ArtReview December 2017 by ArtReview

Tomás Saraceno Art Science Life

Kenan Malik on the right to appropriate

Carmen Herrera, Nocturne, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 cm, 60 x 60 in

LONDON

NEW YORK

Roy Colmer 67 Lisson Street

Shirazeh Houshiary Nothing is deeper than the skin 504 West 24th Street

Carmen Herrera 27 Bell Street

Gerard Byrne In Our Time 138 Tenth Avenue

H IRO SH I SUGI MO T O l on d on 2 6 o c t ob e r – 2 2 de c e m b e r 2 01 7

pa r i s 2 8 o c t ob e r – 2 2 de c e m b e r 2 01 7

SNOW W H I T E

SU R FAC E T E N SION

m a r i a n g o od m a n g a l l e r y n e w y or k

paris

l on d o n

Anna Bella Geiger

Lucas Arruda Paloma Bosquê Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra Coimbra, Portugal 11/11 – 30/12 2017

La Casa Encendida Madrid, Spain 28/09 – 31/12 2017 Hammer Museum Los Angeles, USA 15/09 – 31/12 2017

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané 14e Biennale de Lyon Lyon, France 20/09 2017 – 07/01 2018 Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves Porto, Portugal 29/09 2017 – 07/01 2018

Adriano Costa Sonia Gomes

Mariana Castillo Deball Runo Lagomarsino

Everyday Poetics Seattle Art Museum Seattle, USA 18/11 2017 – 17/01 2018

LACMA Los Angeles, USA 20/08 2017 – 19/02 2018

Paulo Nazareth Runo Lagomarsino PROSPECT.4 : The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University New Orleans, USA 18/11 2017 – 25/02 2018

Solange Pessoa KölnSkulptur #9 Skulpturenpark Köln Köln, Germany 15/10 2017 – 10/07 2019

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

TOMMA ABTS ANNI ALBERS JOSEF ALBERS FRANCIS ALŸS MAMMA ANDERSSON LUCAS ARRUDA RUTH ASAWA MICHAËL BORREMANS CAROL BOVE R. CRUMB RAOUL DE KEYSER PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA STAN DOUGLAS MARLENE DUMAS MARCEL DZAMA WILLIAM EGGLESTON DAN FLAVIN SUZAN FRECON ISA GENZKEN FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES DONALD JUDD ON KAWARA TOBA KHEDOORI JEFF KOONS YAYOI KUSAMA SHERRIE LEVINE KERRY JAMES MARSHALL GORDON MATTA-CLARK JOHN MCCRACKEN GIORGIO MORANDI OSCAR MURILLO ALICE NEEL JOCKUM NORDSTRÖM CHRIS OFILI PALERMO RAYMOND PETTIBON SIGMAR POLKE NEO RAUCH AD REINHARDT JASON RHOADES BRIDGET RILEY THOMAS RUFF FRED SANDBACK JAN SCHOONHOVEN RICHARD SERRA JOSH SMITH YUTAKA SONE AL TAYLOR DIANA THATER WOLFGANG TILLMANS LUC TUYMANS JAMES WELLING DOUG WHEELER

David Zwirner 25 Years

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS JORDAN WOLFSON ROSE WYLIE

JANUARY 13 – FEBRUARY 17, 2018

YUN HYONG-KEUN

NEW YORK

LISA YUSKAVAGE

simonleegallery.com

Luciano Fabro with the work Croce (1965) at the Palazzo Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 17 April 1980. © Archivio Fotografico A. Guidetti e G. Ricci.

LUCIANO FABRO

30 November 2017 – 6 January 2018 London

HA U S E R & W IR T H LONDON

JAKUB JULIAN ZIOLKOWSKI IAN MOON IAN MOON, 2017 (DETAIL) OIL, ACRYLIC PAINT, GLITTER ON CANVAS 220 × 200 CM / 86 5/8 × 78 3/4 IN

Phillip King 29th November, 2017 3rd Fe F bruary, 2018

Colour on Fire 3 Duke Street St James’s

Ceramics

1995 - 2017 11 Duke Street St James’s

3 & 11 Duke Street StJames’s London,SW1 www.thomasdanegallery.com

ArtReview vol 69 no 9 December 2017

Piccante All the talk today is about limits and boundaries. Geographical ones around issues such as Brexit, the limits of social, moral, sexual and indeed legal modes of behaviour in everything from the fields of politics to the entertainment industry, not forgetting the social and economic sphere that surrounds the business of art. Given the nature of the transgressions that have generated this discourse, no one could object to efforts to redefine the boundaries of what’s acceptable and what’s not. And, as importantly, behaviours that should be tolerated and those that should not. Freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harm or exploit others. Nevertheless, all this presents a tricky situation for an art magazine that has, for the last sixty-eight years, devoted itself to exploring artworks that seek to break through the boundaries and limits of normative thinking and, at times, normative behaviour and to expand notions of the personal and social potential of people living in this world. Normativity, after all, involves a submission to controls, and controls that all too often limit thought as well as actions. So this issue is dedicated to exploring the implications of that discourse in the field of cultural production. In the field of art, ArtReview’s contributors look at the way in which Tomás Saraceno escapes the limits of art as a discrete

Connective tissues

discipline, and, at the other end of the scale, J.J. Charlesworth looks as the nature of the relationship between artworks and the character of the artist who made them. Kenan Malik explores the thorny issue of what’s known as ‘cultural appropriation’, an issue concerning who has the ‘right’ to say what about what, and who, ultimately, polices that right. It’s a debate that’s further extended into the realm of art production and criticism by Jonathan T.D. Neil in the article that follows. Alongside that are explorations of the boundary-blurring work of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Carol Rhodes and Georgia Sagri. Underlying all that is a dialogue about what unites and divides us, and whether or not it is more productive, socially and aesthetically, to be focused on the former or the latter. What emerges above all else is that there are no easy answers to such questions. Different circumstances might call for different understandings of the problem. What is more important, perhaps, is that it is a discussion, however difficult or upsetting, that’s worth having. Sometimes, to borrow a turn of phrase from The Invisible Committee (see book reviews), the friction generated by a clash of different world views can be a productive thing. Certainly, in these times, such friction is something about which we should be unafraid. ArtReview

Cheese

Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Atlanta, Georgia, March 1963 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon On Nothing Personal Photographs and documents from Avedon’s 1964 book with James Baldwin

November 17, 2017 – January 13, 2018 Pace Gallery & Pace/MacGill Gallery are honored to be representing The Richard Avedon Foundation.

537 West 24th Street

NEW YORK

THE ESTATE OF STEFAN BERTALAN MARTIN BOYCE MATTI BRAUN AA BRONSON ANGELA BULLOCH NATHAN CARTER DAVID CLAERBOUT THOMAS DEMAND JEAN-PASCAL FLAVIEN CEAL FLOYER RYAN GANDER THE ESTATE OF GENERAL IDEA FRANCESCO GENNARI LIAM GILLICK DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER RODNEY GRAHAM ANDREW GRASSIE GRÖNLUND-NISUNEN MARTIN HONERT

PIERRE HUYGHE ANN VERONICA JANSSENS CHRISTOPH KELLER GABRIEL KURI LIU YE ISA MELSHEIMER PRABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL ARI BENJAMIN MEYERS ROMAN ONDAK PHILIPPE PARRENO UGO RONDINONE CHRISTOPHER ROTH ANRI SALA KARIN SANDER TOMÁS SARACENO JULIA SCHER TINO SEHGAL WIEBKE SIEM DANIEL STEEGMANN MANGRANÉ

POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

ADAA THE ART SHOW 2018 February 27 – March 4, Booth D4

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY April – May, 2018

TOMÁS SARACENO

Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 25

Georgia Sagri Interview by Ross Simonini 40

Under the Paving Stones: Chicago by Sam Korman 33

Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Maria Lind and Aimee Lin 47 Art Featured

Tomás Saraceno by Mark Rappolt 56

Power in Black and White by Jonathan T.D. Neil 74

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa by Linda Taylor 64

Carol Rhodes by Mark Prince 78

The Truth about ‘Cultural Appropriation’ by Kenan Malik 70

page 78 Carol Rhodes, Bay, 1994, oil on board, 48 × 46 cm. Photo: Ian Marshall/Lighthouse Photography. © the artist. Courtesy Andrew Mummery

December 2017

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 86 Basquiat, by Richard Hylton Lyon Biennale, by Louise Darblay Power and other things: Indonesia & Art (1835–Now), by Sam Steverlynck Marc Camille Chaimowicz, by Kristian Vistrup Madsen Lara Schnitger, by Dominic van den Boogerd Isabel Nolan, by Martin Herbert Lucio Fontana, by Barbara Casavecchia Scuole Romane, by Mike Watson Fiona Banner and Peter Voss-Knude, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Jodie Carey, by Laurie Macdonald Torbjørn Rødland, by Daniel Culpan Allora & Calzadilla, by Ben Eastham Sheila Hicks, by Isabella Smith Jack Whitten, by Gabriel Coxhead Zach Blas, by Paul Clinton David Alekhuogie, by Aaron Horst Ad Minoliti, by Shana Nys Dambrot Elaine Cameron-Weir, by Lindsay Preston Zappas Black + Brown People | White Problems, by Emily Watlington

Aaron Flint Jamison, by Yuri Stone Cajsa von Zeipel, by Jeppe Ugelvig Pat Steir, by Rachel Wetzler Frank Bowling, by Ashton Cooper Alexander Tovborg, by Joshua Mack Rachel Rose, by Cat Kron Rodrigo Valenzuela, by Wendy Vogel Books 114 Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the Twenty-first Century, by Georgina Adam Now, by The Invisible Committee Fred Forest’s Utopia, by Michael F. Leruth Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America, by Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder THE STRIP 118 A CURATOR WRITES 122

page 98 Torbjørn Rødland, Trichotillomania, 2010. Private collection

ArtReview

Image Courtesy of Marguerite Humeau. Photograph: Julia Andreone

modernforms.org

Art Previewed

Exterminate benevolence, discard rectitude, And the people will again be filial 23

{ICA MIAMI}Open{Dec}1 { }The }Everywhere{Studio {

Dec 1, 2017 – Feb 26, 2018

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

61 NE 41ST Street Miami FL 33137 305 901 5272

Free Admission icamiami.org @icamiami

Martin Kippenberger, Worktimer (Peter sculpture), 1987. Courtesy the Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo: Lothar Schnepf.

Previewed 1 Since she began exhibiting in 2005, Camille Henrot has frequently highlighted shaky structures of knowledge: how we apprehend reality through self-invented means, from museums to the perfidious swamps of the Internet, to notions of time. Her signature work remains the dazzling video Grosse Fatigue (2013), a narrative of the universe’s creation unfolded via documentation of diverse historical collections appearing as a cascade of pop-up windows, and rapid-fire spoken word by poet Jacob Bromberg. For the New York-based French artist’s show last year in Rome, meanwhile, bronze sculptures – a sad figure from a Boticelli, a losing athlete, a drooping figure weeping while staring at a smartphone – embodied the disorderly and downcast qualities we associate with Monday, most people’s least-loved day. Now, taking her turn in the Palais de Tokyo’s ‘Carte

Blanche’ strand, Henrot takes on a full week while doubling down on the digital undertow. Split across seven spaces in the Palais’s cavernous interior, Days are Dogs divides into seven ‘days’. The week, unlike the year – though we’re leaving out a fair bit of Egyptian and Babylonian inventiveness here, admittedly – is a manmade device built on dodgy foundations, not quite consonant with the Gregorian calendar, and seamed with residual mythology. In Henrot’s update, each day gains a presiding hashtag and each room mixes and recombines works by her and her artist friends, so that – for example – Wednesday becomes less the day consecrated to Woden or Mercury, or more lately ‘Hump Day’, and more associated with whatever contingent objects and images she and her coterie have assembled there. The Palais de Tokyo, please note, is closed on Tuesdays.

Anyone suspecting, in the light of Henrot’s project, that one primary role of artists today is 2 to purposefully falsify might next turn to Toyin Ojih Odutola’s show at the Whitney, To Wander Determined, where the Nigerian-American artist’s sumptuous lifesize portraits in charcoal, pastel and pencil – with particularly virtuosic renderings of black skin – depict two aristocratic Nigerian families who never existed, framed in aspirational interiors. Ojih Odutola is notable in part for her hypermodern career path: she’s come up using social media, has been championed by musicians like Solange, and had her work featured in the background of the TV show Empire (2015–). But she’d be a standout figure for her drawings alone – pointedly presented here in a free-entry area of the museum – which deftly contest clichés of black servitude and reanimate the notion of the artwork as conversation

2 Toyin Ojih Odutola, Wall of Ambassadors, 2017, charcoal, pastel and pencil on paper, 102 × 76 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

1 Camille Henrot, Days are Dogs, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Aurélien Mole. © ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris; König Galerie, Berlin; and Metro Pictures, New York

December 2017

piece, not least due to the ambiguities that swirl Part of the pleasure when Grassie debuts a new which she took up a residency at a glass studio around her group portraits. series is in the traditionalist thrill of his art’s in the Oregonian city, her adopted hometown. More true lies: since he left the Royal College high-grade fidelity; part of it is surprise, since Yet this show, The People’s Cries, with its brightly 3 of Art in 1990, Andrew Grassie’s painterly he’s an artist who seems to design culs-de-sac coloured, semiabstract and, yes, sloppy fusedapproach has evolved from sedulously copying for himself and then, somehow, always reverses glass pieces – including two 12m-long skylights his own juvenilia, to painstakingly rendering out of them (if only into a new one.) – is also tinctured with the daily in other ways. 4 Sandwiched between a multicoloured glass gallery spaces, to the seven paintings in this Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s ‘sloppy craft distension and its ceramic base is the written show, which initially appear to be documentaassemblages’, as the authors of her Wikipedia tions of artists’ studios. Certainly they’re phrase ‘General Strike’, while further works page call them, have long linked to her life: based on photographs, and certainly Grassie’s (and the show’s title) refer to punk, upraised fists she’s repurposed her old couches and homely eye-straining facture in gouache suggests verisiand opposition movements both historical and ceramics, and when she became a parent her militude. But the wry Scot in fact set up these children’s clothes started showing up in her art. contemporary. Hutchins’s everyday, then, is the workspaces in his own studio before docuThat she’s now occupied with stained glass might same fissuring one we’re all grinding through, menting them, presenting them as the lairs naturally be traced to her biography therefore; though maybe she sees it in brighter colours. 5 and sure enough, last year Hutchins visited Lesley Vance began as a painter of still lifes of a succession of imaginary artists: spaces in an abandoned Christian Science church while whose process was gradually to work towards which, ironically given the man-hours Grassie location scouting for her participation in the 2016 abstraction, closing down figurative references puts into rendering them, no work appears to be going on. A surface truth, then, yet the Portland Biennial. She ended up filling in three in taut, modestly scaled canvases until the epistemological ground beneath is weak. missing panels in the church’s glass oculus, after image ceased to register, the painting a record

3 Andrew Grassie, Studio Proposal 2, 2017, tempera on paper on board, 24 × 31 cm (framed). © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

4 Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Daughter, 2017, glass, steel armature, ceramic base, 147 × 64 × 48 cm. Photo: Object Studies. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

5 Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2017, oil on linen, 79 × 61 × 3 cm. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

ArtReview

6 Richard Jackson, La Palette, 2016–17, wood, steel, fibreglass, paint, 279 × 488 × 488 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris

7 Zied Ben Romdhane, West of Life, 2014–16. © the artist

of its mutation away from depiction. During the last three years, though, the forty-year-old Milwaukeean appears to have had a revelation: hey, why not just make abstractions in the first place. As her third exhibition at Xavier Hufkens showcases, Vance now freely improvises awhile and then responds to that, leading to luminous, looping compositions in jewel-box colours: viewers wanting something to grip onto might note allusions to a wealth of earlier painters, from Hans Arp to Georgia O’Keeffe to Hilma af Klint, while those who need narrative can try tracing back Vance’s intricate conundrums to the chancy place where they began, and those who want sheer lyrical complexity can proceed without caution. Contemporary art history, of course, brims with little eureka moments like Vance’s. For

instance, to make a painting one doesn’t need a canvas or any kind of flat support, or a brush. 6 One just needs paint. Richard Jackson, who as his French gallery puts it ‘considers that the nice couple made up of the paintbrush and the painting is a commonplace’, and whose rebarbative antics inspired a generation of West Coast artists, has demonstrated this since the early 1970s. He’s used windscreen wipers to apply paint; also doors, and a Vespa’s wheels. He’s made sculptures from painterly apparatus and sprayed and thrown paint onto all manner of objects – including, in his impishly monumental series of Bad Dog works, the facades of museums, over which said Clifford-sized canine is seen splashing piss-yellow paint. Now, following (apparently) several years of ‘consideration’, he’s reconstructing the Saint

December 2017

Germain bar La Palette – the name being not irrelevant, nor to its curvilinear shape – in an ‘homage to the old and kitsch world of the painter and his easel’. The bar is mechanised, and randomly sprays paint around the gallery; the title, delineating the act, is The French Kiss. At this point, we realise we’ve been banging on about painting for much of this column. We’re not sorry – painting’s the best – but let’s switch 7 media. Over in Mali, the Bamako Encounters is opening its 11th edition since 1994, which means photography, and in this case photography under the rubric of Afrotopia, aimed at countering the Westernisation of Africa by focusing on cultural contributions arising from within the continent. Expect, then, a monographic show for octogenarian London-based Ghanaian photojournalist James Barnor, who – aside from

8 Otto Berchem, Swept Away, 2017, acrylic on brooms, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam

9 Shaun Gladwell, 1000 Horses, 2017, production still. Courtesy the artist and SCAF, Sydney

pioneering work documenting Africans in the UK – went back to Ghana and introduced colour processing there. Other projects include Justin Davy’s exploration of African music since independence, and Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu’s show dedicated to Afrofuturism. You can learn a lot of arcana about codes 8 from Otto Berchem. Did you know that American hobos had a set of signs for each other, eg a triangle meant a homeowner had a gun, a circle with two parallel arrows meant ‘scarper, hobos not welcome’? The Connecticut-born, Bogota-based Berchem used this language for a 2005 work in the Istanbul Biennial, and the interest in hierarchy wasn’t a one-off. Earlier this year he made a work with Amalia Pica, Mobilize (2017): a punning sculpture rendering

a midair cascade – basically a mobile – of falling in Bogota, Berchem is concerned with centre and coloured papers that, neatly, could be read periphery and lopsided power structures, and his revisions might be seen as a symbolic claiming as relating to either of their codified practices. of agency; when, as here, he takes a well-known It recalls Pica’s interest in painful bureaucratic work like André Cadere’s multicoloured sticks processes and turns an earlier videowork by Berchem – Revolver (Universidad Nacional) (2013) and recasts them as brooms, he at once activates – into a sculpture, while the title points to the the political-metaphorical meanings of the politics underwriting the latter’s work. A while cleaning implement – new broom, sweeping ago, Berchem created a chromatic alphabet, away corruption, etc – pointing, à la ‘mobilise’, drawing on sources including the writings of to the necessity of dissent and of reshaping the Jorge Adoum and Vladimir Nabokov (who had balance of power, while, as ever, filtering it synaesthesia), and Peter Saville’s sleeve designs through eye-catching aesthetics. A red thread through Shaun Gladwell’s for the first three New Order albums. In his fifth 9 career has been ‘horse substitutes’ – cars, motorshow at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Dive for Dreams, bikes, skateboards – as well as heroism, mascuBerchem partly continues a project of recoding linity and war. The Australian artist has, among iconic artworks through this alphabet, but his project isn’t a quixotic one. As an American living other projects, spent extended periods in his

ArtReview

Richard Mosse still from Incoming 2015–16 (detail) three channel black and white high definition video, surround sound, 52 min 10 sec (looped) Co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Barbican Art Gallery, London. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased with funds donated by Christopher Thomas AM and Cheryl Thomas, Jane and Stephen Hains, Vivien Knowles, Michael and Emily Tong and 2016 NGV Curatorial Tour donors, 2017 © Richard Mosse courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and carlier|gebauer, Berlin PRESENTED BY

PRINCIPAL PARTNER

NGV.MELBOURNE

MAJOR PARTNERS

DEC 15 – APR 15 2018

A MAJOR PRESENTATION OF GLOBAL ART AND DESIGN ONLY AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

country’s desert to make his series Maddestlife-cycle, and a 3D print of a damaged Roman maximus (2009), which involved Gladwell carequestrian sculpture, shifting the emphasis surfing, ie riding on the outside of a moving – appropriately, given Gladwell’s outlook – from domineering warrior to sacrificial equine. vehicle; and, for the 2016 video Skateboarders And lastly, from galloping to, well, not: we vs Minimalism, commissioning pros to skate on exact replicas of minimalist artworks 10 all get slower as we get older, but Maria Hassabi has ambled ahead of the curve. After debuting (to a Philip Glass soundtrack, naturally). Now, though, Gladwell’s dealing with actual in early-to-mid 2000s New York with performance works that consciously tapped the residual steeds. 1,000 Horses, being shown in Tel Aviv, energy of the downtown scene (graffiti backdrops appropriately links Israel and Australia, referby Dash Snow’s crew, a focus on fashion), the encing the century-old Battle of Beersheba, in which the 4th and 12th Australian Light Horse Cyprus-born artist has since decelerated wildly. Brigades and the Allies, defeated the Ottomans Nowadays her works, performable anywhere – an event that triggered the British rule of from theatres to Wall Street to the atria and staircases of MoMA (for PLASTIC, 2016), constitute Palestine, and is thought to be the last major successions of glacially morphing poses, barely battle involving soldiers on horseback. The works here, though, focus on the horses: videos mobile tableaux vivant; and indeed Hassabi’s and virtual-reality photographs of the horse’s central interest is in the relationship between

the body and the image. (Alongside, clearly, the fact that we all move too fast and don’t stop to smell the roses.) At K20, smartly matched to the cool gratifications of the museum’s concurrent retrospective of Carmen Herrera, she’s presenting a variant on STAGING (2017). Initially performed at this year’s Documenta, it’s a solo of movements by Hassabi subsequently imparted to a quartet of dancers who, art historian/critic Rachel Haidu has written, ‘multiply her, fracturing a solo into multiple parts that can now touch one another, repel or entwine’. What’s being ‘done’, here, is sometimes no more than breathing – which, incidentally, is what Duchamp said he was ‘doing’ for the latter part of his career (even if it wasn’t quite true). Any sluggards looking to defend their inertia, here’s your line. Martin Herbert

10 Maria Hassabi, STAGING, 2017. Photo: Fred Dott. © Kunstsammlung NRW

1 Camille Henrot Palais de Tokyo, Paris through 7 January

4 Jessica Jackson Hutchins Boesky East, New York through 22 December

8 Otto Berchem Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam through 23 December

2 Toyin Ojih Odutola Whitney Museum, New York through 25 February

5 Lesley Vance Xavier Hufkens, Brussels through 16 December

9 Shaun Gladwell Tel Aviv Museum of Art through 24 February

3 Andrew Grassie Maureen Paley, London through 7 January

6 Richard Jackson Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris through 23 December

10 Maria Hassabi K20, Düsseldorf 9 December – 21 January

7 11th Bamako Encounters Bamako through 31 January

ArtReview

oude kerk

Na Christian Boltanski 24 Nov 2017 – 29 Apr 2018 oudekerk.nl

Under the Paving Stones

Chicago plays the long game by Sam Korman

Taking credit Chicago is a slow city, a fact you’ll no doubt come to understand sitting in the back of an Uber or Lyft or Juno. It sounds OK at first. But you’ll soon begin to measure the distance between neighbourhoods in exhibitions you don’t get to see, and you’ll watch as your afternoon tally dwindles to a measly one or two. At this point, you will have spent several days in the Rust Belt, and you’ll be confronted with the uncanny feeling that you’re stuck in traffic in your own hometown. It’s for this reason that you may come across a used-car dealership at the corner of N Western Ave and N Iowa Street. Maybe you’ve just visited a few galleries in Ukrainian Village or you’re on your way to the hardscrabble artist-run spaces in Garfield Park. You are, without doubt, stuck at the crowded intersection, waiting on your second red light. (I hope it is not winter when this happens.) Only a dozen or so cars will fill the modest corner property, and apart from the large neon prices that have been scrawled with purpose across each vehicle’s windscreen, there will be little to distinguish the random assortment. There will be no mistaking the messages of other signage, however, such as, ‘Bad Credit’, ‘Good Credit’, ‘No Credit’, ‘Instant Credit’, though other attempts at candour will not offer the same reassurance. You won’t like the sound of ‘Used OK’d Cars’. You will settle on a half-truth as the answer to how this place survives: audacity is what the used-car man is known for. Your mind will begin to stray to the other details of the last few days, when the thought might return to you that Chicago was named by Bon Appétit magazine 2017’s ‘Restaurant City of the Year’.

above Graham Foundation below Cauleen Smith at the Art Institute of Chicago

Finding the through-line In your perambulations, you will finally arrive at Human_3.0 Reading List, Chicago-based artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s exhibition with the Art Institute of Chicago. It has the best name of any exhibition you’ve seen in years, but what actually marks the show as crucial is the fact that Smith chose this high-profile opportunity to exhibit drawings she has made of books. ‘Love. Resist. Read on. Right on,’ Smith intones in the small catalogue that accompanies the show. It’s easy to pigeonhole the series as an essential reading list; no doubt necessary reading, it’s the supple depictions of these well-read volumes that permit new imaginative leaps between their themes. While you might already count The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), coauthored by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, or Grapefruit (1964) by Yoko Ono as part of your library, add in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) by Donna Haraway, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine and Inferno (2010) by Eileen Myles – a curriculum comes into view. And what kind of theoretical paradigm are you able to build by the time you include Dhalgren (1975) by Samuel R. Delany, Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics (1990)

December 2017

by bell hooks, Young, British & Black: A monograph on the work of Sankofa Film/Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective (1988) by Coco Fusco and an anomalous instruction manual about the weather? Occasionally, Smith depicts her own hand: in her rendition of The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s 1963 dire open letter to his nephew, she holds the recognisable paperback edition to show us its spine. The act of drawing seems to have given Smith the extra time to think about each book. Realised during 2015–16, the series spans genres, with 57 books on view.

