ArtReview March 2017 by ArtReview

Truth, Justice and the New American Way

Jeder Mensch ein Cowboy

1 0 3 M O U N T S T R E ET L O N D O N

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg LONDON

Anish Kapoor LONDON

NEW GALLERY SPACE OPENING APRIL 2017 POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E 10785 BERLIN

PASSAGE/S (DETAIL), 2016. PHOTOGRAPHY: THIERRY BAL

Victoria Miro 16 WHARF ROAD · LONDON N1 7RW

DO HO SUH Passage/s 1 FEBRUAR Y - 18 MARCH 2017

GeorG Baselitz Paris Pantin aPril – JUne 2017 roPac.net

london Paris salzBUrG

PROMOTED BY:

JOHN KØRNER 10/02–01/04/17 BLUE BEDROOM

WONDERFUL WORLD 20/01–18/03/17

GROUP EXHIBITION WITH ANDERS BOJEN & KRISTOFFER ØRUM, POUL GERNES, TUE GREENFORT, RONI HORN, PER KIRKEBY, JOHN KØRNER, TOM MOLLOY AND DANIEL RICHTER

ARCO, 22–26/02/17 / THE ARMORY SHOW, 2–5/03/17

ALFREDO JAAR

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

MARCH 14 - APRIL 29, 2017

sharjah biennial 13 tamawuj 10 march – 12 june, 2017 curated by Christine Tohme A.S.T (Diann Bauer, Felice Grodin, Patricia M. Hernandez, Elite Kedan with Keller Easterling) Allora & Calzadilla Lawrence Abu Hamdan Noor Abuarafeh Abbas Akhavan Abdullah Al Saadi Tamara Al Samerraei Jonathas de Andrade Kader Attia Ismaïl Bahri Sarnath Banerjee Yto Barrada Abdelkader Benchamma Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares Mariana Castillo Deball Roy Dib Vikram Divecha Bariş Doğrusöz Koo Donghee Mandy El Sayegh İnci Eviner Em’kal Eyongakpa Harun Farocki Futurefarmers Mario García Torres

Daniele Genadry Deniz Gül Shadi Habib Allah Taloi Havini Takashi Ishida Iman Issa Ali Jabri Lamia Joreige Christoph Keller Samir Khaddaje Mahmoud Khaled Nesrine Khodr Tonico Lemos Auad Basim Magdy Raqs Media Collective Metahaven Hind Mezaina Hana Miletić Mochu Oscar Murillo Joe Namy Uriel Orlow The Otolith Group İz Öztat & Fatma Belkıs Christodoulos Panayiotou Deborah Poynton Fehras Publishing Practices Khalil Rabah Jon Rafman

Marwan Rechmaoui Stéphanie Saadé Natascha Sadr Haghighian with Ashkan Sepahvand Ghassan Salhab Roy Samaha Massinissa Selmani Dineo Seshee Bopape Setareh Shahbazi Ross Simonini Nida Sinnokrot Walid Siti Monika Sosnowska Zhou Tao Maria Thereza Alves Jorinde Voigt Karine Wahbé James Webb Rain Wu and Eric Chen Paola Yacoub Fathallah Zamroud sharjahart.org tamawuj.org

MAURIZIO CATTELAN, ALL, CURATED BY NANCY SPECTOR, THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, 2011

DAN COLEN, OH GOD!, PALAZZO ROSPIGLIOSI, ROME, 2011

WITH ARE YOU GLAD TO BE IN AMERICA? MASSIMO DE CARLO GALLERY IN MILAN OFFERS A GLOBAL VIEW OF AMERICAN SOCIETY, OF ITS CONTRADICTIONS, CULTURE AND SYMBOLS.

THE SHOW IS DEDICATED TO THE COMPOSER JAMES BLOOD ULMER.

THREE AMIGOS BY MASSIMO DE CARLO TAKES NEW YORK ARTISTS DAN COLEN, NATE LOWMAN AND THE LATE DASH SNOW TO ROME.

ALL BRINGS TOGETHER THE WORKS BY MAURIZIO CATTELAN AT THE GUGGENHEIM NEW YORK.

INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

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ARE YOU GLAD TO BE IN AMERICA?, MASSIMO DE CARLO GALLERY, MILAN-VENTURA, 2011

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photo: Sadaharu Horio in his studio ©Laziz Hamani

ANTwerP - hoNG KoNG www.axelvervoordtgallery.com

participating at The Armory Show, NyC, Pier 94 2-5 mArCh, stand 504 Solo show Sadaharu horio with performances

São Paulo Paulo Nazareth 08/04 2017

New York HIC SVNT DRACONES Lucas Arruda & On Kawara Brussels

02/03 2017

Neither Curated by Fernanda Brenner 18/04 2017

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ArtReview vol 69 no 2 March 2017

Weapon of Choice ‘Jeder Mensch ein Künstler’ – ‘Everyone [is] an artist’ – that was German artist Joseph Beuys’s rallying cry of the 1970s, articulated and rearticulated in successive lectures, publications and artworks. Broadly speaking, Beuys was suggesting that creative activity was an essential part of every role in life – that in order to effect societal change, creative thinking was required. Everywhere we look, ‘the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped, or created,’ he said. The end result, he posited, would be a form of ‘social sculpture’, a shaping and remaking of the human world, or the social organism, and its attitude and connections to the world around it. These days, every time the world changes, there’s some sort of expectation that culture and artmaking will change with it. That art will make itself new somehow. Trump’s in: call an art strike! Nationalism is an issue: let’s make work about identity and belonging! ‘Who are we?’ shriek the organisers of Tate Exchange’s ‘free 6-day cross-platform event, spanning the visual arts, film, photography, design, architecture, the spoken and written word and live art’, their assumption being, presumably, that their audience doesn’t know. And thus art becomes involved in a reactive rather than a proactive process. Worse still, the artworld has a bad habit of insisting on standards in society (equality, justice, freedom, etc) that it doesn’t necessarily apply to itself on a structural level. ‘It’s all about the artists!’ shout the collectors as they clamber into their VIP cars and speed off to the reception. ‘Mhhhgh mghs ghmmms’, mutter the curators in Shanghai and New Delhi (that’s a clue as to where ArtReview has been hanging out over the past few weeks) as they slobber into their M90 antipollution facemasks and begin their mournful trudge around the art fair. ‘I don’t speak Indian!’ shriek the art critics at the English-speaking door-managers as they struggle to gain entry to that same fair during VIP hours. And as for the ‘private view’…

Home service

For the past few decades, contemporary art seems to have been caught in a tug-of-war between its humanistic desires to establish a collective consciousness and its rapacious appetite for celebrations of individual triumph. How that dichotomy (embodied in the opposing icons of the cowboy and the social sculptor) is panning out in the context of the new US regime is the subject of Sam Korman’s feature. Staying in the land of the cowboy (that’s Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger on the cover btw; in addition to being Elton John’s favourite cowboy, Roy was one of the founders of Pioneertown, an Old West movie-set in the Morongo Basin area of California, designed so that actors could live and work there and never have to be out of character – presumably Beuys would have liked that show of initiative), Chris Fite-Wassilak looks at how individual artists are now dusting down the classical trope of cynicism as a tool of critique in their work, while Jonathan Griffin looks at how the politics of representation in portrait painting can be used to confront the politics that govern our daily lives. In two artist profiles ArtReview considers how Do Ho Suh’s work expresses the contradictions inherent in globalisation now that that age has come to a grinding halt, and Lee Lozano’s suggestion that one must first refuse the politics of art before going on to confront the politics of life. But above all, this issue attempts to think about art in this age of protest, as something that is proactive rather than simply reactive. As something that still has the power to shape agendas rather than simply tracing over the lines other people have drawn. ‘I think art is the only political power’, Beuys said, ‘the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind from all repression. I say not that art has already realised this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon.’ That development goes on. ArtReview

Danh Vō weaponised –Singapore

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Art Previewed

Sir Alfred Munnings on the return of the right Interview by Matthew Collings 54

Previews by Martin Herbert 37 Points of View by Jonathan T. D. Neil, J. J. Charlesworth, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Maria Lind and Heather Phillipson 45

page 38 Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian, drawings for the animation From Sea to Dawn, 2016–17 (in Speak, Lokal, at Kunsthalle Zürich)

