In the end, attempts to change other worlds may be a total failure
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With more and more artificial organs available, tomorrow’s people might be cyborgs
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Many computer engineers are convinced that we are seeing the evolution of a new species – the intelligent machine
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In the distant future people may be doing things that would seem like magic to us
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HA U S E R & W IR T H
ELLEN GALLAGHER NEW WORK 14 MARCH – 3 MAY 2014 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM
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HAUSER & WIRTH
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26 March — 10 May 2014 52 Bell Street, London
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Joyce Pensato
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Valerie Snobeck 28 March – 16 May 2014 London
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Galerie Hubert Winter
HELGA PHILIPP March 6 - May 3, 2014
Breite Gasse 17 1070 Vienna Austria ph +43 1 5240976 (fax +9) office@galeriewinter.at
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MARK MANDERS
Cose in Corso 9 March – 28 September 2014
Thursday – Sunday Via Fratelli Cervi 66 Reggio Emilia – Italy ph. +39 0522 382484 www.collezionemaramotti.org
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chuck close : Nudes 1967–2014 534 West 25th street NeW York FebruarY 28 – March 29, 2014 pacegallerY.coM
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Naming and necessity What’s in a name? Each March, when its annual FutureGreats issue comes around, ArtReview starts to think about Claire Danes before Homeland, Baz Luhrmann before Australia, that pub that claims to be the oldest in London in which Shakespeare may or may not have once drunk, and Juliet’s fragrant speech. FutureGreats – it sounds excessive, waaay over the top. It was because of a name that shortly after New Year’s ArtReview wandered into a restaurant in Nice wondering whether or not it was really OK to order some ‘homos’ with its moussaka. Sensing its confusion, a nearby tourist turned to ArtReview and said, “No matter how you spell this Arabic or Armenian or Greek or Lebanese dish, it all translates to the same creamy dip you can savour and enjoy.” ArtReview thought they might be ripping off some Californian’s food blog and, not quite sure which turn things were about to take, it wandered off in search of the simple joys of a traditional French burger. Only to be confronted, at the first stand it came to, with not ‘le burger’ but a baffling selection of alternatives: Emirates – 3 steaks (100g), 3 fromages, oeuf; Le British – steak (100g), fromage, bacon, galette potato; Le Soviet – steak (180g), pain mega. Did that all translate into roughly the same burger? ArtReview spent so long wondering what these delicacies said about the nations that they were named after that it forgot to eat anything at all.
Burger me
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Still, ArtReview likes the absurd confidence of FutureGreats, which forces the people it asks to select them to be true to their convictions. That said, it’s not trying to tell you that every one of the artists featured here is going to be among the most important practitioners on the planet tomorrow morning. Nothing in life works like that. Except insider trading, and you read FutureGreats in that way at your own risk. Yet there’s no escaping the fact that the FutureGreats issue is about speculation of a sort. And ‘speculation’ these days is a dirty word, associated with the kind of financial transactions in which one person gains and many people lose. In art terms, that kind of speculation has driven up the prices of a number of artists under the age of thirty-five, whose works appear at auction only a couple of years after they were made. Last December, at Art Basel Miami Beach, ArtReview was positively hounded by people constantly asking what age the artists it was about to feature were and how many galleries they already had and had anyone else been buying their works. So ArtReview now looks forward to a future in which people will be buying up the work of infants and selling them on before they reach school. But the kind of speculation in FutureGreats is more of the type that involves proposing a theory without much evidence (because the artists selected have had limited exposure). It’s a bit like The Usborne Book of the Future, a 1979 tome ArtReview’s parents gave it when it was four years old (and which provides the quotes on the spine and divider pages of this issue of the magazine) so that it would have some forewarning of what to expect during the course of its life, which promised that by now ArtReview would be walking around with a minirobot in its brain to prevent it getting strokes and, when its legs got tired or its electric car ran out of juice, flying around the world in aircraft powered by satellite-based laser beams. (It was pretty accurate about the 1980s and 90s, though – women being allowed up in space shuttles, energy needs and environmental health being a difficult balance to sustain, and the development of those electric cars, etc.) Of course, it’s not so much the future bit in FutureGreats that’s controversial, it’s the deployment of the word ‘great’ that’s laced with a certain amount of hyperbole, if not hysteria. It’s speculative because there’s no way of knowing, for sure, whether or not any of these people are going to become ‘greats’. In part because it’s pretty hard to define what a ‘great’ is in terms that don’t smack of marketing, advertising, Tony the Tiger and tobacco advertisements from the 1960s. But as ArtReview learned from all the property developers it’s been hanging out with at art fairs recently, the bigger the risk, the greater the fun in taking it.
ArtReview’s oracle
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Mysteries: Tide, 2002. acrylic on canvas, 84 x 84" © The Paige Rense Noland Marital Trust / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Kenneth Noland Paintings 1975 – 2003
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ArtReview vol 66 no 2 March 2014
Art Previewed 29
Previews by Martin Herbert 31
Massimo Minini Interview by Barbara Casavecchia 54
Points of View by Jonathan T.D. Neil, Kimberly Bradley, Maria Lind, J.J. Charlesworth, Mike Watson, Sam Jacob, Mark Sladen, Hettie Judah & Jonathan Grossmalerman 41
The Law and Its Ideas by Daniel McClean 58
page 32 Benedict Drew, Heads May Roll (detail), 2014. Courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London
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FutureGreats 75
Fergal Stapleton, by Rebecca Warren Michael E. Smith, by Mark Rappolt Rokni Haerizadeh, by Negar Azimi Yu Honglei, by Aimee Lin David Scanavino, by Jonathan t.d.Neil Math Bass, by Shannon Ebner Holger Wüst, by Tobias Rehberger Seung Woo Back, by Sunjung Kim Caroline Achaintre, by Helen Sumpter Adam Harvey, by Trevor Paglen Margrét Helga Sesseljudóttir, by Ragnar Kjartansson Ivan Argote, by Christopher Mooney Rebecca Birch, by Oliver Basciano Rachel Rose, by Laura McLean-Ferris Claudia Comte, by Giovanni Carmine
Aliza Nisenbaum, by Chris Sharp Radamés ‘Juni’ Figueroa, by Pablo León de la Barra Morag Keil, by Martin Herbert Yamaguchi Akira, by Makoto Aida Ashish Avikunthak, by Niru Ratnam Yoshinori Niwa, by Mami Kataoka Flaka Haliti, by Maria Lind Zach Blas, by Hito Steyerl Andrea Romano, by Barbara Casavecchia Otobong Nkanga, by Dieter Roelstraete Anicka Yi, by David Everitt Howe Luiza Baldan, by Fernanda Brenner Adam Avikainen, by Anselm Franke Rayyane Tabet, by Murtaza Vali Benoît Maire, by Liam Gillick
page 104 Math Bass, Newz!, 2013, gouache on canvas, 91 × 97 cm. Courtesy Overduin & Co, Los Angeles
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www.dewitt.ch
for the new emperors
revolutionary by tradition Montres DeWitt SA • Rue du Pré-de-la-Fontaine 2 • 1217 Meyrin • Geneva • Switzerland • info@dewitt.ch • +41 22 750 97 97 DeWitt SA • 4330 N.E 2nd Avenue • Miami FL 33137 • USA • info@dewittamerica.com • +1.305.572.9812
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Art Reviewed 115
In the Line of Beauty, by Luke Clancy Morgane Tschiember, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Amor e Ódio a Lygia Clark/Love and Hate to Lygia Clark by Barbara Piwowarska Lamberto Teotino, by Mike Watson Christian Waldvogel, by Robert Barry Stephan Doitschinoff, by Claire Rigby The Garden of Diversion, by Aimee Lin
Exhibitions 116 Akram Zaatari, by Oliver Basciano Siobhan Davies Dance, by Laura McLean-Ferris David Ostrowski, by J.J. Charlesworth Johann Arens, by Sean Ashton Katrina Palmer, by Martin Herbert Dear Art, by Helen Sumpter Filipe Branquinho, by Kathy Noble Dana Schutz, by John Quin Tabor Robak, by Orit Gat Isa Genzken, by Joshua Mack Cyprien Gaillard, by David Everitt Howe Karin Apollonia Müller, by Jonathan Griffin Colby Bird, by Brienne Walsh Aaron Garber-Maikovska, by Ed Schad Allison Schulnik, by Jonathan t.D. Neil Where 2, by Brienne Walsh Michelangelo Pistoletto and Pascale Marthine Tayou, by Aoife Rosenmeyer And Materials and Money and Crisis, by Mark Rappolt Jacob Dahlgren, by Jacquelyn Davis
books 142 Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, by Oliver Basciano Ian Nairn: Words in Place and Nairn’s Towns, by Will Wiles Western Art and the Wider World, by J.J. Charlesworth This Mess Is a Place, by Helen Sumpter ConsumED 149 thE stRiP 154 oFF thE RECoRD 158
page 127 Karin Apollonia Müller, Starlights #2, 2013, lightjet print, 119 × 82 cm (framed), dition of 5 + 2AP. Courtesy the artist and Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles
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ERWIN WURM Synthesa February 28 - April 19, 2014
540 West 26th Street New York NY 10001 Telephone +1 212 255 2923 lehmannmaupin.com
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MAX WIGRAM GALLERY LA BELLA FIGURA ITALIAN ART AND DESIGN FROM THE FIRST REPUBLIC 1948-1992 CURATED BY BJORN STERN AFRO BASALDELLA ALIGHIERO BOETTI ALBERTO BURRI PIER PAOLO CALZOLARI ENRICO CASTELLANI MARIO CEROLI LUCIANO FABRO LUCIO FONTANA LUIGI GHIRRI PIERO MANZONI MARIO MERZ CARLO MOLLINO PIER PAOLO PASOLINI GIOVANNI PIACENTINO MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO GILBERTO ZORIO
18 FEBRUARY - 22 MARCH 2014
106 NEW BOND STREET LONDON UK WWW.MAXWIGRAM.COM INFO@MAXWIGRAM.COM T +44(0)2074954960 artreviewMARCH_2014.indd 1 Max Wigram.indd 247
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Art Previewed
Visitors to the 2020 Olympics might be from the Moon, the Earth and – from giant cities hanging in space between two worlds March 2014
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Previewed
Whitney Biennial New York 7 March – 25 May
Florian Roithmayr Site Gallery, Sheffield 4–29 March
Adrien Tirtiaux Martin Janda, Vienna 19 March – 26 April
Benedict Drew Matt’s Gallery, London through 20 April
Ettore Spalletti MAXXI, Rome, GAM, Milan, MADRE, Naples 8 March – 14 September
Biennale of Sydney 21 March – 9 June
Room Service Kunsthalle Baden-Baden 22 March – 22 June
René Danïels Metro Pictures, New York through 29 March
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Sadie Coles HQ , London 11 March – 26 April
Yoshitomo Nara Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 1 March – 12 April
1 Writer David Foster Wallace gives a reading for Booksmith at All Saints Church, London, in 2006. Photo: Steve Rhodes
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1 If the last Whitney Biennial settled in the literature into the artworld, reflected by the public imagination as a motley of artists tuned presence of, among others, vanguard publishers into hermetic narratives, its successor reads in Triple Canopy and Semiotext(e) (representing advance as ‘the one with no theme at all’. Which digital and analogue approaches, respectively) is, at least, a briefer summary than, say, ‘mirror and writers Gary Indiana and the late David to the infinitude of niche practices that is today’s Foster Wallace, whose title for a 1999 cluster of hyper-pluralistic artworld’ (you can have that short stories, Yet Another Example of the Porousness for free, Whitney press people). Here three of Certain Borders, now sounds like notes towards curators – MoMA’s Stuart Comer, the ICA curatorial strategy. Philadelphia’s Anthony Elms and artist Michelle While the artworld shelters writers, artists Grabner – each commandeer a floor; the 103 look to literature – ArtReview ’s 2013 FutureGreat artists they’ve chosen range from number-eight- 2 Benedict Drew’s show at Matt’s Gallery spins obsessed aesthetic logician Channa Horwitz off from a 1967 Henri Chopin essay concerning to avant composer Pauline Oliveros to the the ‘all-powerful Word, the Word that reigns dyspeptic pop-culture blurts of Sterling Ruby; over all…(we) listen to it everywhere describe and we’re promised ‘little overlap’ between us and describe events, tells us how to vote, them. There’s one slim thematic thread, though: and whom we should obey’. This compulsion the recent migration of nonmainstream for coercion will ring bells for viewers of Drew’s
brilliantly immersive/hectoring installation The Persuaders (2012): here, anticipate psychedelic colour, an ‘alternative sci-fi stage set comprising of a landscape of objects, sound and projection’, instructional voices and a disruptive thesis on how screen-centric living works stealthily to hypnotise and control. Meanwhile in Baden-Baden (the working title of ArtReview’s first novel), where Dostoyevsky apparently lost all his money at the casino and then, not coincidentally, wrote The Gambler (1867), we’re to be reminded of what an underused venue for art the hotel has been – if you (mini)bar obvious exceptions like the occasional hotel-room art fair, Elizabeth Peyton’s 1993 exhibition in the Chelsea Hotel and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Hôtel Carlton Palace Chambre 763, also 1993, where the curator fitted more than
2 Benedict Drew, Heads May Roll (detail), 2014. Courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London
3 George Grosz, Die Straße, 1915. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
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4 Florian Roithmayr, Moat (2013). Courtesy MOT International, London
5 Ettore Spalletti, Viaggio Verso Citera, 1993 (installation view, Casinò Municipale, 45th Venice Biennale). Photo: Attilio Maranzano
60 artists’ work into a 12sqm hotel room. The latter, at least, is being reprised as part of 3 Room Service: On the Hotel in the Arts and Artists in the Hotel, a two-part show looking at two centuries of art and hospitality that moves between the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (including work by Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sophie Calle) and a parcours of hotels in the town, with work set up in hotel rooms by figures including Christian Jankowski and Cindy Sherman. The nestling foothills of the Black Forest, pampered hotel living, spas and potentially losing your shirt at roulette: beat that, Sheffield! They’re trying. Last year, Florian Roithmayr 4 – who originally trained in Germany as a set
designer – apprenticed to Viorel Bratu, a that he was right about them). And when his ‘concrete beautician’, on construction sites for nerves are shot towards the end of it, he hopes public buildings. At Site, the artist is apparently to end up with something as balmy and smart continuing that relationship during a month5 as the work of Ettore Spalletti. For four long residency, exploring the student-teacher decades, in a career celebrated across three dynamic, and working with teaching aids and institutions in Rome, Naples and Milan, the examples of successful and failed conveyance Italian artist has made intoxicatingly beautiful, of learning to the audience. Which sounds dour, slow-motion abstract work: groups of paintbut given Roithmayr’s exhibition history (recent ings, reductive marble and alabaster sculptures, works, typically involving handmade reproducand larger, room-scale, colour-based installations of existing environments, have invoked tions – where, variously, distinctions between the Playboy Mansion and rock engravings in one angle of chamfered edge and another come the Sahara), it probably won’t be. to matter hugely, or one is enveloped in fields One day, when the budget allows, this of sky and eggshell blue and warm flesh pinks. writer is going to make a point of visiting all The shorthand might be Mediterranean the shows he previews here (just to confirm Minimalism, abstraction constantly distilling
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commercial show will foreground recent work: The results, in paintings like that of the real-world atmosphere, bodies, homes; and in any case, it’s likely to further his substantial fish-eyed girl Miss Spring (2012), are measured as with hot-weather holidays, you can have sway over young painters. balances: luminosity and unease, childishness a good sense of what you’ll get and still want Yoshitomo Nara’s work is effectively kawaii and sophistication, Western aesthetics used it over and again. 7 gone bad: a take, via painting and sculpture, in the service of painterly dissonance. In 1987, in his mid-thirties and several years on Japanese cute culture in which kids, as David In 2012, following the Dutch government’s into an eminent career revolving around sinewy, Byrne wrote in a recent catalogue essay, tend announcement of a 21 percent cut to arts seemingly slapdash but in fact artfully stamto have ‘rebelled against their roots and their 6 mering paintings, René Danïels suffered a 8 funding, Adrien Tirtiaux installed The Great big eyes are cold’, and in which punk is as much Cut (2012) in the art centre Stroom Den Haag: brain haemorrhage. Extraordinarily, when in an influence as manga and anime. And while a wooden intervention that took up 21 percent 2006 the Dutch artist tentatively began working his work is easy to frame alongside Takashi of the entire space, beginning in the office – again – using his left hand and focusing on his Murakami’s Superflat, efforts are evidently so that the staff had to work gamely around immediate environment – he was able to pick up being made (by himself and others) to distance it – and then accreting in the exhibition spaces a practice that had concerned itself at least in him from that: his last show, at Pace Gallery in during the show’s run, even restricting access part with fractured language and deep ambiNew York in 2013, found the press release writers to the bathrooms. In his first show at Martin guity in the first place. Since Danïels’s instituinvoking Bonnard and Rothko on the basis of Janda, in 2007, Tirtiaux clad parts of the tional exhibitions of recent years have tilted Nara’s use of diaphanous, layered colour. building in a painted faux-nature scene, towards his 1970s and 80s work, hopefully this
6 René Daniëls, 2 I’s strydend om 1 punt, 1985, oil on canvas, 167 × 12 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
7 Yoshitomo Nara, Untitled, 2007, coloured pencil on paper, 42 × 30 cm
8 Adrien Tirtiaux, Bruggen Bouwen, 2013, wood, metal, performance, Coup de Ville, Sint-Niklaas, Belgium. Photo: Jasper De Pagie
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Zoo(m) De LarGe (JaIL D'art). InstaLLatIon vIew. 2014
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9 Hubert Czerepok, Let’s Change It All (video still), 2011, HD video documentation of performance, 120 min. Photo: Robert Mleczko. Courtesy the artist and Zak/Branicka, Berlin
10 Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Bat Opera, no date. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London
the whole referencing a song by George Brassens that goes ‘Living near my tree I was happy / I should never have moved away…’ Tirtiaux told Bomb magazine’s blog last year, ‘I am drawn to the problematic situations within a site. I hate working with a white cube.’ Martin Janda, no doubt, is looking forward to hanging a nice, straightforward painting show after this. A certain sense of déjà vu hangs over 9 the nineteenth Biennale of Sydney. Somehow, one feels to have seen other shows called things like You Imagine What You Desire and extolling the artistic imagination – though the suggestion that the show ‘seeks splendour 10 and rapture in works that remain true to a greater, even sublime visuality’ is impressive
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in reaching back a couple of centuries for its sentiment, and we can also expect ‘happy anarchy’ and ‘laughter’, apparently. Still, nobody really cares about biennale thematics, and the artist list is great – from Meriç Algün Ringborg to Roni Horn to Mathias Poledna, Agnieszka Polska to Marko Lulić to Ahmet Öğüt. At which one might think: a surefire way into the biennale circuit these days is to festoon your name with diacritics. Yet this isn’t enough for some people – OK, one person, as the artist formerly known as Spartacus (and before that Lali and before that Alalia) is now Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, due to her fascination with how the soul singer died; the name change, she told The Guardian last
year, made Sadie Coles’s hips swing when she heard it. ‘I’m not planning on a third [change],’ she added. What apparently hasn’t changed, happily, is Chetwynd’s freewheeling, high/low-cultural modus operandi, which often involves sculptural sets – her mother was an Oscar-winning set designer; note the theme developing in this month’s column – activated by performances: a recent show at Nottingham Contemporary nodded to Starship Troopers (1997) and My Neighbor Totoro (1988) while more broadly touching on folk traditions of mummer plays and the like. And for anyone lost in a maze of referentiality in her current show, it’s evidently now acceptable to ask – apologies in advance for this – what’s going on? Martin Herbert
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WilliAm JoSeph KenTridge (SouTh AfricAn, born 1955) ‘Drawing from Stereoscope Man at switchboard 1999’ charcoal and pastel on paper £60,000 - 90,000
VieWing 16 - 19 March 101 New Bond Street London
conTAcT +44 (0) 20 7468 8213 sapictures@bonhams.com
The SouTh AfricAn SAle New Bond Street Wednesday 19 March 2014 at 2pm bonhams.com/southafricanart
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Andreas Slominski Works from the Collection of Bärbel and Manfred Holtfrerich January 25 – April 27, 2014
An Exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of Contemporay Art at the Bremen Art Association
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Points of View Jonathan T.D. Neil What is the value of an art history degree?
J.J. Charlesworth How to make a racist chair
Mark Sladen Slow down the Internet
Kimberly Bradley What next for the Haus that Okwui built?
Mike Watson Did art lose its social conscience in 2013?
Hettie Judah The spectre of art
Maria Lind A new enlightenment?
Sam Jacob A new kind of art is occupying the space of the city. Does it reflect us or are we reflections of it?
Jonathan Grossmalerman Everyone else is curating shows, so why shouldn’t I?
Jonathan T.D. Neil What is the value of an art history degree? President Obama came in for a drubbing when he mentioned during a speech at a GE plant in Wisconsin earlier this year that one could probably make a better income in manufacturing than with an art-history degree. The president quickly backtracked, but it’s hard to unring that bell, given how people with art-history degrees have a tendency to pay attention to news and politics, and have laptops and Twitter accounts. The president’s remarks called to mind a similar dismissal, this one made by presumablynot-an-art-history-major Edward Conard, Mitt Romney’s former partner at Bain Capital, who, in a 2012 interview with Adam Davidson of The New York Times, chose ‘art-history majors’ as a derisive shorthand for well-educated kids who opt out of the high-risk-taking, high-rewardproducing economy – an economy that would generate greater innovation and wealth, Conard argues in his book Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong (2012), if we would stop taxing and regulating and even charitably donating. For Conard, our current patterns of inequality are not unequal enough. The greater the economic
rewards for capital-risk-taking, the more ‘art-history majors’ would be induced to give up the safety of their minor gardens of knowledge, irrigated as they are by the innovations (information technology) and wealth (that goes to pay museum, gallery and studio bills) of others. On this logic, if Conard had to be for anyone in the field of the arts, he would be for the artists. Artists, after all, are in the business of leveraging
Artists, after all, are in the business of leveraging capital of different kinds in order to produce something innovative (dare one say ‘new’?) capital of different kinds in order to produce something innovative (dare one say ‘new’?), often underwritten by some sense of societal welfare (be it through pleasure or use), and usually with significant risks involved (few risks are as dearly felt as the one of being ignored). However much one would like to compare artists to knowledge workers in today’s flexible and precarious marketplace, it remains that
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artists, more than art historians, and more than even highly skilled labourers in the manufacturing industries, can still envision a direct path of social mobility to the upper class. Art-history majors, on the other hand, to the extent that they become art historians or, more likely, take on other wage-based positions, cannot and often do not entertain such mobility. This is not to suggest that they are choosing or want a life of impoverishment. Only that it is likely a defining trait of arthistory majors and their ilk that they have given up the promise of some social mobility for a life of service. For example, service to the cultivation of the intellect or the passion one has for art, or for the institution or field of culture or knowledge that supports it, but service nonetheless, which – and this is the crucial point – requires casting off self-aggrandisement as either means or end. Some, such as Conard, will no doubt scoff at such an idea of service, privileged as it may be and as safe as it may seem, certainly in comparison to the heroics of private equity. But the value of an art-history degree lies in that choice between self-aggrandisement and service.
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Kimberly Bradley What next for the Haus that Okwui built? How much does a city’s cultural world shift when an outside curator comes into one of its prize institutions and does things differently? In Munich, plenty. Two and a half years ago, Okwui Enwezor began his directorship at the Haus der Kunst. Since then, the Nigeriaborn curator has exposed more of the art institution’s difficult history than any of his predecessors, but also – and perhaps more importantly – he’s exposed the Munich art scene to a broadened definition of what art is and where it can come from. Enwezor originally set out to open the museum and make it more flexible (the city of course has many renowned museums and collections; but let’s face it, its contemporary artworld skews conservative). His first changes took those ideas literally: in 2012, the main hall’s red marble pillars were unveiled (concealed with curtains hung by previous director Chris Dercon, and prior to that, hidden under a layer of white plaster), and the longblocked southwest stairwell was opened. Late that year, the Haus’s central hall became a public exhibition zone with a commissioned installation – the first were Korean artist Haegue Yang’s multicoloured blinds; now, until September, is a vertiginous installation by Manfred Pernice. ‘Opening the museum’ also meant looking within, and lifting the lid on stories long untold. The 2012 Histories in Conflict exhibition was the first to dive into the building’s history in detail: the imposing building was, after all, Adolf Hitler’s venue for displaying party-line ‘Great German Exhibitions’ from 1939 to 1945. Then came the kind of opening that everyone
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expected from Enwezor, given his famously polyglot curatorial perspective: a look from Bavaria out into the world. In early 2013 South Africa came to Munich, in both a midcareer Kendell Geers retrospective and the Rise and Fall of Apartheid show, the latter travelling from New York’s International Center of Photography. Monographic shows have already been numerous and highlighted artists beyond the usual suspects (Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Abraham Cruzvillegas); topical exhibitions have mixed
Haus der Kunst can only hope that Enwezor’s new curatorial gig – artistic director of the 2015 Venice Biennale – doesn’t get in the way of the benefits he seems to bestow on the Bavarian capital the local with the seminally art-historical (ECM in 2012 spotlighted the Munich jazz label; the same year’s Ends of the Earth was a wonderful sweeping survey of Land art). It’s good news for a city that knows its contemporary artworld needs to expand its horizons (Munich commissioned the Berlinbased artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset to jazz up its streets with public art for most of last year; see ArtReview vol 65, no 7). Luckily Enwezor’s largest stated goal – using the Haus as a platform for knowledge production and Haus der Kunst exterior with Ai Weiwei, Bamboo and Porcelain, 2009, in collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron. Photo: Maximilian Geuter
discourse – has already been put to the test: this past November, the sweeping Festival of Independents format brought the tentacles of Munich’s independent arts scene (yes, there is one) into the museum; with concerts, seminars, performances, exhibitions, workshops and film screenings. Three thousand people attended the opening; the press response was overwhelming. Haus der Kunst can only hope that Enwezor’s new curatorial gig – artistic director of the 2015 Venice Biennale – doesn’t get in the way of the benefits he seems to bestow on the Bavarian capital; his work at the Haus has been nearly universally praised, even in critical Germany. Ideally, the opposite will be the case: that this public–private institution situated in a building created for Third Reich propaganda gets even more global recognition through its affable director, the first African to curate in Venice and only the second curator to head both the Biennale and Documenta. Upcoming highlights in Munich are already many – a permanent Archive Gallery opens this month, about the same time as Matthew Barney’s springtime collaboration with the Bavarian State Opera and accompanying exhibition. And starting next year the building will get a long-overdue, €60 million overhaul by David Chipperfield Architects. Enwezor once told me (disclosure: I do editing work for the institution’s English publications) that he’s the proud owner of a “sharp” pair of lederhosen from posh Munich folkwear emporium Lodenfrey. Let’s hope in his forthcoming globetrotting that he’s around enough to don them from time to time.
ArtReview
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Maria Lind A new enlightenment? For a while I’ve been thinking about the Enlightenment, the New Enlightenment – the one in which the shape of everything from activism to theory revisits many of the virtues that were once held high by the ‘old’ Enlightenment. Virtues such as emancipation and egalitarianism, things – free education and healthcare, reasonably functioning infrastructure (like the postal system and the railways), personal privacy and stability, equality for women and treatment of the child as an active subject – that have been taken for granted for a long time in most Western parliamentary democracies. With an ever more economised, fragmented and surveilled existence in which taxpayers are forced to compensate for the speculative instincts of global financial institutions and the gap between the rich and the poor increases rapidly (to invoke just two examples), it is almost inevitable that there will be a return to social, political and philosophical basics. A return to basics that might point towards a New Enlightenment. Although many of the basics are the same, the New Enlightenment is different from the old version. Essentialist universalism has, for example, given way to strategic universalism, shunning homogenisation while also seeking to acknowledge commonalities across intersectionalities. The light in these enlightenments is also dissimilar: in the new, it is not the ever-present direct and penetrating light that makes things transparent; rather it is a light that reflects and glimmers, which benefits from sparkly materials and shiny surfaces. It is a displaced light that creates opacity and abstraction. But more importantly, it is light that is not always there. This light can very well go out. And then on again, a cinematic light choreographing a story over time. When the slogan ‘No more reality’ is chanted by a group of children who, on a sunny day, are demonstrating, and documented in a video by
Philippe Parreno, some of these enlightenment thoughts are again set in motion. The protest is energetic and merrily disorganised. At the end of the short film a boy has to sit down, wipe the sweat from his forehead and catch his breath. I first experience the work, with its clear sound, from afar, from the entrance of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, as a giant moving image at the end of an elongated space. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a flickering light on a pillar; on the other side I perceive a massive wall of light with dark silhouettes in front – the staff at the new backlit ticket counter. After a while, the children on the screen give way to a spectacular closeup of an infant’s face, then a jellyfishlike creature in water, a mechanical mannequin writing, ‘What do you believe, your eyes or my words?’ and finally flowers. The closer I move to the giant screen, the less I hear and see. Eventually the image dissolves into rods with individual LEDs and I catch a glimpse of the enormous flowers at the exact same time as I discover the Eiffel Tower through the only window in the space. It’s dark outside and the metal structure is covered with light – the spectacle of all spectacles. That world-famous sign of modernity, of science and communication, which as Roland Barthes reminded us nevertheless ended up as the perfect signifier: completely devoid of immanent meaning. As Guy de Maupassant remarked, the Eiffel Tower is visible from every location in Paris except when you are in it, and yet it does not hold anything. There is nothing to see inside. While lacking an interior, it reveals its own construction, thus forming one of its many paradoxes. Furthermore, the Eiffel Tower instigates a new form of intellectualist perception – the bird’s-eye view, which is nothing less than a concrete abstraction. The emotional parcours that runs through Parreno’s Palais de Tokyo exhibition, Anywhere,
Anywhere Out of the World, is driven by mechanical grand pianos playing a version of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1910–11) and enveloped by blurry views through the Palais’s windows. On the way, I encounter more flickering lamps, fluorescent images that glow in the dark, slowly losing their shine until the lights go on again, recharging the images, and a darkened room filled with 16 Marquees made of lightbulbs that go on and off in an incandescent dance. One evening Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster dressed up as a late-nineteenth-century well-to-do man, including moustache, and slowly paced around the black box with a light in hand. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights came alive briefly, just as Marilyn is temporarily with us in Parreno’s film of the same title. Fiction produces facts in his work, and vice versa. The manga character Annlee is a figure with real juridical rights, and Zidane has become ever more imaginary. Ghosts and automatons frequent Parreno’s work too, creatures who fear light and defy rationality and who haunted the old Enlightenment. In both the New Enlightenment and Parreno’s show the basic precondition seems to be the presence and absence of light. Not only in the sense of when the light is on or off, but also in the protocol of lighting: modification, articulation and interrupted magic. This cinematic light is expressly relational in the sense that what it falls on determines its character. Here opacity and abstraction are as important as the light itself. Which in turn means that paradoxes abound. Sadly, but not surprisingly, there are few contributions by women among the works by other artists in Parreno’s ‘solo’ show. A work by one of the many male contributors, Liam Gillick, embodies the paradoxes. He has made black snow fall gently and intermittently on one of the grand pianos, replacing the glowing glitter from his own exhibition in the same space ten years ago.
