ArtReview April 2018

Zanny Begg 04 >

Ana Mendieta, Womanhouse

NEW YORK Dom Sylvester Houédard 138 Tenth Avenue

Yellow Girls I, 2017 (detail)

Rose Wylie

Lolita’s House 20 April–26 May 2018

David Zwirner London

TAKASHI MURAKAMI APRIL 28 – JUNE 17, NEW YORK

NEW YORK LOWER EAST SIDE

PARIS MARAIS

HONG KONG CENTRAL

SEOUL JONGNO-GU

TOKYO ROPPONGI

JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL

LEE BAE

KAWS

LESLIE HEWITT

KAWS

MARCH 3 – APRIL 15

MARCH 17 – MAY 26

MARCH 26 – MAY 19

MARCH 21 – MAY 5

MARCH 22 – MAY 12

ARTIE VIERKANT

MATTHEW RONAY

NI YOUYU

XU ZHEN®

DANIEL ARSHAM

MARCH 3 – APRIL 8

MARCH 17 – MAY 26

MAY 24 – JUNE 29

MAY 10 – JULY 8

MAY 23 – JUNE 30

TAKASHI MURAKAMI

PAUL PFEIFFER

APRIL 28 – JUNE 17

MARCH 17 – MAY 26

Takashi Murakami, Homage to Francis Bacon (Second Version of Triptych (on light ground)), 2016.

Acrylic, gold and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame Triptych (3 panels) 197.8 × 147.5 × 5.1 cm / 777/8 × 581/16 × 21/16 in (each) © 2016 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

ArtReview vol 70 no 3 April 2018

Paths of resistance Accepting her BAFTA for best actress in a leading role earlier this year, Frances McDormand stood before a sea of black – the majority of her female peers had left their colours in their closets in symbolic support of the Time’s Up movement – wearing a dress covered in red-lippy-squiggles and said, with a shrug, “I have a little trouble with compliance”. This of course didn’t mean that McDormand was antifeminist, but that there are different ways to fight the battle. If the recent debates around #MeToo tell us anything, it’s that ideas surrounding what gender relations should be, and how to achieve equality, are far from unified. Nonetheless, it occurred to ArtReview that they all start with just the kind of gesture made by McDormand, namely one of resistance, the assertion of one’s will not to comply with established power structures – nor with consensual, fashionable forms of solidarity. (For more on that last thought, see Rosanna Mclaughlin’s piece on the problematic recuperation of Ana Mendieta as a symbol by protest groups.) Resistance, ArtReview thought as it went on to watch McDormand’s stand for the ‘inclusion rider’ (an equity clause actors can insert in their contracts to insist on diversity among cast and crew), is an enduring attitude, one in which power and received wisdom are constantly challenged and questioned.

Such attitude is nothing new (which does not mean that resistance is futile: the patriarchy might not have been demolished, but it’s certainly

Too little

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being put under increased scrutiny and pressure). In 1405 Christine de Pizan was writing The Book of the City of Ladies, which imagines a city built by and for women, and narrates their achievements through history.

This utopia serves as an inspiration to Zanny Begg and Elise McLeod’s film installation The City of Ladies, which follows a group of young women activists in Paris as they explore feminist histories and ponder how those apply to their present lives. What the film highlights (among many other things: see Nina Miall’s text on that subject) is the role of the collective – of the women as a group, and the protest crowd they navigate – in strategies of resistance.

The histories of feminism are replete with such examples, notably during the 1970s, which saw the proliferation of women’s collectives.

For this issue, ArtReview zooms in on two that have a particular resonance today, and which are being reclaimed as inspiration by artists: the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, a crucial platform for debates around gender, sexuality and feminism in Italy (profiled here by Barbara Casavecchia); and Womanhouse, a work-and-exhibition space created

by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro as part of Cal Arts’ Feminist Art Program (see Lauren Elkin’s take on their story and legacy). Both instances responded to the participants’ need to create new spaces for exchange, enable new types of access and distribution, and build new pedagogical models. They knew that education is the key to structural change, and that the path to empowerment is paved with knowledge. So keep reading. ArtReview

Too late

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Untitled (Windmill, Thérèse Rivère mission, c. 1930, from The Rat Staircase series, musée du quai Branly) 2014

Yto Barrada

How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself

April 5 – May 5, 2018

32 East 57th Street

NEW YORK

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New York Dadamaino 28/02 – 24/04 2018

São Paulo Paulo Nimer Pjota Medley Runo Lagomarsino No element, however has the final word in the construction of the future 07/04 – 17/05 2018

Brussels Anna Bella Geiger Circa MMXVIII Human Landscape Leticia Ramos Resistance of a Body 18/04 – 26/05 2018

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

SOLID GHOSTS

APRIL 18— MAY 19, 2018

MARCUS JAHMAL Red Ibis, 2017 Oil stick and acrylic on canvas 152,4 x 101,6 cm 60 x 48 inches

MARCUS JAHMAL

ALMINE RECH GALLERY BRUSSELS

Art Previewed

Previews

by Martin Herbert 23

Elena Filipovic Interview by Ross Simonini 38

Under the Paving Stones: Istanbul

by Juliet Jacques 31

Art Featured

The City of Ladies

by Nina Miall 48

Womanhouse

by Lauren Elkin 64

Libreria delle Donne

by Barbara Casavecchia 58

Ana Mendieta

by Rosanna Mclaughlin 72

page 23 Ciara Phillips, Every Woman a Signal Tower, 2015, screenprint on linen, 119 × 84 cm. Courtesy the artist

April 2018

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Art Reviewed

Caroline Walker, by Jonathan Griffin Patty Chang, by Ashton Cooper Amy Sillman, by Wendy Vogel Judith Bernstein, by Ben Eastham New Museum Triennial, by Sam Korman

Exhibitions 82 Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943,

by Barbara Casavecchia The State is not a Work of Art, by Oliver Basciano Maria Thereza Alves, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Reframing Worlds: Mobility and Gender in a Postcolonial, Feminist Perspective, by Phoebe Blatton Anne Pöhlmann, by Moritz Scheper Sustainable Futures, by Luke Clancy Ramaya Tegegne, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Ma Qiusha, by Daisy Lafarge Tara Donovan, by Skye Sherwin Iman Issa, by Linda Taylor Hannah Ryggen, by Louise Darblay Yto Barrada, by Izabella Scott Erica Scourti, by Isabella Smith Margaret Salmon, by Susannah Thompson April Street, by Lindsay Preston Zappas Yevgeniya Baras, by Jonathan T.D. Neil

Books 106 Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, by Marie Darrieussecq Misère: The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19th Century,

by Linda Nochlin Give Up Art, by Maria Fusco See What Can be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary,

by Lorrie Moore THE STRIP 110 A CURATOR WRITES 114

page 86 Marisa Maza, RE-Xpedition_017 (still), 2016–17. © and courtesy the artist

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ArtReview

Photography by Warren & Nick

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Art Previewed

Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart’s content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attack those who have no means of defence 21

Previewed Every two years, for a few weeks, GI ceases to mean glycaemic index or Government Issue or whatever, as even health nuts and militarists 1 concede that it’s an acronym for Glasgow International. (Well, maybe.) Thirteen years deep, the art festival that London has zilch to compare with features 268 artists in 90 exhibitions across 78 venues over 18 days; its new director, curator Richard Parry, continuing the smart harmonising of Glasgowbased artists – approximately half the inclusions – and international ones. One leitmotif, flagged by group show Cellular World at GoMA featuring Cécile B. Evans, Sam Keogh and Jesse Darling,

inter alia, is the progressive displacement and augmentation of the human, substantiated by cyborgs, artificial intelligence and avatars, while selfhood’s inflection by politics (Brexit, Trumpism) promises to be aired elsewhere.

If these aren’t leftfield subjects, they might currently be near-mandatory ones. Expect, too, solo exhibitions by figures including Mark Leckey, Lubaina Himid, Duggie Fields and Stephen Sutcliffe.

According to the Whitney’s rulebook, grace three Whitney Biennials and you get 2 a retrospective, hence Zoe Leonard: Survey.

(Again, maybe.) Her first American museum

show is unquestionably overdue. It synopsises Leonard’s taxonomically engagé art’s phases over four decades, often hewing to her local and national environment: memento mori responses to the AIDS epidemic such as her steadily shrivelling fruit skins hand-stitched into sculptural forms, Strange Fruit (1992–97); the intertwining of global trade, labour relations and changing artistic media in photographs of dusty storefronts, Analogue (1998–2009); and numerous further commentaries on loss and exploitation. In You see I am here after all (2008), for instance, Leonard’s varicoloured grid of antique postcards of Niagara Falls,

1 Cécile B. Evans, Something tactical is coming, 2018. Photo: Yuri Pattison.

Courtesy the artist; Glasgow International; Renaissance Society, Chicago; and Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles

2 Zoe Leonard, You see I am here after all (detail), 2008, vintage postcards, 3,851 pieces, 335 × 320 × 448 cm (overall).

Photo: Bill Jacobson. Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

April 2018

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which generates a repeating pattern, unites an imperilled medium with consumerism and tourism’s exploitation of the natural world, shrinking the legendary cascade and placing it at a semiabstract remove.

New Yorkers may already be acquainted 3 with But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, which, trailing its Walter Benjamin-indebted title, debuted at the Guggenheim a couple of years ago and reflected the institution’s aims, since 2013, to steer its collection towards non-Western aesthetics. This presentation in Milan constitutes, we think, the last-chance stop of the final part of that ambitious and

laudable volte-face, which has seen the Gugg accumulate substantial amounts of new art.

Extracted here are works by 13 artists from the Middle East and North Africa – including Abbas Akhavan, Susan Hefuna, Iman Issa and Hassan Khan – leaning towards architecture, sculpture and photography and considering globalisation and gentrification, migration and displacement, often using geometry as a prism and a means of measure.

Keeping wintertime going as spring approaches, White Cube have snagged the 4 first major UK show for Pier Paolo Calzolari, an arte povera mainstay whose signature

medium is frost. Born in Bologna in 1943, Calzolari was initially a painter but, inspired by the pristine light and reflections of Venice, where he was raised, pursued a ‘pure’ whiteness by using little refrigeration units to festoon his art with ice crystals, often combining this coldness with warm elements to suggest elemental binaries of life and death. Combustio (1970), for instance, features a frost-rimed mattress pinned to the wall, overlaid with red neon spelling out the title. Outside of chilliness, as this miniretrospective will confirm, Calzolari likes natural materials transformed by process and chivvied into abstraction:

3 Abbas Akhavan, Study for a Monument (detail), 2013–16, bronze and cotton, dimensions variable. © the artist.

Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

4 Pier Paolo Calzolari, Combustio (detail), 1970, mixed media, 287 × 254 × 72 cm. © the artist. Photo: Lorenzo Palmieri. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

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ArtReview

5 Elin Gonzalez, Meister des Eis’s: There’s More Cruces (TMC), 2018, charcoal on paper, 42 × 30 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf

6 Teresa Magalhães, Untitled, 1972, collage, felt-tip pen and acrylic paint on card stock.

Courtesy the artist and Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon

segments of burned wood plus white salt and lead, or layers of tobacco leaves plus fluorescent text in the shape of an infinity symbol. While some artists’ careers cool down then are reheated for questionable reasons – such as padding a gallery’s inventory – Calzolari’s earthily poetic laconicism deserves reconsideration.

Eros versus Thanatos, a subject that never gets old: such is demonstrated not only by 5 Calzolari but also by Elin Gonzalez, whose gratifyingly idiosyncratic work thus far has enacted an ongoing dance of death, focusing on wall reliefs of fragmentary, ghoulish skeletal

figures. At Lucas Hirsch, alongside a frieze of perky ink drawings on foil of cavorting bones amid smudges of colour, expect gouged Styrofoam reliefs incorporating moss and depicting decaying bodies dancing and musicmaking, while intricate drawings of fantastical eggs dissolving in earth suggest cyclic rituals of rebirth. The aggregate offers a Rorschach test of your relationship to, as they used to say, being put to bed with a shovel. While the press-release writer talks balefully of ‘mouldy meat hanging in scraps’, this viewer – encouraged by titles like Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others,

April 2018

stink more than others (2016) – finds Gonzalez’s dark outpourings bracing, weirdly cheery.

Portuguese artists responding to Pop may 6 not be your specialist subject, but Post-Pop, Outside the Commonplace could change that.

It analyses reactions to British Pop art during 1965–75, the decade of Portugal’s colonial war, when forward-thinking artists were ‘true defectors from the mediocrity which characterised Portugal’, as the Gulbenkian puts it. These artists, some of them having studied in Swinging London and including Teresa Magalhães, Eduardo Batarda and Ruy Leitão – a star student of Patrick Caulfield

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9 Leda Bourgogne, Gum, 2018, chewing gum, pigment liner, various dimensions. Courtesy BQ , Berlin 7 David Hockney, Celia Birtwell, 31st August, 1st, 2nd September 2015, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 122 × 91 cm. © and courtesy the artist

8 David Goldblatt, Winder House, Farrar Shaft, Anglo Mines, Germiston, 1965, digital print on Baryta paper, 44 × 54 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg & Cape Town

– steered Pop’s critical/celebratory consumerist aesthetic into unexpected regions, overlapping it with Conceptualism. Meanwhile, what they were responding to is helpfully illuminated here by work by idiosyncratic Brits already swerving away from British Pop in its heyday, including Allen Jones, Jeremy Moon and Tom Phillips.

Of course, some Pop originators are still going strong, if no longer revolutionising.

Smoke probably didn’t billow from LACMA – à la that famous Ed Ruscha painting – when 7 they thought of taking on a David Hockney exhibition, since the octogenarian Yorkshireman and the city go together like buttons and bows.

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That’s thanks primarily to his 1960s and 70s paintings of blue poolside languor and later neo-cubist colour fantasias of the LA canyons; these, however, are not what’s in this show.

82 Portraits and One Still-life, which originated at London’s Royal Academy, has a perfectly descriptive title except that it doesn’t clarify that this is a tour of the Los Angeles artworld or at least the segment of it that Hockney is friendly with. Expect to encounter, in a frothy palette weighted towards pink and turquoise, John Baldessari, Larry Gagosian, Benedikt Taschen and 79 others, including old pal Celia Birtwell and, cosily, curators at LACMA.

ArtReview

In Paris, another and rather different David: 8 now eighty-seven, David Goldblatt has used his camera in the services of social criticism, sedulously photographing the changing state of his native South Africa from 1948, the year apartheid began, to its messy post-1990 aftermath. Working primarily (and appropriately) in black and white, he’s covered everything from the grinding work trips made by black workers outside Pretoria to the lifestyles of middle-class whites, boys beaten in police detention to the country’s diverse architecture, symbolismrich landscapes to the 2015 student riots.

At the Pompidou, Goldblatt’s complexly

intersecting narratives and highly artistic take on photo-journalism are restaged via some 200 photographs and seven films.

At the other end of the career scale, Leda 9 Bourgogne’s debut show with BQ looks worth catching amid Berlin Gallery Weekend’s characteristic sprawl (27–29 April) or after.

The Viennese artist, who left Frankfurt’s Städelschule last autumn clasping a graduate prize, operates in an inventively Deleuzian bodies-without-organs register, exploring concepts of genderless selfhood and erased identity. Negation accordingly ought to flow through this show: expect chewed gum

adhered to walls and floors, crafted into speech bubbles and whispering secrets, velvet paintings etched with chlorine, perforated with ventilation grids and then mended, and sentinellike, empty cd racks topped with clay mouths that lead viewers circularly back to the spat gum.

Charles Atlas began revising what filming 10 the human body could mean back in the mid1970s as filmmaker-in-residence for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; there, he moved with the dancers’ bodies as they performed, creating a parallel kinaesthetic filmic ballet.

An uncommonly sympathetic filmmaker ever since, emphasising queer issues and the depre-

dations of biopower – particularly questions of who is seen and how – he’s also been a technical pioneer. Atlas’s hot aesthetics, visible in many younger video artists’ practices, reflect his longstanding use of whatever innovations were to hand (chroma key collaging, variable editing): see his much-admired documentary on Michael Clark, Hail the New Puritan (1986), or complex recent video installations involving geometric or numerical sequences that, this retrospective’s hosts declare, examine ‘questions of the segmentation and structuring of the visual space as well as contemporary issues in the politics of representation’. Martin Herbert

10 Charles Atlas, 2003 (detail), 2003–18, four-channel video installation, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

1 Glasgow International various venues 20 April – 7 May

5 Elin Gonzalez Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf 10 March – 27 April

8 David Goldblatt Centre Pompidou, Paris through 13 May

2 Zoe Leonard Whitney Museum of American Art, New York through 10 June

6 Post-Pop, Outside the Commonplace: Pop detours in Portugal and England, 1965–1975 Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon 20 April – 10 September

9 Leda Bourgogne BQ , Berlin 28 April – 23 June

3 But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan 11 April – 17 June

7 David Hockney Los Angeles County Museum of Art 15 April – 29 July

4 Pier Paolo Calzolari White Cube, London through 5 May

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ArtReview

10 Charles Atlas Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich through 13 May

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Under the Paving Stones

Istanbul looks back words and images by Juliet Jacques

Memories and the city In his book about his home city, Istanbul (2003), Orhan Pamuk explores the numerous contradictions that make up its history. Pamuk focuses on the tensions over whether its culture should face East or West, with the Bosporus strait that splits Europe and Asia running through its heart; and whether it should root itself in its past as Constantinople, the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman capital, or rebuild itself – as the most important city in the country, if not its capital – when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ordered the Turkification of place names and a switch from Arabic to Latin script after he declared Turkish independence in 1923.

Subtitled Memories and the City, Pamuk’s take discusses a regionalspecific melancholy, known in Turkish as hüzün, looking at Istanbul’s lost past through the eyes of four writers, from Turkey and elsewhere, none widely translated but all influential on his journey towards becoming his country’s first Nobel Prize for Literature winner. What emerges, via his accounts of Western authors who visited, and of domestic ones who agonised over which Western cultures to assimilate, and how much, is a literary city: which is not just to say writers are shaped by Istanbul, but also that Istanbul is shaped by its writers.

above The Bosporus

below left Book at the Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Literature Museum below right Orhan Pamuk bust at the Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Literature Museum

In 2011 the Ministry of Culture & Tourism established the Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Literature Museum in the sixteenth-century Alay Köşkü pavilion, near the Ottoman sultans’ main residence at Topkapı Palace. Modernist poet, novelist, essayist and politician Tanpınar (1901–62) was one of Pamuk’s inspirations; busts of Tanpınar and Pamuk are displayed, alongside a picture of 40 writers at a 1928 Congress to initiate a Turkish literature, and many other images, books and artefacts, with a space for discussions, performances, workshops and ceremonies.

Artists and their pasts At Istanbul Modern – the city’s largest contemporary art institution, run by a private foundation backed by the Eczacıbası family – there is an exhibition titled Artists in Their Time. The last major show before the centre closes for a complete redesign by Renzo Piano, as part of the $1.2 billion redevelopment of Istanbul’s Galata port district, it takes a line from Tanpınar’s best-known novel, The Time Regulation Institute (1954), as its starting point: ‘I am neither within time nor completely outside of it’. Its theme is artists’ relationship with their present, and how they

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bear the weight of the past and the pressure of the future. The exhibition features a number of Turkish artists, such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, one of the few Turkish filmmakers well-known abroad, and photographer Ara Güler, whose nostalgic images permeate Pamuk’s Istanbul.

The show provides a route into Turkish modernism, with two of its most influential painters, Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901–91) and her son Nejad Melih Devrim (1923–95), being prominent. Like many Turkish artists, Zeid studied in Paris, before her love life tied her to the Middle East, via her marriage to Iraqi ambassador Prince Zeid bin Hussein, although she continued to display abstract works such as My Hell (1951), exhibited here, in France. Devrim looked almost exclusively to the West, being included in Sidney Janis Gallery’s exhibition of Young Painters in U.S. and France in Manhattan in 1950, after he settled in Paris. His Abstract Composition of 1949 is described here as the ‘earliest-known abstract painting by a Turkish artist’, suggesting that Devrim – also subject of a retrospective at Galeri Nev – influenced his mother’s style as much as she influenced his. (Not to mention that abstract Islamic art of the Ottoman period, a feature of Istanbul’s architecture and sites of worship, was an inspiration for many Western modernists, and for Zeid.)

above Galata Bridge below Graffiti at a university in Kadıköy celebrating Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai

top Work by Sarkis at Istanbul Modern above Yüksel Arslan’s Capitalist Production Process I (Private Property), 1972, at Istanbul Modern

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Other works here owe more to the written word. Sarkis, born in Istanbul in 1938, also worked in France; his art focuses on remembrance, and the neon text in his Sculpture with a Monkey Skull Dancing in front of Sarkis’ Big Times, made for his Istanbul Modern solo exhibition in 2009, refers to stages in his art career. Meanwhile, fellow Istanbullu Yüksel Arslan has a wider focus, internationalist in the Marxist sense: Capitalist Production Process I (Private Property) (1972) looks at first glance like a classic portrait of class exploitation, but the standardisation of the workers’ faces and the coins that replace the factory owners’ heads betray a French Surrealist influence, although Arslan’s caustic imagery puts him closer to the movement’s brutal Communist poets than its (often less visceral) painters. The theme is broad – perhaps too broad – and it’s not always evident how the featured works reflect artists’ ambivalence towards the concept of time. It does, however, provide a sense of how Turkish artists’ points of focus have shifted over the last century.

