ArtReview December 2016

The Body and the City in Brazil

C ANNES

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C APRI

LONDON

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COURCHEVEL

NEW YORK

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PARIS

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DUBAI

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GENEVA

PORTO CERVO

www.degrisogono.com

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GSTAAD

ROME

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KUWAIT

S MORITZ T

HIGH JEWELLERY E ARRINGS SET WITH WHITE DIAMONDS UNIQUE PIECE

H A U S E R & W IR T H

PHILIP GUSTON LAUGHTER IN THE DARK DRAWINGS FROM 1971 & 1975 1 NOVEMBER 2016 — 14 JANUARY 2017 548 WEST 22ND STREET NEW YORK NY 10011 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

UNTITLED, 1971 INK ON PAPER 27.6 × 35.2 CM / 10 7/8 × 13 7/8 IN © THE ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON PHOTO: GENEVIEVE HANSON

HA U S E R & W I R T H

MIKE KELLEY MEMORY WARE

ORGANIZED IN COLLABORATION WITH THE MIKE KELLEY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS 3 NOVEMBER — 23 DECEMBER 2016 32 EAST 69TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10021 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

MEMORY WARE FLAT #27 (DETAIL), 2001 MIXED MEDIA ON WOOD PANEL 178 ×117.3× 10 CM / 70 1/8× 46 1/8 ×3 7/8 IN ART © MIKE KELLEY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED / LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY PHOTO: STEFAN ALTENBURGER PHOTOGRAPHY ZÜRICH

2016: Roots and Branches New York

Fondation London

Wael Shawky Milan

INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

@MDCGALLERY

MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM

JOHN ARMLEDER, LIKE A FOUNTAIN, 2015, PLASTIC WATER CAN OVER-FILLED WITH WATER, SPILLED ON THE FLOOR, V.D.

MASSIMO DE CARLO LANDS ON PLANET LONDON WITH ROB PRUITT.

PIOTR UKLAŃSKI, UNTITLED (ECLIPSE NEGATIVE), 2013, PAPER COLLAGE, TORN AND PASTED ON PLYWOOD, 144.8 X 144.8 X 7.6 CM

THE SUN DISAPPEARS FOR SEVEN MINUTES.

ROB PRUITT, FELIX, 2009, 2 CLOCKS, PAINT, COLORED PAPER AND GLUE, 112 X 15.5 X 112 CM

WATER IS FOUND ON THE MOON.

(A WORK FROM INAUGURAL EXHIBITION AT MASSIMO DE CARLO, LONDON: ‘LOOK WHAT I’VE DONE: ROB PRUITT WORKS 1989 - 2009’)

IN 2009

SoL LeWITT LUcINdA chILdS PARIS PANTIN deceMBeR 2016 – FeBRUARy 2017 RoPAc.NeT

PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZBURG

Lucas Arruda Indipendenza, Roma

Michael Dean Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

Michael Dean: Turner Prize 2016 Tate Britain, London

Mariana Castillo Deball 32 Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo

Neïl Beloufa K11 Art Museum, Shanghai

Mend e s Wood DM Rua da Consolação 3358 Jardins São Paulo SP 01416 – 000 Brazil + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com facebook.com/mendeswood @mendeswooddm Image: Solange Pessoa

THE MULBERRY FOREST BECOMING OCEAN WITH PAK SHEUNG CHUEN IM HEUNGSOON TAO HUI MINJUNG KIM PRABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL JANUARY 20 – FEBRUARY 25, 2017 — ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65 D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

MAI-THU PERRET ZONE 23 November 2016 – 4 February 2017 London

simonleegallery.com

Pablo Accinelli Cae la tarde Opening November 22 November 23 to January 28

CLOSED FOR RENOVATION RE-OPENING 2017 7A GRAFTON STREET LONDON, W1S 4E J P+44(0)20 7408 1613

24 November 2016 - 21 January 2017

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY ANTWERP

ArtReview vol 68 no 9 December 2016

It’s personal, it’s political As the December issue was closing, ArtReview found itself in Shanghai supporting its sister publication in the presentation of ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng, a strand of solo projects at the West Bund Art & Design fair. On its third day in Shanghai, ArtReview got to leave the exhibition hall and visit some of the city’s museums and galleries; that day also happened to be the day that the United States of America chose a new president.

Distressed and distracted in its desperate attempts to reload news sites over faltering data connections, ArtReview could hardly concentrate on the works right in front of its face. Which left it wondering, a bit later in the day, just how much art can help – or even cope – at times such as those we appear to be on the brink of being sucked into (the same thought had crossed ArtReview’s mind earlier in 2016, during the attempted Turkish coup, immediately following Brexit and each time it was faced with reports on seemingly endless wars, acts of terrorism and other crises). Then ArtReview went to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s retrospective at the Rockbund Museum, where it had the chance to revisit the late American artist’s work Untitled (Public Opinion) (1991). Here was art that ArtReview, in its current frame of mind, could relate to. The sculpture, 317k (ideally) of individually wrapped liquorice laid in a rough rectangle and covering perhaps 15sqm of floorspace, is about love in the time of crisis (albeit made in the context of an entirely different disturbance to world order, the AIDS epidemic). Here, ArtReview was reminded, is a work that speaks about a political situation through a very personal narrative. And it also served as a reminder that if art is able to effect change on the macro level, or wishes to present the bigger picture, it has to start on a one-to-one basis: as an object or idea that seduces an individual.

ArtReview went on to consider that perhaps this is enough – that such a power can be used to great effect. It felt mildly cheered.

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The ‘personal as political’ unites much of what has been written about in the issue you are now holding. The bodily transformations undergone by Brazilian artists Virginia de Medeiros (whose work appears on the cover), Igor Vidor and Rafael Menôva are cases in point. Examined in Silas Martí’s essay ‘Body and the City’, these three artists’ various metamorphoses take place in direct response to everchanging urban environments. And while there’s nothing more personal than the body, as they enact these changes, de Medeiros, Vidor and Menôva are commenting politically on society at large. Wlademir Dias-Pino, on the other hand, has constructed his own vast intellectual cosmology. As Fernanda Brenner makes clear in her text on the Brazilian artist and graphic designer, he exits the larger, shared world for one he alone has built (though not just for himself). Once in this world, Dias-Pino radically divorces ideas of poetry from those of written language. Yet in his deft use of colour and form, he leaves a door open for us, should we choose to join him. Back in Shanghai, Chinese collective Birdhead performs a similar reimagining of the world – or at least its relationship to the world – in giant photographic matrices that operate on multiple and complex levels, here identified, dissected and pulled back by, appropriately enough, ArtReview Asia’s Shanghai-based editor Aimee Lin. So no, art probably can’t change who becomes the next US president, but it could prove very valuable indeed for its citizens – and the rest of us – as we face an often chaotically changing world. ArtReview

To ease the pain

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Rothko Dark Palette

510 West 25th Street, New York On view through January 7, 2017

Art Previewed

Alois Riegl on Jeff Koons Interview by Matthew Collings 50

Previews

by Martin Herbert 35 Points of View

by J. J. Charlesworth, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind, Heather Phillipson, Jonathan Grossmalerman 43

page 37 Massimo D’Anolfi & Martina Parenti, Infinita Fabbrica del Duomo, 2015, production still.Courtesy Montmorency Film and Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva

December 2016

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Art Featured

Body and the City

by Silas Martí 60

Birdhead

by Aimee Lin 76

Wlademir Dias-Pino

by Fernanda Brenner 66

Artist project

by Jiří Černický 83

Anthea Hamilton

by Helen Sumpter 70

page 70 Anthea Hamilton, Cut-outs, 2012 (installation view).

Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Firstsite, Colchester

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ArtReview

Geraldo de Barros, Untitled, 1983, laminated plastic on wood, 90 x 90 cm

GERALDO DE BARROS / Geraldo Industrial 5 November - 12 January

Art Basel Miami Beach booth m4

avenida Nove de Julho 5162 - São Paulo - Brazil T: 55 11 3842 0634 | www.lucianabritogaleria.com.br

Art Reviewed

Liz Deschenes, by Bill Clarke Inside: artists and writers in Reading prison, by Fi Churchman TOTAL PROOF: The GALA Committee 1995–1997,

by David Everitt Howe Slavs and Tatars, by Owen Duffy Bruce Nauman, by Joshua Mack K8 Hardy, by Andrew Berardini 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, by Stephanie Hessler Kenji Yanobe, by Adeline Chia

Exhibitions 94 Tadasu Takamine, by Nirmala Devi curated by_vienna, by Edward Sanderson Thea Djordjadze, by Kimberley Bradley Tino Sehgal, by Robert Barry Sean Landers, by Mark Prince Kishio Suga, by Barbara Casavecchia Wiktor Gutt and Waldemar Raniszewski, by Phoebe Blatton Lewis Klahr, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Michael Williams, by John Quin Pio Abad, by Naomi Pearce Infinite Mix, by Robert Barry Uri Aran, by Sean Ashton Cindy Sherman and David Salle, by Ben Street Allison Katz, by Kiki Mazzucchelli Nigel Cooke, by Brian Dillon Philippe Parreno, by Helen Sumpter Thomas Hirschhorn, by Ciara Moloney Betye Saar, by Jonathan Griffin Julien Nguyen, by Dean Kissick Erika Vogt, by Jennifer Li

Art Life 126 New York, by Sam Korman Books 132 The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, by Elena Filipovic Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000–2015, edited by Jennifer Liese Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art, by Jane Blocker Dalí’s Moustache, by Boris Friedewald THE STRIP 138 A CURATOR WRITES 142

page 121 K8 Hardy, Look 16, 2016, fiberglass mannequin, metal base, cloth, enamel paint, synthetic wig 185 × 94 cm. Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles

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ArtReview

333 East 47th Street New York, NY 10017 japansociety.org

Simon Starling: At Twilight (After W. B. Yeats’ Noh Reincarnation)

Simon Starling (b. 1967), At Twilight: Mask of W. B. Yeats / At Twilight: Mask of Ezra Pound (After Gaudier-Brzeska), 2016.

Masks by Yasuo Miichi; Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow.

JAPAN SOCIETY GALLERY | NYC

October 14, 2016—January 15, 2017

www.barogaleria.com Pinta Miami 2016 UNTITLED Miami Beach 2016 UNTITLED San Francisco 2017 Túlio Pinto | NADIR #8 | 2014 | Steel stair, glass plate, rope, rocks | Edition of 5 | 220 x 230 x 80 cm

Art Previewed

A power-hungry warrior and a peace-loving wife – could they ever tread together on the path of non-violence?

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Previewed Jordan Wolfson Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 27 November – 23 April

Biennale of Moving Images Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva through 29 January

Guthrie Lonergan Honor Fraser, Los Angeles through December 16

Rachel Maclean Tate Britain (Art Now), London through 2 April

Thomas Bayrle ICA Miami 29 November – 26 March

Alex Da Corte Maccarone, New York through 21 December

Maurizio Cattelan Monnaie de Paris through 8 January

Maria Nordman Konrad Fischer, Berlin through 7 January

Sarah Morris Kunsthalle Wien 8 December – 8 January

Landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love Cell Project Space, London through 15 January

1 Jordan Wolfson, Colored sculpture, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Dan Bradica. Courtesy the artist, Sadie Coles HQ , London, and David Zwirner, New York & London

December 2016

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1 In a recent Fantastic Man article on Jordan Wolfson, gallerist Sadie Coles described the artist’s work as ‘complicated and manipulative’, and suggested, if approvingly, that he’s like that himself. And indeed, for all the meditating and health-regimen-following that the thirtyfive-year-old New Yorker apparently does, we’ve never heard him described as a chilledout pussycat. (‘Brat’, on the other hand, we’ve heard.) But artists don’t have to be nice, and Wolfson’s work is undeniable. Colored sculpture (2016), a giant animatronic puppet of a redheaded, teeth-bared American boy swung from a gantry on chains, locking its gaze eerily on viewers’ eyes via facial-recognition software, and repeatedly smashed to the ground while a schizophrenic soundtrack of speech and emotive music plays, is an extraordinary reimagining of what art can now be, physically

and psychologically. So is its sister, Female Figure (2014), a robot girl in a witch mask, dancing to its own reflection while, once again, eyeing up its audience.

Manic / Love / Truth / Love, Wolfson’s show at the Stedelijk, is split into two parts: the first, running until the end of January, will showcase Colored Sculpture and earlier works including his breakthrough video Raspberry Poser (2012); the second, from February to late April, dusts down the witch and offers a new video installation, Riverboat Song (2016). (For anyone who caught a Tom Sawyer-in-hell vibe from the artist’s towheaded and brutalised puppet boy, here might be more evidence of classic Americana gone awry.) So we’re to go to Amsterdam twice, because that’s how Wolfson wants it, but the request isn’t ungenerous and most likely we’ll assent.

Another way to run the tropes of childhood through a creepy digital filter, meanwhile, 2 is offered by Rachel Maclean, a clear standout in the latest British Art Show. There, her film Feed Me (2015) found the Scottish artist playing – with the help of masks and CGI – all the characters in an hourlong, green screenpowered satiric fairytale that fluently connects various issues du jour: consumption, the sexualisation of children, the imperative to be beautiful and surveillance in an evocation of candy-coloured dystopia. Tate noticed, and now Maclean is the latest artist to feature in Tate Britain’s Art Now series. Since the British Art Show didn’t come anywhere near London, she’ll be news to some. Younger viewers, meanwhile, can enact revenge for having to sit through Philippe Parreno’s glacial Turbine Hall proposal down the road by

3 Maurizio Cattelan, Sans titre, 2001, polyester resin, wax, pigments, natural hair. Photo: Zeno Zotti. Courtesy Monnaie de Paris

2 Rachel Maclean, We Want Data!, 2016. © and courtesy the artist

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ArtReview

4 Karimah Ashadu, Red Gold (still), 2016. Courtesy the artist

5 Thomas Bayrle, Wire Madonna, 2016, rendering by Office GA, Miami.

Courtesy the artist and ICA Miami

refusing to decode for their parents Maclean’s exhibition title, Wot U :-) About.

This writer recently wrote a book in which, 3 in passing, he suggested that Maurizio Cattelan may have retired and may not. (At the time it was impossible to be sure.) True to irritant form, no sooner had that volume headed towards the printers when Cattelan announced that he definitely hadn’t retired. Firstly by installing an 18K gold toilet, coquettishly titled America (2016) and complete with Bulgari wipes, Chanel powder and a guard, in the Guggenheim Museum restrooms in New York. (This, of course, is the artist who announced he was quitting five years ago by hanging all his works from the Guggenheim skylights, and who published a magazine entitled Toilet Paper.) And secondly – if you can call a retrospective that is, in the venue’s words, ‘“deeply” inhabited by

the artist’ to be a reversal of retirement – by polyphony (the word ‘choir’ is mentioned), presenting a substantial solo retrospective, so maybe they’ve actually had less work to do.

Not Afraid of Love, at the Monnaie de Paris, the On the third hand – bear with us – the show French mint, in its eighteenth-century salons. does appear to have a theme of sorts. Mindful of the ‘time’ in time-based media, only 27 works Included in the greatest-hits parade are his will be on show, by, among others, Trisha Baga, iconic suspended taxidermy horse (Novecento, 1997); meteorite-felled pope (La Nona Ora, 1999); Cally Spooner, Karimah Ashadu, Boychild and kneeling Hitler (Him, 2001); and an effigy, Wu Tsang, and Kerry Tribe, and if you notice bursting through the parquet flooring (Untitled a gendered slant to those names, it’s entirely (Manhole), 2001), of Cattelan, whom we might reflective of the list as a whole: the show, the organisers suggest, aims at a particularly suspect of lately being bored, if never boring. feminine view of the world.

Geneva’s venerable Biennale of Moving 4 When ArtReview visited Thomas Bayrle in 5 Images is unusual in featuring only commissioned works. Respect to curators Andrea Bellini, Frankfurt recently, it found the septuagenarian Caroline Bourgeois, Cecilia Alemani and Elvira artist in the midst of a late-career renaissance, Dyangani Ose, then, who have had more work preparing for a cluster of shows including this to do than most. On the other hand this is also one at the ICA Miami. The recognition is richly deserved, not least given how influential the a rare biennial that, the organisers say, doesn’t German postmedium artist – and particularly conform to a curatorial brief, instead espousing

December 2016

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6 Maria Nordman, Cité / Sculpture 1, 1989, wooden box with four drawings, 62 × 58 × 34 cm. Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer, Berlin & Düsseldorf

7 Guthrie Lonergan, Internet Group Shot, 2006, webpage.

Courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser, Los Angeles

his signature ‘superforms’, larger shapes composed of miniature, nested iterations of their forms – has been on generations of artists dealing with systems thinking, but also for the convincing nature of his idiosyncratic vision, which links seemingly disparate aspects including religion, the heartbeat and industrial processes. As testament to that, the centrepiece of Bayrle’s wryly titled retrospective One Day on Success Street will be Wire Madonna (2016), the Madonna and Child fashioned in steel, Bayrle’s largest sculpture to date.

Enough about other people (momentarily): 6 back to you. That’s been Maria Nordman’s attitude since the late 1960s, when, after making films, she began producing site-specific installations that entrained airflow, light, sound and chance meetings with other viewers and volunteers. The Los Angeleno calls the space of

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encounter that her art sets up ‘geo-aesthetics’, and one aspect of it is her Standing Pictures, slim boxes containing artworks (and also, one guesses, being artworks) generally with removable panels that the viewer manipulates in order to see the work. Of course, everybody makes participatory art now, but Nordman was onto this a half-century ago. Go interact.

‘Our Bruce Nauman’ is how fellow Internet-centric artist Cory Arcangel describes 7 Guthrie Lonergan, whose art wrings affect and nullity from the confined space of digital presets that nevertheless contain real life – whether the MapQuest stills of sketchy, spindly SoCal roads in Lonely Los Angeles (2005) or the urge to communicate economically outlined via stock clips overlaid with Sting singing Message in a Bottle in Acapella (2009).

In a 2014 Artforum article, Ed Halter noted that

ArtReview

Lonergan hadn’t made any new work public since 2012, except a note on his website that ultimate-guitar.com had accepted one of his tablature transcriptions (for the HBO Go streaming service’s jingle). This year, though, he seems to have woken up. He debuted new work in a group show at Honor Fraser: Events, Appointments and Errands (2016), a slideshow of personal photographs lifted from Flickr, edited using mainstream formats that don’t allow much inventiveness. His first solo show – at the same gallery, and entitled 2006 – looks back at works he made around that time, the point when the Internet transitioned from being a ‘Wild West’ situation to one of proprietorial software presets and decreasing flexibility. Meanwhile, for the duration of the show, Lonergan invites locals to bring in their outdated tech for recycling.

Of course, when you step away from the Internet there’s still the real world to deal 8 with – or not. In the taut-looking landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love at Cell Project Space, which has showcased/ forecasted emerging practice in London for a decade and a half, Kate Mackeson and Henrik Potter use sculpture and painting/sculpture hybrids to summarise contemporary anomie related to that condition: economic precarity, ubiquitous digitisation, and fluid life/work interfaces. Or, we might say, the effects of endless flat sharing, screen staring and temporary gigs, and how we relate to others and steer ourselves forward in the face of that. Expect updates on Mackeson’s padded figures, somewhere between beds, blankets and bodies; and Potter’s bleak, screenlike, friezelike blackened paintings and consolatory benches.

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Alex Da Corte’s installations and videos A riddle: what falls but never breaks?

(Answer at the end of the paragraph.) Falls Never are compound thieveries: from recent and distant art history (Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, 10 Breaks, anyway, is the title of Sarah Morris’s Poussin, in Die Hexe, 2015, a multiroom installanew show, whose centrepiece is Strange Magic tion interspersing real and replica artworks (2014), which – following her scanning, Godfrey alongside, for example, stripper poles, in a Reggio-indebted surveys of cities (Los Angeles, theatrical environment), pop culture (TRU L IF , New York, Washington, Miami, Beijing…), 2013, in which the artist appears as Eminem portraits of Hollywood insiders and modernist eating cereal) and paintings made using shamarchitectural landmarks the Farnsworth House poos on glass and mirrors. Everything is levelled: and the Glass House – is another exploration art sits on the same plane of influence and of surfaces and manufactured desires: specificharacter formation as, say, VO5. Da Corte lives cally, those engineered by French luxury house LVMH. No doubt we can expect some of the in Philadelphia, and in his Maccarone show, A Man Full of Trouble – named after a pre-RevoluAmerican artist’s tightly designed abstract tionary Philadelphia tavern – he ransacks his paintings, too, which have regularly flanked her filmic excursuses and whose clear-cut city’s past via ‘a menagerie of interrelated sculpinterlocking geometries and alluring colour tures staged atop a carpet depicting a cinematic schemes cogently anticipate our own desire for moment of foiled discovery’, his sources ranging from business murals to Benjamin Franklin them, cake-and-eat-it style. Oh, and the riddle? to Quaker Oats. It doesn’t sound minimal.

Night, duh. Martin Herbert

9 Alex Da Corte, A Man Full of Trouble, 2016 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Maccarone, New York & Los Angeles 8 Henrik Potter, Cell (detail), 2016, closed cell polyethylene foam and mixed media, 700 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist

10 Sarah Morris, Strange Magic (still), 2014, colour, sound, 6 min 6 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Wien

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ArtReview

ATELIER CALDER

ANNOUNCES 2017 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

The Red Feather (1975), Reims croix du sud (1969), and Horizontal (1974) outside the new studio in Saché, 1976 © 2016 Calder Foundation, New York / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

ROCHELLE GOLDBERG

ABBAS AKHAVAN

EVA KOT’ÁTKOVÁ

CALDER FOUNDATION

Points of View

Six months after the June referendum result in which British voters surprised the world by voting to leave the European Union, nothing much has, in fact, actually happened, other than a slumping currency. The initial panic of the political establishment has now settled into a pattern of awkward procrastination by prime minister Theresa May’s conservative administration, much of it down to dragging out the schedule for the enactment of Article 50, the treaty mechanism which will trigger the process of terminating the UK’s membership in the EU. Many in the creative sector were loudly dismayed by the Brexit result, fearing, like many pro-remain supporters, that it signalled the return of a xenophobic, even racist LittleEnglander retrenchment. Others were fearful that it heralded an unprecedented and risk-filled leap into the unknown, with unforeseeable consequences for the economy and European stability itself. But since the initial upset, the art community seems to have had little more to say.

A muted gloom now seems to hang over much of the cultural sector, while the most vocal responses have been pragmatic declarations focused on making the most of the situation, largely coming out of the commercial side of the creative industries. So the UK’s Creative Industries Federation has issued a report of recommendations about free movement of skilled workers and students, and protecting intellectual property; elsewhere a ‘Brexit design manifesto’ has been announced, signed by dozens of leading British names in commercial design and art, making similar demands.

But as for coming to terms with why more than half the country voted to leave, few seem

Listen to britain?

J.J. Charlesworth considers the British artworld’s muted response to Brexit willing to really go beyond the earlier clichés about a ‘deluded’ or misinformed British public, or how to relate to the 52 percent of the country who appear indifferent or hostile to the European project. It’s perhaps not surprising that the most open response has come from those parts of the cultural world with the biggest stake in the idea of a national culture; Rufus Norris, artistic director of the National Theatre, pioneer of ‘verbatim’ theatre, announced in September a major ‘listening project’ for the National titled ‘Missing Conversations’.

Interviewers will record the opinions of ordinary people across the UK, and writers and theatremakers will be commissioned to work with the resulting material. As Norris put it bluntly in September, “I don’t believe 17.5 million people are racists or idiots… I think we’ve got to listen.”

Among contemporary artists and institutions, there have been a few halting responses, again outside London, where artists and institutions have to deal with the reality of their local public having largely voted leave. Derby’s QUAD art centre, for example, invited a print workshop, Dizzy Ink from neighbouring Nottingham,

December 2016

to produce an evolving exhibition of posters, designed in collaboration with members of the public. But such initiatives are few and far between.

The problem of trying to figure out how to develop a dialogue with the leave-voting public has put into stark contrast the remoteness of contemporary art from a wider public, which, especially outside the big metropolitan centres, gets served a certain view of art and the world emanating from metropolitan art culture, with little exchange of views. As artist Liam Gillick, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in July, observed of the slogans generated by pro-remain artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, ‘in retrospect, however well-intentioned these slogans may have been, they seem weak in the face of an entrenched suspicion of bureaucratic Federalism and a distrust of warm statements of togetherness emanating from a metropolitan elite.’

That voters in the referendum upset the mainstream narrative favoured by those who see Europe as a ‘warm statement of togetherness’ at the very least shows up that contemporary art, even if it sees itself as politically and socially engaged, nevertheless does so from the perspective of a relatively narrow cultural and social demographic. Dismissing half the country as misguided or ignorant doesn’t make you a lot of friends. That artists and ‘creatives’ should all uniformly agree on an issue seems more like an exercise in group-think than creative thinking, or an openness to dialogue which art is supposed to celebrate. If art’s engagement with society is to mean something credible, it’s time to have a conversation – to speak, and to listen.

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Maybe the freeway isn’t a cliché.

The first book I decided to read, or reread, upon becoming a permanent resident of Los Angeles – following three years of cross-country commutes between NYC and LA – was Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). I had conveniently forgotten how Mike Davis, in perhaps one of the best social histories of LA’s particular conurbation, his City of Quartz (1990), dismissed Banham as one of its ‘boosters’, and so rendered Banham’s book kind of off-limits for the self-serious left (or was that the self-conscious left? No matter) – and so I plunged in.

For all its breezy sociology, Banham’s The Architecture of Four Ecologies is great for its diagrammatic simplicity, which is to say for its diagrams, pure and simple. The map of the water grid and late-nineteenth-century railroad lines, which appears in the book’s introductory chapter, ‘In the Rear-view Mirror’, is a picture of inevitability. Here is the structure that gives body to ‘Los Angeles’ as an idea. The freeways, one can see, are byproducts of this earlier steam and water circulation, for which, as the Annales school was learning at the same time, geography would be destiny.

The question of course is: where does it all go?

The answer of course is: Hollywood. Banham’s book was published in 1971. The second book I read was Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company, which came out in 1977, and was a follow-up of sorts to Eve’s Hollywood (1974), her breakout quasi-tell-all, which I haven’t read, though I know how it begins: with a description of the author’s visual sense.

She doesn’t like to see numbers written out, she likes ‘10’ as opposed to ‘ten’, because she’s more ‘artist’ than ‘writer’. That’s pretentious, and it’s meant to be. I suspect the rest of the book is meant as an attempt to make you like her anyway (we’ll see; it’s on deck).

But being an ‘artist’ isn’t a reason. Being from Los Angeles is. Banham’s diagrams offer a clue. Today the freeways are called, for example, simply ‘the 101’, ‘the 10’, ‘the 5’, or ‘the 405’ (or, so I’ve heard, ‘the fucking 405’).

Banham’s map has them as ‘the Hollywood freeway’, ‘the Santa Monica freeway’, ‘the Golden State freeway’, and ‘the San Diego freeway’.

These characters make appearances in Slow Days.

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Would Joan Didion ‘take the 101’?

The language of LA’s freeways is changing American letters – again by

Jonathan T.D. Neil

Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange, Los Angeles

ArtReview

Here’s a typical passage: ‘It takes two hours for an ordinary person to get from Hollywood to Bakersfield, so I planned on three, and got out of the house and onto the Hollywood Freeway by 7:00 a.m.’ Babitz must like the way the numbers look because she sees them flying overhead, where they’re never written out, because reading at 70mph is, presumably, dangerous – though everyone seems to do it.

To write them out is to slow down.

‘She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura.’ This isn’t Babitz, it’s Didion, or rather it’s Maria Wyeth, Joan Didion’s achingly absent main character in Play It As It Lays (1970), which is often written about as a scathing critique of Hollywood’s vapidity and vampire ways. The story of Maria’s unravelling is told in first-person and what Didion calls a ‘close third’. Today it reads like a 1950s closeup: Vaseline-lensed and lacking in fine lines.

The narrator is close, but the story isn’t. There is a divide between Didion’s LA (and Babitz’s, and Banham’s) and today, which is registered in the writing, in the style which is disconnected, episodic.

Maria likes to drive. The freeway is ‘the organism which absorbed all her reflexes, all her attention’. Banham liked to drive as well: ‘the actual experience of driving on the freeway prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes’. For Didion, the freeway is the book. It’s what’s American in the American novel (in Los Angeles, at least), where movement and migration matters more than plot.