Liam Gillick, Factories in the Snow, 2007. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo, Paris
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J.J. Charlesworth How to make a racist chair Spot the difference between the following: in the first case, an artist makes a film that depicts scenes of abuse, rape and torture of black men and women. Everybody thinks the film is fantastic and the artist gets lots of awards. In the second case, an artist makes a sculpture in the shape of a partly naked black woman on her back, her legs flipped back over her head, with a seat cushion belted to her thighs, bondage-style, to emphasise that she is meant to be treated as a chair. A rich white female collector has her portrait taken sitting on the sculpture. Pretty much everybody gets very angry, declaring the image ‘racist’, and the rich collector has to issue a statement declaring that she is absolutely not a racist and never intended to offend anyone. The December release, to great acclaim, of artist-turned-film-director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave followed, in January, by the Internet/Twitter storm that greeted the publication of a picture of collector Dasha Zhukova posing on a sculpture by Bjarne Melgaard – now dubbed ‘the racist chair’ – says much The author muses on the fact that art’s claims about art’s wobbly claim to be for itself often have the an agent of social commentary consistency of jelly and critique, while revealing how the topsy-turvy logic of identity politics now closes down any serious discussion about what an artwork might mean. Much of the controversy over the Zhukova/ Melgaard image got stuck on what the artist
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supposedly ‘intended’ with his artwork. So while New York blog Hyperallergic could conclude that ‘it’s nearly impossible to find any kind of insightful takeaway from Melgaard’s use of the body of a woman of color’, The Guardian’s columnist Jonathan Jones could, conversely, assert that ‘[Melgaard’s] intention is therefore the opposite of racist: it is to question power and representation’. So, was the artist intending racism, or a critique of racism?
Zhukova pleaded that the work had been taken ‘out of context’, but the problem is that in the culture of identity politics, context has everything to do with who has the right to make a critique The trouble is, in a culture within which the politics of identity has become mainstream, whether an artwork is intended as a ‘critique’ of power and representation matters less than the minority credentials of its proponent. So the issue wasn’t necessarily the chair, but rather that Zhukova is rich and white. She pleaded that the work had been ‘taken out of context’, but the problem is that in the culture of identity politics, context has everything to do with who has the 12 Years a Slave (film still), 2013, dir Steve McQueen. Courtesy Entertainment One
right to make that critique. The critical ‘intention’ of a male white artist is trumped by those with a greater claim to the identity at stake – ‘As a black woman, I’m offended’. As it turned out, Melgaard tried playing both the ‘art as critique’ and the identity-politics card in his defence: in a joint statement issued with his dealer Gavin Brown, the artist declared that the sculpture existed ‘to destabilize and unhinge our hardened and crusty notions of race and sex and power. These sculptures, made by a self professed “homosexual”, expose the latent and residual self hatred in a culture where the inhuman and overpowering presence of violence and catastrophe is imminent.’ In other words: hey, I’m gay – I’m a minority too, I can’t possibly be racist. The real cultural orthodoxy, though, beyond accusations of racism, lies in Melgaard’s bleak diagnosis of contemporary culture as self-hating and doomed to At this point ‘violence and catastrophe’. In that the author appreciates regard, McQueen’s fatalistic and the honesty strangely hollow vision of of an acerbic antebellum American slavery American resonated with this very contemfilm critic porary sense of pessimism. Amid the flood of accolades for McQueen’s film, it was left to the acerbic (black) American film critic Armond White to argue that ‘McQueen takes on the slave system’s depravity as proof of human depravity’. That is, human beings are endlessly, hopelessly awful. Now that really is offensive…
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Mike Watson Did art lose its social conscience in 2013? In 2013 the rational core at the heart of progressive thinking has come under attack in the guise of the supposed rationality of the financial markets. In the UK, for example, all has been swept aside in the name of ‘austerity’, a policy that cloaks the ostensibly rational notion that power carries its own justification no matter what the human cost might be. On a personal note, all dreamy notions of some inherent strand that might resist capitalism and its worst excesses, both in the artworld and in the sleepy and change-resistant Italian peninsula, were dashed during a six-month stay in Venice, where I took up residence for the duration of the 55th Biennale at Gervasuti Foundation to continue a project started with Rome’s Nomas Foundation a year earlier on models of free education. Neither the Biennale nor Venice itself could live up to their high cultural promise, so thin is the veneer of good intentions masking the hypercapitalist reality that both the city and its world-class art event have become. If one symbol endures from my time spent in a city that practically sinks under the weight of its tourist hordes, it is that of the luxury super-cruise ship siding up alongside Venice and blocking out the sky as its cargo of superrich holidaymakers wave gormlessly at a dwindling indigenous population of Venetians, the latter mumbling obscenities under their breath at the passing travesty. This is a daily scene and testament to the extent to which Venice and its Biennale have become a hideous parody of the progressive cultural notions that had generations of artists and academics returning to the city year on year. Of course the city is beautiful, providing, on a clear, mild, off-season day, an ideal setting for contemplation. Yet while there are perhaps a handful of days in the year on
which one can walk whimsically through Venice’s twisting lanes and alongside its canals, there are entire months when to venture out means to endure throngs of tourists being frogmarched from one site to another, their energy levels maintained by the ‘tourist menu’, which has bought down the standard of food across the city. Apart from being bad for the locals, this kind of hypertourism is disastrous for the tourists themselves, who are fed a cultural experience as far removed from genuine aesthetic reflection as the restaurant food is from Italian home cooking. Holidays, which might otherwise be the ideal time to relax the mind and cleanse the body, have become production lines adept at making – or keeping – people fat
Not one project in the Biennale aimed at a direct social intervention, despite there being two national pavilions dedicated to the theme of money and hassled. As if the entire working year was not already fit for precisely this purpose. The contemporary artworld equivalent of the package holiday hardly fares better. While a biennial is arguably the perfect time for people from across the world to come together in the consideration of art’s role – the Venice Biennale’s theme always alludes somewhere along the line to lofty social ambitions – all too often participation by a country or artist is undertaken at any cost. The results are often achieved with little or no consideration for the local population. Materials and poorly or unpaid gallery attendants are shipped in from across the world, while artists are selected by
their host countries according to often baffling criteria that fail to encourage innovation or diversity. The 55th Biennale, titled The Encyclopedic Palace, might be better named ‘the year of the tree’ due to the inclusion of no less than five tree-based exhibits – three in the Giardini, two in the Arsenale. One cannot help but make a comparison to ‘dead wood’, given the dearth of ideas on show. Although in fairness, one could attribute what was likely a coincidence in the repetition of the tree motif to a desire to get back to basics and away from the obscene proportions of the largest ever Venice Biennale. Though perhaps that would be a little too kind: not one project in the Biennale aimed at a direct social intervention, despite there being two national pavilions dedicated to the theme of money – Russia and Greece. In these times of forced austerity, art arguably ought to speak up Does art for the oppressed in a very direct have a duty to speak manner. This is not even due to for the any particular facet that art oppressed? might have at its core. It is just that an art-based approach to social problem-solving is what we in the artworld have to offer. Scientists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, etc will have their respective approaches too. When people do not seek positive solutions in whichever field they work, they should be called to account. The lack of criticism of the 55th Venice Biennale was surely in part because people are aware of just how difficult it is to do anything in Italy in this economic climate. Yet doing something – whatever – is not enough. With the annual quota of art biennials increasing year on year, it would be great to see the Venice Biennale lead the way in terms of social engagement in 2015.
A cruise ship arrives in Venice. Photo: David Edwards
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Sam Jacob A new kind of art is occupying the space of the city. Does it reflect us or are we reflections of it? At night, outside Central St Martins, London’s behemothic art school that’s recently moved into new premises in King’s Cross, fountains dance. Jets rise and fall from a grid set into the paving forming what looks like a new public square. Coloured lights sparkle in vertical streams. These ripples of liquid neon magentas and greens recall garden-centre kitsch laid out at grand scale. And it’s no accident that this new kind of urban public space feels like this, different to the imperial pomp of Trafalgar Square, the didactic force of St Peter’s Square or the commercial buzz of Times Square. Granary Square, as it’s known, is an example of two things: first, it’s part of a postindustrial space created by polishing, adjusting and adding to former industrial areas – in this case the historic Victorian infrastructures of railways canals and warehouses – repurposing them as a new quarter for creative industries and urban entertainment. Secondly, it’s an example of a space that feels public but actually remains private, owned by its developer. It’s part of a change that has characterised the most successful cities on the planet over the last decade or so. It’s a change driven by tendencies towards increasingly privatised forms of city-making. Since the 1980s the mantra of privatisation has seeped increasingly deeply into the fabric of society. For cities, this means an increasing reliance on private money to effect change. In various forms, such as public/private initiatives, sell-offs or other methods, for example, in the UK, section 106 (aka the percent-for-art), the lines between what was once considered public and private have become increasingly blurred. It produces a very particular kind of contemporary urban space – of which Granary Square is a fairly modest example. But all of
the sensations it creates can be felt to varying degrees elsewhere: it has something of the character of a film set; it gives you the odd feeling that you are a performer in a show; and there’s a material unease in the contrast between slick contemporaneity and a raw industrial inheritance. Think of Manhattan’s High Line, another example of the transformation of ex-industrial infrastructure, a park created on the elevated former New York Central Railroad spur. It acts as an urban promenade, a contemporary version of the Edwardian idea – a place
Since the 1980s the mantra of privatisation has seeped deeply into the fabric of society. For cities, this means an increasing reliance on private money to effect change designed as a way of seeing the city and a place to be seen. Its sensation is strangely domestic, feeling more like a timber-decked back garden than what was formerly a piece of industrial urban infrastructure, much more intimate and geared towards an individual experience than a traditional park. It too is a product of public/ private money – a combination of city funding and private backers. Indeed, the High Line’s success is due in part, I’d argue, to the fact that it successfully articulates a particular idea of the relationship of the individual to the city. Its combination of performance, spectacle, experience and integration of public art has Granary Square, London. Photo: John Sturrock
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become a template for the new spaces of the city that voracious development needs. Take, for example, the huge Hudson Yards project along New York’s Hudson River. The project’s scale is immense: 16 skyscrapers with more than 1,180,000 sqm of office, residential and retail space, 560,000 sqm of commercial office space, a 70,000 sqm retail centre, a hotel, a cultural space, about 5,000 residences, a school and five-and-a-half hectares of public open space. It’s a whole new chunk of city. Stephen Ross, the developer behind the scheme, recently announced the commissioning of ‘the world’s most expensive piece of public art’, with a budget of around $75 million. Having consulted the likes of Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor, Maya Lin and Richard Serra, Ross has hired Thomas Heatherwick, the creator of the London 2012 Olympic cauldron, among other things, to design the centrepiece. It’s not yet clear what this will produce (other than that it will be ‘guided by the theme of gathering’), but the conception of the project – yet another ‘new’ kind of public space, and according to the developer a ‘new icon’ for the city, capping a ‘cultural corridor’ on the city’s west side – is already clear. Though it’s billed as ‘public art’, it will really be neither of those things. Not public in the traditional sense, and not art either. Instead it will be private spectacle as urban entertainment. Cities are not static entities. Not in their physical fabric, and nor in our definition of them. As the political definitions of public and private shift, so too does our idea of the city. And as the idea of the city evolves, we shape it in new ways. But as much as we shape it, it also shapes us. For better or for worse.
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Mark Sladen Slow down the Internet Do you read any online art magazines? It’s easy to consume a lot of images and textual snippets on the Internet, but what about the kind of long-form texts and artist projects that we associate with serious art magazines and journals? Many people complain that the Internet is a highly distracted space, and say that their reading and viewing habits onscreen and off- are very different. But the possibilities for screen-based reading and viewing have been changing in recent years, and one organisation that has been anticipating these changes is Triple Canopy, an online magazine that launched in 2008 under the slogan ‘Slow down the Internet’. Triple Canopy is run by a New York-based collective of writers, artists and technologists. At the heart of its operation is a sophisticated journal centred on art and literature, a publication that contains a mix of creative and critical projects. A recent edition of the magazine included, among other things: a word-andimage piece employing animated GIFs, by artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty; a story by painter Rebecca Bird, illustrated with short animations; an essay on the brain by scholar Isabelle Moffat; and an interactive piece evoking the siege of Sarajevo, by artist Adela Jušić. One distinctive feature of Triple Canopy, as the above might suggest, is its combination of text and images – the traditional materials of a magazine – with video, audio and interactive components. The ability to give readers a richer, augmented experience is of course one of the advantages of an online magazine, and in this respect Triple Canopy harks back to experimental multimedia journals of the 1960s and 70s. These include projects such as Aspen, the American ‘magazine in a box’ that included flexidiscs and Super-8 film; as well as magazines on audiocassette like the British journal Audio Arts. Another distinctive feature of Triple Canopy is the way in which its projects are presented
within a reader-friendly environment, one that reproduces some of the advantages of the space of the page. In its first iteration, the magazine employed a special onscreen frame that determined that all projects were experienced as a horizontal sequence of distinct pages. Although the latest version of Triple Canopy, launched at the end of 2013, has relaxed this format, the new design preserves the sense of calm and containment – and high design values – that has made the magazine distinctive from the start. One reason for Triple Canopy’s new format may be that the conditions for onscreen reading are changing rapidly. In part this is because the advent of tablets and smartphones has provided
Net commentators are increasingly talking about a new ‘postdigital’ world, characterised by a mindset within which digital technology has become mainstream; in which the individual moves easily between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, utilising both us with tools more suited to extended reading. Previously we encountered onscreen texts on our personal computers, devices that were often deskbound, offering many alternate paths for our attention, and on which reading had to compete with task-based activities. Now many of us are reading on handheld devices, objects which were designed to offer a simple reading experience as one of their functions, and which we can take almost anywhere. Screengrab from Triple Canopy of Eve Fowler, A Spectacle and Nothing Strange (detail), 2011–12, letterpress poster, 56 × 71 cm, edition of 100
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Given the advent of these handheld devices, it is surprising that so few online art magazines have emerged that can rival Triple Canopy’s sophistication. For example, the excellent e-flux journal focuses primarily on long-form texts, with little effort to style the reading environment or to employ complex audiovisual elements. It could be argued that the journal’s simplicity is its strength, as the publication’s lack of formatting – and lack of large audiovisual files – means that it flows with greater ease across a multitude of different devices. But it does this by making text its unchallenged king. The question inevitably arises, however, whether we should even try to replicate the magazine format – with its odd combination of virtues – within the digital environment. Net commentators are increasingly talking about a new ‘postdigital’ world, characterised by a mindset within which digital technology has become mainstream; a world in which the individual moves easily between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, utilising both according to their advantages. This thinking would suggest that in the future the more progressive magazines might not be online, but rather postdigital. This postdigital attitude is manifest in the expanded approach to publishing that the relaunched Triple Canopy has adopted. The editors now describe their online platform as a hub for a range of activities that include printed matter and live events – a strategy that is being recognised in the Whitney Biennial this spring, where the collective will mount an installation to launch a new ‘issue’. According to the editors, ‘We see the distinction between the Internet and real life diminishing rapidly, dramatically.’ Triple Canopy is still committed to creating a space that is conducive to the measured consumption of art and writing, but declares that ‘while we used to invoke the slogan Slow down the Internet, now we’re moving on to the more apt, if more comical, Slow down the world’.
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Hettie Judah The spectre of art A ghost is haunting Dover Street. Not one of those flossy-limbed fashion wraiths whose soft footfall percusses this artery of high style, but a bona fide, chain-rattling spectre with unfinished business: the ghost of contemporary art past. Nos 17–18 is the site of the Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons-helmed Dover Street Market that, in the decade since it opened, has reinvented the fashion store as modern wunderkammer, complete with displays of taxidermy and arty installations in the street-front vitrines. DSM has spawned international namesakes, first in Ginza, and, earlier this year, in New York. Through its innumerable imitators it has also been indirectly responsible for retail’s enthusiastic co-option of gallery lexicon. That we now live in a world in which shops are ‘curated’ is thanks in part to DSM’s dogged blurring of the lines between art, retail and display. The ghost at 17–18 Dover Street belongs to the Institute The curious story of how art of Contemporary Art (ICA), galleries became which inhabited the building fashion stores that between 1950 and 1967. While then became art this episode in the location’s galleries… history seems largely to have been lost to memory, as the hub of the Independent Group, the institute was a key site in the birth of Pop art. Critic and curator Lawrence Alloway, who was assistant director of the ICA between 1955 and 1960, described it as ‘a meeting place for young artists, architects and writers who would not otherwise have had a place to gather; London had neither a café culture like that of Paris nor exhibition
openings such as in New York.’ Despite this, the link between the ICA and Dover Street Market came as a surprise both to Gregor Muir, current director of the ICA, and to Adrian Joffe, director of DSM, who Muir contacted with the news last year. This spring, the ICA will address its ghost’s unfinished business, dressing the whole of the site with lifesize images of landmark exhibitions that took place there during its incarnation as an art gallery. Muir’s offsite projects for the ICA – inspired by the institute’s nomadic origins pre-Dover Street – have recently included an exhibition in an annexe of the Selfridges department store, which, as Muir puts it, “took the message out of the [ICA’s] building” and achieved larger and quite different audiences to those they might have in their own space on the Mall. A tribute to London subcultures since the 1980s, at the heart of the exhibition were individuals and institutions that muddied the water between the sites and practices of art, fashion and retail, including East London studio collective and shop the House of Beauty and Culture, and fashion designer and performer Leigh Bowery. A film of Bowery’s famous 1988 performance at the Anthony d’Offay gallery showed on multiple monitors during the Selfridges show. Rather less well known is the version of the same performance that Bowery presented in the window of Parco, a department store in Tokyo that same year. In his relish for vulgarity, embarrassment and display, Bowery triumphed in the vitrine, even having himself stripped naked one day in full view of the street.
A shop is a potent site, and one in which it is hard for art to thrive if it is uncomfortable (or can’t engage) with the dominant language. Luxury-goods houses that display expensive artworks in-store often render them little more than trophies of wealth; accessories to the accessories. Muir describes the experience of working with Selfridges and DSM as one of dealing with likeminded …unless what’s people in a creative milieu, really being said is but as he concedes, he was that the difference approaching both stores between the two with a complete, sitethese days is slight appropriate exhibition that could stand strongly apart from commerce. “I wasn’t curating handbags.” Art galleries being converted into shops; art galleries occupying shops; shops presenting art: despite being linked cogs in the machinery of the modern city, the intermeshing of culture and consumer retail provokes unease. In the same week that the ICA show opens at Dover Street, the local council for the area will be accepting proposals on the urgent question of whether and how the art galleries of this Mayfair neighbourhood should be protected from incursion by luxury fashion retailers. One imagines that DSM is now rather proud of its eminent ghost, and enjoys being the geographical offspring of British Pop art. But it, and every store that has followed it in courting the artworld, is also the spiritual offspring of the unruly, and rather less commodifiable Bowery. He would have curated handbags. And they would have been worth seeing.
Leigh Bowery at the Parco department store, Tokyo, 1988, from the book Leigh Bowery (1998), published by Violette Editions, London
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Jonathan Grossmalerman Everyone else is curating shows, so why shouldn’t I? I am still caught in the midst of my painting slump, so I must admit it was a welcome distraction to get that phone call from Dodge Gallery, inviting me to curate a painting show this coming summer. I’ve had real difficulty concentrating ever since I escaped all that kidnapping business! Glad that’s over with! I still can’t believe I lived in a cardboard shipping box for two months and then, following my harrowing escape, blazed a trail of bloody vengeance. In any case, what I’m trying to get across is that the prospect of clearing my mind with a bit of easy-peasy curating was just the thing to get me out of my midwinter funk. Naturally I jumped at the opportunity, no matter how difficult it was for me to imagine myself curating after all the awful things I’ve called curators in the years since Yale invented them back in 1991. But a curator I now am! So I suppose I should get to work. Doing that thing curators do. I mean, how hard can it be? After all, they’re basically nothing more than waiters… at an overpriced restaurant… with an extremely limited menu. All I need to do is figure out how one goes about ‘curating’. I suppose I could start with a list of artists I like. Hmmm… I thought that this would come easier… It’s not wrong to curate yourself into the show, is it? That might serve as a good jumpingoff point. OK, here we go… 1. Jonathan Grossmalerman Goddamn it! This is going to be harder than I thought! There’s got to be some artist whose
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work has grabbed my attention in the last few of course, they are extremely insightful… years! Ah, yes! There was that great Picasso show hmmmmm… no! This is a coincidence and at Gagosian a couple of years back… nothing more. It’s up to me to turn this aggres1. Jonathan Grossmalerman sive slap in the face into something positive! 2. Pablo Picasso With some further contemplation on the OK! This is starting to feel like it’s coming matter, I suppose I could – and I’m really just together. I’m sure there are others worthy throwing stuff out there – use the leverage of inclusion. I know, I’ll flip through one of curating a show to meet other artists and of these complimentary copies of ArtReview make them my friends. Does that sound creepy? I keep getting. Let’s see… no… no… hmmmmm… It shouldn’t. Imagine, I could simply say, “I’m not really, no… Goddamn it! I had curating a show, would you like to be no idea things had gotten this bad. in it? Let’s hang out.” Looks like I’ll The work in here is terrible! Do I There’s nothing creepy about finally get a simply hate art? I’m fucked! So horribly chance to show that. Anything creepy could happen some of these fucked! Wait a second… calm down, later. No, this is just two people unclaimed Jonathan… often curators simply put palling around. Getting to know each state portraits all their friends in their shows. That’s other. Of course, it would mean that that have been what I’ll do! I’ll fill out the rest of the some sort of ‘studio visit’ would have cluttering up show with all my friends. to happen where I would inevitably be the studio! 1. Jonathan Grossmalerman called upon to say something sensible 2. Pablo Picasso about their work. That is going to 3. Neal suck, but it can’t all be fun and games. At some Oh, Jesus! Neal isn’t even a friend! He’s point the hammer must come down! After all, my employee! Is it true? Is it true I don’t have you can’t make an omelette without a hammer… or something like that… and think for a moment any real friends!? In all honesty, none come of the lady artists! And all their breasts! to mind! Perhaps this exhibition is an intended It’s decided! curse! Some sort of unholy mirror, constructed My curatorial debut is going to be the most merely to torment me! Don’t be ridiculous, inexplicably exhaustive revue of contemporary Jonathan! This is no curse. Simply an unfortunate painting in the history of art! In fact, I’m going coincidence. How could the good ladies at Dodge to call it… The History of Painting! Gallery have had any idea that merely by offering Or maybe Grossmalerman and the History me, Jonathan Grossmalerman, a curatorial slot, of Painting. they would be unleashing this hell? Unless, Maybe just Painting! This part is going to be hard… Courtesy Jonathan Grossmalerman
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CHANG jia CHANG jia
2009, , 2009, c-print, c-print, 59 x59 66.9 x 66.9 in in Sitting Sitting Young Young Girl,Girl
MARCH 06 - APRIL 03, 2014 MARCH 06 - APRIL 03, 2014 DOOSAN Gallery New York DOOSAN Gallery New York
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Other People and Their Ideas No 13
Massimo Minini Interview by Barbara Casavecchia
Massimo Minini’s eponymous art gallery is located in Brescia – a city 90km east of Milan. He opened his first gallery, Banco, in the same city on 23 October 1973, after working at Flash Art magazine. During Banco’s first year of operation he showed Gilbert & George, Sol LeWitt, Giuseppe Chiari, Victor Burgin, Giorgio Griffa and Luis Camnitzer. Conceptual art, Arte Povera and Minimalism were Minini’s early focus, and keeping a keen eye both on the Italian and international scene has been a permanent feature of his long career, from the Italian artists, such as Maurizio Cattelan and Vanessa Beecroft, he focused on in the 1990s to, in recent years, his interest in artists such as Dara Friedman, Jan De Cock and Tino Sehgal. In 2010 Pizzini/Sentences was published, a collection of Minini’s sharp, aphoristic commentaries on all the artists he has worked with over the years. On Hans-Peter Feldmann, for example: ‘We found that we have many similar attitudes, a certain sense of irony, a detachment from the quest for success, firm convictions, an interest in cemeteries and brassiere ads.’
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ART REVIEW You’ve been showing art in Brescia for 41 years. What does it mean to be a ‘provincial’, or maybe just ‘peripheral’, gallery today? Or an ‘international’ one? MAssIMo MInInI Today everything is mixed. When I opened Banco, Brescia was not on the map. Somehow, involuntarily, I ‘created’ Brescia – for a certain world map. Being here meant fewer expenses, the possibility of starting up slowly, of having good artists showing with me, as they said, ‘because I do not have a gallery in Brescia’. Today, when many artists just have one gallery, it makes you laugh. It’s wrong, but it’s the way it goes. Then the fax was born, and art fairs, and the Internet, everything boomed, so that life in the provinces offered other advantages. You are more visible than you might be if you were hidden in a large city, as Julius Caesar said. Art Basel asked me to contribute some texts for their next catalogue. They gave me five reasons for this request: one, the longevity of the gallery; two, my ability to establish relations with artists; three, writing the Pizzini; four, my particular way of setting up the stand; and five, my gallery’s unusual provincial location. Being in Brescia was a plus. AR The whole art system has transformed – exploded, really – in the time that you’ve been a gallerist. Are these positive changes, in your opinion? MM Everything has exploded; the world has exploded. [When I started working] I was earning 200,000 lire [a year] – today’s equivalent would be €2,000 or four million lire. Twenty times more. And with today’s €2,000 you do not live as well as you used to with the old 200,000 lire. Today we run 20 times faster. In a day, we wrote ten to 15 letters, made ten phone calls. Now, between emails, phone calls and texts, we launch maybe 200 messages per day. And finance has a power that it didn’t have – the market has been replaced by the supermarket, the Castelli model by the Gagosian model. The supermarket obliterates the meaning of works. When you look at a painting hanging from a wall, you cannot see the content, the message, if there is one. No, you see the price it achieved at the last auction. AR You open your book on the history of your gallery [Massimo Minini: Quarantanni 1973–2013, 2013] with a homage to two great loves of yours, an artist and a writer: Giulio Paolini and Italo Calvino. Is this the way your stories with artists begin, too? Because of mutual admiration? Or is it possible for you and an artist to work together without liking each other? MM Of course it’s possible, and in fact sometimes one puts up with a lot… if an artist does not like you very much, but she or he ‘works’, you do not give her or him a kick in
the pants, do you? It helps the gallery to live and to show artists you love, maybe, but who do not work (yet)…
AR Whom, among artists and also collectors, did you court for years before he or she ceded, and who never said yes?
AR And who has ‘worked’ the best? What exhibitions have borne most fruit?
MM I did court Richard Long and Richard Tuttle, but I’ve never been able to convince them to show at the gallery. Maybe artists called Richard are not for me. Long has been a real passion, his works were extraordinary. He has worked with Gian Enzo Sperone and then Tucci Russo, in Italy. We were about to close a deal for a show, then Tucci decided to oppose… But now Long’s works are too repetitive. He does well, but he doesn’t intrigue me any more. On the other hand, I’m still in love with Tuttle. Recently, I’ve tried again to convince him. I sent him my book of Pizzini, in which I talk about him. He likes it, he thanks me, he no longer has a gallery in Italy, but since we did not work together in the past – he says – we will keep doing so also in the future!
MM Tangible fruit in terms of sales: among the latest would be Anish Kapoor, David Maljkovic and Giulio Paolini. Image-wise, that would be
The supermarket obliterates the meaning of works. When you look at a painting hanging from a wall, you cannot see the content, the message, if there is one. No, you see the price it achieved at the last auction Hans-Peter Feldmann, Dan Graham, Ian Wilson and Tino Sehgal. AR You’ve often invited artists to collaborate on joint projects. Why? MM I love to put artists in dialogue. Sometimes I like to put them on the spot, to see how they cope. In some cases, artists were looking for each other: I invited Gabriele Basilico and Dan Graham to photograph Brescia, and they were both enthusiastic about working together. When Peter Halley learned about my proposal that he work with Carla Accardi, he almost fainted. When I told Letizia Battaglia that her photos would be exhibited with those of Francesca Woodman, she was incredibly
Irony is a double-edged sword. If you are dealing with someone a bit too serious, they can think you’re taking the piss. Always check out the level of wit of who’s in front of you touched: I didn’t know it, but she had always hoped it would happen. So, a little I understand, a little I guess right. And anyway I have four rooms in the gallery, and it’s not so easy to fill them with only one artist. David Maljkovic, Monica Bonvicini and Hans-Peter Feldmann did very well, though.
facing page Massimo Minini. Courtesy Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia
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AR You’re renowned for your sense of humour. Do you remember any occasion on which it saved your life? MM No, instead I remember many occasions when my jokes were misunderstood and made me risk my life and limb. Irony is a double-edged sword. If you are dealing with someone a bit too serious, they can think you’re taking the piss. Always check out the level of wit of who’s in front of you. AR Going back to the Pizzini: writing has run in parallel with being a gallerist for you. When did you realise that you wanted to write? MM Let’s say that I’ve learned to write (assuming I ever have) late – around the age of sixty. I do not know what happened, but there was a change. I read and reread only a few books. I like to reread, to understand how a writer writes; I become a reader of the second and then maybe of the third level. I try to reproduce certain ways of writing that have impressed me. I do not go for War and Peace, only short stories and blurbs. Then, one night the Pizzini were born… I presented them as labels in my booth at Artissima in Turin in 2009, with an English subtitle, Sentences, borrowed from Sol LeWitt. An unexpected hit. AR In recent years, you dealt also with design and especially with photography, by creating a sort of visual archive of Italian art. Why did you get so passionate about it? MM I celebrate my anniversaries by talking about something else. For the 30-year anniversary of my gallery I thought about putting together a book, then a collection and finally an exhibition of portraits of Italian artists by great Italian photographers. I started with buying images by Elisabetta Catalano, Paolo
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Mussat Sartor and Giorgio Colombo. At that stage, I had 30 portraits and felt like keeping going: it was too small a collection. I talked about it with Egidio Marzona, in Berlin, a great collector of everything. “I have 2,000 photos,” he said. I felt lost. I exchanged some things with him. He took a Mangold drawing from me, I could take as many photos as I wished. Then I had 100. I understood I had to do a proper project. I wrote down a list of photographers: half I knew, half I drove out. That’s how I met Nino Migliori, Mario Cresci, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Ferdinando Scianna… In the end, it didn’t take me long. A couple of years and 500 photos later, I published a book with Photology (United Artists of Italy, 2008), and the exhibition/collection was ready. The collection became a worldwide ambassador for Italian art, shown everywhere from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne, to the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, the Biennial of Photography in Amsterdam and the Estorick Collection in London. My only regret is I didn’t succeed in bringing it to Rome, where I’ve tried everywhere – from MAXXI to MACRo, from Calcografia to GnAM. Nothing.
inhabitants of the Padania, the Po Valley, Corsican, Cypriot, Flemish), in a word, border zones compressed by dominating cultures. Even Manifesta (the European biennial of contemporary art) moves its exhibition around ‘borderline’ areas of culture. Ethnic groups express specific requests: what high culture defines as ‘provincialism’ – ie, lock up behind your ramparts and keep quiet. But there’s also a provincialism of high cultures, when, by presuming to encompass everything in themselves, they snub and castrate the impulses of smaller cultures, without realising that they’re flattening out debate. For instance, if you go to Borneo, you don’t come across Sandokan [the fictional nineteenthcentury pirate created by Emilio Salgari], but Dolce & Gabbana. Now, you find works in English by artists from Trentino: they do it to make themselves understood by a wider public, but they don’t see they’re losing autonomy. On Lake Garda, you read: Zimmer frei, because people are afraid that German tourists wouldn’t understand camere libere. In Germany, on the
highway, they write Ausfahrt. Nobody feels the need to add ‘exit’. Instead, if you go to Adro or Piffione, now the mayors add a little sticker below, with ‘Ader’ or ‘Piffiù’, as if to state: we have our language, we have our roots, without realising they are only exposing themselves to ridicule. If one avoids this zoccolate [crap], I think it could still make sense to talk about Italian identity. But Italian artists trying to ape the ‘international language’ remind me of Renato Carosone’s Tu Vuò Fà l’Americano [You Want to Be American, a song in Neapolitan from 1956, satirising the massive Americanisation of postwar Italy]. AR Where do you go to see a show, when you’re not obliged to? Can you still do it? MM Mainly ancient art museums with major collections. I don’t find exhibitions too attractive, but recently I saw Bembo at Palazzo del Monte in Padua, Chardin and Zurbarán at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Antonello da Messina at MART in Rovereto. I need to brush up. I like prehistory. I’ve been working on some lectures on the relationship between prehistoric and Land art, I’m finalising the texts and images. AR Are there still exhibitions in your ‘must do’ drawer?