March 2017

Art Featured

I Like America… by Sam Korman 62

Let’s Get Cynical by Chris Fite-Wassilak 82

Lee Lozano by Karen Di Franco 70

Power to the People by Jonathan Griffin 86

Do Ho Suh by Mark Rappolt 74

page 82 Dena Yago, Pioneertown, 2015 (Bell), 2016, digital c-print, 78 × 53 cm, edition of 3 + 2AP. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Exhibitions 96 Robert Rauschenberg, by Ben Street Leigh Ledare, by Sam Steverlynck Jean-Luc Moulène, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Dan Attoe, by John Quin Candida Höfer, by Siona Wilson Reinhard Mucha, by Barbara Casavecchia Fabio Mauri, by Mike Watson Natascha Sadr Haghighian, by Stefanie Hessler Jos Näpflin, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Marion Verboom, by Nicole O’Rourke Mustafa Hulusi, by J.J. Charlesworth Monica Bonvicini, by Laura Smith Gillian Lowndes, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Huma Bhabha, by Oliver Basciano Bruce McLean, by Mark Prince Ken Price, by Kiki Mazzucchelli Thomas Struth, by David Everitt Howe Ciprian Mures,an, by Ciara Moloney Fred Eversley, by Jennifer Li Mosquitoes, Dusts, and Thieves, by Owen Duffy Dineo Seshee Bopape, by Owen Duffy

peter campus, circa 1987, by Joshua Mack Jimmy Wright, by Ashton Cooper Johan Grimonprez, Jonathan T.D. Neil SANGREE, by Kim Córdova Pablo Accinelli, by Claire Rigby The Universe and Art: Princess Kaguya, Leonardo da Vinci, teamLab, by Adeline Chia Art Life 126 New York, by Bridget McCarthy Books 132 Age of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter, by Paul Gauguin Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art?, by Kyung An and Jessica Cerasi Particular Cases, by Boris Groys THE STRIP 138 A CURATOR WRITES 142

page 114 Thomas Struth, Space Shuttle 1, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, 2008, chromogenic print, 199 × 377 cm. © the artist

ArtReview

Art Previewed

I know what it’s about – black-hearted villains and roarin’ six-guns 35

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Previewed That Continuous Thing: Artists and the Ceramics Studio, 1920 – Today Tate St Ives 31 March – 3 September Speak, Lokal Kunsthalle Zürich 4 March – 7 May Mac Adams GB Agency, Paris through 25 March

Philippe Parreno Serralves Museum, Porto through 7 May

Theaster Gates White Cube, Hong Kong 21 March – 20 May

Uta Barth 1301PE, Los Angeles 11 March – 29 April

Whitney Biennial Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 17 March – 11 June

Gardar Eide Einarsson and Oscar Tuazon Maureen Paley, London 11 March – 23 April

1st Antarctic Biennale Antarctica 16–27 March

Sue Williams 303 Gallery, New York 2 March – 15 April

1 Aaron Angell, Molybdenum Bell Courtyards, 2015, lead glazed earthenware and glazed stoneware, 39 × 39 × 11 cm. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist, Rob Tufnell, London, and Studio Voltaire, London

March 2017

In 1920, in his mid-thirties, the English potter show its title – via Ken Price, Ron Nagle et al. Bernard Leach returned from sojourning in Works by the aforementioned Wine respond Japan and joined the sketchy artists’ colony in to this, before the show pivots into the flaring St Ives, Cornwall. The young Japanese potter recrudescence of ceramics in 1970s and 80s Shoji Hamada came with him, and on the edge London, now also being more widely reconof town they built a studio – including the first sidered, and works – by Anthea Hamilton, Japanese-style kiln in the West, albeit rickety among others – created in Troy Town Art – and began producing ceramics that fused Pottery, Angell’s East London safe haven for, craft, fine art and Eastern philosophy. Almost a uh, potheads. If, after this, ceramics still century later, earthenware is chic in an artworld make you glaze over, you’re cracked. experiencing one of its cyclic yearnings for the Also well timed, as European nations homespun: think of hands-dirty exponents and the United States erect their isolationist like Aaron Angell, Jesse Wine, Shio Kusaka, 2 fences, is Speak, Lokal, whose 14 artists and, 1 Caroline Achaintre, etc. Hence That Continuous not infrequently, collectives hail from New Thing, Tate St Ives’s nattily structured, centuryYork to Tehran, Adelaide to Dhaka, though the spanning recap. It begins, naturally, with Leach, lineup tilts naturally towards the host instituHamada and their coevals, then detours through tion’s Zürich. If ‘the local’ risks demonisation another coastal earthenware uprising, the 1950s amid proliferating nationalism, these artists (including Piotr Uklański, Shirin Yousefi, and 60s California Clay Movement – an out-ofSarnath Banerjee and Theory Tuesdays) seek context quote from whose prime mover, the to redeem the category, considering how artists jazzily improvisatory Peter Voulkos, gives the

