ArtReview April 2020 by ArtReview

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Evan Nesbit Open Objects robertsprojectsla.com

ROBERTS PROJECTS

DIMENSIONS OF REALITY FEMALE MINIMAL CURATED BY ANKE KEMPKES & PIERRE-HENRI FOULON FELIZA BURSZTYN . ROSEMARIE CASTORO MARIA LAI . LILIANE LIJN . VERENA LOEWENSBERG MARY MISS . KAZUKO MIYAMOTO . LUCIA MOHOLY VERA MOLNÁR . MARLOW MOSS . LYDIA OKUMURA LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA . MAGDALENA WIĘCEK SHIZUKO YOSHIKAWA

MAGDALENA WIĘCEK DURING THE CONSTRUCTION OF FLAME, ELBLĄG, POLAND, 1966 PHOTO: BARBARA DRZEWIECKA. COURTESY THE ESTATE OF MAGDALENA WIĘCEK

PARIS PANTIN APRIL – JUNE 2020

ArtReview vol 72 no 3 April 2020

Crikey. That happened quickly Producing a magazine such as ArtReview’s has always been a networked effort. That’s how it can be in so many places, seeing so many shows at the same time. Right now, however, networked working has taken on a more intense form across the globe, and this issue is the first to be produced since homeworking became a necessity rather than a choice. It’s a new reality, if not, hopefully, the new normal. Like ArtReview becoming addicted to reading contemporary poetry, this hell won’t last forever (but that’s another story). As it put this issue together, ArtReview was conscious of the fact that much of what we once thought of as the immovable infrastructure of the artworld is now either having to move to accommodate a new reality or cracking under ever-increasing stress. Much of what we once thought of as necessary to the smooth functioning of that world is being rendered inescapably contingent. More important, ArtReview is conscious that it is people, from artists and curators, to gallerists, collectors, janitors and cleaners, who are most immediately impacted by this. Although to be honest, it’s simply everyone who is immediately impacted by this. And in this, ‘art’ is neither more nor less special. It’s just one of the things ArtReview cares most about. You can tell that from its name. (That’s what’s in a name, Juliet.)

Coping

When ArtReview was founded, a little over 71 years ago to the day it writes this, it was in the belief that art had a vital role to play in rebuilding and reinventing civic society in the aftermath of two devastating world wars. Art had the ability to communicate beyond written language, it had the ability to allow new futures to be envisioned, new directions to be debated and old realities to be questioned and overturned. Without, importantly, any overt violence. And while it may seem that ArtReview is forever riding the crest of a wave labelled ‘contemporary’, it has to admit that those same ideals have been a guiding light for it to this day. And that now, as world leaders are seemingly split between those who support and those who ignore this progressive space, this outlet for a particular form of sociability that is as much mental as it is physical, or even virtual, supporting those values and promoting those beliefs, seems as important as it has ever been. And while people might not be able to travel, ideas still can. But what should a ‘review’ do when it cannot access the exhibitions it wants to review? When the online or virtual shows are being reviewed by the young folk who run its website and never use their legs? (ArtReview has taken up jogging round its balcony btw, in training for the time when it will once again walk around exhibitions every day of the week.) In the past, this issue would have been dedicated to selecting those artists who are going to set the agenda for the coming year – its annual ‘Future Greats’ jamboree – but as agendas (most importantly ArtReview’s, of course) have been thrown out the window, and all artists are currently in need of support and visibility, ArtReview thought that this issue would better serve as a platform for speculation on what the role of artists might be in a new society to come. And let’s not pretend that renewal, reconstruction and reimagination are not going to be part of life when we come out the other end. Talking of reimagining btw, ArtReview should tell you that its long-planned new website launches this month (artreview.com for newbies). Yes! There is a website at the end of every tunnel! But it’s got more than that. It’s also got a new podcast (on the ‘old’ site already), a relaunched WeChat channel and a bunch of new online features that you won’t want to miss. It’s still everywhere! You may even be reading this via ArtReview’s digital edition (given that paper copies could be hard to come across right now, when most people are neither coming nor going, and letting nothing cross their paths). See, like a butterfly or an annoying Old Testament 11th son, ArtReview is already emerging in a coat of many new colours. For those of you still in the chrysalis, however, stay safe, be kind (ArtReview’s reviewers can ignore that one), recover, see you soon and stay in touch (you can email this guy – markrappolt@artreview.com – and he’ll pass on the message). ArtReview

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Lucas Samaras, Untitled, September 9, 1974, pastel on paper, 13 × 10" © Lucas Samaras

Online Viewing Rooms A SERIES OF CURATED EXHIBITIONS

A Swiftly Tilting Planet March 31 – April 14 Material Matters April 7 – April 21 Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes April 14 – April 28 All Creatures Great and Small April 21 – May 5

@ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

Jeffrey Gibson It Can Be Said of Them

ROBERTS PROJECTS

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

Art Previewed

Letter from the Artistâ&#x20AC;Ś by Bosco Sodi 16

The Interview Roman Signer by Ross Simonini 24

Outside the Frame by Erika Balsom 20

Coming Up Ten shows to see this month by Martin Herbert 30

The Sound of the Self by Patrick Langley 22

page 24â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Roman Signer, Zelt (Tent), 2002, video still: Tomasz Rogowiec. Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

April 2020

Art Featured

Avant-Garde, Inc by Gary Zhexi Zhang 38

Catherine Opie by Fi Churchman 56

Adam Farah by Jesse Darling 44

New Worlds, New Words by Laure Prouvost 64

Tomás Saraceno by Mark Rappolt 48

page 56 Catherine Opie, Dominic, 2008, c-print, 76 × 57 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

ATELIER CALDER

ANNOUNCES 2020 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

Gui (1976), The Red Feather (1975), Reims croix du sud (1969), Horizontal (1974), and Feuille d’arbre (1974) outside the new studio in Saché, 1976. © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

TARIK KISWANSON JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER

BARTHÉLÉMY TOGUO

Art Reviewed exhibitions 84

books 100

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, by Oliver Basciano Rosa Barba, by George Stolz Marsden Hartley, by Rodney LaTourelle Mourning: On Loss and Change, by John Quin Elena Asins, by Martin Herbert Andrew Norman Wilson, by Barbara Casavecchia Notre monde brûle, by Daisy Sainsbury Disarming Language: disability, communication, rupture, by Emily McDermott Pacita Abad, by Skye Sherwin Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, by Max L. Feldman Diane Simpson, by David Trigg Transparent Things, by Ben Eastham Ree Morton, by Jonathan Griffin Lydia Ourahmane, by Sam Korman Hannah Levy, by Jeppe Ugelvig

Dialectic of Pop, by Agnès Gayraud, Kraftwerk, by Uwe Schütte, The Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, by Jörg Heiser, reviewed by Ben Eastham The Force of Nonviolence, by Judith Butler, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Story of Contemporary Art, by Tony Godfrey, reviewed by Novuyo Moyo In Print: a roundup of new releases, reviewed by Oliver Basciano back page 106

page 96 Carlotta Bailly Borg, Mammals 1, 2019. Courtesy the artist (see Transparent Things, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London)

ArtReview

OfďŹ cial partner

Letter from the artistâ&#x20AC;Ś

Bosco Sodi

Is this the end of the artworld as we know it? At this point in our own quarantine, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sure that everyone knows things are going to change a lot. It is up to us now to determine whether these changes are going to be for the better or for the worseâ&#x20AC;Ś Here are some thoughts on that: Are we going to return our focus to the most important part of the equation, the art itself? Or are we going to continue to see art as an object of investment, a holder of commercial value, in which the artist is just a force of production? Are we going to embrace again the real value of art? To try to understand what art is and what it gives to us as humans beings? How art heals the soul, how art helps us to understand our own universe, how it gives us tools to change for the better? Are we, after this disaster, going to have more social engagement, more solidarity? Are we going to be more empathetic? Or are we going to keep trying to seize everything for ourselves? Are we going to continue as spectators of this commercial monster and craziness, or are we going to be a part of the solution? Is it necessary to have so many art fairs and events, so much travel and speed? Or are we artists ready to reestablish our roles as protagonists in all this, instead of continuing to permit art fairs, galleries, curators, critics, etc to rule our careers and future? Are you, the collectors, going to be part of this change, become genuine supporters of the artist, and in the process claim the role of protagonist as well? Or are you going to carry on merely as clients to a commercial endeavour? Are we going to recover the solidarity, the conversations, the friendship, the understanding that art is a beautiful journey, and that all of us have been very lucky to be part of this? Well, this is our decision, and now we have a lot of time to think about it. Have a nice quarantine day

ArtReview

Garden of Six Seasons 一園六季 16 May – 30 August, 2020 Garden of Six Seasons is a precursor to the 2020 Kathmandu Triennale Artistic Director: Cosmin Costinaş Curators: Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung

展覽「一園六季」為 2020 年加德滿都三年展的序章三年展藝術總監：康喆明策展人：Sheelasha Rajbhandari 及 Hit Man Gurung

Para Site G/F & 22/F Wing Wah Industrial Building 677 King’s Road Quarry Bay, Hong Kong Soho House Hong Kong 8/F, 33 Des Voeux Road West Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Para Site 藝術空間獲香港特別行政區政府「藝術發展配對資助計劃」的資助

Art Previewed

But we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get past the first chapter 19

The kinship between the camera and the gun goes back a long way. In 1882 Étienne-Jules Marey took aim with his fusil photographique, producing chronophotographic studies of birds in flight. In their 1969 manifesto Towards a Third Cinema, Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino described their anti-imperialist practice as ‘a long war, with the camera as our rifle’. The association is not always affirmative. The history of documentary cinema is, among other things, a history of domination and objectification in which the camera has served as an instrument of violence. The moving image was an integral part of the colonial project, leaving filmmakers with the task of reckoning with this inheritance. When does shooting (as in wounding) meet ways with shooting (as in filming)? When does the urge to make something visible meet ways with exploitation? As a growing number of contemporary artists turn to picturing marginalised subjects and histories of oppression, such questions push to the fore. There is no magic formula that allows them to avoid this trap – but a handful of recent works led me to consider how obliquity and omission can work as strategies to transform the camera-gun into a tool that honours and repairs. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s Spit on the Broom (2019) is the product of the artist’s research into the history of the United

Fresh Air, New Lights

Erika Balsom looks outside the frame

top and above Spit on the Broom, 2019, dir Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 12 min. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Order of Tents, a clandestine society of black women in the United States that has been operating continuously since the time of the Underground Railroad. Given that the order’s activities and customs have necessarily remained secret, Hunt-Ehrlich’s subject is in inherent tension with documentary’s predilection for exposure. The critic Serge Daney proposed that ‘the highest function of cinema’ is that ‘it doesn’t prove, doesn’t privilege, it gives something to be seen’. Hunt-Ehrlich concurs, but suggests that it can equally abide by an ethics of opacity. Producing a metacommentary on the ambivalence of visibility, she turns to fragmentary news reports and images that evoke without explaining,

reformulating experimental nonfiction as a practice of withholding as much as revelation. It’s a lesson that was on my mind during this year’s edition of Forum Expanded at the Berlinale, the section of the film festival devoted to artists’ films, organised independently from the competition programmes by the Berlin-based Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. It coloured my viewing of two otherwise very different films concerning indigenous life in the Amazon. At the start of Jíibie (2019), a work exploring the preparation and significance of the coca plant among the Witoto people of southeastern Colombia, Bogotá-born, Paris-based artist Laura Huertas Millán offers an immediate clarification through onscreen text: ‘This film is not about cocaine, white powder’. The relation to narcoviolence is present only through negation. Jíibie largely forgoes contextualising information in favour of a tactile immersion in the process of preparing the leaf. As Cristóbal Gómez Abel, the film’s principal protagonist, relays the origin story of mambe – the powder made from coca and ash – Huertas Millán films his mouth in extreme closeup, yoking speech to body. She creates a form that echoes the attitude she adopts towards her subject, favouring the partial and working with sensation more than information. Ana Vaz’s film Apiyemiyekî? (2019) centres on an archive of drawings produced by the Waimiri-Atroari in Brazil as part of a literacy

top Apiyemiyekî?, 2019, dir Ana Vaz, 28 min. Courtesy iffr, Rotterdam above Jíibie, 2019, dir Laura Huertas Millán, 24 min. © the artist

April 2020

initiative undertaken by the educator and activist Egydio Schwade between 1985 and 1986, near the end of the military dictatorship. Here, as in Jíibie, formal experimentation serves to suggest how collective memory is transmitted through material practices, with the artist making no presumption to speak for indigenous people or explain their experience. Superimposed over black-and-white images of the landscape, the colourful drawings show fragmentary scenes of daily life lived under attack as the construction of a new highway aimed at facilitating resourceextraction turned into genocide. The presentday lives of the Waimiri-Atroari remain out of view. Beginning and ending her film with disorienting images of the capital city of Brasilia, Vaz summons the spectre of ongoing state violence without directly picturing it. In grappling with histories of oppression and resilience, these artists leave much unsaid and unseen – acts that bear directly on how they address their audiences. In Apiyemiyekî? Schwade mentions following Paulo Freire’s methods from Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), a book that advocates for a ‘problem-posting’ model of education located in listening and dialogue, as opposed to a ‘banking’ model, whereby students are empty containers the teacher fills with knowledge. It struck me that these diverging pedagogies also resonate as two poles of how documentaries might inform their viewers: many lean towards banking, but not these artists. They pose unresolved problems, discarding any pretence to mastery, conveying an avowed partiality, leaving me to dwell in the uncertainty of the encounter. Erika Balsom is a writer and lecturer in film studies and liberal arts at King’s College, London

The collaborative performance Boomerang, by Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, was originally broadcast live on Texas public television in 1974. I recently watched it on YouTube. Sitting in a blue tv studio, Holt narrates her immediate experiences of being recorded, while, at the same time, her own words are fed back to her via headphones with a one-second delay. As I watched the artist grimace and squirm, the work began to feel like a mildly sadistic speech exam. If the effect felt disorienting for me, I thought, it must have been sickening for Holt. Indeed, over the minutes that follow, the experience destabilises her sense of self and place. At one point, she gives us a paradox worthy of Shakespeare’s tragedies: “I am not where I am”. The video reminded me of a moment in primary school when, one afternoon, a teacher sat me in front of a tape recorder. Encased in thick black plastic and as big as a shoebox, the machine looked sturdy enough to survive even the most destructive event – an earthquake, say, or a typical afternoon in a London state school. Finger hovering over the record button, she instructed me to recite a times table into a microphone built into its side. (Every student in the class was asked to do this, I can’t remember why.) Once I had done so, she rewound the tape and hit play. “Six,” said a voice on the crackly tape. “Nine.” Who was this impostor child, with his whiny, distinctly unserious voice? Surely he wasn’t me. As Boomerang and the memory it triggered demonstrate, audio technology can have dissociative effects on self-image. Stripped of the lower frequencies that resonate in our head bones when we talk, our voices sound oddly high-pitched to us in recordings. The resulting estrangement explains why many people hate hearing themselves on tape. But to psychoanalyse my young self for a second, my discomfort may have had something to do with a deeper anxiety, which Boomerang brought to the fore: that my tape-recorded voice was an inauthentic replica, an acoustic doppelganger that sounded like – but wasn’t – me. In contrast to tape, my first reactions to hearing my echo, naturally produced by cathedrals and multistorey carparks alike, were of joyous interaction with my environment. I shouted at the world – and it shouted back. According to the Roman poet Lucretius, echoes, which multiply the human voice, can evoke a sense of divine reach: ‘one word, / Sent from the crier’s mouth, may rouse all ears / Among the populace’. To disseminate a voice throughout a populace – to access citizens’ ears – has long been connected to the notion of political power. (Contrast this to Holt feeling mobbed by her own echo on public television: “I am surrounded by me”.) But according to Lucretius, there’s a flipside: echoes mock the speaker by

Sounding Off

Patrick Langley on the fine line between lending and losing one’s voice

Language laboratory at a school in Thames Ditton, 1965. Photo: P. Denyer

ArtReview

turning their words into ‘phantoms’. Doomed to repeat the last syllables of whoever speaks at her, Echo, the cursed nymph of the Greek myth, retreats into a cave. Eventually, writes Ovid, ‘only her bones and the sound of her voice are left’. In this nightmarish vision, which the poet Anne Carson and others have read as a parable of patriarchal censorship of women, Echo’s voice outlives her. For sound and video artists working around the time Boomerang was made, tape recorders, Sony Portapaks and tv studios offered new spins on this age-old sonic phenomenon and its attendant anxieties. Take Bruce Nauman’s 1969 video Lip Sync (also available online, should you want to spend an hour staring into an artist’s mouth). In it, Nauman films himself in closeup attempting, not often successfully, to sync his speech with a delayed recording of his voice. It’s a hypnotic demonstration of the unstable gap between self and self-image, body and machine, that for all its angst captures an off-the-cuff immediacy. Today, technologies that record, repeat and multiply the human voice offer anyone with access to an iPhone the possibility of creating not just new audio recordings, but whole barbershop quartets of audio-doubled, speech-distorted selves. In her 2019 album, proto, the musician Holly Herndon pushed this further. She used custom-built ai software to create ethereal cyberchoirs using recordings of her voice and those of her collaborators (among them artist Martine Syms). These digitised phantoms rustle, gasp, arpeggiate and trill in ways no human could, revealing the rich expressive territory that opens up where voice is taken over by software. Rather than threaten the self, such technology expands it. In a noise-polluted age, to fuse your voice with a machine’s may be one way to ensure it reaches people’s ears. Patrick Langley is a critic and novelist based in London

A new podcast available at artreview.com

In episode 1 host Ross Simonini discusses soundscapes with Dawn Kasper, dreams and jokes with Susan Cianciolo and protest-chanting with Samson Young

Punkt (production still), 2006, video, 1 min 40 sec. Photo: Aleksandra Signer

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Roman Signer

“I wasn’t looking for risk, but I obviously needed the risk. There is a certain tension that exists with the risk”

When I spoke to Roman Signer, he was on vacation in Poland, a place he regularly visits from his home in Switzerland. He called while in his hotel room, accompanied by his wife, Aleksandra, and his daughter, Barbara, who translated between English and Swiss-German, as she often does for her father’s interviews. Barbara is also an artist, and I met her four years earlier while staying at Andrea Zittel’s Wagon Station Encampment, a kind of artist residency in the California desert. The following year, we began to collaborate on videos for a musical project, and I began to learn about her father’s art. I grew fascinated by his singular approach, which draws its inspiration from physics and seems to have few connections to contemporary

art movements, a point that Signer himself emphasised several times during our talk. His work most often resembles the activities of a young amateur scientist: simple experiments with no practical utility. Many of these employ rockets, balloons, fans, barrels, cars, boots, umbrellas, kayaks and bicycles. Boot Fountain (2010), for example, uses water pressure to swing a boot into perpetual, Ferris-wheel circles and Office Chair (2009) seats Signer in a plain rolling chair, propelling him forward with ignited rockets. In this work, the art lies not in the fetishising of the objects, but in their activation. Signer particularly enjoys sending simple things – a small house, table or chair – airborne, casting them briefly against a stark blue sky.

