing that might just allow us a better sense of who, what and when we are. A better sense, at least, than that offered by balls fired at us out of nowhere.

Coming together takes many forms: now that postal services in the US and the UK are facing existential threats, Oliver Basciano looks at the role they played in the development of mail art and how this artform allowed individuals to connect and queer communities to develop across geopolitical boundaries.

What possibilities the practice of solidarity might contain for artists, and, indeed, how it might be put into practice in the first place, is something that Dave Beech tackles in a brief history of its deployment in contemporary culture. But being alone (if it’s not enforced) goes hand-in-hand (so to speak) with being together; so, tracking that other trajectory is Ben Eastham, who considers the role of interiority (trust ArtReview on this one, it’ll work for those of you who are fed up with being stuck inside too) as a fundamental quality of art. Fi Churchman uses a trip to a prelockdown exhibition of photographs by artist-activist Claudia Andujar to argue that photography has the capacity to expand art’s potential beyond cathedrals of culture and into the lay space of everyday life. And cover artist Tai Shani, no stranger, after last year’s Turner Prize, to acts of solidarity herself, combines trajectories that draw on the personal, the mythological, the cryptic and the literal in the script for her latest work.

The thing about the (imposed) feeling of being in this together is that it continues to mask various forms of inequality and prejudice, as we’re seeing at the time ArtReview writes this: Minneapolis burns; politicians invent ever newer forms of truth; and statistics for COVID-19-related deaths among BAME groups indicate a proportionally higher fatality risk, as is the case with those we have made institutionally poor. There’s a huge gulf between I and we. Perhaps necessarily so: that’s why we use different words. And while art’s not going to solve any of that, it perhaps provides a sphere in which other ways of being together can be thought through, or explored. In the end, though, and not to mince words (although ArtReview’s contributors may feel that’s one of its editors’ specialities), when words are becoming increasingly meaningless, this issue is about the ways in which art, those producing it or getting lost in it, can tease out various kinds of meaning. Each, of course, in their own way. ArtReview

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Nathalie Du Pasquier Yin Xiuzhen Loie Hollowell Online Exhibition Series June – July, 2020 pacegallery.com @pacegallery

Jeffrey Gibson Fall 2020

ROBERTS PROJECTS

robertsprojectsla.com Photo Courtesy John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

The Absence of Mark Manders Bonnefanten 02.04.2020 — 08.23.2020

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Zeno X Gallery

Gallery Koyanagi

Art Previewed

Hanging on the Telephone

by Patrick Langley 22

The Interview Josh Smith

by Ross Simonini 30

The Pleasures of Home Viewing

by Ben Eastham 24

Coming Up

by Martin Herbert 38

Rainbow Unbowed

by Oliver Basciano 28

page 30 Josh Smith, Untitled, 2019, monotype on Somerset paper, unique, 94 × 69 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & New York

Summer 2020

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Art Featured

Mail Art Revisited

by Oliver Basciano 46

Making Art vs Market Research

by Ben Eastham 64

The Crisis of Solidarity

by Dave Beech 52

Claudia Andujar

by Fi Churchman 68

Tragodía

by Tai Shani 56

Mark Manders

by Craig Burnett 76

page 46 The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant documentation (detail), 1971, The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant winner, Marcel Dot, gelatin silver print, 25 × 20 cm.

Photo: © Vincent Trasov. Courtesy the Estate of General Idea and Esther Schipper, Berlin

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Art Reviewed

COMMENT, EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 96 Goodbye to All That, by Martin Herbert Billie Zangewa, reviewed by Daisy Sainsbury Ida Applebroog, reviewed by Tom Denman Day Whatever, by Mark Rappolt K, reviewed by Barbara Casavecchia Desire at a Distance, by Martin Herbert Eduardo Paolozzi, reviewed by Pádraic E. Moore Week Whatever, by Mark Rappolt Juan Luis Moraza, reviewed by George Stolz Theft and Destruction, reviewed by Phoebe Blatton

Gone Fishing, by Martin Herbert Week Wherever, by Mark Rappolt Beyond the Black Atlantic, reviewed by Emily McDermott Beyond Measure, reviewed by Stefanie Hessler The Days Before Yesterday, by Martin Herbert Month wtf, by Mark Rappolt Toward Freedom, by Touré F. Reed, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth John Cage: A Mycological Foray, edited by Ananda Pellerin, reviewed by Oliver Basciano BACK PAGE 118

page 96 Sandra Mujinga, Nocturnal Kinship (detail), 2018, performance. Photo: Raimund Zakowski. Courtesy the artist, Croy Nielsen, Vienna, and The Approach, London

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ArtReview

JOAN MITCHELL Garden Party, 1961-62 Estimate $4,000,000–6,000,000

AUCTION NEW YORK SUMMER 2020 SOTHEBYS.COM/GINNYWILLIAMS ENQUIRIES +1 212 606 7254 1334 YORK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10021 #SOTHEBYSCONTEMPORARY © ESTATE OF JOAN MITCHELL SOTHEBY’S, INC. LICENSE NO. 1216058. © SOTHEBY’S, INC. 2020

DOWNLOAD SOTHEBY’S APP FOLLOW US @SOTHEBYS

Art Previewed

More absorbent 21

When he was twenty, Alexander Graham Bell, the elocutionist’s son who would later invent the telephone, trained his family’s Skye terrier to pronounce the sounds ‘oo ah oo ga ma’.

Credulous witnesses interpreted this as evidence that the dog could ‘talk’. During our respective quarantines, I have been calling my ninety-yearold grandmother’s landline daily. She doesn’t have a mobile or a computer, so it’s the only way to reach her. I often catch myself, at the start of our conversations, echoing Graham Bell’s miraculous mutt: “How are you, Grandma?”

Phones offer access to voices and people we wouldn’t hear from otherwise. In 1968 the artist and poet John Giorno set up a phonebank in New York, called Dial-a-Poem. People could call a number and hear randomised recordings of poetry readings, political speeches, Buddhist mantras, rants and songs. By distributing live poetry beyond the confines of the avant-garde recital – Giorno liked to claim that Dial-a-Poem helped inspire the internet – the project offered the frisson of intimate, immediate access to a cultural figure who one might ordinarily never encounter in person, let alone have a phone call with. A caller might find themselves with Allen Ginsberg in their ear, proclaiming about “a telephone link to all the hearts of the world beating at once”.

‘Telephone’ is a portmanteau of the Greek for ‘far’ and ‘voice’. However thrilling it would

Sounding Off

A performance in South London leaves Patrick Langley hanging on the telephone

Walter De Maria, Art by Telephone, 1967 (installation view, When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, Fondazione Prada, Venice)

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be to have a direct line to a famous poet, it jars to feel so near to an absent person about whom you care. (Kraftwerk put the paradox succinctly: “You’re so close but far away / I call you up all night and day”.) The very first words transmitted via a proto-telephone, in 1876, in Graham Bell’s Boston laboratory, sought to close the distance between speaker and listener. ‘Mr Watson, come here – I want to see you,’ said Graham Bell into the mouthpiece, summoning his assistant from next-door. When I speak with my grandmother, her soothing, raspy burr and her wicked, snickering laugh are so faithfully reproduced that I never ask for visual proof that it’s really her. That what reaches my ears in response is a facsimile of her voice – Graham Bell’s invention converted sound waves into electrical signals, which were sent down a telegram wire and converted back to sound at the other side – never registers in my experience of the call.

I sometimes wonder if I should exercise greater suspicion. As John Barron aka David Dennison aka Donald Trump knows better than many, phones can be a scam-artist’s signature instrument. You don’t need a slick suit and a beguiling smile, just chutzpah and a plausible accent. That such dishonesty is commonplace points to the trust we instinctively place in the voices we hear on the line, particularly those we know best. Describing how testosterone injections changed his voice during his gender

transition, the philosopher and curator Paul B. Preciado observes that the phone, that ‘faithful emissary’, began to betray him. ‘The voice is the mistress of truth,’ he writes. Yet, when his mother fails to recognise his altered timbre on the phone, he wonders: ‘Am I really her child?’

The phone can be used to deceive; equally, it can reveal more than we intend.

For the phone phreaks of the 1960s and 70s, telephone networks offered opportunities for wayward engineers – a young Steve Jobs among them – to beat telecoms companies at their own game, while for postmodern theorists of later decades, the phone became an emblem of schizophrenic society. Yet neither of these histories has helped me understand why, despite the sudden and not entirely welcome ubiquity of Zoom video-conferences, the humble landline continues to feel so vital. Under quarantine, I’ve found that the qualities that used to give me a disproportionate sense of stage-fright – a variation on the panic that can attend public speaking – are now the source of its most urgent appeal. Given the multitude of pop songs about answer machines, lost numbers, hotline blings and so on, it’s perhaps surprising how few artists have followed Giorno’s example and adopted phones as a medium. When they do, it can be memorable.

Back in 2013, the artist Angharad Williams performed her work Breezer in a South London gallery. She asked a member of the audience for their phone number – cue nervous side-eyes and awkward titters – then promptly left the gallery and called the mobile number of one of the audience members from the park outside.

Having been left nonplussed by her departure at first, the group of us, maybe 15 strong, huddled

around the device. As she walked around the park, Williams read a text about a teenage girl taking her first sip of Bacardi Breezer. Filtered by the iPhone’s tinny speaker, overlaid with buffeting sounds of wind and playing children, Williams’s voice sounded fragile and whispered, like a late-night answerphone message. The phone’s sonic qualities, which emphasised the seductive sibilance of the artist’s delivery, felt doubly apt: a nostalgic evocation of the fumbling, desire-filled chats I used to have on brick phones when I was the same age as the girl in the piece. By requiring that the audience twist their necks and bend their ears towards it, the phone further subverted the expectation of spectacularism that attends so much performance art. The environment felt so close – so private – that I remember feeling mildly scandalised to be sharing the experience with other people. The phone, that technology of breathy answerphone messages, of whispered, late-night chats, of hearing the voices of loved ones and knowing they are safe, held the audience transfixed – until, abruptly, the artist hung up. The performance was all the more forceful for being so quiet: for drawing us into the paradoxical scope of a close but distant voice.

top Angharad Williams, The Last Resort, 2018.

Courtesy the artist above Alexander Graham Bell’s first public demonstration of the telephone – a long-distance call placed in the presence of Queen Victoria, January 1878

Summer 2020

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The memoirs of an art critic should ideally include a chapter in which the adolescent narrator wanders into a small gallery in a rundown neighbourhood. A conversation with the gallerist should segue into a vernissage, at which the aspiring writer should meet a cast of colourful artist types who introduce him to the avant-garde and substance abuse. At a later point they should die, leaving the critic with the duty of writing them into art history and securing his own place in it. Alternatively, it should feature a formative journey with a college roommate to Italy, in which case the chapter should climax in a transcendent experience of art at the Uffizi and a tearful commitment to the lifelong pursuit of beauty.

At risk of plot-spoiling my own memoirs, my originary experience of art was colouringin a patchwork elephant on the kitchen table.

My Year One classmates misread the homework assignment, whether through literalism or laziness, and filled in their printed templates in monochrome pencil grey; I painstakingly outfitted mine in a harlequin coat of many crayons, and was rewarded with an exhibition on the pinboard at Droitwich Library.

My formative experience of a museum came on a school trip several years later to Tate Liverpool, during which the advertisement to my fellow pupils of any transcendent experience of art would have had damaging consequences for my social prospects.

In the absence of revelations likely to interest a major publishing house, I first got into art as a result of its overlaps with the other forms of culture in which I was interested – music videos and poetry, independent films and album covers – and then, fatefully, art magazines. Which is to say that my foundational

Unprogrammed

Lockdown, and the pleasures of home viewing, remind Ben Eastham of how – and why – he first came to art

top Chantal Akerman, No Home Movie (still), 2015.

Courtesy Doc & Film International, Paris above Haris Epaminonda, Chimera, 2019, digitalised Super 8 film, colour, sound, 34 min 15 sec. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia; Casey Kaplan, New York; and Rodeo, London & Athens

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experiences of art were mediated, solitary, contaminated by other disciplines and took place at home. So our current circumstances do not, in the context of my engagement with visual culture, feel like a privation to be endured so much as a return to source.

Without downplaying the horror of the wider situation, I must confess to enjoying this aspect of confinement. Having never shaken a provincial’s suspicion of the metropolitan artworld’s tendency to dress up networking, sex and social climbing as some kind of mystic intellectual communion, I have always been wary of the saw that art can only properly be experienced in person. This auratic pronouncement often masks the aristocratic conviction, laid bare in the artworld’s society of private views and dinners, that art is reserved for those who live in the cities where it is exhibited, have the resources to own it or were brought up within its codes. This emphasis on personal interaction translates into a community in which individuals’ conspicuous presence – and the ability to identify the right people and endorse their opinions – is valued over the less visible and more independent pursuits of reading, thinking and making.

A reproduction in print or onscreen might not perfectly communicate the experience of a painting, but the notion that this disbars the viewer from responding to it emotionally or intellectually is idiotic. Besides which, some forms of art benefit from their transferral into media that can be enjoyed at home. Take for example the artist film programme currently being exhibited by This Long Century, to which I was alerted by the indispensable ICA Daily email. A refreshingly uncomplicated organising principle – 30 moving-image works divided into two programmes, titled ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ – presents artists, filmmakers and artist-filmmakers including Ben Rivers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jodie Mack. One pleasure of the format is the opportunity to spend time with works previously encountered only in passing, or in contexts unsympathetic to the work. My first experience of Haris Epaminonda’s

dreamlike collage of found footage Chimera (2019) at last year’s Venice Biennale, for example, was undermined by its being screened in a crowded room, off a corridor filled with curators being insincere towards one another. I can now watch its 35 minutes from start to end on my sofa, without interruption by air-kissing.

I can sit through John Smith’s great oneliner OM (1986) with a cup of tea and a biscuit; squeeze in Caroline Monnet’s Mobilize (2014) while dinner is in the oven; connect my laptop to the television and settle into Beatrice Gibson’s A Necessary Music (2008). These conditions are not as perfectly controlled as the artist might wish, nor do they work to the advantage of every piece in the selection: Margaret Salmon’s intimate two-channel film I you me we us (2018),

top Sara Cwynar, Red Film (still), 2018, 16mm film transferred to video, colour, sound, 13 min.

Courtesy the artist and The Approach, London above Darren Bader, video file (BTD) (still). © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London

Summer 2020

for instance, is diminished by its transference from 16mm onto video, and the absence of a projector’s whir and the cut of its beam through the darkness. But even in this case the damage is not fatal, certainly no worse than seeing a sculpture reproduced in a book and resolving to seek it out at the next opportunity.

How art will survive commercially in whatever new reality lies over the horizon is a different question, of course, and to browse David Zwirner’s commendable Platform London initiative is to be reminded of how dramatically installation shots fail to generate the rarefied atmosphere on which galleries depend when setting their prices. Yet it also alerted me to Sara Cwynar’s Red Film (2018), a short video in which the Canadian artist tells a story about the semiotics of red until she’s blue in the face. The piece works in this context because it adopts, in order to critique it, the visual language of advertising that has for decades been beamed into our living rooms via commercial television.

To watch Cwynar’s work on a small screen at home complements rather than compromises her message. In fact, so much moving image is now edited on laptops, using materials culled from open online sources and appropriating the aesthetics of videogames or video-sharing platforms, that its display on wall-hanging screens in pristine galleries can seem perverse.

Darren Bader’s video file (BTD), part of an intriguing if inconsistent ‘group show’ hosted

by Washington, DC’s Von Ammon Co., feels designed to be chanced upon during an idle browsing session. Not to mention that its parenthetical acronym – Bored To Death –

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suggests that the artist might have been responding to the same psychological circumstances in which his work is now being discovered.

Online viewing has other benefits. Watching Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015) via the BFI Player, I was troubled by the faint memory of having briefly seen, or been told about, a video essay by Moyra Davey weaving reflections on motherhood into an homage to the Belgian filmmaker. So, when the film ended, I typed the question into a search engine, and was directed to a screening of Hemlock Forest (2016) on Vimeo. Now, I thought as I watched this collage of literary fragments and memoir, I am curating my own programme! Davey’s meditations on identity formation then reminded me that Metro Pictures is screening Isaac Julien’s Baltimore (2003), which led me via Melvin Van Peebles to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

I’m drifting through the modular architecture of an archive containing more art than any museum could hold, generating my own connections! Art and life are reconciled on my kitchen table! So why didn’t I do this before? Well, partly because galleries weren’t making so much material available online, but largely because I was on the underground coming back from a Chantal Akerman screening at the BFI. The commissioning editor of this article pointed out in our preliminary conversation that experimental film moved into screenings in contemporary art galleries in search of an economy to support it, and might end up moving out of it again as a consequence of the current crisis. It might be that the pandemic has comparable impacts on the exhibition of art in other media, prompting a shift away from open-plan spaces into the kind of portable and immaterial media that can be enjoyed in the safety of one’s own home.

As others have pointed out, galleries and museums might now devote more resources to delivering art to people rather than requiring people to come to them, not abandoning art in three dimensions but reconsidering how it is encountered. Instead of confronting visitors with the bald fact of, let’s say, a Joseph Beuys installation and asking them retrospectively to work out the complex social, historical and political context on which its meaning depends – a strategy often ill-suited to contemporary art, and which provokes much popular resentment

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top Caroline Monnet, Mobilize (still), 2014, 16mm film, 3 min. Courtesy the artist above Moyra Davey, Hemlock Forest (still), 2016, HDV, sound, 41 min 15 sec. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York

ArtReview

towards it – it is tempting to imagine a situation in which museums shift their attention to framing their collections online using a combination of images, video and text. Visitors to less crowded institutions might then plan to spend time with works they are more likely to find rewarding, much as when I first entered the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna I made a beeline for the Bruegels by which I’d been obsessed since whim-purchasing a mouldering volume from my local second-hand bookshop.

I like experiencing art at home via print and online media, at least as a complement to experiencing it directly. It works against the recent tendency towards presence and spectacle, and against the preciousness fostered by the white cube: broadly speaking, art is robust enough to survive not only translation into a portable, reproducible and affordable medium but also the distraction of my flatmate boiling the kettle. It is democratic: I don’t go to the Tate because I like peering through crowds of people to see a Matisse that was intended to decorate a drawing room, I go there because I don’t have a Matisse or a drawing room in which to hang it.

It relieves art of at least some of the barriers of class and inherited taste that protect it. Yet while I would maintain that you do not require access to either the in-crowd or a universal museum to engage meaningfully with the products of visual culture, this doesn’t diminish the fact that I miss talking about it with my friends. As soon as some form of normality has been established, I’ll plug my laptop into the projector, buy some beers, get them round. We’ll watch a film together, and call it a transcendent experience of art.

#maspemcasa masp

@MASP 9+ 1. Amedeo Modigliani, Lunia Czechowska, circa 1918, collection MASP 2. Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1880, collection MASP 3. Artwork by Luciano Costa selected for MASP’s drawing at home challenge 4. Édouard Vuillard, The Flowered Dress, 1891, collection MASP 5. Abraham Palatnik (1928-2020) 6. Marta Ichakerian, Untitled (Glass Easels at MASP’s Picture Gallery), 1970s, collection MASP 7. Paul Cézanne, Paul Alexis Reading a Manuscript to Zola, 1869-70, collection MASP 8. Claudia Andujar, Yanomami, 1974, collection MASP 9. Rubem Valentim, Composition 12, 1962, collection MASP 10. Sandro Botticelli, Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John The Baptist, 1490-1500, collection MASP 11. Repost @bradesco MASP Áudios 12. Tarsila do Amaral, The Doll, 1928, collection Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel 13. Édouard Manet, The Amazon— Portrait of Marie Lefébure, 187075, collection MASP 14. Daniel de Paula, Field of action, field of vision, 2017, collection MASP 15. Arthur Timótheo da Costa, The boy, 1917, collection MASP

Av. Paulista, 1578 masp.org.br

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The myths that have grown up around rainbows are numerous and diverse. A bridge to the ancestors in Japanese tradition, to the gods in Norse mythology; the king of heaven’s bow symbolising war in Hindu lore, a malevolent serpent in Australian Aboriginal thinking.

Yet in Western culture the rainbow is more likely to represent freedom and peace, adopted by hippies and the gay-liberation movement alike. The Judeo-Christian God created the rainbow as a promise that he would never again visit the earth with a catastrophe the size of the Great Flood. Well, God-given or not, the world is facing a huge test in the face of the new coronavirus, and once again, at least in Britain, people, specifically children, have turned to rainbows as a symbol of solace.

On the quiet residential streets of lockdown London, it can seem that every house and flat in which a child lives has a homemade work of art depicting a rainbow taped in the window. Some are just the felt-tip or colourpencil squiggles of a restless toddler, others more ambitious: I’ve seen paper collages, textile works, papier-mâché sculptures, Lego models and painted murals. Each creation a testament to the anxiety of isolation or the tedium of social distancing, each a tribute to medical staff who are still out there working.

It was an initiative originally encouraged by schools, before taking on a life of its own, the rainbow registering as a modern folkmotif. That they are made by children makes it hard to be cynical about this display of mass unity in the way that one might be about the weekly ritualised clapping for key workers (adequate funding for the NHS would be the

At Home

From Norse mythology to British windows, Oliver Basciano examines the enduring symbolism of rainbows

Ugo Rondinone, Our Magic Hour, 2003, installed atop the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, as part of the artist’s 2017 exhibition your age and my age and the age of the rainbow, on ongoing project initiated in 2014.

Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin

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best applause, after all). It’s a sentiment (one you may think sentimental, of course) I felt for Ugo Rondinone’s project your age and my age and the age of the rainbow (2014–), which I saw in its 2017 Russian incarnation, for which the artist had invited children with disabilities from across the country to draw rainbows, the results then reproduced on a vast billboard outside Moscow’s Garage Museum. For Rondinone the rainbow has been a recurring obsession of some 30 years, used in sculptures, architectural installations and neon works backgrounding enigmatic phrases such as ‘Dog Days Are Over’ and ‘Our Magic Hour’. The Swiss artist’s your age and my age and the age of the rainbow therefore read as something more than the normal lip service to public outreach or educational engagement, a gesture instead steeped in generosity. For Rondinone, speaking in 2014, ‘It’s the spectrum of colours so it means everything and just encompasses everything. It’s a sign that everybody can recognise [and] I like that there’s no mystery about it.’

This accessibility and universality as an image no doubt explains its appeal to the children of Britain: a signal of proximity at a time when presence is forbidden. The rainbows often face each other across streets, each creation sending a greeting in the place of the children who cannot. So while the rainbow has long attracted artists in the romantic tradition for its mysterious nature (the poet Keats protested that the science of Isaac Newton would ‘unweave a rainbow’), here it’s the common qualities of the symbol, its memelike ubiquity, that are the draw.

London’s V&A museum has started to gather examples of this vernacular phenomenon as part of their policy of ‘rapid response’ collecting, yet it will be a wasted institutional memorial if these paper rainbows are no more than tokens of a passing moment. Rainbows have also historically heralded a new start – again, the Great Flood in the biblical telling – and it is this message that should really be taken from their collective use. ‘She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the overarching heaven,’ wrote D.H. Lawrence in The Rainbow (1915). Lawrence was talking about sexual liberation from the confines of a suffocating society – a Victorian sensibility that dissipated in the aftermath of another cataclysmic period, the First World War – but his words can be easily recontextualised for 2020, where once again we should look to build something new out of the ashes of a global catastrophe.

