ArtReview January & February 2020 by ArtReview

Das ist das Leben seit 1949

valie export

LONDON

Tony Cragg Stacks

ADRIAN GHENIE

“I HAVE TURNED MY ONLY FACE...” 20 NOVEMBER 2019 – 2 FEBRUARY 2020

THE STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM

SUPPORTED BY

ADRIAN GHENIE, UNTITLED (AFTER ROUSSEAU) (DETAIL), 2019 OIL ON CANVAS, 210 × 210 CM, © ADRIAN GHENIE

ST PETERSBURG, RUSSIA

Adriano Costa

Henry Taylor

Otobong Nkanga

Alvaro Barrington

Iulia Nistor

Paloma Bosquê

Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato

Kishio Suga

Patricia Leite

Anna Bella Geiger

Leticia Ramos

Paulo Monteiro

Antonio Obá

Lucas Arruda

Paulo Nazareth

Celso Renato

Luiz Roque

Paulo Nimer Pjota

Dadamaino

Mariana Castillo Deball

Roberto Winter

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Marina Perez Simão

Rubem Valentim

Deyson Gilbert

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy

Rosana Paulino

Fernando Marques Penteado

Michael Dean

Runo Lagomarsino

Francesca Woodman

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Sofia Borges

Francesco João

Neïl Beloufa

Solange Pessoa

Giangiacomo Rossetti

Nina Canell

Sonia Gomes

Mend e s Wood DM

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

Doug Wheeler

David Zwirner

January 24 – March 21, 2020

519 West 19 Street New York

Doug Wheeler, Eindhoven Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Installation (Environmental Light),1969.Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2007, Panza Collection, Gift, 1991. Installation view, The Panza Collection, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2008-2009 © Doug Wheeler. Photo: Lee Stalsworth. Courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution.

IdeasCity IdeasFest IdeasCity IdeasCity

with KunlĂŠ Adeyemi, Marwa Arsanios, Heman Chong, Angela Dimayuga, Eleena Jamil, Rindon Johnson, Bouchra Khalili, Prasoon Kumar, Charles Lim, Zarina Muhammad, Emeka Ogboh, Ho Rui An, Saskia Sassen, Audrey Tang, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and more! Free and open to public ideas-city.org newmuseum.org #IdeasCitySingapore @ideascity @newmuseum

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore Block 43 Malan Road, Singapore 109443 www.ntu.ccasingapore.org ntu.ccasingapore @ntu_ccasingapore @NTUCCASingapore LOCATED AT

HARUN FAROCKI & HITO STEYERL LIFE CAPTURED STILL

CURATED BY ANTJE EHMANN & CARLES GUERRA

IN COMPARISON, © HARUN FAROCKI, 2009

LONDON FEBRUARY – MARCH 2020

ArtReview vol 72 no 1 January & February 2020

Is this the life? Liebe Lerhrerin/Lieber Lehrer, here’s a question ArtReview’s been asked every five seconds for the past month or so: “What were your highlights [in art – although that bit’s included rarely because most people seem to assume for some reason that ArtReview only reviews art] of the past decade?” Fuck them! ArtReview lives in the present, not the past. Although it is prepared to concede that the past affects the present. But only inasmuch as the present affects the past. In the sense of focus and perspective, and the ways in which our memories of the past are constantly being rearranged to suit the needs of the present, things like that. Not time machines. Jedenfalls noch nicht. For the time being ArtReview will leave that nonsense to H.G. Wells and Michael J. Fox, Doctor Who and the guy from Quantum Leap… What? Update its references?? Fuck you! This is the life that belongs to ArtReview. Speaking of which, back in January 2010 ArtReview’s cover, shot by Leigh Ledare, featured a grinning Paul McCarthy with his pants round his thighs. McCarthy was showing off a scar from a recent hip operation, but it looked like he might simply be dropping his trousers to ArtReview’s readers. Or, since ArtReview is its readers (ha, ha, ha – look where that kind of thinking got Jeremy Corbyn), to ArtReview itself. Some things, you see, are never clear. Which is what this issue might, partly, be about. Although ArtReview does recall vowing never to use these editorials to explain what the issue is about. That, after all, is what it hires its contributors to do. In any case, the contributors’ opinions are their own and do not in any way represent those of ArtReview, its staff or its owners, and this is the only place in the magazine that ArtReview’s own voice can be freely heard, so why bother to explain what the contributors think or did? (On the

This is the life

subject of which, back in 2010 there was no editorial for the same reasons that there is one now – go figure – but also partly because of ArtReview’s Trappist fantasies: alles in Untertiteln! As it said then and says again today.) Its lawyers told ArtReview to write the bit before last. The bit before the bit that was on the subject, the bit about the contributors. Just in case. Because you never know. And you can never trust anyone. Although ArtReview meant it anyway. This is the life… But it’s Austrian artist valie export who is on the cover. And a series of whose poems, written between 1966 and 1980, are later in this issue. Auf englisch und auf deutsche, even. And in a way that seeks to acknowledge their original presentation as a video recording of the artist performing them. The translation that comes about when you display or discuss visual art in a printed magazine. But enough with the navel-gazing. These (the poems, not the navels) influenced ArtReview’s choice of writings on identity, belonging, translation and language that make up the rest of this issue. Or it’s just a collection of random stuff that takes you from the deserts of Australia to the capitals of Old Europe. Pointlessly. There are times at which even ArtReview can’t decide. Like it said, it’s not one for navels or explaining. And isn’t all that simply life in any case? What, after all, was with all the Guns N’ Roses references in January 2010? (Arrested development? No, no, that was the decade before!) Why wasn’t Nina Cannell on the cover? And how was giving away a 198-page supplement documenting McCarthy’s then-ongoing Pig Island project a commercially sound project? What? ArtReview asked the flipflop people at Havaianas to sponsor it? And the Havaianas people said yes? Thank you, Havaianas! That was the era of generosity! Welcome to the age of austerity! Which, of course, might make anyone out there who wants to sponsor another artist project in these pages seem more generous still… ArtReview’s publisher told it to write that. Although ArtReview meant it anyway. Email it! Contact details at the back of the mag. ArtReview

This is the life

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Eight Skate & Donate, 2018, Shadow + Reflection + Color, 72 × 101 1⁄4 × 4 1⁄4"

Robert Irwin UNLIGHTS January 17 – February 22, 2020 New York @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

Otis Quaicoe

Black Like Me January 11 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; March 7, 2020

ROBERTS PROJECTS robertsprojectsla.com

JOSÉ PEDRO CROFT

GALERÍA HELGA DE ALVEAR / Booth 7A07 Doctor Fourquet 12, 28012 Madrid / 34 91 468 05 06 www.helgadealvear.com

Art Previewed

Breakfast with… Paloma Bosque 22

Turner Prize Solidarity by J.J. Charlesworth 32

The Nature of Fashion by Clara Young 26

The Art of Documentary by Erika Balsom 34

Estonia’s Shifting Art Scenes by Oliver Lowenstein 28

The Interview Puppies Puppies by Ross Simonini 36

Sounding Off by Patrick Langley 30

Coming Up Ten shows to see this month by Martin Herbert 42

page 44 Evan Roth, Since You Were Born, 2019 (installation view, moca, Jacksonville, 2019). Photo: Bob Self / The Florida Times-Union. Courtesy moca, Jacksonville (see The Supermarket of Images, Jeu de Paume, Paris)

January & February 2020

Art Featured

Thu Van Tran Interview by Mark Rappolt 50

Gedichte (1966–) by valie export 71

Acts of Registration: Ngurrara ii by Adrian Lahoud 58

Karrabing Film Collective by Ben Eastham 84

Lari Pittman by Patrick J. Reed 66

page 50 Thu Van Tran, Penetrable – Rainforest #3, 2019, rubber on canvas, wooden frame, pigment, 180 × 150 cm. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech, Paris

ArtReview

YVES KLEIN Untitled Anthropometry (Ant 132), 1960

Contemporary Art Evening Auction LONDON 11 FEBRUARY

EXHIBITION FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 7 – 11 FEBRUARY 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5569 EMMA.BAKER@SOTHEBYS.COM SOTHEBYS.COM/CONTEMPORARYART #SOTHEBYSCONTEMPORARY © SUCCESSION YVES KLEIN C/O ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2019

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Art Reviewed Alice Tippit, by Jonathan Griffin Hadi Fallahpisheh, by Sam Korman April Dawn Alison, by Fanny Singer Chips and Egg, by Gwen Burlington Alexa Karolinski & Ingo Niermann, by Nina Power

exhibitions 90 Nan Goldin, by J.J. Charlesworth Part 1: Matrescence, by Skye Sherwin Zadie Xa, by Daisy Lafarge Elizabeth Price, by Rachel Hughes Foncteur d’oubli, by Rodney LaTourelle Stephen G. Rhodes, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Time Is Thirsty, by Emily McDermott a.O. – b.c.: An Audiovisual Diary, by Max L. Feldman Julia Wachtel, by Moritz Scheper Rosemarie Castoro, by Martin Herbert Katya Shadkovska, by Phoebe Blatton Patrizio Di Massimo, by Barbara Casavecchia Daniel Pitín, by John Quin Dalton Paula, by Oliver Basciano Biennale de Rabat, by Louise Darblay Jean Curran, by Jonathan T.D. Neil

books 116 Natalia Ginzburg, by Mark Rappolt Krazy Kat, by George Herriman, reviewed by Ben Eastham The Codpiece in Art, by Michael Glover, reviewed by Mark Rappolt In Print: a roundup of new releases, reviewed by Fi Churchman back page 122

page 94 Leni Dothan, Mine (stills), 2012, single-channel video, 23 min, loop. © the artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun, London

ArtReview

@sp_arte sp-arte.com

Breakfast with

Paloma Bosque

Mango juice. Different every day, from the juice of a single fruit to a combination of leaves, roots and fruits

Tapioca with tomato and green leaves (could also be a yam boiled with salt)

Coffee. I have a solo show opening at Blum & Poe, Tokyo, in January. It’s called Dark Matter…

Dark Matter refers to an exotic form of matter whose existence has been hypothesised for decades but never proven experimentally

Chopped (but could be whipped) papaya and banana with Brazilian nut farofa on top

The structure is always the same – a fresh juice, a bowl of fruit and a main course (typically tapioca) – but the individual elements may vary. I get some of the stuff from a street market that takes place two streets from my apartment every Thursday, and the rest is delivered by a local organic farmer, also on Thursdays

ArtReview

OfďŹ cial partner

Art Previewed

Is the same thing as being compassionate 25

Leading Indicators

The sky is blue, dotted with fluffy clouds. A girl walks barefoot beside the sea. In the distance is a thatched hut and a pier jutting out into the water. Waves undulate under the too-casual eye of a lifeguard. The girl, incidentally, is wearing a matching bouclé tweed jacket and skirt. The beach is not in Hawaii or California or the Caribbean, but in the middle of Paris. Housed under the glass dome of the Grand Palais. Chanel’s Spring-Summer 2019 shoreline is just one of the house’s many grandeur nature sets from recent seasons: snowy ski villages, luxury ocean liners, rocket ships, even a rather big copy of the Eiffel Tower have all served as backdrops for the fashion house’s merchandise. Miniaturisations writ large in the snow globe of the Grand Palais, these replicas, though small and contained in the scheme of things, are vast compared to what most fashion houses stage for their runways. In fashion-show terms, the gesture is relatively big; in terms of what it is replicating, it’s relatively small. It is a novelty and a contradiction: the two essential ingredients of fashion’s best-conceived spectacles. In its staging and styling, fashion matches opposites. The point is to electrify the proceedings through those counterpoints. These days, the oddest couple is fashion and nature. At the very highest end of fashion are products like the gg Marmont bag from

Clara Young is unsettled by the contemporary urge to put nature under a glass

Chanel Spring 2019 ready-to-wear collection, Paris Fashion Week, October 2018, Grand Palais. Courtesy Chanel

ArtReview

Gucci, artificial constructs of hipness, status, cultivation, income, street cred – social rather than natural. What is the intangible asset of nature to fashion? “Fashion is the fastest of all the creative worlds,” says fashion production company Bureau Betak’s Alexandre de Betak. “But the periodicity is very short, and therefore it’s very based on what is trending, in the sense of what is important in the world. And the environment matters.” For Dior’s Spring/Summer 2020 show, Bureau Betak commandeered over 160 trees, each hashtagged and qr-coded for traceability and replanting after the show, and arranged them in a nocturnal garden. Dior has previously carpeted its runway in cushiony moss and made its clients perch on shrubbery. Chanel has moved heaven and earth for its shows: whole oaks have been felled for its woodland runway, icebergs transported from Sweden, massive cliffs with cascading waterfalls constructed. From a bird’s-eye view, or at a satellite distance, the landscapes and denizens arranged by Chanel in the Grand Palais recall a Pierre Huyghe biotope – just substitute the French artist’s mingling hermit crabs and sea snails for buyers and celebrities, and watch them go about their ways. The fleeting life-world of the fashion show hums along like the bubble world, or umwelt, of Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, whose writings

inform Huyghe’s vivaria. Subjectively and naturally delimited microcosms of ticks and spittlebugs and butterflies, Uexküll’s umwelten are filled with signposts for food and fight. The biosemiotic bug’s life is not so different from that of the fashion show, which flashes instead with desire and dream. If nature is fashion’s object of desire, it has been signalled in different ways. Spatially confined in the Grand Palais, Chanel’s landscapes are nonetheless seamless recreations, much like Maria Grazia Chiuri’s secret gardens at Dior. It is only the framing that says otherwise. Not so with Raf Simons. When the Belgian designer was at Dior, he mixed flower and foliage with the manmade, subverting both. Betak says, “When we did the mountain of flowers [in the Louvre’s Cour Carrée in 2015], the outside was a beautiful purple mountain of delphiniums and the inside was this very high-tech kind of environment where you could see the mountain of flowers turn into a very white technoid environment. And we had huge cranes in blue where we placed all the lights so that they looked like they were flowers.” In Simons’s ecosphere the artificial invades the natural, and the other way around. Is Simons’s cybernature just fashionable cross-signalling? Or is it pessimistic about our ecological odds? If the latter, it may explain

top Pierre Huyghe, Zoodram, 2010, live marine ecosystem. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin above Haus-Rucker-Co, Oase no. 7, 1972, installed at Documenta 5, Kassel. Courtesy Documenta Archiv

January & February 2020

why we want to put flora and fauna in a jar, in the manner of Vienna collective Haus-RuckerCo’s Stück Natur (Piece of Nature, 1971–73). A bit of preserved, miniaturised pasture, with a miniature hut and miniature trees, it is a tender expression of nostalgia and an ecological wakeup call, like the group’s Oase no 7 (1972), a tuft of tropics in a Plexiglas bulb stuck on the side of a building, or Berg in der stadt (Mountain in the City, 1973–74), a fake mountain mounted on a metallic facade in the middle of the city, a project that never got off the ground. Nature as shut-in reminds us of Biosphere 2, a late-twentieth-century experiment named after Biosphere 1, otherwise known as Earth. Resembling Chanel’s enclosed forest and seashore, Biosphere 2 contained that and more: a rainforest, desert, grasslands, swamp, farm, 3.8-million-litre ocean and a human population of eight under glass in Oracle, Arizona. The sealed 1.3 hectare ecosystem failed after two years, in 1993, because of runaway carbon dioxide. With the Arctic melting and the Amazon in flames, it looks increasingly to be the destiny of Biosphere 1 as well. Walter Benjamin wrote that fashion has an ‘incomparable nose… for what lies waiting in the future’. In framing the great outdoors under roofs and within walls, fashion may be meditating on the great gaseous bubble we are all trapped in. Or, in true fashion, is the bubble rather a bauble? A snow globe souvenir of pristine Nature, a rare commodity becoming rarer, ephemeral in its hothouse, and the most exclusive of luxuries? Clara Young is a writer based in Paris

Nestling beside the Baltic Sea, Tallinn shimmers languidly under a late summer sky as families mingle and – an Estonian end-ofsummer tradition – fires are lit near abandoned, beached hulks of boats to signal the city’s return to work. A stone’s throw to the west, Soviet-era shipping sheds, slipways and drydocks proliferate. Walk towards these, and invisibly you cross a boundary into what is being hyped as the Baltic capital’s big new cultural district, Noblessner, home of the just-opened Kai Art Center, Tallinn’s latest piece of cultural infrastructure. A drumbeat buildup had accompanied Kai’s launch, timed to open alongside one of the city’s major art showcases, Tallinn Photomonth. Visiting a few weekends earlier, I was struck by just how modest Kai’s refit of one of Noblessner’s 13 old buildings had been. Establishing a permanent home for the formerly itinerant Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center (ecadc) (the small organisation at the heart of Kai, tasked with promoting the growth of Estonia’s art sector), the 900sqm Kai is low-profile and functional. A second-floor space comprising whitewalled gallery, hot-desking admin office and lecture and seminar room, the centre has little to animate it architecturally, particularly when viewed alongside other recent European industrial conversions, such as Zürich’s Löwenbräuareal or, perhaps more pertinently, Reykjavik’s Marshall House, far from mainland Europe’s art hubs, and a dockside location to boot.

Anxieties of Influence

Oliver Lowenstein navigates Estonia’s shifting art scenes

Kaido Ole, Kõik koos iii, 2019, 295 × 275 cm.Courtesy the artist and Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn

ArtReview

The inaugural show, Let the field of your attention… soften and spread out, represented one third of the photo biennial’s core exhibition programming, each section providing a window on Estonia’s current art scene as well as responding to the curatorial brief to look ‘more broadly at developments in art and society in a world mediated by cameras, screens and images’. In multiple prelaunch conversations during my time in Talinn, the intention repeatedly conveyed was to present a basket of distinctly post-postmodern themes, including anxieties around photography’s contested status in the era of iPhone tech, the growing sense of powerlessness in the face of accelerating climate change, and bodily awareness and alienation heightened by long, dark northern winters, all of which, while they felt of-the-moment, highlighted just how thoroughly postindependence Estonian art has embraced the international artworld’s concerns, priorities and behaviours. Estonia and its 1.6 million inhabitants have nimbly integrated with Europe since becoming a member state in 2004, establishing the image of a tech-savvy Nordic, aspirational culture on the back of bracing free-market economic reform. Most postindependence artists have studied, and some continue to live, outside the country, and ecadc’s creation has spurred support for exhibitions, alongside research and collaboration, with partners in the Continent’s art centres, mainly Berlin and London, as well as in the United States. The well-connected Temnikova & Kasela Gallery has also effectively navigated the artworld, promoting its stable of artists (among them Jaan Toomik, Kaido Ole and Marko Mäetamm) on the international circuit, including Art Basel, Frieze, Doha and Miami. It became clear, over a weekend of introductions, conversations and discussions, that this was the end of an officially (eu-, governmentand municipality-) funded art scene, and that, beyond its mix of enthusiastic grassroots and poststudent art-scenesters, art historians and Skype-related startup entrepreneurs, other art communities were doing their all-but invisible thing. For instance, Non Grata, an anarchist performance network formed in 1998, soon after independence, around Anonymous Boh, the pseudonym for artist Al Paldrok, has been touring a cross between street and punk performance worldwide, though you wouldn’t know it from official art portals such as the Center for Contemporary Arts database. Entirely different, though equally out-of-kilter with the mainstream, is Jaanika Peerna’s drawingand performance-based practice. Given the targeted funding and private-public investment, the Estonian art scene is, to a certain extent, an ongoing social-engineering experiment, particularly in the context of the country’s

recent post-Soviet history. That history looms large: Russia’s border is 200km east of Tallinn; the cultural divide with Estonia’s Russian ethnic minority is ever-present; and the decline of the Baltics as an East–West bridge is also evident. If the immediate postcommunist generation of artists was fuelled by energies unleashed in the collapse of Soviet Estonia, with, for example, Toomik and Mäetamm turning their backs on Soviet-era training in painting, drawing and sculpture, and replacing it with the then-current Western fascinations of the 1990s – video, performance, installation and conceptual practice – they are now elders to be challenged. Indeed, the mid-noughties generation has done so with a mix of shock tactics (the ritual murder of lifesize models of their teachers, including crafted body parts stuffed down art-academy toilets), Soviet-era nostalgia and pop culture, combined with broader international artworld themes such as identity politics, environmental issues and tech futurism, both utopian and dystopian. More broadly, among the new generation, the likes of thirty-something sculptors Edith Karlson and Jass Kaselaan, photographers Laura Kuusk and Tanja Muravskaja, and video and installation artists Pille-Riin Jaik and Jaanus Samma

have joined earlier waves as the international face of Estonian art. In parallel, where before a primary focus was on looking northward to Finnish-hued Nordic countries, it has been shifting to encompass energies coming from beyond the arc of Western influence. Despite the Oedipal rebellion, however, the younger generation continues to use the same, if expanded, core toolkit – performance, installation, photography, film and video – mixed in with the more recent additions of digital media and natural materials. As I left the Tallinn Art Hall’s exhibition The Art of Being Good, I found myself round the back of the building, in a cellar gallery space. It had been hired out independently by Solveig Lill, a young postgraduate art student commuting between Tallinn and Berlin. All her work consisted of drawings in pencil and crayon. They may have been partially inspired by her Berlin professors, but they also reflected the continued, under-the-radar currency among some Estonian art networks of such elementally low-tech practice. Were the Art Hall folk above interested, I wondered? “No”, replied the artist. “They don’t seem to know about this here.” Kai Art Center, Tallinn. Photo: Martin Dremljuga

January & February 2020

Oliver Lowenstein is a writer and editor based in the uk

Watching Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show (2010), I found myself singing along. In the film, which uses marionettes to tell a history of the Crusades from an Arab perspective, a group of costumed puppets dance to an infectious melody picked out by ecstatic whoops and claps. In New York’s moma ps1 I opened Shazam on my phone, but the app didn’t recognise the tune and a moment later the scene changed. The song lasted less than a minute, and I haven’t heard it since. But four years later, I can still recall that melody. (The same cannot be said for the intricacies of the Crusades.) In Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), Oliver Sacks offers some context on how tenacious earworms can be. In his mid-seventies, he could still hear in his inner ear a Hebrew song about a little goat, sung on Seder nights in his Orthodox childhood home. His point is not that earworms offer Proustian portals to our past but that melodies are encoded in the brain directly. While the taste and smell of a coffee-soaked madeleine might conjure memories of the past by association, music is patterned like the mind itself. If a song is sufficiently catchy –simple and repetitive – you might remember it for the rest of your life. Brushing your teeth, say, or waiting for a train, the tune can at any point irrupt into your consciousness and loop uncontrollably. This is disheartening news for anyone familiar with Axel F by Crazy Frog. I happened to be listening to Robyn’s Baby Forgive Me while reading Sacks’s book and, while I’ve had to reread chapters from Musicophilia to jog my memory of it, I can pull up her melancholy synth line without effort. The culmination of a neurologist’s lifelong fascination with music and a four-bar loop in a synth-pop banger can’t be directly compared, but, as Sacks argues and Robyn demonstrates, music and memory are intimately linked. This sensitivity can leave us vulnerable. My brain is particularly susceptible to the kind of chipper, major-key melodies and claphappy rhythms of Shawky’s tune: a residue, perhaps, of enjoying the songs I sang in primary school assemblies. Songwriters and ad-execs know exactly how powerful a memorable line can be. I will never resent David Bowie for inscribing the riff from Sound and Vision into my mind, but I can’t say the same for “Washing machines live longer with Calgon!” or the insidious jingle for Capital fm circa 1995, which give me the sense that, as William Burroughs warned, mass media is a virus that allows corporations to wriggle into and control our minds. However hard I try to filter my exposure, I absorb and store sonic input indiscriminately: it makes no difference to my unconscious brain if a tune is delivered by a great artist or on behalf of Cillit Bang.

Sounding off

langley

Patrick Langley gets trapped in the music

Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades iii: The Secrets of Karbalaa (still), 2015, hd film, colour, sound, English subtitles. © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London & New York

ArtReview

The wall separating art from the propaganda of consumer capitalism is, on a neurological level, more permeable than I want to admit. Sacks argues that music is ‘engraved’ on a ‘defenceless’ brain and calls the ubiquity of music in the modern age a ‘bombardment’. I thought he was overstating the case until I remembered the tinnitus-induced musical hallucinations my late step-grandmother suffered from during her final years, when the theme song from Chariots of Fire played in her head day and night. She described her experience as ‘torture’. It prompted me to think again about how dangerous earworms are, and whether I’ll eventually pay the price for looping tracks like Robyn’s while I wash the dishes. For hearing people, the only way properly to legislate against the torment of a stuck song in old age is to avoid music altogether. But who among us could do that? I like to think that the art I love, in its ambivalence and complexity, mitigates against the reductive, viral forms of consumer culture that earworms help to propagate. We may be defenceless against these mnemonic devices but, as Shawky’s video demonstrated, the simplest of forms can be a vehicle for open-ended and unresolved content. That they can encapsulate an issue without diminishing its complexity is due in part, I think, to repetition and in part to the fact that melody ultimately transcends language. As such, Shawky’s song distilled an impossibly complex history and irresistibly simple truth: that we would do better to listen to other cultures than enter into wars against them. Patrick Langley is a critic and novelist based in London

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PARK AVENUE ARMORY NYC ARTDEALERS.ORG/ARTSHOW Jared French. Shelter (detail), c. 1944. Egg tempera on gesso panel, 16 ¾ × 16 ¾ inches. Courtesy Jonathan Boos

“When there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity.” So read Turner Prize nominee Helen Cammock, as she stood onstage with her fellow nominees, Oscar Murillo, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Tai Shani, having declared that they would accept the prize as “a collective”. “We… are all the winners of this year’s Turner Prize”, Cammock declared, to whoops from the invited audience gathered in Margate, going on to explain, “We believe when grouped together such practices become incompatible with the competition format, whose tendency is to divide and individualise.” It’s ironic, perhaps, that having made a grand gesture for solidarity and collectivity, the artists’ decision (enthusiastically endorsed by the prize’s jury) should so immediately divide and polarise opinion. For many commentators, the culture of prizes and winner-picking is outmoded, no longer appropriate for the time. For Guardian’s Adrian Searle, ‘subverting the game is something artists are supposed to do’, and prizes force ‘artists whose works and attitudes have nothing to do with one another [to be] pitted against one another for no good reason’. Writing in Apollo, Niru Ratnam similarly agreed that ‘accepting a nomination and then collectively refusing to abide by the rules is a… powerful gesture, [questioning] whether the format of pitting artists against each other is appropriate for the current political and social context in which they work’. So, hot on the heels of the Booker Prize jury awarding the literary gong jointly to two of the six nominees (Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo), and after a string of instances in which winning artists have split their awards with fellow nominees, the Turner Prize winners were jumping onto the growing sentiment that accepting a winner-based artistic prize is tantamount to endorsing a society based on division and inequality. The problem with that is that it’s nothing more than an analogy, and a weak one at that. After all, although we might not care for the spectacle of bright lights, golden envelopes and vip award-ceremony crowds, art awards aren’t

Self Congratulations

Everyone’s a loser at the 2019 Turner Prize, says J.J. Charlesworth

Cowinners Oscar Murillo, Tai Shani, Helen Cammock and Lawrence Abu Hamdan at the 2019 Turner Prize ceremony, Turner Contemporary, Margate. Photo: Stuart Wilson / Getty Images

ArtReview

(as far as I know) some form of sadistic affirmation of social division, exclusion and injustice, the violent cultural affirmation of tyranny. But that’s what artists, in their desire to be seen as thoughtful, socially engaged and politically progressive individuals, suggest by seizing the platform of art awards to make a point. In fact, what prizes mostly represent is the celebration of artistic achievement. And the reason that achievement is recognised as such is because we judge. Judging isn’t just the prerogative of judging panels held behind closed doors, or curators making or breaking artists’ careers, but is something that belongs to everyone. Prizes represent, in a dinner-jacketand-champagne outfit, the fact that art in a pluralist and liberal society is something we all get to criticise, comment on, argue over and judge. ‘Criticism’, in its oldest root, means to divide and to sort, between the good and the bad, or in the case of shortlist prizes, the best and the not-quite-so-good. In a sad paradox, however, by refusing to be judged and by sidestepping any chance of their work being criticised, the Turner Prize nominees unwittingly reinforced the cynical notion that prizegiving is an empty exercise in the bestowing of privilege and career power. After all, these four artists weren’t so affronted by the metaphor of division, injustice and inequality to refuse their nomination outright.