AR Do you think it’s important to reflect a given national or cultural identity? Does it still make sense?
MM The exhibition I just did at the Triennale in Milan [Quarantanni d’Artecontemporanea: Massimo Minini 1973–2013] may have consequences. I think I’m a bit tired of doing exhibitions. I’d need a museum, now. Maybe I could open it in Brescia with the Municipal Councillor for Culture, Laura Castelletti, who could give the town this new adventure. I’m sure she will listen to me.
MM Absolutely not. We’re in Europe, we don’t do wars between Bergamo and Brescia any more. In this reigning culture of globalisation, though, you’ll notice centripetal and centrifugal forces. The more everything goes global, the more some fringes hold on to their little culture, their genius loci. I’m not talking about ethno-political fractions (Basque,
Detail view of Daniel Buren work, 2013 (installation view, Quarantanni d’Artecontemporanea, 2013, Triennale di Milano). Photo: A.Rossetti. Courtesy Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia
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The Law and Its Ideas No 4
Recovering Nazi stolen art – the Gurlitt hoard by Daniel McClean
above Bernhard Kretschmar, Strassenbahn (Tram), undated. Courtesy Augsburg State Prosecutor’s Office
top Cornelius Gurlitt. Photo: © Vantage News
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Background In The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, Lynn Nicholas chronicles the spoliation of artworks by the Nazis across Europe. During the period 1933 to 1945, the Nazis (principally Hitler and Goering) amassed vast repositories of artworks, largely from the plunder of Jewish collections through theft or forced sale. The Nazis also took the modernist artworks they despised from German museums, using these ‘degenerate’ artworks as collateral to aid – through sale or trade – the acquisition of coveted Old Masters. This is seen in the notorious auction of degenerate artworks organised by the Nazis in Lucerne in 1939. In amassing their art collections – Hitler dreamt during his final days of curating his unrealised museum in Linz, Austria – the Nazis were served by a network of favoured art dealers, including Bernhard Böhmer, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller and Hildebrand Gurlitt. Today the legacy of Nazi spoliation is still unravelling. Last November, the German authorities dramatically announced that they had seized over 1,400 (largely modern) artworks from an inconspicuous Munich apartment. In fact, the discovery had been made earlier, in February 2012, but the announcement was controversially delayed as the German authorities conducted further investigations. These artworks, it transpired, had once been in the possession of Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956); and from him they had passed to his widow and then on to his now eighty-year-old son, Cornelius Gurlitt, who concealed them in his Munich apartment. It appears that Hildebrand Gurlitt may have kept many of these modern artworks in defiance of Nazi instructions to sell them on. The Gurlitt hoard contains at least 380 ‘degenerate’ artworks taken from German museums, as well as a further 594 artworks looted from Jewish families, together estimated to value €1 billion. Among the Gurlitt treasures are Seated Woman (1942), attributed to Henri Matisse, which formerly belonged to the Jewish collector Paul Rosenberg. Obstacles Yet how likely is it that the victims – the German museums and the heirs of dispossessed Jewish collectors – will be able to recover their stolen artworks from the Gurlitt hoard? Potential claimants seeking to recover these stolen artworks are likely to confront numerous evidential and legal obstacles. The evidential obstacles are clear: proving that one’s predecessors once owned artworks and that they were stolen or sold under duress (which also renders the transfer of property legally void) can be difficult after long periods – here, after 60 or 70 years. This is particularly the case for the Jewish families (rather than museums) where records of ownership may have been lost or destroyed. The legal picture is also complicated. Under principles of international law, ownership claims involving artworks are generally brought in the courts of the state in which a defendant resides or where the property is situated at the time – for example, if a stolen artwork appears at auction, recovery claims will often take place in the courts of the state in which the auction is due to take place. Applying these principles to the Gurlitt hoard, the likely scenario is that recovery claims will need to be brought in the German courts (applying German law). Although it is possible (if unlikely) that foreign courts may assume jurisdiction in some instances, even if a
foreign court were to award judgment in favour of a claimant, this judgment would still need to be enforced in Germany. Unfortunately, if restitution claims are brought in the German courts, there are likely to be significant obstacles to claimants under current German law. For the German museums whose ‘degenerate artworks’ were seized by the Nazis and sent to Gurlitt, there is the obstacle of the Forfeiture Act (1938), which was passed by the Nazis and, ironically, still remains in force today. The act enabled the Nazis to expropriate without compensation thousands of modernist paintings, sculptures and works on paper from German museums. The act was not repealed by the Allied forces after the Second World War (as they and the German authorities wished to avoid disputes), and it will need to be repealed if German museums are to now bring restitution claims. For the heirs of Jewish collectors seeking the return of their families’ property, there are also significant legal hurdles. The German Civil Code prohibits the transfer of stolen property that has not been acquired in ‘good faith’ (including defences relating to ‘adverse possession’, which can be invoked by a possessor of stolen property after ten years). It would seem inconceivable that Gurlitt could demonstrate good faith in the circumstances, given his father’s possession of the stolen artworks and his own attempts to keep the artworks concealed. However, the bad news for claimants is that under German law, Gurlitt has a special limitation defence that it appears he would be able to rely upon: because he had been in possession of the collection for more than 30 years (his mother died in 1967), Gurlitt could assert that all recovery claims are now time-barred. The 30-year rule astonishingly applies in Germany even to bad-faith possessors of stolen artworks, in contrast to the laws of many other countries. While Gurlitt would be entitled to waive this defence should he wish, his public pronouncements to date indicate that he will choose to rely upon it. The injustice caused by the 30-year rule has led the Bavarian minister of justice to propose that it should be scrapped and for this amendment to have retroactive effect (so that it can apply to the Gurlitt hoard). Until this rule has been repealed, however, do not expect any restitution claims in the German courts. Conclusion The recovery of stolen artworks takes place against a complicated international legal landscape. Most countries, including England, under their civil laws, prohibit the thief or those connected to the theft from ever acquiring good title to stolen property, which means in theory at least (leaving aside evidential and waiver issues) that claims can go back for hundreds of years. However, to avoid injustice, most legal systems also have time limits to benefit innocent or good-faith purchasers of stolen property. English law, for example, contains a defence that if a possessor can establish that stolen property has been acquired in good faith (by him or by others) and that six years have elapsed from the date of the good-faith acquisition, then the original owner’s title to the property is extinguished. Unfortunately, the laws of ownership diverge significantly between jurisdictions. Where a claim is brought and which law is applied by the court (in some situations, courts may also apply foreign laws relating to ownership in preference to domestic law) can have huge consequences for the viability of recovery claims. Claimants need to be mindful of these pitfalls when recovering stolen art.
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Imaginary Boys
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Beauty is always with you by Dale vN Marshall
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500 editions, individually signed and numbered by Peter Doig. 640mm x 860mm, full bleed image (without border, unframed)
Courtesy Peter Doig, Michael Werner Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland
ATHR GALLERY ZIAD ANTAR
LIMINALITY / A SOLO EXHIBITION 22.01.2014 - 01.04.2014 ATHR GALLERY, JEDDAH
IBRAHIM ABUMSMAR
KITES RISE HIGHEST AGAINST THE WIND A RESIDENCY PROJECT 05.02.2014 - 31.03.2014 ATHR GALLERY, JEDDAH
HAZEM HARB
WE USED TO FLY ON WATER / AN INSTALLATION 05.02.2014 - 31.03.2014 ATHR GALLERY, JEDDAH
THE ARMORY
PIER 94: THE ARMORY PRESENTS 06 -09.03.2014 NEW YORK, USA
ART DUBAI BOOTH A29 19 - 22.03.14 DUBAI, UAE
ART BASEL HONG KONG FEATURING AHMED MATER 15 - 18.05.2014 HONG KONG, CHINA
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Hazem Harb We Used To Fly on Water, 2014 Installation of 20 steel cases H50 x W400 cm
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Exhibition Preview 14.03.14 / 5-7pm Admission Free Open Tues – Sun Collective Gallery City Observatory & City Dome 38 Calton Hill, Edinburgh, EH7 5AA + 44 (0)131 556 1264 mail@collectivegallery.net www.collectivegallery.net
David Osbaldeston 15.03.14 – 27.04.14
Image credit: David Osbaldeston, The Measure of All Things, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London
Premiums Interim Projects
7–19 March 2014
Funded by: RA Schools sponsored by
Rebecca Ackroyd, Fondle (detail)
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Visual Arts: Projects / Events / Exhibitions
Gabriel Kuri ‘All probability resolves into form’ 4 April — 7 June, 2014 21 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow, G3 6DF www.thecommonguild.org.uk
Image courtesy of the artist.
The Common Guild is supported by:
New work including painting, sculpture, photography, video and performance
Burlington Gardens Admission free royalacademy.org.uk
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Image: The Armory Show 2014 Commissioned Artist, Xu Zhen, Under Heaven (detail), 2012-2013. Powered by
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Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com
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Sponsor’s statement EFG International is pleased to be associated with ArtReview and its FutureGreats issue. Over the three years that this partnership has been running it has been a pleasure to witness the rise to prominence of many of the artists championed early on in these pages. Artists such as Ed Atkins and Helen Marten (2011) are now well-known names on the international circuit, while Elizabeth Price (also selected in 2011, and a selector in 2013) has gone on to win the Turner Prize. Of those selected in 2012, Wael Shawky has just closed his first major London exhibition, at the Serpentine Gallery, while Petrit Halilaj has completed a major exhibition at Wiels, Brussels. We look forward to the 30 artists included this year – and the diverse array of backgrounds and agendas they represent – going on to achieve similar success. In many ways, each new edition of FutureGreats is a record of a successive generation’s take on the rapidly changing world in which we live. And the themes that characterise the artists presented on these pages are ones that resonate strongly with us at EFG International: the development of emerging new talent, an ever more comprehensive global scope and the expression of a consequently diverse range of interests and passions. Keith Gapp Head of Strategy and Marketing, EFG International Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com
Introduction Everyone’s looking for the next big thing. Newness is central to our ideas of progress and advancement and, well, much of the ideology that orbits global capitalism as we know it. The quest for the new is a constant mantra for successive generations seeking to distinguish themselves from everything that came before. Novelty becomes branding (a named group or movement) which becomes the focus of marketing: right now in art we’re being sold the 89plus generation, the post-Internet generation, etc. And there’s no escaping the fact that FutureGreats itself is a brand (hey, our designers even dropped the space between the two words this year). But it doesn’t represent anything specific that can be marketed (although we back ourselves and the other people choosing the artists you’re about to meet enough to think that this is worth investing some of your time and attention in). Nothing, other than a lack of major recognition, defines the artists in this list. We ask artists, curators and critics to tell us who they’ll be looking out for over the next 12 months. We don’t restrict the choice by age (they don’t have to be young) or geographic location (they don’t have to come from a thrusting new economy). We’re philosophical about the idea of novelty; ideas might be kicking around for years before resolving themselves into a coherent work of art. What we are interested in is artists who reflect upon the problems of our times. In the following pages you’ll find thinking about issues of which you’ll be all too aware: surveillance, economic upheaval, the weight of history… And perhaps other things you never knew you should be thinking about. Our thanks for the continuing support of EFG International, without which we would not be able to undertake a project of such scope, and to all the selectors who have participated in it. ArtReview
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Aliza Nisenbaum Brooklyn-based Mexican artist Aliza Nisenbaum makes paintings. Taking the route of big, brushy and ethereal abstraction after graduation in 2005 from the Art Institute of Chicago, her work has seen a recent turn to figuration. Nisenbaum depicts flowers, textual material (eg, letters from family and friends) and predominantly indigenous Mexicans and Latin Americans. Her painting style is variously reminiscent of New York intimists like Alice Neel, Fairfield Porter, Joe Brainard and Jane Freilicher, while her bright, galvanic palette is liable to bring to mind native heroes such as Dr Atl and the muralists. Such a unique combina-
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tion is particularly poignant for several reasons. First of all, in a global ‘discourse’ of painting dominated by generic forms of largely fungible and thoroughly diluted abstraction, such socially and geographically specific intimism feels refreshingly focused. Secondly, what happens when you combine a patently intimate mode of painting and, say, portraiture as practised by the above-mentioned New Yorkers – which borders on being private – with larger social concerns? Once you are aware of the extent Veronica, Marrisa, and Gustavo, 2013, oil on linen, 130 × 84 cm. Courtesy the artist
to which indigenous people are discriminated against in Mexico, such that they are virtually absent from all representation in the media and advertising (indeed, judging by commercials, you would think that the whole country issued from the same presumably patrician loins as Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz), the mere act of indigenous representation assumes a certain political significance. It is Nisenbaum’s awareness of and capacity to synthesise two culturally distinct traditions of painting while raising their stakes in novel ways (not to mention that she is also a great colourist) that makes her someone worthy of special attention.
selected by Chris Sharp 13/02/2014 10:36
Radamés ‘Juni’ Figueroa
I bring the flavour of the beach in my body and a taste of coconut that burns me, a night song in my throat, banana spots run through by blood. I bring the rumour of the waves in my ears and echoes of the drums that rapture me. Ismael Rivera, Seis de Borinquen (1975) The constant concern of Radamés ‘Juni’ Figueroa’s work has been to investigate the possibilities for creating an artistic language from a Caribbean tropical context. Central to his aesthetic investigation have been ideas of leisure and the possibilities for creation outside of the structures of capitalist workforce exploitation. Using the concept of the ‘tropical readymade’, Figueroa has placed used trainers with plants growing out of them in gallery spaces; he has constructed ‘rainbows’ out of spraypainted plastic pipes sprouting from concrete buckets; and he has made never-ending fountains from which whisky and coconut water flow.
A series of recent large-scale installations take his concept of the tropical readymade to a different scale. Eucalyptus Triangle for Meditation (2013) in the 43rd Salón (inter) Nacional de Artistas in Medellín comprised a narrow, rectangular wooden walkway/bench, raised on stilts below one of the Salón’s skylights, that served as a meditation platform and a place from which to experience the Arecaceae palms planted in tubs below it and the camouflagestyle mural Figueroa had painted on the wall behind using the colour palette of the rainbow eucalyptus tree. Meanwhile, his Casa Club – Tree House of Naguabo (2013) project – developed as part of his one-year fellowship at Puerto
Punto de Encuentro ‘El Arcoiris’, 2010, plastic tubing, spraypaint, tropical plants, plant pots, coconut-water fountain. Courtesy the artist
Rican not-for-profit Beta-Local – was a wooden structure constructed of found discarded material in the middle of the eucalyptus forest in Naguabo. Built with the help of friends, the project was partly improvised and used as little money as possible. Casa Club… celebrated friendship and served as an experimental platform activated by weekend activities – from barbecues to concerts – or functioned more simply as a place to hang out, where visitors could immerse themselves in the forest. An upcoming exhibition at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, and his participation in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, where he will build a structure/intervention in the museum’s exterior sculpture courtyard, will give the New York public an opportunity to experience Radamés ‘Juni’ Figueroa’s work live, while at the same time allowing Figueroa to tropicalise New York.
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Morag Keil Visitors to Morag Keil’s show Potpourri at London’s Cubitt Gallery last year encountered an Internetbased setup leagues away from the technocratic boosterism that’s reshaped our society over the last decade. An unglamorous black Dell PC sat on an office workstation, streaming the Scottish artist’s eponymous seven-minute 2013 film (the website’s URL on a stack of cheap business cards). Here, as footage alternated between a man and a woman pottering around their flats and paparazzi-style footage of zooming motorcycles, a collaged soundtrack was recited by multiple speakers, including message-board comments, N-Dubz’s Tulisa commenting on feeling victimised after her sex tape was leaked, someone lauding Marilyn Manson and a woman talking about how selling images to (presumably adult) websites necessitates sexualising yourself in conventional ways in search of likes – “it’s a trap. The choice is just whether or not you want to make money” – and how, dismayingly, it’s not the industry’s mechanics that are demonised but the girls themselves.
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Keil’s work has repeatedly addressed the illusory freedoms of laptop-enabled selfemployment and online life in general, whether you’re a knowledge worker, a celebrity or a Heat reader. Existence under these terms as well as in the wider, capitalism-driven world is an ongoing tussle enacted on multiple fronts – gendered, biopolitical, commercial – suggests a work like Civil War (2012), an audio installation (again using ugly PC speakers, suspended from the ceiling) mixing Peckham street noise, adverts for amusement parks and audio tracks from Tekken 6 (‘…the digital cartoonified noise of a man beating a woman would be a competitive game, entertainment,’ Keil said in an interview with Alex Waters). A hallmark of Keil’s installations, meanwhile, is forlorn shop mannequins, shorthand for a stymied sales pitch. Relentless definition from outside has been Keil’s wheelhouse since she began, several years Potpourri, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and Cubitt Gallery, London
ago, making ‘self portrait’ paintings based on found jpegs: the very process of painting presented as performative identification. The astringent pleasure of her rough-edged art has been its steady expansion of this focus, updating of identity politicking, navigating of our movement online while maintaining corporeality and refusal to believe in artworld exceptionalism. In Reality Bites (2013), for example, as the interviewer’s voice is chopped and screwed, and video footage gets caught in short redundant loops, artists talk about housing issues, the unglamorous fill-in work they do, how the latter is affected by oldfashioned gender roles and how art itself can become a business. Even if Keil didn’t sustain a wrong-footing approach to a medium that itself militates against such a fate for herself, her gadfly temperament would still be evident in her art’s rigorous antievangelism for what the modern world loves most: consumption, the bright digital abyss and the chimera, under these conditions, of You 2.0.
selected by Martin Herbert 13/02/2014 10:36
Yamaguchi Akira
The best artist in Japan is Yamaguchi Akira. However, while a huge number of Japan’s art viewers know him well, the fact is that in other countries he does not yet seem to be widely appreciated. Yamaguchi possesses the most refined skill of any artist in Japan. He can, for example, accurately depict virtually any object in the world without reference to photographs, through the sheer power of his imagination and memory. While his technique is based on the traditional Oriental method of painting sharply defined outlines with the brush, having originally studied oil painting at art school he is equally in command of Western methods such as perspective and shading. There are some ‘fine artists’ in Japan who have abandoned the disciplined training of artistic skill, and who thus tend to be held in contempt by people as if they were simply manga artists or illustrators.
It is Yamaguchi alone who has earned their particular respect. So – is he simply a gifted artisan? On the contrary. Yamaguchi is also the most intellectual artist in Japan. In the various motifs he chooses to incorporate into his works, both a profound historical insight and a sharp critique of civilisation are fully discernible. While avidly directing his gaze towards the international contemporary art scene (again, often in a critical manner), he also creates work in media such as installation and video. Not only that, but in 2012 he published a book to explain the characteristics of traditional Japanese painting from a modern point of view. It was recognised with Department Store: New Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi, 2004,pen,watercolour on paper, 59 × 84 cm. Photo: Keizo Kioku. © the artist. Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo
a prize for the most authoritative work of criticism in Japan (selected by a jury of well-known intellectuals). So – is he then merely a cool-headed observer? This is not the case either. Virtually all his works are packed full of both a sense of something characteristically ‘Japanese’ (traditional) and the unique humour and esprit of Yamaguchi’s own character. They entice the viewer again and again into a mysterious kind of laughter. A spirit of both pliability and an earnest wish to serve is a richly abundant defining characteristic, infusing Yamaguchi’s works as well as the character of the man himself. As someone with both the most genuine talent and the greatest popularity in the artworld of the Far East, Yamaguchi Akira is an artist you should know about – right now.
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Ashish Avikunthak While moving from the gallery to the cinema might be very of-the-moment (McQueen, Taylor-Wood and, prior to them, Schnabel), it is unusual to see a practitioner go the other way. However, this is the trajectory of Indian filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak, a regular on the film-festival circuit for over a decade. Avikunthak’s film Katho Upanishad (2011) was shown as a three-channel projection in Mumbai’s Chatterjee & Lal in 2012. His new work Rati Chakravyuh (2013) will be shown there this spring. Avikunthak’s films are highly formal meditations on ritual, time and death. They are rooted in Indian religion, philosophy and history, without being about any of these in an anthropological way. Unlike his Indian peers, who use symbols (tiffins, bindis and so on) of their cultural identity in a way that is decipherable for biennial and art-fair audiences, Avikunthak’s works strongly resist being so easily packaged for the new global artworld circuits. Vakratunda Swaha (2010) begins with a piece of footage, shot in 1997, of Girish Dahiwale, a friend of Avikunthak, immersing a statue of the elephant god Ganesha into the sea, before the film moves on to a funeral ritual (Dahiwale committed suicide a year after the footage was filmed). The work then takes a turn for the hallucinatory with masked subjects, including the artist in a gas mask (invoking the
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elephant god’s trunk), walking against the flow of traffic, before a final appearance of the footage of Dahiwale immersing the statue, as voices chant the Ganapati Upanishad. The effect on a viewer unfamiliar with Indian religion and history is akin to being thrust into a series of rituals without having any literal idea of what those rituals might be about. This is important. In an artworld where an increasing number of critics are arguing that much globalised art takes the form of hollowedout visual Esperanto, Avikunthak’s works insist on an Indian epistemology while utilising a rigorously formal visual language that is clearly aware of Western avant-garde practices such as those of Andrei Tarkovsky and Samuel Beckett. These are self-consciously difficult works that are filmed in a self-consciously beautiful way. Katho Upanishad is a dreamily meandering adaptation of a 2,500-word Sanskrit text about enlightenment and nirvana. On the one hand, the work is clearly open to an interpretation below Rati Chakravyuh, 013, production photo. Photo: Dibendu Dutta. Courtesy the artist. facing page, top Vakratunda Swaha (film still), 2010, 16mm negative to digital frame transfer. facing page, bottom Katho Upanishad (film still), 2011, digital frame grab. all works Courtesy the artist
that is rooted in an in-depth understanding of the Upanishads, a series of texts that are the source of the key tenets of both Hinduism and Buddhism. On the other hand, there is no prerequisite to have a full grasp of the Upanishads in the same way that there is no prerequisite to understand the complex symbolic system Matthew Barney devised for The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) in order to watch those similarly visually lush works. In a recent interview Avikunthak has stated that his films ‘are not codes that have to be decoded or cracked’. Instead he has drawn parallels with visiting a temple, where the majority of worshippers do not have a literal understanding of the ritual that takes place in Sanskrit (a situation analogous to attending church ceremonies that still take place in Latin). There is something wilfully idiosyncratic in this mode of making work that is visually seductive while being on another level deliberately incomprehensible to many viewers. Avikunthak’s work was largely ignored as his contemporaries at art school entered the speculation-driven contemporary Indian art market during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Now that that scene has shot off a cliff and left a bruised generation of gallerists and artists, his belated emergence within the gallery circuit is to be welcomed.
selected by Niru Ratnam
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Yoshinori Niwa
Yoshinori Niwa is known for projects that work as social interventions realised through diverse media including performance, video and installation. In recent years, Niwa has been exploring the idea of value and exchange through our daily behaviour in public space. Through such self-explanatory works as Exchanging Between Turkish Lire and Euros in Istanbul Until There Is Nothing Left (2011), Depositing All the Money in My Pocket in the Street (2012) or Duplicating My House Key and Distributing the Copies (2012), Niwa questions the relationship between larger social and economic conditions and their meaning for individuals through nonsensical actions. Niwa’s interests in social conditions have increasingly led him to engage with the historical and political context of ideologies, and to produce works on the theme of rethinking socialism and communism. As a Japanese artist born in 1982, he has no real
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experience of the Cold War or the ideologies that underpinned it, but wanted to seek out ways in which to somehow grasp a fragment of that history as ‘real incident’, or to awaken this past in the contemporary moment. In 2010 he travelled to Romania to interview former members of its Socialist party, which resulted in Tossing Socialists in the Air in Romania (2010). The following year, he asked people in Moscow if he could borrow something from them related to Vladimir Lenin. He collected 150 portraits, photographs, propaganda posters, newspaper articles, flags and badges of the Communist leader, and exhibited them under the title Looking for Vladimir Lenin at Moscow Apartments at Ai Kowada Gallery, Tokyo, in 2012. The project revealed the gap between the political state Walk in the Opposite Direction of a Demonstration Parade, 2011, video document of performance, 10 min 1 sec. Courtesy Ai Kowada Gallery, Tokyo
of the nation and the individual citizens’ state of mind, an interest the artist pursued in two works on the Japanese Communist party, which has existed for over 90 years, during which time its significance and position in Japanese society has gone through major changes. For Proposing to Hold Up Karl Marx to the Japanese Communist Party (2013), Niwa interviewed various members of the party and questioned their understanding of Marx while carrying a poster of him around the city. Meanwhile in Celebrating Karl Marx’s Birthday with Japanese Communist Party (2013), he verified how Marx and his concept of communism have been accepted in local cities in Japan. It is this continuous questioning, in a deliberately nonsensical manner, of the shared understandings within social and political history, and exploration of the parallels between that and the uncertainties of Japanese society, that makes Niwa’s art something we won’t be able to overlook in the years to come.
selected by Mami Kataoka 13/02/2014 10:36
Flaka Haliti The intimacy that is indicated in Flaka Haliti’s work is mischievous. Here, personal experiences such as love, loneliness and longing are taken at face value but are immediately turned into points of systematic general inquiry. The banal becomes serious, and vice versa. Take, for example, the video installation I Miss You, I Miss You, ’Till I Don’t Miss You Anymore (2012), in which she reclaims love for art, from Hollywood and the rest of pop culture. Actual personal messages sent across long distances during the three stages of love – falling in love, being in love, falling out of love – are typed out on three flatscreens suspended from the ceiling. As the words appear in familiar, more or less clichéd phrases on the screens, they also resonate in the space, via Google Translate’s mechanical female voice, which renders them in English. Here Haliti is searching for the deep meaning in a shared yet unique experience.
Migration and other forms of mobility are the parents of the kind of long-distance relationships Haliti has in mind – 95 percent of which fail, according to the artist herself. Living between Pristina, Frankfurt and Munich, she should be no stranger to that situation. As a foreign student at Frankfurt’s Städelschule she explored the segregated, transitory expat community in the German banking capital and communications hub, where locals and internationals hardly meet. Interviews with expats were transformed into language-course-like audio tracks with simple statements such as “I came to Frankfurt for my job”, “I don’t speak German, as I don’t need it for my daily occupations” and “I feel international here”. Yet, coming from Pristina, the artist – like so many others – was I Miss You, I Miss You, ’Till I Don’t Miss You Anymore (detail), 2012, mixed media, video installation. Photo: Stacion. © the artist. Courtesy CCA Pristina
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continuously considered an immigrant rather than an ‘international’ in Germany. There is almost always a performative element to Haliti’s work, whether she’s declaring artists’ legal immunity, like diplomats, in a newspaper announcement on 1 April, or smuggling a bull’s testes into a gallery. The latter happened in Pristina in 2007, at a time when only male artists from Kosovo were visible internationally. Addressing the imbalance, Haliti was met with the comment, ‘It’s because women don’t have balls’. Upon which she secretly introduced two such organs into an exhibition of her peers, filming the process and providing Kosovo with its very first illegal art action. Conformism is challenged, head-on, by this artist who may not have a signature style in terms of her work’s appearance, but definitely does in her approach. During 2014 she will have solo exhibitions at Mumok in Vienna, Kosovo National Gallery in Pristina and Studio Nihil Baxter in Berlin.
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Zach Blas Want to evade face recognition by looking great? Try Zach Blas’s tools of ‘queer opacity’. Fag Face Mask (2012), from his ongoing Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–), creates facial anonymity by confusing visual recognition patterns. A pink sparkling plastic phenomenon, it is concocted (or so we are told) by the biometrical measurements of a multitude of gay men. The superimposed result doesn’t resemble any contemporary human or other known organic figure. But it makes a wonderful in-your-face statement about elegance, defiance and sex – as in innovative procreation. What act of creation spawned these faces? Might our species look like this if all Palaeolithic human genres and genders had cross-mated even more vigorously and, nonchalantly, also included alien purveyors, occasional fern scrubs and sea cucumbers? But wait: we may still get there in the future! Mate with sparkling plastic now and here’s looking at you in a million years! The masks most charmingly make the point that the way to defy standard macho technosurveillance and infomilitarism is not via an equally macho tech-obsessive
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countermovement rife with male authoritarianism, but miraculous, multifaceted sex. Blas is not alone in such contemporary inquiry. Artists like Laura Poitras, Metahaven, Jesse Darling, Sang Mun, Tyler Coburn, Dmytri Kleiner, Andrew Norman Wilson and James Bridle, and organisations such as Auto Italia South East deal, in one way or another, with the affective, political, material, social aspects of a radically fucked up, unevenly developed, both exhilarating and disturbing networked space. (Poitras most obviously with mindboggling and game-changing consequences. She is the most successful, smart and competent political artist of the early-twenty-first century. She, Glenn Greenwald – who is the only person besides Poitras who has a full archive of the global surveillance disclosure initiated by Edward Snowden – and Chelsea Manning completely overthrew the traditionally dead white-male relationship between cutting-edge technology and gender.) Works by Rabih Mroué and Lina Facial Weaponization Suite: Fag Face Mask, 2012. Photo: Christopher O’Leary. Courtesy the artist
Saneh, Trevor Paglen, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Harun Farocki and Raqs Media Collective have set important precedents for this. On the other hand, most recent digitally inflected art seems to effortlessly wipe away queer, feminist, political or actually any position whatsoever. All-male shows and accelerationist monogender discussions return as the new/ old norm. In this context Blas’s approach brings a dash of glamour and mischief to a postdigital aesthetics partly driven by testosterone-heavy technocults and partly by glib brand looks. While a lot of contemporary technologically oriented art tries to resuscitate the wreckage of Futurism, or overidentifies with strategies of surgical marketing and apple polishing, Blas’s work insists that one doesn’t need to brand oneself into voluntary servitude or to eagerly identify with the aggressor. It may well suffice to fuck him. Or her. Or it. It’s such a reasonable idea and possibly much more fun too! Fuck military technology. Fuck infrastructure. Fuck drones. Fuck protocol ’til it hums with pleasure. Throw in glitter and some shiny sensors. And after a few million years, there might be a smashing progeny!
selected by Hito Steyerl 13/02/2014 10:36
Andrea Romano
Andrea Romano likes difficult titles, with a special fondness for hendiadys – wherein a single idea is expressed via two words connected with ‘and’. Doorkijkje, his recent show at Fluxia gallery, in Milan, was named after the Flemish term for the see-through doorway that allows the public to view something outside the pictured room in Dutch Old Master painting. His Milanese debut solo, in 2011, at Gasconade, was titled Claque & Shill, like the series he presented: laboriously detailed drawings (of a white tiger with a rare deformity) encased in heavy marble frames ‘carved to the limit of their substance’, as Romano describes them. These are beautifully refined objects striving for benevolence and applause, tough and well aware that perfection and consensus can easily reach breaking point.