April 2020

He treats explosions like ephemeral sculptures, and documents them as if they were tests with some larger, ongoing purpose. For exhibitions, he shows various media: photographs and films of these actions, and installations of his objects, but his attention remains always focused on the underlying movement of energy. While all artists work, in some form, with the transference of energy, Signer does so explicitly. Personally, my first reaction to his work is often laughter. Signer’s art isn’t a joke, but it expresses the absurd futility of human activity with the concision of a good punchline. Even now, at eighty-one, he seems to maintain an open, childlike curiosity to his environment and proclivities.

Nothing to do with my work ross simonini Have the two of you ever collaborated? barbara signer We’ve never worked together directly. I help translate, or organise, or accompany him on his travels. So in that way, we work together. roman signer She’s my secretary. barbara I wouldn’t call myself that. It’s an assistant’s job. It’s irregular. It’s organic. If I have a lot of my own work, I do less with him. I just try to help.

I cannot find it. Sometimes I go through the library and discover something I didn’t know I had, and I take it up to the bedroom and read it. Collecting books is a passion. An addiction. ross Do you write? roman Only if I have to. Just short and simple description. A few sentences. ross What about your monographs and the books you make documenting the actions – do you see these as part of the art?

barbara Since I was twenty. Almost 15 years. It started after high school. Aleksandra, my mother, also works for Roman.

ross At what age?

roman I was never a young artist. My first show was at thirty-five. ross He gets to watch you be a young artist.

barbara Yes. The studio is in the basement. The meeting room is the living room, and Roman’s office is in his bedroom. So there’s no separation.

barbara I feel like a young artist, but I don’t know if I am anymore. ross Did you discuss art with your father as a child?

ross Were you engaged with the art when you were young?

barbara Not so much. But I watched him and I always wanted the freedom. It took me a long time to realise that my father was an artist, that he was doing something different from other people. They took me to exhibitions and openings, but they didn’t try to teach me.

barbara I went to the studio to play. Or with my friends. It was very normal to have art around. ross Roman, can you describe your studio? roman It’s a big space about five metres high. I built it four years ago.

ross You both work with film. Do you watch films together?

ross Do you do your thinking in the studio?

roman We both like the cinema. I go regularly. The last film we saw together was Bergman’s Wild Strawberries [1957].

roman No, usually in my office and bedroom or the bathtub. Or when I read.

roman I am happy to have changed my job, even if it was quite late. I would have been unhappy as a technical draughtsman for architecture. I worked in that field for ten years. After that I went to art school.

aleksandra signer The first drawings are from 1969.

ross Is the work a part of your family life?

roman I read many things. I am currently reading a book on Venice by a Dutch writer named Cees Nooteboom. I also like to read the Russian writers, like Nabokov and Pasternak. I have a very large library. Books on nature, travel, technical books, art, volcanoes, airplanes. But it’s not a work library. It’s a pleasure library. And there is no order. If I look for something,

ross When you look back in this way, are you satisfied with your life as an artist?

roman At twenty-seven, when I stopped working as a draughtsman. I had to work as a draughtsman again for a few years to make money. I didn’t really start to do art until I was thirty-two.

ross How long have you been doing this?

ross What are you reading?

Sometimes I have to look up things in the book myself, to learn about my own history.

roman Yes. This is a big part of my work. I often spend a large amount of my time designing books we are working on. They are the primary documentation. They are archives.

above Schweben, 1995, b/w photograph, 60 × 40 cm facing page Unfall als Skulptur, colour photograph, five parts, 32 × 47 cm each. Photo: Michael Bodenmann

ArtReview

Leeches on the toe ross Do you think about work while on vacation? roman I used to make work in the 70s and 80s on vacation. Now it’s a retreat from art. ross The 70s would have been before Barbara was born. How did having a family change the work?

April 2020

Roman Signer in 2009. Photo: Michael Bodenmann all images Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

ArtReview

roman In the year she was born, 1982, I made a large amount of work. I think it was because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make work after she was born. Or maybe it was just a very productive year. Either way, it was an exceptional time.

ross Did you ever get hurt?

ross Was the work of better quality?

roman With fire, yes. I got burnt on the hands and legs and face. But everyday life is much more dangerous. A few years ago, in the middle of the night, I was walking in the dark and banged my toe on the bedpost. I’ve had problems with that toe for years.

roman It was not different from before or after.

ross A dark house is a dangerous place.

ross Did you, in fact, make less work after Barbara was born?

roman I just wanted to go to the bathroom but I didn’t want to wake up Aleksandra, who was sleeping. I was walking very fast because it was cold and I banged it. My doctor said I have to have an operation. He has to make the toe stiff.

roman A little less than 1982, but still enough. We didn’t have a lot of money in the 80s, so I was drawing a lot, rather than realising projects. ross In general, do you think the quality of your work has fluctuated throughout your career? roman I haven’t become worse or better. I produce less in general now, because of my health. But it’s not worse work. Nowadays it’s big exhibitions. Before, it was smaller works. I had more time. Artists should not do too many exhibitions. Artists need time to develop. ross Your work is often about the body and features your own body. How has your body’s ageing affected the work? roman I used to do a lot of actions where I was physical: running and jumping. I can’t do this anymore. I had to stop that kind of work.

barbara I think it’s not a very good idea. roman The pain is getting worse and worse. It’s going up, into the hips.

ross Is risk-taking important to the work? roman I wasn’t looking for risk, but I obviously needed the risk. There is a certain tension that exists with the risk.

roman It can be. Sometimes I need the wind, the snow, the rain, the sun for the piece to work. It’s not only about space. I like to work with the river, the velocity of it. This is more like the interaction of it. I love to watch rivers. ross Is nature purely material for you?

ross Would you say that energy is your primary material?

roman Beds have to be constructed in a different way. The leg of the bed should be inside, not in the corner.

roman Yes, speed, movement. But some works are about something that might happen.

aleksandra There are beds like this! roman Maybe I will make a sculpture about this.

roman Some doctors will put leeches on the toe. I have considered this.

roman No doctors. Just an assistant. My brother is a doctor. He is retired now, though.

ross But the work isn’t about nature?

ross The same thing happened to my father, actually.

roman Not really. I did the most dangerous things after she was born. But I stopped doing whitewater kayaking after a friend of mine died kayaking in 1981.

ross Do you ever have doctors on hand? Or assistants?

roman It’s just practical. There are many things I cannot do in the studio. I can’t light rockets and explosives. Only small ones. I can’t use drones indoors.

roman I see nature as energy.

aleksandra I hear that turmeric is very good for these things.

roman In one work [Sinking in Ice, 1985] I walked onto the ice until it broke and I fell into the water and had to get out. Some works don’t look dangerous but are. I once stood inside two barrels stacked on top of each other and then they were covered with a mound of gravel [Action in a Gravel Quarry, 1997]. If I was inside for too long, I could have gone unconscious from a lack of oxygen and too much carbon dioxide. But I didn’t.

ross Why place the work outdoors rather than indoors?

barbara He’s walking in a strange way now.

ross Did you take less risks with your body once you had a daughter?

ross What were the most dangerous works you’ve made?

roman I use the term nature-as-studio. I am not a Land artist. I never leave anything in nature. No traces. What remains are photographs, videos, objects.

Watching rivers ross Are you still athletic, despite the toe? roman No. I’d like to hike more. Nature is a very big inspiration. Nature is still important to the work, but I used to be able to move more. When you hike, you can think more. ross What’s the nature like where you live? roman It’s a small town. You can walk 15 minutes and be in nature. Forest, mountains, lakes, rivers. I was born in Appenzell, which has a very beautiful landscape. There is a place there called ‘The End of the World’, near Kurhaus Weissbad, that is my outdoor studio. It’s a hotel and resort but I have printed permission to go there and work. I can show the police the piece of paper, if needed. There is a small road that goes into the back of the resort and into nature. The police cannot go there. ross Is the work separate from nature?

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ross Potential energy. roman But I am not a kinetic artist. And I also use motors, fans, water pumps. Not just the wind. ross Do you have a definition for energy? roman A force that can move something. Push it. Lift it. Every movement is energy. ross Albert Einstein defined the magic of quantum entanglement as ‘spooky action at a distance’. Do you see your work as magic? roman There are some strange things. When you stretch a rubber band and you leave it for ten years, it no longer has its elasticity. Where does the elasticity go? Because energy never goes away. ross Do you trust science? roman I understand too little to distrust it. I have an emotional approach to science. People think that I calculate the results of my experiments, but it’s more intuitive. It’s more physical than scientific. ross Will you ever retire from making art? roman I have no programme. I don’t intend to stop at any age. I will make art as long as I am healthy and I enjoy it. A solo show by Roman Signer is on view at Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, through 18 April Ross Simonini is an artist, writer and musician living in New York and California

2 Eileen Agar, Figures in a Garden, 1979–81, acrylic paint on canvas, 123 × 153 cm. Courtesy Tate, London

1 Betye Saar, The Divine Face, 1971, mixed-media assemblage, 107 × 57 cm. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

3 Goshka Macuga, Death of Marxism, Women of All Lands Unite, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

ArtReview

Coming Up by Martin Herbert

Speculative fiction at the best of times; psilocybin suggested; how’s your internet connection?; rotting fruit marking the passing of time; meatus, Wheatus, leaks and flows; achieving against the odds

Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 22 April – 26 July

At the time of writing, all museum shows, gallery exhibitions, biennials and other art events previewed here were proceeding as planned. However, given the pace of developments around the spread of, and measures to combat, covid-19, we recommend that you check live listings prior to visiting these shows. By the time you read this it may well be a list of things we wish we could have seen. Exhibitions are, of course, in flux right now. Many spaces have announced the immediate closure of shows or limited themselves to appointment-only viewings, and commercial galleries have accelerated the development of online viewing-rooms, a feature that had previously been developing at a leisurely pace. In some cases venues are also setting out prospective reopening dates – which may be overly optimistic, or, given the asymmetry in the spread and relative containment of covid-19, may work out. As a result, some of the exhibitions discussed below may be viewable either in reality, or digitally, or, sadly, not at all – normally this column is a type of speculative nonfiction, but given the direction things are heading in at the moment, it seems as if that ‘non-’ may well be redundant now. Nevertheless, let’s buckle up and head off.

Betye Saar’s projected show at the Museum A timely esoteric emphasis also underpins Ludwig, another exhibition belatedly spot2 The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the lighting a nonagenarian woman artist, is a result Cosmic Tree at Camden Arts Centre, a sprawlof the Los Angeles-based artist being awarded the Camden Arts Centre, ing show – bringing Wolfgang Hahn Prize last year; in theory it offers London, 22 April – 21 June audiences in Germany, where she is barely known, together the work of an entrée into her singular cosmology. Her art dozens of figures, including Eileen Agar, Carl – originating alongside West Coast ‘funk art’ and Jung, Carol Bove, Simon Ling and Fred Tomaselli, influenced by flashpoints such as the assassinaas well as Hindu and Jain cosmological diagrams, tion of Martin Luther King, Jr, Saar’s discovery, Tibetan mandalas and a good deal more – that in 1967, of the work of Joseph Cornell and visits investigates ‘the subjectivity and being of plants’. to African and Oceanian ethnological museums The art and artefacts on display hew to notions of the intelligence of plant forms, whether in – is rooted in assemblage, collage and print. In their encoded fractal geometries or curative and her hands, repurposed racist ephemera (depicpsychoactive properties. Expect, here, a conflux tions of ‘mammy’ stereotype Aunt Jemima, for example, rebranded by Saar in the heyday of the of ‘object-oriented ontology’, hippie mysticism, Black Panthers as gun-toting and liberated) meets recent neuroscience and millennia-old spiritual supernatural doodads such as tarot cards and traditions: we don’t suggest you pop a chunk of shamanism-related objects, and preserved family psilocybin chocolate on the way there – if, again, heirlooms. A cumulative expression of structural you can get there – but we also wouldn’t caution inequality, forms of consolation and visions of against it. an alternative reality, all of this feels up-to-date, It’s likely that nobody at the Walker given not only the continuing dismal evidence was expecting a pandemic, citywide Walker Art of deep-seated racism in America but also the turn lockdowns and home confinements Center, – perhaps escapist, though understandably so – when they came up with an exhibition Minneapolis, towards spirituality and mysticism in contemconcerned with performing immo18 April – porary art, which, circularly, to some extent Saar 3 bility, but here we have The Paradox of 26 July has influenced. Certainly worth an afternoon’s Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance. Googling if you can’t see the exhibition. (An unanticipated, ironic reading of the

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‘paradox’ being that it may be inaccessible the pair’s three-decade legacy of brilliantly because the exhibition programme has been mobilised ordinariness, particularly their stilled, and so have audiences.) But in theory deadpan and deceptive mimicry of quotidian the show is a pretty glorious endeavour: it objects. In 2018, for example, he exhibited a brings together some 100 works by 65 artists, snowman sealed in a glass-fronted freezer at including 15 performances, and if they’re not moma, a reworking of a 1987 work by the duo. He’s also, of late, branched out into curating, all quite still, they are likely to unfold slowly. and Kunsthaus Bregenz has on its docket solo The plan is for ‘object-based art and pictures works that, from the sounds of it, will naturally that subtly come to life or shift outside the continue in his (and their) ambivalently serioframe [and] actions staged by live performers comic earlier manner: ‘a video which explores that slowly unfold or unexpectedly reappear. the work of leisure [whatever that means], Across the exhibition, puppets and automatons reliefs made from synthetic foam, cardboard dance through space, while burning candles imitations of objects relating to the packaging and rotting fruit mark time’s passing.’ And while industry, and large-format photographs of acts the transgenerational artist list moves from of microvandalism in public spaces’. Marina Abramović to Sophie Taeuber-Arp, from Imi Knoebel Robert Morris to Vanessa Beecroft to Paul Chan. 5 White Cube Since David Weiss of Fischli/Weiss died in is a living link to a Bermondsey, deep modernist past: 4 2012, Peter Fischli has continued to keep alive London, 29 April – 21 June Kunsthaus Bregenz, 25 April – 5 July

now in his 80th year, not only did he study under Joseph Beuys but, prior to that, was on a course in Darmstadt based on a proto-Bauhaus programme blueprinted by László Moholy-Nagy. Knoebel’s breakthrough Raum 19 (1968) splits the difference between Bauhaus austerity and Beuysian social sculpture, being a collection of dozens of stretchers and unpainted geometric elements that can be organised in myriad ways and suggest continual, modular future use. (In 1988, in a practical example of the social usefulness of art, Knoebel created the Kinderstern, or ‘Star for Children’; the profits made selling variations on it have gone entirely to children in need.) Either in the real or onscreen, White Cube has gathered examples of Knoebel’s latter-day shaped monochromes on aluminium, an array of red shapes from his ‘Constellation’ series and a remake of a six-panel painting from 1975, all

4 Fischli / Weiss, How to Work Better, 1991. Photo: Jason Wyche. © the artists. Courtesy the artists; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles; and Public Art Fund, New York 5 Imi Knoebel, big girl v.1, 2019, acrylic and aluminium, 46 × 30 × 3 cm. © the artist. Photo: Ivo Faber. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

ArtReview

6 kp Brehmer, Proportion of Public Sector Employees (by income bracket) according to Service, 1976–77, acrylic on canvas, 130 × 320 cm.Photo: Roman Maerz. Courtesy Arter, Istanbul

7 Rae-Yen Song, Song Dynasty ii, 2018. Photo: Michael Barr. Courtesy the artist

of it likely to adhere to the artist’s core interest oblique diagrammatic abstraction from in a purely abstract art of colour and form, albeit 1976–77 was titled Proportion of Public Sector one that has work to do in the real world. Employees (by income bracket) according to Service. At the same time as Knoebel was making An undated drawing suggests a less mellow Raum 19, German Pop art – or, as it’s better critique: it’s entitled The West Has the Biggest Pigs. 7 known, Capitalist Realism – was taking off Glasgow International Various venues, in Germany. A central is being postponed, with no 24 April – 10 May Arter, Istanbul, figure in this, alongamended date given, but we’d 16 April – side Sigmar Polke and like to salute it anyway. The plan was for it to 6 September someone called Gerhard distribute itself, as usual, across the city, offerRichter (whatever ing a myriad of presentations by dozens of 6 happened to him?), was kp Brehmer (1938–97). artists (the last one, in 2018, involved some Celebrating what would have been his 80th 250 participants, in approximately 70 venues, birthday with a four-venue touring show, and this one was similarly scaled). The ironical changing at each site, The Big Picture’s projected kicker, given those dimensions, was that artistic final stop is at Arter in Istanbul. Brehmer (who director Richard Parry gave his biennial the title used his initials for Klaus Peter as an allusion and theme of Attention. That would be timely, to the Kommunistische Partei) spent a lifetime obviously: our minds are increasingly splintered 8 as an analyst of capitalism’s operations – an by, among other sources, social media and the

ever-more-cataclysmic news cycle, and art under such circumstances might be a balm of sorts: an opportunity for close, sustained and patient looking. If that still takes place later this year, you might have to make some decisions about what you give your attention to, but Parry’s own, smartly chosen programme included displays by figures ranging from Duncan Campbell to the late Carol Rhodes, Martine Syms to Gretchen Bender, while the auxiliary shows were set to involve, among others, Nina Beier, Melvin Edwards, Graham Fagen, Adelita Husni-Bey and Margaret Salmon. A meatus, if you don’t know, is an opening to the interior of the body: the ear, for example, or the nose. (A Wheatus, by contrast, is a crappy emo band from years ago.) It is also, for Sydney-based artist/curator Frances Barrett, a useful metaphor: she sees Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, April 4 – June 9

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meatuses as places suggestive of incision, after which the body can leak and flow in unexpected ways. In Meatus – a word you might be getting used to by now – Barrett strategises to oversee various forms of flow and merging. Alongside a sound installation conceived with Hayley Forward and Brian Fuata, she’s set to hand acca’s galleries to Nina Buchanan, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga, considering them as ‘ear canals, oral cavities, and anal spaces’, in an immersive evocation of the bodily, which likely explains the forewarning that the show contains adult content and that earplugs and torches will be available. Fantastic Voyage (1966) this presumably isn’t. And if that’s not enough immersivity for 9 you, Carlos Garaicoa Peabody Essex has you covered. In the Museum, frequently politicised 10 Salem, through Cuban artist’s new 3 January 2021 installation Partitura,

40 music stands each feature a score sheet graced with abstract drawings and a video tablet playing footage of a single street musician in Madrid or Bilbao. The result, though all emanating from Spain, is meant to convene a global panoply of musical styles, from West African griot to opera and classical cello. However, since we’re also told to expect that the room will be filled with ‘the soundtrack to a three-channel video installation based on a composition by the composer Esteban Puebla’ – in which the score-sheet drawings will be animated – it’s hard to guess how this will sound, though the institution reckons Musée d’Art it will be ‘surprisModerne de Paris, 24 April – 23 August ing, joyful and revelatory’. If Hubert Duprat isn’t on your radar, that’s partly his own choice: the mercurial and philosophical French artist chooses not to show

much, works to his own clock and is a moving target: his materials and artisanal techniques include knapped flint, marquetry, crystals and, for which he’s best known, insects, specifically caddisfly larvae, which Duprat gifts with gold leaf and precious stones and allows to make minisculptures in the form of protective sheaths for themselves – this being what they do in the wild with whatever they can find. What might be apparent from this, and from his career-spanning Paris retrospective, is that Duprat’s subject, encompassing the oldest tools (like flint) and forms of creativity both human and nonhuman, is species-wide ingenuity; his viewpoint encompasses millennia and, really, all life on earth and the materials we’ve dug out of it. If it’s edged with melancholy, given what human extraction has wrought, it also celebrates what we’ve achieved and, against the odds, might yet. Presumably many of you will now have time to use the aforementioned Google to check him out.