Implicitly, they were accepting that their work deserved to be nominated, that their work should be seen as the best, among all the art made in the uk in the last year. (Nor did it stop them accepting the prize money, or accepting other prizes: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, only a few days after the Turner Prize, happily pocketed the less high-profile but equally big-money Edvard Munch Art Award – a tidy £41,000, which Abu Hamdan didn’t split, since there was no shortlist to split it with.) Critics, too, seem increasingly uncomfortable with judging and criticising. In his Guardian comment, Searle opined that newspaper critics ‘collude in the game. We are expected to pick winners and losers, and to judge – rather more publicly than the actual judges of the prize.’ To which one might wonder: aren’t critics supposed to judge? And if not, why bother with prominent art critics and their influential public platforms? What justifies their choices and their pronouncements, and eventually their status? But most at fault – since prizes are based on judging – were the judges themselves. After all, art prizes gain their legitimacy from the fact that, in awarding a prize, the judges have to explain themselves for the choice they make. No prize has ever been awarded on the admission of a judge who has said, ‘I’m currently dating the winner’s gallerist’, or that ‘everyone else is giving them an award, so we did too’. In shortlisting artists for prizes, the judges have to offer their critical opinion of why an artwork is the best of what is out there. In selecting shortlisted artists, and eventually winners, judges have to give their reasons for why the rest of us, the public, should consider these artworks as the best there is. Not judging, not being able to decide between

Spartacus, dir Stanley Kubrick, 1960, 198 min

six, four or two (in the case of the Booker Prize judges), reveals the lack of belief in making a case for the different qualities of artworks or (in the final instance) in being able to offer a common standard for all of them, and of convincing the public that these are important aspects of what they are being asked to consider. There, however, is where the uncertainty lies. What are the criteria by which these artists and their work are proposed as the best this year? It turns out that, for the Tate, as Tate director Maria Balshaw declared in her introductory address at the awards ceremony, what really mattered in this year’s nominees was the “shared commitment… to work which is collaborative, socially engaged and fearlessly committed to a positive change in the world”. For Balshaw, “these artists express for us the urgent issues of our time: inequality injustice, intolerance, the displacement of peoples, the suppressions of identities and histories”. In other words, these artists are important principally because of the social issues they deal with, not the qualities (or the quality) of the art they make. It’s not surprising, then, that nobody wanted to judge. When political issues such as these are just as righteous and as worthy as each other, who would dare choose between them? It’s worth recalling that political grandstanding on art awards is not new. In 1972, in an early protest against what nowadays gets called ‘artwashing’, the leftwing art critic and novelist John Berger was awarded the Booker Prize, about £65,000 in today’s money. Berger, a radical leftist and one who knew the value of self-publicity, declared he was going to give half his winnings to the black revolutionary group the Black Panthers. But at least Berger did not refuse his prize, and the implication that his novel, G, was the best that year. Instead, he took his winnings, made his (political) criticisms about Booker McConnell – the prize’s original sponsor, which, he pointed out, made its fortune in its exploitation of workers in the Caribbean sugar plantations – and turned the money (in part) to radical ends. (In case anyone needs reminding, the Tate, too, was paid for from the profits of the work of sugar plantation workers.) There are of course those who would criticise the politics these artists espouse, but that’s beside the point. Art prizes are not awarded for the best politics. They’re awarded for the best art. And when judges and critics prefer to applaud political gestures over artistic value, everyone loses.

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Artists have long contested the idea that cinema provides a window on the world. Indeed, simply by charting the ways in which artists have insisted on the materiality of the medium, tampered with its representational capacities and conceived of the image as a sculptural presence in space rather than as a portal to an elsewhere and elsewhen, it would be possible to produce a history of the moving image in art. The desire to shatter the screen-window was tied not only to an aesthetics but a politics, too: if ‘the cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires’, as Jean-Luc Godard puts it – quoting André Bazin – at the beginning of Le Mépris (1963), then artists have often been suspicious of the rose-tinted view much filmic fiction affords, to say nothing of its accompanying pleasures. To the eyes of the avant-garde, meanwhile, the relatively unvarnished visions of documentary risked appearing as mere copies of reality, focused too much on content and too little on form. Today something has changed. Something that makes that history feel like – well – history. The days of formalism are over. Even the fascination with immersive multiscreen display that surged during the 1990s and 2000s feels from another era. But it’s not that alone. It’s as if artists have realised that they don’t need a dozen screens and fussy installations to make great work; channelling the viewer towards a single projection, in a cinema or a gallery, is enough. Or even more than enough. It can be the best choice – a path to a different form of immersion, one that avoids gimmicks and suggests a confidence in the power of what is being shown. And what is being shown? Lots of things, but especially images of actuality. The broken window is being mended, pressed into the service of exposure, not escapism. Whether it is the clear-eyed observationalism of Wang Bing, the intimate diaries of Charlotte Prodger,

Fresh Air, New Lights

Erika Balsom on how artists learned to love documentary

Charlotte Prodger, bridgit (still), 2016, single-channel video, 32 min. Courtesy the artist; Hollybush Gardens, London; and Koppe Astner, Glasgow

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the enchanting docufiction of Eduardo Williams or the found-footage essays of Arthur Jafa, today’s most vital moving-image works are marked by an expansive and pluralistic documentary impulse. As different as these practices may be, these and many other artists are reinventing how the moving image can function as a window – not just on a world, but on our world. The window-on-theworld metaphor was used mostly by those trying to discredit the idea that cinema serves up reality itself, which of course it doesn’t. What this forgets is that windows frame what is seen outside. They can be dirty, and we see through them nonetheless. They block, transfigure and reveal. Documentary – the form of filmmaking most associated with the notion of the screen as window – is better defined as an attitude rather than as a genre. It is an attitude that involves attending to reality, hopefully with care and without aspirations to master or objectify what is shown. That many artists are taking up a documentary inclination is, in a sense, nothing new; one could date the beginning of the so-called documentary turn to Documenta 11 in 2002, when curator Okwui Enwezor displayed key works committed to questions of reality and truth by artists such as Chantal Akerman, Amar Kanwar and The Atlas Group, among others. Festivals such as Courtisane in Ghent and the Essay Film Festival in London are exploring the lineages of these interests, extending the histories of artists’ moving image and documentary alike by reminding us that they have long overlapped and interacted. Yet to look at the major festival showcases of artists’ moving image in 2019, among them the Moving Ahead section at Locarno and Projections at the New York Film Festival, is to find an unprecedented commitment to the urgent task of reflecting on how images mediate our experience of reality. Whether it concerns how technology is reshaping identity and politics, how to remember the past and imagine a future or what to do about the crises of climate and migration that face us, in this moment of pervasive emergency, artists are devising new languages that grapple with the complexity of our world, far from the formulas and claims to objectivity that dominate infotainment. Early critical and curatorial conceptualisations of the documentary turn tended to focus on the need for fictionalisation and hybridity as means of breaking away from a supposedly naive faith in documentary truth. They embraced doubt. Today, when this doubt is everywhere, it is time for criticism to catch up to artistic practice and place belief over suspicion. Rather than proclaim the impossibility of accessing reality, we must recognise that we can’t afford not to try. Erika Balsom is a writer and lecturer in film studies and liberal arts at King’s College London

Puppies Puppies Tombstone (Andrew D. Olivo 6.7.89–6.7.18), 2018, etched granite tombstone, 58 × 56 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist and What Pipeline, Detroit

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The Interview by Ross Simonini

Puppies Puppies

“I have to reintroduce myself to people all of the time now”

I first encountered Puppies Puppies online, in a search-engine labyrinth of pop-culture overwhelm: Lord of the Rings, Frozen, SpongeBob SquarePants, Shrek, Harry Potter. These works were readymade portmanteaus – a condom stuffed with spaghetti, Voldemort’s head Photoshopped onto the body of a fashion model, the eye of Sauron gazing down from a New York City billboard. Other installations were built from impossibly mundane objects like waiting-line stanchions and hand-sanitiser dispensers. Initially I could find no name, image or consistent biographical information associated with the artist or artists who created the work. Likewise, the performances were costumed affairs, concealing all traces of their identity. As I followed the work, I noticed recurrent themes of health and body awareness, usually pitched to a gothic tone: an exhibition about the bubonic plague (at Halle für Kunst, Lüneberg, 2019), a show of the artist(s)’s blood (at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, 2019) during which hiv testing was offered and, at What Pipeline, Detroit, in 2018, a show

about the death of ‘Andrew D. Olivo’, the former identity behind Puppies Puppies. I first encountered Jade Kuriki Olivo, the newly transformed person behind Puppies Puppies, through an introductory email from her gallery. We soon met in person at a Japanese bakery in Lower Manhattan. She wore all black and parted her long, silky dark hair down the centre. Olivo had recently moved to New York from Los Angeles and had requested to meet early in the day so as to keep an appointment for acquiring a New York ID card. As we began speaking, I noticed that the café was playing music, primarily from Disney films, with songs from The Lion King (1994) and Beauty and the Beast (1991) on loop. This concerned me a little, as the belted ballads might drown out Jade’s gentle voice on the recording. But I’d recorded interviews in louder environments, and Olivo had limited time until their government appointment, so rather than move locations, I hoped for the best. Our talk was immediately comfortable and intimate, thanks largely to Olivo’s generosity and vulnerability, and over the next few

January & February 2020

days I continued to replay moments from the conversation in my mind. But when I finally listened to the recording, our voices had mysteriously disappeared. Even in the moments between songs, when the environment around us fell silent, the recording didn’t register even the faintest murmur from our conversation. The situation was unfortunate, and yet, considering the longtime anonymity of Puppies Puppies, this erasure felt appropriate. Unsure how to proceed, I wrote Olivo, who responded with measured calmness. “Is it possible for you to transcribe what you remember?” she wrote. “Memory driven. And I can look through it and make edits to fill in some gaps.” So this is what we did. One week later, with reasonable accuracy, I recalled over 2,000 words of our conversation. I’d never attempted such an exercise before, and I attribute its success to the memorable quality of our talk. Once finished, Olivo reshaped their words and my own, and relabelled her answers to alternate between each of their monikers. What follows is a fully reimagined dialogue.

The artist with a live wolf in a field

rs When did you start taking hormones?

jade kuriki olivo A month.

A billboard for the movie was also installed publicly. At the opening, right after the movie ended, there was a performer who recreated a profound dancing scene from the movie. A Fantastic Woman stars Daniela Vega, who is an exceptional (trans) actress.

rs And why did you move?

rs When did you decide to transition?

jko Yes, it was. Brain surgery helped me realise this is the only life I have to do what feels right.

puppies puppies My ex-partner and I got divorced. I couldn’t live in Los Angeles anymore. We moved there together. The city felt intensely full of memories and moments related to this relationship.

jko About two and a half years ago.

rs When did the surgery happen?

rs Was it a long time coming?

rs That seems like it was a pretty collaborative relationship. He did an interview in your place once, right?

rs What did you look like then?

pp In 2010. I was in Chicago and the tumour was discovered by chance. I was riding my bike and I got hit by a car. I had a cut on my head that bled very badly, as head wounds do. A police officer came to the scene and demanded that I take an ambulance, but I knew how much those things cost, so I just walked to the emergency room. They gave me a ct scan, and staples for the small gash. They thought I had a flesh-eating virus inside of my brain. I spent a week thinking that’s what I had. Then after an mri they found a tumour. The neurosurgeon said he would monitor it, to see if it grew. It did. Over the next year, it started growing. So they had to surgically remove it.

ross simonini How long have you been in New York?

jko He’s an incredible writer. He used to write some of my press releases. I collaborate with people often. Almost everything I exhibit is a collaboration. rs In what ways do you usually collaborate? pp For example, in 2018 [at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin] I collaborated with my friend Cielo Oscuro and photographed them on their first day of hormone replacement therapy. I gave her two weeks’ worth of hormones and blockers. Any profit made from these photographs goes towards helping fund Cielo’s transition. A few Instagram posts for her crowdfunding campaign were printed on vinyl and posted to the wall so anyone seeing the work could directly donate to her. In that same show, I also worked with the gallery to create a theatre and screened Sebastián Lelio’s film Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman, 2017) three times a day. Different reflective surfaces that the main character saw herself in were recreated (or I acquired readymade sculptures) and hung on the wall. A red led digital-scrolling marquee announced the title of the film and the times it was screened throughout that day. Wheat-pasted posters for the movie were applied in various parts of Berlin.

pp Yes, but I didn’t know it. I was unhappy for so long.

[jko reaches into a bag and reveals an id card with a picture of a strikingly different, bearded, shorthaired person and an old picture of the artist with a live wolf in a field] rs Wow. pp Yes. I have to reintroduce myself to people all of the time now.

A flesh-eating virus rs Do you feel better now that you’ve transitioned? jko I feel good at times (it’s more like a rollercoaster of ups and downs). Much more relaxed with myself (but also not relaxed in certain situations…)

rs So only six months after you decided to hormonally transition. That’s a very quick decision.

rs How did your life change after that surgery? jko I was worried that I wouldn’t be an artist after the surgery, but I continued producing art. I smoked a lot of weed because I was depressed and I thought it was the only way I could cope. Afterward, I started becoming more impulsive. I was telling the people closest to me at the time, “The moment is all we have”. But there are pros and cons to this life-is-fleeting way of thinking. rs Is that why you so quickly started hormones? pp Yes. rs Did the brain surgery affect the way you think? jko It affected my language skills. I couldn’t understand sarcasm for a while afterward, and I’m very bad at grammar since the surgery.

Love, Bob Esponja, 2015, performance, Material Art Fair 2015, Mexico City. Courtesy the artist

pp Two years ago.

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top body fluid (blood), 2019 (installation view, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, 2019). Courtesy the artist

above Una mujer fantรกstica, 2017, dir Sebastiรกn Lelio, screened as part of Puppies Puppies, Una Mujer Fantรกstica (A Fantastic Woman), 2018, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin. Courtesy the artist

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top Courier on Horse (Donnelly), 2019, performance, Plague, Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, 2019. Courtesy the artist and Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg

above Plague, 2019 (installation view, Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, 2019). Courtesy the artist and Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg

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rs What do you write? pp Poetry. I also worked for TransLatin@ when I lived in Los Angeles, and one day the person I worked under asked me to write a proposal to the Los Angeles City Council on how city funds can be allotted to the betterment of gendernonconforming/trans folks. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t draft something in such an official/ professional manner after the brain tumour. rs In your work, it seems as if you use the vocabulary of pop culture instead of language. Every character is a word, and you use them to create your own sentences. jko I used SpongeBob because it’s ubiquitous… same with the Minions. I like these symbols because most people already understand them in some way or have some sort of relationship to them. I shouldn’t say everybody. I shouldn’t use generalisations. But many people know who Voldemort is, so I can play with that symbol. I can subvert it. [Let It Go from Frozen, 2013, starts playing on the speakers] rs Did you arrange for this to play right now? pp I discovered [snowman from Frozen] Olaf when asking a friend, the artist Alivia Zivich, which fictional character would she put on a costume of and dance in. I then fell in love with him… a suicidal snowman.

rs You’ve been doing nude performances recently. Is that about exposing your true self? pp The majority of my performances for the last year have been naked. I have done four already. I also want these performances to document the ways in which my body and appearance have changed the longer I’m on hormone replacement therapy. rs Which ones are you taking? jko I’m taking progesterone (a hormone), spironolactone (a testosterone blocker, in a way) and oestrogen, or Estradiol. rs And what are they doing to you? pp My testicles have shrunk. I barely produce sperm anymore. I’ve grown a thin layer of fat under my skin, which can sometimes make certain facial features appear slightly more rounded. Growth of breast tissue… [jko removes a fuzzy jacket, revealing multiple tattoos. One reads ‘puppies’ in a modern font, one says ‘ssoorrry’ in a sketchy scrawl and another, which has been visible already, reads across four of her knuckles, and spells out ‘jade’] rs Why ‘sorry’? jko It’s a stick-and-poke. I thought it was nice that I was saying sorry to my older self

for getting the tattoo, and my friend/fellow artist Siera Hyte was at the time spelling out sorry, apologising to me, as she put a needle into my skin. rs What about the creative process do you most enjoy? jko I like the moment when the idea clicks. I think about an idea for months, from every possible angle, every possible reading of it. I change things and change things, and then suddenly it works. I keep playing with the elements until I get the simplest version of the idea. rs What kind of elements are you playing with? pp Like at the Plague exhibition at Halle für Kunst, the thoughts that came to me were: mannequins, sheets and mud. I’ll drape muddy sheets on the mannequins. rs You re-performed an early Trisha Donnelly work [untitled (jumping), 2002] at that show, right? jko Yes. I dressed up as a Napoleonic courier and rode in on a horse and recited a fragment from a speech about defeat. rs Donnelly’s work is so much about mystery, which seems to be an important material for you. What other artists, for you, have that mystery? pp Lutz Bacher. In one of her Do you love me? [1995] videowork interviews, she asks her Bay Area gallerist about her work, and he describes something as “so Lutz”. She proceeds to ask, what does “so Lutz” mean? The gallerist fumbles as he tries to describe her work and then finally he says that at the gallery they were searching through storage and found a skeleton that they never knew was there. He then realised that “so Lutz” meant “something that was always there but you never saw it”.

Ssoorrry rs You’ve been as anonymous as possible for the past seven years, but you seem to be more public about yourself now. jko I’ve changed my thinking on that now that I’ve come out as a trans person/femme. Anonymity means something different. It doesn’t feel right to be hiding who I am if I have the privilege to be seen as myself. Although for many trans people it’s not safe or possible to express these parts of themselves openly in their current circumstances.

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

Liberty (Liberté), 2017, performance, Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy the artist and Balice Hertling, Paris

January & February 2020

Tschabalala Self, Lenox, 2017, fabric, ribbon, painted canvas, flashe and acrylic on canvas, 172 × 127 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005, oil on canvas, 274 × 274 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum, New York

3 Anders Sunna, Vintern i Paskarova, 2019, mixed media on mdf, 99 × 61 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Coming Up by Martin Herbert

A colour-saturated revival; an undercurrent of homoeroticism; nature-adoring royals; a dispiriting trajectory; a complicated life; outside pressures and background psychic stresses; and a delicate glass cube

Nearly 40 years ago, in 1981, London’s Royal rest of the globe, 60 of his effusive and alluring to recent trends in abstraction, will likely go unremarked, but this Academy mounted the landmark show A New canvases serve to reposition the black figure Brooklyn Museum, will undoubtedly be Spirit in Painting, which spread its wings wide within the painterly continuum. New York, 20 February a feisty display. enough to enfold Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol These aren’t the only exhibitions this month – 24 May 2 Kehinde Wiley and Jean Hélion, but centred on the thento assess how painting has changed, or rather would have fitted nicely into this show, but ascendant Neo-Expressionism and Italian been changed from within, in our still-new, save your tears: he’s got his own New York Transavanguardia. Whatever its virtues, in if already exhausted-feeling, century. retrospective to mount, 16 years on from his retrospect this was an 3 In Stockholm, The Trees, Light Green: Whitechapel Gallery, Bonniers first museum show at the same venue. Wiley’s extremely pale-andLandscape Painting – Past and Present London, 6 February Konsthall, virtuosic paintings, as is well known by now, male show. To the declares its intentions from the get-go, – 10 May Stockholm, 1 extent that Radical take the stylistics of European portraiture leaving out the perhaps unnecessary 22 January as an armature for black representation. His Figures: Painting in the New Millennium is an detail that it focuses on Scandinavian – 29 March figures, poised and hieratic, are exclusively unofficial sequel – though featuring just ten art. In play here are several timespans. people of colour, wearing sneakers and sportsartists, the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition The older (meaning dead) artists’ practices date wear, often chosen off the street; though aims to survey the colour-saturated revival from the turn of the twentieth century, by presumably he didn’t just bump into one of of expressive figurative painting since 2000 which time industry had rapidly expanded in his more notable subjects, Barack Obama. The – it’ll illustrate how much things have shifted. Sweden and the first national parks were being former us president, who he painted in 2018, More than half the artists here, among them established. (The Industrial Revolution was also was pictured seated against a spread of bright, Tala Madani, Christina Quarles, Dana Schutz, contemporaneous with the popularisation of oil coded foliage – chrysanthemums for Chicago, Tschbalala Self and Michael Armitage, are paint.) The exponents in this show include the jasmine for Hawaii, African blue lilies for Kenya women. They’re not all European or American Impressionism-inclined Julia Beck, the nature– and Wiley typically poses his subjects against or white. The work engages with gender fluadoring royal Prins Eugen and the moodily such decorative backgrounds, so that even idities, race, sex and geopolitics, and it’s often expressive Evert Lundquist. The living painters, when their poses evoke portraits of Napoleon, inflected by digital prep work. Stately European meanwhile, work in the teeth of climate change, there’s a flavour of, say, the portrait photography males do figure, after a fashion, but we’ll find and their landscapes more regularly espouse of Malick Sidibé et al. (And, not infrequently, Paul Gauguin, Willem de Kooning and Eugène doubt and anxiety, whether in a relationship an undercurrent of homoerotic energy.) At the Delacroix as subjects of retrospective interrogato the sublime (Sigrid Sandström’s canvases, Brooklyn Museum, which will feature a selection rather than reverence. More widescreen which threaten to collapse into abstraction), tion of the World Stage (2006–) paintings that reasons for figurative painting’s rebirth, such as in the heavy, ominous but suavely daubed have seen Wiley extend his casting calls to the a bullish art-market and a weariness with regard vegetation of Jenny Carlsson, or in Sara-Vide

January & February 2020

Ericson’s ritualistic excursions into the landscape surrounding her Swedish studio. Even when such recent works look relatively bucolic, one might bear in mind that the show is timed to close on 29 March, the day in 2020 when humanity will supposedly have consumed the year’s resources and will be depleting future reserves. Enjoy the painted nature, then, and despair. Nor, to perpetuate this daisy chain, is Bonniers Konsthall the only institution with ruralism on its mind right now. The 98 percent of the earth’s surface that is not citified is the 4 research focus of Rem Koolhaas’s Guggenheim exhibition Countryside, Guggenheim Museum, The Future. Here, the highly New York, 20 February metropolitan architect – 14 August (author, you’ll remember, of Delirious New York, 1978, as well as the architect of the short-lived Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas) uses a ‘multi-sensory’,

research-driven installation involving photos, or elect to commodify themselves. The outcome videos, archive materials and a wallpaper display of this dispiriting trajectory, writes philosopher wrapped around the museum’s famous rotunda Peter Szendy – one of three curators Jeu de Paume, spiral to consider the silent changes that have of the Jeu de Paume’s new group Paris, 11 February been going on outside of cities in recent decades. show, along with Emmanuel Alloa – 7 June This, famously, is where the Trump voters are; 5 and Marta Ponsa – is, if you will, The it’s where vast cattle-grazing lands are (the Supermarket of Images. (No mention of Guy display clarifies the boggling scale of these); Debord, but maybe there’s no need.) For Szendy, and it’s also, for Koolhaas, a space of potential this new reality of the economics of a life lived, possibility and change. Expect a focus on China, and bought and sold, through images deserves South America and California, excursuses on a new word: iconomics. Meanwhile, a spread artificial intelligence, political radicalisation, of artists has been entrusted to articulate the global warming, subsidies and tax incentives, position, including Aram Bartholl, Samuel and much more. If you’re not sure how all that Bianchini and Máximo González, whose Small fits together but you’re at least curious, that Money Labyrinth Project (2013–15) generates might just make you an ideal viewer. collages from out-of-circulation banknotes, Ninety-one years ago, Walter Benjamin turning economics into images. (Hmmm, wrote of a moment when we’d reach ‘a one there should be a neologism for that.) hundred percent image space’. Are we there Self-marketing in the visual economy yet? Images are the means by which not only 6 is something Bunny Rogers knows plenty objects but, now, people are commodified, about: the American Kunsthaus Bregenz, 18 January – 13 April