ArtReview

Some shows in the Laurieston area of Glasgow (city centre, south bank) during Glasgow International, April 20th to May 7th but outwith the festival programme SERGE CHARCHOUNE: THIRTIES / SIXTIES at Oxford House, 71 Oxford Street curated by Andrew Mummery in association with Merlin James / 42 Carlton Place CHAMBER OF MAIDEN THOUGHT (Peter Davies, Katy Dove, Raydale Dower, Angus Hood, Eilidh McNair, Christian Stock, Catherine Street) at Plant, Nicholson Street lane curated by Graham Domke LOTTE GERTZ / CHARLIE HAMMOND / TONY SWAIN at Oxford House, 71 Oxford Street Openings: Friday evening, April 20th See the web for more details and for GI shows in the neighbourhood

February 9 – April 22, 2018

Rudolf Polanszky February 9 – April 1, 2018

Haris Epaminonda April 12 – June 17, 2018

Bouchra Khalili April 12 – June 3, 2018

Elaine Reichek June 29 – September 2, 2018

Other Mechanisms curated by Anthony Huberman

secession Friedrichstraße 12 1010 Vienna, Austria

www.secession.at

Creative freedoms If to the visitor Istanbul may seem obsessed with its past, then the artists and activists I met were obsessed with its future, precisely because it looks so bleak. Since Occupy Gezi – an effort to save one of Istanbul’s few parks, involving an array of groups including environmentalists, students, anarchists, football fans, Kurds and LGBTQI people – launched widespread protests against Erdoğan’s autocratic rule in 2013, there has been a clampdown on dissent, which intensified after the failed coup of July 2016. Last year, Erdoğan made himself president in a constitutional referendum held in an ongoing state of emergency, won by the narrowest of margins, with 1.5 million unstamped votes. During that year, many academics, authors and journalists have been imprisoned or exiled, drawing international condemnation: 38 Nobel laureates recently signed an open letter quoting Erdoğan in 2009, saying that ‘the old Turkey who used to sentence its great writers to prison… is gone for ever’, and demanded that he release writers jailed after the coup. Pamuk, tried in 2005 for discussing the Armenian genocide and mass killings of Kurds, and later fined 6,000 liras, did not sign, surely aware that adding his name would secure a long prison term.

top Office of Useful Art, dedicated to a perceived crisis in contemporary museology, at SALT Galata

above and below Works from Elmas Denız’s A Year Without a Summer at Pilot Galeri

The only exhibition to confront this directly had just finished when I arrived. This was at Depo, in support of the not-for-profit gallery’s chairman, entrepreneur and patron, Osman Kavala, who was arrested in October for ‘attempting to overthrow the constitutional order’ after returning from Gaziantep, southeast Turkey, where he was starting a cultural centre for Syrian refugees. He was accused of organising the Gezi protests, assisting Kurdish activists and acting for US and European interests. This occurred as Erdoğan attempted to shore up his religious base in a country that, since Atatürk, has based its politics on secular principles. Erdoğan changed Turkey’s time zone to align it to the Middle East and Russia; he has also pursued war at Syria’s border, where there is a large Kurdish population, clamped down on Pride (although LGBTQI organisations still put on events) and generated a climate of fear unknown since the military dictatorship of the early 1980s.

In an expression of solidarity with Kavala, artists congregated in Depo to write letters to him, hold reading sessions and make work in shifts.

Having started the initiative with no expectations, it’s unclear what the institution will do next, but it may be that the campaign to release Kavala – a benefactor of several projects, including the high-profile !f Film Festival (which had invited me to the city to judge its ‘Love and Change’ political documentary section) – galvanises Istanbul’s art community into more coordinated resistance.

Going underground There are plenty of smaller galleries that still function despite this climate, in which opposition from religious groups to opening nights (with their visible drinking) is supported by authorities keen to criminalise and shut down sites of dissent, clearing space for property developers. Elmas Denız’s second solo exhibition at Pilot Galeri, A Year Without a Summer, is named after a meteorological event that followed a volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815, and it encourages its audience to reconsider how humanity relates to nature. Denız places the language

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ArtReview

www.museum-ludwig.de

April 18 – August 12, 2018

© Haegue Yang, Photo: Paul Hester

HAEGUE YANG E TA 1994 - 2018 G WOLFGANN- HAH PRIZE 2018

Exhibition funded by

Wolfgang Hahn Prize awarded by

Ein Museum der

of advertising over a video of Sri Lanka, asking how capitalism could turn such a magnificent landscape into a luxury item; her 2017 artist book Flying Plants, Dogs and Elephants, silk-printed on paper made of elephant dung and hung on Pilot’s walls, invites readers to contemplate the beauty of everyday interactions with animals and vegetation.

OJ (Orange Juice) Art Space aims at introducing young and emerging Turkish artists to the European audiences who continue to visit the city (especially during the Istanbul Biennial, the most recent of which was curated by Elmgreen & Dragset and ended in November). Postinternet artist Pinar Marul’s first solo show, Unknown, is inspired by UFO researcher and conspiracy theorist Maximillien de Lafayette, drawing on science-fiction and cyberpunk films and literature in its presentation of sculptures of decontextualised, defamiliarised human organs, made

above Work by Pinar Marul at OJ Art Space below Osman Dinç at Pi Artworks

top Pinar Marul at the OJ Art Space above Poster for LGBTQI film screening

from hosepipes and other manmade materials (which might also be read as an oblique comment on the political climate). Another Turkish sculptor, Osman Dinç, has an exhibition at Pi Artworks, in a building in Karaköy with a small gallery on each of its five floors. I left too early for Light Theory, a performance art piece by Museum of Innocence director Onur Karaoğlu about the lives of three gay men in contemporary Istanbul, but as the artists, curators and LGBTQI activists I met told me, this city has too rich a counterculture, and too diverse an artistic community, to allow Erdoğan and his supporters to turn contemporary art into a nostalgic object of hüzün.

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker

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ArtReview

John Byrne Knocking on Heaven’s Door

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Carsten Nicolai, tele, 2018 © Carsten Nicolai und VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018, courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/ Berlin und Pace Gallery

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NEOlITHIC CHILDHOOD ART IN A FAlSe PResent, c. 1930

Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Brassaï (Gyula Halász), from Graffiti de la Série VIII: La Magie, 1955, gelatin silver print, 141 × 106,3 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris. bpk | CNAC-MNAM | Estate Brassaï

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Matilda Moors, ravage me (detail), 2017. Digital image.

Interview

Elena Filipovic “I should start by pointing out that neither Hammons nor his work is readily accessible”

by Ross Simonini

Elena Filipovic Photo: Danai Anesiadou

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ArtReview

In conversation, Elena Filipovic casually refers to herself a “Duchampian”. As a curator, writer and historian, she is deeply informed by her study of Duchamp, who she considers a “pioneering example” of an artist who had a “lifelong role as a curator”. Her book The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2016) is a culmination of her doctoral research at Princeton.

She describes the book’s subject as “the activities that didn’t look like artmaking in the conventional sense but had everything to do with how Duchamp positioned his artworks in the world”.

Perhaps the most glaring of these operations was his declaration, already during the early 1920s, that he had stopped producing art, all while actively making and circulating artlike things via note-writing, reproducing, dealing and, indeed, curating for the remainder of his life.

A recent book that Filipovic edited, The Artist as Curator: An Anthology (2017), collects more than 20 essays on artists who work curatorially, who address the context of their own work and who see curating other artists as an extension of their own practice. Naturally, the book begins with Filipovic’s discussion of Duchamp, who used exhibiting as a means for dramatically reinterpreting his own art and the work of others.

He hung paintings according to chance, lit shows with flashlights and filled an exhibition with a network of string, making it impossible for viewers to access the art.

The anthology also includes Filipovic’s essay on a clandestine exhibition by David Hammons, which the artist installed (without announcement) in an import shop in Lower Manhattan.

For Filipovic, Duchamp’s “marginal activities” led her to the work of Hammons, an artist who has often refused to exhibit and is known for subverting the conventions of contemporary art culture. In fact, Hammons has often called himself the CEO of the DOC (Duchamp Outpatient Clinic) and recently purchased property for a potential ‘museum’ in Yonkers, New York, under the name Duchamp Realty LLC. The most recent of her publications, in what has been an admittedly busy year for her, is David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale (2017), part of the One Work series by Afterall Books. For these books, writers use a single artwork as a lens for looking at an artist’s larger body of work (eg Lee Lozano’s Dropout Piece, begun c. 1970, and Philip Guston’s The Studio, 1969). In this case, Filipovic tracked the mysterious Bliz-aard Ball Sale, in which Hammons sold snowballs on the sidewalk in the middle of winter in 1983. The book is both a compellingly readable narrative and a remarkable work of scholarship. For eight years, Filipovic persisted in studying a subject who did not want to be studied, and several details from her idiosyncratic process with Hammons are discussed in the following interview.

Before her current job, Filipovic cocurated the 5th Berlin Biennale in 2008 with Adam Szymczyk and served as senior curator at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, from 2009 to 2014. In November 2014 she took up the directorship of Kunsthalle Basel, where she has since organised significant exhibitions by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Anne Imhof, Mark Leckey and Maria Loboda, among others. She spoke to me from her office in Basel on the heels of the monthlong ‘live exhibition’ New Swiss Performance Now and during the installation of solo shows with Yuri Ancarani and Michael E. Smith.

ROSS SIMONINI How did you begin the vast project of studying David Hammons?

ELENA FILIPOVIC Well, I should start by pointing out that neither Hammons nor his work is readily accessible. You rarely encounter

“To figure out who might have passed by a man selling snowballs, unannounced, in front of Cooper Union in 1983 was a vast enterprise.

No written source could confirm what day the sale was held.

I had to map a family tree of his friends and lovers and the lovers of his friends, anyone who I thought might have known about it and anyone that might have known someone who knew about it” a piece of his in the permanent collection of a museum. For the longest time, there simply weren’t any exhibitions of his work around, or they were few and far between. You won’t find an official website, no ‘contact me’ URL. There’s no gallery officially representing him. There’s no bona fide cv that circulates. It was hard to figure out what he’d done or where he had studied in any factual way. He had become almost mythic and was referred to with incredible deference, but the writing on him was relatively meagre for someone so significant. And always the same terms were repeated – difficult, elusive, trickster, hustler – without much of an examination of why or what it has meant over the years to position himself in that way. There are some absolutely brilliant essays out there but no proper monograph – only a few out-of-print, hard-to-find, extremely expensive exhibition catalogues from back in the day, when he more

April 2018

easily accepted to do exhibitions, and a fabulous bootleg book in Spanish. I cherished any I could get my hands on, and inevitably kept coming back to the few images that circulated of his snowball sale. I couldn’t understand why so little had been written about it, and I didn’t want to accept that such a seminal work not be taken more seriously. What resulted is David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale, and the fact that it happens to be the first monograph on Hammons is still astonishing to me. But sometimes we have to write the books we want to read ourselves.

And in this case it’s a rather slim volume that actually leaves much of Hammons’s mystery intact, so more than anything I hope it will inspire others to write more.

RS Because of Hammons’s slippery ways, writing about him seems more like being an investigative journalist than an art historian.

EF For most of art history, there’s some kind of object that remains, or at the very least there’s a record to be found and consulted, but here [with Bliz-aard Ball Sale] I was dealing with a work that couldn’t be summoned and was made, in part, not to be able to be summoned. His snowballs pretty much melted on contact, which is a perfect metaphor for how his larger practice operates. But when I began research for the book, I naively began to think like a proper art historian, believing I would come to some ‘truth’ about these objects. For several years, while struggling with this, I felt like a failure. How could I possibly historicise the work ‘properly’ when whatever discussion there was of Bliz-aard Ball Sale had different information? One article said the prices of the snowballs were in relation to their size. Another said they were all $1.

Another said that the prices were negotiated.

And there wasn’t even a single essay seriously dedicated to the work, despite how frequently it is cited. Just a handful of photographs and passing mentions…

RS And the artist wouldn’t tell you directly.

EF No, of course not! We’re talking about Hammons, after all. I realised that the only way I could try to learn more about it was to collect an oral history from people who had been there or knew him at the time. But to figure out who might have passed by a man selling snowballs, unannounced, in front of Cooper Union in 1983 was a vast enterprise. No written source could confirm what day the sale was held on, or if it was a single day, or multiple days. I had to basically map a family tree of his friends and lovers and the lovers of his friends, anyone who I thought might have known about it and anyone that might have known someone who knew about it, and their lovers… you get the idea.

Then I had to track them down and convince

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David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983. Photo: Dawoud Bey. Courtesy Tilton Gallery, New York

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ArtReview

them to talk to me, or to Alhena Katsof, an amazing assistant that I had engaged along the way to help me, since I couldn’t manage, or afford, to keep coming back and forth from Europe to interview each person. The people I contacted would inevitably get in touch with Hammons first, you know, to make sure it was OK to talk to this crazy lady asking about his snowballs.

He must have said it was okay, because every one of them agreed to speak on the record. I have the feeling Hammons was observing my process in this way. And after he must have gotten many, many such calls (more than 40 people were interviewed for the book), I think he understood I was serious, and wasn’t going away, which is when he agreed to speak to me.

RS Did he actively refuse to talk to you before that?

EF Well, first of all, how do you get in touch with David Hammons? If you ask anyone who knows him, they know better than to give out his contact information. That was a huge obstacle at first. But once I got past that (it took over a year) and got a telephone number for him, he didn’t ever pick up or answer the messages I left. Ironically, my way in was through Duchamp: I left a catalogue I had

made on Duchamp at a gallery where Hammons had once had a show with a note and I asked the gallery to forward it. Shortly after, he got in touch with me. His first move was to give me homework: read Ben Okri. I did, he tested me a bit on the phone and then he agreed to meet me, this was in 2009. We talked, walking the streets of New York City for hours, but quite immediately he made it clear that he wouldn’t tell me much about Bliz-aard Ball Sale. He said something along the lines of, “I’m looking forward, I’m not looking back. I’m not interested in the past.”

And he didn’t answer my attempts to reach him again in the years immediately after that. I wrote him to tell him I wanted to write a book about the snowball sale. No answer. I asked to interview him. No answer. I asked to curate a show of his work. No answer, of course. [laughs] We only began really speaking some five years later, after I had by that point managed to track down and speak to a heck of a lot of people about Bliz-aard Ball Sale. I got a message that was along the lines of – I’m paraphrasing here – “Damn, you are persistent. I’ll talk to you now.”

And then we began speaking every Tuesday at 10 am for 29 minutes, exactly the amount of time it took for the cordless battery on his home

telephone to stop working. This artist who sells his works for millions of dollars has a phone that only stays charged for 29 minutes, you have to love it! As his phone battery would start signalling its end, he’d say, call me next Tuesday or whatever, and I had this running appointment with him. And then I got a new job as director of Kunsthalle Basel and life got so hectic and I missed one of my appointments…

RS Oh no.

EF Yeah, you can already tell what happened, right? I had missed our phone date, so he was totally unreachable after that. I wrote him these apologetic notes, which was probably the worst thing I could do. That was the end of our regular conversations, although I had so much more that I had wanted to ask. Because I also have to admit that whenever I had my 29 minutes with him I would squander some of them out of sheer nervousness to be talking to him at all.

But when I finished my manuscript and took a trip to New York about a year and a half ago, he heard that I was in town and he just spontaneously turned up. We had our last conversation, which gave me the final words – his words – to close the book. He basically said:

David Hammons: Five Decades, 2016 (installation view). © the artist. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York

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you should keep researching, keep talking to people, you should keep doing this for years, but you don’t need to write the book.

RS In actually writing it, how did you end up addressing your own bias?

EF One moment in the process that really vexed me was, precisely, when I was grappling with what I was sure were the race implications of Bliz-aard Ball Sale. I asked Hammons again and again about these. I probably really annoyed him, actually. I just couldn’t believe, as he insisted, that he made the piece without race in mind. And, with Hammons, you never really know if he is testing you, or playing you. After all, Ronald Reagan was trying to make everyone believe that benefits would ‘trickle down’ to the poor if only the rich would pay less in taxes, unemployment and homelessness were at an all-time high, there was a crack crisis going on, all of which predominantly and negatively affected black men and women, while an overwhelmingly white art-market was booming, and here was a black man on a street corner peddling carefully arranged gradations of white to all-white customers. Given how loaded that act at that moment was, and of course

Hammons’s own outspoken tackling of race throughout his practice, it seemed evident to me that here he was tackling the issue as well.

But he was adamant that Bliz-aard Ball Sale was light, humorous and absurd, and, he said, I would be mistaken if I saw something else.

This worked on me for a long time. Because, of course, I saw the deliberate absurdity, but I also saw a far more mordant depth. And Hammons’s art is often sited on exactly the razor edge between them. But I thought to myself, if the artist says this particular work is not about race, I somehow can’t respectfully talk about it in those terms, perhaps especially because I don’t know myself what it is to be black in a country founded on and still sadly upheld by white supremacy. It took me some time to realise that I could honour Hammons’s understanding of the work and nevertheless contextualise it in such a way that you understand how contemporary race realities infiltrated it, whether he intended them to or not.

RS The way Hammons interacts with the market, selling his work for vast sums of money – for you, is this in contradiction with his decision to withdraw from culture?

David Hammons: Five Decades, 2016 (installation view). © the artist. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York

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EF Yes and no. No, because to be contradictory is what Hammons actually wants, which makes it not a contradiction at all. He has actively dodged MoMA or Tate or LACMA or any venerable institution that wants to stage a retrospective of his work. Yet not long ago he did a kind of ‘retrospective’ with Mnuchin Gallery, headed by a former equity trader, and he made another one in a Greek shipping magnate’s private art space in Athens at a moment when Greece was in total financial crisis. This is not a coincidence. He will never be where you expect him to be. Besides that, he’s putting his finger where the money is and where the issue of money is at stake.

Throughout his career, he’s been actively thinking about value. What does it mean that something commands a certain price? He manages to make art that costs nearly nothing to make, and then he sells it to people with an extraordinary amount of money, making the point that they are finally going to pay.

I’ve talked to curators who complain that his work is too expensive for museum collection acquisition, wondering if he would consider a discount. But he has no interest in offering a discount to institutions, or to anyone actually.

The story goes that if you ask for one, the price

goes up! And if a museum or collector will pay several million dollars for a [Gerhard] Richter, why should it be an issue to pay that amount for a Hammons? Not to mention that if they waited until he cost $6 million, it means they simply weren’t supporting black artists when they could have and should have. I won’t say that it’s a way to get even per se, but it is a reckoning.

Because it’s never been his goal to allow his art to be easily consumable. Instead he is managing to make it both disruptive and sited in the homes of people with obscene amounts of money.

he decided to stop making them. He didn’t want to be the producer of easy money. And that remains the case, even if it might not look like it given how much he now sells his works for.

RS He’s pure contradiction. He seems to be embedding himself into history, like a folktale, while simultaneously rejecting history altogether.

EF There’s this great statement by Sun Ra: ‘History is only “his story”. You haven’t heard my story yet. “My story” is different from

RS But he’s also turned away from money, right?

EF There was a moment during the early 1970s when his body prints were selling like hotcakes.

An iconic work from the series The Wine Leading the Wine had sold for $1,000, which was a lot of money then, especially given that he was basically crashing on sofas and bathing at friends’ apartments at the time. And that was pretty much the exact moment

“his story”.’ Like Sun Ra, Hammons’s relationship to History, with a capital H, is entirely bound to his acute understanding of how much it has belonged to, been written by and served to validate the cause of white privilege. So it is no wonder that he has always had an ambivalent relationship to History and not made it easy for the historian.

But he must have been aware that to resist (art) history comes with risks too. Because you never know if, by withholding and refusing prestigious museum shows, refusing official representation, refusing visibility, you will remain totally obscure and forgotten or if your own particular brand of opacity will make you twice, or thrice, as powerful. He’s made no secret of the fact that he’s been playing a long game from the start. And you know what? He’s winning.