And they’re not to be trusted. In 2010, Romano undertook for weeks a shared performance with fellow artist and friend Alessandro Agudio that consisted of their vilifying each other in front of common acquaintances, to test the field’s limits. Tension between two polarities is a recursive feature. Last year in Paris, at Gaudel de Stampa, he created a short-circuit between the ‘newest’ possible (and thus most top left Jelena Pillow Cast (2), 2013, digital print on aluminium, 93 × 67 cm. Photo: Andrea Rossetti top right Highlight, 2013, liquid crystal, pigment, stereolithographed nylon, 56 × 26 × 24 cm. Courtesy Gaudel De Stampa, Paris above Marco Mother Mold (1), 2013, print on aluminium, 118 × 78 cm. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy Fluxia, Milan
quickly obsolete) polyurethane sculptures, made with a 3D printer and painted with a shiny prototype car varnish (Highlights, 2013–), and a series of felt-pen drawings inspired by the ‘modern/primitive’ Flintstones cartoon (H&B, 2012–), focusing on small details of the gestures involved when humans and animals touch. At Fluxia, this evolved into the drawing series Potsherds & Gaze (2013), in which the artist tried to reconstruct, from memory, some of the figures from the previous show), while the tactile seduction of the polished image was represented by black-and-white photos, shot in collaboration with fashion photographer Delfino Sisto Legnani, where naked models embrace a sculpted cushion, which thereby conjoins hardness and softness. One quality by means of two, over and over again.
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Otobong Nkanga Nigerian-born, Berlin-based Otobong Nkanga’s early training in the converging traditions of live arts and performance lend a decidedly wayward, playful charge to her research-heavy artistic practice, steering her work away from the dour academicism that so often cripples art projects invested in the production and dissemination of knowledge. The lighthearted tone that characterises Nkanga’s use of her own body (and voice) does not belie the heft and seriousness of the subjects of her research; if anything, it proves that particular research to be a lived, truly embodied experience. What, then, commands the investigative attention of her heterogeneous, multidisciplinary practice in drawing and photography, installation and
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video? The role of mapping (ie, the visual imagination) in the history of colonialism; the dense web of social, political and economic tensions and outright conflicts percolating around the oil-rich Niger Delta in the artist’s native Nigeria; memories of a long-lost childhood home, and memories of the many places that have been home, however provisionally, to the artist ever since; the notion of ownership Glimmer: Fragments, 2014, performance and video, duration of performance 60 min, body-fitting metal sculpture, mica (lepidolite, phlogopite, muscovite, fuchsite, biotite), gloves, plastic card. Presented at Landings: Confrontation and Confession, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Photo: Ernst Van Deursen
of land and precarious living; the malleability of custom and tradition, and the geographic determination of the notion of use value as it attaches itself to certain objects and products… Earthly matters, in other words, centred upon the paradigmatic notion, so pivotal to information and knowledge economies alike, of the resource. One could even think of Nkanga’s work as a species of Land art for the twenty-first century, ie, updated for a globalised, mobile and unmoored world hardly conceivable to the macho pioneers of 1960s Earth art – an update whose aesthetic resourcefulness must evidently match the challenges of the earth’s fought-over riches. This the work of Otobong Nkanga does with keen visual intelligence and great gusto.
selected by Dieter Roelstraete 13/02/2014 10:37
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selected by David Everitt Howe 13/02/2014 10:38
It wouldn’t be much of an insult to compare Anicka Yi’s work to cheap takeout, because that’s kind of what it is. You could smell her 2011 47 Canal show Sous-Vide before seeing it, as the bouquet of tempura-fried flowers comprising the disembodied head of Sister (2011) left a particularly pungent smell in the air. The flowers, overflowing out of the neck of a cheap-looking red sweater, eventually lost their aroma, letting the more understated odour of olive oil take centre stage. It gurgled, drooled even – from holes punched into the walls of a nearby room, in the work Auras, Orgasms, and Nervous Peaches (2011) – before collecting in a trough near the floor. For her contribution to Some End of Things (2013) at Basel’s Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Yi’s sad little fried friends made another appearance, this time laid to rest on blocks of resin in cardboard boxes. Arranged in several rows on the floor, they resembled
Donald Judd’s 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum (1982–6) turned into small, messy, fucked-up food trays that overwhelmed the rest of the show with their stench, which either made you hungry, if you’re into fried food, or vomit, if you’re not. This is hardly the stuff neominimalist dreams are made of. As simple and spare as her installations can be, they’re remarkably abject in the sense that food – and by extension smell – attributes something grotesquely bodily to everything she makes, no matter how provisionally antiseptic, such as her stretcher frames of soap or the little assemblage sculptures inserted into wall cavities at Lars Friedrich, Berlin, as part below and facing page Tenzingbaharakginaeditscottronnienikolalosangsandrafabiansamuelaninahannahelaine (detail), 2013, flowers, flour, peanuts, plastic, paper, epoxy resin, peanut oil, canola oil, panko-flakes, acrylic, cardboard and aluminium, dimensions variable. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York
of her recent exhibition Denial. One, The Easy Way to Quit New York (2013), features an incongruous mix of media, from a stainless steel showerhandle to fish-oil pills, arranged into something elegantly allegorical about the various industries that constitute our identity. We are living, breathing ciphers of capitalism – shitting and pissing its products, food, perfume or otherwise – a pattern Yi foregrounds, if not destabilises, by rendering these shiny, attractive things functionally ‘unclean’, as Julia Kristeva described the abject, making our ‘identity… feel constantly threatened’. There is, indeed, something sinister to Yi’s works, whether she’s boiling shredded Teva sandals in recalled powdered milk, or vacuum-packing peanuts in a kind of plastic scarf, draped around a Philippe Starck chair. What do these things say about us? The answer, whatever it is, seems particularly cautionary in Yi’s hands.
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Luiza Baldan Luiza Baldan works mostly through photography to investigate, in depth, man’s relationship with architecture, searching for little oddities and breaks in the sameness of everyday life. The immersion of the artist in her subject matter has reached the point where she actually lives in the places – such as Oscar Niemeyer’s iconic ‘Copan’ building in São Paulo – in which she chooses to develop her research. Her stunning images are part of a process in which work and life are mixed together in a dilated performance, which begins at home and spreads throughout the building, studio and streets of the city. The work has no specific end, itself being a recurring experience in the life
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of the artist, who changes address from time to time and creates written narratives of her experiences in order to produce works of this nature. Besides Copan, Baldan has undertaken artistic residencies in other emblematic buildings, experiencing the wonders and paradoxes of living in places that are part of the collective imagination. Included among these projects are Pedregulho (Benfica, Rio de Janeiro, social habitats designed by modernist architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy), Península (Barra da Natal No Minhocao Series, 2009, photo, 120 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist
Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, an ‘eco-neighbourhood’/ ‘neighbourhood-condominium’ constructed during the mid-2000s) and the Raposo Lopes building (Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, dating from the late 1930s and containing one of the largest residential swimming pools – albeit currently deactivated – in Latin America), among others. Above all, it is the sharpness and complexity of Baldan’s photographs, associated with the urgency of the themes she deals with, such as the decay in landmark buildings in Brazil and how housing conditions directly influence the lives of the people she chooses to portray, that makes her one of the most interesting artists of her generation.
selected by Fernanda Brenner 13/02/2014 10:38
Adam Avikainen
The giant abstract painting, measuring some 25 by 15 metres and stretched on a museum wall, is, suggests its creator, but a tiny part of the skin of a monster. And indeed he might be right. Beyond its sheer size, the texture and the dark brown, green and grey colour scheme certainly suggest a monster’s skin. Yet it is also vaguely reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting: a nonhierarchical rhizome, a ‘scene’ of so many possible, imaginary landscapes, a ‘map’ full of doors to immersion and contemplation. The painting has been created not so much by willed, intentional brushstrokes, but by the weather and by organic material such as herbs and ginger roots, with which the canvas has been treated every day. Adam Avikainen is a creator of fictional narratives or imaginary scripts, and the medium through which these scripts are translated into his immediate environment. In such a fashion, Avikainen, who has spent recent years in various parts of East Asia, ‘reads’ both nature and culture by letting them ‘write’ themselves – his art is one in which projection and inscription collapse on real and imaginary canvases, in paintings and installations, and in writings and poems. The skin painting has a story: the monster is called
‘Ginger Glacier’ (as is the painting, from 2012), and combines cold and heat, little and large, in an impossible tension. From a soundtrack of talking teenagers, we hear that the Ginger Glacier is a monstrous, quasi-mythic ‘nonbeing’ that comes to us from a future geological age. It is pictured by Avikainen as a mutation of life, growing out of all life’s symbiotic relation to the sun. It’s not simply that we owe our own and all life on earth to the sun; according to current scientific predictions, this giant burning gas ball will have completely consumed the earth in about five billion years. Indeed, in one billion years all the oceans will have evaporated. Consequently, we humans have less than 50 million years to drastically alter our physical bodies to withstand extreme heat. The Ginger Glacier is a name for what will become of our human bodies as well as all other elemental and spiritual life: a collective body composed of anarchic cellular life forms living and growing in symbiotic relationships, a ‘frozen heat wave’ that ‘dances with the sun’. Ginger Glacier, 2012 (installation view, Taipei Biennial). Courtesy the artist and Monitor, Rome
Like this one, most of Avikainen’s ‘scenarios’ begin when ‘humanity’ as we know it (as something beyond or in control of nature) ceases to exist. They raise awareness of the multiple other actors that define our fate – from the uncountable organisms, such as bacteria, that inhabit our bodies, to the large-scale processes, on a geological and planetary scale, in whose ‘bodies’ we live in much the same fashion as the bacteria in our own. Avikainen’s work makes us familiar again with the alterity of life; it brings us close and into imaginative-sensory contact with that familiar strangeness of mineral, vegetal and mental dimensions of life. Avikainen is a traveller of margins: not merely of the physical world, but of the territories of language, common imaginaries, mental geographies. He tests their limits, and at these limits a world of mimetic inversions and infections begins, a world of anarchic animism, in the face of which Avikainen turns variously into a diviner or a forensic investigator. It is this anarchic and imaginary force behind Avikainen’s idiosyncratic poetics that makes him one of the most challenging artists of today.
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Rayyane Tabet Much of the art of Lebanon’s influential post-Civil War generation – which includes artists such as Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and Rabih Mroué – relies on the status of the photographic image, playing its veracious claim as historical record against itself through strategies of fiction, absence, erasure and latency, to investigate the complex relationship between history and memory. Rayyane Tabet navigates similar terrain but adopts, instead, the approach of an archaeologist, excavating material rather than representational traces. These artefacts then serve as jumping-off points for subtle sculptural installations that attempt to transmute the recent past – personal and collective – into experiences of form, space, surface and weight. Take The Shortest Distance Between Two Points (2013), Tabet’s debut exhibition at Beirut’s Sfeir-Semler Gallery, which traces the chequered history of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, a midcentury endeavour among three American oil companies to connect the oilfields of
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Dammam, Saudi Arabia, to the Mediterranean Sea over land. Tabet distilled more than half a decade of research into a precise sculptural meditation on the line as abstraction: folding rulers traced the pipeline’s path to scale on one wall; 40 steel rings created a line down the centre of the gallery; pages of frayed yellowed stationery, recovered from the company’s abandoned Beirut headquarters, were presented, framed, in a neat row on another wall. Ultimately, every line is just a set of points, and the tension between the line’s unrelenting continuity and the integrity of each point along its path serves as a poignant below How to Play Beirut, 2011, two inkjet prints on archival paper facing page Architecture Lessons (detail), 2012 (installation view, Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, 2012), 1,200 wood block toys cast in concrete, dimensions variable both images Courtesy the artist and Gallery Sfeir-Semler, Beirut & Hamburg
metaphor for the difficulties of excavating and representing history. In other projects Tabet uses popular games and rituals to help lighten the load of history. Inspired by an American college drinking game named after his hometown, How to Play Beirut (2009) riffs on the double meaning of being ‘bombed’. Tabet produced a table customised for the game, the holes cut out to hold beer glasses introducing craterlike scars into the city map grafted onto its surface. And for Fire/Cast/Draw (2013), Tabet adapted a ritual to ward off evil performed by his superstitious grandmother into an artistic act: a handful of lead shot, each the weight of a bullet, was cast and cooled in water into a unique nugget, whose craggy surfaces are supposed to reveal your enemy’s face, thus neutralising his power. Tabet repeated this 5,000 times, extending its promise of protection to the collective, materialising, through art and superstition, the missing evidence needed to bring to justice those culpable for the region’s many conflicts and failures.
selected by Murtaza Vali 13/02/2014 10:38
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Benoî t Maire Within a context where there are many tedious clichés about how bad things are – how shallow and useless art has become – Benoît Maire seems to have no place. And he is not alone in this nowhere. It is possible that he has no place because his work is geared to escape any given contemporary locale. He operates in relation to the history of ideas and a quizzical recasting of philosophy. Maire does not do this in order to create a pedagogical practice where the artist is reduced to giving amusingly subjective lectures within an academic context. His relationship to philosophy operates in terms of ideas as material. Asking how ideas find material form and how ideas can be used as a way to measure ideas in context. Constantly moving to and fro
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between measuring, checking and recasting concepts into material form and back again. There is a constant to and fro here, also, between states of consideration and application. It is always too early or too late to decide what might constitute a future anything, let alone a future great. It might be better to think about someone who deals with great ideas. Moving recently away from art as a form with which to measure ideas, Maire is moving into a set of works that involve the development of a new language of images. Images functioning in Untitled, 2013, silk print on canvas, 135 × 220 cm. Photo: Joachim Schulz. Courtesy Croy Nielsen, Berlin
relation to each other. A step away from the abstraction of language as a series of marks towards the consideration of ideas as a set of interrelated images. There remains no consolidation of form and content here, but no rejection of it either. There is no stability here. There is a strong obligation on the viewer to use the work – but no instruction manual. The work is more of a codex. A transition from scroll to book. The future greatness here is the ability to find forms that function as codices. Taking ideas and recasting them into transitional mode. Operating between ideas. Continuing regardless. Building up a sequence of works that are restless.
selected by Liam Gillick 13/02/2014 10:38
Fergal Stapleton
Fergal Stapleton’s work occupies a mysterious and beautiful place between something like high seriousness and borderline worthlessness. A main characteristic of all his work is the extreme precision of its tunings – and then look at what is being tuned: bare little moments of attention, variations of low-energy hope, the slight, the perfect, the sad. His output has some scope to it – from perfectly otherworldly large oil paintings of animal/spirit conversations/ceremonies, to smaller oils of peculiar, delicate blossoms, unlikely glassware, meagre fivers, coins and
other dimly shining things. And then there are the sculptures: varied accumulations of strange-but-familiar objects such as concrete lumps inside dark cases, red-lit like remote items from another world; freestanding panels, some mirrored gold, bearing lowly arrangements of pale light and grey concrete; and constructions with motors and flapping fabric or wavering lightbulbs. And there are also much larger 2moro (II), 2014, acrylic sheet, paper, Conté crayon, LED, electrical fittings, MDF, household paint, 90 × 80 × 80 cm. Courtesy Carl Freedman Gallery, London
works, such as his pale, hengelike monuments of polystyrene and household emulsion. Against the grain of artworld trends, Stapleton has been quietly influential to a certain breed of younger artist for at least a decade, and is recognisable as an exemplary force in his attitudes to art. With his new show at Carl Freedman Gallery, London (to 15 March), and a new set of works, Stapleton looks like he’s in range of the public eye once more, and those mysterious forces that surround art trajectories again just need that boost to bring his career closer to its proper place.
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Michael E. Smith On entering an exhibition of recent work by Michael E. Smith, you might be forgiven for not instantly noticing where that work is. Indeed, your first impression is of overwhelming emptiness. Then you might notice a folded sweatshirt perched on something that looks like (and is) a wasp’s nest, covered in some sort of silver plasticky goop so that it also suggests a broken or partially melted engine part. The largely empty gallery setting does not elevate this object, but instead exaggerates its seemingly pathetic and lonely status. Nearby you might come across a mixing bowl over which someone has stretched a white T-shirt. It seems at once empty and obese. For all that something is present (much to your relief), something also seems absent: the body the T-shirt was designed to house, the contents of the mixing bowl. And then there’s what looks like a crumpled plastic bag that might once have contained butcher’s offal or medical waste (actually the effect, in Meat Wad, 2013, is created using translucent printed vinyl) hanging from a tubeless strip-light fitting on the gallery’s ceiling. Now you realise that there’s not much in the way of lighting here. But perhaps this goes with an overall impression
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that’s more one of bafflement than illumination. Then again, that might be because in recent years you’ve been conditioned to expect art galleries to deliver big, dramatic artistic statements. Even when they involve a certain minimalist aesthetic. The overall feeling of this exhibition, which took place at Berlin’s KOW last year, is of staring at the kind of urban detritus that might have washed up on some nearby beach, having previously suffocated some passing wildlife (definitely the sensation when staring at Tucan Sam, 2013, a bundle of coloured feathers balled up in plastic sheeting, the whole attached to the gallery wall), and that’s now waiting to be examined and catalogued by a team of
below Michael E. Smith, 2013 (installation view, KOW, Berlin). Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin facing page, top Untitled, 2013, sweatshirt, wasp nest, plastic, 34 × 23 × 29 cm. Private Collection, Cologne facing page, bottom Meat Wad, 2013, printed vinyl, 27 × 18 × 13 cm. Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin all images Photo: Alexander Koch
environmental activists as evidence for their next campaign. Not that Smith insists on that last part. Life’s flotsam isn’t necessarily its pollution. Sometimes it’s the basis for an archaeological study of our ruined times. Environment is key to Smith’s work in more ways than one. For example, some works, such as Untitled (2013), which features a car’s front seat mounted like a severed head on a windowsill, might conjure the plight of the artist’s native city, Detroit (and a postrecessional state of being more generally). Others, such as Mike (2013), evoke famous American chickens that had long lives despite losing their heads and the coincidence of the artist and his American gallerists (the Michaels Clifton and Benevento) sharing a name. (See? It’s not all doom and gloom.) But most important, given the way Smith currently treats a gallery space, you have to look for his work before you can look at it. And then wonder what it’s doing there at all. And it’s this ability to build up a viewer’s state of consciousness, while simultaneously forcing him or her to look at the traces of a breakdown, which makes his work so special.
selected by Mark Rappolt 13/02/2014 10:38
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Rokni Haerizadeh
For Rokni Haerizadeh, life is rendered as a series of elaborate rituals. The Dubai-based artist is perhaps best known for painterly tableaux whose subject matter draws from weddings, galas, murders, parades, funerals, riots and revolutions. His human forms – often very large and wildly expressionist – turn a crooked lens onto the madness of contemporary society. The Fictionville series (2009–) takes as its inspiration Iranian playwright Bijan Mofid’s popular musical play Shahr-e Qesseh, or City of Tales (1968). That play’s characters are, alternately, parrots, monkeys, elephants and, of course, an ass. While Shahr-e Qesseh’s trenchant critique was rooted in prerevolutionary Iran,
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its resonance extends to the present day. Fictionville’s protagonists, also animal-humans, populate familiar scenes drawn from the news media – in particular images of strife from around the world. Victims, killers, bystanders, men, women, politicians, the media apparatus itself: no one is let off the hook. Large washes of watercolour are tempered by the artist’s meticulous pencilwork – what he refers to as
My Heart Is Not Here, My Heart’s in the Highlands, Chasing the Deers, 2013, gesso, ink and watercolour on printed paper, 30 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai
doodling – creating a net effect of disquieting, uncomfortable beauty. A recent animation work, Reign of Winter (2012–13) – shown at last year’s Carnegie International – takes the pomp and gaudy gaiety of the British royal wedding, starring Prince William and Kate Middleton, as its material. Crafted in meticulous stop-motion style, heads wobble and fall, arms droop, torsos assume the form of demonic heads. Herein is macabre spectacle – not unlike the spectacle of war, you might say – experienced as artistic licence. It is via the act of deliberate deformation that the work is anchored in the hand and body of the artist, and finally that the public is rendered private.
selected by Negar Azimi 13/02/2014 10:38
Yu Honglei Yu Honglei is one of the few artists of the post-1980s generation who makes art in all kinds of media but insists on describing himself as a practitioner of just one: sculpture. He was trained as an animator, but started producing art in the form of a series of object-based sculptures, each of which has a story to tell. Since his 2013 solo exhibition Everything Is Extremely Important: There Is Nothing That Will Not Come Back Again, at Beijing’s Magician Space, he has developed a new strategy of building up ‘scenes’ or ‘constellations of works’ that make multiple artworks part of a single narrative. For Yu, sculpture is about developing new forms and creating new life out of the objects he encounters in the everyday. In particular, he is drawn to objects that are encountered once and then disappear without being noticed, before one day reentering his life in an unexpected way. And yet Yu’s loyalty to some sort of truth in
‘objects’ doesn’t prevent him from using media other than sculpture to document them when he realises that he needs a different voice. He makes animations, videos and also installations that combine image, object and video. He is without doubt one of those much-talked-about ‘postInternet’ artists, in the sense that he sources images from the web and treats the knowledge and information he obtains from the Internet in the same way as that harvested from his own direct experience. But he also believes in a ‘poetry’ that exists under the skin of everyday objects, and in an object-specific ‘beauty’ (though he personally might be very cautious about using that term) that can be ‘upgraded’ Everything Is Extremely Important: There Is Nothing That Will Not Come Back Again, 2013 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Magician Space, Beijing
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once subjected to artistic interpretation. In this respect perhaps he’s too romantic to be really post-Internet. Yu is particularly interested in how the life of an artist forms his or her art. His recent animation The Farm (2013) is a riff on Joan Miró’s 1921–2 oil painting of the same title; in it, Yu reconstructs the Spaniard’s farmhouse in Mont-roig del Camp and reconstructs, also, Miró’s life there. I find Yu’s own existence, in his three-room apartment in Beijing, to be intriguingly similar to Miró’s ‘farmer’s life’ of nearly a century ago. Notwithstanding the fact that, whereas Miró and his wife raised cows for milk and grew grapes for wine, Yu has his computer plucking images from the world and rendering files of his new videos, both artists present a timeless idea of the satisfying as being one in which they are at the centre of their worlds.
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David Scanavino By all accounts, David Scanavino is enjoying a successful career trajectory, having exhibited his work consistently in solo and group exhibitions since graduating from Yale’s MFA programme in 2003. Museum recognition is growing. Both the Pulitzer Foundation in St Louis and the Aldrich Contemporary in Connecticut are showing his work this year. More press is soon to follow. It’s understandable. Scanavino’s work is smart without sacrificing either aesthetics or impact. Linoleum, in all its many unappetising colours, is a signature material, configured as wall and floor pieces. Heavy rope of various
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different configurations is cast in Ultracal. Pulped newspapers are applied directly to gallery walls, the taupe colours an aggregate of the papers’ print and photo inks. More recently, Scanavino has turned to coloured construction papers of the kind one finds in art classrooms, producing pieces that call to mind Ellsworth Kelly.
below left Untitled, 2013, archival pigmented paper pulp on paper, 127 × 99 cm below right Untitled, 2013, Hydrocal, 18 × 8 cm diameter both images Courtesy the artist
It would be foolish to attempt to understand any of Scanavino’s pieces apart from the rest, as each exhibition is often a fully considered work unto itself. What animates his arrangements is a concern with ‘imprinting’, manifested literally in the rope casts and finger- and thumbprints of the paper-pulp works as much as it is figuratively in the linoleum so common to the institutional environments – schools, libraries – that press on us with their authority. That’s just a taste of what makes Scanavino’s work smart, but don’t underestimate its playfulness, which is the resource that Scanavino will be able to draw on for many shows to come.
selected by Jonathan T.D. Neil 13/02/2014 10:38
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Math Bass
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selected by Shannon Ebner 13/02/2014 10:42
The Los Angeles-based artist Math Bass works between painting, performance, sound, video and sculpture. In Bass’s work the body is in question. Is the body present or absent? Is the body a disembodied voice or a hooded and shielded spectre, audible but not visible, visible but covered in fog surrounded by a pack of barking dogs performing alongside a pack of humans singing? And then there are hardedged paintings in which space and colour are flat, flat, flat and the canvas plays tricks on your eyes, forming faces made from collections of interchangeable symbols such as smoke, fire, alligators, matches, razor blades, cigarettes and the letter ‘z’. For Body No Body Body (2012), Bass covered handcrafted A-frame ladders with irregularly shaped striped canvases sewn together on three sides. The encounter with these objects is a lot like seeing a puppet on stilts, or even one or more persons lying down in a crouched huddle: you can see them, but they can’t see you. The headless bodies do something else that’s curious.
For Angelenos it is a familiar sight to encounter a house covered by a striped tarp. When you are new to the city, you wonder what the tent is concealing, only to find out that they are protecting the neighbourhood from house ‘bombings’, aka chemicals that are being gassed into the tarps in order to exterminate termite infestations. While this geographic reference may be lost on some, the painted canvas coverings-cum-sculptures in Bass’s installation still yield a dubious presence, passing as both menacing and festive – like bodies caught hiding in plain sight seeking privacy, protection or still something else not meant for public display. For Brutal Set, a performance produced and performed at the Hammer Museum for the 2012
facing page Newz!, 2013, gouache on canvas, 91 × 97 cm below B.B.S.Q., 2013 (installation view, Wallspace Gallery, New York) both images Courtesy Overduin & Co, Los Angeles
Made in LA exhibition, a collection of single and A-frame ladders were used as props and supports alongside concrete casts of inverted jean trousers and shorts, and a terracotta potted plant, the one ‘living’ element, apart from the performers themselves, to populate the otherwise brutal set. As the performers moved about the space in a random pattern of loose choreography, they sang the lines: “Who say you have to be a dead dog… One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do… And it comes down, it comes down, well it comes down, and it comes down, it comes it comes… Scores of blood and fire and freeways, I am going to get my share… One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do… Who say you have to be a dead dog…” Handling each other’s bodies with as much regard as the set’s props, the performers alternate between a cappella and in-the-round chorus, fugue and eventually total discordance, rising as high as Math Bass as she climbs to the top of the ladder supported by her full cast in order to smash the plant and end the performance.
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Holger Wüst
Holger Wüst is an artist who lives and works in Offenbach, a city right beside Frankfurt am Main. He studied at the well-known Städelschule in Frankfurt. For years he has worked on very large format black-and-white collages of found photographs. He mounts these photographs on relatively wide walls so that they become almost mega-cinemascopesize pictures. Wüst also converts these photographs into extremely striking, poetic films of high technical quality. The camera slowly moves over these
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massive ‘landscapes’, zooming in and out. Sometimes it zooms so deeply into the image that you can read single pages of a book, such as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which in the larger image appear as only a tiny detail. All of these collaged details seem to be compiled into allegorical images concerning utopia and the history of revolution. Indeed Holger Wüst, ZEKHER (Part two, the commodity labour-power) (installation view, Frankfurter Kunstverein), 2010. Photo: Wolfgang Günzel & the artist. Courtesy the artist
Wüst’s work circles around the world of political imagery, leftish philosophy and practice. However, the amazing thing is that he is able to overlap this with a kind of almost surreal beauty and melancholic poetry. Wüst’s use of the political creates a poetic language that finally lets one believe that political art is possible after all, rather than being simply an abuse of poetry or other aesthetics. Personally, I find it hard to understand why Holger Wüst is so little known outside of this regional context. I think his work is fantastic.
selected by Tobias Rehberger
Seung Woo Back Seung Woo Back’s work emerges from the way in which the pervasiveness of digital image processing negates the need to produce original photographic images. Taking this as both a necessary condition and a point of departure, Back has developed work in which he deploys archives of photographs, some taken by him and some by others, to expose the realm of images and offer it as a reconstructed world. Back’s use of archival images started with his Blow Up (2004–5) series, a set of enlargements made from regular snapshots taken by the artist during a visit to North Korea in 2001. During this extremely rare opportunity, Back could only photograph what he had been granted permission to shoot. In addition, his films were all confiscated before he left and returned as cut-up negatives and prints compatible with a positive image of North Korea. Unsatisfied, Back initially neglected these photographs. Only after reviewing them years later did he decide to use them, blowing up particular details. The results
are pale, severely cropped and blurry. Yet by focusing on overlooked details from the vastness of information contained in the censored photos, Back subverts the control to which they had originally been subjected. He continued to work with images from North Korea for the series Utopia (2008–11). In these images, Back altered North Korean propaganda photos of buildings from posters and postcards through distortion and the use of primary colours in the background. These altered images, while indirectly referencing Russian Constructivism, also heighten one’s awareness of how they were constructed. In a Utopia work from 2011, the artist divided some of these images into 13 equal parts that were sent to 13 countries with identical printing specifications. When all 13 parts of the same photograph were returned, they highlighted the different printing results. Memento: A-#005 (8th, Apr, 2011), 2011, digital print, 17 × 26 cm. Courtesy the artist
Since whatever was considered the ‘original’ image comprised one set of specifications, these results highlight how, at the moment of taking a photograph, it is impossible to foresee what effect different processes will have on the image produced. Also addressing unforeseeable effects of the processes that images undergo and the myriad reconfigurations of the information they contain, Memento (2011) was constructed from archives of found images collected by Back. For this work, he asked eight people to make their own selection of images from over 50,000 photographs that once belonged to numerous individuals. The choices and arrangement of these photographs taken by others were made in accordance with each selector’s projected narrative. These reconstructed narratives, like the methodologies Back used in Blow Up and the Utopia series, interfere with the intentions present not only at the time the images were taken but also with the subsequent decisions that were made as they were collected.