4 Rem Koolhaas, Countryside. The Future, 2019, research image featuring Koppert Cress, a farm in the Netherlands that uses low-energy magenta led lamps in its greenhouses. Photo: Pieternel van Velden

6 Bunny Rogers, Columbine Cafeteria, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Uli Holz. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

5 Máximo González, Degradación, 2010. © and courtesy the artist

ArtReview

7 Kapwani Kiwanga, The Secretary’s Suite (still), 2016. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris

7 Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance, 2017, mixed media. Photo: Jörg Baumann. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London, and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City 8 William N. Copley, Battle of the Sexes No. 2, 1974, acrylic on cotton, 159 × 286 cm. © the estate of the artist / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York

post-Internet pioneer has explored it thoroughly Dhaka Art Summit, ising a very present-day 7–15 February while moving across media, from photography problem for the us. and video to installation, often appearing in her The fifth edition own work as a kind of composite self that mixes 7 of the Dhaka Art Summit is, as ever, not for fact and fiction, an interior self and influences the energy depleted. Stretching over four floors from outside. (‘Objective art is impossible,’ of the Shilpakala Academy in the Bangladeshi she’s said.) Those outside pressures and backcapital, it mixes exhibitions (including the 6 ground psychic stresses, in her work, have Samdani Art Award), panel discussions, symincluded the performative Internet phenomposia and performances via some 500 contribuenon of ‘planking’ (which, in photos, she recast tors under the steerage of Diana Campbell as a form of sexual submissiveness), the 1999 Betancourt. The theme holding this year’s Columbine massacre, the existence of online edition together is Seismic Movements, which child porn, male My Little Pony fans, and, apparently refers not only, as you might in the 2017 installation Farewell Joanperfect, the expect, to geopolitics, but to shifting readings idea of her own death, rendered as the spectacle of history and art history. (‘We continuously of her own imagined funeral. American funerwork to break down barriers between art, als, indeed, are the subject of her four-floor film, craft, architecture, design, research, and show at Kunsthaus Bregenz: expect lawns, institution production to think of new forms concrete roses and sprinklers evoking school of togetherness,’ Campbell Betancourt affirms shower rooms – bringing us, inevitably, back on the website.) Expect, among other things, to Columbine, 20 years ago now but symbolan installation by Adrián Villar Rojas made

January & February 2020

from 400-million-year-old fossils, a multiscreen film by Thao Nguyen Phan exploring a little-known midcentury Vietnamese famine, paintings by Ellen Gallagher furthering her interest in the Afrofuturist mythology of Detroit techno recluses Drexciya, a group exhibition responding to Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam, a nine-day film programme curated by The Otolith Group, a ‘festival of connectivity’ organised by Jakarta’s Max Hetzler, Gudskul and, well, Berlin, 17 January a tonne of other delights. – 7 March The late William N. 8 Copley had a complicated life, onto which his show at Max Hetzler, The Ballad of William N. Copley, will offer a partial window. First he was an art dealer, trying to sell Surrealism to Los Angelenos who weren’t ready for it; then he was an American surrealist himself – Marcel Duchamp encouraged him, and Copley bought his Etant Donnés (1946–66). His subsequent art

career pivoted from a mix of thickly outlined, having her first solo show in the uk, relatedly bright-coloured proto-Pop and folk art in the aims to reconnect labour and the human hand 50s and 60s to, in the 70s, sexually explicit – partly, in a restoring of dignity, as a reminder works focusing on the problematics of malethat the factory-produced objects we use, and female relationships, and self-imagined flags that we often don’t even go to shops to buy – eg for the uk and Russia – that emphasised anymore, are very much the product of human national issues. In amongst this, up to his death toil. As such, her works here – a largescale felt in 1996, he made wallpaper based on that found installation, collection of garments, film made in American brothels, painterly tributes to in a Chilean textile factory, wall mural and a prostitutes, and reappropriations of his own range of ‘freestanding geometric drawings earlier work. He also found time to be married installed by natural patterns’ – are doublesix times and predate the contemporary use edged. In the relatively luxe conditions of an of the acronym ‘sms’ in a series of late-60s art gallery, we’re reminded of the difference portfolios of artistic collaborations titled between industrial labour and artistic labour, Shit Must Stop. This, you may not be surprised but also of the parallels between them – and, to learn, followed one of his divorces. somewhere in there, the ubiquity of work and ‘My mum always said I learned to weave the need to give it value. As befits an artist who trained as an architect, and knit before I learned to read and write. 10 Sarah van Sonsbeeck Hands are tools for me and I can’t disconnect Annet Gelink, is interested in space, 9 that,’ Johanna Unzueta says. The New YorkAmsterdam, and specifically its use based Chilean artist, now 18 January Modern Art Oxford, – 22 February 8 February – 10 May

as a container of sound and silence. Some of this, apparently, stems from an episode with noisy neighbours; she estimated how much of her space the sounds of their sex and arguments were occupying, and tried to get them to pay the appropriate share of her rent. A 2009 work found her making a glass cube to ‘contain’ a cubic metre of silence near a museum; when it was vandalised, she renamed it One cubic meter of broken silence. Elsewhere, she’s made paintings using Faraday paint, which is intended to block electromagnetic signals, and seemingly riffed on silence – and peace – being ‘golden’ in a stream of works that used melted gold bars, gold leaf, and, in 2013, a gold Anti Drone Tent. As with her delicate glass cube, van Sonsbeeck surely knows that such moves are purely symbolic, emphasising privacy and seclusion as pipe dreams, and her works are replete with error, failure, collapse of intentions, all that jazz. Galleries, nevertheless, tend to be pretty quiet spaces, so there’s that.

9 Johanna Unzueta, December 2014, January, February, March 2015 ny, 2014–15. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City

10 Sarah van Sonsbeeck, Faraday Painting (walking towards an artwork, vacuuming) (detail), 2019, faradaïc paint with graphite and carbon on canvas, sugar, actions in the studio. Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam

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OPERA WOZZECK — BERG

SIR SIMON RATTLE | SIMON MCBURNEY

COSÌ FAN TUTTE — MOZART

THOMAS HENGELBROCK | DMITRI TCHERNIAKOV

THE GOLDEN COCKEREL — RIMSKY-KORSAKOV AZIZ SHOKAKIMOV | BARRIE KOSKY

L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA — MONTEVERDI LEONARDO GARCÍA ALARCÓN | TED HUFFMAN

INNOCENCE-WORLD PREMIERE — KAIJA SAARIAHO

FESTIVAL D’AIX—EN—PROVENCE

SUSANNA MÄLKKI | SIMON STONE

30 JUNE — 18 JULY 2020

OPERA CONCERTS INCISES INSTALLATIONS AIX EN JUIN ACADÉMIE MEDITERRANEAN

2th 5th April Grand Palais 2020 www.artparis.com An Overview of the French Art Scene: Common and Uncommon Stories

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But it can just as often 49

Thu Van Tran My words fly up, my thoughts remain below Interview by Mark Rappolt

ar What kind of things did you change in the translation?

Thu Van Tran was born in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and moved to France as a refugee in 1981, aged two. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she now lives. In 2014 she regained her Vietnamese citizenship. Her work – which spans photography, video, sculpture and installation – was included in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 and the following year was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp. In the past she has stated that we are all made by ‘stains’ and that history is constructed by ‘contamination, occupation and domination’. While her work has tackled the colonial relationship between Vietnam and France as well as Vietnam and America, incorporating histories of violence, exploitation and capital, it also explores the formal and chemical qualities of the different media in which it is realised.

tvt The whole narrative takes place during a rising tide and it is told while the narrator is waiting for the water to turn. I wanted to get closer to a form of spoken language, and also to insist on the contemporary dimension of such a story, so I decided to transpose the past time of the narrative into present time. I also wanted to change the names of geographical locations (cities, lakes) to those of Southeast Asia. But as I read, I realised that Conrad never mentioned either the Congo or Belgium at any time in the book. The changes I have made are those guided

artreview Language has played a role in many of your works. thu van tran In 2013 I had a solo presentation based on experiments with language and light in the Statements section of Art Basel. It began when I was travelling in an English-speaking country and started to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [1902] in English, the language in which it had originally been written. I was determined to understand it, which meant that it gradually became clear that I was effectively engaged in a translation project that would end up with my publishing a version of the book in French. But I started translating in a very particular way. I didn’t want to reproduce Conrad’s original text word for word; I wanted to test whether or not my lack of comprehension of the language and my subjective interpretation of the story could produce new meanings.

“The question is how to capture, visually, this instant of passage from life to death. Disappearance leaves traces, it is the passage that is intense. It’s the same for words” by a personal writing – my subjectivity. For example, the ‘official’ French title of Heart of Darkness is Au coeur des ténèbres, but I translated it as Au plus profond du noir, which means something more like ‘Deepest into the black’. For me, it was important to remember the skin colour within the black colour. My interpretation has also taken me further: I have, for the third edition of the book, incorporated whole passages of my own invention. I describe in more detail the contradictory feelings that could be experienced by the characters who encountered madness. I still haven’t read the official French translation because I rewrite my translation for each new

edition. I already know that for the next one I will replace the ivory, which is the coveted and stolen resource in the narrative, with rubber… ar Does this relate to your personal experience? You’ve made reference to the rubber plantations of Vietnam in previous works. tvt Yes, all of these changes have to do with me and my experience, but especially this process of transmitting through another language. I tried to negotiate the trajectory of one world moving into another: Joseph Conrad’s world into mine. I was looking for a kind of collision. Conrad navigated up the Congo River during the period of the country’s occupation by Belgium; I come from Vietnam, a former French colony. Also, I grew up with two languages: one culture from the inside, one of the outside. These two had structured my mind and thought, in an equal duality. I express myself in French, whereas I dream in Vietnamese. I have always juggled between one and the other, with humour and deficiency, adopting behaviours specific to each language. I wondered if my cognitive world was limited by the possibilities of my language. Likewise, I wondered whether or not the frontiers of my language were those of my world? Would I understand the idea of freedom, could I feel it, if that word didn’t exist in the language I spoke or thought with? Would I have grown up the same if I only spoke Vietnamese? Moreover, communist ideology played a role in my consideration of the Vietnamese language: in it, the pronoun ‘I’ has a dozen transcriptions, depending on the position one occupies in relation to the person one is addressing. There is no ‘I’ in absolute terms; only relative to another person, group or a society. It is a language in which, for example, it is difficult for me to express objection.

above Au plus profond du noir, 2013, books, hevea wood pallet, 85 × 90 × 90 cm preceding pages Imaginary Jackson, 2016, two editions of George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, 1972, red ink, dimensions variable

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Heart of Darkness, 2013, 59 a4 paper sheets, 120 glass sheets, 4 hevea wood planks, dimensions variable

January & February 2020

top Listen, the darkness deepens, 2016 (installation view, Ladera Oeste, Guadalajara, 2016). above We live in the flicker (detail), 2016, unfixed photograms on Kodak paper, dimensions variable

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ar The personal seems important to you. tvt During the process of translation I was first drawn to Joseph Conrad’s own biography: at the end of the nineteenth century he returns from a trip to the Congo, after which he enters a sort of aphasia that will last about three years. He finally transposes his story and the violence that he had witnessed during that journey into the form of a novel that he decides to write in English. He could have chosen to write in Polish, his mother tongue, or in French, a language that he knew well, but he preferred to use a language in which he was completely uncomfortable, as if only it could break the aphasia in which he was immersed. This language process inspired me. ar Why is this idea of discomfort important? tvt I think because it can lead us to situations where we get the obvious. Conrad must have needed some form of struggle or combat in the language to deliver his story in writing. I discovered that the Japanese author Haruki Murakami wrote with a typewriter early in his career, while he ran a jazz bar in Tokyo’s suburbs. Every night, when the bar closed, he tapped on a machine that had a Latin keyboard, and so decided to write his first texts in English, which he translated to Japanese. He said that this process allowed him a particular method of writing: first English forced him to write in a pareddown, essential way, after which the process of translating it into Japanese brought a miraculous breath of fresh air to his relationship with his native tongue, seen from the perspective of a foreign language and structure. Murakami relearned Japanese by using another language that forced him to write clearly. He has said that his first writings would not have been the same if they had been written directly in Japanese. ar Can translating be as powerful as writing? tvt It seems to me that the question has no meaning. I am writing when I translate. My approach to Conrad might seem free of restrictions, but in reality it was laborious, as I tried to unravel the original in the most intuitive way possible in order to rewrite it. I think translating involves a writing process that is just as valid as writing on a blank page. ar Can you ever escape the constraints of written/ spoken language? Isn’t the attraction of visual art partly the possibility of escaping this? tvt Rules of speech and writing can be dispensed with by recourse to sound and vision; that is, by transcribing the musicality of language and the drawing qualities of writing. I was interested in the visual aspect of writing, and the question of how to exhibit it. Somehow I had to imagine another level of translation.

In the end it took the form of two works. The first was a materialisation of the text [Au plus profond du noir – Manuscript, 2013]. I chose to display every page of the whole 60-page manuscript in sequence, with each soaked in an increasing amount of black ink to produce a gradient from beginning to end of pure white to deep black, light to dark, legible to illegible. I wanted the darkness to gain in presence while we experience the text. The second work dealt with the reading experience. It consisted of a series of unfixed photograms on which were exposed excerpts from the novel [We live in the flicker, 2013]. ar Is there a distinction to be made between your translation of the words and your physical manifestation of the words in the photogram? tvt Both are translation gestures, but one treats equivalence on the level of meaning, the other operates by equivalence of intensity and emotion, which is closer to an act of transcription. As Umberto Eco mentions in his essay ‘Dire presque la même chose’ [2003], the distinction is situated in the level of translation. For each

“When we think ‘writing’, we don’t actually see anything. We read a word on a piece of paper, a book or a screen but we don’t see the word as a potentiality of form or an affective formal experience” degree, we have to accept loss as a creative factor. We lose something, but what do we gain in return? In a way, this is how mutation operates. ar How did you choose the particular excerpts in the photograms? tvt I chose to extract sentences from the novel where light appears but could never remain, since it is always caught up by the darkness of the story. And then, at night, in front of the bay window in my studio, I used stencils to expose the words on photosensitive paper. The first rays of early morning sunshine literally captured and inscribed the words. I left the stencils exposed for months and obtained a kind of chemical saturation. Light revealed the writings: ‘The sky without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light…’; ‘The white patch had become a place of darkness’. ar Do you think there is a relationship between the processes of language and of chemistry? tvt When the photograms are finally exhibited, and because the process of exposure is ongoing,

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the light that made the words appear also inevitably makes them disappear. This chemical process somehow has both pure autonomy and pure immediacy. In my opinion, the process of language is similar. For example, even reciting by heart something perfectly memorised has an element of the unexpected, a margin of error, because the word (la parole) is an unprecedented act, you can’t ‘take away’ something that has been said unless you say it again… The experience of saying something is unique, like a process that moves forward in a sequence that doesn’t turn back. When I write I always speak out loud, to catch the harsh part of the language, combining abstraction and meaning, mixed to give a pure material. I look for this unexpected aspect in my relationship with shapes and materials, and chemistry somehow has this. ar Are you attracted to this kind of ephemerality? The ability of things to change or fade or disappear? tvt For the unfixed photogram series, we feel the blue is chemically fading to grey: the more you read, the more you erase the word (because of its exposure to light). This phenomenon of appearance and disappearance is what I am often looking for in language and the sculptural process. A movement that embraces language and material within a common creative process. In We live in the flicker I entrusted a possible experience to the material, by giving the words to a moving surface with light as the intermediary. All this experience remains at the service of a fragile moment of reading and beauty… It is so hard to define what an aesthetic experience ultimately depends on, for it can manifest itself or it can simply not happen. Within these ephemeral, immediate or slow phenomena, I am looking for that. The question is also how to capture, visually, this instant of passage from life to death. Disappearance leaves traces, it is the passage that is intense. It’s the same for words. Listen, the darkness deepens [2016] is the title of an exhibition in Guadalajara, in which I developed this notion of language embodied in materials. The show also included the series We live in the flicker, with a transcription of a Fernando Pessoa poem placed on the ground [People, 2016]. ar Why the Pessoa poem? tvt Pessoa, in a collection of poems translated into French as Le gardeur de troupeau [in English, The Keeper of Sheep, 1925], writes: ‘I am the shepherd, my herd are my thoughts, and I think with my eyes, with my nose, with my ears, my mouth…’ I quote from memory, but I totally agree with the fact that we do think with our senses. That is the first reason, I guess, that Fernando Pessoa is like a friend at my side.

He is the poet of our melancholia. He disappears from the visible world because he feels he belongs to no land. Also, he pretends to be plural, several. Under the name of Alberto Caeiro, he writes free verses in a rough language about things of a spiritual nature. They spoke to me of people, and of humanity. But I’ve never seen people, or humanity. I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar, Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space. I took this excerpt from Pessoa/Caeiro’s Poèmes jamais assemblés (‘uncollected poems’) and my wish to give body to this speech drives me to work with clay, earth itself. I chose the physical earth to symbolically materialise the missing earth evoked in the poem. I moulded letters and cast hundreds of ceramic letters, all unfired, to show their fragility of being. The poem was therefore delivered in fragments. Our Melancholia [2017] is a library of the moulds that preserves the possibility of materialising this language. ar What does it mean to you to materialise writing? tvt When we think ‘writing’, we don’t actually see anything. We read a word on a piece of paper, a book or a screen but we don’t see the word as a potentiality of form or an affective formal experience. Here, the poem evokes the impossibility of belonging to any part of the earth, the feeling of political and melancholic exile. A subtraction of the man from the reality. I looked for the most effective form to deliver these words. The moulds appear as the possibility for these verses to exist, and for any poetry to exist. The word here is shown in its absence, in its container. In the fragile frame, the mould,

which I have tried to protect, because the plaster, by being mineralised, became brittle, broken and fossilised; the wax prostheses come to support this potential of speech to be born and to emancipate itself through its own appearance. These moulds at once describe the possible proliferation of the word and warn about its absence or potential disappearance. Here again the negative form, le trace, the hollowed form, will insist on the fragile word, and witness our desire to be and belong. ar In 2014 you were invited to curate a show on Marguerite Duras’s writings at the Centre Pompidou. Perhaps we could end with that. Why did you title it Portrait of a style of writing? And why distinguish between the style and the author? tvt The French title – Portrait d’une écriture – doesn’t really seem to distinguish the two. I mean the border is less present, and the association of ‘portrait’ and ‘écriture’ makes them even closer. Indeed, I think that our investigation of Marguerite Duras’s ‘style of writing’ was carried out in the first place through a portrait: through her life but also through her choice to write for the outside world while retaining her own private narrative. She was able to publish texts of extreme intimacy, such as that written after her first child’s death in the journal Sorcières [‘Witches’]. The scenography that I proposed embodied this duality. I faced problems such as how to give life to an archive and how to restore the experience of Duras’s life without falling into a form of documentation? The exhibition was intended to introduce the experience of the writing through a presentation in the mode of a collision between written, spoken and imaged forms. This is how texts, sounds and films were programmed into sequences played

At a Tortoise’s Pace, 2019, 30 ceramic tortoises, dimensions variable. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele

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within the show, which had a specific duration. The time and space of the exhibition were then totally intertwined. ar Does the relationship between the outside world and the personal or intimate narrative that you see in Duras also inspire your own work? And does it also involve a negotiation with the ego? In that it places value or importance on the individual narrative? tvt One thing that brings Duras and I closer together is our common filiation with Indochina (she was born in Vietnam’s Gia Ði.nh Province and lived there until her majority). This closeness to her experience can give me as much insight into her life as any biographer. But in reality, what makes me feel close to her was her commitment to what she called ‘the outside world’. More specifically, a text she wrote to express her indignation at the closure of a factory that dismissed all its workers. Of course, novels such as The Sea Wall [1950], which recounts her childhood in a French concession in Indochina, spoke to me, but, as she said, this book is first and foremost a communist novel, in the way in which it engages in a critique of the French colonial administration through the story of the trials suffered by her mother. I think the ego’s share must be exceeded to take on another form. This transformation takes place in each of Duras’s books. For her, writing is the act of absolute transformation. Even if the story is originally motivated by her feeling of injustice and sometimes by revenge (as is the case with The Sea Wall), once the writing takes place it has already taken her elsewhere. In this, she is the author who has influenced me the most. ar A solo exhibition, Dust Notes, is on view at Almine Rech, Paris, until 11 January

Our Melancholia, 2017, plaster, residues of clay, wax, rubber, oak wood, gouache, dimensions variable All images ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech, Paris

January & February 2020

Acts of Registration by Adrian Lahoud

Adrian Lahoud, curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, explains how one of the exhibits functions as a work of art, a map, a territory and a historical and legal document 58

ArtReview

January & February 2020

June 1992, Mabo island continent since 1788, those signals are still with us. They can be The Mabo v Queensland (No 2) case, settled on 3 June 1992, recognised made out if we are prepared to listen. native title in Australia for the first time. It is often described as a landIn 1993, in the aftermath of the Mabo decision, the Native Title mark decision, but it merely admits in legal form what to everyone Tribunal was established. The claims process is designed to prioritise was already an indisputable fact: that Australia was inhabited before it negotiation and to encourage parties to take responsibility for resoluwas colonised and, therefore, that these inhabitants had claim to land. tion of native title proceedings without the need for litigation. Mabo is often credited for overturning terra nullius, a Latin The Native Title Act states explicitly that the crucial function of phrase that translates as ‘nobody’s land’. Most of us Australians the Tribunal is to facilitate mediation between Indigenous groups and were taught that it formed the legal pretext for British settlement other parties (eg state governments or private parties). That is, once of the Australian continent, but we were taught wrong. Terra nullius Indigenous claimants have demonstrated title to the land, the law begins to frame our account of white settlement about 100 years after hopes that the claimants will negotiate agreements with these other the arrival of the first fleet. What parties, whether for compensation In Australia the state is the sole source of or future rights. These are referred to Mabo overturned, then, was not only a moral and legal fiction, but a historlaw. Yet another legal order exists, where as Indigenous Land Use Agreements. The High Court may hear or review ical one too. The continent was not the law is orally transmitted rather ‘settled’ – it was conquered, and the cases where the Tribunal fails to facilthan written, and values secrecy and conquerors knew it. itate agreement between the parties. Like so many of the lies that linger initiation rather than public statements Going to court is time-consuming, as it typically takes over a decade to around our history, terra nullius is a fig leaf cast back in time so that it might eventually be taken for a histor- reach a conclusion. And it is costly, on the order of tens of millions ical truth. One of the most pernicious is that Aboriginal Australians of dollars. lived in a state of subsistence. According to this image of precoloIn 1998 the Liberal government under John Howard passed the nial indigenous society, life was little more than a harsh, unending Native Title Amendment Act, which significantly modified and struggle to satisfy primordial needs with meagre opportunities. limited the original act. The purpose of the amendment was to It’s a more pernicious lie because it’s one thing to admit to conquering, protect the interests of the pastoral leaseholders whose lands cover another to accept that the conquered are your equals. But precolo- 44 percent of Australia’s landmass. More accurately, perhaps, the nial indigenous Australians did not live in a state of subsistence. amendment was designed to preempt and limit the ability of Aboriginal Australians to test Native Title claims against pastoral The ample time allocated to ceremony is but one proof of this. Moreover, as the work of scholars like Bill Gammage and leases in the High Court. Bruce Pascoe makes clear, this was no primordial state of nature. In Australia the state is the sole source of law.1 That law consists The continent was designed. Its ecologies were modified, its rivers of public, verifiable statements. In the case of property claims, maps, were controlled, its fields cultivated, its movements and cycles and surveys and deeds are the privileged kinds of statements for estabrhythms manipulated and harnessed lishing the truth of tenure. Yet The continent was designed… its rhythms another legal order exists, in which in a grand choreography spanning thousands of communities and lanthe state is not the only source of law; manipulated and harnessed in a grand guage groups, and lasting tens of where the law is orally transmitted choreography spanning thousands of rather than written, a law that values thousands of years. communities and language groups, secrecy and initiation rather than How’s that for an image of Auspublic statements – absent of maps, tralia? A vast intergenerational, multiand lasting tens of thousands of years surveys and title deeds. The Native ethnic design project at the scale of an entire continent. Despite the evidence, white Australia couldn’t recog- Title Act brings radically different moral, legal and ecological orders nise it, and still can’t. Eventually, though, it too will become an indis- into contact. Their encounter raises difficult questions about the past, putable fact. present and future of relationships between black and white Australia. Take a recent piece of research on the veracity of oral testimonies in Australia. Researchers have recently recorded 21 Aboriginal 1993, Lampu Well, Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia stories and myths along the coast of Australia, all of which corrobo- In 1993 a group of communities from the Great Sandy Desert met rate historical sea levels. That might seem unremarkable, except that at Lampu Well, on the northern end of the Canning Stock Route, the sea levels being described are between 7,000 and 18,000 years old; to explore making a Native Title Claim. Kimberly Land Council that means that these empirically verifiable stories have been accu- Chairman Kurinjinpyi Ivan McPhee explained to those assembled rately transmitted across 300 to 700 generations. that under Native Title the claimants would have to prove: Think about the kinds of social structures required to secure the integrity of such stories over millennia. Their Our culture, our law, our traditional law page 78 Ngurrara artists producing Ngurrara origin reaches back before the invention of Where we come from and who we are Canvas ii at Pirnini, May 1997 writing, even before the invention of language. Where we walked on the land page 79 Artists Pijaji Peter Skipper and Tapiri Despite the time that has passed, despite every Peter Clancy at Jinpirimpiri, May 2005 attempt to silence the messages that they carry, both images Photo: K. Dayman. Courtesy Ngurrara For the next four years, community members, an despite everything that has happened to this anthropologist and the manager of the Mangkaja Artists and Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency

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both images Ngurrara Canvas ii Awakening Ceremony led by members of the Ngurrara Canvas ii Artist Group during the inaugural edition of Sharjah Architecture Triennial, 2019. Photo: Sharjah Architecture Triennial (top), Talie Eigeland (bottom)