both ‘investigate and broach local conditions’, whether they position themselves as activists or creators of graphic novels, performers or documentary-makers. The local, the organisers indicate, has value as a realm where ‘precision is possible’ – although, this being art, we’re advised to expect ambiguity aplenty. Meanwhile, the answer to whether the Speak, Memory-echoing title foreshadows consideration of Switzerland’s most famous literary nonlocal, Vladimir Nabokov, nestles in a sealed envelope bearing a local stamp. In 2010, Mac Adams made Thinking of 3 Nabokov, a photographic series that served, as have many of the Welsh artist’s works since the first instalment of his noir-ish Mysteries sequence in 1974, as a kind of existential crime scene. Here, butterflies (the fabled writer was of course also a fabled lepidopterist) perch on the edge of a mug among police evidence bags, flutter above tattooed skin or sit among rope, hatchets and masks. The story is inconclusive,

2 Samsul Alam Helal, These hidden lovers got married 3 years ago, from the series Runaway Lovers, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Zürich

3 Mac Adams, The Homecoming, 1976–2017, installation, dimensions variable, unique piece. Courtesy the artist and gb Agency, Paris

ArtReview

5 Uta Barth, In the Light and Shadow of Morandi (17.03), face-mounted, raised, shaped archival pigment print  in artist frame. Courtesy the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles

4 Philippe Parreno, Quasi Objects: Marquee (cluster). Disklavier Piano. My Room is a Fish Bowl, 2014 (installation view, Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin), mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: © Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Serralves Museum, Porto

the narrator unreliable; apropos, given the runs: got a light, Mac? No, but I’ve got a dark of the fugue, and influenced by Gilles nod to the author of Pale Fire (1962). Adams has brown overcoat. Deleuze’s 1968 Difference and Repetition, each made such controlled procedurals-without‘Whodunit’ is a vexed question in Anywhen of the 13 rooms is a variation on the last, conclusion his metier – all we know, really, is differentiated by arrangement and colour. 4 (2016), Philippe Parreno’s speculatively whodunit. Within this, though, he’s toggled authorship-displacing commission for Tate Another artist drawn to repetition and his aesthetic from the monochrome, WeegeeModern’s Turbine Hall, in which drop-down difference, Giorgio Morandi, has lately served esque photography series The Third Swan (2009) screens, audio, video and sound effects are 5 as an inspiration to Uta Barth, whose phototo room-size installation tableaux and public art ostensibly triggered by the digitally analysed graphic series In the light and shadow of Morandi projects. Here, in Homecoming, we get several of morphology of live yeast, sitting unobtrusively (2017) comprises one half of the German those aforementioned tableaux (The Homecoming, in a back office among spare fish-shaped artist’s first solo show since she was awarded 1976–2017, and one of the Mysteries images balloons to replace the ones already caught in a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant in 2012. (We’d take made three-dimensional), the crisp editorial Tate Modern’s rafters. (The show closes in early a holiday too.) These seductive, opaque works photography of Postmodern Tragedies (1986–9) April.) The Frenchman’s subsequent show, for feature arrangements of silhouetted vessels and a ‘conceptual collage’ from 1971. As his Porto’s Serralves Museum, A Time Coloured Space, strafed with what look like reflections of light gallery happily points out, Adams’s attentions is similarly unseating. It’s a retrospective, of through coloured glass, done by, as the gallery to the staged, sign-laden, semiotics-influenced sorts: the works date back at least to his Speech says, ‘drawing with light’. Elsewhere, in the photograph precede those of Cindy Sherman, Bubbles (1997–), taking in aluminium sculptures, Untitled 2017 series, Barth’s three-decade engagewhile his 80s works involving shadows have the film, light objects, a digital player piano and ment with the phenomenology of perception honour of influencing second-generation yba more than 180 drawings along the way. But, with – relaying how rather than what we see – is artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster. As the joke the exhibition being based on the musical model focused on a patch of her Los Angeles studio’s

March 2017

7 Sue Williams, Mark Always, 2016, oil on canvas, 183 × 213 cm. © the artist. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

6 Gardar Eide Einarsson, Silver Tarp (Pink), 2014, acrylic, graphite, ink, silkscreen on canvas, 220 × 190 cm. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