Today that novel is more numerical, more algorithmic. This has nothing to do with the descent of tech culture and tech economies upon the Southern Californian coastline. I’d venture it has more to do with a tightening of the landscape, of the geography. The cars are more numerous and more enclosed (not so many convertibles today). They are quieter. There are screens everywhere. The numbers that are flying overhead have shed their connection to any place one might be going. ‘The San Diego freeway’ doesn’t exist any more, because no one is going to San Diego; they ‘take’ the 405.

In a town that once boasted of no nine-to-five jobs, people are just going to work.

In the basement of a residential building in Lisbon’s Xabregas area, a curtain is snaking through the shaftlike space. The curtain is black, with see-through parts shaped like clouds or cave openings. Through the fine fabric mesh, the viewer can spot wooden frames the size of old-fashioned bathroom mirrors hanging perpendicularly from the walls using elegant black metal hinges that can be moved according to the preferences of the viewer. The frames hold layered images of buildings and trees printed on both sides of acrylic glass, together with geometric abstract shapes in bright colours.

Like the curtain, the frames are both opaque and transparent; they are boundaries, but not dogmatic ones.

The curtain, titled All Our Tomorrows (all works 2016), functions as a spatial denominator, and the frames are support structures, devices that hold other things up for us to see and experience. Such ‘apparatuses of visibility’, appliances of access, have long been artist Céline Condorelli’s special interest. In 2009 she published the book Support Structures together with Gavin Wade, which is ‘a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.’

In Condorelli’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Lissabon some of the works determine the space, manipulating the view and movement of visitors in a manner that almost encourages a game of hide-and-seek. Small colourful wooden spinning-tops looking like miniature merry-gorounds feature in the show, and a copy of a book on artist Palle Nielsen’s utopian playground

support structures Maria Lind sees new ways of working and living together in Céline Condorelli’s exhibition

from top Céline Condorelli,Concrete Distractions, 2016 (installation view); Céline Condorelli, Models for a qualitative society, 2016, painted black acacia, painted steel both Photo: Bruno Lopes. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon

December 2016

The Model: a Model for a Qualitative Society at Moderna Museet in Stockholm from 1968 is included in the small study area. Equally significant in this context is the architect Lina Bo Bardi, who famously argued that a museum should contain a playground, something that Condorelli finally realised with a merry-goround at the Bo Bardi-designed museum MASP in São Paulo earlier this year as part of the group exhibition Playgrounds 2016. In Lisbon that interest continues: Bo Bardi’s outstanding SESC Pompeia (a centre for culture, leisure and education formed out of an old factory in São Paulo inaugurated in 1986), has left its traces in the show, most obviously in the see-through parts of that curtain, shaped like the windows of the building.

The drive to be together under circumstances other than the ones we are used to has been strong in art over the last decades, both as a topic and as a methodology, for example how to live, study and work together. And this drive has not diminished; on the contrary, as we view structures – supportive or not – falling apart on all levels under late capitalism, it seems more urgent than ever before. Condorelli is one of the most interesting voices in this regard, with a second book pertaining to the topic – The Company She Keeps – published in 2014. In it, the artist takes a close look at the practice and philosophy of friendship, as a particular kind of support structure with which surprisingly few female philosophers have engaged with.

A rare and distinct support structure, although its stability is also in danger due to people’s general lack of time.

Surrounded by Condorelli’s works in Lisbon, I am reminded of Félix Guattari’s 1988 essay ‘The Three Ecologies’, in which the late French philosopher maintains that the effects of IWC – Integrated World Capitalism – necessitate a new ‘ecosophy’, one that puts forth three types of ecology: that of human subjectivity, that of social relations and that of the environment. Each ecology needs its own radical reformulation in the age of IWC, but, more than anything, it is necessary to rethink how they coexist and intermingle. In this remarkably fresh and politically pressing text he calls for new paradigms that are ‘ethicoaesthetic in inspiration’. It seems to me that Condorelli’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Lissabon and its acute sensibility towards self-determined collective ways of being together, and her practice overall with the recent work on friendship and its values and vicissitudes for that matter, do some of that.

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Ron O’Donnell Bonjour Monsieur Byrne Exclusive Limited Edition Print

£195 from the National Galleries of Scotland online shop

Giclée print, produced on 230gm Hahnemeuhle fine art archival quality paper. Signed and hand numbered by the artist.

Edition of 100, plus one artist’s proof. Unframed and unmounted. Size 60 x 48cm.

© ronodonnell National Galleries of Scotland Charity No. SC003728

W.W.W. (Whole World Working) A project devised by Anastasia Philimonos 03.12.16 – 05.02.17 The gallery will be closed 19 December 2016 – 4 January 2017 www.collectivegallery.net Michel de Broin, Keeping on Smoking, film still, 2006.

Courtesy the artist, photo by Claire Healy.

Let me tell you that when a bitch comes into season, it’s a hot, rough social event. There’s no party the world over to rival the stimulants and grubby fondles and hormones up for grabs. There are not suddenly more dogs of all humours and flavours but there are more dogs, up close, that need what they need. A lot of breath approaches.

These dogs are like forceful men, sidling in on the sniff. Marj is dispatching her message through a silent, sexy signal, sensible for miles.

She’s busy transmitting something real, to get back something real.

(At last she’s not even scared witless by the stranger blasting into his phone, “I don’t give a flying fuck about the cheese sauce! It’s not worth six thousand pounds.”) Nothing symbolic here. Marj has something urgent to say, and she’s enflaming herself to say it. There’s a touch of blood, and there’s another touch of blood. There’s recurrent, pheromonecharged urine, flyposted along the way. She is undertaking a high-stakes promotional campaign and the campaign reads: ME. Even before her come-here olfactory offensive, Marj was an enticement. Never mind the dogs – just getting to the shop, great hunks of the world would come lunging at her face, wolfwhistling across streets, kissy-kissy noises, prodding her passing bounty.

What lessons could human–canine relations learn from feminism? Does the ‘back off’ face work also against dog-botherers?

(I am one, it doesn’t.)

Now it’s just that things have got a little more acute. Marj is ripening down there and dogs are coming by to taste. To get a whiff of recognition, dogs take the time that they take. Marj is open for association. But these dogs aren’t her lovers.

When play turns to shove, there’s not a single one she allows to make unreserved love to her. She places her swollen vulva firmly on the ground. NO TO UNREQUITED SCRUTINY. Intrigue is intrigue’s end.

Sass

Courtesy the artist

And all this is happening years after Duchamp came painting Mona Lisa’s tantalising, look-at-me tash. And then named her with that pun – five letters that hint at her other three-quarters being undreamable butter. Like Marj, and some of us, she carries her greater magnetism out of sight. Plural, alluring, either.

What you don’t see is not like this at all.

Can this hidden, demented inner and lower life also be a mirror? A mysterious and frustrating feeling depicting the dis/continuity in all we see and are? Meaning: we want in, we want out? Meaning: what’s for real? Oh, I don’t know I hardly know why I’m here and who’s making up the rules but I’m glad we’re not pieces of rock and you’re holdin’ your body next to mine – sudden transparency of relations.

We humans and dogs have a lot in common, spitting foamy mouthwash and pricking our ears for danger. Dogs, too, have to deal with getting the once-over, getting seized by intrusive hands, tumbled head-under-tail into enthusiasm’s steamy cup. Dogs too have to cope with being filled with indecisions, whether to lie on one side of the room or the other, whether today’s mode is electricity or sluggish, whether to drop the chewy bouncing thing.

(Lucky for dogs that they don’t often travel by aeroplane. Imagine being free of having your body dragged through the air by several computers and a couple of people in fitted uniforms driving a can that compresses food into a salty lick and space–time into a few forgettable movies and has little to stop it getting ripped open and cleansed in an icy wind.)

Like a dog, like all species, my species has had some influence on my life, and an immense one on my art and lovers. But, mainly, my species is ‘alive’. Dogs and humans die in the same way.

The only significant difference is we spend our lives trying not to wonder how and what terrible silence will rip us out of the world.

December 2016

47

by

Heather Phillipson

A museum curator is coming over for a studio visit and I’m hoping she’ll be very pleased with what I have planned for her.

You see, between you, me and the lamppost, it won’t really be much of a studio visit at all!

But rather a romantic candlelit dinner for two.

Yes, that’s right! I am going to seduce a museum curator! I’m on a charm offensive with the artworld! A charm offensive!!!

My total artworld domination reboot shall succeed through the carefully combined effort of:

offer her a backrub!

A BACKRUB!!

A little adult contemporary on the Bluetooth speaker and I should have a museum show within the year.

And not just any museum show. Not at the goddamned Ronkonkoma Community Museum (RNKMCM), the Wichita Museum of Contemporary Art (WCTMoCA) or the Cincinnati Center of Cultural Kreativity (CCoCK), which is really more of an abandoned mall than an actual museum.

No! We’re talking a real, first-class, grade-A

1 Appealing to the dark forces that have bound man to woman for millennia 2 My excellent new K2-inspired paintings of not anything in particular

from light chat to snapchat

I cannot believe it’s taken me so long to come up with this clever scheme!

I know, I know… you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Isn’t this a bit beneath you, Jonathan Grossmalerman?”

Well, no. It isn’t.

Not if you’ve seen the news! The contemporary art market is softening as a whole and my own particular market is in absolute freefall!

My Artist Index position is negligible and my Google Alerts have slowed to a trickle and mostly concern parking violations. Also, I’m beginning to believe the small Bushwick gallery that brought me back to the public’s notice (with an added hip quotient) has stolen all of my money!

A suspicion buoyed by the fact they no longer answer their phone, inhabit their adorable bodega storefront space or appear anywhere on the Internet. Even the gallery director’s Tinder profile, once a hotbed of millennial hookups, is suddenly dormant. Word on the street is that the gallery now exists entirely on Snapchat… although I can’t verify that because I can’t seem to figure out how Snapchat actually works!

I mean… I downloaded it onto my phone, but then what??

So that leaves me here, all by my lonesome!

Looking out for no 1. Poor little old me.

But I’m no babe in the woods. It’s a dog-eatdog world out there, and I’m playing for keeps!

What I need is some sort of institutional support!

(And when I say some sort of institutional support I am of course referring to the museum

Jonathan Grossmalerman on how an artist generates forward momentum

48

institution sort, not the psychiatric institution sort.) Hence my special ‘date’.

You see, my clever plan hinges to a great extent on the first few pregnant moments.

I shall answer the door in my bathrobe and act as though I was certain we had scheduled the studio visit for another date. I even have the studio visit written down for the 12th in my datebook, despite that fact that today is the 11th.

And the 11th is the day we actually scheduled the studio visit for... which I will then show her! Doubting herself, she will overlook the fact I am in nothing but a loosely fastened silk bathrobe and join me in the studio, where there happens to be a recently opened, chilled bottle of white Burgundy! I will compliment her ensemble and call it “sophisticated-looking”, place my hand on hers and say confidently, “Tell me about your day”, at which point I will studiously listen, eyes on her, fixed. None of that waning-interest stuff that generally derails this sort of thing! I won’t interrupt her with things that don’t pertain, or shout at her suddenly.

And when she’s finished telling me about her day… here comes the coup de grâce… I shall

ArtReview

museum show!

All I have to do is follow through on my plan to the letter. Give the best goddamned backrub of the century and Bob’s your uncle! Zam-boom.

It’s all jazz hands and big smiles!

I was going to cook a cassoulet but I have such confidence in my backrub plan, I’m not even going to bother. I’ll just put out some chips or something. Maybe some salsa.

Who really cares?

I mean, sometimes I even amaze myself with these clever little deceptions. Putting the appointment in on the wrong date in my calendar book is one of those details that pulls everything together. That’s where the magic of the chicanery makes itself evident. I ask you!

Who else even comes up with stuff like that?

It’s really too cute by half.

Of course, having written it in on the wrong date opens up other terrifying possibilities… like forgetting the actual date of the appointment. Which, come to think of it, I only really have a faint hunch is tonight. I should probably have written that down somewhere.

Even if in secret. Like on a receipt in my wallet or in code on my fridge. I suppose actually that it’s possible I did. But I have no idea what the code was and I can’t discern anything from what’s written on these damn receipts. One says &7&SQL-222 Heseltine want teraz mil… What the fuck does that mean? Is it code? What could that possibly mean????

Oh, man! This could really be a problem.

I can’t email her to check because then my whole plan goes to shit. I suppose I could simply sit and wait, but anyone who knows me knows I’m not really a sitting-and-waiting kind of guy!

I know! I’ll spend this time figuring out Snapchat. You see? Always moving forward!

FRED INGRAMS DITCH PAINTING THE FENS 6 DECEMBER - 8 JANUARY

SUPPORTED BY

DICK SCOTT-STEWART (1948 - 2002)

THESE TIMES | ARCHIVE PHOTOGRAPHS 6 DECEMBER - 8 JANUARY

SUPPORTED BY

183-185 BERMONDSEY STREET (adjacent to White Cube) LONDON SE1 3UW A NOT-FOR-PROFIT PLATFORM SUPPORTING THE FUSION OF ART, PHOTOGRAPHY & CULTURE telephone 0203 441 5152 abps@project-space.london www.project-space.london

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 52

Alois Riegl on Jeff Koons Interview by

Matthew Collings

Alois Riegl, born in Linz in 1858, died in Vienna in 1905, was one of a group of influential art historians who established art history as an independent academic discipline, and insisted on a formalist approach.

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ArtReview

ARTREVIEW Jeff Koons mentioned you on TV recently.

ALOIS RIEGL Yes, I saw it. He said the key to understanding works by him on show at a Mayfair gallery during Frieze week in London, works consisting of photographically accurate copies of famous paintings, with large reflective spheres attached to them, which he calls Gazing Balls, is found in my concept ‘the beholder’s share’. He said I was “the first to speak about art being finished inside the viewer”. He was actually talking about sculptures he did a year ago, with the same attachments. These blue reflective balls. But the explanation applies to the paintings as well.

AR Is it true?

ALOIS RIEGL Well, it’s a fair enough definition of the notion I established in 1902 that the viewer is free in front of an artwork to have his or her own associations. It was elaborated in different ways later on by Walter Benjamin and E.H. Gombrich. It was Gombrich who rephrased ‘the beholder’s involvement’ to ‘the beholder’s share’.

AR Were you flattered, then?

ALOIS RIEGL Something can be true and untrue, untrue in essence while having a few features of truth. A Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist came on, to praise Koons, speaking of these reflective spheres. He said, “What does he do?

He creates a mirror so when you look at a work of art you see yourself in it. This is the first time a systematic attempt was made to incorporate the beholder into the work of art. You actually visualise yourself. I’ve never seen that before and I’ve looked at art for much of my life.” This is all fairytales: art that mirrors the viewer’s body – so you can literally see yourself in art – is nothing to do with my enquiry into the psychological phenomenon whereby a viewer’s inner reflection completes the meaning of a work of art.

AR Did you like Frieze week: did you go to many parties?

ALOIS RIEGL Frieze is all parties, really, it’s profoundly unserious, the selling is real, nothing else is, it’s a concentrated staging of a new mood everyone’s familiar with. What’s wrong with it is it drives down enquiry to a level of infantilism, which degrades the whole culture. A healthy, busy, prosperous market – always a good situation, after all, everyone wants to get the most out of life, to be comfortable, to stretch the mind, to explore every possibility, and you can’t do this if there are no resources, if you’re up against it at every moment, if struggle is all you know – gets to the state where consumption is morbidly dictatorial, like a totalitarian society. Nothing else can be thought. The new image of aesthetic experience is people wandering past artworks with their mouths open looking into their

phones. Of course there are husks of thought, but these are filled with marketing, and art itself now speaks only of this emptying out, it can easily seem.

AR Is this just you being cynical or is cynical now the only thing anyone can be?

ALOIS RIEGL To be – it’s a good question: how can we be? We can experiment.

AR How do you do that?

ALOIS RIEGL You must first acknowledge art is about ownership now, and in some ways the link is straightforward. Any lovely lady or gentleman used to an elegant lifestyle knows it. You might see a Henry Moore at Frieze Masters and not ask anybody about it, because you don’t want to be tempted, but then sell an Albers, so you follow up on the Moore. Or you sell a house and you don’t want the money just sitting there, so you buy an Albers. To know even a little about what happens with art, you’ll know what work is likely to

Distortion in art can be productive – artists do it in many ways. Koons distorts intellectual information he comes across, and it results eventually in the art he makes – generated from a will to be commercially successful, yes, but also to invent and experiment. Why shouldn’t he distort what people have said? increase in value – in fact, it’s a waste of time to know anything else. It’s a bit dispiriting when you think of two things Marx said. One: that we invented God to explain ourselves and then found ourselves taking orders from our own invention. And two: art will soon end. This is because of the triumph of the marketplace over every aspect of life. The dispiriting thing is that although art appears to linger on, the reason we invented it in the first place was to celebrate God, and now we’ve got to take orders from PR companies about what to say about it.

AR So there’s nothing else – just things that don’t mean anything?

ALOIS RIEGL You have to work at it. Notwithstanding what I just said, I think you have to be careful how you think of the mass media and money. Communication is good, and prosperity facing page Alois Riegl, c. 1890.

Licensed to the public domain

December 2016

is good. Distortion is what you have to be alert to: what is convenient for life should not be distorted so that it is a value above life.

AR What about distortion in art?

ALOIS RIEGL Artists do it in many ways, and it can be productive. Koons distorts intellectual information he comes across, and it results eventually in the art he makes – generated from a will to be commercially successful, yes, but also to invent and experiment. Why shouldn’t he distort what people have said?

AR How do you mean?

ALOIS RIEGL The value of his work is up or down not according to whether he got the meaning right of something complicated I wrote years ago, but if the artistic results make an impact or not. I don’t see much in these gazing-ball experiments, but he’s always been uneven. He sows the seeds with one group of works that might not be significant, for another further ahead that will be. And I wouldn’t care if his only consistently sincere motivation really were the question of how to make money.

He doesn’t have to have the self-consciousness of an intellectual whose medium is the intellectual idea alone. A Vanity Fair article wholly preposterous in its fawning – which it has to be, otherwise he wouldn’t give the reporter and photographer access – is nevertheless right to observe that he is the son of merchants. He works hard. Perhaps, as I read elsewhere – although it is as yet more alleged than proved – he showed deplorable politics in laying off members of his workshop staff who want to unionise.

However, this political position, if it exists, is in any case not the content of his impressive stainless steel puppies and sausage-dog sculptures, enlarged kitsch, which express delight in the commodity image, but do so with the decorative, stunning impact of a monument built by Egyptians 5,000 years ago to express divinity.

AR You wrote a famous book about ornament, and it contributed to the art-historical approach known as formalism.

ALOIS RIEGL Yes, in the nineteenth century, instead of insisting, as a materialist must, that all art forms are the direct products of materials and techniques, I thought it was possible to write a continuous history of ornament. And from that transcendent point of view, I find Koons’s puppies formidable. The interest an artist has with form should not be confused with formalism, by the way. One is inevitable: the other is an aberration. And in any case formalism is not a real thing. It is an assumed thing: assumed in the mind of someone hostile to something they call formalism but that could be anything. (It could be merely the denigrator’s

51

lack of sensitivity to form, for instance.) But to return to Koons and his impressive forms, whose imagistic aspect is that of a kitschy sausage dog many metres high with an alizarin glow: Hal Foster describes their atmosphere as ‘poisoned apple… witchy charm’, and I agree when he says the impact relies on ambiguity, that without it the work falls flat.

AR You were saying Koons doesn’t have to be an intellectual?

ALOIS RIEGL The idea that he illustrates some theory or another he only partially grasps isn’t important. The work genuinely expresses our world today in spite of his explanations, not because of them. A historian ought to consider them, of course, if they are out there on the record, and a consumer will always take some light pleasure in hearing them. But the work has to be judged for its efficiency ultimately by other work, by historical precedent.

the canvas. A generalised transparency, and overlaid simple imagery, went with large letters spelling out provocative terms from the language of the intifada. Feminism was linked to uprising. And then sometimes, if a relatively more pleasing ornamental level was achieved, it still seemed naive.

AR What do you mean naive?

ALOIS RIEGL Well, I don’t want to linger on it, because my evaluation is now completely different, but the level of visual arresting-power attained in the decorative or ornamental content of truly outsider art, which has been well researched by colleagues such as Walter Morgenthaler and Hans Prinzhorn, is not approached. But as I say, I now have a different picture of the situation with her. Visual power is not exactly the issue.

AR Does it grate when you see him in the mass media all the time?

ALOIS RIEGL The communicative power of the mass media is neither good nor bad. It’s how you use it. I like a formulation by John Perrault, the art critic and artist who used to write cleverly in Artforum during the 1970s, and who died recently. He said if you take three famous art figures that use the mass media – Yves Klein, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol – you can think of each in terms of a good or a bad example of that utilisation. There is a genuine spiritual intent in Klein’s work, so if he gets himself filmed creating fire paintings or photographed so it looks like he’s leaping into a void, or whatever other things he might do to create publicity around the issue of a symbolic void, he’s what we might call a good example. A bad example is Dalí, because he’s not using the mass media for the Surrealist programme of disrupting bourgeois consciousness, but just for making large amounts of money. And Warhol is a mixed example. I think it’s fair to say Koons is the inheritor of Warhol.

AR Is there anyone painting now that you like?

ALOIS RIEGL While eating standard-level sushi at Frieze Masters that cost so much I could only laugh, I was intrigued by an interview with Jutta Koether, the postpainting painter, in October. I had to reconsider a style that in the past I found uninviting because tentative.

Years ago the paintings were not all that different to now. Drawing with watery oil paint filled up

52

AR You drank the Kool Aid? ALOIS RIEGL No, I had my own reflections spurred by reading.

AR She does all this staging with performances and hanging the paintings on specially constructed floating walls, or using the painting as a prop to contextualise readings from a diary to a seated audience.

ALOIS RIEGL Yes, that’s what the interview was about. I realised it is untrue or misleading to say to oneself that defiance against confident Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Manet Spanish Singer), 2014–15, oil on canvas, glass, aluminum, 176 × 137 × 38 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Gagosian

ArtReview

painterly flair equates to abnegation of talent or lack of it in the first place. A look of undeveloped talent, an adolescent drawing style, exists, yes, but within a clever construction. A liberal art lover might see only alienation at first. Oh, God, we’ve got to consider this, they groan to themselves. Such a perceiver is asked to take part in an experiment in being.

AR How do you think it works?

ALOIS RIEGL It’s not that there’s already a better way of being and the event is staged to draw attention to it, but the staging gives anyone the possibility of finding one. Central to the experiment is a language of painting developed in opposition to muscular painting’s associations of a big brush, impactful scrawling, large designs, impasto, speed and strong contrasts. Small brushes, watery paint, tentative swirls and doodling suggesting regression and mental absence – which, interestingly, Georg Baselitz once wrote about in a manifesto, an interest in regressive doodling summoning up snail and pretzel forms – make up the means.

Blushes and washes of tints rather than emphatically wrought surfaces; and slow, undirected and unintentional movements rather than dynamism: each tell you to think differently about interesting tonal colour. Madame Matisse: The Green Line by Matisse, for example, or the historic precedent he has in mind: an angel’s face in a Byzantine mosaic, also with ornamental coloured lines.

The revolutionary potential of that kind of art (Modernism transforming bourgeois materialism; early Christian art emphasising spiritual life rather than earthly power) is affirmed by Koether’s painting-performances, but complacent comfort with it is dislodged: she doesn’t say to wallow in grim alienation but rather finds a way to examine subjectivity that comes from examining alienation. And for this she develops a language that depends on knowledge of emphatic masculine achievement, but the language is opposite, it is soft and not emphatic, it can only be a language in its softness in relation to the strong one – because of its difference. The audience will think of it as a brave, exciting proposal, in which apparently affectless states are pathways and not a bazooka blasting your aesthetic guts out.

Next month Sir Alfred Munnings on Carroll Dunham

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17–19 Feb 2017 Cape Town International Convention Centre Bringing together contemporary art from Africa and the world.

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James Ensor, The Intrigue (detail). Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) © www.lukasweb.be - Art in Flanders vzw, photo: Hugo Maertens / © DACS 2016

Art Featured

Ashoka waged war after ruthless war, yet by the time his children grew up, he proudly saw them off as Buddhist missionaries 59

Body and the City Three Brazilian artists respond to crisis and transformation in their country through works focused within and around their own bodies

by Silas Martí

In the wake of the bulldozers that ravaged Rio de Janeiro in preparation for last summer’s Olympic Games, and in the aftermath of an impeachment process that many consider a coup d’état, Brazil and its cities have been likened to masses of scar tissue still recovering from reckless transformation. As politicians fight for power and struggle to calm the state of revolt now rampant all across the country, artists here have responded by placing their bodies in the line of combat, pursuing physical transformations as metaphors for a nation convulsed by political and economic turmoil. Bodybuilding and hormones have become staples of politically charged performances as a new wave of artists attempt to reflect on violent change in the flesh.

Igor Vidor, who is at the forefront of this scene, started this line of work after an accident. He was surfing off the coast of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, when he was swept away by the waves, nearly drowning before struggling ashore and collapsing in the sand. Though he’d been training to brave the open sea on a surfboard, he realised he’d pushed himself a little too far this time. This former athlete, used to the gruelling routine of football matches, had already become an artist by the time he tried to carve a performance out of confronting Bahia’s biggest waves. Vidor is interested in the sublime, a return to a Romantic vision of man’s surrender to the elements. With a tropical twist, his performance is an updated version of Caspar David Friedrich’s smartly dressed gentleman contemplating the edge of a precipice, the abyss portrayed at once as an insurmountable chasm and the most magnetic of death traps.

Less than a year after the artist’s brush with death, another episode left its mark. Vidor was driving on the highway with his father when a car swerved and crashed head-on into theirs. The woman behind the wheel of the oncoming vehicle died on the spot. Vidor didn’t suffer a scratch, owing his life to an airbag. “This really moves you. Those last 30 seconds before I thought I was going to die were the closest I’ve been to the idea of the sublime,” he told me on a call from Seoul, where he’s currently an artist-in-residence. “Up until then I had been researching the idea of the sublime, but always thinking about it as something radical. This near-death experience made it all a lot clearer.”

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Death, or the violence that can provoke it, foregrounds Vidor’s work. But it is society, rather than nature, that seems to deal the most forceful blows. This young artist’s practice, always anchored in the way a body reacts to its surroundings, has been equally shaped by the transformation of Rio de Janeiro in preparation for the Olympics.

Brazil’s postcard city went through drastic cosmetic surgery before the biggest sporting event descended on its shores last summer; entire neighbourhoods were razed, communities were uprooted and glitzy monuments seemed to drop from the sky during the makeover frenzy. The gentrification efforts, which left the police on edge, also exacerbated racism and discrimination (by virtue of the fact that more often than not it tended to be black and indigenous areas that were being gentrified), detonating a wave of measures to whitewash and tame the unruly contours of Rio. Vidor’s artworks are created through physical transformations.

He reacted to the forced removal of nearly 3,000 people from Vila Autódromo, a poor neighbourhood that lay in the path of the Olympics’ westward expansion, by learning how to lift weights professionally.

Timing his own transformation to match the pace at which the favela was being demolished (a site where the Olympic athletes’ apartments now stand), he engaged in a full-fledged process to increase his muscle power, changing his diet and following a heavy exercise routine. In Rio Olympics 2016 (2016), he is seen lifting a barbell amidst the rubble of the houses. For each dwelling, Vidor raised the combined weight of its former inhabitants. “I wanted to create some kind of noise in that context,” says the artist. “Even my presence, the figure of a white, bourgeois man, worked as a symbol of the demolition of that place.”

This symbolism, however, has drawn criticism to his performances, seen by some as shallow or opportunistic. Placing a sculpted body in a slum torn up for an event seen with scepticism in times of crisis could seem rather tasteless and ineffective from an artistic or aesthetic point of view. But while somewhat irregular, his actions find more solid footing in the idea of jarring contrasts, situations that go beyond the surface of a symbol to tap into the energy of bodies that clash (physically, racially or economically) with their surroundings.

ArtReview

Igor Vidor, Rio Olympics 2016 (still), 2016, HD video, 15 min.

Courtesy the artist

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Igor Vidor, Corra Como Se o Sol Pudesse Alcançar Você (Run as if the Sun Could Catch You), 2016, HD video, 4 min 13 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Virginia de Medeiros, Cais do Corpo, 2015, video, 7 min 3 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo

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After seeing a black, shirtless boy arrested as a ‘potential suspect’, he ten-minute work nears its end, we see Sérgio returning to Simone, filmed Corra Como Se o Sol Pudesse Alcançar Você (2016), a command that moving between male and female identities, and transgressing translates roughly to ‘run as though the sun could catch you’. In the gender boundaries. This process, of course, was met with disbelief, black-and-white two-channel video we see a game of tag in which verbal abuse and violence in the derelict working-class neighbourVidor and a group of black teenagers run through the streets of hood (which has a history of homophobic violence) in which he lives.