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April 2019, Fitzroy Crossing Arts Resource Agency in Fitzroy Crossing would return to country and try to define the area of the claim. The claim area they would even- In April this year we travelled to Western Australia to meet with the tually seek to establish Native Title over was 83,886 sq km, or about surviving artists and nominated descendants of deceased artists at the Karrayili Education Centre in Fitzroy Crossing. For many of twice the size of the Netherlands. During this period, the question would remain: how to establish the 21 artists and descendants present, it was the first time that they in front of an Australian legal tribunal their culture and law, where had gathered as a group since the 20th anniversary of the painting in they came from and who they were? In other words, what, in the eyes 2017. Terry Murray opened the meeting with a minute’s silence for of the Native Title Tribunal, would constitute proof of land tenure loved ones who had passed or could not be there. From the very start, going back generation after generation? the entire idea of intergenerational rights could not have been more Then they made a most startling decision – to paint the proof powerfully expressed. of their claim. It would be the first, and so far the only, time in AusI followed by explaining that the feeling we all felt during the tralian history that a painting would minute’s silence spoke to an underNgurrara ii is a strategic intervention be entered as proof of historical land standing of how much of our world individually and collectively (our tenure. But first the artists would have in a land rights claim, one that adapts to decide what kind of stories to share landscapes, environments, beliefs, etc) traditional laws and stories about with each other. is received in some state from parents, country to produce legal and political In the words of artist Tommy May: from ancestors and from other kin. Meetings like this raise important effects using aesthetic means When I was a kid, if my father and questions in the context of exhibitionmy mother took me to someone else’s country, we couldn’t making. What do artists stand to gain from having their work on mention the name of that waterhole. We used an indirect landisplay? What use might others have of architectural exhibitions? guage which we call Malkarniny. We couldn’t mention the The Ngurrara Canvas ii is a case in point. The painting is priceless, so it will never be sold. Its value will increase as a result of exhibiting name of someone else’s country because we come from another it, but how does a community in North Western Australia benefit, in place, from different country. That is really the Aboriginal practical terms, from that increase in value? If we don’t manage to way of respecting copyright. It means that you can’t steal the stories or songs or dances from other places. This law is still answer those kinds of questions, then we end up repeating the extracvalid and it is the same when we paint… We can paint our own tive modes of existence that exhibitions are now trying to critique. story, our own place, but not anyone else’s country.2 That changes the way that we begin to think about exhibitionmaking, about how to deploy institutional infrastructure to empower The artists also had to make a decision as to what kind of stories and the communities that we are working with in return for their giving what kind of law to share with the Australian Native Title Tribunal. us the permission to show their work. As May recounts: For Ngurrara ii is so much more than a painting. It is a strategic intervention in a land rights claim, one that adapts traditional laws and stories about country to produce legal and political effects using We can’t show white people everything. If you tell everybody, it is like selling your country. You have no law there behind. You aesthetic means. That makes it completely singular in the already rich and complex tradition of Indigenous Australian cultural production. can give a little bit, but not too much. Kartiya can take away the stories, the pirlurr (one’s spirit), the power for your country and On the one hand, it is a map in the cartographic sense, since it still leave you with nothing.3 might be said to point to things. On the other hand, it is far more than a representation; indeed, it is, in a very It is a historical narration of the emerAfter agreeing that they would promaterial and literal sense, country, duce a collective painting, the artists as those involved in painting it have gence of the landscape. It is a site for made a second startling decision as always pointed out.4 ceremonies of cleaning, maintaining and to the contents of the painting. They As artist Gail Smiler says: awakening. It is the embodiment of kin, decided to paint something that was common to all four of the claimant Standing on and moving and the home of ancestors. It is a carpet communities: to paint waterholes, or around the painting gives you the feeling that the country is nearby, as easy as putting your ‘jila’. Water could make different stories and law commensurate. foot on the other side of the sandhill. That’s how it felt when I So on 9 May 1997, after four years of meetings, studies and discussions, a group of over 40 Aboriginal men and women from the was interpreting for the tribunal, standing right on the place we Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala and Juwaliny communities and were talking about. But I know for the old people that it is a long language groups got together at the Pirnini outstation, about six way to their country. The painting makes it closer for people.5 days’ drive south of Fitzroy Crossing in the Great Sandy Desert. The plenary session with the Native Title Tribunal was just ten days away. It is the expression of law and the way rights to tell stories about The following day, on 10 May, Jimmy Pike took a brush and made the country are differentiated among different members of the commufirst mark, drawing the line of the Canning Stock Route from one nity. It is a historical narration of the emergence of the landscape. edge of the canvas to the other. His fellow artists found their country It is a site for ceremonies of cleaning, maintaining and awakening. It is the embodiment of kin, and the home of ancestors. It is a carpet, on the canvas, and began painting.

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Ngurrara Canvas ii Awakening Ceremony led by members of the Ngurrara Canvas ii Artist Group during the inaugural edition of Sharjah Architecture Triennial, 2019. Photo: Talie Eigeland

January & February 2020

Justice Gilmour at the 2007 Ngurrara Native Title Determination (still from Putuparri and the Rainmakers, 2015, dir Nicole Ma)

you can stand on it, dance on it, let dogs walk on it. It is a plan, both in the literal sense of marking out spaces for artist’s bodies to sit and paint their respective areas, and in the deeper and more profound sense of an intervention that attempts to shape a future action. It is a unique, multivalent object, one that nonindigenous people will only ever apprehend at the very edges of its meaning. May 1997, The Plenary Session With the painting completed, the artists insisted that the hearing take place on their land. It is so that on 19 May 1997, under a tent and a series of tarps in Pirnini in North Western Australia, the Australian Native Title Tribunal assembled to hear evidence in the case called Kogolo v State Government of Western Australia. Fred Chaney, deputy chair of the Native Title Tribunal, arrives at the Plenary Conference with John Clarke, a representative of the State Government of Western Australia and two other state government employees. The canvas is unrolled before the tribunal. Testimony is given by a number of artists including Warford Pujiman, Spider Snell, Nyuju Stumpy Brown, Pijaji Peter Skipper, Nada Rawlins, Nanyjan Charlie Nunjun, Parlun Happy Bullen, Jukuna Mona Chuguna, Kulyukulyu Trixie Shaw. When they are called to testify, they walk over to the canvas, they stand on the part of the canvas that is their country, and speaking in the The author wishes to thank Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, Karen Dayman, Belinda Cook, Fred Chaney, Kirsten Anker, Michael O’Donnell, John Carty. Ngurrara Canvas ii artists: Manmarriya Daisy Andrews, Munangu Huey Bent, Ngarta Jinny Bent, Waninya Biddy Bonney, Nyuju Stumpy Brown, Pajiman Warford Budgieman, Jukuna Mona Chuguna, Raraj David Chuguna, Tapiri Peter Clancy, Jijijar Molly Dededar, Purlta Maryanne Downs, Kurtiji Peter Goodijie, Kuji Rosie Goodjie, Yirrpura Jinny James, Nyangarni Penny K-Lyon, Luurn Willy Kew, Kapi Lucy Kubby,

Monday Kunga Kunga, Milyinti Dorothy May, Ngarralja Tommy May, Murungkurr Terry Murray, Mawukura Jimmy Nerrimah, Ngurnta Amy Nuggett, Japarti Joseph Nuggett, Nanjarn Charlie Nunjun, Yukarla Hitler Pamba, Parlun Harry Bullen, Kurnti Jimmy Pike, Killer Pindan, Miltja Thursday Pindan, Pulikarti Honey Bulagardie, Nada Rawlins, Ngumumpa Walter Rose, Kulyukulyu Trixie Shaw, Pijaji Peter Skipper, Jukuja Dolly Snell, Ngirlpirr Spider Snell, Mayapu Elsie Thomas, George Tuckerbox, Wajinya Paji Honeychild Yankarr.

four different language groups of the claimant communities, they explain their culture and law, where they came from and who they were. According to one tribunal member, it was ‘the most eloquent and overwhelming evidence that had ever been presented there’.6 November 2007, The Determination In 2007, ten years after that Plenary Session at Pirnini, Justice Gilmour of the Federal Court of Australia returned to deliver the determination. In the course of this, the judge stated the following: Can I say that in making these orders this Court does not give you native title. Rather the Court determines that native title already exists. It determines that this is your land. That it is based upon your traditional laws and customs and it always has been. The law says to all the people in Australia that this is your land and that it always has been your land.7 ar Adrian Lahoud is dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London, and curator of the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial. This essay was commissioned as part of Sharjah Architecture Triennial’s Rights of Future Generations: Conditions programme, which can be found at sharjaharchitecture.org Notes 1 Kirsten Anker, ‘The Truth in Painting: Cultural Artefacts as Proof of Native Title’, Law Text Culture 9 (2005): 95. 2 As quoted in: Eleonore Wildburger, ‘Indigenous Australian Art in Practice and Theory’, Coolabah 10 (2013): 204. 3 As quoted in: Mona Chuguna, Peter Skipper, Tommy May and Karen Dayman, ‘Maparlany Parlipa Mapunyan – We are Painting True, Really True’, Kimberley Appropriate Economies Roundtable Forum, Fitzroy Crossing, 11–13 October 2005. 4 Anker, ‘The Truth in Painting’, 112.

ArtReview

5 As quoted in: Top of Form Margo Neale, Sylvia Kleinert, and Robyne Bancroft (eds), The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 496. 6 Geraldine Brooks, ‘The Painted Desert’, The New Yorker, July 28, 2003: 60–67. 7 As quoted in: Larissa Behrendt, ‘Ngurrara: The Great Sandy Desert Canvas’, Aboriginal Art Directory, 17 June 2008. https://www.aboriginalartdirectory.com/news/feature/ngurrarathe-great-sandy-desert-canvas.php.

Lari Pittman Loaded Symbols by Patrick J. Reed

above This Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless, 1990, acrylic and enamel on mahogany, two panels, 325 Ă&#x2014; 244 cm facing page How Sweet the Day After This and That, Deep Sleep Is Truly Welcomed, 1988, acrylic, enamel, and five framed works on paper on wood, three panels, 244 Ă&#x2014; 488 cm

ArtReview

How do you enter the world of Lari Pittman? Where do you start with During a public conversation with Connie Butler, chief curator at paintings so dense with coded meaning that they resemble double- Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum, on the occasion of Pittman’s recent speak bouncing off sound mirrors? Attune your sensibilities to a gay retrospective Declaration of Independence, the artist fielded a quesmaximalism; prepare for visual and verbal platitudes transformed tion about the language of the objects – such as posies, gourds, cacti into bon mots; identify the verb and seek out the subject. Catch a phrase and crockery – that recur in his paintings. He replied that while the image might stay the same, its signification is variable. This notion, and you’ll catch the drift. A tendency towards playfulness, ambiguity and idiosyncrasy can also applicable to semiotic play within the realms of gender and sexube traced through the Angeleno painter’s career. That reluctance to ality, is rooted in a queer wisdom that pays no heed to heteronormative conform to easily identifiable categories means that his victories, too, conventions or canonical traditions. This isn’t to downplay the artist’s have been hard won. As a student at the California Institute of the Arts obvious dedication to the history of painting, but to highlight how he during the mid-1970s, Pittman declined to be a part of the hetero- moved away from the established principles of painterly modernism macho Pictures Generation and instead looked to the legendary to mine the relatively sidelined cultural histories of the decorative Feminist Art Program, brought to the school by Judy Chicago and arts, textile design and craft. Pittman’s work is a declaration of indeMiriam Schapiro in 1971. When he started working, painting was dead; pendence from straight categorisation, drafted according to his own in 1985, Pittman himself almost died aesthetic values and influences. Pittman’s work is a declaration after being shot twice in the stomach His paintings are also haunted by of independence from straight by an intruder to his home. A turbuthe spectres of trauma. Intermingled lent period in American history – for with his customary flash and pomp, categorisation, drafted according to his they lend the Needy series (1990–92) a queer artist making queer paintings, own aesthetic values and influences a peculiar shade of melancholy. The the era of the aids epidemic and the Culture Wars was devastating – is encapsulated in motifs including effect is not immediately apparent: Transfigurative and Needy (1991) is so coffins (in the Beloved and Despised series, 1989–90), guns and nooses. vibrantly coloured and excessively ornamented that a viewer might They seem to presage the rampant violence of American society today. easily miss the cartoon-faced, screaming houses on fire in the lower Yet seeking singular answers in any one of Pittman’s teeming strata of the canvas or fail to grasp the symbolism of the inverted paintings, let alone his body of work, is a fool’s errand and contrary to mauve owl that floats at the centre of the image, flanked by two the work’s spirit. The purpose of this aesthetic and linguistic excess is burning candles. If the owl signifies wisdom, then an upside-down to generate multiplicity of meaning. For example, This Wholesomeness, owl is a symbol of rebellious unlearning: in Transfigurative and Needy, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless (1990) describes two sides of all the clutter of Western thought is dumped into the flames of a a furtive romance. Composed on double mahogany panels, the hori- burning bourgeois township. There goes the neighbourhood. zontal seam divides a realm in which the painting’s central characters, Pittman created the Needy series, in part, to counter the abuntwo men in silhouette, perform intimacy from another in which they dance of phallocentric art produced during the aids crisis (take for perform indifference. A system of arrows, some turning widdershins example Keith Haring’s The Great White Way, 1988) and, in another part, and others colliding head on, discourage narrative linearity; rather, to acknowledge the vulnerability and resistance of a penetrable body. they imply a mixing of the private and the public to suggest the Owls are throughout the series outfitted with opulent vaginas but remain multigendered beings; the penis, when it does sneak into the psychological complexity of closeted desire.

January & February 2020

image, as in Transubstantial and Needy (1991), is ghostly. Considered as fiction/cannibalism fiction’ in the Los Angeles Public Library catasuch, the phrase ‘get out’ that hovers in close proximity to the orifices, logue. It is a tale set in a distinctly different world from Pittman’s, especially in Transformational and Needy (1990), might be an exorcist’s but the concept of ‘the marbled swarm’ – a densely allusive manner of command: patriarchy – get out! Hostility to nonbinary identity – get speaking and writing that the narrator uses to beguile others – could out! Legislation detrimental to the female body, the queer body – get fly across the divide into Untitled #5 (2010) or the drawings of Pittman’s out! And you, the viewer, are implored to get out of here, if you still Orangerie, an installation from the same period reprised in Declaration. can, by these birds that travel on the night-sea crossing. (Remember, you must listen carefully to what you see.) Just as images are granted the mechanical function of words, so In his catalogue essay for the Hammer retrospective, Donatien words are granted the privilege of pictorial form in Pittman’s oeuvre. Grau points out how Pittman, whose mother was Colombian and That is, they get to be as fancy as everything else in the picture. A 1988 father American, uses his bilingualism to generate new hybrid forms painting entitled How Sweet the Day After This and That, Deep Sleep Is of language and symbolism. In the paintings’ superficial elements, Truly Welcomed is emblazoned with ‘!What?!’(perhaps a self-reflexive graphics and colour schemes alluding to the painter’s Latin American comment on the work’s verbose title) over two-thirds of its eight- heritage are rolled together with iconography specific to white by-sixteen-foot surface in a quasi-antique script described by Butler American kitsch. In This Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues as a ‘raunchy italic’, also seen in the Regardless, for instance, note the pairGraphics and colour schemes alluding valediction ‘Sincerely, Lari’ unfurled ing of colonial-era silhouettes with to the painter’s Latin American heritage across the centre of Spiritual and Needy patches of the lime green, yellow, (1991). In Untitled #16 (A Decorated pink and red associated with fiesta. are rolled together with iconography Chronology of Insistence and Resignation) Although Pittman claims, in specific to white American kitsch (1993) words slip into the image as conversation with Butler, that his credit-card logos, while works from the mid-1990s are peppered with works eschew the brutality of the outside world, they engage with the exclamations ‘hey girl, love-sexi’ and ‘cum ‘n’ git it!’ gussied the violence that now plagues the United States. In the monumental up in a saloon-style typeface. Flying Carpet with a Waning Moon Over a Violent Nation (2013), red-rimmed A 1991 artist book pits Pittman’s cacophonous visuals against gun sights frame romantically Wild West terrain. That the landscapes novelist Dennis Cooper’s ultranaughty, handwritten prose in the within the circles are blurred reads as a comment on the shortsightedsemiepistolary Have you seen... An excerpt from Cooper’s contribution ness of those firearms enthusiasts and policymakers who have failed reads: ‘Carefully, Dennis stripped Lari’s clothes off. Canvas deck shoes, to stop the hail of bullets in schools, movie theatres, concert venues, white socks, khaki short pants, t-shirt (ironed), vest. He folded and gay nightclubs and small-town holiday markets. But Pittman also hid that away in the closet. Then he flipped Lari over and took a little draws a bead on the kind of citizens who allow this to continue; by sniff of his ass crack…’ The response on the page opposite shows one of situating the painting’s audience in a sniper’s stakeout, he implies Pittman’s iconic number 69s wedged between ‘Dear Dennis’ and ‘How that they too are implicated. The vaguely typographical forms of the do I find meaning?’ The question, of course, remains unanswered, but drawing series New Map of America (2013), meanwhile, seem to propose all the better for the blossoming of possibilities that conjecture allows. an adjusted alphabet. No longer legible, the configurations are an Two decades after their collaboration, Cooper published The open code: amoral, unfixed and available to be turned to any meaning. Marbled Swarm (2011), a novel tagged as ‘homosexuality fiction/murder They cipher the difficulty of articulating these confused times. ar

Flying Carpet with a Waning Moon Over a Violent Nation, 2013, Cel-Vinyl and spray paint on canvas over wood, 274 × 915 cm

ArtReview

Transfigurative and Needy, 1991, acrylic and enamel on mahogany, 208 Ă&#x2014; 167 cm all works ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

January & February 2020

artgeneve.ch

artmontecarlo.ch

sculpturegarden Geneva Biennale

In collaboration with

With the kind support of

valie export

Poems January & February 2020

1966 Geboren wurde ich in der Klinik, die der Stadt Linz gehört. Getrunken habe ich an der Brust, die meiner Mutter gehört. Versteckt hab ich mich vor den Bomben, die dem Staat England gehörten. Gekleidet hab ich mit den Kleidern, die meiner Schwester gehörten. Geweint hab ich nach meinem Vater, dessen Tod dem Vaterland gehört. Gespielt habe ich mit den Bällen, die den Kindergarten gehörten. In Büchern hab ich gelesen, die der Bücherei gehören. In Zügen fuhr ich, die dem Staat gehören. Auf Sesseln bin ich gesessen, die anderen gehörten. Gelebt habe ich von dem Geld, das meinem Freund gehörte. Die Luft habe ich geatmet, die Gott gehört. Dass ist das Leben, das mir gehört. Geschrien habe ich mit der Stimme, die mir gehört. Gebissen habe ich mit den Zähnen, die mir gehören. Gekratzt habe ich mit den Nägeln, die mir gehören. Geweint habe ich mit den Tränen, die mir gehören. Gesehen habe ich mit den Augen, die mir gehören. Gedacht habe ich mit den Gedanken, die mir gehören. Gelacht habe ich mit dem Lachen, das mir gehört. Geküsst habe ich mit dem Mund, der mir gehört. Geschlafen habe ich mit den Träumen, die mir gehören. Dass ist das Leben, das mir gehört.

1973 Eine Schlange am Rücken tätowiert, tanzend nach der Wirbelsäulenflöte, Wirbelsäulenflöte, wie Pflastersteine. Sturm – Raum – Materie. Die Nervensäule Die Zeitgeist Das Instrument des Bewusstseins Mensch.

Die Säulenflöte: Der Fötus spritzt den Schleimbrei in das krustige Wasser.

Material der Wirklichkeit. Eine Frage. Die Vergangenheit in staubige Ritzen blasen und ohne Nerv den Hammer in die Wunde schlagen. Das Blutsuchen lasst den Fleischschmerz erfahren.

1966

1973

The spinal flute:

Matter of reality. A question.

Metal gestures.

Metallene Gesten. Ich trinke das Glas Wasser in der Sommerhitze. Ich rinne den Schweiß zwischen meinen Füßen und verstehe kein Wort von deinem Gesicht. Es ist kalt und dein Körper steht mir zur Seite und ich gebe dein Glas weiter und deine Hitze kann nur meine Hitze sein. Doch dieses Glas Wasser hab ich nie getrunken. Warum sollt ich ein Meer trinken, wenn ich das Leben nicht verstehe. Sanfte Erde vor der Regenrinne wie ein Kanal mit dem blinden Goldfischteich, das Wasser welches drin sein muss, ohne Wolken wie ein welkes Blatt mit dem Goldfisch die Mutter, die im Wasser klebt in einem schmutziger Schleim aus Bröseln. Zwischen Menüpreisen unlesbare Zeichen auf weiße Holztafeln gespuckt. Du warst ein feuchtes Blatt unter meinem Schuh, welches ich lieben werde, weil es mich an etwas erinnert, was ich einmal gewusst habe. Wer straft mich und vor wem muss ich Angst haben. Mit deinen Fingern hast du auf den Kot geschlagen wie auf meine Fut. Zellen um mich stehen leer. Ich bin allein, ein ausgehöhlter Seeigel. Bist du zurück? Wo und wann bist du ausgestiegen? Ein ausgebrannter Geier. Stanzes in Revolution.

Ich möchte dir was schenken. Zum Denken. Zum Fühlen. Ich schenke dir ein Ticket nach. Die Haut beißt Disteln in die Luft, quillt schwarze Lava in die Spalte, die Perlen pfählen Nerven. Ich möchte dir was schenken. Zum Denken. Zum Fühlen. Ich schenke dir ein Ticket nach Alaska.

Jetzt ist alles kalt, müde und tot. Verloren erstarret erlebe ich den Schmerz. Ich laufe schnell, doch die Angst wirft ihre Haube über mich. Die Ameise erstickt zwischen Sandkörnern. Mein Körper steht in einem dunklen Rachen.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to give you something. For thinking. For feeling.

Now everything is cold, tired and dead.

Time congealed on itself

A bowl of love

In caesura.

Ineinandergeronnene Zeit Meine Hände sind meine Identität. Mein Gesicht und die Zeit ist die Zeit die mich macht, ist die Zeit für mich in der Zeit, in der ich es mache. Ist die Zeit, ist mein Gesicht. Es geschieht in der Zeit. Verliere ich die Zeit. Ich finde sie in meinen Händen wieder.

Eine Schale Liebe. Eine Schale Leben. Eine Schale Lügen.

In Zäsur. Ohne dich die Stunden sind leer. Ohne dich die Wände sind still. Ohne dich ich schreie. Ohne dich es regnet und ich weine. Ohne dich meine Haut ist Stein. Ohne dich das Auge vergilbt. Ohne dich ich kann nicht fliegen. Ohne dich meine Füße auf Glassplittern. Ohne dich ist kein Wort. Ohne dich kein Schlaf geschlafen werden muss. Ohne dich ist kein Weg. Ohne dich ist kein Himmel. Ohne dich ist kein Stern. Ohne dich die Sonne ist schwarz. Ohne dich ich kann nicht fühlen. Ohne dich ich kann nicht leben. Ohne dich ich kann nicht sterben. Ohne dich das Blatt zerschmettert meine Hand. Ohne dich kein Schatten. Ich schaue in den Spiegel. Und sehe mich.

In hope

In einer Hoffnung. In einer Glaubwürdigkeit. Der Wörter die man spricht. Liebe Angst und Mensch. Geknickt wie ein Dinosauris, legst du dich über mich, geknechtet wie ein Untier verwoben, versteinert. Post-bartum zurückgeschleudert zu den Korallenriffen.

Eine tränenlose Hand reicht einst ich uns der Steine. Jetzt ist das Meer zu groß geworden. Mir. Die schwarzen Pflasterquader schließen rollend, die Wangen bohren. Die augenlose Luft springt einen Schritt zum Siege. Nimmt Platz anstelle wo es fehlt, das Gold. Das Meer hier drinnen und das Meer hier draußen deckt das Eis mit Nägel zu. Ein Stein ist keine Angst. Und Angst ist kein Wort. Mit steinerner Hand zerschlage ich die Zunge und denke dabei gewonnen.

Credits English translation: Jennifer Taylor Gedichte, 1966 Video, Video dvd 2011, Ton, s/w, pal 4:3, 7’48’’ Performancekonzept, Drehkonzept: valie export Performerin: valie export Kamera: unbekannt; Montage: valie export valie export Filmproduktion Wien, © valie export Poems, 1966 Date of shooting unknown Video, video dvd 2011, sound, b/w, pal 4:3, 7 min 48 sec Performance concept, shooting concept: valie export Performer: valie export Camerawork: unknown; montage: valie export valie export Filmproduktion Vienna, © valie export Courtesy the artist and Sixpack Film, Vienna

A tearless hand once passes us the stones.