9 Carlos Garaicoa, Partitura, 2017 (installation view, Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, 2017). Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua San Gimignano

8 Frances Barrett, Meatus (detail), 2020, ear worms by Debris Facility. Photo: Charles Dennington. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

10 Hubert Duprat, Larve aquatique de trichoptère avec son étui, 1980–2000, gold, pearl, sapphire, turquoise, coral, lapis lazuli, 3cm (length). Photo: F. Gousset. © adagp, Paris, 2020. Courtesy Art Concept, Paris

10 Hubert Duprat, Tribulum (detail), 2012, flint, foam, 100 × 70 × 18 cm. Photo: F. Gousset. © adagp, Paris, 2020. Courtesy Art Concept, Paris

April 2020

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With my 9 year old because all the tales 37

Avante-garde, Inc It’s time to embrace new models of artistic agency and reorient art’s relationship with business and society by Gary Zhexi Zhang

It’s no secret that the utopian impulse of contemporary art has long out in pursuit of cultural ‘disruption’. For artists, negotiating this found itself alternatively seduced and repelled by the efficacy of business. terrain simultaneously as creative, critical and economic agents Business organises society and shapes regimes of value in ways that demands a comparable degree of cynicism, agility and entrepreart has seldom been able to claim for itself. Incapable of meaningfully neurial plasticity. negating or acknowledging systems of power, Western contemporary The past decade has seen rapid iterations of the ‘art and business’ art resigns itself to an institutional landscape sustained by the dubious genre. At some point, poetic, performative entanglements (such as largesse of the Zabludowiczes, Sacklers, Kochs, Googles and BPs of this Goldin+Senneby’s Headless, 2007–15, an odyssey into offshore finance) world, all the while rehearsing its structural critiques. Meanwhile, its and studiously ironic ambivalence (such as the 2016 DIS-curated most valued possessions – its critical autonomy and its political identi- Berlin Biennale) gave way to strategies of assimilation and accelerafication with the public sphere – have become a space of refuge and self- tion, whether by inclination or necessity. The canonical example of denial that merely legitimises its capture by those very same powers. the 2010s was probably the trend-forecasting agency K-HOLE, which What would it mean for artistic practice to reorient its relationship was formed by four art-school friends who, while grifting fashionto business and society, from negative postures of criticality towards industry jobs in New York, became ‘interested in the total collapse a generative mode of critical negation? What this amounts to, in the that comes with being the thing itself’. As it turned out, they were crudest terms, is that artistic practice would not only explore, subvert exceptionally good at ‘the thing itself’ – publishing punchy trend or engage, but would practice in substance what it preaches in theory reports on emerging youth cultures – while their status as impos– to ‘be the change you want to see’, to quote a popular bumper sticker. tors in both art and business engendered a double-agency that saw The 1960s and 70s – a more optimistic era of art, science and industry them lauded at both Frieze Art Fair and the World Economic Forum. – saw a number of pioneering programmes that sought to position Briefly, their activity as precarious artists hustling at the coalface of the artist as cultural researcher and instigator within society at large. culture became both valuable and profitable. ‘Business LARPing’, as These included the Artist Placement cofounder Dena Yago later reflected Artistic practice would not only explore, in an article in the e-flux journal, Group in Britain, which inserted the artist – conceived as an ‘incidental reached its limits in the boardroom: subvert or engage, but would practice person’, a disinterested interloper – in substance what it preaches in theory ‘We conceded that seeing the future into the midst of government and [does not equal] changing it. Networks business, and György Kepes’s commitments to ‘art on a civic scale’ at of power and influence remain the same.’ the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts But what comes after the LARP is over? Perhaps the real thing. Institute of Technology. In a period of intense social and techno- In 2017 curator Victoria Ivanova and philosopher Armen Avanessian logical transformation, these initiatives sought to expand ‘artistic called for an ‘institutional realism’ that ‘[explores] the gaps between research’ beyond gallery walls, integrating artistic labours with those what institutions think they do and what they really do’. In a short more obviously productive domains of advanced industrial society. text under the moniker ‘Bureau for Cultural Strategies’, they argued In the decades since, the hope that artists would become ‘[makers] for a redressal of the failure of institutions to capitalise on the cultural of esthetic decisions’ in the new ‘systems-oriented culture’, as CAVS value they produce, by ‘locating and harnessing institutional capacity fellow Jack Burnham once proposed in his essay ‘Systems Esthetics’ to increase value, influence pricing [and] play into geopolitical and (1968), remained largely unrealised. Meanwhile, with the ascent ideological agendas’. of platform capitalism, the contemporary technology sector has Is the museum a thinktank, a platform, a consultancy? Ivanova now become a powerful player in the systems that produce culture, works as part of the Serpentine Galleries’ Research & Development as well as in shaping the epochal narratives and desires of that culture. Platform, a relatively new arm of the London institution. In March Cognitive dissonance notwithstanding, art, culture, technology and the platform published its first report on ‘Future Art Ecosystems’ (cobusiness become ever more intermingled in a system without discern- produced with consultancy Rival Strategy), in which it envisions art ible edges, only semiporous membranes. Indeed, the notional artist institutions as innovative early-adopters of emerging technologies, who offers incisive critiques and radical visions has been partially with section headings like ‘Tech Industry as Art Patron’, ‘Strategies superseded by the management consultant – mercenaries hired in for the Art-Industrial Revolution’ and the ‘Art Stack’. Headed by the to tell C-level executives just how bad they’ve been – and the startup Serpentine’s ‘chief technology officer’, Ben Vickers, the platform is founder – today’s heroic ideal of the starving entrepreneur, burning aligned with the likes of the Berggruen Institute, a Californian global

ArtReview

Page from k-hole #5: A Report on Doubt, 2015. Courtesy k-hole

April 2020

Suzanne Treister, The Escapist bhst/The Algorithm that Travelled to the End of the Universe, 2019. Courtesy the artist; Annely Juda Fine Art, London; and p.p.o.w. Gallery, New York

ArtReview

Ben Vickers at the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Digital X Workshopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; series, Norman Foster Foundation, Madrid, 17 February 2019. Courtesy Serpentine Galleries, London

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governance and cultural thinktank founded by real-estate billionaire comings and goings of technological research and corporate process. Nicolas Berggruen. The rhetoric of r&d favours the actionable over Like Vickers at the Serpentine, Primer invokes the motif of “pushing the theoretical, reflecting a desire to escape the paralysis of what theo- artists’ work upstream” in the supply chain, seeking to leverage a shift rist Suhail Malik, in his forthcoming book On the Necessity of Art’s Exit from passive consumer of technologies to an active role in shaping from Contemporary Art, has characterised as contemporary art’s ‘[substi- technoculture. For Diakron, Primer is a way to test the elasticity of tution of] the identitylessness of the present with its own indetermi- artistic autonomy without sheltering it from other forces in society, nacy’. With its deep connections to both public and private networks instead seeking confluences with the organisation: “No one would fail of money and power, the Serpentine is well positioned to experiment to see the good we do here”, Kjaerulff states. with, and benefit from, the supply chain configurations of contemMeanwhile in Berlin, the sight of artists-cum-consultants is porary technoculture. The emphasis on ‘strategy’ is a tacit acknowl- already a familiar one. This should come as little surprise: in an art field edgement that compromises will be made in the pursuit of resources struggling for institutional survival and cultural relevance, alongside and relevance, presumably regarding the optics of patronage and a fragmented public sphere, client work might start to feel more like complicity. In a recent talk, Vickers argued for art’s value to be consid- disalienation than selling out. One of the main characters in novelist ered historically – including its histories of patronage – and that ‘art Elvia Wilk’s near-future Berlin-based debut, Oval (2019), is a concepinstitutions cannot be on the right side of everything’. While this shift tual artist employed by a green tech company to teach it ‘how to think towards a cultural realpolitik is in many ways welcome, it is difficult to better, how to critique its institutionality’. Meanwhile, established in imagine how the Serpentine would retain any semblance of autonomy, real Berlin, 2017, Nemesis is an ‘alternative design and strategy consulhowever strategically, as a muse to Silicon Valley. After all, this is the tancy’ run by k-hole alum Emily Segal and architect Martti Kalliala. institution that appointed Yana Peel, an ex-Goldman Sachs execu- A self-described ‘Janus-faced’ business and thinktank, Kalliala tells tive, as its most recent ceo. Peel subsequently resigned after an outcry me that their work involves “rethinking forms of luxury” and “the over investments made by a fund managed by her husband, Stephen question of value creation under late capitalism”. More concretely, the Peel. The precipitous arc of Peel’s eager hire and contentious resigna- pair consult with boutique brands on identity and strategy, deriving tion is a reminder that contemporary art’s relationship with business revenue, for example, as creative directors for the bedding company remains predominantly transactional: exchanging access to wealth Buffy. Given the immaterial logics of branding, it is unsurprising that and influence in return for trust, prestige and meaning. Conceivably, artists have carved out an interface of conversion between cultural and the Serpentine might leverage this transaction to cultivate a genera- actual capital, sidestepping from the fluencies of cultural production tive symbiosis between the ‘art stack’ into the business of consumer insight. A managerial lexicon, more reminiscent Emphatically, Nemesis is not an artand the ‘tech stack’ in the common pursuit of cultural innovation, so long of a Rand report than a museum press work, but a practice that garnishes an as the outcomes serve, in the final analestablished professional genre – the release, is echoed by emerging artists brand consultancy – with what Kalliala ysis, the shareholders. A managerial lexicon, more reminiscent of a Rand report than calls a “higher resolution of cultural literacy”. It resembles an ‘altera museum press release, is echoed among emerging artistic prac- native consultancy’ in the same way that Primer might be considered tices seeking more ‘tactical’ engagements with culture, often oper- an ‘alternative artistic platform’: both arbitrage their value across ating doubly as consultants, thinktanks or businesses. A notable domains of knowledge and practice. Fittingly, the core of Nemesis’s example is Primer, a ‘platform for artistic and organisational devel- appeal lies outside of Nemesis: Segal is a writer and artist, Kalliala is opment’ formed in 2016 by the Copenhagen-based artist collective half of electronic music act Amnesia Scanner. In the interests of finanDiakron inside the headquarters of Aquaporin, a biotech company cial sustainability, the artist-consultant seeks to have it both ways, that develops water purification systems. Recalling Artist Placement claiming the ‘incidental’ character of the artist-researcher against the Group, Primer resembles an ‘itinerant platform’ in semiperma- ethical compromises of business (‘I’m gathering intelligence’), while nent residence inside Aquaporin’s gleaming factory-laboratory. Its serving that same outsider status as a value proposition to clients most visible output has been a series of exhibitions, inviting artists (‘I’m a connoisseur’). The avant-garde as a service, so to speak. engaging ecological and technical themes to intervene in Aquaporin’s Such ethico-political acrobatics lie perhaps at the heart of tactics, industrial research environment. Internally, the group also researches suggesting new models of artistic agency through an accelerationist so-called hybrid organisations, transdisciplinary entities (like Primer programme while risking entrenchment within the dystopian itself) ranging from hacker spaces to the Ethereum Foundation, which configurations of the present. Even to the contradictions and indecut across traditional silos of knowledge, influence and organisational terminacies of contemporary art – its practitioners, institutions and protocol. Their relationship to Aquaporin is nonfinancial, with the multiplicity of publics – there remain crucial differences between startup offering free access and space. When I ask Diakron and Primer shareholders and stakeholders. A ‘navigational ethics’ will take delicofounder Aslak Aamot Kjaerulff about the power dynamics at play, he cate handling, but as Kjaerulff reflects, “It’s interesting to see how far refers to a “navigational ethics […] sometimes you are more clean and upstream you can go”. ar sometimes in the real dirt, rather than trying to claim a solid ethical position”. Kjaerulff acknowledges that the project is likely neither Gary Zhexi Zhang lives and works in New York. He is director of strategy at Foreign Objects llc, a design consultancy based at new inc, the New permanent nor scalable, contingent as it is on the goodwill of the startMuseum’s cultural incubator. He is a board member of N3plus, a platform up’s (current) ceo, who views Primer as one experiment among many. connecting artists, brands and media conglomerates through future-driven Nonetheless, like ecologists embedded in the lifecycle of a technology, retail experiences the circumstances afford the artists an unusual intimacy with the

ArtReview

Emil RĂ¸nn Andersen, dk 179913, 2016â&#x20AC;&#x201C;19, residency at Primer/Aquaporin, Kongens Lyngby. Courtesy the artist

April 2020

Adam Farah by Jesse Darling

Untitled (endz poetics), 2019, digital negative scan. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

TuRNpike | Technics | 2000 (still), 2018, hd video, sound, 2 min 19 sec. Courtesy the artist

It feels strange to write about this work under the rubric of ‘future greats’. Which future? Whose greatness? The broader practice of Adam Farah, aka free.yard, seems to contest everything inherent to a received understanding of these concepts. ‘Greatness’, in the context of the corrupted mediocrity of the mainstream art-canon, is gendered, racialised, encoded in a matrix of limitations imagined as axes of taste – and when the idea of a linear futurity is predicated on the idea of linear memory, what happens to the people, places, objects and experiences that are structurally and consistently displaced by the apparatus of that linearity? Time, after all, is a phenomenon of the specific, not the universal; and maybe the ‘great’ artists are the ones who don’t really want to be ‘artists’ at all. The description on their website lists Farah as an artist and composer, but they are also a rigorous archivist and restorer of obsolete but functional technologies and media, a gourmet cook, an active reader and researcher, and what one might describe as a psychogeographer (though in their own words: “sometimes the only literary historicization on a particular topic of interest is limited to the exploits of white men – but it leaves you with all the gaps to fill in thru how you might see the world based on a different way of experiencing it – [...] imbue it with what you know of ur own worlds, in this case my own endz”.) As free.yard they trade as a curatorial platform, or mutable brand identity, whose logo (resembling the now-defunct p2p streaming network Limewire) may be found on a series of downloadable gift wraps, a range of homemade hot sauces or in collaboration with various art co-ops and organisations, including not/nowhere; flatness.eu; The Showroom, London; and the South London Gallery. This is a practice set in motion (as in momentum, or by the artist’s own definition, momentation, meaning “a pronounced moment with

a specific purpose or desire attached to it [that] highlights the action and movement, the moving spirit existing in various moments”) by the advancing frontiers of gentrification, racism and neoconservative homophobia – but also by a loving kind of roving, an embodied re/search for and into the objects and places that remain exempt from, or outside of, these forces. There is nostalgia for the promise of connectivity shut down by capitalism: the demise of Limewire can be seen as analogous to the slow violence of London’s gentrification, in which the spaces of community are eroded by money and whiteness. It isn’t a linear progression forward into some kind of capitalist future; it’s a practice in perpetual fugitivity, in the back-and-forth, in the in-between. In Farah’s videos turnpike | Technics | 2000 (2018) and medicated summers / benefits trap / ends portals (2019), the picture moves backward in slow-mo through busy London streets while a device – respectively a hi-fi system and PlayStation Portable – is static, front and centre in the screen (the time loop and the slowdown are phenomena familiar both to connoisseurs of 1990s r&b videos and to those suffering ptsd). The first videowork plays Dario G’s Sunchyme (1997), the second Sugarbabes’ Stronger (2002). The music is everywhere; it’s everything. In a further series of videos, including after the judgement day (2018) and Revelation nw9 (2018), we’re out by the orbital: overpass, underpass, the moving spirit embodied in the rise. The modern spatial theorist Michel de Certeau wrote that ‘space is a practiced place’, and here we are in the privatised limens of London, but there’s music, of course, and the new city with the old songs seems to call back a rich tradition of remix and homage. There is no future: there’s just the momentation, this life here, now. Later’d. Elated. Greatness. ar

April 2020

medicated summers / benefits trap / ends portals (still), 2019, hd video, sound, 3 min 44 sec. Courtesy the artist

after the judgement day (still), 2018, hd video, sound, 49 sec. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Revelation nw9 (still), 2018, hd video, sound, 1 min 1 sec. Courtesy the artist

p2p theory ( free.yard Archives), 2019, iPhone photo. Courtesy the artist

April 2020

Aerocene Pacha: Notes on a Possible Future by Mark Rappolt

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On 22 January 2020 the artist Tomás Saraceno officially launched Fly with Aeroecene Pacha, a balloon like sculpture piloted by Leticia Marques and powered by the action of the sun on a contained body of air. Launched at Salinas Grandes in Jujuy, Argentina, and part of the global public-art project CONNECT, BTS, it travelled 1.7km in 21 minutes. The project as a whole, which took place between 21 and 28 January, set six world records in various categories and marked the latest step in a project that the Argentinian artist has been evolving over the course of more than two decades of collaborative research and experimentation, and through one broken back (his own). Since then, most of the world has gone into lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the work’s messages of community, connectedness, nonviolence, freedom and resistance feel more profound than ever.