Flamengo, a middle-class district in Rio, screaming ‘catch’. “It caused Medeiros’s next work will involve looking at the culture of a commotion,” says Vidor. “Just the sight of black boys running in voguing in New York, the haven for homosexual life that Manchester a place dominated by whites raises suspicion, and we were in fact has become (with its openly gay mayor) and the fate of mothers who have lost gay sons and daughters to homophobic violence in Brazil. stopped by the police.”

Violence bred by intolerance is also at the heart of a series of works “I’m interested in looking at the body as a place of resistance,” says

by Virginia de Medeiros, another artist undergoing radical physical the artist. “Voguing competitions reminded me of the reality of transformation, this time in order to create photographs, perfor- Candomblé, almost a religious trance, much like the whole process mances, films and installations that investigate the construction of involving Simone’s transition into Sérgio.” gender identities in environments with inherent discrimination. For Rafael Menôva, a young artist based in São Paulo, is also engaged a year now, she has been taking testosterone boosters and oestrogen in transformation. For the past four months he has been dieting and suppressors in order to undergo a female-to-male (FTM) transition. exercising to become a real-life version of Laocoön, the Trojan priest It’s what she calls a latent performance, because the transformation immortalised in a classic Greek statue now in the Vatican Museums in itself, though documented by the artist, isn’t the work. Medeiros has Rome. Since he started his practice, Menôva has reflected on today’s been using this transition as a kind of filter, to see the world from obsession with a perfect body in the homosexual community, quesa male perspective. It isn’t clear yet how this will become a work in tioning the struggle to shape, hone and maintain mountains of itself, but her latest production has been done during this process, muscles while finding time to live a life of standard work and play. and she feels it is guided by the physical transformations of her body. Before this more radical performance, which involves daily shots of “The body changes, but so does the mind,” she told me in São Paulo. hormones and rigorous control of eating and sleeping patterns, he “It’s much more than a physical thing. I don’t separate my works from made ceramic sculptures of whey protein cans and silicone dumbbells real life. My body is changing, my voice is changing. I’m building a that seem to be melting. character, so to speak, and perhaps this will evolve into a performance While seemingly superficial, Menôva’s transformation is the that will sum up this whole experience.” performance aspect of a yearslong effort to map and occupy derelict In a way, her work is a struggle to dissect aggression (in the sense and forgotten spaces in São Paulo with artworks and parties. Leader of that the gay or transgender subjects of her work are often the victims a project named iScream, the artist contrasts the vision of a perfect, or of aggression) on a deeper level. Medeiros started her transition right perhaps excessively perfect, body with the experience of urban ruins. after finishing a work that was featured at the Bienal de São Paulo The freedom of roaming through destroyed movie theatres and parking two years ago. Sérgio e Simone (2007–14) shows the transformation of lots in the city’s darkest zones is the urban negative of an addiction to Simone, a transvestite living in Salvador, into the gym, the idea of a floundering metropolis Virginia de Medeiros, Sérgio e Simone #2 (still), contrasted with an artificially vigorous body, a Sérgio, a fanatical preacher who believes he’s the 2007–14, video, 9 min 55 sec. Courtesy the artist Messiah, sent by God to save humanity. As the synthesis of contemporary urban experience. ar and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo

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Rafael Menôva, Piscina, 2013, mineral pigment print on cotton paper, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Wlademir Dias-Pino

by Fernanda Brenner

Here’s what happens when the son of a typographer grows up to be an artist who considers the alphabet mankind’s cruellest invention

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Since early September, a large sign has welcomed visitors to São the experience of the poetic image by bypassing the written word’s Paulo’s main Ibirapuera Park. It is both curious and enigmatic, status as the only possible deliverer of messages in a poem. This deploying a language that appears familiar, but offers no obviously marked one of the rare moments in Brazilian cultural history when intelligible message. It seems open to interpretation, but remains a the discussion of poetry was extended beyond the typical Rio–São graphic combination of triangles and primary colours that looks flat Paulo axis of cultural production. Despite not being fully aligned from a distance, but more complex as one approaches, before finally with concrete poetry, which was in the making at the same time in revealing itself to be a relief formed by overlapping wooden boards. São Paulo, Dias-Pino’s work was acknowledged by the group, and he Is this some kind of code? A message from aliens? An advertisement took part – alongside poets Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Décio trying to sell something? Or nothing? And it’s not just the image Pignatari and Ferreira Gullar – in the seminal National Exhibition of that is intriguing, it’s the presence of this particular medium as well: Concrete Art at the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) in São Paulo in 1956. a municipal law – the ‘Clean City’ Act – passed in 2006 banned this The exhibition came not long after the first international art exhitype of advertising, which had cluttered São Paulo’s urban landscape bition at the São Paulo Biennial in 1951, and besides representing a key moment in Brazilian avant-garde culture, it gave significant visifor decades. bility to cutting-edge productions A caption on the back of the board informs the visitor that this is of local Concrete art and poetry. part of the Outdoors project, spread Dias-Pino’s production overacross the park and developed by lays syntagmas and disintegrates Wlademir Dias-Pino between 2015 alphabets and mediums in order to dilate and recreate existing and 2016 in the context of the 32nd codes and systems. The artist/poet São Paulo Biennial; they are 20 has always considered himself synthetic graphic representations first and foremost a graphic artist, of landscape in Cuiabá. About to which is to say that he treats both celebrate his 90th birthday, and words and images as objects on a still active, this prolific artist has page: “I have always put my hands a vast but little-known oeuvre that’s recently become the subject on the words and on the paper,” he of renewed interest. In addition says. The son of a typographer, he to his strong presence in the bienwas familiar with the techniques and trades of graphic production nial, The Infinite Poem of Wlademir from a young age, and from this Dias-Pino, the artist’s first comprehensive survey show, was mounted tactile intimacy with typefaces and this past March at the Museu de rotating printers, Dias-Pino proArte do Rio (MAR). So why has poses a new sort of language, bethe artworld been so slow to fully yond the written and spoken word. embrace the work of Dias-Pino?

Most of the time he just “lets the The answer to that lies in the very words happen” in a way that meaning is not the direct result of a word title of that retrospective: for much of his career, Dias-Pino has been combination. Sometimes there are primarily regarded as a poet and no words; sometimes the words are just graphic signs such as lines graphic designer. or dots. According to him, man Dias-Pino operates in his own invented writing, but not reading, world; talking to him, one gets the and if every narrative is colonising impression that his ideas circulate in an almost hermetic sphere. For the viewer, there are as many (in that alphabets and grammar force you to behave, or decode things, possible approaches to his production as there are readings of one of in a certain way), then the role of the poet is precisely to invent new his ‘dismountable’ poems – collections of detached pages that contain forms of inscribing and visualising semantic codes, in order to remain fragments of poems that the reader can arrange in infinite ways. This free and open up new ways of communication.

Since the 1950s, Dias-Pino’s projects have featured themes central artist’s complex biography, living between two cities, Rio de Janeiro and Cuiabá (in the central-west part of Brazil), and his inherently to the discourse surrounding contemporary art: among them the novel production techniques further contributed to the fact that issue of authorship; the interaction with spectators/readers in a way although he was actively involved in some of that encourages their active engagement with above Brasil meia-meia, 1966, book-poem. the key moments in Brazilian art and culture the work of art/poem; the use of digital logic Courtesy the artist (connecting subjects to each other through of the past 50 years, he spent much of this time facing page by Wlademir Dias-Pino Works open links, providing an operational system for as an outsider. at Ibirapuera Park during It was in Cuiabá, in 1948, that Dias-Pino someone else to use, develop or expand) as a tool the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, 2016. founded the literary avant-garde movement for the ‘democratisation’ of the artistic process; Photo: Leo Eloy / Estúdio Garagem . Courtesy Intensivista (instensivism), which intensified and the spontaneous and free reproduction the artist. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

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of his creations. His poems are made to be ‘acted out’, the meaning This groundbreaking educational initiative had, as its main objective, revealed when there’s interaction; and they offer an experience akin the preparing of students to deal with the most urgent problems within their own communities, always favouring practical knowlto being inside a live maze that reconfigures itself at every turn.

An emblematic example of Dias-Pino’s work is his first book-poem, edge over classic academic studies.

A Ave (The Bird), published in 1956, in a limited edition of 300 handmade In conversation, Dias-Pino reveals some insights into his interior copies. The poem, which was his contribution to the National Exhibition labyrinth, explaining that looking at the rocks and bends of the local of Concrete Art, was conceived as a total object, exploring all the possibil- river in Cuiabá was more important to his poetics than any literary ities and properties of the graphic space and of each element employed reference, and that since he was a boy he has been collecting images in the manufacture of the book: paper, serigraphy, folds, lines, etc. In from different sources, from manuals to newspapers and all sorts of the poem, the closed alphabet is replaced by a free-reading scheme, no magazines. And naturally he talks extensively about the limitations copy is identical and words and graphics overlap through combina- of text in comparison to the infinite possibilities of image. tions of perforated transparent paper.

Since the 1970s, under the title From a tactile intimacy with Enciclopédia Visual Brasileira (Brazilian Visual In A Ave, the medium is no longer suborEncyclopaedia), Dias-Pino has compiled dinated to the content; it becomes the typefaces and rotating printers, driver of the message. To this end, Diasa collection of images in a cataloguing Dias-Pino proposes a new Pino codified the word in materials and system that contains 1,001 volumes disort of language, beyond the vided into 28 themed sections, each one signs, choosing a type of communicacontaining 36 volumes of 36 pages each. tion that dispenses with any convenwritten and spoken word tional repertoire, thus removing the Each page contains found-image collages (mostly made using Xerox machines, with only the most recent one territorial reference from language.

For Dias-Pino the word is always functional: like a mathematical made using image-manipulation software such as Photoshop) that unit. His words operate as self-enclosed structures: any trace of a word’s evoke a plethora of themes, from rock paintings to comics, from reference to anything external to itself dissolves into pure geometric ancient writing to computerised language. The images are manipinformation as you ‘read’ through the book. The use of a conventional ulated and reconfigured by the artist to form entries that welcome alphabet merely enables the transition from the mechanical reading endless interpretation and can be modified at any time. The logic performed by the human brain to the ‘visual reading’ proposed by behind the organising scheme is cardinal, a counterpoint to the Dias-Pino. In this way, he suggests a complete overcoming of the self- ordinal arrangement of the alphabet, which informs the arrangement referential structure of concrete poetry, arguing that the unfolding of of dictionaries. processes is fundamental to the poem. His works are rendered as relaAt the São Paulo Biennial, Dias-Pino selected a group of images tions, through poetic mobilisation as a collective act and in real time. from the Enciclopédia… to be displayed in a sophisticated spatialThe poet creates and delegates the code to his readers, as a sort of algo- graphic composition. Over a triangular room, painted graphic rithm or open-source ancestor. schemes serve as background for carefully aligned columns of images In 1967, as a natural follow-up to his radical semiotic experiments, printed on simple A4 sheets. There’s no empty space in the instalDias-Pino founded the poema/processo movement, alongside a large lation: the large group of images and the painted lines cover every group of poets from Rio de Janeiro and Natal. According to the artist, inch of the walls. According to Dias-Pino, the painted areas functhe alphabet is the cruellest instrument ever created by man. The tion as reading keys for the ‘entries’ in his Enciclopédia… Presenting movement vehemently rejected the idea of poetry as a ‘spiritual state’ this ongoing work in such a fashion, we gain insight into the artist’s and the image of the poet as an isolated creator. It proposed breaking attempt to categorise an intermittent flux of information, something with the linearity of Western linguistic that has obvious analogies to the way we Man invented writing, but not systems and introducing seeing as lead our lives today. a new way of reading. The poems of Enciclopédia… is a living testimony to an reading, and if every narrative is this era favoured found images from artist who has spent his entire life thinking colonising, then the role of the newspapers and other sources, and deeply about visual structures so he could poet is to remain free, to open up generic graphic forms over words and subvert them. Whether creating a univerphonemes. Besides its contribution to sity programme or reinventing the book new ways of communication Brazilian avant-garde poetry and arts, form, Dias-Pino is always searching to set the movement played an important role in Brazil’s countercultural up processes rather than produce objects. Even the objects he makes history. Dias-Pino’s efforts in promoting the movement – in spite of – open to public poetic appropriation through the creation of what he increasing government censorship and the disregard of local critics calls versions – propose open systems rather than formulas or estab– were a form of activism, closer to the logic of consumption and lished concepts. mass culture than to an academic debate. That said, one other great Writing about Dias-Pino’s work in 1985, the Brazilian encyclopaeachievement of the artist was his participation in the founding of the dist Antônio Houaiss quotes a 1936 letter from James Joyce in which Universidade da Selva, the first higher education institution in Mato the Irishman tells his four-year-old grandson that the language Grosso state, located in the arid central west of Brazil and created spoken by the Devil – Bellsybabble – is evil because he makes it up during the 1970s, the most oppressive years of Brazilian dictatorship. as he goes along. If creativity is to be unlimited, then perhaps we Having first been invited to design its visual identity, Dias-Pino then should all follow – as Wlademir Dias-Pino has always done – the became engaged in the development of its educational programme. Devil’s method. ar

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A page from Wlademir Dias-Pino’s book-poem A Ave, 1956. Courtesy the artist

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Anthea Hamilton

by Helen Sumpter

above and facing page Turner Prize Exhibition 2016, 2016 (installation views).

Joe Humphrys. Courtesy © Tate Photography

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The English artist is currently sampling, collaborating, choreographing and deadpanning her way through three quintessentially British shows; is there a (Turner) prize at the end?

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Aquarius, 2010, digital banner with support, 750 × 750 cm.

Photo: Joseph Balfour. Courtesy the artist

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Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that visitors to this year’s Turner that articulates the ambiguous experience of images and objects in Prize at Tate Britain were queuing to take photographs of each other a digital age. in front of a 5m-high sculpture of a man’s bare bottom and thighs, Hamilton’s references are drawn from diverse and sometimes hands gently pulling his cheeks apart. Anthea Hamilton’s Project for perverse sources in fashion, design, film, advertising, pop culture, Door (After Gaetano Pesce) (2016) is part of the reworking of the London- kimono design, Kabuki theatre and mime. But key images (as well born artist’s 2015 show Lichen! Libido! Chastity! at Sculpture Center as motifs and titles) recur, printed at huge scale on buildings or in New York, for which she received her Turner nomination. The featured in short animations and as freestanding cutouts like props absurdist sculpture, which wouldn’t look out of place on a carnival on a stage. One of these images is a black-and-white photograph of a float, provides the perfect backdrop against which to stand, point man in skimpy trunks, sitting on a cube with his arms outstretched, up at the crack, highlight the punning observation that this is holding on to a long, thin bar that rests across his shoulders. Hamilton not only a door but a ‘backdoor’, and used it in Aquarius (2010), printed onto “I’m interested in strong images like smile for the camera. It’s fun and flipa 7m-high scaffolding support and pant, not to mention a gift for tabloidthat because you can do a lot with them; shown on the roof of a multistorey car headline writers – ‘The Turner Prize park. The effect of the crisscross of scafbecause they have their own internal really is the butt of jokes now’, ran folding visible behind the image gave strength. In Aquarius the image becomes the model’s moody macho pose a more one headline. Hamilton works across video, installation, sculpture and perclassical association with Leonardo da both comic and sexual” Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1490), an assoformance, but there’s more to her work than bottom humour: there’s a playful and often ambiguously dead- ciation that Hamilton then literally cuts into by creating an opening pan exploration of our shifting physical relationships with the femi- between the figure’s legs, making the walk between them an absurdly nine, with objects and with images. silly act. “I’m interested in strong images like that because you can Project for Door… originates in a photograph from the early 1970s of do a lot with them; because they have their own internal strength. a silicone rubber model of an unrealised project for an actual doorway In Aquarius the image becomes both comic and sexual.” for a New York skyscraper by Italian artist, architect and designer Conversation and collaboration are also key to how Hamilton Gaetano Pesce, whose surreal approach to design – which includes works, from her ongoing series of giant printed inflatables, LOVE chairs moulded from strands of extruded polyurethane that look like (2012–), also created with Byrne, to working with fellow artists spaghetti, and sofas covered in fake grass, decked with cushions in the including Julie Verhoeven, as well as mime artists and choreograform of huge fabric flowers – Hamilton admires. “I’m drawn to the phers. She has an ongoing relationship with choreographer Kostas theatricality in both the way he makes and photographs his objects Tsioukas, who most recently created performances in response to and his noncompromising commitment to materials,” she explains her work in the British Art Show 8. “I always think about the walk that when I visit her in October at the Gasworks studio complex, in South someone makes through a space,” she says. Hamilton views her interLondon. “There’s also a directness with the body in his work that I felt pretation of Pesce’s door as a form of collaboration, not only with the I understood.” originator, with whom she discussed how she was going to realise her Hamilton’s early work experience, between studies for a BA at version of the work, but with the architecture of Sculpture Center Leeds University and then an MA at the Royal College of Art (London, itself, for which it was conceived. “When you work by yourself, you’re from where she graduated in 2005), includes a stint in set design for refining and editing yourself all the time. In collaboration I love this film and TV. She also worked for the Arts Council and co-ran a gallery idea of how in improv theatre you can’t say ‘no’.” for a year in Shoreditch, but it’s the creation of ambiguous theatWhere Hamilton’s ideas of collaboration come together perfectly rical environments, in which objects and images, as well as people, are in her ongoing Hepworth Wakefield exhibition, Anthea Hamilton perform, that has been a constant in Reimagines Kettle’s Yard, a reworking (in Hamilton’s output. For her 2012 exhithe Hepworth galleries) of the very “When you work by yourself, you’re bition Sorry I’m Late, at Firstsite gallery refining and editing yourself all the time. particular domestic arrangement of in Colchester, one room, painted in art and objects put together by British In collaboration I love this idea of how collector Jim Ede (1895–1990) at Kettle’s blue screen as if in preparation for another reality to be projected onto it, Yard in Cambridge. The collection of in improv theatre you can’t say ‘no’” contained MDF cutouts of female legs. cottages that form Kettle’s Yard (curG-clamped together in cavorting arrangements and embellished with rently under renovation) were converted by Ede to display his collecsprigs of flowers or with vegetables pendulously suspended between tion during the 1950s. Hamilton’s skill lies in the seamless way that them, they managed to be as much about proportion and balance as she has combined selected objects from the collection with both they were about associations with hosiery ads or suggestive vegeta- existing works of her own, new works made in response to the collecbles. Recent exhibitions include the 2015 Biennale de Lyon and the tion and works by invited contemporary artists. Images of British 2014 Gwangju Biennale, a project for this year’s Frieze New York, a grasses printed onto a kimono by Hamilton and displayed on a stand show at the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (with partner Nicholas Byrne), (British Grasses Kimono, 2015) are taken from photographs by botanistthe still-touring British Art Show 8 and an ongoing UK exhibition at the photographer Roger Phillips from a book Hamilton found in the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire. Her considered combinations of collection; a vase of flowers – Kettle’s Yard always has flowers on objects and images often play with scale and materials, the relation- display – is an ongoing artwork by artist Maria Loboda titled A Guide ship between 2D and 3D surfaces, and reality and artifice, in a manner to Insults and Misanthropy (2004–), the seemingly innocent blooms

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each having been selected for their negative symbolic connotations.

While the aesthetic feel of the display coheres around the story of one discrete period collection remaining intact, the theme of theatrical artifice is introduced as if by stealth.

A work that’s easy to overlook at the Hepworth is a mobile comprising 76 small stones encased in delicate knitting, Hamilton’s reworking of Ede’s selection of stones, which, at Kettle’s Yard, are arranged in a spiral according to size. “There is a logic and a system to what I do,” she says, “but whether it’s visual or linguistic, it has to work through a twist or a flip.”

Project for Door…, surrounded by brick-patterned wallpaper at Tate, a reference to Sculpture Center’s brick walls, doesn’t get prime position in her Turner display; that’s given to a second space, wallpapered with a print of a blue sky, complete with fluffy white clouds (bricks and cloudy sky both bringing to mind the surrealist works of Magritte). In this space, among other works, hang five metal and mixed-media sculptures that take the nominal form of knickers but are also reminiscent of toddlers’ swings in a park, all slightly different in their decoration and all titled Guimard Chastity Belt (2016). Hamilton cites her references as a series of art nouveau-style filigree padlocks made by Paris Metro entrances designer Hector Guimard, and King Henry VIII’s heavy-duty battlefield armour, both designed to protect against contact with the body (and both of which she spotted on visits

to New York museums). The contrast between the delicate locks, triangular-shaped like a pubic bone, and the armour, made for the entire body, but impossibly heavy and weighty, become, when Hamilton had worked through their dualities of protection and restriction, Chastity Belts. For the female body there’s only one area that’s important; for the male, it’s all of it. Decorated with flowers, leaves and other small objects, and with no actual lock or means of wearing them, these are chastity belts in name and shape only. “For me, works like these are almost more abstract the more direct they are,” Hamilton says, “like the statement of putting a big bottom on a wall and saying it’s a doorway. It’s so blunt that it can be an expansive thing.” I can see her point. When an object appears so obvious in the context of art, we, as viewers, are conditioned to think that there must also be a wider meaning and to search for what that is; in this case we are trained to ignore the obvious absurdity of what’s in front of us. But that’s exactly what deadpan seeks to achieve. ar Anthea Hamilton Reimagines Kettle’s Yard can be seen at the Hepworth Wakefield, in Yorkshire, until 19 March; her work in British Art Show 8 is on view across three venues in Southampton until 15 January; the winner of the Turner Prize will be announced on 5 December, and the Turner Prize Exhibition 2016 continues at Tate Britain, London, through 2 January

Anthea Hamilton and Nicholas Byrne, Love Pillow, 2016, ash, cedar, cherry wood, iroko, meranti, purple heart, sapele, walnut, wenge, zebrano, silk, cord, rope, 74 × 23 × 18 cm. Courtesy the artists

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British Grasses Kimono, 2015, digitally printed silk, cotton, 160 × 160 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist

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‘A Bigger Photo’

by Aimee Lin

Passions Bloom Ambitions from Vagina – 23, 2016, photocollage, Tilia plywood, grass cloth, traditional lacquer, gold foil, Chinese traditional wet-mounting technique, 502 × 1502 cm (in 138 pieces)

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A continuously reimagined world is unfolding in a series of giant photo matrices by Shanghai-based collective Birdhead. What are they trying to tell us?

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Passions Bloom Ambitions from Vagina – 23 (detail), 2016, photocollage, Tilia plywood, grass cloth, traditional lacquer, gold foil, Chinese traditional wet-mounting technique, 502 × 1502 cm (in 138 pieces)

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Passions Bloom Ambitions from Vagina, a new series of works that Birdhead The sheer volume of its output led Birdhead to assemble a succeshas been developing since 2015, comprises large-scale and multilay- sion of self-published photobooks, such as Xin Cun (2007), The End of ered photocollages consisting of grids of photographs overlaid with Mainland (2010) and The Light of Eternity (2013). In one regard, each of other, specially mounted photographs and, sometimes, traditional these projects documents Birdhead’s life journey: departure from Chinese calligraphy. Last June, at Art Basel Unlimited, Birdhead their home (Xin Cun, meaning ‘new village’, refers to the residential presented Passions Bloom Ambitions from Vagina – 23 (2016), the biggest complexes built in big cities during the socialist era in China), travwork from the series to date. The body consists of a 5 × 15m photo elling in a world that is geographically bigger and wider (The End of matrix of 134 black-and-white photographs of natural and urban Mainland), and the spiritual arrival of Chinese classical artists’ free and scenes. At the centre of this is a photograph consisting of four larger romanticist tradition (The Light of Eternity). Now comes the ongoing panels that feature a group of tadpoles swimming in a pond. On top project qing fang zhi dang. of this last are four Chinese characters – qing fang zhi dang (Birdhead’s To a certain degree, the grids of photographs in Birdhead’s latest translation of which provides the title for the work) – written in kai works can be seen as a variation of the photobook adapted to fit a style and covered in gold leaf. The four-panel photograph is mounted contemporary gallery space. After showing these site-specific photo using a traditional wet-mounting technique (normally used in matrices – all of which are titled Welcome to the World of Birdhead Again connection with calligraphy and ink painting), and coated with tradi- – at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the National Art Center, Tokyo (2012), tional lacquer (normally used in connection with furniture), a trans- New York’s MoMA (2012) and many other institutions and galleries, there is a sense that Birdhead has gradually developed a particparent resin extracted from the Chinese lacquer tree.

But this is just to describe the work’s outer appearance. Hidden ular photo-editing methodology and aesthetic expression, which between the four-panel photograph and the grid are six other reached its maturity in a 2015 show at Shanghart. In this analysis, I’m photographs featuring fireworks exploding against a dark night going to look at Birdhead’s photo matrices in terms of three technical sky. Beneath them, in the grid, are portraits of the two members of levels: at the first, each photograph in the matrix is carefully refined Birdhead. These three layers of images, together with the Chinese text and transformed into an abstract pictorial unit, and then used to on top of them, make up Birdhead’s most complicated pictorial and compose a bigger photograph. At the second level is a layer of meantextual world yet: one that fuses contemporary shanshui (landscape), ings generated by the content of the images: the artists themselves, traditional calligraphy, romanticism, passion (to look at the fireworks their friends, tree branches, sky, buildings and highways, a contemand tadpoles through Freudian eyes) and a notion of self that rests in porary shanshui in which urbanism overlaps with nature and personal an inner world. ambitions and emotions projected Indeed Birdhead has been cononto it. The third level comes from the There’s a sense in which the viewer is structing a continuous, expanding, special mounting technique Birdhead encouraged to enter the image, to move has developed over the last few years. and incessantly reimagined pictorial or wander through the pictorial scenery Wet mounting is a traditional techworld of its own since its establishment nique used for Chinese classical ink in 2004. Born in Shanghai, Song Tao and Ji Weiyu have spent most of their life in their hometown. Birdhead art and calligraphy; when used on photography, it has the effect began because of their shared passion for collecting (film) cameras and of flattening the printing paper, and involves the use of materials taking photos in the street. Born in the late 1970s and early 80s, the such as precious wood, handmade paper and silk, not only to protect members of Birdhead are part of a generation of artists who grew up the work but also to give it a particular aesthetic (and, by virtue of in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, and connected with each other its connection to historically precious objects, economic) value. via BBS and online blogs, which also became sites for the publication Traditional lacquer was used in ancient China and Japan to protect of their works. Like their contemporaries, early Birdhead was influ- precious interior items such as furniture and tableware by sealing enced by Japanese photography, especially the photo avant-garde from them off from the air. Over time, the colourless coat of lacquer may the 1960s and 70s, and the use of shashin shu (Japanese photobook). By turn yellow, which adds a further aesthetic layer, particularly in the beginning of the 2000s, this generation of grassroots practices China and Japan, where traces of time are considered to be of great had come to be called ‘Chinese New Photography’ (a label used as a aesthetic value. marketing tool during the late 2000s and early 2010s) , a photographic Birdhead’s method is to scan the films and create digital files in expression that is very close to urban photography and shi-shashin which Birdhead refines the tones before laying out the images in (personal photography) in Japan. During that period, as was the case a photo-editing application to make the big picture. So the photoin the work of other artists in this grouping – among them No.223 matrices work is not just a group of smaller pictures, but also one big (Lin Zhipeng), Qing Touyi (Liu Yiqing), Pixy Liao (Liao Yijun) – Song picture. In Chinese, shanshui literally means mountain and water; in Tao and Ji Weiyu’s work comprised records of their private life, close the tradition of Chinese scholar painting, a landscape doesn’t necesfriends and the urban landscape in which they lived. But unlike the sarily involve the actual recording of mountains and water (generally others, Birdhead was particularly obsessed with film cameras and the in the form of a river) and their special relation: the artist can conceptones and textures produced in a traditional darkroom. Looking at the tually invent his own shanshui on paper. Therefore, Birdhead’s art at works from the late 2000s, we can see how these two young men were its first level is very close to the making of conceptual shanshui, and trying to understand themselves and the city and times in which they also, considering their emphasis on photographic tones, very close to were living. Back in those days, they were practising guerrilla photog- Chinese classical calligraphy art in cao (cursive script) or xing (semiraphy, attacking their world with aggressive shoots and provocative cursive script) style, normally considered to articulate an expresflashlighting, and by producing a massive quantity of photographs. sionist consciousness.