Handcrafted rainbows spotted across London during spring 2020. Photos courtesy the author

Summer 2020

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Josh Smith in the basement of his live–work space in Brooklyn.

Photo: Ross Simonini

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ArtReview

The Interview

by Ross Simonini

Josh Smith

“I try to be a good artist, and to be a good artist I think you have to feel like you’re falling”

Seven years ago, I sent an email to the painter Josh Smith to ask about a possible interview.

Four years later, I received a one-line response: ‘I will do the interview sometime if you like’.

From that moment, it was another three years before we were able to find an afternoon to meet this past winter.

As we discuss in the following interview, Smith is resistant to socialising, and prefers to spend long stretches of time in his Brooklyn home, a largely windowless warehouse he’s transformed into a live–work complex.

Throughout the building’s two storeys, he’s set up several spaces for his art: a workshop for building, a ceramic studio with a kiln, a casual studio, mostly used for storage, and a primary painting studio with a ping-pong table, “for exercise”. The house also contains multiple lounges, kitchens and a large art

collection, which includes a piece by Mary T. Smith (no relation) in the bathroom, and a living room tiled with Haitian paintings.

On the day we spoke, Smith’s studio was empty of new work, but I was able to flip through a few stacks of paintings from the various series he’s made over his career. There were some grim reapers, tropical sunsets, fish, devils and monochromes, all rendered in his loose, full-armed strokes. Not present was his early work: the abstractions, the canvases he uses as palettes or the paintings of his own name, the ‘signature’ works that are most often associated with his success.

Smith usually paints in batches of highly specific, simple subject matter – fruit, animals, landscapes, myths – which often have the appearance of being made feverishly and in the pursuit of honest, unmediated expression. He works

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in this same way across collage, bookmaking and clay, using seemingly arbitrary content as his engine for accreting material. Taken together, his work suggests one man recreating the fundamentals of painting.

For our interview, we settled into his library, walled with grey metal shelves and filled with books: art, fiction, poetry and history. In the middle of our talk, he pulled down a monograph of some American Colonial painters and opened it to a portrait of George Washington

by Gilbert Stuart. “I wish I could do portraits,” he said, “but I’d have to be more patient.”

After the interview, Smith brought me down to the basement, where he grows an impressive variety of leafy green vegetables.

For ten minutes, he carefully snipped until he had stuffed a plastic baggie filled with lettuces and chards, which he gave me as parting gift.

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Locked In

RS Do you consider your personality as it relates to your painting?

RS What is it about the outside world that feels unattractive in these periods?

Ross Simonini We’re sitting in this library, surrounded by books, almost all of which are artbooks.

Do you read these or just look at the pictures?

js Well, I spend long periods of time alone, like maybe months. Sometimes I won’t leave my studio for six months.

josh smith Mostly I just look. You know how you read an artbook: you open it, you look at a picture, you read what’s around the picture, then you kind of lose interest. And there are periods where I read a lot. Like a lot. But that’s when I’m not smoking, not using, you know, any pot or anything.

RS You won’t leave this building?

js I just don’t feel like I have the time to engage in it. It’s like fasting or something. So, for the last show I did in New York – which was in May or April – I wanted it to be very good, so I had to focus. But I feel like all the shows could be my last show. There’s times when you’re a little more easygoing about it, but in New York, I feel like there’s so many artists and so many galleries, and my peers are here. And I don’t want them to think that I didn’t do the best that I could.

RS Smoking isn’t good for reading? js Not even a little. I get hung up on every word and everything becomes so intensely interesting for me that I can’t make any progress. But other times, I’ll take a load of artbooks upstairs and read.

RS You get your input from books. js Yeah, because you need gas to keep going.

I mean, you can see from the books around us, it’s a collage of everything I love.

RS Do you read non-artbooks? js What I like to read about is other civilisations and history. I love South American history and indigenous history. All the people who lived in America way before us. I listen to a lot of audiobooks when I work. I think that’s just a great gift. That technology. I can just really learn so much. It’s like a child – having someone read something to you. I listen to a lot of nonfiction, but I can’t really do fiction when I’m working. Nonfiction books, you can miss a little bit here or there and it doesn’t matter so much. You can tune out. But in literature, the whole thing is so considered and thought out. In my life, I would never have time to read thick books about the Aztec culture. But on an audiobook, I can. And I mix it up with music too.

RS Like what? js I would say pretty much exclusively a synthetic type of hip-hop music. I don’t like very folky music in the studio. I also like 8-bit stuff a lot. I like to feel like I’m punching when I’m working, so mostly I like Southern and New York rap. These people are so young, and there’s such fresh energy in it. I think of those people like painters.

RS How so? js Just the way people dress and the way they develop personalities. The casualness of it. It’s like they’re pulling stuff out of the air, out of the back of their brain, and for me, all of that can be applied directly onto the canvas.

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js That would be like a worst-case scenario, and it’s not healthy. So yeah, you kind of get delusional a little bit. Like, I know I’m not some rap guy, but you kind of lose touch with reality. I love that. I think that’s a luxury, but when you do go back out into the world, you realise how fucked up you are, ’cause you don’t know how to talk to people.

RS Does good work come out of these periods? js Of hiding out? Yeah. I have to do it to get my work done. Ideally, I’d be more of a person who works a few hours a day and then goes out for drinks with friends. But I have a social problem. I know really great people and I know this city’s teeming with wonderful people, but I don’t know how to access them necessarily. I have to work a lot to make sure that my work is really good. I don’t clock out.

I call work being “locked in”. I’m not painting like all the time. I just, it’s just locked in, like, just waiting for work and thinking and digging around. It’s a lifestyle. I don’t have any responsibilities. I don’t have a family. I like to stay up all night when I’m working, because you’re the only person in the world at night.

You don’t hear the cars outside or anything.

I try to be a good artist, and to be a good artist I think you have to feel like you’re falling.

Like you’re kind of slipping and falling. It’s uncomfortable and it’s kind of a sick lifestyle.

RS Are you most happy when secluded? js You haven’t seen me during these phases, like you’re seeing me now. In hindsight, yeah, there’s nothing like going into your studio with two bags of Fritos and six Red Bulls. And then, you know, you just work all night and just – you’re by yourself. I like to get stuff done.

But then again, you emailed me years ago and it took me many years to write back. But I mean, I’m not a jerk. I’m just in a spiderweb. I’m not a spider. I’m just trying to avoid being eaten by myself. Eaten up! I mean, how do the great artists get it done? There’s also a lot of tricks that people do, and I don’t want to do those tricks.

RS Like what? js Settling into something and making a run out of it. Going your whole career doing one thing. It drives me insane that some artists are just repeating themselves over and over.

I think it’s conservative.

ArtReview

RS Do you enjoying showing work? js I think I like to show off. I want a receptive audience, and I don’t like mediocrity.

RS Do you just exhaust yourself? Is that why you feel like it’s your last show? js I mean, I also try to make work that is really bad, you know, like bad enough that it could go either way. I did a monochrome show, for instance, and I’m fortunate, ’cause I can roll through things. And a lot of artists don’t have the agility. But I don’t think I’ve closed any doors for myself. It would be hard for some people to change, and I can change.

RS You’re rejecting the outside world in your personal life, but reacting against it in your work. js I can spot trends really easily. And I don’t like trends. You know, people getting in other people’s footsteps too much. Like I don’t think that’s why you should come to New York. Make your own footsteps.

RS Is selling your paintings a way of being social? js I try to make my work so that it’ll appeal to a lot of different people: kids and adults.

I want people to look at my work and understand exactly how it was made. I mean, ’cause you can see all the brushstrokes. I like my work a lot. It’s the thing I like most about myself. Really. I love the idea of my work in homes. I was in DC recently for tourism and went to all these museums, and all that stuff was protected. The stuff that we’re seeing, the old stuff, it went into the homes of wealthy people and managed to survive. Like, I love eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century American art. This country was just being made, and the art survived all that. And there were only a few painters, you know, you could count them on two hands. And it still looks so fresh.

Big Love RS Do you ever show paintings that you don’t like? js Why would I show anything that I don’t like?

That seems cynical.

Untitled, 2019, oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm.

Photo: Farzad Owrang. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & New York

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above Untitled, 2019, monotype on Plike paper, 83 × 31 cm.

Photo: Farzad Owrang. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & New York

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facing page Josh Smith: Life, 2020 (installation view, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich).

Photo: Stefan Altenburger. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & New York

ArtReview

RS Or maybe it’s an act of honesty, which is something you seem to value in your art. You’d be showing work that is not necessarily an expression of greatness, but an expression of failure, or falling, as you call it, which is a way of being vulnerable. js A lot of my work does illustrate my depression, especially the abstract paintings. I think abstract paintings are a supreme artform, but I don’t know if that’s really true, aside from a few artists in the middle of the last century. I think there’s still a lot of space there, that there’s still another step there that can be hammered down.

RS Do you look at contemporary work? js I don’t know how helpful it is to see that much contemporary art. I think it can really hurt you to see earnest people kind of missing so clearly. It bothers me. You know, the art, the energy expenditure and art materials, and you could see they’re trained well and everything, but they’re just missing. It kind of eats me up.

It makes me feel guilty.

RS How much time are you spending in the studio? js Oh, probably about every day. Twenty minutes at least. But a lot of times I just come and get one of these racks and fill it up with books and bring it upstairs, just to learn.

RS What are you learning now?

js How to take care of my body. So I’ve been reading a lot of books about health. I’m getting old and I don’t feel that good. No one teaches you diet and exercise in school.

RS Upstairs, in the studio, there’s a ping-pong table.

You said you use that for exercise? js Yeah, I try. I try to use that. I lost a lot of weight, and now I’ve gained it back.

RS On purpose? js I think it was just stress. I lost like 60 or 70 pounds. And then when I saw people again, I think it scared them, you know? I looked so different. So I don’t want that to happen again.

RS Are you still a vegan? js Yeah. I’ve been a vegan for nine years.

But I started thinking maybe I was depriving myself, ’cause I’ve been feeling so tired, just fatigued. So I don’t know. I love being a vegan, but it makes social stuff really hard – not drinking and being a vegan. The only thing I don’t like about it is the word vegan. It’s a stupid word. It’s sharp.

RS You told me that you use psilocybin mushrooms as a way of helping when you socialise. js Yeah, like, you go out, you just take a little bit, and you’re just more relaxed. I wish I could

Summer 2020

do it more often. You know that you get a tolerance for that stuff really quickly. You can’t do it every day.

RS Does it help with your depression? js Yeah, it does. I mean, I assume everybody has depression a little bit. I don’t want to say mine’s worse than anybody else’s, but Jesus, I think maybe mine might be worse than other people’s. I just think too much about things.

And when someone does something mean to me, I just don’t understand it. I’m a coward, so I just keep myself out of the line of fire. I just put it in the art.

RS Do you think that you are progressing as an artist? js That’s such a good question. No. I think I’m the same artist. I think I’ve picked up more confidence. I’ve got better art materials, you know, brighter colours, and I’ve gotten more time. I think I’m the best artist that I can be for now, but I don’t think it’s good enough. Or else I would stop. I mean, the proof is someone like Jasper Johns or Louise Bourgeois. When I see an eighty- or ninety-year old artist that’s still doing stuff that’s fresh, I realise I haven’t even started yet, you know? But I have turned through some stuff pretty quickly.

RS Are you improving as a person?

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js I think I’m a much worse person. Or maybe I’m just hurt. I think I have a good heart, but I’ve lost my inner child. And that’s the quest I’m on now, to try to find my inner child again.

I mean, I’m such a loving person, and I would do anything for anybody, but I’ve been hurt by people. They’ve done mean things to me that I don’t understand, and I’m not feeling like calling them out on it. So I just like internalise it all. I’m not really into forgiving shitholes.

RS Maybe the forgiveness is for your sake, not theirs. js Yeah, but fuck them. You forgive a bad person, they’re gonna fucking do something worse to you. Two seconds later, maybe. I’m also way too sensitive, you know, and I don’t really want to change that either. I don’t want to become less sensitive.

RS That’s what being an artist is all about. js And I have sacrificed a lot to be an artist, to be like this. Like I don’t have a family. I’ve probably seen my parents a handful of times since I’ve left Tennessee. And, yeah. You are totally right. You forgive people for yourself.

But I mean, I don’t even think the people who I’m thinking of now, they did anything wrong.

It’s all in me, you know? It’s all on me.

RS Do you want to have kids?

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js No. But when you get to be this age, everyone has kids. So you know, you don’t have options. Any relationship you have with someone you knew in your twenties or even thirties is fake. It’s kind of truncated, like, “I can see you between 7 and 7:15, but then you have to put Lucy in a bed”. It’s just not deep love, you know? And raising kids in the city is really tough too. Yeah, I feel like that’s kind of isolating, and also a lot of my peers are really busy. Everyone’s either out of town or recovering from some dramatic thing. It’s not a big love. You get that in your twenties. It’s just kind of missing now.

It’s hard to have close friendships as an adult.

The Turnaround js Can I ask you, what’s the perception of me out there in the world? You can be honest.

RS For one thing, you’re seen as productive. You use quantity as a kind of material that’s essential to the work. js Yeah, that’s just what I do. Maybe other people are just not that productive, you know?

And I have the luxury to, like, I have several galleries, and they move stuff.

RS Another way that people perceive you, I would say, is successful.

ArtReview

js Well, to be successful, you have to give a lot away. I’ve given a lot away, and you know, I’ve been ripped off a lot and dealt with a lot of shady kind of situations, and I haven’t really kept a really tight control over stuff. I’ve just hammered, and not got hung up on every little thing or this or that.

RS This is related to the quantity, right? Somebody who makes three paintings a year would have a harder time with getting ripped off. js Safety in numbers, yeah. I learned that from my favourite artists: Picasso and Picabia. I get rid of a lot of stuff. I don’t keep any drawings.

I get rid of tons of paintings. Or I’ll have them restretched. But my early work was cheap. I really spread it around, you know? And early on, I made all my stretchers. I had a really barebones operation. Like I wasn’t spending it to make it. I made hundreds of stretchers! I think about stretchers as money, you know? Having lots of stretchers makes me feel rich. Because you could do anything with these. I don’t know what to do with money, but I know what to do with stretchers.

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

above Untitled, 2019, monotype on Plike paper, 93 × 67 cm.

Photo: Farzad Owrang. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich & New York

facing page Josh Smith: Life, 2020, installation view.

Photo: Stefan Altenburger. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York

Summer 2020

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2 Keith Arnatt, Notes from Jo (detail), 1991–95, colour photographs. © Keith Arnatt Estate. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

2 Keith Arnatt, Notes from Jo (detail), 1991–95, colour photographs. © Keith Arnatt Estate. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

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ArtReview

Coming Up

by Martin Herbert

(Futures and Pasts Edition) Anomalies; the funniest piece of art ever made; a sly recouping of status; a salty, ponytailed boomer; Appalachian banjo-picking; a capricious video art collection; and the endlessness of mortal combat

“And the rest is hysteria / and I stole that,” drawls Kurt Vile on Hysteria (2018). Confess your thefts, lest ye be busted. In that spirit of candour, let me say that the concept for this anomalous column – lighter on new and forthcoming exhibitions than usual, there being far fewer of those around – is perhaps not entirely original. Maybe what follows owes something to Greil Marcus’s long-running ‘Real Life Rock’, currently hosted by the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Nick Hornby’s ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’ for The Believer. I wouldn’t know, though; I’ve never read either of them, ever. In any case, as is suggested by the subtitle – hat-tip to The Fall – the focus is dual, on shows that are coming up and, uh, stuff I’ve been reading, listening to, looking at, etc. Some of what’s listed below will be a few weeks away, or a cross-city journey away or just

a YouTube or Google search or Bandcamp delve away. Other inclusions, should one be minded, might require a bit more effort to source.

Recently on social media an artist friend of mine tossed out a question: what’s the funniest piece of art ever made? The crowdsourced responses included videos by Paul McCarthy and Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, BANK’s ‘Fax Bak’ letters critiquing press releases – ha ha, except I was the recipient of one – and the famous, timeless Belgian statue 1 of a pissing boy. They led me to revisit William Wegman’s early, grainy, comic-conceptual monochrome videos, such as Two Dogs & Ball (1972), in which a pair of elegant, utterly serious-looking Weimaraners (Wegman’s own famous Man Ray, the other apparently called Hooka) rotate their necks and mournful eyes in perfect sync as the artist slowly waves a ball

Summer 2020

around offscreen. Pretty good, and a reminder of what an oddball figure Wegman is, with his dog calendars and riches, and lack of latter-day credibility, which he seems not to care about at all. Wanting to make a suggestion of my own vis-à-vis humorous art, all I could think 2 of that might outdo these was Keith Arnatt’s Notes from Jo (1991–94), everyday notes from the wry British conceptualist’s wife, which he would take off the fridge or table and photograph, in perhaps a sly recouping of his status as a henpecked husband. One: ‘5:45 HAVE FED BLOSS – ROLY HAD SOME GO-CAT – SOMEONE (NOT ME) HAD BEEN SICK ON KITCHEN FLOOR’. Another: ‘WHERE ARE MY WELLINGTONS YOU STUPID FART?’ Sometimes the tone pivots and a door half-opens – on a shaped scrap of yellow paper: ‘MISSING YOU – SORRY’ – leaking a different emotional light.

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It’s not hard to figure out why people on Twitter are currently crowdsourcing amusing distraction. What struck me about the notion of ‘funny art’, though, is that it’s an oxymoron unless the work isn’t deliberately funny. Not much would survive outside of context; funny art is farting in church. The stakes are low, and it’s amusing until you compare it with actual comedy. After a while I wanted to be reminded of what real laughter felt like, and I erred at first by watching some of 23 Hours to Kill, the new Jerry Seinfeld standup special on Netflix, wherein the woodchuck-faced bard of grousing grinds through a routine about remembering your concert tickets – of all things, right now! – and the hardships of his own multimillionaire lifestyle, proving himself spectacularly out of step with our benighted moment.

Asking myself who could tell the kind of jokes I might want now, I remembered 3 I’d long meant to check out George Carlin, whom I’d previously just known of as a salty, ponytailed boomer who said something about all the words you can’t say on TV but who was supposedly a misanthrope of the highest order. And there he was via YouTube, back from the dead, blackly doing the maths of human decline in a weirdly uplifting way.

On ecological decline, comparing our fourbillion-year-old home with the chances of a species that’s been a ticklike irritant on it for a comparatively microscopic time, Carlin tosses out an exasperated aphorism: “The planet is fine. The people are fucked.” (It’s in the delivery, the facial expressions.) Yes, we brought a lot of plastic. That might have been the reason the planet wanted us here. Maybe

it has plans for it. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups,” Carlin sighs elsewhere, while on the news, footage plays of myriad Brits and Americans breaking lockdown because they’re bored.

The music critic Alex Ross once wrote of listening repeatedly to any symphony that it starts off hard to grasp but then, after a while, it’s like you can predict the weather. The records I’ve played most recently have often been ones where that breakthrough never previously happened with me, but suddenly there was time. So I took a lot of walks listening to 4 Jim O’Rourke’s 38-minute, single-track album The Visitor (2009): a suite of patiently unwinding melodic miniatures, all parts overdubbed by the Japan-based American musician. Heavy on sparkling midrange, it improbably fuses chamber orchestration, the latticelike interplay

3 George Carlin performing his Jesus is coming… look busy routine, April 2008. Courtesy Creative Commons

4 Album cover for Jim O Rourke, The Visitor, 2009, released on Drag City label

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ArtReview

5 Kankyō Ongaku, Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990, 2019, released on Light in the Attic label

7 Barbara Hammer, Double Strength (still), 1978, 16mm film transferred to video, 14 min 3 sec, colour, sound. Courtesy the estate of Barbara Hammer and KOW, Berlin & Madrid

of Chicago postrock, 1970s soft rock, progressive rock, drone, Appalachian banjo-picking and more, defaulting regularly to folk-jazz acoustic guitar backed by piano curlicues and bursts of martial percussion. As the days and steps and listens passed, I felt like I was moving with increasing confidence through the rooms of an elegantly oblique videogame. Decisions about pacing and harmonic conversations between the segments, which had at first felt like a stringing-together of discrete sketches, manifested themselves. When bursts of sun or banks of clouds were coming, I knew it, got it.

Indoors, meanwhile, I stuck doggedly to crate-digging label Light in the Attic’s 2018 5 archival compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990, breath-slowing writing music par excellence, full of water-droplet synths,

processional gamelan compositions and improvisatory pieces for gongs in which the silences are as significant as the sounds. Even if you never get entirely away from an undertone of desperation in seeking such narcotising music, you can get far enough for a while.

In a painter’s studio last year I noticed 6 Anne Truitt’s Daybook (1982), which the painter said he’d been enjoying. Shortly afterwards I lighted upon a copy in a secondhand bookshop, the sort of coincidence I don’t ignore. But then I proceeded to shelve the book until lately, when the idea of inhabiting someone else’s thoughtful, productive, honest days felt appealing. The noted American minimalist sculptor kept her daybook for seven years, between 1974 and 1981. It’s not exactly a diary. Quite a bit is retrospective, unflinchingly so. (‘Last winter,

Summer 2020

during the course of preparation for the retrospectives, I found myself on the crest of an unspeakable loneliness,’ begins one 1974 entry, going on to discuss the higher quality of ‘naked pain’ she discerns in a Rembrandt self-portrait painted when he was her age then, fifty-three.)

Truitt is a patient, lucid writer; the book balances inner confessionals – where it doesn’t recount her day-to-day activities, or her childhood, or her thoughts about art per se – with the grave elegance of her prose, and her abundant seriousness about what she does. It feels cleansing, inspirational.

The art collector Julia Stoschek seems set to leave Berlin in a snoot about rents, but in the meantime she’s generously putting her capacious video collection online (at jsc.art).

7 A recent dip into it brought up Barbara Hammer’s terrific 16mm film Double Strength

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(1978), a grainy, patchwork, deeply intimate queer chronicle of the artist’s relationship with a trapeze artist and choreographer, backed with Erik Satie’s meandering pianism and music-hall song. As each partner takes turns telling their side, and as we hear the relationship evolve and even advance optimistically towards the horizon of death – a good part of the film celebrates the ageing yet still athletic nude body – their trapeze artistry becomes a beautiful metaphor for mutual support, ‘a land where we can make whatever we want of it’. The result, offering insights into the advantages of one deepening partnership over a succession of excitable flings, feels at once like a time capsule and a capsuling of something timeless.

Let’s imagine going out, shall we? As suggested above, and as is well known, the field

of options has contracted, but there are things going on, things coming back. Grab your mask and let’s go, in theory at least.

Given that he’s such a familiar figure 8 in the contemporary art firmament, Thomas Schütte is uncomKonrad Fischer monly tricky to pin Galerie, Berlin, down. His figurative 2 May – 30 sculptures can resemSeptember ble authoritarian statues, be tenderly expressive of fugitive emotion or, as in his well-known United Enemies series, reflect the endlessness of mortal conflict.