Who’s reality are you? Gerald Williams was a founding member of AfriCOBRA, a Chicagobased movement that operated throughout the late 1960s and into the 70s. Their name stood for ‘African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists’; composed of African American artists, its art was intended

above left David Hartt at the Graham Foundation above right Jennifer Packer at The Renaissance Society

above Gerald Williams at Kavi Gupta Gallery below Ken Ellis at Boyfriends

to unite the black community around a pan-African aesthetic. A selection of Williams’s paintings from the 1960s to today at Kavi Gupta shows why the movement’s impact radiated, and was so quickly adopted beyond Chicago. Early paintings are wily and affirmative: for Say It Loud (1969), the work’s title provides the bold backdrop against which three afro-haired figures come into focus. And there is a wild exuberance to the collection of traditional African patterns that comprise the portrait My Parents (1975). Williams’s later work would become more meditative, characterised by a pointillist style that would appear like a form of shamanic divination. The sense of space in Nostalgia (2007), Fragmentary Apparitions #2 (2010) and Looking Out On the Morning Rain (2014) does not belong to the earthly plane. In Portrait Y (1970s–1990s), more pointillist patterns ebb and flow around the head of an adolescent figure. Accessibility and impact were foundational to AfriCOBRA’s politics, and these paintings share the same meticulous beauty with a more populist medium like textiles, directly resembling West African fabric patterns and weavings. In a message painted at the bottom of Portrait Y, Williams ponders: “IF YOU ARE NOT A MYTH THEN WHO’S REALITY ARE YOU? IF YOU ARE NOT A REALITY THEN WHO’S MYTH ARE YOU?”

ArtReview

Tending bar and quilting swastikas What you will have failed to realise when you first visited Ken Ellis’s Selected Works: 2006 to the Present at Boyfriends, especially if you are new to Chicago, is that the artist is a local folk hero. People will be quick to tell you, however, and there’s a lot of evidence to back it up. First: Ken works in that archetypal American folk medium: quilts. His puffy, hand-embroidered textiles capture typical scenes of American violence and capably spin them into epics. Police abuse against African Americans in a handful of smaller panels clearly resonates with a depiction of the murder of a Native American at the hands of nineteenth-century military guards. Two quilts hone in on symbols of white supremacy – Klansmen, Hitler Youth, Skinheads – the terrifying truth of which comically substantiates with the soft-stitched homeliness of decorative swastikas. You might be told that Ken is a bartender at a local favourite bar. A 1999 article in Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly paper, confirms the fact, and provides further support of his myth: he learned sewing from his dad and picked up the tools of his trade along the way; he dropped out of college, he’s been working in bars since the 1990s, he’s into punk. Chicago is where many artists get educated (the School of the Art Institute is one of the country’s most popular art schools, and the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago are represented by influential arts faculty), and, though Ken’s work stands alone, hardly in need of any biographical buttressing, his story will be perennially popular with wayfaring young artists seeking to confirm an inviolable idealism or to substitute it for their own developing character. One way or the other, Ken’s story offers reassurance. We come back to our folk heroes because we need them. There is a bizarre resemblance between Jennifer Packer’s exhibition Tenderheaded at The Renaissance Society and David Hartt’s in the forest at the Graham Foundation. In both shows, lush plants and foliage are a vibrant counterpoint to bodies in repose. Packer’s flowers are her secret weapon, and in the portrait Graces (2017), which depicts a man reclining in a reading room, plants not only offer a memento mori, their slumping plumage presents an emotional foil for the figure’s contemplative state. Hartt, on the other hand, turns his attention to architecture, and studies the abandoned 1968 modernist housing development Habitat Puerto Rico. The HD video in the forest (2017) scrutinises the skeletal concrete remains of architect Moshe Safdie’s ultimately unfinished project in the Hato Rey neighbourhood of San Juan. Hartt portrays the building as a mausoleum for foliage.

above Tribune Tower facade, detail below Five Rooms by Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

When building became theory The Chicago Architecture Biennial, ambiguously titled Make New History, packs its primary venue, the ornate Chicago Cultural Center, with site-specific installations, photographic documentation, experimental films, material studies, architectural models, scholarly research and diagrams, artworks, proposals for other biennials and several microexhibitions. Five Rooms (2017), an architectural intervention by Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner, sums up the show (and had me in stitches). Using the ultragross tiles typical to convention centres, they built four partitions into an awkward ground-floor section of the building, making little to no improvement, but nonetheless subdividing the space into five semifunctional ‘galleries’, including space for another contributor’s photographs. Comically, it isn’t clear where the exhibit starts and the building ends. The top floor of the exhibition revisits an architecture competition from 1922 for the design of the new headquarters of the Chicago

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Tribune. By the time the original competition closed, the newspaper had received so many proposals that it was determined they should be exhibited. A turning point in the field of architecture, the travelling exposition shifted emphasis from the building to the concept, laying the groundwork for the more theoretically driven world of architecture, and its metamorphosis into what today resembles a social science. Though other galleries offer a hodgepodge of displays, this historical turning point would suffice as the biennial’s theme, I would guess, and in this instance, various architects and studios were asked to reinterpret some of the original proposals in the form of five-metre-tall models, on view here. Later that afternoon, I had a look at the actual neo-gothic building that had won the competition (designed by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood). Since it was completed, real fragments from various historical buildings have been embedded into this edifice. With a stone from the Great Pyramid, marble from the Parthenon, a decorative element from Notre Dame and a brick from the Great Wall, among other bona fide landmarks, the building itself comprises a unique architectural compendium.

above top Diane Simpson, Study for Sombrero, 1995 above middle Thomas Grünfeld, Misfit (pheasant/goat), 2009 above bottom Margot Bergman, Untitled (Red Hot), 2010

above Chicago Architecture Biennial below View of Marina City

Tiny, tacky, runty You could see Corbett vs. Dempsey’s exhibition as a sendup of the architecture biennial’s grandiosity. Titled Small Sculpture, it presents just that. The following may offer a satisfactory enough description: tiny Richard Artschwager, tiny Rachel Harrison, tiny Carol Bove, tiny Mike Kelley, tiny Dieter Roth, tiny Joe Brainard, tiny Joyce Pensato. Is Diane Simpson the best sculptor in the United States? The dinky Study for Sombrero (1995), a complex maquette Simpson conjured from MDF and tacky polyester batting, still confirms her inimitable ability to completely mystify any space she works in. To encounter Thomas Grünfeld’s hybrid taxidermy Misfit (pheasant/goat) (2009) will magically alter your mood for the rest of the day. And try not to melt when you see Margot Bergman’s Untitled (Red Hot) (2010), a smiling, runty little rabbit-like quadruped that can’t help but seem happy to see you. The degree to which you enjoy this exhibition would depend on how many times you say to yourself, “It me”.

Warning: neighbourhood art organisation You might not know what to make of an outdoor installation at Acre, a residency programme headquartered in Pilsen (the actual residencies primarily take place in Wisconsin). Artists Ayesha Singh and Misael Soto (a former resident) have obscured 60 percent of the building’s facade with a largescale reproduction of the building itself. Printed on vinyl and mounted to a hulking set of steel scaffolding, the entire scene is rendered even more bizarre when you consider this redundant billboard against the rest of the street, which is rather residential. You might also wonder about the permits involved, the rental agreements signed, the answers they had to provide to their suppliers; the conversations you might imagine the artists and curator had with officials will start to overshadow petty concerns about meaning. That it happened at all, having passed through these civic and commercial channels, confirms its relevance. They already convinced those they needed to convince. At this point, the installation performs a seemingly simple operation to notify residents that there’s an art organisation in their neighbourhood. Mounted to the scaffolding were the only exhibition didactics I saw at any art institution presented in both English and Spanish.

An audience of one or two above left Ayesha Singh and Misael Soto at Acre above right Jesse Malmed pin below Malmed’s Western Pole All photographs by the author

Back at the intersection of N Western Ave and N Iowa Street, you might also notice, on the northwestern corner, Western Pole, an ongoing project by my friend Jesse Malmed, who tapes or staples a new flier to the same electrical pole every month. It’s next to a bus stop, and the idle commuters are probably the only people who have noticed the fliers at all. To give an example of what they would see: ‘You need to speak with me. –Dad’, reads a contribution from Fontaine Capel; or ‘Wet Pain’ by Hope Esser. I was lucky to witness Patrick ‘Q’ Quilao’s contribution: an advertisement for the ‘Who Shot Mr. Burns?’ episode of The Simpsons, which originally aired 17 September 1995. A joke is being played on someone, though admirers will tend to possess a paranoid sense of humour and a heavy predilection for puns. ‘Passersby’ is how Jesse himself would describe the intended audience of the works anyway. He clearly takes joy in the strange and absurd, a quality inspired by Fluxus and New Media artists of the 1960s and 70s; as with his predecessors, Jesse finds it is equally imperative to be responsive to the immediate concerns and conversations of his community. He has written, ‘My favorite bands are still my friends, because I’m still here for possibility.’ In his roles as an artist, filmmaker, educator and curator, he possesses the gravitas of a goofy rabbi. Jesse, together with his longtime partner, curator Raven Munsell, operated Trunk Show (2013–16), a multiyear series of happenings that involved artist-designed bumper stickers for their car (the project ended naturally when their car finally failed to start). It’s their particular brand of humour that makes Jesse and Raven posterchildren for Chicago: together they measure the success of an artwork in incidents of joy and befuddlement, and that art should imbue a city with an awkward sense of wonder. Two additional details about Western Pole deserve mention: one, the name is a pun on Western Exhibitions, another longstanding local exhibition space; and two, it used to be located on a pole in front of the used-car dealership, until Jesse began to suspect the fliers were being removed. Sam Korman is associate editor of ArtReview

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Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and workshop, Odalisque in Grisaille (detail), about 1824-34 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence

Image: Aiden Milligan Between the Pines (detail)

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Interview

Georgia Sagri “It’s almost like we try again and again to assume that we are all on the same planet. No, we are not all on the same planet” by Ross Simonini

Attempt. Come., 2016, performance, duration 20h, Documenta 14, Athens. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Georgia Sagri’s multifarious work for Documenta 14 involved dozens of sculptures, a short film, a manifestolike text and a variety of performances in multiple countries. All of these activities, collectively titled Dynamis (2017), revolve around an approach to the body she has been developing for years, and which, for the first time, she here attempted to “transmit” in a series of workshops over eight months to 200 people. In action, this training manifests as something like a Dada event, a dance rehearsal and an acting class, with a group of participants she refers to as a chorus (as in Greek theatre). Pairs of people walk, run, hum, count, crouch, dance, yell and chant, and at the centre is Sagri, a demanding, fastidious conductor who speaks in half-direct, half-ambiguous commands: “Concentrate on the breathing,” she says. “Not on what you are supposed to be while you are doing this!” At one point the workshop was open to the public, and audience members could engage in dialogue with Sagri. Her work has often encouraged viewer participation, such as Art Strike (2013), performed at the Lyon Biennale, in which audience members were brought, one by one, to stand onstage until all the seats were empty. Most of Sagri’s work orbits around performance, and yet she dislikes the term and usually attempts to twist its parameters, especially those related to space and time. Many of her works take place over long, unbroken periods. Dynamis occurred ‘simultaneously and in continuum’ in both Athens and Kassel for six days this last June, with performers moving slowly, deliberately and in strikingly unusual ways among Documenta’s attendees. The performance also spilled out of the galleries

and museums and onto the street, a gesture of social and political engagement that has been present since Sagri’s early works, some of which were a part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In Polytechnic (1999) she stood in a glass cage, wrapped in bandages to commemorate studio protests in Athens, and in The New Kind (2003), a video for the Athens Biennial, she crawled through city streets with bound hands and feet. Born, raised and still partly living in Athens, she has said of the city that ‘every time you go out for a walk there is a protest. It’s impossible to not be politically involved.’

“When these two groups of people met, they started crying, because they realised they were doing almost the same movements – without me directing anyone, without me trying to impose any choreography” Her sculptures, too, are performative. For her work Unethical Nests (2011) she strapped plastic dog transporters under the Brooklyn– Queens Expressway in New York. For Dynamis, she created blown-glass ‘scores’ of the breathing and counting practices in her workshops. Whatever her chosen media, Sagri’s work offers an intense and sometimes humorous exploration of the human body, especially Dynamis, Breathing score I’n (detail), 2017, handblown glass, steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

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its place in contemporary capitalist culture. She often pushes her own body to its limits, usually through exhaustive, repeated movements – twitching, jarring facial expressions, screaming, crying – and to do so she has drawn upon the manners of a used-car salesman, Bruce Lee, ancient drumming rituals and iPod commercials. For the following interview, I Skyped with Sagri, who was in Athens for the final days of Documenta 14. Ross Simonini What have you been teaching in your workshops? Georgia Sagri The point of the workshops was to share my practice, which is primarily based on physical and mental exercises that I’ve been developing and practising by myself in solitude for ten years now. It was not an easy process, as it was the first time that I was actually sharing this very personal practice with others. I had to find ways to transmit, and at the same time to observe how it affects other bodies and help those bodies to adjust to the training, as well as to find individuals willing to participate in a six-day nonstop performance with me. At the opening of Documenta 14 in Athens the workshop was open to the public, and a group of 20 stayed to be part of the performance in June – during the opening of Documenta in Kassel. RS Who took part in the workshops? GS Many different people – artists, dancers, actors, sociologists, anthropologists, writers, musicians, singers and students of the schools of the arts from Kassel and Athens. Most of them were very enthusiastic and curious about performance art, and some wanted to go through the workshop to learn more about performance

Soma in orgasm; as leg, as hand, as brain, as ear, as heart, as breast, as sex, 2017 (installation view, Documenta 14, Athens). Photo: Angelos Giotopoulos. Courtesy the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

ArtReview

but also its relation and connection to their field of interest. For example, the dancers were very much interested in breathing exercises, and many of them benefited from the training to realise basic mechanics of the skeleton, the posture and diaphragm. But it wasn’t only for me to teach someone a fixed method, but to be able to continue developing it myself. RS This sort of self-training, do you apply it to every one of your performances? GS Exactly, because it is a training, it has no endpoint. It can be a preparation for any performance but also it can stay as training. RS And the workshop is a training for anybody interested in movement. GS In understanding their bodies, basically. Understanding their physical capacities, and the individual and unique characteristics they carry. Because each person has very specific and unique capacities and conditions, the way we experience the world is very different. It’s almost like we try again and again to assume that we are all on the same planet. No, we are not all on the same planet. This planet holds many different planets, many different organisms that are really totally different from each other and experiencing this place in a totally different way. So I have to be okay with that. Most of the time, we’re trying to adapt to something that we see, and we try to mimic, and the better we do this, the more we form our bodies and qualities. But each person has their own conditions and their own capacities to exist and experience everything, so I understand training as a way to abandon this idea of mastery – mimicking someone – in order

to acquire and understand the unique qualities that each of us carry; that is, in my opinion, taking care of the self. Which for me at least is also the base, the foundation, for the medium of performance. Or any kind of medium of using the body as primal material. RS Because you feel that, ultimately, mastery is just imitation? GS Because mastery has been the foundation of what we call the ‘nation-state’. The performing arts were created to support the idea of representation through reproduction.

“The orgasmic force is the space and time we can give to each other to understand our differences, where we actually understand what needs to be transformed. It’s also the political or social moments that we understand as revolutions” The performer is representing the citizen onstage, and the characters that support existing hierarchies, and this in my opinion has already happened a lot. We have mastered performing. We have mastered reproducing figures, but we haven’t acquired the tools and analyses and training of beings. Because when you have representation, you have also particular roles. So for example, in the theatre, you Dynamis (detail), 2017, 28 sculptures, ten breathing scores, and performances for Documenta 14, Kassel. © and courtesy the artist

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have – still – the representation of the master, servant, woman, man, the representation of the difference between animal and man. What I’m trying to do with my work is to establish a field that doesn’t have fixed roles. I’m starting from very basic things, from understanding the mechanics of the body, appreciating the variety of organisms. On the other hand, because I’m working with this body, with my body, I need to analyse and understand it socially, physically and mentally. And in order to do that I create tools, tricks, training for myself to go along with an activity that exposes specific parameters of time and space. With performance, we assume there is already a form that is presented. No, that’s performing arts. What I’m trying to say is that with performance, we acquire the capacity to be ready to perform. RS How is that capacity achieved? GS For Documenta 14 there was a particular trajectory that this piece was trying to grasp. That is, how to create a sociality. And this action happened at the same time in both cities, Athens and Kassel. Dynamis was a priori taking place in the same field – even if it was happening in two different cities, the piece was constructed as happening in one place, in one field, in one space. It was a very difficult task because – and that’s the reason why this training was necessary – the people that participated in the performance had to actually do these actions for six days nonstop, they had to not only physically prepare but they also had to admit to themselves that they can do something that they don’t necessarily believe logically. It doesn’t work for them logically. But then it works for them emotionally. And when these two groups of people met in Kassel on the last day of the work,

Polytechnic, 1999, performance in the streets of Athens. Photo: Dimitris Diakoumopoulos. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

they started crying, because they realised they were doing almost the same movements – without me directing anyone, without me trying to impose any choreography. And they were doing them because they were coexisting in the same field of sociality, of space and time.

careful in this – understanding our heartbeats, our breathing, our walking, our gestures.

RS You have said that this work orbits around the concept of orgasm. Is this the central idea?

RS Do you think of your work as rooted in music?

GS Dynamis was the central character: Dynamis is orgasmic force, not exactly strength, and not exactly power. The force that makes people transform, change their lives – personally but also socially. So, it’s not the orgasm of sexual intercourse, it’s the orgasmic force, which makes people come together and change the course of their lives. The orgasmic force is the space and time we can give to each other to understand our differences, where we actually understand what needs to be transformed. It’s also the political or social moments that we understand as revolutions. RS This work was performed in the street. For you, does this make the work a form of social activism, where you’re trying to engender some kind of social engagement? GS I will say that it is a training of emotional capacity that can be shared. And that capacity can create a field of understanding and imagining another way, another space, another time. A common time. The participants, the performers and myself, we tried to touch that moment. RS Are you breathing in prescribed ways for the work? GS When I’m using the performance as a medium, I don’t assume, “Okay, I’m breathing”. It’s a privilege. It’s better to be a little bit more

RS You began as a musician. GS I was trained as a musician from the age of five.

GS My work is rooted in understanding the score’s function during the performance of a piece. That’s how I got more interested in visual arts. RS What kind of music were you trained in? GS Classical cello. RS The term ‘score’ suggests music. GS For me, it was the opposite of musical scoring. I was observing the breathing, and I was giving it a reality in blown glass. The breathing was scoring me. RS A documentation. GS But this documentation, all of it is in the field of art. You know, we don’t just make tools that actually work. Some tools are also there to not work. [Laughs] Which is very good! Because we don’t have someone to tell us, “Oh, it’s not working”. RS You think of your training as something that doesn’t have to work, as well? GS Of course! Yeah, of course. RS It’s just something that you present, and then after that there’s no intention with it? Dear all, 2013, performance at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon. Photo: Blaise Adilon. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Biennale de Lyon

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GS I don’t present the training. I’m training. The training is to be trained. That’s it. Like in music: to be able to make a note sound, you need to work and train for many years. For some people at some point, they have a sound. Others don’t. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t trained. They have been trained. And that’s the beautiful part – that you train to make the sound, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to sound. But the whole training, the whole calibration of the listening, the position, the everyday need to work on the sound to make it sound – that’s the whole point, not to make the sound. The way that I’m working doesn’t have an end, it doesn’t have a Beethoven. RS You seem to resist hierarchy in general. GS Yes. I’m really not very comfortable with hierarchies. RS But you embrace structure. GS Structure is not hierarchy. Structure is part of the creative force, the chaos, which is surrounding us. We try to make sense of it. We try to create a trajectory of our own path and our own understanding of what this chaos is. That’s not hierarchy. This is the base for creation. If I was assuming everything around me was fine, I wouldn’t have any need to make sense of it, to make something out of it. I’m interested in the moment when the chaos takes form and materialises. Ross Simonini is an artist, writer, musician and documentarian based in New York and California

C H A R L E S A T L A S 17.2 – 13.5 2018 T E R E S A B U R G A 26.5 – 12.8 2018 ENGAGE • LEARN • EXPLORE artstudiesonline.com

K O K I T A N A K A 25.8 – 11.11 2018 M A R I A EICHHORN 24.11 2018 – 3.2 2019 Limmatstrasse 270 CH–8005 Zurich migrosmuseum.ch migros-culture-percentage.ch

AN INSTITUTION OF THE MIGROS CULTURE PERCENTAGE

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Points of View

In the slew of abuse accusations that have been made since the Harvey Weinstein sexual misconduct allegations broke, one of the more disturbing undercurrents has been a shift in the debate over how artworks relate to the lives of the artists who make them. Unquestionably, the notion that an artwork’s merit should be judged in the light of knowledge of the artist’s personal life and behaviour has gained traction in recent months. Beyond the revelations and condemnation of the abuse itself, public commentary – from op-ed articles to socialmedia chat forums – is fixated on the question of whether or not we should watch films or TV programmes by actors, or look at artworks by artists, once we hear about the way they have behaved. And moreover, whether we should accept that the artistic value of their work is itself bound up with – and inevitably tainted by – their personal lives and behaviour. Writing on frieze.com in the wake of the artworld’s own post-Weinstein campaign ‘Not Surprised’ (following allegations of sexual misconduct brought against Artforum publisher Knight Landesman), Elvia Wilk dismisses the ‘arty excuses for the abusive behaviour of geniuses’ that allow that ‘he’s an asshole but he makes great work’. ‘It’s that last excuse that most urgently needs to be dismantled,’ Wilk writes: ‘In order to move beyond outcry to action, that statement must become a paradox. He cannot make good work if he is a sexual abuser. If a person is an abuser, the work cannot be good. I don’t just mean that the work is somehow tainted by bad behaviour. I mean the work itself is actually not good.’ While no one would endorse or excuse abusive behaviour by anyone, this is nevertheless an extreme conclusion that throws up some troubling questions. It turns on the widespread frustration that men might get away (and indeed have gotten away) with abusive behaviour while continuing to profit from their work. And given that many of the abuses that have been brought to light have operated within and to some extent been permitted by the framework of professional power relations, it’s not surprising that it’s led to a call for instant justice and the punishment of abusers by hitting them where it hurts. As Wilk puts it, ‘if we can agree that abusive worker = bad work, it follows that an acceptable form of social retribution in response to verified testimony – pending litigation – is to injure the careers of those workers.’

True Faith JJ Charlesworth examines the consequences of judging an artwork via the person who made it

If campaigners want to punish transgressors by demanding a boycott of the work that allows them to earn a living, that’s one thing. Although there are, of course dangers, to this – involving the verification of an accusation, what punishment means, and who delivers it – about which we should be nervous (hence Wilk’s cautious emphasis on ‘verified testimony’, even though she elsewhere states that she errs ‘on the side of believing witnesses by default’). But the idea that one should see the work itself as ‘bad work’ because of its author’s behaviour is itself equally troubling. The idea that we shouldn’t, or can no longer look at an artwork without referring to the author’s life, should be open to question. Artists as morally questionable and downright criminal as Caravaggio (he killed a man) or William

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Burroughs (he shot his wife in the head) or the weird English modernist Eric Gill (he sexually abused his daughters) or Richard Wagner (he was fiercely anti-Semitic) still produced work that, strictly speaking, has its own merits, and, indeed is still deemed to have its own merits (London’s National Gallery held an exhibition exploring the influence of Caravaggio’s art earlier this year; Wagner concerts are still popular fare; Gill Sans remains a widely-used font). To argue that ethical concerns (how people should behave towards one another in society) are identical to aesthetic concerns (how an artwork has an effect on its audience) destroys the distinction between the experience of artworks and the experience of social life. It makes absolute the relationship between the meaning of an artwork and what is publicly acceptable, and, in the case of dead artists, makes the social values of the present arbiter over the past. Aesthetics don’t always match ethics, because artworks are not people, and because the people who experience works (us), aren’t attending to the author of a work, but to something independent of the author. This isn’t to deny that an artist’s subjectivity leaves its traces in a work – all the recent tortured think-pieces by writers trying to decide whether to watch another Woody Allen film or Louis C.K. show ever again speak to the problem of interpreting a semi-biographical work in the light of public revelation. But it is to recognise that artworks are deliberated according to the broader interests and concerns of a diverse public. Insisting that the work equals the artist’s behaviour and opinions effectively asserts moral sanction over the audience’s freedom to consider its content, its effect and its value, on the audience’s own terms. Trying to abolish the difference between the good or bad of an individual person and the good or bad of an artwork is really about imposing a new moral etiquette – one in which we feel obliged to disapprove of the work in order to show that we disapprove of the author. But audiences should be free to make their minds up about the behaviour of artists, and just as free to value artworks as something other than the person who makes them. We may not be able to trust artists to be good people. We should trust ourselves to judge good artworks. J.J. Charlesworth is online editor of ArtReview

To have power entails being able to influence the way things go. In The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), a 2016 film by Amsterdambased duo Metahaven, power is about exercising sovereignty. In this work, released in 35 segments on YouTube, sovereignty differs from the nation-state-oriented geopolitics of geographical territoriality that has dominated the European discourse of power and politics since the seventeenth century. The Sprawl is about the kind of agency that is able, through communication, to disrupt ‘the other side’: to undermine any belief in demonstrable truth. The rise of ISIS plays a role in the film, as does Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

State of the Nation Maria Lind finds that art follows life, just as life follows art

both Metahaven, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (still), 2016, HD video, 70 min. Courtesy the artists, Lighthouse and The Space