8 Work by Theaster Gates. Photo: Theaster Gates Studio, Chicago. © the artist and White Cube, London & Hong Kong

exterior wall, tabulating changes of light and we get) will look timely, but it’s been timely humidity. Be prepared to look long and slow for years now. in order to receive meditative dividends; Barth, Continuing the general theme: ‘It’s really 7 about boys, isn’t it?’ Sue Williams told an one suspects, is merely the latest in a long line of West Coast creative types to be productively interviewer around the time of her last show brushed by Zen breezes blowing in from Japan. at 303 Gallery, in 2014, a couple of decades on Don’t expect much peace in Maureen Paley’s from her calling-card works mixing elements of counterculture cartooning, all-over abstrac6 latest show, a double-header featuring Gardar tion and suggestions of domestic violence. Eide Einarsson and Oscar Tuazon. Galleries The paintings she was talking about – centriexhibiting Tuazon sign up to get walls ripped fugally lyrical abstract-expressionist from a into and spaces congested with large, mute arrangements of cross-beamed wood. Galleries distance, seeded with pungently gendered who exhibit Einarsson – who’s Norwegian figuration up close – featured an aroused male but based between New York and Tokyo – sign kangaroo, the Twin Towers and phalluses in up for hefty doses of nihilism (albeit of the general. ‘It’s becoming more of a fascist world,’ Williams said, considering the authoritarian Nietzschean sort, aimed at nearly killing you fallout of 9/11. Judging by what we’ve seen of psychologically to make you stronger) expressed the paintings she’s made while chickens came via post-Warhol silkscreens of police violence and American flags, melancholy texts and oilcan home to roost, her tenth show with the gallery sculptures. We’d say that all of this (if that’s what will tweak her latter-day, warped-Helen

ArtReview

Frankenthaler mode. The compositions feel vivid and spacious, in an outwardly welcoming manner; but zoom in and you notice ripped architecture, fragmentary male figures, handwriting and tumbling dice: a timely synecdoche for high-stakes political gambling. Elsewhere in New York there’s a bit of Central Park architecture called the Astor Gate, 8 but Theaster Gates is in Hong Kong. Don’t get confused. Gates, of course, deals not just with architecture but with regeneration and community: his transformative history of conversions in Chicago’s predominantly African-American South Side, from his Dorchester Projects to the Stony Island Arts Bank, an arts gallery and community centre, requires little rehearsing by now. Almost as remarkable, though, is how Gates leverages the art market to help finance his communitarian projects. For all the visual canniness of his para-paintings made from

Tan Ping The Certainty of Uncertainty 不確定性中的確定性譚平抽象繪畫展

策展人黄篤 Curator Huang Du

This exhibition is curated by Chinese renowned independent curator Huang Du, exhibiting three major works by Tan Ping (b. 1960, Chengde, China), a Chinese pioneer of abstract art. In December 2016, Tan Ping was invited by Simon Maurer, the director of Museum Helmhaus Zürich in Switzerland, to perform live painting. His works will be unveiled for the first time in Asia after the exhibition in Switzerland. Tan Ping goes against the logic of multiple perspectives in traditional painting and presents an exhibition space with a mixture of abstract elements and live action at Leo Gallery Hong Kong.

Shanghai | Hong Kong www.leogallery.com.cn

upcycled firehoses, tar roofs and wood floorNew York painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, ing, and his intricately counterweighted Gulf collective GCC, Occupy Museums, Lightsculptures, gallery shows like his 2015 exhibition and-Space veteran Larry Bell and hard-blowing at White Cube Bermondsey, Freedom of Assembly, saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who retools also seemingly serve as funding drives via the spiritual jazz of the Civil Rights 60s for pointedly democratic art loaded with histories a fresh age of turmoil. Expect accordingly of use. In Hong Kong, coinciding with White a reflection of America’s current experiment Cube’s participation in Art Basel Hong Kong with plutocracy, and its visible consequences. during late March, anticipate works in bronze And the proud sponsors of this fraught artistic that further nuance Gates’s interest in roofing shebang? A jeweller, Tiffany & Co; an auction practices – but don’t expect them to go over house, Sotheby’s; and a financial services firm, your head. J.P. Morgan. Perfect. 9 For viewers of a certain age, the Whitney Another biennale launches in March, but Biennial may feel more biannual, but in fact 10 you can’t go to the Antarctic Biennale unless you were among 100 people invited by Ukrainian the last edition was in 2014. Now, however, artist (and former sailor) Alexander Ponomarev after a pause as the museum settled into its to the Argentine city of Ushuaia, where the relatively new HQ in the Meatpacking District, research ship Akademik Ioffe will voyage into the biennial is back, curated this time by ‘the icy inaccessibility of the Antarctic contiChristopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, and, in nent’. It’s a trip, man. To further quote the terms of display acreage, bigger than ever. The 63 artists and collectives encompass young website: ‘Instead of pompous apartments,