All of this tends to be analysed as reflecting the human condition, but such bromides don’t get to the heart of Schütte’s estranged art; language bounces off it. In Konrad Fischer’s sumptuously appointed Berlin space, expect an ambivalent showdown between two statues

in the courtyard and, inside, a generously hung show that ranges from ominous steel mobiles to oversize urns to sculptural heads that feel by turns sci-fi sleek, abraded Kunsthal and near-abstract, Charlottenborg, and are suggestive Copenhagen, 13 June – 9 August of battered soldiers.

At the last Venice 9 Biennale, Jane Jin Kaisen graced the Korean Pavilion with the double-channel video Community of Parting (2019), a feature-length meditation intermingling aspects of the Denmark-based Korean artist’s own diasporic experiences with aspects of myth, ritual and historical narrative, shot in seven countries and bringing together female Korean shamanism, natural and urban landscape, and voiceovers mingling poetry and personal testimony in a gendered tale of migration

11 Rade Petrasevic, #nohomo, 2019, acrylic and oil on canvas, 100 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist and Christine König Galerie, Vienna

8 Thomas Schütte, Experten II, 2020.

Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn.Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin, VG-Bildkunst Bonn

12 Dean Monogenis, Remedy, 2013, acrylic on wood panel, 30 × 41 cm

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ArtReview

9 Jane Jin Kaisen, Community of Parting (still), 2019, double-channel video installation.

Courtesy the artist and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

13 Monira Al Qadiri, Divine Memory (still), 2019. Courtesy the artist

and overcoming marginalisation. Reshowing the piece in Copenhagen, Kaisen augments it, embedding it in an installation mixing rice paper, found objects, textiles and photography; and adds, for good measure, a range of works from the last decade of her practice.

Writer, artist, brother Christine König of Balthus, occasional Galerie, Vienna, actor and first-rate weirdo 5 June – 1 August – ‘I am a maniac,’ he once 10 noted – when Pierre Klossowski is exhibited in company he tends to be paired with other outré figures, like Hans Bellmer. Here, his sparring partner is the youngish Viennese 11 painter Rade Petrasevic, whose firm and feisty paintings don’t visually correspond to Klossowski’s faded, pastel-coloured, epicene drawings but share an unbuckled, fervid atmosphere. Here, two works by the late Frenchman – one featuring his enigmatic

female avatar Roberte, the other finding Socrates with his head near a young man’s genitals – converse with Petrasevic’s eerie vanitas still lifes and fetishistic depictions of male bodies, and notions of sex, submission and hallucination hang in the air.

12 Dean Monogenis’s approach to painting purportedly dates back to 9/11, when Baronian Xippas, Brussels, 5 May – 18 July it was impressed 13 upon him that buildings, too, live and die.

That insight underwrites the American artist’s works, alongside an anxiety about urban sprawl and architecture’s impact on nature.

In the suite of coolly impersonal, precisely limned, often European-feeling canvases at Baronian Xippas, even the calmest moments are infected with unease: a boxy modernist ski chalet looks like a blight, a lake backed by mountains hums with toothpaste-coloured

stripes, fragments of deckchair canvas fly around the patio of a villa against a blameless blue sky. Monogenis, it appears, has a knack of making deeply covetable paintings that aren’t necessarily easy viewing.

Planetary Memories, It’s also to his credit that Migros Museum, the work feels fresh, as ‘the Zürich, 7 March relationship between humans – 11 October and nature’ is a well-trod conceptual landscape. Witness Potential Worlds 1: Planetary Memories at the Migros Museum, the first of two shows to explore our impress on the world, while also pondering possible futures. Here the focus is on how the planet’s spoils have been looted in the pursuit of power and resources: the artists include Monira Al Qadiri, Carolina Caycedo, Cooking Sections and Mark Dion. An opportunity to go out, then – depending where you’re living – and consider the upsides of staying where you are.

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Don’t be distant just because you’re distanced

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Art Featured

As the swelling 45

Strange Mail How the postman delivered a lifeline to queer misfits

by Oliver Basciano

US Postal Service letter carrier, photographed

by H. Armstrong Roberts, 1972. Courtesy Alamy

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Michael Morris’s submission to Piss Pics, c. 1972.

Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography

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top General Idea (A Project of AA Bronson), Orgasm Energy Chart, 1970, offset on bond paper, 43 × 28 cm.

Courtesy the Estate of General Idea and Esther Schipper, Berlin

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above Granada Gazelle, Miss General Idea 1969, displays the entry kit for The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, gelatin silver print on paper board, 76 × 102 cm.

Courtesy the Estate of General Idea and Esther Schipper, Berlin

ArtReview

‘Come back, I must see you at once.’ So telegrams the heroine of The to friends during the 1950s, inspiring what later became known as the Well of Loneliness to her lover, Angela, who is holidaying with her New York Correspondence School, and on to various 1960s Fluxus husband. Written in 1928 by Radclyffe Hall, the novel exposes soci- artists and On Kawara. The medium has a political history as well ety’s prejudice towards gay relations. The text itself raises suspicions as a conceptual lineage, linked to pamphleteering and the producat the village post office in rural Worcestershire from which it is being tion of samizdat from, among other places, behind the Iron Curtain, sent. ‘The clerk counted the words with the stump of a pencil, then China and Southeast Asia. Moreover, the relative privacy afforded by she looked at Stephen rather strangely.’ For Stephen – the name an the postal service offered a way around censorship systems imposed affectation of the protagonist’s late father, who had been expecting a by oppressive regimes: mail art became hugely popular in Latin boy – the urgency in the request comes from the fear that she is losing America for artists surviving the various military dictatorships, for the affection of a sweetheart. Had she been in a mood to tread care- example. The works mailed out through Queer Correspondence will fully, she might have used the more private, but slower, postal system. come with a stamp designed by Gelare Khoshgozaran, an artist who has used postal art previously to In 1840 the Royal Mail introduced Although initiated in response to the explore American authoritarianism. the Uniform Penny Post, a reform In her 2016 project U.S. Customs that allowed anyone to post a letter pandemic, Queer Correspondence is also Demands to Know (2016–), the Tehranfrom one location to another within an addendum to the official history of born, LA-based artist sent parcels the UK for the cost of a penny. It was mail art that traces its lineage from postpacked with LEDs, a luminescent a hugely democratising moment, making mailed correspondence availcards Marcel Duchamp sent a neighbour glow visible through the packaging, able to great swathes of the populaby post from Iran to the US in the face in the early twentieth century tion for the first time. It also allowed of international sanctions (and no for far greater privacy, a factor that raised hackles with conserva- doubt the suspicion of border staff). tives of the time, who feared it would permit the kind of illicit relaIn the US, however, an alternative history can be charted in which tions that entangled Stephen and Angela. Today of course email and the medium served as a way for renegade individuals or disparate social media have superseded the letter (not to mention the telegram), avant-garde gay scenes across the country to hook up. The late-nineleaving the economic viability of postal services under threat. In the teenth-century Comstock laws forbidding the posting of anything UK Royal Mail share prices have plummeted since the company was deemed obscene or sexual in nature (which would come to include privatised in 2013, and in the US the Postal Service has become yet sex toys, contraceptives and literature on abortion) lost force over another enemy to be squashed by Donald Trump, collateral damage time, many reshaped or simply repealed during the 1960s to allow the unhindered transit of missives containing queer subject matter in the president’s ongoing battle with Amazon.

With the potential loss of these services no doubt in mind, Queer (and, in some cases, downright ‘filth’). This moralising retained Correspondence, a new project from Cell Project Space in London, recalls more of its legal force during the 1950s, however, when Wallace the long history of LGBT communities finding solace in the anonymity Berman gained a following in the LA underground scene. Berman of the postal system, be it for writing letters to lovers, receiving liked jazz, drugs and the occult, and surrounded himself with mail-order pornography without the danger and embarrassment of a gang of similarly far-out brethren for whom sexuality and gender entering a sex shop or, in the context of art, participating in the niche were slippery concepts. In 1957 he had an exhibition at the Ferus tradition of queer mail-art. The project entails various artists and Gallery that earned him the attention of the LAPD, who arrested him writers (all of whom had been originally commissioned to make work for showing lewd material: the evidence, a work titled Factum Fidei (1956–57), featured a close-cropped for the gallery’s East London venue, Berman’s project was not explicitly gay picture of a couple having graphic but whose shows were cancelled due sex that had been framed and hung to the COVID-19 lockdown) creating but provided an example of how to disfrom a large wooden crucifix by a work through mailed correspondtribute art that would have been deemed short rusty chain. Interestingly, the ence between their ‘queer families’ unacceptable by the law or established photograph, which was by a friend – the LGBT communities in which they socialise and work. These collabart system. The post office became a place named Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel, an Aleister Crowley-acolyte orative projects will then be produced of rescue for misfits and nonconformists who went by the mononym Cemeron, in an edition of 500 and mailed out to anyone who wishes to receive them (and who has signed up via the had originally been contributed with no trouble to Semina, Berman’s gallery website). The first commission, the result of communiqués loose-leaf magazine (nine volumes of which were published between between artists Alex Margo Arden and Caspar Heinemann, each self- 1955 and 1964) featuring cut-up poetry and collage sent in by the likes isolating, will be delivered to letterboxes in June; in July the pen pals of Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jean are Los Angeles-based Salvadoran artist Beatriz Cortez and Korean Cocteau. Written under the pseudonym Pantale Xantos, one poem Kang Seung Lee, also living in LA; and so on, with a new commission by Berman reads, ‘A face raped by innumerable messiahs places into ready each month until the end of the year. sodden cotton an anxious needle / A face hisses rules to cathedrals and Although initiated in response to the pandemic, Queer Correspon- prepares for the narco myth.’ The cover of issue five features a large dence is also an addendum to the official history of mail art that traces stone penis; issue six a naked woman with a revolver. Distributed to its lineage from the postcards Marcel Duchamp sent a neighbour in the a limited audience via mail, it operated away from the prying eyes of early twentieth century, to the collages and prints Ray Johnson posted the vice squad.

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Covers and pages from the nine volumes of Semina, 1955–64. Courtesy the Estate of Wallace Berman and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

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Berman’s project was not explicitly gay – the sex scene in Factum Fidei is a straight one, though there was an element of gender nonconformity in a lot of the contributions to Semina – but provided an example of how to distribute art that would have been deemed unacceptable either by the law or the established art system. The post office became a place of rescue for misfits and nonconformists. The Chicano artist Gronk recalls that he grew up in conservative surroundings and was ostracised for his perceived difference at school. By the time he moved to LA, in 1972, and met the mail-artist Wiz Dreva (the pseudonym of the late Carlos Almaraz) at a lecture given by Willoughby Sharp, the founder of Avalanche magazine, he was also beginning to experiment with postal art. Gronk recalls Almaraz as being ‘very, very cocky’ with the speaker, and afterwards the two got talking.

They exchanged addresses and promised to write. While no artworks came for a while (Dreva would claim he smudged the ink with which Gronk had written his address by masturbating on the scrap of paper), they met for a second time at a gig and started to exchange a series of Dada-inspired collaged postcards and long, fantasy-filled letters. The correspondence bore fruit both personally – Dreva recalls it was Gronk who took him out on LA’s gay scene for the first time – and professionally. By 1978 Dreva/Gronk had ten years’ worth of the paraphernalia to exhibit at LACE, in just the second show the LA nonprofit staged. Separately Dreva was the lead figure in a group who called themselves Les Petites Bon-Bons, active in both mail-art circles (including exchanges with Johnson, General Idea and the British COUM collective) and the local glitter-rock scene. It is this joining of local cliques and global networks that proved a driving force for queer mail-art. The activist and critic (and cofounder of Printed Matter, Inc) Lucy Lippard received mail from the group, including one missive that featured their name fashioned in red script alongside a black-and-white photo of the group embracing. It is captioned ‘imagine a Gay universe’. A second provides a manifesto of sorts: ‘Les Petites Bonbons are Gay Pansensualists. We acknowledge and we reject the attempts of straight male sexuality, thru genital imperialism and heterosexual male supremacy, to limit and restrict human experience.’

General Idea similarly used the post to facilitate their art and activism.

Throughout the 1970s almost all of their projects contained an element of mail art. Some – like the Orgasm Energy Chart (1970), in which numerous collaborators were asked to log their orgasms over a month on graph paper and return it to the group, the results a seemingly empirical study of sexual liberation – use mail art as a medium in its own right. Even one of the trio’s most famous works of the period, the gender-bending The 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant, entailed the group mailing out kits to over a dozen artists, each containing the rules and regulations for their alternative pageant, together with a ‘pageant gown’ in which respondents were asked to pose and then mail back in the form of a photograph. These posted performances were then judged and awarded at an intentionally over-the-top prizegiving ceremony held at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. The project carries all the hallmarks of General Idea’s interests: fetish, ritual, libidinous imagery and consumer culture. Interests shared around the same time by fellow mail-art protagonists the Vancouver-based Image Bank: the two groups collaborated on occasion. Also a trio, Michael Morris, originally from the UK, and Canadians Vincent Trasov and Gary Lee-Nova took their collective’s name from William S. Burroughs’s cut-uptechnique novel Nova Express (1964), in which the Beat writer meditates on and rails against various systems of control. In it, society, culture and government are represented by viruses that attack the body and co-opt it for their own gain.

For Image Bank, and their peers within the interconnecting networks of queer mail-art, the use of the postal system was a way of hijacking a corporate or governmental authority for nefarious and radical means. The return to mail art in 2020 might seem mere nostalgia for a time when such utopian ideals seemed obtainable – the medium all but replaced by the internet – but Cell Project Space’s Queer Correspondence project also taps into the queer fear of isolation; and a fear of the historic loneliness often felt by LGBT people prior to our hypernetworked age and the era of social media. In a period of being confined to home, unable to feel the warmth of human connection, a letter, it seems, still goes a long way. ar Queer Correspondence runs through December, via cellprojects.org

Mail art sent by Les Petites Bon-Bons to Lucy Lippard, 1970s

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Artists and the Crisis of Solidarity

by Dave Beech

top Precarious Workers Brigade protest at the Barbican Centre, London, 2013

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above Melanie Gilligan, Popular Unrest (still), 2020, video drama in five parts, 80 min total.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf

ArtReview

Artists do not have a great reputation for solidarity. The mythic its leftwing counterpart in the years immediately after the collapse image of the isolated individual in the studio contrasts perfectly with of communism in terms of their attitude to solidarity. The former, he the tropes of solidarity: picketing strikers, antiwar marchers, the said, ‘rejected all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentiencampments of Greenham Common and Occupy. Recent theoret- mentalism’, whereas the latter was a ‘deconstructionist cultural critic’ ical and activist challenges to what American art historian Caroline who subverted the existing order, including ideas about solidarity, Jones has characterised as the ‘romance of the studio’ have disclosed and therefore ‘served as a supplement’ to the project of the right. the scale and variety of interchanges necessary for the production and But seriously, it is fair to say that while neoconservatism and circulation of art – and the army of unheralded nonartist art workers neoliberalism set about patiently to dismantle the legal, economic involved; interchanges that have resulted in an extension of solidarity and cultural prerequisites of leftwing solidarity (employment rights, between artists and the art workforce more generally, as exemplified state pensions, unemployment and sick pay, trade unions, housing by the Precarious Workers Brigade, W.A.G.E. and Melanie Gilligan, regulations, the welfare state and so on), political theorists on the left consciously displaced the established discourses of solidarity among others. with more philosophically robust This is unusual. More typically, artists establish relations with non- If solidarity is needed more than ever during discussions of hegemony, identity, artists without making appeals to the period of its crisis, solidarity today is at placed-based politics, community, the counter-public sphere, agonism solidarity. For instance, art’s ‘social once among the most urgent political projects and intersectionality, among other turn’ during the 1990s was a project things. Critics can be suspicious to socialise the artist through conand among the least likely to succeed of solidarity as a method for estabvivial or agonistic methods of audience participation, which fell short of establishing networks of soli- lishing allegiances to power. Judith Butler, for instance, observed darity. A conference at Tate Modern in February 2019, ‘Axis of how the demand for solidarity within political movements has been Solidarity: Landmarks, Platforms, Futures’, looked at how artists can perceived as the demand to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the group. support solidarity movements. But what would it take for art itself to The political confrontation between identity politics and a politics become an infrastructure of solidarity? of solidarity were laid out by bell hooks in her pathbreaking 1986 essay The age of rightwing populisms that has set people against one ‘Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women’. Here hooks writes, another, and the age of multiple overlapping privileges and microag- ‘black women were quick to react to the feminist call for Sisterhood by gressions, is not the epoch of solidarity. If solidarity is needed more than pointing to the contradiction – that we should join with women who ever during the period of its crisis, solidarity today is at once among the exploit us to help liberate them. The call for Sisterhood was heard by most urgent political projects and among the least likely to succeed. many black women as a plea for help and support for a movement that The current crisis of solidarity has been articulated best by those crit- did not address us.’ If the problem with sisterhood exposed by hooks ical movements that emerged after 1968 and that shattered the anti- corresponds exactly to the critique of solidarity from identity politics, capitalist hegemony of a seemingly unified working class. Solidarity, for hooks the problem was a lack of solidarity in the feminist moveit seemed at the time, was little more than a cover story for discipline ment. ‘Women do not need to eradicate difference to feel solidarity,’ within the established workers movement. Identity appeared to some she said, adding, ‘Solidarity is not the same as support. To experience as the only basis for solidarity and therefore solidarity across identities solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and was so often curtailed or blocked. However, it is wrong to blame the goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be occaabsence of solidarity today on identity politics alone. The institutions, sional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn; Solidarity requires ways of life and resources of the workers movement collapsed under sustained, ongoing commitment.’ the weight of the rightwing backlash Although hooks builds a poweragainst the postwar settlement, not It is more difficult to imagine art as a site ful case for the political merits of solibecause a wider spectrum of voices of solidarity when political solidarities are darity, it is Jodi Dean who has done most to theorise solidarity, in her made themselves heard. in retreat and the political theory of solirecently republished book Solidarity It is more difficult to imagine of Strangers (1996). Dean distinguishart as a site of solidarity when politdarity has been out of favour for so long ical solidarities are in retreat and the es between different political conceppolitical theory of solidarity has been out of favour for so long. The tions of solidarity, identifying three main types: ‘conventional soliliberal tradition has always scrupulously administered a blindspot darity’, which arises out of common interests; ‘affectional solidarity’, towards solidarity. Richard Rorty’s 1989 study, Contingency, Irony, and which is a narrower form of support based on feelings of mutual care Solidarity, with its ‘liberal utopia’ of contingent solidarity, or solidarity and concern limited to friends; and ‘reflective solidarity’, to name without commonality, is as close as it gets. Solidarity is strongest, he that kind of solidarity that is formed through discursive interconclaimed, ‘when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought nections in which differences emerge through processes of recogniof as ‘one of us’, where ‘us’ means something smaller and more local tion and response, discussion and questioning, and openness and than the human race. Just over a decade later, even this half-baked defi- accountability. Conventional and affective solidarities are inhernition of solidarity appeared starry-eyed. In his final contribution to ently exclusive. Affective solidarities do not extend beyond an intithe collaborative book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000) Slavoj mate network, while conventional solidarities ‘respond to the value Žižek, in dialogue with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau, sardonically pluralism of contemporary multicultural societies by increasing the characterised the difference between the rightwing intellectual and demands made on group members, by rigidifying identity categories’.

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above, from left Turner Prize 2019 winners Oscar Murillo, Tai Shani, Helen Cammock and Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Photo: Stuart C. Wilson.

Courtesy Turner Contemporary, Margate

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Dean’s concept of reflective solidarity is formulated precisely to overAll politically engaged art or political engagements within art come these difficulties. The principal difference between conven- that have emerged in the last decade have shifted the pattern of tional solidarity and reflective solidarity for Dean turns on the func- organisation in art away from sociality towards solidarity. Ecological tion of dissent within a group. ‘In contrast to conventional solidarity activism in art has also encouraged forms of solidarity rather than in which dissent always carries with it the potential for disruption, sociality. Liberate Tate was successful in breaking up the partnership between Tate and BP because it facilitated collective acts of reflective solidarity builds from ties created by dissent.’

Solidarity based on debate is harder to imagine than solidarity dissent that converted shared convictions into palpable expresbased on identity in this epoch of fragmented solidarities, conditional sions of solidarity. In other words, Liberate Tate was an infrastrucalliances and specified communities. Solidarity, we can say, has become ture of solidarity. Campaigns for the decolonisation of art’s institunarrower, not weaker, insofar as specific splintered social groups can tions and demands for reforms to alleviate the precarity of artists and obtain the highest intensity of solidarity but pose a threat to solidarity art workers are best not when they call for differentiations between that might be formed not only across divisions within a specific group educated and unskilled workers but when they establish ongoing but also between such groupings. Rather than solidarity being some- solidarities between them. This is why the ‘statement of solidarity’ thing that can be assumed between people suffering from the same sys- of the Turner Prize nominees in 2019, which resulted in them shartem of prejudice or exploitation, it needs to be built through common ing the award, was a glorious gesture of the intersectional recognipractices. This is why Dean stresses that ‘solidarity itself has to be tion of the urgency of a range of political struggles even if its solidarity with others remained symunderstood as an accomplishment’.

Here, then, is the fully baked definiThe point is not to assert that there is only bolic or unrealised. tion of solidarity.

The tendency to boycott muone true social form of solidarity but to seums and biennales, particularly When groups, including art organisations, assert the primacy of overcome the misconception that solidarity since 2014, for instance, is driven by the solidarity of artists, critics, curapractical action over theory, they are, is the politics of a narrow, exclusive club tors and others. Calls for solidarity in part at least, prejudicing their style of solidarity in favour of assumed shared interests and blocking the and activism were combined, for instance, when over 100 artists possibility of developing and extending solidarity through disagree- and writers added their signatures to an open letter to selected artment and dissent. However, while the differences between affectional, ists to boycott Creative Time’s Living as Form exhibition in 2014 conventional and reflective solidarity are conceptually enriching, because one of its venues is an institution with a ‘central role in mainthere is no reason to assume that they are practically incommensu- taining the unjust and illegal occupation of Palestine’. The boycott rable. The point is not to assert that there is only one true social form of the 19th Biennale of Sydney and Manifesta 10 were also based on of solidarity but to overcome the misconception that solidarity is the a show of solidarity among participating artists. What’s more, these politics of a narrow, exclusive club identity. Different groups, organi- campaigns typically express or establish solidarities with migrants, sations and institutions foster different combinations of congeniality, prisoners, the victims of war and occupation, as well as expresscooperation and critique. This sense of the interweaving of modes of ing solidarity with broader struggles against racism, sexism, solidarity was missing from the debates on art’s social turn, which homophobia and colonialism. It is the viability of such solidarities treated conviviality, agonism and conversation as rival models of soci- that determine whether the art boycott is a technique for hoardality rather than components of an integrated, dynamic and expan- ing political agency by a minority of art professionals or a method sive form of solidarity. And this goes some way to explaining why the for demonstrating that every political struggle must also be a cul1990s debates on the social turn now appear so dated and diluted. tural struggle. ar

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Tai Shani

OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are models for a structured, tragic play about my family.

MOTHER No. No. MOTHER + AUNT NO! GHOST CHILD What else is there to say but an absolute negation... an absolute refusal. No, no to this aberration, a bloated leviathan, collapsed weight on caving, crisis hearts and chests.