Moreover, the work represents the notion that art as a discipline is intricately connected to those traditionally considered discrete: science, mathematics, engineering, ecology and sustainability, to name a few. After studying architecture in Argentina, Saraceno relocated to Germany, where he began working with the art department of Frankfurt’s Städelschule. He has since studied at NASA’s Ames Research Centre, in Mountain View, California (2009), and he has been a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2012, as well as collaborating with Germany’s Max Planck Insitute and the Natural History Museum in London. Perhaps more importantly, at a time when others vociferously doubt it, the Aerocene project speaks to the idea that art can have an identifiable use-value too. One that goes beyond its current generally accepted function as a subsection of the tourism and leisure industries, or as a vehicle through which to circulate, generate and protect wealth and the status commonly associated with that. Though that’s not to say that leisure – in the sense of ‘fun’ – is not a part of it.

ArtReview

April 2020

In November 1919 H.G. Wells began publication of his illustrated The Outline of History, in which the celebrated British author chronicled the history of the world from its origin until the end of the First World War in 24 fortnightly instalments. It was a work that he continuously revised until 1937. By 1941 it had become a sufficient staple of school history lessons to be referenced in John Huston’s film The Maltese Falcon. In one of the later versions, the final page of Wells’s narrative offers a painted illustration, commissioned from F. Collins, titled The Range of Man ’ s Life Extends Continually. It depicts the Italian-built airship Norge carrying the explorer Roald Amundsen across the North Pole, its undercarriage illuminated by the light of a rising sun coming up above the ice. In a sense, Saraceno’s project, with its practice (and thus, hopefully, message) of a nonviolent exploitation of natural resources glosses Wells’s pronouncement to suggest that the range of all life, human and nonhuman, might extend continually. Perhaps, in doing so, it avoids some of Wells’s tendencies towards pomposity too.

In 1979 Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis published The Usborne Book of the Future: A Trip in Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond. Under the heading ‘Airships to make a comeback?’ it speculates that ‘airships are ideal for use in countries where there is no developed road or rail system. They can carry heavy loads and deliver them without needing an airport.’ Beneath a picture of a blackand-white airship (that looks rather like an orca), it continues: ‘This airship is designed for use in hot sunny countries. Its beetle-like shell contains thousands of solar cells which generate electricity to power the propulsion motor at the rear and two small manoeuvring motors at the waist.’

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Pacha is an Incan concept relating to the division of the different spheres of the unified cosmos. The pachas were used to designate realms that are both spatial and temporal, and incorporate the Yanantin dualism, in which opposites are interdependent, that characterises many indigenous Andean philosophies. For Saraceno this translates to the slogan â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;We are flying with our head in the clouds but our feet on the groundâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

April 2020

In keeping with the themes of nonviolence and community, Saraceno describes the Aerocene Pacha project as developing in solidarity with the 33 indigenous communities in the Salinas Grandes region, where the so-called green rush to mine lithium for batteries (extracted by pumping beneath the salt plains: two million litres of water are required to mine each ton of lithium) is having the knock-on effect of polluting local drinking water (in addition to decimating agriculture and violating those communities’ belief systems, which oppose extraction practices). Between 2015 and 2018, investment in lithium exploration and production in Argentina grew by 928 percent. Thirty-six percent of Argentina’s reserves are contained within the province of Jujuy. At the official launch of Aerocene Pacha, members of the communities of Tres Pozos, Pozo Colorado, San Miguel del Colorado and Inti Killa de Tres Morros blessed Mother Earth and protested against the exploitation of their land rights, of which they are not the only victims. ‘Salinas Grandes no se toca el agua vale mas que el litio’ [Don’t touch the water in Salinas Grandes, water is more valuable than lithium], read one banner. As much as Aerocene Pacha is an expression of freedom, it is also an expression of resistance.

ArtReview

CONNECT, BTS is a global initiative, featuring 22 contemporary artists, developed by a group of international curators under the artistic direction of Korean curator Daehyung Lee. The project aims at exploring diversity, interdisciplinarity, connectivity, new synergies and a greater respect for the interconnectedness of the world around us. For more information visit connect-bts.com The Aerocene project is open-source and collaborative. For more information visit Aerocene.org

all images Courtesy Tomás Saraceno

April 2020

Catherine Opie by Fi Churchman

Untitled #3 (Swamps), 2019, pigment print, 102 × 152 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

ArtReview

“I bear witness”

Untitled #2 (Swamps), 2019, pigment print, 102 × 152 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

April 2020

above Rhetorical Landscapes, 2020 (installation view). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

facing page Untitled #3 (Political Collage) (still), 2019, animated digital collage. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

ArtReview

the very validity of photography is American photographer and artist called into question,” the artist says. Catherine Opie has spent more “Everyone’s asking, ‘Aren’t there than three decades exploring identoo many images now, Cathy?’ Well, tity – what it means, how it’s reprethere’s too much of everything, sented – across numerous bodies of work and subjects that range from but it’s about how you decide to disqueer identity (the 1991 series Being seminate that information. That’s and Having, for which Opie photowhat’s interesting to me – this idea of criticality.” The resulting conflagraphed herself and her queer female friends performing mascution of cuttings from print media linity, launched her career) to urban made into political collages, with and natural landscapes, to tempotechnology that allows us to access a rary communities, politics and iconconstant stream of news, brings into focus the highly edited nature of the ographic critique. information we receive. Opie’s start as a photographer came at the age of nine, when she She goes on to describe how the picked up her first camera (a Kodak contemporary political climate, the Instamatic) and, having completed a book report on child labour for post-truth era and the way in which society is fed information has led which she took inspiration from Lewis Hine’s early-twentieth-century her to make the connection between print culture and the us’s wetseries on child factory workers (he was made the official photographer lands, both of which are ecosystems vital to preserving, say, indefor the National Child Labor Committee in 1908), promptly told her pendent thought, or keystone species of a particular environment, but parents that she wanted to become a documentary photographer. which are nevertheless under threat. That Opie includes wetlands in “I realised that a photograph could literally have this power to, not the series is no coincidence given that in American political discourse necessarily create social change (because I’m not that idealistic), but swamps have represented bureaucratic quagmire, a sentiment popuI think it’s important to create social change if even one’s own commu- larised during the 1980s and one often referenced by Trump’s bornity can recognise themselves within the work later on,” Opie tells me, rowed line ‘to drain the swamp’ of federal government (not forgetwhen we meet in London on the morning of the Barbican’s Masculinities ting his attacks against news outlets that don’t conform to the curopening, in which her series Being and Having and High School Football rent government’s ideology by calling them ‘fake news media’). (2007–09) are included. She goes Despite the fact that Okefenokee “Everyone’s asking, ‘Aren’t there too many on to cite Robert Frank, Karlheinz Swamp is a protected area, conservaWeinberger, Wilhelm von Gloeden images now, Cathy?’ Well, there’s too much of tionist groups are currently fighting off proposals by heavy mineral and Julia Margaret Cameron as influeverything, but it’s about how you decide to mining company Twin Pines, whose ences. “I was able to grow up with the great kind of pictorial magazines disseminate that information. That’s what’s project along the eastern border of like Life and National Geographic,” she interesting to me – this idea of criticality” the wildlife refuge threatens to literally drain the swamp. Opie’s inclucontinues. “So as a kid, for me that sion of the wetlands points to the idea that although they are an icon was always the way a story began to be told.” In her most recent series, on show (although affected by closures of that region, they are omitted from the stereotypical visual rhetoric related to the current covid-19 pandemic) at Regen Projects in la, of well-known national sites like Yosemite National Park (the first site Opie returns to that early inspiration of mid-century print culture. to be officially recognised, in 1872, a decision influenced by the photos Rhetorical Landscapes comprises nine largescale landscape photo- of Carleton Watkins, later extensively photographed by National Park graphs of the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia and eight stop-motion advocate Ansel Adams and which were also a subject of Opie’s 2018 animations (all untitled, 2019) shown on giant kiosk screens, styled Hong Kong exhibition, So long as they are wild) that picture the us landlike smartphones. These last feature a compilation of images cut and scape as a symbol of Manifest Destiny. Most of the 62 listed parks are collected from magazines and newspapers since the 2016 us presi- located in the Western us, and just two are swamps. Opie presents the dential election campaign that build up into a collage. “In this day swamps as quiet, lush and verdant. They are photographed from the and age where we’re on an iPhone, scrolling through the news, wetland’s waterways: natural paths that allow visitors to pass through

April 2020

the ecosystem but also reinforce its impenetrability, reflected here in the opaque, glassy black water. By contrast, the animations are transparent in their politics and – inspired by Terry Gilliam’s stop-motion animations for Monty Python – address subjects ranging from the us’s prejudiced treatment of minorities, the resurgence of white supremacy, partisan politics, gun laws and extreme patriotism, to the environmental crisis and impact of industrial development. They do this, however, with a dose of humour and absurdity: on one screen an ice cream cone falls on the heads of a group of white supremacists; guns fall from the top of another screen and pile up into a mountain of weapons; and skyscrapers bob around amid magazine cuttings of waterscapes, while supporters of Trump’s wall ‘drown’ in a corner and a baby seal peers out from the middle of the flood, the scene topped with a beach umbrella. The irony now, of course, is that nature seems to be getting on with its business while humanity struggles. Does criticality in these images, then, also lie in the issue of visibility? To make something visible is to acknowledge its existence – whether the subject is the environment, or politics, or human communities. So how does Opie navigate the tension between the seen and unseen? How does she operate her camera in a way that makes the invisible visible, without imposing onto the subject a specific meaning, or category, or stereotype? Opie doesn’t mention it explicitly when we speak, but there’s an underlying sense throughout her series that in order to make her subjects visible in a way that debunks the stereotype, she perverts existing and normative understandings of them. In doing so, this has allowed Opie room to manoeuvre between

wide-ranging subject matters – whether she takes images from print out of context to create political collages, or portrays specific communities of people while manipulating the kinds of art-historical tropes designed to prescribe an individual’s status, and one that has long held a hegemony over the way we understand and view Western society. “I believe in bearing witness in the simplest way photography does,” she says, and something about this answer makes me realise that the same drive behind her childhood project on Hine’s photographs exists in all of her work. It’s not just about making social issues and communities visible – it’s about doing it with empathy and in such a way that people can recognise their own communities. Being and Having, first shown in New York, is made up of 13 closeup portraits featuring Opie and her lesbian friends wearing fake moustaches, sporting ‘tough-guy’ stares, and photographed against a bright, warm yellow backdrop (a visual device inspired by Hans Holbein the Younger): as a minority of the leather subculture, which was at the time dominated by men, they perform a version of extreme masculinity. Each photo is accompanied by a small metal plaque engraved with nicknames like ‘Chicken’, ‘Oso Bad’, ‘Pig Pen’, ‘Chief’, and Opie as ‘Bo’ (her alter ego as ‘a serial killer from the Midwest who’s a used aluminium-siding salesman’ was an early example of her interest in the role stereotypes play as much in the construction of personal identity as in the way judgements are formed). The series was made at a time when the aids epidemic had had a profound impact on the lgbtq community – one that predominantly affected gay and bisexual men, and trans women: by 1995, one in 15 gay men in the us had died of an aids-related illness. It was also shown the year after queer theorist Judith Butler

Papa Bear from Being and Having, 1991. © the artist. Courtesy Thomas Dane, London, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

ArtReview

had published Gender Trouble (1990), in which the notion of gender as a performance entered academic, and then wider social discourse. “In the early 90s, you didn’t see portraits being constructed in that way. There’s seduction in those portraits and that came from my own desire in relation to the leather community. It was a community that was really fun to be in and party with, and go to clubs where our bodies pressed against each other – and even though we were in an epidemic, there was an ability for us to feel cohesive and political within our visibility – there was a hotness to it,” she says. “Even for myself it was a radical move: I’m proud that I was brave enough to be out myself at that time period, and that I was able to confront all the fears around it in terms of my own internal homophobia.” Having grown up in a conservative household and having experienced childhood abuse, Opie views the opportunity to explore her sexuality within a supportive community built on its members’ shared empathy with one another as allowing her to reconcile not only her own homosexuality in relation to her career but also to delve into the multifaceted nature of desire and how that’s bound up with the notion of identity. The Self-Portraits are a series of three photographs, Cutting (1993), Pervert (1994) and Nursing (2004), all set against a cloth backdrop of richly coloured brocadelike material. In Cutting, Opie’s naked back is turned to the viewer. She faces a dark teal cloth printed with stylised clothbowls of fruit. Scratched into her back is a crude, childlike drawing of two women holding hands outside a house; a sun is peeping out from behind a cloud and two birds soar in parallel. Beads of blood pool in the sun’s rays, or drip from the chimney. The drawing speaks to the kind

of idealised life that a child might imagine, cutesy and happy, with sunshine. Opie cuts herself again in Pervert. Her face is hidden behind a gimp mask, each arm pierced from wrist to shoulder with a row of needles, the same ones used to carve out the word ‘Pervert’ in neat elegant script across her bare chest. She sits, as if patiently waiting, in front of a black and gold brocade curtain. And in Nursing, Opie is photographed breastfeeding her baby son; their gazes meet across the now pearly-thin scar on her chest, framed by red and gold drapery. We talk about how people have reacted to these photos. “In different interviews, one question I have had a lot is, ‘Why did you mutilate yourself?’ I’ve always had a big problem with that terminology. People attach psychological issues onto those self-portraits. I always found that very off-putting and surprising, because this was a very specifically performed identity on my body in relationship to queer culture. You have to constantly remind people and reframe those images to a certain extent,” she says, and goes on to explain that the carving of ‘pervert’ was in reaction to how her own subcommunity of leather and s/m friends were viewed and othered by the wider lgbt community at the time. Historically, visual symbolism in portraiture has played a role in building an identity, or narrative, for the sitter. Everything from the objects and materials that surrounded the subject to the clothes and demeanour of the sitter would describe their worldly position. In Italian and Northern European Renaissance portraiture, brocade, for example, a labour-intensive, dyed, woven silk fabric that was introduced via Venice from Byzantium in the fifteenth century, came to symbolise a certain kind of social status: only the wealthy and the

Self-Portrait / Pervert, 1994, c-print, 102 × 76 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

April 2020

above Untitled #10 (Surfers), 2003, c-print, 127 × 102 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

facing page Stephen, 2009, c-print, 102 × 76 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

ArtReview

appear in landscapes of games in nobility were able to afford such a costly material, and consequently the fabric play. Here, Opie captures something maintained a long status as a material beneath the surface of this gendered that denoted a particular, aspirational performance, one that is designed class-structure. The material, used as a to conceal emotions or individuality: insecurity and awkwardness backdrop to frame Self-Portraits, both bely their stoic expressions. “High functioned to elevate and make visible the queer experience within a domischool footballers might have scared nantly heteronormative society, and the shit out of me when I was in at the same time challenged ideas of high school, because I was a chubby what was ‘socially acceptable’ identomboy who wore glasses and was tity. The latter is perhaps more evident teased constantly by that group of when a comparison is drawn between, boys. But that doesn’t mean that for example, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s I go back and make photographs that 1488 painting Giovanna Tornabuoni are pushing this heightened sense nee Albizzi, in which the initial and of masculinity. No, I bear witness to emblem of the sitter’s husband and his family are embroidered onto who they are and who they stand before me. That has to count for somethe shoulder of her clothing, and Pervert, where that form of insignia thing, because if we were constantly going off these stereotypes, how is replaced with the needles that identify Opie within the s/m family. can we see people in any other way beyond that?” What’s more, the holding back of visibility, by the gimp mask worn To image something over and again makes it more digestible by Opie, is offset not only by her naked torso and its inscription, but to the public – so that subjects that are typically regarded as taboo by the protective positioning of her hands clasped over her womb – are ‘normalised’. That’s what Susan Sontag says in the oft-quoted a gesture symbolic of fertility or pregnancy in Renaissance painting, On Photography (1977). But she also reminds us that there are conseand in this context, one that challenged the assumption that lesbians quences to complete visibility: the risk of making the subject so ubiqin the s/m community couldn’t also be, or hope to be mothers. A decade uitous that viewers can no longer empathise with it. Opie evades this in her work by putting into tension the relationship between the later, she photographed Nursing. “Using art history as a reference is actually a way of figuring out invisible and visible, knowing precisely what to reveal in order to how to be transgressive within your hook a viewer in, and what to conceal “High school footballers might have work while at the same hooking in order to get the viewer to linger on her photographs, and enter into people into a language. For example, scared the shit out of me when I was in a visual discourse with her subject, if I went into a documentary mode high school. But that doesn’t mean that I go from her recent politically focused of photography in the 90s and took back and make photographs that are push- work, to her social documentary pictures of my friends in their rooms, those photos would be in a very ing this heightened sense of masculinity” of her own community and others of which she is not a part – all the specific position within that history of photography. But what does it mean to use a history of painting while fostering a sense of empathy and human connection. to look at a subject that is viewed as ‘transgressive’ or ‘dangerous’? In the landscapes of Icehouses (2001) and Surfers, the horizon line Referencing art history is a way of bringing the viewer in and getting fades so that land or sea becomes sky, interrupted only by the presence them to look at the subject in a different way – or to be seduced even. of tiny temporary fishing huts set up on the lake ice or the silhouettes My early subjects are thought of as abject or transgressive, but my of surfers waiting for the waves. Everything is going on underneath photographic handling of them utterly does not do that.” – you just can’t see it. ar That empathetic approach to framing her subjects, as well as her long-held interest in debunking cultural stereotypes, led Opie Due to the covid-19 pandemic, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, has to explore other communities in series like Surfers (2003) and High temporarily closed its gallery. Rhetorical Landscapes has School Football (2007–09). In the latter, teenage boys pose for portraits been extended through 2 May, and can be found via this website: in their uniforms – a symbol of American hypermasculinity – or else regenprojects.com/exhibitions/catherine-opie10

April 2020

New Worlds, New Words Project by Laure Prouvost Story by Céleste and Isidor Prouvkens

Language and narrative have consistently played a major role in the work of Turner Prize-winning, Antwerp-based artist Laure Prouvost, who represented France at last year’s Venice Biennale. Many of her works combine film and installation to explore instances of miscommunication and mistranslation, and the trajectory of ideas gone awry. In the project that follows, she presents a verbal–visual story that explores the construction of new languages, red herrings (not actual ones) and the art of communication itself. Themes, in short, that dominate and perhaps provide an antidote to these isolating times. 64