ascetic cabins. Instead of chaotic creative wanderings, a conjunction with Nature and explosion of consciousness through discussions with scientists, futurists, and technological visionaries.’ This ship of souls, mostly unidentified at press time, will use the South Pole as a tabula rasa for speculative thought, always a rewarding activity. What if you had a biennale and nobody came? What if, contra bluster, you were merely the latest artists to do this – given all the art/research missions that have already transpired? Can a biennale put the Larsen Ice Shelf together again? What is that massive object lately identified under Antarctica – is it an installation? We’re not pessimists, but we’re also not invited and will muse at home, enjoying a frosty biennale of the mind, and wait. In 2014, 15 and 16, Ponomarev organised various prequels at the Venice Biennale and at two Venice Architecture Biennales. There will doubtless be sequels. Martin Herbert

9 John Divola, Abandoned Painting B, 2007, inkjet print, 112 × 137 cm. Courtesy Maccarone, New York & Los Angeles, and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica

10 1st Antarctic Biennale (expedition). © Antarctic Biennale

ArtReview

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Points of View

Why so much surprise and exasperation at the charges of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ coming out of the American chatter machine? Why has the divide over whether or not to take our new president ‘seriously’ or ‘literally’ marked out some new partisan DMZ? Haven’t we been confronted with all this before? It was just over a decade ago that we were exposed to the postmodernism of American politicians tearing down a different set of grand narratives. Remember Donald Rumsfeld, the epistemologist, offering lessons on ‘unknown unknowns’? Or Karl Rove, the metaphysician, schooling journalists on the naïveté of ‘realitybased communities’? As Bill Clinton said, I guess it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is. We are back on similar ground, it’s just that today the politicians have Twitter. Before succumbing to this morass of fear and loathing, it’s worth recalling Bruno Latour’s 2004 essay, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’. Latour was writing in the wake of those spurious claims about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, but his essay is really a coming to grips with the legacy of critical theory as well as Latour’s own role in the rise of ‘science studies’ and its commitments to revealing the ‘social construction’ of things that people once took as givens, such as the laws of physics, and that comforted the Western psyche as it remade the world in its own image. Latour notably targets the cycle of ‘critique’ itself, whereby, in a first move, mere objects, plain facts, are shown by the critic not to have any causal agency of their own but to be blank

When facts become concerns Jonathan T.D. Neil suggests we turn to Bruno Latour to help navigate fears of Trump and his gameshow vision of America screens onto which naive subjects project their own interests and desires; then, in a second move, those subjects’ interests and desires, the fetishes of the naive, are themselves revealed to be nothing but manifestations of deeper, more structural forces – history, sociology, geography – which, by the way, are only ever visible to the omnipotent critic. If this story sounds familiar, it’s because this movie was just run again, and the American public bought front-row seats (never the best in the house). Trump was one such mere object, a matter of fact in the New York society world and then in the unscripted television world, where his brand and status seemed well aligned. The Apprentice was where the vulgarity of network TV met the vulgarity of the people’s (alleged) billionaire in that most vulgar of

March 2017

formats: the gameshow. Highly mediated but well circumscribed, Trump’s vulgarity did not need explaining. It was just there. Selfevident. Like defining pain by kicking a stone. Like all great television personalities, like all matters of fact, Trump was whatever we wanted or needed him to be: an oaf, an asshole, a champion, a winner. Like facts, he was the answer. And then he won the presidency, and the oaf, the asshole, the winner had to be explained. So began the second move: it’s not that anyone really wanted Trump as president, they were just responding to the rising power of an urban elite, to a globalism in which they weren’t taking part, to an unfinished and unconfronted history of racism. Leave Trump alone. It’s the people who are oafs, assholes, and – because they got their man – winners. Of course it is just coincidence that Latour’s essay was published the same year that The Apprentice debuted. That’s just a vulgar fact, and as far back as 2004 Latour was telling us that the facts don’t matter. They still don’t. To matters of fact Latour opposed matters of concern – ‘gatherings’ is the word he uses, gatherings of ideas, forces, players and arenas in which ‘things’ and issues, not facts, come to be and to persist, because they are supported, cared for, worried over. The gatherings that we have seen of late in response to the rise of that one vulgar fact named Trump are just the first flowering of our realisation that we must rally around such matters of concern: ‘things’ such as liberty, law, justice and truth – aggregates and practices that are in the greatest need of care today.