AUNT No secrets, no rejection, always forgiveness. I can’t understand a reality of never being reunited. I feel violent.

MOTHER And contagious.

GHOST CHILD A belief so resolved that for an instant in the committed invocation of that word, No, a summoning, is almost powerful enough to break the world.

MOTHER Bring you back, make it before or an after, or an elsewhere, where this hadn’t happened at all. Where shrapnel wouldn’t have pierced your vital organs, and left you bloodless.

Where you would have been born without organs. Arrived fully formed, and talkative, and wise, and gentle, as you had been.

GRANDMOTHER Born during a heatwave, and an infestation of harlequin ladybirds that carried STDs. GHOST CHILD Non-believers have to accept that the price for secular respite is that of eternal separation.

ᐤ OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are cryptic; they are spell books, to be read literally but with focal belief.

GHOST CHILD N. O. Enter this as an encrypted password to open a parallel world where shrapnel would have missed my organs, or better scenarios. Oh, so much better yet.

AUNT Open a million almost infinite worlds where you would have survived. A million almost infinite worlds where you did not survive. Where you died faster or slower, died multiple times, survived but only barely, not enough to be able to say you are here, although some of your organs still functioning somehow.

MOTHER Or terrible worlds, where you died many times in awful circumstances before this, or you were a stillborn. Or the worst of worlds where you were never born at all.

GRANDMOTHER Oedipuss stop playing with that dead man!

MOTHER Or a pointless world, almost identical to our most brutal of worlds distinguishable only by a single quark in the atomic makeup of the pigment of the speckled navy paint sprayed onto moulded steel of a car door in a car plant in Untertürkheim, which later would collide and decimate your body.

GHOST CHILD A material homonym of us.

OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are her bodily remains.

MOTHER I bring this lamentation for you.

I bring this torment for you.

I bring this dread for you.

I bring this unorthodox prayer for you. Which really is a very, very desperate teleological plea.

I brought this dread for you. Held the bridle. Swallowed the heavy stone, to keep everything in me fused to the mercurial surface of our disagreed, agreed world. I bring this dread to you, for you and me to diffuse it.

GHOST CHILD In this anxiety there is a sharpness that slashes the translucent curtain of this metaphysical proscenium arch, and beyond it, under a spiritual spotlight, I am cracked open by the heavy object that both generates, and is generated by dread, it distends far beyond circumstance, words, and my body, and my bodily remains, and their bodily remains, and all the bodily remains that ever were, and ever will be.

GRANDMOTHER You’ve broken all the eggs on purpose! Against the world.

MOTHER A shrinking memory for words. I want to swallow a dictionary, and I don’t care if it kills me.

ᐤ OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are sites for myth making and the collapse of myth into prosaic materials both natural and synthetic.

GHOST CHILD A Nuclear family. A body horror movie.

MOTHER Sometimes we called you kin, you were strong and sweet looking, we gazed upon you in squirming breathless rapture.

GHOST CHILD I was so happy to be your child. Nuzzle and sniff you, lupine and little, with a muscular, hairy back.

GRANDMOTHER Bury the pups in the garden next to Buddy.

They’re so small, put them in this sweet box, don’t throw them into the ground like that, it is unbearable!

GHOST CHILD Each day brought the possibility of us existing together, in our precious dependency and unflagging, constructing affection for each other. I did not need to find out who you were, you were all I ever knew and you knew me as you had made me, just so.

When sent to bed I was happy to go to bed, upstairs, while you stayed up downstairs being adults doing things and talking quietly about things that were not for me, because of their cruelty, depravity, creepiness, because they were mundane and boring and/or bureaucratic. I was thankful to be us, because you were so powerful and magnificent.

OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are maquettes for never closing, hardcore, hedonistic nightclubs, where we can lose our minds.

GRANDMOTHER Under the building and under the basement lie the foundations. They called it the production room, the cinema room, or the blue-lit stage.

GHOST CHILD Oh my god I love this song.

AUNT I love the drugs and the excitement, I loved fucking but I was never ready for a heteronormative life even though we came from a very bourgeois background. Actually we never aspired to be women.

GHOST CHILD I dropped acid with my aunt, in the forest. The white sun dappled on my closed eyes like a strobe in darkness.

Dispersing the density of neon reptilian hieroglyphs, skittering towards the contrast of the dim periphery of the eye, to become visible again.

Here too, even more determinedly, we felt we completed some fractal design. Coded into the digital’s hallucinogenic natural, and nature’s analogue psychedelics.

AUNT I was never interested in having a relationship outside of the home. I didn’t need it, never loved someone enough to leave my real life, to go somewhere else. I was only able to be semifunctional in family relationships, I never lived with anyone else.

I am troubled, I’m looking for union in my own being, I’m bipolar and these two strong forces need to be harmonised in me, if that could happen, that would be the best kind of marriage for me.

GHOST CHILD The rotting tree stumps, miniature postapocalyptic cities.

AUNT I have always had a violent imagination, and imagined you and everyone around us, dying in horrific ways all the time, as a baby I’d see Eve dropping you.

AUNT Say it again. Abaddon, Leliel, Azrael, and Metatron. We never were of this world anyway.

MOTHER I kiss your little chocolatey mouth, brought back from the slaughterhouse.

ᐤ OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are an aerial drone view of an archaeological site of unknown civilizations, from the past or the future.

MOTHER I can’t do it, I can’t.

AUNT I’ll do it then.

GRANDMOTHER Dr Kummer tried, but the abortion didn’t work, Mrs Kummer would send grape sugar and butter to the camp for us both to be strong enough to survive, that is how you came into our lives, at the end of the war.

ᐤ OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are dwellings for me Oedipuss, the cat. (singing) I’m sorry Ms. Jackson, I am for real Never meant to make your daughter cry I apologize a trillion times Me and your daughter Got a special kind of thing going on You say it’s puppy love We say it’s full grown Hope that we feel this, feel this way forever

GRANDMOTHER Stop running, be careful when you are going down the stairs.

AUNT Although I was afraid and worried when you arrived, you were my biggest love.

ᐤ OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are a symbolic portrait of a time-travelling mystic.

MOTHER There is nowhere for me to deposit all this unproductive love I have amassed for you. It will calcify in me in your image, like a teratoma, unformed, metabolized twin. Hair, teeth and nails, some orifices, enough anthropomorphic, organic matter to cast a resurrection spell.

AUNT Make a circle of salt. Call upon the angels, Abaddon, Leliel, Azrael, and Metatron. Rise, and make all livable again.

GRANDMOTHER At the top of the stairs, look! Look! Turn off the light, there look!

MOTHER My baby’s wet bear cub-like mouth, more softly parted than her stomach and dripping too with reddish and scarlet, gooey galaxy, and where it drips all red, all scarlet and all gooey it flows back into starry, bronzed galaxy, wet stardust.

ᐤ OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are a faery corpse.

GHOST CHILD The funeral was a devout moon river on the inky surface of the purled water. The funeral was the faery name spelt in a murmuration pattern at dusk. No. A façade of a house that looks like a crying human face. A tattoo of the infinity symbol on a wrist. No. A meitu freckled selfie of a woman in her 40’s on a phone.

AUNT Gemini, Gemini, Aries, Taurus.

GRANDMOTHER Mercury, Mercury, Mars, Venus.

AUNT Air, Air, Fire, Earth.

MOTHER Sweet child of mine refusing to fatten up. Sweet child of mine unbearably still. Sweet child of mine all matter in earth.

Baby Osiris. Absorbed and metabolised into the leaves that reach into the white light of the sun.

The public day, a spray spat out in laughter. A goo, dribbled out from a corner lip in paralysis. An elixir swirled in the warm capacity of safety. In the private day, I had promised that today, we would play and I would not let boredom find you, pierced organs divvied up in those carved gilded canopic jars.

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OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are a medieval vision of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.

GHOST CHILD Are you afraid of dying?

MOTHER No, don’t be afraid of death or the dead, it’s only the living that can and will certainly hurt us.

GHOST CHILD Aren’t you terrified of us never ever seeing each other again?

MOTHER + AUNT No. NO! (scream) GHOST CHILD This scream is a sound wave travelling as long as its molecular collaborators will carry it, then it will end up in a museum of unrecoverable vibrations.

ᐤ OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are airports for extra-terrestrials my parent’s sibling said when they saw them.

AUNT What can we say to the dying? Farewell I have known you.

We have known and loved each other as much as anyone could hope to.

Here we lived together. Skinless. Connected by an understanding that our worlds are revolving in each other’s benevolent orbits.

GHOST CHILD And love, an unconstrained love of these energetic fields emanating from a delicate set of processes, hormonal make ups, synapses, a prose like network of cellular activity and phenomena, and subtle mannerisms, that provoke so much tenderness and eternal devotion, from one lost coordinate on the temporal plane to another.

MOTHER What can we say to the departed? They can’t hear but, I would tell them, there is no recovery, no return.

GHOST CHILD To the living? That it is time to say goodbye.

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, I said goodbye by saying I love you; I said I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love

you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you

mum my aunt grandmother, Eve Oedipuss new leaf metal railing Portland stone jackets hair electricity crisp packet sky sky rubber kin engine acceleration ladybird

I love you Y I love you bus I love you imagination Never forget Tories kill I love you red I love you sky I love you water I love you paper I love you piss I love you iphone 7 I love you choking me, my mouth open slack passively, submitting. You kiss me, your tongue deep inside my grateful mouth.

I love you satellite I love you sky I love you polyester I love you stairs I love you 11 stairs I love you pine I love you sky I love you sky I love you dust I love you ash I lov

ᐤ OEDIPUSS THE CAT These are portals for ghosts to come into our world, they can be summoned here.

AUNT Are you ready?

MOTHER Give me a moment please. I’m scared.

AUNT We have lived a good, good life, in love with life and the world.

MOTHER One last time. My baby, my love, haunt me, come from the shadows of this gloom, knotted, rootless heartbreak and step into a supernatural light that exposes your familiar beloved, casually smiling face.

OEDIPUSS THE CAT Opening the door, you turn around, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching top of the pops, your face, generous, contagious delight.

ᐤ CREDITS p 1: Tai p 4: Tai pp 5+6: p 8: Tai

Shani and 3D artist partyTime.jpeg, Eve, Tragodía, 2020 Shani, Outsides & Erotics 4, 2020 Yael Aviv, Goa, 1979 Shani, Ghost Child, 2020

ᐤ Tai Shani’s exhibition Tragodía is on view at Grazer Kunstverein through 4 September

Making Art vs Market Research Why we all need a fortress of solitude

by Ben Eastham

Recently I have been drawn to a particular type of art. One that gives Artists such as Ian Cheng, Philippe Parreno, Anna Tsing and Haegue colour and shape to the feeling of life from the inside. And by that Yang have in recent years been preoccupied by the radical unknowaI mean art that articulates the psychological experience of a subject bility of nonhuman intelligences; Duras’s film affirms the irreducible rather than the boredom of being stuck inside all day. Although my strangeness of other humans. I wanted more of this, so sought out Ben Russell’s video investigations into altered states. In Trypps #7 (Badlands) renewed interest in the former no doubt stems from the latter.

The representation of an ‘inner life’ might seem like a retro- (2010) we watch a young woman on acid bliss-out in the Mojave desert; grade artistic project in the wake of postmodernism. It could even in Black and White Trypps Number Three (2007) we watch moshing kids sound quiescent in the midst of crises that demand organisation and at a punk gig enter into a trance; his recent La montagne invisible (2019) activism, and I don’t mean to sound a retreat into look-out-for-your- is inspired by René Daumal’s unfinished novella Mount Analogue (1952), self liberal individualism. But the general consensus that meaning which describes an expedition to a mountain that exists only in the is constructed by relation, that identity is a function of intersecting mind. It wasn’t quite the same hit – Duras’s fragmentary film-poem is fields and that a work of art is legitimated by its social or political more to my taste than Russell’s psychedelic ethnography – but I was contexts can be stifling. still excited by this same commitment to the representation of interior The freedom to address a subject that cannot be dictated by, or states that are unreproducible. It would be possible to discuss Duras’s reduced to, external structures – bluntly, what it feels like to exist – was film in theoretical terms – with reference to the flâneuse, perhaps, or and is one corollary of artists’ struggle for liberation from the church, psychoanalytic principles of identity formation – but this would be at the state and the market. That move establishes the grounds for best superfluous to its effect and at worst a violence against it. Similarly, critique: only by taking up a position Russell’s work resists the idea that the A familiar landscape is distorted through audience can fully understand their outside the networks of power can artists report on them. But the freesubjects’ interior lives by fitting them the prism of someone else’s mind, and dom to make work without adaptinto the proper contexts. Which is, in this impulse – using words and images after all, precisely the kind of sciening it (consciously or unconsciously) to structure a feeling – I found something tistic assumption that thinkers like to the expectations of an audience is Jean-François Lyotard rejected when also the principle that animates art. like consolation in my own solitude And that distinguishes it from the contesting that art must resist recuexpression of a collective ideology, which is to say propaganda. As the peration into the dominant modes of thinking.

The corollary of this was that I did not feel obliged to define myself novelist Álvaro Enrigue put it in a 2016 interview with Bomb magazine, ‘a writer worried about reception is cooking a dead book’. The in relation to these subjects, a liberating experience that might explain same is true of artists cooking up artworks. the aforementioned consolation. The paradox is that by asserting How courageous an artist still has to be was brought home to me by both their subjects’ freedom and my own, these films generated Marguerite Duras’s Les mains négatives (1978). The short film captures a much stronger sense of connection than any number of works that Paris at night through the back of a car window: neon boulevards make explicit appeal to my politics. Yet this still came as something overlaid by a spoken monologue on love and loss. Halfway through, of a surprise to me. Haven’t I suffered enough confessional poetry?

I gave up trying to piece together the narrative. The film makes no Am I not allergic to autobiographical art? Don’t I endlessly complain concessions to the viewer, does not participate in a community, does about peoples’ determination to air their disposable emotional expenot contribute to a debate. Yet this is not heroic self-projection on riences on Instagram? But broadcasting our feelings isn’t the same a grand scale but a modest assertion of the right to an interior life. as structuring them, and in a culture without private spaces we are A familiar landscape is distorted through the prism of someone reduced to what we see of ourselves reflected in others. else’s mind, and in the nature of this impulse – using words and What appeals to me about the above films might simply be that images to structure a feeling rather than advance they disregard the rules of an attention economy facing page Marguerite Duras, a proposition – I found something like consolabased on that which is – in both the psychological Les mains négatives (still), 1978, tion in my own solitude. and smartphone senses – easily shared. Artistic colour, sound, 13 min 43 sec

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top Ben Russell, Trypps #7 (Badlands) (still), 2010, 16mm film, colour, sound, 10 min

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above Monica Bonvicini, Hausfrau Swinging, 1997, video installation

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communities online offer an important refuge from the vagaries of the asserted art’s freedom by poking fun at the idea that the CIA had no market, among other things, but that sense of shared purpose quickly better instrument for the enforcement of America’s ideological printransforms into a need to be noticed and affirmed. In the context of ciples than the New York School. Today, I have come to be suspicious artistic production, the danger is that this is internalised and that the of press releases presenting art as the instrument of a cause. Not artist starts unconsciously to produce work that is liable to generate because art should not be political but because, to repeat a phrase that the instantaneous approval of the community: art that is relatable, is often repeated, but never quite enough, all art is always political. that gestures to recognised causes, that positions itself within an iden- When the curators of a biennial make explicit their solidarity with a cause, it can sometimes (not always) risk supporting the brand of the tifiable constellation of other works and meanings.

This assimilating tendency operates in both directions, with eccen- festival’s sponsors by invoking freedom of expression without meantric work quickly ‘reclaimed’ for centrist causes. The idea for this text ingfully testing it. was planted by an unexpected encounter a couple of years ago with a The freedom to articulate one’s own point of view is the preconseries of Mike Kelley’s Kandors (1999–2011), the architectural models dition of independent thought, because it establishes a subject posihe based on the miniaturised city that Superman preserved in a bell tion. Józef Robakowski’s Z mojego okna (From My Window, 1978–99) jar. I remember being irritated by a wall text describing these sculp- collages two decades of footage taken from his apartment in Łódź tures’ celebration of American subcultures, an easily digestible narra- with idiosyncratic descriptions of the residents he sees below. ‘Our tive that is flatly contradicted by even cursory attention to the work. house is our corner of the world,’ Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics The bell jar is a symbol of disconnection; the city state is the only link of Space (1958), and so Robakowski invites the viewer into a space that to Superman’s home planet, which was destroyed by an evil maniac; is very literally constructed by the state – on the ninth floor of a tower comic book obsessives are not traditionally the American children block in a Soviet housing estate – but is also incontestably his own. most perfectly adjusted to their peer groups; Superman, who lived From this position he is able to observe the society that surrounds him a double life and never revealed his and to comment upon the changes identity to anyone, kept the city in that take place in it. the only place he felt safe, which he It might be that the excluded are called his fortress of solitude. generally better at articulating interiority. Born into a set of conditions Kelley’s fragile worlds are deeply in which they feel free, members personal expressions of anxiety and of the majority have no need to existential threat, to which any define themselves in opposition to well-intentioned curatorial dignifithem. Monica Bonvicini’s Hausfrau cation of folk art or marginal fraterSwinging (1997), in which a woman nities must defer. That the artist with a house for a head bangs it used the materials to hand to articuagainst a drywall corner, communilate these feelings doesn’t make him cates the violence required to free representative of anything beyond oneself from those structures. But if himself, nor does his entry into the canon serve to elevate cultures the task of contemporary art is to be that might prefer to remain underone of reconstruction, as Hal Foster ground. Which is another way of saying that these are important has recently suggested, then artists also might show how it is possible works of art because they excite the feeling of alienation, not because to build new ones. Interned in a Nazi labour camp, Jonas Mekas they are symbolic of alienation. Rosanna Mclaughlin has previously learned what it means to have one’s individual humanity denied: written in ArtReview of how the beatification of Ana Mendieta glosses the extraordinary delicacy with which his diaristic films are stitched over the violent contradictions that make her work so powerful, together attest to the labour of constructing a free experience of the and the characterisation of Kelley as some kind of envoy from blue- world. To dismiss this kind of self-creation as indulgent is a symptom, collar America also reduces the artist’s achievements to those of a dili- not a renunciation, of privilege. gent cultural attaché. Recruiting Kelley to a cause sympathetic with If there is a vocational solidarity in art, it consists in protecting the the artworld’s liberal sensibilities – that alienation should be repre- freedom of artists to construct their experience of the world indepensented alongside nonalienation, as if it were a minority ethnicity – dently. In an era in which selfhood is constructed by the panopticon defangs his work. Subsuming art into the field of cultural politics, of social media, to articulate our feelings in a fashion that does not by reducing works to a cause they are assumed to stand for, reveals appeal to an audience might be an act of resistance. Art is uniquely art’s own ontological crisis. (And might also be a battle in the war for good at representing this complexity, and we look to it because we primacy between individuating artist and systematising curator.) intuitively understand that we are tangled up with other lives in ways The urge to hitch every work to a principle begs the same ques- that cannot be expressed in conventional logic or language. Against tion posed by an Ad Reinhardt cartoon: ‘Is painting a practical means this, other academic disciplines offer no more than a posteriori explaof propaganda today, with all our newspapers, movies and radio?’ nations of art’s bright revelation that we each construct our own position in a field unified by consciousness. Or, The answer then was ‘no’, and this is ever more the case today, whatever our feelings towards Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Art-Talk (detail), 1946, as Chantal Akerman more elegantly phrased it: as published in PM, 9 June 1946. © 2020 estate the cause and however ludicrously the artworld ‘the more particular I am, the more I address the of Ad Reinhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), inflates its own cultural influence. Reinhardt general’. ar New York. Courtesy David Zwirner

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More Than ‘Just’ an Artwork Claudia Andujar’s photography takes things to another level

by Fi Churchman

Aracá, Amazonas/Surucucus, Roraima, 1983

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Call it lockdown-induced introspection, but sometimes it takes being Photography Changes Everything, developing a discourse on photoshut out of the artworld (in this instance, the physical one, and the graphs that has largely been centred around those made as art, and office from which this magazine is produced) in order to realise just those that were elevated to the status of art. But, Heiferman writes, how much that environment can narrow your understanding of visual ‘While the championing of photography as art by photographers, culture. For example, here’s a writer with a specific interest in photog- galleries, art museum photography departments, art historians, raphy, for whom writing about it started to become about trying to and MFA programs, has helped foster serious consideration of the prove the ways in which that medium is an art, within the pages of medium, it has also created something of a roadblock.’ That is, the an art magazine – an absurdly reductive position to take. Ironically, value of photography has become dependent on whether it is received sometimes it takes an exhibition to as an artform, and not, as it should be, come along in order to knock those for the much broader cultural role it The value of photography has become plays in changing the way society blinkers right off. To understand that dependent on whether it is received as what’s exciting about photography perceives and operates in the world. an artform, and not for its much broader is precisely the fact that it cannot, in Where amid all this does the work itself, be reduced to an artform. of Swiss-born Brazilian activist and cultural role in changing society photographer Claudia Andujar fall?

In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote of the rivalry between painting and photography in ‘The Work of Art in Following a traumatic childhood that included fleeing from Hungary the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, an essay describing the advent to Switzerland in 1944, when her father and other family members of photography as the first revolutionary means of reproduction at a were killed at Auschwitz and Dachau, Andujar moved to New York moment of crisis for ‘traditional’ arts: ‘When the age of mechanical and then São Paulo, where she began her career as a photographer. reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its She made her first series of work, photographing the indigenous autonomy disappeared forever.’ It seems that the artworld’s response Karajá people from the Rio Araguaia, in 1956, published photographs to this crisis was to absorb the medium by, as American academic in art and culture magazines such as Life, A Cigarra, Jubilee, Esquire and and curator Marvin Heiferman observes in his 2012 publication Realidade, and, although making a conscious decision to turn her

The young Susi Korihana thëri swimming, infrared film, Catrimani, Roraima, 1972–74

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artistic career towards activism, has nevertheless exhibited work at people’s cosmological worldview – one that stems from an unseen art institutions and galleries internationally since 1960. For almost realm of spirits, accessed only by shamans and through community seven decades, Andujar’s photographs, extensively of indigenous rituals during, for example, reahu funerary feasts. Showing these peoples, have slipped between the genres of documentary, anthro- photographs to the community functioned as a tool of communication that allowed her to build a relationship with the Yanomami; pology, activism and art.

The latest exhibition of her photographs, documenting the indig- culturally, they do not make images of themselves for fear that leaving enous Yanomami of the Amazon and their fight for human rights, first part of their earthly bodies behind after death will disrupt the cosmoopened in early 2018 at Instituto Moreira Salles’s outpost in São Paulo, logical order, yet they agreed to the publication of Andujar’s photobefore travelling to its main location in Rio de Janeiro in 2019 and then graphs on the understanding that these would help build awareness to the Fondation Cartier in Paris earlier this year (with plans to travel of their culture and aid the campaign against the destruction of their to Winterthur, Milan and Barcelona). people and lands.