ArtReview

Russia is one of several case-studies here: the film examines how the country operates within the planetary-scale computing megastructure that theorist Benjamin Bratton, one of the film’s talking heads, calls “the stack”. The stack – consisting of the cloud, the Internet of Things, apps, smart cities, etc – is an abstract vertical model, replacing and distorting the horizontal topology of geopolitics as defined by the Peace of Westphalia (the 1648 treaties that protected the territorial integrity of nationstates in Europe). The stack, with its multiple vertical sovereignties, is, Bratton argues, the superpower of our time, albeit an incidental one. The film is exceptionally seductive, as is typical of Metahaven’s work, with a continuous overlaying of images and graphics (both figurative and nonfigurative) – reflections, smoke, chromatic colours – and atmospheric, melancholic music. Footage of YouTube’s Los Angeles headquarters, of a huge Russian missile-launcher caught on a mobile camera near the crash site of flight MH17 in the Ukraine, and of street fights in Bahrain are mixed with staged scenes featuring beautiful young people in nondescript spaces. As one of them swings a sword athletically, the action is described as “aesthetic terrorism”, while another appears with global positioning coordinates on her face. A third actress is identified as “impersonating the idea of taking position”. Then there are colourful flowers, decorative explosions and recurring upside-down footage shot from a car driving in the US. Poetry by Anna Akhmatova is recited in Russian, as are quotes from Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art? (1897) that exemplify an expressive paradigm of art, and a lyrical text by Metahaven themselves. Metahaven’s film starts with a forest filmed at night, which quickly turns into a rocky, computeranimated landscape, a scene that brought to mind another recent tour-de-force of propaganda I encountered, the exhibition Seven Days That Changed Russia, at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg. That show’s introductory film opens with a captivating panoramic projection of a northern landscape devoid of humans – Russia before Russia. Seconds later the landscape is populated by a large group

of people, who trigger the heroic story of Russia’s struggle for freedom, from the chainladen Middle Ages to Peter the Great to Yeltsin himself. In rapid succession, carried forward by dynamic visuals and sound, leaders appear and disappear from the screen: Lenin and Gorbachev are briefly present, whereas Stalin is only mentioned in the voiceover. And Putin? The stunningly well-constructed exhibition follows seven days in August 1991 when Yeltsin assumed leadership in the wake of a failed coup d’état, leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union – or, in this version of the narrative, the genesis of ‘democratic Russia’. Ostensibly a monument to Russia’s first elected president, the exhibition turns to Putin, cast as both sovereign and messiah, on the sixth of its seven ‘days’. He appears then as the chosen one, ultimately delivering freedom to Russia, thanks to the foundational work of his predecessor Yeltsin. The exhibition – put together by museumexhibition design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates, who among many other things created the exhibition design for Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library – is based on a surprisingly interesting and precise selection of documents, objects and images, orchestrated partly through installation strategies made familiar by artists such as Edward Kienholz, Ilya Kabakov, Mike Nelson and Michelangelo Pistoletto. One room is a replica of an ordinary living room in the Soviet Union in 1991; another copies Yeltsin’s office on 31 December 1999, the day he delivered his famous televised resignation; a third room contains a grocery store with empty shelves. The exhibition is embedded in a building born as a shopping mall but converted, at an early stage of construction, into the presidential centre, which opened in 2015. Surrounded by fashion stores, upscale cafés and restaurants, a bookshop, a grocery store, an art gallery and an open space with ping pong tables available to anyone in the mood, the exhibition becomes

the heart of a fully-fledged propaganda machine enveloped by an impressive media facade. By the look of it, the Yeltsin Center could just as well be located in London, Seoul, New York, Dubai or Shanghai – it is a perfect neoliberal marketing vehicle, with a seemingly happy union of commerce, real estate, leisure and culture. And yet there is something typical of today’s Russia about it: although not popular with the current president, the skilfully propagandistic insistence on the importance of the presidential office and the current president as the inevitable sovereign is at its heart. The command that Metahaven has of contemporary visual communication, their understanding of the digital sublime and how to use it to manipulate, has an equivalent in the Yeltsin Center. The final room of the exhibition is ‘the hall of freedom’ and features largescale flatscreens with various people expressing their thoughts, feelings and opinions about ‘freedom’, among them Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Through tall windows there is a beautiful view of Yekaterinburg, next to a video booth where visitors can record their own views on freedom. To me, it looks a lot like repressive tolerance, squared. Both The Sprawl and the Yeltsin Center rely primarily on affect, leaving me with memories of the captivating atmospheres they conjured. While sound in The Sprawl is as powerful as the image, it is the editing that shapes the film. The emotional impact of the subject matter is reflected in its production, in how it is articulated down to the smallest component. At the same time, the film is full of succinct and enticing catchphrases: “interface as space of splintering”, “lamination of perception”, “subtitling the real”, “cognitive fundamentalism” and “digital scream”. The film helps articulate the current condition with an interfacial regime based on incredible reduction and pre-narration, which it wants to reveal and counter, and yet is at the same time part of. While the Yeltsin Center offers one manifestation of that regime, using architecture and lifestyle as propaganda, both are quintessentially of our time. both Seven Days That Changed Russia (installation view), 2015, at Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, Yekaterinburg. Photo: Evgeniy Kondakov

December 2017

Maria Lind is a writer and curator based in Stockholm

While many of the products of Japanese manufacture and design are known internationally, and the nation has long been exporting its pop culture in the form of music, animation/manga, films, video games and various sub-cultures to Asia and the world, broadly speaking its contemporary art remains a domestic phenomenon. It is certainly the case that relatively few young Japanese artists, often collaborating with luxury brands and fashion houses, have entered public view internationally. The biannual Nissan Art Award is one of the vehicles set up to combat this and the five finalists for this year’s edition each present a new work at BankART1929 in Yokohama. Beyond the competitive agenda, the award exhibition provides an opportunity to examine the output of a generation of artists in Japan who are emerging from an age that has been defined by the politics of Shinzō Abe and the lasting impact of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The exhibition begins with the work of Ryuichi Ishikawa, a photographer who believes that his medium allows for a ‘confrontation’ between the artist and the world. His project here is a collection of photographs of daily life in his hometown, featuring depictions of his bedroom, living room and toilet, and more intimate details such as the toys his child leaves lying around the home. It also includes ostensibly less personal photographs of US military planes flying above Okinawa – sometimes so close to the buildings that they look as if they might be plucked from the window – but this is in fact an occurrence that is so regular in the city that it forms just another aspect of domestic life. Riffing off a tradition in Japanese photography

King of the monsters Aimee Lin discovers that Japan’s young artists have the potential to be the Godzillas of our age

of recording daily objects, the series is an ode to everyday life, honest and intimate, that ultimately reveals the sensible truth of the country to be a far from normal state of being. The photographs of another finalist, Motoyuki Daifu, also focus on quotidian life – in this case his daily meals, often comprising microwave foodstuffs, and canned and packaged products. On the one hand this is a celebration of sometimes garishly colourful (or colourfully packaged) food; on the other hand it documents commodities, consumerism and excess. More minimalist is the work of Nami Yokoyama, the only female artist and the only painter included in the exhibition. She presents a set of paintings of neon texts

above top Hikaru Fujii, Playing Japanese (still), 2017, video, 40 mins. Courtesy the artist above bottom Motoyuki Daifu , STILL LIFE (detail), 2013-2016, 86 × 66 cm (each), chromogenic print

ArtReview

and graphic patterns (a Christian cross, cartoon-style characters and texts about art history and painting). While the work signals a conceptual turn in her painterly practice, it is also another rendition of Japan’s dominant consumer society. Yuichiro Tamura’s installation End Game (2017) features three theatrical stage settings: a ‘sculpture workshop’, in which a Corinthian pillar is being processed from the engine of a deconstructed Gloria (a signature Nissan car series, first launched during the 1960s), a typical Japanese interior decorated with objects imported from the West including a pianola that plays Gloria from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (1819–23), and lastly a small glass-walled room papered with news stories about Laura Branigan, singer of the 1982 cover version of Umberto Tozzi’s 1979 disco hit Gloria, inside of which a three-channel video shows the deconstruction of a silver Gloria and the reuse of its materials to create the pillar and two trash bins (these last echoing the symbolic props from Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame) exhibited in the installation. By dispatching various cultural and historical references, Tamura illustrates how the idea of glory, as one driving force in cultural production, is born, grows, exists, ends and is then transformed. In a sense, you start to get the feeling that the artists on show here play a role in modern society that is rather like that played by Godzilla during the 1950s: they are a product of their time, and simultaneously the destroyers of it and (potentially) the creators of a new future. Hikaru Fujii, born in Tokyo and the winner (selected by an international jury) of this year’s grand prix, uses documentary, video art, archival material and workshops to reflect on what it means to be Japanese. Playing Japanese (2017), inspired by British clergyman H.N. Hutchinson’s 1901 ethnological study The living races of mankind and by the Osaka Expo of 1903 (which featured many anthropological displays, among them a ‘Human Pavilion’), is a multivideo documentary installation of a workshop in which participants were invited to ‘play’ the Japanese of 1903, observing the indigenous peoples of Hokkaido, Okinawa, Taiwan and Korea through a Western perspective. By bringing a historical context back to life, participants and viewers are able to stand

in the broad scope of history to examine the difference and commonality between people of today and of a century ago, to witness the violence of colonialism, and how anthropology was once used to help Japan build up its national identity and imperialist vision. Aside from the historical studies and performative workshop, Fujii uses a video language that is quiet, calm and poetic, and distinct from many other documentaries. As the winner of the Nissan Art Award grand prix, Fujii will be supported in taking up a residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. One tiny step towards building an art scene free from Japan’s inherent isolation. Aimee Lin is editor of ArtReview Asia

above top Yuichiro Tamura , End Game, 2017, installation view above middle Nami Yokoyama, Crucifix, 2017, oil on linen, 162 × 130 cm above bottom Ryuichi Ishikawa , home work, 2017, installation view all images Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy Nissan Art Award

December 2017

EXCEPTIONAL MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART FROM AROUND THE WORLD

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Exterminate ingenuity, discard profit, And there will be no more thieves and bandits 55

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Tomás Saraceno How to do things with art by Mark Rappolt

December 2017

preceding pages 163,000 Light Years, 2016 (installation view at MARCO Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist, Pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen and Esther Schipper, Berlin. both images Aerocene Explorer, 2016, developed by the Aerocene Foundation and collaborators. Photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno

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Aerocene, 2015, Tomas Saraceno (middle) launches at White Sands (NM, United States). Photo: Christ Chavez. Courtesy the artist, Pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa, Tanya Bonakdar, New York, Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen and Esther Schipper, Berlin

It’s summer, the sun is out and Tomás Saraceno is standing in a court- causes the balloon to rise. The ropes (now attached to the balloon) are yard-cum-amphitheatre buried in the middle of the labyrinthine Asia handed to the artist, the balloon catches in the wind, there’s talk of Cultural Centre (ACC) in Gwangju, South Korea. In the hangar-like how this technology offers the potential for transportation without exhibition space next door, the Argentinian artist has just unveiled the consumption of fossil fuels or rare gases, of how the gizmos in his first solo show in this part of the world. Outside he’s started to the bottle can be hacked or adapted to measure air pollution, pollen unpack an ordinary-looking canvas backpack before a small audience counts, distance travelled, or to explore the atmosphere in any other of journalists. It turns out to contain a plastic bottle containing some way you might desire, of how all this might lead to a new perception sort of distinctly homemade-looking electronic gizmo, a reel of rope, of and perspective on what it means to be an earthling… And just as he what looks like a neatly rolled sleeping-bag, a pair of gloves of the seems on the verge of a Mary Poppins-style lift-off Saraceno’s demontype that an art handler might wear, a clipboard and some pens: all stration ends. The Explorer backback is part of the exhibition, we are in all, the kind of practical kit a schoolchild informed. Visitors can borrow it as part of might be handed before wandering across the show. For limited use only. The Aerocene project moves some fields on a dreary geography fieldIt’s a bit of an anticlimax, as if the artthe notion of sculpture away from trip. Then the sleeping bag turns out to be work had broken a boundary between the being a statement and towards realms of aesthetics and lived experience a hot-air balloon. only to be reeled back in to the space of Saraceno is demonstrating his Aerocene it being a performative act the imaginary. A promised freedom extenExplorer, part of his wider ongoing Aerocene project (officially launched during the United Nations Climate Change ded and then retracted at the moment you reach out your hand to grab Conference in Paris in 2015), which the website advertises as ‘your it. A form of flirting, perhaps. A proposal that seems ultimately indepersonal tool for solar-powered atmospheric exploration: a tethered- cent, if you like. It feels as if Saraceno’s balloon has hit an invisible flight starter kit offering a new way to sense the environment’. His limit of the exhibition space, a convenient container that goes beyond assistants trot around the courtyard filling the black balloon, which the bricks-and-mortar limits of a physical space to exist as a mental appears to have all the material properties of a large plastic bag, with space in which we separate art from life, and bounced back to earth. air. (Indeed, a related project, Museo Aero Solar, 2008–, features balloons And yet for all that the experience is not an unproductive one. made by communities around the world out of accumulated plastic As we leave the courtyard something has changed in a perception bags.) The trapped air is heated by the sun and the pressure difference and consciousness of the world around us and the ways in which our

December 2017

Hybrid solitary semi-social musical instrument Pavo: built by one Cyrtophora moluccensis – one week – one Argiope anasuja – ten days – and one Cyrtophora citricola – two weeks, 2014, 28 × 18 × 18 cm, spidersilk, carbon fibre, glass. Photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno

ArtReview

Omega Centauri, 1 Nephila kenianensis, 4 Cyrtophora citricola, 2014 (installation view from Vanitas at the Georg Kolbe Museum, 2014), spidersilk, carbon fibre, light, tripod, various dimensions. Photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno. Courtesy the artist, Pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa, Museo di Villa Croce, Genoa, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen and Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin

December 2017

Eclipse of the Aerocene Explorer, 2016, performance in Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, January 2016, during Tomás Saraceno’s artistic expedition. Photo: Studio Tomás Saraceno. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen, Pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa and Esther Schipper, Berlin

bodies interact with it. Of how constrained and conditioned we are by limits both physical (gravity) and social (health and safety regulations). And of how we might reclaim a space (the air), that right now, on the Korean peninsula when rockets are being test-flown overhead, is evidently both restricted and militarised (a process that the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk dates back to 1915 and the first poison gas operation launched by the German army at Ypres, a point at which, he also claims, mankind ‘discovered’ the environment). In some way your mind, at least, has been set free. Between 1992 and 1999 Saraceno trained as an architect, before going on to study art at Frankfurt’s celebrated Städelschule. “I came from architecture to art because I think the role of art is much more undefined,” he explains when we meet in his vast Berlin studio complex a month later. “I get disappointed when the category of art is something that is defined and understood. Life is a long journey to unlearn what we have learned.” Appropriately then, his Aerocene Explorer exists in a liminal position in which it is both a functional, open-source technology (‘tested and developed by a passionate global community of artists, geographers, philosophers, thinkers, speculative scientists, explorers, balloonists, and technologists, and other enthusiasts’) that enables a low-budget exploration of the atmosphere, and a ‘sculpture’ by Tomás Saraceno. The artist makes no secret of the fact that it is the much-criticised financialisation of contemporary art that allows him to push the more experimental aspects of his operation. But one wonders too if the project’s occasional designation as

an artwork makes its encouragement of free movement and a new type of occupation of space more tolerable to those authorities and corporations who might not want to tolerate these kind of thoughts or actions. Indeed, while the Explorer is designed for tethered flight (thus better suited to carrying those small devices that measure atmospheric properties and acting as a training vehicle for those with grander ideas of flight), Saraceno has also experimented with larger balloons that enable human flight. The Aerocene is a project that moves beyond the speculative and towards the pragmatic. It moves the notion of sculpture from being a statement (about qualities generated by the removal or accumulation of three-dimensional material) towards a performative act (in that the sculpture acts as a promise of a certain action – in this case flight). Perhaps it’s appropriate then that inside the ACC, Saraceno’s exhibition, Our Interplanetary Bodies, remains propositional – presenting an image of the world within which we are invited to experience and extend. The dark, open space is dominated by a series of large, glowing orbs, suspended within a network of ropes and overall suggestive of planetary systems – offering the kind of experience that you’d associate with a planetarium, or one akin to wandering into the middle of an orrery or a large scale model of the solar system. There’s a tentlike sleeping pod hovering near the roof that visitors can enter (once fitted with a safety harness) via a long ladder. Elsewhere in the room the focus shifts from the heavenly to the earthly where a Nephila spider spins its web within a dramatically illuminated glass box. And, then, to things

ArtReview

Our Interplanetary Bodies, 2017 (installation view at the Asia Culture Centre). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen, Pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa and Esther Schipper, Berlin

smaller still, via a soundtrack generated by the tracking of dust particles flowing through the space. The effect as a whole is to open perceptions (or to decongest our sense of perception) and to connect a series of perspectives on the environment and our place within it ranging in scale from the micro- to the mega-. And, at the same time, the exhibition functions as an index of some of the artist’s key concerns. Six-hundred square-metres of Saraceno’s studio is devoted to webspinning spiders. Indeed, he possesses the largest (and only) collection of three-dimensional spider webs in the world. He confesses that it’s an interest (actively developed since 2008) that was partly inspired by the twentieth century projects of radical architects and engineers such as the German Frei Otto, who developed a series of mathematically complex lightweight tensile structures, and Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s paper architecture for the Japanese pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, all in the pursuit of economically and environmentally minimalist ways of living. Saraceno’s ongoing Cloud Cities (2002–) is a series of transformable, connectable, inflatable, inhabitable spaces, while works such as the largescale installation In Orbit (2013) feature micro-cities made up of nets and inflatable spheres suspended 25 metres above the ground. Saraceno’s interest in webs is as much metaphorical as it is physical. For both the Aerocene and other projects he consistently operates within interdisciplinary networks and communities. The Max Planck Institute, for example, is currently renting space in his studio. At 7am each morning (three hours before the studio itself starts work)

a researcher visits the space to record the sounds of the spiders and their webs. He may or may not have any interest in Saraceno’s activities in the field of art. Saraceno himself is currently researching the use of webs as a musical instrument (in part in conjunction with the American composer Ari Benjamin Meyers), in between giving the occasional TED talk and other educational lectures. Talking to other disciplines is a “beautiful mind exercise”, the artist says. “It extends your perception of the world. People come here to hear some creatures scratching around. It changes our behaviour too,” he adds with a sense of both curiosity and wonder. He’s encouraged the spiders to operate in communities too, exhibiting webs that are made by social and antisocial species and ‘hybrid webs’ made by spiders of more than one type. It’s an example, he says, of the potential of collaboration. “Spiders have characters,” he goes on to state. “It seems that their roles interchange according to the time of day.” After which the artist quips that if Karl Marx had known this he might have had second thoughts about his theories concerning the differentiation of labour. Is Saraceno worried that he might be exploiting his spider labourers? I ask. The artist pauses then laughs ambiguously. ar Our Interplanetary Bodies is on show at the Asia Cultural Centre, Gwangju through 25 March. Tomás Saraceno: Entangled Orbits is on show at the Baltimore Museum of Art through 22 July Mark Rappolt is editor-in-chief of ArtReview

December 2017

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa Fail Better by Linda Taylor

ArtReview

December 2017

In Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s solo show at CAPC Musée d’Art Con- commissioned by the Bienal de São Paulo and Los Angeles County temporain de Bordeaux earlier this year, the vast cathedrallike Museum of Art, borrows its title from an experimental 1975 producmuseum appeared as if in the macabre aftermath of some artificial tion by art students from the Universidad Popular in Guatemala of catastrophe – an ambitious genetic experiment, perhaps. Its black- Hugo Carillo’s 1962 play of the same title. The students’ adaption of ened floor was strewn with white carved forms, like fallen masonry. the play was in direct protest to the repressive political environment Curious human–plant hybrids hung from large steel structures or imposed by the Guatemalan government, and many of its participants languished among the ruins, their bizarre anatomies starkly defined were forced to leave the country or assume new identities following its in the cold, hard glare of fluorescent tubes embedded in the rusting staging. Ramírez-Figueroa states an interest in the theatre as “a tool framework. The most unsettling of these hybrids, the only figure to of consciousness-raising”, but his work often evokes early-twentiethstand on its own feet, was a singular plant-pod-dwarf. An oxymo- century movements in the arts, such as the Theatre of the Absurd and ronic amalgam of horror and humour, of sinister intent and childlike Dada, which offer less direct rebukes to the politics of war by refusing innocence – this diminutive character might be perpetrator or victim, to engage with authority on its own terms or with its own language, producer or product. Cruel ringmaster or tragic clown. rather than the more overt politicking of the 1970s. Beckett’s famous (and – forgive me – relentlessly quoted) line from This queer figure encapsulates a compelling quality of the Guatemala-born, Canada-raised, Berlin-based artist’s work: its Worstward Ho (1983), ‘Try Again. Fail again. Fail better’, came to me refusal to be entirely one thing during my first encounter with or another. Ramírez-Figueroa’s Ramírez-Figueroa’s work. In The work offers a sad humour, redolent of a work is queer in the widest posthe video Incremental Architecture forlorn Buster Keaton standing in the window (2015) the artist walks into the sible sense of that word, a sense frame wearing a white corruthat includes the dissolution of a fallen house, a reflection on the Sisyphean of binary oppositions: male/ nature of the human condition and a mischievous gated plastic cube that, with its female, gay/straight, light/dark, facade of columns and arches, critique of progress and the modernist project resembles an architect’s model. light/heavy, culture/nature, tacky/ With his bare arms and legs tasteful and so on, but also encompasses a range of contemporary and historical dictionary defi- protruding from the cube, there is something of Alice – grown too large for the White Rabbit’s house – about Ramírez-Figueroa’s nitions such as strange, odd, peculiar, confounding and tricksy. The title of the show, Linnæus in Tenebris, recalls the title of Bertolt appearance. He is awaited in stillness and silence by three assistants Brecht’s 1919 play Lux in Tenebris (Light in Darkness) in which the hypo- dressed in stagehand-black and arranged on a two-tier scaffold and critical Paduk deters brothel visitors with a bright light and illus- step ladder, and three musicians assembled before a marimba bearing trated lectures on venereal disease, only to invest his profits in one their band name, Siempre Juntos (Always Together). The assistants of the brothels, allowing him full exploitative rights over the sex pile four more modules of varying architectural styles atop the one workers. Both Ramírez-Figueroa’s largescale installation and Brecht’s worn by Ramírez-Figueroa. Balancing the precarious vertical tower farcical play humorously scrutinise the dubious desires and motives of block, which extends his height twofold, the artist takes up position and raises his arms outward. At those who profess to ‘enlighten’. this signal the musicians play a I begin to make so many correlaThere is an inference that Western ‘scientific sprightly, vaudevillesque tune tions between Brecht’s play and objectivity’ is no more rational than crackpot and Ramírez-Figueroa begins to Ramírez-Figueroa’s work that dance slowly, with deadpan exI am surprised and slightly crestconspiracy theory. There is also, however, a pression and improbable grace. fallen when the artist tells me delight in the surreal way these theories create The music stops upon the ineviBrecht is not a deliberate referent fantastic narratives from disparate elements. table collapse of the assemblage, and he doesn’t think he knows and the artist returns to the the play (“my work is often more intelligent and better-read than me”). He adds, however, that assistants, who pile on more architecture. The sequence is repeated members of his family involved in Guatemalan experimental theatre twice more until all the modules lie scattered on the floor (not unlike during the 1970s were “definitely into Brecht”, so a subconscious the ‘fallen masonry’ in Linnæus in Tenebris), whereupon the artist leaves awareness is not entirely impossible. the scene with shoulders slumped and head bowed in the manner of While many performance artists insist on distinguishing their a disappointed child. The repetitive futility and engaging tenacity of art practice from theatre, Ramírez-Figueroa, whose practice encom- the performance also recalls Albert Camus’s central metaphor in The passes live action, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, is more open Myth of Sisyphus, his 1942 treatise on the absurd. to exploring the potential of theatrical tropes and devices in his work. Even with no wider knowledge of the artist’s work at that point, His sculptures often double as props and are designated as such in Incremental Architecture offered a great deal: a sad humour, redolent Props for Eréndira (2014), a work commissioned by the 10th Gwangju of a forlorn Buster Keaton standing in the window of a fallen house, Biennale, which imagines an alternative set for the titular film, a reflection on the Sisyphean nature of the human condition and scripted by Gabriel García Márquez (left unmade for over a decade, the a mischievous critique of progress and the modernist project. The work, I would later learn, is a development film was eventually released in 1983, directed preceding pages Linnæus in Tenebris, 2017 (installation view). of an earlier performance, A Brief History by Ruy Guerra). Corazón del Espantapájaros Photo: Arthur Péquin. Courtesy CAPC Musée d’Art of Architecture in Guatemala (2010) (recently (Scarecrow Heart, 2016), a recent performance Contemporain, Bordeaux

ArtReview

both images Shit-Baby and the Crumpled Giraffe, 2017, carved expanded polystyrene, epoxy resin, fibreglass, mineral pigments, dimensions variable. Photo: Bruno Lopes. Courtesy Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon

December 2017

revived for the Guggenheim, New York, as part of its Latin American Circle performance presentation in May 2017), which, with costumes modelled on a Mayan pyramid, a colonial church and the modernist National Bank of Guatemala, more specifically critiques colonial appropriation and processes of urban regeneration in Guatemala City. Perhaps it says as much about my own predilections as it does about Ramírez-Figueroa that I once again sensed a Beckettian torpor during a performance in Bordeaux, also titled Linnæus in Tenebris and made in collaboration with Guatemalan poet Wingston González. A combination of affectionate codependence and weary antagonism between the two performers was redolent of Vladimir and Estragon in their interminable wait for Godot. The title of González’s script, The Beach Awaits You, is both a promise of something better and of death – given the poet’s references in his text to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which Victor’s best friend, murdered by the former’s creation, is washed up on a beach. If the installation, which is recast as a set for the performance, insinuates a biocatastrophe, these characters, whose costumes made from latex moulds of the sculptures give an uncanny impression of their innards spilling outwards, might be its mutant survivors. Their speech is slow, deliberate and repetitive, as if they are relearning how to speak, or to connect with each other across the gap between their languages as one speaks Spanish, the other French. Even when permitted to read an English translation of the script, I found the dialogue disjointed and difficult to follow, as if the characters were trying to piece together some kind of cohesive meaning from disparate fragments of memory and dream. If contemporary Western minds are confused by the confluence of contradictions in Ramírez-Figueroa’s work or perturbed by anomalous specimens such as a bunch of bananas sprouting a human arm, one might blame Carl Linnæus, the Swedish botanist who devised the modern system of classifying living organisms. Linnæus is

emblematic of Western eighteenth-century rationalism that sought to drive out the ‘darkness’ of irrationality with ‘enlightened’ scientific objectivity. Any creature that cannot be defined within the hierarchal and distinct categories of Linnæan taxonomy is logically deemed monstrous, alien and unnatural – like Frankenstein’s monster. Less well known than his organisation of living things into Kingdoms, Phyla, etc is Linnæus’s subdivision of the species Homo sapiens into continental ‘varieties’ – each with particular qualities or failings. Unsurprisingly he deemed his own ‘variety’, Europæus albus (white European), superior to all others – a racist belief-dressed-as-fact that enabled moral and scientific justification of colonialism and slavery. In Linnæus in Tenebris Ramírez-Figueroa confronts the legacy of the Enlightenment – and by extension European colonialism – with the experience of those displaced and alienated by its reverberant effects. The steel structures that dominate the installation are like those used on banana plantations, where many of the artist’s compatriots and family members would labour on land they were not permitted to own for a product from which they did not profit: the very definition of Marxist alienation and a major contributory factor to the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96). Colonial goods shipped to the West were stored in vast, purpose-built warehouses such as this one in the centre of Bordeaux, which now houses the museum of contemporary art. The imposing, navelike space rises nonchalantly above the incriminatory scene with arched and arch indifference. The sculptures, ‘like fallen masonry’, have not fallen from this austere interior but refer instead to the elaborate stone carving that adorns much of Bordeaux’s finest architecture. If plants and animals carved in stone mark an appropriative civilising of nature, Ramírez-Figueroa underscores this imposition by carving his peculiar menagerie from that most unnatural and polluting of materials: expanded polystyrene.