Drifting through Facebook, I scan a comment by a respected New York-based British novelist. The novelist muses about how, weeks ago, he had agreed to review a ‘light comic novel’, but now ‘the world is on fire and you can’t get your head to a place where anyone ought to give a crap about this stuff at all’. Is there a place for a ‘light comic novel’ in a ‘world on fire’? Or, to put it another way, is there place for artworks that aren’t directly and immediately responsive to the sense that politics has taken a shocking, unprecedented turn? The reaction to Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office, with the immediate imposition of a US travel ban on citizens of a group of Middle Eastern countries, has drawn the ire – and full attention – of millions worldwide. The artworld has been swift to register its opposition, with individuals and organisations finding ways to denounce Trump’s miserable and illiberal attitude and edicts, ways that range from gallery closures in New York and elsewhere on inauguration day, to MoMA’s hanging of artworks by artists from countries included in this travel ban, to the ever-publicity-hungry Anish Kapoor using social media to circulate his riff on Joseph Beuys, a self-portrait titled I like America and America doesn’t like Me. What should artworks be about in ‘a world on fire’? But what if the sense that the world is on fire is more perception than reality? Another author, Bret Easton Ellis, when asked about his opinions of Trump’s election – in a discussion with Hans Ulrich Obrist ahead of the opening of his recent exhibition at Gagosian London of works in collaboration with artist Alex Israel – questioned the response to Trump as much as Trump’s own actions: “I didn’t vote Trump, I’m just saying the hysteria is bothering me a lot more than the reality of what he’s doing.” Ellis laid the blame on “celebrity culture”, suggesting that the “overreaction” to Trump was “endemic in the culture”. While Obama’s administration had overseen deportations of migrants, for example, “It is all about image and how people are swayed by surfaces, and Trump disgusts people.” People, he said, “see this big orange lump, angry, big puffy face, and it really is quite a different step from the celebrity hep-cat glamour of Obama”.It’s easy to take issue with Ellis’s glib, ‘just-deal-withit’ cynicism. But there is a point to his caution about ‘celebrity culture’, and the nature of the ‘hysteria’ and ‘overreaction’. It’s not so much to do with celebrity culture, however, as it is the disconnect between images and reality that celebrity culture epitomises, and which has spread to the way

Freak out and lose your shit There’s a lot more feeling than thought out there, thinks J.J. Charlesworth we interact with the world of politics. If anything characterises the intense reactions to Trump (or Brexit), it’s a shrill emotionalised reaction to the image of the political world changing into something that appears – to liberal and left eyes, at least – less tolerant, more narrow-minded and divisive.It’s not that appearance doesn’t represent reality – though the ‘crisis of representation’ that has mutated into the obsession with ‘fake news’ shows that something has come radically unstuck. Rather, the intense responses to political events are intense responses directed at and channelled into the world of images – social media, Twitterstorms and, yes, even flashmobbed protest marches. In an op-ed for The Guardian, novelist Hari Kunzru – it was he whose post I had spotted on Facebook – observed his own reactions postTrump: ‘Like many of my friends, my social media use has become compulsive and unhealthy… One of my symptoms is a compulsion

Alex Israel & Bret Easton Ellis, 50 Million People, 2016, acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 213 × 305 × 5 cm. © the artists. Courtesy iStock

ArtReview

to spend too much time on the far-right internet.’ Reflecting on the question of how ‘feelings’ have become politicised, Kunzru is right to observe that ‘though the right berates the left for a politics based on empathy, their own strategy… is towards the colonisation of the public sphere by the presentation of feeling, instead of more traditional republican (and Republican) virtues such as moral rectitude, sincerity or adherence to truth.’ In the last lines of his much-quoted essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Walter Benjamin concludes that the ‘the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life’. Today there’s a lot of extremely emotive rhetoric about the supposed ‘rise of fascism’ (Benjamin would have laughed at that one). Yet, although analogies with 1930s Germany are wildly overwrought, it’s true that politics is again full of a combination of images and feelings – in some new sense, full of aesthetics. Feelings are immediate reactions – to people, to events, to elections, to artworks. The aestheticisation of politics that Benjamin saw in the rise of fascism had to do with quelling political action by making people feel better about their subordination. Today things are stranger: much art appears to be all about action – socially engaged art, political art, protest art – while politics has become an aesthetic response. But both are rooted in the eruptive expenditure of feelings and images, after which nothing much changes. The world isn’t on fire, but it demands people’s active involvement, and that requires as much thought as feeling. There might then be a space for artworks about the possibility of something else.