It includes over 300 photographs, an In a series of black-and-white and Showing these photographs to the audiovisual installation (first preinfrared photographs made in 1974, community functioned as a tool of Andujar depicts the Korihana thëri, sented in 1989 and reproduced for communication that allowed her to build one of many Yanomami communithis show) and collaborative drawings ties, engaged in a reahu ceremony as made between 1971 and 1989 during a relationship with the Yanomami hosts to the Xaxanapi thëri, dancing, several of her visits to the community.

Located across the ground and basement levels of the foundation, the feasting, drinking plantain soup and breathing in yakoana-tree exhibition follows her work chronologically – beginning with a series powder. This powder is considered to be the food of the xapiri, ancestral of photographs of the Yanomami community based in Catrimani, spirits that protect the Yanomami land and who share ancient knowlRoraima state. Originally published in Brazilian magazine Realidade in edge with the communities’ shamans via the ingestion of it. Multiple 1971 (and later in the newspaper Ex-14 in 1975) for a self-assigned photo- long-exposures in the photographs render the scenes dreamlike. In journalistic project on the Amazon rainforest, they include images one particularly dazzling image two men brandish weapons while made with various techniques, such as the use of infrared, multiple streaks of light cluster above them in a manner that evokes shaman exposure, reduced shutter-speed and Vaseline-smeared lenses in order and Yanomami spokesperson Davi Kopewana’s description of the to achieve a representation of her understanding of the indigenous xapiri in The Falling Sky (2013): ‘A path of light opened before my eyes

Youth Wakatha u thëri, a victim of measles, is treated by shamans and paramedics from the Catholic mission, Catrimani, Roraima, 1976

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Collective house surrounded by sweet-potato leaves, infrared film, Catrimani, Roraima, 1976

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and unknown beings came towards me… They approached with slow The exhibition itself, split into two distinct halves, moves from movements, in a blinding light, waving young hoko si palm leaves.’ photographs that invite the visitors to take a glimpse at Yanomami In a sense, then, these photos, and those in Andujar’s other series, life through images of community hunts, celebrations and people simultaneously behave as documentation of a people and a culture, bathing, sleeping, cooking and playing together, in which we might but also leave space for interpretation, recalling oft-cited theo- recognise moments of our own lives, to those with a sobering tone rist Roland Barthes’s ‘photographic paradox’. In his 1961 essay ‘The in the basement gallery that mark Andujar’s decision to depart from Photographic Message’, the Frenchman describes this situation as her career as an artist and instead dedicate herself to campaigning ‘the co-existence of two messages, the one without the code (the for the protection of Yanomami culture and lands. The building of photographic analogue), the other with the code (the ‘art’, or the the Trans-Amazonian highway and Perimetral Norte highway, set in motion by Brazil’s federal government treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric, of the photograph)’. This, in 1972 and 1973 respectively (the latter The first COVID-19-related Yanomami he posits, results in an ethical parawas abandoned three years later), as death was reported in April, suspected dox through which photojournalism well as the discovery of gold, uranium to have been transmitted by illegal seeks to document reality as closely and cassiterite, brought miners and migrant workers to the region. The and impartially as possible, in a mangoldminers who invaded the reserve subsequent introduction of diseases ner that is ‘against the investment of values’, while the dissemination and reception of these images inevi- and viruses devastated the populations of indigenous communities – a threat that is now being repeated since the first COVID-19-related tably involves interpretation.

Andujar’s photographs of the Yanomami are a unique example Yanomami death was reported in April, suspected to have been transof such an overlap, driven by the photographer’s intent to reflect mitted by illegal goldminers who have invaded the Yanomami reserve. her understanding of her subjects’ worldview as well as the subjects A wall bisects the basement gallery. On one side, a series of blackthemselves. Moreover, her photographs are socially invested in the and-white portraits taken between 1974 and 1976 form a grid across campaign for Yanomami rights (and therefore staged so as to elicit the perimeter. They are closeup and intimate, revealing moments emotional investment from the viewer), which in turn becomes an such as a mother cradling her baby, a small child with closed eyes, a alternative entry point (beyond the ‘objective’ record) for both the girl’s lips being pierced with a palm splinter during a rite of passage marking puberty or the midsection of a man’s face, in deep contrast viewer and the institution that shows them.

Young woman in a hammock, collective house of the Korihana thëri family, Catrimani, Roraima, 1972–76

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so that one half is entirely cast in shadow. His visible eye looks directly NGO Comissão Pró-Yanomami (CCPY, 1978), with which she embarked into the lens. Opposite these hang a series of drawings made with on an international campaign (joining with human rights organisation colour pencils by the Yanomami, developed between 1976 and 1978, Survival International) to demarcate a continuous stretch of protected and depicting mythological stories. There’s a sense here that Andujar Yanomami lands. Her photographs accompanied pamphlets, reports is creating methods of communication, not only during her experi- and manifestos that were sent to international government agencies, ence with the Yanomami (later, during a phone call, she explains, “For the United Nations and the World Bank. It would take 14 years of camthem to draw with paper and coloured pencils was very new, but it was paigning before the Brazilian government would agree to a protected a way of trying to see if we would understand each other. It wasn’t just Yanomami territory, on the eve of the UN Conference on Environment art. To have them draw was a language”) but also with the exhibition and Development (also known as the Earth Summit), in 1992. visitors. The works invite the visitors The other side of the dividing to develop an empathic connection wall in the basement shows a collecIt’s not hard to make the uncomfortable with the Yanomami via photographs comparison between Andujar’s personal tion of photos documenting the social of the participants that accompany effects of increased contact with the family history at the hands of the Nazis their drawings. The participants Yanomami – which, as well as introducing disease, delivered substance included seventeen-year-old Naki and the numbering of the Yanomami abuse and addiction, and violent uxima, whose five drawings made in 1977 depict Omama (creator of life) and his twin brother, Yoasi (creator conflicts – and a series of photographs taken during the 1980s when the of sickness and death), two images of beliefs and practices related to CCPY initiated a vaccination programme (as part of a wider healthcare menstruation, a poisonous plant used to make curare for arrowheads project) to help inoculate the Yanomami against the epidemics deciand an image of temporary shelters used during hunts. In the profile mating their communities. Used as ID for the doctors’ medical records, portrait of Naki uxima, against a background of dense shadow, he Andujar’s photos could easily fit into her portrait series, were it not turns his face towards the light, eyes closed. That same year, Naki for the fact that each sitter is distinguished by a number assigned to uxima died from measles, and the Brazilian government expelled them. Hung in grids according to different communities, it’s not hard Andujar from the Yanomami territory. to make the uncomfortable comparison between Andujar’s personal During her exile in São Paulo, along with missionary Carlo family history at the hands of Nazis, the numbering of the Yanomami Zacquini and anthropologist Bruce Albert, Andujar cofounded the and the threat to their lives – but this, in the same way as the earlier,

Guest decorated with vulture and hawk plumage for a feast, multiple exposure, Catrimani, Roraima, 1974

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top Candinha and Mariazinha Korihana thëri clean red-billed curassow, whose plumage is used to feather arrows, Catrimani, Roraima, 1974

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above Journey by pirogue, Catrimani, Roraima, 1974

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colourful images on the ground floor, serves as an access point for the ways in which photography can be deployed to suggest that art institutions can be agents of change and in this sense ‘relevant’. There’s no viewer, using an acutely meaningful visual language.

In an adjoining room, the audiovisual installation Genocidio do doubt that, now, when Brazil’s current president is encouraging the Yanomami: morte do Brasil (1989/2018) acts as a coda to the exhibi- destruction of the Amazon and its indigenous communities for profits tion. First presented at MASP, São Paulo, the work was produced in in minerals, logging and farming (in the first four months of 2020, response to the ongoing conflict, massacres, epidemics and environ- 1,202 square kilometres of the Amazon were razed) within protected mental damage caused by invading miners and farmers. Originally a territories, the increased visibility of Andujar’s work might be considprotest against the genocide of the Yanomami and the government’s ered one of great salience. And displaying it within an art context is, plan to split the territory into 19 isolated areas, the 2018 iteration of simply, a means to an end. A travelling exhibition will help with that, Genocidio do Yanomami, accompanied but that the photographs shown by a soundtrack sung by indigenous The work of photographers like Andujar in this context will achieve similar Brazilian singer Marlui Miranda, results as they did in aiding her work serves to elevate art and its Western is shown on 12 columnlike screens campaigning directly with the CCPY, institutions from a passive position to arranged in a semicircle and flashes Survival International and the United with images taken from across her Nations remains to be seen. As Susan an active participant in ‘real’ issues series, culminating with the ID phoSontag wrote in On Photography (1977): tos accompanied by newspaper clippings of the words ‘marcados para ‘Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art… from the beginning photography has also morrer’: marked to die.

In an age in which it seems like the social value of art is increas- lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete.’ At their ingly tethered to the extent to which it is considered ‘activist’, it’s most potent, Andujar’s photographs go way beyond ‘art’ and the arguable that the work of photographers like Claudia Andujar serves endorsements of its institutions. ar to elevate art and its Western institutions from a passive position (one that observes, reflects, comments on life) to an active participant The Fondation Cartier plans to reopen the exhibition Claudia Andujar, in the discussion of ‘real’ global issues. Where once the debate was The Yanomami Struggle, in June, subject to government guidelines, about photography’s legitimisation as an artform, now it is about the and has extended its run through to October

Collective house near the Catholic mission on the Catrimani River, Roraima, infrared film, 1976

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Mark Manders A Glossary

by Craig Burnett

Composition with Yellow and Blue, 2014–18, painted bronze, painted canvas, wood and glass, 69 × 50 × 42 cm.

Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

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is for Mud

Mud, Parmenides told a young Socrates, has no form.

Unlike beauty, justice, a chair, or the human, mud is available only to our senses. When we hold a cold clump of clay in our hands, we do not imagine that it is a token of some perfect idea of mudness. Yet clay, for Mark Manders, is an ideal medium. A grey substance that can take any form, embodying an infinite range of ideas.

Manders throws mud like a bookish Prometheus, engendering beasts that look forever frozen at the edge of being born, and at the edge of collapse.

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A

is for Absence

The first work Manders made was in 1986, when he was eighteen. He wanted to be a writer at the time, and he placed pencils and writing instruments on the floor as if it were the footprint of an empty building, or the outline of an abstracted human body. He called it Self-Portrait as a building. He realised that he preferred the mute evocations of objects to inflexible words, awkward approximations that need to be translated. “You can build a room like a wordless sentence,” says the artist. For the past 36 years or so, he’s been pursuing that task: a self-portrait – A is for autobiography – through rooms and objects. If the artist is absent, his rooms are thick with matter, and the artist’s oeuvre is an ever-expanding image of its maker.

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Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a building), 1986, writing materials, erasers, painting tools, scissors, 8 Ă— 267 Ă— 90 cm.

Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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Fox / Mouse / Belt, 1992–93, painted bronze, belt, 15 × 120 × 40 cm.

Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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is for Ruse

Manders presents half-formed creatures, semisculpted, abandoned, all sculpted from cracked and crumbling slabs of clay. Or so it appears. It’s a trick, a ruse. In 1992–93 he made Fox / Mouse / Belt, cast it in bronze and then decided to paint as if it were wet clay. All of his hulking, silent heads, the sliced faces, the crumbling beasts: he wants them to express an “extreme, vulnerable nakedness”. But the seemingly wet clay, soft and ready to submit to anyone’s hand, is an illusion of fragility, of the incomplete. Cast in epoxy or bronze, and painted, the seemingly unfinished is hard and permanent.

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Consciousness, according to a lot of recent studies in neuroscience, doesn’t perceive but predict. We don’t know what we perceive, but we perceive what we know.

Manders revels in this chasm between what we see and what we know. The bust in Composition with Yellow and Blue (2014–18) is enclosed in glass, away from our fingers, a slice of yellow wood pressed into its malleable face.

We see wet clay, not the bronze beneath the trompe l’oeil surface. We can only close our eyes – like the figure herself, away from the visible, the mundane, the mud – to find pleasure in knowing that we have been deceived by our senses. Manders conjures a peculiar kind of longing in the viewer: a desire, however futile, to unify the data we receive from our senses and our knowledge.

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is for Monumental

Manders preinstalls future ruin into his monuments.

The figures in Composition with Four Yellow Verticals (2017–19), with their enormous ‘shattered visages’, brings to mind Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818). If that famous pharaoh declared his immortality in the vast monuments he commissioned to mark his reign, he was, inevitably, erased by the implacable force of entropy. Manders likes to think of his work as inhabiting a perpetual now, an ever-present immediacy.

He infests his monumental sculptures with the ravages of time to ensure they never grow old.

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Landscape with colours, 1997, painted wood, sand, painted ceramic, 173 × 300 × 200 cm.Photo: Dirk Pauwels.

Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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is for ‘As If’

‘My work is an ode to the fictional, “As If” way of thinking,’ writes Manders. If a building were a person, if a monumental bronze sculpture were a fragile, ephemeral chunk of mud. As if a coloured table (Landscape with colours, 1997) were an Impressionist painting. As if everyday teabags could be arranged, as in – ( – / – / – / – / – ) (1998) or Finished Sentence (1998– 2006) into a perfect image of the beautiful. As if, in Mind Study (2010–11), some unlucky angel, or armless martyr, were forced to attend a corporate board meeting.

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N

is for Necks

Mark Manders is fascinated by the necks in Piero della Francesca’s paintings. Look at the necks of the guards in Piero’s Resurrection (c. 1460). They bend and extend, creating a sculpture presence distinct from the faces they support. The skin is open, naked and vulnerable, like the raw surface of a Manders sculpture. Or look at the angels’ necks in the National Gallery’s St John the Baptist: the necks are still, strong, unblemished, like that of the figure in Room with Unfired Clay Figure (2014).

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Room with Unfired Clay Figure, 2014, painted bronze, wood, iron, plastic, painted ceramic, chair and painted epoxy, 273 Ă— 440 Ă— 620 cm. Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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Composition with Four Yellow Verticals, 2017–19, painted bronze, wood, iron, 266 × 391 × 419 cm. Photo: EPW STUDIO. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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is for Demiurge

If the demiurge has many iterations, he is often some version of God’s potter, fashioning the earth’s creatures from muck and matter. When I last walked into a Manders exhibition and encountered Composition with Four Yellow Verticals (2017–19), I felt as if I had wandered into an art school for demiurges.

A room stuffed with impossible piles of mud shaped into faces, these quiet, gargantuan sculptures balanced on crutches in some hybrid state between mind and matter: here was a piecemeal and precarious vision of creation, seemingly unfinished, yet cast in bronze and built to last forever. If I came back a week later, would I find the artist hunched over his creation, finishing the bodies of his golems? Or would the sculptures have creaked into life and hit the road, loping through the city like a gang of giantess philosophers, nodding sagely at our fragile flesh?

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E

is for End

To what end does Mark Manders make art? Imagine a world without Kafka or Mondrian. Inconceivable, says Manders. They have transformed our culture, and the world as we understand it is impossible without them.

“That’s what I aspire to with my work, that at some stage it will be impossible to imagine a world without me.

If I didn’t have that aspiration, I couldn’t do what I do.”

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The writer Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) deployed linguistic games, systems and constraints to compose his books. Similarly, Manders, a fan of the Frenchman, uses combinations of (English) words to compose his sculptures, such as Table / Corner / Typewriter (1998).

A word becomes an image. Language does not describe the world, but predicts and creates it. A world conjured from systems, constraints and reductions becomes more beautiful.

R

is for Raymond Roussel

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S

is for Supermarkets

Mark Manders believes that his work could survive without the label ‘art’ to distinguish it from other objects in the world at large. Documented Assignment (1992–93) consisted of a bronze mouse, taped to a shelf, in a Tokyo supermarket. When he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, in 2013, he placed Fox / Mouse / Belt, prone and vulnerable, seemingly sculpted from fresh clay, on the floor of a Venetian shop. “All my works”, says the artist, “can survive in a supermarket.”

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The Absence of Mark Manders is on view at the Bonnefanten, Maastricht, through 23 August

Documented Assignment, 1992–93, patinated bronze and cello tape (AP), 9 × 13 × 3 cm.

Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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Stream or download the latest episode of ArtReview’s podcast, hosted by Ross Simonini, at artreview.com

In episode 2: painter Josh Smith speaks about choosing to be a recluse (before we all became recluses too) and about why it’s valuable to his work; photographer Farah Al Qasimi discusses her secret life as a Soundcloud musician (and plays some new music); writer Patrick Langley discusses the history of telephone art; and artist Angharad Williams performs an act of channelling

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Goodbye to All That Recalling an exhibition seen in New York more than a year ago…

On social media the other day, I made a quip: ‘We’re all art historians now’. As with many jokes, or at least many of mine, it was halfserious: when there are no new exhibitions except (inevitably dissatisfying) digital ones, the mind is borne back upon the past. Usually I see more shows than I can write about, and sometimes I don’t happen to write about the ones I really like; on occasion the experience of seeing a show exceeds the parameters of an exhibition review, being tangled up with life, happenstance, sadness. So I want to say something about Mary Beth Edelson’s exhibition in New York exactly a year ago, which I found extraordinary at the time and which has lingered in my memory since, but in order to do so I have to step, at least temporarily, outside the confines of the art and the strictures of the review format.

Edelson is a pioneering American feminist artist, born in Chicago in 1933 and, until recently, a long-term denizen of downtown Manhattan.

Something of her character can perhaps be gauged from this quote, in an Artforum interview from 2011: ‘There is a feminist adage: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. To which I say: Let’s get some other tools! Fuck his house – who goes there anyway?’

My wife, the artist Eva Grubinger, has known Edelson for many years and introduced me to her in 2015 at the opening of a survey of feminist art in Hamburg. Edelson was friendly but flinty. I didn’t really know her work at that time and didn’t talk to her beyond hellos – you assume there’ll be another moment, or it doesn’t really matter, and for now two friends were catching up. Then, for a while, it was apparently hard to contact her. Last year, when I was back in the city, I saw that she had a solo show at David Lewis Gallery on the Lower East Side. A good sign, I thought.

The exhibition, titled Shape Shifter, was modestly scaled but nevertheless the most captivating show I saw during that trip, and a highlight of my gallery-going year. (I took Carol Bove, about whom I was writing a book; no slouch herself, Bove said she was hugely impressed.) But it wasn’t new work. It was, like Edelson’s previous show in the same venue, art from the 1970s freshly de-mothballed. The main event was a roomful of painted-plywood cutout ‘figures’, or semiabstractions, or totems, dating from 1974–75: to get in there, you had to step around one, a circle impaled on a triangle, which all but blocked the door. The room, with these human-size and roughly patterned entities gathered around the viewer – heliocentric

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hemispheres atop triangles, others with schematic upraised arms, one like a giant bird – felt deeply ritualistic, borderline occult, also celebratory, tapping something primordial.

‘The ascending archetypical symbol [sic] of the feminine unfold today in the psyche of modern Everywoman,’ Edelson was quoted as saying in the press release, ‘They encompass the multiple forms of the Great Goddess – Reaching across the centuries we take the hand of our Ancient Sisters.’

The rest of the show comprised small, startlingly intense black-and-white photographs made at various points during the 1970s. In one,

Edelson – assumedly – appeared in a Neolithic cave, sitting in a ring of lights, some kind of strange, streaky illumination whipping its way towards her through the half-dark. In a trio of prints, something dark and blurry shakes high grasses. In another sequence, a cloth-wrapped figure rolls off the side of a cliff. In perhaps the most indelible work, Woman Rising / Sky, from 1973, Edelson stands on scrubland at (seemingly) dusk, arms outraised, an echoing white V – simple postproduction, it seems – shooting upwards above her, cracking the deepening sky. An installation view of a 1974–75 exhibition shows Edelson, then around forty, striking a balletic pose while surrounded by her

then-new cutout figures, hand on hip, right foot brought up to left calf.

Mary Beth hadn’t been answering her phone, and I’d been asked to ask the gallery how, or where, she was. It turned out she was now in an assisted-living facility somewhere outside the city; I left an email address, asking if the gallery owner could pass on the details, but no email came. Of course, people get old and shift shape for the worse. But the experience of Shape Shifter, for me, was indivisible from a larger context, larger shifts. Edelson is yet another woman artist relatively sidelined for much of her later life (partly for her determined gravitation towards feminist spirituality, but partly due to good-old artworld sexism), then revived in her twilight years, just about too late for it to matter much to her. That factor played against the vivaciousness and unabashed mysticism of Edelson’s 1970s art – more alive, it seemed, than any other art being shown in the city at the time, and in tune with the esoteric art being made now – making the show wholly bittersweet alongside more mortal concerns: how quickly and irrevocably people decline in old age, the wasting of intellect and the loss of knowledge, the fadeout of an artistic vanguard and the revival of toxic masculinity and gender imparity in our own time. Ars longa…, of course, and bringing this work back into the world had to be a net positive, but it wasn’t an untainted one. Had Edelson even seen the show?

All of these emotional and ethical aspects swirled around in the gallery. And in the street as we walked away. This wouldn’t be everyone’s experience of the work, but it couldn’t help being mine.

A couple of months after that, Artforum published a laudatory, lengthy feature on Edelson’s 1970s work, one that nevertheless had a valedictory tone: the author, Dodie Bellamy, closed by noting that an ‘entire generation of feminist visionaries will soon be gone’. A while later, on social media again, I scratched out a hypothetical, a short-story pitch: a gallerist starts working with a ‘difficult’ woman artist of advanced age who, in a twist, turns out to be immortal. Again, only halfjoking. I was thinking, first, of an Italian artist I’d recently watched being wheeled around her first retrospective, aged ninety-one and virtually blind. And I was thinking, inevitably, of Mary Beth Edelson. Martin Herbert

Mary Beth Edelson, Light/Dark Sophia (front), 1974–75, painted plywood, 244 × 122 cm.

Courtesy David Lewis Gallery, New York

Shape Shifter, an exhibition of 1970s work by Mary Beth Edelson, was on view at David Lewis Gallery, New York, 3 March – 21 April 2019

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Billie Zangewa Soldier of Love Galerie Templon, Paris 14 March – 6 June As the opening day of Billie Zangewa’s show drew to a close, few would have anticipated the circumstances that would soon engulf it, nor the new resonances her work would find in light of them. While visitors trickled out of Galerie Templon, Emmanuel Macron announced new measures to combat COVID-19.

In the days that followed, the country went into lockdown: the gallery closed its doors; daily life changed for everyone.

Born in Malawi and based in Johannesburg, Zangewa creates embroidered silk works that celebrate those aspects of the day-to-day that pass unnoticed until they are gone: a school run, a swimming lesson, a birthday party with friends. The importance of the everyday is embedded in the choice of her medium. In interviews she has described how the appeal of textile lies in the way it constitutes a universal, sensory experience that punctuates all our daily lives. In a show that focuses on love, touch is also the point of contact between the individual and the external world, the physical encounter between self and other. This is nowhere more apparent than in Soldier of Love (2020), which depicts the artist walking her young son to school, his hand in hers. Her body leans towards

his, the viewer can almost feel his weight pulling on her. The work’s title evokes the show’s central theme: the duality of love and struggle that underpins existence. It would be easy to dismiss as a cliché, but sometimes the most well-worn phrases contain the greatest truths.

Zangewa is the protagonist in all but three of the ten tapestries exhibited, where identity is conveyed as multiple, contradictory and above all constructed through its everyday expression.