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

David Hammons, Untitled, 2013, glass mirror with wood and plaster frame, fabric, 192 × 97 × 29 cm. © the artist. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York

April 2018

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Art Featured

Ah, child and youth, if you knew the bliss which resides in the taste of knowledge, and the evil and ugliness that lies in ignorance, how well you are advised to not complain of the pain and labor of learning 47

Zanny Begg’s The City of Ladies Resistance, revisionism and reclamation

by Nina Miall

The City of Ladies (2017) was filmed on the streets of Paris at the concluMuch of the work’s dialogue came out of a workshop in which the sion of the Nuit debout protests against proposed labour reform in June women – respondents to an advertisement placed by Begg and McLeod 2016, less than a year after coordinated terrorist attacks across the city on casting sites – shared stories about their experiences as politically left 130 people dead. A collaboration between the Sydney-based artist engaged Parisiennes in the twenty-first century. Their political awareZanny Begg and her childhood friend, Paris-based filmmaker Elise ness is also visibly shaped by filmed exchanges with critical thinkers McLeod, the 20-minute-long video installation responds to cues from including Hélène Cixous, Silvia Federici, Fatima-Ezzahra Benomar and Sharone Omankoy. Woven into The City of Ladies, excerpts from two different – but related – cultural and historical moments.

The first is contemporary Paris and the new forms of collective these conversations introduce an intergenerational and pedagogical action that have emerged to challenge the city’s takeover by heavy- dimension to the film’s discussions of contemporary feminism. handed police in the aftermath of The film takes its second cue the attacks. This social movement, In the film’s opening and concluding sequences, from a very different milieu to the which aligns itself with altergritty urbanism of present-day a refrain from the Eagles of Death Metal song globalisation activists around the Paris: a 600-year-old imaginary world, is filtered for the purposes city, built, occupied and governed Kiss the Devil (2004) – which was playing as the of the video through the perspecexclusively by women. Written terrorists opened fire in the Bataclan – erupts,

by Christine de Pizan in 1405, The tives of seven young women. its unhinged guitar riffs acting as sonic Book of the City of Ladies conjures a Through a nonlinear series of viwalled utopia populated by real gnettes combining documentary ballast to the film’s intellectualism and allegorical women, whose footage with scripted dramatic passages, Begg and McLeod explore the experiences of these young contributions to history its author enumerates. Begg refers to the female activists, many from migrant backgrounds, as they move book as ‘a catalogue of amazing women’ in an interview produced by around the city. Scenes of the women protesting, dancing, gossiping the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, which premiered The and philosophising, during nightly assemblies at the Place de la City of Ladies (2016) in the 2017 edition of its biennial The National: New République or over lazy cigarettes on the banks of the Seine, reveal Australian Art. Despite her prolific and iconoclastic output – de Pizan their nascent feminism converging with other wrote 41 books in a 30-year career and deployed Miniature of Justice leading the queens social-justice struggles of the time, expressed in a range of innovative rhetorical techniques to into the City of Ladies in The Book of the City conversations among themselves and encounchallenge the misogynistic leanings of her male of Ladies, Harley 4431, f.323. © The British contemporaries – it is only in recent decades that ters with other groups.

Library Board, London

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writers such as Simone de Beauvoir have acknowledged de Pizan’s made by intersectional feminism to the debate in recent years. The idea that discrimination rarely occurs in isolation, and that its injury impassioned defence of women as a protofeminist treatise.

Begg and McLeod take inspiration from this pioneering text, is amplified by the cumulative manner in which different forms of recognising in it a centuries-old antecedent to the present moment, in discrimination can overlap and intersect, finds voice in the film’s which the legitimacy of the white male viewpoint is in crisis. Loosely young leads, many of whom are of different ethnicities and are following the dialogic structure of de Pizan’s book, The City of Ladies contending with religious, racial or sexual prejudice simultanealso revolves around a group of women imagining a feminist utopia ously. Issues of immigration, terrorism, postcolonialism, transgen– a perspective on the world that de derism, Afro-feminism, labour, teenIt plays over scenes of the teenage girls Pizan called feminania – absent of the age pregnancy and Islamophobia discrimination and disempowerment are refracted through the lens of engaged in acts of political and sexual that permeates their lives. Refocusmisogyny in the film and threaded liberation, or caught unaware in mothrough the women’s individual naring de Pizan’s lens of misogyny on ments of self-actualisation.

Developing ratives. As one of the young women the present, the filmmakers connect declaims during a march protesting current feminist debates around reconfidence in their own voices, they proposed labour reforms: “We’re productive rights, the legislation of join in the provocative chorus fighting for workers’ rights, so let’s women’s bodies, rape culture and domestic violence to the mistreatment of women condemned by actually see women’s labour in this struggle”. the late medieval author, which escalated, not long after the book’s In dramatising the manifold experiences of this group of young publication, into the witch trials of the fifteenth and sixteenth centu- activists, Begg and McLeod (like de Pizan before them) subvert the ries. “The witch hunt was the equivalent of the war on terror today idea of a single, teleological narrative, instead representing multiple intersecting feminist histories and experiences, in its criminalisation of a broad range of behavwhose relationship to other facets of identity iours,” explains Silvia Federici at one point, above Zanny Begg and Elise McLeod, politics is also portrayed. “Feminisms, not femitracing a lineage from the persecution of Joan The City of Ladies, 2017, production still. of Arc to the recent burkini ban in France. nism,” as Begg explains, “the only way feminism Photo: Federique Barraja. Courtesy the artists In drawing these parallels, The City of Ladies can exist is by having space for difference.” The facing page Zanny Begg, detail of wallpaper in The City of Ladies, 2017. Courtesy the artist also acknowledges the important contribution video’s labyrinthine structure reinforces this

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preceding pages Zanny Begg and Elise McLeod, The City of Ladies, 2017, production still.

Photo: Federique Barraja. Courtesy the artists

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this and facing page Zanny Begg, flags created for The City of Ladies, 2017. Courtesy the artist

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logic. An algorithm devised by programmer Andrew Nicholson edits concert with the algorithmic editing process. At times, the women’s the work, determining which of these heterogeneous stories a viewer rendition of the childhood song ‘Who were the witches?’ is delivered encounters at any particular moment. Adapting the language of video with the playfulness of a schoolyard ditty; at other times, the song’s gaming, the algorithm randomises the selection and compilation of association of women with witchcraft is imbued with a formidable 52 different narrative strands into a nonlinear, single-channel video sense of feminist reclamation. In the film’s opening and concluding framed every 20 minutes by predetermined title and end sequences, sequences, a refrain from the Eagles of Death Metal song Kiss the Devil looping endlessly. There are roughly 300,000 iterations that can be (2004) – which was playing as the terrorists opened fire in the Bataclan animated by this algorithm, its chance decisions laying different – erupts, its unhinged guitar riffs acting as sonic ballast to the film’s intellectualism. Covered by the Australian postpunk feminist band emphases on the video’s themes.

In ceding control over the final edit, Begg and McLeod have Mere Women (in another act of reclamation), it plays over scenes of created a work that exposes the bias of traditional historiographies the teenage girls engaged in acts of political and sexual liberation, or – masculinist, colonial, Western – instead foregrounding multiple caught unaware in moments of self-actualisation. Developing confineglected stories and viewpoints. “If you think history is on your dence in their own voices, they join in the provocative chorus: “I’ll kiss side, let me remind you that women didn’t write these books – if they the devil, I’ll sing his song.” had, the stories would be different,” voices one of the protagonists The conceptual and affective power of The City of Ladies lies in its over slow-motion shots of the women dancing uninhibitedly against examination of the performance of resistance – a choreography of a backdrop, designed by Begg, featuring illustrations of women in gestures at times fierce, at times vulnerable and uncertain – within domestic servitude. At the same time, the film’s revisionist feminist the young women’s public and private spheres. Slipping between impulse is particularly strong in the concluding sequence, which, documentary and dramatic modes to look at the urgencies of femiwith its rousing and triumphant tone, suggests nism in the contemporary climate, it explores precisely that teleological arc that the filmhow we gather ourselves to enact the futures we above Zanny Begg and Elise McLeod, The City makers are seeking to disrupt. imagine. ar of Ladies (still), 2017, single-channel durational The complexities of revisionism take shape video, colour, sound. Courtesy the artists around specific musical cues in the film, many of Nina Miall is an independent curator and writer facing page Zanny Begg, detail of wallpaper in The City of Ladies, 2017. Courtesy the artist which repeat or recur as variations on a theme in based in Sydney

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Words into Action The story of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective

by Barbara Casavecchia

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‘My dear, I have been searching for stories to help explain the way I see our relationship. Stories from the history of the political practice of relations. It led me to the places where women who theorised it still practise it.’ So begins A story from Circolo della rosa (2014) by Alex Martinis Roe, a film narrating the relationship between two members of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. The film traces the genealogy of ‘sexual difference’ – a theory that insists on female embodiment as something other than a negative of the masculine ‘norm’ – and its influence.

A wider resurgence of interest in Italian feminism of the 1970s has lately been reflected in the artworld, where there has been a renewed attention to the writings of the author and activist Carla Lonzi, triggered by new studies by scholars Giovanna Zapperi and Raffaella Perna and reinterpreted by artists including Claire Fontaine and the late Chiara Fumai. It’s a natural association: Lonzi was an art critic whose commitment to alternative, more horizontal and freer forms of communication had emerged in ‘Autoritratto’ (‘Self-portrait’, 1969), an experimental essay that took the form of a choral conversation, for which Lonzi put questions on themes, ranging from the personal to the political, to 14 artists and then cut, pasted and mixed the questions with the answers, dissolving any hierarchies between interviewer and subject, the artist and the writer.

Language and its use, circulation, censorship, refusal or subversion is essential to old and new waves of feminism. The ‘Manifesto’ (1970) of the Rivolta Femminile – the group Lonzi founded with painter Carla Accardi and activist Elvira Banotti – proclaimed that ‘man has interpreted woman according to an image of femininity which is his own invention… Man has always spoken in the name of the human race… we consider history incomplete because it was written, always, without regarding woman as an active subject of it.’ Martinis Roe revisited the history of these feminist approaches to speaking and writing through a research and art project that included workshops, oral histories, group practices and six films shot across Milan, Paris, Utrecht, Sydney and Barcelona, culminating in the touring exhibition To Become Two (2014–17). In order

facing page Claire Fontaine, Pretend to be dead, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Roberto Apa. Courtesy the artist and T293, Rome

to tell the story, the camera in A story from Circolo della rosa zooms in on a Milanese bookshop. So, let’s do the same.

In the week before Christmas 1974, a black-and-white leaflet circulated in Milan announcing the opening of a new bookshop, the Libreria delle Donne (Women’s Bookshop). The flier declared ‘the need to affirm the diversity of our sex and of our condition’ through the promotion of women’s work, while at the same time making an early crowdfunding appeal: ‘Six million lire is needed, we have one’.

Inspired by the Librairie des Femmes in Paris, the bookshop would be run by a cooperative dedicated to the great Italian feminist writer Sibilla Aleramo and stock essays, novels, children’s books, paintings, graphic works and records by women only.

Among the first to respond to the appeal was a group of artists – Accardi, Mirella Bentivoglio, Valentina Berardinone, Tomaso Binga, Nilde Carabba, Dadamaino, Amalia Del Ponte, Grazia Varisco and Nanda Vigo – who donated their work to a special portfolio, introduced by the art critic Lea Vergine, in support of the bookshop. It was sold at a ‘political price’ in order to ensure that it would be ‘accessible to the greatest number of people, outside the traditional circuit of art galleries’. The first books to fill the shelves were retrieved from the unsold stock of publishing houses unwilling or unable to promote female writers.

The bookshop tapped into a new spirit of radical feminist publishing in Italy. Rivolta Femminile printed a regular series of ‘green books’ edited (and often written) by Lonzi, including the patriarchy-smashing Let’s Spit on Hegel (1970) and The Clitoridian Woman and the Vaginal Woman (1971), which reflected on psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution. In Rome, in 1974, Elisabetta Rasy, Manuela Fraire, Maria Caronia and Annemarie Sauzeau (then married to Alighiero Boetti) had established Edizioni delle Donne (Women’s Editions). After months of ‘epic fights’ with Lonzi about the direction of the publisher, Laura Lepetit split from the Rivolta Femminile in 1975 to start her own Milan-based press, La Tartaruga, with a women-only catalogue.

In its first manifesto, the Libreria delle Donne declared its intention to operate as ‘a laboratory of political

above Claire Fontaine, Taci, anzi parla brickbat, 2015, brick, brick fragments, glue and archival digital print, 17 × 12 × 6 cm.

Courtesy the artist and T293, Rome

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practice’ and a place where ‘the expression of creativity by some of us, also highlighted how the vocabulary of the ‘thought of difference’ and the will of liberation by all of us’ could meet. The practicalities of promoted by Lonzi and her peers had moved on from emancipation running an independent bookshop required, as the Italian academic to self-determination.

Laura Grasso has written, that its founders ‘create bonds, situations In 1976, after the first mass pro-abortion protest in Milan, the and exchanges among women not based exclusively on words and Libreria delle Donne sent a vibrant letter of dissent to Il Corriere della including, instead, the dimension of “doing”, the relationship with Sera, in which Pier Paolo Pasolini had published a provocative article money, the expression of practical activities’. The economic model titled ‘I am against abortion’ a year earlier, prompting ripostes from was a political statement in itself: the space (with a large shopfront Natalia Ginzburg and Italo Calvino. After sending Rivolta’s own overlooking the street) was obtained for a small rent from the munic- response, ‘Female Sexuality and Abortion’, which Il Corriere declined to ipality of Milan, which had been tasked with allocating a portion of publish, Lonzi wrote directly, and affectionately, to Pasolini, who did the space under its control to cultural purposes. The work was volun- not answer. The text voiced the group’s uneasiness towards the reductary and arranged in half-day shifts to avoid hierarchies and class- tive identification of women with a socially oppressed group, whose based divisions of labour: economic forms of resistance could be described independence was rare in Italy during as reproductions of the mechanisms of The economic model was a political the mid-1970s, where only one in three statement in itself, the work voluntary masculine politics, arguing that their woman worked outside the home, and goals could not be reduced to the restiand arranged in half-day shifts to avoid even then for salaries 30 percent lower tution of denied rights. In doing so, the Libreria rejected the male caricature of than men. hierarchies and divisions of labour How to translate words into action feminism propagated by the media. was – and is – a key issue for the women’s movement. But equally The Libreria’s research into an alternative genealogy of culture crucial was the reflection on oppressive language structures (shaped resulted in the publication of Le madri di tutte noi (Catalogo giallo) (The in Italy, particularly, by the patriarchies of Fascism and Catholicism), Mothers of Us All [Yellow Catalogue], 1982), an anthology of female writers on how to invent new gendered forms of expression and with whom – Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, the Brontës, Elsa Morante, Gertrude to share them. The groups who practised autocoscienza (conscious- Stein, Anna Kavan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Virginia Woolf and Ivy ness-raising) during the early 1970s were also the first to organise Compton-Burnett – selected collectively and after long discussion. self-help associations and pro-choice independent clinics. Divorce In 1987 came Non credere di avere dei diritti (forthcoming in a new transwas legalised in Italy in 1970, after hundreds of demonstrations, and lation by London’s Silver Press as Don’t Think You Have Any Rights), four years later a referendum to recriminalise it was unsuccessful. which recapitulates the decades on either side of the opening of the In 1975 the reform of family law finally granted equal rights to both Libreria, written as a collective history, an analysis and a weaving spouses, while abortion was ratified in 1978. The public debates that together of individual voices and tales. preceded the decriminalisation of ‘the interruption of pregnancy’ The practice of autocoscienza, started in the US and amplified in granted mainstream visibility to many feminist issues, but they Europe by the French group Psychanalyse et politique before being

preceding pages Claire Fontaine, Pretend to be dead, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Roberto Apa. Courtesy the artist and T293, Rome

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above Alex Martinis Roe, A story from Circolo della rosa (still), 2014, HD video, 8 min 18 sec.

Courtesy the artist

taken up by Rivolta Femminile and others, was an attempt to look resigned from her managerial position. Then there was the exodus closely at the relationships between women and men, women and from the extraparliamentary groups: women left Lotta Continua, Il women, mothers and daughters, and to overcome aggression, Manifesto, and others left Potere Operaio. There was a famous headmutism and recrimination by finding new words to voice one’s self. line in the newspaper Il Manifesto: “And the feminist walks out”. It ‘Autocoscienza is not something you learn,’ the group wrote. ‘It’s a can’t be ignored that, in order to affirm female practice, it was necesdiscovery. It’s a birth, you feel as if you have found the key to solve sary to sever ties with male politics. See, I think this is still an interall your knots, to walk differently in life… You have to come to terms esting position, even nowadays.’ with your own fragility, the needs you didn’t acknowledge, the diffiA step forward, now. The Libreria delle Donne, relocated to Milan’s culty of facing the world differently, without masks. And if you don’t Via Pietro Calvi, is still open, and has expanded its spaces and fields do it, you go backwards. You can’t stand still, you know, so it’s either of operation: it is a bookshop with more than 7,500 works by 3,700 ahead or backwards, with the main difference that now you know it.’ women writers, a publisher and a library, while the Circolo della Rosa Let’s take a step backwards. When in 1970 Serena Castaldi, who next door hosts meetings, readings and a canteen. In 2001, Corrado had recently relocated to Milan from Levi proposed that one of the windows New York, initiated the collective on the street be dedicated to visual art.

Lonzi didn’t feel able to speak freely, Anabasi, the first meetings of women The programme was coordinated by as the other members were deferring focused on affectivity and reciprocity, Donatella Franchi from 2006 to 2015, to her words and because she rejected intimacy and the quality of communiwhen a new cycle curated by Francesca Pasini began: contemporary female cation. In 1972 Lonzi left the group that the hierarchies this seemed to entail artists were invited to use the showcase she had helped to catalyse because she didn’t feel able to speak freely, as the other members were deferring to express their relationship to art, books, women and ideas. to her words – which they treated too reverently – and because she In the meantime, feminism has continued to evolve towards rejected the hierarchies this seemed to entail. She continued to edit intersectionality, witches are back in fashion and #MeToo recently the books published by Rivolta Femminile, which in 1978 released repositioned sexuality, gendered and transgendered bodies, violence her famous Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista (Shut up, or rather and the social construction of guilt and power structures at the core speak. Diary of a feminist), an extended, deeply personal reflection of mainstream communication. If retrograde words, attitudes and upon subjectivity, speaking up, being silenced, choosing silence as forms of aggression keep seeming to return from the past to the present, then so too can the lessons of the Libreria delle Donne. As opposition and the radical powers of language.

The issue of ‘cutting ties’ was recursive. As Lia Cigarini explains Lonzi has written, ‘Man always postponed the solution to an ideal in an interview with Chiara Marcucci about her involvement with the future of humanity, but it does not exist. Instead we can reveal Libreria, ‘A few used the expression “exodus”. Carla Lonzi stopped present humanity, that is, ourselves.’ ar being an art critic; Carla Accardi, who was an important painter, for a while stopped participating in exhibitions; Daniela Pellegrini Barbara Casavecchia is a writer and curator based in Milan

Alex Martinis Roe, A story from Circolo della rosa (still), 2014, HD video, 8 min 18 sec. Courtesy the artist

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A House of One’s Own What a pioneering programme at Cal Arts teaches us about collaborative education

by Lauren Elkin

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When the studio space promised by Cal Arts to the newly founded but to the renown of the atelier. Art has historically been social, and Feminist Art Program wasn’t ready at the start of the 1971–72 academic gendered: the master artist was always a he, as were his students; year, the teachers and students on the program decided to improvise. women were barred from the apprenticeship system. Womanhouse Between November and January, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and was an attempt to pioneer a new pedagogy: collaborative, nonhierarthe artists on their course took over a dilapidated Hollywood mansion, chical, feminist. restored it and turned it into a collaborative workshop and gallery. The Yet the power relations structuring the interactions within a space they named Womanhouse opened to the public at the end of collaborative are highly charged, and there was a fair amount of fricJanuary and was visited by 10,000 people over the next four weeks. tion within Womanhouse. Some of the participants thought Chicago Womanhouse was the subject of much condescending coverage in and Schapiro were imposing their own agenda on them; these the press, with the LA Times calling it ‘cheerful and disarming as a pack students had come to Cal Arts to do their own work, and instead found of laughing schoolgirls under a porcelain sky’. It is difficult to recon- themselves learning to use power tools to restore a house. The work cile that verdict with documentary images of the exhibition: in Judy was all-consuming: eight hours a day painting, plastering and wallChicago’s Menstruation Bathroom, papering, fixing broken winSome of the participants thought Chicago and dows, restoring floors, building a bin overflowed with bloody tampons; in the house’s theatre, partitions. One participant, Mira Schapiro were imposing their own agenda on the living room, two women Schor, would later call it ‘a boot them; these students had come to Cal Arts to do bearing a giant cock and overcamp of feminism’ in an intertheir own work, and instead found themselves view with Paula Harper, the art size cunt argued over whose job it was to do the dishes (‘Stu-upid, historian who had first proposed learning to use power tools to restore a house your cunt/pussy/gash/hole or to Chicago and Schapiro that whatever it is, is round like a dish. Therefore it’s only right for you they rent a space and turn it into a women’s art project. Wilding recalled to wash dishes’). In one of two works collectively titled Maintenance, having to ‘get there at 8am, work until lunch, then a meeting or CR Sandra Orgel very slowly ironed a large sheet; later in the night Chris [consciousness raising] or a big fight over lunch, then work again until Rush would come out and scrub the floor. There was a ‘Womb Room’ everybody had to go home’. At night they would reconvene to work (officially titled Crocheted Environment), filled with Faith Wilding’s on the performances or to ‘sew pillows for the performance space or to massive web of rope and yarn, and a kitchen by Robin Weltsch and work on bread dough for the dining room food piece. I was never home Vicki Hodgetts whose walls and ceilings were dotted with stencilled for three months – that was Womanhouse.’ fried eggs, suggestively titled Eggs to Breasts.