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Birdhead once used the expression ‘a bigger photo’ to describe its the aesthetic vocabularies created by the mounting of the works. photo matrices. Indeed this process does overcome the technical diffi- The members of Birdhead believe that the action of pressing down culties of producing a gigantic photograph (in this way Birdhead’s the shutter is to take a slice out of time and space, thus a moment of concept and methodology are very different to that of Andreas Gursky, self-reflection. To refine, edit and lay out those hundreds of photofor example, who focuses on the same end using a single image). For graphs is to study their inner world and to revisit the moments of me, though, the real beauty in the apparently simple description self-reflection, while the mounting of the photographs is the mate‘a bigger photograph’ lies in the fact that the photo matrix helps rialisation of self-reflection. Although Passions Bloom Ambitions from to overcome the limitation of photography as a mechanical way of Vagina is a naughty joke, the characters are a quotation from the seeing, by producing an image that is not governed by single-point third-century poet and scholar Cao Zhi’s Qi Qi, or Seven Ideas (210 AD), perspective, but rather by a scattered perspective. As a result there’s where it is used to express his ideal: to indulge one’s passion and a sense in which the viewer is encouraged to enter the image, to to free one’s ambitions; in other words, it encourages self-expresmove or wander through the pictorial scenery. British painter David sion, as opposed to the Confucian ideology of self-restraint, or the Hockney explored techniques of producing the scattered perspective Taoist ideal of inactivity. But as a member of a family that ruled one of Chinese scroll painting via photography in one of his early photo- of biggest kingdoms at the time (he was one of the sons of Cao Cao, collages, Walking in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto, Feb, 1983 chancellor of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the man who laid the (1983). In his recent paintings and videos (especially the 18-screen video- foundations of the state of Cao Wei), Cao never could live life as he works from 2010 and 2011, included in the exhibition A Bigger Picture wished, and was murdered by his brother at forty. It could be said that at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, documenting the seasons in throughout his lifetime, Cao was a man who perceived the darkness Woldgate Woods from clips recorded by nine cameras attached to an of his present and grasped, in art, a light that could never reach its SUV), he has explored more possibilities to produce alternative visual destiny. The light is a metaphor of his ideal, qing fang zhi dang, an ideal experiences and pictorial expression via scattered perspective. In a that was too ahead of its time: the country in the next 1800 years was way, Birdhead’s photo matrix and the method of making it are not dominated by the Confucian ideology (and Taoism as an option for only a means to assembling an abstract and conceptual landscape, but individual life). In this regard, he could be seen as the first contemporary artist in the history of China: to follow Giorgio Agamben’s also a development of Hockney’s exploration of landscape.

While Hockney’s interest in Chinese classical painting generally definition of ‘the contemporary’ as ‘the one who, dividing and interfocuses on the scientific study of perspective, Birdhead’s practice polating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relahas, to a certain extent, inherited the free and romanticist spirit of tion with other times’. Birdhead’s spiritual resonance with Cao is Chinese classical artists. This can be seen at the secnot the result of a gesture of cultural conservatism, Welcome to Birdhead World Again, ond level of their work, the world of meanings made but rather an alternative statement in the context of Shanghai, 2015 (detail), 2015, contemporary art. ara of the content of their photos, and the third level, photographic installation

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For a Bigger Photo 2015 – 5, 2015, photographic installation, wood, British Ilford archival fiber warm cotton gloss photographic paper 335gsm, Chinese lacquer, wet-mounting technique of traditional Chinese painting, Epson UltraGiclee, 250 × 120 × 5 cm

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Gagarin’s Thing

by Jirˇí Černický

Gagarin’s Thing is a project I began working on during an artist’s resi- was offered, as an artist, an opportunity to collaborate on the recondency in San Francisco. I met someone there who told me something struction of the Gagarin Thing. about a strange occurrence connected with Yuri Gagarin’s return from NASA had overall responsibility for the restoration procedures. the cosmos in 1961: an object was found onboard his vessel, an object My participation began on a consulting level. I was invited to propose that had allegedly not been there when Vostok 1 launched from Earth. alternative materials to replace the original, damaged ones (difficult I was both discomfited and excited by this information, and I began to manufacture in the local conditions). Later, however, my particito take an intense interest in the case. Even though acquiring informa- pation became more important and the idea came up of presenting tion was, and is, exceptionally difficult, to this day I am surprised at its the Gagarin Thing to the European public. I must point out that the quantity and variety. The collected information consisted partly of my visual appearance of the Gagarin Thing and especially what it reprework and partly of contemporary documentary material that provides sents is very surprising and highly interesting, even though the object a very strange testimony regarding the history of the Cold War. acquired significant changes after the reconstruction.

The unique ‘Gagarin Thing’ was first stored in complete secrecy at The resulting work of art was presented in 2010 under the title an unknown location in the Soviet Union (very probably within the Gagarin’s Thing in Václav Špála Gallery in Prague. The exhibition was walls of the Kremlin), but later, as a gift from Khrushchev, ended up conceived as a museum exhibit presenting, primarily in the form of under the protection of US President Kennedy. In 1972 it was irrep- archives, the issue of the Gagarin Thing in such a way that the specarably damaged following the discovery and subsequent attempted tator would have an opportunity to verify its existence. The philosophy theft of the object by the Japanese Secret Service. At this time the first, of dealing with the documentary photography is based on the fact that albeit minimal, information leak occurred. interpretations of the Cold War are considerably uncertain in nature, Thanks to efforts on my part and the help of a number of friends, because they are subject to propagandist manipulations by the histoI was gradually able to compile reliable information on the existence rians commissioned by the governments of all the countries involved. of the object, as well as other things. In 2000, in I would like to attempt to draw from this phenomThe top to a box, adorned with the connection with an exhibition of my work in Los enon and present to the public my own version of ‘Gagarin Thing’ (GT) motif, that was part Angeles, I was contacted by a certain official from history, the linking thread of which is a ‘readymade’ of Nikita Khrushchev’s heritage the office of the President of the United States and whose very existence is difficult to comprehend.

– what it contained is sadly not known

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top Moving the GT from one laboratory to another. The object was repeatedly analysed above This unique photograph captures the source before it was removed from the body of the GT. It presents a view into the insides of a cooling container inside which the GT was attached to a measuring device in the form of glass cylinders. It was able to capture the average change in temperature on different parts of the source. Although the cooling process did inspire a decrease in thermoactivity, the effect was minimal, and as soon as the object was removed from the container, its temperature regained its previous value

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A photograph of the original esoteric drawings by Nikolay Suchoruchenko.

They portray an attempt to understand the existence of the GT in the context of Orthodox Christian cosmology and spiritualism.

Especially notable is the tendency to associate these transcendental phenomena with the technological terminology of cosmic machines

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A view of the installation of the Gagarin Thing in a neoclassicist niche of the White House from July 1962 (Printing Section of the White House)

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above A bronze memorial statue, made on the occasion of the first anniversary of the discovery of the Gagarin Thing all images Courtesy the artist

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British Grasses Kimono, 2015, digitally printed silk, cotton, 160 × 160 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Aquarius, 2010, digital banner with support, 750 × 750 cm.

Photo: Joseph Balfour. Courtesy the artist

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British Grasses Kimono, 2015, digitally printed silk, cotton, 160 × 160 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Aquarius, 2010, digital banner with support, 750 × 750 cm.

Photo: Joseph Balfour. Courtesy the artist

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Art Reviewed

Read of the charmed life of this famous king of Magadha, who not only built a prosperous kingdom but spread the message of universal love 93

Tadasu Takamine Brothers TKG+, Taipei 16 July – 11 Septemberr Brothers – Synesthesia (2016) is a kinetic light and sound installation housed in a darkened room, one of two new works at the centre of TKG+’s miniretrospective of Japanese artist Tadasu Takamine’s work. In Brothers – Synesthesia, two luminous spheres, tethered by their flexes to motors on the ceiling, spin in synchronised circles to a soundtrack, rising from ankleto knee-height as they spin faster and faster, revealing a floor covered with ash evocative of a lunar or volcanic surface. It’s unclear whether the spheres spin to the soundtrack or the soundtrack follows their motion, but the overall impression is of elements that are forced by programming to behave according to a defined pattern (at one point the paired lights create an infinity loop or figure of eight).

On the one hand this gives the work the quality of a ballet; on the other it makes it come across as something akin to a fairground amusement. Ultimately it is neither one of these nor the other, just trapped awkwardly in between.

This sense of restriction or forced cooperation carries through to a series of three new photographic works titled Brothers – Solicitude (2016). Each features the same pair of sweaty wrestlers, stripped to their underpants, their arms locked in combat by plaster casts that stretch from the elbow of one to the elbow of the other. So while they are literally locked in combat, they are unable to do anything; win, for example. The loss of control of one’s body and the dependence on another’s renders them little more than living sculptures, in a way that makes the avoidance of any potential violence (at the expense of things like liberty and freedom) an ethically complex issue.

And that’s a complexity that’s ever-present in Takamine’s work.

The mildly erotic character of Brothers – Solicitude is ramped up several levels in the artist’s most famous, most controversial and least-shown (for reasons that will become clear) videowork, Kimura-san (1998). The Kimura of the title was a victim of the 1955 Morinaga poisoned baby-formula incident, which left him unable to control his limbs or talk. The video portrays the artist (who, at the time of the video, had been one of Kimura’s voluntary carers for five years) talking to Kimura, caressing his body, lifting his pyjamas to tweak his nipples and finally jerking him off to a closeup, slow-motion climax. Along the way Takamine muses on Kimura’s (enforced) acceptance of his lack of control of his body (and of what others do to it) and claims, a little disturbingly, that he wants to make him a star. The artist also explains, somewhat hesitantly, that the noises Kimura makes and his eye movements indicate his consent to the public display of the video. But it’s hard to know whether the artist is celebrating his friend’s assertion of his free will or whether it’s the artist’s will that’s really on display. Neither he nor Kimura are gay, Takamine asserts at one point in his monologue rather defensively, somewhat undermining confidence in the overarching narrative about him giving sexual pleasure to someone who cannot pleasure himself. The Kimura-san video on display here is in fact split between the original recording of the artist and Kimura, and the documentation of a performance in which the artist sits in front of a two-screen projection of the same, his head in a cage that he uses to smash and grind panes of glass at key moments in the video. It’s unclear as to whether this is some weird form of personal atonement or a symbolic breaking of barriers.

It’s debatable whether the artist is (however briefly) taking possession of his friend’s body

facing page, top Brothers – Solicitude II, 2016, laser print, 76 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist

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(for the purpose of making a shocking artwork) or whether the artist imagines that his intimate relationship with his passive friend is in some ways an utterly stripped down and fundamental description of what it means to be social (and an advocacy of disabled people’s right to pleasure). Ultimately it’s the fact that you’re never quite certain who has the power in the relationship between artist and ‘star’ that makes the video so disturbing and, consequently, so powerful. It also, in turn, makes one wonder if we are capable of judging any relationship in terms other than those that suggest a powerful and a powerless party. For one viewpoint on the work might certainly be that it records everyone getting what everyone wants. Even if, at the end of it all, the artist indicates that he wishes he could have done better. Read that how you like.

After watching Kimura-san, you certainly feel that Takamine might have done better with To the Sea (2005), a video of the face of the artist’s wife as she goes into labour. At times it comes across as tender, at others simply voyeuristic, but ultimately its public screening seems to take the intimacy out of an intimate relationship, perhaps because the relationship between subject and recorder does seem to be an uneven one in terms of power dynamics (and who, but a voyeur, wants to watch someone else’s home videos, however well-crafted and sensual they are?). Similarly, the widely exhibited stopmotion video God Bless America (2002), in which the artist and his partner spend 17 days in a red, womblike studio apartment watching TV, canoodling in bed and all the while shaping two tons of clay into a succession of giant heads, culminating in a caricature of George Bush that sings the titular song, seems like, well, just messing around. Nirmala Devi

facing page, bottom Kimura-san, 1998, single-channel video, 9 min 37 sec. Courtesy the artist

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curated by_vienna Various venues, Vienna 8 September – 15 October This year’s edition of the sprawling series of exhibitions under the umbrella title curated by_vienna takes place in 19 commercial galleries across the city. Each invited a curator to respond to a theme set by the critic (and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) Diedrich Diederichsen.

In his short text titled ‘My Origins? I Made Them Up’, Diederichsen suggests that artistic displays of homage marked by Oedipal or avant-garde breaks are futile, and even a Western fetish for non-market-oriented ‘minority and marginalized histories’ leads only to their becoming absorbed into the (institutionalised) mainstream. Diederichsen suggests one possible way out of this impasse with Afrofuturism, appearing via a chaotic and traumatic physical and cultural scattering (presumably as a result of colonialism and/or the slave trade). As he characterises it, Afrofuturism sees the present as being productively related to a possible future, rather than a progression from the past (in this respect there seems to be a reflection of the messianism of Walter Benjamin, although Diederichsen does not bring it up). In this way, one’s origins turn into a future-oriented concern. The curatorial responses to this take a number of forms, but often the curators’ engagement with Diederichsen’s ideas is less than clear.

At Kerstin Engholm Gallery, Heike Munder curates Resistance Performed Revised: Aesthetic Strategies under Repressive Regimes in Latin America, a show revisiting the vibrant period of artistic dissent towards local authoritarian regimes during the 1970s. Included is evocative documentation of ephemeral performances: the 3Nós3 group from São Paulo stretching coloured plastic sheets across roads in Interdiction (1979), or Marta Minujín’s The Parthenon of Books (1983), a replica of the Acropolis temple made from 30,000 books that had been banned under the recently ended dictatorship in Argentina

(a version of the work will be on view in Kassel as part of Documenta 14).

Curator Luis Pedro Miret Perez’s Chaotica: An Approach to Chaos from the Perspective of Cuban Fine Arts, at Galerie Ernst Hilger, addresses social and political issues in more sculptural ways than the ephemeral interventions seen in the previous show. Ariamna Contino presents elaborate framed paper cutouts of guns in the Untitled (Arsenal) (2016) series, and Tonel’s ironic cartoons on the subject of economics such as Bunds vs. Bonos (2011), or the stack of metal letters awaiting rearrangement into meaningful words in Ivan Capote’s Anagram (New world order) (2015) appear as subtle tactical commentaries rather than direct interventions into society.

At Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art, curator Luigi Fassi’s Nur im Okzident (Only in the Western World) refreshingly addresses the Western bias of modernity (and contemporaneity) with a group of artists critical of the hegemony of Eurocentric discourses, particularly the early-twentieth-century philosopher Max Weber’s assertion that rationality is a uniquely European phenomenon. A set of oversize passport stamps carved from large blocks of wood make up Barthélémy Toguo’s The Administrator (2008). The stamps’ handles are in the shape of human heads and shoulders, while the base is carved to print statements such as ‘JULIUS CAESAR IN AFRICA’, ‘BANANA COFFEE DIAMOND NO VISA’, pointing to legacies of invasion and colonialism. Haroon GunnSalie’s video History after Apartheid (2015) collects footage of demonstrations throughout the world broken up by the police with water cannons, coloured dyes in the water marking out the protesters for later identification and at the same time creating an enduring aesthetic for the rationality of violence.

Bettina Steinbrügge curates Emak Bakia at Krobath Wien, proposing the ‘significance of the formal based on historical as well as

facing page, top Tonel, Bunds vs Bonos, 2011, ink on heavy paper, 104 × 69 cm.

Courtesy Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna

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contemporary positions’, and taking inspiration from Man Ray’s eponymous 1926 film and Henri Michaux’s 1950s ‘mescaline drawings’ made under the influence of the drug. Providing contemporary responses to the modernist formalism that Ray and Michaux were reacting to are Nasreen Mohamedi’s Malevich-influenced abstractions, Haleh Redjaian’s installations of threads delineating space and Sofie Thorsen’s cut-paper sheets hanging loosely off rigid upright rods.

Winter Is Coming (Homage to the Future), curated by Maria Arusoo at Georg Kargl Fine Arts, draws heavily on the symbolism of myth and technology. The candles and grotesque rock formations of Joey Holder’s installation Tetragrammaton (2016) appear to create a site for ritual magic, on the floor in front of which dawdles Agnieszka Polska’s The Bearer of Bad News (2015), a video projection of the shadow of an aimlessly wandering figure. In the next room, Andreas Angelidakis’s video VESSEL (2016) in part suggests that the illustrations on ancient pots may have served as a contemporaneous version of the Facebook newsfeed. The show as a whole leaves the visitor with an uncomfortable feeling of being present in alternate readings of the past and mythological interpretations of the present.

The exhibitions mentioned above are all effective individual presentations, but their relation to Diederichsen’s theme often seems tenuous, which is a problem for curated by_vienna as a whole. Diederichsen’s essay is provocative: for all its brevity it contains an argument with complex (and potentially controversial) ramifications. However, his explicit questioning of the basic notion of ‘homage’ is not critically reflected upon in most of the attendant exhibitions, leaving a sense that these shows have little connection to each other or even relevance to the purported theme of the project.

Edward Sanderson

facing page, bottom Joey Holder, Tetragrammaton, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna

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Thea Djordjadze To be in an upright position on the feet (studio visit) Secession, Vienna 8 September – 1 November Thea Djordjadze has long been known for sculptures that both explore an inner tension of form – often by juxtaposing geometric, coolly architectural pieces and handcrafted organic objects – and create an external tension in the environments around them, a kind of universal site-specificity. In To be in an upright position on the feet (studio visit), the Berlin-based artist has moved everything in her studio (everything that wasn’t nailed down, at least) into Secession’s main space, to create an exploration of both site-specificity and spatial tension within a seemingly intimate sphere.

On first look, the exhibition hall appears to be a container for, well, stuff. But Djordjadze’s subtle, poetic order quickly asserts itself.

Objects are divided by typology into delineated gridlike zones: near the entrance, a row of oversize Plexiglas sheets is loosely attached to the wall. On the floor are wood frames encased in Plexiglas (floorbound vitrines of sorts) containing all kind of objects, somehow logically arranged. One ‘vitrine’ holds an array of art materials: rulers, chicken wire, sacks of plaster, drills, a box filled with rolls of tape.

In another, plaster pieces look like half-finished or rejected works.

Elsewhere are comfy-looking seating arrangements: a couch with throw pillows, a chaise, a black Eames-esque lounge-chair and footrest placed on a low, black platform.

Plywood sheets line walls or stand freely; worktables stand alone or in groups. Tall potted plants line up against one wall, while along another are rows of canvases: some blank, some painted, most turned towards the wall.

Djordjadze’s trademark riffs on display structures – plinths, spindly supports – dot the vast space, as do objects that look like finished sculptures. In the room’s centre a tall metal structure acts as a corridor to the hall’s rear, where studio objects in wood are grouped on the left; metal on the right. On both sides, multiple elements like wood shelving or a metal kitchen unit are installed directly on the wall, in rhythms at times reminiscent of early minimalists like Judd, or even Charlotte Posenenske. On one rolling trolley nearby is a tiny white model of the Secession space itself, likely preparation for the show, nearly hidden here on the middle shelf.

Paradoxes abound: this is a studio visit but the artist is missing. As we’ve seen for a century, everyday objects have been

transformed into artworks, but here they are on view as everyday objects (…as artworks, and this is of course where things become complex). Djordjadze has put her inner workworld into a public space – the makeshift floor ‘vitrines’ are fascinating windows into artistic production – but there’s a sense that nothing too private is on view here. Work processes and materials are exposed, yet presented as a meta-exhibition, not as self-disclosure.

For me, other thoughts arise, having to do with longstanding discourses on immaterial production and the historical romanticisation of the genius artist. For the run of the exhibition, Djordjadze’s studio in Berlin is completely empty. Is she enjoying this respite from… stuff? Or finding it difficult to think without it? Is she tired? Is this exhibition, besides being the kind of exercise in graphic and spatial experimentation we’d expect from her, also a statement on labour, precarity or something else? Here, Djordjadze’s familiar dance with space appears to go beyond tensions of form and placement and into inquiries both individual and universal; the extra dialectical layer only adds to the show’s appeal.

Kimberly Bradley

To be in an upright position on the feet (studio visit), 2016 (installation view).

Photo: Sophie Thun. Courtesy Secession, Vienna

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Tino Sehgal Palais de Tokyo, Paris 12 October – 18 December “My name is Ann Lee…” This is not the first time I have encountered the manga character purchased by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe in 1999. Three years ago, I was in this same auditorium in one of Palais de Tokyo’s subbasements during Parreno’s exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World, watching her on a screen. Though I missed her performance in that exhibition, she’s stepped out of the screen again for this one, embodied by a real-life ‘four-dimensional’ girl – which, she says, “is much more fun”.

“Lately I’ve been hanging out with an artist called Tino who works with people, not objects,” Ann Lee explains to her new friend, a boy called Marcel. “But he always seems to be very busy,” she continues, before turning to address the handful of spectators: “Do you think it’s better to be too busy or not busy enough?” Everyone keeps shtum, avoiding her gaze.

Sehgal is the second artist (after Parreno) to be given license to use the entire Palais de Tokyo space. The place has never looked so empty. Apart from one of Felix Gonzalez-

Torres’s spangly curtains over the entrance and a few of Parreno’s balloon fish (which seem to have become lost in the beams of the foyer’s ceiling), the place is almost completely bare.

It’s even emptier than the Centre Pompidou’s famous Vides, the 2009 show of historical empty galleries. At least Vides had wall texts, signs and whitewashed surfaces. Sehgal has gotten rid of all that. The place seems abandoned.

So it’s with some trepidation that I start walking towards the first gallery – until a small boy rather solicitously offers himself as guide.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he asks.

“What is progress?” I’d read about Sehgal’s 2006 work, This Progress, so I felt at ease chatting about the aporias of nineteenth-century positivism with first this boy and then a somewhat older boy, wandering in circles through the otherwise deserted halls. I was less prepared for my third interlocutor, who rather abruptly butted in with the line, “Handwriting is an erotic activity.”

Before long, I’m left to wander the galleries alone, with little to indicate where the work can be found or even what is and isn’t part of the

show. At one point I stumble into a room where two people are deep in conversation. It took me a while to realise I had gone the wrong way (at least, I think that wasn’t a work). The whole thing became increasingly disorientating. Finding myself half-pushed into a darkened room full of whispering beatboxers (This Variation, 2012), then half-blocked from leaving a room containing five men who asked visitors to comment on their activity only to mock anyone who did (This Objective of That Object, 2004), felt weirdly threatening. The personal stories I was told by interpreters peeling off from a group of joggers (These Associations, 2012) fell into some awkward uncanny valley between real conversation and pure theatre. It started to remind me of those things on Facebook when someone insists we fill social media up with songs or cats or poems instead of advertisements, which always make me think that those songs, cats, and poems have been reduced to the status of advertisements. Maybe the problem with filling a gallery with people instead of objects is that those people start to acquire the status of objects. Robert Barry

Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal’s Annlee, drawn at Palais de Tokyo, 2013, pencil on paper. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo, Paris

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Sean Landers Small Brass Raffle Drum Capitain Petzel, Berlin 16 September – 28 October In 2004, Sean Landers claimed that his art had become conscious of his self-conscious persona – he was ‘not self-conscious “scared” but selfconscious in that I know too much about what I’m doing… That’s why my current show [at Andrea Rosen Gallery, that year] is like a parody of my earlier self.’ Landers was either being fatuous or disingenuous to imply that his earlier work might have evaded formalising the self it represents. His handwritten paintings of the 1990s, with their outpourings of confessional, stream-of-consciousness text, were always performances posing as crises, balanced between self-knowledge and self-doubt, like the word self-consciousness itself. Perhaps, as David Foster Wallace once said, ‘we need more words for self-consciousness the way Eskimos have for snow’.

Landers’s art has always been embarrassing, but whereas it used to make us embarrassed for him, the series of nine three-quarter-length ‘figure paintings’ at Capitain Petzel are remarkable in that the embarrassment is all ours. Our susceptibility to their overweening demand on our empathy is pathetic, given the absurdity of their anthropomorphic reconfigurations of the debris of an early-twentieth-century surrealist vocabulary. Landers himself, previously centre-stage, has withdrawn, his self-consciousness expunged from his facture, his gestural expressionism sublimated into fine peinture.

In the plush showroom, this looks, at first, like art conforming to a commodity status that it used to hold at the remove of the awkwardness of its execution. These are no longer paintings that admit, however partially, to having failed.

They brandish their craft unironically.

And yet, the refined technique is not a gratuitous embellishment, but a means of gaining a finer grasp on Landers’s art-historical models – or on his own past. If he can now do Bruegel as well as Magritte – with one as another’s background – he is just as likely to be doing himself, with some of the figures based on earlier paintings. This is one way for art ‘to argue the relevancy of [its] maker’ – as Landers claims ‘all paintings do’: by placing yourself in the exalted company of your own canon. Captain Homer (Seven Pipes for Seven Seas) (all works 2016), a sailor based on Magritte’s Le Stropiat (The Cripple, 1948) with an array of pipes protruding from his full beard, is set against a Winslow Homer seascape.

The virtuosity required to produce the still-life effects of a meerschaum pipe, wood veneer or beaten gold is the equivalent of the painterly standup routines of Landers’s text works. But, with the exception of Elysium – a wide-format painting of a forest glade, with an iconographic key to the cycle etched into its trunk – text, previously the primary weapon in Landers’s arsenal, has been exiled to the paintings’ backs, onto which sheets of handwritten comments

are attached. These esoterically personal musings on what appears on the other side of the canvas are invisible, except to the owner, the curator, the gallerist or the visitor armed with laminated copies available at the desk.

The concealment is apt because Landers uses the portrait genre, that traditional embodiment of artistic subjectivity, as an alternative outlet for his self-consciousness.

Eyes, here, are focal points­of sentiment – a snowman’s melting tears, the gold coins of a scythe-bearing skeleton. They implore our sympathy for a figure’s plight, stranded in a limbo of crossed references. Their gaze insists on their exposure of subjectivities that challenge our credulity: a weeping snowman, with a pine cone for a nose, against a Bruegel snowscape; a smoking Cyclops, with a bottom for a mouth, in a park courtesy of Bosch. The artistic test might be to evoke figural presence as a painting’s centre of gravity in the midst of a virtuoso jumble of allusions, which does everything to render that presence risibly implausible. Landers’s high-definition illusionism has impersonalised his painting. The effect is to transfer his selfconsciousness into that of his invented figures, taking the spotlight off himself, and allowing his voice, so prominent in earlier work, to disappear behind the canvas, as though acknowledging its own redundancy to the form he has invented. Mark Prince

Captain Homer (Seven Pipes for Seven Seas), 2016, oil on linen, 122 × 104 cm.

Photo: Christopher Burke Studio. © the artist. Courtesy Capitain Petzel, Berlin

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Kishio Suga Situations Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan 30 September – 29 January The display of Kishio Suga’s retrospective Situations is simple: almost all the 23 sculptures on show (created since 1969 and ‘reactivated’ by the artist for the occasion) rest on the concrete floor of HangarBicocca’s open plan, forming a horizontal continuum interrupted only by the black columns bisecting the space.

There are a few notable exceptions to this rule, and they gently press viewers to experience other dimensions of the exhibition space.

At the entrance, Critical Sections (Setsu no rinkai, 1984/2016) runs from ceiling to floor, for over 20 metres: small branches are inserted in a cord of braided white strips of cloth, in order to measure the imposing verticality of this architectural scale. In a corner, Continuous Existence–HB (Renkai–HB, 1977/2016) is a set of forked branches leaning against a white wall: a wiggly line of rope lies atop them and creates a sort of elevated orography, before falling again to the ground to rest in peace. Halfway through the hall, Infinite Situation iii (door) (1970/2016) is a bulky wooden beam wedged diagonally into the only open doorway of the otherwise sealed and dark gallery; outside, the rare trespassers are greeted by Unfolding Field (Noten, 1972/2016), an installation of stone blocks, green plants and bamboo poles dangling in the wind.

At the hangar’s far end, Left-Behind Situation (Shachi Jōkyō, 1972/2016) occupies the whole volume of the Cubo, a cubic barrel-vaulted building, with a web of industrial wire cable – one single cable, over 1km long, stretched across the room and fixed to its concrete walls with bolts and pulleys. Wooden blocks of different shapes and colours are placed atop each point of intersection, so that they seem to float in midair, as if levitating, while shadows crisscross on the ground below. This quiet coup de théâtre, where everything lies in a state of tension and suspension, best embodies the work of Suga, especially here. Left-Behind Situation successfully defines its own perimeter, and carves a silent, undisturbed space of contemplation. Ma – the void, or negative space, or interval that surrounds all things and endows them with a real presence, a cornerstone of Japanese aesthetics – can here deploy its magic, whereas the systematic juxtaposition of works throughout the exhibition generates a taxonomy of shapes, colours and media that subtracts some strength from them.