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Caroline Achaintre A hollow mask, moulded from thin ceramic and textured like snakeskin, sits atop a triangular, welded-steel frame, the mask’s simple features comprising two blank eyes and a gaping mouth. It’s a primitive fetish object on a display stand, until you read the title, Shopper, and then that gaping gob transforms into the space framed by the upside-down, dangling handles of the shopping bag to which the object’s title and its form now obviously refer. This effect, akin to pareidolia – seeing faces in inanimate objects – is a recurring feature of encounters with Caroline Achaintre’s work that, alongside slippery ceramic objects, also
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includes large tufted-wool rugs and colourful inks and watercolours on paper (the latter on show in her exhibition Mooner, through 1 March, at London’s Arcade gallery). Exhibitions often include selections of the above objects presented within geometric shelving structures that wouldn’t look out of place in high-end department store display.
below left Wanderer, 2012, hand-tufted wool, 208 × 172 cm below right Chubber, 2013, ceramic, leather, 35 × 33 × 24 cm both images Courtesy the artist and Arcade, London
While the use of ceramic as a material has seen a resurgence in recent years, Achaintre’s visual references – primitive-looking fetish objects, carnival, the chunky forms and candy colours of postmodern design – are to many still as unfashionable as pottery once was. Her foregrounding in her art of the pleasure in process and materials might also be viewed as the less dominant paradigm (over a focus on concept and theory). Yet these and other frictions – between fashion and taste, abstract and figurative, art and design, and primitivism and postmodernism – are also why this work gets under your skin. And stays there.
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Adam Harvey
Adam Harvey’s work can be conducive to a certain type of sensationalist media coverage. Indeed I first came across his Anti-Drone project (2013) – in which Harvey produced three items of clothing, including a burqa and headscarf, made from a metallised fabric that renders the wearer all but invisible to thermal imaging surveillance – through just this type of reporting. But the mainstream media do the artist an injustice: first of all, this is not just some conceptual one-liner. Harvey puts a lot of thought and energy into the actual production and testing of his works to ensure they actually function. So, for example, the artist developed and manufactured Off Pocket (2013), a little pouch into which you can place your
mobile phone so that all incoming and outgoing signals are blocked. It’s not just a piece of political commentary on our surveillance society, but a working product that anyone can buy at Harvey’s website (I have one myself). The thing that interests me most about his work, however, is that it addresses the fact that in the twenty-first century we’re very close to the point, or have passed the point, where most of the photographs and most of the images made in the world are not produced
‘Anti-Drone’ Wear, from the Stealth Wear line of thermal-signature reduction fashion, 2013, with designer Johanna Bloomfield. Courtesy Adam Harvey/ahprojects.com
for humans to see: they are made by machines for other machines to view and compute, from automated license-plate or passport readers, to grocery store price scanners. With works like CV Dazzle (2010–), a research project into how makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) can be utilised to confuse facial recognition software, Harvey is moving beyond the representational paradigm of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury image-making and consumption, and developing a visual and conceptual language to engage a world of seeing-machines, postrepresentationalist images and the dynamics, power and technology that characterise the not-too-distant future.
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Margrét Helga Sesseljudóttir
Margrét Helga Sesseljudóttir is an artist who derives a direct link from the corporeal art of such greats as Carolee Schneemann. Margrét uses the carnal to radiate a fine-tuned melancholic and sculptural presence in her work. She works with performance, photographs, found objects, painting, etc arranged in sculptural compositions. There is something deeply personal and real about her work. She is a songwriter of soul who puts unspoken longing into form. A self-portrait taken from a flat angle in a solarium – purple flesh. The photograph is glued to a plastic tent. Then there is a pipe that connects the photo to a gold-sprayed structure that resembles
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a glittering chariot. A glowing piece. Then there is a really powerful and emotional installation in a conference room, in which she is lying facedown on a leather IKEA sofa, perfectly still in a fixed, sculpted position for hours, wearing white panties and white tennis socks. The sofa is full of small white jelly puddings. The room is scattered with fragile, personal and humorous sculptures. Then the centrepiece of that installation is an
Unstable Interior Postponed, Transportation of Nothing, 2013 (installation view, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art). Photo: Attila Urban. Courtesy the artist
enlarged photograph of a man masturbating in a small family car in Reykjavík: the photo was taken from above (Margrét was in a bus and took the photo at a red light). Everything is somehow soft, small and moist in this room. With all the artificial materials and oddities in her works, there is a remarkably calm sense of everything being exactly as it should be: nothing is forced, it all feels so natural. These works are behind words. Indeed, she is a mute when is comes to explaining them, clad in a glittery fur. This is stuff coming from a special place, going who-knows-where, but it could be the start of something spectacular.
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Ivan Argote I’m interested in art because it’s like doing philosophy without having to write. Ivan Argote, Les Inrockuptibles, January 2011 What is dreamt of in Ivan Argote’s philosophy? There are Rousseau-like bits in his videorecorded pranks – getting the crowd in a Paris metro elevator to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ (Anniversaire, 2009); asking metro-goers not to give him a coin but to accept one (I Just Want to Give You Money, 2007); telling tetchy rush-hour pedestrians at busy intersections in Madrid, Paris and New York that he loves them and that they are beautiful (Sans Titre, 2010–12). These are funny, but also earnest in their attempt to produce authentic connections between the individual and the community, to force public masks to fall away, or highlight how rarely, if ever, this happens. There’s some postcolonial Marxism in there, too, splashed with a dash of semiotics – public monuments of Spanish kings wearing Peruvian ponchos made in China (Turistas, 2012);
equestrian statuary with the riders Photoshopped off their mounts (Horses, 2011); and the Egyptian obelisk in Paris’s Place de la Concorde, which ActUp once sheathed in a pink condom, prostrating itself in a Paris gallery, lowered to mere art, spent (Hangover and Ecstasy, 2014). Mainly, however, it’s Nietzschean – critical, iconoclastic, playful, poetic – a ‘transvaluation of all values’. Well, not all values, just the everyday bits of life-denying public nastiness that make us step past panhandlers, glare at attention-grabbing oddballs and avoid each other’s eye on buses and in elevators. The subtitle of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (1889) pops into mind – ‘How to Philosophise with a Hammer’ – except Argote’s hammer is inflatable and squeaks when
Excerpt – As Seen in Mompox, Magdalena: Here We’re Happy With All of Our Problems, and Tired of All of Your Solutions (detail), 2014, concrete, polyurethane, steel, paint, 179 × 102 × 25 cm. Photo: Claire Dorn. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris
you hit somebody. His multitudinous appetite for media – video, photography, sculpture, performance, installation – calls to mind Bruce Nauman, an obvious influence, though Argote’s brand of bad-boy is much less harrowing. The goofy pranks have gained him quick notoriety, starting with Retouch (2008), a 12-second video in which he spraypaints a pair of Mondrian paintings in the Centre Pompidou, which almost got him booted from the MFA programme at the Beaux-Arts in Paris (relax, they were under glass). Most of his stunts, however, pale in comparison to the standard YouTube fare out there, and his newest gallery-friendly gewgaws – poorly proofread lines of English dialogue laser-etched onto c-prints and resin-cast bowling balls with severed hands sticking out from them – are a bit thin. So, future, great? If he follows the leads laid down in the above-mentioned Sans Titre – my favourite work so far of the decade – and the rich seam of La Estrategia (2012, look it up), well, then, well, yes.
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Rebecca Birch Rebecca Birch is a good filmmaker. She knows when to make an edit, when to take a conventional shot and when to allow the action to take place offscreen (in The Year-Going, her 2011 video portrait of young Dutch clockmaker Johan ten Hoeve, the protagonist is only revealed bit by bit – a shot of his hands grinding a cog into shape, a closeup of an eye inspecting a tiny component). Birch also knows how to play with light and shadow (indeed it’s a bit of a motif in her work); she knows the merits of a good song to ratchet up the emotive resonance of a situation (in Great Northern, 2011, a video made during a residency in the frozen Northwest Territories of Canada, a melancholic country ballad sets the mood for this portrait of an insular community). But what makes her a great artist isn’t any of this formal
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stuff; it’s the interaction she builds up with her subjects, and in the relationships she creates as part of the subtly performative process of her practice. In the case of the two works mentioned above, the subjects’ ease on camera, and willingness to tell their stories, is testament to this rapport. A second strand to Birch’s work, in which she instigates road trips with fellow artists, or leads public walks, points to the dialogic quality of artmaking as the true, and perhaps radical, heart of her practice. A look at the artist’s website reveals photographs documenting
Blackrock Road Trip, 2011. Photo: Karen Donellan. Courtesy the artist
journeys up and down the UK – she’s just about to start a new series that will take the M11 motorway north out of London as its primary route. A lichen-covered stick is present in many of these images. Picked up on an earlier trip, it now acts as a sort of MacGuffin around which collaboration and conversation circle within the hermetic confines of a car. With this, one can perhaps understand the videocamera as taking a similar role – giving Birch the opportunity to embed herself in a community or situation that would remain closed otherwise. The presence of the camera enables the artist to strike up conversations with the people she finds there – a not inconsiderable creative feat. In fact this is the true art in her work, the bit that goes largely unrecorded.
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Rachel Rose
I once made the mistake of tasting cured, decomposed shark meat, which was served as a small, neat, innocuous-looking cube of very pale pink flesh. I can only describe what followed as being like tasting years and years of death at sea, as though everything the shark had ever killed was rotting in my mouth at rapid, time-lapsed speed. I was brought back to this experience by the young American artist Rachel Rose’s latest videowork, Palisades in Palisades (2014), shot on the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River from New York and New Jersey. It features a friend of the artist, who acts as something of a double or stand-in. The camera gets very tight in on the subject, allowing you o see everything from the pores on her face to the fibres of her top. The sound is close, heavy and often shockingly sharp – the girl’s eyelashes, covered in clumps of black and cobalt-blue mascara, make noises like falling jewellery as they blink. But suddenly the camera pulls away fast from her, and zooms in microscopically close to a papery, yellowing leaf throbbing with dark veins in a tree far above her. The picture flickers,
alternating with the inky lines of a monoprint behind it, the first in a tour of extreme closeups of images of artworks that depict the Palisades, most notably paintings and prints featuring George Washington directing troops during a battle from the American Revolutionary War that was fought on the site. Rose edits sharply back and forth, strobing through various forms of image-making technology: her camera searches the background of a painting and finds an image of an animal, zooming in close before cutting to an interior shot of its belly as it is entered by a bullet. As the camera pulls out, though, its appears to be leaving not a dead animal, but an orange plastic bag discarded in the Palisades a few feet away from the female subject of the video, her hair flicking in the breeze. Every object makes a dense sound as the camera passes through it, and every material is layered up as if expressing stratified periods
Palisades in Palisades, 2014, video, 9 min 31 sec. Courtesy the artist
of time, such that the girl is depicted as being tied to the fabric of the world and to the history of the place with an extreme intensity. Rose’s rhythmic and haptic editing is exquisite, and the artist’s background in painting does much to inform the way that she builds up tranches of sound and footage as though she were working up layers of paint on canvas. For a previous videowork, Sitting, Feeding, Sleeping (2013), produced in a moment of crisis about continuing to make art, and prompting her to investigate a feeling of ‘deathfulness’ that had settled on her, the artist went on several research trips to get close to entities that were almost human, or almost dead, such as advanced AI-controlled robots, cryogenically frozen dead bodies and zoo animals. The result is a deeply thought video essay on living and material, spoken by Rose’s Auto-Tuned voice, that asks the central question, “What are you sitting, feeding, sleeping, for?”, eventually arriving at the proposition that perhaps we are here “for the mutations that we make”.
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Claudia Comte
The hockey players of Gstaad – the super-exclusive VIP town in the Swiss Alps – were probably pretty astonished when first confronted with Claudia Comte’s idea for a performance. They had to use her sculptures as pawns for a game that she developed and for which she designed a field under the ice. And while they where pushing around those human-size abstract forms, the artist would underline and direct their actions by playing cartoonish sounds on a cheap keyboard plugged into the stadium’s loudspeakers. It sounds funny and crazy; and, in fact, it is. But more interesting is the fact that this performance
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highlights one of the core topics of Comte’s artistic practice: how can we activate sculpture? With her fresh attitude towards well-known abstract forms, genuine explosive energy and humorous research, Comte has recently occupied a central place in the Swiss art scene and seems to be everywhere at the moment. Her advantage: she can produce fast and has a lot of ideas ready, simply waiting to find the perfect matching place in which to be realised. From shaped Claudia Comte & Omar Ba, 2013 (installation view, CentrePasquArt, Biel, 2013). Photo: Annik Wetter. Courtesy the artist and BolteLang, Zurich
canvases, to zigzag wall paintings, optical patterns or monochrome surfaces, monolithic blocks or organic shapes, her vocabulary doesn’t leave any field of abstraction unexplored. And the combination of all these is there to see in her exhibitions, which can be perceived as very well calibrated installations. But more importantly she’s breaking with a tradition and succeeding in breaking a formal taboo: as a female artist she’s successfully intruding into the traditionally masculine domain of abstract art. No wonder that her favourite tool with which to shape sculptures is the chainsaw.
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Art Reviewed
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Akram Zaatari On Photography People and Modern Times Thomas Dane Gallery, London 27 November – 1 February What is a photograph? This is the (admittedly unoriginal) question Akram Zaatari poses in this excellent exhibition packed across two gallery spaces. The first venue is largely given over as a screening room for the artist’s 42-minute film, On Photography People and Modern Times (2010). Formed of two synchronised projections, showing a desk in what the press release reveals to be the Arab Image Foundation, a nonprofit research institution that Zaatari formed along with fellow artist Walid Raad and photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad in 1997, from bird’s-eye and front-on views respectively. The desk is occupied by a digicam and monitor (the screen of the monitor invisible from one perspective, the screen of the digicam similarly obscured from the other), which each display video interviews, recorded by Zaatari between 1998 and 2000, with various retired studio photographers (or their relatives) from across the Middle East. We see his subjects leaf through their old photographic work, which in most cases seems to date back to the 1970s. Their reminiscing is largely anecdotal. Teased out via the dialogue, however, are differing meditations on the nature and affect of a photograph.
One interviewee posits the photograph as a means of capturing the present, “like a reflection in the pool”, he says in thickly accented English. In another conversation, the daughter of a deceased photographer recalls all the props and costumes kept at her father’s studio for customers to dress up in, foregrounding the photograph as fiction; conversely, a third subject looks wistfully at an old photo of friends and family and notes that “very old memories” are being reconstructed by the image. A convivial chap remembers the occasions when one of his customers branded the portrait he had taken of them a “lie” because the camera had not captured the subject’s personal (mis)perception of their appearance. “It simply captures what one is like; it acts as a mirror,” the photographer remembers explaining to the angry sitter. If On Photography People and Modern Times poses questions, then something of an answer is provided by a selection of works presented in the gallery’s second space – among them an installation of short Super-8 films, HD videoworks projected onto the walls or displayed on Kindles and iPads, black-and-white portrait
photographs developed from archive negatives (smiling wedding photographs, grinning boys larking about with a cardboard cutout of a glamorous Western starlet, demure young ladies) and new still-life colour photography shot by Zaatari himself, either wall-mounted or displayed in archive drawers. All of these works in some way document vintage imagemaking equipment or portray an old photography studio. While further reading reveals the subject of this work to be Studio Sheherazade, a photography business belonging to Hashem al-Madani, a Lebanese portraitist who worked in the city of Saida from the early 1950s (and in whom Zaatari has had a longstanding interest), nowhere in the actual exhibition is this fact revealed. Instead the viewer is left to treat these documents as mysterious archaeological artefacts, around which we are free to weave our own historical narrative. When coupled with the knowledge of the turbulent, traumatic chapter of Lebanese history that unfolded concurrent to this studio business’s period of operation, the idea that an image can form the basis of unreliable, or indeed fictive, memory, is a politically poignant one. Oliver Basciano
On Photography People and Modern Times, 2010 (installation view). Photo: Thierry Bal. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
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Siobhan Davies Dance Table of Contents ICA, London 8–19 January The cherrypicking of certain dancers and choreographers by art institutions has drawn some criticism over the past five years, though it’s also true that the changing status of dance, and its proximity to forms of conceptual art performance, can be tracked to the discipline of dance itself, and specifically to the conceptual choreographic work of European (primarily French) choreographers and dancers such as Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz and the crossover figure of Tino Sehgal, who danced in the troupes of Bel and Le Roy before developing far more slippery work, featuring call and response and split-second improvisations with audiences, suited more to a gallery than a stage. British dancer and choreographer Siobhan Davies went the other way, studying art before moving into dance, and has done much to position her own company as a site of crossover – from exhibitions with Victoria Miro to art exhibitions and experimental collaborations with artists at her own company studios in South London. The lapse in engagement between art, dance and the museum from the 1980s to the 2000s was doubtless exacerbated by issues of archiving and collecting, in that museums have traditionally acquired objects far more often than they’ve acquired performance work, while performers routinely refuse to let their work be documented in an
unsatisfactory fashion that loses the very liveness crucial to performance. And so Table of Contents presents a way to rethink the notion of the dance archive – asking where, indeed, a dance archive is located, if not in the body itself. Table of Contents is an open dance archive as art installation, wherein Davies is joined each day in the space by five other dancers and choreographers (whom Davies refers to as ‘dance artists’), each dressed in casual jeans and shirts rather than dancewear, to perform dances from their own personal histories. The performers regularly gather themselves, and their audience, around four tables, which change configuration, and which the dancers use as a map of the theatre, on which they mark out each set of sequences. A long thin table bisecting the room into two narrow spaces will stimulate different movements and ideas than a more easily navigable solid square, and these key structures, which allow the performers to be reactive and responsive to the present situation, are crucial devices designed to heighten the uniqueness of each live event, even in repetition. It’s this kind of flexible treatment of an archive that presents itself when a male and female dancer move around the room taking turns to bear one another’s weight while discussing the memories that come with making certain moves or performing certain holds. Or allows a dancer to finish one of Davies’s
choreographic sequences, that sees her falling extravagantly on the floor around the room, and segue into a stumbling, improvised speech that describes the way in which looking down at her hands as she fell transported her back to childhood games of leaping off bunkbeds with a friend onto a mattress below, attempting to fly, and failing each time. The piece felt most like an interesting take on the museum, however, when a male dancer performed several short sequences of dances that he has learned over time, each beginning with the phrase “I wonder if the right thing for right now is…”, before saying the name of the dance and crediting its choreographer. This piece has a certain relationship to Charmatz’s ongoing project Musée de la Dance, recently seen at MoMA, and which radically experiments with the idea of a museum as a living, breathing entity. Just as Bel, Sehgal and co. greatly influenced the ways in which performance can be treated in an art context, projects such as these show dancers experimenting with the very idea of a museum, in a way that art museums simply aren’t. Because museums of dance still do not exist, there are still possibilities to experiment with the form they might take – but from experiments such as these, it seems certain that dancers want a vital form of museum that is always alive, and never a tomb. Laura McLean-Ferris
Table of Contents, 2013 (performance view, ICA London). Photo: Pari Naderi. Courtesy Siobhan Davies Dance, London
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David Ostrowski Yes or Let’s Say No Simon Lee Gallery, London 28 November – 31 January Debates about contemporary painting often get caught up with the idea of ‘endgame’ painting. A term borrowed from chess for that point in the game where there are only a few possible moves left. It’s that point where I tend to sweep the pieces off the board in a fury and storm out of the room. I’m not very good at chess, and I usually lose. But the moment when an unwinnable game gets swept away might also be the beginning of something new – a clean slate, tabula rasa. Maybe one senses a similar mix of frustration and elation in German painter David Ostrowski’s canvases, which present you with a variety of just-enough-to-notice, bareminimum interventions on large, uniformly portrait-format canvases, each precisely 241 by 191 cm. These aren’t ‘painterly’ interventions, they’re attempts to boil things down to unpainterly essentials: paper sheets collaged loosely into strips across the canvas; what looks like paint spray-gunned in arcs and scribbled blocks; and in F (Auch die schönste Frau ist an den Füssen zu Ende, Elena’s Feet) (all works 2013), nothing
more than the smudged print of a human foot, bottom left corner. Everything, then, is calculated to escape the confines of gallery-painting convention, trying to point, all the time, to a less compromised world; so the spraypaint gestures to graffiti, likewise the collaged paper implies posters, flyposting and the rough scene of the urban street. This might make more sense in the light of earlier works by Ostrowski, in which the urban world and its inhabitants make more of an appearance, and in which the artist plays out a more energetic, messy hybrid of cave-painting clichés and graffiti figuration. But here things are muted, kept tasteful, minimal and a little bit beige. It’s a weird tension, this mix of strippeddown asceticism and pent-up anarchy. Pointing outward, to nonpainting tropes such as the ‘canvas of the street’ or readymade gestures such as the footprint, these works suck in the art-historical references, without necessarily meaning to: the spraypaint and collage draw one back to Antoni Tàpies’s later ‘mural’
paintings, the footprint might recall some Yves Klein-like Anthropometries body-print false start. But the levels are turned down: the upturned sprayed curve that marks F (Don’t Honk) looks like nothing so much as a cartoon closed-eyelid – a sleeping painting. Among these are more haughtily ‘endgame’ paintings: four white-grounded canvases whose only motif is a painted stripe or two that runs around the edge of the canvas: black, acidic orange, black with acidic orange and black with greeny-yellow. Such gestures might have been extreme once, but now they feel domesticated. Maybe that’s not Ostrowski’s fault. But… wanting to strip things back, open the door to the supposedly fresher air outside, keep it real – such intentions suppose that authenticity (or even the ‘beauty’ that Elena Brugnano, in her gallery text, supposes is present in Ostrowski’s paintings) is only to be found in actions and gestures that are spontaneous, unthought and unmediated. It’s just the ‘only’ that doesn’t quite ring true. J.J. Charlesworth
F (Landscape), 2013, gesso and lacquer on canvas, wood. Courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery, London
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Johann Arens Internet Centre & Habesha Grocery Paradise Row, London 13 December – 1 February Like the launderette, the Internet café is, for me, a last resort when domestic appliances fail. An artwork consisting of fixtures from an Internet café might therefore be expected to evoke bad associations. This wasn’t the case with Johann Arens’s exhibition; if anything, it made me want to visit such places more often. His installation appropriates equipment and furnishings taken from the Internet Centre & Habesha Grocery, an Ethiopian outlet in Tottenham that closed in 2013. In the basement space are six partitioned desks, each with its own PC and swivel chair, some 1990s modular furniture and a wealth of printed matter, ranging from posters offering free legal advice to biblical quotations and a sign requesting patrons to ‘stick your chewing gum here please’. Patrons have duly obliged, creating a neo-dada artefact in the process. There are also coffee cups, walking sticks, sacks of turmeric used as mouse mats and a number of things that read as emblems of a deracinated community: miniature tom-toms, bags of green coffee beans, ceramic ornaments of animals presumably indigenous to Ethiopia. These recur as leitmotifs, some combined with computer accessories to make sculptures shown in vitrines: a stack of coffee beans with a toy wildebeest and a USB connector; an old PC
embedded in a tangle of cables with leather purses and miniature earthenware casseroles. The desktop computers aren’t online; you can open the browsers, but only to peruse the search histories of Habesha’s past users. Less an exercise in social participation, Arens’s project inclines towards postcolonial ethnography. Alongside the tom-toms and animal ornaments, the Ethiopian alphabet poster and wicker clock, the ‘Western’ elements – the ergonomic wrist-rests and clunky PCs, the dismal modular furniture – seem like trappings of a superannuated cultural hegemony, a collection of ailing Caucasiana. It’s not quite Orientalism in reverse, but there’s a subtle ‘othering’ of the Occident, a discreet chastening of Western technologies and their built-in obsolescence. Look, says the earthenware casserole, peeking out from its nest of cables, I’m still viable. Is the Internet café still viable? Although, thanks to the smartphone, the idea of going somewhere specifically to access the web now seems anachronistic, such places continue to operate as social hubs. They are also aesthetic bulwarks against the hipsterisation of the high street. To inhabit one is to inhabit the opposite of an Apple advertisement. The hardware is ugly, nothing is cool and once you’ve taken your
place in the chicken coop of squalid booths, all you are left with is the bare utility of your own thoughts. The anonymous online profile they confer – relative to the home user – may also be a factor in their appeal. While it’s true that the grocery side of Habesha’s operation feels underrepresented, Arens’s appropriations constitute a diligent portrait, encompassing the full spectrum of its social character. Sure, the outcome feels embryonic, the research stage of an ongoing project rather than a fully realised work, but there is enough here to make you wonder how the Internet cafés of the future might function, who will use them and what other services, apart from online access, those users will require. Maybe it’s where the books should go when they close down the public libraries, arranged Dewey Decimally in outlets across the city, Philosophy in Tottenham, Economics in Peckham… My point is only semifacetious. Common to both services is a sense of imminent redundancy. Also, a spirit of autodidacticism pervades Arens’s display, and autodidacticism may be big in the future, if the government’s higher-education policies bear fruit. Whether the Internet café is capable of evolving into a classroom is another matter. Sean Ashton
Internet Centre & Habesha Grocery, 2013 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy Paradise Row, London
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Katrina Palmer Reality Flickers MOT International, London 6 December – 1 February Reality Flickers, or ‘Miss Reality’, is one of two characters in the recited, recorded short story one hears, in Katrina Palmer’s first solo show, after walking into a grey steel locker less than two metres square. But nothing is stable in the textual-sculptural cosmoses constructed by Palmer – a slow-burning, serious, formally unique artist in her mid-forties, selected by Elizabeth Price last year as an ArtReview FutureGreat – and so ‘reality’, here, is also that which we know it as: what we believe, for now, to be real. That flickers too. Sit down on a metal chair and Palmer’s English voice, processed to sound thin and hollow and variably laced with reverb, recounts a brief, grim, surreal revenge narrative. Miss Reality is a skip-scavenger, perhaps an artist – “she had recently been inquiring into the unstable matter of reality, a greater understanding of material contingencies was the very thing she pursued” – and one of her finds, we’re given to surmise, was this very locker. Stumbling out of a skip one day, Reality meets the Heart Beast, who, muttered double-tracked voices suggest, is a “fucker” and a “trickster”, a master of facades. They go back to her place; he wins her affection by looking at her work, “an open vein
that led directly into her bloodstream”. As they clinch, she is “deep in the fantasy that his eyeballs could be extracted and added to her collection”. Cue a brief, pointedly Bataille-like conflation of erotics and optics: the subject of eyeballs and their removal, of course, also addresses seeing and not seeing. The Heart Beast only wants Reality’s body, and when it’s all over she realises as much. Furious, she stabs him through the neck with “the anodised handle from a shattered glass door”: picture it corkscrewing glassily through vocal cords. And so this is a story about reprisal, but also sculpture and form. The narrative, in its diverting extremity, is a roughhousing form of dematerialised sculpting, manifesting skips and eyeballs and door handles and bodies in the mind’s eye; and in this sense the artist Palmer appears closest to is Lawrence Weiner, who views his own texts as sculpture. But Weiner’s work is a relatively closed and propositional system. Palmer’s is phenomenological, with intentionally ragged edges that create a frictional anxiety, and feels to be going somewhere outside of mere structural inquiries. In the course of Reality Flickers, clearly, words become objects, sentient people become
bodies/receptacles, objets trouvés in the gallery have supposedly emerged from a fiction, men are not what they appear to be and the nervy Miss Reality turns quickly murderous in her frustration at deceptive surfaces. All of this could be neutered if we arrange things in one particular order: that the narrative is an attention-getting metaphor for appearances per se, ‘appearances’ and their unreliability being a piety of contemporary art. Yet that short-sells Palmer’s specific, gendered focus. The extremist storytelling tradition she comes out of includes the writings of William Burroughs and Kathy Acker as well as the Cinema of Transgression: this is updated punk provocation, in other words, constructing a nightmarish fantasy-space that’s a distorted magnification and upending of actual male/ female power relations – and noting, not irrelevantly, that such things still need saying. Such writing, of course, now finds a fragile sanctuary in the artworld. Outside of its chambered viscerality, though, the latent thrill of Palmer’s show is that it presents her not as an experimental writer looking to recontextualise herself, but as someone who recognises that writing, to earn its keep here, ought to speak – in order to modify – art’s language. Martin Herbert
Reality Flickers, 2013 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and MOT International, London
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Dear Art Calvert 22, London 28 September – 8 December Curated by Zagreb-based collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, this group exhibition of video, text, drawing and installation by 20 international artists takes as its starting point, and its title, the text Dear Art (1999), a work by the Serbian-born, Croatian conceptual artist Mladen Stilinović. Penned as a love letter to the medium of art itself, Stilinović’s missive is a critique of art’s complex relationship to power, politics and value, and as such is part lament and part chastisement for art’s perceived passivity in its co-option by the structures of power and money. In addressing ‘art’ as if it were a sentient being, Stilinović also suggests that it might serve its cause in trying to effect change better if it stopped enjoying being courted by power, and instead kept a lower profile for a while. The four female members of WHW (Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović), along with designer Dejan Kršić, came together as a curatorial collective through shared political interests, in the same year that Stilinović’s Dear Art was written. Fifteen years on, their Dear Art exhibition, originally
conceived for and shown at the Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana/Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, is a response to Stilinović’s text in the form of a snapshot of art’s relationship to politically and critically engaged practice in the present day. The question of whether art can be an effective agent of political change is central to the work of Berlin-based Belarus artist Marina Naprushkina. In 2007 she set up the ‘Office for Anti-Propaganda’ as an archive of and vehicle for political actions and publications. In her short film The Emperor Is Naked (2013), Naprushkina’s voiceover calls for artists, as part of society, to engage with rather than distance themselves from politics and society’s problems, as she herself is seen demonstrating for freedom of speech outside the Belarusian embassy in Berlin. Collaborative Croatian duo Fokus Grupa (Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović) work in a range of media, but are represented here by their ongoing series of pencil drawings depicting other artists’ political and legal actions over the last century, including an artist picket line in New York in 1936, the first International Dada fair in 1920
in Berlin and the founding members of the first women’s gallery cooperative at the A.I.R. Gallery in New York, in 1972. Elsewhere, artists highlight issues of gender politics within political activism (Sanja Iveković); gender and language (Halil Altındere); access to information (Marcell Mars); and ownership and copyright (Cesare Pietroiusti). Along with a handout of his reprinted Dear Art text, Stilinović is represented by a series of works (from 1976 to 2006), in the form of simple text and sculpture representations of political expressions – a thin red line – Red Thread (1976); six loaves of bread placed diagonally on the floor, each with a triangular slice of gateau perched on top – titled Bread, Cakes (For Marie-Antoinette) (1996). Did art follow Stilinović’s advice and become less passive and more engaged? On the strength of the work here, you’d have to say yes; but then look at the network of high-profile individuals who surround the art market, and the price people are willing to pay for certain art objects, and you’d have to say no. Perhaps it’s time Stilinović wrote another letter. Helen Sumpter
Sanja Iveković, The Right One (Pearls of Revolution), 2010. Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy the artist
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Filipe Branquinho Showtime Jack Bell Gallery, London 20 November – 19 December Filipe Branquinho’s series of photographs titled Showtime (2012–13) is a provocation – one that encompasses the thorny social politics surrounding women, race, economy, place and nationality. It comprises six photographic diptychs, the left side of each depicting an element of architecture from the Rua de Bagamoyo area in Maputo, Mozambique – old colonial buildings, such as Hotel Central, once grandly glamorous, now dilapidated, yet still with a melancholy beauty emphasised by their light and colour – the right side, an image of a woman posing in a sparsely furnished bedroom. So who are these women? They are prostitutes who regularly use the hotel to provide services to their clients. And what do they have in common? They are all black, all bare-breasted. They all stare directly into the camera, some confrontationally, some provocatively, some as if they are laughing a little at whoever is viewing them. Most of them wear nail polish, sometimes chipped, in varying shades of red – from pillarbox to maroon. Their breasts all seem natural and are at different stages of perkiness according to age, size and the effects of gravity. All the
women also wear knickers, or something to cover their pubic area. Yet the people who use these prostitutes are absent. I would presume they are men, but given I know nothing of the context, I do not want to generalise. So these women pose for us viewers alone. It would be all too easy to read them, as I have above, as generic, homogeneous beings: they are nearly naked, they are prostitutes and they have seemingly allowed a male artist to objectify them. But what if we knew more about who they were? How would we react then? What if we knew about their lives, histories, backgrounds and daily routines? It’s all too easy to lump women (and yes, humans in general) into categories and stereotypes, as the media and society at large do, as it makes them easier to dismiss – from skinny (supposedly) anorexic models to butch militant lesbians, girl-power pop heroes, the feminist ‘twitterati’, burka-clad (supposedly repressed) bodies, bitchy alpha power-hungry careerists and middle-class oversexed twentysomethings. And in many ways this is what Branquinho has done here in his home country and culture: by photographing these
women in their place of work, ‘dressed’ as objects on display, their profession and status immediately confronts us and is questionable. However, what happens if we read these architectures as theatre sets, and the women as performers? The framing, staging, sparse surroundings and poses of the women are both more theatrical and cinematic than they are ‘real’. Branquinho also paid these women the going rate for their time and asked them to pose in any way they wished. The shots he took of the buildings were carefully composed and lit – often through windows, framed by doorways or looking from the inside to the outside – all tropes used in cinema and theatre to enhance and influence the narrative being portrayed. Therefore, perhaps, as the title Showtime connotes (this is also the title the prostitutes have given to the hotel rooms they use themselves), this was Branquinho’s own ‘show’: a purposeful provocation, addressing the infinite art-historical lineage of the male gaze, while jabbing at the easy cultural, racial and social assumptions that we can be so quick to make. Kathy Noble
Showtime DIII, 2012–13, c-print on cotton fine art paper, 60 × 60 cm. Edition of 3 + 1AP
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Dana Schutz Hepworth Wakefield 12 October – 2 February The hotly florid colouration of Dana Schutz allied with the icy cool forms of Barbara Hepworth (many of which, as the institution’s name implies, are on permanent display here)? Perhaps it is not so surprising that the American painter’s first European public showing is in Wakefield. Both artists share a major interest in haptic perception – for Hepworth this meant the sculptural feel of marble and bronze, while for Schutz the challenge is conveying the intricacies, the myriad sensations, of touch through an image, a painting, that is (border markings on the floor, of course) supposedly untouchable. Hepworth’s works often invite a caressing stroke, but for Schutz some textural sensations are clearly rebarbative – as with Licking a Brick (2011), which appears to be a self-portrait of wired disgust. Her engorged purple tongue is a distorted exaggeration of the norm that recalls Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s visualisation of the sensate as a homunculus with Jagger lips, flapping tongue and E.T.-type index finger. Schutz’s greatness, in this regard, might lie in her ability to capture what our somatosensory cortex gets up to. Praxis might make perfect if you are a Barbara Hepworth with hyperfunctional
parietal lobe ability, but what if you are the opposite: dyspraxic? Schutz is terrific at capturing the quotidian torture of proprioceptive challenges like, say, putting your clothes on in the morning, as with the neocubist Getting Dressed All at Once (2012), wherein a girl fights a blue-and-white hooped T-shirt, a sly wink at Picasso. Or another everywoman struggling with her recalcitrant black straps in Bra Removal (2012). Clumsy challenges in daily life affect Schutz’s men as well – directly across the exhibition room, Fan (2012) shows a hirsute hipster wriggling out of a scarlet jumper as a Damoclean ceiling fan centimetres above his arms threatens amputation. There’s much sexual humour here too: in Hop (2012) a fit MILF upstages an unfit schmuck with a beer gut by pointing one of her chunky pink legs straight to the sky. Schutz’s work invites synaesthetic response. Her studio is in Brooklyn and it’s easy to imagine hearing the plaintive sound of fellow Brooklynites Grizzly Bear when looking at the moody melancholy of Piano in the Rain (2012). Here a hard rain is gonna fall on the hunched player – the V-shaped raindrops bounce and are painted with relative (albeit
implied) heaviness in contrast to, say, the soft drips of an Alex Katz. She’s good at pain too, capturing the pathos of a person with phocomelia in Small Apartment (2012). And there is dark glee with Butterfly (2012), where a hydrocephalic child rips the wings off an unfortunate lepidopteran. More trouble with coordination occurs in Shaving (2010), as a female figure sits legs akimbo on a beach preparing to depilate with a giant can of lime-green Gillette foam. There’s a frisson of horror akin to Buñuel’s eye-slicing as she holds the Bic razor daintily between thumb and forefinger and slashes up a livid sanguinary streak. Schutz’s paintings have a clear narrative pull and invite storytelling. Unlike Dexter Dalwood, with his similar constructions that encourage fictive extrapolation, her world is peopled and thus more human. The best work here is a crowded Beckmann-influenced allegory of the difficulty of construction and coordination – Assembling an Octopus (2013). In it, several art students try to piece together an image of said cephalopod. As purple tentacles drape over the scene, the painting and the show yell that getting ‘it’ together in art, in life, can be really difficult. John Quin
Hop, 2012. Courtesy the artist, Petzel Gallery, New York, and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
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Tabor Robak Next-Gen Open Beta Team Gallery, New York 24 November – 12 January It starts as a rollercoaster and continues with a videogame that needs no players. With 14 screens and computer-generated imagery, Tabor Robak’s exhibition at Team Gallery appears as a technological feat, but one disguising its lack of content. The rollercoaster, Algos (all works 2013), is a 3D animation, shown on two screens at eye level, of the metal tracks one sees when riding a rollercoaster. The viewer is drawn through landscapes, parks and buildings, all devoid of human presence. The result is not haunting or mysterious, merely excessive. The motion is initially impressive and imaginative, but after watching the piece for a while (it’s a 17-minute loop), it becomes repetitive and short on anything but a cursory visual experience. Thematically similar is Free-to-Play, a videogame that plays itself. Displayed on four screens stacked vertically, the HD video
of a game in ‘match three’ style (think Candy Crush Saga) is played with symbols such as cell phones, a palette, advertising logos, monetary signs and other icons that were stock-bought and reprogrammed by the artist. Both works recall familiar images and experiences, and Free-to-Play, even though it alludes to an interactive platform, is as devoid of agency as a rollercoaster. The viewer is left to be dazzled by a display of high-definition technology in lieu of asking why such an expensive presentation hasn’t been used for something more insightful. The same problem afflicts 20XX, a futuristic cityscape puzzled together from images of familiar skyscrapers, such as London’s 30 St Mary Axe (‘the Gherkin’) and New York’s Empire State Building. The nighttime scenes, complete with rain and neon lights, bear the same videogame look that the other pieces possess, the difference
being that, unlike the other works, 20XX does not enjoy the fast pace of a game or ride. Here the frame moves slowly, lingering on certain vistas, like a traditional landscape. Robak seems to be after some kind of dialogue with such a familiar visual trope, but without a visible awareness of the genre’s history, which could ground the piece. In the show’s press release, Robak describes his pieces as a ‘Photoshop tutorial aesthetic’. What he has ended up with is imagery that uses the newest technology to look incredibly dated. These are the works of a young artist reacting to developments in what is arguably the most technologically advanced visual language created in decades. While Robak does not lack in technical skill, he needs to establish a conceptual language that would make these works more substantial than experiments in cool-looking video. Orit Gat
Free-to-Play, 2013, 4-channel HD video, custom software, 60 min, installation dimensions 305 × 128 cm. Courtesy the artist
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Isa Genzken Retrospective MoMA, New York 23 November – 10 March Isa Genzken may well be, as curator Sabine Breitwieser asserts in her catalogue essay, ‘one of the most important artists of our time’. The physical and thematic breadth of Genzken’s work is stunning, and her masterful use of mass-produced tat is both innovative and, ostensibly, influential for a younger generation devoted to the aesthetic of accumulation – although neither the show nor the accompanying monograph explore this influence. The presentation at MoMA begins with an installation of mannequins, Schauspieler (Actors, 2013) and then surveys the artist’s career chronologically, from the high-finish, spearlike ellipses and roughly cast concrete structures that resemble ruined sanctuaries, which she made during the 1970s and 80s (when she studied in Düsseldorf and then lived in Cologne while married to Gerhard Richter), to her exuberant towers and mises-en-scène of toy soldiers, plastic bowls, artificial flowers and other tacky doodads that she began during the late 1990s. By then she’d divorced, moved to Berlin and started hanging with a younger crowd.