Chicago would write some of her students off as overprivileged, This combination of site-specific work, performance and instal- with no sense of the sheer manual labour it takes to be an artist or the lation unabashedly made women’s experiences the subject of art. importance of collaboration for female artists at a time when women It was also an ambitious attempt to democratise art education and were just starting to claim a space in the artworld. She wanted to instil artmaking, a utopian feminist project now the inspiration for an a work ethic in these young artists, to disabuse them of the notion exhibition titled Women House (perhaps to skirt the pesky accusations that the artist enters her studio and creates masterpieces by the light of essentialism that have dogged criticism of the original project), of the muse. She wanted, in a word, to give her students a commuwhich opened at the Monnaie nity. ‘A model based on work and Chicago wanted to instil a work ethic in these de Paris in late 2017 and transprofessional learning’, she said to Harper, ‘can transcend the ferred to the National Museum young artists, to disabuse them of the notion personal, which is where many of Women in the Arts in that the artist enters her studio and creates women’s groups get bogged Washington, DC, in March. But masterpieces by the light of the muse.

She wanted, there were flaws in the concepdown.’ Where her own project got tion of the original project that ‘bogged down’, she claimed, was in a word, to give her students a community led to friction between its parin issues of class. Where her stuticipants, and from today’s perspective it functions as a case study dents in the women-only programme that Chicago had led at Fresno of the relationship between the individual artist and the collective, State College the year before were mainly working- and middle-class, the new girls, students at a private art institution, ‘resented’ the work and of feminist collectives more generally.

‘Art is social’, the sociologist Howard Becker reminds us, ‘a form they were being asked to do. ‘They didn’t think they should have to of collective action’. This applies even in the case of artists who sign work regular hours. They wanted to just work when they wanted to. their work individually but are supported by other artists (in the form And they resented me. And they resented Mimi [Schapiro]. And there of apprentices or assistants). It is built into the very transmission of was a whole lot of struggle. But some of it was creative struggle.’ Yet art: the workshop was for a long time the dominant educational Chicago doesn’t address the conflicts of interest the project provoked; model for young artists, in which to triumph was to make work that a school cannot become a collective as easily as that. the older artist would sign. That history continues in the studio pracFor all of these frictions, Womanhouse generated important pedatice of artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, though whether gogical techniques and processes that constitute valuable contributhese more closely resemble educational institutions tions to art education. Brainstorming took place as a preceding pages Sandra Orgel, Ironing or factories is moot. The trainee artist’s individual group, by ‘going round the circle’ to build on an idea, from Womanhouse, 1972, performance. labour was understood as contributing not only to Courtesy Through the Flower Archives, an image, a story. The ideas for the rooms were generhis personal advancement or the success of his master ated this way, as the women opened up about their Penn State University Archives

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Faith Wilding and Jan Lester, Cock and Cunt Play from Womanhouse, 1972, performance. © Judy Chicago. Courtesy Though the Flower Archives, Penn State University Archives

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Judy Chicago, Menstruation Bathroom from Womanhouse, 1972. © the artist. Courtesy Through the Flower Archives, Penn State University Archives

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Faith Wilding, Crocheted Environment from Womanhouse, 1972. Courtesy Through the Flower Archives, Penn State University Archives

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experiences with domesticity. The texts for the performances were drafted as a group, and while some students had their own rooms to ‘decorate’, others collaborated in such a way that it was not clear who had contributed what.

Chicago and Schapiro were not alone in believing it was crucially important for female artists to band together: groups like Women Artists in Revolution and the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists organised protests against their exclusion from group shows. Given that women have not been afforded the same opportunities for self-expression in the visual arts – that they have not been fostered or recognised as artists in the way that men have – they wanted to provide students with the kind of positive reinforcement and support that would enable their creativity to ‘flow’.

For all that it was politically inflected and content-driven, the work has attracted more than a few charges of essentialism; given its emphasis on middle-class domesticity, Womanhouse reflected the cultural fetishisation of a particular kind of woman (probably white, probably heterosexual); it did not represent a model for all womankind. Such a project would truly be utopian; there is no one place that could ever be all homes to all women. Instead, Womanhouse employed manual labour usually

coded as male in order to problematise ideas of women’s labour, within the larger context of a radical art programme empowering female artists to problematise the idea of who can be an artist. So many hurdles to women’s declaring themselves artists derive from the cultural assumption that they should be at home, performing (unpaid) domestic labour.

Womanhouse calls this into question, not through propaganda, but through the process by which it came into being.

Far from promoting an essentialist vision of the kind of art that women make, Chicago and Schapiro built a programme that instead recognised the importance of giving women a space in which to develop a sense of themselves as artists. Schapiro wrote of hoping to teach the ‘ego strength [the students] will need in order to survive as artists in our society’ in a 1971 issue of Everywoman. But in this case they were asked to forego their egos in service of the larger project, and it is understandable that the collective seemed threatening to young artists trying to define themselves in a hostile professional environment. It points to a key feminist dilemma: do women want to be accepted on the same terms as men – terms set by men themselves – or do they want to scramble the rules and create a new game?

For untried, untested undergraduates, the former seemed a safer bet.

Nil Yalter, Topak Ev, 1973, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Vehbi Koç Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul

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According to those who took part in it, the Feminist Art Program was trying to break down the hierarchies of traditional art pedagogy, from the atelier to the academy, and the whole value system it kept in place: in terms of professionalism, the elevation of art over craft, the distinction between popular culture and high art. But the problem with building this kind of collective in the context of an art school is that no matter how experimental the pedagogy, the teachers are still there because they have some expertise to impart to the students, who pay for the privilege. The school cannot be a true collective as long this imbalance of power exists, based on the payment of money in exchange for services.

The touring Women House exhibition, which I visited at the Monnaie de Paris, is more curator-driven than collective, featuring the work of established names like Louise Bourgeois, Nikki de Saint Phalle and Claude Cahun. Still, as I walked through it, I thought that perhaps the power of the Womanhouse concept lies not only in its collective roots, but in the interchangeability of the women who occupy it. The house itself is a potential space that women can occupy politely, the way they’ve been groomed to, or they can get out their power tools and rebuild it from the ground up. There’s a whole

history of women’s artwork across media using domestic space to challenge the way we inhabit it, and the way we think about habitation in general: Francesca Woodman’s Space2 (1975–78), Nil Yalter’s Topak Ev (1973) or Monica Bonvicini’s Hausfrau Swinging (1997).

According to the descriptions on the Womanhouse website, it was the dining room that ‘represented a greater collaborative effort than any other room in the house’. Beth Bachenheimer, Sherry Brody, Karen LeCocq, Robin Mitchell, Schapiro and Wilding came together to create it, sewing, painting, baking and building a table. It seems appropriate that the most collaborative work in this collective experiment was a room celebrating conviviality and the breaking of bread. Chicago is not credited as having been involved in this room, yet it seems a precursor to her Dinner Party (1974–79): a feast laid for a phantom group of historically important women who haven’t shown up yet, but still might. ar Lauren Elkin is a writer based in Paris Women House is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, through 28 May

Laurie Simmons, Woman Opening Refrigerator / Milk in the Middle, 1978, cibachrome print, 9 × 13 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York

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Artist or Martyr?

The life and legacy of Ana Mendieta

by Rosanna Mclaughlin

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1976, colour photograph, 51 × 41 cm. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, Paris & New York

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Ana Mendieta, Body Tracks, 1974, colour photograph, 25 × 20 cm. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, Paris & New York

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‘Stop glamorising violent men! Where the fuck is Ana Mendieta? delusions of grandeur. Andre’s defence argued that Mendieta’s ‘fiery NEVER FORGET… CARL ANDRE KILLED ANA MENDIETA.’ So read Latin temperament’, and her interest in the Afro-Caribbean practice a cardboard placard, decorated with teardrops and a portrait of of Santería, was evidence of a suicidal disposition. Guilty, of racial Andre with a Pinocchio nose, at a protest outside the opening of Tate stereotyping. The case against Andre was so hamstrung by police procedural errors as to make prosecution almost impossible. Guilty, Modern’s Switch House in 2016.

When Ana Mendieta fell from the window of the apartment of belonging to a group who routinely avoid censure for domestic she shared with Carl Andre in 1985, in the midst of a drunken argu- abuse. Yet found not guilty of second-degree murder. ment, her death cleaved the New York art community in two. Many In New York, 1992, a few hundred people turned up outside refused to believe that an artist preparing for her first solo institu- the Guggenheim SoHo to protest the exhibition of Andre’s work, tional show, at the New Museum, had committed suicide; nor did among them Mendieta’s friends. It would be over 20 years before the they think it feasible that she might have fallen accidentally. Others second protest occurred, organised by the artist Christen Clifford and accepted Andre’s acquittal in court, believing that the continued spurred on by the opening of an international touring exhibition accusations of murder were designed to serve a feminist agenda. of Andre’s work, Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010, that debuted The unsatisfactory official verdict did little to quell the discord, and at Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2014. Clifford is too young to have the case continues to prove divisive. Judge Alvin Schlesinger, the known Mendieta personally, but she feels a close affinity to her work. man responsible for the decision in a bench trial, later admitted that Over the phone she told me that, as a young woman, she had realthough Andre ‘probably did it’, there were no grounds to rule out enacted some of Mendieta’s Siluetas – outlines of her body, dug out reasonable doubt. In the decades since, in place of closure, the couple of ice, mud and sand, filled with blood, set on fire, left to dissolve have become the protagonists in a macabre artworld legend, with beneath the tide and the sun. Clifford stumbled across a number of Mendieta playing the role of Cuban exile and martyr-on-high and articles published in the run-up to the opening at Dia, all of which Andre the white male bogeyman. framed Andre in a positive light. Her The protest at Tate Modern was thought process went something To turn a dead woman into a martyr is carried out in response to the inclulike this. ‘Wait, isn’t this the guy who to turn her story into your own, and to sion of Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966) killed Ana Mendieta?’ followed by, view Mendieta only through the lens of in the new building’s inaugural dis‘Why is no one saying anything?’ play. It was organised by a cohort of On a May evening, a small group victimhood is to risk repeating her erasure artists and activists who have taken gathered outside Dia: Chelsea wearup Mendieta’s death as an emblem of the abuse of women, particu- ing white, forensic-style overalls. Clifford unfurled a banner bearing larly women of colour, and who accuse institutions of condoning the words ‘I WISH ANA MENDIETA WAS STILL ALIVE’, and a bag of this systemic abuse whenever they choose to exhibit work made by chicken guts was deposited on the pavement – a reference to Mendieta’s husband and (as they maintain) killer. In an article for Mendieta’s early videowork Moffitt Building Piece (1973), for which she Artslant, Liv Wynter, the organiser of the protest – who in March left a pool of blood on the pavement in Iowa City and filmed the reacpublicly resigned from her role as one of four artists-in-residence with tions of passersby while hidden in the back of a car. The second protest the schools workshop programme at Tate Modern following inju- took place the following March, inside Andre’s exhibition at Dia: dicious comments by director Maria Balshaw about sexual harass- Beacon. Clifford and a handful of friends staged a cry-in, sobbing by ment – alluded to the manner in which Mendieta’s story has become Andre’s sculptures, until they were escorted off the premises by secua proxy for wider issues. ‘My motive was basically to make noise, to rity. Outside they made Siluetas in the snowbanks and embellished remember our sister who has passed, and to demand acknowledge- them with fake blood. ment for how many murderers and abusers, most of whom are white The protests also proved divisive. ‘When I first heard about the protests in New York, I’ll admit I rolled my eyes in disdain,’ the men, occupy these galleries.’

Murder is not the only offence of which Andre is popularly accused. scholar Jane Blocker wrote in Culture Criticism. ‘The protest at Beacon Some of the charges are more unflattering than illegal, others pertain seemed similarly silly – crocodile tears manufactured for the occasion to the transgressions of his demographic, but all add to the prevailing by people who, judging from the photo documentation of the event, appetite for retribution: Andre was lauded among the greatest sculp- weren’t even alive, let alone grieving, in 1985 when Mendieta died.’ tors of his generation at a time when the work of women was routinely The artist and curator Coco Fusco, who knew Mendieta briefly in life, absent from museums and galleries. Guilty, of gender privilege. He had a similarly caustic response to Mendieta’s posthumous canonitold the emergency services operator that Mendieta ‘went out the sation. ‘The people who can’t separate her from Carl Andre and from window’ following an argument about his greater fame; a detective her untimely death’, she wrote to me, ‘are obsessed with constructing later told the writer Robert Katz that, when he arrived at the scene, female experience as victimisation. They are not concerned with her Andre produced a catalogue of his work to show him. Guilty, of art or her life, only with capitalising on her death to justify fantasies

facing page, top Ana Mendieta, Moffitt Building Piece (still), 1973, Super 8 film transferred to HD digital media, colour, silent, 3 min 17 sec. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, Paris & New York

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facing page, bottom Chicken blood and guts spilled by the No Wave Performance Task Force in front of Dia Art Foundation, New York, to protest Carl Andre retrospective, May 2014. Courtesy Christen Clifford

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Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1977, colour photograph, 51 × 41 cm. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, Paris & New York

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Ana Mendieta, Alma, Silueta en Fuego, 1975, Super 8 transferred to high-definition digital media, colour, silent, 3 min 7 sec. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, Paris & New York

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that are neither empowering nor politically sound.’ (Wynter’s recent apartment are described in bone-splitting detail. Following the resignation from Tate would unlikely alter Fusco’s position. In an protest, I contacted Stupart to enquire about the resurgent interest in email circulated to the press offering herself for interview, Wynter the case. ‘The abject, Cuban, bleeding, traumatised body and her work comes uncomfortably close to taking credit for Mendieta’s stature: is literally murdered by Andre and his minimalist utopian yawn‘Within months’ of the protests she organised, she wrote, ‘Ana’s work fest, and I think every time his work is shown, that happens again’, was being celebrated, leading onto many film screenings and spot- they replied, exchanging Mendieta’s name for a gendered and racial lights on her – this happened as a direct response to the two protests.’) description of her body at death.

‘Oi Tate, we’ve got a vendetta,’ the crowd shouted, banging on the Fusco and Blocker are ardent and intelligent advocates of Mendieta’s work, who acknowledge the likelihood of Andre’s guilt. glass windows at the private view, ‘where the fuck is Ana Mendieta?’

They are not women whose opinions are easy to dismiss. Blocker ends One of the ironies of this history: if protesters have taken up the her essay on a conciliatory note, accepting that the protesters’ tears mantle of ensuring Mendieta’s work is not forgotten, with regard to may well be genuine, yet it occurred to me that both the protesters the market and institutional representation, it’s not clear that they and their critics were right – a reality typical of the era, in which virtue needed to. ‘Ana Mendieta suffered during life from being underand self-interest are not easily parsed. The legal system’s ineffectual valued, not after her death,’ Coco Fusco wrote to me. ‘She has become record of prosecuting domestic violence must be scrutinised, as must a kind of postmodern Frida Kahlo. She has not been overlooked at all – the precedent for facilitating abusive men. But to turn a dead woman on the contrary, she is one of the few Latin American women artists of into a martyr is to turn her story into your own, and to view Mendieta her era who is widely known and exhibited.’ Her work is included in only through the lens of victimhood is to risk repeating her erasure.

57 public collections, in the US, Latin America, Europe and Australia, I am cautious of the expectation that a protest be perfect because collections that include the Guggenheim and Tate, the same instiit risks overshadowing the very reason it has mobilised. When tutions where protests decrying her absence have been held. When conservative estimates suggest 35 percent of women globally have Mendieta died, she was yet to have a single museum show. been assaulted by a male partner or The death of a beautiful woman, ex-partner, it seems unwise to tear In an artworld willing to congratulate itself wrote Edgar Allan Poe, ‘is unquesdown the house because we object for championing overlooked and maligned tionably the most poetical topic in to the colour of the walls. A deadly the world’, a sentiment shared by women, we must also acknowledge the war is being waged against women, artists from John Everett Millais to possibility that we may be complicit in a in which the legal system has shown David Lynch. The spectacle of female itself an ally to the aggressor, and it collective type of abuse, in which the ideal death has long been a defining culis in response to these bleak conditural feature, and Mendieta’s postwoman artist is dead or close to dying tions that Wynter and Clifford felt humous CV may reveal an uncomcompelled to act. (‘Of course I wish she didn’t have to be a victim,’ fortable truth. In an artworld willing to congratulate itself for chamClifford put it. ‘How much better if she were still alive.’) Nevertheless, pioning overlooked and maligned women, we must also acknowlI felt a growing unease at the repurposing of imagery from Mendieta’s edge – as curators, viewers, writers, collectors, dealers and protesters oeuvre as a means of symbolising her victimhood. Moffitt Building – the possibility that we may be complicit in a collective type of Piece – echoed in the dumping of guts outside Dia: Chelsea – shows abuse, in which the ideal woman artist is dead or close to dying.

Mendieta at her most complexly voyeuristic. Passersby are shown How to remember Mendieta, without viewing her practice solely blood, but without a body, and with no way of ascertaining cause or through the lens of her death? How to mourn her without objectifyeffect. To confuse the blood of Mendieta’s work with the blood of her ing her? ‘Feminism is not served by turning violence into a litany’, death is to overshadow its particular cosmology of meaning – the writes Jacqueline Rose in ‘Feminism and the Abomination of Violence’ metaphysical reckoning with her status as a Cuban exile, the desire (2016). ‘Such strategy does not help us to think… violence against to manipulate and overwhelm audiences – which add to its peculiar women is a crime of the deepest thoughtlessness. It is a sign that the emotional charge. As Maggie Nelson writes in The Art of Cruelty (2011), mind has brutally blocked itself.’ In response, Rose urges us to think.

‘You can’t toss it in the ghetto of feminist protest art and ignore its Think enough, to disentangle the cultural fascination with female victimhood from the fight against misogyny. Think enough, so that more aggressive, borderline sadistic motivations and effects.’

By the time the protests spread to London in 2016, the mood we do not only see women as broken and damaged, even as we cannot had grown angry, and increasingly morbid. Participants arrived in ignore the breaking and damaging done. Think enough, so that any funeral attire, and later returned with arms dipped in red paint, a violence done to Mendieta does not brutally block our ability to see reference to Mendieta’s performance Body Tracks, in which she drags her work for what it was. Occasionally sadistic, mesmerisingly narcisher blood-drenched arms down a canvas – again, the blood of her sistic, deeply ambitious and utterly beguiling. ar work mingled with the blood of her death. A pamphlet handed out that day contained a piece of writing by the artist Linda Stupart, in Rosanna Mclaughlin is a writer and editor. In 2017 she was a TAARE which the details of Mendieta’s fatal fall from the window of Andre’s resident with the British Council Caribbean

facing page Protesters march towards Tate Modern, London, demanding the removal of a work by Carl Andre from Tate’s new collection display, June 2016. Photo: Charlotte Bell

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June 14 – 17, 2018 Photograph taken at Kunstmuseum Basel

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Please recall that a small dagger or knife point can pierce a great, bulging sack and that a small fly can attack a great lion and speedily put him to flight 81

Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 Fondazione Prada, Milan 18 February – 25 June Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 is an art-historical tour de force.

It aims at reconstructing the conditions in which Italian art was produced and experienced during the years that saw the rise and fall of Futurism and Fascism – movements strongly linked since Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto, which exalted ‘war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman’. With over 600 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photos, posters and architectural plans on display, the exhibition is the result of two years of meticulous research carried out by curator Germano Celant and a small army of associate curators, researchers and contributors, involving loans from hundreds of public and private collections and archives.

A jam-packed list of acknowledgments features in the accompanying 660-page, encyclopaedic publication, which I mention here because the show finds Celant demonstrating, primarily, his authority as exhibition-maker. With this ambitious historical survey, Fondazione Prada consolidates its scope of operations, further expanded by the imminent opening of the last segment (a giant tower) of its lavish OMA/AMO-designed premises.