Incremental architecture, 2015, performance for video. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City

ArtReview

It may seem simplistic, ridiculous even, to blame the single figure of Linnæus for the violent fallout of colonialism. In insinuating such a direct causality Ramírez-Figueroa deliberately plays with methods often employed by conspiracy theorists who join the dots between apparently unrelated phenomena to create simple, yet incredible, explanations for complex, often political, affairs. Ramírez-Figueroa’s interest in conspiracy theory was apparent in his sculptural installation God’s Reptilian Finger (2016) at Gasworks, London, in which he aligned David Icke’s belief in a shapeshifting reptilian master race from outer space with the pseudo-archaeological practices and beliefs of Mormon missionaries in Guatemala. There is an inference that Western ‘scientific objectivity’ is no more rational than crackpot conspiracy theory. There is also, however, in Ramírez-Figueroa’s work, a delight in the surreal way these theories create fantastic narratives from disparate elements. Another hybrid, a stork with human toddler legs, appears in Ramírez-Figueroa’s most recent exhibition in Portugal, Shit-Baby and the Crumpled Giraffe (2017), an installation sculpted entirely in polystyrene at Kunsthalle Lissabon. Like the child-bearing stork of sexuality-denying parental myth, it holds in its beak a cloth hammock that seems to contain not a baby but a baby’s primary product: shit. The inscrutable concentration on the face of a child-figure, who sits as if on a potty but directly on the floor rather than on any of the pristine chamber pots that are arranged around the space, suggests that he might be the creator of the copious poo that not only soils the stork’s bundle but also rises from a lidded pot like a charmed snake and describes a shit-streamer flourish in midair. The third figure of the sculptural installation is a giraffe that, with its white geometric form and pointed feet, resembles an enlarged origami model. The ‘crumpled giraffe’ appears as a symbol for the mother in a dream of ‘Little Hans’ in Freud’s famous case study of a phobic five-year-old

boy used by Freud to demonstrate and prove his hypothesised five stages of psychosexual development – which include the anal stage. In Freudian theory the anal stage, in which the infant takes pleasure in bowel control, precedes the phallic stage, in which the genitals become the primary site of pleasure and Oedipal desire comes into play. Ramírez-Figueroa comically hints at Oedipal sexuality with the suggestive pink protruding tongue of the giraffe ‘mother’. The faecesclearing-toddler-stork, on the other hand, with its smooth, genitalfree crotch, might stand more for the societal repression of sexuality and its equation with filth. If Shit-Baby and the Crumpled Giraffe marks a shift away from the subject of the Guatemalan Civil War, which forced Ramírez-Figueroa and his family to flee Guatemala for Mexico then Canada in his childhood, it retains an analogous concern with unbalanced struggles for autonomy and power. While Ramírez-Figueroa tells me he is keen to call out those guilty of violent exploitation and injustice, his work never feels didactic. There is no moralistic mission to enlighten. A couple of months before I saw the Kunsthalle Lissabon installation, I asked Ramírez-Figueroa whether, given his recurrent references to childhood and dreams, he was influenced by Freud. He replied that he “used to enjoy reading Freud’s case studies as if they were short stories”. It strikes me that this proclivity to read fact and theory as fiction – to deny generic distinctions and dichotomies – underlies the uncanny and idiosyncratic nature of Ramírez-Figueroa’s work, in which light can be dark and darkness, brilliantly, light. ar Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: The Green Ray is on show at daadgalerie, Berlin, through 14 January. Another solo exhibition can be seen from 2 March through 7 April at Sies + Hoke, Düsseldorf Linda Taylor is a writer and artist based in the UK

God’s Reptilian Finger, 2015, fibreglass, carved polystyrene, UV sensitive pigments and uv lighting system, dimensions variable. Courtesy Gasworks, London

December 2017

The Truth About ‘Cultural Appropriation’ By Kenan Malik

M. F. Husain, Mithuna, 1963, oil on canvas, 86 × 188 cm. Courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

Whether it’s art or politics, campaigns against cultural appropriation are bad news for interaction and imagination 70

ArtReview

Maqbool Fida Husain is perhaps India’s greatest artist of the twenOne of the key arguments of many such critics is that one speaks tieth century. His work linked ancient and modern traditions and through one’s identity; that one speaks, as writer Nesrine Malik has helped transform Indian modernism. But not everyone appreci- put it, ‘as a’: ‘as a woman’, ‘as a Muslim’, ‘as an immigrant’. And those ated Husain’s work. His depictions of Hindu deities, often naked, who are not ‘as a’ must take their cue from those who are, especially outraged Hindu nationalists who questioned his right, as someone of if they happen to be privileged by being white or male or straight. Muslim background, to depict figures sacred to Hindus, accusing him ‘Lived experience’, Malik writes, ‘is on its way to becoming the supeof ‘hurting religious feelings’. His home and gallery were ransacked, rior and most veracious form of truth.’ And as the novelist Kamila many of his paintings destroyed. He faced law suits, including ones Shamsie has observed, ‘What started as a thoughtful post-colonial for ‘promoting enmity between different groups’. The harassment critique of certain types of imperial texts somehow became a pecuspread beyond India’s borders. In 2006, London’s Asia House Gallery liar orthodoxy that essentially denies the possibility of imaginative shut an exhibition of his work after protests and the defacement of engagement with anyone outside your little circle.’ two paintings. Husain, who died in 2011, was forced to live his last What is really being appropriated, in other words, is not culture but the right to police cultures and experiences, a right appropriated years in exile, in London and Qatar. Were he still alive today, M.F. Husain’s Hindu critics might well by those who license themselves to be arbiters of the correct forms of be accusing him not of sacrilege but of ‘cultural appropriation’ – the cultural borrowing. Such policing is deeply problematic, both artis‘theft’ of images and ideas that tically and politically. It deadens creaThe idea of cultural appropriation has, truly belong to another culture tivity and it assaults imagination. The and that he had no right to take importance of imagination is that we in recent years, moved from being can take ourselves beyond where we without permission. an abstruse academic and legal concept are, beyond our own narrow perspecThe idea of cultural approto a mainstream political issue. From tives, to imagine other peoples, other priation has, in recent years, worlds, other experiences. Without moved from being an abstruse Beyonce’s Bollywood outfits to Dana academic and legal concept to a the ability to do that, both artistic creaSchutz’s painting of Emmett Till mainstream political issue. From tivity and progressive politics shrivel. Beyonce’s Bollywood outfits to Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, Take the debate about Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), a painting and from the recent controversy surrounding Sam Durant’s sculpture derived from photographs of the body of Emmett Till, a fourteenScaffold (2012) to Omer Fast’s recreation of an old Chinatown storefront year-old African American murdered by two white men in Mississippi at James Cohan Gallery, New York, there is barely a week in which in 1955. Till’s mother had urged the publication of photographs of her controversies over cultural appropriation are not in the headlines. son’s mutilated body as it lay in its coffin. Till’s murder, and the photoSo, what is cultural appropriation and why has it become such graphs, played a major role in shaping the civil-rights movement and a contentious issue? Susan Scafidi, professor of law at Fordham have acquired an almost sacred quality. University, defines it as ‘taking intellectual property, traditional Schutz’s painting caused little controversy until it was included knowledge, cultural expressions, or artefacts from someone else’s in the prestigious Whitney Biennial Exhibition in New York. Many objected to a white painter depicting culture without permission’. This Appropriation suggests theft, and a process such a traumatic moment in black can include the ‘unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, analogous to the seizure of land or artefacts. history, and for that depiction to redress, music, language, folklore, ceive the accolade of a Whitney BienBut when it comes to what UNESCO calls cuisine, traditional medicine, renial presentation. The British artist ‘intangible’ cultural forms, the question Hannah Black even organised a petiligious symbols, etc.’ But what is it for knowledge of ‘ownership’ becomes far less meaningful tion to have the work destroyed. or expression or a cuisine to ‘beIn the same Whitney Biennial was and far more tortuous to define long’ to a culture? And who gives a painting by Henry Taylor titled The permission for someone from another culture to use such know- Times Thay Ain’t Changing, Fast Enough! (2017) which depicts the death of Philando Castile, an African American man horrifically shot dead ledge or forms? Appropriation suggests theft, and a process analogous to the in his car by a policeman, in 2016. Taylor’s painting, unlike Schutz’s, seizure of land or artefacts. With artefacts and land the meaning of has received little criticism, but rather has been praised for its ‘hauntownership is clear, even if in many cases disputed. But when it comes ingly vivid depiction’ of the shooting of Castile. to what UNESCO calls ‘intangible’ cultural forms – ideas, language, In my view neither painting has significant artistic merit. For folklore, cuisine, religious symbols and so on – the question of ‘owner- critics of cultural appropriation, however, the real difference is not ship’ becomes far less meaningful and far more tortuous to define. aesthetic, but identitarian. Schutz is white and Taylor black. What really lies behind the debate about cultural appropriation is To subsume aesthetic considerations to those of identity is to not ownership but gatekeeping – the making of rules or an etiquette render art meaningless. It is also politically troubling. The campaign to determine how a particular cultural form may be used and by against Schutz’s work, as the American critic Adam Shatz has obwhom. What critics of cultural appropriation want to establish is that served, contains an ‘implicit disavowal that acts of radical sympathy, certain people have the right to determine who can use such knowl- and imaginative identification, are possible across racial lines’. edge or forms, because at the heart of criticism of cultural appropriaOr, as Shamsie tweeted (in response to the controversy over Lionel tion is the relationship between gatekeeping and identity. Shriver’s defence of cultural appropriation at last year’s Brisbane

December 2017

A key argument of those who abhor cultural appropriation is that Writers Festival) ‘”You – other – are unimaginable” is a far more probif one does make use of ideas or images or objects from other cultures, lematic attitude than “You are imaginable”.’ Many critics of cultural appropriation insist that they are one should do so only with ‘respect’. ‘We can enter other cultures’, the opposed not to cultural engagement, but to racism. They want to Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally suggests, only ‘as long as we… protect marginalised cultures and ensure that such cultures speak treat them with cultural respect’. for themselves and are not simply to be seen through the eyes of There are certainly many cases of the racist use of cultural forms, more privileged groups. The American critic Briahna Joy Gray from minstrelsy onwards. Much art, though, is necessarily disreacknowledges that ‘The idea that only black artists have the right to spectful, even contemptuous, of cultures and traditions. address Emmett Till’s murder through art seems wrong.’ But, she In Chris Ofili’s painting, The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), one of the argues, critics of Dana Schutz ‘have a point’ about ‘exploitation’: Madonna’s breasts is made of elephant dung and she is surrounded ‘Depicting Till is not a problem but using Till to garner profit and by collaged images of female genitalia, cut out from porn magazines, made to resemble butterflies or angels. When shown at the Brooklyn acclaim would be.’ It is true that cultural engagement does not take place on a level Museum in 1999, the painting was denounced by many Christians, playing field, but is shaped by racism and inequality. Racism ensured including the then mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, as ‘sick’ and as that the great black pioneers of rock ’n’ roll never received their due, ‘desecrating somebody else’s religion’. William A Donohue, President of whereas many white artists, from Elvis Presley onwards, were feted as the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, called for a picket of cultural icons. Yet, as the poet Amiri the show, claiming that Ofili’s work The trouble with the notion of ‘disrespect’ ‘induces revulsion’. Such responses Baraka once observed, the issue here is that it conflates several issues: from were inevitable – the point of the is not that of cultural appropriation at all: ‘The problem is that if painting was to challenge traditional outright racism, to the unthinking but not portrayals of the Madonna. The Beatles tell me that they learned necessarily racist use of ‘exotic’ cultural everything they know from Blind Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Willie [Johnson], I want to know forms, to the deliberate challenge of cultural Verses (1988) was seen by many Muswhy Blind Willie is still running an lims as blasphemous in its depiction and religious beliefs and rules elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s of Islam, and it was. In its retelling that kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of of the story of the founding of Islam, and its portrayal of the Prophet and of his wives, the novel was inevitably, and deliberately, disreculture because that’s normal.’ Preventing the Beatles from drawing on the work of Blind Willie spectful of Islamic traditions. Johnson or other black singers would have done little to improve M.F. Husain did not intend his paintings of Hindu deities to be disreblack peoples’ lives. It would not have overthrown Jim Crow laws in spectful. But many Hindus certainly saw them as so, a disrespect made the 1950s. It would not rid America of discrimination in the labour worse, in their eyes, by the fact that the artist was not Hindu himself. market today. Nor will preventing Dana Schutz ‘profiting’ from The trouble with the notion of ‘disrespect’ is that it conflates painting Emmett Till protect the Emmett Tills of today. several issues: from outright racism, to the unthinking but not necesOnly mass social and political campaigns to transform the very sarily racist use of ‘exotic’ cultural forms, to the deliberate challenge structures of society – such as the civil rights movement of the of cultural and religious beliefs and rules. It also conflates respect 1950s and 1960s – can bring about such change. Otherwise, social for people with respect for their cultures and traditions. Equality justice comes to be seen not as the erasure of exploitative structures requires us to treat all people as autonomous moral beings with equal but merely as the possibility of ‘cultural fairness’ within them. The rights and dignity. But while that requires that we respect the right of campaigns against cultural appropriation are an implicit acceptance others to hold different ideas and beliefs, it does not require us to treat that the playing field cannot be levelled, and that the best we can do all their ideas and beliefs and traditions with respect or deem all ideas and beliefs and traditions as being of equal worth. is fence off certain areas.

ArtReview

The consequence of these two types of conflation is to make it letter to the Whitney Museum demanding the removal and destruceasier for those who do not want their cultural beliefs to be chal- tion of Schutz’s Open Casket insisted that ‘if Black people are telling lenged to dismiss all critiques as ‘disrespectful’ or ‘racist’. ‘Disrespect’ her that the painting has caused unnecessary hurt, she and you is the contemporary secular version of ‘blasphemy’. And its impact must accept the truth of this. The painting must go.’ In fact, just as many black people opposed the closure of Exhibit B, so many African is as pernicious. Every society has its gatekeepers, whose role is to protect certain Americans, including artists such as Kara Walker and Jack Whitten, institutions, maintain the privileges of particular groups and cordon have defended Schutz. But, for the critics, only their voices constitute off some beliefs from challenge. Such gatekeepers protect not the ‘the truth’. Far from aiding the marginalised, such campaigns serve marginalised but the powerful. Racism itself is a form of gate- to close down dissent and debate. keeping, a means of denying racialised groups equal rights, access The very term ‘cultural appropriation’ is inappropriate. Cultures work not through appropriation but through messy interaction. and opportunities. In minority communities, the gatekeepers are usually self- Writers and artists, indeed all human beings, necessarily engage appointed guardians whose power rests on their ability to define with the experiences of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone what is acceptable and what is beyond the bounds. This is true not just inhabits one (or several), and in inhabiting a culture, one finds the of debates about cultural appropriation, but of much wider contro- tools for reaching out to other cultures. versies over minority communities and the arts. Cultural interaction is necessarily messy because the world is messy. Some of that messiness is good: Consider, for example, the Cultures work not through appropriation the complexity and diversity of the case of Exhibit B, a show about but through messy interaction. Writers world. Some of it is damaging: the ‘human zoos’ designed by South racial, sexual and economic inequaliAfrican Brett Bailey. It featured and artists, indeed all human beings, 12 ‘tableaux’ in which motionties that disfigure our world. necessarily engage with the experiences less performers were exhibited Such damaging messiness will as artefacts. These tableaux were not be cleaned up by limiting cultural of others. Nobody owns a culture, but drawn from nineteenth-century interaction, or by confining it within a everyone inhabits one (or several) racist freak shows, which Exhibit particular etiquette. In reframing poB took as the starting point for an exploration of slavery, colonialism litical and economic issues as cultural ones, or as issues of identity, and present-day racism. campaigns against cultural appropriation obscure the roots of racism, In 2014, the show was to have been staged by London’s Barbican and make it harder to challenge it. In constraining what Adam Shatz Centre but was closed down because of protests that it was racist. The called ‘acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative identification… actors in the show put out a statement insisting that ‘we are proud across racial lines’, they make such challenges more difficult still. to be black performers in this piece’ and that, far from being racist, The campaigns against cultural appropriation are bad for Exhibit B was ‘a powerful tool in the fight against racism’. To which creative art. And they are bad for progressive politics. They seek to one of the critics, the sociologist Kehinde Andrews, in a debate with police interaction and constrain imagination. For the sake of both art Exhibit B actor Stella Odunlami, replied, ‘black artists do not have the and politics we need less policing and constraints, more interaction authority to define what is and is not acceptable’. But black sociolo- and imagination. ar gists apparently do. The campaigns against cultural appropriation, like that against Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. His From Fatwa Exhibit B, empower not those who suffer from racism or inequality to Jihad: How the World Changed From the Satanic Verses but, in the acid words of the African-American critic Adolph Reed, to Charlie Hebdo was published in a paperback edition earlier ‘the guild of Racial Spokespersonship’, those who take it on themthis year. This article is an edited version of a talk given at Rich Mix, London on 10 November 2017 selves to be the guardians of the acceptable. Hannah Black’s open

December 2017

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (overture); or, Overture con claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members), 1993, paint and enamel on metal. Courtesy the artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California

ArtReview

Power in Black and White By Jonathan T. D. Neil

‘It’s like Jet up in here’, ‘Black is in fashion now’, ‘We were eight years aestheticized and deployed in secondary images to sell stuff.’ Hence in power’: important excerpts from the intellectual discourse of why ‘black is in fashion now’. blackness today. The final quote belongs to Ta-Nehisi Coates, arguably the most Four statements. Four judgements. Only the last one makes me important writer in America today. We Were Eight Years in Power is the uncomfortable. Why? Because it’s mine, and I am white – more specif- title of Coates’s just-published book, an excerpt of which appeared in ically, I am (in no particular order) a highly educated, white, male, The Atlantic under the title ‘The First White President’, a klieg-light heterosexual, professional educator and writer. There is another illumination of the racism, both latent and manifest, that pervades the name for that: it’s ‘privileged’. Indeed I am: boarding school, Andover; US electorate and, alleges Coates, our liberal intelligentsia. Indicting college, Cornell; PhD, Columbia; job, most recently, Sotheby’s writers such as Mark Lilla, who declaim the left’s multigenerational Institute of Art, Director and Head of Global Business Development; move to a ‘pseudo-politics’ of identity and the ‘self-regard’ it entails, Coates reaffirms, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, that ‘all side-hustle, ArtReview. politics are identity politics – except the politics of white people, the It doesn’t get much worse, or better, than that. The quotes come from three writers whom I admire deeply. politics of the bloody heirloom’, Coates’s name for the violent inheritThe first is from a piece by Darryl Pinckney. The quote isn’t his, but ance of racism the dividends of which whites have enjoyed since the one he relates from the curator Camille Brewer, whom Pinckney founding of the Republic. Such is the power of whiteness. recalls running into on ‘Frederick It is this whiteness that stands It is a whiteness that pervades the artworld, Douglass Boulevard in Harlem’ – a behind Kelley Walker’s exhibition line that is meant to set the racial its museums, its galleries, its fairs and benefits Direct Drive at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis last year, colour of the scene. It appeared in and other self-congratulatory proceedings, and was the target of the boycotts The New York Review of Books, where behind which Ta-Nehisi Coates’s tailwind – and resignations that followed the Pinckney published ‘The Trickster’s Art’, a lovely review, primarily of inclusion of Walker’s image appromore like a tradewind – blows strong Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portrait priations (his standard modus show at the New Museum this past summer. Brewer is referring to the operandi) of photographs from the 1963 Birmingham campaigns for pages of Artforum, where advertisements for shows by black artists racial justice and covers of black lad-mag KING – images that, though appear newly prevalent. made in 2006, were now appearing in a city where the senseless killing The second quote is from Zadie Smith’s Harper’s Magazine review of Michael Brown at the hands of a white St Louis police officer set off of Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017), a biting racial critique dressed months of unrest and catalysed the Black Lives Matter movement. It up in the genre of a horror thriller, and Dana Schutz’s painting Open is this whiteness that stands behind Schutz’s decision to depict the Casket (2017), the portrait of the murdered Emmett Till that was at the beaten and murdered Till in Open Casket (and which was protested with centre of so much debate over race and cultural appropriation on the calls from some artists and activists for this painting’s removal from occasion of this past year’s Whitney Biennial. Again, the quote isn’t the Whitney Biennial and the work’s destruction). It is this whiteness Smith’s, but is quoted by her, as what one character in Peele’s movie that also stands behind Sam Durant’s Scaffold (2012), and the artist’s says to its hero, Chris, and which sums up the emotional alchemy of decision to give that sculpture, and his rights to it, to the Dakota elders contemporary liberal white guilt. ‘In the liberal circles depicted in for whom the work – which included a reproduction of a scaffold used Get Out,’ Smith writes, ‘everything that was once reviled – our eyes, to hang 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862 (to date the our skin, our backsides, our noses, our arms, our legs, our breasts, largest state-sponsored execution in US history) – represented one of and of course our hair – is now openly envied and celebrated and the later episodes of an as yet unacknowledged genocide.

December 2017

Sam Durant, Scaffold, 2012 (installation view). Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy the Dakota Oyate and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

ArtReview

More than these recent episodes in the history of art’s institu...although the move from racial identity to cultural identity appears to tional confrontation with the history and legacy of racially motivated replace essentialist criteria of identity (who we are) with performative criteria injustice, we know this whiteness pervades the American cultural (what we do), the commitment to pluralism requires in fact that the question landscape, a signature of the origin of Western (ie white) Modernism of who we are continue to be understood as prior to questions about what we do. and the modern world, a whiteness that, as Coates writes in his piece Since, in pluralism, what we do can be justified only by reference to who we are, on Trump, ‘cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tail- we must, in pluralism, begin by affirming who we are; it is only once we know wind for most of them’. It is a whiteness that pervades the artworld, who we are that we will be able to tell what we should do; it is only when we its museums, its galleries, its fairs and benefits and other self-congrat- know which race we are that we can tell which culture is ours. ulatory proceedings, behind which Coates’s tailwind – more like What this meant during the 1920s was that being ‘American’ would no longer be equivalent to being a citizen and would now a tradewind – blows strong. If I stress ‘cultural landscape’ here, it is not because I believe the require being a part of (adopting, or assimilating to) American culture. categories of the economic or the political are somehow free of this At the same time, however, that American culture was itself being whiteness – all evidence today is tragically and sadly to the contrary – redescribed in terms of race – in terms, that is, of whiteness. This is but because it is in the arena of culture that racial identity is affirmed the logic of nativism, and it is a logic that is at work again today. and adjudicated. This is not new. It is significant that the last noteHence my discomfort. Not only because to be white and to make worthy efflorescence of racial consciousness in the United States, at a statement regarding blackness is to draw upon the reserve of whiteleast as made current by the visual arts, was crystallised in and by ness (Coates’s ‘bloody heirloom’) that I have inherited and which has the 1993 Whitney Biennial. It was then and there, in the exhibited long enjoyed and wielded a violent power in the US and around the work, but also explicitly in Thelma Golden’s catalogue essay ‘What’s globe – but especially in the US. But also because today, in the wake of White…?’, that ‘whiteness’ was identified, one might say diagnosed, Trump’s election and the politics and violent legacies of racism that pushed him into office (Trump’s immigration bans echo the racially as the condition to be metaphorically fought, like one does a cancer. At the time, though, the chosen weapon of treatment was ‘differ- motivated 1924 Immigration Act, which also set immigration limits ence’, and the deployment of ‘difference’, in both theories and prac- based on national origin); in the wake of a newly visible and emboldened white nationalism (and its tices of cultural analysis and Nazi enthusiasts, another arteinstitutional engagement, would My own commitment to pluralism necesfact of the 1920s); in the wake of do the work of dismantling sitates the affirmation of my own whiteness, a newly amplified nativist rhetthe ‘grand narrative’ of whitea cultural identity that, as much as I might oric about ‘America First’ and ‘real ness. Daniel Joseph Martinez America’ and ‘real Americans’ (all put it plainly in his muchwish it, cannot be disarticulated from reproduced and discussed interthe whiteness that stands behind Trump. Must of which echo the political rhetvention, which emblazoned the oric of the 1920s); my own commitWhitney’s metal admissions tags one jettison a commitment to pluralism, then? ment to pluralism necessitates, with the phrase ‘I can’t imagine on this logic, the affirmation – to the cultural politics of difference? ever wanting to be white’ – titled: of my own whiteness (see above), Museum Tags: Second Movement (overture); or, Overture con claque (Overture a cultural identity that, as much as I might wish it, cannot be disarticwith Hired Audience Members) (1993) – and so interpolated equally ulated from the whiteness that stands behind Trump; just as much as their wearers and readers in a power dynamic of racial identifica- it stands behind the recent episodes of racial politics involving Schutz, tion and difference. Walker and Durant; just as much, one must add, as it stands behind Though a host of theoretical writing coming out of Europe begin- the artworld itself. ning in the late 1950s and 60s canonised and conceptualised differMust one jettison a commitment to pluralism, then? – to the ence by embedding it firmly within the history and discourse of decol- cultural politics of difference? This is the way pointed to by Lilla, onisation, difference in the United States during the early 1990s was by Michaels and by others, who argue for an end to cultural politics a mechanism for challenging, first and foremost, whiteness, which tout court and its replacement with the politics of ‘citizenship’ (Lilla) Cornel West’s ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’ (1990) did or ‘class’ (Michaels). There is comfort here, in the strength of the the most to forcefully articulate. Given our current circumstances, argument, in the unyielding logic, but I fear that a commitment to however, it is useful to recall one of the less celebrated (or notorious) the politics of citizenship or class will compromise a set of aesthetic books by Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and commitments that I don’t want to give up, commitments to the Pluralism, which was published in this period (1995) and took up the work of, for example, Kara Walker, Leslie Hewitt, Shinique Smith, prehistory of West’s ‘cultural politics of difference’ by tracking the Rashid Johnson, Rico Gatson or Adam Pendleton, artists who, like discourse of American nativism to the 1920s. What Michaels demon- the authors mentioned above, I admire and whose work exceeds the strated during the 1990s was that, in the 1920s, racial difference was ‘rising tide’ politics of citizenship and class; whose work also points being redescribed – in the progressive and not-so-progressive litera- to a way through or past the power of whiteness, by pointing to the ture of the era – as cultural difference, and defended as such in the power of blackness, to its histories and figures and forms, which, name of ‘pluralism’. At the same time, however, that pluralism, and at least in the US, is redefining American culture as something other the cultural differences it supported, could only be grounded upon than white. ar a newly won commitment to identity. As Michaels writes in the first chapter of Our America: Jonathan T.D. Neil is associate editor of ArtReview