The first three galleries, spare and luminous, render the earlier pieces both elegant and monumental – a MoMA show has rarely looked so effortlessly choreographed – but the messier, later production, constricted in small spaces, lacks the room required by its exuberance and material richness. The retrospective’s focus is Genzken’s relationships to architecture and to New York. Series like Fuck the Bauhaus (2000), model ‘buildings’ cobbled from Slinkies, lightshades, Plexiglas and what have you, evince an interest in structure and an irreverent attitude towards Modernism. Three scrapbooks, each titled I Love New York, Crazy City (1995–6), and the schematic towers – plastic tables, toy cars, hospital carts – made in 2008 as proposals for rebuilding at Ground Zero, are paeans to the metropolis she has visited frequently since the 1960s. But such work seems less about architecture than the city as a stage for personal and communal experience, as the flyers announcing raves and the street snapshots pasted in I Love New York… reveal.
It’s the ‘I’, not the structural, that really dominates, from the regular inclusion of the artist’s photo in her work to the autobiographical nods in pieces like the clump of plaster called Mein Gehirn (My Brain, 1984) or works named after close friends like Wolfgang Tillmans and Kai Althoff. Genzken’s is a complex, troubled persona (a letter from her lawyer that’s pasted in the scrapbooks cites the artist’s frequent erratic, often manic behaviour). While the catalogue includes an essay by curator Jeffrey Grove, who outlines autobiographical references in Genzken’s work, there seems to be a critical omertà concerning the artist’s psychological instability. Yet individual and communal traumas do run throughout her work: post-Second World War reconstruction, 9/11, disassociation in Kinder Filmen (Children Filming, 2005), an installation inspired by schoolchildren who used their cell phones to record an assault. All suggest a profound interplay between individual psychosis and social entropy, of which Genzken’s use of stuff is part. It gives the work an edge, and a poetic rightness, that have yet to be explored. Joshua Mack
Schauspieler (Actors) (detail), 2013, mannequins, clothes, shoes, fabric and paper, dimensions variable. Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne & Berlin
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Cyprien Gaillard Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens Gladstone Gallery, New York 9 November – 1 February Cyprien Gaillard’s Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens shares with Richard Serra’s swooping metal passageways down the street at Gagosian a kind of uncompromising, brutal masculinity that, in its minimalist simplicity and scale, seems curiously old-guard, as if monumental sculpture from the 1970s was suddenly in vogue again. Taking the excavator heads off those mammoth machines that scoop earth out of the ground, Gaillard has arranged them at eye level around the perimeter of the gallery. They don’t look very big from afar, but while they’re all different sizes here, the biggest ones can be monstrous up close. They’re arranged like rows of open jaws, replete with heavy teeth pressing down into the floor. Washed and waxed, they reveal some stunning detail – note the hash marks on the maw of Cuban Gallinule (all works 2013), which look like they could’ve been drawn on instead of etched in metal. Lord Howe Stubtail is streaked in a brilliant orange – rust? For each, Gaillard has inserted slim onyx and calcite cylinders into the holes through which the gaping buckets are usually attached
to their excavators, as if to tame or balance their raw industrialism. Sourced from Iran and Utah, the cylinders add a gentle, geopolitical frisson to the mix. Beautifully refracted on the inside, like layers of compressed, cloudy gems, these exquisitely delicate minerals don’t so much contrast as complement their boorish counterparts, which actually, on the surface at least, display equal detailing. Bathed in light from a bizarre lightboxlike ceiling constructed specially for this show, the sculptures are breathtakingly otherworldly. It’s fittingly ironic that the exhibition’s title is taken from a slogan on a construction site’s mural in chichi Beverly Hills. Gaillard thought it strange that the site’s bright future was compared to Dickens – a sad, dystopian invocation if ever there was one. Lifting the contents of some godforsaken construction pit and placing it, rather ceremoniously, in one of Barbara Gladstone’s two pristine Chelsea spaces, Gaillard has buffed and polished what is literally the most workaday machinery into beautiful totems of ‘progress’ wrapped in scare quotes.
What is the promise of new development after all? More luxury condos? More tacky people who live in them? Equally tacky artworks to go on their walls? There’s a welcome undertone of pessimism to Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens, in which the tools we use to build our cities are left decidedly sinister, even animalistic, as if the minimalist sculpture of yesteryear had turned into something that might actually eat you. Less interesting are the slight sculptures upstairs, which are kept tidily in display cases. Made of National Geographic magazines, where a few of each issue’s pages have been curled back to form something like an elongated blossom, each work juxtaposes the images inside to reveal the environmental impact of human activity, such as the automotive industry in Detroit Outgrows Its Past. Surprisingly, these works seem heavy-handed compared to the monsters downstairs, which say a lot about who we are by doing very little – they simply sit there and scare us, because they are us. David Everitt Howe
Fiji Bar-Winged Thrasher, 2013, excavator head and banded calcite. 155 × 193 × 173 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels
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Karin Apollonia Müller Far Out Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles 14 December – 18 January There are two opposing critical interpretations of the aerial panorama. Looking at the earth from above is, on the one hand, a way to see patterns, systems or gestalts not visible at close quarters – the behaviour of crowds, for instance, or the geological growth of cities. This distanced perspective might also, conversely, be considered generalising, flattening and simplifying. From afar, everyone looks the same. People move like water or gas, and the built environment appears biological. Do these similes point to profound universal truths, or are they delusions? Personally, I lean towards the latter view. In Far Out, Karin Apollonia Müller convenes three series of large-scale photographs of the view from approximately 350 miles above the earth. High-resolution files from the Hubble Space Telescope are publicly available online, although, since the telescope captures images in a broader electromagnetic range than the human eye, the raw data must be creatively processed in order to achieve the marvellously colourful images of galaxies and star systems that are familiar to most of us from science museum postcards and calendars. Müller’s
Worldlights and Citylights series depict a nocturnal planet earth, while the Starlights series (all works 2013), which begins the show, represents the farthest reaches of deep space. It is hard to assess the extent of Müller’s postproduction in many of these images. Some, such as the admittedly beautiful Starlights #2 (all works 2013), seem straightforward – even generic – pictures of gaseous nebulae. Others, such as the roiling and lapidarian Starlights #4, are notable for their absence of stars, which the artist seems to have erased. Worldlights echoes these miasmic effects except, this time, the points of light picked out against deep blueblack voids are, one realises, cities and towns. The outline of Italy is recognisable, inverted and upside down, in Worldlights II. But the landmasses are not consistent with world geography, and it is clear that Müller has collaged a number of different images together, erasing borders and fusing nations. The photographs depict an existential homogeneity that only John Lennon dared imagine. With the Citylights photographs, in addition to glowing cities and inky backgrounds, Müller
has included landmasses in ultramarine blue. Australia and North and South America appear upside down, as, I suppose, they must sometimes be when seen from space. Müller’s technique is wilfully disorientating and distorting; this is not a geography lesson. The effect is to cast whole continents as ice floes adrift under moonlight. Cities become fragile pioneer settlements clinging to hostile shores. How critical is Müller of the romantic fantasies that she spins around her appropriated scientific data? Certain images recall sentimental pictorial clichés about man’s courage when faced with awesome nature (the hunter in the snow, the cottage in the woods, the diver beside the whale, etc). One of the final works in the show, however, whisks back the curtain. The red Starlights #1 evokes a microscopic picture of blood vessels in the back of the eye. It returns us to the awareness that, in Müller’s photographs, we are looking at our own looking just as much as we are witnessing the wonders of the outer universe. That which seems furthest away is actually closest at hand. Jonathan Griffin
Worldlights IV, 2013, lightjet print, 119 × 188 cm (framed), edition of 5 + 2AP. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles
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Colby Bird Clyde Glenn Burns Fitzroy Gallery, New York 14 December – 16 February In Valley Mills, the small Texas town where Colby Bird grew up, there lived a man named Clyde Glenn Burns (1933–2013). A model citizen and hometown hero, Burns served first as a contractor for a company that supplied parts to NASA and then as mayor of Valley Mills, before retiring to become, as his obituary states, an ‘accomplished carpenter’ and ‘all-purpose Mr Fix-It’. Although Bird was not related to Burns, the older man became significant to him. According to Maureen Sarro, cofounder of Fitzroy Gallery, he made the young artist feel embarrassed about his craft. As to how or why, she did not elaborate, but the suspicion is that, to a man who devoted his time to fixing things that people actually used, being an artist must have seemed like a frivolous endeavour. Bird’s exhibition is a homage both to Clyde Glenn Burns and to the shame that he provokes in Bird. How this homage manifests itself isn’t clear exactly. There is a lot of woodworking in the exhibition, mostly in a series of three sculptures
composed of parts from Thonet ‘bistro chairs’. The sculptures are light and graceful, and recall both Giacometti and Carol Bove. Roughly the same height as a tall male, their construction is a tenuous balancing act performed by the steam-bent wood of the chairs’ legs and backs. In each, there is an addition of an organic object – a tiny beaker with a green flower nestled into a curve, for example – that transforms the works from mere sculptures into still lifes, a move that lends them fecundity. Woodworking also plays a role in Leisure (all works 2013), a series of 14 electrostatic prints that have been treated with wood stain. The effect on the images, whose subjects include a barn, a basketball, dense foliage and a beautiful girl in a retro white bikini, is that they look sepia-toned and ghostly. Contained in brightly coloured frames that reflect Kodak Color Control Patches, which allow photographers to match hues when reproducing original artworks, the aesthetic, to this critic’s Brooklyn-based eyes, is pure Bushwick: rather than matching the
frames to the Kodak colours, Bird does so using the fluorescent Montana Gold spraypaint favoured by street artists such as KAWS. The subjects reflect the Brooklyn hipster fantasy of a simple agrarian life: pretty farms, pretty ladies, pretty lazy. In the back room sits a series of ten House Lamps composed of lightbulbs, wood, stones and bricks all balanced together, much like the Chair sculptures. Presented like objects in a design store, they call to mind the elegant lighting fixtures of Isamu Noguchi. Like Noguchi, Bird seems to argue through them that from common building blocks, ephemeral (and functional) art can be created. What end Bird’s shame in the face of Burns ultimately serves is unclear. The work here doesn’t come close to transcending, or even challenging, his role as an artist. There are no apologies. The deceased man merely serves as a curious biographical reference point within an otherwise unremarkable – albeit beautiful – conceptual exhibition. Brienne Walsh
Chair, 2013. Photo: Alan Wiener. Courtesy Fitzroy Gallery, New York
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Aaron Garber-Maikovska Fast Red Lobster Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles 23 November – 28 December Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s video Fast Red Lobster (2013), the centrepiece of his exhibition of recent work at Greene Exhibitions, features the artist repeating a series of apparently random and disconnected motions, playing with his hands or brushing and poking the tabletop of a corner booth at Red Lobster, an American chain restaurant that appeals to middle-class clientele. This performance, a kind of acted-out doodling, is an extension of similar ones the artist has performed in galleries, apartments and store windows. The gestures derive from drawing, painting and sculpture, and are conventionally in service to some creative end rather than being of interest in and of themselves. The exhibition at Greene ripples out from the video. Garber-Maikovska has cut out the top and side from the trailer of a Keebler cookie truck and set the extracted piece (a tough panel of aluminium in the manner of a Cady Noland) on its side in the gallery as a space divider. Around this little corral circle a number of tall portraits rendered as frenetic line drawings
applied in ink or acrylic to Gator- or Polyboard on aluminium frames. The portraits do not exactly observe the trailer corral as much as they form a frieze of action around it. Some brood or sit in stern judgement, others smile and laugh. One gets the impression that GarberMaikovska is playing Toulouse-Lautrec to Middle America. The corral may be a restaurant booth, the portraits its involved patrons. The artist, in the centre of the scene, doodles away. This setup could have been fun, but GarberMaikovska is too involved in the tropes of recent art, too in need of that sober contemporary ‘look’, to conjure any sort of emotional or intellectual charge. His motions in the video, which register somewhere between boredom and the instinctual spasms of the catatonic, want to be the brain-dead centre of a corporate theatre, to bear a bit of pathos à la Paul McCarthy. But they are surrounded by too-familiar talismans of installation, which drain them of affect. Inexplicably, Garber-Maikovska leans one of the portraits against the wall, a gesture that
makes no more sense than that this is what artists do a lot these days. The same goes for his decision to paint some of the works on Gatorboard and some on Polyboard, the latter offering a bluish hue that jarringly separates these portraits from those on the brighter white of the Gatorboard. Garber-Maikovska apparently used what he had, materials that he found. But there is simply no reason to bring the rubric of found objects into this show. Instead of the portraits standing in strong juxtaposition to Garber-Maikovska’s performance, perhaps even being seen as springing from his expressive actions, they court the independent frostiness of Christopher Wool or Wade Guyton. Ironically, Garber-Maikovska is more involved with clever albeit conventional references than with the point he seems to be trying to make about contemporary life: that sometimes it is hard to be creative amidst conformity, that the imagination dies in modular systems of organisation. Contemporary art, apparently, is not immune. Ed Schad
rem
Grove, 2013, ink on fluted Polyboard mounted on aluminium frame, 178 × 103 × 5 cm. Photo: Jesse Fiorino. Courtesy the artist and Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles
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Allison Schulnik Eager ZieherSmith, New York 9 January – 22 February Allison Schulnik works oil paint like it’s frosting – thickly, generously. Her endgame is never surface, though (à la Glenn Brown), but relief. At the same time, her subjects are anything but cake. Old men, gnomes, druid-types, mermaids, skeletons, fates, crones and the like: it’s a repertoire drawn from the sad, the creepy, the slightly macabre. Imagine a slouching hobo clown on a bad acid trip and you’re almost there. Hobo Clown (2008) is in fact one of Schulnik’s first fully mature stop-motion animation works. Working in clay (‘claymation’ is for Gumby admirers), Schulnik spends considerable time in that short vignette making her clown’s eyes curl, pulse and bloom. And eyes have always played an important structural role in her art. In the paintings – often single and group portraits of motley casts of characters – Schulnik treats them as cavities, dark absences in the impasto, like pairs of black velvet bows. In her newest animation, Eager (2014), the biggest pair of eyes belongs to a funky,
well-hung horselike creature that gambols through a nature scene while carrying three fates on its back (more on those figures in a moment). The movement of the horse – if it is that – sets the forest floor a-scurry, or rather pollinates it. Fungi spring to life, as do exotic flowers, grasses and tree branches. There are eyes and mouths for each and every in this clay fantasia. Flora is shown, as it often really is, as vaginal and phallic at once, a doubling that Alizarin Flower and Blue Flower (both 2013), two glazed porcelain sculptures that accompany the film, display as well. Yet the essence of the germinating deed remains motion. Which is why, one might conjecture, the animation begins with a single one of those ‘fates’, folded over on herself as if holding a yoga pose (‘seated forward bend’?). In time with the music (the original score was commissioned from Aaron M. Olson), this fate unfolds herself and sweeps her arms up and back, and then folds down once more. Only now
a second fate has appeared, as if sprung from and mirroring the first. Then the cycle repeats once more. So from motion, ingemination. Our three fates animate the screen, performing their undulating exercises. What’s interesting about these three fates is that their middle-parted cords of clay hair hide no face, only black cavities, voids, as if Schulnik’s eyes have grown to incarnate an entire visage or have been jettisoned altogether. For her, eyes are signs of life, sad and empty though it may be. At one point during Eager, something does emerge from one such void, but it’s neither face nor eyes; jet black, it’s more akin to the death with which mythology has long associated these characters. The impasto is there in the show’s two paintings (St. Louis Man, 2012, and Porch Pot, 2013), and the clay is still there in the sculptures and film, but Schulnik seems to be saying goodbye to the easy delights of dark fantasy and opening up to more archetypal materials. That’s bigger game, so good for her. Jonathan T.D. Neil
Eager (film still), 2013, clay/stop-motion animated film, 8 min 30 sec. Courtesy ZieherSmith, New York
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Where 2 Where Gallery, Brooklyn 15 December – 14 February In the nether regions of Bushwick, Brooklyn, located underneath an elevated subway track, there lies a strip of secure storage lockers. These lockers function, depending on the tenants, as bodegas, taco stands, cellphone stores or, if the tenant is Where, an experimental exhibition space run by first-year Yale PhD student Lucy Hunter and the artist R. Lyon. Currently presenting Where 2, a project that pays homage to Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Hunter and Lyon have yet to figure out what Where wants to be exactly: a critically lauded gallery in the hippest of hipster neighbourhoods? Definitely. A platform upon which overly educated participants can flex otherwise useless critical-theory muscles? Inadvertently. A gallery space that explores new modes of spectatorship by publishing a blog and video previews concurrently with exhibitions? Perhaps not as new as they’d like to think. One thing is for certain, Where 2, which was curated by the young impresario A.E. Benenson, will stop most people in their tracks. The project
consists of a flatscreen television that plays Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); the light from the film fills the barren streets outside with an otherworldly flickering during the twilight hour, which is when it runs, 6.30 – 8.15pm daily. A press release taped to the locked glass entrance invites spectators to stream live footage of the screening – that is, themselves captured and broadcast by a webcam on site – on their smartphones via the gallery’s Tumblr page. This footage is relayed at a lethargic rate of only two frames per second, however, a speed prescribed by Gordon’s original video piece, which stretched Hitchcock’s film to 24 hours. Both Gordon’s piece and its interpretation by Benenson force Psycho to produce new meaning within the context of the artworld. In Gordon’s case, this meaning has to do with questions of authorship and temporality: by slowing down the projection, Gordon tests his audience’s patience, but also liberates the film from the realm of both narrative and
entertainment. In Benenson’s case, the question asked is whether or not authorship even matters. But what’s more interesting is the title Benenson gives himself. Even though he spent over 60 hours learning the coding necessary to create the feedback loop, Benenson calls himself a curator, not an artist, the latter being, of course, what Gordon was called for the exact same process of pirating an original and reformatting it. The strongest statement Where 2 makes, then, is that, within today’s artworld, being a curator, or at least calling oneself that, carries more weight than being an artist. Where 3, the next exhibition slated for the space, will purportedly take this question to the next level by exploring what it would mean for a gallery to represent curators. Whether or not this is prescient of the future, or just another feedback loop for a group of young graduate students pondering their place within the artworld, remains to be seen. Suffice it to say that the curator is dead. Long live the curator. Brienne Walsh
Where 2, 1397myrtleavenueunit4brooklynny11237.com, 2013 (installation view). Courtesy Where, New York
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Michelangelo Pistoletto and Pascale Marthine Tayou Galleria Continua & CONtemporarySULER, La Punt, Switzerland 21 December – 30 March Villages like La Punt in the Graubünden region of Switzerland are understated, beautiful, solidly historic and decidedly exclusive. As a location for contemporary art, Galleria Continua’s temporary home here could be viewed as an exquisite Petri dish, isolated from worldly concerns by the thick walls of a freshly renovated sixteenth-century ‘chesa’, or impressive house. What has grown there is an exhibition of works by the venerable Italian Michelangelo Pistoletto and fortysomething Cameroon-born, Belgium resident Pascale Marthine Tayou. Despite their different biographies, a tight selection demonstrates shared formal and thematic ground. Pistoletto’s Senza Titolo 92 (1976–2013) is the centrepiece of the vaulted room, a tall, doublesided, upright mirror bisecting a conical pile of garments, multicoloured on one side and in shades of white on the other. Thanks to the mirror, the heap’s form appears more or less constant as the viewer moves around, though the fabric that is visible shifts from brash variegation to being drained of colour and vice versa. The piece is surrounded by other mirrored Pistoletto works, including Louvre (Prigione)
(Louvre, Prison, 2013), a mirror silkscreened with an image of a tourist’s back as he snaps the other Michelangelo sculpture in the museum, The Dying Slave (1513–6). There’s a Tayou mirror piece too, Dirty Mirror, Masks and Co. (2013), into the back of which the artist has scored small patches of bright colour and loops through which we can see glimpses of adhered papers with handwritten texts, all of this now behind glass and framed, after which the frame has been smeared with ground cacao. Around the space are dotted six Poupées Pascale (2010–12), standing doll figures made of crude crystal, between 50 and 60cm tall, male and female, each laden with decorative paraphernalia. One man is adorned with bunches of Allen keys for earrings, while strings of beads around his torso hold three short brushes with woven handles to his back, all of it topped with the bristles of a decidedly second-hand toilet brush; a woman is less heavily encumbered but nonetheless restricted by strings of organic and synthetic beads that attach small stuffed toys to her like so many clinging children. The commonalities in the two artists’ media, in particular their use of salvaged and
low-quality materials, indicates their sensitivity to cycles of consumption and waste, twinned with migration in Tayou’s wandering dolls or taking place within the framework – or the ruins – of Europe’s cultural heritage in Pistoletto’s Louvre (Prigione). They both elevate mean materials to decorative or monumental status; they both play with the viewer’s ability to see the works, blinding them via glittering media or obscuring the works’ surfaces. None of this is news, and Tayou can hardly be unaware of Pistoletto’s five decades of work within and since the Arte Povera movement during the 1960s, but the encounter between the two illustrates a shared joie de vivre, an accompanying lightness of touch and enjoyment of the absurd. So while it is problematic to look at these artworks, with their embedded questions about value, instability and poverty, in a site that is saturated with privilege, imagine oneself in a social vacuum and they can be a delight. If only the visitor could avoid her own reflection in the mirrors, dragging her firmly back to the earthly present with all its inequalities and complications. Aoife Rosenmeyer
Michelangelo Pistoletto and Pascale Marthine Tayou, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Lorenzo Fiaschi. Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing & Les Moulins
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And Materials and Money and Crisis Mumok, Vienna 8 November – 2 February Curated by Richard Birkett ‘in dialogue’ with artist Sam Lewitt (the dialogue started during a conference at New York’s Artists Space in 2012), And Materials and Money and Crisis features work by 11 artists (of whom Lewitt is one) and seeks to address the issue of how immaterial factors – the conditions of production and display, the language used to talk about art and the forms of exchange surrounding it – affect the reception of artworks. In doing so it looks to establish parallels with the more general relationship between capital and material; for the curator, that’s a relationship that ruptured with the dissolution of the gold standard in 1971 (when currency values no longer had to be linked to gold reserves and thus became immaterial), which in turn created the conditions for the current financial crisis. You could argue that the rupture began long before then (perhaps with various eighteenth-century financial bubbles), but no one can accuse this show of lacking ambition or relevance to the present moment. Not least to the financial bubble that surrounds parts of the contemporary art market right now. What does this all mean in terms of the art on display? Most of the works suggest or are constructed around a narrative (which is why Birkett describes the exhibition booklet, in which these are laid out, as ‘part of the exhibition’). Cheyney Thompson’s Broken Volume (10 L)
(2013) comprises cast-concrete sculptures displayed on pedestals and composed of one-inch cubes (with a hint of Antony Gormley about them) in an arrangement generated by an algorithm that underpins many financial modelling tools. We’re left to admire the abstract and inhuman beauty of their (visually-not-sodecipherable) logic. The five Perspex panels of Henrik Olesen’s Produce 1–5 (2013), to which the artist has attached the debris of his daily life – largely packaging for foodstuffs and male grooming products, as well as taxi receipts and an old iPod – become part diary, part portrait, in which an absent body is captured as a processing plant for various consumer products. In the context of this exhibition it also brings to mind the cliché about one person’s (material) rubbish being another person’s (more-or-less valuable) contemporary art. (As well as another one about the simple ideas being the best.) And more generally, it highlights the way in which the art on show either parallels the curator’s theme in terms of its subject matter or is, inherently, that subject matter. And yet, a shared theme is not really what comes across to the person meandering through this show. Indeed, as a reviewer, it’s tempting to go on tracking the exhibition as a series of discrete solo presentations, because that’s how it feels. In part this is for practical reasons: Emily
Wardill’s stunning 16mm film The Palace (2013), which allies visuals of architecture and a biographical narrative, needs to be shown in a closed space, as does Maria Eichhorn’s Meer. Salz. Wasser. Klima. Kammer. Nebel. Wolken. Luft. Staub. Atem. Küste. Brandung. Rauch (1991) – a chamber filled with a saltwater fog into which visitors enter, absorbing the atmosphere. But it also extends to works such as R.H. Quaytman’s collection of paintings Voyelle, Chapter 26 (2013), which seems somewhat marooned in a cluster on one of Mumok’s back walls. Even the repeated presence through the show of Melanie Gilligan’s entertaining videoworks 4 x exchange/abstraction (2013) and Lewitt’s Weak Local Lineaments (E2, E3, E4) (2013), copper-clad laminate panels, variously corroded and positioned and scaled to indicate hidden and visible windows on the gallery’s facade, doesn’t draw the whole thing together. In fact, you begin to wonder whether or not the exhibition guide is so central to the show because it’s so hard, on the evidence of your senses, to synthesise anything as precise as the curator’s analysis of the roots of the world’s global economic crisis from the works on display – a slipperiness that, crises aside, is what the common sense tends to posit as separating art from economics in the first place. Perhaps the real point of the show, then, is that the one is as imprecise as the other. Mark Rappolt