The exhibition adopts a strict protocol: its structure and contents are based on photographic and documentary evidence, so that not only the individual artwork but the historical context of its production, display, promotion, circulation and spectatorship are exposed.

This recalls the ‘circumstantial paradigm’ introduced by Carlo Ginzburg in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (first Italian edition, 1986), equating the methodology of art historians with that of detectives, judges and psychoanalysts, so that clues and symptoms ‘permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable, reality’. And, Post Zang… reveals, Italy’s reality between the two wars

was not a pretty one. By focusing on art’s ‘return to order’, as well as its contributory role in Fascist propaganda, this exhibition also discloses the conformism of state-funded artists, critics and academics; the economic mechanisms regulating the relations between arts, craft, industry; and the public’s willingness to participate in a Fascist ‘aestheticisation of politics’, as Walter Benjamin would have it.

The exhibition’s layout, designed by New York-based studio 2 × 4, mirrors the curatorial perspective to the letter. Enlarging dozens of documentary pictures to architectural proportions, as black-and-white wallpapers, it inserts viewers ‘into’ the original rooms (of museums, biennales, galleries, private houses, artists’ studios), with the artworks repositioned accordingly. The immersive effect is uncannily akin to augmented reality. One room after the other, one travels through exhibitions marked by individual figures and strong works: the impressive, expressionist marble sculptures of Adolfo Wildt at the 1922 Venice Biennale, the algid and magical portraits

by Turinese Felice Casorati (supported by liberal ‘cultural agitator’ Piero Gobetti, arrested, beaten and forced into exile in Paris, where he died in 1926, and by industrialist and collector Riccardo Gualino, condemned to confinement in 1931) at the 1924 edition; Giacomo Balla’s aggressively militant paintings at the Futurist exhibition at the 3rd Rome Biennale (1925) and Fortunato Depero’s textile mosaics at the Venice Biennale a year later; the Milanese group show of Novecento Italiano in 1926 (Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Anselmo Bucci, Luigi Malerba, Leonardo Dudreville, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi), whose cult of ‘Italianness’ is theorised by art critic (and Mussolini’s lover) Margherita Sarfatti.

Meanwhile, the Venice Biennale offers a crucial stage to the paintings of Carlo Carrà and terracotta sculptures of Arturo Martini (1928), as well as to the sinister monumentality of Mario Sironi’s paintings (1932). One arresting

moment is the rendering (in the cavernous basement of the new tower) of the 1932 blockbuster Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution held in Rome, which attracted almost four million visitors and revenues equivalent to €5.6 million.

The pictures of the original 19 theme-based rooms are video-projected on huge bannerlike screens, so that the bombastic grandeur of the show is reenacted with chilling accuracy.

Room after room, the uneasiness grows, or at least mine did. With notable exceptions – paintings by Carlo Levi and Aligi Sassu (both arrested), Fausto Melotti’s abstract sculptures, Marino Marini’s nonheroic cavaliers, Corrado Cagli’s painful sketches – the exhibition mimics the increasingly claustrophobic cultural climate of Fascist Italy and the increasingly decorative, conventional and rhetorical subjects of Italian art. Women, for instance, are obsessively depicted as mothers, in line with the regime’s regulation of women’s rights and reproductive role. A monumental curtain, featuring an image of the first group show organised in Genoa, in 1945, after liberation, marks the end of the exhibition, as if a way out were finally possible.

Given the current political climate in Italy, where populist and neo-fascist parties emerged as winners from the most recent general election, I kept asking myself why the role of reconstructing the ideological context of a regime – one that brainwashed its population, brought it to war, imposed colonial domination upon Ethiopia, Libya and Albania, promulgated racial laws, killed members of parliament, silenced dissidents and condemned to deportation and death thousands of people – is entrusted only to the detailed chronology that accompanies viewers along their path, with no obvious critical narrative. Visual and documentary evidence and erudite catalogue essays are all very well, but may not be an effective cure for the collective amnesia that seems to afflict our present as much as our past. Barbara Casavecchia

facing page, both images Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

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The State is not a Work of Art Tallinn Art Hall 16 February – 29 April “This is shit,” the man in the ski jacket spat. “It’s fucking propaganda.” A moment earlier he had burst into the gallery and demanded I tell him what the charcoal drawings I was looking at were about. “Er…,” I said hesitantly, “They each depict an arson attack made on a building in which asylum seekers were housed.” It became evident that ski-jacket-man thought I was the artist.

“I could fill this room with drawings of attacks made by immigrants on Swedes. Why don’t you show that?” “Really?” I asked. “Yes,” the man said, adding, by way of curious evidence, “I’m Swedish.” With that, he stormed back out into a Baltic snowstorm, shouting over his shoulder, “You’re a communist. A dirty fucking Trot.”

Thomas Kilpper’s Burnout (2016–17) is one of the more forceful works in this group show, curated by Katerina Gregos, which takes as its focus the nation-state, nationhood as a cultural construct and the rise of nationalism, and occurs in the centenary of the Estonian republic. Naturally, such a subject leads to questions of who is welcome (or made to feel welcome) in a country, and who is not (who is ‘of the culture’, and who is not). At its best the exhibition delves into this thorny topic with considerable nuance; at worst, it hectors.

In the latter category, Daniela Ortiz’s ABC of Racist Europe (2017) is a series of 26 collages with accompanying captions. ‘A’, for example, is for this: ‘The airplanes that white European tourists

take on their holiday are used for the deportations of racialized migrants and asylum seekers’.

‘M’ is for the Mediterranean, and so on, each of the Peruvian-born, Barcelona-based artist’s instalments proving angrier and more condescending in their political simplicity than the last. It makes me wonder about the work’s intent: I get that Europe has a lot to feel guilty about, but these are just Woke-101 bullet points.

Loulou Cherinet’s two-channel video Statecraft (2017) also riffs on immigration, but removes the singular voice of the artist (which holds a place of privilege in a gallery) and addresses the subject through members of the (Swedish) public. In a series of discussion circles, featuring a multitude of political standpoints, the concepts of innanförskap (‘insidership’) and utanförskap (‘outsidership’) are interrogated.

We hear both from migrants who wish but are denied innanförskap (even if they have become Swedish citizens ) and from those resistant to immigration. The thoughtfulness demonstrated in these conversations is in stark contrast to Ortiz’s grandstanding, as the speakers wrangle with the importance of having a national identity and the implicit discrimination that comes with it. This is echoed in Jonas Staal’s ambitious, ongoing New Unions conferences, represented here through video documentation presented in a room carpeted with a map of Europe, in which representatives of various

independence movements (from the Scottish National Party to a Kurdish solidarity group) come together to discuss methods of transnational solidarity, and how nationalism can be radical, socially liberal and outward-looking.

The exhibition, its title an inversion of art historian Jacob Burckhardt’s maxim, is evenhanded in its profiling of what might be termed, respectively, positive insidership and toxic insidership (for his part, Burckhardt would see both as suffocating modes of control). Vexillology (2015), 211 photographs found on the Internet

by Cristina Lucas, of football fans decked out in the colours of their national teams, demonstrate instances of the former approach; so does Jaanus Samma’s investigation into the Estonian folk culture lost under the Soviet occupation (embodied through a display of traditional straw costumes and archive photographs of them in use). Conversely, there’s Szabolcs KissPál’s From Fake Mountains to Faith (Hungarian Triology) (2016), a faux museum-display that traces the folkloric myths currently being deployed in Hungarian extreme nationalism. My ski-jacketed pal might have liked, without irony, the relics on show in KissPál’s work – I can imagine him waxing lyrical on the mystical significance of the Turul bird to his political brethren in Hungary – but he’s never going to be persuaded from his poisonous path by the majority of the works here, propaganda or not. Oliver Basciano

Thomas Kilpper, Burnout, 2016–17, series of drawings, charcoal on paper, dimensions variable. Photo: Karel Koplimets. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin & Cologne, and Tallinn Art Hall

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ArtReview

Maria Thereza Alves Seeds of Change: New York – A Botany of Colonization Galerie Michel Rein, Paris 10 February – 31 March Before the advent of steel ships and the widespread introduction of water pumps in the mid-twentieth century, heavy materials such as earth, sand, rocks and rubble were used by merchant vessels as ballast to counterbalance the weight of their cargoes and crews. So that boats could take on more freight, this ballast waste was dumped at foreign ports, where it would be reused as landfill. Exotic plants from all over the world flourished on these grounds, altogether altering the landscape.

Including an ensemble of 22 paintings, texts and maps, this exhibition is the latest iteration of Maria Thereza Alves’s project Seeds of Change (1999–), which she first undertook in the European seaports of Marseilles, Reposaari, Dunkirk, Topsham, Liverpool and Bristol, before travelling across the Atlantic in November 2017 to stage the exhibition at the New School, New York. Through longterm research, the Berlin-based Brazilian artist seeks to unravel the tortuous history of migration during the colonial era by tracking plant species accidentally introduced to new lands through the discharge of ballast water and sediments.

Upon entering the show, viewers are introduced to the topographical singularities of New York with Traces from the Past: Some

Ballast Material and Flora (all works 2017).

Sketched in ink and watercolour, this map highlights all the neighbourhoods from Brooklyn to the Bronx where ballast soil and flora can be found, making clear that much of Manhattan was erected on ships’ discarded materials. Displayed next to it, the four watercolours of Alves’s series Ballast Indicators illustrate, in the typical botanic style, common weeds that still grow out of pavement cracks all over the city yet are native to Eurasia or Africa. Hanging loosely against the walls in the main exhibition space, six untitled acrylic and ink paintings on linen further represent delicate floral imprints or, as I see them, ensigns. Alves used wildflowers as brushes to realise them – including the Eurasian dandelion and greater celandine, both introduced to North America through maritime trade.

Perhaps more significantly, eight short, all-caps manuscript texts on light monochromatic watercolours (abstract seascapes, if you will) each relay the artist’s disorderly account of some evidence gathered throughout her coastal investigations. Taken altogether, they divulge a truly complex correlation between silenced if not untold colonial histories.

In “Whenever people were transported”, for instance, she suggests that Caribbean coral

sand can be found in the harbour of New York because its ‘settlers preferred enslaved Africans “seasoned” in the Caribbean to enslaved Africans purchased directly in Angola’. She also indicates that with the cotton plantations thriving in the United States, and so much of their production shipped to Liverpool, some Irish people fleeing the Great Famine could be ‘brought listed as [live] ballast into the port of New Orleans as the rates were cheaper’. Finally, in “The Liberia”, she mentions how emancipated African Americans who left the country to found Liberia ended up enslaving the natives there, not allowing them to vote until 1963.

Wherever Alves has docked so far, Seeds of Change has led to the site-specific creation of new ballast flora gardens in a collaborative effort involving both local communities and horticultural experts. The plants cultivated and exhibited in New York are missing in the Parisian exhibition, which significantly truncates it.

The show nevertheless offers a powerful glimpse of the artist’s eco-philosophical journey, which draws suggestive parallels between displaced seeds and populations, all the while hinting at episodes of violent colonial diaspora such as, but not only, the transatlantic slave trade.

In doing so, it radically challenges fixed notions of indigenousness. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Ballast Indicator: Atriplex rosea, 2017, watercolour on paper, 30 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Michel Rein, Paris & Brussels

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Reframing Worlds – Mobility and Gender in a Postcolonial, Feminist Perspective Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin 4 November – 21 January Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK), Berlin 2 December – 21 January This two-part group exhibition of Berlin-based artists, the culmination of three years’ research by an NGBK project group of six, features a wide-ranging cast. Both sites host Mathilde ter Heijne’s ever-growing collection of photographs of anonymous women (shot between 1839 and the 1920s), made into giveaway postcards, with biographies on their versos of contemporaneous women whose progressive stories have been largely elided.

Also represented (in Katrin Winkler’s filmed interviews) are Namibian women sent as children to the GDR to escape their country’s struggles, then abruptly returned following the Berlin Wall’s fall. Included too, with their own photographic work, are such historical figures as archaeologist/writer/secret agent Gertrude Bell (1868–1926), who played a major role in the establishment of modern Iraq.

In recognition of how deeply colonialist thinking remains ingrained in structures of knowledge, the lives of women entangled, complicitly or otherwise, in colonial projects – and the artworks they have inspired – are here linked to the question of how feminism operates across cultures today. These are timely issues, finding resonance in recent cases: eg the removal of journalist Rokhaya Diallo from the French digital council after pressure mounted against her counter-stance to dictates from the ‘colour-blind’ state, namely the ‘burka ban’. With this in mind, an exhibition about mobility, race and gender in so-called postcolonial Europe feels more like a marker than an endpoint, and part of an ongoing discussion that must necessarily breach the realms of art and academia.

This has been somewhat addressed in staging Reframing Worlds not only at Kreuzberg’s NGBK but also at Galerie im Körnerpark, a former orangerie in a neobaroque park (built between 1912 and 1916) in the backstreets of Neukölln, the southeastern borough famous for Berlin’s highest density of immigrants and ‘ex-pat’ creatives (note the colonial mindset behind that customary discrepancy in terminology).

Here it is more likely that local residents from all walks of life may come into contact with an exhibition whose title does, admittedly, reflect a tendency in certain factions of the German artworld to make everything sound like a PhD thesis.

Meanwhile, the artworks in this long, high-ceilinged gallery are arranged with a touch of degree-show awkwardness (rather shy of the imperial space in how they hug the walls), or are crowded down the far end.

There is room, nevertheless, to stand back and feel the returned stare of Rajkamal Kahlon’s Do You Know Our Names? (2017), mixed-media portraits reworking prints of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ethnographic photographs that sought to codify ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ features. Kahlon applies gouache to the prints, a medium that evokes antiquarian ethnographic studies.

Painting here becomes a form of manually engaged care-work, reimagining, updating: bands across a woman’s mouth, equally suggesting a muzzle or sinister measuring methods, are formally echoed in a multistranded necklace, and again in the red stripes of a ready-for-the-office blouse (Kahlon’s

facing page, top Katrin Winkler, Towards Memory (still), 2016, two-channel video installation, 32 min. Courtesy the artist

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addition), the type found in any modern high-street shop (where the necklace could also easily appear, its ‘ethnic’ origins a distant point).

Works in the similarly cavernous though more neutral NGBK are given room to breathe yet also converse. Judith Raum’s pastel-toned paintings of rubble and shards, set on the floor, scan like fragments responding to Gertrude Bell’s stylistically unconventional, black-and-white field photographs of 1905–20. Taken in what would be today Syria, Turkey and Iraq, these are full of unexpected compositions and the motion of an affected witness who’d initiated her own expeditions with local guides. This in turn relates to Susanne Kriemann’s deliberate historical conflation/confusion of novelist (and archaeologist) Agatha Christie’s aerial photographs of the Syrian desert and her own photos of the region. Perhaps nobody typifies a ‘vision of Britishness’ quite like Christie, who was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971 and whose novels are filled with nasty racial slurs.

‘The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes’, she once said, with a very English kind of disingenuous self-deprecation, suggesting that, despite her success, she was still one of a legion of Little Englander housewives across the land. That she was ‘doing the dishes’ in her other, less recognised archaeological work, in deserts across the Middle East, is an example of the tensions that Reframing Worlds seeks to highlight when considering the complex intersections of feminism, race and mobility. Phoebe Blatton

facing page, bottom Rajkamal Kahlon, Do You Know Our Names? (detail), 2017, series of gouache and acrylic ink on archival digital prints, 100 × 70 cm (each). Courtesy the artist

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Anne Pöhlmann Japan Diary Clages, Cologne 19 January – 24 February The view of Japan from Europe or the US is mostly characterised by a lack of understanding concerning its completely different milieu: we like to poke our ‘long noses’ into it but inevitably end up coming adrift. Perhaps this is most beautifully portrayed through Bill Murray’s clumsy character in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), when he attends a kado flower-arranging class with Japanese ladies. It is also especially true for photography, given the numerous photographers since Robert Capa and Henri CartierBresson who have travelled Japan in order to readjust their gaze within this wholly disparate visual culture, thereby fostering a photographic Japonisme that has hardly been interested in understanding the culture portrayed.

Anne Pöhlmann’s exhibition Japan Diary, the result of a three-month artist’s residency in Kyoto, demonstrates awareness of this tradition, but at the same time wants to go beyond the productive utilisation of getting lost in the cultural gap. On their own, her photographs most likely would convey this naivety or cultural cluelessness. Yet the Dresden-born artist counters this by ingeniously interweaving her images with fabrics: the photographs, some printed on photo paper, others directly on textiles, are mounted on materials pinned straight onto the walls.

Entry #03 ferns, Kiyomizu-dera (all works 2017–18), for instance, is a closeup of several ferns, exuding a contemplative mood. As an atmospheric pic-

ture, this photo would be nothing more than a clichéd reproduction of Japan’s oh-so-enchanted nature. But Pöhlmann has printed it on black cotton, introducing a minor chord into the image. In addition, the picture is hemmed in by a perforated, equally black rubberised cotton fabric – the one often used by Raf Simons – which both frames and expands the image. The fabric’s flowing materiality and sumptuous black colour correspond beautifully to the subject: the fern grove at the Buddhist temple Kiyomizu-dera is a memorial for love – which to our ears initially sounds like a contradiction.

Studying Pöhlmann’s work, one repeatedly encounters a question concerning the material fixation of the photographic image: the background that the image sinks into also descends into the image. Correspondingly, her photographic image – and she would probably say this is true of all photographs – cannot be divorced from its materiality. Rather, it merges with the fabrics, adding layers of meaning.

The materials she uses are at the same time image carrier, frame and pictorial element, and the photographic image is by no means always the focal point of the individual works.

But, in all fairness, it must be said that her preoccupation with the mutual interpenetration of image, printing process and carrier is much more serious than the obsession with printing of a generation of Postinternet artists.

The equal distribution of fabric and textile is nicely shown in Entry #01 horsetail. This almost rectangular fabric picture consists of two horizontal bands, the upper one made from mint turquoise microfibre, the lower from worn white velvet. Recessed into the latter is a photograph printed on cotton in the style of Rinko Kawauchi. It shows some strange objects in closeup (horsetails, according to the title) lying on a purple shimmering tarpaulin. Of course the photo portrays something Pöhlmann encountered in Japan, yet here it primarily depicts the texture of the tarpaulin as an insert into an otherwise abstract picture plane, adding another grid beside the fabrics and the printed image. This is significant because you cannot help but pay as much attention to the small details of the textiles, their folds, structures and patterns, as to the photographs of Zen gardens and garden gates. We notice the abundance of details on the fabrics and the photos, but fail to get behind their respective meanings, remaining on their – admittedly wonderful – surfaces. In this respect, Pöhlmann’s diaristic Japan photos and the textiles are analogous to each other.

Fabrics are made to be worn, but first and foremost they serve to conceal. There is no better way of exhibiting the idea of a veil of incomprehension that traditionally covers the (photographic) eye of most Westerners in Japan. Moritz Scheper Translated from the German by Kevin Kennedy

Entry #03 ferns, Kiyomizu-dera, 2017–18, rubberised and perforated cotton, direct print on cotton twill, 161 × 125 cm. Courtesy the artist and Clages, Cologne

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ArtReview

Sustainable Futures Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh 8 February – 1 April The town of Cobh, the original departure point for transatlantic steamships (such as the Titanic and the Lusitania) leaving Ireland, was once known as Queenstown, after its then-ruling British monarch, Victoria. As such, it’s a frontline witness to the advances and retreats of empires and industries, a rich text on the restless networks that humans create, destroy and rewire. Sirius Arts Centre, housed in the gorgeous eighteenth-century villa built to house Royal Cork Yacht Club, is an example of what those changes have meant. On a good day its bright galleries, perched on a steep bank above the lapis slop where the River Lee becomes Cork harbour, spritz everything with Venetian radiance. But scan carefully through the windows and you’ll also see the plumes of some of Ireland’s heaviest industry, while enjoying the erratic drone and clank of earthmovers shaping the mysteriously dark soil across the bay.

Sustainable Futures, featuring four Irish artists, interests itself in this kind of picking and unpicking, especially in processes that could occur without us, but which, for the moment, are made to happen in our wake.

Even the media enlisted here have a tang of commentary, or at least hint at an awareness of the real cost of making these environmentally engaged interventions in the gallery.

Fiona Kelly seeks out ‘waste’ materials to turn them into sculpture, often with a wry humour in which monumentality engenders a smirk. So, for To Be Considered (2017) she gathers limestone dust to use as writing material, gluing it to inscribe, in roman font, an archaic word for dust across the gallery’s brilliant walls. Nearby, in The Distillation of Detritus (2017), a rubble of reconstituted concrete lozenges (inspired by Tetris bricks) develops a similar jest with different weights and measures. Méadhbh O’Connor’s Biosystem IV (2018) floats high above that fray, a series of hanging-basket-type orbs of reindeer moss, air plants and other specimens, which advertise an immense and impressively self-directed planet immune, in the long run, to our attentions.