Suga uses unprocessed materials, both natural and artificial (stones, zinc plates, concrete bricks, grass, plywood, rocks, steel rods, paper), and arranges them in elegant compositions lasting only as long as their appearance

in public: each time they are reproduced, the artist introduces some changes. The influence of Buddhist spirituality is evident, so that it’s tempting to read these works as timeless existential metaphors: the ephemerality of all status quo and balance, the recurrence of natural cycles. To me, one of the defining aspects of this show, where little documentation is provided (besides the free booklets) to help the public associate Suga with a precise time, geography, ideological position or modus operandi, is its being constantly lost in translation, from East to West and back again. While studying under Yoshishige Saitō at Tama Art University in Tokyo, during the late 1960s, Suga learned about American Minimalism and got accustomed to the writings of Baudrillard and Deleuze. Like other protagonists of Mono-ha (School of Things) and Italian Arte Povera – the two groups exhibited side by side at the Tokyo Biennale in 1970 – he struggled against the violent colonisation of consumerist society by means of a ‘less is more’ version rooted in his own culture. Besides market pressure, I wonder if Mono-ha’s recent ‘rediscovery’ and success is linked precisely to that refusal of the ‘too much’, to the instant relief provided by enhanced materiality to our postdigital and increasingly disembodied experience of the world. Barbara Casavecchia

Left-Behind Situation (Shachi Jōkyō), 1972/2016. Photo: Agostino Osio.

Courtesy the artist; Glenstone Foundation, Potomac, Maryland; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

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Wiktor Gutt & Waldemar Raniszewski Destructive Culture (1977) Pola Magnetyczne, Warsaw 23 September – 19 November Destructive Culture, an installation by Wiktor Gutt and Waldemar Raniszewski, was first shown in 1977 at Galeria Repassage, Warsaw. At Pola Magnetyczne – a space that doubles as the gallerists’ home – the many elements that comprise the work, including the framed manifesto, slide projections and even the music played at the original show, are being reconvened for the first time.

Entering the first room of the exhibition, you notice the music of Bach and the smell of old books, which turn out to be the artists’ archive of ethnographic publications. It all feels very ‘at home’ with the environment.

But dominating the centre of the room is a pair of glass panels encasing a large number of black-and-white photographs, standing at a 90-degree angle like an oversize folder, at once shielding and revealing its contents.

The instinct is to move around it, to see what’s inside. In one panel, headshots of Auschwitz prisoners are arranged in several dozen rows, mirrored in the other panel by portraits of tribespeople, recognisable in some cases as belonging to a series of photographs of indigenous Sudanese taken by Leni Riefenstahl, or Edward S. Curtis’s Native Americans. It could be argued that even in describing these peoples via their more famous ‘captors’, I am fulfilling an accusation made in the artists’ manifesto: that ‘anthropocentric European culture’ can only dominate and destroy both its own and those outside of it.

Laboratory stamps and sporadic handwritten observations, poignantly revealing a name, occupation, year of death, mark the backs of several photographs from the Auschwitz State Museum, from which the artists requested a random selection, unaware some would arrive with notes. That many do not have such inscriptions adds further poignancy. Nevertheless, it makes a stark contrast to the portraits taken from ethnographic publications, all devoid of such specifics, when more information could have been attributed. Perhaps it is to the artists’ credit that they chose not to further inscribe the portraits they themselves ‘recaptured’.

The current instalment, replete with documentation of the happenings that occurred during the exhibition at Repassage, suggests a fresh appraisal of the work as being of historical interest. A frame of black paint surrounds the panels, a remnant from when they were covered entirely, with only slits left through which the eyes of each portrait were visible. Visitors were invited to scrape back the paint, physically altering the process of engagement with the photographic portrait they’d chosen upon; an analogue tactic that seems quaint in today’s postinternet age, if not still affective. Following this audience intervention, the artists took the panels out to the street. Site-specificity was a defining interest of the Polish neo-avant-garde, of which this work is a perfect example. Galeria Repassage was located at Warsaw University, where the demonstrations of March 1968 erupted largely

Destructive Culture (1977), 2016 (installation view) .

Photo: Nicolas Grospierre. Courtesy Pola Magnetyczne, Warsaw

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in reaction to a state-sponsored campaign of ‘anti-Zionism’. Two large photographs at Pola Magnetyczne show the artists holding the unwieldy glass and its contents, their faces tense as they risk confrontation. One blurred figure, turning to look, stands out against the crowds filing past, heads bent downwards.

But what of this action, of this insertion of the artists into a further juxtaposition with their subjects? Are we meant to admire their bravery? Perhaps an answer lies in an interview conducted for Warsaw Gallery Weekend between Pola Magnetyczne’s gallerists and Wiktor Gutt.

The gallery suggested that in appropriating and conflating people’s suffering, albeit in order to criticise the root cause of such suffering, there is the risk of ‘mental shortcutting’. Gutt’s response was that Destructive Culture is ‘a shriek of misery’.

In the current discourse around appropriation and colonialism, the white man shrieking at his own reflection doesn’t quite cut it as a response.

I would hazard that the reflection reveals a far more parochial set of questions about Polish identity in the generation born in, or just after, the Second World War, about living under Soviet domination, which saw the exodus of thousands of Polish Jews to Israel. For a work created in the spirit of action and provocation, it is in this conversation, if Gutt is brave enough to have it, that a hidden layer of specifics could resound with more nuance and surprising relativity than the polemic of the grand manifesto.

Phoebe Blatton

Lewis Klahr Circumstantial Pleasures Grieder Contemporary, Zürich 30 September – 12 November Lewis Klahr is known for a stop-motion film practice based on sampling of midcentury sources that rips along apace to vigorous scores.

In the wake of the Los Angeles-based filmmaker’s 90-minute anthology work Sixty Six (2002– 15), screened recently at Tate Modern, MoMA and, in September, the Zürich Film Festival, the 15-minute animation Circumstantial Pleasures (2016) is to be the first chapter in another longplaying film.

This new work, framed here by still photographs and collages from the past three years, confounds expectations of cute pop-cultural historic indulgence. Klahr’s closeup observations skew, in a contemporary manner, towards the incidental and overlooked, examining the printed textures of payslips and envelope interiors, blister packs, plastic inserts and condiment sachets. These are positioned and moved before the camera, at first hitching a ride with OMD’s 1983 track Of All the Things We’ve Made, including its prelude of speaking clocks, to capture our attention. Sometimes the movement of a prop hits upon an established trope from animation or graphic novels, when a dark surface drawn across the scene suggests a change of location or time of day, for example, or a piece of paper moving through the shot

comes briefly alive, but Klahr does not build upon these. Fragmentary narrative hooks never find purchase. Figures appear occasionally, cut from comics that cannot easily be dated, but besides briefly bearing witness to the ongoing sequence, build no apparent story.

Maybe their narrative charge is inserted to contrast with the indexical nature of other objects or pictures of objects, or perhaps they have the opposite function – to illustrate how all the source material Klahr uses has figurative potential.

Two subsequent tracks, Prince’s Something in the Water (Does Not Compute) from 1982 and Talking Heads’s Drugs of 1979, keep lulling the viewer. A few motifs repeat: an airport, a jammed motorway or electricity pylons; travel paraphernalia and dazzling patterns (in tandem with vocals about mind-altering substances) are recurrent themes too. And then it’s over. The soundtrack could be from the rolling programme on a TV music channel, and though none of the three tracks had videos produced, they all date circa the birth of MTV in 1981. How does this sit with Klahr’s previous manipulations of comic shorthand to generate new architectures and stories, seen here in the numerous photographic still prints from other

works in which retro fittings, handsome and pensive men with lined brows and wistful, beautiful women are standard fare?

The show includes another significant work, Streets (2016), a collage on cardboard: over a bright, vertically striped background, 60cm tall, are six horizontal lines of buildings and structures cut from graphic novels. The collage is accompanied by a link to a film to be viewed on your own device: a shot out the window of a Chinese train, a forest of highrise blocks meeting the horizontal track in the foreground.

Suddenly the cityscape, and an artist’s attempt to record its cadence, becomes vitally contemporary, as urgent as it was for Futurists a century ago. Viewing Circumstantial Pleasures in light of Streets, you could say that both new works play with anachronistic dissonance.

Collaging the images and media of different eras is an established facet of Klahr’s work, and in Circumstantial Pleasures he brings this closer to our time than before. As a result, the dissonance is less marked and the result frustratingly difficult to grasp. There is something more than mere pleasure elicited from form at play in the work; identifying exactly what that is, though, might require greater hindsight.

Aoife Rosenmeyer

Circumstantial Pleasures (still), 2016, digital video, colour, sound, 15 min 19 sec. © the artist.

Courtesy Grieder Contemporary, Zürich, and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

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Michael Williams New Paintings Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich 2 September – 23 October Prenez garde à la peinture! This was Francis Picabia’s warning in his work of the same title (c. 1919), and Michael Williams displays cognisance of the snares and clichés, the limits of optical trickery, that the French master relentlessly recognised. The New York-based Williams starts with computer-generated imagery to create the 11 large canvases on display here. His flippant (albeit knowing) tone is highlighted by the title of a painting seen in the middle of the gallery space. Fish Smoothie (2016) is an inkjet on canvas executed in black with a text in white that reads: ‘This painting is (approx) 1.288695416844e-15 light years from your eye/face’. The work, as such, is a cousin to Richard Prince’s joke paintings, though Williams’s gag bears the distinction of being quite funny. You find yourself moving nearer to and farther from the painting just to tamper with that scientific exactitude. There’s something here, too, of that elusive movement Orphism, a sly reference perhaps to Picabia’s pal Apollinaire and his description of drawing as the ‘voice of light’, painting as a luminous language. Games with light and line are Williams’s forte.

There are arguably two trios of related works here. The first of these features some

crudely sketched figures and smears displayed upside down, an effect that recalls the collaborative paintings of Georg Baselitz and Jonathan Meese. Williams’s paintings are inkjet on canvas, albeit with oil paint slathered in thick curves to distort and delay easy comprehension.

A nectarine-coloured figure (perhaps a kind of sarcastic self-portrait) in Prisoner’s Cinema (2015) holds a purple-handled paintbrush high in his left hand. He appears stuck in a cell, confronting an abstract sequence of monochrome markings; his jeans are falling down, exposing some ass-crack. The figure in Pilgrim Psych (2016) is obscured, his face set in a simian grimace, his nose like a male mandrill. I say ‘his’ because there appears to be a giant member and a humongous set of pink testes emerging from his torso in the upper left corner. Finally, in 3 (2015), a bald man with the wacky eyes of a South Park character sits under a lightbulb at his computer keyboard. A calendar above his head has the dates crossed off as if he wills time to pass. Again there are oil smears in weird shapes obscuring his cranium, apparently crowding his mind. Taken together, the three paintings suggest an oddly humorous ennui, the daily challenge of the artist’s life as he tries to create something original.

Fish Smoothie, 2016, inkjet on canvas, 222 × 280 × 4 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich

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The other potential triptych (its parts all dated 2016) was again created using inkjet on canvas and majors in the use of three differing shades of lilac. Why lilac? Perhaps because these days this colour appears as a ubiquitous accompaniment to advertising related to interiors, to the corporate world’s idea of furnishing ‘the good life’. Williams, one suspects, rejects this wholesale. Buddha Mutt features the silhouette of another male loser, a brother perhaps to Paul McCarthy’s Painter (1995), with a wispy combover, a baboon proboscis and the word ‘fail’ where his mouth might be. Next up we see Abdicable Frithsokens, a large lilac spot and an apparent advertisement with the words ‘best beach for kids in LA’ around its circumference. Hints that there might be more trouble in the putative West Coast paradise come with 4, the third canvas, where several scrawled ‘fucks’ surround a crying face on a white box on another lilac backdrop.

As with Picabia’s rebuke to the truths of painting nearly a century ago, Williams expands on his admonition to the digital age with another inkjet here, 5 (2015), where an ominous bald figure approaches us holding an executioner’s rope, this threatening text floating above the figure’s head: you’d better not be deleting cool files. John Quin

Pio Abad Notes on Decomposition Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow 16 September – 30 October Writing to a friend during the Second World War, the combat photographer Lee Miller requested ‘a pink silk nightdress for the sake of my morale’. Later, in April 1945, not long after Hitler fled to the bunker, Miller had a bath in his Munich apartment. Before leaving, she took Eva Braun’s powder compact as a memento.

What is the relationship between luxury, celebrity and painful episodes of human history?

How are domestic objects implicated within violent events? Can we trace the cultural legacies of repressive political ideologies? These are the kind of questions at stake in Notes on Decomposition.

A large red-and-gold wall-mounted flag opens the exhibition. Its ostentatious design co-opts Soviet symbolism to commemorate a capitalist ideology: auctioneer’s gavel replaces hammer, champagne glass sloshes out a curving sickle of fizz. The symbolic power of objects is also referenced in Not a Shield but a Weapon (2016), a work that features 100 replica handbags manufactured in Manila and modelled on Margaret Thatcher’s black leather Asprey (sold at auction for £25,000 in 2011). Arranged in rows on white blankets, the installation simultaneously evokes the aesthetics of minimalist sculpture such as Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt and the display strategies of street-market sellers.

This gesture conflates multiple economies, raising ideas of exclusivity and the global infrastructure of counterfeit luxury goods.

Notes on Decomposition (2016), a work that borrows the exhibition’s title (a ‘literal translation’, as Abad terms it, of Emil Cioran’s book Précis de decomposition, 1949), is a vinyl wall text accompanied by 12 hand-drawn illustrations.

This two-part work describes 144 objects sold at politically significant auctions between 1991 and 2015. On display are the decorative fruits of illicit and unethical labour. A pair of bronze whippets belonging to Lehman Brothers, a Regency silver tea urn confiscated from Filipino politician and kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos: objects embroiled in narratives of corruption, scandal and greed. The wall text operates as a key to the illustrations, listing both the estimated and achieved sale value of the auctioned lots; it’s incredible to read that Lehman Brothers’s corporate sign fetched £13,750.

I like that the vinyl mimics a sponsors wall: echoing the sentiments of Andrea Fraser’s essay ‘L’1%, C’est Moi’ (2011), it highlights the activities of wealthy collectors against a backdrop of growing global inequality. The work appears neutral and informative: discreet serif font, black-and-white drawings executed with repetitive stylistic precision. But really, I’m rubbernecking at the material casualties of well-documented global events.

Despite Abad’s stated goal of presenting revisionist historical readings, Notes on Decomposition treats its material too super-

ficially. Much like the ‘analysis’ articles repeatedly shared on my Facebook feed – the kind that summarise other articles, rehashing existing content and adding little extra – the installation is symptomatic of one of the ways information is mediated online. The exhibition guide describes the work as a navigation tool, an attempt to ‘sample particular universes and simplify the world to one sentence’.

This reductive drive mimics clickbait logic, in which headlines are the currency and following the links doesn’t necessarily lead to more information.

It’s when the work demonstrates what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as ‘critical intimacy’ – the acknowledgement that you can only deconstruct what you love – that I’m most interested. This is most notably present in a reproduced photograph taken by Abad’s father when he was a student activist in 1986.

The image depicts the presidential living room in Malacañan Palace immediately after the ouster of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Abad has used this photograph in previous exhibitions, and the influence of his father’s later political career within President Benigno Aquino III’s Philippine cabinet is evident from its recurrence. It’s as if he is stuck on the power of the rupture the photograph reveals. Perhaps he longs to experience an equivalent political victory but doubts a shift like this will ever happen again. Naomi Pearce

Notes on Decomposition, 2016 (installation view).

Photo: Alan Dimmick. Courtesy CCA, Glasgow

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The Infinite Mix The Store, London 9 September – 4 December Bom Bom is the dancehall queen of Japan, and as Jeremy Deller and Cecilia Bengolea’s new film shows, she can shake her booty with Kingston’s finest. Like a bizarre contemporary take on Alice in Wonderland, Bom Bom’s Dream (2016) follows its eponymous hero on her way to dancehall stardom, seeing her finally win an electric fan for several minutes of grinding in the dust in a rowdy outdoor contest. Along the way we see her whisked into the sky on a gust of wind and swallowed by a giant chameleon, with the aid of some incredibly cheap-looking effects. This is an oddly disjointed work, by turns dreamlike and documentary-style. But in its presentation of Jamaica’s dancehall culture through the awestruck eyes of our outsider-avatar, it succeeds in capturing something of the secular magic of the music scene as modern ritual.

Most of The Infinite Mix’s ten ventures into (as the exhibition subtitle puts it) ‘contemporary sound and image’ might as well be described as artists’ music videos. For Martin Creed’s Work No. 1701 (2013), this means paring the form down to a single gesture: the simple act of crossing the road. Creed’s film, soundtracked by his own song You Return, follows a succession

of strollers as they pass from one side of a New York intersection to another, lending their steps a choreographic quality by repeating it and setting it to a beat. For Kahlil Joseph, it means exploding the music of Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city, interweaving its individual stems with Foley field-recordings and footage from the past and present of the rapper’s hometown. Joseph’s m.A.A.d (2014) winds up as a kaleidoscopic vision of Compton, California, which circles around the central trauma of the 1992 LA riots without ever quite touching it, juxtaposing time-stamped home movies from the period with newly shot surreal imagery, like men hanging upside-down from lamp posts or running backwards down nighttime streets, suggesting the hallucinatory displacement of an unspeakable core.

Enjoyable as they are, neither of these two really upsets the dynamic of image and sound as it already stands in contemporary music videos. But Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) activates the music itself into performing its own auto-critique. The film presents a seemingly endless jam by what appears to be the very

ideal type of mid-1970s fusion groups, featuring a mix of black and white musicians, Indian tabla, Moog synthesiser, a long-haired hippie guitarist and a conga player in traditional African dress, to evoke the eclectic melange of styles that came together in recording studios at that time. So smoothly is the work put together that only the film’s length – over six hours, during which the players do not get tired, break a sweat, or break for water – gives the lie to its apparent cohesion. In fact, LuandaKinshasa is a composite of many different takes featuring musicians in period dress. Its selfconscious fictionality belies at once the supposed spontaneity of the jam session, recorded music’s truth claim as a record of a real event and the quasi-utopian notion underlying ‘fusion’ itself.

Alone among the works at The Infinite Mix, which also features pieces by Cyprien Gaillard, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Rachel Rose among others, Douglas’s film works as a critique of music’s self-mythologising. But it’s Bom Bom’s Dream that opens up new kinds of mythic potential, finding a continued place for fantasy in contemporary sonic culture.

Robert Barry

Stan Douglas, Luanda-Kinshasa, 2013, single-channel video projection with sound. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner, New York & London; and Victoria Miro, London

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Uri Aran Two Things About Suffering Sadie Coles HQ, London 1 September – 1 October The closer you look at Uri Aran’s first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ , the harder it is to name what you see. This is especially so with the three vitrine works, combinations of objects apparently salvaged from derelict interiors. A subjunctive mood sets in. She woke early and left straight for the bodega. She picked up scissors and glue. She had to let him know how she feels, and an hour before was beautiful (all works 2016) contains what could be wooden offcuts from an old winery; a drawing of what could be a biological study; metal oddments that may or may not be parts of machinery specific to the location, alongside more identifiable things – a photo of a poodle, a CD of Pergolesi’s Salve Regina (1736), still shrink-wrapped (the vitrine’s security glass further augmenting the hermetic enigma).

Although the vitrines present as still lifes, they perhaps aspire to landscape: objects here functioning as metonyms of place. But the heterogeneous elements don’t have the atmospheric charge of, say, Joseph Beuys’s vitrines.

More successful is the freestanding assemblage Clock, whose ingredients are offset with a narrative that evokes a cinematic elsewhere.

Two horse saddles covered in black resin lie on an old table-cum-desk, alongside bronze dog biscuits, a belt, a clip-on microphone and,

on the floor, a broken steering wheel. A lens provides a view into a drawer containing a poster for a missing dog (the poodle from the aforementioned work). ‘Someone come into yard, kill dog, cut head off dog, Ling Ling very good dog, very much want head return’, reads this tragic document, imparting an atmosphere reminiscent of a Coen brothers film.

Like the assemblages, the paintings also have a salvaged quality, the markmaking of the more abstract works on HDO plywood veering between doodle, diagram and accident, the balance exquisitely struck in Professor Stork, an olive-brown polyurethane and graphite study on an offcut of ply formerly used for masking out paint, Aran’s modulation of the surface blurring the boundary between the found and manipulated.

The six videos here, though titled as separate chapters, effectively comprise one work.

Two Things About Suffering is projected in the rear space; the other five are shown at workstations in the main gallery. All feature the same protagonists, two suited men, one of whom supplies commentary as they undertake seemingly unconnected activities – sharpening pencils, playing with baguettes, acting out combat moves – in settings ranging from suburban

Texas to desert edgeland, while the other remains silent. Two Things About Suffering finds them in a high-walled empty warehouse, discussing Richard Boleslavsky’s book Acting: The First Six Lessons: Documents from the American Laboratory Theatre (1933), here a touchstone for ‘the conditions in which we are expected to act’.

At one point we cut briefly to them lighting matches in a gloomy office, an adolescent pursuit that counterpoints their adult themes: “To listen, to look and feel truly is not all,” quotes the voluble one. “You must do all that in a hundred different ways.” Welcome finds them in a rehearsal space playing classical piano.

Suddenly they stop, roll up the shutter, step outside to admire a passing freight train, before returning to their entertainment. The implication here, and in the other videos, is that everything – banal or ‘edifying’ – is of equal interest. Like Bouvard and Pécuchet, the eponymous characters of Flaubert’s last novel, who quit their jobs as copy clerks to try a range of pursuits including chemistry, farming and philosophy, they embrace the arbitrariness of their programme. They could do this, they could do that – the subjunctive mood sustained throughout with no prospect of closure.

Sean Ashton

Clock (detail), 2016, leather, wood, metal, bronze, microphones, glass, photo, resin, graphite, ceramic, china marker, plastic, foam, wax, oil, 127 × 132 × 109 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London

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Cindy Sherman and David Salle: History Portraits and Tapestry Paintings Skarstedt, London 1 October – 26 November Once upon a time, this wouldn’t have seemed like an uneven match. After all, a show of work

by Cindy Sherman and David Salle, made around the same time (1989–90), on comparable conceptual territory – loosely, the sardonic citation of the tropes of Old Master painting – might have seemed like a balanced pairing of two mavens of Pictures Generation postmodernism. Yet Salle’s Tapestry Paintings are so illustrative of their moment, so historically on the nose, that it takes an effort of the imagination to heave them into the present. Tiny in the Air (1989), for instance, a Dutch Golden Age genre scene of cavorting backgammon players, is interrupted by various discordant elements, some superimposed, others on individual canvases inserted into the painting’s surface: transparent heads redolent of Japanese and African sculpture, flashes of work by Bellmer and Giacometti, chiaroscuro images of a woman toying with an artist’s mannequin, a square of de Kooningesque drooled paint. The desired effect is of an equality of indifference, where painterly registers perform like a sequence of

wilfully lame celebrity impersonations. Close up, though, the application of paint is uniformly wan and cursory, regardless of the sampled style. The result, at once arch and airless, drains.

Attempts to locate an organising intelligence – why this tapestry, this Giacometti, this arching nude – are trumped, continually, by each painting’s visual shrug of apathy. You feel like a square for asking.

Despite their common allusions to historical painting, both artists’ works are fixated on the photographically mediated image: neither suite of works is ostensibly about painting, other than as just one cultural product among others. Sherman’s History Portraits, parodic cover versions of works by Fouquet, Raphael and others, derive from images of images, sidestepping the mediation of the painted surface to investigate, instead, the artifice of content.

The Portraits of the title refers not to the content of her sources – some of which, such as images of the Virgin Mary, aren’t strictly portraits – but to Sherman’s established habit of appearing as the subject of each photograph. In each case,

Old Master paintings are treated, Pageant of the Masters-style, as theatrical tableaux, wonkily affixed prop breasts, noses and eyebrows painfully and wittily visible. Notice how, in works such as Untitled #205 (1989), bright red lipstick and slathered-on stage makeup sit awkwardly against the real features of the artist’s face, and a latex torso, with breasts and pregnant belly, fails to cohere with the body beneath. The History of Sherman’s title is a style, a costume to be tried on. As though stilling the process of historical painting at the point before the canvas is touched, her works replay art history as amateur dramatics.

Unlike Salle’s contemporaneous work, though, Sherman’s photographs accrue complex meanings on closer inspection. Shot in 35mm, their softness of contour reads, however deliberately, as painterly fuzziness, and their carefully staged inauthenticity is as much a tribute to as a parody of the great fakers of the arthistorical past. Appropriation, after all, is the rule: great artists steal, as someone once said. Ben Street

left David Salle, Tiny in the Air, 1989, acrylic and oil on canvas, 239 × 345 cm. © the artist / licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy the artist and Skarstedt, New York & London right Cindy Sherman, Untitled #205, 1989, chromogenic colour print in artist’s frame, 156 × 123 cm (framed). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Skarstedt, New York & London

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Allison Katz We boil at different degrees The Approach, London 18 September – 23 October Ten paintings by London-based Canadian artist Allison Katz are hung in a line, in order of scale, across the gallery’s four walls. Almost as tall as the wall, the largest, Broader Than Broadway (2016), depicts a curved, tree-lined dirt road.

That thoroughfare spans the whole width of the bottom half of the canvas – creating a perspective that encourages a ‘lifesize’, one-to-one scale relationship between viewers’ bodies and pictorial space – before disappearing off into its upper left. Other works on show – Giant (2013–16), an oversize, spectral female figure hovering over a townscape, and Giant Cock (2016), a painting of a crowing cockerel, the surface scattered with real rice grains – evince a similar sensitivity to scale, albeit here relying on titles to make the connection explicit, as does the last work in this sequence, the diminutive Fairy (2016), in which a glowing pixie figure floats against a dark background.

In typical Katz fashion, this collection of apparently mundane and arcane imagery is intimately linked to a process of notetaking that is a prominent feature of her working method.

Such notes often include first-person accounts

of lived situations, written like diary entries or direct quotations by other authors and taken from books and magazines. Her texts are fragmentary compilations of short, evocative snapshots of unrelated ideas and personal experiences that work in an associative manner while generating a series of images and motifs that may or may not be reproduced in the paintings. In the notes reproduced in the exhibition’s accompanying handout, for instance, Katz recounts a tense encounter with a gun-toting guard when driving inadvertently into mining territory in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, followed by a sudden encounter with cows ‘clustered on the tufted grass island in the middle of the road, like a Dutch painting’, as she describes it.

In another entry, she narrates a fairy-hunting experience (and examining flowers in search of evidence of their presence) in London.

While these stories are not exactly represented in Katz’s paintings, they create visual reverberations, such as the road in Broader Than Broadway and, of course, Fairy. Far from illustrating the artist’s fragmented plots, her works operate within a pictorial system that feeds on

written language to experiment with the nature of representation and the meanings that can be generated through image association.

Words are merely a starting point for the incorporation of seemingly disparate symbols that form a subjective visual lexicon, in which the narrative element is constantly being interrupted, never reaching a conclusive meaning.

We boil at different degrees also includes some of Katz’s trademark tropes, such as the picture of a cabbage and a figure in profile (Cabbage (and Philip) No. 5, 2013) – which have been recurring motifs in past works – and the explicit reference to the self in Schrödinger’s Katz (2016), in which the depictions of a living and a dead cat (alluding to the homonymous Austrian scientist’s thought experiment ‘Schrödinger’s cat’) are superimposed with the image of a female hand, possibly the artist’s own. These are works that seem to address the mediated character of representation by highlighting the gaps between words and images, and Katz manages to tackle this issue with a lot of humour and wit, as well as through deceptively simple and engaging paintings.

Kiki Mazzucchelli

We boil at different degrees (installation view), 2016. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and The Approach, London

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Nigel Cooke Roman Willow Pace London 20 September – 22 October The genus mimosa, which gilds in fat yellow clumps several of Nigel Cooke’s new paintings – there are nine works in the show – is derived from the Greek mimos, meaning actor or mime, which in English gives us ‘mimic’ and ‘mimesis’.

It’s so named because certain sensitive species will fold up their leaves when heated or touched, as if impersonating sentient beings of quite another sort. There are kinds of mimosa too whose bark will yield the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine, which is used in shamanic rituals by Amazonian Indians. A flower charged with meaning, then, but that in a painting like Salome (2016) appears savagely decorative, stippling and streaking the surface, threatening to cloud in gold this hallucinatory scene: a pink-gowned woman strums an acoustic guitar in a forest clearing littered with sawn trunks and boughs. Eight glyphic crows surround her, summoned you might suppose by her unheard song.