The serene domestic scenes of Sunday Morning Pursuits (2020) – browsing the newspaper – or Cold Shower (2019) contrast with the more anguished self-portrait Am I Enough? (2020). In this simple composition, stripped of background noise, the artist confronts the viewer, naked.

The title’s question reverberates in the hesitancy of her pose, at once defiant as she presents her body to the viewer, but also uncomfortable, as she looks away, refusing to meet that gaze. The artist uses her medium to full advantage: her body is sewn from fragments of silk that reflect the way the light hits her skin, but also evoke a self in construction, assembled and reassembled. The torn sections in the tapestry are a frequent feature of Zangewa’s work, and speak, as the artist has described, to the darker, more

traumatic aspects of experience, present but never fully revealed to the viewer. This practice reappears in The Swimming Lesson (2020), the largest and perhaps most emotionally charged work in the exhibition. Here, the artist’s son sits alone on the side of a swimming pool; vast swathes of cloth missing from the foreground indicate the absence of figures from the original scene – the swimming instructor and Zangewa herself. The work captures the simultaneous distress of a parent forced to relinquish control, and the joy of seeing that child grow into an autonomous adult.

One of the exhibition’s most striking works is Birthday Party (2020), a bright, busy composition where friends and family gather around a table. Unlike the other works on show, the characters are depicted without facial features, the traits of individuality suppressed to accentuate the collective energy of the scene and to mark the passage from the particular to the universal. Zangewa’s works don’t need a pandemic to be appreciated, but perhaps now more than ever we understand why it is the minutiae of the everyday, and the relationships that play out within it, that we should all be celebrating.

Daisy Sainsbury

Birthday Party, 2020, embroidered silk, 141 × 137 cm.

Courtesy Templon, Paris & Brussels

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Ida Applebroog Mercy Hospital Freud Museum, London 28 February – 7 June ‘But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads,’ says the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’. Text from Gilman’s story, along with passages from Sigmund Freud’s case studies and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), accompany the drawings by Ida Applebroog currently being exhibited at the Freud Museum. The American artist chose the texts herself, and we can understand why. The drawings – which she made in 1969–70 in San Diego’s Mercy Hospital, where, struck with severe depression, she interned herself for six weeks – are fraught with psychological angst, questioning what it is to be human.

Of these texts, Gilman’s story bears the most direct resemblance to Applebroog’s drawings, not least for its protofeminist overtones, being about a woman’s domestic isolation as she undergoes a nervous breakdown (at the climax of which she identifies with a colony of imaginary women living within the wallpaper, trapped and trying to escape) and her subjection to her more ‘rational’ physician husband.

Like Gilman’s wallpaper, the drawings are inhabited by amorphous, seemingly animate forms that hover between emergence and obscuration – you can’t tell if they’re coming or going. Scribbled in the bottom corner of one such drawing are the words this way… no that way… Come this way… no that way… repeated over and over, aligned vertically and scrawling from the bottom of the sheet to about halfway up, continuing for ten lines until she runs out of room. The last four of these lines

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are compressed, crammed in; we are left with the impression that if it were not for the arbitrary border of the page, she’d have carried on repeating these words forever.

To the left of this marginalia is a humanoid form jaggedly outlined in black pastel – and yet there is nothing really to signify that this is a human being or meant to be a figure at all, human, anthropomorphic, animal or otherwise. The ‘head’ is like the head of a turtle, but its ‘mouth’ could also be an estuary, just as the withered ‘breast’ could be a promontory or the ‘arm’ a peninsula. Then again, is it anything?

Is it not just an abstraction? Like many of the ‘figures’ in the Mercy Hospital series, it plays on our own inclination to recognise the familiar in the strange. We automatically see a figure – I see a ragged old man with a walking stick, but there is nothing really to signify that this is what is being represented. Nor is there anything to say that the faint squiggle behind it is necessarily a tail, or an imaginary tail, or if in fact there are two figures overlapping, one the devilish alter ego of the other, and so on… In this sense, the drawings play on our own inherent madness. We are all like Gilman’s heroine to a certain degree, we all see ourselves in the pattern on the wall.

The boldness of outline, variance of linear texture and professionalism with which each line is marked (which itself is demonstrative of her training as a graphic designer), and the context of hospitalisation in which Applebroog made these drawings, lends them an organic cellularity that is no less than menacing. “I am more interested in doing something to the

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viewer than saying something to the viewer,” Applebroog would say later, in a documentary film made by Beth B, her daughter, in 2016. They resemble at once the cellular forms seen through a microscope and geographic formations seen macroscopically from a great height or outer space. Indeed, it cannot be ignored in the midst of a pandemic that they bear an uncanny resemblance to magnified (and viral) photographic images of the coronavirus, which takes its name from the pricked, crownlike circumference of its membrane. This is especially the case in those drawings in which ‘wet’ media like ink and watercolour predominate, as the clouds of colour, and the black boundaries that seem to be trying to contain or exclude them, smudge and bleed.

At a symposium held at University College London in 2011, Applebroog talked about the years 1969 and 1970 – just after she had moved from Chicago to San Diego – as a time in which she craved sanctuary. The lines in these drawings are indeed boundaries, topographical in both the geographic and biological senses of the word. They are barriers within and outside of our bodies, which, for Applebroog – a self-described feminist who has often said that at a young age she learned ‘how power works’ – amount to the same thing. Her biology, as a woman, has proven to be restrictive, and yet the walls society has built to restrict her are not of her own body or her own will. At the same time, walls, boundaries, isolation, when it is her choice to be isolated, are conducive to introspection, sanctuary and – in the case of Mercy Hospital – recuperation. Tom Denman

above and facing page  drawings from the Mercy Hospital series, 1969. Š the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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Day Whatever Notes on the self and others, from a state of suspended animation I find that now, as much as my attention has turned to the profound, it has also turned to the trivial. I was going to talk here about following Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems – the mathematical proof that some things cannot be proved. And proof, of course, has a relation to truth. I’ve been reading about and around the theorems this past week. Distracted as much by details relating to the Austrian’s appalling life (it made me feel better) as by any of his mathematical or philosophical achievements (the idea was that they might make me feel better about facing the unknown). As a kind of therapy (obviously). It began with Janna Levin’s surprisingly good (surprising because the cover was so bad) A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. A novel that creates a relationship between Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, who in reality never actually met.

Although they were aware of each other’s theories. And the being aware but never meeting bit seemed appropriate to our times.

Things escalated in the Gödel direction from there. Thanks to Google. And people who upload pdfs of books. Reflections on Kurt Gödel, by Hao Wang, a collection of facts, notes and quotes, was particularly good among the latter. Wang, a logician, ‘was in close contact with Gödel in his last years’ (Gödel’s not Wang’s).

I learned that Gödel had ‘eaten mostly eggs’ when his wife took a trip back to Vienna in 1960, by which time the Gödels were living in Princeton. The notes for 1961 begin, ‘According to G… his health was exceptionally poor this year. I do not know what the health problems were.’ It’s in a section of the book titled ‘Facts’.

But really the most exciting thing that happened to me last week was a text from a friend sharing recipes posted online by the British bakery chain Greggs and the US fastfood joint McDonald’s, c/o The Daily Mail. I feel guilty saying that. Not the Daily Mail bit; the food bit. Kurt died of starvation for his art. Or science. Sometimes that line is fine. He weighed 29kg at the end. By then he would only eat food prepared by his wife.

Sausage, Bean & Cheese Melts and Sausage & Egg

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McMuffins were out. He had an obsessive fear of being poisoned. She had been hospitalised for several months when he died. He had stopped eating. So perhaps food excitement is a subconscious reaction. Although, clearly, it’s not subconscious anymore. That’s the price of writing things down: words make you tell lies.

Or maybe that’s an art-critic syndrome: always having to justify things. Or blame something.

I should point out that my period of social distancing, isolation or quarantine (I’m not sure what I’m practising at the moment) has become a period of jogging, eating healthily and keeping a disciplined routine of writing and editing.

And, while I like to think this is a choice (and congratulate myself for that), it might also be a perceived necessity (a subconscious result of the bombardment by various news channels and unsolicited emails telling me how to live – literally). At times this becomes a kind of Kurt Gödel as a student, 1925.

Courtesy Creative Commons

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mania – people promised me I would have time to read while stuck at home, and now I worry that I’m not reading enough. Not getting the ‘benefit’ of being stuck at home.

Consequently, I have subtracted one hour from my sleeping time. That hour is now reading time. Even though other hours in the day are also reading time. With additional periods of reading time for moments of stress. In fact, I’m probably reading a lot. I’m probably getting that so-called benefit. And more. This, I know, is a privileged position in which to be. Most people are probably in far worse positions than this.

Although perhaps I’m acknowledging that because I feel I have to and not because I mean it.

I worry that I’m developing a problem with empathy the longer I stay inside. I’m starting to treat unsolicited emails about solidarity ‘in these troubled times’ with a degree of cynicism that borders on hostility. They don’t really mean it: it’s form without substance, just a symptom of the hollow language of these times. And, while we’re at it, I’m clearly resorting to blaming my subconscious for decisions that are more conscious than I would care to believe.

Junkfood has previously been a guilty pleasure to be indulged in when abroad. Or when in a rush.

Or subject to a craving. Perhaps the truth is that I love it. But it’s never a product that should come near the homely hearth of health.

Is a Sausage & Egg McMuffin more healthy if I make it, knowing what went into it? Does following the recipe make it a Sausage & Egg McMuffin? Will I have taken the Mc out? Did McDonald’s deliberately leave something out of the recipe it supplied?

In any case, should I try to replicate or to improve? And, armed with my newfound Gödel knowledge, could I write a formula to get to the bottom of all that? But I’m supposed to be saving myself so that I can save the NHS. Eating a fry-up of eggs, burgerised sausages and cheese seems to run counter to that. It would definitely invalidate the jogging. So I’ve forwarded the recipe to other friends. As a gesture of solidarity.

In these troubled times. Mark Rappolt

K Fondazione Prada, Milan 21 February – 26 October K brings together an installation by Martin Kippenberger (The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, 1994), a film by Orson Welles (The Trial, 1962) and an album by Tangerine Dream (Franz Kafka – The Castle, 2013). The title refers primarily to Kafka, whose unfinished novels Amerika, The Trial and The Castle (all posthumously edited by Kafka’s friend Max Brod and published between 1925 and 1927) inspired the three works on show – albeit with plenty of poetic licence. In his catalogue introduction, curator Udo Kittelmann describes the exhibition as ‘a story, not unlike a parable, about “the darkest concerns of human life”’ (a quote from Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka), its structure a triptych or altarpiece whose parts are ‘presented entirely separately from one another…, both in space and time’.

Kippenberger’s The Happy End… is installed in Fondazione Prada’s main ‘Podium’ space, encased in spectacular glass walls. The installation represents an imaginary conclusion to Kafka’s story, whose protagonist Karl Rossmann applies for a position in, as Kafka describes it, ‘the largest theatre in the world’ (that is, rampant American capitalism), after reading a poster proclaiming: ‘All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward!’, only to find himself engulfed in

never-ending interviews for hapless jobs. On a well-lit green soccer field, flanked by bleachers and referee high-chairs, Kippenberger recreates the imaginary dialogues with an orderly grid of threesomes, each comprising an empty desk and two chairs of various designs and epochs, to suggest a multitude of discourses across time.

Orson Welles’s claustrophobic and darkly humorous masterpiece, starring Anthony Perkins as Josef K, is screened in the foundation’s huge in-house cinema. In an iconic sequence, echoing Kippenberger’s work, K walks through a vast office filled with rows of typing clerks at work at their desks; Welles shot it in the halls of the Zagreb Fair, with 850 identical desks and 850 extras. The movie, too, ends on a slightly brighter note than the novel: instead of being executed ‘like a dog’, K bravely laughs in the faces of his slayers. Finally, music by Tangerine Dream is played on a loop in the twin ‘Cisterna’ spaces, fitted with purple carpeting, purple lights and comfortable loungers, as if to recreate the atmosphere and tint of ambient music, the genre pioneered by the legendary Krautrock band since the early 1970s.

After the drastic measures of social distancing induced by COVID-19, Kittelmann’s

remarks on the topicality of Kafka’s ‘trilogy of loneliness’ and the ‘widespread fear of an epoch-making transformation of an unknown scale’ inevitably stand out. And yet, the impossibility of visiting K after a certain point reveals another aspect of the show’s cross-disciplinary approach, strategically merging three strands (art, cinema, music) of the foundation’s programme. K’s potential to alter the temporality of an average visit also works in the present tense, when all contents are forced to migrate online. Welles’s film and Tangerine Dream’s album are only a click away from everybody’s devices, and I have played them on a loop to keep me company while writing, bent over my home desk like millions of other people across the globe. The final track of Franz Kafka – The Castle is titled A Place of Mercy, described thus in the sleeve notes: ‘It is not necessary to leave one’s house. Remain at your desk and hark.

Don’t even hark, just wait. Don’t wait, stay completely quiet and alone. The world will open itself up for its decipherment, it is incapable of anything else, you have triumphed and at last it will wind rapturously on the floor before you.’ The happy end indeed?

Barbara Casavecchia

Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, 1994, mixed media, 300 × 200 cm. © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

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Desire at a Distance The forgotten pleasures of viewing art in reproduction In the introduction to his 1996 essay collection, About Modern Art, the art critic David Sylvester recalls that his damascene conversion to art came via a black-and-white reproduction of Matisse’s Dance (1910). When I read that, in my mid-twenties, I didn’t find it as weird as I might now. You got into art through photos? Fine, so did I. (Just not during the 1930s.) I grew up with one art gallery nearby, in Leeds, and while I grew to love some of the works in their collection, the stuff that first imprinted itself on me when I saw it was all on the page. Obviously, I’m thinking about this now because the days of art being inaccessible in the flesh have, for most of us, recently returned, however briefly, however lengthily. We scorn the reproduction when there’s a choice: when you live in a city full of open galleries and capacious museums, why flip pages or click through websites?

When you don’t, though, you make do with what you have.

There are upsides to such enforced distance. As a teenager I used to buy cheap bootleg cassettes of bands I liked, which were usually haloed in hiss and distortion, and having to strain to hear or see something through the murky artefacts of repro, to push back against a degree of unavailability, is a masochistic pleasure mostly vanished in a high-def era, similar to waiting for a television show to be broadcast. Maybe you also imagined that were you ever to glimpse the legit version, whether a Matisse painting or a well-mastered release of Mothers of Invention outtakes and jams from 1970, it’d be impossibly thrilling.

But for now, you can’t have it and the result is distance as desire mechanism, a longing for something else that is, at the same time, an experience in itself. Don’t ask Walter Benjamin, ask Proust; ask anyone who has loved and not been loved back.

Sometime during the first half of the 1990s I saw my first roomful of de Koonings, at what was then The Tate. I can’t remember which ones.

I do remember that one or two of them were in the cerulean-blue, heavily illustrated monograph of the Ab-Ex master that I’d taken on my foundation course and progressively splattered with paint, especially the page with Pink Angels (c. 1945). I’d gotten into de Kooning in the first

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place through another art book with a lot of pictures in it, Edward Lucie-Smith’s Lives of the Great Modern Artists (1986). As a schoolboy I’d stare the print off that thing, with its images and in-thestudio portraits, projecting, far from its times and places. I don’t paint anymore – a distant cheer goes up – and I mostly don’t read hagiography like that anymore; the propelling naivety is gone, or at least it’s buried. Again, though, something gained and something lost. An array of real de Koonings is simply a different, more vivid, more numinous order of experience than a photo where the colours are a bit off. (Except you won’t know that until you’ve been there in the gallery.)

Yes, it’s better. But when a photo is all you’ve got, it counts. And so I’m looking at reproductions again, much more now and closer, because they’re

all there’s been lately, and trying to recalibrate.

There’s something pleasurable about it, this disinterring of an old way.

Artists, as usual, are ahead of us in this respect. Even if there is no sight like an artist in meltdown because the colours aren’t quite perfect in their new catalogue, the ones I know mostly have art books in their studios; the painters in particular look at photos of paintings as an alternation from and spur, or goad, to painting, and they’re not that fussy. They have the old Phaidon books with detachable plates in them sometimes. While the critical community, if it exists, considers the reproduction a necessary evil and illustrative support – heaven forbid you’d ever review a show from a set of jpegs the gallery sent through – artists don’t snob, don’t spurn. They pin up postcards from the museum

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gift shop; they live with whatever emits a vibe.

This stuff can be like a good-luck charm, too, or a shorthand for whatever compound the artist wants to get into their work: I remember being in Rebecca Warren’s studio and her having there, if I recall correctly, a diagram of a black square that represented blocked ideation, a plastic figurine of Freud and a photo of a cat; all of this was important to her, generated moods.

In the meantime, I’m out here with an inbox full of invites to virtual viewing rooms, and I don’t want to be. The so-called 3D walkthrough, the gimmickry that allows you to take a work from the gallery’s inventory and, via digital compositing, see it placed in your own home, etc – these are inventive and laudable ways to bridge the gap created by lockdown, to keep viewers and buyers onstream. But, to be a churl about it, they remind me of being at the gym, on one of those running machines that offers filmed footage of a landscape through which to jog or sprint. Every once in a while, if you squint and block out the music and the sound of other machines and grunting, you might fool yourself into thinking you’re actually out in the fresh air, the real. But only momentarily, and then there’s a sort of ambient disappointment in remembering that no, you’re thundering away on a treadmill.

It’s like wandering down the street on Google Earth because you can’t go out.

And so not to criticise anyone who enjoys panning and swooping around a virtual gallery (and social media initiatives such as #MuseumsUnlocked, in which people post pictures taken in the institutions they currently can’t enter, are clearly making some people happy), these are proposals edged with melancholy. Which is maybe why, for all that it’s somehow a privileged move, I keep turning the computer off – dodging the flood of content that galleries are pumping out – and picking up a book of reproductions, or leaving the computer on and only looking at one or two images from a museum’s archive. This different pace, this definitely-not-real, is pacifying, a balm. Meanwhile, as I write, it’s just been announced that Berlin, where I live, is reopening its galleries. For the moment, I might just stay in. Martin Herbert

Eduardo Paolozzi The Metallization of a Dream Clearing, Brussels 17 January – 14 March Eduardo Paolozzi was ambivalent about being referred to as a Pop artist, though he is often described as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the movement in Britain. Like his peer Richard Hamilton, he emerged from the cerebral interdisciplinary milieu of the Independent Group, which sought to analyse and influence the future of art, design and technology. Perhaps correctly, the Scottish artist felt his affiliations with Pop led to reductive interpretations of his work and obscured its roots in an ideological approach. This show, featuring sculptures, suites of prints and an early animation (dating from 1963 to 1975), testifies to the complexity and formal cohesion of Paolozzi’s output.

Paolozzi once described his work as a ‘health warning for an uncreative and thriftless society’, and much here implies that the relationship between man and machine is irrevocably tipping in a doomed direction.

Attesting to his sociological interest in the apparatuses of commodity fetishism, it also reveals his desire to dissect and diagnose the rationalised psychopathy of Western civilisation. The series of screenprints entitled Universal Electronic Vacuum (1967) engages all the classic visual tropes of psychedelia: Day-Glo grids, Ben-Day dots, shimmering rasterized tracery. Its horror vacui is overwhelming, an overabundance of optical stimuli squeezed into every available inch. A comparatively sombre

print from this series, War Games Revised, stands out: a schema of missiles and thermonuclear bombs rendered in matt silver and navy. These projectile weapons are arranged to resemble the components of an injection-moulded scalemodel kit. The familiar aesthetics of massmade playthings fused with the advanced instruments of industrialised killing, made while the Vietnam War raged, recalls the agitprop photomontage of John Heartfield.

Another suite of prints, Conditional Probability Machine (1970), consists of 25 black-and-white etchings of sober, barely altered images sourced mainly from scientific and military journals depicting an array of subjects such as irradiated mice, crash-test dummies and cyborgian automata: a study of the ways in which twentiethcentury scientific and technological achievements were driving the human species towards more efficient forms of barbarism. Clearly, Paolozzi was deeply preoccupied with the psychological and physical impact of technology; yet while he may have had some inkling of a dystopian future, he never could have envisaged the techno-rational containment of our cybercapitalist twenty-first century. Paolozzi’s vision is positively rose-tinted when compared to the bleakness of our current situation, more Barbarella than Black Mirror.

The show’s nucleus is a metallic citadel of mechanomorphic sculptures, amalgamations

of mechanical miscellanea: household appliances, turbines, pistons and industrial tubing prefabricated in monochrome cast metal.

Parrot (1964) appears like a priapic totem from some postapocalyptic world; Pan Am (1966), a welded modular construction, resembles the debris from a spacecraft that broke apart on reentry. Several of these were originally commissioned for a playground, reflecting the enthusiasm of those booming years in which factions of artists believed that art and architecture could be democratising, emancipatory agents for fomenting positive social change.

The show’s title is taken from an artist book, a manifesto-cum-monograph Paolozzi produced in 1964, its focus the changing dynamic between humans and machines.

Yet from today’s vantage point the titular phrase might also be seen as referring to the way in which the utopian initiatives and progressive aims of the 1960s were moribund and ossified by the century’s end. Ultimately, The Metallization of a Dream constitutes the remnants of a once-vital avant-garde that, like Russian Constructivism, was unironically committed to an idealistic position. Instilled in these works from Paolozzi’s zenith are the imagined possibilities of a long-lost moment – assured exuberances all but absent from our plague-ridden present. Pádraic E. Moore

Collage City, 1975, cast, extruded and welded aluminium, 180 × 190 × 110 cm.

Courtesy Clearing, Brussels

Summer 2020

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Week Whatever Drinking with Cesare Pavese + moments of intensity, extended emptiness This week I’ve been spending some time with Cesare Pavese in the hills outside Turin. To get away from Gödel and his incompleteness theorems. He’s hiding. (Cesare, not Kurt.)

Everyone round here is in hiding. Although they seem to be managing quite the number of secret parties at night. Drinking, dancing, conversing, flirting – that kind of stuff. After all, the hotels are shut and who else is going to drink the wine? Obviously everyone is keeping a watchful eye out for the authorities. It’s all on the QT. Having been something of a womaniser in his youth, Cesare has mellowed out a bit. He seems to be finding a sort of contentment in the hiding and the solitude. He probably has to, in order to stay sane. Except that he’s a frequent attendee at the parties.

Where he’s chasing an old flame.

He’s working as a teacher (although school’s closed at the moment) and goes on solitary walks with a dog that he found.

That bit’s important. The relationship between man and beast is contingent rather than necessary.

Cesare never has to take complete responsibility for its care. Because it’s both his and not his. (The dog and the responsibility that comes with it.) Later he finds out that the old flame has a son that may or may not be his. No one’s telling, so no one knows. Moreover, no one knows if it’s important to know. The dog wanders in and out of his life. The potential son too. Like everyone and everything else.

I remember talking with the artist and former Situationist Constant during the very early 2000s about what it was like to be a single-parent artist when he left Amsterdam (after his then-wife had left him) to live among the bohemians and courtesans of Paris in Pigalle.

“Having a son was rather like having a dog now,” he boldly replied. As if on cue his dog scampered around his feet. “You always knew there was someone to give you affection when you needed it.” At least I think that’s how it happened. The conversation took place a long time ago. And he wasn’t so keen on my recording anything.