Earth, in both senses, has literal importance in the work of Sarah Lincoln, whose ceramics play with the material’s deep-buried origins as mud, as well as its familiar reappearance as archaeological pottery finds. Skin Contact (2017) features a series of spiral-surfaced plates, some covered or half-covered in silver paint, suggesting alien artefacts uncovered during a dig on Earth, while Digit (2017), a small collection of tubes in raw terracotta, fine china, metal or bone, suggests a taxonomy of fingers, each slightly evolved (or devolved?) as though by the changing pressures of an environment whose details have been lost from the records.

David Thomas Smith’s photographic project Anthropocene – two parts of which are here, 1000 Chrysler Dr, Auburn Hills, MI, United States and Silicon Valley, CA (both 2009–10) – has the largest industrial footprint on show, offering the least sustainable practice in Sustainable Futures. Smith’s images take as rawmaterial terabytes of Google satellite images showing financially and industrially significant landscapes, which the artist digitally collages together until they form supersized abstractions, their symmetries evoking everything from MRIs of tumorous tissue to carpet patterns or polished gemstones, this latter effect heightened by a presentational medium (giclée prints mounted in liquid acrylic) that glistens almost obscenely.

Perform due diligence in your environmental accounting here, tot up the costs of the satellites, rare earth metals and petrochemicals without which these images are impossible, and any critique might already be stymied.

If, that is, the code of practice under which such work is made were settled, if it were certain that good eco-ratings made good art and that those now producing art without accounting for its planetary impact must produce its opposite.

For the moment, thankfully, impact is still being calculated in more diverse fashions.

Luke Clancy

Sustainable Futures, 2018 (installation view).

Courtesy Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh

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Ramaya Tegegne Feelings are Facts Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zürich 19 January – 10 March Ramaya Tegegne’s publishing, curating, performance and exhibition projects address the economics of art production and display and how rumour operates and communities form, and often cite other artists and artworks to do so. Borrowing its title from Yvonne Rainer’s memoir, Feelings are Facts is the Swiss artist’s first solo show in a commercial gallery, and in it she toys with the implications of this new context. Hanging from the glass door of Galerie Maria Bernheim, Business Hours (all works 2018) shows the gallery’s opening times on a standard sign manufactured for that purpose, making clear that this is a shop like any other. Shermans, meanwhile, displays items including rainbow-coloured combs, lipsticks and disposable razors fanned out on a trestle table in the manner of a low-rent retailer or beauty parlour. This inventory of the props used by Stuart Sherman in his 1994 performance Queer Spectacle seems to await reactivation by the American artist but, given that he died in 2001, must remain in limbo. Is the raw material still more than the sum of its parts today?

Mullicans consists of mirrors propped against walls around the gallery, mimicking Matt Mullican’s Bringing the light into a windowless

room and burning a leaf (1973). Where the original was situated in a dark room and used a series of mirrors to focus light on a leaf and burn it, Tegegne is working in a window-walled gallery in wintertime Zürich. Piercing rays of sunlight are rare here, and so the shrivelled leaf outside the gallery’s bathroom, where the chain ends, remains unsinged and almost overlooked.

Our Bodies Ourselves, a frieze from pages of the eponymous publication first produced in 1971 to promote women’s knowledge of, and consequent power over, their own bodies, occupies one corner of the gallery. Browned pages from an early edition contrast with others from a 1998 reissue to form a narrative that starts with a woman’s investigation of her own body, continues through relationships, sex, pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing and ageing, and culminates by addressing sexual politics and women’s rights. In isolation, the work illustrates Tegegne’s engagement with an evolving history of gender politics – seen in her reference to Sherman’s work – though not much more.

Tegegne’s strategy is to decode the DNA of recent art history and weave its strands into new combinations. In the context of an exhibition, the works cross-fertilise. Here, the propped

mirrors of Mullicans chime with the image of a woman examining her vagina using a mirror in the pages of Our Bodies…: visitors end up literally and metaphorically scrutinising themselves, forced to consider their part in this scenario. By referencing Mullican, Sherman, Gran Fury and General Idea in a site where art history, art present and economics intersect, she reminds us of how contemporary galleries have taken to mining the saleable past.

Tegegne also proves that it takes time and effort to generate the social or emotional value associated with an artist’s work, and that this cannot be conjured merely by namechecking.

Is the excerpt from Jean Carlomusto’s film L is for the Way You Look (1991) – in which a group of lesbians discuss spotting Dolly Parton – a masterclass in how ephemeral value might be produced? As the women describe, discuss, joke and fantasise about what they experienced, a narrative is constructed. It’s a shared narrative, an emotional and cultural fabric that binds the speakers together. Shermans reads as both a yawning absence – the artist died too young and his work was little documented – and the spark to light a rumour about something worth reviving. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Mullicans (detail), 2018, mirrors, sunlight, magnifying glass, tree leaf, dimensions variable.

Photo: Annik Wetter. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zürich

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ArtReview

Ma Qiusha Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) 17 February – 3 June In the darkened, single-room space of Ma Qiusha’s solo exhibition at MIMA, the soundtrack is grating, akin to fingernails clawing a blackboard. It emanates from the freestanding projection of All My Sharpness Comes from Your Hardness (2011), a video in which a pair of legs, bare except for black ice-skates, are shot from above as they struggle to skate along a tarmac road. At first this seems a riff on Alice falling down the rabbit hole; the legs appear to dangle as the road scrolls dizzyingly underneath them. Closer inspection of her shadow – and a read of the exhibition handout – reveals the full picture: Ma allowed herself to be strapped to the back of a car, and filmed ‘skating’ the distance between her childhood home and her grandmother’s house. Sparks fly, and the impact with the hard tarmac on which she sometimes appears to glide, without ever really finding her footing, speaks to the difficult hodology that individuals must find – or be dragged along – from childhood to adulthood.

Ma Qiusha’s work is represented here by video and photography, incorporating sculptural elements such as photos mounted in archival foam boxes. The artist was born in Beijing during the early 1980s and her work speaks to the changes in China’s political and cultural climates in the decades following

her birth: opening up to foreign investment; the influx of Western consumer culture and neoliberal attitudes. Like most Chinese citizens born between 1979 and 2015 under the onechild policy, Ma has no siblings. And, like many girls born in this period, the artist tells us – in a confessional but emotive video, From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili (2007) – her parents ‘wanted a boy’. The film is sparse, direct. Ma details her artistic journey from childhood, originating in highly pressurised drawing lessons enforced by her mother, who would watch through a window or sit beside her, pinching her leg sharply when a detail was rendered incorrectly. Ma is forgiving: she understands this punitive behaviour – her parents were poor, and wanted her to succeed – but at the end of the film her own discreet pain is revealed: she falls silent, and there are tears in her eyes as the camera zooms in and she removes a small razor blade from her tongue.

In light of this anecdote, the absence of drawing in the show becomes poignant.

Relationships, when they are portrayed, appear as fraught conflict between conformity and individual freedom. Each of the three video channels of We (2009) depicts a couple dressed in white nondescript clothing and in different positions: standing side by side, standing

embracing, sitting side by side. For a while, nothing happens. And then, slowly, one partner breaks away, tearing the fabric that had stitched each couple together. The remaining partner is left partially clothed, looking bereft and vulnerable; the sound of tearing echoes intermittently through the gallery.

The series 1990 (2017–18) explores such entanglements through the mass-produced household calendars popular during the 1990s, which often presented scenes of domestic femininity and other ‘wholesome’ images such as cats, flowers and smiling children. Ma disrupts these representations by rephotographing 12 images – one for each month – developing the prints as cyanotypes and displaying them in wall-mounted grey-foam frames. While the resulting blue of these warped images comprise an uneasy nod to the blue shirts of the Communist party uniform, the foam frames recall archival storage, alluding to the ways in which notions of femininity are circulated and monitored by normative cultural standards.

Ma’s work testifies to the turbulent, formative nature of upbringing, but it also affirms that context can be creatively harnessed.

As All My Sharpness Comes from Your Hardness demonstrates: friction can sharpen your skates.

Daisy Lafarge

All My Sharpness Comes From Your Hardness (still), 2011, single-channel video, 25 min 29 sec. Courtesy the artist and Beijing Commune

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Tara Donovan Compositions Pace Gallery, London 24 January – 9 March It is hard not to feel a pang of disappointment on entering the American sculptor Tara Donovan’s first show at Pace’s London space.

An artist-magician of sorts, she typically dazzles you with transformations of everyday consumer flotsam into landscapes and organic forms, and then invites you to get up close and see how the trick is done. In Pace’s large, airy gallery, there were no snowy mountains conjured from polystyrene cups, no giant gauzy spores fashioned from acrylic rods or milky stalagmites made from buttons.

Instead, the exhibition condenses her longtime interest in using Minimalism’s truth to materials, and Process Art’s transparency of making, as means to explore the illusionism that earlier iconoclasts sought to explode.

In place of her well-known voluminous works, in which millions of identical little parts repeat through space according to a simple methodology (stacking, twisting, etc), a new series titled Compositions (all works 2017) lines the

gallery walls. At first blush these appear to be identically sized square paintings, or drawings in shades of grey. Palimpsests of dancing geometric shapes point to Donovan’s concerns with depth and surface, Agnes Martin-like strips signal her Minimalist forebears and textile patterns suggest her repetitive and labour-intensive methods, comparable to crafts like embroidery and weaving.

Up close, these works reveal themselves to be shallow, wall-mounted boxes filled with thin white plastic rectangles of the kind typically used for identification cards. It’s an association that heightens the abstract imagery’s implications: camouflage patterns or polygraphlike scratchy zigzags suggest social order, surveillance and the individual’s relationship to the crowd. Stacked so that only their edges are visible, the cards form planes of light and shade that vary depending on how densely they are packed. For all the display of labour, Donovan has a playful approach to the formal

and physical qualities of traditional sculpture and painting. The shading that suggests depth on a flat picture plane, for instance, turns out to be literal depth, created by the gaps between cards. Then there’s the way the imagery grows lighter or darker as you walk from one side of a composition to another, like a sculpture viewed in the round. It disappears into an almost total whiteout when seen side-on, while we become aware of the physical reality of the cards and their enclosure.

There’s a thrill to seeing a familiar trick, like dissembling the boundaries between sculpture and painting, done well. One of the sticking points of Donovan’s oeuvre, however, is that it doesn’t build on the legacy it mines: Minimalism’s ‘what you see is what you see’ plainness. The sublime, stunning mass and wondrous complexity of earlier installations carry them through. But with the spectacle scaled back, one wonders if Donovan has boxed herself in. Skye Sherwin

Composition (Cards), 2017, styrene cards and glue, 100 × 100 × 10 cm.

Photo: Tom Barratt and Mark Waldhauser. © the artist. Courtesy Pace, London

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Iman Issa Material for 2018 Spike Island, Bristol 17 February – 15 April A bittersweet melancholy sound, like the horn of a ship evoking both loss and new beginnings, intermittently resonates throughout the gallery spaces. This sound piece, Material for a sculpture acting as a testament to both a nation’s pioneering development and continuing decline (2011), is one of ten works in the Material series (2010–12), each accompanied by their titles vinyl-printed on the wall. All but two are displayed on white plinths, and their titles describe, but do not identify, commemorated figures or events. The absence of specific information makes way for multiple associative possibilities. A black tassel in Material for a sculpture recalling destruction of a prominent public monument in the name of national resistance (2010), for instance, suggests a fez: an item of headwear with a complex wealth of cultural, political and symbolic history. For me, I confess, with my unworldly English upbringing, the fez conjures, before all, the British comedian and deliberate bungler of magic Tommy Cooper.

Each of the works in the Material series is inspired by public monuments well known to the artist but not identified. While referencing the monumental, however, the scale is decidedly human. Material for a sculpture commemorating an economist whose name now marks the streets and squares he once frequented (2011) suggests a redress.

Personal effects – items worn or held close to the body – are arranged in a vitrine. Missing,

however, is personalisation. Where an engraved or embroidered name or monogram might be expected – on the case of a fob watch or the corner of a handkerchief – one finds a conspicuous blank suggesting, perhaps, that a frequently used public name might lose its intimate identity. The removal of names has sinister connotations, invoking refusals of humanity and erasures from history. An absence of a name, particularly one rendered invisible by overfamiliarity, may permit certain liberties.

Three copies of Book of Facts: A Proposition (2017) are presented at individual desks, each with a white plinth-seat – positioning the reader as an active element of the work. The book is a catalogue of an exhibition that never was, replete with plates, bibliography, a list of illustrations and index, but missing figurative images. Titles in the bibliography are without authors and often end in ellipses (A History of Mythology in … for example). The plates are simple diagrams, each a rectangular outline framing captioned red dots that mark the position of objects in the ‘picture’. The accompanying texts, drawn from a diverse range of research, allow the reader to build an image in their imagination without permanently fixing it. Despite – or rather because of – its absences, the book proffers myriad permutational imagery and reading. Omission, here, does not equal

reduction. It is employed, instead, as a device of democratic enrichment, recalling Barthes’s ‘birth of the reader’: ‘A text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other’, writes Barthes in The Death of the Author (1967).

Barthes resonates as I encounter Common Elements (2013). Framed fragments of text from the autobiographies of four public figures, and photographs of recreated museum pieces, the origins of which range from the scholarly to the domestic, line the four walls. Five sculptures referring to forms seen by the artist in museums – one resembles a sepulchre – occupy the floorspace. Decontextualised and reconfigured in a new relation to one another, these elements mingle into narratives resembling memory.

Names of the autobiographers are, on this occasion, given – but very quietly, in a small wall plaque: among them, cultural theorist Edward Said. As I read one of the texts – ‘What does a magician do? Doesn’t he give himself the ability to foresee the future?’– I think perhaps my Tommy Cooper reference is not so ridiculous. My childhood memory of Cooper and his inappropriately appropriated fez connects me, however tenuously, to a pool of memories, prosaic and profound, beyond my personal experience but not beyond the magic of imagination. Linda Taylor

Material for a sculpture recalling the destruction of a prominent public monument in the name of national resistance, 2010, wooden sculpture with black tassel, painted white plinth, vinyl text on wall, dimensions variable. Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London

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Hannah Ryggen Woven Histories Modern Art Oxford 11 November – 18 February That Hannah Ryggen’s tapestries have lately been the subject of renewed interest is not surprising, given that the self-taught Norwegian weaver used traditional techniques to deliver a personal take on the rise of fascism across Europe. Although she died almost half a century ago, her work combines the concerns of the present with the seductive appeal of lessons from the past.

One striking element of her large tapestries is the contrast between their ‘archaic’ look and the contemporaneity of their subject matter, as well as the freedom of composition they denote. In common with the traditions of Norwegian folk tapestry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the illusion of perspective is absent, with events and characters collapsing onto the picture plane. The structure, instead, stems from large blocks of colours and geometrical patterns, which create a visual hierarchy between the various elements depicted.

The large friezelike 6 October 1942 (1943) resembles a triptych, across which a dreamlike narrative unfolds: on the left, Adolf Hitler is seen shooting Henry Gleditsch, the director

of the Trøndelag Theatre, as oak leaves – a symbol of the Third Reich – come out of the dictator’s buttocks, while Winston Churchill watches from a tower at the centre of the composition; on the right Ryggen and her family (the artist becomes recognisable as a recurring character in the works) appear on a boat amidst tumultuous waters, perhaps attempting to escape.

Other compositions are even more radically segmented, becoming semiabstract. Ethiopia (1935), originally presented at the 1937 World Expo in Paris, was made in reaction to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and is divided into two horizontal planes.

The upper third is divided into a succession of vignettes, in which appear successively a black man, a white coloniser, Emperor Haile Selassie and another black figure brandishing Mussolini’s head on a spear. Black raised hands reappear throughout the various scenes, echoing the vertical motifs that occupy the lower two thirds of the composition. A similar composition arises in the sombre Death of Dreams (1936).

At the centre, a man (Nobel Peace Prize-winner Carl von Ossietzky, we learn from the exhibition

6 October 1942, 1943. © the artist / DACS. Courtesy Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim

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handout) is about to be executed by red-faced Nazi officers, while prisoners, depicted in white, witness the scene from behind bars. Five vertical rows of swastikas, outlined in grey and dark brown, gloomily occupy the lower part of the composition.

The more domestic We and Our Animals (1934) reveals the artist and her family’s daily life on the farm outside Trondheim where they lived. Ryggen worked on a loom built by her husband, carded and spun the wool from her sheep and concocted her own dyes from plants and, famously, urine to obtain the royal blue that recurs in many of her works. Despite her apparent isolation from the currents of global politics, Ryggen was moved to speak to the international struggle of the oppressed, to weave herself into the larger political tapestry and present it to the world (at the Paris World Expo, the Venice Biennale in 1964 or in front of her house, in Nazi-occupied Norway). Here the personal and the political are, both literally and figuratively, entwined – a galvanising example in these times of heightened individualism and nationalistic discourses. Louise Darblay

Yto Barrada Agadir The Curve, Barbican Centre, London 7 February – 29 May The city of Agadir was destroyed in 1960, by an earthquake that lasted 15 seconds. Brittle stone buildings collapsed, burying 15,000 people alive, just before midnight, in their beds.

In the Barbican’s Curve gallery, Moroccan artist Yto Barrada has etched the white outlines of 11 buildings into its long wall, which appears like a giant, curved blackboard. The mural, documents the reconstruction of the city by a group of French-Moroccan architects – notably, Jean-François Zevaco and Elie Azagury – in Le Corbusier’s Brutalist style.

Twelve wicker seats, fabricated by weavers in Tangier, are laid out along the gallery’s promenade. Some look like kissing chairs, others like simple benches. Voices emanating from hidden loudspeakers read from the Berber Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s experimental fiction Agadir (1967). The voices describe thousands of bodies putrefying in the heat, corpses cleared away by soldiers, bulldozers and rats. Khaïr-Eddine referred to his writing as ‘guerrilla linguistics’ – a collision of reportage, confession and poetry,

splicing French with Arabic – and his cast (which includes a Berber queen, a fortune-teller and a pirate, among others) debates the reform of the city’s buildings and political structures.

At intervals across the exhibition, actors appear in pyjamas, roaming the corridor like patients in a ward.

Barrada is an artist-hoarder, visiting flea markets and municipal archives, filling her studio with fieldwork. An interest in fossils, museology and urban planning led to fictional guidebooks – first, A Guide to Trees (2011) (advice on how to groom a city for visiting dignitaries), and later, A Guide to Fossils (2015). As a trained anthropologist, Barrada’s penchant for systemfinding shows. A mobile made of baskets, hanging at the end of the promenade, is an archive of wicker forms.

On an adjacent wall, a film plays footage of rescue missions harvested from newsreels, and panoramas of the devastated city, showing the spectacle of its destruction. Dazed citizens describe the sound of the quake. One sequence,

in which Le Corbusier himself visits the remains, verges on ruin-lust.

A critique of colonial modernism twists through Barrada’s work, but softly. More palpable is the task of playful abstraction: in a series of paper collages opposite the mural, international press materials from the days following the earthquake are cut up, reassembled and made into jagged forms. Like KhaïrEddine’s ‘guerrilla linguistics’, these reimaginings of the disaster take refuge in abstraction and experiment, and refrain from explicit context – a strategy of resistance, perhaps. Only on later reading do I fully apprehend the irony of the international rescue missions: it was the Agadir Crisis of 1911 that sparked four decades of French colonial rule. In 1960, just four years after the country regained its independence, foreign troops aid the relief efforts, nurses to Agadir’s wound. Today, Agadir is a city of white boulevards, European-style cafés and hotels along the beachfront. The Berber city has all but vanished. Izabella Scott

Agadir, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images.

Courtesy the artist and Barbican Centre, London

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Erica Scourti Spill Sections Studio RCA, London 23 February – 18 April The paper-covered windows spanning two sides of Studio RCA in Battersea might, at first glance, suggest that the space inside is under construction. But what seems to be a haphazard paper screen is, on closer inspection, a collage of paperwork belonging to Erica Scourti: from corporate banalities (‘THIS IS YOUR TRAVEL TICKET’) to the embarrassingly personal – a letter from a gynaecology department, or emotive handwritten scraps (‘generally just FEELING too much’). Where past work – such as her ghostwritten memoir, The Outage (2014) – portrayed the artist through an assessment of her digital footprint, the evidence of self used as source material here is analogue. Viewed cumulatively, all this printed material takes on the character of accidental confessional poetry, forming a kind of textual self-portrait.

Spill Sections has the openly provisional appearance of a work – and a self – in progress. This investigative frankness is one of Scourti’s most compelling qualities.