‘Why don’t we make our own little tv thing about what’s really going on?’” by Ben Eastham

ArtReview

How the Karrabing Film Collective challenges official narratives of indigenous life

In the Emmiyengal language, ‘karrabing’ describes the time at which Talked (2014), for example, shows a family hassled by welfare officers the tide is furthest from the shore. It also alludes to the coastline that being forced to choose between acceding to the demands of the state connects the homelands of the extended family of the Karrabing and observing a ritual in their native country. This constant negoFilm Collective, defining neither a specific place nor a fixed identity tiation between conflicting systems informs works such as Wutharr, but a fluid body of people. Membership of the group, all but one of Saltwater Dreams (2016), in which a group stranded on an island by a whom are indigenous Australian and were born in the rural Belyuen broken boat motor bickers about how disgruntled ancestral spirits, community that has grown from a 1940s internment camp, continues uncomprehending state authorities and Christian missionaries have to swell. “We’ve always said 30,” founding member Elizabeth Povinelli contributed to their predicament. The work acts out the multiple and intersecting realities that constitute indigenous identity: like the sea, says, “but now we’re saying 50, although really there might be 70.” The collective has over the past decade produced a body of work it is subject to different forces, is ever-changing, is always connected. dramatising the conditions – social, political, temporal – in which It was in the aftermath of one particularly violent interference its members live. The central subject is the struggle to adapt to the that Karrabing Film Collective was founded. A confected moral panic more insidious everyday interventions of the state (the intrusion prompted by a 2007 report alleging endemic child neglect in indiginto their small community of police officers, housing corporations, enous communities gave the federal government an excuse to introsocial services), resist the pressures of duce the Northern Territory National These films discredit a model of indig- Emergency Response. Also known as extractivism and capitalism and mainenous identity as consisting exclusively The Intervention, it claimed special tain their connections to each other and exemption from federal laws against their ancestral lands. Scripted, acted in an anachronistic set of traditions to and directed by members of the group, racial discrimination in order to enforce which its members must rigidly adhere a raft of measures against indigenous its films challenge the narratives imposed on marginalised communities by those in power. A palpable people. Povinelli, who has been travelling to Belyuen since completing anger is leavened by empathy, wit and humour: those new to its work her studies in philosophy in 1984–5, when she was invited by its senior might start with the satirical Night Time Go (2017), which combines members to become an anthropologist in order to assist them in a doctored archival footage with a quasi-British Pathé voiceover to tell land claim, remembers that Australia’s abc radio wanted to report the issue.But the community felt that whatever they said to a state broadan alternative history of the Belyuen community. It is not only straightforwardly racist narratives that Karrabing caster, however sympathetic, would inevitably misrepresent their exists to rebut but also the liberal forms of indigenous recognition position. So they went hunting instead, and it was on the way back, that emerged during the 1970s. Often starting from fictionalised Povinelli recalls, “that Jojo [Linda Yarrowin] said, ‘Why don’t we make versions of mundane happenings – the threat of eviction, the imposi- our own little tv thing about what’s really going on?’” tion of a fine by the police or the illegal incursion of a mining corpo“It was not my idea to make films,” Povinelli says, and her initial ration into protected land – the collective’s films discredit a model reaction was to caution against the kind of ethnographic filmmaking of indigenous identity as consisting exclusively that purports to give indigenous communities The Mermaids: Mirror Worlds, 2018 in an anachronistic set of traditions to which a voice by simply providing them with cameras. (installation view, Institute of Modern Art, its members must rigidly adhere. When the Dogs “We know about that way of doing things,” Brisbane). Photo: Louis Lim

January & February 2020

Night Time Go (still), 2017, hd video, 30 min. Courtesy the artists

Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams (still), 2016, hd video, 28 min 23 sec. Courtesy the artists

ArtReview

When the Dogs Talked (still), 2014, digital video, 34 min. Courtesy the artists

was the other members’ reaction to her warning, “We want somebody their country is,” Povinelli cites Yarrowin as saying, “but your own land is connected by story, by ritual, by marriage, by sweat to other who knows what they’re doing.” Delivered in the community’s creole and often structured lands, so you have to keep them strong if yours is going to be strong.” according to shifting time signatures, the films’ vitality is instead Past and present, too, are inextricably entwined. In Wutharr, consistent with their criticism of the liberal assumption that indig- ghostly ancestors stalk the landscape even as state officials visit the enous identity is rooted in a frozen past. Not better than the forms family; The Mermaids, or Aiden In Wonderland (2018) is set in a dystoof discrimination that preceded it but “differently bad”, the effect pian near future that also invokes Australia’s shameful history of of Australia’s land rights reforms being predicated on a model of separating indigenous children from their families for ‘reeducaauthentic, singular and demonstrable indigenous identity was tion’ or medical experiment (the destructive consequences of which destructive. “A specific anthropological form became the mandate for continue to be felt today). That the present and past are bound up indigenous people getting their lands back. This foreign form had the in ways other than the conventionally linear has implications. If the effect of dividing communities on the basis of what settlers believed past is not dead – if it is not even past – then these and other state were traditional versus historical relations to land.” The ensuing frag- crimes cannot simply be confined to school textbooks and redressed mentation of those groups, Povinelli points out, had consequences with an apology, however sincere. They continue to act upon the including that it was “easier for capital to get in there”. present in ways that must be acknowledged, addressed and incorporated into policy. Capital in Karrabing’s films is rep“Everybody knows where their country resented by the mining corporations Karrabing combines fact and fiction that have coopted large swathes of the is, but your own land is connected by story, in order to represent the complexity of Australian landscape. In Windjarrameru these intertwining realities. “It’s a stoby ritual, by marriage, by sweat to other (The Stealing C*nt$) (2015), four young ry, but it’s real,” according to Povinelli, lands, so you have to keep them strong” men are chased by police into private “not exactly what happens but what – and poisoned – land. In their experience and the discussions that happens.” To assume that because these stories are authored by surround it, an understanding of country as a complexly intercon- members of a rural Australian community their meaning can be nected system is counterpointed with the Western principle that it confined to a specific time and place is to ignore the profound entancan be parcelled up into independent territories (an idea discredited glements that they enact: these concepts have applications far beyond by, among other things, the global ecological crisis so dramatically the local conditions the films begin by describing. As it is impossible symbolised by Australian bushfires). But it’s typical of these films to separate the past from the present, so it is futile to attempt to that the construction of any simple binary between Western and non- cleanly separate here from there, to establish conclusive definitions Western ways of thinking quickly breaks down. Doesn’t the indige- of ‘us’ as distinct from ‘them’. As Povinelli says, “it’s all happening in nous model of dynamic interaction and creative exchange resemble a the present.” ar progressive model for globalisation? And isn’t it above Seenandunseen, 2017,three-channel the Western principle of sovereignty, individuDay in the Life, Karrabing Film Collective’s latest video, vitrine, maps, magnifying alism and rational self-interest that now seems film, will premiere at the International Film Festival glasses. Photo: Carl Warner. Courtesy Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane stuck in the past? “Everybody knows where Rotterdam, 22 January – 2 February

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50 # 10 Chancery Lane 1335Mabini 303 Gallery 47 Canal A Miguel Abreu Acquavella Aike Alisan Sabrina Amrani Anomaly Antenna Space Applicat-Prazan Arario Alfonso Artiaco Artinformal Aye B Balice Hertling Beijing Art Now Beijing Commune Bergamin & Gomide Bernier/Eliades Blindspot Blum & Poe Boers-Li Tanya Bonakdar Ben Brown Gavin Brown C Gisela Capitain Cardi Carlos/Ishikawa Chambers Chemould Prescott Road Yumiko Chiba Chi-Wen Clearing Sadie Coles HQ Contemporary Fine Arts Continua Paula Cooper Pilar Corrias Cristea Roberts Chantal Crousel D Thomas Dane Massimo De Carlo

de Sarthe Dirimart du Monde E Eigen + Art Eslite Espace Gallery Exit Experimenter F Selma Feriani Konrad Fischer Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Fox/Jensen Stephen Friedman G Gagosian Gajah gb agency Ghebaly Gladstone Marian Goodman Gow Langsford Richard Gray Greene Naftali Grotto H Hakgojae Hanart TZ Hauser & Wirth Herald St Max Hetzler Hive Xavier Hufkens I Ingleby Ink Studio Taka Ishii J Annely Juda K Kaikai Kiki Kalfayan Karma International Kasmin Sean Kelly

Tina Keng Kerlin Peter Kilchmann David Kordansky Tomio Koyama Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Krinzinger Kukje kurimanzutto L Pearl Lam Simon Lee Leeahn Lehmann Maupin Lelong Lévy Gorvy Liang Lin & Lin Lisson Luhring Augustine Luxembourg & Dayan M Maggiore Magician Space Mai 36 Edouard Malingue Matthew Marks Marlborough Mayoral Mazzoleni Fergus McCaffrey Greta Meert Urs Meile Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Mind Set Francesca Minini Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash Mizuma The Modern Institute mother‘s tankstation N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nadi

Nagel Draxler Richard Nagy Nanzuka Taro Nasu neugerriemschneider nichido Anna Ning Franco Noero O Nathalie Obadia OMR One and J. Lorcan O‘Neill Ora-Ora Ota P P.P.O.W Pace Pace Prints Paragon Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Pi Artworks PKM Plan B Eva Presenhuber R Almine Rech Regen Projects Nara Roesler ROH Projects Tyler Rollins Thaddaeus Ropac Rossi & Rossi Lia Rumma S SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Rüdiger Schöttle ShanghART ShugoArts Side 2 Sies + Höke Silverlens Skarstedt Société Soka Sprüth Magers

March 19 – 21, 2020

Star Starkwhite STPI Sullivan+Strumpf T Take Ninagawa Tang Templon The Third Line TKG+ Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Tornabuoni Two Palms V Vadehra Van de Weghe Vitamin W Waddington Custot Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube White Space Beijing Barbara Wien Jocelyn Wolff Y Yavuz Z Zeno X Zilberman David Zwirner Insights A Thousand Plateaus Asia Art Center Bank Baton Beyond Empty Gallery Hunsand Space Yoshiaki Inoue Johyun Kogure Richard Koh Leo MadeIn Jan Murphy Nova Contemporary

Pifo Misa Shin The Third Gallery Aya Axel Vervoordt Watanuki / Toki-noWasuremono Wooson Discoveries A+ Contemporary Bangkok CityCity Capsule Château Shatto Commonwealth and Council Crèvecoeur Don Fine Arts, Sydney Green Art High Art Jhaveri JTT Maho Kubota Emanuel Layr David Lewis mor charpentier P21 Project Native Informant Jessica Silverman Park View / Paul Soto Southard Reid Gregor Staiger Tabula Rasa Yuka Tsuruno Vanguard

Henry Moore with his sculpture Seated Woman at ART 01, 1970 by Kurt Wyss (Above); David Zwirner at Art Basel Hong Kong 2019 (Below)

YEARS

Participating Galleries

Art Reviewed

Be the same thing as being mean 89

Nan Goldin Sirens Marian Goodman Gallery, London 14 November – 11 January The photograph is of a pale-skinned young woman, from the midriff up, against a red wall. Her aquiline nose and high cheekbones appear in closeup. She wears only a body-ornament made of strands of cascading, filigree-threaded silver stars that fall from a headpiece down over her small breasts. Blonde hair scraped back, she looks down to somewhere outside the frame. This is Greer Lankton in Nan Goldin’s Greer modeling jewelry, nyc (1985). The transgender artist was, like the photographer, part of the New York demimonde of the 1980s that straight America repressed or ignored: lesbians and gays, transsexuals, drag queens, postpunks and artists. Hanging at the heart of this epic part-triumphal, part-elegiac show, Greer modeling jewelry condenses a recurring theme of Sirens: the inherent glamour of individuals who reinvent themselves. By taking on new appearances and personalities, they create a reality in which the norms of straight society can be ignored. Yet this reality is precarious, sustained by little more than friendship, mutual support and – behind the cascade of stars – human bodies that prove to be frail without the protection of wealth, status and conventional social institutions. In Sirens, death is always waiting out of frame: photographs from Goldin’s legendary 1985 slideshow and 1986 photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are positioned alongside those from the 1993 iteration of The Other Side (a slideshow of black-and-white pictures of drag queens taken during the mid-1970s) and newly made videoworks. In the video slideshow The Other Side (1994–2019), for example, the previously elfin and sparkling Lankton is older and thinner, gnawed by anorexia; she died from an overdose in 1996. Goldin, who was surrounded by aids and addiction, survived. Although only just. Sirens is not a normal show for Goldin, since it has not been a normal year. During the 12 months since she joined

Marian Goodman Gallery she has added to her status as a pioneering artist the role of crusading activist, having almost singlehandedly brought the us opioid crisis to the artworld’s attention by pointing the finger at the Sackler family made staggeringly rich by it. It was the Sacklerowned Purdue Pharma that, during the late 1990s, developed and aggressively marketed the opioid-based painkiller Oxycontin as a magic pill for long-term chronic pain; its success helped the Sackler Foundation become one of the most powerful philanthropic organisations in the artworld. Goldin herself became addicted to Oxycontin after being prescribed it to manage the pain of an injured hand: when the prescription ran out, she, like millions of addicted Americans, drifted on to street drugs. She got clean in 2017, and then she got angry, founding the pressure group p.a.i.n. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and protesting the institutions where Sackler money was most visible. She had skin in the game: early in 2019, Goldin announced that she would boycott her own retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery if it did not turn down a £1 million grant from the Sackler Foundation. The museum acquiesced, and soon institutions around the world announced that they would refuse any further donations from the Sackler Foundation, which in turn indefinitely suspended its philanthropic activities. These events are alluded to in Sirens by a glass cabinet at the gallery entrance displaying p.a.i.n.’s recent protest and publicity materials. The show’s new works bookend the presentation of newly editioned prints from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and The Other Side – from the bleak anger that runs through the new video Memory Lost (2019) at one end of the gallery, to the triumphant celebration of queer desire that thunders out of the short, quasi-pop video Salome (2019) at the other.

facing page Greer modeling jewelry, nyc, 1985, archival pigment print, 114 × 76 cm

ArtReview

Installed on three screens, Salome is both a cheerful homage to camp and a resilient two-fingers-up to the patriarchy. The lefthand screen collects three appropriated movie clips of Salome’s ‘dance of the seven veils’: two risqué black-and-white silent-cinema versions and the closing scene from Ken Russell’s thoroughly queered Salome’s Last Dance (1988), in which the veiled dancer finally strips to reveal that he is a proudly penis-waggling man. But what sets off Goldin’s bawdy cut-up Salome is the central screen: a looping early cinema clip in which a host of pancaked, eyelinered men in white tie and tails look agog – all expressionistic leering, gurning and jaw-dropping – towards the adjacent screen on which Salome dances. Merging into a Dalíesque cluster of staring eyes, these anonymous masculine drones lose their minds before the genderfluidity they both loathe and desire. “You know that it’s real if you feel that it’s real!”, choruses the driving electro soundtrack (John Robie’s One More Shot, 1990). And, just to remind everyone of the long history of sexual prohibition in straight culture, on the righthand screen Goldin tacks on a fragment of biblical Hollywood, in which the members of some royal court are punished by the Lord for whatever misdemeanour they have committed with a great storm that brings down the columns of their palace and sweeps them away. The glam exuberance of Salome gives way to the colder fury that trickles through Memory Lost, a video/photo essay that is a shadowy world of woozy, blurred and tenebrous stills, shots of burn-marked photographs haunted by the ghosts of Goldin’s opioid-junkie reality. White pills set out carefully on a hotel-room desk with the counting-house precision of the addict making sure she has enough to get through the ensuing days; crackling snatches of telephone conversations in which Goldin and her friends talk from the depths of depression and

January & February 2020

above Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973, archival pigment print, 41 Ă&#x2014; 41 cm

facing page Brushstrokes in blue sky, Malibu, 2006, archival pigment print, 150 Ă&#x2014; 225 cm

ArtReview

all images Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

addiction. “What did you get?” asks a voice like Goldin’s. “All that you wanted,” comes the anonymous, defeated voice in reply. The sirens in Homer’s Odyssey were femaleshaped creatures whose seductive song would drive sailors mad, enticing them to wreck their ships on the rocks of the sirens’ island, thereafter to be eaten by them. The figure of Odysseus, binding himself to the mast and thus unable to respond to their call, has become a symbol of the overpowering nature of desire, of aesthetic delirium, of intoxication in general and of the misogynist figure of the woman as seducer and devourer of the male ego. But sirens are also the sound of alerts and alarms. In recording herself succumbing to the siren-call of legalised addiction, Goldin captures something of its lonely, suburban banality. Memory Lost touches on the social cost of the opioid crisis, although we really only catch glimpses of this through Goldin’s autobiographical lens – there is no social documentary here, apart from a snap of a printed sign in a pharmacy window

that makes the panicked declaration ‘We do not sell Oxycontin here!’ There is little fascination, seduction, glamour or individual liberty to be found: only grimy hotels, winter landscapes, holes accidentally burned into mattresses and a little bottle of Oxycontin squatting in the dark confines of a hotel-room safe. The final new work is the video that gives this show its name. The origins of the found footage in Sirens (2019) are myriad, but the clips – of ecstatic hippies gyrating, of nightclubbers dancing in the gloom and, principally, of the almost extraterrestrially thin and glamourous features of Donyale Luna, the ‘first black supermodel’, whose star coursed through the films of Andy Warhol to the covers of Vogue – hark to an earlier historical moment. “We are stardust,” intones a singer in the soundtrack of songs accompanying The Other Side, and Luna shines with it, though she died of a heroin overdose in 1979. A sprinkle of stardust can’t protect these fragile bodies from the hostility of straight society.

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Especially once big pharma figured out that it was possible to make money from the war on drugs. During the opioid crisis, millions of Rust Belt and ‘flyover state’ Americans became addicted to prescription medications. They might have voted for Reagan, Bush or Trump; might once have despised the inhabitants of Goldin’s world. The artworld funded by philanthropic organisations including the Sackler Foundation remained largely indifferent to their suffering, and that political and cultural split stalks Sirens. The unfinished business of the culture wars is the exhibition’s blind spot, because, in the end, the suits got everyone, queer and straight. There’s no easy solution here, only a possible escape. The skylit upstairs gallery hosts a series of largescale prints, mostly vast depopulated landscapes, darkening horizons somehow still rich in colour. They might represent a departure from everywhere else depicted in the show, a last snap of the shutter to capture transcendence. J.J. Charlesworth

Part 1: Matrescence Richard Saltoun Gallery, London 15 November – 21 December This, the first of two shows curated by Catherine McCormack exploring ‘maternal politics, identity and embodiment’, is a timely arrival. A raft of recent writing has put maternity at the centre of cultural debate – Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work (2001) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018) among them – but, in the visual arts, the subject remains a fringe concern. No one could adequately summarise the experience of becoming a mother in one word, but matrescence is the anthropological term for the process. Coined by Dana Raphael in 1973, it describes the transition for women into a new, constantly evolving, conflicting identity. McCormack’s stated aim is to offer ‘a different understanding of maternal experience as something open to transformation beyond the persistent archetypes that have dominated our collective cultural understanding and expectations’. With video, photography and performance documentation by 11 artists, spanning 60 years and three continents, the exhibition treads a broad terrain – from the hypermedicalised maternity ward of 1950s America to China’s one-child policy – and is filled with emotional and psychological extremes. Among them Hermione Wiltshire’s appropriation of a photo taken from Ina May

Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery (1976) of the moment she says birth workshop leaders fear to show, a baby crowning: the mother appears, contrary to popular perceptions of labour, ecstatic with pleasure (Therese Crowning in Ecstatic Childbirth, 2008). Or Laia Abril’s harrowing accounts from women seeking an illegal abortion in Poland in 2016, told through text and photography. What pulls the show’s scattered projects together is the tension between how mothers feel and how external forces picture and shape us. This conflict is established from the outset with portraits upending the iconography of the Madonna. Jo Spence pours petrol on sanitised, asexual images of motherhood with a typically confrontational photograph of her suckling a grown man. Leni Dothan’s video Sleeping Madonna (2011), meanwhile, has a double-edged tenderness. It shows the artist and her young child breastfeeding and snoozing, capturing the mutual bliss of the sleep-inducing ‘cuddle hormone’ oxytocin as well as parenthood’s monotony. The show’s dominant mood, though, is anxiety, be it about loss of identity or state control. Fear of the other powers Helen Chadwick’s photo of a blood-red Barbie, born from a meat vagina, and Renate Bertlmann’s video documentation of her performance as a creepy priestesscum-monster with a mask of pacifier nipples,

Helen Chadwick, Birth of Barbie, 1993, cibachrome photograph, 58 × 50 cm. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

ArtReview

as well as Eve Arnold’s disturbingly hygienic photo of a masked doctor presenting a baby to its mother. Projects like Abril’s are a sharp reminder to those who have grown up with women’s rights that the social and political concerns explored by those pioneers remain very real. The final work encountered by the visitor is her Window of Life (2016), a photo of a sinister hatch in the wall of a contemporary Polish convent, where those unable to have abortions can leave their babies. Its glass is pitch black. One comes away with the sense that the process of becoming a mother is moulded by outside pressures that must be protested and subverted. Yet, thanks to the groundbreaking work of these earlier feminist artists, the push against the constraints placed on women socially, medically and politically has cleared the way for an exploration of motherhood in which its myriad positives, its richness and strangeness, can be addressed alongside its negatives. Dothan seems a lone voice in this respect, and there is little in the first half of this two-part presentation of what the writer Nelson achieved in The Argonauts, shaping the experience of motherhood – or matrescence – on her own terms, acknowledging joy alongside struggle. Skye Sherwin

Zadie Xa Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation Tramway, Glasgow 26 October – 15 December “All creation legends are true”, claim the narrators of Zadie Xa’s film Child of Magohalmi and the Echoes of Creation (2019), part of her multimedia installation at Tramway. This rejection of singular narratives is reflected in the exhibition’s multiplicity and excess, encompassing film, sound, painting, sculpture, costume and performance. Through the combination of these elements, Xa reanimates the myth of Mago(halmi), a giant goddess who, in Korean folklore, is said to have created the world. In Xa’s hands the marginalised story of Mago is both a recuperative and speculative gesture, clamant with ecological portent. Plunging the smaller of the gallery’s two spaces into darkness punctuated by colourful spotlights, Xa has carpeted the room and filled it with pseudo-aquatic sculptures: oversize resin conch shells and orcas, including an enormous denim orca, ‘Granny’, which demarcates the space. The effect is subaquatic but kitschily so, more Seapunk than a po-faced statement on ecology. According to the handout, ‘Granny’ is named after a real-life orca matriarch whose pod is under threat, but also serves as

seating from which to comfortably watch the film that dominates the space. Child of Magohalmi… is a mesmeric, narratively disjointed and at times slow-moving film, best absorbed in intermittent doses. Combining choreographed scenes and animation, its imagery ranges from a masked figure on a beach (Mago) as she creates the world from sand, water and her own bodily excretions, to pastel-hued kelp overlaid on waves. The film is at its most compelling when these sequences coincide with other elements of the installation, such as animated orcas leaping through a night sky, or the narrator’s mention of amethyst quartz, as the resin conch shells emit an eerie violet light. Unlike Korean folklore concerning male deities, Mago’s story was never written down but transmitted orally through generations of women. The film’s self-interrupting narrative and onomatopoeic repetitions of “echo”, “gurgle” and “splash” vocalise Mago’s suppressed matrilineal narrative. Through the figure of this abject, terraforming goddess, Xa connects the excretions of the body and the accretion of land in a mutually fertilising cycle. It is Xa’s

painting of Mago, however, that effects the presence of the goddess most strongly – only on a close look do you notice, nestled between the folds on Mago’s forehead, a half-closed but piercing third eye. This painting and the more handmade aspects of the installation – including denim orca-embellished costumes worn by performers dancing to Janggu drum rhythms on the opening night – bring a lightness and humour that balances out the comparatively self-serious film and its ambient soundtrack. The array of references Xa draws on are at once conceptually alluring and politically salient. Allying a neglected matrilineal mythology with current ecological precarity, Child of Magohalmi... is a celebratory and ritualistic retort to patriarchal, monotheistic and Western-centric creation narratives and their progeny, found in present-day attitudes towards environmental extraction and destruction. While the exhibition may lack convincing aesthetic cogency, the powerful and provocative figure of Mago(halmi) – and her various incarnations by Xa and her collaborators – is defiantly unforgettable. Daisy Lafarge

Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo, Magohalmi, 2018, polymer resin, spraypaint, acrylic paint and synthetic hair. Photo: Keith Hunter. Courtesy the artists

January & February 2020

Elizabeth Price a long memory The Whitworth, Manchester 25 October – 1 March The videos, sculptures and archives in Elizabeth Price’s most extensive uk survey exhibition to date draw on sources as disparate as coalmines, neckties and the Shangri-Las to present history as an ever-changing social practice rather than a static repository of information. The British artist’s video installations play at intervals in two blacked-out rooms on opposite sides of the Whitworth’s central gallery. K (2015) works across two screens, one of which shows a flickering animation composed of thousands of still images of the sun rephotographed in the ‘K’ light that gives them their uncanny glow; the other shows a digitally animated hosiery production line. Clips of pop stars migrate between the two, while a group of professional mourners, the Krystals, provide an onscreen narrative as the mechanical loom suggests their performance of sorrow. The viewer is left to join the dots, or to consider how meaning is generated through these relationships. at the house of mr x (2007), meanwhile, takes the viewer on a tour through the home of a cosmetics mogul-cum-art collector. The camera lingers on sumptuous interiors as the onscreen script (and, briefly, a voiceover) moves between registers: archival,

curatorial, commercial. The effect is to unsettle the authority of any single interpretation. The exhibition’s standout is the woolworths choir of 1979 (2012), a video installation bringing together archival and new material to reflect on how memories are formed in a fragmented media landscape. Commemorating the Manchester department store fire that left ten dead, and shown in the city for the first time, it is placed opposite at the house of mr x – the cheap flammable armchairs pictured in the former contrasting jarringly with the latter’s sleek Bauhaus furnishings. Combining moving image, music and text, this vast projection is a hypnotic sensory assault. A slideshow lecture on choir architecture segues into a swelling girl-group chorus (“we know”), which bleeds into footage of the blaze; clips from music videos are spliced with horrified onlookers’ recollections of the incident, their gestures together forming a syncopated rhythm. The Shangri-Las’ ‘twist of the wrist’, for instance, finds its eerie counterpart in the waving arms of those trapped behind barred windows. By collaging such incongruent images and materials, Price creates an unnervingly visceral act of remembrance.