This Salome is not the adolescent nearnude imagined by Gustave Moreau – though Cooke’s paintings have something of the French decadent’s seething and lurid melancholy – nor the pale and fatal torturer put on stage by Oscar Wilde. Instead she’s a whimsical figure out of 1960s folk/psych fantasy, but as if reimagined last month for some retro fashionmag spread – she’s nothing if not awkwardly

theatrical. Here she is again sitting among more yellow flowers in Salome (Seasons) (2016), eyeing us with one kohl-dark eye from behind a curtain of hair, while a wall of orange embers obtrudes from stage right. These burning logs and branches appear in a number of the new paintings; along with the flowers, they have partly replaced the charred-black expanses in earlier works such as Temptation of Saint Anthony – Black Mimosa (2014–15). But you could hardly say the freshly incandescent pictures feel more cheered: iconography and texture are just as insistently gothic as before.

This time, however, there are what appear to be fairies – or dryads. How else to describe these self-absorbed young women who pose among the trees, whether green or burning?

At times – in the case of the musicians especially – they are like figures out of Richard Dadd’s teeming, asylum-bound painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855–64): weirdly static and sinister. In Spanish Blossom (2016) a quartet (two girls and two adults) plays a tune that has melted into vertical lines the complexly stencilled, pink blossoms that surround them.

In Mosquito (2016), a lone girl in a white dress plays a violin while the embers tumble above her like an advancing wall of lava. These characters, who sometimes seem dwarfed by the flora that flourishes about them, recall

Salome, 2016, oil on linen backed with sailcloth, 230 × 220 × 5 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Pace London

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the magical green world of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590–97), especially as it was ravishingly imagined in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 movie. Where Reinhardt’s spriteful company glitters with in-camera effects, Cooke’s equivalents are the cottonwool-thick streaks of white paint that, even at their most vivid, give most of these works their gauzy detachment.

Which is not to say that these paintings are all about their venerable (and even classical) reference points. Some of these young women and girls might be goth or emo kids on provincial streets – except that they are hunkered down and hiding in some approximation of an elemental woodland out of Middle-European folktales. Here is Little Red Riding Hood looking snotty and bored beside a bonfire, another figure tricked up in a skeleton suit as if for Halloween; or is she Death itself with a black look about the hollows of her cheeks? As often in Cooke’s paintings, there are hints of the artist’s own directorial presence in the wings: a hat brim among the shadows. And in Smoking Lovers (2016) his own Oberon and Titania, impish royalty, looking for all the world like a brittle celeb couple snapped in slouchy downtime: ‘Then, my queen, in silence sad, / Trip we after the night’s shade.’

Brian Dillon

Philippe Parreno Anywhen Hyundai Commission, Tate Modern, London 4 October – 2 April Successfully activating Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for the institution’s annual commission is a tough gig. After Anish Kapoor filled the space physically with Marsyas (2002), Olafur Eliasson charged it with an atmospheric experience for The Weather Project (2003) and Bruce Nauman occupied it aurally with Raw Materials (2004), the pressure has been for artists to come up with increasingly innovative propositions. With a history of creating nonnarrative installations that animate a space through a combination of orchestrated sound, light and movement, Philippe Parreno already seems a perfect fit, and what he’s done here only confirms that suspicion. For the ears there is an ever-changing succession of sounds, some miked-up to and fed in from the building itself, others not, including a thunderstorm, snippets of children’s voices and layers of buzzing, humming and ominous musical tones. For the eyes: Parreno’s signature helium-filled fish balloons (species specific to the location)

gently bobbing about; strips and blocks of lighting, some part of the existing fabric of the building, others created, that pulse on and off; a large screen that descends and ascends into the centre of the space, onto which a sequence of coloured lights may be projected. The screen is accompanied (or not) by a series of horizontal and vertical flats that also rise and fall, creating a semi-enclosed viewing space in front of the screen. When this occurs, a short film plays, featuring ventriloquist Nina Conti and footage of a cuttlefish in a tank. Between these events there is sometimes just stillness and silence.

It’s when the film plays that Parreno’s interest in artificial, digital and organic life, and how that life communicates, becomes more explicit. Conti ventriloquises lines about transparency and diaphaneity and about how “the mask is the first automaton”. Meanwhile the cuttlefish, in its strangeness, especially when shown in extreme closeup, appears as a benign and almost alien intelligence. Despite

Conti being highly skilled in her art, the combination of her clipped delivery and the powerful but echoey audio speakers through which it’s delivered often hinders the understanding of her words. Maybe this is intentional. It’s probably also no coincidence that Parreno presents us with a cuttlefish, a creature that can communicate through changes in chromatic skin colouration, skin texture and movement.

There is another lifeform at work here too.

In a small room at the back of the Turbine Hall, cloudy yeast cultures growing in glass jars are connected by an impressive array of wires, tubes and digital displays to a series of monitors.

It’s this bioreactor, we are told, responding to changes in the hall’s temperature and atmospheric conditions, that is controlling the sequence in which the events occur. Parreno has, by bringing life to the Turbine Hall, as close as possible brought the Turbine Hall to life. Helen Sumpter

Anywhen, 2016 (installation view).

Photo: Tate Photography. Courtesy the artist and Tate Modern, London

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Thomas Hirschhorn Stand-alone The Mistake Room, Los Angeles 7 October – 17 December At the Mistake Room, several armchairs, covered entirely in brown packing tape, stand against a wall, and multiple monitors are fixed above them. Nearly every centimetre of the gallery is emblazoned with graffitied phrases such as ‘Predatory Lending’ and ‘Corporate Agriculture’, and a fireplace, exploding with piles of cardboard masquerading as firewood, is crowned by a heaving heap of critical-theory books by Derrida, Adorno and Deleuze, among others.

Similar arrangements of objects, texts and materials are repeated through four consecutive rooms.

In each, a cardboard tree trunk crashing through the centre of the spaces is punctuated by photocopied images documenting the grisly aftermath of some unknown violence, affronting the viewer with gruesome items such as bloody limbs and mutilated penises. Undeniably affecting though this appalling spectacle is, it also raises the question: why show such imagery?

Through the constructed scenario of the exhibition, Hirschhorn interpellates (as Althusser would have it) the gallery visitor as witness to a crime, thereby suggesting that the viewer must bear some ethical responsibility to take action. Yet, as we are assailed constantly by media representations of war and suffering,

what power can such photographs have within a contemporary-art context?

While Hirschhorn’s projects appear more chaotic than do most exhibitions, they are more carefully calculated than they appear. Everyday materials are chosen for their ‘non-intimidating’ qualities, in the sense that these are materials that anyone could deploy, just as Hirschhorn has, and that no special skill is needed, only ‘energy’, a favourite term of the artist. The fragmentary wall texts are all gleaned from the artist’s collection of newspaper headlines, what he calls ‘news poetry’. Even the seemingly random nature of their application is authored, with multiple taggers employed to create the illusion of several voices.

Indeed, it is this emphasis on appearances that is most troubling about Hirschhorn’s work.

Artists can (and should) invoke Marxist theory all they like, but not if their working methods (let alone their exhibition titles) are less than communal. Rather than actually inviting the contributions of others, Hirschhorn appears more interested in retaining authorial control.

His Gramsci Monument (2013), a summer-long public art project located in a working-class neighbourhood in the Bronx, New York, drew

Stand-alone, 2016 (installation view).

Courtesy the Mistake Room, Los Angeles, and Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel, Mexico City

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criticism from art critics for dropping the ideals of a privileged white man from Switzerland into the heart of a predominantly black and Hispanic community. The artist claims to create a space in which political ideas and philosophical propositions can be discussed, but the subjects of those conversations are decided by the artist, rather than his would-be interlocutors.

Here in Los Angeles, this seems like a missed opportunity, with the exhibition taking place in Boyle Heights, a neighbourhood at the centre of conflicts over gentrification and race. None of that is alluded to here; in fact Stand-alone was first exhibited at the artist’s commercial gallery in Berlin in 2007 and has been borrowed for this exhibition from the Coppel Collection in Mexico City. The irony of a cheaply made, Marxistinfluenced installation that has been purchased by an art collector and then shipped at considerable expense to a disadvantaged neighbourhood in East Los Angeles should not be lost on visitors.

Stand-alone’s own history of circulation and acquisition tells more of a story about capitalist reality than Hirschhorn ever could. But that’s the way today’s artworld works, and sadly no amount of sticky tape can mask this.

Ciara Moloney

Betye Saar Black White & Blend Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles 10 September – 17 December Betye Saar’s double exhibition at Roberts & Tilton coincides with the opening of her career survey at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. The first exhibition, titled Black White (which opened a month before the second exhibition), is a more concise presentation in the gallery’s project space that arranges assemblage sculptures and collages spanning from the present back to an early etching by the artist – now a nonagenarian – from 1964. Blend, the second and more generously spaced display (actually including fewer works), occupies the main gallery. Its focus is the major mixed media installation Mojotech (1987), which stretches nearly 7.5 metres along one wall and was the outcome of a residency Saar undertook at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge.

The loose conceit for this exhibition, reflected in the separate titles, is that Black White not only organises the broadly monochromatic works according to their colour, but also reflects critically on how specific meanings attach to colours and symbols. Blend, according to the exhibition handout, is the more ‘ambiguous, arbitrary and abstract’ of the two. The reality is that there are works in each that could easily be shown in the other. A more productive

observation is that, throughout her career, Saar has always moved back and forth between engineering explicit meanings and casting mysterious spells, between the political and the personally intuitive, and between – at the risk of sounding glib – ‘issues’ and ‘poetry’.

Mojotech is an apposite example in this regard. A wide ziggurat of wall-mounted panels, the work progresses symmetrically from its blue and black outer extents, with occult symbols painted over green circuit boards, inwards and upwards through blue then terracotta then white panels, with pieces of digital componentry fixed alongside mirrors, clocks, little skeleton figurines and pieces of animal bone.

A perforated metal sheet is fringed with snakeskin. Above it, eyes stare out at us; below it hangs a heart. Reportedly, visitors to its 1987 installation at MIT brought offerings that they placed on an altarlike shelf, among candles and compact discs.

Saar professes to believe in certain forms of mysticism and arcana, but standing in front of Mojotech, it is hard to shake the idea that here she is using this occult paraphernalia to satirise the faith we place in the inscrutable workings of technology. Across the room, a throne bristles with wired-together metal leaves, keys, eyes,

hearts and other trinkets, lit from beneath by a tube of blue neon. Pause Here – Spirit Chair (1996), which rests on black coal, is an object at once absurd and deeply serious. Many of the knickknacks look as if they were purchased from gift shops or garden centres. But placed centrally among the kitsch is a medallion commemorating Martin Luther King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Other symbols suddenly take on extra significance: an ornament depicting a sailing boat becomes a slave ship; those keys become instruments of incarceration. The chair is not so much the throne of a king but a homemade and heartfelt shrine to his memory.

Because Saar is an African-American artist who regularly appropriates derogatory racial imagery, her more subdued work is often overshadowed by its incendiary counterparts.

In Black White, beside sculptures combining birdcages and cotton bolls, head-scarfed Mammies and black crows, a series of four framed collages from 1982 reveals Saar’s quiet side. One exquisite piece includes pencil drawings of birds, a tarot card and torn pieces of paper sewn on with threads dangling. Its title alludes to the narrowly glimpsed interior life of a publicly political artist: Every Secret Thing (Almost) (1982). Jonathan Griffin

Black White, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Courtesy the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles

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Julien Nguyen Superpredators Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles 11 September – 29 October The five oil-on-panel paintings on display consider power and homoeroticism from four different perspectives. In The Fairest of the Seasons (all works 2016) the myth of Ganymede, the most beautiful boy of Greek mythology, is transplanted to present-day Los Angeles. An androgyne with a featureless mound in place of his genitals, resembling Mechanical Animals-era Marilyn Manson, reposes on a hot-pink rock under a green palm before a flat black void.

Elementary Dear Watson shows a more temperate woodland from an identical single-point perspective as Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest (c. 1470), only in the modern retelling the humans have become the prey, pursued by a malevolent artificial intelligence – the title is a catchphrase associated with Sherlock Holmes, but also a reference to IBM’s cognitive computer system Watson – taking the form of cyborglike knights with baboon-red buttocks, shard penises and a hypoallergenic (hairless) cat in place of the hounds, all rendered in the futurist style of Umberto Boccioni. Another use of singlepoint perspective appears in the chequerboard floor of New World Order, into the centre of which strides Christine Lagarde, head of the

International Monetary Fund (IMF), making an unconventionally sinister shaka, or ‘hang loose’ sign, with her right hand. Behind her a pair of lithe, epicene adolescents hang from the barren trees in their underwear as punishment, like a scene from a Calvin Klein campaign in hell.

A small work, Son of Heaven, borrows its architecture and furniture from early-nineteenthcentury Chinese painting and sits its beautiful Pre-Raphaelite boy on an isometric grid, in keeping with the representation of space in Qing dynasty compositions. Lastly, the facade of the pale stone altarpiece that dominates I know why the caged bird sssings provides the work’s organising structure, with different images arranged around and inside of it. The centrepiece is a panel depicting three boys without bulges in their pants imprisoned by a huge phallic snake that makes an elegant rococo swirl around them.

In places, the snake’s body recedes backwards into the bloody surface of the painting, suggesting that this space is nothing if non-Euclidian.

‘Superpredators’ is the term Hillary Clinton used in 1996 to describe African-American gang kids without conscience or empathy, and it has been dredged up again and again by those

opposed to her. Its appropriation here as an exhibition title draws our attention to this year’s US presidential election, the wider struggle for power and a variety of bogeymen that haunt contemporary politics. Just as the Renaissance painters he likes to reference sometimes included allegorical representations of the power of their patrons, Nguyen is concerned with the representation of power in today’s society. His paintings are allegories of power, not only in their hierarchical representations of space but also via their protagonists, who might be maleficent forces themselves: a great snake evoking the serpent in the Garden of Eden as well as the reptilian overlords that conspiracy theorists claim are controlling our governments; Lagarde and the IMF, which again conspiracy theorists allege is part of a shadowy New World Order; an artificial intelligence run amok; the lascivious god Zeus, in the form of a bald eagle, abducting Ganymede; the America that this eagle symbolises.

In these paintings young men are not superpredators but captive white sex objects – toned, long-limbed avatars for all that is beautiful in the world and needs protecting.

Dean Kissick

The Fairest of the Seasons, 2016, oil on panel, 57 × 57 × 3 cm.

Photo: Michael Underwood. Courtesy the artist and Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles

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Erika Vogt Eros Island: Knives Please Rise Overduin & Co, Los Angeles 10 September – 22 October Multimedia, installation and video artist Erika Vogt proffers the knife – the prehistoric invention that altered the trajectory of humanity in terms of the way we hunt and eat, survive and kill, create and destroy – as a convincing human surrogate in Eros Island: Knives Please Rise.

Vogt’s oversize, clownishly colourful knives are all, according to the press release, titled after friends and fellow artists (Richard Knife, Astrid Knife, Helen Knife and so on). The tool in this case is not just an extension of the body, but replaces it. A few of the forms are invented, but most are adapted from actual holdings in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cybele Knife (all works 2016), for example, is based on an eighth-century Peruvian sacrificial blade, while Cleo Knife takes the shape of a gold warrior sickle from nineteenth-century India.

Some of the knives lean against walls while others are installed upright throughout the gallery, standing theatrically as if they were actors upon a stage. Indeed, several of the sculptures were initially designed as props for a performance at the Roulette Theater in New York as part of Performa 2015 and are made from lightweight, moveable materials such

as polyurethane, linen, aluminium and acrylic.

A necessary stage presence perhaps also accounts for the exaggerated palette and size of the sculptures.

Though the sculptures are displayed just a few feet from one another, there is a sense of disengagement between the objects. This may be explained by Vogt’s adoption of Roland Barthes’s theory of idiorrhythmy in her performative practice and in the outline of her ‘Set Theory’, included as part of the rigorous 140-page artist book that visitors can flip through in the gallery lobby. In 1977, Barthes delivered a lecture titled ‘How to Live Together’, the crux of which was the concept of idiorrhythmy, a term and a way of life borrowed from monasticism wherein monks cohabitate and yet live essentially in solitude, according to their own rhythm or pace. It seems Barthes harboured a wistful longing for living and being alone, even though he shared a house with his mother his entire life and was comfortable being a highly recognised public figure in the Paris cultural milieu. He wrote: ‘Fantasmically speaking, there’s nothing contradictory about wanting to live alone

and wanting to live together,’ but also conceded, ‘where cohabitation does not preclude individual freedom’. Similarly, the sculptures inhabit the same space, but they do not necessarily have a dialogue.

Vogt’s application of idiorrhythmy and excavation of Barthes’s ultimately unresolved query of ‘How to Live Together’ – the phrase leaving off the unspoken and implicit qualifying adjective ‘peacefully’ or ‘happily’ – reveals an impossible ideal. The artist’s book contains a detailed compendium of knife history and paraphernalia, from ancient artefacts to advertisements. It ends with dozens of pages devoted to front pages of The New York Times from 2015, regularly beset with multiple stories of violence, fire, war and other atrocities. If the front page of one of the nation’s most widely circulated newspapers is any indication, it seems incontrovertible that living together equates to violence.

With this perspective, Vogt’s contained knife sculptures can either be viewed cheerfully as a kind of utopic vision, or, more cynically, a sinister satire of humanity, to be played out upon the mythical space of the stage.

Jennifer S. Li

Eros Island: Knives Please Rise, 2016 (installation view).

Courtesy Overduin & Co, Los Angeles

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Liz Deschenes Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 29 June – 16 October Over the last 20 years, Boston-born Liz Deschenes, who now resides in New York, has produced a meditative and restrained body of photo-based work that is informed

by Minimalism. Several works presented in this, her first midcareer survey, respond to the environments in which they are presented and encourage viewer interaction. Like other artists working in photography, such as Alison Rossiter, Walead Beshty, Sara VanDerBeek and Nadia Belerique, Deschenes’s practice affirms photography as an art form by emphasising the medium’s essential properties (paper, light, chemical processes) and by blurring the line between photography and sculpture through modes of display.

Entering the gallery, viewers first see Tilt/Swing (360° field of vision, version 1) (2009), an arrangement of six rectangular photograms mounted on metal plates that highlight Deschenes’s elemental approach to photography and her method of altering viewer perceptions of space through sculptural means. Deschenes created the photograms by exposing black-andwhite photographic paper to moonlight, and then fixing the exposure with a variety of chemicals, including silver. To fully experience the piece, visitors must stand in the midst of the

work to take in the refracted views of their body and surroundings, which, unfortunately, wasn’t permitted here. Nevertheless one could have a ‘hall of mirrors’ experience in front of Gallery 7 (2014), a line of 11 human-scaled, silver-toned framed photograms, whose reflective sharpness varied with the amount of light in the space.

Two wall-mounted photograms – the angular Shift/Rise #42 (2016) and the concave Bracket #7 (2014) – function in a way similar to Donald Judd’s stacks or a Fred Sandback yarn installation. They draw attention to the gallery’s architecture, and raise awareness of our physical presence within the space. A third wall sculpture, Stereograph # 11 (2012), consists of two vertically oriented components hung on adjacent walls, drawing on early photography’s deployment of stereogram photo cards and viewing devices in order to create illusory three-dimensional images.

This thoughtfully paced survey, curated

by Eva Respini, stumbles only when descriptions of Deschenes’s work extend beyond immediate formal concerns. (Indeed, most works in the show are dogged by lengthy didactic wall panels.) Green Screen # 4 (2001/2016), a 4.5m-long inkjet print hung vertically, refers to the technology used to create special effects for

Liz Deschenes, 2016 (installation view). Photo: John Kennard. © the artist. Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

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movies and television. The accompanying text explains that this technology was adopted because the earlier blue-screen backdrop was incompatible with ‘darker skin tones’.

Deschenes’s piece, then, ‘offers a subtle commentary on the changing perceptions of race and its relation to the history of film and photographic technologies’. Interesting idea, but this work was originally conceived 15 years ago, well before the current moment of fraught race relations in the US. Such an interpretation feels opportunistic, as Deschenes’s overall practice, based as it is on minimalist precedents, doesn’t require or solicit imported meanings. No other works in this survey hint at such sociopolitical concerns. Perhaps this is an attempt to help visitors relate to the work, or contemporise it, but it’s unnecessary, and feels distracting.

The survey’s final installation, Timelines (2016), was created specifically for the ICA and consists of 11 photograms mounted inside the building’s bank of windows facing Boston Harbour. Viewers catch glimpses of themselves in the photograms’ reflective silvery surfaces as they contemplate the equally reflective surface of the water. Here, Deschenes’s unobtrusive intervention subtly enhances an already pleasurable experience of looking. Bill Clarke

Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison HM Prison Reading 4 September – 4 December This exhibition, an Artangel project, marks no anniversary: the now decommissioned Reading prison was originally built in 1786 as a correctional house; it became a county gaol in 1793; the current cruciform structure was built in 1844; and Oscar Wilde, whose extended letter De Profundis inspired this exhibition, was incarcerated there between 1895 and 1897. Three years after his release, Wilde died of cerebral meningitis in Paris; De Profundis (which he had entrusted to his friend and ex-lover the journalist Robert Ross) was partially published in 1905. For the first seven Sundays of this exhibition, the letter was read out, in roughly six-hour sessions, by a series of actors, artists and writers in the former chapel-turned-rec room.

Other artists are showing works in the cells: Peter Dreher’s glasses of water, a subject he has been repeatedly painting since 1974 (to the point at which there are now more than 5,000 such works), are shown as one, two, then six in separate cells. At once a reflection of the artist’s own solitary studio confinement and at the same time evocative of the monotony of interned life, the still lifes that hang on dull pockmarked walls appear to mark the passing of time – like the daily ritual of tallying notches while doing time.

The atmosphere is suffocating. Some works are subdued. Steel bars obstruct small windows

and, from the upper level cells, the sky is reduced to abstracted blue-grey squares.

Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda (2008–10), in its entirety comprising 162 units of two tables stacked surface to surface, a layer of compacted earth in between and symbolic of coffins, was originally made in response to gang violence in Los Angeles and mass graves that she saw in Colombia. Though a small number are included in this exhibition, the ‘coffins’, among which the visitor weaves, serve in this context as an acknowledgment of the unmarked graves of inmates buried in a plot of prison land ‘out back’.

But there are also works that are resistant to the context of prison, that rebel against the system that imprisoned Wilde, and seek connection to the world beyond the barbwired wall: Nan Goldin’s assembly of footage (including Jean Genet’s only film, Un chant d’amour, 1950, and an early recording of Wilde’s play Salome, 1891) and photography (The Boy, 2016, images of Goldin’s muse of more than 20 years tacked to the walls) imbue the cramped cells with a corporeal presence, forcing life into them with writhing bodies and brazen sexuality; In Memoriam (2016), a sculpture by JeanMichel Pancin, occupies the former chapel with a concrete slab the dimensions of Wilde’s

prison cell and the very door that shuttered him in isolation; Robert Gober presents two torsos through which a riverbed and bubbling cascade flow, bringing to mind the wateriness of memories and dreams as well as a craving for something natural in a place that is all metal, brick and sterile lino floors; and there are Wolfgang Tillmans’s self-portraits photographed using a distorted mirror found in one of the cells, portraits that hang in solitary while his film Imprisoned (2016) – offering scrambled glimpses of the town outside from behind window grills – plays out on an end wall of the cruciform building.

For a year during his internment, Oscar Wilde was not allowed to write. In 1896, a progressive warden, new to Reading Gaol, allowed Wilde to compose what would later become De Profundis. Ten letters, written by contemporary authors and artists, can be listened to in the C Wing: on metal tables lie headphones and paper copies of one-way correspondence. In these cells the visitor is invited to sit and listen to accounts of stateenforced separation. Some are fictional and others personal, but all encapsulate a sense of constraint, the desire for human bonds, the rawness of abrupt departures and the desire to write oneself outside. Fi Churchman

Nan Goldin, The Boy, 2016 (installation view, HM Prison Reading). Photo: William Eckersley.

Courtesy Artangel, London

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TOTAL PROOF: The GALA Committee 1995–1997 Red Bull Studios New York 30 September – 27 November Finally, we can all binge on Melrose Place (1992–9) in peace. If one ever needed an intellectual excuse for watching Alison cope with her miscarriage – and in the process witness her overhear Taylor tell Kyle that Peter was actually her brother-in-law (omg!) – Mel Chin’s GALA Committee project In the Name of the Place (all works 1995–7) is it. The blanket that poor Alison is resting under is actually RU 486 Quilt, one of the most identifiable ‘works’ of art Chin – a conceptual artist then based at the University of Georgia – and his unwieldy cohort of young artists in GALA Committee made specifically for the show’s sets in this outlandish, genuinely subversive, hilarious and seemingly implausible avant-garde stunt. The quilt’s design is the chemical structure of RU-486, the abortion drug commonly known as the morning-after pill and available in the US only since the year 2000. It is one of more than a hundred politically charged props with which the GALA Committee ‘infected’ the show. TOTAL PROOF: The GALA Committee 1995–1997 collects all these works in one place for the first time since they were shown at MOCA Los Angeles, in 1997, and offers definitive proof

that In the Name of the Place is an exhilarating and brilliant collusion between the artworld and pop culture.

That In the Name of the Place even happened at all is something of a miracle. Chin cold-called Deborah Siegel, Melrose Place’s set decorator, with a pitch: that the committee would provide free props for the TV show, slipped into the background of the drama as a subliminal, sleightof-hand critique of contemporary culture and politics. What resulted was a sneaky, underthe-radar two-year project that spanned the television show’s fourth, fifth and sixth seasons.

Working directly with Siegel and other production staff – some of whom were CalArts graduates appreciative of the gambit – the committee created works loosely based on advance scripts Siegel provided to the group. For much of the project’s duration, not even the cast had any clue when, for instance, the committee switched out the word VHS for STD on a tape cassette cover; or made a pillow with an image of the HIV virus’ glycoprotein covering on it (HIV Pillow with STD Video Sleeves); or changed the shape of the typical white circle in a pool game’s eight ball into the

continent of Africa (Africa Is the Eight Ball). These slight object alterations raise the question of what the point was when no one watching TV would be noticing any of this. The project wasn’t made public until its exhibition at MOCA Los Angeles in 1997 and a subsequent Sotheby’s auction in 1998, and even then, both appealed to a very specific artworld audience with probably no crossover to the larger viewing public.

The works’ very elusiveness and quasiinvisibility was part of the point. The show went into syndication, and is still running today (something the GALA Committee was expecting), which means In the Name of the Place will continue to unfold for the foreseeable future, long past the political context of the 1990s: the ongoing AIDS crisis, identity politics and global capitalism on overdrive. These issues continue unabated, though in altered forms, lending the work a contemporariness. As word spreads, through exhibitions like this, perhaps more people will pay attention, making In the Name of the Place a very, very sneaky success, one that adds critical complexity to the kinds of TV shows so often dismissed as trite. David Everitt Howe

Africa is the Eight Ball, 1995–7, regulation-size pool balls, enamel paint, plastic rack.

Courtesy the artists and Red Bull Studios New York

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Slavs and Tatars Afteur Pasteur Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York 8 September – 22 October A butcher’s curtain quarantines the entrance to Slavs and Tatars’s Afteur Pasteur. The curtain implicates viewers as pathogens. Like microbes through a membrane, they pass through the vinyl strips, which are printed with images of bacteria and horses, a banner displaying the words ‘milk champagne’ and the Cyrillic spelling of kumis (a fermented dairy beverage).

On the other side of the screen, everything is bathed in pink and lime fluorescent lights.

The disco hues glimmer off mirrored pedestals, six copper-framed military cots topped with woven rugs and the exhibition’s centrepiece: a ‘bacteria bar’ from which a bacteria barista will serve gallerygoers copper cups full of ayran, a Turkish yogurt drink. In this gesture of thoughtful interaction, participants can consume the briny froth that brims with probiotics. And so the contagious cycle continues.

Afteur Pasteur is an ambitious and sportive outing for Slavs and Tatars. For this exhibition, the Berlin-based collective researched the processes of souring and fermentation as catalysts of, and metaphors for, geopolitics and transcultural dynamics. Indeed, much political discourse today seems to concern itself with stopping the ‘spread’ of something, be it refugees or Western hegemony. They termed it ‘Pickle Politics’, and the research cycle manifests in a variety of polyglot word games (à la

Mallarmé and Broodthaers) and aesthetic conundrums. A banner titled Hammer and Nipple (2016) depicts pickle breasts lactating language.