December 2017

Carol Rhodes Nowhere Land By Mark Prince

Photography, with its automatic claim to evidence what it pictures, The lack of human presence could be a function of distance, with the emphasises that painting has never been suited to documentary, buildings just remote enough for their windows to be visible, but not despite having been the default medium of visual record up until the the figures surrounding them. And yet it seems an ontological rather end of the nineteenth century. Painting is only proof of its painter’s than merely perceptual parameter, and carries over to paintings that process. Contemporary painting that seeks to prioritise its documen- show their subjects at close enough range to reveal human activity. It tary function is mostly either gauche or an ironic process of coming is a question of divesting the landscapes of a familiar presence in order around to ‘realising that one can’t make an image’ of one’s subject, allow them to become repositories of states we project onto them: loneas Frank Auerbach once put it. It is either blinkered to a context that liness, disorientation, dislocation, the desire to escape. Distance from has overtaken it, or using its means to expose their limitations. Carol the action is as much a psychological condition as a matter of standRhodes’s paintings are of the latter sort, but surreptitiously so. Their point. Implicating the viewer (and artist), it is distance kept as much as topographical appearance proves to be a guise rather than a measure, distance from. But it is also another sign for the medium: for the relative as if abstraction had assumed the postures of realism to gain itself a reluctance of painting to let you into the image it offers. The landscape credibility in which she doesn’t ultimately believe. These postures are becomes subject rather than setting by avowing its condition as a taut not merely a set of received stylistic tics, but the deceptive signs of conglomeration of painted forms, as painting before place. And the conforming to the powerfully empirical character of the British land- absence extends not only to that of people: the spaghetti junction of Rivers, Roads (2013) is devoid of vehicles, with no potential momentum scape painting tradition. Born in 1959, and based in Glasgow, Rhodes makes relatively small to disturb its immaculate stasis; nothing threatening to interrupt oil paintings on gessoed panels, and rigorously linear pencil drawings the timelessness of the scene, no ulterior movement to compete with on sheets of paper of approximately the the measured drag of Rhodes’s brush, What makes these paintings’ details amplifying its smallest gesture against same size as the boards. These are forms, unsettling is their being plausible in a static foil. formats and a subject that say something about the assumptions underlying them: themselves while straining credibility This sense of stoppage, of arrested that the world is amenable to naturalistic motion, of frozen, abstract forms masin their pictorial contexts representation. Subject is as constant as querading as elements within a scene scale and vantage: lightly built-up coastlines, extrasuburban conur- testifying to human concourse, is a sign of the deceptiveness of bations and ‘light-industrial hinterlands’ – in Michael Hofmann’s Rhodes’s empirical rhetoric. After all, these are paintings that wear phrase – viewed from what might be the altitude of a low-flying their Ruskinian badge of verisimilitude on their sleeve: from their hot-air balloon, or a plane that has just taken off. Only in the occa- Pre-Raphaelite-ish use of small, fine brushes on a smooth, white sional earlier work is a strip of sky visible above the table of land, and ground – cultivating the faint glow of the white’s luminosity – to the in the light of what was to come, it looks like succumbing to a conven- pert directionality of the strokes, sculpting blocky houses and regution of pictorial illusionism. Otherwise, resisting the illusionistic pull larly bulbous trees, or sweeping over the curve of the landscape, regisexacted by the familiar triad of sky/horizon/earth, the landscape fills tering every nuance of its three-dimensionality. There are echoes of the picture. This overallness is related to the essentialism of modernist nineteenth-century plein air oil sketching, particularly the dour British abstraction – the synonymity it cultivated between composition and variety, going back to the terse geometries of Thomas Jones’s latesupport – with the Earth as a metaphor for the picture plane. Even the eighteenth-century sketches from a Naples rooftop, marking the end of conventionally lower vantages never quite seem to touch the ground. his European tour: a first and final foray into topographical naturalism Rhodes’s paintings are consistently unpeopled, although dense with for an artist trained in a classicism that stemmed from the artificiality traces of habitation. Their elevated point of view is not naturally ours of Claude Lorrain’s fecund Italian vistas, framed by glowing pines. – at least only since the end of the nineteenth century, and then only The plein air tradition of sketching in situ involved oil and waterby artificial means – as if the absence of the human referent required colour painting on small boards and sheets of paper, executed within the corresponding absence of a human viewpoint to perceive it. the landscape itself in order to capitalise on nature’s immediate

ArtReview

Two Buildings, 2012, oil on board, 47 × 57 cm. Photo: Simon Mills. © the artist. Courtesy Andrew Mummery

December 2017

Fortification, 2016, pencil on paper, 42 × 56 cm. Photo: Ian Marshall/Lighthouse Photography. © the artist. Courtesy Andrew Mummery

ArtReview

Business Park (Night), 2007, oil on board, 78 × 57 cm. Photo: Simon Mills. © the artist. Courtesy Andrew Mummery

December 2017

presence to produce a more ‘truthful’ rendition of its effects, in contrast its air of terse functionality, and would hardly have been visible, it to an earlier, studio-based tradition, which manipulated generic seems, in the limelight that presides over the rest of the picture. coulisses and antique props into ideal arrangements. Ironically, What makes these partially unassimilated details unsettling Rhodes is adopting the tropes of one kind of painting to enact a is their being plausible in themselves while straining credibility in process much closer, in its piecemeal arrangement of appropriated their pictorial contexts. The early Road and Path (1997) – with its trees elements, to that of the art it was rejecting. She creates her compo- like flailing, underwater creatures, its dysfunctional vertical spikes sitions out of features she discovers in found photographic mate- blocking the entrance to a car park and its jarring architectural heterorial – magazine pictures, aerial mapping – which are then adapted as geneity – is so blatantly a fantasy that it sacrifices the bedrock of she incorporates them into the network of a composition. Her marks realism on which Rhodes’s paintings usually depend and thrive. It claim to be in thrall to how things are, only to turn out to be referent- is an attempt at a mode that might be called topographical surreless. They make us wonder what they might be trying to convince us alism, a brave oxymoron that doesn’t quite come off. In her mature of by assuming an air of what they are not; and then encourage us to work the fictiveness is covert or structural, a function of colour reladouble back and realise that perhaps this is what all representational tions and the unlikely combination of forms that in themselves mainpainting does. Which, by extension, would make her style a metaphor tain an air of fierce objectivity. Two Buildings (2012) refers to an earlyfor the workings of painterly illusion itself. twentieth-century manor-style house and a brutally symmetrical In this self-reflexivity, Rhodes is making postmodern paintings industrial complex, facing one another across a roadway’s divide. that resemble premodern paintings. ‘Network’ seems the right word Isolated on a barren plane, they seem to be expressing a mutual chalbecause many of her compositions are elaborately structured by what lenge. Their coexistence in this bleak environment seems less credseems like an excess of roadways; but also, more ironically, because ible than their individual presences. The distinction is emphasised Rhodes’s networks might be the antithesis of those that David by the glow that seems to emanate from both buildings, jointly sepaJoselit had in mind when writing about contemporary painting’s rating them from the dim space they occupy, as well as by Rhodes’s theme of connectivity. They are axes of dissociation, networking to drawing of the same composition, which casts them as schematic no purpose, in spaces in which no one is being connected. Exploring shells, geometric figments of a design that has been constructed on these silenced arteries, and the terrains they divide, one stumbles on paper out of a series of regular planes, rather than according to visual minor glitches in the pictorial logic, like that odd, geometric edifice information gathered in the unpredictable perceptual conditions of a on a hilltop in Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape With A Man Killed By A Snake landscape lit only by dusk or dawn. This is painting that exploits the (c. 1648), which appears more like an Escher puzzle the longer you kind of disjunctions plein air naturalism was designed to overcome. look at it. The Rhodes equivalent might be the It is more by colour than design that Rhodes Road and Path, 1997, oil on board, 43 × 56 cm. roof of a hangar at the centre of Pier (Night) (2000), asserts the autonomy of her paintings from the Photo: Andy Keate. © the artist. striped with a shocking-pink gaudiness that defies documentary mode to which they seem beholden. Courtesy Andrew Mummery

ArtReview

Colour is transposed from a naturalistic register across the span of a able to make out the vague lineaments of obscure industrial features composition until its relations make representational sense on their and isolated housing; a feeling of uncertainty that the remote detail own terms, which may have only the most tenuous connection to will continue to exist outside of the accident by which it is perceived. how the place they picture might conceivably have appeared. The two Rhodes’s landscapes are unlocatable because they are fantastical – patches of vegetation just off the coastal road of Pier (Night) look like they do not exist outside of a painting’s fiction – and because they huge, questing slugs because their reddish-brown colour fails to be are remote. They are both far-off and farfetched. They are ‘nowhere taken up by the greyish setting. It is as if colour has broken loose of its places’ both in the sense of their fictiveness and their obscurity, their realist base into a flight of free association. Business Park (Night) (2007) being nowhere to be found and ‘in the middle of nowhere’, the former is a dark painting; its turquoises, viridians and crimsons as precisely a metaphor for the latter, and vice versa. This double-edged obscurity, coordinated as they are apocryphal, like an infrared intensification as the focus of an eminently representational idiom, is a manifestaof the darkness’s voiding of colour, an effect that does not seem arbi- tion of the most eerie kind of science fiction: that which is not made trarily subjective, but calibrated across its spectrum into a matter-of- safe by being placed under the remit of the familiar unknownness of fact light specific to a fiction, invented rather than reported, but still outer space or the distant future, but shares the ground under our feet. able to trade on the accuracy of its report. The obscurity of the unperceived, or seldom perceived, may also But Rhodes’s art would be didactic or academic if her pseudo- imply the marginality of painting as a medium for documenting realism were merely a type of formalism – a means of arriving at colour reality in our photography-oriented image world; but also that schemes that remain in the subjunctive: as if a landscape looked like what painting is able to show us may be an alternative reality to the this – and not a way of positing places specific to a particular world evidenced but not experienced digital image, reversing those terms. to which they might all belong, and which each painting extends in It is among the paradoxes of Rhodes’s painting that her protracted its scope. The characteristically furtive, clandestine air of the build- process of arriving at a painting’s colours and forms doubles as a ings she paints – as if they were concealing sinister secrets – is a func- means of conveying to the viewer an experience of a place that its tion of their seeming to have been designed first and foremost in the image informs us is distinguished by human absence. In the era of abstract, out of geometric shape and colour, and only secondarily with Google Earth, in which we assume that everything is either visible or the intention of creating a realistic image of architecture. A focus on can be made visible at the touch of a screen or click of a mouse, Rhodes form manifests itself as an aspect of the charged atmosphere of the pictures places beyond our means of establishing their existence, inaccessible except imaginatively. This makes her art a parable of the world into which her art projects us. It is a clue to how that world might be defined, and what it might limits of information, meticulously striving to inventory spaces that signify, when she writes that she is painting ‘left-over by definition cannot be verified. ar Pier (Night), 2000, oil on board, 42 × 51 cm. land’. Her paintings crystallise the feeling of passing Photo: Simon Mills. © the artist. through, or over, a dark, foreign landscape, only Mark Prince is a writer based in Berlin Courtesy Andrew Mummery

December 2017

FRANZ WEST

7 December 2017 - 20 January 2018

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY ANTWERP

Art Reviewed

Exhibit the unadorned and embrace the uncarved block, Have little thought of self and as few desires as possible 85

Basquiat: Boom for Real Barbican Art Gallery, London 21 September – 28 January Presented as the first largescale exhibition of its kind in Britain, Boom for Real charts Jean-Michel Basquiat’s meteoric rise from aspiring graffiti artist in Manhattan to international artworld celebrity. The press release tells us that this exhibition, more than any other, ‘focuses on the artist’s relationship to music, writing, performance, film and television, placing him within the wider cultural context of the time’. Divided into 14 sections, this wider cultural context includes, among others, ‘New York/New Wave’, ‘SAMO©’, ‘Canal Zone’, ‘The Scene’, ‘Bebop and Art History’. Such categories function to authenticate Basquiat’s artistic significance and the exhibition’s curatorial premise. Over 100 artworks and an extensive range of archival material such as notebooks, audio and video recordings, interviews, artist correspondence and photographs detail the minutiae of a lucrative but ultimately shortlived career. By compartmentalising the exhibition into thematic sections, the show’s narrative thrust identifies Basquiat’s processes of production, appropriation and visual interpretation. Paintings such as Jack Johnson (1982), Hollywood Africans (1983) and the totemic Tuxedo (1983) are testament to this, highlighting the artist’s ability for visual and cultural acuity. An array of collaborations, creative associations and influences from Andy Warhol and

Fab 5 Freddy to Keith Haring and Charlie Parker further illustrate the wide-ranging scope of Basquiat’s creativity. Coupled with a portrait of a near bankrupted New York City, this seemingly compelling and revelatory narrative masks as much as it reveals. Is it really possible to evaluate Basquiat’s practice and legacy without reference to the coterie of dealers and collectors who played such an influential role in propelling him and his art to the status of immortalised commodity? In Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (1998), Phoebe Hoban notes that ‘Basquiat’s life spanned an [sic] historic shift in the art world, from Pop to Neo-Expressionism, from hip to hype’. Hoban’s observation alludes to an altogether more troubled narrative, laced with pecuniary ambition, self-interest and the commodification of art and artist. Predictably enough, Basquiat: Boom for Real renders the transformative role played by 1980s corporate America and the rise of the rapacious art dealer as peripheral to the narrative of a creative and enigmatic genius. Entering the exhibition, we are confronted by an enormous black-andwhite video projection of Basquiat dancing in his studio from 1985. Such an incidental, almost banal piece of archival footage sets the tone for the show. Basquiat is, quite literally, projected as a larger-than-life persona, an object of curiosity.

Blockbuster exhibitions are rarely the forum in which nefarious agendas, not to mention the spectre of racial politics, can be subjected to closer scrutiny. While the exhibition’s New York-centred narrative further gilds Basquiat’s legacy, it does little to elucidate and contextualise his unrivalled status among wider histories of African-American art from the time. Is SAMO ©, the graffiti tag Basquiat developed alongside Al Diaz, a project really on a par with seminal New York street performances by African-American artists such as Adrian Piper (Catalysis, 1970) or David Hammons (Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983)? From this perspective and despite its forceful narrative, the exhibition raises more questions than it answers. Since his death in 1988, Basquiat has received an interminable level of attention from across the international arts arena. Major retrospectives, copious publications, several films and, most significant of all, the everincreasing, eye-watering sums of money paid for his art at auction. For galleries, collectors, critics, curators, auctioneers, publishers, dealers and family estate alike, Basquiat is the ‘gift’ that just keeps giving. As the latest blockbuster, Basquiat: Boom for Real will invariably ensure the artist’s stock will continue to pay dividends to all concerned. Richard Hylton

Jean-Michel Basquiat on the set of Downtown 81 in 1980 or 1981. Photo: Edo Bertoglio. © New York Beat Film LLC and the estate of the artist

ArtReview

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983, acrylic and oil stick on canvas. © the estate of the artist; Artestar, New York; Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; ADAGP, Paris

December 2017

Lyon Biennale Floating Worlds Various venues, Lyon 20 September – 7 January The invitation to curate the Lyon Biennale is something of an assignment: its artistic director (and cofounder, in 1991) Thierry Raspail proposes a ‘keyword’ (such as ‘global’, or ‘history’) that spans three editions and which curators are asked to interpret. Floating Worlds is Centre Pompidou-Metz’s Emma Lavigne’s take on the loaded – to the point of being hackneyed – word ‘modern’, spread across the contemporary art museum (MAC, of which Raspail is director), a former sugar factory (La Sucrière) and a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome assembled on a city square for this edition. And modern it is, in a quite literal sense, with key early-twentieth century works being displayed alongside contemporary works throughout the MAC. Ernesto Neto’s signature light-and-textile environment Minimal Surface of a Body Evolution on a Field (2007) enshrines biomorphic, cloudy sculptures by Hans Arp and slashed paintings by Lucio Fontana; Cerith Wyn Evans’s mobile A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N (2008) interacts with spatial experiments by Zero group members Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Fontana; Yuko Mohri’s Moré Moré (Leaky) The Falling Water Given #4-6 (2017) – in which three large three-dimensional wooden frames contain an elaborate mix of everyday objects connected by a circuit of plastic tubes through which water circulates, evoking the leaks that infiltrate subway stations in present-day Tokyo – is presented alongside a series of Marcel Duchamp’s box-works displaying miniature versions of his own work, notably a late edition of his Boîte-envalise (1966). A consistent thread throughout the exhibition is the place given to music and sound works, and their crosspollination with poetry and visual arts. Lavigne cites Umberto Eco’s notion of the ‘open work’ – the work of art as a fertile ground for multiple interpretations – as

well as the avant-garde plea for the hybridisation of fields. In one room, scores by concrete and minimalist musicians Terry Riley and Philip Corner dialogue with a maplike poemcomposition by Fluxus artist Mieko Shiomi, while an elliptic story of an encounter by Ján Mančuška, displayed as lines of letters extended at eyelevel, traverses the space (Oedipus, 2006). At best, these free associations offer poetic encounters that resonate aesthetically, tracing filiations across art history; at worst, they feel merely superficial, resting on purely formal considerations. As a whole, the operation feels a bit traditional, with overtones of an outdated museum display. The display at the Sucrière, however, is on the whole more contemporary, with works dating from the 1960s onwards. Everything here is in flux – from David Medalla’s cylinders slowly secreting wormlike formations of foam (Cloud Canyons, 1963–2016) on one side of the groundfloor space, to Damián Ortega’s suspended submarine made from industrial sacks and filled with salt, steadily pouring out its content through a punched hole (Hollow/Stuffed: market law, 2012), on the other. Somewhere in the middle, two of Hans Haacke’s ‘natural systems’ – Wide White Flow (1967–2017), a large silk sheet undulating to the airflow of fans and Together (1969–2017), a network of plastic tubes through which water and air are pumped alternately – circulate in the space. Environmental issues arise through Bruce Conner’s Crosswords (1976), an assemblage of video footage of nuclear explosions mushrooming almost grandiosely to music by Riley. The work is echoed elsewhere on the wall by Diane Thater’s White is the colour (2002), a nebulous, foreboding black-and-white projection of a cloud that seems almost holographic (fluorescent tubes installed on the floor act to

facing page, above Montreal Biosphere, designed by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Photo: © Bertrand Buisson

blur the edges of the frame); it hovers, in similar fashion to Conner’s film, halfway between sublime and destructive. But the best work here is probably 67–76 (2017), a ten-minute film by Julien Discrit that revolves around the inauguration of another Buckminster Fuller dome: the geodesic, celestial one presented at the 1967 World Expo in Montreal, and the 1976 fire which destroyed the building’s acrylic bubble, leaving the steel structure bare. Healthy ‘modern’ young people are seen practising various sports – one surfs on the river, a group practices rowing – with the dome in the background; a deep soothing voice reads from Fuller’s seminal Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, written that same year, in which he presented some of his visionary ideas on the environment, renewable energies and egalitarian society. As the characters all stop to watch the dome slowly burn up in flames (recreated digitally by the artist), Discrit points to a bygone time of grand hopes for the future, offering gloomy resonances with the ecological crisis we are facing today. More work like Discrit’s is maybe what’s lacking in this biennale. Lavigne conjures the idea of ‘liquid modernity’, a concept developed by philosopher Zygmunt Bauman to define the impermanent nature of the postmodern world in constant mutation. Yet the most interesting part of Bauman’s thinking is his analysis of the destabilising social impact of a ‘liquid’, fragmented world on the notion of selfhood, and as a result, on society and its future. Here, however, despite their undeniable qualities, the works on display generally fail to speak to our modernday selves and the world we inhabit, and as such the show feels safe. With works floating midair between ‘imagination, poetry and art’ – Lavigne’s words – we find ourselves in search for something more grounding. Louise Darblay

facing page,bottom Céleste Boursier Mougenot, Clinamen v3, 2017. © Blaise Adilon. Courtesy the artist, Biennale de Lyon 2017 and Galerie Xippas, Paris

ArtReview

December 2017

Power and other things: Indonesia & Art (1835–Now) Bozar, Brussels 18 October – 21 January Though Indonesia’s independence from its former colonisers, the Netherlands, can be accurately dated to 1945, when presidentelect Sukarno and his vice-president Mohammad Hatta proclaimed the country’s self-government, it would be a historical falsification to pretend that this moment happened out of the blue. With Power and other things, whose somehow strange but fascinating title is excerpted from the Indonesian declaration of independence, curators Riksa Afiaty and Charles Esche want to sketch various anticipatory episodes of resistance ingrained within the country’s rich yet violent history. The exhibition begins with two different nineteenth century paintings of Diepo Negoro, leader of the uprising during the Java War (1825–30), depicting the same moment he was arrested by the Dutch. The work by the Javaborn Raden Saleh portrays Negoro with chin proudly upraised; that by Dutch artist Nicolaas Pieneman hymns the colonial system, with soldiers in impeccable uniforms and the Dutch flag waving high. The titles, too, are revealing: while Saleh’s work is simply called The Arrest of Pangeran Diponegoro (1857), Pieneman’s bears the more triumphant The Submission of Prince Dipo Negoro to General De Kock (c. 1835). The juxtaposition is a perfect opening for a show that wants to rewrite history, recognising all too well that each side has its story and that historical narrative is often used and adapted to one’s advantage.

Though to open with such early works would suggest otherwise, the exhibition is not set up chronologically. Instead, it moves back and forth in time, illustrating how certain phenomena keep returning, in various shapes, throughout history. Hence, Lidwien van de Ven’s research project in the form of video, documents, texts and enlarged pictures, Fragments (of a desire for revolution) (2017), emphasises not only an example of resistance preceding Indonesia’s independence – uprisings by the Communist Party in 1926–27 – but also the often-forgotten role of women in this story, focusing on one of them, activist Raden Sukaesih. The next chapter veers back in time by showing a copy of (and preparatory sketches for) the triptych The Battle between Sultan Agung and Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1973), a work commissioned from the artist Sudjojono by the then-governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin. By depicting the first struggle against colonial rule, the new Suharto regime (to which Sadikin belonged) wanted to inscribe itself within that tradition of resistance. The dioramas inside the National Monument (colloquially known as Monas) in Jakarta were another way for the nation to portray itself by visualising its coming-into-being through various episodes. For I was born in Indonesia (2017), Tom Nicholson takes this format as a starting point for another story: that of refugees who end up stranded in Indonesia because of Australia’s tough immigration policy. His contemporary version consists of little sculptures of hugging veiled women

and a person wading through water, episodes also told by the refugees themselves in the videos next to Nicholson’s diorama. While the dark pages from colonial history are not eschewed, neither are these from the post-independence period, illustrating the often-used metaphor of the victim becoming a villain. As a response to a communist plot in 1965–66, the new president Suharto took advantage of the events to purge communists and ethnic Chinese, leading to a death toll estimated as between half-a-million and three million. Here both FX Harsono and Agung Kurniawan refer to that horror, the former by making rubbings from gravestones of people from the Chinese minority, which he presents here on pieces of textile attached to the wall and through a video installation (Pilgramage to history, 2013); the latter by interviewing female prisoners about their fate and projecting their testimonies on their clothes. Kurniawan’s work Gentayangan (2017) is preceded by Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s No False Echoes (2008); this video, though, could have served as the show’s grand finale. For it, van Oldenborgh took Soewardi Soerjaningrat’s 1913 pamphlet If I were a Dutchman, a bitter attack on the colonial regime, and asked the Dutch-Moroccan rapper Salah Edin to perform the text. The result, a decade-old artwork concerning a centuryold sentiment, feels shockingly up-to-date: social exclusion and segregation live on, merely assuming new shapes. Sam Steverlynck

Sudjojono, The Battle between Sultan Agung and Jan Pieterszoon Coen, 1973, oil on canvas, 300 × 1000 cm. Courtesy Jakarta History Museum

ArtReview

Marc Camille Chaimowicz One to One… Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover 29 September – 7 January Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s exhibition One to One… is a theatre, but one in which each element has been severed and dislocated. The stage is set before we encounter the new installation from which the show takes its title: lining the wall of this first gallery is Rideaux de scène, Théâtre Jean-Vilar, Bourgoin-Jallieu (1991–92), a curtain Chaimowicz made for a French playhouse. In front is a fully proportional dressing room for an imagined (so the exhibition text tells us at least) production of Jean Genet’s The Maids (1947). Installed inside of what looks like a wood shed (and titled The Props and Wardrobe Room, 2011/17) we are nonetheless barred from accessing the space, left to peek through the windows set at myriad curious artefacts and costumes. Not quite true to Genet’s play, however, those who know it will struggle to make sense of the assemblage, suggesting that, in Chaimowicz’s theatre, fabulation extends beyond the stage. Whether experienced before or after the main work here, these two pieces act as a leaking floodgate between public and private, reality and fiction, actor and spectator – a cue to suspend disbelief. Enter One to One… (2017): a life-sized model of Chaimowicz’s new flat in Vauxhall,

London, filling the vaulted hall of the Kestner Gesellschaft, a former bathhouse. Chaimowicz has marshalled his private living space as material for his art practice since the 1970s, so it is not surprising that this (still ongoing) home move would spawn an artwork too. His interest in the subjective realm may be read as a protest against Modernism’s proclamation of objectivity, but it is also a convenient outlet for an evident passion for interior design. A comparison with high-postmodernist heavyweights such as Milan’s Memphis Group would not be out of place: Chaimowicz’s aesthetic programme is as sharp as it is playful. Here, a distinct colour palette of earthy pastels adorns walls and textiles, along with solitary furniture pieces such as the exemplary One Metre Chair (1992–93). But whereas Karl Lagerfeld’s 1980s Monaco penthouse was all Memphis, who would live in all-Chaimowicz other than Chaimowicz himself? His designs possess a remarkable idiosyncrasy and delicate sensitivity wholly antithetical to the gilded irony that otherwise characterises postmodern decor. The single chair and a row of Campari bottles clad with pages from the Financial Times: this is where the display transcends the world of applied

arts. For a faint scent of melancholy bruises this home like the resigned loneliness that comes with being the natural sole inhabitant of your own mind. Arranged both within the flat and in the gallery, a series of disorienting photographs by Lise Queinnec shows the London apartment through mirrors or at tilted angles, uncanny and distinctly unpeopled. That Chaimowicz did not take the pictures himself adds another gaze to that of the visitor, the latter already as if illicitly intruding upon someone’s privacy. Yet this privacy is manifestly staged – like stepping onto a theatre stage after-hours, unsure what show is playing or what your role in it is. An old exhibition flyer pinned to the wall that depicts Chaimowicz lying on a bed with his back turned is the only body represented in the installation. As such, it works as a kind of punctum; a partial presence, or only halfunintentional disclosure of the subject at stake. One to One…, as the title ambiguously implies, is about relationships between entities, be they spaces or people. Two people occupying the same room simultaneously, one in Vauxhall and one in Hanover. This is a thesis on intersubjectivity, intimacy and performance, laid out in beautiful colours. Kristian Vistrup Madsen

One to One…, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Raimund Zakwoski. Courtesy Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover

December 2017

Lara Schnitger Don’t Let The Boys Win Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden 26 September – 11 November The city of Dresden frequently finds itself the site of demonstrations. It is, after all, the birthplace of Pegida, an anti-Islam movement that likes to proclaim its unsavoury ideas loudly on the streets. The march organised by Dutch artist Lara Schnitger on the eve of the opening of this exhibition was of a very different sort. A procession of women, men and children made its way through the city centre, holding aloft banners made out of wooden slats, items of clothing and swaths of fabric. Orange placards brandished phrases like ‘asking for it’ and ‘flirty’, and three so-called Slut-sticks (2015) were carried around – little maypoles of sorts made of kinky lingerie, white lace and women’s underwear trimmed with fur, with a kitten printed on them. The march, titled Suffragette City, looked like a #MeToo protest, but it wasn’t. Schnitger had held this parade before: for the first time in Basel in 2015, and then again in Washington, Paris and her hometown of Los Angeles. The performance isn’t a protest so much as an ode to the turn-of-the-twentieth century’s suffragette movement and the feminist art activists of today. Some members of the public greeted the parade with obscenities and jeers.