Maria Eichhorn, Meer. Salz. Wasser. Klima. Kammer. Nebel. Wolken. Luft. Staub. Atem. Küste. Brandung. Rauch, 1991 (installation view, Galerie Wewerka & Weiss Galerie, Berlin, 1991). Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin
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Jacob Dahlgren Painting into Space and the Meaning of Construction Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm 14 November – 22 December Given his history of transforming everyday objects into large-scale installations and intricate constructions that hint at the power of excess and the void, it’s clear that Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren is no stranger to repetition. His artistry illuminates both his personal obsession and a commitment to following one path, one notion of simplicity or selfelevated design until its completion. In so doing, Dahlgren emphasises that less is more – that Minimalism still possesses a visual impact on viewers, moulding the mindsets of the masses. Embracing the linear, abstract and geometric, and the human desire to locate order and beauty in a world that often provides neither, Dahlgren’s solo exhibition – his second here – features works (many sitespecific or performative) that express how an artist can cultivate awe-inspiring impressions stemming from deliberation and recurring tasks, and from the alteration of domestic objects and common items such as weighing scales, coloured pencils and darts. Here there appears to be a shift in focus from primarily highlighting Dahlgren’s personal relationship with chosen patterns, stripes or solo-focused work methods, begun nearly a decade ago in works such as Colour Reading and Contexture (2005), towards including
everyday citizens in works such as in December 5 Demonstration (2007) (alongside complementary demonstrations occurring in multiple locations worldwide), where strangers walk streets holding his uniquely designed banners and placards (a protest inevitably universalised and anonymised by this motion, for their iconography has no recognisable association) or No Conflict, No Irony: I Love the Whole World (2013). Here, a colourfully designed 100-metre-long banner, text-free and patterned with coloured lines and shapes, was constructed by the public and sports enthusiasts and carried through Edinburgh, from Meadowbank Sports Centre to Salisbury Crags. This tendency to utilise banners, placards and flags quickly steers one into the realm of politics, asking one to take a closer look at societal constructs, cultural conventions and normative behaviour. In such cases, the artist creates variants of tools like abstract, geometrically designed placards, subverting any tendency to represent real-world ideologies that might be perceived as problematic, vacant or ineffectual. Oftentimes, Dahlgren’s stripes are incorporated into military and service-oriented uniforms; this visual trademark has been present since his earliest investigations. Yet his relationship with the stripe evolves. Firstly,
he obsessively collects and wears striped T-shirts. The film Neoconcrete Space (2012) features 1,027 striped T-shirts that he has worn and will continue to wear until death; in the film Non Object (2013), the artist clandestinely stalks strangers coincidentally wearing similar striped shirts; in Work as Method (2013), stripes are displayed via manipulated coloured pencils placed side by side: parallel, perpendicular, intersecting. In his performance piece and abstract ‘painting’ Neoconcrete Ballad (2013), Dahlgren creates rules for others to collectively create a new piece; they drill holes into the gallery wall, then later place coloured plugs into each hole; the spectator is only able to view the holes, never the individuals working or making the hole; they’re hidden behind a wall as they work. This gesture persuades one to consider their relationship with work and production, for when a consumer is removed from production, it is easier to objectify the worker and the product. The artist’s choice to highlight the division between spectator and worker mimics the stifled rapport between producer and consumer, so that this performance serves as commentary on how patterns currently present in daily life can be harmful. Yet Dahlgren’s works remain playful even when they have communitybased participation in mind. Jacquelyn Davis
Neoconcrete Ballad, 2013, a mural in progress, created onsite with coloured plugs placed in the wall over the course of the exhibition. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Bérangér. Courtesy Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm
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In the Line of Beauty IMMA, Dublin 12 October – 23 February Beauty is back. Again. And this time it’s living in a far more contingent and perhaps even open relationship with truth. The fact is, the pair have been seeing other people for years now, with Dave Hickey, among others, organising dates. So even if, as the curator asserts, the scheme of this IMMA show has been to gather a group of 11 younger Irish artists around the question ‘What is your idea of the line of beauty?’ the task is not straightforward. For starters, the question embeds a reference to William Hogarth (who originated the theory of the line’s existence during the mid-eighteenth century) and another to the 2004 novel by Alan Hollinghurst, a nesting that suggests that there’s tolerance, here, for notions of beauty filtered through artists and writers rather than direct encounters with it. The point seems to be not so much to narrate an encounter with curvy lines (although, there are plenty of those throughout, for example, hiding in the gravitationally draped cardboard and tape lines of Aleana Egan) or contemporary novels (Oisín Byrne’s large-scale line-drawn portraits of sleeping figures seem to strike a reference to Hollinghurst). But rather to propose
a meetup between artists who might feel comfortable deploying the word ‘beauty’, at least in the sense that Hickey, another reference point for the show, famously offered during the 1990s (primarily via essays collected in The Invisible Dragon, 1993). At the centre of this small show is a print from Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753), a multipanel graphic catalogue of serpentine feints, from drapery to musculature, periwigs to petals, putti to cacti. The image is a tiny exhibition in itself, a distorting transtemporal mirror of the gathering through which we walk at IMMA, leading from a large text-driven piece (Joseph Noonan-Ganley’s A Pot in the Life of Janet Hamer, 2012, also includes some handmade ceramics) via Sam Keogh’s abject recycled works in plaster and wounded raku, to a room filled with the paintings of Ciarán Murphy. In between, In the Line of Beauty offers (as per Hickey’s gloss on beauty itself) various machines for capturing attention and various equally varied conceptual cargos ready to unload. Fiona Hallinan’s Unsold (2011/2013), a wall piece that creates an ordering of real petals and leaves, acknowledges a resonant truth of the natural
world, the fabulous detail of nature (you can zoom right in and the resolution still holds up), while underlining the fierce contingency and diverse economies of visual pleasure. A similar micro approach to the issue comes in David Beattie’s Approaching Reality (2013), a draped polyester mobile stirred by every molecular shift of the room’s air, as well as (just to be on the safe side) its own tiny electric fan. Thermodynamics, meanwhile, also come under scrutiny in Caoimhe Kilfeather’s mahogany, lead and steel sculptures, oceanically sagging and yearning into Hogarthian curves. And at the climax of the show – both at the end of the serpentine route the curator has planned through the gallery, and at the exhibition’s densest moment – hang Murphy’s canvases. A collective full stop that registers as the beginning of a fresh sentence, their compulsive surfaces, their fleeting, absentimage images – like L2. (2013), featuring a mammoth planetary orb quietly struggling to remain visible – are armed with beauty and adequate to the task of waylaying us long enough to unload their precious cargo of uncertainty. Luke Clancy
Sam Keogh, Plaster, Ink, Found Containers, Acrylic Varnish, 2013, plaster, ink, found containers, acrylic varnish, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
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Morgane Tschiember Polystyrene, Shibari & Co Loevenbruck, Paris 13 December – 8 February The recently installed frosted glass facade of Loevenbruck was, to say the least, a considerate architectural choice, concealing an otherwise risqué business from innocent passers-by: for what Morgane Tschiember installed behind the opaque front window feels strictly intended for adults. So leave your children behind and your virtue as well – in her third solo show at the gallery, the French artist’s somewhat sensuous and handmade approach to Postminimalism verges on the erotic and profane realm of BDSM. Ouch. While the artist dominates with her great touch, or tact if you will, the submissive part is here played by something that, while not the most popular medium in contemporary art practice, is nevertheless the one and only prima materia of the (pre-Fall) man: clay, here bending to the maker’s will. Yes Adam, get back to your origins: within three ensembles of sculptural works, Shibari, Skin and Polystyrene (all works 2013), Tschiember digs into and sexes-up the traditional art of pottery. All the pieces presented at Loevenbruck were made last summer during the newly created NUOVE//Residency programme, a project through which international artists
can learn the techniques of and experiment with ceramics in Nove, which has been the historic ‘capital’ of the earthenware industries in Northern Italy since the seventeenth century. In Shibari, Tschiember revisits the eponymous and traditional Japanese practice of bondage – also known by connoisseurs as ‘Kinbaku,’ which literally means the ‘beauty of tight binding’. The body of work comprises three shapeless pots, each intricately tied up and suspended by linen rope, one beside the other, from the ceiling. If the art of Shibari is often considered a fetish by (corrupted) Westerners, it is nonetheless an aesthetics designed to reach communion on a carnal and spiritual level with (consenting) enslaved models – whether naked people or, as is the case for Tschiember, clay vessels. A rather sensual attempt, you’ll admit, to inhabit or explore the medium she’s recently seized upon, the tortuous knotting of the ceramics right after their spinning on the potter’s wheel and before their firing caused not only their voluptuous misshaping, but also many cracks on their flesh. Speaking of which, the two ceramic works that constitute the second ensemble presented at Loevenbruck, Skin, do indeed share a certain
quality with flesh’s delicate complexion and slow necrosis. Resembling something between a wedding veil and a death shroud, both are embroidered sheets that Tschiember covered with clay, preserving its natural whiteness for the one and applying mint green engobe to the other, before firing the compositions. The result is absolutely astonishing. While both ceramic textiles are displayed hanging from high steel pedestals, the clay does not adhere strongly to the fabrics and, throughout the length of the show, imperceptibly crumbles down to form at their bottom small heaps of powder. How does it go: from dust you were made, and to dust you will return? It might as well be. The last ensemble displayed at Loevenbruck, Polystyrene, features three ceramic casts of the same 50-inch cube of white foam, made at three different stages in the process of carving the lightweight block with a welding torch. A little reminiscent of gravestones, the resulting clay sculptures are installed on three large steel panels laid on the floor in the middle of the gallery. And thus the pure, heavenly matter – polystyrene is composed of 98 percent air, after all – is forever frozen in stone. Violaine Boutet de Monvel
Shibari, 2013, ceramic, mint-green slip, blue glass enamel and linen rope, dimensions variable. Photo: Isabelle Giovacchini/© Adagp, Paris
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Amor e Ódio a Lygia Clark/Love and Hate to Lygia Clark Zacheta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 13 December – 23 February This show takes its name from Marcelo Cidade’s sculpture of two conjoined brass knuckles displayed, like a butterfly, in a vitrine. The object seems dead: as dead as Lygia Clark’s Bichos, metal beasts made during the 1960s to be manipulated, but now too valuable to be touched. Seen through glass, robbed of any participatory potential, Cidade’s Amor e Ódio a Lygia Clark (Love and Hate to Lygia Clark, 2006/2013) evokes the frustrations of an ostensible dialogue between contemporary artists and the historical Brazilian avant-gardes: Concretism, Neo-Concretism, Tropicalismo and designs by Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi and others. While the title of the exhibition might lead one to expect an answer to the question of how artists today work with the legacy of this extraordinary modernist ‘cage’, it offers little evidence that a way out has been found. We seem to find ourselves in a permanent cycle of formal repetition – a condition perhaps not unique to Brazil. If there is any dialogue with the past to be discerned, then it’s an impossible, internally fraught one. In Cidade’s sculpture, symbols of gang violence are embraced in an antifunctional shape that presents an impasse. The two halves of the knuckledusters cannot be separated; there is no fight, or: there is love, or: the object is useless. Illustrating a similar point, Luiz Roque’s fuzzy, old-school video Bicho (2001–9)
shows a spectator manipulating Clark’s Bichos at a Neo-Concretist exhibition, as she would have intended him to, to the delight of his conspiratorial colleagues – until a guard puts an end to the fun. There would seem to be no way to reclaim the direct experience of the past, physically. Here, the ambivalent legacy of Brazilian modernism is hinted at but not addressed directly. All manner of abstract forms proliferate, vying for our attention all around us, while what few realworld subjects there are recede – most notably in Yuri Firmeza’s Action 1 (2005), a series of colour photographs of a male nude retreating into the safety of the hollow of a tree. The unexpected punctum of the show may be Guilherme Peters’s unassuming video of a young man wearing a French Revolutionera wig, screaming at the top of his voice in a decrepit-looking room, or alternately stepping on the edge of a rake, which lifts to slap the actor uselessly on the chest. The work’s title is Robespierre and an Attempt to Resume a Revolution (2010) and the crier is an update of the eponymous figure – alienated – but nevertheless in thrall to the myths of French history – a strangely postcolonial work whose subject is trying to find its balance while literally skateboarding on a small half-pipe. Leandro Nerefuh also addresses colonial and postcolonial myths and imagery, including different aspects of
‘Brazilianness’, through slavery and allegories of America. The multilayered installation Makako abre a bunda: The Boaventura Paradigm (2013) consists of a huge reproduction of a familiar, though anonymous, seventeenthcentury painting entitled America (c. 1650); arches representing gates to two different worlds; and books including (the well-known in Poland) A Escravra Isaura (1875). The whole forms an artistic quasi-system for depicting what Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos termed ‘abyssal thinking’ (a broadly colonial methodology for dividing the world into regions of order and of chaos), translated into contemporary ‘abyssal agitprop’. For the artist, ‘modern’ and ‘postcolonial’ are two dimensions of the same process, and postabyssal thinking is proposed here as an alternative to postcolonialism. The dilemma of artistic identity in contemporary Brazil presented at Zacheta finds a strong parallel in the concurrent exhibition on the same floor of the gallery: The Map: Artistic Migrations and the Cold War, tracing Polish postwar artists’ search for a ‘strong poet’ under socialism. Both exhibitions are fluid and open – suggesting archives of the recent past – and present an ambivalent image of the modernist legacy: one characterised by the anxiety of influence. Barbara Piwowarska
Leandro Nerefuh, Makako abre a bunda: The Boaventura Paradigm, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Marek Krzyzanek/Agencja Medium
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Lamberto Teotino EP Dino Morra Arte Contemporanea, Naples 23 November – 15 February Our cultural epoch is curiously lacking in the type of existential analyses that characterised other periods of crisis in the modern age. Galleries and museums are full of works that echo our financial malaise, either by mimesis of capitalist processes or criticism of the political and financial institutions that underpin them; but the dispiriting effect that economic or spiritual crises have on the individual is little explored by comparison. Against that trend, and across two rooms, EP – or ‘extended play’ – presents five photographic works selected from five different projects undertaken between 2011 and 2013 by the Rome-based Lamberto Teotino. All in black and white and all comprising manipulated photographs printed on Hahnemühle cotton paper, these revisit a tendency to reflect on the dark aspects of the human psyche as well as the human individual’s embedding within time: philosophical subjects recalling the influence that Heidegger and Sartre had on postwar literature and art. L’ultimo Dio (The Last God, 2012–13) sums up well Teotino’s overall tendency to depict the cold abstraction of itself that humanity has become in our postindustrial age. This large-scale portrait of a typical patriarchal figure (one could imagine him being a psychologist,
scientist, banker or industrialist), his features obscured by a type of leafy organic growth (and so evoking the work of John Stezaker), appears to symbolise a possession of the self by an empty imposter. In the same room, Wormhole (2012–13) depicts a rugged landscape featuring a grazing cow cut with precision down the middle, revealing a gap through which the sea and land behind can be seen. This manipulation – which is part of the artist’s reflection on quantum mechanics and the ways in which the laws of physics are impervious to human and animal life – is unsettling for its subtlety. As here, the images on display – despite their manipulation – leave the viewer to reflect less on images that are skewered and more on a skewered reality: one which the images depict without exaggeration. Mr and Mrs Smithee (2013), the most recent and biggest (at 240 by 160 cm) of the works on display, takes two images of a male and female archer respectively, each at the point just prior to releasing their bows, and places them opposite and facing one another, each bearing cold expressions. Poised to shoot at one another while standing in the setting of an otherwise tranquil urban garden the subjects hint at the ease with which humanity pits itself against
itself, on both the societal and personal levels. The image manipulation itself is barely visible, giving the image a slight eeriness. Something is not right, but it’s unclear if it’s the shadows or the scale of the subjects. Yet the truly worrying aspect of this exhibition as a whole is its cold presentation of the human form, devoid of sentimentality. Sistema di Riferimento Monodimensionale (One-Dimensional Coordinate System, 2011–13) depicts five female dancers on stage, the portion of the photo at the level of their eyeline having been cut out and the brow slightly lowered so as to clinically and precisely remove part of each of the women’s heads. The subtlety of the manipulation initially evades detection until the viewer realizes that each woman has been very precisely and deliberately deformed. The work is from a series in which the aforementioned ‘cut’ is used as a simple device to symbolize the notion of folds in spatiotemporality. While the science is reduced to a symbolic form, the fragility of humanity in a universe it doesn’t fully understand is well conveyed, with zero respect for the ethical niceties that we look to in order to provide solace for a bleak reality. That reality is here conveyed, via Teotino’s research, with almost autistic clarity. Mike Watson
Sistema di Riferimento Monodimensionale, 2011–13, inkjet print on Hahnemühle cotton paper mounted on Alu-Dibond in wood frame, 62 × 70 × 4 cm, edition of 3 + 2AP. Courtesy the artist and Dino Morra Arte Contemporanea, Naples
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Christian Waldvogel Peripheral Vision FRAC Lorraine, Metz 9 November – 9 February Like a Dada Jules Verne, Christian Waldvogel is a man of quixotic – if idiosyncratic – adventures. At the age of fourteen, the Swiss artist asked his father for the location of the West Pole. Though Waldvogel admits that his father was quite correct in insisting on the nonexistence of any such pole, he refused to be deterred by such trivial matters. It must exist, the precocious teenager declared. The pole’s location, he has finally concluded, is both temporal and chronological: ‘It is at both the middle and the centre of night’, a text on the gallery wall asserts. Alongside walls lined with Biblical diagrams and photographs of Arctic explorers, Waldvogel’s installation West Pole (2005/2013) models his thinking on the matter via a large lamp on a tripod, an even larger disc suspended a few feet away representing the earth, and, tucked behind it, a night photograph of Hong Kong harbour (the eventually determined location for this prospective pole). Trained as an architect, Waldvogel is still probably best known for his hitherto ‘open
source’ art project Globus Cassus (2004–; the wiki was taken offline in late 2012). Equal parts Buckminster Fuller and Freeman Dyson, Globus Cassus reimagined the old idea of the hollow earth as a futuristic megastructure, utilising the whole of the earth’s mass to create a vast geodesic icosahedron of a size approaching that of Saturn. The work made up Switzerland’s contribution to the 2004 Venice architecture biennale and won a gold medal at the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair. It fills a room here in Metz, with a lengthy video and lavish wall charts, but I find myself drawn more to the quirkier charms of his recent adventures to the West Pole and so forth. For his next mission, for instance, Waldvogel decided he wanted ‘to not turn with the Earth’. Since our planet rotates at 1158 km/h, he simply went up in a supersonic jet and flew west at precisely this speed. In order to document this hard-won stasis, he transformed the whole cockpit into a pinhole camera to take a picture of an immobile sun. In a room which also happens to be under constant surveillance for an ongoing
work of Dora Garcia’s called Forever (2004–), the result of Waldvogel’s experiment (a large red sheet with a slight fuzzy patch in the lower left side) is exhibited alongside some films of the trip, his flying suit, and various other knickknacks, housed in a large vitrine (The Earth Turns Without Me, 2009–11). There is an obvious similarity with Guido van der Werve’s The Day I Didn’t Turn With the World (2007) but with the Dutch artist’s physical commitment replaced by the brute force of jet engines. Conversely, I found Waldvogel’s idea rather more playful, more inviting. Van der Werve doesn’t show us a still sun, as Waldvogel does, but a man alone going through a particular experience that we can only observe with a certain amount of awe, but not really share. As should be clear, then, Waldvogel’s actual exhibits are slightly pathetic. As ‘works’ in any classical sense, they are doomed – perhaps inevitably – to failure. But that almost doesn’t matter, since his starting premises are so wonderfully poetic. Like the very best Fluxus text scores, they are invitations to dream. Robert Barry
Standstill (The Earth Turns Without Me) (videostill), 2010. © ProLitteris
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Stephan Doitschinoff FVTVRV Choque Cultural, São Paulo 23 November – 23 December Stephan Doitschinoff is a man with a message – or, rather, lots of messages. They’re spelled out in a lexicon of symbols that appear over and over in his work, clustered like nebulae around the mournful mortals in his paintings. They orbit a sun-headed man in O Sol (2013) as a pair of crowned swans hovering at his chest, a cobra at his solar plexus and a clutch of Orthodox steeples gathered at his groin. In Água Preta (2013), a man and a woman are locked together, a waterfall gushing from her heel while twin satellites spin at his shoulders; and in Emergência (2013), a bee is swarmed by a dozen or more icons, from stars, globes and bleeding hearts to a constellation of psychoactive plants including peyote, psilocybin and morning glory. Doitschinoff must be one of the most heavily tattooed artists in São Paulo. That is, we don’t know how many tattoos, if any, his own skin harbours; but his iconography has found a home on the bodies of dozens of his admirers, inked out on chests, shins, shoulders and arms in a gallery of images that can be seen on his Facebook page, featuring more than 100, and
counting. Jungian in their insistence that we consider the symbol, just contemplate it, his icons, many of which figure repeatedly in his paintings, are as universal, simple and enigmatic as Mexican lotería cards – Babel in flames, the heart spilling forth, the calavera; but they also bristle with impenetrable, carefully lettered acronyms and arcane references. The fruit of years of research into religious art, mythology and Brazilian folk art, the paintings in this exhibition were made during Doitschinoff’s return to the village of Lençoís in northeast Brazil last year, where he had previously lived for the best part of three years, and where he eventually painted the exteriors of a number of his neighbours’ houses with his self-taught brand of quasi-religious imagery. On the wattle-and-daub walls of some of the poorest homes in the village – which was once at the heart of Brazil’s diamond-mining trade – churches drown in a sea of troubles and a man lies prone, a tree growing from his chest and diamonds rising from his guts. In the ‘semimedieval atmosphere’ of Lençoís, as Doitschinoff has described it, the images’ roots in Brazilian
traditional art and sacred art seem to take them full circle, and the murals, documented in photographs in Doitschinoff’s 2008 book CALMA, become folk art themselves. The meanings in Doitschinoff’s insistent messages are there for the taking in his writings – in CALMA and in CRAS, his 2012 book of modern illuminated manuscripts, paintings and texts, in which he explains some of his symbols (e.g. the Tower of Babel in flames as the exhaustion of globalisation: ‘We have consumed everything’). Occasionally, a symbol jars or feels a little didactic – the São Paulo state flag at the man’s wrist in Água Preta; and the meshing of Doitschinoff’s boldly graphical style with more gently painted tableaux, inserted into the canvases like little dreams, as with a pair of mushroom-eating apes, also in Água Preta, doesn’t always pay off. The rest of the time, sheer contemplation of the paintings – of their cool aquas and ambers, of the lovely planes of the painted waterfalls and the interlocking locks of the women’s hair, and of the soulful faces of their human figures, rich with pity and sorrow – quietly delivers its own message. Claire Rigby
O Sol, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 200 × 240 cm. Photo: Alexandre Vianna. Courtesy the artist and Choque Cultural, São Paulo
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The Garden of Diversion Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing 2 November – 2 March A young naked woman is dancing, adopting poses from classical sculpture and moving in a cheerful green garden, in the middle of which is an empty place that would normally house the statue of some romantic figure: an equivalent to Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince, perhaps. But this is not a live performance. Rather, it is a series of moving images from Kan Xuan’s video A Happy Girl (2002). The video is played on a monitor placed on a pedestal in the exhibition hall in Nanjing’s brand-new, Steven Holl-designed museum. It sits near a narrow window through which one can see a cheerful green garden, this time a real one – a landscaped campus in which the art museum is located. This one work and its setting highlight the ingenious design of Philippe Pirotte’s The Garden of Diversion. It is as though the curator has placed invisible mirrors and windows in and outside the building – transparent or reflective optical instruments that allow one to see the dancing and moving content of one artwork in another,
the museum and its cheerful green garden playing a major role in the scenography. It is in the last setting that Xu Zhen (who has taken to recently referring to himself as a MadeIn Company Production) has created a garden of forking paths. A recent iteration of his Movement Field Series (2012–), it is composed of various itineraries that are collected from historical political and social movements. A garden of zen or jaku (tranquillity, one of four principals of Chanoyu by Japanese tea master Sen Rikyu [1522–91]) and a monumental space for social movements at the same time. Meanwhile, inside the museum building, He An has built up a minimalist ritual space titled Wind Light as a Thief (2013) using materials from urban construction sites to create an aesthetic alternative to the extravagantly manicured campus in which the museum, along with a hotel, a congress centre, a number of villas and other facilities, is set. Just a reminder, if you like, of a more tremendous and ambitious construction site: the modern China.