ArtReview

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ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Start off with romantic intentions 83

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography Barbican Art Gallery, London 20 February – 17 May This survey exhibition is a feast for the eyes, particularly if your eyes are partial to feasting on fit men. Featuring over 300 photographs and films, both editorial and art, by more than 50 artists, the exhibition seeks to survey how masculinity has been represented from the 1960s to the present. The beauty pageant begins in military fatigues: Adi Nes’s Soldiers series (1994–2000) features youthful Israeli servicemen, seemingly caught by an embedded photographer. A narrative of barely concealed mutual homoerotic desire runs through the body language of these subjects, all unnaturally handsome. One photograph shows four of the military men peeing in a line; in another a guy is caught snoozing on an army transport bus, the lens trained on his thick, muscular neck. In a khaki tent, a soldier lying on his side, the bare soles of his feet exposed to the lens, stares across at a brother-in-arms who is messing around with a candle, dripping wax on his hand. Nes’s photos are, in fact, entirely staged. So too the rough Lebanese streetfighters shown posing and flexing on Beirut’s ruined streets in Fouad Elkoury’s series Militiamen: Portrait of a Fighter, Beirut (1980). The men, though real soldiers, are, we’re informed via a gallery caption (it’s not obvious from the photos themselves), taking part in a film. These images of the man’s ur-role – fighter and protector – provide an introduction to an exhibition that seeks, so the curatorial blurb says, to explore ‘the diverse ways masculinity has been experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed’. The problem is, as the show progresses, that diversity is not really evident. Instead what we get is an exhibition of queer erotics, almost entirely dated to the twentieth century. No bad thing in itself – there is some fantastic work here – but by approaching masculinity through this narrow gaze, the exhibition has little work addressing the toxicity of patriarchy, or the social change engendered by the #MeToo movement, both of which are reference points claimed by the curators. Barely a handful of works tackle the patriarchal order at its most potent (and potently awful). Karen Knorr’s Gentlemen (1981–83), picturing members of London’s private clubs, their privilege evident in body language as much as the stately interiors, is a rare exception. Likewise Richard Avedon’s The Family (1976), a grid of 69 portraits of America’s political, military and media

establishment, almost all white and male; but these works, in this context (The Family was originally commissioned by Rolling Stone to mark the country’s bicentennial, during the first post-Watergate American presidential campaign), do little to move the conversation beyond identifying the privileged demographic. Better in this regard, and notable in that it is one of the most recent works on show, is Andrew Moisey’s The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual (2018), which documents jocks indulging in not-always-innocent hijinks. The works originally appeared as a photobook and were accompanied by an essay – not on show here – by Nicholas L. Syrett, an academic in gender studies, who notes that the activities depicted, ‘such as excessive drinking, hazing and womanising, can all be seen as trying to make ourselves a more masculine man’. More such interrogative insight into the insecurity of heterosexuality would have been a welcome addition to the show (recent moving-image work by artists such as Ed Atkins, Andrea Bowers and even Jordan Wolfson spring to mind). The straight world is again addressed in a section of the exhibition dedicated to the family, but with works such as Duane Michal’s Grandpa Goes to Heaven (1989), Masahisa Fukase’s touching Memories of Father (1971–90) and Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home (1984–92) – the last featuring Sultan’s father in his retirement village (practising his golf swing, vacuumcleaning in his socks) – the curating here concentrates on the vulnerability of old age. Otherwise the exhibition cycles through homoerotic tropes, including the sportsman (Catherine Opie’s pictures of American highschool football players, be they floppy-haired twink Devin, his hand resting on his groin, or Stephen, his toned midriff showing beneath a tiny Superman T-shirt); the bodybuilder (Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger – all abs and oil – or Herb Ritts’s pictures of a muscled guy lifting tyres); and the cowboy (Isaac Julien’s steamy After Mazatlán, 1999/2000). All these images fall under the rubric of gay fantasies of hypermasculinity. Other galleries are dedicated to images of effeminate but no less highly sexualised men. A 1970 photo by Karlheinz Weinberger shows a long-haired dandyish type naked but for a long fur coat, his cock as thick as a cola can. Just as camp is another studio photograph by

facing page, top Adi Nes, Untitled, 1999, from Soldiers, 1994–2000. Courtesy the artist and Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles

the Swiss artist in which a different model wears nothing but a straw boater and the tiniest of tiny denim shorts, the fly teasingly unzipped. The viewer peruses these pics, as well as Peter Hujar’s 1982 images of the ethereally beautiful drag performer David Brintzenhofe, soundtracked by The Paris Sisters’ 1965 version of Dream Lover, its perky doo-wop sound-spilling from Kenneth Anger’s three-minute film Kustom Kar Kommandos, made that same year. A young man, tanned, blond hair Brylcreemed back, polishes an evidently beloved hot-rod. Some wall space is reserved for other groups outside the dominant white Western heteronormative power structure, though these too tend to intersect with queer identity. An outing for Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) is always welcome, the 45-minute film telling the story of black gay identity via an uptown Manhattan speakeasy, segueing between the 1920s of the Harlem Renaissance and the 1980s disco scene. One character wrestles with his twin desires to “hunt dark meat in Harlem” and for “being loved”, a tension between sex and emotional connection also palpable in the quotes attached to Sunil Gupta’s photographs of gay men in New Delhi. While India’s social conservatism during the 1980s was no barrier to guys copping off in the ‘party and park scene’, it severely limited the chances of a committed relationship. Photographed with none of the exhibitionism of the European and American subjects, turning away to protect his identity, a man named Jangpura is quoted as bemoaning ‘being alone with no prospect of meeting anyone’. Most illuminating however is a small selection of work by female artists examining the female experience of masculinity, not least Laurie Anderson’s Fully Automated Nikon (1973), photographs of men who harassed the artist in the street; and the voyeuristic pairing of Annette Messager’s The Approaches (1972), sneak pics of men’s groins, and Tracey Moffat’s Heaven (1997), snatched footage of male surfers changing, a welcome promotion of straight female erotic desire. Yet this lens on heterosexuality is all too brief; while art history has long been written by straight white guys, the urgent work is not to ignore them in exhibitions such as this, or exclusively to consider masculinity through a queer gaze. Instead the camera needs turning round to allow moments of self-interrogation. Oliver Basciano

facing page, bottom Tracey Moffat, Heaven (still), 1997, video, 28 min. © the artist / dacs. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

ArtReview

April 2020

Rosa Barba Turn and Wind Parra & Romero, Madrid 26 February – 4 April Roughly halfway through Rosa Barba’s Aggregate States of Matter (2019) – the stunning film installation that forms this show’s centrepiece – is a centrally framed shot of a woman. It’s a spare, almost classical portrait: a three-quarters, head-and-shoulders pose, set against the vast Peruvian altiplano, or Andean Plateau, which lies below and beyond. As the camera circles to address her face-on, she raises her eyes and looks impassively into its lens while the wind lifts wisps of her hair. The slight creases in the skin of her face find echoes in the folds of the terrain beyond, so that she seems not only to be in front of but also within and even of the landscape itself. And the film then moves on. In keeping with the film’s deft, almost dreamlike structuring, no information is offered regarding who this woman is or why she is portrayed with such tender immediacy. External sources tell us, however, that she served as translator between Barba and the local Quechua people during the film’s onsite production. Thus her presence in the film, while brief, might be seen as emblematising the essential role of translation in the works here and in Barba’s transdisciplinary practice in general; an expanded kind of translational process, less concerned with relaying content itself from one

artistic format to another than with capturing, assimilating and ultimately revealing, often in an indirect fashion, the shape-giving impulses below the surface of such content. Aggregate States of Matter is a 20-minute study of a remote section of the Peruvian Andes, from Lake Titicaca to the peaks of the Cordillera Blanca. It is decidedly not a conventional documentary – it is far too elliptical and nonnarrative for that – yet neither is it inaccessible. To the contrary: the film’s layering of images and voices of the Quechua people, intimacy with its human subjects, breathtaking aerial footage and overarching gentle simplicity are as seductive as they are hypnotic. In the process, Barba succeeds, with remarkable efficiency, in conveying (ie translating to film) a sense of the land, the life it supports and the people who inhabit it; she also conveys, with equal economy, the terrifying changes affecting all of these as the mountain glaciers melt and retreat. (“Cambio climático”, or climate change in Spanish, can be discerned within the film’s recorded conversations, which otherwise take place in Quechua.) What is revealed is all the more powerful for being revealed obliquely, without stridency, as something that is, again, not only in but of the landscape itself.

ArtReview

Formally distinct yet sharing a certain methodological approach, another work in the exhibition – Liberties (2020) – consists of a pair of undulating wall-hanging sculptures cast in wax (the show also included languagebased prints reminiscent of concrete poetry, a sound installation and a small librarylike installation of Barba’s books and artworks by her colleagues.) Within Liberties, small wax letters seem to emerge and flow downward, as if unfurling; at the same time, the densely textural work is reminiscent of organic material, of a geological eruption and crumbling (not unlike the glacier in the nearby film). This morass of words is drawn directly from Susan Howe’s 1980 poem ‘The Liberties’, so that what is at work is a kind of ekphrasis, a re-expression of a given artwork in a different medium. But here the shift is not from visual into verbal form but from the verbal to the sculptural. And more crucially, Barba’s reworking of Howe’s poem is utterly removed from an impulse towards illustration or even interpretation, but rather pushes – outwardly, sculpturally – towards something generative in its own right, like a seismic outcropping in a landscape of language. George Stolz

Marsden Hartley The earth is all I know of wonder Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk 19 September – 19 January ‘Restless’ is an adjective often used to characterise both Marsden Hartley and his work, due to his nomadic lifestyle and constant reinvention of his painting style in response to shifting influences and artistic ambitions. His complex succession of styles reflected his travels between America and Europe, uniquely combining the reductionism and subjective vision of Continental modernism with a mystic, constructive version of American regionalism. The ongoing sense of experimentation and discovery embedded in the American painter’s work is nevertheless anchored by a very distinct sensibility; a profound emotionality that set his work apart from his contemporaries. One of the largest retrospectives of Hartley ever mounted – over 110 paintings made between 1906 and 1943, the year he died, aged sixty-six – and the first in Europe since the early 1960s, the exhibition brings together the diverse range of Hartley’s canvases (plus drawing, writing and poetry). In a sequence of rooms corresponding to the artist’s travels and stylistic periods, the exhibition is divided chronologically into six ‘chapters’ that include research-style ‘pinup’ boards of related ephemera. Hartley’s agitation might be accounted for by a loneliness and longing that engulfed his hardscrabble childhood, and as an adult he reportedly never lived for more than ten months

in any one place; this restlessness is reflected in his artistic inquisitiveness but no doubt also relates to the difficulties of living as a gay man, in societies where homosexuality was illegal, even if accepted in the bohemian circles he moved in. It’s through the coded subtexts of homosexual longing that the show proposes we understand the vision that informs Hartley’s heartbreaking paintings. The Louisiana retrospective repairs his neglect in Europe, while addressing Hartley’s latent homoeroticism (often misunderstood in his lifetime). In so doing it acknowledges the presence of gay desire obscured by the hetero-male modernist canon: the first work here is a Cézanne-style still life, Pears (1911), unmistakable phallic forms nestled together. The final gallery is filled with Hartley’s late-period, larger-than-life ‘hunky’ male figures (1935–43). From the beginning, Hartley’s landscapes, abstracts and still lifes had a throbbing, vivid corporeality; he also often incorporated shapes reminiscent of body parts such as thighs, buttocks and especially phallic forms in his nonfigurative work. Yet soon after a tragic bereavement that marked a peaceful interlude in Nova Scotia, Hartley began to incorporate human figures. These are at once primitivist and sophisticated, often with a single figure against a

monochrome background pressed urgently to the picture plane. His figures are surprisingly wooden, with strange proportions and geometric features that might be mistaken for outsider art for the virtuosic pathos Hartley achieves. His work shifts quotidian subjects into the symbolic dimension, yet here he approaches the mythic by evoking a ‘regressive’ sensibility in which visual liabilities are used as overtly emotional assets. Many works in this later style depict beefy, hirsute men, and were disingenuously described by Hartley as created for gymnasiums. Yet considering the homoerotic nature of this work – obvious from today’s perspective – Hartley is clearly, finally, ‘coming out’ here. As curator Mathias Ussing Seeberg has noted: if Hartley painted the landscape like a figure for most of his career, in this final phase he paints the figure like a landscape. The bodies here are tenderly observed yet idealised, almost disembodied, epic and monumental. The resolute loneliness of the artist, perennially an unloved spectator and never a participant, assumes candid physical form. The result is a truly weird, beautiful, absolutely personal vision, establishing an unattainable longing that could be a metaphor for all the neglected dimensions eclipsed by modernism’s emphasis on heteronormative desire. Rodney LaTourelle

Adelard the Drowned, Master of the ‘Phantom’, 1938–39, oil on academy board, 71 × 56 cm. Courtesy Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

April 2020

Mourning: On Loss and Change Hamburger Kunsthalle 7 February – 14 June While two museum guides are pointing me towards the café, a woman’s singing, hymnlike, suddenly soars from somewhere behind them. I quip, “Gott kommt!” – God is coming – and they don’t laugh, knowing what I’m in for: an emotional wringing through Mourning’s mangle of death. The vocalising constitutes the first work in the show, a sound installation called Four Part Harmony (2020) by Susan Philipsz. Based on an old Irish folksong, it refers to the Celtic tradition of keening – ritualised singing for the deceased. The atrium fills with the artist’s haunting voice, the composition arranged in ascending and descending scales. The key work in this show, which brings together some 30 artists from 15 countries, comes next: Andy Warhol’s Jackie (1964). The small silvery silkscreen has jfk’s widow sunk deep in her new world of emptiness and pain, and sets the tone for the show: it’s another descent, a soul plunge like a prolonged sigh. Bereavement can be disturbingly upsetting, as with Adrian Paci’s Interregnum (2017), with its edited video footage of mass mourning following the deaths of Stalin, Mao and other dictators. How frightening to witness the ease of manipulated hysteria. Some seem genuinely

upset; not a few, you suspect, are faking it. What disturbs is that you are never sure which. Bas Jan Ader’s I’m too sad to tell you (1970–71) is still too sad to look at for long, even if you don’t know his fate. Unfortunately Ragnar Kjartansson’s God (2007), installed in the next room, comes across as slight alongside such heavyweight pathos. The Icelandic artist croons, in the louche manner of a 1950s torch singer, that “sorrow conquers happiness”. (Cheers for that.) A moment of tragicomic respite arrives via two Ghanaian artists who design coffins. Ataa Oko’s 80 Zeichnungen (2004–07) is a grid of drawings picturing speculative coffins – shaped like ducks, cars, crabs – while Kudjoe Affutu’s celebratory orange-and-black-striped wooden minicoffin, Tiger (2006), might look good on (what was once) your mantelpiece. More acute sadness arrives with photojournalist Paul Fusco’s famous rfk Funeral Train (1968/2019). Mourners stand mute alongside the tracks as the body of the assassinated senator is transported to Washington, DC. We see black and white, young and old, united as if in Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream but in reality together only in tragedy. The death of hope is right here. Philippe Parreno’s short video reenactment, June

8, 1968 (2009), if anything reintensifies the grief: on watching, all shifts dreamily – to paraphrase Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘A Northern Hoard’ (1972) – while, in the distance, Philipsz keens. Philipsz has two more works here. One, Returning (2004), is a film loop of people visiting the Karl Liebknecht memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten; another political hero assassinated, another utopian vision crushed. Things get · even sadder with Aslan Goisum’s video People of No Consequence (2016), where a hall in Grozny slowly fills with shuffling elderly people, the last 119 survivors of Stalin’s forced deportations from Chechnya. The worst is saved for last: the violent death of a child. How to show what should never be seen? Khaled Barakeh’s series The Untitled Images (2014), altered photographs from the war in Syria, aim straight for the gut. He uses a scalpel to excise the victims from the picture. But the adults remain intact holding the child-shape, a white void; the slumped, defeated postures of the living horrify. With wilful political ignorance of humanitarian truths all around, and scientific concerns about the death of the planet, a show majoring on grief that accentuates the personal and communitarian implications of mourning seems entirely appropriate to the moment. John Quin

Khaled Barakeh, The Untitled Images (detail), 2014, five c-type prints, 21 × 30 cm (each). Original photo: Manu Brabo. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Elena Asins Machines to Change the World kow, Berlin 15 February – 14 March A couple of things that are useful to know about Elena Asins upfront: she was a pioneer of computer-enabled art and, for a while, studied semiotics with Noam Chomsky. The latter fact is relevant insofar as the Madrid-born artist, who died in 2015 aged seventy-five, used digital animation, sculpture, concrete poetry and a variety of twodimensional works to figure, in sequential nonrepresentational art, something analogous to Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’: an underlying set of structural rules posited as innate to all humans. Asins’s work, powered by the energies of cybernetics and combinatorial theory – such as Ramsey’s theorem, which argues that disorder always seeks to resolve itself into regularity – suggests the invisible presence of systems underlying everything. The scope and, frequently, Euclidean rigour of her practice were on full display at a 2011 retrospective in her home city’s Museo Reina Sofía. kow, meanwhile, doesn’t even attempt to compress it into the one upstairs room they’ve devoted to her. Instead, they

offer a tightly circumscribed sample, seemingly pulled from a dusty archival box: ‘rare works from the 1980s’, which turns out to mean an austere selection of computer printouts arranged in grids and friezes, in which black abstract forms pass through sprightly modulations, underwritten by alien logic. Reading one long framed strip of 18 conjoined pieces of dot-matrix printer paper – dated 1989, and seemingly titled Canons 18/11 (there is no list of works) – from left to right, we first see one biomorphic blob hovering above another. On the next sheet, it’s joined by a third, while one of the preexisting ones has morphed slightly. What follows is constant quiet permutation, shapes changing, vanishing, reappearing, the whole looking like not only animation cells but a set of dance steps without music, the glyphs finally shrinking and winking out. Asins, here and elsewhere, mobilises sheer aesthetic confidence. Just as you don’t have to be a musicologist to note the grace and sense of resolution that permeates Mozart’s music – which she also studied closely – these works

make intuitive sense even while suggesting a meaning or purpose you can’t quite grasp. In 3 in 3 Perspective Scale 33 newplan (Nr.1-49) (1989), a 7 × 7 lattice of variously agglomerated Necker cubes – the ones with ambiguously reversible perspective – permute mutely from sheet to sheet. As you look, noting where a section of geometric architecture has vanished and another, or several more, appeared, Asins’s work appears in dialogue with both Minimalism and the allover painting that preceded it – this sequence, large as it is, insinuates itself as an extract from an endless process. Asins’s idealism still resonates, though an exhibition titled Machines to Change the World in 2020 can’t escape irony and melancholy: count the ways that computer technologies have indeed changed our world, from job automation to the isolation effects of social media to drone warfare. These works, beamed in from another time, implicitly indict our own, even while they offer a bleep of theoretical optimism: things might seem chaotic to us, but in Asins’s universe, disorder is just an illusion. Martin Herbert

Elena Asins, 3 in 3 Perspective Scale 33 newplan (Nr.1-49) (detail), 1989, computer drawing on fanfold paper, 147 × 214 cm. Photo: Ladislav Zajac. Courtesy kow, Berlin & Madrid

April 2020

Andrew Norman Wilson

Lavender Town Syndrome

Ordet, Milan 4 December – 15 February I started this piece when the destruction of the infamous ‘Vele’ housing complex in Scampia, Naples (have you watched Gomorrah?) was all over the news. I’m finishing it in the shadow of reports on the spreading of covid-19 virus in northern Italy: tv, phone, computer screens constantly alight around the house. Perfect timing to ponder Andrew Norman Wilson’s Lavender Town Syndrome, where collective imagination, utopian architecture, conspiracy theories, mortality, emotional overload and extreme optical strain are gathered together to question our perception of what the artist calls ‘truthiness’. Presented at Ordet, a newly opened space in Milan’s Porta Romana area, the American artist’s exhibition revolves around a new multichannel video: z = |z/z•z-1 mod 2|-1 (all works 2019), projected in slightly different versions on three screens installed in the main space. Each variant begins with the same sequence of extended zooming shots (filmed with telephoto lenses usually employed for wildlife documentaries) of a single balcony of the iconic Marina City complex in Chicago, designed during the 1960s by architect Bertrand Goldberg – a “concrete lotus flower” in “the most square city on earth”, as Wilson remarks in voiceover.