In the Lehmann brothers’ new gallery space, several of the props that were carried in the procession are installed against the wall, in combination with a number of freestanding sculptures. Express Yourself (2015) looks like an archaic totem pole, draped in a chainmail of silver and copper-coloured sequins and standing on three legs upholstered in leopard-print fabric. A wooden structure forms the skeleton of the work, with the mounted panels of fabric as the skin – they seem to keep each other in place in a precarious balance. The ‘neck’ of this stick figure bears a long zipper; its face emblazoned with the words ‘Touch me’, followed by a little heart. Like most of the works in the exhibition, this plush toy gone wrong looks both innocent and a tad perverse. In addition to the sculpture, nine oval panels hang from the walls. One of them, Curly Curtains (2016), is a collage of bleached cotton, resin and small threads. Here, the female cosmos appears as a soup with a vagina and pubic hair floating around in it – or is it a moustache? Schnitger’s work has echoes of radical feminist art of the 1960s that focused on the corporeal and

Don’t Let The Boys Win, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden

ArtReview

the domestic, the use of household skills such as sewing, but its joyful appearance seems to outweigh its political drive, making the war against patriarchy looking somewhat carnivalesque. The title of the performance, Suffragette City, derives from the frantic track on Ziggy Stardust, the album that made David Bowie the god of glam rock back in 1972. Some claim the song is about Bowie bidding farewell to the love that dare not speak its name. ‘Don’t lean on me man,’ he sings, ‘You know my Suffragette City / is outta sight / she’s alright.’ The singer himself wisely refrained from commenting on these rumours. Something of Bowie’s dizzying, gender-blender dressing-up party reverberates through Schnitger’s work. Her sculptures are decked out and done up like they’re ready for a night out on the town – sexy, stylish, provocative. They amplify femininity and couple elegance with exuberance. Truly subversive – like Bowie’s carefully tailored androgyny – they are not. But they are cheerful. And that, too, counts for something, especially in Dresden. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Emma Rault

Isabel Nolan Calling on Gravity The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 28 July – 30 September Among the 47 works in Calling on Gravity, one notable for its title alone is the liquescent oil painting Tony Soprano at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (2017), in which the complicated fictional mobster looks pensive, smoking a cigar, against a lemon-yellow rendering of the Vienna museum’s domed ceiling. That Soprano doesn’t belong there is partly the point; Nolan has stated that she has issues with how museums latently enforce hierarchies, including the way they coerce us to look up, respectfully. It makes sense, then, that her well-stocked yet spacious assembly here of sculptures, drawings, paintings, photographs and rugs, dating from 2012 to 2017, feels like a minimuseum, but also one that superficially makes very little sense. Four ‘characters’ appearing in her lighttouch, watery oil paintings might guide you through it: the aforementioned Soprano, the theologian/cosmologist Giordano Bruno, the philosopher/activist Simone Weil and the artist Paul Thek, each of whom was a strange, category-scrambling mix of the mystical and the rational. (Soprano murders people, but he has a philosophy too, scrawled on another painting: ‘You are born to this shit, you are

what you are’.) Each figure, too, appears against a contradictory backdrop: there’s a lot of luminous modernist abstraction in Nolan’s daubing, which fits none of the figures. Alongside these, you find things that should be elevated brought down to earth: a sequence of crisply fabricated chandelierlike sculptures, dropped to the floor or tipped on their side, sometimes draped with cloths whose colours suggest the play of light but actually block light. Various photographs, snapped in museums and hung deliberately low, depict the sculpted feet of saints, which Nolan had noticed are always off the ground (hovering or lying down, their soles visible), as if anticipating leaving earth for heaven; while various others, taken outside museums, are resolutely earthy: pigeons puttering, feet on pavement. Meanwhile there are all manner of nooks and alcoves that present miniature upendings. Clinging to one secluded wall is “What kind of dust is it?” (2017), a line of coppery lumps in compressed insulation foam, apparently magnified dust particles; a rainbow-bright coloured-pencil drawing near the entrance, Doryphoros in Glory (2016), records Nolan’s

sedulous, irreverent attention to the ass of a Greek sculpture depicting the eponymous warrior. A geometric floor-based sculpture, Narcissus’ pool ( for SMcK) (2017), whose title suggests it might have something to do with the late artist Stephen McKenna (with whose estate Nolan shares a gallery), does suggest rippling water in its nested format of geometrical shapes, but also replays the authoritative effect of institutions: we get the association because the title pushes us that way. Mostly, though, what Nolan achieves is a kind of suspension, one that ends up being a gift, speaking to and, for a moment, symbolically undoing authority and class structures. Associations cancel themselves out: for every upward movement here there’s a downward one, for everything old there’s something newer, and the show offers no logical route through itself; it’s an elegant sprawl in which you can’t even hold onto medium-specificity. The outcome is a kind of mobilised reverie in which you don’t feel the force of instruction, but rather give yourself up to blissful, untethered drift, and forget the paradox that someone has orchestrated this for you. Martin Herbert

Tony Soprano at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2017, water-based oil paint on canvas, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

December 2017

Lucio Fontana Ambienti / Environments Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan 21 September – 25 February ‘History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past,’ John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing (1972). It was only after the advent of Neorealism, for instance, that Caravaggio was ‘rediscovered’ by Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, who revived the painter’s myth with a groundbreaking exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan. By coincidence, while a blockbuster reenactment (Dentro Caravaggio) of that show is taking place at the same venue, Hangar Bicocca has mounted a retrospective of Lucio Fontana that reframes our ways of looking at his revolutionary relationship to space, body, perception and new media – all familiar tropes of the current ‘information age’. It was in postwar Milan, where Fontana moved back in 1947 (from Argentina, where he was born in 1899), that the artist theorised – in his Spatialist Manifesto – the need for ‘painting to emerge from its frame’ and for art to embrace science, radio and television. By ‘using the resources put at our disposal by modern technologies, we shall produce in the sky: artificial shapes, miraculous rainbows, luminous writings’, he wrote in 1948. His experiments on canvas brought him to the new series of Concetti Spaziali (Spatial Concepts), first with the ‘holes’ (1949), then with the famous ‘cuts’ (1958). But Fontana’s ambitions were more radical than this. In 1949, at the Milanese Galleria del Naviglio, he created Ambiente spaziale a luce nera

(Spatial Environment in Black Light), open for six days only, where sculptural elements painted in fluorescent colours (violet, rose, blue) and hung from the ceiling were illuminated by UV lights, hence appearing as free-floating in the dark. That first environment is also the starting point for this retrospective. Curated by Marina Pugliese and Barbara Ferriani, together with Vicente Todolí, the exhibition works as a rigorous exercise in art-historical philology and research, not only into the art but also into audience accessibility. The layout is elegantly simple: the nine environments – five of which, reexhibited for the first time since Fontana’s death – are reconstructed in 1:1 scale by using their original materials (neon, UV lights, metallic wallpaper, carpeting, rubber flooring) and enclosed in black boxes. The sequence is chronological, from 1948 to 68, and the venue is very dimly lit, as if at night, preserving the perceptual and optical effects of the visitor’s encounter with black light, immersive colours, obscurity pierced by fluorescent dots and unbalancing surfaces devised by Fontana (who regularly worked in collaboration with architects, and who cosigned Ambiente Spaziale ‘Utopie’ (Spatial Environment ‘Utopias’, 1964) with artist Nanda Vigo). There are only two brightly luminous reconstructed installations, positioned at the beginning and end of the show’s parcours. Above the entrance

hangs the spectacular Struttura al neon per la IX Triennale di Milano (Neon Structure for the 9th Milan Triennale, 1951), an impressive neon ‘scribble’ suspended from an oval ceiling, painted in ‘Giotto blue’ – another version of which is permanently on show at Milan’s Museo del Novecento. Fonti di energia, soffitto al neon per ‘Italia 61’, a Torino (Energy Sources, Neon Ceiling for ‘Italia 61’, in Turin, 1961) occupies the cubic space at the end of the Hangar with hundreds of green and blue neon tubes, arranged on different levels and following divergent diagonal lines, hence generating a blinding full-immersion into a geometrical and abstract space. This exhibition seems finely attuned to another latter-day trend of the art-historical sphere, ie the disruption of the evolutionistic patterns of ‘modernity’ and modernism at large, in favour of a more pluralistic, polycentric and less US-obsessed narration. Reconstructing Fontana’s forgotten research in the fields of environments, light and space implies also expanding the chronologies of art, and redefining its lineages. Some of his works predate those of Dan Flavin, Allan Kaprow and Bruce Nauman. It’s not a matter of establishing who ‘invented’ what, but to relocate the birth of an artform on a broader scale: to move it not from margin to centre, as Julie H. Reiss’s famous book about installation art once had it, but from centre to margin. Barbara Casavecchia

Ambiente spaziale a luce nera, 1948–49/2017, neon, UV lights, metallic wallpaper, carpeting, rubber flooring, dimensions variable. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan

ArtReview

Scuole Romane Bibo’s Place, Rome 28 September – 28 November Expanding to Rome after opening its first gallery in Todi, Perugia, four years ago, Bibo’s Place opened its second space with a tribute to the city’s strong lineage of modern painters. Specifically, Scuole Romane (Roman Schools) continues the tendency of the gallery to show side by side the works of artists ranging from early-modern to contemporary. On this occasion, the venue’s two floors host – with a few exceptions – the work of figures from three distinct groups and periods working in the Eternal City: the School of Via Cavour, the School of Piazza del Popolo and the School of San Lorenzo. Each of these is firmly rooted in a Roman quarter and a particular time period, though what unites the artists is a tendency to emphasise simple, bold designs with a strong reliance on tonal contrast. The first group, active between 1929 and 1945, is represented by, among others, Mario Mafai, whose shared house and studio in Via Cavour gave the group both a meeting point and a name. Mafai’s simple oil Tetti di Roma (Rooftops of Rome, 1950) testifies to the close relationship between content and form, with Rome’s unmistakable skyline described in a patchwork of terracotta and rose daubs. The School of Piazza del Popolo, so called as its main protagonists used to socialise daily

at the Caffè Rosati on the historical piazza, is represented by Mario Schifano and Franco Angeli. These two present a peculiarly Roman interpretation of the painterly tendencies of the two decades between 1960 and 80, when the group was most active. Schifano’s large untitled acrylic on paper from 1982 dominates the ground floor, characterised as much by fluid gestural movements as by adherence to a formal compositional structure – a mix that evokes the religious frescoes of the Baroque period visible in many of the city’s churches. Angeli’s earlier acrylic-and-gloss Of America (1966) features a red silhouetted eagle’s head on a roughly executed blue background, into which part of the work’s title is written in the white of the card it is painted upon. The US-centric imagery is rendered in frantic emotive marks, signalling a barely concealed frustration beneath Rome’s famed xenophilia: neither the city nor its artists have ever regained the splendour of the city’s heyday, way back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the power and wealth of its empire long since usurped by America. From the same group, Tanto Festa’s untitled painting from 1967 features a stencilled side profile repeated twice, evoking the mechanical reproduction and repetition common to the artist’s American peers. The image,

however, is not taken from contemporary pop culture but rather from the head of the mythical Aurora in the monumental Florentine tomb of the Medici family. Towards the end of the 70s, the San Lorenzo school congregated around a former pasta factory in, yes, the San Lorenzo quarter, where many of the original group still occupy studios alongside younger artists. This coterie is represented by Gianni Dessì, Piero Pizzi Cannella and Marco Tirelli. On the ground floor is Cannella’s untitled 2014 work: a small canvas featuring a white sleeveless dress suspended in a dark ethereal space and comprised of densely layered paintwork, suffusing the piece with a sense of time’s passing. Adjacent, and hung suspended in the centre of the space’s large shopfront window, one of three works from artists not involved in the three schools acts like a red thread, uniting the works of the show’s 17 artists, which span 89 years. Leonardo Petrucci’s Non ora, non qui (Not now, not here, 2017) features an hourglass filled entirely with black sand, conveying timelessness. Being a Roman artist has long seemed to be about keeping one eye on the past with a view to communicating in the present. In our fast-moving times, it falls to the city’s current generation of artists to fulfil this role. Mike Watson

Tano Festa, Untitled, 1967, mixed media on cardboard, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy Bibo’s Place, Rome

December 2017

Fiona Banner and Peter Voss-Knude Last Tango, Zürich 7 October – 2 December It was never going to be a fair contest. Once inside the door of Fiona Banner and Peter Voss-Knude’s two-hander exhibition, Banner’s mural WpWpWp (2014–17), a typographically distorted onomatopoeic description of a helicopter’s whipping blades, dominates the space, flooding it with an absorbing conception of sound and movement. When it comes to harnessing the imagery of armed forces and conflict – subjects the artists have in common – the British Banner has a couple of decades’ head start over the Danish Voss-Knude, though this show equally demonstrates her recent interest in the corporate context. Nose Art (2015) positions two Harrier jet noses side by side, high on the wall, sleek sides patterned with fine graphite stripes borrowed from corporate fashion. These might be the breasts of an immense Amazon, or maybe a rebuttal of Allen Jones for the post-Weinstein age. Invited to collaborate by the Archive of Modern Conflict in London, Banner in turn commissioned an extensive photographic portrait of the City of London by war photographer Paolo Pellegrin, which became illustrations for Banner’s 2015 version of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart

of Darkness. With astonishing economy, Banner implicates the City, and by extension the British establishment, in Conrad’s story of aggression, profiteering and masculine brutality, presenting it meanwhile in the glossy format of a high-fashion magazine. (Pellegrin’s pratfall shot of a suit jacket blown by the wind to reveal the wearer’s striped suited bottom informs many subsequent works, including Nose Art.) Voss-Knude’s interests lie in the interpersonal bonds that enable men – principally – to fight together. His media are varied, from musical collaborations with soldiers recorded by his band Peter & The Danish Defence, to drawing and installation. At Last Tango he replies to Banner with the nearly fourmetre-wide charcoal drawing One Statue, Two Eyes (2017), which depicts a Florentine statue of two men who fought in Homer’s The Iliad, Menelaus carrying dead Patroclus. The statue is drawn in two parts, the lower halves and pedestal on the left, Menelaus’s helmeted head and the slumped figure he carries in the righthand half. This fracturing and zoning in on bodies continues with the comical honouring of the Male Version

of a Sports Bra (2014), a bronze cast of a jockstrap pinned to the wall around groin level. Both artists occupy a small additional space for their work alone. In hers, Banner has Spooning Chairs (2015) from a series of bent plywood chairs equally striped in graphite, this pair lying side by side on the ground contemplating the orange fluorescent paper and graphite work Pinstripe Bum Face (2015). Voss-Knude’s works benefit from their isolation, in which he continues his fragmentary approach with two 2011 pencil drawings, Waterfall seen out of the window of a police car and Jungle seen out of the window of a police car. Dating from a time when he was studying in London and applied (unsuccessfully) to become a police special constable, they are roughly car-window shaped, blurred and incomplete. Here too, displayed on a windowsill, is another synecdoche: He Weaves (2009–17), a greying vest, into the front of which have been woven countless tiny metal bars, each about a centimetre long, turning the cotton dark silver. By rights it should be a piece of armour, but it functions more like a fallen torso: he weaves, he writhes, he is human and vulnerable after all. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Fiona Banner and Peter Voss-Knude, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Kilian Bannwart. Courtesy the artists and Last Tango, Zürich

ArtReview

Jodie Carey Earthcasts Edel Assanti, London 23 June – 11 August The lower part of London-based Jodie Carey’s installation Earthcasts is just about visible from Newman Street, through the parked cars and semireflections of Soho’s buildings on the gallery window. The pillars of plaster behind the glass immediately conjure a hint of nature. Once inside, one sees that the gallery space has been transformed into something akin to a copse of silver birch. Spread unevenly at intervals of anywhere between 50cm and 2m is an arrangement of 50 totemic casts, mottled white, which, while all explicitly constructed objects, are suggestive more of natural growth than the initial sombre impression given by their presence as unmoving, sentinel-like silhouettes. Each of the 50 casts stands around 3m tall, immersing but not oppressing the viewer. The rusted bases offer the kind of weighty physical presence that only a lump of metal can, which, in turn, amplifies the sense of a light fragility in the plaster trunks they support. This physical contrast of plinth and cast extends to the metaphysical, pointing towards growth and decay. Which is natural and which is manmade, however, remains unclear.

As one approaches the work, more intriguing aspects of the conversation with the environment it inhabits become apparent: as a pool of light falls through the roof lantern at the back of the space, the copse breaks into something like a clearing. A dialogue between materials is again present, the chipped concrete and dusty wood of the gallery floor a welcome prelude to the surface of the casts – in Carey’s words, a site-responsive rather than site-specific work. Each cast contains the reliefs and marks of everything that went into it, natural or artificial. Carey’s process of construction consists of many small and careful, almost intimate stages, even the wood used to form the shape of the mould had its own long and complex past. Reclaiming rafters from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, imbued with over a century of cultural and structural history, the artist began to chip and carve away at their surfaces. They were then buried, to be later dug up, the resulting hole in the ground serving as a mould for the final casts. Once the wood was removed, the stone, ceramics and other detritus in the earth further altered the surface of the cast, ironically giving it a

gnarled, barklike skin. A final addition, white paint on white plaster and some soft pastel shading from colouring pencils, completes the totems. They stand as slender, intricate and complex sculptures, while conversely speaking to the fundamental techniques of the medium. Carey carries this fundamentality through the works that surround her central installation: four rough, woven canvases, dipped in plaster and altered with fleeting brushings and marks of dye. These are reminiscent of details in a forest, blending into the surroundings, white canvases on white walls. Carey’s endless series of juxtapositions creates an ambiguous environment that conjures a multitude of narratives: a forest, a city or a ruin, one room or 50 monuments, the copse in an open landscape or a clearing in dense forest. Without being explicitly anthropomorphic, the sculptures’ surfaces and svelte profiles are echoes of Giacometti’s figures, almost persuading the viewer to interact with them, both in terms of the details of individual sculptures and of the forestlike whole. Laurie Macdonald

Earthcasts, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Studio Will Amlot. Courtesy Edel Assanti, London

December 2017

Torbjørn Rødland The Touch That Made You Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London 29 September – 19 November The photography of Torbjørn Rødland is an art of uncomfortable (and sometimes violent) juxtapositions. His eruptions of the uncanny into the realm of the everyday are queasily direct: grabbing you by the throat and leaving you – finally – to process the strange sensation of it all. There’s a charged, tactile quality to much of Rødland’s work in The Touch That Made You, the Norway-born, LA-based artist’s debut UK gallery exhibition, showcasing his photography from the past two decades. In Frost no.4 (2001), the arm of a heavy metal rocker, clad in spike-studded leather, grips the bark of a tree in an oddly tender embrace. In Candles and Cubes (2016), a series of candles encased in ice deliquesce into a puddle, with all the futility of a chocolate teapot. In The Very Hungry Caterpillar (2005), we see what appears to be the remnants of a kids’ birthday at some point in the 1980s: HäagenDazs, Diet Coke and a VHS of hokey baseball flick Field of Dreams (1989). In fact, these are reputedly some of George W. Bush’s favourite things, displaying Rødland’s taste for ironyfree statements. Consumption is a recurring theme. The human mouth figures as a site of both hidden recesses and expressed desires, while hunger

is rendered as something of a pathological appetite. In Avocado (2013) a ceramic imitation of the fruit, a polka-dotted handkerchief peeping out of the top in surprise, is posed like a shot from a Waitrose Food magazine. Plate and Spoon (2015) is a gastronomic anxiety dream: a halfdevoured cake lies on a plate strewn with a spoon, gold teeth and molars. The large scale of the prints are simultaneously arresting and force you to look closer. Intraoral no. 1 (2015), from Rødland’s collaboration with a Zürich dentist, shows a latexgloved hand injecting anaesthetic into bared gums. It’s cold, brutal and dispassionate. Trichotillomania (2010–11), its title referring to a condition where people pull out their own hair, shows a neatly cut orange bristling with wispy blonde strands, an image both arresting and curiously perverse. There’s a fetishistic streak running through Rødland’s oeuvre, including images of dripping paint, octopus tentacles and honey suggestively drizzled down a woman’s face (Goldene Tränen, 2002). He frequently turns disembodied body parts into erotic avatars. Bathroom Tiles (2011–13) shows a woman’s feet, toenails painted scarlet, squelching in some kind of transparent ooze. In Pads (2010–14), a woman kneels on a wooden

Bathroom Tiles, 2011–13, chromogenic print on Kodak Endura paper mounted on aluminium. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

floor in protective knee gear. Red Pump (2014) nods to the kinky voyeurism of Guy Bourdin: a red stilettoed heel hooked suggestively into a waistband. These scenes turn us into voyeurs, implicated yet anonymous. In Summer Scene (2014), a nerd gets a sneakered foot in his face, treading the line between softcore BDSM and something more sinister. Although many of these works have the sheen of commercial photography – splashy and tightly composed – Rødland isn’t afraid to use the image itself as a critique of our spectacle-obsessed age. In Heiress with Dogs (2014), Paris Hilton becomes an unwitting, and witless, synecdoche for empty celebrity: a reality where nothing exists beyond the self-promotional surface. Blue Portrait (Nokia N82) (2009) presents a photograph of Anne Frank on an old Nokia phone against a backdrop of autumn leaves. A comment on our era of selfiecentred isolation perhaps. Here the photograph becomes an epitaph – a haunting reminder of the past – where we merely seek our own narcissistic reflection in the present. As with most of Rødland’s images in this show, there’s just enough of a hint of provocation – even tastelessness – to make it impossible to look away. Daniel Culpan

Allora & Calzadilla Foreign in a Domestic Sense Lisson Gallery, London 22 September – 11 November Responding to criticism of the disaster relief supplied to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, Donald Trump explained, with unimpeachable factual accuracy, that it is ‘an island sitting in the middle of an ocean… a big ocean, a very big ocean’. Its geographical isolation was the chief reason, he insisted, that less US aid had reached the archipelago than the similarly crisis-hit states of Texas and Florida. A more convincing explanation for the disparity is contained in the title of Allora & Calzadilla’s timely exhibition, which adopts the US Supreme Court’s historic definition of Puerto Rico as ‘foreign in a domestic sense’. The 1901 verdict on a trade dispute established the territory as simultaneously within and without the United States, a colonial possession denied the rights afforded to incorporated states. The implications of this oxymoronic ruling – despite being US citizens, for example, Puerto Ricans cannot vote in the presidential election – continue to shape the unequal relationship between protectorate and protector. If it’s not immediately clear how the wallmounted and freestanding sculptures at Lisson give formal expression to this association, then the listed materials give them away. Across adjacent walls hangs Manifest (2017), its two hulking forms resembling ship engines, each a rust-coloured tangle of metal pistons and pipes caked in bat guano. Combining a metonym for global traffic with a natural resource that was

once a tradable commodity, the work alludes to the early days of US overseas imperialism, specifically the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which legalised the annexation of any unclaimed islands rich in the fertiliser upon which an agricultural economy depended. I say the listed materials ‘give them away’ because, having discharged their purpose in alerting the viewer to this colonialist history, the sculptures feel drained of affective power. The same literalism hinders Loss (2017), a string bag of oranges cast in black wax and propped against the wall. Again the work relates to a specific event, the import tax dispute that led to the Supreme Court’s fudged ruling, and again it is both blandly transparent (if you are familiar with the context) and frustratingly opaque (if you are not). The work attests to an injustice but, beyond using black as a signifier of mourning, does little to summon the suffering not captured by the dry language of historical record. Exhibited in a side room, a video (The Night We Became People Again, 2017) composed of slow tracking shots of Puerto Rican locations – a cave that hosts an installation by the artists, an abandoned factory – calls to mind Amie Siegel’s Provenance (2013) and Quarry (2015), both of which document the global movement of goods and services. By counterpointing the contemplative beauty of the images with desolate scenes that hint at the exodus of Puerto Rican workers to the mainland, the artists generate an ambivalence that is elsewhere lacking.