The theme of the show is drawn from writer Hu Fang’s 2009 novel Garden of Mirrored Flowers, about the reality of garden construction versus the narratives established by historical change and social upheaval. The novel also provides a parallel text to Olafur Eliasson’s film Your Embodied Garden (2013, the result of a trip to two scholar gardens in Suzhou, China, undertaken in the company of Hu, among others. The other works (by a total of 24 artists from around the world), among them ten pieces of Danh Vō’s We the People (2010–13), a full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, continue to unfold the plot of Pirotte’s space-based fiction, opening up concepts such as the existence of a world-inside-a-world and a world-outsidethe-world, and various iterations of the garden theme. It’s a show for wanderers, windowpeepers, garden researchers, hyperlink-aholics and all those who are interested in illusions created via optical, spatial, iconographic or literal tricks. Aimee Lin
Kan Xuan, A Happy Girl, 2002 (installation view), video, 1 min 18 sec. Courtesy Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing
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Books
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Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art by Jens Hoffmann Thames & Hudson, £29.95 (hardcover) At the risk of sounding pernickety, Show Time would be more accurately subtitled The 50 Most Influential Group Exhibitions of Contemporary Art. This is a book – a directory, really – that celebrates curating, a trade of which Jens Hoffmann is a prominent exponent. Aside from a slightly pedestrian introduction and a more informative panel discussion with some of the curator’s big-hitter professional peers, the bulk of its 250-odd pages is given over to cataloguing what Hoffmann has subjectively deemed the 50 key exhibitions – among them the YBA headline-stirring Sensation (1997) and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s experiment in time, space and interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation at Documenta 13 (2012) – since Jean-Hubert
Martin’s influential Magiciens de la Terre (1989). Forensically listed for each are dates, venues, catalogue and artist details, together with a short writeup. The latter could use more descriptive detail and critical nuance, perhaps; but otherwise the book seems to reflect reasonably sound judgement and is a useful resource. Yet it is not intended to be simply a reference work. Magiciens… was chosen as the kickoff point not only because of its iconic status as a project that battered Western supremacy in the artworld, but also because around the same time curating was breaking away from art history to become a discrete discipline. (Hoffmann notes that the first curatorial course was initiated in Grenoble, in 1987, closely followed by similar
Ian Nairn: Words in Place
Nairn’s Towns
by Gillian Darley and David McKie
by Ian Nairn and Owen Hatherley
Five Leaves Publications, £10.99 (softcover)
Notting Hill Editions, £10 (softcover)
Ian Nairn, who died in 1983 at the age of fifty-two, is an unusual figure. Prominent in print and on TV during the 1960s and 70s, he has since been mostly forgotten. But not entirely. One corner of a certain field is forever Nairnland – that field is architecture writing, which Nairn shaped to a degree that is hard to overstate. Jonathan Meades, Owen Hatherley, Gavin Stamp, Deyan Sudjic – every leading architecture writer cites Nairn as a formative influence. These enthusiasts have kept the Nairn flame burning. Now there are signs of a Nairn revival: two books in 2013, a film in 2014, more planned. Gillian Darley and David McKie’s Ian Nairn: Words in Place is a series of biographical essays, each of which carries a short appreciative preamble by a Nairn aficionado, including all those named above. Nairn put into words the disenchantment felt by much of the British public with how the country rebuilt itself after the Second World War – a position strengthened by his lack of obvious ideological agenda and (small-c) catholic taste. Perhaps ‘disenchantment’ is too gentle a word. Outrage, the Nairn-masterminded special 1955 edition of The Architectural Review, was every bit as angry and accusatory as its uncompromising title. It was ‘a prophecy of doom’, warning that Britain was becoming a homogenised exurban wilderness, a dispiriting monotony of low-quality architectural junk from
Southampton to Carlisle. This landscape was given a name: subtopia. How an unknown twenty-four-year-old with no background in architecture could preside over this seminal piece of polemic makes a fascinating story. The rest of Nairn’s too-short career was spent writing (and making films) about places, setting out his idiosyncratic yet seductive ideas of what was good and what was bad. He was no modernist but neither was he a kneejerk antimodernist – he spoke urgently about the need to preserve many threatened buildings and neighbourhoods, but scorned prettifiers as much as vandals and spoke up for the Barbican, slagheaps and ‘a pile of old cars he’d discovered somewhere between Welwyn and Hatfield, for its vividness and drama’. The greatest of his topographical works is Nairn’s London, a despairing 1966 love letter to the capital. The key to his influence may have been the message he drummed into his readers, summarised by Darley and McKie: ‘Go and look at this place. See what you think. See how you feel. Respond. And if it is being diminished, if the flavour is being squeezed out of it, think about how you might respond to that, too.’ Words in Place makes a fine introduction to Nairn if no actual Nairn is to hand. His books have all been hard to find for years. But now another has found its way back into print: Britain’s Changing Towns, repackaged as Nairn’s
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courses in New York and in London.) For Hoffmann, historicising the profession’s finest moments acts as evidence for his view that it has parity with artmaking, that curating is an ‘artistic undertaking’. And although some of his discussion partners see things differently – Maria Lind maintains that her job is to ‘enhance the potential’ of an art object, Hans Ulrich Obrist uses the word ‘choosing’ in reference to the process of staging a show – most share the view, in Mary Jane Jacob’s words, ‘that exhibitions are no longer so much about selecting or organizing, but making’. Perhaps Hoffmann’s subtitle is correct after all. A show made by a single artist, a show made by a single curator: what’s the difference? Oliver Basciano
Towns by Notting Hill Editions, a new publisher of slim, lip-smacking hardback nonfiction. We are, Darley and McKie say, in for a treat: ‘the most assured and well-turned essays he ever wrote’. These 15 portraits of towns and cities were written as columns for The Listener magazine between 1960 and 1964. When these were collected in a book in 1967, each essay was given a postscript by Nairn updating the reader on what had changed. In the new edition, Hatherley contributes his own updates on what has changed since – a smart move, redeeming what might otherwise have been a period piece. Inevitably it’s a mixed bag. There are too many detailed descriptions of churches, which can be utterly sedative on the page. Nairn springs to life when he breaks away from antiquarianism and gets into the grain of a place. This is often a question of overlooked detail: quirks of layout, public toilets, the underlying terrain, even its grime: ‘Brummie pigeons seemed to have a remarkable architectural sense… they shit to a pattern.’ Ultimately Nairn is seeking the humanity in places, even to the extent that he praises slums, including the pre-redevelopment Gorbals: ‘I can hear the cries of outraged planners already: “Really, this fellow Nairn has gone too far this time.” But I would plead with them really to go and have a look at the Gorbals, while it is still there.’ Here is Nairn: go and have a look. Will Wiles
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Western Art and the Wider World by Paul Wood Wiley-Blackwell, £19.99/€24 (soft cover), £65/€78 (hardcover) As Paul Wood points out in his introduction to this book, to suggest that you might reopen a discussion about the relative merits of the history of Western art in a global context is likely to get a negative response in a critical atmosphere in which postcolonial theory, the politics of multiculturalism and the respect for cultural difference hold sway, and in which any talk of the ‘Western canon’ is rubbished as no more than the cultural defence of the West’s history of colonial and imperial power. Wood’s book is no such defence. It is instead a cautious, open-minded attempt to write about the history of Western art from the Renaissance through the early and late modernist era, as it encountered, and was encountered by, the rest of the world. It eventually comes to reflect on how the current moment of globalisation is bringing the curtain down on a 500-year period that saw ‘the West’ take over the world. In the broad arc of Wood’s account, that growing imbalance of power was responsible for European culture starting to identify art with the idea of human progress, and then using art as justification for white, Western culture’s superiority over all others. Wood’s narrative starts in the world of Marco Polo and the early Renaissance, a period that he sees as marked by relatively equitable social and cultural exchanges between Christian Europe, the Ottoman Empire and China. Wood then turns his attention to how increasingly adventurous European powers encountered the less developed societies of the Americas and the South
Pacific, and how these began to lay the foundations for the European sense of civilisational superiority, while also planting the idea of the ‘noble savage’ who, while less ‘civilised’, stalked the European imagination as the symbol of an originary human authenticity. Artistically, the thread through this is the development of representational art, and particularly of Renaissance perspective. Wood’s account really starts to cook when he gets into the emerging age of empire, and of what New Art History academics like to call ‘modernity’; as mimetic representation becomes an academic orthodoxy resting on its classical laurels, the alternatives presented by, say, Japanese art, become a weapon that European radicals turn against the unthinking arrogance of the academy. Woods continuously reminds us that the ‘canon’ of Western art was never free of internal conflict, never merely the byproduct of empire: he insists on the critical position of the European avant-garde in particular, showing how, for example, contrasting artists from Manet to the communist-inspired surrealists and even fascist-inspired futurists forced acknowledgement of empire and colony into their work, while colonised artists sought to turn the colonial projections of the nonWestern other back on themselves, thriving on the dialogue with likeminded Europeans. Wood’s approach is not without tensions: the tradition of mimetic representation remains an ambiguous historical problem in his arguments, since it is this form of image-making that
becomes the most obvious symbol of Western art’s sense of its own achievement and cultural superiority, yet which still cannot be dismissed as a mere idiosyncratic accident of European art. Given Wood’s account of the intermittent cultural trade in perspectival representation between Europe, China and Japan, you get the feeling that he is still uncertain about what to do with the idea of historical ‘progress’, since it appears that other cultures found a genuine artistic innovation in Western representation, even after Western avant-garde culture had grown weary of it. But Wood has little to say about progress, and is just as nervous faced with that other bogeyman of white, European cultural hegemony, ‘universalism’. It means that while he courageously takes on the rise of ‘globalised’ conceptualist art, and the ‘radical particularism’ of its confused apologists, Wood cannot quite confront their politics of cultural fragmentation. Yet perhaps it is only by arguing that, for example, perspective was an advance in historical human culture not because it proved that Westerners were superior, but because it demonstrated that human culture could develop a critical sense of its past accomplishments, and which could furthermore be taken up by everyone, that one starts to see what is lacking in postcolonial critiques of the Western canon: the radical promise of universalism, of common humanity and shared knowledge. After all, as Woods points out early on, it was actually Arabs who invented perspective, not Europeans. J.J. Charlesworth
This Mess Is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter Edited and compiled by Zoë Mendelson And Publishing, £22.50 (boxed) Hoarding disorder – defined as ‘the excessive collection of and failure to discard objects of apparently little value, leading to clutter, distress, and disability’, was only named as a psychiatric condition in its own right in May 2013. Previously it had been categorised solely as a subset of obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorders. An essay setting out the reasoning behind this shift – by consultant psychiatrist Alberto Pertusa – is one of a series of texts and works on paper, commissioned from artists, archivists, psychiatrists and others, for this anthology on the subject of hoards and collections, compiled by artist Zoë Mendelson.
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With contributors including artists Florence Peake, Tomoko Takahashi and Dean Hughes; critic and curator Nina Folkersma; and nurse consultant in cognitive behavioural therapy Satwant Singh, the book reflects its theme not only in its widely collated content but in its structure, being itself a collection of unbound pamphlets and loose pages, contained in a boxlike cardboard folder. The works in each copy can be looked at and replaced in any sequence, with the order (or subsequent disorder) up to the viewer. Collaborations across art and science like this can result in a diluting of the rigour of each discipline, perhaps through an overawareness of the need to make one subject accessible to the
audience of the other. The opposite is true here, with the contributions of artists and scientists enlivening the discourse into how collections and hoards function. It’s a dialogue that Mendelson intends to be ongoing, through a programme of discussions and events, and also in a related illustrated novel she has completed called The Detroit Project. Pertusa’s research into hoarding produced the ‘Structured Interview for Hoarding Disorder’ questionnaire, a copy of which is included in This Mess… I’m tempted to complete it, just as soon as I’ve tackled that giant stack of paper and books that has been piling up for months beside the bed. Helen Sumpter
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Adam Chodzko, Unpopularity. The Bauxite Mines, Fokida, August 1st – 30th 2075, 2013. A0 exhibition poster
Austria Galerie Meyer Kainer Elke Silvia Krystufek 19 Mar – 19 Apr Open 11–6, Tue–Fri; 11–3, Sat Eschenbachgasse 9 A-1010 Vienna meyerkainer.com
Belgium Tim Van Laere Gallery Peter Rogiers 30 Jan – 15 Mar Open 1–6, Tue–Sat Verlatstraat 23–25, 2000 Antwerp timvanlaeregallery.com Galerie Almine Rech Jannis Kounellis 13 Mar – 19 Apr Open 11–7, Tue–Sat 20 Rue de L’Abbaye/ Abdijstraat B-1050 Brussels alminerech.com
Denmark
Jonathan Meese: Zoo(m) de Large (Jail d’art) Galleri Bo Bjerggaard 17 Jan – 26 Apr Open 1–6, Tue–Fri; 12–4, Sat Flæsketorvet 85 ADK-1711 Copenhagen V bjerggaard.com
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais Jason Martin: Gestural Ubiquity 22 Feb – 21 Mar Open 10–7, Tue–Sat 7 Rue Debelleyme, 75003, Paris ropac.net Galerie Perrotin Post Op. Perceptual Gone Painterly 1958–2014 Curated by Matthieu Poirier 8 Mar – 19 Apr Open 11–7, Tue–Sat 76 Rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris perrotin.com Galerie Almine Rech David Ostrowski: Das Goldene Scheiss 15 Mar – 19 Apr Open 11–7, Tue–Sat 64 Rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris alminerech.com
France Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin Amos Gitaï: Army Day Horizontal. Army Day Vertical 23 Feb – 10 May Alex Katz: 45 Years of Portraits. 1969–2014 2 Mar – 12 Jul Open 10–7, Tue–Sat 69 Avenue de General Leclerc 93500 Pantin ropac.net
Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve Paris Romain Bernini: Woods 5 Feb – 15 Mar Open 11–7, Tue–Sat 7 Rue de Pastourelle, 75003 Paris suzanne-tarasieve.com
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Art Paris Art Fair
Modern + Contemporary Art + Design China Guest of Honour
27 Mar – 30 Apr Grand Palais Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris artparis.com
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Germany Johnen Galerie Katharina Fritsch, Rodney Graham, Aldo Rossi, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Wiebke Siem, Jeff Wall: Early Works 13 Feb – 17 April Open 11–6, Tue–Sat Marienstrasse, 1010117 Berlin johnengalerie.de
Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014: Beyond Tomorrow
Ireland
Spain
Wilhelm Sasnal: Take Me To The Other Side
Angela Bulloch: Pentagon Principle
Lismore Castle
UK
18 Apr – 21 Sep Open 10.30–5.30, Mon–Sun
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum Dale vN Marshall: Walls With Wounds 15 Feb – 18 May Open 10–4, Mon–Sat; 12–4 Sun Jordan Well, Coventry, CV1 5QP theherbert.org
Lismore Castle Arts Lismore, Co Waterford lismorecastlearts.ie
Helga de Alvear
Italy
5 Apr – 10 Aug quadriennale-duesseldorf.de
Victor Man: ‘Artist of the Year’ 2014
John Jones Framers
16 Jan – 22 Mar Open 11–2, 4.30–8.30, Tue–Sat
Massimo De Carlo Piotr Uklanski: Red, White and Blue Gelitin: Buco 28 Jan – 15 Mar Open 11.30–7.30, Tue–Sat Via Giovanni Ventura 5, 20134 Milan massimodecarlo.it Brand New Gallery Yinka Shonibare MBE Mar–May Open 11–1, 2.30–7, Tue–Sat Via Carlo Farini 32, 20159 Milan brandnew-gallery.com
Doctor Fourquet, 12 28012 Madrid helgadealvear.com
Switzerland
Galleria Continua Marcelo Cidade, Jonathan de Andrade, André Komatsu 1 Mar – 17 May Open 10–1, 2–7, Tue–Sat Via del Castello, 11 53037 San Gimignano (SI) galleriacontinua.com
Bespoke picture framing, art installation, fine art conservation, collection management and artwork printing
Sacré 101 – An Exhibition Based on ‘The Rite of Spring’ Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst 15 Feb – 11 May Open 11–6, Tue, Wed, Fri; 11–8, Thurs; 10–5, Sat–Sun Limmatstrasse 270 CH-8005 Zurich migrosmuseum.ch
Norway
Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle
Raeber von Stenglin Raphael Hefti 16 Mar – 19 Apr Open Wed–Fri 12–6; 11–5 Sat Pfingstweidstrasse 23 / Welti-Furrer Areal CH-8005 Zürich raebervonstenglin.com
Clifton Terrace London, N4 3JG johnjones.co.uk
Enantiodromia
89plus: “Poetry will be made by all!”
Peder Lund Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings 29 Mar – 31 May Open 12–5, Wed–Sat Tjuvholmen allé 27 N-0252 Oslo pederlund.no
LUMA Foundation 30 Jan – 30 March Open 11–6, Tue–Fri; 11–8, Thurs; 10–5, Sat–Sun LUMA /Westbau Löwenbräukunst Limmatstrasse 270 CH-8005 Zurich
21 Mar – 22 Jun Open 10–8, Mon–Sun Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.de
FOLD Gallery 15 Mar – 26 Apr Open 12–6, Wed–Sat 15 Clerkenwell Close London, EC1R 0AA foldgallery.com
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Emtone Print Company
Boutique litho printer, offering award winning print services.Brochures, point of sale, leaflets through to building wraps, pop ups and banners, we print it all.
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The Mosaic Rooms Rashid Ali & Andrew Cross Mogadishu–Lost–Moderns Feb – 26 Apr Open 11–6, Tue–Sat The Mosaic Rooms A.M. Qattan Foundation Tower House, 226 Cromwell Road London, SW5 0SW mosaicrooms.org Daniel Blau Eyewitness: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographers 15 Feb – 29 Mar Open 11–6, Tue–Sat 51 Hoxton Square, London, N1 6PB danielblau.com
Canada Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art Keita Morimoto: The Nightwatchers 8 Feb – 6 Apr Open 11–6, Tue–Sun 952 Queen Street West, Toronto, ON M6J 1G8 www.mocca.ca
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal Adrian Paci Lives in Transit 6 Feb – 27 Apr Open 11–6, Tue–Sun; 11–9, Wed 185 Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Montréal, QC H2X 3X5 macm.org
USA Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum Claire Watson: Now What 6 Mar – 11 May Rosane Volchan O’Conor: Organismo 6 Mar – 11 May Open 12–6, Tue–Sat 116 Blue Star San Antonio, TX 78204 bluestarart.org
Mexico Kurimanzutto Adrián Villar Rojas 8 Feb – 15 Mar Open Tue–Thu, 11–6; 11–4, Fri–Sat Gobernador Rafael Rebollar 94 Col. San Miguel Chapultepec 11850 Mexico City kurimanzutto.com
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Melanie Smith 22 Mar – 15 Jun Open 10–7, Tue–Sat; 12–6, Sun 5216 Montrose Blvd, Houston, TX 77006 camh.org
OMR José Davila/Pia Camil/James Turrell 4 Feb – 15 Mar Open 10–3, 4–7, Tue–Fri; 10–4, Sat Plaza Río de Janeiro 54, Colonia Roma México, D.F. 06700 galeriaomr.com
Nicaragua
Hammer Museum Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology 9 Feb – 18 May Open 11–8, Tue–Fri; 11–5, Sat–Sun 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024 hammer.ucla.edu Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time 5 Feb – 4 May Open 10–5, Tue–Wed, Sat-Sun; 10–9, Thu–Fri 100 Northern Ave, Boston, MA 02210 icaboston.org Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Ruffneck Constructivists 12 Feb – 17 Aug Open 11–6, Wed–Fri; 11 – 5, Sat–Sun 118 S 36th St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 icaphila.org LACMA Four Abstract Classicists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, John McLaughlin 21 Dec – 29 Jun Open 11–5, Mon, Tue, Thu (Wed closed); 10–8, Fri; 10–7, Sat – Sun 5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036 lacma.org
MoMA PS1 Christoph Schlingensief 9 Mar – 30 Jun Maria Lassnig 9 Mar – 25 May Open 12–6, Thu–Mon 22–25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, New York 11101 momaps1.org Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Darren Waterson: Uncertain Beauty 8 Mar – 1 Feb Open 11–5, Wed–Mon 87 Marshall St, North Adams, MA 01247 massmoca.org Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth David Bates 9 Feb – 11 May Open 10–5, Tue–Sun 3200 Darnell St, Fort Worth, TX 76107 themodern.org Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago William J O’Brien 25 Jan – 18 May Open 10–5, Tue–Sun 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 mcachicago.org Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland Sara VanDerBeek 7 Mar – 8 Jun DIRGE: Reflections on [Life and] Death 7 Mar – 8 Jun Open 11–5, Tue–Sun 11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44106 mocacleveland.org Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit State of Exception 7 Feb – 4 May James Lee Byars: I Cancel All My Works at Death 7 Feb – 4 May Open 11–5, Wed–Sun 4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201 mocadetroit.org Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Jacob Hashimoto: Gas Giant 1 Mar – 8 Jun Open 11–6, Thu–Mon 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012 moca.org
Vancouver Art Gallery Edward Burtynsky: A Terrible Beauty 1 Mar – 26 May Open 10–5, Mon–Sun; 10–9, Tue 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2H7 vanartgallery.bc.ca
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New Museum of Contemporary Art Jeanine Oleson: Hear, Here 22 Apr – 6 Jul Open 11–6, Wed–Sun 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002 newmuseum.org SItE Santa Fe FEAST: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art 1 Feb – 18 May Open 10–5, Thu–Sun 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 sitesantafe.org Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art Jennifer Meanley: Far Away, in the Meadow 22 Mar – 24 May Open 10–5, Tue–Sat; 1–5, Sun 750 Marguerite Drive, Winston-Salem, NC 27106 secca.org The Contemporary Austin Charles Long 18 Jan – 20 Apr Open 11–7, Tue–Sat; 12–5, Sun 700 Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas, 78701 thecontemporaryaustin.org Walker Art Center Edward Hopper: Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process 13 Mar – 20 Jun Open 11–5, Tue–Sun 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55403 walkerart.org Whitney Museum of American Art Whitney Biennial 7 Mar – 25 May Open 11–6, Wed–Sun; 1–9, Fri 945 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, NY 10021 whitney.org
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Mozambique
Brazil
Kyrgyzstan
Renata Lucas
Luisa Strina
China
18 Mar – 19 Apr Open 10–7 Mon–Fri; 10–5, Sat ShanghARt Gallery Open 10–6, Mon–Sun ShanghART Main Space, Bldg.16, 50 Moganshan Rd. shanghartgallery.com
Rua Padre Joao Manuel, 755 loja 02, Cerqueira César 01411-001 São Paulo galerialuisastrina.com.br
Fortes Vilaça Janaina Tschäpe 6 Feb – 15 Mar Open Tue–Fri, 10–7 Rua Fradique Coutinho 15000 5416-001 São Paulo fortesvilaca.com.br
Hong Kong Avenue des Arts Gallery Marcos Marin: OP’ART EXPERIENCE Open 11–7, Mon–Fri; 10–2, Sat Unit 06 – 12/F Hollywood Centre 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan avenuedesarts.org
Raquel Arnaud Daniel Feingold 31 Jan – Aug Open 10–7, Mon–Fri; 12–4, Sat Rua Fidalga, 125 – Vila Madalena São Paulo 05432-070 raquelarnaud.com Galeria Baro Daniel Arsham: Volcanic Ash, Rusted Steel 15 Feb – 29 Mar Open 11–7, Tue–Fri; 11–6, Sat R. Barra Funda, 216 – Santa Cecília São Paulo 01152-000 barogaleria.com
Singapore Equator Art Projects Yuli Prayitno: Unity in Diversity: Archaeologic Excavation of the Peranakan Tionghua 13 Feb – 9 Mar Open 12–7, Tue–Sat 47 Malan Road, #01-21 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 109444 eqproj.com ShanghARt Gallery Han Feng 28 Feb – 10 Apr Open 11–7, Tue–Sun 9 Lock Road, #02-22, Singapore 108937 shanghartgallery.com Gajah gallery Open 11–7, Mon–Fri; 12–6, Sat–Sun 140 Hill Street Old Hill Street, Police Station Building #01-08 Singapore 179369 gajahgallery.com
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from $1,800 Ana Kraš, Bonbon lamps, 2012 anakras.com
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Price on request Mungo Thomson, Negative Space (stsciprc1999- 14d), 2013 robtufnell.com Price on request Richard Wright, Untitled, 2013 robtufnell.com
$18,000 Josefa Filkosky, Untitled, 1973, enamelled aluminium wright-now.com
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eyestorm.com
$2,000 Urs Fischer, Frankie, 2013 artsy.net
€300 Susan Meiselas, Prince Street Girls, 2013 yvon-lambert.com
£550 Matthew Darbyshire, Holstein Cow, 2013 zabludowiczcollection.com
$5,500 Martino Gamper, Mono, 2008 wright-now.com The London-based Italian designer, famous for his 2007 100 Chairs for 100 Days, in which he reconfigured found chairs, here appropriates shipping crate plywood and combines it with preexisting furniture elements to create a corner seat
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£4,000 – £6,000 (est) Arthur Goldreich, Mantle for Nelson, 1983 bonhams.com
can$500 Peter Doig, Fisherman, 2002/2013 mbam.qc.ca
A rare piece of anc heritage that links Nelson Mandela to Goldreich, the South African-Israeli abstract painter and a key figure in the antiapartheid movement, which is to be sold at Bonhams, London, on 19 March
£100 Laure Prouvost, Wantee teapot, 2013 grizedale.org £18.83 Stewart Home, Proletarian Post-Modernism, 2013 testcentre.org.uk A 12" lp featuring live recordings of readings by the artist, activist and ArtReview contributor (including three performed while standing on his head), together with a studio recording of the short story ‘Cunt Lickers Anonymous’ (1996)
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Read ArtReview in even the tightest of corners Online at artreview.com or through the iTunes Store
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For more on artist András Baranyai, see overleaf
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Contributors
Mark Sladen
Luke Norman & Nik Adam
Contributing Writers
is a London-based curator and writer. In recent years Mark’s engagements have included directing Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, being a jurist for the Turner Prize and curating an exhibition at Lismore Castle in Ireland. Mark’s current research is around art and publishing, which is the subject of his new column for ArtReview. The first column is on the subject of online art magazines, focusing in particular on Triple Canopy. For further reading, Mark recommends: Artists’ Magazines by Gwen Allen (2011); and In Numbers, by Philip Aarons and Andrew Roth (2010). Mark also writes a blog on art and ‘expanded publishing’, which can be found at 246littleclouds.tumblr.com
are photographers. They first began working together in 2009. Currently based between London and Copenhagen, they continue to work collaboratively on personal and commercial projects. Using photography to present discourse surrounding a variety of subjects, including still life, portraiture and sculpture, the duo seek to explore subjects that provoke consideration and visual curiosity. Luke and Nik have exhibited their work in institutions and festivals across Europe, the USA and Asia, and have been identified and awarded as emerging talents within the photographic medium by Foam Magazine, British Journal of Photography and Wallpaper*. This month their photographs can be seen on the cover of ArtReview as well as in the books pages and Gallery Girl.
Makoto Aida, Sean Ashton, Negar Azimi, Robert Barry, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Fernanda Brenner, Giovanni Carmine, Barbara Casavecchia, Luke Clancy, Jacquelyn Davis, Shannon Ebner, Anselm Franke, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Liam Gillick, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Sam Jacob, Mami Kataoka, Sunjung Kim, Ragnar Kjartansson, Pablo León de la Barra, Maria Lind, Daniel McClean, Kathy Noble, Trevor Paglen, Barbara Piwowarska, John Quin, Tobias Rehberger, Claire Rigby, Dieter Roelstraete, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Ed Schad, Mark Sladen, Hito Steyerl, Murtaza Vali, Brienne Walsh, Rebecca Warren, Mike Watson, Will Wiles
Barbara Piwowarska is an independent curator and art historian based in Warsaw. She was born in 1976. This month she reviews Amor e Ódio a Lygia Clark (Love and Hate to Lygia Clark) at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. For further reading she recommends the guide that accompanies the exhibition, edited by Magda Kardasz, together with an exhibition handout from a previous show of the Brazilian artist’s work, Katarzyna Kobro/Lygia Clark, edited by Jaroslaw Suchan and published by Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, in 2008.
Barbara Casavecchia is a writer and curator based in Milan, where she teaches at the art academy of Brera. She is contributing editor of Frieze and writes for Art Agenda, Mousse, D/La Repubblica and Kaleidoscope. Since 2008 she has cocurated the public art project All’Aperto (Fondazione Zegna), whose next stage, by Dan Graham, will be unveiled this coming May. She is currently working on two books, one on Andrea Kvas, the other Marcello Maloberti , both for Mousse Publishing. For further reading she suggests Roman Signer: Talks and Conversations (2014), because of the beauty of its “chat-hikes”, and Dan Graham’s Nuggets (2014) because it’s a goldmine.
Contributing Artists/Photographers András Baranyai, Luke Norman & Nik Adam Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp
András Baranyai (preceding pages)
Comics and communism haven’t always mixed. While Chairman Mao’s China pumped out millions of lianhuanhua, palm-size propaganda minicomics with one panel per page, Hungary was one of several East European nations to forbid comics as capitalist Western trash, apart from their own worthy, wordy graphic novelisations of classic novels, and imports of Michel Vaillant and later Pif Gadget, published by the French Communist Party. After the change of system in Hungary in 1989, activists formed the grand-sounding but since disbanded Hungarian Comics Academy, while the free underground arts and literature magazine Roham encouraged experimental, self-expressive comics. It was here that András Baranyai published his first forays into the medium, drawing on influences from his country’s fine art, illustration
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and graphic design from the past to conceive his daring visual narrative constructions. Baranyai’s distinctive aesthetics have also been welcomed into the artworld, notably in a collaboration with muralist Richárd Orosz to transform the Chimera Project gallery in Budapest into the immersive installation Renaissance Now! (2012) “Our idea”, he says, “was to create a playful, illusionistic space using axonometry, and ‘space within space’ effects from Renaissance murals. We translated the title texts, integral to the murals, into Esperanto, an artificial, modern but quasi-dead language and a funny paraphrase of Latin.” Baranyai is currently working with Memento Park, one of Budapest’s more surprising recent attractions, where monumental statues from the communist regime have been resited in an open-air
museum. “The park’s director commissioned me to collaborate on a picture book for children (but I hope it will be enjoyable for adults too) to present the real history of communism.” Close to a graphic novel in spirit, its release later this year will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the political changes. So ironically it’s comics that will bring communism to life for Hungarians, some not old enough to have experienced it. Approaching forty himself, Baranyai has memories of that era, which explains the undercurrent of paranoia running through his circular, cyclical Strip You Are Here, which concerns state surveillance and neighbours spying on neighbours. Communism may be history in Hungary, but like Memento Park’s imposing monuments, it casts a long shadow. Paul Gravett
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Reprographics by PHMEDIA. Stock photography by Oleg Gekman, Photocreative, Marko Tomicic and Takayuki, all courtesy Shutterstock.com. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (ISSN No: 1745-9303, USPS No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months July, August and February by ArtReview Ltd and is distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe NJ 08831 and additional mailing offices. Periodicals postage paid at New Brunswick NJ. POSTMASTER: send address changes to ArtReview, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe NJ 08831
Text credits Photo credits on the cover Four covers by John Morgan studio, photographed by Luke Norman & Nik Adam on pages 142, 153 & 158 Luke Norman & Nik Adam
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Quotations on the four spines and on pages 29 and 115 are from the Usborne Book of the Future: A Trip in Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond, written by Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis and published in 1979
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Off the Record March 2014 Slumped over his fourth bottle of Flying Dog Doggie Style real ale, my boss Rupert is a mess. “I don’t understand where we’re going to find these so-called FutureGreats, Gallery Girl. And by God, the gallery needs some hot young talent. Collectors don’t visit, curators don’t Skype me, I’ve slipped out of Liste, through the arms of the Armory and out the tradesmen’s exit of Art Brussels. I’m staring down the barrel at ArtHamptons here. Things aren’t good.” I slam down my Proenza Schouler frosted PVC clutch bag on the pub’s somewhat grimy table, deliberately knocking aside Rupert’s packet of artisan Mr Trotter’s pork scratchings. “Pull it together, Rupert. How hard can it be? Just pillage the programme of one of these badly funded not-for-profits. The Chisenhale? The Showroom? Let those curators do the hard work and then cream off the talent. It’s like renting porn videos from Mr Softytop’s ice-cream van in Victoria Park – he does all the dirty work and you get the rewards.” “Not bad. But all the galleries are in on that trick. We all know what Mr Softytop is really selling. I need a better trick.” “OK, how about we work out who are going to be the most influential curators in the next couple of years and then we pick artists who they will like and make famous, in the process making you the ultra-high-net-worth individual you deserve to be?” Rupert gets out his Argos MyTablet and starts punching into its screen. Time passes. Outside, the early-spring sunshine fades, as I take the chance to read another 20 pages of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. “Enwezor!” I am snapped out of my reverie by Rupert’s discovery of the next Venice Biennale curator.
“What does he like?” he barks at me. “Well, you know… that sort of more culturally diverse stuff where Modernism isn’t just a monolithic discourse centred on Paris and New York but a heterogeneous set of overlapping narratives that we might understand as modernisms.” Rupert looks baffled for a moment and then his face falls. “Oh, I see,” he says, looking sadly at his white legs poking out from under his light blue Marc Jacobs shorts. “Cheer up!” I interject. “We could just go and hang at some private views of offbeat, small galleries and try to nick their best artist. Look at Eddie Peake and Oscar Murillo – there’s got to be loads more like that.” “I like it! But hold on, what can I offer these kids? My credibility is shot to pieces.” I nod sadly in agreement, but then have a brainwave. “Cash! Good hard cash. What about that money we made from the massive sale to that nice Southeast Asian collector who walked onto our stand at Art Stage Singapore and bought everything, promising to pay in just a few weeks when he released capital from his latest art fund?” The tears well up in Rupert’s eyes before he looks away, crunching the last pork scratching between his thumb and forefinger so that all that’s left is a greasy, salty, porky mess. “Oh, Rupert.” I stand up and sweep the empty bottles and porkscratchings packets from the table. “Do we need FutureGreats? What about Future-they-might-do-OK-for-a-couple-of-showsbefore-fading-entirely? You know, like all of the artists we always show. We phone our collectors, we sell them some average works. The artist gets an online review somewhere and a group show in the north of England. A curated group show in a small, dark town on this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars.” The crowd in the pub have turned to me. The landlord has stopped pulling pints and has his hand in a fist shape over his heart. “This other Eden, demi-paradise,” I roar. “And then no one hears anything again about this artist that we represent, this middling artist like a stone set in the silver sea, until his or her work is consigned to Phillips’s ‘Under the Influence’ sale and fails to hit its low reserve!” Rupert has fallen to his knees, weeping. Some of the crowd have started singing Jerusalem. I kick off my Saint Laurent python ankle boots and climb on the table. “For this is the artworld you and I live in, standing firm against the envy of less happy artworlds – this blessed plot, this earth, this realm.” Hauling him up, I embrace my boss as the crowd raises its frothy ales and follows my toast, “To the average! To the mundane! To seeing your £3,000 investment lose all value over 24 months! To the midmarket artworld!” Gallery Girl
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www.mmk-frankfurt.de Aïda Muluneh, The 99 Series, 2013, Series of seven photographs (detail) © Aïda Muluneh / Form: Surfacegrafik.de
The Divine Comedy
Heaven, Hell, Purgatory Revisited by Contemporary African Artists 21 / 3 — 27 / 7/ 2014
www.dior.com – 020 7172 0172