Inside, the walls are papered with prints formed from photographs of the collage (further fragmented through the choice as to what was photographed) rearranged into new configurations. In a chain reaction of processes, OTHERHEAD (2018), a 15-minute

video on an iPad duct-taped to a wall at slapdash angle, reworks these prints in turn: the artist fed the printed images into an Optical Character Recognition app that translated them back into text. As the printed source comprises fragmentary materials, at all angles, in both Greek and English (Scourti was born in Greece and is bilingual), the result is as scrambled as a game of Chinese whispers. The video shows the text scrolling down an iPhone screen; using the automated ‘Speak’ function, the smartphone reads out lines of recognisable words, symbols and gibberish. Struggling to categorise the text’s language, its voice oscillates between languages and genders.

Dividing the space are semiopaque dust sheets that call to mind both DIY and theatre curtains – Scourti often uses performance alongside digital media, and on the opening night performed the text from OTHERHEAD – that also serve to frame the installation’s second video, Hot Readings (2018), seen on a large wall-mounted monitor. Taking its name from a technique used by stage psychics of gleaning information later presented as psychically attained, it samples some of Scourti’s videoworks from 2008 onwards. Rather than presenting an entirely new artwork, she instead considers

Spill Sections, 2018 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist

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her existing corpus and her evolution as an artist; as she states in the voiceover, “You could call it a performance review”. Collaged together, they show key fragments of past work: from early performances in which Scourti screams in public places, to video diaries made in her bedroom.

These have all been uploaded to YouTube; the automatic subtitle function forms the source of texts onscreen. Scourti narrates these idiosyncratically: there are deviations, tangents, telling hesitations before and between words.

With its process-led play with language and texts created between human authorship and computer programmes, Spill Sections recalls the protocols of conceptual poetry. Like a Postinternet Jackson Mac Low, Scourti uses systems to create work, which, like Mac Low’s poems, is then edited to create the desired effect. Some passages from OTHERHEAD seem so apposite as to suggest the artist’s hand (for instance: ‘combining bespoke craft along with 3.2~x: <º *~ technological processes, that are boiling ove r me n U’). For all Scourti’s analysis of onscreen performances, changing looks and regrettable past decisions presented and reconsidered, what speaks the loudest here is the sense of their maker as an unfinished text, open-ended and contingent. Isabella Smith

Margaret Salmon Circle Tramway, Glasgow 16 February – 18 March In A Death in the Family (2009), the first instalment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Proustian autofiction My Struggle, the author reflects that ‘writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows’. This idea of a teasing-out, a lingering encounter with what is already known, might equally be applied to the work of Glasgowbased filmmaker Margaret Salmon. This major survey of the artist’s work comprises three multichannel film installations – consisting of stacked monitors showing different films on each screen – and Here, there, everywhere… outside over there, a screening programme in four weeklong parts, each featuring a selection of short 16mm and 35mm films.

Many of the films, which span the period from PS (1998/2002) to this year’s Company, imbue everyday scenes with an intimacy characteristic of Salmon’s approach to her subjects. In House (2018) the camera leads us on a silent tour of empty interiors, like a memory unfolding room-by-room. As with Knausgaard’s writing, the experience of watching the film fluctuates between boredom and meditative engagement.

But where Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir pursues a classic, linear narrative arc, Salmon’s

visual vignettes are more epigrammatic, distillations of moments from longer lives. In Peggy (2003), for example, ostensibly a documentary record of a day in the life of an older woman, or Ramapo Central (2003), which follows the routine of a middle-aged female receptionist from work to home, the cinema-vérité form recalls Émile Zola’s definition of art as ‘no more nor less than a corner of nature seen through a temperament’.

There is a feminist agenda at play here too, in that the apparently unremarkable experiences of suburban women (housework, getting ready, shopping, going to work) offer a means of exploring gender politics. In this, Salmon’s work recalls Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s iconic 1977 film, Riddles of the Sphinx, as does her use of voices that may or may not be those of the characters onscreen. Salmon’s selection and mise-en-scène of these moments allows the viewer to grasp something of the strangeness of the familiar when subjected to close scrutiny, to see the vernacular as poignant. Such cinépoetry, a shared characteristic of much recent Scottish moving image, can sometimes verge on preciousness, subscribing to the clichéd notion that the world needs visual artists to help

‘reveal’ the poetry in the prosaic (it doesn’t).

For the most part Salmon avoids such pitfalls, adding texture through her layering of sound and suggested narrative, such as the repetitive accusations the husband in PS makes against his wife – “you have not been honest” – chilling in his insistent pursuit of marital discord.

A highlight of the screening programme is Mm, commissioned for 2017’s Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. The band Sacred Paws, Salmon’s collaborators on the soundtrack, bring an invigorating edge to footage of a race between the Berwick Bandits speedway team and the Peterborough Panthers, switching between word association-as-critical commentary and (more successfully) frenetic, joyful music that parallels the imagery. It stands in contrast to the mood of many of the other works partly, perhaps, because of the UK location and postpunk soundtrack. In other respects, though, Mm extends Salmon’s ability to excite visual pleasure while retaining an element of criticality, moving fluidly between bombastic, almost accusatory spoken word and an intimate, celebratory portrait of the Bandits.

Susannah Thompson

Circle, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Keith Hunter.

Courtesy Tramway, Glasgow, and LUX Scotland, Glasgow

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April Street The Shoulder and the Bow Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 20 January – 3 March Recent trends have painters expanding off the canvas, out into dimensional space; the space of sculpture. There is an embedded tension in this expansion – the arena of painting, that great domain of symbolism and illusion, becomes mired in the physicality of the real.

In The Shoulder and the Bow, April Street traverses between the symbolic language of painting and the real space that sculpture embodies. The artist presents eight small works that hang politely around the gallery, yet while they register within the formal language of painting, Street’s process is a much more physical one. Through press materials and interviews, we learn that Street’s paintings begin with a private act of wrapping her body in swathes of fabric, and then choreographing herself dipping into various pools of paint. This act performed for no one is an elaborate way to embed colour into fibre. By swaddling her own body in the materials she uses, Street develops a haptic knowledge, while creating a stored energy in the fabric used.

This body of work utilises hosiery fabric, which Street wrestles and cajoles, stuffing

her material in places, to create an interlacing surface whose wrinkles and knots become major compositional players. In some works, such as Woman with blue flowers (2016), the materiality of the hosiery-cum-canvas is so confused that the eye delights in following its tunnelling path as it inverts and crumples around itself – its organic trail suggesting a dancerly movement. In one section, a pale yellow tubular form is speckled with purple dye as it plummets diagonally across the canvas, only to be enveloped into a pink and yellow heartlike form. The work evokes fashion as much as sensual gestures.

These paintings are at their best when they revel in abstraction, allowing the energy that Street imbues within the material to be a partner in dictating the composition and form. In A knight’s tale with pink vase (2017), layers of sculptural fabric and paint swirl around each other, dramatically shifting from bright fuchsias to deep blues. In Fall to earth (2017), the colours of the applied paint spill into each other like an oil slick on a wet roadway.

Yet elsewhere, in works such as An arrangement with apple and bird (2017), the references to still life and its accompanying traits are far more straightforward: horizon line on the bottom third of the canvas implying a table; items arranged on top; background looming behind. Here, Street’s low-relief objects protrude in a conventional fashion: an apple shape is clearly defined and bursts forth from the canvas. One feels as though the objects should be read, rather than felt. The composition and dimensionality in these works illustrate rather than evoke through their form. This sudden jolt into representation feels wonky and forced. The paintings across this exhibition are at their best when the artist relinquishes a certain amount of control over the material, allowing their spatiality and twisting forms to find themselves. By contrast, the instances where the artist managed her material too heavily, in order to create recognisable objects and shapes, pull the viewer out of the elaborate bodily fantasy laid before her.

Lindsay Preston Zappas

An arrangement with apple and bird, 2017, acrylic paint and hosiery fabric on wood, 61 × 51 × 9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

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Yevgeniya Baras Towards Something Standing Open The Landing, Los Angeles 27 January – 10 March I can’t decide if Yevgeniya Baras is playing a primitivist game or an outsider game in art.

Her newest paintings, all untitled from 2016 and 2017, and all oil on burlap or canvas with occasional foreign elements, such as wood or glass or branches affixed to or embedded behind their surfaces, exhibit what is becoming something like a signature style: mixtures of both rich and muted hues, thick lines and scumbles, ambiguous symbols, figures and forms emerging from rough surfaces, resulting sometimes from paint, sometimes from the picture’s substrate, and modest canvas sizes, with most dimensions at 60cm or smaller.

In the current series, many paintings bear quasi-Cyrillic text and lettering. This is new.

In prior works, such as the ones Baras showed at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York in 2016, only one of the paintings (on my count) involved anything resembling such alphabetic incursions. But in the last two years the letters are more frequent, and more prominent, and the paintings conjure, at least for me, both

the mysteries of peasant primitivism, and the Cubo-Futurism that animated the early experiments of the avant-garde in Russia.

Whether Baras wants this is probably beside the point. In the first decades of the last century, text fragments and woodblock lubki were picked up by various Russian artists (Goncharova, Larionov, Malevich) as means to challenge the bourgeois naturalism that had dominated high art in the nineteenth century.

The vagaries of text, and the mysticism of the indigenous ‘other’, pointed to hidden dimensions of meaning, deeper truths, that the modernising world was both concealing and uncovering. If art could channel these truths, could take a hammer to its calcified forms, then a new age, a new utopia, might dawn.

I don’t believe Baras is after a new dawn.

Such radicality is nothing if not foreclosed from artists of her generation (artists of any generation today, really). But one does sense that Baras is after those mysteries that were once easily associated with the earthy otherness of the

rough-hewn and whatever was still out of step with the age. The thick weave and frayed edges of her burlap canvases suggest work and wear (not to mention impoverishment), while her diagrammatic forms and textual annotations are like muddy hieroglyphics meant to undo our contemporary imperative to produce anything instantly recognisable.

It’s to Baras’s great credit, then, that she can produce paintings that appear wholly sincere and strategic at the same time. Baras does not come to her work decorated with anything like the outsider’s badges of autodidacticism and obsession. She was educated at London’s Slade and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she received a BA in fine art and psychology as well as an MS in education (graduating cum laude, no less). Her MFA is from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One has to assume that anyone with those intellectual chops understands well the effects she is after – there can be no mystery there. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Untitled, 2017, oil, yarn and wood on burlap, 46 × 61 cm.

Courtesy the artist and The Landing, Los Angeles

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Caroline Walker Sunset Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles 13 January – 10 March How much can we find it within ourselves to feel sorry for a beautiful middle-aged white woman who lives in a stylish modernist house surrounded by high walls of tropical foliage with heart-stopping views over the endless gridded expanse of Los Angeles? How about when she floats in her aquamarine pool, one outstretched hand trailing in the water, while her hunky pool boy skims leaves and bugs from the surface nearby?

Caroline Walker never directly solicits our pity for the protagonist who recurs throughout the six large oil paintings and several smaller works exhibited in Sunset, but the dominant tone is unmistakably one of loneliness. To make this suite of paintings, Walker, who is British, rented a fabulous house in the Hollywood Hills and a model to go with it – actually a former Miss Colorado – and shot hundreds of photographs. The paintings are far from photorealistic, but the gaze of the lens persists, making them feel both cinematic and voyeuristic. The narrative that emerges, however, is of nothing

much happening: the woman works out, eats in a restaurant, talks on the phone, gets dressed in front of a mirror. She seems to live a life of ease and elegance, untroubled by the grime and grind of the city beneath her.

Why, then, is the mood so bleak? Perhaps because Walker gives us no hint of anything going on behind those heavily made-up eyes.

The woman appears as an expressionless cipher, a soul trapped by the rigid verticals and horizontals of her home just as she is by the contours of her toned body. In Desayuno (all works 2017) she examines her breakfast like it’s a problem to be solved. In Thanks for Noticing she fastens a necklace as if donning armour for a battle.

In reading these paintings, I am acutely conscious of leaning into archetypes and clichés.

What, after all, do I know about the inner lives of faded beauty queens, beyond how they are usually depicted in film and on TV? Perhaps the presumed pathos of the narrative contradicts the actual evidence of the paintings. In the most striking painting in the show, the title work

Fishing, 2017, oil on linen, 250 × 200 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

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Sunset, we look down from a balcony to where the woman is drinking and speaking on the phone.

Beside her is another glass. Is it ours? And whose is the recently vacated table setting in Desayuno?

Walker must know full well that she is trafficking in clichés, although her intellectual position towards them is never fully revealed.

As an overactive generator of images, Los Angeles (and Hollywood in particular) continues to promulgate clichés about itself as if its very existence depended on it. Those clichés are often exclusionary and regressive. But what do Europeans such as Walker (or, full disclosure, myself) care about that? The pattern for decades has been for visitors to arrive in the city and plunder it like colonial marauders for the imagistic treasures it offers. Anyone can go home with a photo of the sun sinking into the Pacific, or a selfie with a palm tree and a rented Mustang.

What about the people who live here, though, who find themselves – like Walker’s protagonist – trapped half in and half outside of a dream that was never truly their own? Jonathan Griffin

Patty Chang The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017 Queens Museum, New York 17 September – 4 March The cover image of Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, an artist book published as part of this exhibition at the Queens Museum, shows a mound dwelling that, amidst the ruins of the ancient Chinese city of Miran, resembles an upright breast and nipple. Miran, which was once an oasis stop along the Silk Road in northwest China, benefited from its proximity to the Lop Nor lake (the ‘wandering lake’ of Chang’s exhibition title) until the lake’s migration left the city isolated in the Taklamakan Desert. Chang’s foregrounding of this abandoned anthropomorphic structure illustrates her careerlong insistence on the body even when addressing issues like the rise and fall of dynasties, the unfixed landscape and the economics of water.

The Wandering Lake encompasses nine years in which Chang has travelled to, and worked in, sites including Xinjiang province in Western China; Newfoundland, Canada; the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan; and her father’s deathbed. It repeatedly touches on the relationship of the human body to various bodies of water. ‘It is interesting to look at geographic mapping as a way to contain history – how bodies of water shift and upend the intricate histories that are built up around them,’ Chang writes. ‘A geological body that shifts locations displaces and calls into question the systems and identities that rely on it.’

The exhibition is divided into three galleries, in which the project’s disparate parts – including

several videoworks, vitrines containing archival research, photos adhered to plywood panels and blown glass urinary devices – intermix to varying effect, with the opening installation of two videoworks being the most striking. Titled Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part I and Part II (both 2016), the juxtaposed projections succinctly evoke the themes running through the project.

The two screens are composed of four sheets of cardboard joined at jagged angles, disrupting the projected images. The first screen is installed so that its left edge meets the left wall of the gallery, with the second just a few paces behind and running to the right wall, so that Part I peeks out from behind Part II. Each shows Chang steadily washing an oversized carcass in a place where economies tied to water have faltered.

The first video tracks Chang as she moves down and around the side of an abandoned, rusty ship in Muynak, Uzbekistan, where a once-thriving maritime community was destroyed by Soviet river-diversion projects that caused the Aral Sea to dry up. Chang moves along the hull with a bucket and sponge, wetting an area corresponding to her armspan in a gesture that feels simultaneously tender and futile. Towards the end of the video, Chang stops for breaks between wipes, and her exhaustion is evident: even while addressing the historical desertification of the site, she brings the viewer back to the exhaustion of her own body. In the next video, she uses an identical sponge to wash

a dead whale on the shore of Fogo Island in Newfoundland, where the fishing community has been fractured by a federal moratorium on cod fishing. That this is a white sperm whale also calls to mind the history of commercial whaling in North America (Chang’s artist book quotes a passage from Moby-Dick, 1851).

The sound of the waves breaking against the body of the whale overlaps, because of the proximity of the works’ installation, with the slosh of the sponge against the ship’s side.

As Chang works her way down the large white creature, she cautiously steps across the seafloor, never descending too far into the water where the whale’s lower body and broad forked tail undulate in the waves. The press release calls it a ‘ritual’ and ‘reparative’ washing, but it is unclear who the reparations are for – hunted whales, out-of-work fishermen or maybe even the artist’s father, who died two years prior.

Chang allows her act to take on multiple metaphorical significances.

In these two key works, Chang attends to obsolete forms in order also to attend to the bodies, histories and cultures upended by disruption to water-related economies. They are in this sense representative of an exhibition in which she uses the movements, strains and tenderness of her own body to insist that we also consider the individual body when examining the past, present and future implications of the events that displace entire peoples. Ashton Cooper

Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part II (still), 2016, video projection, 12 min 49 sec, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and MAB Society/Bank Gallery, Shanghai

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Amy Sillman Mostly Drawing Gladstone 64, New York 26 January – 3 March ‘How does a painting belong to a network?’

David Joselit asked in ‘Painting Beside Itself’, nearly a decade ago. Also in 2009, Amy Sillman started pairing her paintings with zines – made freely available to visitors – that fleshed out her works’ associative threads. In her case, the word network could be substituted for any number of less clinical terms – like cult, coven or an intergenerational fabric of queer(ed) affinities.

And although Sillman advocates for a formal, poetic reading of her work that bridges abstraction and figuration, it’s impossible for me to read it outside of either language or our overlapping networks, which include her former students at Bard College (where I studied curating).

The artist once described herself as a ‘Romantic Modern Postmodern Aesthetic Sensualist’, and both her art and pedagogy encourage an unabashed pleasure in making and looking. Yet on some level, she is also a contrarian. Mostly Drawing, Sillman’s debut show with Gladstone, includes 30 compositions – with one exception, all around 102 × 66 cm – crammed end-to-end on the gallery’s walls.

Housed in the gallery’s Upper East Side

location, the installation thumbs its nose at the conventions of both white-cube display and tasteful decor.

The works themselves, made from a process of silkscreening and painting on paper, seduce the viewer into a meditation on the relationship between painting and language, reproduction and spontaneous gesture. A trio of drawings displayed near a window (SK40, SK21 and SK47, all 2017) vibrate with the contrast between ghostly white overpainting and hot hues of yellow and orange. Here a body is suggested, perhaps of a back hunched over. Several other compositions nod to the AbEx generation of which Sillman is an unabashed fan; two women gallerygoers debated her relationship to Motherwell in front of the drawing Anti-Social #2 (2018). I found myself more drawn, however, to works like SK9 (2017). Here the upper half is partly obliterated by a black swoosh likely left by the side of a squeegee, while the bottom half depicts legs in motion. A raised foot (one of Sillman’s signature motifs) appeared again nearby, in XL–18–1 (2018), a 150 × 100 cm composition hung above a fireplace. Here, the ugly appendage seemed poised to stomp out the fire.

Sillman’s accompanying black-and-white zine plays on the notion of the publication as a Rosetta Stone. The front cover shows a simple line drawing of a jug filled with pictograms, complemented by contributions like those of Alexander May and Jess Arndt (both Bard grads), who added vaguely onomatopoeic captions to Ray Yoshida drawings, or a diagram of tools

by Erika Vogt (a Bard faculty member). But ultimately, Sillman’s interest in language is the way that it unlocks or suppresses desires.

On one page of the zine, she reproduces Carol Rama’s drawing Cadeau (2000): a surreal, headless series of spread legs, with black censor bars covering the genitalia. A few pages later, opposite a work by her former assistant Rebecca Watson Horn resembling a big bang, Sillman includes her own writing on her drawings: ‘A gesture made from between the legs and discharged through the gullet […] The drawings that result lie on the floor like abandoned arrows from a quiver, dejected and excited.’ Rather than a network, we might rethink Sillman’s work as a series of knots: entanglements between organs, artists and histories. Wendy Vogel

SK51, 2017, acrylic, ink and silkscreen on paper, 102 × 66 cm. Photo: John Berens. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

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ArtReview

Judith Bernstein Money Shot Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York 18 January – 3 March It has become cliché to open a review with reference to one of the many crises in liberal democracy – and in so doing make a tenuous claim for art’s (and art critics’) ability to pass meaningful comment upon them – but is sometimes unavoidable. So, here goes: the 45th president of the United States is a quasi-fascist conman exploiting the world’s most powerful political office for his own ends; his nuclear brinksmanship is an expression of insecurity in his own sexual potency; he is, in short, a shrivelled cock-and-balls dripping with ejaculatory fluid. This is in the paintings of Judith Bernstein, I should make clear.

At Paul Kasmin, eight new largescale works by the veteran feminist artist are lit from above by ultraviolet lights that pick out the phosphorescent pigments – screaming pinks, livid yellows and virulent reds – in which they are executed. The disembodied head of Donald Trump, rendered in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo on a particularly nightmarish trip, is the suite’s dominant motif: a floating scrunch of penis and testicles in a swastika-patterned cap’n’bells. That the president is repeatedly

captioned ‘schlongface’ or ‘Trumpenschlong’ and in Money Shot – Blue Balls (2017) fires impotent spunk missiles at busts of ‘Putinschlong’ and ‘Kim Jong-unschlong’ makes a pretty unambiguous point about masculine power and the neuroses underpinning it.