Similarly defamiliarising strategies are evident in slow dans (2019), a largescale, ten-channel installation that combines kohl (2018), felt tip (2018) and new work the teachers (2019) into an interrelating trilogy. In this new arrangement, the past, present and future entwine: coalmines are reimagined as underground communication networks; patterned neckties and purple markers reframed as symbols of workplace misogyny and feminist revolt; a dystopia conceived in which speech has been abandoned. Sound spills into the otherwise quiet central gallery, which houses two new works: gett redy (2019), a collection of black-and-white pinhole photographs of bulbous tongues and bric-a-brac glassware, and inky spit, floppy disq, vox gerl (2019), sculptural, calligraphic prints. Here the archive becomes self-referential, accommodating phrases and motifs from slow dans, including the coalmine photographs of Albert Walker that informed kohl and traced the industry’s demise under Thatcher. In an era of social amnesia and disputed histories, Price’s attention to dismantling and rebuilding the collective memory is dissident, exhilarating and necessary. Rachel Hughes

ArtReview

Foncteur d’oubli Le Plateau, Paris 19 September – 8 December A wide-ranging collection of art, design and architectural objects from the early twentieth century to the present, featuring the work of 35 practitioners, Foncteur d’oubli (or ‘Forgetful Functor’) begins before you enter the gallery building. Artist Tarik Kiswanson has removed the tubular metal handle on the front door and attached it to the gallery’s front desk, where it resituates the latter as sculpture, providing an introductory allegory for the exhibition. Displacement and recontextualisation are central to artist-curator Benoît Maire’s premise: the title refers to a mathematical operation that, according to the show’s press release, ‘shifts objects from one category to another by “forgetting” certain properties’. Accordingly, the exhibition is subtly designed in a series of overlapping styles. While paintings are hung on white walls, ‘decorative’ objects are laid on tables and chairs but also on platforms, as in design museums; narrow, wall-to-wall shelves display small sculptures, ceramics and artefacts; eccentric assemblages sit on custom-designed plinths that echo shapes in the artworks themselves; works in darkened spaces are lit by theatrical spotlights, creating a cabinet-of-curiosities atmosphere. The gallery space is divided by arched entryways that, in turn, refer specifically to Raphaël Zarka’s striking architecturelike models. Circles,

ellipses and other rounded shapes echo through the works in the exhibition (especially those of architects Studio Anne Holtrop), in solid plinth shapes and ephemeral lighting geometries, to create a rhyming of frame and form in which the display architecture refers to, and recontextualises, the shapes on display. The chair is often a designer’s opportunity to lean into sculpture, and the ‘forgetful functor’ is strikingly evident in the artist/designer duo OrtaMiklos’s hard and jagged Iceberg Throne (2018) and the shredded Marcel Breuer Wassily Chair (Untitled, 2015) by artist Mélanie Matranga – both of which reject comfort. These artists arrive at an object through a performative process, shifting the focus from function (or even aesthetics) to the evocation of action. Expectations of function are likewise upended by reconfigurations of everyday consumer objects relocated to the gallery and estranged: Nina Beier’s Automobile (2017), for example, ‘weirds’ a remote-controlled car by stuffing it with human hair. But function is not the only attribute forgotten so that the works here slip disciplinary categories. Take, for example, Simon Dybbroe Møller’s Negative Plate (2013–14) series of ceramics, depicting dishes of leftover food, that strip the charm from Instagram ‘food porn’. This contemporary focus on disciplinary disruption is

balanced by the presentation of the elegant and minimal furnishings of Robert Mallet Stevens and also Eileen Gray, whose tubular-metal style criticised functionalism for not being sensual enough. These bespoke examples of the early modernist aspiration towards the ‘total artwork’ provide a surprisingly enriching historical touchstone by exemplifying a utopian disregard for professional boundaries. By recasting the tricky ontological relations between the disciplines of art, design and architecture in terms of an algebraic process, Foncteur d’oubli’s immersive exhibition design (conceived by Maire with Marie Corbin) preserves the physical autonomy of individual works while emphasising interrelations and overlaps. The move beyond categorical distinctions is further articulated by the inclusion of ceramic pieces throughout the exhibition, as well as the presentation of minerals, crystals and other natural artefacts that expand the timescale beyond the human. Too often this ‘interdisciplinary’ territory is conceived in simplistic terms of ‘hybridity’ or an ‘on or off’ relation to ‘functionality’, but these fluid poetics suggest a shared process of creation. Beyond the aspirations of individual makers, the creative process is driven by a common fascination with materials and gestures. Rodney LaTourelle

Simon Dybbroe Møller, Negative Plate (Dorade poêlée), 2013, porcelain plate, resin, polyurethane varnish and silicone, 28 × 28 cm. Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini, Milan. © the artist

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Stephen G. Rhodes Spätkauff Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin 30 November – 28 December In his autobiographical novel John Barleycorn (1913), Jack London describes two kinds of drunkenness: one messy and ultimately senseless, the other able to subject reality to a transformative ‘white logic’ that reveals the appalling contingency of life. In modernism, likewise, a cold appraisal of conventions or tradition is treated as the motor of worthwhile art, which develops through a series of calculated destructions. Responding to this understanding of art, Spätkauff, an exhibition of ten paintings by the Houston-born, Berlin-based Stephen G. Rhodes, shows the limitation of any impulse founded on obliteration. For at least 13 years, Rhodes has been preoccupied by a form of portraiture in which the subject is exploded, sunk into the canvas and encircled by atmospheric plumes of smoke. This painterly trope explains his interest in drunkenness, the form of subjective destruction central to Spätkauff. In contrast to earlier paintings, however, these new variants subtract the subject only to put it back in. Fluffy smoke clouds and hollowed-out forms are overlaid with unctuous and lurid brushstrokes congealed as wine glasses and facial forms, depicting as well as affecting the psychedelic and disorientating nature of inebriation. Here,

Rhodes’s drunken subjects are both extremely present and somewhere else. A deliberate misspelling of spätkauf or späti – the 24-hour convenience stores at the heart of Berlin’s permissive drinking culture – Spätkauff is a study in toxicity. Featuring paintings rendered in fleshy oil paints, and frequently appropriating gestures from the history of art, it acts as an analogy of both intoxication and the act of painting itself, portrayed here in far from transcendent terms. Within Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi’s labyrinthine, partly wood-panelled space, though – which has the ability to grant even the sunniest work a distinctly sinister pallor – the paintings appear too bright, oversize; nauseating, almost. These are not missives of joyful release, but hangovers of bacchanalian, painterly excess. The characters of Spätkauff are characterised by a gout-inflamed physicality, an excessive corporeality in marked contrast to their intellectual nonpresence. Their bodies are engorged, sickened and grotesque, most notably in Rückwärts Der Azephalish Weingott Geht Los Endlos Flüssigkeit (all works 2019), in which Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, floats above a crowd, discharging his alcoholic bounty onto a sea of outstretched hands. In Constitution, two hefty,

white-clad figures emerge from a conspiratorial haze of ochre and magenta. One drinks a glass of wine in abandon, while the other, an unlikely Salome, sits impassively holding a tray containing the merriment’s accompaniment – a human head. Reading these paintings as allegories of painting and drunkenness, Spätkauff seems resolved to negate the appeal of both. Rhodes – equally well known for his sprawling, mixed-media installations – works big in order to upend the heroism of big. And while constantly referring to art history – Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent x (1953), for example, as well as Rodin’s famous thinker in First Wastoid – the paintings’ considerable size, along with their iconography (Adam and Eve being cast out from Eden in Supported Possession, John the Baptist’s disembodied head in Constitution), mean they also invite a mystical, if not religious, reading. In this there is a pitch-black humour: with SelbstBesoffst (translated as self-drunk, but again misspelled), we are invited to lose ourselves, rapt, in a hallucinogenic depiction of a drunken figure being dry humped by its spectral twin. The muse, white logic: making art never looked so perverse. Rebecca O’Dwyer

Rückwärts Der Azephalish Weingott Geht Los Endlos Flüssigkeit, 2019, oil on canvas, 204 × 218 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

ArtReview

Time Is Thirsty Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 10 October – 26 January Distant sounds echo in an empty lobby, bass rumbling through my body. At the top of the stairs to the exhibition space, a glass bowl filled with earplugs stands next to a sign warning of loud music. Save for the white walls and silent security guard in place of a daunting bouncer, the dimmed lights, cavernous space and pounding techno suggest the entrance to a club rather than a museum. At first, the earplugs seem unnecessary. Hanging opposite the entrance is On Kawara’s Sept. 19, 1992 (1992), one of his iconic Date Paintings, next to Xavier Aballí’s 29 Okt. 2019 (2019), part of a painting series in homage to Kawara, counting the days since the artist’s death. Here, however, the works serve to neither establish nor reference the artists’ own timelines but rather that of the exhibition: everything on view, by some 34 artists, design collectives, musicians and writers, has been made since 1992 – the year that the Kunsthalle Wien opened. After this brief introduction, I head back to pick up ear protection, the soundtrack by British musician Peter Rehberg and Italian duo Vipra starting to prevent me from hearing my own thoughts.

Moving beyond Kawara and Aballí’s paintings, a dusting of iridescent blue glitter covers a patch of floor (Ann Veronica Janssens’s Untitled [Blue Glitter], 2015–), behind which six mannequins wear Fong Leng polyester tracksuits that could have been found in a warehouse of 1990s deadstock as easily as on the streets of present-day Berlin (Willem de Rooij, series with various titles, 2015). Behind the figures, and arranged in a grid, hang ten black inflatable pvc ‘canvases’ by Franco Mazzucchelli (all Bieca Decorazione, 2017). Although each is delicately heat-stamped with an abstract pattern, they appear here like a singular black mass of soundproofing foam. Lining the floor’s edges is Jason Dodge’s untitled, undated installation of over 200 glass jars in various sizes – some acting like petri dishes, collecting bacteria; others scrubbed clean, sitting next to abandoned lollipops, batteries, rubber bands and superglue. Elsewhere, Georgia Sagri’s vinyl 3m stickers graphically replicate and enlarge the appearance of their titular subjects – fresh bruise, open wound, deep cut (all 2018) – while AnnaSophie Berger’s time that breath cannot corrupt (2019) suggests traces of visitors: three garments on the floor are covered with dried, cracking

mud, above them the brown imprints of having once been wet and thrown against the wall. This is the detritus of a party, attendees and their actions frozen in time, with an occasional scoop of intel from the outside world. A curatorial intervention, for example, has resulted in the display of six oversize prints of articles published by The New York Times, topics ranging from race riots in Los Angeles, to Germans protesting violence against migrants, to climate change. The articles resonate as though they were written yesterday but are all from the 1990s. Such a confusion of time and space is, apparently, precisely what curator Luca Lo Pinto wished to instil, writing that, since the 90s, ‘the future and past seem set in some kind of loop’. In the exhibition booklet, Lo Pinto continues: ‘From [the 1990s] on, there is seemingly nothing culturally significant that hasn’t existed before, albeit in slightly different guises.’ If that’s true, the exhibition proposes neither answers nor speculations. As the sole visitor, I feel like I am alone at Berghain, the dj finishing their set as the shades begin to open after nearly three decades of lost, forgotten time; my mind and body unsure where to go or what to do next. Emily McDermott

Time Is Thirsty, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Jorit Aust. Courtesy Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna

January & February 2020

a.O. – b.c.: An Audiovisual Diary Athens School of Fine Arts and State of Concept, Athens 7 December – 1 February Neurotics, Freud thought, are ‘anchored somewhere in their past’. Fixated on the memory of some earlier happy time from which they cannot free themselves, they find the present and future unbearable. Most modern nation-states take a similarly fixated view of themselves, agonising over how to make good on a supposedly glorious past. The group exhibition a.O. – b.c.: An Audiovisual Diary deals with one version of this, questioning not just who the Greeks are or were, but the contemporary Greek national imaginary. It doesn’t, of course, tell the whole story of modern Greece: independence from the Ottomans, Nazi occupation, dictatorship, the democratic present. This is hardly a narrative of triumph – nobody except the far right would want that, even if it were possible. Instead, by limiting the historical scope, but showing a vast range of works – some 60 pieces from 80 listed contributors, including paintings, videos, installations, graphics, conceptual works, photographs and more, spread between State of Concept’s space in the Filopappou district and the School of Fine Arts 3km away – curators Vicky Zioga, Electra Karatza, Maria Adela Konomi, Lydia Markaki and iLiana Fokianaki show work produced after the 2004 Olympic Games but before the 2010 sovereign debt crisis, as the initials in the title hint. The opaque title and sheer volume of eclectic work makes a.O. – b.c. less a diary than a neurotic symptom, condensing and displacing the many effects of a collective trauma: the sudden shift from petty nationalistic pride during the Olympics to the bailouts, humanitarian crisis, riots, police brutality and the rise of the far right. Austerity might officially be over, but the wounds to the Greek psyche persist, so viewing a.O. – b.c. is like seeing all those unresolved feelings up close, unfiltered, in something like the transference process.

We can clarify some of this by making five works stand in for the whole exhibition. While this isn’t ideal, they reflect its main theme: how the Olympics and the crisis intensified already existing neuroses about Greek identity. The real question, of course, is which ‘past’ it is anchored in and how and why this is so. This is very clear in Bill Balaskas’s short video Parthenon Rising (ii) (2010), downstairs in the Filopappou space. One dramatic image, the imposing, postcard-perfect Parthenon at night, is struck by flashes of light in time to thundering piano music. The radiance could be coming from fireworks from the Olympics’ opening ceremony – or Molotov cocktails thrown at the police. We aren’t told, seeing only the chiaroscuro effect. Either way, the Parthenon is a convenient ideological standin for the heroic birth of a whole civilisation (if not civilisation itself), now a burden weighing down attempts to create something new, with four centuries of Ottoman influence airbrushed out. In Balaskas’s film, the ancient monument can reflect only indirectly how things are now, since we never see what is really happening for what it is. Leda Papaconstantinou’s film The City and the Sunset (2007) shows the baking Athenian sun sink behind the mountains. The Ancient Greeks had a cyclical concept of time modelled on observable nature (day and night and seasonal changes), represented by the pantheon of gods. The mechanical gaze of the camera, however, imposes a modern notion of what Hannah Arendt called ‘rectilinear’ time, moving in one relentless direction. Papaconstantinou still manages to evoke the wonder and terror of the sunset as it slowly fades from view, despite the fact that images of this kind have, in less sensitive hands, been reduced to marketable kitsch for stock photos or computer screensavers.

facing page, top Barking Dogs United (Nikos Arvanitis and Naomi Tereza Salmon), Property Offer, 2009 (public art project, 2nd Athens Biennale). Courtesy the artists

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A certain kind of terror is evident in December Riots (2008) by photojournalist Eirini Vourloumis, showing masked protesters and heavily armoured riot police swathed in acrid teargas. The riots were set off when police murdered fifteen-year-old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos, but expressed other grievances relating to the global financial crisis. Vourloumis’s images capture the rage of people who feel they will always be oppressed, never determining their own lives, just as a preceding generation of Greeks lived under the thumb of a us-backed military junta. Vangelis Vlahos picks up on this history with a different take on the gap between the national imaginary and real life. His framed photocopy of a 2004 us ambassador’s report on Greece’s national defence capacities reminds us that Greece still has budget-swallowing strategic commitments as a nato member, despite the fact that, at the height of the crisis, middle-class people struggled to feed their children, and that refugees still sleep on the streets of Athens. Artist duo Barking Dogs United’s Property Offer (2009), three images from Edem Beach along the luxurious coastline at Palaio Faliro in the south of Athens, brings institutional critique to bear on the crisis. The collective take what look like, under normal circumstances, bland tourist snaps of tanning bodies in the sun. More deviously, however, they place the beach’s orange umbrellas across the sand to spell out, in English, ‘for sale’. This can only be seen from above, as an image pulled from Google maps illustrates, but, with black humour, draws attention to growing economic inequality and the degradation of the public sphere. The lost polis is yet another Athenian invention: easily fetishised, impossible to live up to, its very absence reminds us that there is no truly happy past for this or any other nation. Max L. Feldman

facing page, bottom Eirini Vourloumis, December Riots (detail), 2008, photographs. Courtesy the artist

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Julia Wachtel Tears, Drips and Pixels Super Dakota, Brussels 5 September – 20 October If Julia Wachtel is currently a less prominent figure than Pictures Generation compatriots such as Gretchen Bender, Sarah Charlesworth and Sherrie Levine, it’s partly a matter of bad luck. The past couple of years have seen her London gallery close and her New York dealer Mary Boone sentenced to a prison term. Amid such upsets, though, Tears, Drips and Pixels mostly radiates consistency. These seven, primarily large-format canvases, almost all from 2018–19, centre upon Wachtel’s trademark mix of cosy, greetings card-style illustrations – goofy figures, flowers with faces, the occasional Hanna-Barbera character, etc – abutting found, screenprinted photographic imagery. Business as usual, one might say; though arguably, by now, Wachtel’s narrow but forceful manner of sardonic pictorial counterpoint doesn’t require big twists. The discontinuous planes of her paintings remain in active dialogue, whether commenting on each other or simply talking past each other. Float (2019), for example, pairs a nonchalantly painted, sad-looking penguin with a photograph of an inflatable iceberg, with swimmers on summer holidays jumping off it. The environmentalist critique is easily understood, and anything but subtle. Nevertheless, Wachtel’s paintings make us laugh. It’s not a cathartic laughter, quite the opposite: a painting like Float

shows us the impossible, enduring encounter of two mutually exclusive realities in one framework. By making them coincide, she can show the underlying reality whose suppression gives superficial coherence to our own experience: in this case our regret for climate-related species extinction coupled with increasing consumption. Wilted (2018) operates similarly. On its left side are overlaid and blurred images of supermarket offers; on its right is an anthropomorphic, doubled-headed sunflower with its head bowed low and tongue hanging out. Here, too, Wachtel’s ‘message’ is obvious; pesticidedriven agriculture poisons nature and our food; again, though, the physical slamming-together is effective in both formal and conceptual terms. Even more so as the paintings are constructed from as many canvases as there are pictorial segments, making the image carrier appear as an unsteady whole. This latest exhibition demonstrates, too, how refined and painterly Wachtel’s combinations have become, especially when there is no superficially political message to transport. In the smaller-format Caption (2018), the left half shows the black running leg and white shoe of a cartoon figure on a white background, the rest of the figure disappearing into the juncture with the righthand canvas. One could say the figure is

lost in the split. This reading is supported by the other, silkscreened half of the painting, which shows an apparently lousy photograph of a detail of a photograph on a computer screen, framing a white area in red on two sides. The result is a red beam, or split in the centre of the painting, producing moiré patterns. The cartoon figure seems both attracted and swallowed by them. Wachtel’s idiosyncratic image structures gain from a slightly more casual execution. The best example here is Sunrise (2018), a landscape format unsteadily composed of four panels, roughly divided between a fragment of the Jolly Rancher sweet logo, photographed from a screen and rich in shimmering, digital moiré, and a comical symbol of a yellow sun on a yellow background that Wachtel stopped painting partway through. Both motifs are broken up by a number of vertical stripes, giving the painting a strange rhythm and a connective organisational structure. These upright blocks recur in other paintings, such as Seed (2018) or Endangered Species (2014), obscuring parts of the screenprinted areas and, amid the artist’s characteristic bipolar order, achieving painterly friction with pointedly low effort. One might think of the Warhol epigone Wade Guyton – except that Wachtel is his precursor, and sharper. Moritz Scheper Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

Endangered Species, 2014, oil, flashe and acrylic ink on canvas, 152 × 219 cm. Courtesy the artist and Super Dakota, Brussels

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ArtReview

Rosemarie Castoro Time = Space Between Appointment and Meeting mamco, Geneva 9 October – 2 February By now it’s a familiar narrative. An artist is too slippery, too changeable, to find renown in their own time. In ours, when elusiveness and volatility are retrospectively seen as virtues, and dealers and curators are scouting for inventory and clout, they’re rediscovered, and the revaluation and institutional shows begin. It’s bittersweet. But Rosemarie Castoro, this retrospective suggests, was likely temperamentally unsuited to the kind of career-building repetition and articulation that would have made her a star. In mid-1960s New York, in her mid-twenties, she’d already mastered a sharp hybrid of Pop aesthetics and Minimalism’s attentiveness to the body, making hot-coloured abstract paintings centred, first, on a repeated Y-shape, like myriad arms outspreading from torsos. After a couple of years, she segued into big monochromes constructed from diagonal stacks of pencilled lines, their length seemingly related to her arm span. Actually, they’re longer – Castoro folded and unfolded her canvases to make her sweeping gestures – and this mix of objectivity and withholding ambiguity would recur through subsequent excursions into Conceptualism, performance, installation and sculpture. In 1968, the same year she was completing her cycle of paintings, she was also making

drawings like Portrait of Sol LeWitt with Donor and Friends – more sloping, pencilled lines within a grid – which represents its eponymous scene, and mixed hints of sociability and business, about as clearly as your average Howard Hodgkin canvas. By 1969 she was typing intervallic descriptions of her day (‘From leaving stoned out of my mind to look for someone to buy me a whip… from the search for a whip to the finding of a friend’), which suggest an offstage dialogue with Lee Lozano, as do handwritten works on graph paper. Castoro’s SoHo loft, we know, was a meeting place for figures including Agnes Martin, Carl Andre and Yvonne Rainer. The following year she made installations (the walk-in box Room Revelation, in which an inverted light fixture in the centre of the floor slowly illuminates when the door is closed, like a secret whispered in an upside-down gallery) and street performances. It’s hard to tell, then, whether Castoro in these years was a pioneer or a weathervane. By 1972 she’d moved onto less classifiable stuff: weird, relieflike ‘paintings’ in greyish modelling paste, like standalone gestural strokes or extremely shambolic Frank Stellas. Three years later she was deep into sculpture, the paired Land of Lads (1975) and Land of Lashes (1976)

offering, respectively, a row of wobbly black ladders and a parade of spidery false eyelashes, the titles punning on the gender concerns that frequently shimmer within Castoro’s art. The 1979 Flasher sculptures make this clearer still. Wrapping big sheets of aluminium partway around her body then painting them black, she here abstracted and reclaimed a flasher’s overcoat, formally conversing with Richard Serra while pointing more largely to malefemale power relations. A very late work like Mountain Range (2004–08), a brigade of labialike black aluminium sculptures, might give a viewer whiplash if they then return, in the looping set of rooms this show occupies, to the fizzy abstract canvases at its outset; at the same time, though, with the female body ghosting both ends of the show, there’s a sense of bookending. It’s unavoidably ironic that the wilful, high-intellect shapeshifting preserved in between, that which seems likely to have undone Castoro’s profile during her life, is now what gives this show its abiding electricity: call this the next-best outcome. She died with barely a ripple in 2015, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac scooped up her estate soon after, and, well, here we go again. Martin Herbert

Purple Orange, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 213 × 213 cm. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, London & Paris,

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Katya Shadkovska Yeltsin Death Brigade Trafostacja, Szczecin 17 October – 17 November I first encountered a video by the Russianborn, Warsaw-based artist and activist Katya Shadkovska at her gallery, Lokal_30, in Warsaw. Julia (2016) exposes, via the subject’s testimony, the oppression of a transgender sex-worker in St Petersburg and her brutal treatment by the police. An intimate, claustrophobic film made with the rough urgency of a video uploaded from inside a warzone, it’s typical of Shadkovska’s portraits of marginalised figures: unfussy and chaotic, hard-hitting yet unnervingly open to interpretation. Her latest video, Yeltsin Death Brigade / Freedom or Boredom (2019), is about the Yeltsin Death Brigade, a subcultural movement that emerged in St Petersburg circa 2014. Its members, mostly male and youngish, were children when their parents experienced the ‘shocktherapy economics’ of postcommunist Russia. Youthful distance goes some way to explaining their nostalgia for Boris Yeltsin, first president of the Russian Federation, from 1991 to 99, who, as a ydb member explains, was “a true anarchist… he just broke down the ussr, started drinking, and it was dope”. Appropriating Soviet, Nazi and religious symbolism and donning oversize rubber masks of ‘Das Boris’ (one hypnotic scene shows two topless masked men tenderly embracing each other), ydb posits Yeltsin’s reign as a brief moment of

freedom between the mental grip of the Soviet state and Vladimir Putin. In a domestic setting, three men, semidisguised in black hoodies, squash together on a sofa. “We are rightwing antifascists and leftwing nationalists. We are homophobes, sexists, macho-ists, nationalsocialists, feminists and lgbtq ,” they declare, illustrating ydb’s exaggeratedly absurdist, looping opposition to every shibboleth of the left or right. Elsewhere they cry “Inshallah!”, aping isis videos, the next moment donning Israeli flags – a typical expression of ydb ‘logic’. The exhibition, in a black room with spotlit ydb merchandise and ephemera mounted on the walls, might suggest a ‘trolling’ of the sombre ‘dialogue of upheavals’ exhibit at Szczecin’s National Museum, and of the fetishising, historicising effect of ‘the institution’. Screens show further interviews with ydb members, one obsessed with “ass-fucking”, and the varying reactions of antifascist activists to the ydb. This is a provocative exhibition in Poland, where state interference in cultural institutions tracks an unfolding ultraconservatism with worrying echoes of developments in Russia. This is acknowledged in the video recording of the Speech to Poles (2019), made by Anatoly, an eccentric older guru-figure. Comically declaring himself for “p.u.t.i.n! The Party of Ultraright Transgenders and Naturals!”, Anatoly is seen

being led on a leash through the streets, readily inserting a bottle up his rectum to prove he couldn’t care less if the police do it to him. This recalls a particularly East European strain of extreme performance art, or the (again) trolling activities of Tranzytoryjna Formacja Totart, The Orange Alternative or Łódź Kaliska. But Shadkovska – without endorsing the ydb – would argue that, as a grassroots subculture, Anatoly and his friends are far more transgressive and emancipated. Nevertheless, Anatoly himself suggests a degree of masquerade in identifying as lgbtq , and the notion of emancipation is subtly probed in the main video’s final scene. At a ydb gig, the camera fixes on one of the few, almost always silent young women who feature. Seemingly alone, texting, as though demonstrating to herself and others that she isn’t truly alone, she sways self-consciously, eyes lifting to the stage as she mouths lyrics learned by heart. Her T-shirt is emblazoned with the image of the old white man who represents that moment of freedom when, as one ydb member puts it, “you could slap a bitch in the face, and no one would do a thing about it”. A man jostles in front of her, oblivious and absorbed in his own pleasure. The credits begin rolling over her young face, her fingers still clamped around her phone. Phoebe Blatton

Yeltsin Death Brigade/Freedom or Boredom (still), 2019, video, 38 min 33 sec. Camera: Kasia Mateja. Courtesy the artist