The most compelling work in the exhibition, Blackout (2017), resembles an eviscerated animal carcass rendered in twisted strips of frayed metal. Composed from the reconstituted parts of a transformer destroyed by an explosion at a Puerto Rican electricity station, the work plays on the unequal transfer of power even as it flags up a domestic energy crisis exacerbated by unserviceable debts to the United States. The structure emits a menacing voltaic buzz, establishing an uneasy atmosphere in the space that is at first heightened and then transformed by a twice-weekly performance by a choral ensemble (mains hum, 2017). The show’s title suggests that Allora & Calzadilla aim to explore the doublespeak definition of what it means to be Puerto Rican – foreign and domestic, other and same – through the juxtaposition of disparate objects, materials and media. It’s a strategy premised on metaphor, the association of one thing with another, that the Surrealists valued for its capacity to generate unpredictable, polysemous and hybrid meanings. Yet Allora & Calzadilla maintain a firm control over how their work can be read, pitting themselves against the linguistic ambiguity that makes possible such ethical evasions as ‘foreign and domestic’ or ‘war on terror’. Poetic metaphor is ill-suited to the task of reestablishing the authority of ordinary language, however urgent the cause. It’s a bind from which the artists fail to escape. Ben Eastham

Blackout, 2017, mixed media, 139 × 262 × 129cm. Photo: Dave Morgan. © the artists. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London & New York

December 2017

Sheila Hicks Stones of Peace Alison Jacques Gallery, London 4 October – 11 November Sheila Hicks’s star is firmly in the ascendant. From the 15-metre-wide Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands (2016–17) in Viva Arte Viva at the Venice Biennale, to the 200-metre-long Hop, Skip, Jump, and Fly: Escape From Gravity (2017) snaking along New York’s High Line, the octogenarian artist’s installations seem to be cropping up everywhere. The show at Alison Jacques Gallery (Hicks’s second) spotlights a more modest strand of her artmaking. Still, the gallery is dominated by the sculptural presence of Grande Boules (2009): a cluster of riotously colourful pouffelike pieces, reminiscent of wholesale bales of yarn. They are vibrantly, joyously tawdry; metallic strands glint through a grab-bag assortment of thread. Suspended nearby is I am at the Gate (2017): thick skeins of golden yellow nearly three-metres-high hang down, Rapunzel-like. These large works recall the accidental beauty of some arrangement glimpsed on a textile factory’s floor, recalling Hicks’s assertion: ‘If you keep your eyes open, you’re going to have a hell of a time.’ When Hicks ignores her own adage, the result is slicker, more minimal – and overall,

less engaging. Langue d’Oiseau II (2016–17), a big woven panel of red and orange bands, resembles nothing so much as Rothko reinterpreted by Habitat. It wouldn’t appear out of place in a tasteful corporate lobby – and, as if to suggest so, it’s been placed in the foyer. Elsewhere, patterns skitter and fall out of line; stray filaments offer nuance in otherwise well-behaved works and orderly strands are pleasingly disrupted. Thickly bound tendrils of forest-green peek through tidy threads of saffron yellow and orange in Torsade Orange (2015). The effect is to encourage you to look closely and consciously. That being said, there’s a perceptible tension between the different demands Hicks’s larger and smaller-scale works make in the gallery space. Gigantism doesn’t encourage enjoyment of the tactile details of tone and texture (which are, broadly speaking, some of fibre art’s most compelling qualities) – in fact, it hinders it, encouraging a step backward rather than forward. Is the inclusion of the large pieces a preemptive retort against readings of this work as craft only? At the other end of the spectrum is Hicks’s career-long Minimes series: small,

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framed weavings made in response to trips in Africa, Asia and South America. Their size, flatness and presentation render them more pictorial than other works, while the scale – each comparable to the page of a diary – invites intimacy and close observation. And, overall, they repay this attention. Back from the Front, ‘TUV’ (2017) harnesses sashiko, a Japanese stitching technique, in an exuberantly haphazard fashion. Porcupine quills adorning Ensemble (2003) render the textile reminiscent of a memento picked up on holiday. A small striped feather insinuates itself into the weft of As If I Did Not Know (2015–16) like a chance encounter. These diminutive works speak eloquently of Hicks’s experiences of travel. Humblest of all is Shaker (2017), a grid of faded scraps from an old man’s shirt, inspired by the make-do-and-mend culture of eighteenth-century Shaker communities. Nearly unravelling, it wavers but holds fast. The humility is touching. For all the largescale projects worldwide, it’s good to see that the grande dame of fibre art still appreciates the small things. Isabella Smith

More Dimensions Than You Know: Jack Whitten, 1979–1989 Hauser & Wirth, London 27 September – 18 November Jack Whitten’s work was one of the highlights of Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation, a show that did an excellent job of introducing a number of African-American artists who are hardly known in Britain. However, the context in which his work was placed – a room exclusively containing abstract paintings and sculptures – also pointed to one of the exhibition’s most problematic aspects, namely its attempt to link virtually every work or style, even the most purely formalist, to matters of black identity. Of course, numerous artists actively strived to develop what they saw as a specifically black aesthetic. But does that mean all art by AfricanAmericans, to qualify as ‘authentic’, necessarily has to represent the black experience? Can’t art by African Americans ever just be universal? What’s fascinating is that these are exactly the sorts of questions Whitten’s paintings themselves seem to wrestle with in the seventyeight-year-old artist’s first solo show in London. Ostensibly, all the works are abstract. Geometric shapes often feature – as in Annabelle II (1984), a circular canvas whose creamy, thickly impastoed top layer is faintly incised with quadrilaterals and deeply gouged with crisp, concentric circles to reveal richer colours beneath. Also, there’s a strong focus on ideas of process, on paintings revealing the methods of their own manufacture

– most notably in the four small, square works from Whitten’s DNA series (1979), where a painted, abstract ground has been raked or combed (Whitten constructed special, multipronged raking tools) to create a gridded pattern, a different shimmering, eye-watering, weavelike effect in each case. They’re unique pieces, in that sense – but at the same time they’re like a kind of system or code, products of a process that’s impersonal, universally applicable, indifferent to identity. DNA, that most fundamental of codes, was the metaphor Whitten chose for that series’ title. But he also likened his work to photography, in the way that his raking processes could be seen as fixing or developing an image. He’s quoted in the show’s catalogue describing his art as a way of photographing his thoughts – the idea being one of capturing something personal and subjective, externalising it, making it objective. Soon, he began to experiment with another object-related technique in his Site paintings (1986), using moulds he took from the urban environment – metal grilles, manhole covers, tire treads – to cast directly into acrylic paint, the patterned sections forming a sort of topographical collage. These two strands come together in what are the most impressive works in the show,

the large paintings dedicated to various friends and luminaries. Ode To Andy: For Andy Warhol (1986) consists of tessellated, ash-grey casts of chicken wire, bubble wrap and brickwork, surrounded by frantic scrubs and drizzles of bright paint. Willi Meets The Keeper (For Willi Smith) (1987) is even more madly mesmerising, the swirling, embossed fragments buckling into knotted ridges and lesions, while skeins of colour dimple and pucker. The paintings aren’t portraits, they don’t represent anything – but nor are they not portraits, according to Whitten’s philosophy: rather they’re depictions, like photographs, of his thoughts or feelings, psychic impressions of a subject. And it’s here that the theme of race becomes manifest – not merely because various works are dedicated to prominent African-Americans; but because of the variegated, skinlike textures the paint makes: wrinkles, keloids, charred-looking wounds. The resonances are oppressive, unavoidable – albeit most obvious in the drenched black surface of Black Monolith I, A Tribute to James Baldwin (1988). There’s no way of chasing objective truths, these works seem to declare, without ending up back at that most abiding, divisive truth of all, the fact of racial identity in America. Gabriel Coxhead

Ode To Andy: For Andy Warhol, 1986, acrylic on canvas, 244 × 208 × 5 cm. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

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Zach Blas Contra-Internet Gasworks, London 21 September – 10 December Although ostensibly critical of capitalism, Derek Jarman’s cult film Jubilee (1978) was originally conceived of partly as a way to make a profit out of the punk scene. It’s therefore a decidedly ambivalent feature for Zach Blas to use as the basis for his queer anticapitalist sci-fi Jubilee 2033 (2017), the main video in his first institutional solo show. Where Jubilee satirised manufactured media heroes, Blas’s target is the Internet, dominated by a deregulated capitalism and increasingly consuming the world at large. Jubilee 2033 begins in the 1950s with free-market figureheads Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan, the latter accompanied by his wife Joan Mitchell. Reclining in a chair, a wild-eyed, mannish Rand (played by Susanne Sachsse) argues that altruism and the common good must give way to unbridled individualism. Only in this way can heroic men – supported by compliant women – achieve great things unimpeded. As Blas demonstrates, this sexist economic model already dominates the Internet: the trio are visited by Azuma

Hikari, a servile CGI fembot currently commercially available as an artificial intelligence assistant, presumably marketed at men. She transports the group into the year 2033, where tech startups lie in ruins, their offices ransacked and torched. A genderless AI operative, Nootropix (played by performance artist and body builder Cassils), describes how online monopolies are giving way to a revolution that seeks to return the Internet to the early potential seen in it by cyberfeminist thinkers. Throughout the show, Blas self-consciously employs Critical Art Ensemble’s technique of ‘utopian plagiarism’: the appropriation of existing cultural forms to imagine an alternative future. It’s a potent satirical tool that in the film produces many funny lines (“my heroes were the infrastructuralists”) delivered in a hammy manner that captures the rough charm of Jarman’s original. But like any oppositional strategy, it risks being shaped by the very thing it resists or appropriates. Nootropix is announced as “our black hat”,

Zach Blas, Jubilee 2033 (still), 2017, single-channel video, colour, sound, 17 min 10 sec. Courtesy the artist

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a kind of lone hacker intent on wilful destruction; aren’t such rebels simply countercultural versions of the Randian hero, like Jarman’s marketable antimarket punks? And by mirroring the destructive politics of Jubilee, is Blas saying that online capitalism must be accelerated to breaking point in order to bring about change? It’s a not unproblematic scenario, in which the most precarious members of society would doubtless be the collateral damage. In the second of the exhibition’s two rooms, a trio of videos (Inversion Practice #1–3, 2015–16) offer absurdist strategies for working against the Internet from within, using online editing software. One screen depicts the erasure of social media platforms, leaving only the user’s words; on another, a find and replace function exchanges the word ‘capitalism’ for ‘internet’ in a range of essays on the unimaginable end of capital. These minor, less extreme gestures show just how hard it is to imagine the end of the Internet, and how we might go about doing so. Paul Clinton

David Alekhuogie Them Boys Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles 8 September – 21 October David Alekhuogie’s show is full of butts – concrete butts to be exact, cast from mannequin hip busts used to model underwear (Altered States series, all works 2017). Alekhuogie reconfigures these forms first materially, from plastic to concrete, then usefully, as vases, casting copper pipes into each to hold water and the stems of various flora. A dutifully abstracted mannequin allows the projection of oneself into the garment modelled. In the case of underwear, we are meant to picture our own butts, clad in cotton and elastic. Alekhuogie’s butts, however, are ideal to the point of inspiring neurotic waves of inadequacy – on closer inspection, this oh-so-perfect butt appears to be flexed, slightly. In concrete, it is ensured a proud defiance of gravity for some time to come. The question of why one might experience in a gallery that for which a department store will generally suffice goes unanswered. But Alekhuogie takes us further down the aisles in his Pull-Up series: close-cropped, highly detailed photographs of the low-slung, saggy-pants style of revealing layered jeans, gym shorts and underwear that has become one of the cyclical

consternations in American culture. Recall President Obama’s famous remark, cited in the press release, that ‘brothers should pull up their pants’. That low-slung pants associate one with a certain swagger (further accentuated in the revelation of favoured brand labels) lacks the unremarkable associations of, say, a blouse. That is, rather than being an ordinary index of personal expression, the clothing choices of young men of colour quickly become cultural fodder for handwringing, often wildly misinformed discussions about violence, gang culture, hedonism and what-have-you. Alekhuogie offsets these loaded associations with two Epson ink-tinted cyanotype series: Nikes and Athlete. The former serialises an image of drapery, the latter that of a cropped classical torso of a male athlete. The colour throughout is strikingly artificial, luminous in spots and dulled by absorption in others (all are printed on watercolour paper). The Pull-Up series zeroes in on the tactility of fabric. The pieces are cropped to the point of abstraction, with each swath of fabric crossing the picture plane in a catenary slump, nary a bodily contour in sight. The involuntary ruching of elastic-

banded gym shorts works like an undulating wave across a trio of low-mounted prints, Pull-Up B/B/B, Pull-Up W/O/B/G and Pull-Up R/B/W. In two works, Pull-Up W/O/B and Pull-Up R/R, the sensuality of the absent body fills the frame by implication – time and movement implied in each work’s vaporous multiple exposures. Another brand logo, and, funnily enough, a belt, show through the haze of R/R. The American cultural need to comment on, ‘correct’, or capitalise upon the clothing choices of young people of colour points in its own way to idealised masculinity as much as Ancient Greek statues – only, in contemporary times mannequins are repositories of the ideal rather than statuary: the serial mould occupying the space of the original. The appeal, and repulsion, of saggy pants in the American psyche rests on the presumption of young men of colour as dangerous in some essential way – a deepseated racial caricature that first presumes, then glamorises the ‘exotic’. Alekhuogie’s work here demonstrates – particularly through the language of advertising – more than it contemplates the ever-finer line between disgust and allure. Aaron Horst

Them Boys, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Brica Wilcox. Courtesy the artist and Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles

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Ad Minoliti G.S.F.C. 2.0 (Geometrical Sci-Fi Cyborg) Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles 12 September – 4 November The thing about cyborgs, as a combination of the organic and the mechanical, is that their existence does not so much blur boundaries as render the very premise of boundaries obsolete. For artist Ad Minoliti, the allegorical potential of the cyborg’s non-binary formulation presents an intersectional concept (beginning with combined human/machine consciousness, manifesting in analogue and digital techniques, and referencing gender theory), as well as a broader working method she employs in her combination of, for example, both analogue and digital techniques within single canvases. By installing painting, sculpture and video works within site-specific mural elements, she overtly and dynamically undermines the dominance of the discrete, rarefied object, instead privileging a more fractured experience rather than a smooth experiential continuum within the exhibition space. The elements of the murals are combinations of brightly coloured, stylised geometrical and anatomical forms – arms, legs, circles, triangles and the occasional feline. Augmenting the room, the wall paintings contribute imagery of human legs to paintings, or create large-scale crotches in which the canvases nestle, or playground scale motifs (swings, slides, climbing elements) on which the paintings seem to perch. These motifs in turn appear as elements of her

paintings, which unto themselves represent an even deeper dive into the allegorical potential of materials and processes, as well as a more representational articulation through direct mediation of the image content. The artist’s extensive invocation of cyborgs, hybrid consciousness, gender theory and geometry could conjure a stark aesthetic, or at least a tone of gravitas. In fact, Minoliti is playing this game with light-hearted, colourful exuberance. Sky blue, rosy crimson and radiant lime are the key hues of the installation, and the shapes are rendered in a somewhat naive mode that evokes Matisse’s cutouts, his dancers and stars, in both form and palette. The paintings themselves are made with a deliberately hybrid process in which they are painted, photographed, scanned, reprinted on canvas, then augmented by hand-painting, which often entails the addition of more schematic geometrical elements that both amplify and obscure the initial composition. And about those initial compositions: many reference a childlike fantasy world of surreal quasi-natural landscapes and abstract flourishes. The more successful examples are from her Case Study House series (2015), in which she builds upon the foundations of iconic Julius Shulman architectural photographs, replacing the leisure ladies of the originals with more

fully-modelled versions of her geometrical lexicon – the triangles, circles, and squares which populate both the wall and the canvas. In these works the contrast between pictorial naturalism and the constructs of surreality plays out with more visual and optical drama, and draws more attention to her mediations, as well as to the specificity of her conceptual narrative – by forcing diverse processes, material idioms and styles into closer proximity. One part of the installation expands Minoliti’s core mission of intersectional fusion into the realm of video, sculpture, and importantly, collaboration. She often invites other women artists to participate in her art, in this case, Zadie Xa and Yaoska Davila. Davila’s Picasso Asshole (2017), appears as a vignette in which two of Minoliti’s paintings recline on fancy fringed tuffet cushions and watch a video loop featuring Xa. The mutual reflection between the artists’s works can be enjoyed and understood as expressing their relationship to art history, gender politics and refined activism. The setup of both works is also pretty funny. And indeed humour is a mainstay of this exhibition, in which random chickens, emoji-like cartoon elements and high level discourse collide in a playground of upended paradigms. Shana Nys Dambrot

G.S.F.C. 2.0 (Geometrical Sci-Fi Cyborg), 2017 (installation view). Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles

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Elaine Cameron-Weir wave form walks the earth Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles 17 September – 22 November A disclaimer in the introduction to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) reads eerily like our modern ‘opinion expressed’ television warnings. She writes: ‘The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction’ – almost as if the unborn protagonist were penning himself into being. A text accompanying Elaine Cameron-Weir’s exhibition reads at once like a bad English translation and a concrete poem – grammar and spelling to the wind! In one of the more coherent sentences, Cameron-Weir echoes Shelley’s sentiments of nonhuman selfautomation: ‘…I started adjusting a machine in a large room, then at the other end of the room the same machine began to make adjustments to itself’. Indeed, an eerie sense of the absent body permeates the exhibition, although any sense of whose body it is remains unclear. For example, FOR MAKE ADMIT THIS VOIDE (all works 2017) comprises a rubber (perhaps army surplus) jacket outfitted with leather strapping and steel surgical hardware, each prong holding a humble stone of raw amber.

The surgical device seems more a trendy accessory than an obscure, ominous tool for body modification. Markedly, this jacket, like the other suspended sculptures in the room, is suggestive of, yet absented from, the body: a cruciform chainmail is strung up from the ceiling and given pewter body parts and leather harnessing (dressing for altitude); nearby the artist’s feet have been cast in pewter and dangled from a treated leather harness (wave form walks the earth). The feet here, removed from leg or torso, introduce an element of dismemberment that is faithful to the exhibition’s sinister undertones. At their best, Weir’s sculptural assemblages are an uncanny blend of function and ornament. At moments, the exhibition feels futuristic – musing on sentience and robotics – while elsewhere its aged materials (raw leather, Second World War-era oxygen masks and linens) feel nostalgic. Amidst this alchemical brew of provocations, a flirtation with the psychosexual permeates. The bodies suggested by CameronWeir’s sculptures are subject to suspension, bondage, capture and delight. Like in previous bodies of work, the artist uses olfactory stimulus to aid in her bawdy fiction. The unwieldily titled Who you are what looks out from behind you

are is the thing that names what transforms…now, look what calms the captive by letting him sniff the perfume, like smell what smells like your masters crotch emits pleasing scents of a labdanum resin that is being slowly warmed on a laboratory heating mantel. Above this device, a moulded swath of leather recalling a Zorro mask dangles, as if to personify this scientific assemblage. Two wall works included in the exhibition make use of familiar materials – parachute silk, stainless steel, leather – though they seem to function outside of the fiction created elsewhere, speaking more to art history than to narrative. While loosely suggestive of a hide, or splayed animal, bound to the wall, the works read as paintings. Nevertheless the wall pieces allow a rest from the voyeuristic implications of the sculptural work; simple delights come from the formal arrangement of ruching and draping. The circular and muddied narrative created by Cameron-Weir is less overtly didactic than Shelley’s Frankenstein. Without a clear protagonist, the viewer herself is implicated in the whirlpool of sensuous, steam-punk futurism that seems to revel in pleasure more than warn of impending doom. Lindsay Preston Zappas

dressing for altitude, 2017, pewter, stainless steel, leather, sandbags, 113 × 20 × 154 cm. Photo: Veli Matti-Hoikka. Courtesy the artist and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles

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Black + Brown People | White Problems Samsøñ, Boston 9 June – 19 August The only way to enter Black + Brown People | White Problems is by stepping on the Confederate flag lying on the floor in the entrance way. Facing viewers from the end of the long and narrow gallery are archival photographs of lynchings and black servitude set in frames engraved with sentimental phrases like ‘Always & Forever’ and ‘Good Friends’. This is Family Pictures (2016), Steve Locke’s contribution to the exhibition, a group show of works by artists of colour that takes as its subject uncomfortable conversations. The images are painful and poignant comments on the long history of the casual depiction and spectacularisation of murdered African-American bodies, which today occurs in a new form. While the practice of white people exchanging postcards of lynchings has waned, photos and videos depicting murdered black bodies continue to go viral and garner click capital. The press release to the show features a 1955 photograph of Emmet Till’s murderers, gleeful after news of their acquittal – a nod, no doubt, to Dana Schutz’s contested solo exhibition on view contemporaneously about a mile away at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Schutz’s painting of Till, Open Casket (2016), sparked protests and conversations about capitalising on black suffering after its inclusion

in the last Whitney Biennial. Locke’s poignant handling of media spectacularisation – which precedes the Schutz controversy – likewise centres on images of black deaths, and regardless of the artists’ respective identities, Locke clearly offers a much more thoughtful and careful handling of these images, situating his own use of images of black bodies within both the current moment and the long history of their abuse. Locke’s timely critique of spectacle should here be extended to the ways in which uncomfortable conversations are turned into controversy and then capitalised on, wherein criticism becomes clickbait. While the conversation has been a productive one, it has come at the cost of shifting focus away from some incredibly powerful – and frankly better – painters who were in the Whitney Biennial, including Tala Madani and Henry Taylor, both on view once again at Samsøñ. Few recent painters have struck me as hard as these two. Taylor’s Tasered (2006), his contribution to this exhibition, is painted in colours rich yet flat, with brushstrokes at once careful and urgent; the painting is both responsive and considered. Not only in form, but in process and content, taking distance from timely images: the police officer who shot Philando Castile was acquitted of all charges while

Henry Taylor, Tasered, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 152 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Samsøñ, Boston

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Taylor’s painting of Castile was on view in the biennial. Madani’s Hands In (2005) similarly has the quickest brushstrokes of any of her paintings that I’ve seen. This simultaneous responsiveness and reflection provides the perfect model for how to try and act in a political climate like this one: to act thoughtfully but to respond urgently and passionately. The curatorial strategy likewise points to the merits of reflective responsiveness – the exhibition and its accompanying library have grown throughout the summer by way of new books and new works. The exhibition also responds to the ossification of the Schutz exhibition on the ICA’s calendar before her name was a controversial one. There are protesters who believe this is no excuse – that Schutz’s show (which does not include the painting of Till) should be pulled, that it is irresponsible to go on with business as usual. Either way, it is perhaps more powerful to look away from the spectacle and turn instead to Black + Brown People | White Problems, which offers not only different voices but more thoughtful and adaptive work. Rather than reactionary opportunism, the Samsøñ exhibition provides a space to engage in careful and urgent – and at times uncomfortable – conversations about pervasive white problems. Emily Watlington

Aaron Flint Jamison The Stored Work Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York 10 September – 15 October Aaron Flint Jamison’s solo show includes more than just his own work: on view is Miguel Abreu Gallery’s holdings of available works by all the artists it represents, as of 10 September 2017, the opening date of the exhibition. Spanning both Abreu’s Eldridge Street and Orchard Street locations, Jamison has coordinated the delivery of artworks from storage facilities in New Jersey, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and has opened storage closets onsite. Clustered in groups by artist, the works are left wrapped as they would be in storage – crates marked with shipping information, Sharpie warnings written by art handlers on makeshift cardboard boxes, aged bubble wrap and ragged shipping tape abound. All the packages feature stickers noting the contents of the package with accession number sequences. Featured in the Eldridge Street location is a viewing room, complete with workstation (perhaps staged, at least it wasn’t active on my visit) and a small sculpture presented for condition assessment.

Aesthetically, certain packages function as interesting sculptural forms; others are seductive only in their mystery. While these are the objects on view, it is Miguel Abreu, his staff, the other artists on the gallery roster, a conservator, art handlers and all of the people, time and logistics involved in the apparatus needed to execute this simple idea that become the most intriguing aspect of this exhibition. The press release, written in the first person by the artist, notes that visitors are ‘encouraged to speak to one of the gallery’s directors’ to request a viewing of any of the 373 artworks onsite. It also notes that a conservator will ‘unpack the stored works one-byone’ to assess and confirm the current gallery records. Jamison provides details on the four offsite storage facilities, screenshots of the software he wrote to catalogue and track the stored inventory, and his plans to design a new centralised storage facility for the gallery.

It is a generous premise – to air out some old work, to work with the gallery staff to make their day-to-day work more efficient and to plan for new spaces, in the process reengineering the relationship between staff, artists and the artwork that brings them together. There is a long history of exhibiting the backroom and using art to promote institutional transparency, and Jamison’s work tends to revel in pulling back the curtain. Though his brand of institutional critique here, if it is in fact a critique, is more curious than confrontational. More important than revealing the artwork Miguel Abreu hasn’t sold is the hint at the system that allows for artworks to leave the gallery for new homes in the first place. The exhibition stands as a layered gesture towards productivity, all the while tracing and uncovering the networks that facilitate the circulation of art, ultimately pointing to the labour, both physical and affective, that lies behind the objects. Yuri Stone

The Stored Work – Frieze Presentation, 2017 (installation view, Frieze London). Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

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Cajsa von Zeipel The Alpha State Company Gallery, New York 10 September – 15 October In certain psychophysical states, the distinction between persons and interiors of a dimly lit nightclub may not seem totally clear, but depending on how you look at it, there may be freedom in this kind of perceptual distortion. Cajsa von Zeipel’s sculptures move between powerful human figuration and uncanny objecthood: slightly enlarged bodies fuse with benches, ATMs, mirrors and ramshackle bar interiors. Despite their strangeness, these mythological creatures-in-the-making feel somewhat familiar: club kids, poseurs in puffer jackets, all thriving in that liminal euphoria of the disco. The object-figures, variably sculpted in a freehanded mix of fibreglass, Styrofoam, epoxy and plaster, emerge from von Zeipel’s research into Area, the infamous hedonist club of 1980s New York, which, under the direction of the Goode siblings, became the main temple of afterhours debauchery in the city. Von Zeipel summarises the spirit of her imagined historical

scenes through the alpha state, the first stage of sleep or hypnosis, when the mind is set at ease and begins to dream, but Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of the ‘carnivalesque’ would offer an equally apt description: a state in which the very conditions of normative subjectivity (obedient to power structures) is suspended and overturned, however temporarily. When exactly does one become an object, or a piece of furniture – or become recognised as such? Party politics aside, the truly radical gesture of von Zeipel’s work lies in bringing these dynamic and nocturnal figures out of the dark and into the clinical brightness of the white cube. Here they are frozen, or turned to stone as if relics of another world (in Babe you know what to do (Cajsa & Sophie), all works 2017, a couple is captured in sweet embrace on top of a shopping cart). The work reads as a critique of the historical category of sculpture, whose modernist apparatus persistently attempts to absorb and freeze

Babe you know what to do (Cajsa & Sophie), 2017, resin, fibreglass, plaster, styrofoam, steel, shopping cart, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Company Gallery, New York

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any site and scene, but in turn kills the liveliness of its subjects. But as part monuments, part interiors, von Zeipel’s sculptures are categorically transgressive, inviting viewers for sitting as much as contemplation. Alpha State, a wall-like block of plaster and metal rods with attached handles on both ends, serves both as diamond-dusted room divider and as space-warped representation of a hectic bathroom scene with more than a few formal similarities to August Rodin’s The Gates of Hell (1880–1917). In Aura a partygoer is eternalised in a classic bronze copy of her stern-looking face. Even Damien Hirst (and his recent venture into aquatic sculpture in Venice earlier this year) seems to get a treatment: in Lazer Racer a vaginal water-squirting sea-monstress is reduced to decorative water feature embellished in fake corals. As a critique of identitarianism emerging from a critique of sculptural form, it gives a powerful weight to von Zeipel’s hedonist bodies. Jeppe Ugelvig

Pat Steir Kairos Lévy Gorvy, New York 7 September – 21 October Pat Steir’s paintings are, in the artist’s words, “made by gravity”: since the late 1980s, she has almost exclusively employed a process of pouring and dripping layers of thinned oil paint onto upright canvases tacked to her studio wall, allowing the pigment to work its way down the surface. Inspired in part by her friendship with John Cage, Steir’s turn to poured paint was a means of “remov[ing] ego from the work” by allowing the paintings to ultimately create themselves. Steir plans out the order in which she will apply colours, the viscosity of the thinned paint for each layer, and the duration of the pour, but the end results are dictated as much by chance and the elements – the humidity in the studio on a given day, for instance – as the artist’s own intent; once the paint hits the canvas, her control over the situation ends. Though her works are formally in dialogue with Abstract Expressionism, she explicitly rejects the ‘expressionist’ part of that

equation. (As she recently quipped in an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, “if you have to express yourself, you should see a therapist”.) Kairos, Steir’s first New York exhibition since joining the bluechip gallery Lévy Gorvy in 2016, features 12 recent paintings, mostly employing an ethereal, icy palette of light blues, greys, pinks and greens, alongside shimmering silver and gold. All of the paintings are organised around a central vertical split, but Steir achieves remarkable variety within this simple compositional format. Some paintings seem to cleave at the centre, revealing underlying strata of layered paint beneath the surface. In Lila Judith (2016–17), an overall field of pinky purple, punctuated with narrow drips of white, opens up to reveal a streak of black. At a distance, Morning (With Red Line in the Middle) (2015–16) appears to consist of thin rivulets of black paint dripped over a white ground, bifurcated by a forceful strip of black. Up close, it becomes evident that the

opposite is true: the ‘drips’ of black are cracks in the layer of white on top, pulling apart at the middle. The effect is elemental, like tectonic plates shifting, or sutures coming undone. Others have a more emphatic, Newmanesque ‘zip’ dividing the canvas: in Sweet Grey (2016–17), for instance, one of seven smaller, square canvases on the gallery’s second floor, two parallel streaks of red cut down the centre, emphasising the tonal inversion between the two halves: on the left, lavender overlaid with cascading passages of white and grey; on the right, silvery grey tinged with lavender peeking through from underneath. One large painting, Angel (2016–17), is unlike the rest, with a precise, taped-off line of tangerine orange resting atop a whitish ground – a homage to Steir’s late mentor, Agnes Martin. In its deviation, this painting seems to offer a key to how to understand the rest, foregrounding the palpable energy Steir creates at the seams. Rachel Wetzler

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Frank Bowling Metropolitanblooms Hales Project Room, New York 6 September – 15 October In the art criticism he wrote during the early 1970s, Frank Bowling chafed against the then-pervasive ‘black art’ label, which he found limiting rather than liberating. In an artist statement from 1972, he formulates the act of making abstract-expressionist paintings as political: ‘The practice of painting within the boundaries of Formalism provides a setting in which I am able to test and ultimately prove my own freedom.’ Bowling’s take on abstract painting feels as urgent as ever in Metropolitanblooms, a diminutive show of six works Bowling made between 1978 and 1986. Timed to coincide with a Bowling show at the gallery’s London headquarters, this exhibition is also concurrent with Bowling’s major retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich as well as his inclusion in Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation exhibition. Among these more notable offerings, this tiny show

stands out because New York has unfortunately seen far less of Bowling than Europe has. I won’t use the stale label ‘overlooked’ to describe Bowling – he certainly hasn’t been – but he regrettably hasn’t had a solo institutional exhibition in New York since his Whitney Museum show in 1971. The works on view are heirs to an ab-ex sensibility, but complicate a limited view of modernist painting. Made when Bowling had just relocated from New York to London (and to a much snugger studio), these smaller and more intimate paintings shrug off the bravado of the New York School’s monumental abstraction. Rather than the great whooshes of colour found in the poured paintings that precede them, the works from this period allow pours to puddle, and Bowling has built up their palettes in layer upon layer of swampy drips and swirls of paint.