The nipples drip Polish words that translate to ‘sour on power, the government provides only kefir’. Next to the banner rests Szpagat (2015), a forked tongue, cast in bronze. Enacting a gymnast’s split, the piece suggests the type of linguistic acrobatics and doublethink that state apparatuses regularly deploy. By setting up such object-relations as Szpagat and Hammer and Nipple, Slavs and Tatars inaugurate morphological fallacies. Things ontologically hop between being tongue or breast, phallus or abstraction; the slippage never yields.

Contemporary art is expected to perform ambiguity. All too frequently, gallery pressreleases frame works of art as being neither this nor that. Slavs and Tatars dig beyond this well-trod ground to embed their work with misunderstanding. Without the proper codes for reading, vacuum-formed plastic pieces like Kwas ist Das (2016) gleefully confuse or outright confound. Kwas (spelled in the piece in German as Quaß), a Polish fermented rye beverage, doubles as a homonym for the German word was (or ‘what’). The other two German words, written in Cyrillic, are combined to propose the question, ‘What is that?’ Through the process of transliteration, incomprehension is carefully

designed. Because of such erudite reliance on circuitous wordplay, the two sculptures from the ongoing series Kitab Kebab beseech to be understood as an anomaly. In Kitab Kebab (Zombie Microbes) (2016), a metal skewer lances philosopher Henri Bergson’s book Laughter (1900), as well as texts about flesh-eating bacteria and other tomes. In one sense, the Kitab Kebabs function as utilitarian research maps to the ideas that underpin Afteur Pasteur. Yet these works also feel pedagogic, as if the viewer cannot be trusted to establish such theoretical and historical connections autonomously.

The individual works of art in Afteur Pasteur are like the bacterium of the ayran consumed in the exhibition: protean entities whose meanings adapt and morph depending on their environment, context and percipient host. Before we are able to resolve the works of art in this exhibition, these carriers of multiple languages and ideas inevitably mutate and become something else, which, in turn, produces a need for such works as the Kitab Kebabs.

Slavs and Tatars recognise that fermentation is a precarious undertaking. It can go both ways.

That which is being fermented can, without care, spoil. If we are to trust in the work of Slavs and Tatars, then ideology circulates like bacteria. And so they seethe and spread.

Owen Duffy

Stongue, 2015, resin, 10 × 27 × 9 cm.

Courtesy the artists and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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Bruce Nauman Contrapposto Studies, i through vii Sperone Westwater, New York 10 September – 29 October Since the mid-1960s Bruce Nauman has consistently created some of the most visionary and innovative artwork around. Conceptually rich and existentially trenchant, it probes the body in temporal, physical, political and psychological spaces, and incorporates, as an opus, video, sculpture, drawing and installation.

Nauman has redefined what art can say and how it says it. The seven looped videos that comprise Contrapposto Studies, i through vii (2015/16) reinforce, both individually and in toto, the breadth and depth of his work.

The pieces range in duration from seven to just over 63 minutes. All are based on a clip of the artist, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, seen from the front, back or side, walking forward and backwards, his hands held behind his head as he shifts his hips from side to side in a clumsy, methodical gait that mimics contrapposto – the classical stance meant to represent the weighted body in space. In each, the images are arranged in multiple vertical columns, and as the series progresses, they

are split into horizontal registers so that body parts move in different directions and at times appear to shift and repeat across rows creating complex but apparently mathematically determined patterns. In a further complication, segments in which the artist steps backwards are rendered in positive, and those in which he steps forward, in negative. Combined with the sound of the artist’s feet scraping against the floor, the visuals become dizzying.

The series revisits works and subjects Nauman addressed early in his career. These include, most obviously, Walk with Contrapposto (1968), a video in which he walks back and forth in a narrow corridor, and more generally a group of works that took the artist’s body as their subject, for example, Wax Templates of My Body Arranged to Make an Abstract Sculpture (1967), which divided the body into seven units reflecting the art-school paradigm that the represented figure be seven heads high. These works play on the tension between the artist’s actual physicality and the

Contrapposto Studies, i through vii, 2015/2016 (installation view). © the artist / ARS, New York and DACS, London.

Courtesy the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York

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abstract ideas of artistic practice in which he engaged.

Nauman has not appeared in his work since the late 1960s. In reintroducing his body, and in revising past works, he invests the themes they explored with issues of ageing and mortality.

Contrapposto is, after all, a tool to freeze or transfer the body into permanent, artistic form, in essence removing the look of it from lived time. Small details such as the hole in the right armpit of his shirt, or beneath it the rectangular outline of a colostomy bag (as confirmed by the gallery), become evident as one watches the videos and reinforce the intensely immediate, personal experience of age. But through duration, multiplication, reversal and repetition, the highly specific presence and character of the artist’s body is driven towards abstraction. Time becomes the frame, medium and ultimate theme of the works. Sustained viewing and listening draws viewers into the visual, auditory and temporal rhythms of the videos, rendering us, as much as the artist, time’s subjects. Joshua Mack

K8 Hardy Docudrama Lagagareena, Los Angeles 2 October – 5 November Go barefoot across the floor to the drawers of the dresser that hang like broken jaws, all the clothes lolling tongues. Peek with searching eyes through the closet. Flannel and silk, cotton and polyester, denim and lace. Shoes, neatly lined and haphazardly stacked, empty of feet, wait for yours to fill them. Cowboy boots and ballet flats, high heels and sneakers, flip-flops and moccasins.

You go out and collect more clothes. The shed skins of others at thrift stores, the factoryfresh ready-to-wear beckoning from mannequins and racks. You finger the bolts of fabric in the textile district and buy yards and buttons and zippers to assemble and remix the above into something all your own.

What to wear? Who are you going to be?

What qualities will you exude? Comfort and conformity or some obviously difficult outsider’s beauty? To blend in, to stand out? To peacock, to butterfly? You know clothes are just costumes, for class, gender and a hundred other things, but if worn right, they can still make you feel things.

Brave and beautiful. Powerful and free. Sexy. And perhaps by proudly appearing as all these things, you assert your presence, find yourself and just

maybe help those who wrestle with awkward class, shamed bodies or sacrilegious desires to claim their own flesh, their own force through the example of your shameless abandon.

I first read of K8 Hardy in a fresh copy of LTTR (an abbreviation that means many things, but most often ‘Lesbians To The Rescue’, the name of the feminist genderqueer collective and annual journal that Hardy cofounded in 2001). Peeling through those pages, I saw such rare bravery and naked lust, a dance party uprising within a pluralist feminism, wondrous weirdos with every kind of body I could imagine.

These exuberant humans would change the world. They had already changed me. Hardy’s name and work appeared here and there over a decade and more, erupting like a firework out of an art video newscast, as an unusual stylist, from a credit in a record’s liner notes or from an unlikely fashion show at a biennial.

And now, her first solo show in Los Angeles as well as the first for this new gallery, a collaboration between Mexico City’s House of Gaga and New York’s Reena Spaulings, hence the portmanteau name: Lagagareena.

Spread throughout the spacious secondfloor gallery overlooking the lake in MacArthur Park, a series of mannequins strike curious poses (and in one case flies through the air) wearing many of the outfits Hardy made for her 2012 Whitney Biennial runway show. Alongside these decked-out mannequins, a video called Express Looks (all works 2016) shows Hardy posing outfit after outfit for a self-portrait that documents everything she wore for a decade, a kind of abbreviated alternate version of her longer work Outfitumentary (2001–12/2016; not on view). Both Hardy in her outfits and all those worn by the varicoloured mannequins reveal a sensibility: absurd, fun, lively. Harlequin and humorous, punk as fuck, but underneath it all the very serious act of making a self. In riot grrrl and in the larger DIY punk scene that it erupted from, many of us were given permission by our peers to find who we were against what we were born with and forced through. Hardy, a riot grrrl, a Lesbian To The Rescue and always an artist, here translates that difficult struggle into a document of resistance turning into affirmation, of a bold and brazen beauty. Andrew Berardini

Docudrama, 2016 (installation view, Lagagareena, Los Angeles).

Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles

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32nd Bienal de São Paulo: Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty) Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo 7 September – 11 December Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty), the title of the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, gained a new urgency after Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached only days before the exhibition opened. The ousting was the result of a bribery trial amidst economic decline, which some have described as a parliamentary coup.

The process was led by conservative Michel Temer, who during his interim presidency (as Rousseff’s vice president, he has succeeded to the presidency and will be serving out the remainder of what would have been Rousseff’s term) has abolished the ministry of culture (reestablishing it only following massive protests) and appointed an all-male, all-white cabinet. Also among Brazil’s woes, just months before, the country had experienced what is being called the worst environmental disaster in its history, when an iron ore tailings dam in the state of Minas Gerais ruptured. In this atmosphere, the biennial’s exploration of uncertainty – in the political sphere and due to global ecological irresponsibility; catalysed by international migration and the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands – has proved topical.

The curators, led by Jochen Volz, proposed the garden as an associative curatorial framework, linking the inside of the pavilion, which thanks to few walls feels open and airy, to the

Ibirapuera Park outside. Eduardo Navarro’s work Sound Mirror (2016) introduces the prolonged tube of a gramophonelike horn, which is aligned towards the crown of a palm tree, through the pavilion’s glass facade, allowing visitors on the inside to listen to the plant. Many of the exhibited works are conceived around natural materials, like the untitled and undated sets of carved and painted tree trunks by eco art pioneer Frans Krajcberg, or Jorge Menna Barreto’s functioning vegan restaurant Restauro (Restoration, 2016), based on sustainable food production networks and highlighting agriculture’s impact on the environment.

Gardens often reflect the style of an individual, or the values of a culture and its relationship to nature. In Brazil, Portuguese and Dutch colonisers framed their agricultural plantations and monasteries with greens reflecting their taste and claims upon territorial and ecological control, remnants of which stand as present-day reminders of centuries of European colonial presence. Whereas the exhibition did not explicitly address this landscaped historicity, the garden is a curiously affirmative concept for a biennial taking place in a park next to a huge granite monument dedicated to the Bandeirantes (seventeenth-century Portuguese colonisers, gold hunters and slave raiders), which was built

between 1921 and 1954 by the Italian-Brazilian sculptor Victor Brecheret. Nonetheless, the recent dam disaster’s bitter taste of (neo-) colonialism resonates in Carolina Caycedo’s work A Gente Rio – Be Dammed (The People River – Be Dammed, 2016) in the form of map-resembling drawings with text, a video and satellite photographs, as well as fishing nets from areas affected by the privatisation of water. Several works in the biennial are dedicated to land rights, like Dineo Seshee Bopape’s :indeed it may very well be the ___ itself (2016), consisting of compressed soil platforms on which gold leaves and other objects are placed, and the rights of land, like Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares’s project Forest Law (2014), an ongoing series of legal cases arguing for the sovereignty of indigenous land threatened by oil and mining extractions.

If ecology is the relation of organisms and their interactions with the environment, the garden is a site of inscription of the modernist opposition between culture and nature, of human thought imposed on nature. Architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter describes this dyad as the imaginary axis upon which modernisation and progress are conceived. The entangled ecological and economic crises are the results of the transformations of territory,

Eduardo Navarro, Sound Mirror, 2016, site-specific installation.

Photo: Leo Eloy/ Estúdio Garagem. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

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which are often colonial projects, and deeply rooted in this false opposition. The manmade topology of the megalopolis of São Paulo is the subject of Rosa Barba’s to-the-point work Disseminate and Hold (2016). The 16mm film focuses on the 3.5km concrete overpass nicknamed the Minhocão that meanders through the city like a giant earthworm. At night and on Sundays the flyover is closed to traffic and reclaimed by pedestrians, whom Barba’s film follows in a rhythmical sequence that is interwoven with archival material. The images are overlaid with text fragments by the artist Cildo Meireles, a key figure in the cultural opposition against the 1964–85 military dictatorship.

A shot of a graffiti reading Temer Jamais (Never Temer/Fear) links historical events to the current political situation, while the Minhocão per se becomes a symbol for architectural impositions on nature and the domestication of soil for economic and other human purposes.

Emphasising diverse forms of knowledge, the biennial includes numerous references to native cultures, from projections coming out of the indigenist audiovisual project Vídeo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages) to Maria Thereza Alves’s Uma possível reversão de oportunidades perdidas (A Possible Reversal of Missed Opportunities, 2016), a series of fictional conferences the artist organised with Amerindian students around topics usually ignored by Brazilian institutions. Öyvind Fahlström’s concrete poetry piece Den svåra resan (The Difficult Journey, 1954) proposes an alternative to the linear structure of language,

and in Rachel Rose’s immersive video Everything and More (2015), projected on a semitransparent screen installed against a window with a view of the park, the astronaut David Wolf describes the cognitive shift in awareness known as ‘the overview effect’ that makes so many space travellers return to earth as ecologists.

The biennial grapples with the failed promises of modernity, evinced in works like Maryam Jafri’s Product Recall: An Index of Innovation (2014–15), an array of objects and photographs of products accompanied by captions describing the failure of, say, Kleenex’s antivirus tissues or Pepsi’s nursing bottle, products by companies that were an epitome of the capitalist myth of progress that went awry. However, in the conceptual assertion of Don Quixote’s idealist marvelling (in maybe the first modern novel) at the discrepancy between his expectations and the real world, the exhibition feels delayed. The realisation that uncertainty permeates all arenas of life and the fact that progress is a myth have long been understood by those structurally excluded from it – Amerindian peoples, for example.

Yet the biennial provides a timely reminder that uncertainties in the form of climate change and political instability are entering previously spared areas, collapsing the borders that global capital is attempting to uphold. Carla Filipe’s installation Migração, exclusão e resistência (Migration, Exclusion and Resistance, 2016) occupies the pavilion’s terrace with endangered food crops planted in plots of car tires, proposing

the reclamation of urbanised spaces and the revitalisation of knowledge crucial for survival, concerns with increasing geographic and social scope.

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s catalogue text is a key to the most thought-provoking ideas and works in the exhibition, suggesting that the pillars of modernist thinking – separability, determinacy and sequentiality – are collapsing. In nonlocality, she argues, resonating with Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the differences between human groups, and between human and nonhuman entities, have little ethical significance, and can instead be understood as singular expressions of everything else in the universe, as countless entanglements. Such links can be found in Jonathas de Andrade’s O peixe (The Fish, 2016), a highlight of the show. The film shows fishermen on the northeast coast of Brazil holding and caressing their catch until it dies. The artist’s forged myth is a comment on the impossibility of reconciling humans with the product of their labour, in this case due to increasing estrangement from traditional fishing, and nature ‘itself’. The work calls for the creation of new myths and models that don’t resort to ostensible certainties and idealisms of the past, but instead create new, nonlocalised entanglements of fact and fiction, human and nonhuman. Whether these can be found in existing, anthropogenic concepts of gardens, which this biennial frames as attempts of ecology itself, is uncertain. Stefanie Hessler

Jonathas de Andrade, O peixe, 2016, 30 min, 16mm film transferred to digital HD. © the artist. Courtesy Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

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Kenji Yanobe Cinematize Takamatsu Art Museum, Japan 16 July – 4 September Art may make all sorts of consolatory claims about getting you through hard times, but how many artworks can help you survive a proper nuclear fallout? For this, look no further than the output of Osaka-born Kenji Yanobe, who has channelled a very Japanese sense of nuclear paranoia into an impressive line of products for the end times. Yellow Suit (1991), for example, is an iron-plated antiradiation suit that looks like a fat man, the belly swelling out like an oil drum and sturdy enough to withstand bullets.

Connected to the suit by a rubber tube is a wheeled trolley containing a plant, or ‘oxygen generation device’. Other survival tools include a junior suit for kids (Mini Atom Suit, 2003); a ¥100 coin-operated car that can detect radiation (Atom Car (White), 1998); and another Mad Max-style shelter/military tank that comes with its own water distillation system (Survival System Train, 1992). Everything’s supposed to work, and their serious design and industrial finish give off an air of credibility – though I am slightly worried about the efficacy of a ‘ladies’ suit (Radiation Suit Uran, 1996), given that the legs are ‘protected’ only by a transparent rubber crinoline skirt and red patentleather hooker-boots underneath. But fear not, Yanobe has included other handy items, such as an extendable makeup mirror and a portable shower, which – priorities! – are surely indispensable to the female survivor during a nuclear apocalypse.

At times ridiculous, politically incorrect and driven by the logic of comic-book pseudoscience, Yanobe’s work is on the whole weird and gleeful enough that you don’t resent his occasional retrograde tendencies. This midcareer survey of the fifty-one-year-old artist is split into seven parts, tracing a personal journey where his nuclear obsessions grow, over 30 years, from fearful to cautiously hopeful. His career began when the Kyoto City University of Arts graduate made the first prototypes for his atomic suits after a small leak at the Mihama nuclear power

plant in 1991. Gradually, his inventions became more ambitious and drew from various popcultural sources, such as incorporating the double-‘horned’ hairstyle of the classic cyborg manga character Astroboy, Mickey Mouse’s ears and the rubbery designs of fetishwear. This is the phase that best corresponds to the Cinematize in the title, as the suits – dramatic, stylish, visionary – are great works of character design.

The cinematic connection is brought even closer to home as Yanobe is now art directing a new nuclear disaster film called Bolt, parts of which are still being shot in a room of the gallery specially set aside for a film set.

There then followed an ethically questionable period where Yanobe put on one of his suits and went to Chernobyl, taking a series of photographs with elderly survivors in the former Soviet city and exploring its deserted spaces (Atom Suit Project: Antenna of the Earth, 2000). Because it came across as exploitative, he regretted this project, and his subsequent work took a more uncomplicatedly inspirational and less interesting turn. In response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, which also caused the Fukushima nuclear accident, he created a cutesy doe-eyed character called Sun Child (2011) – a boy in a hazmat suit with his helmet removed. Three years later he created a companion piece called Sun Sister (2014), a girl in a sleeveless silver dress with her arms outstretched. Both statues are 6m tall and stand in the lobby of the museum.

For me, Yanobe is at his best when he allows a tension between dark and light to exist in his work: on the one hand, the fear of nuclear contamination or warfare, on the other hand, a stubbornly optimistic, pop appearance.

On the whole, his earlier work, where postapocalyptic visions are packaged in objects of modern industrial finish, remain the most powerful, because he never quite tips his hand as to whether the entire business is deadly serious or an elaborate joke. All the outfits in

facing page, top Yellow Suit, 1991, lead, steel, Geiger counter, plants, 230 × 300 × 300 cm.

Courtesy Takamatsu Art Museum

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the Atom Suit Project (1997–2003), for example, feature funnel-shaped Geiger counters made of glass, positioned over the privates to (according to wall text) protect ‘delicate organs of the human body’. The effect is exaggerated nipples and dicks that flash and bleep, a kind of Jetsons-themed sex-club getup. In contrast, the post-Fukushima works with the Sun children are straightforwardly kawaii, like Takeshi Murakami’s Superflat cartoons or wholesome illustrations in children’s picture books. Maybe Yanobe found it impossible to remain snarky in the face of one of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophes. As the world slips into irrevocable ruin, his response to the horror was to offer up simple symbols of hope.

But it is notable that in recent years, the most recurrent character in his oeuvre is a new one called Torayan. The character – a ventriloquist’s dummy in a spacesuit – was inspired by his father’s postretirement pastime. The older man had taken up ventriloquism as a hobby, and once dressed his dummy in a borrowed Mini Atom Suit (2003). From this, Yanobe was inspired to create a new hero for his own work: a doll in a hazmat suit with a combover and a funny Hitler-like moustache. Among other things, Torayan stars in a picture book (Torayan’s Great Adventure, 2007–8), has his own mini action-figures (Mini Torayan, 2007) and operates a mobile theatre (Blue Cinema in the Woods, 2004).

Torayan also has a particular resonance in the exhibition venue. Takamatsu is a nononsense port city many people use as a base to explore the Setouchi Triennale, which is spread out over islands in the Seto Inland Sea and aims to rejuvenate these depopulated places. These islands are often filled with older people and abandoned schools, houses and farms – and art can only do so much to jumpstart these dead towns. In this context Torayan is a cheerful presence. He’s basically a childsize old-man doll singing and dancing at the end of the world. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Kenji Yanobe and Sebastian Masuda, Flora, 2015 (installation view, Kyoto Botanical Garden).

Courtesy Takamatsu Art Museum and Kyoto University of Art

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Art Life New York The first in a new series of multiple-show city reviews takes on contemporary art in the Big Apple

by Sam Korman

Patrice Casanova, Fowl Play: Isabella Rossellini's Heritage Breed Chickens, 2012–16, silver gelatin print. Courtesy Hunter College Art Galleries, New York

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In the city, an actress and her chickens In 30C+ heat, with tropical humidity, my sense of the city is heralded by tous ceux qui vivent: the bodies of people, models, rats, tourists, workers, hybrids, Christ, cab drivers, mummies, poets, Midwesterners, the dead and near-dead, firemen, architects, gallerists and cats. It’s New York Fashion Week and the 15th anniversary of 9/11; Friday, 9 September was the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison riot, and prisoners in 24 states initiated a strike to protest the slave-labour-like working conditions faced by the incarcerated. In Midtown Manhattan, on my way to Petzel gallery, I notice a group of people wearing the same cute pink cap – tourists, maybe. I grasp the hats’ significance on my way back to the subway, where the group has joined its colleagues in the United Automobile Workers; United Food and Commercial Workers; Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union; and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters on the platform. A few steps before going

underground, I chance upon Fowl Play at Hunter College Art Galleries, which features nigh on a zillion portraits by Patrice Casanova of actress Isabella Rossellini’s home-reared heritage breed chickens. I am sweating through my shirt before I even get on the crowded train.

Chelsea and the Midwest, a suicide and a home ‘I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody,’ says the narrator of William Gass’s short story In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968). It’s a diaristic tale of aimless isolation and spurned ambition in America’s heartland, and Victor Burgin’s videos Mirror Lake (2013) and Prairie (2015), which comprise his exhibition Midwest at Cristin Tierney, similarly present a critical history of the region.

Mirror Lake tells the story of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous ranch homes, the Seth Peterson Cottage in Wisconsin. Matter-of-fact intertitles lead us from the violent displacement of the

Winnebago tribe in the state to the eventual suicide of Peterson, an ambitious young Midwesterner who had commissioned the country home from Wright. Renderings of the Mirror Lake cottage and Atlas-like depictions of a nude man under a tilted glacial boulder infuse the narrative with a striking lonesomeness. The elegant immersion of Wright’s cottage into the lush landscape appears like the scene of a crime – like the rest of the show, the video’s academicism left me paranoid in the way that a good gut-punch, hard-boiled-detective-noir might.

At the gallery, agitprop Burgin is also showing at Bridget Donahue, where UK 76 (1976), a series of 11 digital prints, is pasted directly to the gallery’s wall. Burgin captions the series of black-and-white photographs with agitprop texts, cycling through adlike images of the suburbs next to industrial textile workers, a fashionable woman in her underwear and people waiting for the bus.

Victor Burgin, UK 76 (detail), 1976, set of 11 archival inkjet pigment prints printed in 2016, 102 × 152 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

Victor Burgin, Mirror Lake, 2013, digital projection, 14 min 37 sec.

Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York

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‘There is a whole class of people compelled to rent themselves on the market…’, reads one piece, while others dance between hardline Marxist alienation and ironic romanticism – menace pervades the image’s first-person POV. During the 1970s, the work was destroyed when it was removed from the wall; remade, it is a reminder of the relevance of Burgin’s semiotic turn: Conceptualism is a form of storytelling that bestows value on objects, mingling epistemology with money.

On the Lower East Side, hanging out I saw the show at Bridget Donahue after I had locked myself out of my office, and possessing an unwelcome abundance of time, I also landed at Dutch designer Karel Martens’s exhibition at P! In fact, time is central to the collection of experiments in information design, exemplified

by Three Times (in Blue and Yellow) (2016), a type of clock comprising three overlapping duotone

discs. The steady rotation of each disc records a second, a minute and an hour respectively, indicating the time with varying intensity.

Two blue hemispheres will align and recede in a calming union; but a moment later, blue and yellow come into contact, contrast and register the hour with a flickering, anxious effect. No keys, no phone, no wallet, no cash, I was left to aimlessly wander the Lower East Side. Like the 24-hour clock, which was originally designed for people whose biorhythms are synchronised to alternative, often disorienting cycles as a result of geography, work or both (healthcare workers, pilots, astronauts, even Arctic explorers), Marten’s ‘clock’ grounded time in the senses, reminding me that my body can do other things than work.

In the video BLIND PERINEUM, Matthew Barney, nude save for the mountain-climbing gear strapped to his waist, strains to latch a carabiner to a nearby hook, about halfway through his climb across a gallery ceiling – a potent reminder that the body in process is the central metaphor, if not material, in his work. Yet at

his show Facility of DECLINE at Barbara Gladstone, the thought made me wonder: why don’t more artists cite him as an influence? Duchamp, Thek, Kudo, Kelley, Hesse and Huyghe might offer a better thematic template for the body politics, hybrid practices and petroleum-based medical supplies used by many contemporary artists, but Barney’s exhibition, which collects work from his 1991 debut at the gallery, demonstrates his sustained relevance too. The show includes the iconic Transexualis (1991), an industrial freezer containing a weightlifting bench cast in petroleum, and REPRESSIA (1991), a wrestling mat underneath an intricate, ceiling-mounted climbing apparatus that resembles a bidirectional phallus. A sternal retractor – the device that holds open the chest cavity during surgery – rends the mat, readying it for the blunt instrument that imposingly dangles above.

The quarter-of-a-century-old works feel prescient today, making it difficult to answer the question above. Younger artists (Josh Klein, Anicka Yi, Alisa Baremboym, Rochelle Goldberg, Max Hooper Schneider and Jessi Reaves, among

Karel Martens, Three Times (in Blue and Yellow), 2016, painted aluminum, acrylic, 3D printed components, electronic timers, motors, 100 × 30 × 15 cm. Courtesy the artist and P!, New York

Matthew Barney, REPRESSIA, 1991, wrestling mat, Pyrex, cast petroleum-wax and petroleum jelly, olympic curl bar, cotton socks, sternal retractors, 488 × 549 × 450 cm.

Photo: David Regen. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

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others) have picked up on Barney’s materials; and artists and collectives such as Cally Spooner, DIS, GCC and K-HOLE have also addressed the motifs of fitness, health and a body inextricably linked to technology. A distinction could be drawn at the level of authorship, however, as Barney is a quintessential auteur and many of these contemporary practices operate based on networked subjectivities, be they systems of race, labour or personal relationships. As they pertain directly to the body, Barney’s metaphors of penetration, physical resistance and restraint – ideas that have become synonymous with a toxic masculinity – appear blunt compared to the soft power of individualised surveillance and hormone-hacking, which enables artists (and governments and corporations) to render the body porous to its surroundings at the molecular level. However, Barney’s subjects, like his materials, remain in process. Melting, freezing, sweating, hardening – we’re confronted today with a question: as the body machine grows more sophisticated, does it necessarily change its nature?

Uptown, tenderness Had it not been for the air conditioning, I might’ve been too overheated to inhabit Maria Lassnig’s New York. The late painter’s time in the city is the subject of Woman Power: Maria Lassnig in New York 1968–1980 at Petzel. It compiles works on canvas, watercolours, drawings and historical materials. Particularly funny and heartening: The Prey (1972), in which a hunched figure looks like a pile of unupholstered foam, with a creepily in-turned foot, and American Cats, (1971), where the banal lives of two cats are finally depicted with the requisite lush, luminous indolence.

Yet, it’s the irrepressible bodies of Lassnig and her contemporaries that give the show its indelible presence. Self-portrait with Silvia / Silvia Goldsmith and I (Selbstportrait mit Silvia / Silvia Goldsmith und ich) (1972–3) portrays Lassnig’s complex friendship with Goldsmith, a founder of Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc, and other women’s rights advocacy groups, as a reproduction of another painting. A warm light and turquoise background render the topless

painter’s flesh almost palpable: she wears an expression of surprised relief as the activist places a hand on her shoulder, and calmly, confidently returns our stare. According to the gallery handout, the Vienna-born painter called the US ‘the country of strong women’, which makes the underlying self-reflexivity quite bizarre. Like Barney, Lassnig gives the body an uncanny, even unsettling presence, but for the latter, it provides a link between two women.

She appears paused at the brink of speech, though something – tenderness, support – is being communicated between them.