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Patrizio Di Massimo Kura, Milan 25 September – 20 November Patrizio Di Massimo’s oil paintings are welloiled machines of conceptual playfulness. They make me think of the historical Italian theatre genre commedia dell’arte – whose name is easily mistranslated as ‘the comedy of art’, when ‘the comedy of profession’ is closer. Indeed, the protagonists here – at this nonprofit, Cura magazine-affiliated space – are artists, art professionals and art history. The London-based Italian artist presents them as characters dressed up in gaudy, trendy costumes, frozen in dramatic poses, against theatrical sets enclosed by velvet curtains. The palette is bold, the outlining sharp, the detailing clinical, as if under a spotlight. Love, hate, wrath and desire abound, together with spectacle, histrionics, melodrama and irony, as in the comic plays performed by the likes of Harlequin, Columbina or Pantalone. As in Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), libido is a prima donna of Di Massimo’s stage, where nudity, enslavement and bondage embody the sadomasochistic implications of all relationships. It’s a theatre of the self, where the classic ménage à trois between Me, Myself and I – aka Ego, Id and Super-Ego, in Freudian terms – is interpreted by personifications of the artist himself, his wife (the curator Nicoletta

Lambertucci) and their family and friends, attired in different guises. Di Massimo’s new paintings add to his ongoing ‘quarrel series’. In Prussian Love (all works but two 2019), the two contenders are collectors Alan Prada and Fabio Cherstich; in Bauhau, it’s the artist Goshka Macuga and her partner Nabil Bouhir, who grip each other’s clothes in front of their dog (‘bau-bau’ is how a dog barks in Italian). Di Massimo also plays with art history: Macuga’s Adidas tracksuit, for instance, is decorated with Roy Lichtenstein motifs, while Epico Cavalleresco (After Joseph Paul Blanc) [Knightly Epic (After Joseph Paul Blanc)] appropriates kitsch mid-nineteenth-century French art pompier, substituting the Christian knight Ruggiero with a fierce Chinese youxia she-warrior in the role of the rescuer of the seductive Angelica. In Untitled (Green Triptych) Di Massimo appears variously unclothed or scantily clad in lingerie, enslaved to female dominatrices, amid torture and pleasure. If the erotic imagery clearly pays homage to the brothers Balthus and Pierre Klossowski (whose wife Denise served as model for Roberte, the serial protagonist of the artist’s titillating compositions), the surreal, suspended atmosphere

of the scenes refers also to another famous pair of Italian painters and brothers: Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio, whose Monumento ai Giocattoli (Monument to Toys, 1930) has inspired Di Massimo in the past. The lesserknown magic realist Antonio Donghi comes to mind too, with his eerie repertoire of clowns, jugglers and carnivals that peaked during the years of the fascist regime. In the monumental Self-Portrait as abstract painter (after Annie Leibovitz) Di Massimo casts himself as the alter ego of a famous comedian. Reproducing a 1981 Rolling Stone cover, it depicts Steve Martin in a white tuxedo smeared with black paint, posing in front of a large blackand-white composition by Franz Kline (an artist present, at the time, in Martin’s own collection). Di Massimo, instead, turns Kline’s black into a fruity, feminine, gelatolike pink. To me, though, the key to the entire show lies in the smallest and most intimate portrait of the group, installed in front of the entrance, like an overture. Diana (6 months) depicts the artist’s newborn child and her cartoonishly puzzled look, as if the adult world, and all its fantasies and ghosts, were nothing more than an opera buffa. Barbara Casavecchia

Prussian Love, 2019, oil on linen, wooden frame, 180 × 180 cm. Photo: Alessandro Zambianchi. Courtesy Kura, Milan

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Daniel Pitín A Paper Tower Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague 26 September – 5 January A woman’s head is seen in profile, hair as sleek as an otter’s. She bobs up, as if mid-breaststroke, amid thick smears of aqua paint: this is Swimming Pool (2019), a highlight of Daniel Pitín’s substantial show of paintings and videos. The pool appears otherwise abandoned, like some relic of the good life, a signifier of societal decline. The woman’s body tips ambiguously, and indeed the scene feels only half-real: while there appears to be water directly around her, the ‘pool’ looks drained, and quite possibly not a pool but something else. She flattens into it, and the ochre concrete floor merges at the edges with junk, detritus made from scraps of collaged newspaper. The woman is Romy Schneider in Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1969). The Prague-born Pitín is fond of splicing two realities in one image: he melds arthistorical and cinematic references in a variant on the Verfremdungseffekt, a dissection of illusion. Swimming Pool began as a maquette made from cardboard and coloured paper: the painting based on it was constructed using bits of glued newspaper and then overpainted to deliver its half-finished appearance. The artist exposes his methodology like a magician showing a trick’s mechanics. More cinematic referencing occurs in another large painting,

237 (2018). We are creepily drawn through multicoloured portals, our gaze traversing variously shaped apertures cut into a sequence of walls (reminiscent of Gordon Matta-Clark’s work), to encounter an ill-defined naked female figure holding, perhaps, a shower rail. Scratches on the canvas obscure her face, rendering her ageless; her body seems to drip with water. Suddenly there’s recognition and horror too: it’s that room 237 and that succubus thing from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Lee in a Bath (2016), a sister image, catches the photographer Lee Miller blithely washing herself in Hitler’s tub as if scrubbing away evil. Pitín interrogates voyeuristic moments while suspending them: what are these lonely figures up to? In Window Blind (2017) a seated man and standing woman have their backs to us. They focus on events in front of them, things we cannot make out. As with the aforementioned paintings, such realism emerges from a hastily constructed set. Near-abstract blocks of grey and black are crisscrossed with white stripes; Pitín’s palette is muted, freighted with implicit dread. Again memory is triggered; we may remember this as a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954): the man is James Stewart, the woman Grace Kelly.

Pitín quotes the same film in Broken Windows (2019), one of two video installations here. Scenes from the movie are projected through small apertures cut inside a tatty cardboard model of a housing block, decorated with paint smears. The scale discombobulates: the effect is like micropsia, like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. A shockingly grotesque moment arrives when Kelly’s face is seen smeared with pigment. The other video installation is weaker: Rotations (2019) features Robert De Niro as seen in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and we’ve been there too often. Pitín’s real strength lies in his paintings, and the show concludes with a bravura display. In Between Spaces (2014), another monumental canvas, shows an empty room with an enormous expanse of parquet flooring. Summer in the City (2019), even larger, presents the frontage of a building like that seen in Rear Window, now bent and ripped like another cardboard model. Balcony (2008) is perhaps the most impressive work: the reflection of a streetlamp and the shadowing of said balcony give the architectural feature a dark sense of the sinister, appropriate in this most eerie of cities. John Quin

Swimming Pool, 2019, oil on canvas, 180 × 230 cm. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; and Nicodim Gallery, Bucharest

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Dalton Paula Between prose and poetry Sé, São Paulo 19 October – 14 December In Trianon Park, a few blocks from Sé gallery’s new Jardins premises, stands a statue of Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva. It’s an ugly thing, of little artistic importance, depicting a bearded man in rumpled eighteenth-century dress striking a heroic pose. In this memorial, and in historical scenes painted by lauded colonial-era artists such as Jean-Baptiste Debret and Johann Moritz Rugendas, the figure of the bandeirante – those Portuguese settlers who ventured from São Paulo further and further into Brazil’s interior – is brave and daring in his exploits. In reality, though, ‘exploration’ was part of the remit: these guys made much of their cash chasing runaway slaves and putting indigenous people in manacles. Bueno da Silva is namechecked by Dalton Paula in the brief notes that come with the artist’s exhibition of 14 watercolours and one sculptural installation at Sé, and this small show seems an attempt to restore balance and speak up for the victims of his myth. In Assentar a senhora indo à missa (all works 2019), a litter (the type used, as the title suggests, to carry a posh lady to Mass) balances on the back of

two chairs that sit against a blue sky in an otherwise empty, dusty landscape. In another painting, a hammock is strung between two similar chairs; others feature the same chairs with a hog slung over the back or a pole of dead parrots balanced atop. The furniture seems to serve as proxy for people: carrying one’s mistress, holding up a sleeping master, taking swine to market. Afro-Brazilian history and culture are subjects that have occupied Paula throughout his ten years of artmaking, and his work makes frequent reference to colonial art history. Here, everyday scenes of slave-owning Brazil, albeit rendered allegorically, recall the peripheral characters depicted in the history paintings that celebrate the mythology of Bueno da Silva and his ilk; oil paintings in which stripped and chained African men and women are common, their plight unquestioned. In those old works, prevalent in Brazilian museum collections, the black bodies act as scenic furniture, painted to support a picture of colonial civilisation and European supremacy. In the centre of Paula’s show is a freestanding metal rack of shelves filled with over

50 bottles and oil canisters, each decorated with the same chair motif or animals apparently symbolic in the Brazilian religious tradition of Candomblé, among them goats, pigs, frogs, oxen and various fish. The nature of these symbols was lost on me without reading essays and interviews with the artist (provided by Sé outside the gallery office). That a show remains oblique without such a contextualisation I would usually judge as ungenerous. Yet the failure here is my own: while the intricacies of Candomblé and Afro-Brazilian symbolism might be elusive to the average São Paulo gallerygoer, they are integral facets of everyday life in Paula’s home city of Goiânia. That the colonial adventurers are celebrated in the parks of São Paulo, but the living culture of black Brazil is not, is something the country has only just started to address. Poking from the tops of each of the containers is a rag, giving them the appearance of Molotov cocktails: the unequivocal expression that Afro-Brazilian culture is a useful weapon, a tool of resistance to the lingering dominance of Europe. Oliver Basciano

Assentar volta à cidade um proprietário de chácara, 2019, India ink and aquarelle on paper, 25 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Biennale de Rabat Un instant avant le monde Various venues, Rabat 24 September – 18 December ‘Une biennale? A Rabat? Pour qui?’ my friend texts back after I tell him I’m coming to visit him in Morocco (and stay on his sofa). The more people I meet in Rabat, the clearer it becomes that no one has a clue there is a biennale opening across 11 venues in the self-dubbed ‘city of light’ – the website wasn’t up, there were no social media pages and, beside a few billboards, there was little communication with the public. ‘For whom’ strikes me as a fair question when it comes to a largely state-funded event on this scale. (Morocco’s only comparable exhibition, the Marrakech Biennale, has been indefinitely postponed; sponsors pulled out when it emerged that the last edition, in 2016, operated with a deficit of €250,000.) At the press conference, curator Abdelkader Damani’s answer to that question seems to be: for artists, for the public, but especially for women, as the biennale’s 64-strong, women-only artist list is meant to show. Art history is too often written by men, he stated, and so, by offering women the stage, his biennale would be an act of ‘reparation’. The intent is laudable: this is, after all, a country where women’s rights are often dictated by religion and where, a few days into my stay, an open letter signed by over 400 Moroccan women condemned the imprisonment of journalist Hajar Raissouni, sentenced to a year in jail for premarital sex and having an abortion, and called for the revision of archaic and oppressive laws. Yet the tokenistic and marginalising effect of Damani’s gesture, not to mention its implications (making women reliant on men to give them a voice), felt not only self-congratulatory but deeply problematic. What rang true, nonetheless, were the acts of writing and rewriting performed by many works in the exhibition. Covering two flanks of the facade of the Musée Mohammed vi, the main venue of the biennale, Katharina Cibulka’s monumental banner reads, ‘As long as following our rules is more important than following our

hearts, I will be a feminist’; an oddly utopian yet too-ambiguous statement, whose literal Arabic translation by the artist, running along the other side of the building, sparked debate among the public (the museum’s director, Abdelaziz El Idrissi, says the institution was aware of the dubious translation but preferred not to interfere with the artist’s work). Inside the museum, the thread is picked up by Ghada Amer’s Private Rooms (1998), a series of satin garment bags hanging from a cloth rack, their silky surface embroidered with passages from the Qur’an that mention women, but translated into French. Here, the translation is both statement and encryption, a means of negotiating restrictions on representing the holy Arabic text. At the Oudayas Museum, a seventeenthcentury Andalusian-inspired palace and its gardens housed in the Kasbah, a multimedia installation by Katia Kameli fittingly explores converging influences and how narratives move through cultures. Part of her ongoing research project Stream of Stories (2014–), it traces the genealogy of La Fontaine’s Fables (1668) back to the Hindu Panchatantra, a collection of allegorical tales written in Sanskrit around 350 ce. While the original manuscript is lost, it survives through a stream of translations (into Persian around 570 ce, then from Persian into Arabic in 760). Kameli’s display, which ranges from reproductions of original texts and animal masks to blown-up excerpts of the fable’s script and a video projected onto a screen, focuses on the Arabic version, the popular Kalila wa-Dimna, which reached Europe in the thirteenth century as The Fables of Bidpai. The installation reveals how the stories (and their moral messages) were edited through translation to suit different cultures or political aims (up to La Fontaine’s address to the dauphin), while pointing to the fluidity of certain foundational narratives across cultures and national borders. Questions around our relationship to cultural heritage also run through the most compelling solo presentations. At Fort

facing page, top Katharina Cibulka, As long as following our rules is more important than following our hearts, I will be a feminist, 2019 (installation view, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Mohammed vi, Rabat). © and courtesy the artist

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Rottembourg (built in 1902 to host two large cannons gifted by German arms manufacturer Krupp), such questions rise up through the cracks of Dana Awartani’s tiled floor (Standing by the ruins, 2019). Replicating traditional Islamic geometric patterns, Awartani used the Moroccan tiling technique of zellij but skipped the tempering and firing that would have ensured the floor’s conservation. The work’s slow deterioration – and eventual crumbling – throughout the duration of the biennale feels like a muffled echo of the violent destruction of Palmyra and other heritage sites by isis. Taking a perhaps more preventative approach, Rand Abdul Jabbar’s exhibition at Galerie Banque Populaire (one of several banks in the city with exhibition spaces) reads like her own sculptural ‘musée imaginaire’, composed of ceramic interpretations, we’re told, of cultural artefacts from the Mesopotamian region encountered by the artist in various ethnographic museums (Earthly Wonders, Celestial Beings, 2019). Scrutinising the objects arranged in mysterious groupings on plinths, the museumgoer conditioned to look for wall texts offering clues as to their provenance and historical significance does so in vain; instead, by their quiet presence, the objects – some evoking tools, others human or abstract representations, all rendered in seductive glazes – ask us to imagine their stories, or consider them on their own aesthetic terms. These presentations dedicated to a single artist’s practice give depth and value to a biennale otherwise lacking in focus. The title Un instant avant le monde, no matter its poetic and philosophical underpinnings (the press release quotes Hannah Arendt’s writings on the ‘infinite improbability’ of new beginnings), is so wide it could speak to any artwork ever produced, and as a result the selection here feels driven by a curator’s whim. As to corrective gestures of gender imbalance in the artworld, the real change will come when exhibiting women artists does not warrant congratulation. Louise Darblay

facing page, bottom Rand Abdul Jabbar, Earthly Wonders, Celestial Beings (detail), 2019, mixed-media sculptures. Courtesy the artist

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Jean Curran The Vertigo Project Roberts Projects, Los Angeles 23 November – 14 December The status of the movie still – what is it? (not quite photograph; not quite film), how does it signify? – was a concern for critics and theorists, not to mention artists, beginning sometime during the 1970s. For sure it coincided with English translations of Continental theory making their way into the academy, most notably Roland Barthes’s essays ‘The Third Meaning’ (1970) and ‘Upon Leaving The Movie Theater’ (1975), but it was also catalysed by the arrival of the American New Wave in Hollywood and the codification of auteur theory, within which Alfred Hitchcock holds a privileged position. The question we need to pose to Jean Curran’s The Vertigo Project, then, is why this work, and why now? Curran has printed 20 stills from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) using the same Technicolor dyetransfer process with which the film itself was originally printed. Many of the images are iconic, such as the closeup of Madeleine’s bun,

her profile set against the red-walled interior of Ernie’s restaurant or her diminutive figure set against a gorgeous vista of San Francisco Bay and the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge (all works 2018). The colours are rich, and the images possess that distinct haze that is an artefact of the bleed of the transfer process itself. No skin is blemished. No surface streaked. Technicolor afforded a fantasy of appearances, which is perhaps why it proved so popular. Vertigo, which is all about appearances, was its ideal vehicle. Curran’s technical feat is worth remarking upon. Technicolor is now long out of use and obsolete. The motion pictures that were made with it are artefacts themselves, ones often consulted by conservationists given how well their colours resist the fade-to-pink that plagues other film-print processes used in that era. Curran’s expertise with the dye-transfer process must now be regarded as that of a master craftsman whose practice represents a language

No. 7 From ‘The Vertigo Project’, 2018, dye-transfer print, 36 × 53 cm. Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

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and culture that is on the verge of extinction, were it not for her dogged dedication to keeping it alive through her work. Admirable as this may be, the question remains, why do it? Beyond the film aficionados and Hitchcock fans, it’s difficult to see the relevance of this work to the image culture of today. Obsolescence was once a category of radical renewal, yes, but what was the radical promise of Technicolor? What liberties could it have unleashed were it freed from its bondage to the Hollywood machine? Intellectually, The Vertigo Project’s play of appearances and its deployment of the doubling that is essential to Vertigo’s story of erotic compulsion (the prints are in many senses the film’s double) offer plenty of fodder for interpretation. But the psychic heat is missing. There is no anxiety, no fear and trembling, no pathology in The Vertigo Project, which is not very vertiginous at all. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Alice Tippit Still Life with Volcano Grice Bench, Los Angeles 16 November – 18 January Groins abound in Alice Tippit’s exhibition of paintings and drawings at Grice Bench. They are not always easy to see, however – or rather, they disappear at second glance. What, you might ask yourself, is so crotchlike about that upside-down vase (Peer, all works 2019), that candle (Cinch), or that stick of dynamite (Safe)? Tippit is a master of the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t school of visual innuendo, of drawing-room indecency, of wordplay that seems outrageously funny even if, on reflection, you can’t exactly say why. Tippit owes the inspiration for the title of her show to Emily Dickinson, whose poem number 601 begins ‘A still—Volcano—Life— / That flickered in the night— / When it was dark enough to do / Without erasing sight—’. Like Tippit, Dickinson knew how to marshal vastness within the small frames of her poems, and how to open a seemingly interior view

to wide horizons. In Tippit’s terse, taut compositions, landscape often exists inside the body: in Dress, two lofty pine trees hairily stand in for the voids between a figure’s arms and torso. Her paintings are indeed still – evoking signs or pictographs, rendered in soft flat grounds with hard edges, rarely more than three colours to a canvas – but they relate to things that are defiantly mobile and mutable: human bodies, words and meanings. Since these bodies – when gendered – are, like their creator, female, double entendre comes to serve as a sort of privacy screen. (When men use double entendre, it might be noted, it generally works to the opposite effect.) In Cinch, for example, dark, hiplike forms flank a geometric candle, its grey colour matching the negative space beyond the hips and its orange flame standing in for an upside-down pubic triangle. The anatomical resemblance

is entirely deniable; a paranoid viewer could be driven mad wondering if maybe the carnal apparition was just a pathological projection of his erotic fixations. As a female painter representing the female form, Tippit evidently feels the stakes of her project to be vexingly high. How to show without exposing? Her solution is to rely on her ample wit and visual poise. Oscar Wilde springs to mind (although femininity, in the 2010s, is scarcely akin to homosexuality in the 1890s – is it?). Safe, one of the most extraordinary paintings in the exhibition, depicts a lit stick of dynamite boxed in by a tomato-orange ground; I cannot convincingly explain how it looks like a vagina, but it does. What wins out, in the duck-rabbit contest unfolding in the viewer’s visual cortex, is not the vagina but the dynamite, fizzing fast, about to blow this tight semiotic package to smithereens. Jonathan Griffin

Safe, 2019, 0il on canvas, 40 × 33 cm. Courtesy the artist and Grice Bench, Los Angeles

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Hadi Fallahpisheh Almost Alone Tramps, New York 22 September – 17 November The three bodies of work on view in Hadi Fallapisheh’s exhibition – focused on photograms, ceramic cats and pillows, respectively – already display a certain cartoon quality, but the parablelike nature of the photograms in particular offers even greater hints at his art’s televisual potential. So much so that I would be happy to learn that someone had bought the rights and adapted it as an animated tv series. First of all, there is the narrative: over the course of these 15 photo-based works, a man is lured into the underworld by a devilish rat, his existence turned upside-down – home is jail, friendship is betrayal, the pious are judged, animals are treated more humanely than people and the earthly escapes of drink and prayer lengthen rather than shorten one’s sentence in this nightmarish fantasy. Second is their appearance: drawn directly onto the photopaper with light, and patched together from premade transparencies, the vibrantly coloured images in this series resemble largescale animation cels. The sketchy linework and visible bits of adhesive tape contribute

a sense of immediacy to Fallahpisheh’s twisted sitcom about a world on the brink of madness, particularly in such works as All Bald Men Must Die (2019). In this image, the man is locked out of his house, forced to watch as the rat rides his pet cat like a horse, although in this world, a big smile on the cat’s face indicates its willing compliance. In the gallery’s main office, a clowder of ceramic cats signal Fallahpisheh’s Iranian roots: the titles are all the same, identifying each of the stout, smirking little doofuses as being Persian Cat Mustafa, Persian Cat Majid and so on (all 2018). But it’s the exhibition poster that points to Almost Alone as a parable of immigration. A fictional sms conversation makes light of Fallahpisheh’s uncertain visa status, joking that the show is so bad, it will get him deported. Like the best parables, however, every gesture has a dual meaning, and here the self-deprecating statement doubles as, or rather conceals, a brazen taunt to the authorities. This ability to hide in plain sight is a matter of survival for Fallahpisheh and other immigrants who live with the same

Almost Alone, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Mark Woods. Courtesy the artist and Tramps, New York

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sense of dread, but it is also germane to Tramp’s unusual context, occupying several stalls on the second floor of the East Broadway Mall, a city-owned building tucked into the cavernous space below the Manhattan Bridge. Parables, folklore and urban legends often take place on, under or around bridges, and Fallahpisheh was clearly inspired by this infrastructural limbo, converting the thresholds between two stalls into a lifesize rathole. The highest compliment I could pay to the show is that it reminds me of The Simpsons, but that would sidestep Fallahpisheh’s truly idiosyncratic method of imagemaking: it is costly, mistreats photography’s finely engineered tools and probably shouldn’t work – he’s literally groping around in the dark. But it’s this sense of fumbling, almost childish brinkmanship with the photographic form that nails the comedy (and ennui) of our current geopolitical moment, even if it leaves us wanting for a more definitive statement on our times. Whatever, Fallahpisheh still got me to laugh-cry. Sam Korman

April Dawn Alison sfmoma, San Francisco 6 July – 1 December It takes a moment for the impact of these Polaroid self-portraits to register, given that each is no larger than the palm of your hand. Step closer, look more intently, and you’ll be met by an astonishing artistic vision. April Dawn Alison was the private persona of an Oakland-based commercial photographer known to familiars as Alan Schaefer (1941–2008). Her public debut is drawn from a collection of more than 9,200 photographs, virtually all of them self-portraits, taken over more than 30 years and discovered on the artist’s death by artist Andrew Masullo, who purchased them from an estate liquidator and donated them to sfmoma. Together, they chart the evolution of April Dawn Alison, into whose frippery and face-paint Schaefer slipped after hours, and always in secret. A horizon line of clustered frames – some containing single images, others thematic groupings arranged in grids – illustrate three decades of exploration, experimentation and exultant self-actualisation. Indeed, Alison is often pictured holding other Polaroids of herself, as if caught in the act of witnessing her own inception. Polaroids offer instant gratification but also, crucially, privacy (no

one else would be developing the film). While the photographs were left undated, and largely unsigned, there is an implicit chronology to the display: we begin with a more tentative blackand-white Alison, captured on the earlier and more beautiful Polaroid film, her transformation limited to a wig and falsies. From the late 1960s, Alison gains in confidence and panache, her set-ups diversify, grow increasingly narrative and, in a series of bondage-themed images, veer into gymnastic terrain. The choice of environment and costume is often droll, more William Wegman than William Eggleston: standing, back to the camera, amidst the strewn streamers of an empty party; a housewife surrounded by domestic paraphernalia; a French maid smoking. Alison collected wigs, loved clothes, favoured high heels. The material fluency doesn’t come as a surprise – Schaefer would have used Polaroids to check composition or lighting in his commercial work. Still, it’s impossible to know to what degree Alison was aware of queer predecessors like Claude Cahun or Pierre Molinier, whose photograph Les jambes de Jean Meunier (1972) finds echo in Alison’s many fetishised, stockinged legs.

Likewise, the drama of Alison’s poses, their implicit narrative and conflation of artist and subject recall the auto-scrutinising work of Cindy Sherman in the 1970s. Then there’s Andy Warhol in drag in 1981 or Robert Mapplethorpe in bondage in 1974. Whether or not Alison was looking outside for inspiration, she had a keen understanding of what makes a good picture. An arresting sense of humour prevails: many images show Alison posed on her back, legs splayed, feet in the air, her face contorted in mock horror or feigned surprise. Others show her from behind, as if their creator were eager to see how she appeared to the world: svelte waist, shapely legs, form-fitting skirts, a mane of freshly brushed hair – a woman, unmistakably. The question of whether these images ought to have been displayed given the private nature of their production has dominated the discourse surrounding this exhibition, but risks eclipsing the work itself. What is most striking about April Dawn Alison is that she could – in private and with no expectation of display – be so committed to her art as to leave behind a repository so vast, compelling and provocative. Fanny Singer

Safe, 2019, 0il on canvas, 40 × 33 cm. Untitled, undated. Courtesy sfmoma, San Francisco

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Chips and Egg The Sunday Painter, London 15 November – 21 December Chips and Egg presents five female artists whose work explores the practical conditions of their gender in ways that are thoughtful, poignant and at times humorous. Curated by Helen Nisbet, it takes its title from the scene in the 1989 film Shirley Valentine (‘I like chips and egg on Tuesday, this is Thursday’) in which our hero reclaims her agency, leaving her routine-loving husband and home for Greece. Valentine’s self-discovery is an attempt to escape the clutches of domesticity; these artists seek to move beyond clichés of femininity by reclaiming and reinventing the experience of womanhood. In six mid-sized paintings across the walls that greet the visitor at The Sunday Painter, Milly Thompson foregrounds postmenopausal women’s sexuality through her hedonistic paintings of sultry women lazily reclining. Rafaela in her Lair (2018) is particularly sensuous, with bold brushstrokes and deep, dreamy colours. The muffled sounds of a woman talking extends from behind

the black cloth leading to a projection of Alia Syed’s documentary film Unfolding (1987), set in a council launderette in Deptford. In contrast to Thompson’s women at leisure, Syed overlays and repeats images of women folding clothes, as if the film is methodically folding in on itself. It captures the ritual of their daily work and the support of a community space. Despite their different approaches, Thompson and Syed’s pieces work harmoniously as seductive commentaries on selfhood and collective care. In the downstairs gallery, Kate Davis’s Charity (2017), a thoughtful and humorous video-essay on the subject of breastfeeding told through stills of canonical statues and paintings, is shown on a wall monitor with headphones. In voiceover, Davis imagines formally contracting the labour of breastfeeding and to form a union in order to demand better rights, as images of Madonna suckling Jesus and Roman Charity slide on screen. The combination is genuinely funny.