While the vantage point and visual trajectory remain claustrophobically identical, with a touch of Rear Window-ish voyeurism, the subjects on the balcony change: a bees’ nest, large dried lotus seed pods, corncobs inside a bbq , a sculpture, two towers made of biscuits recalling the shape of Marina City, twin kids wearing identical Star Wars jerseys and finally a yellow papier-mâché Pikachu, modelled after a meme found on Reddit. Their appearance accompanies a convoluted voiced-over story of a small group of artists who drop out of the art system to instead embrace socially engaged design and deal with parenting dilemmas. From here on, the versions of the video diverge, to include diverse imaging technologies, such as photorealistic raytraced animations (based on materials actually existing in nature), and lysergic, trancelike 3D fractal ‘ray-marching’ animations, developed by the computer engineer Code Parade. These visions extend from macro to micro, to infinitesimal, to out of focus and back again, in endless chains of replication and multiplication of the same pattern or image, with no escape route from the maze. From one of the video iterations, z = |z/z•z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome, we learn that the syndrome in question is named after a creepy lilac-coloured village in Pokémon games, hosting “the Tower”, a structure

z = |z/z•z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (still), 2019. Photo: Nicola Gnesi. Courtesy the artist and Ordet, Milan

ArtReview

“filled with countless memorials for deceased Pokémon”. During the 1990s, the syndrome supposedly afflicted hundreds of Japanese children, pushed into anger outbursts, seizures and even suicide by the binaural beats of the Pokémon background music. Wilson’s theatre of vision is so full of optical wonders and charged with tension and anxiety that it’s hard to resist the lures of its digital samsara. The objects from the ‘real world’ on display in the gallery – like the same roughly fashioned Pikachu featuring in the video, installed next to a row of green Romanesco broccoli (whose florets naturally replicate Fibonacci fractals) – appear ridiculously lowres in comparison. Reality looks better, and feels better, when augmented and fictionalised, as in Pokémon Go. Goodbye, then, to the good old days of childhood innocence, naive ecstasy, collective enthusiasm and the utopian optimism of Silicon Valley. In the last room, a video of the first seconds of a hand-drawn cartoon created for the 1965 Charlie Brown Christmas Special, accompanied by the first notes of its original jazz score, loops endlessly on the vintage screen of an iMac G4. A snowy landscape, a baby-blue frozen pond and a sorrowful title: I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. Barbara Casavecchia

Notre monde brûle Palais de Tokyo, Paris 21 February – 17 May A collaboration with Qatari museum Mathaf, Notre monde brûle (Our World Is Burning) offers an ambitious survey of contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa. Some 30 artists address three interwoven phenomena: the ecological crisis, the successive sociopolitical crises facing the region and a crisis of history, where traditional narratives are being dismantled and supplanted, not least in artistic practice. The tone is set by Amal Kenawy’s The Silent Multitudes (2010), an installation that replicates the dimensions of shoebox flats in Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods. The walls consist of flammable gas cylinders; inside, a video of a gas cylinder being kicked along the pavement underscores the foreboding atmosphere. Created just before the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Kenawy’s work captures the uneasy feeling of imminent upheaval. Shirin Neshat’s Our House Is on Fire (2013), meanwhile, takes us directly to the revolution’s aftermath, with portraits of Egyptians who lost loved ones during the conflict. While powerful, the photographs look almost too beautiful, too aesthetically sanitised alongside Mounira Al Solh’s I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2012–), portraits of Syrian refugees sketched alongside handwritten testimonies. Drawn on the lined paper used to process asylum requests, the images feel improvised, the makeshift artistic practice echoing the necessary resourcefulness of displaced people.

Sculptures by American artist Michael Rakowitz, entitled The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2007–), also embed the precarity of the situation they evoke into the substance of the works themselves. After the Fall of Baghdad in 2003, Iraq’s National Museum was looted, and numerous artworks and artefacts destroyed. Using Interpol’s inventory of the missing objects, Rakowitz recreated lifesize replicas assembled from food packaging and Arabic newspapers; these foreground the instability of both cultural heritage and political regimes. This quality reappears in works dealing with environmental themes, such as Khalil El Ghrib’s untitled, undated installation of cardboard, oxidised copper and lichens, depicting the fragile equilibrium of living ecosystems. But while a parallel might be found here between ecological and sociopolitical crises, there are limitations to such comparisons, given the different timescales, geographies and subsequent distribution of responsibility involved. Francis Alÿs’s contribution contextualises many of the surrounding works by examining the discourses that have arisen around geopolitical conflict. Based on time spent with British troops in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, his backlit oil paintings on tracing paper resemble maps in military headquarters. Abstracted landmasses in yellow and green

are labelled with dialectic couplings: subject/ object, us/them, tourist/migrant. These labels evoke cartography’s colonialist history, the way borders and territories are instrumentalised in nationalist rhetoric, but also the terminology of postcolonial theory and the possibility of challenging dominant discourses and their accompanying ideologies. When Notre monde brûle was announced, the Palais de Tokyo faced criticism over its collaboration with Qatar’s state-funded museum. lgbtq+ groups called for the exhibition to be pulled. Given the show accentuates humanist, socially progressive values in curatorial comments and the works included, the discrepancy between these values and those espoused by its funders doesn’t go unmissed. This raises a question about the political role of art institutions and what we expect of them: should exhibition organisers, as members of an institution, take an overt position? Or, as in this instance, is it enough to exhibit works that challenge the political status quo to hint towards art’s capacity to effect change? The answer clearly differs according to the institutions involved, the constraints of their national legal frameworks and the risks they run by taking such a stance. In certain circumstances, an oblique approach may be the only leeway a curator has; in others, an institution’s silence can hang heavy over the show. Daisy Sainsbury

Amal Kenawy, The Silent Multitudes, 2010, steel, lpg gas tanks, video, 300 × 600 × 400 cm. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo, Paris

April 2020

Disarming Language: disability, communication, rupture Tallinn Art Hall 14 December – 24 February ‘Museum visits are hard on my body. Rest here if you agree,’ reads a seat cushion on a bench. Another navy cushion in an adjacent gallery states, ‘This exhibitions [sic] has asked me to stand for too long. Sit if you agree.’ These cushions, part of Shannon Finnegan’s ongoing Museum Benches series (2019–), are next to counterparts rendering the same phrases in Estonian and Russian. Here, language is not just a universal system of knowledge or expression; it is hyperspecific, both passive and active at once. Finnegan is one of 13 artists with disabilities included in Disarming Language (cocurated by Christine Sun Kim and Niels van Tomme), and her work exemplifies the show’s curatorial cornerstone: language is a system that has the ability to incite change. The first room of the exhibition is soundtracked by Live in Oakland (2019), a danceable electronic mixtape by Dax Pierson, in which he declares at one point, “Don’t take your physical abilities for granted, for you can lose them, with the snap of the neck”. Wall pieces from Andrea Crespo’s series Step Right Up (2019) ask the audience to reconsider images, headlines and stories reproduced from various media outlets that perpetuate the idea of the ‘freakshow’. One memorable black-and-white print

depicts a line drawing of a suited teenage boy standing hand-in-hand with a girl in a dress and corsage who is seated in a wheelchair. Across top and bottom are the words: ‘He asked her to prom even in her condition / Like and share = respect’. Another blurred image of a woman running with prosthetic legs is overlaid with the text: ‘The only disability in life is a bad attitude’. While the written and spoken words in Pierson and Crespo’s works provide a seemingly straightforward entry point into the exhibition, nuances are revealed in an accompanying guide. Pierson’s techno, for example, comprises sound samples of his personal medical equipment and motorised wheelchair – parts of his daily life since 2005, when a car accident resulted in a spinal injury. Three wall hangings by Gudrun Hasle are embroidered with pastel-hued body parts and what at first appear to be indecipherable phrases. But say these out loud and the message becomes clear: “brif in brif audt / repet in a cam tone / breathe in bref audt / lestend / brif in bref audt / repit”. Hasle, who has been diagnosed dyslexic, reminds us that disability isn’t always visible, and that language is never fixed in stone. Other works, by Sunaura Taylor, Jeffrey Mansfield and Alison O’Daniel, explore the

language surrounding deafness and blindness and the divides between the disabled and nondisabled. A series of vinyl wall texts scattered throughout the show are extracted from Taylor’s 2017 book Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, which argues that degradation and devaluation in human/ animal and disabled/nondisabled binaries function according to similar language systems – systems built on, among other things, ‘ableist paradigms of language and cognitive capacity’ that ‘we must begin to examine’. In other words, liking and sharing do not equate to action or respect, but effectively degrade and devalue the life of a human and ‘her condition’ to that of a meme, and her existence to part of a freakshow. Additionally, running a marathon – with or without prosthetic legs – is indeed an inspirational feat. However, the idea that disability results only from a bad attitude thereby implies that physical or mental impairments can, and should, be overcome by personal strength and resolve – a resolutely ableist perspective. Disarming Language acts upon Taylor’s call for examination, proposing language itself as a methodology to disarm and reframe the status quo. Emily McDermott

Andrea Crespo, Pediatainment, 2018, mixed media, 52 × 152 × 8 cm. Photo: Karel Koplimets, Tallinn Art Hall. Courtesy the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

ArtReview

Pacita Abad Life in the Margins Spike Island, Bristol 18 January – 5 April In the short documentary Wild at Art (1995) the late painter Pacita Abad explains how she was once detained in Hawaii, suspected – because she was from the Philippines – of travelling with a fake passport. This brush with systemic prejudice led to her series Immigrant Experience (the works shown here are dated 1991–94), huge quilted canvases painted and embossed with embroidered forms using the ‘trapunto’ technique. They occupy over half her exhibition at Spike Island, where they hang, flaglike, from the ceiling. But this isn’t a fight-the-power protest art the story might suggest. Rather Abad filtered what she learned from fellow immigrants from places as diverse as Cambodia and Korea in works of colour-saturated affirmation. We’re shown people’s day-to-day challenges and aspirations: at work, negotiating the school system, getting married or shopping for groceries. America’s land of plenty is evoked in glowing street signs and trolleys brimming with branded goods. These are rendered with all the vibrant appeal of the flora and fauna, costumes and traditions from beyond the us that also feature in these works. Though Abad studied art in Washington, dc, it was the traditions of the countries she travelled to in Asia, Africa and Latin America she related to most. Her paintings incorporate

everything from batik to macramé, mirror embellishments and ink drawing. Each surface is intensely worked with dots and dashes of pigment and stitching, sewn-on shells, sequins and beads, real clothes and cutup dyed fabric, and the abstract trapunto paintings that occupy the rest of the gallery are a kaleidoscope of this technical cosmopolitanism: an early work composed of swirling, dripping organic shapes is inspired by the peeling walls of her home country’s capital, Manila. The series Oriental Abstractions (1984–92) uses Korean ink-brush painting as a starting point for screen-printed, mosaiclike constellations of crescent moons elaborated with dots, latticework and zigzags. Trippy titles like Liquid Experience (1985), a work in which hot red mountainous forms recall Japanese landscape painting, suggest the San Francisco counterculture scene that, having fled Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship during the 1970s, first nurtured her creative sensibility. Though her work was not unknown in the us, Abad worked largely outside the Western artworld, making and showing paintings in the countries she visited. She was invested in a broad and local audience (creating public artworks like her 2004 covering of Singapore’s Alkaff Bridge in multicoloured patterns) and favoured unconventional methods of distribu-

tion (decorating dresses and even a dinner set). But with the recent drive to address art history’s predominantly white, male and Western-centric blind spots, and a resurgent interest in fibre art, her paintings have lately gained exposure, with major museum acquisitions, a survey in Manila and inclusion in international art fairs. Dubbing herself a ‘woman of colour’ with cheerful double entendre, she approached identity in a manner distinct from the nuance of today’s debates. Yet her sense of globalist empathy speaks enthusiastically to our own, particularly in this fraught moment, when borders are closing. What rescues her project from exoticism is how Abad approaches her material as a fellow outsider, keen to give other overlooked people and creative traditions a platform through her painting. Her labour-intensive process, the works’ size and their installation – here, hung from the gallery’s lofty ceilings – all emphasise that this is a project of everyday monumentalism. The effect is especially striking in la Liberty (1992), in which a brown-skinned Statue of Liberty poses triumphantly in an intricately decorated patchwork dress against a rainbow sunburst. She’s ‘a woman of colour’ in every sense and, like all of Abad’s work, an exuberant banner for multiculturalism before the term became a staple of artists’ discourse. Skye Sherwin

L.A. Liberty, 1992, acrylic, cotton yarn, plastic buttons, mirrors, gold thread, painted cloth on stitched and padded canvas. Photo: Max McClure. Courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate

April 2020

Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna 17 January – 29 February Named after ancient Mesopotamian king Sargon of Akkad’s bold claims about the extent of his rule, this exhibition crams 25 works, including colourful paper collages, sculptures, installations, found objects and a video – the fruits of four series and three collaborations from 2004 to 2019 – into all three floors of the gallery. The titular paper collage series (2018), video installation Chronoscope 1952 or 1953 11pm (1) (2012–17) and Ian’s Gulf (maps version) (2018) are clearly part of the Venezuelan-born, Berlin-based artist’s critique of cultural imperialism. In other works, this is brought to bear on contemporary art production per se. Edward W. Said justified the limited scope of his essay collection Culture and Imperialism (1993) by referring to the ‘unique coherence and special cultural centrality’ of British, French and American imperialism. With the title series, Balteo-Yazbeck displaces some of these expectations by going further back into history, turning classic imperialist maxims from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and more into email addresses and hashtags. He does so using familiar typefaces from consumer goods against a background of fragments from fashion magazines, holiday snaps and stock photos, like an extravagant ransom note. Some titles refer to imperialist projects that saw themselves as Sargon of

Akkad did (cesar@marenostrum.ad, britain1821@ sunneversets.co.uk), but others – #benevolentglobalhegemony, #encodingworlddominationgenealogy and dominion@planet.com – point to continuities between earlier empires and neoconservatism or today’s Silicon Valley ideology. Each piece’s fractured, patchwork feel mimics how empires impose powerful interests (gods, laws, economic activity) on diverse groups. By inviting us to look at ancient empires using the visual codes of the present, Balteo-Yazbeck suggests that today’s networked culture gives the world a more uniform look than any historical empire despite its eclectic style. The collages line the walls of the shorter part of the gallery’s L-shaped main space. Five sculptures made from olive wood, o.k., Nail Polish 3000 bc, gps 1973, Opposable Thumb and Carving Coal Since 4000 bc (all 2018), irreverently modified remakes of works by an artist identified as Attilio Napolitano, stand on cylindrical plinths in the middle. These uncanny handlike figures grasping the air are like ghouls trying to escape a graveyard; or warnings against trespass from some deep forest, repurposed with a folk-art feel. And though the lacquer applied to Nail Polish 3000 bc updates something ancient-looking, the macabre imperialism/artistic-domination connection is clearer when the source material is more recent.