Vase, 1985, acrylic paint on paper, 107 × 67 cm. Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, New York

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It’s interesting to see the formal interests Bowling shares with his peers – Sam Gilliam’s paintings on rice paper from the 1970s come to mind, as do Al Loving’s paper collages from the same period. Bowling has also taken on Helen Frankenthaler’s colour sense and Lynda Benglis’s drippy tactility. The show’s two works on paper, Autumn Flare (1986) and Vase (1985), are undeniably its standout pieces. In Autumn Flare, the paper’s absorption of thickly applied layers of yellow, pink and purple paint creates an alluring ripple that emphasises the colour’s physicality and its glopping sensuality. Vase is all pastel pinks and purples, but rips and tears along its edges make the work feel refreshingly unprecious – the painting’s surface becomes a tactile object rather than a sacred space. Though small in size, this show proves Bowling to be a crucial figure in expanding our understanding of the political potential of abstract and expressionistic painting. Ashton Cooper

Alexander Tovborg altars of humanity Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York 12 October – 12 November the symbol has resurrected Blum & Poe, New York 15 September – 28 October Of late, many artists and critics have decried the toxic effects of greed on contemporary art and, more cogently, society. Few, however, have broached this fraught subject with the hallucinatory vision, iconographic complexity and references to tradition-rooted morality that Alexander Tovborg develops in these complementary shows: together they form an exegesis on Mammon – the New Testament incarnation of venality that Jesus opposes to clarity of vision and spirit (Matthew 6:19–24) – and its long march through history. At Nicelle Beauchene, this exploration plays out across a five-panel allegorical painting, ALTARS OF HUMANITY (the symbol has resurrected) the worship of mammon (2016–17). Its deeply coded imagery includes figures of dinosaurs, Noah’s Ark, satellites, planes, the ouroboros, a map of Pangaea, the EU flag and two clock faces set at 11:58 (which suggest a schematic, if obvious, end of days revelation). Each segment is divided into rectangular units across which patterns repeat, as in Mayan reliefs. Forms are composed

of networks of parallel and concentric lines rendered in luminous colours painted on felt and collaged onto wood. Their effect reinforces a sense of symbolic structure and hallucinatory overload meant, it seems, to surpass literal understanding, or perhaps to induce a spiritual clarity of sight as suggested by the biblical reference, though both goals remain unfulfilled. Equally complex, the works at Blum & Poe, altars composed of a central panel paired with two drawings, are titled after avatars of Mammon, such as MAMMON (the symbol has resurrected) neutral angel, atlantis & pregnant capitalist (2017). These also include, according to other works’ titles, ‘hérnan cortés’, ‘the 1%’ and ‘president elect’. Specific combinations of circles and signs represent most of these evils, though sometimes literalism creeps in: Trump’s face is recognisable in the shape of a grotesque, and the ‘pregnant capitalist’ is represented by a serpent with trucks and ships in its belly. Here again, the repetition of forms reflects a dizzyingly complex cosmology, but the paintings seem stiff. Only the drawings

exude a luminosity that hints at something beyond a highly developed schematic system. Tovborg’s work seems akin to the wideranging exploration of styles in contemporary figuration that, in its sum, risks devolving into decorative excess. More historical precedents might include Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint and the visionary Argentine Xul Solar, all of whom sought to link the quotidian with the universal. But his closest parallels might be Matthew Ritchie and Matthew Barney, for their articulations of highly developed, self-referential iconographies. That his five-panel painting contains references to past work as well as portraits that meld his countenance with Mammon’s adds self-critique to his exegesis. Tovborg’s obsession seems sincere, nor is it preachy, refreshing at a time when much on the subject seems tendentiously theoretical and moralistic. But his iconography, in its complexity, remains obtuse and adds little to an understanding of, or exit from, human enslavement to Mammon. Joshua Mack

ALTARS OF HUMANITY (the symbol has resurrected) the worship of mammon, 2016–17, mixed media, 300 × 1000 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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Rachel Rose Gavin Brown’s enterprise, 127th Street, New York 15 September – 28 October The four-legged protagonist of Rachel Rose’s animated video Lake Valley (2016) calls to mind any number of the roly-poly characters that populate children’s books, and the work’s narrative is as hazy as the creature’s provenance. Making its US debut after a run at the Venice Biennale, Lake Valley follows a scruffy, vaguely feline/canine/vulpine animal as it passes through a vibrant but sinister dreamscape. At the Harlem space, the eight-minute video is projected on a five-by-nine-metre screen accessed through a massive rolling freight entrance that exposes the floor-level gallery to the street, where it plays nightly on a loop from 6pm to 6am. Lake Valley’s landscapes and characters are constructed using eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury clippings from a vast range of illustrated children’s books, which are animated by hand and collaged using postproduction software. The exquisite composite renderings have elicited comparisons to the illustrated interior worlds of children’s literature classics, such as the Moomin series (1945–70) and Winnie the Pooh (1926), but a resemblance might also be drawn to the less-known 1940 board book Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt, whose titular rabbit bears

a likeness to Lake Valley’s creature. Similarly to Kunhardt’s groundbreaking sensory children’s book – the first to embed tactile surfaces, such as a bunny’s fuzzy tail and a father’s scratchy beard, within its pages – Rose’s latest work does not so much upend narrative convention as unmoor it. Lake Valley’s narrative arc is as expansive as it is inconclusive. Rose previously transformed her fascination with the dislocating sensory effects of space travel into the 2015 video Everything and More, but Lake Valley takes as its subject the psychological toll of indeterminacy – one’s lack of clarity regarding the story in which one features – as it considers the loneliness of pre- and nascent verbal childhood. The work’s unspeaking, unnamed subject – a pet, or perhaps an extension of the child shown sleeping near the video’s beginning – awakens with the child, observes her day omnisciently and finally ventures out at nightfall as the girl returns to sleep, either through the front door or into a framed abstract landscape within the house. There, the animal discovers a lush, foreboding wilderness composed of densely interlaid swatches sampled from (in Rose’s estimate) thousands of scanned vintage illustrations. A subsequent, visually

arresting strobelike scene evokes the hallucinatory, somatic 1960s films of Paul Sharits. Like Sharits, Rose ties physical sensation to emotional register. As the disoriented and forlorn creature curls up to sleep in a copse, an aerial shot zooms ever farther out to reveal the endlessly sprawling suburban landscape surrounding the green space, and the child once more awakens. Rose is interested in the aspects of experience that evade mimetic and diegetic expression, and her art’s broad focal range has been accused of using a breathless poetic indeterminacy to obscure a lack of meat. Yet this very indeterminacy allows for intimacy; viewers pull from their own experiences in their assessments of the work. Gavin Brown’s unusual presentation, a departure from the frenetic Biennale mounting – where the video was sandwiched between adjacent installations and the Central Pavilion’s food hall, its stillness subsequently denuded – facilitates an experience both communal and intimate in the near empty gallery, with nary a gallerist or art aficionado in sight. One hopes that at least a few passersby happen upon it by chance in the early hours, their guard perhaps enough softened by alcohol and incongruity to read into it what they would. Cat Kron

Lake Valley (still), 2016, HD video, 8 min 25 sec. Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York & Rome

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ArtReview

Rodrigo Valenzuela General Song Upfor, Portland 6 September – 14 October For the Chilean-born artist Rodrigo Valenzuela, physical and artistic labour have always been intertwined. After moving to the United States in 2005, Valenzuela worked for a decade in construction while he developed his artistic practice. These jobs influenced the production of several experimental videos documenting fellow workers: in Maria TV (2014), for instance, Valenzuela combines interview footage of Latinx nannies and maids with sequences in which they perform telenovela monologues, enacting their real-life frustrations through dramatic dialogue. For a 2015 exhibition at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum titled Future Ruins, Valenzuela paired these videos with the black-and-white photographic series Hedonic Reversal (2014), depicting decaying architectural structures. They are faked, however: Valenzuela made the images through a painstaking process. He constructed scenes of destruction in his studio, photographed them, created digital scans of those images as backdrops and assembled further objects in front of them, accompanied by dusty footprints and scrawls of chalk and graphite. Future Ruins, mounted in a gentrifying Seattle, evoked Robert Smithson’s 1967 characterisation of the New Jersey Turnpike as ‘ruins in reverse’. In his catalogue interview for the exhibition, conducted over a year before

President Trump vowed to ‘Make America Great Again’, Valenzuela explained his interest in artificial ruins: ‘I am not seeking to symbolize loss and nostalgia for a better past; I’m seeking to understand if there is pleasure in the ruin itself’. General Song takes a more prosaic and politicised tone. Its title draws on Pablo Neruda’s volume of poetry narrating the history of the Americas from a Latinx perspective. In the main gallery space, Valenzuela shows seven photographs from the Barricades series (all works 2017), based on research of historical uprisings. Like the Hedonic Reversal pictures, these are near-human-scale prints of faux ruins assembled in the artist’s studio. The images, however, are more sombre and straightforward; they are printed in muted, silvery tones, and lack the stark contrast of the earlier work. Plywood two-by-fours, tyres, chains and bricks are scattered across these new anarchic compositions, evidence of apparent unrest. His photographs of the scenes are mounted or wheat-pasted on boards in the background of the images, with reverse constructions staged in front of them. The fact that there is no reflection of the photographer in what appears to be a ‘mirror’ at the back of the image is immediately striking.

Remarkable, too, is Valenzuela’s eye for poetic detail in everyday materials. In Barricade No. 2, for example, a piece of corrugated metal on the ground stretches forward and backward – in the ‘real’ foreground and replicated background – like a flowing river. In Barricade No. 1, Valenzuela paints a scaffolding grid – in his words from the Future Ruins catalogue, ‘the quintessential structure of the everyday that the working class builds’ – on the background, and ersatz shadows on the floor. On a wall adjacent to the photographs, Valenzuela shows the seven-minute slowmotion video Meditations on Land (2013). Here he trades the documentary conceit of his earlier work for full-on theatricality. The artist himself appears as a shirtless Colossus moving mounds of dirt, a nod to Goya’s painting El Coloso (1808–12) of a giant as allegory for Spanish fortitude in the Peninsular War. Elevating the artist to the status of mythic hero, Valenzuela’s video offers an odd counterpoint to the photographs. Where the Barricades subtly evoke themes of displacement, political deceptions and economic precarity, the video animates art history, turning the toil of war into a symbol. Valenzuela’s work is most successful when it refuses such a divide between material reality and its representation. Wendy Vogel

Barricade No. 2, 2017, archival pigment print mounted on Dibond, 141 × 115 × 6 cm (framed). Photo: Mario Gallucci. Courtesy the artist and Upfor Gallery, Portland

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Books Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the Twenty-first Century by Georgina Adam Lund Humphries, £19.99 (softcover) A veteran art-market journalist, Georgina Adam is discrete and observant, and good at navigating the elite social-scene and culture of the art market beyond the noise of auction prices. If her 2014 book Big Bucks: the Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century charted the wild ride of commercial expansion at the turn-of-the-millennium (asking whether the art-market boom would ever stop), her new work revisits many of the earlier book’s themes in the light of the art market’s relative slump from 2015. It’s a gloomier take, in which Adam focuses on the ‘excesses the explosion in the market in the twenty-first century has brought in its wake,’ among which she includes ‘the active branding of art and artists as a commodity, the buying of art for investment or speculation, the temptations of forgery and fraud, conflicts of interest, tax evasion, money laundering [and the] pressure to produce more and more art.’ The book is an engaging introduction to these less visible background dynamics, compiled from Adam’s reporting of legal cases, auction results, big gallery and institutional developments and interviews with various industry players, some of them braggingly public, others off-the-record, no-names-please shy. That Adam chooses to focus on such things as the growth in freeport artstorage, the obsession with art as an investment opportunity, speculative buying and the litigious

quagmires of copyright and authentication is meant to highlight how much money has become an end in itself within the shadowy corridors that connect galleries, auction houses and art advisors eventually to the global class of the ultra-rich. Adam’s accounts of the excesses is certainly entertaining; of visiting Zhang Huan in his vast studio-factory in Shanghai, the artist piqued when Adam tells him she’s going to Sterling Ruby’s studio in Los Angeles, which, she believes, is ‘just as big’; of the relentless legal skirmishes of appropriation artists like Richard Prince or Jeff Koons, endlessly in and out of court battling with pissed-off artists claiming they’ve plagiarised their work; of the gala dinner that opened Shanghai’s West Bund art fair, where 360 uber gallerists and collectors are served ‘sea cucumber intestines nestling inside frozen globes’ by 40 radio-earphone-choreographed servers. Indeed, the rise of China features in its own chapter, signalling the increasing importance of the Chinese market and of its dynamic and fabulously wealthy collectors, and China’s staggering rush to build museums, largely driven by tax incentives for big property developments, but where political and economic volatility has encouraged many wealthy Chinese to get money out of the country (especially after the 2015 devaluation of the Yuan), often through buying art in the West.

Lying behind much of Adam’s disquiet is this obscure dynamic of liquidity seeking out art. As she writes of the expansion of freeport art-storage, ‘this plugged into a shift in how the uber-rich were investing their money, by increasingly accumulating tangible assets such as wine, art and vintage cars, particularly after the global financial crisis of 2008-9, when interest rates on other investments plunged to rock bottom.’ And as she points out, ‘art’s special qualities of portability means it can be bought with one currency in one country, but resold in another – acting in effect as a sort of alternative currency or shadow money.’ The real limitation of Dark Side of the Boom is that, while it looks at the art market’s continued relative robustness, even after 2015, there’s no closer explanation of why there’s still so much cash in a period supposedly marked by slump, particularly in the West, and slowing growth elsewhere. Yes, ‘there is the chance of making extraordinary profits on art, at a time when other investments have offered poor or non-existent returns,’ Adam writes, and the excesses she describes are no doubt driven further by this new context. But how the global space of the commercial art market intersects with the wider machinery of the global economy remains only glimpsed. What lies beyond is the real dark side of the art boom. J.J. Charlesworth

Now By the Invisible Committee Semiotext(e) £11.95/$13.95 (softcover)

Society is falling apart. The world today provides us with every excuse to revolt against a (capitalist) system whose imposed political and social norms do everything possible to suppress our freedom. The trouble is we’re not used to expressing that freedom because we view life through the filter of our screens and try to understand what’s going on in the world via an obfuscating fog of comment and commentary, all of them tools controlled by corporations or governments, but not us. Trapped in a world of artificial likes and artificial friends, we don’t know ourselves. Our lives are but a blind stumble. We’re crippled when we’re on our own. We’ve lost touch with anything

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real. That’s the ‘now’ into which The Invisible Committee launches its latest tract. Translated from the French, Now follows the anonymous collective’s previous books The Coming Insurrection (2007) and To Our Friends (2014), of which the present essay is figured as a ‘phantom chapter’. Like those earlier works, Now echoes the bombastic, aphorism-laden prose of French theorist Guy Debord and extends his concerns about the spectacle of capitalism blocking any attempt to situate ourselves in the present. Yet, as much as the Committee’s target is the guardians of capital, it is also the union groups who ‘march like Zombies’ of the left. ‘Being

ArtReview

on the left or on the right is to choose one of the countless ways afforded to humans to be imbeciles,’ the Committee spits. ‘Belonging is all that remains to those who no longer have anything.’ ‘The real has something intrinsically chaotic about it.’ ‘Politics, in France, is a cultural disease.’ ‘What is truly political is what emerges from life’. Where does all that leave us? Well, broadly speaking the Committee argue that we should embrace the chaos, see social and cultural friction as productive and understand that true freedom involves a dialogue with different worlds and different forms of life. Any sane person might consider that a valuable proposition right now. Mark Rappolt

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Fred Forest’s Utopia: Media Art and Activism by Michael F. Leruth MIT Press, $29.95/£24.95 (hardcover) In 1975 Fred Forest turned up to the São Paulo Bienal (in which he had not been invited to take part) in order to stage an alternative biennial of his own. In a hall by the side of the official exhibition galleries, Forest displayed his own photographs, video interviews with Bienal participants and related ephemera as if they were anthropological discoveries from another time entirely. He called it The Biennial of the Year 2000, and the effect was a thoroughgoing estrangement of the whole event, with its quotidian effects and events appearing as curious artefacts from some foreign (future) society. The stunt was typical of Forest – not just in its playful détournement of artworld rituals, its indeterminate place between public spectacle and public art or its use of video (then, still, an unfamiliar new media) to turn the public gaze back upon itself. But also in the way it positions Forest himself as some vagrant visitor from another time or place. There are moments while reading this often-fascinating monograph when Forest’s antics with Portapaks, telephone systems and TV networks reminds one of that old science fiction trope of the time traveller trapped in the past, desperately trying to marshal the technology of the era in which he finds himself in order to jury-rig the future technology he requires to get home. We might recall the Simple Net Art Diagram (1997) by artist group MTAA, in which two

simply rendered computer terminals are joined by a snaking black line with a red lightning strike in the centre bearing the caption ‘The art happens here’; Forest’s work, from his first ‘sociological art’ experiments in 1967 to his most recent work in the virtual environment of Second Life, seem to have always taken place in this liminal space between networked terminals. Fred Forest’s Utopia is a first book for Leruth, the artist’s friend, sometime collaborator and associate professor of French and Francophone studies at the College of William & Mary in the US. It is somewhat dry (though certainly nowhere near the Sahara levels of aridity to be found in much academic writing), but for the most part this doesn’t matter, since Forest’s own antics – inserting blank squares into newspaper front pages, waging highly publicised legal battles against the Centre Pompidou, running for president of Bulgarian state television – are themselves so lively. One might compare Leruth’s text with Stanisław Lem’s dense, fictitious reviews of imaginary books in A Perfect Vacuum (1971) and One Human Minute (1986); indeed, there were times while reading this book when I started to doubt the reality of Forest himself. Certainly if Forest hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary for someone to invent him. He is, in some ways, the perfect latetwentieth-century artist: born French, but with

an American-sounding name; equal parts huckster, prankster and social scientist; marked by the influence of John Cage, Yves Klein, Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan while seeming to anticipate later developments in relational aesthetics and net art. And yet you will search in vain for Forest’s name in Rhizome’s online Net Art Anthology (2016–) or Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter’s anthology of ‘art and the Internet’, Mass Effect (2015). Nor is Forest’s work held in any major national collections – except, significantly, that of the French Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, which is not an art museum but a radio and television archive. The artworld seems constitutively incapable of taking Forest seriously (no doubt his relentless publicity stunts, lawsuits and all round mischief-making haven’t helped). This is to be regretted, since Forest’s work has much to tell us about the transformations of time and space wreaked by our contemporary media environment, the slippery nature of reality online and the enduring possibilities for transcendence in a demystified contemporary world. While Klein may have introduced the void into contemporary art, Forest, born just five years later, was the void’s first native citizen. Of course he was an old fraud, an egotist and a publicity-seeker. He may also have been the first artist to raise these qualities to the level of the sublime. Robert Barry

Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America by Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder The MIT Press, £27.95/$34.95 (hardcover) A sort of Billboard for the cultural-studies set, the book describes, analyses and rates roughly 150 albums from the authors’ personal collection (they are partners, both academics). The pair focus on releases where music is more the warm-up than the headliner, with many of the covers reproduced in full-page scale. Dividing their selection into the categories of ‘Home’ and ‘Away’, and further classifying it under headings ranging from ‘Honeymoon’ and ‘Let’s Have a Dinner Party!’ to ‘Space’, they place the LPs in the context of a developing consumer society and escalating Cold War, two powerful sources of insecurity during the postwar years that the record, as a ‘central information technology and an information distribution format’, could ease and channel,

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not least into diverse group identities (and markets). With After the Dance (1955), for example, from Columbia’s Music for Gracious Living series, a young couple can receive instruction in how to ‘spontaneously’ continue the evening’s celebrations back home with friends: from suggested menus in the liner notes, to a further playlist (courtesy Peter Barclay and His Orchestra). A longer look at the cover, in which couples mill about an open kitchen and dining space, reveals the sort of white goods and decor one could aspire to: a guide to the overwhelming bounty of economic expansion in mid-century America. The records featured in ‘Away’ serve much the same function in the realm of foreign travel, promoting a lifestyle of sophistication

ArtReview

and luxury for the jet age while soothing a traveller’s fears of the unknown through gentle language instruction, street sounds and ‘country-appropriate’ music. But these LPS weren’t just socialising and marketing tools, the authors state: they act as implicit propaganda for democratic capitalism, demonstrating the superior freedoms of choice and leisure on offer, and rebutting Soviet claims to being the sole superpower with a culture. This is tremendously rich, if not entirely new territory, and the authors have been judicious in their analyses, largely withholding comment on sexual and racial politics, though you can tell they’re itching to dive in. Here’s hoping they’re saving that for their next album. David Terrien

February 23-25, 2018 Festival Pavilion | Fort Mason San Francisco photofairs.org

September 21-23, 2018 Shanghai Exhibition Center Shanghai

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover Tomás Saraceno and his Cosmic Dust Spider Web Orchestra, 2017 (installation view, How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires). © Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2017. Courtesy the artist; Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen; Pinksummer contemporary art, Genoa.

The words on the spine and on pages 23, 55 and 85 are from Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Book One, XIX, translated by D.C. Lau (London, 1963)

on pages 115, 120 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

December 2017

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A Curator Writes December 2017

“Colours shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green.” I lean back and look at Rodolf expectantly. He looks back at me entirely cluelessly. “Murakami, for god’s sake boy.You know: dissociative protagonists, lots of cats, bizarre dream sequences. Like Artforum’s boardroom.” Rodolf still looks blank. “OK, let’s get back to business! Look, if someone is willing to spend $450 million on a work that experts think is a Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, we’ve got to muscle in! Have we still got any of those ‘Frans Hals’ or ‘Lucas Cranach the Elders’ knocking about it in the cellar? We could phone up our chums at the houses and see if there’s any space in their contemporary auctions for a bit of ‘early Vermeer’ if you get my drift!” “I’m afraid we’re totally out Ivan,” Rodolf replies. “I had to get rid of them all pronto after a box of your personally signed certificates of authenticity were found next to those half-painted Pollocks during the Knoedler trial.” “I made a knife to cut fruit,” I protest. “If others use it to kill, blaming me is unfair! And more importantly, how are we supposed to make some proper money? I mean, I can’t survive on a curator’s salary…” “But nobody actually pays you a curator’s salary Ivan…” “How about I go back to putting exhibitions on at great European institutions but tip off collectors beforehand so they can hoover up the work?” I interrupt. “It’s remarkable that no-one’s thought of that.” Rodolf coughs. It must be the weather. Bloomsbury is just so damp in December.

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“I could initiate an exhibit-as-you-gift service for patrons here in London, the type of thing that got delightful Yoo Byung-eun his exhibition at the Louvre back in 2012…” Rodolf sits down in the Queen Anne highback leather armchair. This is a surprise, the dear boy never sits when I am standing. I snakehip closer to him wondering whether this is the moment when I should reach out and tweak his nipples but the idea seems oddly absurd. Does one tweak both in the same direction or in opposite ways? Does one tweak back when one has reached a particular moment of torsion? And then does one just do it again? My thinking is interrupted by Rodolf. “Ivan, come on, this isn’t why I joined you as an unpaid intern all those months ago. Surely you’ve had enough of curators on the make, of senior artworld professionals getting sleazy on juniors with the vague promise of a promotion? What about making crucial exhibitions, or discovering and supporting artists who one day will alter the course of art history? Isn’t that what it’s all about?” He casually picks up my Martin Kippenberger resin ashtray, one of just 50 in existence in the world, and chucks it towards my crown jewels. His aim is true and I reel around the room clutching the Kippie and groaning. Rodolf stands up. “When I read about you whilst researching my dissertation at the Courtauld Institute I read about a fearless curator who would stop at nothing to critique the institution, while simultaneously offering shows to artists whose radical practice would question the ontological reality of the very walls that you placed them on.” As I stumble around, my nads still numb with pain, he trips me up. I fall headfirst into the fireplace. “I imagined I would come here and work for no money but for a constant diet of intellectual stimulation. I thought you would dismiss collectors rather than make phonecalls to them about who you wanted to shoehorn into your latest half-baked idea for a show.” He picks up the antique brass poker. “I thought you would spend your time in the high intellectual pursuit of truth and beauty, holding salons here in Bloomsbury with fellow curators, rather than revelling in the gossip of who was next in the roll-call of shame that now casts its shadow on the artworld.” I have to admit, he’s very handsome when he’s angry. I twist my neck so that I can try and communicate this but all I can do is utter a strange groan. He strikes me firmly in the head with the poker. He moves towards the fireplace. He’s picked up the Kippie ashtray. In my daze I remember the joke. ‘Kippenbecher’ is of course colloquial German for ashtray. Liver cancer got dear Kippie in the end. The endless drinking, dancing, fighting and singing. I remember him pulling down his trousers, dancing round parties before trying to have a fist-fight. What would he have made of the artworld now? After he was beaten up by Berlin punks, he made a painting of himself bandaged up and called it Dialogue with the Youth of Today. I look up. Rodolf makes a stride towards me, raising the ashtray. He is my youth of today. Outside, I think it must still be raining. I Kurator