The paintings’ ghoulish glow-in-the-dark effects are, when I visit, diminished by the daylight that pours through the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows. When the sun hides behind a cloud, however, the space is transformed into a dingy underground club, linking these new paintings to Bernstein’s formative interest in the graffiti of men’s toilet stalls as insights into the male subconscious. The transformation begs the question of why the space wasn’t blacked out: perhaps to allow the slim possibility that the president might, in the course of being driven uptown to Trump Tower, catch a glimpse of himself as a pouting, impotent and pointedly feminine dictator in Money Shot – Shooters (2017)? A more likely explanation is that the artist wanted these agitprop paintings to be visible through the

windows to passersby in order to serve their function as denouncements of, and incitements against, the administration.

Sledgehammer-subtlety is thus a strength rather than a weakness of works such as Money Shot – Green (2016), which reimagines the Capitol as a one-armed-bandit whose three reels have come up Trumps, over which an erect penis sprays dollar signs and swastikas. The message is designed to shock – and to incite anger that might lead to action – rather than as a sober contribution to the proverbial ‘marketplace of ideas’ in which it seems racism and misogyny are now up for reasoned discussion. Bernstein’s latest work is a deliberately crude expression of a sophisticated intellectual tradition: the titular allusion to pornographic filmmaking chimes with fellow Second Wave feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who argued that its normalisation is symptomatic of the oppression of women in contemporary society. That the conflation of money, power and male domination is best expressed through the iconography of sexual violence should, these days, come as no surprise. Ben Eastham

Money Shot, 2018 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York

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2018 Triennial: Songs of Sabotage New Museum, New York 13 February – 27 June I’ve noticed a lot of citations on my Instagram feed lately. Last week, a colleague posted about a poetry reading and made sure to clarify the identity of the poets (both people of colour) and that the image on the flyer pictured ‘Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ 1968 Olympics Black Power salute’. I was surprised such an iconic image would require captioning until another person I follow posted a screen capture of rap mogul Diddy’s Twitter feed, and thoroughly accounted for its origins, despite the fact the image already included the musician’s name and familiar portrait. Even memes, the lingua franca of image-sharing platforms, will often feature their creator’s water stamp, but the practice has taken on outsize political significance. The 2018 New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage, seems to have trickled down from the same source, focusing its attention on artists who seek accountability from who’s looking and what’s pictured.

Curators Alex Gartenfeld and Gary CarrionMurayari stage a handsome introduction in the fifth-floor gallery: mystifying and eloquent, harsh and foreboding, the combination of works insists on infrastructure as the exhibition’s driving metaphor. At the centre of the room is E.L.G. (2018), a monolithic swing set

by Diamond Stingily. Chains dangle from fat, iodised aluminium bars, making the children’s plaything look like it belongs more in a prison yard. Inviting further injury, a prank has been prepped for any would-be swinger: a red brick is precariously positioned on the beam above the swing. Dangling in the remaining headspace, Tiril Hasselknippe’s Balconies (støp i meg

støp) (2018) reduce their eponymous form to menacing steel contraptions that resemble a forensic reconstruction of an embassy bombing.

Wilmer Wilson IV’s series of largescale collages, each of which obviously requires hours of labour, contribute to the feeling of claustrophobia. Layers of imagery collected from promotional materials in the artist’s neighbourhood in West Philadelphia are subsequently blanketed with staples, producing ethereal metallic embroidery patterns. In Manolis D. Lemos’s video dusk and dawn look just the same (riot tourism) (2017), the early stages of a miniriot fill the otherwise empty streets of Athens with thrilling anticipation. It devilishly captures the violence behind recent public demonstrations, and its soundtrack haunts the room.

Admittedly, the title Songs for Sabotage brought to mind holes punched in walls, documentation of museum board-members’ real estate holdings and other ways that artists might weigh in on the political fundament of the museum; anarchy that it never quite delivers.

A few works still manage to operate as signposts, however, and question how to keep the museum accountable to artists’ ethical scrutiny. Lydia Ourahmane’s Finitude (2018) is tucked into an alcove in the rear stairwell that connects the fourth and fifth floors. It looks like the wall is slowly crumbling, but it is actually ash and chalk, slowly suffering the vibrations of speakers playing a low, ambient soundtrack. And I wish every museum in the US presented something like the documentary webseries What is Deep Sea Mining? (2018), by Inhabitants (Mariana Silva and Pedro Neves Marques, with Margarida

facing page, top 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio.

Courtesy New Museum, New York

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Mendes), in its lobby, like the New Museum does here. A sense of catastrophe creeps into the museum experience after the video’s humble lesson succinctly informs us about the inconceivable scope of deep sea mining – a practice that “will create plumes of unpredictable consequences…”

Though the exhibition gives plenty of space to standout entries (see paintings by Manuel Solano and Janiva Ellis) and hilarious new discoveries (see Song Ta’s politically risky videowork), it does not manage to justify an overall structure that supports formal and gallery-bound work over more unwieldy activist and social practices – not to mention performance, lecture or even screening programmes that have become standard to exhibitions of this kind. This feels like a missed opportunity to bring artists more directly into the conversations surrounding their work, and to rechart institutional best-practice. Audiences gain access in these negotiations, too. But as with social media, the participants are absent from the conversation, and without them present, it can be difficult to know how to responsibly scale issues up to a global conversation or down to a local one. That the show’s curators seem to fall in line with social media policy, and step back from their own responsibility for this task, belies a cynicism or, at least, hesitation. The exhibition does little to reconfigure how we understand artistic labour, and less to reconsider how largescale international shows, and global art institutions, are accountable to artists.

Ultimately, Songs for Sabotage is confined to the same old tired infrastructure. Sam Korman

facing page, bottom Lydia Ourahmane, Finitude, 2018, ash, chalk, steel, looped sound, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

April 2018

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Books Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

by Marie Darrieussecq, trans Penny Hueston Semiotext(e), £12.99 (softcover) In the seventh of his Letters to a Young Poet, written in 1904, Rainer Maria Rilke expresses the hope that ‘someday’ there would emerge ‘women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit but only of life and reality: a female human being’.

In this affectionate biography, Marie Darrieussecq proposes that just such a female human being was not only alive at the time but – in the form of his friend Paula Modersohn-Becker – right in front of the writer’s eyes.

Paula Modersohn-Becker was born into a Germany that Darrieussecq describes as ‘innocent’ – meaning before the wars, and the burden they would impose on twentieth-century German painting – and died in it too, succumbing to a postpartum embolism in 1907. In the intervening 31 years, she produced a body of work that would belatedly secure her status among the most important painters of the short period between the dawn of the century and the prolonged night that descended on Europe shortly afterwards. For many years scandalously little-known outside her native Germany (where for decades her reputation rested on the popularity of her published letters), Becker’s painting has been the subject of a recent and dramatic reappraisal, including an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris cocurated by Darrieussecq in 2016.

This neglect might partially be attributed to the fact that, beyond certain superficial formal similarities and the coincidence of time and

place, Becker sat uncomfortably among the early Expressionists with whom she was typically grouped. This idiosyncrasy is inseparable from her achievements, argues Darrieussecq, as a woman working outside and against a tradition defined by men and, specifically, the male gaze.

Becker’s affecting portraits of pubescent girls, mothers and her own body reveal that female human beings are ‘more surprising than the story told by artistic conventions’ (comparisons with the anguished, eroticised or infantilising girls that haunt the paintings of her male peers drives home the point). To succeed as ‘a woman painting women’ required that the artist work outside of male constructions of femininity.

In doing so, Becker showed how it is possible for women to ‘invent themselves in a man’s world, by breaking and entering’.

Drawing on the artist’s diary entries, personal correspondence and the evidence offered by her paintings, Darrieussecq’s account of Becker’s life reads more like an elegy for a dead friend than a conventional biography.

She quotes liberally from the artist’s witty and winning letters to a close circle of friends including Rilke and the sculptor Clara Westhoff; the artist’s husband, Otto Modersohn; and her mother, Mathilde. The disarmingly simple power of Darrieussecq’s prose – conveyed in a sharp and self-effacing translation by Penny Hueston – seems tailored to accommodate her subject’s voice and to reproduce the emotional directness of her paintings. Indeed, this book

seems less interested in elaborating on Becker’s technical achievements or placing her in an art historical lineage than with attempting to evoke the emotional charge of Darrieussecq’s experience of her paintings.

That relationship – like those between painter and model, painting and viewer, biographer and subject – is in the case of ModersohnBecker premised on intimacy. A portrait of a breastfeeding mother and child is ‘not sentimental, or pious, or erotic’ but instead evokes ‘another sort of sensuality’ and ‘another sort of power’, meaning that which exists among women. Her greatest achievements are in this respect Self-Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Anniversary and Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace (both 1906), in which the artist stands ‘stripped of the masculine gaze’ and comfortable in her body and the regard in which it is held. In becoming the first female painter to portray herself naked for the benefit of other women, Modersohn-Becker introduced to painting a new way of seeing.

If ‘intimacy is’, as the artist wrote in her diaries, ‘the soul of great art’, then it is this quality that Darrieussecq seeks to emulate.

Paula – as her biographer comes in the course of her narrative to call her, narrowing the distance from her subject and discarding the surnames that tie her to the ‘mere opposites’ of father and husband – reinvented the way that women are represented. With Being Here Is Everything, Darrieussecq aspires to do the same. Ben Eastham

Misère: The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19th Century

by Linda Nochlin Thames & Hudson, £24.95 (hardcover) This posthumously published study by the great art historian explores the representation of poverty, powerlessness and marginality (gathered under the term misère) in art from the time of the Great Famine to the Great Depression. Underlying that is an attempt to work through the contradictions and harmonies present in art’s efforts to appease the conscience of the wealthy and to highlight the plight of the poor: is poverty a subject or a cause? ‘There is no such thing as representation pure and simple,

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disengaged from ideology,’ Nochlin announces at the beginning of the book, before describing the production of ‘picturesque’ representations of poverty as a means of disempowering the poor. She goes on to explore the idea that ‘truth’ might be fundamentally incompatible with aesthetics, the role of gender in representations of poverty and ideas of social justice in the works of Gustave Courbet, and ultimately touches on the question of whether it is ethical or even possible to represent the poor in our current

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‘media-saturated’ times. There are moments when the core thrusts of Nochlin’s arguments get bogged down in academic point-scoring at the expense of deeper investigations into the social context of her period of study, but if you’re willing to overlook a certain amount of (earned) peacocking, Nochlin speaks clearly and simply to the ongoing question of whether art can or should be a form of activism or is necessarily a reactive, monocular form of propaganda disguised as reportage. Mark Rappolt

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Give Up Art

by Maria Fusco New Documents, €28 (softcover) Art criticism has no set definition and no consensus as to what it is (as art historian James Elkins has gleefully pointed out many times). If we don’t know what it is, does it even exist? A few years ago, the UK Home Office refused my application for residency as an art critic, claiming that art criticism wasn’t writing but a form of advertising. They had a point: the critic’s relationship to the exhibition and the art object is, at least in part, to convey, to involve and to – at least conceptually, but sometimes literally – sell the art. But it’s also, as this collection of short essays, poems, reviews and lists by Maria Fusco proclaims, a lot grittier, muckier and more fun than that. At the centre of the book is a contention of the risky paradox of writing about art, where the writing fixes the absent artwork into a specific meaning. It’s the ‘about’, Fusco contends, that’s the problem. ‘Art writing’, as she refers to it (within which criticism is just one facet), should remain restlessly, endlessly prepositional: not just ‘about’, but also ‘in’, ‘with’, ‘of’, ‘on’ or even ‘off’.

As a slim selection of Fusco’s output from 2005 to 2013 – including texts for exhibitions, presentations for conferences on criticism and pieces for art publications like Art Monthly, Dot Dot Dot and Untitled – the book is unashamedly meta. It comes with its own manifesto, via ‘11 Statements Around Art Writing’, a set of dry dictums cowritten with her coconspirators Yve Lomax, Michael Newman and Julian Rifkin at the now-gone MFA Art Writing programme

at Goldsmiths, of which Fusco was founding director (including, ‘6. Art writing is in the situation of the fulcrum’, by which I imagine writing as a crowbar, to be used to pry open, or smash); as well as Fusco’s reading list of comics and postmodern fiction, reprinted from Frieze’s ‘Ideal Syllabus’ series. In between texts about art writing (and more than a few enjoyably enigmatic aphorisms, such as ‘constriction and consistency make a pair of muscular thighs: our heads are happy clenched between these very thighs’), a few short pieces illustrate the ‘in’, ‘of’ and ‘off’ approach, with impressionistic texts that write from the perspective of, say, a sewing machine, or actor Donald Sutherland’s face.

Continuing the inner logic of the artwork and seeing where it might go, it’s an approach that’s at times unexpectedly intimate, at others more whimsical, though collected here it also becomes apparent that a preposition indicates placement; removed from the contexts that produced, elicited, inspired or birthed them, some texts end up feeling enigmatic, or a little lost.

A sense of absence, of things referring to other things, permeates the book. Fusco writes, engagingly, about the process of creating a script for artist Ursula Mayer, based on an Ayn Rand play (but doesn’t reproduce the script); a short review of a performance at the Barbican

by German composer Heiner Goebbels seems included here precisely because the event was based on transposing a series of texts by T.S.

Eliot, Kafka and Beckett into music. But most prominent is the elusiveness of the art writing itself, talked about as a perpetually arriving possibility. ‘What I’m interested in is what art writing might be, rather than what it actually is’, she states in ‘Say Who I Am, or A Broad Private Wink’, calling for writing ‘enacting critical judgements through question after question rather than answer after answer’. What it is, then, is endlessly deferred, and Fusco seems happy to stand on the threshold and gesture towards this wonderful world of pure imagination.

To write not-about art, then, seems to be to deny explanation, to avoid the pretence of objectivity, to involve by immersion. Fusco’s art writing is more akin to the role of the artist, another link continuing a chain of creation.

But the activity of criticism Fusco proposes isn’t just passing the buck, it’s more an initial attempt to locate criticality in creativity. This book is a guide to a few approaches, a toolbox in the punk spirit of ‘this is a chord, this is another, now go start a band’. In bouncing around these translations and transmutations in writing as, of and around things, what arises at points, interestingly and unexpectedly, is a confusion of subjectivities, a productive smudging of the ‘I’ that is assumed to be the Receiver, Interpreter and Endpoint of art. What does such writing tell us about art? It tells us to dig deeper; to bring your own goddamn shovel, and then to be the shovel, and to be the hole. Chris Fite-Wassilak

See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary

by Lorrie Moore Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95 (hardcover) ‘See what can be done’ was the phrase Robert Silvers, longtime editor of The New York Review of Books, would append to ideas he floated past Lorrie Moore on the way to commissioning a text from her. And she did, for Silvers and for many other editors (three of whom are this volume’s dedicatees), taking the position that it is a rare artist who gets to be a critic – and in the same medium, no less – of her own discipline; and further, that this is a responsibility to be shouldered (‘like jury duty’, Moore self-deprecates). Along the way, the author, who has become one of America’s most acclaimed novelists and short-story writers, proposed a few ideas of her own, gradually assembling a ‘shadow life’ of book reviews,

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music and television writings, appreciations and cultural commentary. Published over the course of 30-plus years, primarily in the NYRB and The New York Times Book Review, they are compiled here for the first time.

The open-ended nature of the inquiry, the see-what-can-be-done, is amplified in Moore’s circling approach to subject and in the nature of compilations themselves, with their compressed and then suddenly expanded chronologies. The format throws up incongruities and an occasional historical lurch (one page for Barack Obama, ten fulsome pages for The Wire, 2oo2­–08), encouraging, in this reader at least, a nonlinear approach, led by Moore’s radiant intelligence and her steady delivery of obser-

ArtReview

vations such as: ‘Letters, the writing writers write when they should be writing…’ In this way I come upon Moore’s review of Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) – ‘she is (to speak historically, and to speak even, say, in a Russian or French or Irish saloon, loudly and unarmed) one of the world’s greatest short-story writers’ – then spot that Moore has written another Munro review; read that too; and, lo, there’s a third text. I finish it, wander over to my bookshelves, wonder why I have not read everything Munro has ever written, vow to do so, make the same commitment to Moore, and return to this generous, convivial guide to living life thoughtfully, to circle the subject once again. David Terrien

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Artwork by Zanny Begg, 2018

The words on the spine are from Christine de Pizan’s The Song of Joan of Arc (1429), and the words on pages 21, 47 and 81 are respectively from Letter to the God of Love (1399), The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) and Le débat sur le Roman de la Rose (1401–5), all by Christine de Pizan

on pages 107 and 112 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

April 2018

113

A Curator Writes April 2018 I pull my coat up as I walk down The Mall. The wind gusting under Admiralty Arch is enough to chill one to the marrow, but the real reason I hunker down into my collar is to avoid the gathering of normally gentle womenfolk outside the august Institute for Contemporary Arts. I have been reliably informed by my young assistant Chuck that this very evening they will throw off the veils of demureness and voice angry remarks about their male brethren in the artworld. This makes me nervous. Chuck has also told me that along with the fairer sex there will be “trans and gender-nonconforming” individuals in attendance at the meeting but that makes me feel even more edgy.

Luckily I manage to avoid recognition and quickly turn up the steps that lead to Carlton House Terrace and into the safety of the Diogenes Club. Tony, the trusty doorman, ushers me inside. With a nod and a mirthless grin he points towards the Bachelors Room. I enter discreetly, not wishing to disturb proceedings of tonight’s meeting. “… and just up the road, I hear that a gathering of women from the artworld is taking place at this very minute at the ICA, an institute that I’m sure I don’t need to remind you was set up by six fine fellows: Geoffrey, Roland, Herbert, Peter, the other Peter and E.L.T. What would these chaps, who between them would bring the lessons of Dada and Surrealism to tame old postwar London, think about this bastardisation of the institute they so nobly founded…”

“Excuse me…,” I interject politely.

The gathering of artworld chaps turns towards me. “… but what does E.L.T. actually stand for? I mean, could he have been a, well, you know, a she?” I ask mischievously, well knowing what it stands for. “An Eliza, perhaps?”

The speaker looks visibly annoyed. He rightly suspects I am joshing with him.

“E.L.T., well, you know,” he begins. “Definitely a man. Absolutely through and through. I should imagine it stands for… Elton. Yes, Elton. Like Elton John. Candle in the Wind. Rocket Man. Friend of Dorothy. That sort of thing. Nothing wrong with that, we’re not goddamn homosexualists here.

This is the artworld!”

“Geoffrey, Roland, Herbert, Peter, the other Peter and Elton?” I ask.

“Oh for god’s sake, man, it doesn’t matter. Do you think the womenfolk up the road are trying to work out if J.K. Rowling is a John or a Julie? No! They are plotting our downfall right now. They are demolishing the canon, pointing out that most of the top museum jobs are dominated by us fine fellows and fomenting revolution on social media sites that range from, erm…”

To my great surprise I see dear Chuck hand the speaker a piece of paper. Chuck winks at me. “… from, erm, Friends Reunited to Qaiku,” he finishes reading from Chuck’s note.

The assorted men in the room scrabble for pens to note down the social media sites they urgently need to get a presence on.

“Enough of this,” says an angry German gentleman whom I recognise to be a gallerist. “How do we fight back? They say they are not surprised, well I am bloody surprised.”

114

There are mutterings of “hear, hear” and a banging of tables from those sat in the armchairs towards the front of the room.

“They are undermining the museums!” says one. “Look at Helen Molesworth, I mean who the hell does she think she is, suggesting that the idea of genius has been created over the centuries to favour the white man? She had to go!”

“But, erm, surely there is a correlation between genius and us chaps?” replies the speaker.

There is more banging of tables.

“But what can we do about this tide of shouting ladies?”, asks a leading museum director. “They are the Angry Birds and we are the green-coloured pigs in this new reality. Where is our Mighty Eagle?”

“Who the hell is the Mighty Eagle?” says the curator of Carry On Cowboy, the recent seminal retrospective of Jimmie Durham.

“Is Larry the Mighty Eagle?” someone yells above the increasingly loud fray.

“Or Sir Nick?” shouts another voice from the crowd. “He will always be my Mighty Eagle!”

“Isn’t the Mighty Eagle on the Angry Birds side? My children have seen the movie!” says a third.

“Sir Nick is on the other side? Larry as well? Alea iacta est! We are truly lost!” cries the speaker. Chaos erupts about the normally sedate Bachelors Room. Grown men are weeping. One is trying to pick up a table with what looks like the intention of hurling it across the room. Tony the doorman is wrestling with him. I pick my way out of the chaos and move towards the exit. It is time to leave. The centre cannot hold. I. Kurator

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