He said that if I recorded our conversation, then I’d only really listen to him afterwards on tape. And that my actual conversation would be with the recording rather than with him.

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This would make things boring for him. But on reflection I’m beginning to think that this process might have made him say what I wanted him to say. Because it relied on what I remembered. And while he was confident that what he said would definitely be memorable, I was sceptical. I would only remember what I wanted to remember. Although the few conversations we did record shortly before the end of his life indicated that he might have been saying what I wanted him to say anyway.

For a couple of years we saw each other every few months. He wandered in and out of my life. As much as you can wander on a route from London to Amsterdam that goes train, plane, train, train, plane train. Like most relationships, it was characterised by moments of intensity followed by longer moments of emptiness. He had once had a vision for changing the world and its way of life. I wanted to know why it hadn’t come to pass and what Cesare Pavese, The House on the Hill (1948), Digit Books edition, 1960

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bits of it might be salvageable now. Or then.

My then, not his then. In any case, the intensity and emptiness seem now to be much like the experience of the narrator in Cesare’s account of Italy at the end of the Second World War. Everyone tries to get to know everyone else, but no one knows what their companions have done, are doing (there are resistance activities, a consequent need for secrecy and a variety of trust issues) or will do in times to come. All they know of each other exists in the moment. Which mainly serves to remind them of all the things they don’t know. In the book (The House on the Hill), relationships are empirical rather than metaphysical. A distinction of which we’re constantly reminded now.

But the last was really a subconscious connection. (Ha, ha!) The book consciously reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s statement (in her brilliantly titled memoir Everybody’s Autobiography) about her childhood home in Oakland, California: ‘there is no there there’. Which seems to be what everyone who’s not fighting for their life is starting to worry about now. Although the Stein quotation is also referenced in the account of Kurt Gödel’s life that I’m reading at the moment. So presumably that’s what’s reminding me. Perhaps the rest is just a product of the desire to join dots – to assert a logic where there is none. That’s a product of writing, not viruses btw. And art writing in particular.

But it (logical explanations of things that lie beyond logic) is also part of the paradox that Gödel was tackling when he published his incompleteness theory. So maybe what I want to say is that it goes a bit beyond art writing too. And that the idea of a getaway I proposed at the beginning of all this is a lie. Obviously. I’m still stuck at home. And still stuck on Gödel.

A friend called me the other day. They’re stuck (on their own) on the other side of London.

They asked me how social distancing and being cooped up inside was for me. “I have a large balcony,” I replied. “So I can get outside while technically being inside.” “You have a partner too,” they replied. “You’re not living on your own.” I think they were just trying to hide their jealousy of the balcony. Mark Rappolt

Juan Luis Moraza Tripalium Espacio Mínimo, Madrid 25 January – 14 March The larger share of Juan Luis Moraza’s exhibition Tripalium consists of a series of theme-andvariation sculptures, all also entitled Tripalium (with individuating subtitles) and all dating from 2020. Each mixed-media sculpture (fashioned from materials such as wood, steel and acrylic) is composed of a group of rod- or stakelike elements, bundled together vertically and clasped near the top so that their bases or ‘feet’ splay outward, creating a tripodlike structure. The ‘rods’ take various representational forms, many of them enlarged versions of objects from everyday life, such as a measuring stick; a foam tube of the sort used by children to keep afloat in swimming pools; an overgrown selfie-stick (phone included); a giant screw and bolt; an antenna; a copper tube; a roll of coins and so on – the execution of these objects being nothing short of exquisite.

There’s a degree of irony to the choice of objects, along the lines of Claes Oldenburg’s work, but not outright kitsch or humour.

To the contrary, Moraza’s use of the Latin term tripalium in his titles is a reference to a Roman device consisting of a group of three or more poles that was used to torture slaves – this same tripalium ‘torture’ later deriving into the word for ‘work’ in certain Romance languages,

such as trabajo in Spanish or travail in French.

In other words, no, not funny.

Etymological references to work and torture aside, by their nature Moraza’s sculptures here embody stability, the same way a three-legged stool or (again) a tripod does.

As such they are decidedly not precarious, despite their air of delicacy. But while not physically wobbly, there is a different sense of insecurity to these objects in that they consist of nothing more than assorted objects bound together, with no internal or organic structure; remove that single metal clasp and they would immediately collapse. This combination of stability and its opposite lend the works a potent and graceful sculptural presence, while perhaps pointing to a corollary reading rooted in the fundamental precariousness of our (more or less) consensually bound systems of labour, time and money.

The other work in the exhibition is a series of prints entitled Banco Internacional de Tiempo Laboral (International Bank of Labour Time) (2019). These take the form of printed banknotes from multiple nations and in multiple languages and with a rather madcap iconography that includes an atomic mushroom cloud, a lunar landing vehicle, a gaggle

of beauty pageant contestants and images of historical figures such as Nikola Tesla, Michel Foucault and Harry Houdini. Moraza’s banknotes correspond not to monetary value but rather to quantities of time, with bills ranging in value from 0.001 seconds to 5 million hours and with each note bearing the ostensibly sinister but ultimately rather confusing phrase ‘My time is your money’. The thematic connection to the Tripalium sculptures is clear – the interdependence of labour, time and money – although the thinking within Moraza’s overall programme is somewhat less so. Whose time and whose money?

Doesn’t time-banking rely fundamentally on a cooperative structure of exchange, not on a ‘mine vs yours’ dichotomy? Is this ‘bank’ a form of worker autonomy or further worker oppression? (Even more confusingly, on occasion the phrase is reversed to ‘Your time is my money’.) Nonetheless, as in the sculptures, the execution of these printed works is marvellous: they must have been great fun to assemble, with their eclectic imagery and holograms and watermarks and other graphic elements, and that delight in inventiveness – in the work that went into the work – is conveyed felicitously to the viewer. George Stolz

Banco Internacional del Tiempo Laboral (detail), 2020, 24 digital prints on 90g Guarro Torreón paper, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Espacio Mínimo, Madrid

Summer 2020

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Theft and Destruction Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 21 February – 9 April Theft and Destruction features 30 artists, predominantly Polish, spanning several generations, presenting representations and manifestations of deliberate and accidental destruction; from Mariola Przyjemska’s film History of paintings destroyed by Marek Kijewski (2020), about having her paintings slashed by her former partner, the artist Marek Kijewski, to Rafał Bujnowski’s untitled ink on paper works of shadowy, tropical fauna, infused with an unexpected tonal intensity after succumbing to a fire. Footage from the exhibition Warsaw Accuses, staged in 1945 in the devastated capital’s National Gallery to demonstrate German crimes against Polish culture, still shocks with its display of ravaged paintings and mutilated cherubs. The film could easily be exhibited under a nationalist agenda, divergent to that of Arsenał’s curator Michał Łukaszuk; Białystok is a city notorious for the violence against 2019’s Pride parade.

With parts of the country declaring ‘LGBT Free Zones’, Poland’s queer minority is today’s ‘enemy’, as a work by Julita Wójcik, Stamp of the Polish Post – Rainbow on Zbawiciela Square in Warsaw (2020) reminds us. A depiction of her repeatedly vandalised sculpture Tȩcza (2010), a rainbow constructed of plastic flowers that used to stand in central Warsaw, is reproduced on a set of ‘design your own’ postage stamps,

alongside the envelope used to send the work to Białystok with one of the same stamps. Hardly a grand theft, rather a quiet appropriation and subversion of a state-run institution’s gimmick.

This exhibition explores the potency of visual art against the backdrop of a nationalist government panicked about culture’s reach.

The recent installation of an avowed enemy of ‘cultural Marxism’ as director of Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art is broadly considered a blow to the independence and internationalism of visual arts in Poland.

I thought about this looking at Batowice (2009),

by Edward Dwurnik. Pasting a contemporary sepia study of the eponymous Krakow district

by Bartek Materka onto a larger canvas, Dwurnik, who has often mined social realist imagery, invades and extends the scene with vigorous strokes of blues, purples and yellows.

But is the effect destructive? Materka, 30 years Dwurnik’s junior, ironically becomes ‘the old master’, supplying the distant, nostalgic core of this nocturnal industrial scene, albeit one corrupted by Dwurnik’s unorthodoxy. I wonder what other subtle aberrations might slip through a nationalist vision.

Which leads to Dominika Świȩcicka’s Makieta parku (2020): a model of an imaginary

Theft and Destruction (installation view), 2020.

Photo Maciej Zaniewski. Courtesy Galeria Arsenał, Białystok

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park for lost artworks, including an obligatory Lenin statue, a Mosul relief destroyed by Isis and Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), notably not destroyed, despite calls for it to be. The equivalence of these works is fraught with questions, especially considering the reiteration of the ‘black death spectacle’ of Open Casket. But the rough fabrication, in which the works are far less visible than if you googled them, is a fittingly pessimistic gesture towards materiality.

The maquette references Oskar Hansen’s unrealised ‘antimonument’ for AuschwitzBirkenau, The Road (1958), which would have run diagonally through the camp, the only thing to remain as everything around it perished. Here, the road is littered with weeds, the right-angled route reminiscent of a swastika.

In the centre of another small room, the only cast (made by the artist in 2018) of Wanda Czełkowska’s Głowa (Head) (1968) imposes with its osseous bulk. Czełkowska sawed the head down the middle, dispensing with half and revealing the sculpture’s metal armature. The title, Głowa, remains crucially ‘whole’, suggesting that the head only functions when freed from the tradition (in this case, figurative sculpture) to which it had formerly belonged.

Herein wrestles the spirit of this timely exhibition. Phoebe Blatton

Gone Fishing Why taking a break is a good thing for people who care about art ‘When things get too much for me,’ wrote Joseph Mitchell in his 1956 essay ‘Mr Hunter’s Grave’, ‘I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.’

The appeal is clear. Time stands relatively still in a graveyard and the dead have salutary lessons for the living: snap out of it, live while you can, be present. I sometimes skulk around tombstones for the same reason, but what I like better is to walk a mindless, unvarying circuit of a lake near where I live. I went there the other day and saw an accidentally perfect symbol of how things are right now, one that also felt like a teachable moment.

Out in the middle of the sunlit waters was a rowboat, a silhouetted figure perched at either end: at least two metres apart, I’d have said. I sat on the shore, pulled into their slowed space and watched awhile.

They weren’t fishing, or even moving, just staring peaceably into space, becalmed, as if one of Peter Doig’s canoeists had found a friend in the time of social distancing. Elsewhere on the shores other people were fishing – perhaps not all of this was in accordance with the law – but of course fishing is mostly doing nothing except being there, reflecting, meditating without spiritual trappings.

The most useful book I read before everything changed was Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), for reasons the title might make obvious. Odell is an artist, and her book is not so much about inactivity as about tuning in to the real world and reclaiming your own attention. Some of her examples for how to do this come from art – John Cage makes an appearance, as Odell finds her hearing marvellously heightened after leaving a Cage concert – but after reading it I spent a fair bit of time mooching around parks looking, for periods long enough to make me conspicuous, at single trees or plants, discovering how much I could get out of them visually, and also refusing to engage with the whole picture, which would probably have felt overwhelming in zoom mode.

Part of the pleasure of walking outside in those days was that I was newly attending to things that were already there and had been under my

nose all along, except I hadn’t been able to focus on them. This activity didn’t require the production or pursuit of something newly made, just a shift in focus.

In the artworld and outside of it, I suspect most of us spend more time on intake than contemplation. It’s easier, for one thing, to keep chasing the new than to drill down into something already half-familiar and find noteworthy new layers, even if the latter is, in the long run, more satisfying. There’s a bit of resistance that has to be overcome when novelty is everbeckoning. (For this reason, some of my happiest reading experiences have been when I’ve been

stuck, on holiday say, with just one book.)

But glut can also be an alibi for inattentiveness.

Now, as you may have noticed, the artworld is broadly on pause. Except in a handful of cities, new exhibitions are not happening. But, for a range of reasons – primarily that heavily leveraged galleries need to keep selling work to survive – they’re happening online. Meanwhile it’s assumed that we’re so addicted to content that we need a tsunami of fresh gallerygenerated podcasts, ruminative in-house texts, sneak peeks at what artists are making during lockdown, etc.

I wish it could be otherwise. Contemporary art is, or has been for the last couple of decades, a perpetual-motion machine, or a tail wagging a dog. In a book I wrote a few years ago, I lamented seeing ‘too many exhibitions that Arnold Böcklin, Die Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead), 1880, oil on canvas, 111 × 156 cm.

Collection Kunstmuseum, Basel

Summer 2020

are blatantly products of the studio treadmill, which circularly pay for the assistants and the fair-booth acreage’, and nothing has changed in the meantime except, well, you know. You can’t meditate if you only inhale; you need to exhale too. This could have been and still might be a moment for a breather. Not least because what art is it that artists are supposed to make in the face of this snookering virus? Art about it feels wrong (and risks short-term relevance); art about anything else feels gauche. But the gallery system has snookered itself as well by becoming, broadly, structurally unable to handle a break in operations; hence the frantic pivot to online art fairs, etc. Magazines, too, need a steady crop of fresh faces to suggest or simulate dynamism. If you have an emerging-artist section, an artist needs to emerge every month, whether a good one has actually done so or not.

The capacity for a backwards glance, even the potential for reflection, has felt barely there for years, until now.

Of course, while the shutters are down and the market scrambles to compensate by reaching out through the screen, a viewer can arguably move at their own speed, wander around awhile in the cemeteries of the archive, sandwich in hand. Follow the Cageian advice to stay with something after it bores you and see what happens when you crash through the irritation barrier, whether that thing is a single image or an artist’s oeuvre or an essay you last read a decade ago and with which you think you’re familiar (except that you’re a different person now, so perhaps not). Forget trying to memorise the names of every new artist, curator, etc, because for most of us that’s been impossible for a while. And you won’t be physically cornered for some time anyway. Resist in general the infinite scroll, the desire for which fades after a while. It remains to be seen whether, bumpy ride though it will undoubtedly be and not without undeserved casualties, the artworld reverts to a more manageable, less monolithic scale that makes it easier to honour art with our attention, perhaps our newfound attention, to it. Gallerists and artists are beginning to predict as much, and a sizeable part of me hopes they’re right. Martin Herbert

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Week Wherever Resisting the stampede towards the virtual Well, this week has been a write-off. I read a slightly disappointing novel about fatalism and love during the Sri Lankan Civil War. I thought that an intense account of the suffering of others would help with my empathy problem. (Like it had when I’d read an account of Kurt Gödel starving himself to death a few weeks ago.) And that I’d somehow be connecting with my Sri Lankan ancestors. From an apartment in London. Sporadically decorated with some of their religious knickknacks. It didn’t and I didn’t. Although in some respects I was reminded that I do share aspects of their faith. And, like them, I don’t like being bombed.I watched a documentary about Philip Larkin presented by A.N. Wilson, a very English newspaper columnist ‘known for his biographies’. For the next day I couldn’t stop imitating Wilson’s clipped British accent, while I talked to myself (obviously – although podcasts did begin to seem like an option), having somehow morphed from colonised to coloniser in the space of 24 hours. And I could not stop staring out of my high windows and dreaming up the poems Larkin might have written about our shitty new world: ‘An air of baffled absence, trying to be there / Yet being here…’ Yep. It turns out he had already written them. Parody potential denied. Like I said, the week was a write-off. Rather like Wilson’s attempts to deal with Larkin’s racism in the documentary.

And to think that at some point I thought that these columns were going to be uplifting in a dark sort of way. Now I was going to have to give in to the barrage of emails exhorting me to ‘experience’ art online. So I would have something ‘new’ to say. Not, as the whole Larkin fiasco reminds me, that such a thing is possible.

That’s when I moved from the definite racist to the possible paedophile. (Isn’t that the history of British literature?) Discovering, while avoiding the online art shows, an old ArtReview article written by an architect friend in which he mentioned an episode from Lewis Carroll’s obscure, unpopular and final novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. (For the record, it’s Carroll, not the architect friend, who’s the possible paedophile.)

It’s the sequel to his (Carroll’s, not the architect’s) penultimate unpopular novel, Sylvie and Bruno.

Carroll had originally planned that they should be one popular novel, but his publisher worried

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that it was too long to be popular. It turns out people had developed short attentionspans even in the age of Victorian verbosity and Dickens. Nothing is new.

With the benefit of hindsight, people today say that it was the lack of humour rather than the length of Carroll’s ramblings that the publisher should have been worried about. And, to be fair, it’s not like I could bring myself to read every page of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. Although that might be because I don’t have part one of the project to hand. So the characters never seemed to develop. They arrived at the beginning of the book fully formed. Somewhere else.

Doubters: this is how the preface begins – ‘I MUST begin with the same announcement as

in the previous Volume (which I shall henceforward refer to as “Vol. I,” calling the present Volume “Vol. II”), viz that the Locket, at p. 405, was drawn by “Miss. Alice Havers.”’ Carroll goes on to thank his ‘many’ reviewers for their bad reviews of ‘Vol. I’, before continuing thus: ‘In the Preface to Vol. I were two puzzles, on which my readers might exercise their ingenuity. One was to detect the 3 lines of “padding,” which I had found it necessary to supply in the passage extending from the top of p. 35 to the middle of p. 38. They are the 14th, 15th and 16th lines of p. 37.’ Old fool. FYI there is no locket on p. 405.

There’s an engraving of a locketless woman in bed on p. 404. Although maybe he was referring to ‘Vol I’. In case ‘Miss. Alice Havers’ sued. The need for the ‘padding’, beyond puzzling his Illustration by Harry Furniss from Lewis Carroll, Bruno and Sylvie Concluded (1893)

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readers, is never explained. Still, a life in pieces is what we all have to deal with these days.

And, in that sense, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded isn’t all bad.

The passage in question concerns cartography. And it somehow seems to encapsulate what our new lives are like. And why certain aspects of them – online or virtual art shows, for example – are worthy of a certain scepticism: “What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr [although he seems German, he’s supposed to be a visitor from another planet, btw – presumably these amounted to the same thing to English people in the late nineteenth century]. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile.

And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?”

I enquired.

“It has never been spread out yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

It’s not that I don’t look at artworks online. I do. But I want to resist the stampede towards the virtual, the arms race of the digital and any move to exchange the virtual for the real or to pretend that they are somehow equivalent.

Because, as the extraterrestrial German says, the country itself does nearly as well.

In my mind, the passage by Lewis Carroll will always be read to me by someone impersonating A.N. Wilson. I’ve got enough fuzzy edges and unstable connections already. I like them.

And no screen can mimic them. Even if this week was a bust.

Coda: as I write this, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has just announced the release of ‘the largest and most detailed ever photograph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, a 4.8-gigapixel image that will allow viewers to see ‘individual brushstrokes’ and ‘even particles of pigment in the painting’. Whatever.

Mark Rappolt

Beyond the Black Atlantic Kunstverein Hannover 15 February – 1 June In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Paul Gilroy describes ‘the Black Atlantic’ as a shared culture rooted in the convergence of cultures from Africa, the Americas, Britain and the Caribbean produced by the transatlantic slave trade. Twentyseven years later, Beyond the Black Atlantic seeks to expand and even redefine this shared culture in bringing together four young artists: Sandra Mujinga, Paulo Nazareth, Tschabalala Self and Kemang Wa Lehulere.

Gilroy’s book uses the ship as a recurring motif to focus on the Middle Passage and to act as a vessel of ideological and cultural exchange.

Appropriately, then, this show opens with Wa Lehulere’s installation Matric 2015 (2018), with its glass bottles containing sand and scrolls of paper, guarded by porcelain dogs painted black. Wa Lehulere’s oeuvre often addresses the apartheid era, and these protected documents act as a reminder of inaccessible education. Here, however, the bottled messages – perhaps found floating, sunken or about to be cast out to sea – recall humans being forced through the Door of No Return, packed tightly into the hold and shipped from one place to the next as chattel.

In the following room the mood shifts to one of protection and fear. Under green light are three towering humanoid figures made

of black faux-leather (Mujinga’s Camouflage Waves 1–3, 2018), hoods concealing where there should be faces, gangly fabric arms sagging past equally lanky legs and knees. This green light appears in another room, overtaken by Mujinga’s video installation Re-Imagining Things IV (2020).

Two monitors – hung behind a curved black wall – display YouTube videos of fireworks altered with a liquid-effect filter and isolated in a green background. Here the green takes on new associations: rather than suggesting theatre or questioning whether the hooded figures are actually protecting themselves, it harkens to a filmic greenscreen as a place of alteration and transformation – a place where anything can be made manifest.

Digital manipulation and representation are again referenced in a room of Self’s textile assemblages and paintings. Her colourful, oversize portraits exaggerate women’s thighs and butts, and men’s phalluses and afros, pointing towards stereotypical media portrayals of black bodies. Self’s work gives way to Nazareth’s Anthropology of the Black II (2014), a film in which he lies on the ground at a museum for psychiatric patients in Salvador da Bahia and covers his head with skulls of the deceased. Elsewhere, 34 televisions host videos of waving flags, filmed by the artist during a two-year walk from Horizonte to New York City (Bandera Rotas

(Broken Flags), 2014/2020). Placed on wooden pallets, the monitors are ready for immediate relocation, questioning the idea of a flag’s ‘fixed’ representation. Throughout their works, Self and Nazareth address the idea of malleable identities – in relation to nationalism, history and the current world order.

The breadth of positions here evidence the fact that black identities and communities cannot be summated by a singular term like the Black Atlantic; that there is no singular ‘African diaspora’. Diasporas are wide-ranging, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean to intra-Africa, so we should indeed be thinking beyond the Black Atlantic.

The exhibition’s informational handout suggests one reason, among many, for this shift in understanding: ‘Social conflicts in Western societies that were long thought to have been overcome… have sparked new awareness among members of the Black community’.

But this begs the question, who has ever thought social issues like racism or inequality have been overcome? Perhaps this ‘new awareness’ results not from the realisation that such social issues continue to pervade everyday life, but rather from a global move towards an existence beyond the Black Atlantic – from finding seats at the table for everyone.

Emily McDermott

Sandra Mujinga, Re-Imagining Things IV, 2020, two-channel video installation. Photo: Raimund Zakowski. Courtesy the artist

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Beyond Measure Trondheim Kunstmuseum 29 February – 9 August Times of crisis turn normality oblique, even unrecognisable. They expose the habitual as a fragile construction. Beyond Measure scrutinises the standards and parameters on which notions of normalcy hinge. Extending the lineage of artists such as On Kawara, who, from the 1960s onward, created extreme yet ostensibly objective rules for his work and followed them rigorously, the show turns to eight contemporary artists’ takes on measurability and, notably, its failures.

Humour is present throughout the exhibition, for instance in Vida Lavén’s sculptures Non Record Attempts II – World’s Second Largest Teddy Bear (2019) and Non Record Attempts III (2019), supposedly the world’s second-largest and second-smallest toy teddies displayed side by side, neither of which will ever make it into any Guinness World Records. Oddvar I.N. Daren’s Measuring the Depth of Snow (1981), meanwhile, depicts the artist in eight succeeding photographs sinking deeper into a snow mound, as displaced blocks of snow, their height apparently equivalent to the depth of his body, stack up in front of him.