Comfort (2019), for example, based on an adjustable chaise longue designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1927 and made partly from solar panels and electronic components connecting it to a contemporary Ikea stool based on an Alvar Aalto design, suggests a link between intellectual property and classic critiques of hegemony. This continues upstairs with Warao Chinchorro / Hammock (Water-Oil) (2004–14) – a hammock woven by members of the Warao people (indigenous to the Orinoco Delta) with a framed 2010 untitled pigment print by stilllife photographer Holger Niehaus lying in it – implicating contemporary art in that critique. The connection is solidified downstairs. Chronoscope 1952 or 1953 11pm (1), a cbs public affairs show about early Cold War American military interests – which the artist has playfully defaced by digitally overlaying pink and green ink on the presenters’ eyes and mouths – faces Ian’s Gulf (Maps Version), two individually framed maps of the Middle East taken from a 1951 edition of Fortune magazine, indicating strategic geographies and available raw materials in the same colours. Balteo-Yazbeck’s point, evidently, is this: imperialist extractivism treats the world as a resource to be marketised, but that greedy process is also at play in the conceptual vampirism of contemporary art itself. Max L. Feldman

pharoh@allthatsunencircles.eg, 2018, from the series All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset, paper collage on wood, 118 × 164 cm. Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

ArtReview

Diane Simpson Sculpture, Drawing, Prints 1976–2014 Nottingham Contemporary 8 February – 3 May Diane Simpson’s Samurai 10 (1983) is an impossibly flimsy-looking sculpture. Despite finding its inspiration in the armour of elite Japanese warriors, this wonky freestanding work looks ready to crumple at the slightest breeze. Decorated with pale-red-and-white pencil grids, its intersecting mdf planes pivot and bend in accordance with an unfathomably strange yet satisfying geometry. Simpson’s idiosyncratic aesthetic originated during the mid-1970s, when, as a mature student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she began translating her isometric drawings into three-dimensional objects. Early experiments, such as the relief collage Contained Containers (1976), set the tone with its skewed folding forms composed of scraps of wood, cardboard and printed paper. Its industrial appearance is countered by a gentle domesticity, a duality present throughout this modest exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary – remarkably, the artist’s first museum presentation in Europe. Drawing has been fundamental to Simpson’s practice for more than 40 years. Each sculpture begins on graph paper as a precise axonometric projection in which objects are rendered obliquely, producing strange, optical distortions. Like a dressmaker’s pattern, the drawings contain the essential information required to fabricate her meticulous models, all made by hand. Each three-dimensional

work is here accompanied by its two-dimensional antecedent, such as the elegant SleeveSling (1997), in which a piece of vaguely conical pink cloth overlaid with perforated aluminium is draped over a suspended bar. An adjacent drawing reveals its source to be a flamboyant Elizabethan dress sleeve. While this game of show-and-tell provides fascinating insights into Simpson’s process, the drawings tend to distract and close down readings. Beyond these formal juxtapositions of flatness and volume arise issues of gender, the symbolism and sociology of clothing and complex tensions between abstraction and figuration. Simpson has acknowledged postminimalists Eva Hesse and Richard Artschwager as influences, as well as postmodern design, art deco and the architectural vernacular of her native Chicago, variously informing her heterodox combinations of pattern, fashion, decor and sculpture. A particularly pleasing example is the curving, finlike form of Court Lady (1985). Inspired by seventeenth-century English court dress and Japanese Sengoku armour, the tall sculpture is laced together with bright red cords that zing against its stained dark exterior. The seemingly disparate clothing styles that inform Simpson’s works are related by their function: the exaggeration and accentuation of certain body parts. Peplum i (2014), for instance, isolates a decorative detail designed

to emphasise waistlines: a white skirtlike form with candy-pink edging rests atop a wood and copper base, resembling an occasional table. Though less elegant than other works, it demonstrates the peculiar way that forms coalesce in Simpson’s structures, as details of clothing begin to resemble architectural features that simultaneously suggest items of furniture. Women’s domestic labour is referenced by Simpson’s Apron series (2000–05) and it’s hard not to read these works as semiautobiographical (for years her art languished in obscurity while her responsibilities as a mother took precedence). Indeed, she has recently noted that Apron iii (2001) is an evocation of her childhood kitchen. Its glossy cream and olive-green colours mimic the domestic vernacular of suburban homes in postwar America. A waist-height shelf covered with vintage linoleum sports an abstract art-inspired design, a wry comment perhaps on the challenging integration of career and home life. While such works seem quietly political, Simpson denies any feminist agenda, though it seems hardly coincidental that her interest in domesticity and the social codes of clothing often relate to culturally constructed gender roles and the containment, contortion and concealment of female bodies. Claims to the contrary are another instance of strength masquerading as flimsiness. David Trigg

Samurai 10, 1983, mdf, oil stain, coloured pencil, 135 × 112 × 83 cm. Photo: Tom Van Eynde. Courtesy the artist; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; Herald St, London; and jtt, New York

April 2020

Transparent Things Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London 21 February – 3 May The protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972), a fragment of which serves as ‘script’ for this intricate group show, is Hugh (pronounced ‘you’) Person (pronounced ‘person’). ‘Hullo, person!’, the narrator calls out at the novel’s beginning, but Person can’t hear. Soon after, Person’s discovery of a pencil in a hotel room sets the narrator off on a Proustian journey into the object’s history. The ‘past shines’ through such ‘transparent things’, the narrator explains, before revealing that this pencil was cut from a pine by ‘old Elias Barrowdale’. Which suspiciously godlike deduction might be taken as a hint: the histories of things may be perfectly transparent to the narrator but must remain obscure to persons inside and outside his fiction. The psychological backstory of the brass ashtray placed on a plinth at the entrance to this exhibition, its edges embossed with ‘depressive’ / ‘alcoholic’ / ‘mother’, might seem as simple as the pencil to parse. Yet Becky Beasley’s teasingly misspelled title – Astray (d.a.m.) (2018) – suggests that the identities of objects and people are more elusive than is convenient for either art critics or the psychoanalysts whom Nabokov so despised. If the privacy of people and things is violated by the intrusion of narrators into

their past, then the inclusion by curator Natasha Hoare of so many blocked windows might be read as reasserting the right to an interior life. The association of paintings and photographs with windows is parodied by Marie Lund’s Stills (2015), which stretch soiled curtains into tasteful modernist monochromes; David Hammons’s Untitled (Basketball drawing + stone) (2006) mounts a sheet of paper dirtied by bounced basketballs in a gilt frame balanced, precariously, on a rock. The Blue Window (2017) pictured in Lucy Skaer’s photograph is reencountered as a sculpture on the first floor, its four gridded panes bricked up with lightly crazed lapis lazuli. Laid flat like a trapdoor, Skaer’s opaque glass mirrors Hammons’s reorientation of floor as window, to the same exclusionary effect. The interior of the gallery itself refuses outside scrutiny since Michael Dean has whitewashed its windows as if a shuttered shop, the emulsion applied in cursive ‘f’ shapes like a handwriting exercise. Here, and in two vaguely anthropomorphic concrete obelisks by Dean, language is frustrated. ‘fucksake’, reads a line of police tape dangling from an outstretched finger, while these figures are crowned by books with butterflies on the covers, splayed open to reveal a stuttering text: ‘…hahaha

hahah aha…’. Kerry Tribe’s whirring film installation Parnassius Mnemosyne (2010) also nods to Nabokov’s lepidoptery (it shows magnified images of the eponymous butterfly’s wings) and to the original title – Speak, Mnemosyne – of his 1951 autobiography. That its wings might, like the goddess of memory Mnemosyne, ‘speak’ to novelists and art lovers is little consolation to the butterfly pinned to a board. Its interior life is fatally obscured, not revealed, by its transformation into art. Indeed, the exhibition is most convincing when it avoids portentous and quasiconfessional gestures (such as Theaster Gates’s Hammond organ – an icon of black popular culture imprisoned inside a minimalist wooden cube, it hums mournfully) to more closely resemble Nabokov’s own sketches of butterfly wings: brilliantly patterned, calculated to the point of cruelty and metaphysically meaningless. Prior to entering the hotel room containing the pencil, Person is told that no one remembers him because everyone is dead (except the narrator, of whose imagination he is a figment). The best work here reminds us that the lives of others are hidden behind a screen, and the past is obscure beyond the boundaries of fiction. The only transparent thing is death, through which nothing shines. Ben Eastham

Lucy Skaer, Further Consumption / Blue Window, 2017. Photo: Nicholas Knight Studio. Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc, New York & Paris

ArtReview

Ree Morton The Plant That Heals May Also Poison Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 16 February – 14 June Facts and suppositions about Ree Morton’s life might not be so integral to our reading of her art if she hadn’t died in 1977, aged forty, having started late, leaving behind just six or so years of work: a compact oeuvre of sculpture, drawing and installation that acquires an almost unbearable poignancy when framed by the knowledge of its sudden ending. Nowhere in The Plant That Heals May Also Poison – the survey that originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, in 2019, and now concludes at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles – do we learn how Morton died. Even in the catalogue, presumably to avoid sensationalising her narrative, it’s not revealed until page 64 that she died after being injured in a car crash, then never mentioned again. As with any artist who died young, Morton’s narrative is burdened by pathos; in the loosely chronological hang at the ica la, the work accrues a gathering sense of doom. The earliest works, such as the wall-mounted Wood Drawings (1971) made from scrap wood, pencil and felt-tip, combine the expansiveness of mapmaking with the humility and simplicity of Agnes Martin’s drawings. Over time, text and appropriated content enter the work, and along with it hints

of Morton’s wry humour and sharp sense of irony. There’s no escaping the feeling that a sickly presence was growing inside the work, despite its often upbeat aspect: her preference for pastel colours, always slightly muddy; the toxic-looking, malleable plastic known as Celastic that became her trademark material; her motifs of drooping, soggy bows and thickpetalled flowers; her use of weak yellow lightbulbs, forever on. In fact, art for Morton was a route to selfrealisation, celebration and joy. In exhibition notes, ica Philadelphia curator Kate Kraczon and ica la curator Jamillah James handle Morton’s story with sensitivity, detailing the revelatory evening drawing classes she attended during the 1960s while living in Jacksonville, Florida, with her three children, and what they describe as ‘the happiest summer of her life’, spent with them in Newfoundland, Canada, and which inspired the maplike pencil Newfoundland Drawings and the wood, canvas and acrylic sculpture Souvenir Piece (both 1973). As her work developed, Morton increasingly exploited the visual clichés attached to her role as a woman and mother. In a typed funding application from 1976 (found in one of two vitrines of photographs and print ephemera),

she describes wryly her ‘classic housewife/ mother with unsympathetic husband situation’, noting that her children are now living with their father while she concentrates on her work in New York City – ‘an exciting phase of ripening ideas and images’. The corner installation For Kate (1976) includes two twisting Celastic streamers that loosely bracket a smattering of sticky-looking sculpted roses and a painting of more roses that resembles an old-fashioned tea tray (the title possibly refers to Morton’s grandmother). In Don’t worry, I’ll only read you the good parts (1975) – perhaps the most heartbreaking work in the show – the titular promise is painted on a wrinkled sheet of Celastic that resembles a drying animal hide, accompanied by a cartoonish yellow flower. It is a promise that, though lovingly sincere, seems wrapped in the knowledge of its inadequacy. Morton paid tribute to the people, places and things she loved in artworks that are, in many cases, rather hard to love. It was almost as if she was testing how far deep and true sentiment could carry forms that were not – and are still not – conventionally beautiful. It takes time to fall in love with the things Morton made, and that seems to be how the artist wanted it. Jonathan Griffin

Don’t worry, I’ll only read you the good parts, 1975, oil on Celastic, 137 × 66 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. © The Estate of the artist. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

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Lydia Ourahmane Solar Cry cca Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco 6 February – 28 March There’s a haunting sense of immanence at play in Lydia Ourahmane’s Solar Cry exhibition, a spirit seemingly distilled from biblical immanence and the artist’s autobiography. Ourahmane grew up in Algeria during the 1990s, facing persecution as a member of a radical Christian minority. Her family moved from safehouse to safehouse, until finding asylum in London. The chapter in Ourahmane’s life presented here concerns her recent relocation back to Algiers. On one hand it is a story of faith, but more involved with the carrier than an immaterial sense of belief. The exhibition centres on an expedition Ourahmane took to Tassili N’Ajjer, a remote region in the Sahara known for cave paintings. Inside an empty cave she left a tape recorder, the overnight recordings from which became the audiowork Solar Cry (all works but one 2020). To put this gesture in perspective: she crossed a desert, entrusted herself to strangers and camped out in a remote area known for military raids; and rather than sit in a cave herself, she entrusted the experience to outdated technology. The thing is: do I believe her? I barely noticed the work at first, yet once you become aware of the low thrum emanating from the gallery’s walls, you can’t unhear

it, forever aware of the resonant emptiness at its heart – a clunky hvac system of the soul. Other works similarly address how immaterial factors shape the body. In warrior girl c.12,000 b.c. the artist was inspired by a cave drawing depicting the titular symbol of female daring, filming herself getting a copy of it tattooed on her body. In my generation, spiritual tattoos have a certain connotation, but the video nonetheless gives me pause to consider whether the scarcity of questionable tattoos on my body actually demonstrates a lack of conviction. Elsewhere, 3kgs salt (2020) litters the entire gallery with crunchy rock salt. A nails-on-chalkboard sensation becomes a full-body wrench when I discover Tassili N’Ajjer was once part of a trade route on which slaves were exchanged for the eponymous weight of salt. And there is a certain congruity between the Polaroid Cave painting of a Woman giving birth c.6,000–12,000 b.c. and the wall drawing ℵ0. For the latter, Ourahmane excavated a section of drywall and pencilled the mathematical figures directly on the concrete. In Judaism, aleph stands for the singularity of God, but here it is multiplied by zero, effectively impregnating the gallery with the equation for infinity’s bottom.

ℵ0 is intended as a permanent work: the drywall will be replaced, concealing it. Ourahmane’s idea is that memories and rumours will attest to its ongoing presence. I wonder why I am now responsible for this legacy. Further complicating matters is her decision to cover the skylights with lighting gels, casting everything in a crystalline blue. She doesn’t call it an artwork, but in a show that attempts to find a material basis for expressing the ineffable – in a way, to name it – why should we take Ourahmane at her word? Still, with 1st draft of my Mother’s book “Divine Encounters” (1974–92), Ourahmane offers a strong argument for following her on this journey. Documenting the sacrifices her family made for faith, this tale would resonate widely, yet the only copy resides at the gallery. Again, Ourahmane’s choices place you at a crossroads. Are you one of the faithful, respecting the artist’s intentions for the text? Do you play the apostate, relaying her mother’s life story in this review? Or do you simply content yourself with the intimacy of knowing a secret? In Ourahmane’s show, faith isn’t just a matter of belief. It depends on the strength of your desire. Sam Korman

warrior girl c.12,000 b.c., 2020, single-channel digital video, sound, 3 min 44 sec. Photo: Impart Photography. Courtesy of the artist

ArtReview

Hannah Levy Pendulous Picnic Casey Kaplan, New York 23 January – 29 February The body is a strange thing in the eyes of industrial design: soft, sticky and lumpy, it hardly fits the mechanic idealism of twentiethcentury modernism, with its slick formalism, shiny surfaces and total celebration of glass and steel. Corporeality – feeling like a body – seems almost totally repressed in the last century of interior design, and this is what makes Hannah Levy’s sculptures such an intensely seductive encounter in the present. Made in two conflicting materials – polished steel and luminous, flesh-toned silicone – Levy’s speculative objects manipulate the somatic to an almost comical extreme, and in the process highlight the anxieties about the body repressed beneath our sanitised designed environment. But the artist’s first exhibition at Casey Kaplan appears to skip the modern era in search of a more complicated object–body discourse, landing somewhere in eighteenthcentury decorative arts. Three large chandelierlike structures (all works Untitled, 2019 or 2020) hang at eye height from metal chains in the first room, their grand and dramatically curved steel arms shaped into eerily sharp hooks or claws. Silicone appears either as corporeal lumps

coldly pierced by the steel, or as skinlike tissue stretched to ‘dress’ these antagonistic yet playful structures, suggesting some kind of posthuman sacrifice: silicone is the stuff of prosthetics – the ultimate uncanny cutaneous substance. Along the wall, a line of curvy, sconcelike fixtures (again in steel) each support a single asparagus stalk enlarged and cast in fleshy silicone: resting languidly against the cold reflective metal, they evoke the body as a fatigued alien limb, collapsed there or put on display for its decorative quality. In the back, a small trampolinelike structure sits on the floor with hostile, sharp hooks pointing against a potential user. While both Paul Thek and Eva Hesse come to mind as formal precedents, Levy’s camp anthropomorphism is more evocative of the monstrous sensuality of Rococo, whose artists similarly equipped furniture with animal feet and manipulated wood resembling skin (quick research into eighteenth-century Italian furniture led me to several wonderful pieces that could easily fit within the artist’s oeuvre). But while Rococo’s grotesque is often discredited in art history, Levy’s objects read

as totally chic: sleek, tactical, humorous and thus highly Instagramable, they capture the zeitgeist of contemporary design aesthetics as it exists between the luxury object and its circulation as image. Building up aesthetic associations through shape and surface, Levy manages to formulate a larger point about the complexities of tastemaking: while the sensual and grotesque haunt design modernism (which still haunts today), the language of 1960s postminimalism has been recouped in the design world of the present, albeit congealed and reduced to pure form, to fashionable surface. The body, meanwhile, continues to float as a scattered set of signifiers, appearing almost accidentally in objects and images, leaving us anxious, triggered, turned on. This point seems unnecessarily underscored in a series of stocklike photographs of manicured hands delicately baiting a fishhook in the back of the gallery, directly referencing the earlier chandelier: unnecessary, perhaps, because the sculptures already speak so powerfully, so penetratingly, about the corporeality of imagehood. Jeppe Ugelvig

Untitled, 2019, nickel-plated steel, silicone, 66 × 48 × 5 cm. Photo: James Wyche. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

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Books

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ArtReview

Dialectic of Pop by Agnès Gayraud, translated by Robin Mackay, Daniel Miller, Nina Power Urbanomic, £25 (softcover)

Double Lives in Art and Pop Music by Jörg Heiser, translated by Nicholas Grindell Sternberg Press, €24 (softcover)

Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany by Uwe Schütte Penguin, £9.99 (softcover) ‘Popular music’, sniffs Theodor Adorno in his 1941 essay on the subject, is inferior to ‘serious music’ because it distracts listeners from making the painful intellectual effort needed to see through the lies that cloak the structures of power. But Adorno wasn’t in Jamaica during the great sound clashes, nor at the first Can show in Cologne. He never cleared the queue at Berlin’s Berghain as the sun broke over the horizon or danced to Donna Summer’s I Feel Love (1977) at a suburban house party hosted by a perfect stranger. When it comes to his passing judgment on the liberating effects of pop music, he didn’t know what he was talking about. While it’s tempting to state that the affective experience of pop music justifies itself, this is unlikely to pass muster in continental philosophy departments. Three books by European critical theorists on pop music – the term here divested of its bubblegum Anglosphere associations and encompassing everything from krautrock to hiphop – attempt to square the circle. Their task is complicated by Europe’s ambivalent relationship to pop: recall the students in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 Sympathy for the Devil, who argue that rock ’n’ roll is a symptom of American cultural imperialism and bebop is the authentic expression of revolutionary consciousness (though, of course, Adorno hated jazz). Each book at some point addresses itself to the leader of the Frankfurt School, suggesting that those devoted to both Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) and Joy Division find it difficult to accept that the author of the former would have rolled his eyes at the latter. Such hankering speaks to the conflicts underpinning any attempt to formulate a philosophy of pop music. The foremost of these is that subordinating the emotional experience of pop to the categories of critical theory risks domesticating it. Nothing is more likely to convince me that the Sex Pistols were a distraction from revolution than being lectured about how revolutionary they were. The academicisation of pop might seem analogous to its commodification by the market, a means of dissecting it in order to illustrate a narrative or serve a reproducible commercial function. These are the paradoxes of which any theorist of pop who is also a fan must be aware. Agnès Gayraud, a philosopher who also makes witty, Gainsbourgish chamber pop as