In a similar vein, Cinzia Mutigli’s video My Boring Dreams featuring Whitney, Nenah, Kylie and the Gang (2019) collages clips of celebrities, workout videos, cleaning and beauty products while Mutigli reflects on celebrity, success and interpretations of her dreams. Both essays are playful and profound reflections on the harsh realities of women’s bodily experiences; their reproductive function, their role as carers and the expectations put upon them. The exhibition’s strength lies in its cohesion, as the works gesture to each other and motifs emerge: tiles, dreams, washing machines. As an exploration of the female condition, it resists the temptation to make overarching claims or to ostentatiously subvert stereotypes in favour of a more sensitive, documentary approach. Poignant, funny and unapologetically personal, Chips and Egg responds to the domestic as a site of constraint, as well as a source of rich imagery. The result is an idiosyncratic perspective on these women’s lived experience: an exhibition about women, not only for them. Gwen Burlington

Milly Thompson, Nor playing the flute, 2015, oil and acrylic on board, 61 × 51 cm. Courtesy The Sunday Painter, London

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Alexa Karolinski, Ingo Niermann Army of Love Auto Italia, London 4 October – 8 December Welcome to the Military-Emotional Complex. In two ‘docufiction’ films, Army of Love (2016) and Oceano de amor (2019), Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann gather ‘propositional regiments’ to address a pressing but tricky need: to be loved. If you bring a group of diverse people together who want to give love, or receive it, or both, can you create a cuddle-cult to change the world? Half a century after the last wave of free love, desire remains a problem for any egalitarian project: there will always be some more ‘fuckable’ or ‘loveable’ than others. Desire discriminates despite the good intentions of its bearer – “I like men who have long hair and beards”, states one woman during one of the interviews in Army of Love. “I have an unusual body,” says a disabled man as he receives a massage, “and it’s fucking unattractive.” So can society, or art, make up for sensual injustice? The ‘First Code of Ethics of the Army of Love’, developed during a ‘training camp’ held by the artists in Utrecht in 2017, and available at the exhibition, states that ‘soldiers have to offer love to people they might not like in the first place, [and] they also have to seek consent’. To give love that is fair and decommodified,

you should give up on preference as well as exchange. But is asking people (even with their consent) to get over the specificity of their desire ethical or even possible? The larger question of whether anyone has a right to sex (or love) is a fraught one. Statemandated intercourse is the stuff of nightmares, but kindness still exists, despite the best efforts of an alienating and individuating culture. Karolinski and Niermann push an activist approach, breaking with the passivity imposed by dating-app algorithms and consumer capitalism. Both films present interviews with the ‘armies’ about their various desires and opinions. In Army of Love, filmed with the participants in a fancy-looking indoor swimming pool, a sometimes-naked group of people carry each other in the pool, or hang about wearing fetishgear, discussing, in often emotional terms, what they find attractive and what other people find attractive about them. (One blind man describes how women feel safe with him because he cannot ogle them.) In the Cuba-based film, Oceano de amor, the lives of the ‘soldiers’ are more on show. We see army members at work, or caring for family, or

fitness-training in the park. They are asked about their lives and about automation – the idea that robots will soon replace human workers, which might allow more time for love. Most of the participants are not keen on robots: “Maybe for the Japanese, but the Cubans are not into that”, says one. Another suggests that socialist Cuba has always had more time for love – not least because of all the blackouts. From a technophilic, capitalist point of view, Cuba’s socialist collectivism seems outmoded; but from a human point of view – from the standpoint of love – it is paradise: the final sequence of the Cuban love army dancing on the beach and playing in the sea is truly magnificent, and it is unlikely that robots, however sexy, would prove so moving. But the audience is left with a question: why, after supposed sexual liberation, has sex and love become such a problem? Free love without larger social change will always remain a kind of pity-plaster. Can we admit that life and desire were unfair from the off, or that while we might succeed in the abolition of social inequality, this might not entail the surrender of the curious, singular and enigmatic specificity of desire? Nina Power

Army of Love (still), 2016, hd video, colour, sound, 42 min. Photo: Lucy Parakhina. Courtesy the artists

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Books The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Frances Frenaye New Directions, $12.95 (softcover)

Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor New Directions, $15.95 (softcover) You may have noticed that the writing of Natalia Ginzburg is coming into fashion once again in the English-speaking world. Or at least that her out-of-print works are coming back into print (as is the case with The Dry Heart); or that new English-language translations are appearing (Minna Zallman Proctor’s rendition of Happiness, as Such); or that she is being championed by contemporary writers such as Rachel Cusk (who introduced the republished uk edition of The Little Virtues in 2018), Zadie Smith and Maggie Nelson. Or, for the more adventurous among you, that Sandra Petrignani’s 2018 biography of the Italian writer (La Corsara) will appear in German (as Die Freibeuterin) in March. Or maybe you didn’t notice it at all, because you only notice what happens in galleries, because you’re only interested in the visual arts. In any case, here’s why you should care. The family, Ginzburg once said, is ‘where everything starts, where the germs grow’. And so The Dry Heart begins with a narrator and her husband. She asks him a question. He shows her a drawing of him waving goodbye to her from a steam train. After which (six lines into the text) she shoots him ‘between the eyes’. The drawing may or may not have answered the narrator’s question (we can only draw that conclusion as Ginzburg’s tale reaches its conclusion – which, ouroboroslike, returns us to the point at which it starts: the shooting). But it does relate to a subject about which she and her husband struggle to speak. And the fatal division between a life lived in theory and life lived in practice. A paragraph later the narrator has gone out for a cup of coffee. For the rest of the novella she sits on a park bench, having slipped off and pocketed her wedding ring (more words expended on that than on the shooting), and relates how she got to this point. And, as we read that, we begin to think, as we do with many of Ginzburg’s works, about how language and art relate to emotion and action, and how actors (more particularly, although not exclusively, women actors: Ginzburg, her friend the author Italo Calvino once wrote, ‘is the last woman left on earth’, a player on a stage in which everyone else was simply an actor in a man’s world) relate to their socially prescribed roles. (In most cases they don’t.)

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When the narrator of The Dry Heart imagines getting married, she pictures the objects she will surround herself with, the potted plants, the stylish gadgets, the armchair and the embroidery. Desire and emotion – the personal – is voiced via prostheses – a ficus, a blender, a gun – and, with the exception of the last, is couched in smotheringly anonymous domestic terms. The potential husband is faceless, no more than a voice. He is anyone, not someone. Because marriage is what a woman in postwar Italy is expected to achieve. There’s a notion somewhere that once the narrator attains the status of married woman she’ll be able to take a lover for the fun part. But an acceptance therein that the fun part is not the required part. The reality, when it comes, comprises her husband’s affairs, dead children, the desire for more children and a love that waxes and wanes in a manner seemingly outside the narrator’s control. Women in Italy ‘wait’, Calvino noted. The Dry Heart (1947) is Ginzburg’s second novel, but the first, as a result of Fascist-era restrictions on the work of Jews being published in Italy, to be issued under her own name (the first, published in 1942, was credited to Alessandra Tornimparte). Her first husband, the editor and writer Leone Ginzburg (one of the founders of the celebrated Einaudi publishing house), had lost his Italian citizenship in 1938 (the same year he married Natalia), been internally exiled (with his wife) in 1940, arrested and severely tortured (to the point of crucifixion) in 1943 before dying in prison of his injuries in 1944. Natalia’s mother was Catholic, her father Jewish Italian. Consequently and despite her early membership of the Communist Party and participation in a number of antiFascist activities, the persecution she suffered was less, relatively speaking. Nevertheless it, and the war in general, profoundly shaped her writing. How could it not? The relation between objecthood and subjecthood plays out particularly strongly through Ginzburg’s sparse, precise use of language (or, for the English-language reader, her translators’ replication of her sparse, precise use of language). ‘A woman awoke in her new house. Her name was Adriana,’ begins Happiness, as Such (originally published in 1973), as Ginzburg splits what the

ArtReview

character is from who she is, while subtly suggesting that the what comes before the who. A little later we find out that it is Adriana’s birthday, but this is told to us in the same way we are told that it is snowing outside. As the novel unfolds, a series of letters document an estranged familial and social structure in which everyone’s estrangement seems to grow deeper the more they attempt to understand the others. The whats (a woman, a son, a mother, a friend, a lover) and the whos fail to come together; everyone on some level is seeking to manipulate the others (notably a son by doing things, a mother by saying things). ‘I do this person the great favour of living with him in his house and spending his money that he doesn’t need. But what does this asshole want from me in the end. Sometimes I’m so angry that’s what I think,’ writes Mara to Michele, Adriana’s son, who has fled Italy for England – leaving a trail of debt – as a result of political persecution, and who may or may not be the father of Mara’s child. Mara is living with an older, wealthy man, while trying to persuade Adriana that her baby is definitely Michele’s and that Adriana should make her son marry her. Michele, in the meantime, has married an older Englishwoman as part of his own quest to fit in and be respectable. As is often the case with Ginzburg’s work, these relationships are governed by signs that her characters are unable to read and conventions that no one really understands. At times the novel seems to anticipate the infamous maxim from Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction (1987), ‘No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other’ – but Ginzburg gets us there with infinitely more subtlety and nuance. Perhaps ultimately it’s in her consideration of agency, particularly female agency, and the potential for any individual to possess that within a society, that Ginzburg’s work continues to have force. That and the fact that, while the consideration is complex, the language is direct and simple. At times even brutal. By and large her characters are people to whom things happen, even as they are constantly wishing to make things happen for themselves. ‘What am I doing here? Where am I? Why am I wearing a fur coat?’ Mara writes to Michele at one point. Mark Rappolt

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George Herriman’s Krazy Kat: The Complete Color Sundays 1935–1944 by Alexander Braun Taschen, £150 (hardcover) Here’s what’s going down in Coconino County: Ignatz Mouse is pursuing a vendetta against Krazy Kat, which he satisfies by launching bricks at his head. Order is fitfully maintained by Officer Bull Pupp, who loves Krazy, who loves Ignatz, who loves bricks. Hundreds of variations on this scenario, played out in George Herriman’s syndicated comic strip from 1913 to 1944, form one of the great bodies of work in popular American art. Taschen’s colossal and highly covetable anthology reproduces the colour strips made in the final ten years of Herriman’s life. These blown-up panels make it easier to appreciate the wit concealed in their details, the energy of the artist’s line and his surrealist disregard for continuity: in the course of a 30-second conversation, Ignatz and Krazy might walk from a barren desert through a verdant park and onto a footlit stage. These dreamlike incongruities mean each strip resembles a collage, allowing Herriman to treat individual panels as discrete compositions while experimenting with the overall page design (the conventional comic-strip grid fractured into a constructivist jigsaw or mussed into a scrapbook jumble). If Herriman’s popularity was built on the charm of his characters, then his artistic

reputation relies on this formal and intellectual playfulness. In 1937, sneaky Ignatz reaches out from what appears to be a painted portrait to fire a painted brick at Krazy (Pupp retaliates by painting black bars over the portrait, imprisoning the real and represented mouse). The treachery of images is a recurring theme, with a 1917 strip (reprinted here within an illuminating introduction by Alexander Braun) revolving around ‘oon “peep”… meaning a “pipe” and not a “look”’. Krazy, who is not a cat, and Ignatz, who is not a mouse, smoke the not-a-pipe, and a stoned peace breaks out beneath a cartwheeling sun cross. These and other nods to Native American mythology jostle with Krazy’s creole and Chinese-heritage platypuses in this multicultural Arizona, and Braun highlights Herriman’s status as a white-passing descendent of Haitian ‘free people of colour’ before suggesting that Krazy started life as an allegory for minority ethnic experience. He cautions against reading the oeuvre exclusively through the prism of colour – it doesn’t stand up beyond a wilfully selective reading – but this topsy-turvy community, in which a cat loves a mouse from whom he is protected by a dog, is an apologue for a functioning (which is not to say utopian) American society. Because there

is no animosity here. Our hero Krazy receives each brick-blow from Ignatz as a ‘missil of affection’ from his ‘l’il ainjil’, a cluster of hearts bursting from his head; the mischievous Ignatz, meanwhile, is lost without Krazy to play with and never happier than when dozing in Pupp’s adobe jailhouse. The balance of this community is maintained by each part’s fidelity to their own selves. Ignatz must act up; Pupp must order; Krazy must love. This selection straddles a decade shaped by economic collapse and the rise of fascism, and another marked by resistance and recovery. At the end of our own dishonest decade, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that Herriman’s paean to play and empathy was read by millions of Americans on lazy Sunday afternoons. In late August 1939, Officer Pupp is moved by thoughts of Ignatz’s happy family to reflect that ‘the world walks in beauty’, quoting a Navajo prayer just a few days before W.H. Auden will write in 1 September 1939 that ‘we must love one another or die’. Auden later explained that ‘there must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parableart, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love’. Krazy Kat is both. Ben Eastham

Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art by Michael Glover David Zwirner Books, £8.95 (softcover) It will come as no surprise to learn that the underlying focus of Michael Glover’s sprint through the (admittedly limited) history of the codpiece – as represented in visual art – centres on the hyperbolic relationship between man and manhood, codpiece and cock. But then again, surprises are not really what this slight volume is about. Most of the material covered can be found in the Wikipedia entry for codpiece. Excusing his as a ‘light-hearted’ history, the author dives into the moment during the sixteenth century when the codpiece had completely surrendered any pretence towards utilitarian function to become a high-fashion item, psychological ballast and priapic symbol par excellence in representations of male power. ‘The codpiece is all about boastfulness

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and braggadocio, sad men pretending to be more than they could ever hope to be,’ Glover writes. As if there could be doubt. Nevertheless, Glover warms to his subject, boasting about a ‘gigantic’ history and how he’s going to be ‘yanking in’ literary figures (Rabelais and Shakespeare among them), and generally overwhelming us with so much selfconscious punning and innuendo (Titian is ‘ambitiously thrusty’) that it begins to read like one of Henry Miller’s paid-by-the-fuck books (the American was allegedly offered $1 per page for Opus Pistorum, written during 1940–41, provided each page had at least one instance of penetrative sex; he, like Glover, overdelivered). We begin (via a comic revival of the codpiece courtesy of the 1980s bbc historical comedy Blackadder, as if anyone might be

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doubting the tone of this chronicle) with Hans Holbein the Younger’s study (c. 1536–37) for a portrait of Henry VIII, in which ‘the entire known world seemed to pivot around Henry’s choice of member enhancement’. As if there could be doubt. By the time we reach Giorgione’s The Tempest (c. 1506–08), the commentary has become limitingly one-dimensional. There are only so many portraits of codpieces being admired by dogs and families, only so many indexes of codpiece fashions past and only so much punning and sneering that one can take. There’s no Larry Blackmon, no fetish culture and no real exploration of where the codpiece might sit (see – it’s contagious) today. Other than as an enduring example of the delusions of men. Glover should have quit at Blackadder. Mark Rappolt

In Print A roundup of new books for the New Year “New year, new me!” – ArtReview has never said. New Year’s resolutions are founded on guilt and aspiration, neither of which it suffers from. Besides, why run a marathon when you can read transcriptions of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alison Cuddy’s conversations with ‘creatives’ including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates and architect Jeanne Gang in Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon (Terra Foundation & The University of Chicago Press, $19.95)? Instead, it prefers to leave change to those who are invested in studying it, like art historian Terry Smith, author of Art to Come (Duke University Press, $30.95). ArtReview isn’t about to set foot into time’s flowing river, because Smith, who sees linearity as an ‘old-fashioned’ way of thinking about time, kicks up the silt of art history to present us with a historiography of contemporaneity. That’s a fancy way of saying a study of written histories (in this case of art) at, and about, the time in which they were written. (And anyway, ArtReview doesn’t want to get its toes dirty.) To that end, he takes us through ‘contemporary’ buzzwords and ways of thinking about issues like globalisation, the Anthropocene, decolonisation, indigenisation, revived fundamentalisms and ecoactivism, to ask how we might harmonise our differences in a way that ‘ensures our mutual survival’ on this planet.

Paul B. Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99) is another collection of writings around the topic of change, told through the critical theorist and curator’s experience of transitioning from Beatriz into Paul B. Throughout these 68 texts (originally published in French newspaper Libération from 2013 to 2018) he examines the ways in which certain bodies are treated as inferior ‘to that of a citizen whose gender and nationality are recognized by the administrative conventions of the nation-states they inhabit’. The writings thread together concepts around the liminal spaces of subjects ranging from language and gender to migration and cities in flux, using a markedly corporeal language that encourages an empathic reading: ‘Transsexuality is a silent sniper who plants a bullet in the chests of children standing in front of a mirror or counting their steps on their way to school… For those who have the courage to look straight at the wound, the bullet becomes the key to a world they had seen nothing of before.’ The poet and occasional filmmaker H.D. (aka Hilda Doolittle) might have liked Paul B. The founding member of Imagism did, after all, write that in order to reach a higher state of consciousness, the mind and body had to synthesise. The brain alone is ‘a disease comparable to a cancerous growth or tumour’, while the

body ‘without reasonable amount of intellect is an empty fibrous bundle of glands’. Four texts by H.D. accompany ‘Notes on Thought and Vision’ (1919) in Visions and Ecstasies (David Zwirner Books, £8.95), all written shortly after she contracted pneumonia nine months into her pregnancy (and was not expected to survive), and the resulting essays knit this traumatic experience together with her interest in Greek mythology, challenging gender roles and the development of modernist art. The clear, direct language championed by the Imagist poet, the kind that could crystallise an image in the mind of the reader, is difficult to locate in Ed Atkins’s Old Food (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £9.99). Resisting any traditional genre, this text was written following the artist’s 2017 exhibition of the same title, which featured videoworks of weeping cgi characters and racks of period costumes. The broken lines and images read like a stream of consciousness unanchored to a specific time or place – though a mention of Wotsits and Starbucks indicates that it’s set in the uk sometime from the late 1990s. Atkins, reflecting on the absence of humans in the exhibition, here favours the visceral impact of associated images and words, pumping the poetry-prose with lines that speak of our primeval instincts, needs and desires, in order to ‘seek empathic commons’, and at the same time reduces the human body to a meatbag: ‘We were, I / think, to one another, glazed hams / repast in a hot stint, pocked with / squeaking pickled eyeballs.’ What would society look like if women didn’t need to worry about shattering male egos? Why, they would go mad with power, of course. Tai Shani’s 12-part performance project dc: Semiramis (2018) offered a glimpse into this possible world, in which otherworldly characters from an allegorical postpatriarchal city (inspired by Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405) deliver monologues, and is now published as a collection of experimental prose in Our Fatal Magic (Strange Attractor Press, £12.99). ‘Sirens’ is told from the point of view of a group of women as they begin to transform, not into Ovid’s winged creatures, but into a kind of omnipresent digital entity whose voice forces the listener to bleed ‘thin rivulets of blood, like streaming red ribbons from your ears’. H.D. would be proud. Fi Churchman

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Art and design credits

Text credits

on the cover Design by Isabel Duarte incorporating stills from valie export, Gedichte (Poems), 1966, date of shooting unknown, video, video dvd 2011, b/w, sound, pal 4:3, 7 min 48 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sixpack Film, Vienna

Words on the spine and on pages 25, 49 and 89 are from Stig Dagerman, A Moth to a Flame (Bränt barn, 1948), 2019, trans Benjamin Mier-Cruz

on page 117 Illustration by Olga Prader

ArtReview

There are some places where you’ll never run out of nourishment…

Courtesy Paloma Bosque (see page 22)

These are elementary particles that hardly ever interact with regular matter and don’t emit light, which makes them exceedingly hard to detect. This problem is compounded by the fact that no one is really sure how to characterise dark matter, although it is thought to make up about 27 percent of the universe

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You see, I was escorting a particularly insolent local bigwig – Terreeoboo, King of Owhyhee , to be precise – to the Resolution for a quiet chat (about possibly some disciplining) with regard to a missing cutter. And just as I’m bundling him into a launch, there, on the shore, is a wizened old native holding a coconut and mumbling. On account of his posturing I surmised that he was some sort of witch doctor. Naturally I presumed the coconut was a form of offering. Why wouldn’t I? I’m practically a god around here. Here meaning the Pacific – and more specifically Owhyhee (but I’d be able to say the same were I on the other side of the Ocean too). I invented it after all: the Ocean and the things on both sides of it. Anyhow, back to Owhyhee: there I am, waiting to receive a coconut when, would you believe it, they bashed me on my coconut, left me half-drowning in the surf while they stabbed me (repeatedly, I might add, while my wretched crew watched from the ship via telescopy – utterly humiliating, like some antique prototype of that I’m A Celebrity thing you people are now obsessed by, but more real, more violent and, obviously, more Celebrity) and then carted me off to the village, where they disembowelled me and then baked me. pacifico my arse! If I wasn’t dead, I’d do something about that maritime misnomer. Thanks for nothing Senhor Magellan! I named botany Bay after my colleagues found lots of plant specimens there. Mount dromedary because it looked like a hunchbacked ungulate. Point upright on account of its perpendicular clifts. Point hicks because that’s how I assumed Lieutenant hickes spelled his name. (I mean, what kind of Englishman has silent vowels in his name? It’s a damn’d dishonest Continental practice.) In any case, the lesson is this: never trust a Portuguese to do an Englishman’s job. As my good friend bj is always saying. I hope you voted for him btw. An honest Englishman. But where was I? Aha! ok! I was dead by the time all the butchery and cookery (ha, ha) took place, but somehow i’m the one who ends up with the reputation as a trespasser, killer and a thief! they baked me! But at least they did it properly. Half-baked is the only way to describe Her Majesty’s (in my day you knew where you stood: we only had kings, they were all called George and they all spoke German; that was when Britain was truly Great – indeed, it was the third of the Georges, the one who sat on the throne for most of my lifetime, who invented the greatest version of Great Britain by allowing Ireland to be a part of it) Government’s recent expressions of mild regret, to the descendants of the Māoris I killed, for me having invented New Zealand. I endeavour (he, he) to regret nothing. Not that I really have to try. Well, perhaps I do regret,

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The Raw and Cooked

‘The Death of Captain Cook’, illustration by Léon Benett and Paul Philippoteaux, from Jules Verne’s The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century (1880, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington)

and this really is ridiculous, that the ’ahu’ula that Terreeoboo gave me the night before his subjects killed me (before the cutter thievery, when we were still on good terms) is now in the Australian Museum in Sydney. It’s Owhyheean not Australian! The only connection between Australians and skirts is me (even though I barely had time to try it on)! Who’s the thief now? The first time I travelled to the so-called Pacific was when I set out to record the Transit of Venus. After I’d done that (yawn) was when I first discovered the inhabitants of New Holland:

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I was, I wrote at the time, ‘so near the Shore as to distinguish several people upon the Sea beach they appear’d to be of a very dark or black Colour but whether this was the real colour of their skins or the Clothes they might have on I know not’. By the time I had hooked up with the Gwiyagal it became clear that they weren’t wearing clothes. Although the Gwiyagal themselves used to cover themselves in a white clay. Which was confusing. Did I mention that when I first met the Gwiyagal I had to shoot one of their warriors – Cooman I think he was called – in the leg in order to remind them that we meant them no harm? He dropped his shield at that point, I think as a kind of offering again, so I took it with me and gave it to the British Museum. Apparently Cooman’s great, great, great, great, great, great grandson has been pestering the museum because he wants it back. Can you believe that he claims that it is ‘the most significant and potent symbol of imperial aggression – and subsequent Indigenous selfprotection and resistance – in existence’? Finders keepers, buddy! It was a gift in any case. Talking of finding and keeping, I should mention the real Venus in my life, Elizabeth Batts. I married her and stayed married to her for 17 years, until I got as ‘cooked’ as she was (boom, boom). And even though I only actually spent about four years with her, she gave me five sons and a daughter. Which just goes to show that I was as productive at home as I was abroad. Elizabeth was the daughter of Batts the elder who used to run a pub called the Bell Inn in Wapping. He was a mentor of sorts: the even elder Batts, Richard, had been a mariner. Although not a mariner in the sense that I was: there are parts of the world in which I invented marinering. When I wasn’t inventing parts of the world that is. Or the world itself. Did I tell you it was me who calculated the distance of the Earth from the Sun? Unless it was the Sun from the Earth. I was never quite sure which (but I had help of course). That’s why they kept naming space shuttles and command modules after the ships in which I did my discovering I guess. In any case, nasa loves me. I’m definitely a god to them. Anyhow, the funny thing was, despite all the mentoring from Batts the elder, I never actually managed to run a pub of my own. But interestingly there’s a 25 square-foot strip of Hawaiian beach that’s mine, although they gave it to me after the stabbing and baking. Well, really they gave it to the British crown, but I like to think that l’état c’est moi and all that. I mean, literally it is in my case. L’océan Pacifique c’est moi as I always used to say, mainly to the natives. In English of course. I think they regretted killing me. Later they made a coin with my face on it. To commemorate me, not the killing of me. I think. Like I said, I think they regretted it. ar