The sinister consequences of attempts to measure the unquantifiable are evident in Meriç Algün’s Billboards (2012) pasted onto

the museum walls. Each features a question concerning a person’s relationship status and mental health, permitting only binary answers of yes and no, and taken from standardised forms Algün had to submit when applying for European citizenship. Forms such as these encode bias disguised as objectivity into decisions deeply affecting people’s lives, and in some cases preside over life and death.

Approaching objectivity from another angle, Toril Johannessen’s series of silkscreen prints, Words and Years (2010–16), scrutinises the language and methodologies of science. Counting how often a particular word, for instance ‘feminism’, is published in journals, the findings are presented in convincing diagrams that seem to tell us something about the world but are ultimately meaningless. The pointlessness of numbers without content is present also in Alexander Gutke’s installation Singularity (2010–16). The work consists of a 16mm film of a tape measure projected onto the wall in a corner, which appears to measure the size of the room, but remains a pseudo-scientific gesture.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video installation Scenes from Western Culture (2015) is arguably the centrepiece of the show. The individually titled videos, lasting from one-and-a-

Oddvar I.N. Daren, Measuring the Depth of the Snow, 1981, photography, 170 × 880 cm. Courtesy the artist

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half minutes to over three hours, expose the absurdity of standards of normalcy, or rather what is considered normal in Western societies.

Dog and Clock depicts a well-groomed canine lounging on a carpet in a domestic space decorated with midcentury furniture. A pendulum clock is ticking relentlessly, African sculptures on the ledge of a fireplace complement the bourgeois scene, evoking the ennui of comfort.

Rich German Children shows a group of wholesome-looking kids playing in a spruced-up garden, and Dinner follows a couple, played by musicians Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, dining at an upscale New York restaurant while half-engaged in trivial conversations.

As Kjartansson’s durational videos push ‘normal’ situations from Western societies to their absurdist extremes, the work delivers a funny and scathing critique of the standards of a culture whose short-sightedness of its own conventions dictates profoundly flawed notions of the ordinary. At a time when science is key to grappling with the climate crisis or a virus spreading around the world, Beyond Measure reminds us of the limitations of numbers no matter how vital they are, insisting convincingly on the unquantifiable power of art.

Stefanie Hessler

The Days Before Yesterday Can we return to a time when the artworld was creative rather than professional?

For those of us that work in the artworld, a pause in operations creates a narrative arc: there’s the starting point of your actual experience and the currently imposed endpoint. My own storyline begins in the sketchy mid-1990s, after I left art school, and leads, for now, to the hypertrophic, globalised behemoth that lately stopped in its tracks. Misty-eyed nostalgia is a risk to be navigated, looking back. I wouldn’t want to revisit everything about my earliest, uh, professional days – I was usually broke, for starters – but in particular my interactions with gallerists in recent times have made me think about their predecessors, or in some cases their younger selves, who were somewhat different.

A bit of backstory: I got my first driblets of work in the London artworld by writing letters. When I was twenty-two I pulled out my electric typewriter and wrote to the editor of Dazed & Confused, as it was then known, saying their art coverage stank and I could do better; I scribbled a note to Time Out saying they didn’t cover South London enough and, since I lived there, why didn’t they hire me. Bizarrely, or maybe because confidence is a virtue even when it’s founded on naivety, both of these strategies worked. The editor in charge of art coverage at Dazed wrote back saying it might have been smarter of me to write directly to him, rather than embarrassing him in front of his boss, but he still generously allowed me to write for the magazine (for no pay).

The perks, such as going to magazine launchparties where some band called Radiohead was playing an acoustic set, I stupidly turned down. Anyway, the third letter I wrote, circa 1997, was to a gallery owner, who will remain nameless. I used fancy locutions to express that I liked his gallery and wanted to work there.

The gallerist interviewed me, thinking he’d found a salesperson, and then kept me on anyway as a press officer when it became evident that I couldn’t sell for shit. After I failed at that too, he asked me to manage the gallery. I suspect now that he wanted to make me a director and financially culpable.

The gallerist was a swan, appearing to glide smoothly while his legs pumped wildly beneath the waterline. He seemed to owe a lot of money to various people, which he affected not to care about – every few weeks we’d get a fax tabulating a horrific amount of back rent. He lived a posho-bohemian lifestyle, based on the evidence of the people who passed through the gallery after hours. He kept the place afloat by charming a succession of backers and always pulling off a secondary market deal in the nick of time. Our mailing list was full of rock stars and royalty, none of whom we ever saw at the gallery. The gallerist was an oddity, but he was – this is the point – just one kind of oddity among the other misfit gallery owners I was meeting at the time.

Back then, of course, there were more artist-run spaces, and the artists/gallerists were extremely friendly to upstart me, given that I didn’t know much at all; either that, or they suffered me because I was writing for a weekly magazine in which a review would increase footfall.

(Yes, that’s right, I was working for a commercial gallery and reviewing shows at other ones.

If you don’t say anything, neither will I.) Dealers who now have large spaces in London, named after themselves while they used to be called something else, were just starting out. Some of these latterly august figures had trained as artists too, and it’s been a slow process whereby they’ve smoothed off their disorderly edges, become besuited salesmen like the generation before them, something Dazed and Confused (still), 1993, dir Richard Linklater

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gained and something lost. Some of them drifted chaotically in and out. I remember one South London gallerist, an architect by training, proudly showing me a video of himself filmed by one of his artists, in which he was slumped on a flight of stairs at his own private view, drunkenly yowling karaoke. No idea where he is now, but he isn’t running an empire of galleries. Many of the artists he was among the first to show, however, you’d recognise. At shows like this, nervously gripping a Beck’s, I’d repeatedly run into a scruffy little guy a bit older than me called Gregor Muir, who was also writing things for Dazed. A rival, I thought. He appears to be doing quite well now.

A little later, soon after the turn of the millennium, things changed. Artists were still opening galleries, but the people who’d previously been goofballs at parties were progressively affecting a deep, studied, careful cool, fearful of making the wrong impression.

A great professionalisation was afoot, helped along by a wave of spaces opened by trust-fund kids who’d learned to be well-mannered at private school. The stakes were higher – rents were up, sales needed to be made, fairs were starting – and risk was increasingly off the menu. Sometime in the midst of this, so I heard, my former gallery boss shuttered his space and pretty much vanished to the Home Counties.

The messy energy and jagged personalities of the 1990s London artworld are a big part of where the existing one – or just-recentlyexisting one – came from. The conditions that made it possible, the empty spaces and cheap rents and lack of necessity to be a perpetual affectless pro, were undone by the creeping gentrification that the art infrastructure famously contributed to, and by the fair-centric model of art commerce. In the last of these columns I speculated that, after our current plight, the artworld might just rematerialize smaller. If it does, I would wish that it found room for the wayward, risk-taking approaches that preceded everyone uncrossing their fingers, doubling their overheads, donning their suits and buttoning their lips. Martin Herbert

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Month wtf More notes, from not-so-splendid isolation After the success, a few weeks ago, of reading about an Austrian genius with evident mentalhealth issues who eventually starved himself to death, I returned to the scene of the ‘crime’ and picked up a Stefan Zweig novella. (The first Austrian was Kurt Gödel, for those of you who missed it: the genius revolved around his incompleteness theorems; the starving was a result of his inability to deal with daily life. Both were comforting to me in different ways, hence the success.) Zweig’s work is frequently cited

by Gödel scholars attempting to describe the ‘atmosphere’ in Vienna at the time when the logician was studying there. The novella is about a man who has been imprisoned and interrogated by the Nazis, but who manages to steal a book, build an alternative mental universe and then disappear into it. You don’t need to know the details, really. Except that the book is about chess, which initially seems a curse, because the man isn’t that interested in the ‘sport’. But it becomes a blessing once he realises that he can play the whole game in his head. The man slowly develops a split personality that allows him to play himself. Even though he recognises that this is both a ‘logical absurdity’ and the road to madness. Because, as with Gödel, his imaginary world is too complete (even if for Gödel that completeness involved it being incomplete). It leaves him too far removed from reality to ever go back. In 1942 Zweig and his wife killed themselves while in exile in Brazil. ‘My inner crisis consists in that I am not able to identify myself with the me of passport, the self of exile,’ he wrote shortly before the end.

It took a new reality – a Zoom panel discussion – to remind me that what’s important now might be what I’m not seeing rather than what I am seeing. And that the whole seeing and not seeing thing might be part of the empathy problem I keep returning to. The seeing business was one of the subjects of the discussion, between the writers Kiese Laymon, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Arundhati Roy, hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Although the fact that Crenshaw was using a Zoom background into which parts of her head kept disappearing made the ‘what we see/what we don’t see’ stuff come even more to the fore.

The writers talked about various issues – broadly concerning race, class and poverty – that were being buried amid the current crisis. It served as a reminder of how, now that I’m being bombarded by other types of lectures about all other bodies being potentially toxic, I’m slowly being trained to avoid them. The bodies, not the lectures. Although I tend to avoid those too.

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Live bodies are obstacles; the bodies of the dead are hidden. Behind numbers and statistics, graphs and comparative studies. (I’m fortunate enough not to know anyone who has died of COVID-19.) I’m also being trained to accept, not to enquire. And, in a way, to avoid the very thing that an art critic is supposed to do.

Assuming that you consider the visual, and the act of seeing and then the interrogation of what you see to be something essential to the role of the critic, that is. Sinister stuff.

When you think about it. I worry that, generally, I don’t. Unless it’s got something to do with my Sri Lankan or Jewish ancestors being marginalised in or omitted from an image or account of an episode from the inglorious colonial past.

Which, in any case, perhaps serves my own narrative more than it does theirs.

I watched a three-part documentary about wildlife in Arabia. It started off innocently enough. Birds, snakes, lizards, oryx, dromedaries, the odd scorpion – that kind of stuff. The general vibe seemed to be about showing how the desert actually contained so much, despite appearing to contain so little. In that sense it worked like a media briefing by the UK government (that’s where I’m hiding for the moment, btw; in the UK, not the government) or a press release for an exhibition. Naturally, there was a subcurrent about how life carries on even in the harshest of environments. I wondered if that was why the BBC was broadcasting it now.

(It originally aired in 2015.) And then I wondered if that was why I was watching it. Then the mood began to switch. Because of the programme’s content; not because of me.

It gradually emerged that the documentary was, in fact, something of a propaganda vehicle for Dubai. About how people who consumed quite a lot (of water and energy) were in fact helping creatures used to surviving on not a lot.

What looked like greed was in fact generosity.

Suddenly oil rigs in the Gulf had been reframed (for the purposes of the nature documentary) as sites of ecological splendour. They were breeding grounds for fish and thus magnets for whale sharks hoovering up eggs and plankton.

And, in that way, they were helpful to scientists studying marine giants. Scientists who, one presumes, are environmentalists of some sort.

The oil-rig workers were reimagined as helpful whale-shark spotters. Suddenly the waterintensive crop farms (so water-intensive that facing page Stefan Zweig (standing), Vienna, c. 1900.

Courtesy Fundo Correio da Manhã

ArtReview

they have a limited lifespan) that had popped up in the middle of the desert were nature parks.

Luxury stopovers that gave tired birds a break and a bath on their migratory flights. Like the way stations that were rapidly constructed by switched-on entrepreneurs when the Silk Road became an actual road. Did the people who funded the programme only show the nature people what they wanted them to see? Did the nature people only see what they wanted to see?

I followed that up with Zhao Liang’s Behemoth, a surreal documentary about the environmental, societal and personal damage effected by coalmining and related industries in northeast China. In it, horror is mixed with a certain poetry – gently riffing off Dante’s Inferno. Most of it comprises footage of people doing what they are forced to do to exist. And the effect on the landscape of what they are forced to do in order to exist. But then I felt a creeping annoyance at the way in which the poetic interludes (often accompanied by a nude male body curled up in the scarred landscape) kept interrupting the unrelenting misery of watching miners dodging explosions in claustrophobic hells, families foraging for coal scraps on slag heaps under the cover of darkness, shepherds rounding up flocks while a constant stream of trucks poured out rubble and dust to create the heaps, and people who were now hooked up to oxygen tanks because of the rubble, the dust, the chemicals and the heat. One of the things seemed real. The other did not. Although ‘real’ takes on a totally different meaning when all you’re really doing is wearing out a sofa in a relatively spacious London flat. The ‘heaven’ in Behemoth, by the way, is a new-build city in which no one actually lives; but about which people can dream while they live, hand-to-mouth, somewhere else. If you’re someone like me, watching Zhao Liang’s movie elicits a healthy dose of guilt. Which is, I guess, a form of empathy that cancels itself out. A zero-sum game.

For the record, both the nature documentaries and Behemoth were ‘research’. Not the fruits of an idle channel surf. For ongoing ‘projects’.

Which is to say that it’s not without purpose that I’m watching these things. It’s important to hold on to your agency. Although it’s important too not to delude yourself about that. Increasingly the watching and the reading that these columns encompass seem to be a way of looking sideways at what’s really going on. I’m starting to think that it’s not having a sense of empathy but doing something with it that counts. Mark Rappolt

Summer 2020

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Books

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Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism

by Touré F. Reed Verso, $19.95 / £11.99 (softcover) US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden recently attracted criticism when he exclaimed at the end of an interview on US radio show The Breakfast Club, “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”. Host Charlamagne tha God shot back, “It don’t have nothing to do with Trump, it has to do with the fact – I want something for my community”.

However spontaneous and unplanned, the exchange typifies much of the way race, politics and economics is understood and lived in the US (and elsewhere). Arguments over the nature and causes of racial inequality are now often violently polarised, and ethnic and racial identity has become a cultural and political fault line. Concepts of white supremacy, white privilege and systemic and institutional racism have become popular in understanding why black and brown people continue to lose out against white peers, in income, employment, housing and social mobility. And as identarian views of social divisions have become more popular, what Touré F. Reed refers to as political economy – the analysis of social divisions based in the relations of working people to capital – has moved to the fringes of leftwing and progressive politics.

It’s encouraging, then, to read Reed’s lucid historical analysis of the evolution of US class and race politics, from the New Deal era of the 1930s and 40s, through the civils rights years of the 50s and 60s, to the neoconservative reaction of Reaganomics in the 80s and the present era of neoliberalism – a period overseen

by Democratic administrations as much as Republican ones. Reed agrees that Democrats – from Kennedy to Obama – ‘have unquestionably failed to address the structural sources of racial disparities’. But rather than conclude – as more pessimistic post-Obama progressives such as the influential commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates have done – that economic redistribution policies simply failed to engage with the entrenched power of ‘systemic racism’, Reed argues that Democrats have often gone along with accepting neoliberal economic tenets, while tending ‘to abstract racial disparities form the political-economic forces that generate them’.

Toward Freedom is an intricate account of the conservative drift in liberal thinking and policy from the Great Depression to the current moment. Throughout, Reed examines how antiracist demands were continuously isolated from broader demands for economic reforms that would coalesce the interests of working-class Americans to endanger capital. What Reed finds is that the evolution of identitarian notions of ethnic group-identity has become the way political representation is understood, even while, as he bleakly observes, deindustrialisation and its neoliberal aftermath have destroyed wages and narrowed opportunities for workingclass and middle-class Americans, regardless of race. Reed is scathing when it comes to the ‘postracial’ agenda of America’s first black president. ‘At its core,’ he writes, ‘postracialism was a reactionary fantasy. President Obama… presumed that since the victories of the modern civil rights movement had swept aside the formal

racial impediments to black equality, lingering inequality had less to do with extant prejudice than slow economic growth, racism’s historic legacy and, crucially, the cultural deficiencies of poor African Americans themselves.’

As Reed notes, ‘Obama’s presidency would exert little positive influence over racial disparities.’ But, notably, Reed also takes issue with Coates, one of the most prominent critics of postracialism, who in recent years has been at the forefront of the demand for a specifically race-oriented economic policy of reparations.

Reed sees Obama’s quiescent acceptance of the neoliberal economic status quo, and Coates’s ‘conceptualization of racism as the engine of history’, as two sides of the same failure of political thinking on how economic divisions refract and reinforce racial ones – what Reed typifies as ‘race reductionism’.

Reed’s analysis is a much-needed counter to increasingly divisive, identity-driven accounts of why social inequalities persist between groups. Biden, of course, was insinuating that black Americans should align themselves, as an ethnic group, against a performatively racist and xenophobic president, regardless of what Democrats might do for working people. Meanwhile, Charlamagne tha God only wants to know what supporting the Democrats will do for ‘my community’. ‘The bottom line’, Reed concludes, ‘is that the fate of poor and working-class African Americans – who are unquestionably overrepresented among neoliberalism’s victims – is linked to that of other poor and workingclass Americans.’ J.J. Charlesworth

John Cage: A Mycological Foray Edited by Ananda Pellerin Atelier Éditions, $55 (hardcover) It might seem of niche biographical interest that composer John Cage was an enthusiastic amateur mycologist, but such was his passion that it undoubtedly came to influence his music.

‘I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom,’ he is quoted as saying in this new two-volume study of the American’s forays into the world of fungi, which includes, alongside texts by writers, artists and curators, a reproduction of Cage’s 1972 Mushroom Book and his 1983 poem ‘Mushrooms et Variationes’.

Cage was not interested in the psychoactive qualities of shrooms – he never took drugs

in his life, he said. Indeed, though he cofounded the New York Mycological Society and appeared on an Italian quiz show with ‘toadstool’as his specialist subject, it seems less the shrooms themselves and more the act of foraging for them that inspired his musical work.

Cage went to Stony Point, in upstate New York, in 1954 to establish an electronic music studio but was sidetracked into the local woods.

His burgeoning hobby got off to a bad start when he misidentified a specimen, eating a poisonous hellebore that left him hospitalised.

It would seem that the life-and-death potential of his mycological pursuits offered a useful

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contrast to the extreme freedom granted by avant-garde composing. ‘In the mushrooms it’s absolutely necessary you see if you’re going to eat them as I do, not to eat one which is deadly. Whereas I take the attitude in music that no sounds are deadly. It’s like the Zen statement that every day is a beautiful day.

Everything is pleasing providing you haven’t got the notion of pleasing and displeasing in you.’ Where composing, according to Cage, should be concerned with chance and disharmony, mycology was bound by strict rules, making this hobby an important counterweight to his profession. Oliver Basciano

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on the cover Tai Shani and 3D artist partyTime.jpeg, Eve, Tragodía, 2020

Words on the spine and on pages 21, 45 and 93 are by Keston Sutherland, ‘Ode to TL61P 3’, The Odes to TL61P, 2013

Summer 2020

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“God knows I want to break free! I want to break free from your lies…”

Sorry, you caught me having a singalong with my good friend Freddie Mercury. He’s famous for his singalongs here in the afterlife. Before you ask, I’m not going to get into the ‘But where are you: heaven or hell?’ business. There have to be some mysteries about what happens next.

Word reached me that the editors of ArtReview had that clown Columbus writing in these pages last issue. A man who couldn’t tell east from west. All he introduced to his so-called New World were new diseases. And bizarre ideas of ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’. You call those people colonialists, I believe. In my day ‘colonialism’ hadn’t been invented. I wasn’t interested in ‘discovering’ or ‘recognising’ diversity and then exploiting it and wiping it out under the ethos of some sort of universalism. The ummah doesn’t make distinctions on the basis of race or ethnicity. My army was one of the most ethnically diverse there has ever been. I’m not going to pretend I did no wrong. But I do know that good deeds wipe out bad deeds.

If you opposed me, I wiped you out. I did it in the name of security, not some myth of ‘betterment’ or sense of cultural superiority. ‘If they keep out of your way and do not fight you, and offer you peace, then Allah does not allow you any course [of action] against them.’ I liked to roam, of course, so a fair number of people did cross my path. (Most of them Muslim btw, so it wasn’t much to do with spreading the faith.)

But that’s not my fault. My people were nomads.

Your historians reckon my campaigns resulted in the death of five percent of the world’s population. Seventeen million people, they say, give or take. But they miss the point.

I was bringing glory to the Dar al-Islam. OK, so I cemented 2,000 people into the towers of Isfizar.

Alive. And then there were the 70,000 people or so I had executed in Isfahan. A few more in Delhi.

But I hear that you are now protecting yourselves in order to protect society at large. It was a bit like that with me (OK, maybe not quite that fucked up). I killed a few people early on so I wouldn’t have to kill a lot more later on. And I did it with style. With aesthetics.

When the people of Baghdad rose up against me, I taught them about architecture by building 120 towers made out of 90,000 heads. That was my signature, you see. Architecture and the head thing.

People called my capital, Samarkand, the Pearl of the East, its architecture – palaces,

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In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists justify themselves, Timur says he’s different

mosques, madrassas – was the envy of the world.

Mainly because I was a details guy (yeah, I think Mies stole that one from me). If the builders fucked up, they rebuilt. I personally made sure of it. When they were building the Cathedral Mosque, for example, I popped by and found out that they had made the portal too small.

Despite them telling me everything was super A-OK in their daily reports! I had them tear it down on the spot. If I hadn’t made the surprise visit, the whole hobbit-door thing would have made me lose face.

So I tore the face off one of the supervisors, Mohammed Jalad, for good measure. ‘Let he who doubt our power look upon our buildings,’ I used to say. My style inspired the Taj Mahal. And the Kremlin.

As for the head thing, when I took Smyrna I bombarded the fleeing Christian knights with the severed heads of their mates. But I always spared the artists and the intellectuals. The heads with something in them, as I used to joke. You might well think of me as a collector. Those serial looters at the Met in New York do (they have

some of the stuff I inspired). They don’t get hung up on the killings or the heads. They don’t even mention it on their website. They call me ‘the founder of one of the most brilliant periods in Islamic art’. Most people called me Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction, Conqueror of the World, Emperor of the Age. Personally, I favoured ‘Sword of Islam’. In any case, the point is that it’s the art that endures.

You guys should look on the bright side.

I did. Out of my campaigns came great beauty.

I even invented my own form of chess. And given that I never lost a battle, who better than me to do that? It’s more elaborate than the one you know today – 110 squares on the board and more than twice as many pieces. But that’s just another example of the dumbing down that’s gone on since I left. And to think that some of my contemporaries thought of me as a barbarian.

To them I say: ‘The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.’ That’s Claude LéviStrauss. I’ve been looking into his work recently. As I think you probably guessed back at the beginning of all this.

Back in my day, I used to converse with Ibn Khaldun (we met when I was besieging Damascus – at my invitation, they lowered him by rope over the city walls so we could ‘hang’ – ha, ha). He invented sociology before it was invented. Not that any of you people remember his name. His theory was that the group solidarity – we call it as˛abiyya – that I generated among my armies and followers was the secret to my success. I think that some of your governments now are trying to encourage this kind of ‘spirit’ as you battle the ‘invisible enemy’. The self-interested ones, they die. In my time I made sure of that. In your time, well… you’re sheep.

Even my greatest critics, like that shit Ahmad ibn Arabshah, had to give in to beauty: ‘Timur gathered from all sides and collected at Samarkand the fruits of everything: and that place accordingly had in every wonderful craft and rare art someone who excelled in wonderful skill and was famous beyond rivals in his craft’. He wrote that in Tamerlan: The Life of the Great Amir. A ‘history’ in which chapter headings include ‘The Bastard Begins to Lay Waste Azerbaijan and the Kingdoms of Irak’. What can you do? I was dead when it came out.Otherwise he would have been. Players gonna play; haters gonna hate. (I can’t wait until Taylor gets here – BIG fan.)