La Féline, makes a virtue of these contradictions by turning Adorno’s method against him. Her brilliantly executed theory of what he dismissed as ‘standardised light popular music’ does not attempt to reconcile intellect and emotion but instead sets them up as antagonistic impulses that contribute to the ‘dialectic of pop’. The form is not compromised but instead enlivened by its manifold antitheses: between novelty and revivalism, authenticity and affectation, nihilism and utopianism, avant-garde ‘anti-pop’ and mainstream ‘pop’. The dialectic is negative per Adorno, because there is no promise of resolution; the coup de grâce is to demonstrate that these self-reflexive processes preserve pop’s autonomy by failing to map onto what Gayraud (who, it must be remembered, is French) calls ‘the Procrustean bed of rational progress’. Taking examples from Joe Meek to Rihanna, she makes a convincing argument that this restless backand-forth generates the ‘hybridisations and transformations’ that keep pop music alive. First published in German in 2015, Jörg Heiser’s Double Lives in Art and Pop Music traces a comparably dialectical relationship. Through chapters exploring modes of exchange between the two fields – collaborations (Yoko Ono and John Lennon), crossovers (Joseph Beuys’s regrettable foray into agit-pop) and dual competency (from Carsten Nicolai to Fatima Al Qadiri) – Heiser develops a theory in which ‘context switching’ between disciplines generates the energy on which both feed. His early warning against art or music’s retreat into its own specialisms is familiar, but Heiser is quick to challenge the assumption that ‘blurring boundaries’ is inherently good. What elevates Heiser’s book is how this relationship between art and music serves as case study for a society in which boundaries – between creativity and labour, public and private, work and leisure – are also breaking down. While introducing dancers into a sculpture exhibition for no good reason not only infuriates anyone who likes either sculpture or dance, it is symptomatic of neoliberalism’s tendency towards the creation of a single, undifferentiated market for its commodities. Why appeal only to a sculpture audience if you can appeal to a dance audience? And a lifestyle audience, and an audience interested in ‘culture’…

April 2020

In this model, the Romantic ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk is revealed as the formal expression of an exploitative society founded upon the merger of industries, deskilling and the erosion of workers’ rights. Rather than dissolving categories or erecting barriers between them, Heiser suggests we maintain a (fluctuating) separation between fields, then learn how to step between them. This not only prevents art and pop from being subsumed by the culture industry but might also help workers resist their own exploitation. All of which is wrapped up in a deeply engaging history of the encounters between art and pop, from The Velvet Underground to Michaela Melián. Both Gayraud and Heiser devote considerable attention to Kraftwerk, which only highlights how little Uwe Schütte’s workmanlike biography of the band shares their anxieties around the assimilation and academicisation of pop music. It is replete with examples of ‘context switching’ – from a vision of Germany’s future drawn from prewar culture to the sly appropriation of avant-garde artistic strategies. Yet rather than interrogate these tensions, Schütte celebrates the ‘convergence’ of art and music, and, rather ominously, the seamless ‘fusion’ of man and machine. One is left wondering if the reconciliations he identifies and seems determined to accelerate – between art and music, museum and concert hall, pop and the academy – are an unqualified good. Indeed, Kraftwerk’s recent performances at the world’s grandest museums might seem, in this light, to stray perilously close to the multimedia extravaganzas that inaugurate sporting or cultural events, and which Heiser identifies as the ultimate expression of the totalising tendencies of a hypernetworked capitalist society. The integration of different disciplines into one spectacular whole is also at odds with Gayraud’s agonistic and unstable system, suppressing the tensions that might generate new forms. These bland spectacles exemplify the forms of entertainment that Adorno warned would distract people from attending critically to the conditions of everyday life. Art and pop music, these books demonstrate, must remain open to external influences while resisting the blandness of ‘contemporary culture’ or the approval of the academy. But if you were dancing last night, you’ll know this already. Ben Eastham

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The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler Verso, £14.99 / $24.95 (hardcover)

Halfway through The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler observes that ‘we might prefer to adopt a humanist framework and assert that everyone, regardless of race, religion, or origin, has a life that is grievable, and then to militate for an acceptance of that basic equality’. But, she goes on, in adhering to the ideal ‘that every life ought to be grievable’, ‘we badly misrepresent reality, in which radical inequalities abound’. This is a world in which ‘lives are not equally valued’, one of ‘racism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny, and the systematic disregard for the poor and dispossessed’. Why whole societies currently seem to accept – and ignore – the deaths of human lives at home and abroad is the moral and political problem that exercises Butler throughout The Force of Nonviolence. Butler – celebrated for her seminal book Gender Trouble (1990) – here combines deconstruction and psychoanalysis to unpick how violence is framed as legitimate or illegitimate, and how, perversely, those who are most powerless are often designated – by the power of the state – as the source of violence, whereas ‘state violence’ always cloaks itself in the language of legitimate ‘force’. Invoking Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Butler highlights how contemporary biopolitical power over life differs from the ‘power of the sovereign’: while the sovereign could, in Foucault’s terms, ‘make die or let live’, the biopolitical has the power ‘to make live or to let die’. This form of power is both everywhere

and nowhere, not least in the ‘phantasmagoria of racism’ that might explain the actions of, say, police officers killing black Americans who pose no threat: how, Butler asks, could Walter Scott, shot dead in 2015 as he ran away from South Carolina police, ‘become phantasmagorically turned around, made into a threatening figure to be killed?’ Or similarly, how can we understand how European governments disavow responsibility for ‘the thousands of migrants who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean’? Racism, here, informs what Butler calls the ‘metric of grievability’, which deems such lives ‘not worthy of safeguarding’. Butler’s attempt to explain this moral vacuity, even while liberal society pays lip-service to the notion of equality of human rights, leads her into a complex psychoanalytical exploration of how the individual subject, and entire societies, imagine others as a violent threat against their own selfhood. Going back to the theories of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, Butler examines the ambiguities that lie at the heart of the social bond between people – the tensions between love and hate, nurture and loss, hostility and dependency – which she then maps onto the social realm. Returning to Freud’s concept of the ‘death drive’, Butler argues that rather than deny the destructive drives that human beings harbour, an ethics of nonviolence should emphasise the life of the social bond not as the individualist liberal

concept of a ‘contract’ between otherwise independent, competing individuals, but as ‘based in embodied forms of interdependency’. ‘The obligation not to destroy each other’, she writes, ‘emerges from the vexed social form of our lives, and leads us to reconsider whether self-preservation is not linked to preserving the lives of others.’ The limit of Butler’s psychoanalytical horizon, though, is that it cannot really explain what lies behind the ‘war-logic’ that distorts people’s capacity for solidarity into a paranoid fear of others. Butler’s examination of the correspondence between Freud and Albert Einstein (published in 1933) regarding the psychological motivations of populations during the rise of fascism, offers insights into how people lose their inhibitions against violence towards others, but tells us nothing about the economic and political causes of war. So The Force of Nonviolence is frustrating for its lack of substantial suggestions for which political forms might embody this ethics of nonviolence. Perhaps it flickers into view for a moment, but Butler barely registers it: ‘Freud’, she writes, ‘speculated that an evolution of the masses may be possible through education and the cultivation of solidaristic sentiments of a non-nationalist sort.’ If there is a name for the political form of radical equality and reciprocity in the social bond, it is democracy. Yet Butler names it only once, and passes it by. J.J. Charlesworth

The Story of Contemporary Art by Tony Godfrey Thames & Hudson, £29.95 (hardcover) On the face of it, Tony Godfrey has taken on a mammoth task in narrating the story of contemporary art. Mammoth because the ‘contemporary’ in ‘contemporary art’ stretches any common-sense notion of what that word means chronologically, and mammoth because there are so many competing stories of art with which to contend. In particular, Godfrey has set out to include perspectives from outside the West and beyond men only: the first a decision likely influenced by the time he has spent in Singapore and Manila (where he has been based since 2009) as an educator and curator; the second simply, one hopes, a quest for truth. His story begins during the late 1970s and early 80s, with the accelerated commer-

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cialisation of the artworld. From there the book cycles through established artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Bill Viola, while also giving attention to those less well known on the global art circuit, such as Filipina Geraldine Javier (Godfrey’s partner) and the indigenous Australian Emily Kame Kngwarreye. For Godfrey, what unites all this is less a matter of forms and materials, and more the offer of a particular experience (he uses a quotation from Liverpool football manager Jürgen Klopp to make the point, but, tellingly, leaves you to draw your own conclusions about the links between sporting and artistic spectacles). However, given that his book remains largely divided into chapters based on the rise

ArtReview

(or fashionability) of artistic mediums (with others based on the rise of contemporary art’s institutions), the idea quickly loses traction. Where Godfrey shines is in his seamless weaving, from the very beginning, of nonWestern art into a history that has, until relatively recently, been dominated by it. He doesn’t shoehorn it into a separate chapter, consolidating its entire narrative in a couple thousand words. He is deliberate in this and plays to the strengths of his knowledge and experience. He also delivers on his promise not to confuse the reader with academic rhetoric. His account is informal and accessible, which makes the story an unintimidating if shallow introduction to the subject. Novuyo Moyo

In Print A roundup of new and recent publications on mediated history, snapshooters and the fashion whirlwind In 1989 Jonas Mekas was sitting in his studio apartment on Broadway in New York, watching the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. He started to film the tv screen as footage of Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush flickered across it; zoomed in on appearances of Kazimira Prunskiene, the future prime minister of the soon-to-be-independent Lithuania, the country from which Mekas emigrated in 1949; and continued to record the television on and off for two years as pundits and talking heads on nightly news shows had their say. The result, a documentation of the documentation of the ussr’s slow implosion, became Lithuania and the Collapse of the ussr (2009), a video that clocks in at just under five hours. Now part of it is a book – Transcript 04 44’ 14”: Lithuania and the Collapse of the ussr (Humboldt Books, €30) – in which the mediated media is mediated once more. For all that the video and book document a moment of political history, both also serve as a self-portrait of an immigrant, his birth country filtered through the perspective of his adopted home. Made up of transcripts of those newscasts and grainy stills from Mekas’s original video, it’s a book that shouldn’t really work but proves strangely moving as one sees the mediation of history unfolding in real time. Taking issues of change up a notch, the slow, unbearable end of the world is the subject of How Everything Can Collapse, by agronomist Pablo Servigne and eco-adviser Raphaël Stevens (Polity, £14.99). The book charts an imminent, unmanageable decline in the world’s environ-

ment and social systems, and though it was of course written before the covid-19 pandemic, this kind of catastrophe is now dreadfully relatable in the way the slow-burn of climate change, however dangerous, has never managed to be. The pair point out, however, that from outside an anthropocentric perspective, such decline might not be a negative: without the invasive species Homo sapiens, the world will prosper (recent viral videos showing the clarity of the Venetian waters absent the usual boat traffic perhaps attest to something similar). Though this may, for our species, be of little comfort in the current circumstances. Starved of physical human contact and being forced to mediate the world through the screen in these days of isolation, perhaps the work of Doug Wheeler – a pioneer of the American ‘Light and Space’ movement, whose artmaking reflects his interests in dematerialisation, landscape and the emptying out of human presence – is similarly one of the last things you want to read about. Stick with it, though, because as art historian Germano Celant notes in this new monograph (David Zwirner Books, £45), there exists in Wheeler’s paintings and light installations a ‘phenomenological collapse of materials’ that is as relevant now as it was during the 1970s. Amateur Photography. From Bauhaus to Instagram (Kehrer Verlag, £26), a self-explanatory catalogue to a recent exhibition at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, charts the work of lay witnesses to history, which has come into its own in a world awash with disposable digital imagery. It’s funny how much curator Esther Ruelfs’s description of Bauhaus

photography in her essay here (‘an experimental approach in which the camera is tilted upwards or downwards, tonal values are distorted, or objects are shot in extreme close-up or in exerted details only – all stylistic means that emulate the casual snapshooter’) chimes with the photographs in ArtReview contributor Jeppe Ugelvig’s new book on fashion and art, Fashion Work (Damiani, €40). The cover of the latter shows an extreme close-up of a man’s perfect smile, while the documentation of work by Bernadette Corporation, Susan Cianciolo, bless and dis continues the same sense of effortless cool. What unites these four outfits, says Ugelvig, is how they’ve made art not just relating to fashion, but from an ‘embedded’ position within the fashion industry. Clothes say a lot about us, both as a society and as individuals. (Whether we will see out the Anthropocene in rags or Saint Laurent remains to be decided.) Such is the basis of a memoir by Alexandra Shulman, Clothes... and other things that matter (Octopus Books, £16.99), in which the former editor of British Vogue traces her life and the place of women in Western society through fashions, ill-advised or otherwise. The idea that an item of clothing comes with emotional baggage is demonstrated, meanwhile, through the tragic story of Pippa Bacca, recounted by Nathalie Léger in The White Dress (Les Fugitives, £10), a work of autofiction new in translation. Bacca, an Italian artist, was murdered in 2008, having set out on a performative hitchhike through Europe wearing a white wedding dress, an act she hoped would symbolise the ‘marriage between different peoples and nations’. Perhaps this hasn’t been the cheeriest 900 words you’ve ever read, so ArtReview feels like finishing with something beautiful. Paper Bells (The Song Cave, $17.95), a collection of newly translated work into English by Vietnamese poet Phan Nhiên Hȧo, is full of admittedly melancholic but sometimes humorous diaristic observations on the minutiae of everyday life: the weather, making ends meet, the evening news. In ‘Rainy Day Song’, from 1989, there are some lines that feel, at least in this moment, like a paean to humanity. ‘It rains morning to night / I still have enough to survive a hundred more years / so I’ll just lie down and sing / man’s forever song’. Oliver Basciano

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Design and illustration credits

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on the cover Design by John Morgan studio and Isabel Duarte

Words on the spine and on pages 19, 37 and 83 are by dominique123456, from a customer review of Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (Pantheon, 1984) on amazon.co.uk

on page 100 Illustration by Olga Prader

April 2020

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You know, back in the day, I was a superspreader. Back Page But not like you know it today. I fucking spread civilisation. And the word of God! (The two go de la mano.) To the New World. Which I invented. Before me, we all lived in the old world. Which was rather sad and narrow, lacking in imagination. Trust me, you didn’t want to be there. I fucking didn’t. But let’s not talk about that. The point is that I stand for progress. New worlds, not old ones. Things you can invent, not things you have to accept. Like I said, I was doing the work of God. And what is the work of God? Creation. The funny thing is that now no one seems to know what I was talking about when I said I discovered San Salvador. You all celebrate it in your ‘history’ books but can’t place it on a map. You don’t even know if it was a string of islands or a single island (even though, in 1925, you did decide that it was a single island, and named it San Salvador, as if you had discovered it, when in fact I had, and in any case now your ‘experts’ are not sure that was really the real San Salvador, which means that a lot of academics can still have careers, so somehow I’m supporting them too, from beyond the grave – parásitos); all you really know now is that it was somewhere in the Bahamas. Fuck! I was very clear in the description I gave in my diary: muchas aguas y una laguna en medio muy grande. (ok, so I gave the Diario documenting my first voyage west to discover the east to Queen Isabella – she’s the one who paid for my exploring – when I got back west by travelling east. She fucking lost it – perra – then she had a problem with my so-called ‘enslavement’ of the natives. But we’ll get to that later (as we went along there weren’t that many to enslave anyway). The Diario you have now was written during the 1540s by a monk who was a friend of the family but who probably made a few things up given the lack of an original, except that bit which I just repeated to you, which is from my lost original, which I know because I wrote it and you know because the monk Me landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492, told you that bit was from the detail from a 1592 engraving by Theodore de Bry original. But, fuck, how difficult can it be? I mean, the whole reason that I did the difficult bit of finding and inventing the place was so that you people would be saved all that bother of having to do it yourselves. I’m a problem solver; you’re problem makers! My exploring fucking killed me; you’re killing my exploring. But I suppose that’s geography for you. Always invented. Mainly by people with imagination like me. San Salvador is in Asia, as I maintained to my dying day. I was following

In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists justify themselves, Christopher Columbus speaks

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in the footsteps of Marco Polo, not some fucking Viking peasants in a rowing boat. You’re looking in the wrong fucking place! But back to the enslaving: that’s all you people go on about nowadays. And the dismembering and killing. Back in ’92 you ruined the 500th anniversary of my having discovered America with that kind of talk. I mean, after you cut off a man’s ears and nose (for stealing corn, I might add), it’s not like you’re getting top-real when you sell him on. Just like it’s not like you can do a proper census of the natives, or Los Indios, as I decided they should be called. Who knows where they came from? And what’s in a number anyway (unless it’s a nautical mile)? You say there were between 600,000 and five million of them when I landed in 1492. wtf?! That’s a margin of error that makes the whole thing meaningless. When I told Isabella where I was going, I was precise: I told her that Asia was just a few thousand miles west of Europe. Oh, and here’s the rub: by 1548 Los Indios were down to around 500. That’s why I’m writing this column. You people say I was a superspreader, but you’re using it the way you do when talking about your own problems. Los Indios gave me parrots and cotton threads, you people say, and I gave them smallpox and influenza. And thus Guanahani became San Salvador. But hey, I’m still big with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I read an article on their website about how great I was and how Mormon predicted my coming… and Mormon was a fucking Indio. So there! You forget that I invented globalism. I linked one hemisphere to the other, and now that most of you are stuck inside, you’re missing it, aren’t you? I’ve watched you with your biennials and your art fairs, your dim sums and your dashis, your ‘can’t miss’ art events. Blabbering about new territories, new art ‘destinations’ and the great ‘investments’ you’re picking up there as if you ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’ them. Mierda. You didn’t; I did. I invented the whole system! The thing is this: you need old-world pathogens to start a new world. Otherwise it’s going to be their world, not your world. You know this better than I did: you consume to produce, you produce to consume; consuming is just what you do when you’re a consumer. Which you are. The thing you make sure of is that you don’t consume yourself. Assuming you have that choice. And choice is what you’re supposed to have in a consumer society. Although I see that you’ve had a few of your choices restricted now. Mi cadáver viajó más de lo que tú lo harás.

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

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Robert Irwin, Black³ (2008), Art Basel in Basel, 2015 [Top]; ART 05 in Basel, 1974, by Kurt Wyss [Bottom]

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