In the avenues, highlighters, heroin-chic and a gamble A waifish male-model cuts cocaine on the thigh of an emaciated female model. A diamond ring blings on the woman’s index finger. A copy of the Dalloz Code du Travail (the compendium of French labour law) rests by her side. And a fragment of swirling skies from Van Gogh’s

Maria Lassnig, Self-Portrait with Silvia / Silvia Goldsmith and I (Selbstportrait mit Silvia / Silvia Goldsmith und ich), 1972–3, oil on canvas, 126 × 178 cm. © Maria Lassnig Foundation. Courtesy Cristin Tierney, New York

David Rappeneau, Untitled, 2015, acrylic, ballpoint pen, pencil and charcoal pencil on paper, 40 × 28 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Queer Thoughts, New York

Maria Lassnig, American Cats (Amerikanische Katzen), 1971, oil on canvas, 82 × 85 cm. © Maria Lassnig Foundation. Courtesy Cristin Tierney, New York

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The Starry Night (1889) encloses the scene of new age disaffection and indulgence. The A4-size drawing, Untitled (2015), is part of €€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€, the reclusive artist David Rappeneau’s solo exhibition at Queer Thoughts. There are other fastidious illustrations of anatomically impossible models that harken on Karyn Kusama’s mid-1990s techno-dystopian animation Aeon Flux and testify to the renewed fashionability of goth- and heroin-chic among the fluid and anonymous communities of Tumblr.

Rappenau’s erotic fan-fictions are underscored by the lo-fi appeal of blue highlighter that saturates these pages – the drawings seem to represent the disaffected fantasies of a technobureaucrat as much as a youthful cool.

Alison Knowles restages The House of Dust at the James Gallery at CUNY Graduate Center.

In 1967 the Fluxus artist developed software that generates a poem about ‘a house of…’ followed by a randomised sequence of typologies (materials, situations, occupants); in 1968 the poem inspired a futuristic igloo that hosted

readings and performances; in 1970 the edifice was relocated to Southern California, where it housed Knowles’s classes at CalArts; and in 2016 the poem again provided a structural basis, this time for three simultaneous and overlapping archival exhibitions weaving work by the artist and her contemporaries. An electronic typewriter ticks out the permutations of Knowles’s computerised ‘Poem in Progress’. ‘A CAT / IS NEVER / ON THE SIDE / OF POWER’ reads another poem installed in one of the gallery’s windows, using the letters from a movie-theatre marquee. It sums up the sleepy intractability of the three exhibitions, which, only delineated by a complicated series of checklists, playfully claw at our attempt to have a straightforward relationship with any individual artwork. My attention was directed at a wall drawing when I stepped on a set of dice and nearly tripped. I am not sure what I rolled, but the chance incident exemplified the show’s beguiling effects, which, then as now, undermine upright citizens.

Richard Hawkins’s ceramic relief Norogachian Prostitute Priestess of the Sun (2016) is a cartoonish

transsexual mummy with a skull in its flayed womb and stigmata on its hands and feet.

The show at Greene Naftali reinterprets Antonin Artaud’s drawings during his institutionalisation: talismanic symbols and figures that explore subjects that range from mythology to ‘the sexual inadequacy of god’. It offers as good a Halloween costume as I might find.

A series of massive drawings on canvas introduce the late Ellen Cantor’s survey Are You Ready for Love? at NYU’s 80WSE gallery. Against the bravado of these hulking raw canvases, what does she use? A pencil. And fills the paintings like they’re the pages of a perverted teen’s diaries: orgiastic illustrations of pixies, Barbies, Disney characters, figures you can learn to draw from a book or trace off TV. The style is characteristic of twee-fandom, and their deliberate amateurishness imbues the show with a confessional air. Cantor’s characters only reveal themselves when they’re getting laid, or having their hearts broken. Viewers are able to flip through hundreds of drawings on racks in the back galleries – the narratives unfold from the front to the

Alison Knowles, The House of Dust, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Samuel Draxler.

Courtesy the James Gallery, Graduate Center, CUNY

Ellen Cantor, Pinochet Porn, Chapter 3: Paloma (the best friend), 2008–16, Super 8 transferred to video, sound, 2 hours 3 min.

Courtesy the artist’s estate

Richard Hawkins, Norogachian Prostitute Priestess of the Sun, 2016, glazed ceramic in artist’s frame, 58 × 65 × 11 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

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back of these pages, mischievously framing our erudite scrutiny as voyeuristic peeping.

The show also includes Cantor’s magnum opus, Pinochet Porn (2008–16), a soap opera set during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile.

It was left unfinished when the artist passed away in 2013, but through dedicated scholarship, friends and a successful Kickstarter campaign, the film was processed and pieced together in its entirety. Several projectors are arrayed around the room, each displaying a single chapter; below each one are excerpts from Circus Lives from Hell (2004), a series of drawings that provided the script for the screwball tragedy. It tells the story of the incestuous love lives of children growing up under the violent political regime.

The coming-of-age story cascades through old men in bed with young women, orgies, tragic deaths in the street. Cantor cast her friends and colleagues, and between their self-conscious acting and the film’s wacky editing and lowbudget ingenuity, the X-rated production possesses an air of childlike playfulness and innocence. It’s fun to see some familiar faces

feel each other up, though all negotiate the relationship between power and love through the vicissitudes of libido. Pinochet Porn is bursting with Cantor’s explosive soul.

In the Meatpacking district, a bull screws a heifer Like Burgin, Cantor too has multiple billings: besides solo shows at 80WSE, Foxy Production and Participant Inc, there’s COMING TO POWER: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women, a show curated by Cantor in 1993 and now being restaged at Maccarone. The gallery’s walls painted black, it’s a public peepshow: a golden shower spans heaven and hell in a totemic Cantor wood relief; a bull screws a heifer in a photograph by Zoe Leonard.

With a painting of a crappy jpeg of another painting of a scheming email covered in splattered eggs, Jay Chung & T Takeki Maeda confirm a rumour I had heard about Essex Street gallery owner Maxwell Graham, Real Fine Arts

co-owner Tyler Dobson and artist Megan Marrin. I’m not going to reveal the secret – Maxwell didn’t post it to the gallery’s website.

Sure, I’d prefer not to be coy, but then not enough time has passed for the original incident to seem funny. These sensitivities already implicate us in the discourse of institutional critique heralded by these young galleries. It’s an aura, and, good or bad, it’s leveraged by all those other people talking. In another painting, two people lurch after an irritated cat – it’s a parable about bullying as trifling as the rumour was.

Passing through the West Village, from one show to another, I overheard a woman standing on the stoop of her luxury apartment on the phone. “He thinks he’s too cool because his art is in a fucking gallery,” she said, sounding like an Ellen Cantor character. “But he doesn’t even sell any of it.” Should I take an Uber to the next gallery? Time would mitigate the contact between my body and all these shows. Like this lady’s relationship, an opinion might only be a desire to consume. I was sunburned and nearly passed out from dehydration in the back of the car.

Ellen Cantor, Title unknown (Snow White), c. 1996, pencil on canvas, 244 × 366 cm. Courtesy the artist’s estate

Doris Kloster, Tribadism, 1993, gelatin silver print, 61 × 51 cm. Courtesy the artist and Maccarone, New York & Los Angeles

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Books

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The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp

by Elena Filipovic MIT Press, £29.95 (hardcover) ‘He scribbled on just about anything: torn scraps of paper, the back of a gas bill, hotel letterhead, the underside of a Camembert cheese label.’ So writes Elena Filipovic early on in her meticulous, polemical study of Marcel Duchamp’s ancillary activities: the works, and not-quite-works, that have evaded familiar art-historical stories about the advent of the readymade and conceptualism before Conceptualism. In Filipovic’s compellingly partial view of him, Duchamp is a photographer, a curator and a thinker about the nature and role of the artist’s studio. But he is first of all a writer: a composer and compiler of notes, instructions, lists and (as he put it) ‘aphorisms and pseudo-thoughts’. He gathered such fragments in his Box of 1914, not long after he had resolved to give up painting and become a librarian. The twin gestures, Filipovic argues, are aspects of the administrative, curatorial persona the artist adopted for the rest of his career.

In 1914 the notes were simply photographed for inclusion in multiple editions of the Box. Neither Duchamp nor collaborators or critics at that time considered he was doing anything notable with photography itself. But Filipovic is surely right to say that the 16 photographs reproduced in 1914 mark the start of an ambitious, exacting experiment in (and about) reproduction. When he came to collate materials related to the Large Glass (1915–23) into The Green

Box (1934), and many other works and ephemera for his Boîte-en-valise (1935–41), Duchamp had texts, images and miniature objects manufactured with such fidelity to their sources that there was often more labour involved in making the copy than its original. In other words, Duchamp’s obsessively managed replication of his own work yields ‘perfectly ambivalent objects’ whose authentic presence fluctuates – no wonder Walter Benjamin commended his ‘small but influential output’ in an early draft of his essay on art and reproducibility.

Filipovic’s lobbying for Duchamp the photographer is aimed at the failure of postconceptual theorists to acknowledge that he had been some distance ahead of the century in more ways than one. The same point holds for the museological aspect of a work like the Boîte-envalise, which Benjamin Buchloh once disparaged as ‘complacent, melancholic and passive’ when compared to the authentic institutional critique of a later artist like Marcel Broodthaers. In fact, Filipovic argues, Duchamp’s boxes are trenchant refusals of the logic of the museum; they’re of a piece with the curatorial work the artist did for the Surrealists before and after the Second World War, cramping well known works and erecting barriers so that they hover at a critical distance.

After the text, the photograph and the museum, Filipovic turns to Duchamp’s final

work, Étant donnés (1946–66): the elaborate peepshow nude and landscape installed after his death at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For many years it was ignored, or explained away as an old man’s folly, by critics and art historians who, Filipovic argues, ought to have been best attuned to its elaborate fakery and sly comment on the scopic regime of the museum. It’s a work that retrospectively casts much of Duchamp’s most fragile and fleeting projects (surrealist catalogue designs, window displays) as hidden clues and precursors. But it also combines the themes Filipovic has been arguing for all along: Duchamp wrote, for example, an extremely detailed instruction manual for the installation of the piece, and relied heavily on photography.

The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp is the product of 15 years of research, writing and exhibition-making. It began as a doctoral thesis, and informed her large touring show Marcel Duchamp: A Work That is Not a Work of Art’ (2008–9). (Filipovic is now director of the Kunsthalle Basel.) If some of the book’s arguments – especially as regards the artist as archivist and curator – seem now less pressing than when Filipovic started her research, the result is still a book bristling with intelligent readings of Duchamp’s work, and many details that complicate our view of his life and legacy.

Brian Dillon

Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000–2015 Edited by Jennifer Liese Paper Monument, $28 (softcover)

Could a book review take the form of a manifesto?

‘1) All critical writing is political’ Could it dispense with the rules of spelling and grammar, those structural weapons of a patriarchal, cis, WASP power structure? ‘this new bk is lib with the so called INVENTION in riting’ Could it find the first-person narrative useful?

‘Sitting on a veranda in Bahia, halfway through reading Social Medium, a collection of artists’ writings edited and introduced by Jennifer Liese, I spot a hummingbird flitting past. Returning to the page, a transcript from Ryan Trecartin’s videowork The Re’search, I found a useful analogy between the bird’s garish colour and hyper energy…’

The pastiches above (with apologies) are intended to reflect the variety of writing in

this book, but could as easily be used to make the case that writing holds no particular watermarking as authored by an artist. So what’s the point of bringing together a bunch of disparate texts, all reprints, and ranging from art and art history to politics and memoir, under that label?

A short 2001 essay by Mike Kelley (included in a section of the book titled ‘Artists writing on artists writing’) gives one possible justification: critics can’t tell the full story. In ‘Artist/critic’, the late American artist argues that ‘the oppressive, institutionalized version of art history’ peddled by straight-up critics had silenced nuance in the development of art’s narrative. Arguably Kelley’s point about the institutional restrictions of art still stands – but I’m thinking in a different way.

Perhaps the commercial strictures and journalistic traditions of art media and the expectations of its audience (that’s you) allow less leeway in

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terms of invention. So Tania Bruguera is allowed a certain level of dogmatism in ‘Manifesto on Artists’ Rights’ (2012) because her text is read in the context of her wider art-activism. With Deanna Havas’s achingly millennial voice (in a series of postings from her Twitter account), we understand the artist is performing an identity. We give Koki Tanaka free rein to ponder on ‘Asianness’ in a diaristic text, or Qiu Zhijie to sneak a meditation on his son into a 2014 text ostensibly tackling ‘Why I do ink painting’ (both excellent highlights from the 70-plus contributions). Then again, you probably came here to find out about the book, not me. So here’s the art critic’s summary of Social Medium: a thoroughly engrossing read, very few duds, the texts largely entertaining as well as intellectually stimulating. But also: I did see a hummingbird while reading. Oliver Basciano

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Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art

by Jane Blocker University of Minnesota Press, $30 (softcover) The past few years have seen a flurry of whatwas-the-now books, essays and even exhibitions that look at current art production as history, from Richard Meyer’s What Was Contemporary Art? (2013) to Terry Smith’s text ‘Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity’ (2006) and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Altermodern, the title of his 2009 Tate Triennial and a term he coined to describe a new form of transnational, multicultural modernity, tailor-made for the globalised world. A number of these projects shuffle through the same bibliography (Agamben, Huyssen, Foucault, Derrida et al) to do what Jane Blocker aptly describes as ‘talk about the present moment while at the same time analyzing why that moment makes talking about it so difficult’.

Blocker, an art historian at the University of Minnesota, adds to this body of research through an analysis of work by six artists whose methodologies and approaches to history and its representation she sees as models for arthistorical practices that are dealing with questions of the role of history in contemporary art.

For example, in addressing the historiographic problem of discerning fact from fiction, Blocker cites Matthew Buckingham’s Amos Fortune Road (1996), a film that studies the differing or conflicting accounts of a slave named Amos Fortune, who bought his own freedom and moved to New Hamphsire, as directly engaged in looking

at the ways histories are constructed. In another chapter, Blocker examines the pressure to be ‘of one’s time’, through the performance of Goat Island’s work The Lastmaker (2007), which had been criticised by art historian Claire Bishop as not contemporary, calling the performance group out for the theatricality of its work.

Blocker here runs through the performance, its politics and form, to argue that ‘the law of reality falls more heavily on some subjects (the obscene, the queer) than on others, making theatricality an important strategy of being and mode of eluding the police (whatever form they may take)’. It’s an argument that not only answers the facile criticism that theatricality is not contemporary, but posits dramatisation as a strategy that allows a sidestepping or highlighting of the forces of the majority and could be translated to other activist practices.

Blocker’s method is instinctive, in a way: if artists’ work is the subject of inquiry, why not learn directly from the artists? When Blocker discusses Buckingham’s film, for example, she uses it to identify the historian’s problem of unreliable sources. Buckingham’s work becomes both the narrative that drives her discussion of forgetting and memory, and an example of a way of thinking about this historical problem: the artist’s assertion that forgetting plays into the hands of the rulers who are writing history.

Apart from the use of the artworks, there is the issue of Blocker’s choice of artworks. The flipside of looking to artworks as examples for historical methodology is that you risk instrumentalising them: there’s a lingering sense that Blocker’s choices of works are simply the easiest when it comes to a discussion of temporality, in that all but one here are time-based media (video and performance). Then consider the fact that five of the six artists she discusses are men: Steve McQueen, filmmaker Ross McElwee, Francis Alÿs, Buckingham and Dario Robleto (Goat Island comprised women as well as men). The jarring absence of women in a book about historicising the now made me want to throw it out the window in frustration.

Where Blocker is most successful is in the (very academic) survey of literature she provides throughout the book. In the first page, Blocker writes that ‘there is no end of the “now” in sight’.

From Agamben to Meyer, she makes the argument that the definition of the now, of the contemporary, is slippery at best, unmistakably heterogeneous and always stupefying in its omnipresence. We don’t need video and performance to tell us this, but art certainly reminds us – whether historians, artists or viewers – of the need to, as Buckingham says, investigate ‘how we know what we think we know, how we construct stories about the past’. Orit Gat

Dalí’s Moustaches: An Act of Homage

by Boris Friedewald Prestel, £19.99 (hardcover)

A portrait of the artist as… a moustache. That clearly was the pitch for this book, coming from Berlin-based art historian Boris Friedewald.

Here the ‘Hairy Beginnings’ (chapter two) are to be found in young Salvador Dalí’s decision to ‘make myself “look unusual”, to compose a masterpiece with my head’ before moving from the provinces to the Spanish capital. His new look (sideburns, shoulder-length hair and said moustache) was met with ridicule in Madrid, where his fellow students nicknamed him ‘the artist’ (those words made less kind by the fact that he was at art school, among fellow artists).

But setting a pattern, Dalí vanquished that scorn with his talent for painting and self-promotion, and soon had an audience (as well as deep friendships with Buñuel and Lorca). Setting another pattern, one that would waft about him like a bad odour, Dalí’s grooming decisions showed

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a certain fascination with the facial hair of strongmen (Stalin, Hitler) – or at least that’s the angle of approach on discussions of the artist’s politics here (Dalí, of course, repeatedly fell out with André Breton and the Surrealists for, among other things, alleged fascist sympathies). There were other odours too: saliva, varnish, egg white, Hungarian moustache wax, ocelot excrement, black pen and the ‘sweet sticky juice of dates’ (this last to attract the flies, or ‘fairies of the Mediterranean’, as Dalí called them, which would fly into his open mouth as he painted and ‘tickle his thoughts’).

Dalí expounded a theory of ‘capillary decadence’ to predict the ultimate failure of Communism, tracing the whisker lineage from Marx (‘biblical luxuriance’) to Malenkov (‘clean-shaven as the moon’). Friedewald does something similar here, charting Dalí’s passage

ArtReview

through life by the scale and design of his facial hair. If ‘happiness makes the hair grow’ (a Catalan proverb, possibly invented by the artist), then Dalí was thrilled to have escaped Europe for New York with Gala in 1940, where, the author reports, ‘his moustache grew thicker and its tips longer’. That Gala, Dalí’s ‘twin’, the half-masculine/half-feminine match to his own duality, his saviour, mother, wife and muse, only appears on page 83 (and then too, only tangentially via Philippe Halsman’s photo of Dalí as the Mona Lisa), may be due to the fact that she didn’t have a moustache. This work wears its scholarship lightly, when it’s not burying it entirely in warmly told tales of some frankly bizarre grooming habits, but you will come away from it much better informed about what has already long been the world’s most famous moustache. David Terrien

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The Tragedy of Zé Ninguém

by Tito na Rua

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For more on Tito na Rua, see overleaf

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Contributors

Stefanie Hessler is a curator and writer from Germany. She is the cofounder of the art space Andquestionmark in Stockholm (with Carsten Höller). Recent curated exhibitions include the 8th Momentum Biennial in Moss, Norway, Outside at Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden and various projects in Brazil, Chile and Colombia. In 2016, Hessler co-edited the anthology Life Itself for the Moderna Museet Stockholm. She is curator at TBA21 in Vienna for The Current, an exploratory fellowship programme on a research vessel investigating human impact on the oceans. This month, she reviews the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo.

Sam Korman is an independent writer and curator. He currently lives in New York. For this issue, he roams the galleries of New York for the first in a series of city-based reviews marathon.

Fernanda Brenner

Contributing Writers

is the founder and artistic director of Pivô, an independent, non-profit art space in São Paulo. Since 2012, the space has hosted around 40 projects, including exhibitions, artist residencies and a studio programme, featuring more than 200 artists from 15 different countries. Brenner recently curated Laugh and Tears Have No Accent in Swiss Cottage Art Gallery in London, and So Far So Good as part of White Cube’s ‘Inside the White Cube’ programme. Here she profiles Brazilian artist Wlademir Dias-Pino.

Sean Ashton, Andrew Berardini, Robert Barry, Phoebe Blatton, Kimberly Bradley, Fernanda Brenner, Barbara Casavecchia, Adeline Chia, Bill Clarke, Matthew Collings, Owen Duffy, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stefanie Hessler, Dean Kissick, Sam Korman, I. Kurator, Jennifer Li, Maria Lind, Silas Martí, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Ciara Moloney, Naomi Pearce, Heather Phillipson, Mark Prince, John Quin, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Edward Sanderson, Ben Street

Jiří Černický

Contributing Editors

is a Czech visual artist, known for his experimental projects, working across video, visual poetry, photography and installation. His work is characterised by a social and political engagement either addressing taboos or creating fictitious scenarios, but always with irony, humour and sharp criticism. Wild Dreams, a retrospective of his work was on show at Rudolfinum Gallery, Prague, earlier this year. For this issue, he creates a visual project titled Gagarin’s Thing.

Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Jiří Černický, Mikael Gregorsky, Benjamin McMahon, Tito na Rua, Anna Vickery

Tito na Rua (preceding pages)

Tito na Rua means ‘Tito on the street’. “It poses a question,” the artist explains. “What do I bring to the streets?” It’s the Portuguese tag adopted

by New York native Alberto Serrano, who has been working mostly out of Rio de Janeiro since 2001, when his wife and his studies at the Parque Lage art school took him there. Born in the Bronx in 1978, he recalls that “graffiti artists were the only artists I ever came across until I went to a comics convention. So as a teenager, watching the Royal Kingbee paint the walls of my street taught me the basics of graffiti culture and mural painting.”

Serrano never got past buying a blackbook to sketch designs and making one random tag.

Instead, comics became his medium of choice.

By 2009, feeling burnt-out from working on his graphic novel Burnside, he took up a friend’s invite to get out of the house and try dabbling in street art. Serrano found what he would “bring to the streets” once he began painting murals in Rio as Tito na Rua. “I gained a new perspective on Basquiat, and I saw how Banksy and Blu used public space. Blu’s animations were a light-switch moment for me. I also like to look at Os Gêmeos, JR and Shepard Fairey.” Tito na Rua fused his two passions, graffiti and comics, by painting single panels or sequences onto exterior walls to be read from one site to another. His linking character

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is Brazilian ‘everyman’ Zé Ninguém (‘Joe Nobody’), a science professor with a companion, Cào Viralata (‘Pooch Dog’), and a slight case of amnesia.

Serialised wall-by-wall, Zé Ninguém’s search for his lost love Ana secured the artist funding to expand it into a citywide graphic novel. “I think Brazil is the only country that has legalised graffiti/street art,” Tito na Rua says. “There are limits, but artists are free to create in public. Being a graffiteiro is part of popular culture. I myself guest-starred on a telenovela as part of a graffiti crew. This acceptance helps when executing projects in public.”

The results are large comics responding to scale, human and urban, painted onto blank or ignored parts of the cityscape, readable by anyone passing by. Episodes interact with their physical locales and architecture throughout Rio and its environs. An invitation to London inspired Tito na Rua to add a surprise detour by Zé Ninguém, recorded in three of his story’s final walls which he painted in Tower Hamlets. The entire suite of almost 150 graffitis was compiled into a graphic novel in 2015 supported

by Rio’s Culture Department. Zé Ninguém also took part in the city’s Olympic programming, appearing in ‘O Nocaute’, a vertical strip showing his boxing triumph in nine panels, ten storeys high, in Copacabana. “Finding suitable walls has been a constant issue,” says the artist. “Now it’s finding time and

ArtReview

funding. The sun has also become one of my main concerns.”

In October 2016 Tito na Rua switched from outside walls to gallery walls with his first solo painting show, at Espaço GaleRio. He is well aware of the tensions success can create. “Getting the best real estate is key for everyone, be it by getting permission or getting the courage to do it anyway. When the city, companies, organisations and property owners support the work of certain street artists, it tends to cause jealousy and frustration among the others. Especially if the city is tough on vandalism. How is everybody else supposed to get ahead?”

Tito na Rua suggests, “Cities need to have dedicated spaces and prominent programmes for those looking to create. Local upcoming artists should have space in gentrified neighbourhoods, street artists should be encouraged to create ambitious and exciting work in underprivileged communities. And continue to have stiff laws on vandalism. True vandals still need to earn their stripes.”

For his new Strip, ‘The Tragedy of Zé Ninguém’, he reused a wall he had previously painted on the street level of Copacabana’s sanitation department.

To Tito na Rua, the message in the bottle, a nod to Magritte, is “a challenge to myself and an affirmation to the public”. This is definitely not a dead end.

Paul Gravett

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Virginia de Medeiros, Meiriele (detail), from the series Fábula do Olhar (2013), digital photopainting on cotton paper, sound. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo

Phrases on the spine and on pages 33, 59 and 85 are from publicity material for Ashoka,

by Meena Talin (Amar Chitra Katha, 2005)

on page 124 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 128 photography by Benjamin McMahon on page 162 illustration by Anna Vickery

December 2016

141

A Curator Writes December 2016 I cough politely and gently tap the microphone. Like a professional athlete, I am completely ‘in the zone’ (the only difference, obviously, being that the key muscles are in my head rather than a tight pair of Lycra shorts). It strikes me that – to paraphrase Deuteronomy – for too long I have tarried until I remembered the command to leave Sinai. I have stayed long enough at this mountain! For me, the mountain was the bar at St John, a short stroll from ArtReview’s offices.

But now I am back on the horse. Back doing what made me who I am: Ausstellungsmacher.

I begin.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the international art-press, welcome to the first edition of the Wuhan Biennial here in Hubei province, China.

As chief curator, I am proud to announce the biennial’s theme…”

I have, perhaps controversially, withheld my lineup until now, in part because of my long-held distaste for e-flux but also to add dramatic tension to my return as a leading curator. I scan the room and see assorted members of the international art-press looking back at me with expectation. No cost has been spared on giving this lot the type of junket they live for. First-class flights, large rooms in the New World Wuhan Hotel, a private paddle-boat tour on the East Lake.

The correspondent from The Art Newspaper particularly loved that one, I can tell you. All of this was courtesy of the generous Mr Feng, the collector who kindly financed this new biennial. Not a huge amount on the Internet about the Fengster, although I gather he has built a few successful casinos in Manila and such places. Good for him, I say.

I love a flutter on the Grand National myself. “…and that theme is Hooker/Hookah…” I continue.

The press murmur in acknowledgement and – I think – delight.

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“…My biennial is a geography of performance where life is conceptualised as passing through water in a long stem. Hookah! And then we degrade ourselves for money! Hooker! I will touch on the primal rite of passage we all undertake through our Kleinian mothers. I will circle around the inevitability of late global capital that meets us as we are unmercifully expelled into the blinding light!”

The audience claps enthusiastically, particularly those I’d treated to a final round of Five Grain Liquor last night at the Return 97 bar and nightclub. Indeed, the lady from Artforum’s Scene & Herd looks like she’s still drunk. It’s lucky those columns write themselves, I think to myself. I start listing the artists in the biennial, this wonderful show that dropped into my inbox earlier this year when I was beginning to think that my career as a leading curator was over, that all I was left with was this column and the occasional free dinner at the London outpost of Massimo De Carlo, where the gallery staff naively and touchingly believe that I am Richard Flood.

“Guan Xiao! Paulina Olowska! Li Wei! Mona Hatoum…” I chant my lineup as a Powerpoint presentation of images unfurls above my head. The names of my artists roll around my mouth in a muscular and rich fashion, like a good 1998 Pomerol. Olow-ska. Ol-owww-skaaa.

Ha-toomb.

I run through my list. The journalists keep clapping, urged on by Mr Feng’s staff, who largely seem to be nice, if serious-looking chaps dressed in black suits and carrying cattle prods in some sort of nod to China’s agricultural past.

“And these contemporary artists circle back to the key work in the show, a wonderful preparatory drawing for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon that has been in a private Chinese collection for decades!”

The room erupts in cheers as an image of the Picasso appears.

This contemporary-art-meets-modernist-masterpiece might now be de rigueur, but I suspect a few of the more learned scribes in the audience remember I was the first to seriously explore such juxtapositions in my seminal group exhibition Look how Manet fucks I give that toured the East Midlands in 1988.

And then I hear it. A soft voice from the back of the room.

“Fake.”

“Fucks!” I shout back. “I said ‘fucks’. Look how Manet fucks I give!”

I realise that I have momentarily lost my poise. A figure gets up at the back of the room. His rimless glasses and cheap haircut stick in my craw. Schachter. The dealer-turned-artopinionator. The worst sort. He slips out the door. Three of Feng’s crew discreetly follow and there is a muffled sound of thumping and shouting. I turn back to the assorted press, a number of whom look rather jumpy.

“And now my curator’s tour!” Like a tai chi master assuming the Golden Cockerel Stands on One Claw stance, I have regained my immaculate poise. I gesture towards the entrance to the galleries, and the journalists line up to follow me. I look at them and think of dear departed Christopher Hitchens’s words: ‘One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.’

I. Kurator

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