General Idea, a pioneering group of Canadian conceptualist and media-based artists, inhabited and subverted various forms of popular and media culture to legendarily acerbic effect. Formed in Toronto by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, the group lived and worked together for 25 years, dividing their time between Toronto and New York from 1969 until 1994. That was the year Partz and Zontal died from AIDS-related causes, a scourge they helped significantly to destigmatise. Finding humour in the darkest situations was one of General Idea’s hallmarks. For a quarter century they channelled their bleakly sardonic spirit into a spate of multimedia works that included beauty pageants, boutiques, TV talk shows, a magazine, fair pavilions and advertisements. Blurring the line between fiction and reality was only part of the trio’s goal. What they were really after was identifying and exploring the culture’s endlessly recursive feedback loop: ie the myriad ways in which art imitates life in the same way that life imitates art. The timely recent survey exhibition General Idea: Broken Time (2016), at Mexico City’s Museo Jumex, expertly portrayed General Idea’s ouroboros-like turn of the cultural screw. Inexplicably, the retrospective (organised jointly with Argentina’s Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, MALBA) turns out to be touring Latin America only. The same is true of the critical blockbuster Andrea Fraser: Le 1%, c’est moi, currently on view across town at the Museo Universitario de Arte ontemporaneo (having arrived from Barcelona’s MACBA). In light of Donald Trump’s isolationist policies (and let’s not forget that these shows and their touring schedules were organised before those policies became presidential;

feeding the feedback loop Christian Viveros-Fauné fears that shows like General Idea’s recent retrospective in Mexico City will no longer be welcome on US soil

things have the potential only to get worse), this bodes badly for audiences north of the Rio Grande. In the future, one can imagine that North American art-lovers will be obliged increasingly to travel south to see important exhibitions by controversial artists from Canada and the US. Featuring 120 works in unconventional media, such as men’s skivvies, giant inflatables resembling antiviral capsules, stamps, wallpaper and escutcheons, and more conventional material like video, sculpture, paintings, photographs and installations, General Idea’s motley production self-consciously hews to the group’s 1975 dictum that ‘General Idea is basically this: a framing device within which we inhabit the role of the artist as we see the living legend’. In practical terms, and despite their selfidentification as artists, the group’s activities often look like those of a wacky public relations company or advertising firm. Take the trio’s pivotal 1971 beauty-contest project, Miss General Idea Pageant – a stripped-down allegory of how to get ahead in the artworld. Later, in 1987, the group took the acronym for acquired immune deficiency syndrome and turned it into a logo by reinterpreting artist Robert Indiana’s famous 1966 sculpture LOVE. In no time, their recreation became a wearable rallying cry emblazoned on millions of activist surfaces (the show includes wallpaper, T-shirts and a poster campaign that targeted major US cities). Their best-known work, this newly retooled symbol pointed up where General Idea moved from simulation to interventionism: they turned AIDS into LOVE, and vice versa.

from top General Idea: Broken Time (installation view, 2016), photo: Moritz Bernoully, courtesy Museo Jumex, Mexico City; General Idea, AIDS, 1987, screenprint on paper, courtesy the artists

March 2017

ALFRED BASBOUS

SOPHIA CONTEMPORARY GALLERY ALFRED BASBOUS - MODERNIST PIONEER – SELECTED WORKS 11 Grosvenor Street, London, W1K 4QB 17 February – 28 April 2017 www.sophiacontemporary.com

Syrene, Bronze, 200 x 45 x 25 cm, 1998

ART BRUSSELS Tour & Taxis, Avenue du Port 86C, BE - 1000 Brussels 21 April – 23 April 2017 www.artbrussels.com

Last November, in a basement not far from Alexandria’s scenic corniche on the Mediterranean, I saw light at the end of a tunnel. Not a big light – in fact a rather small one – but one whose impact was greater than its size, and I have been thinking about it ever since. The light came from a group exhibition celebrating the end of a ten-month programme at Mass Alexandria, a studio-based independent art course initiated by artist Wael Shawky in 2010. Most of the other things I encountered in Egypt felt gloomy, even dark. Empty cafés and restaurants, deserted, dusty shops, overwhelming traffic and widespread signs of unemploment: the ‘tunnel’. Even the area around the Pyramids, one of the prime tourist sites on the planet, appeared listless.As things become more dire and dangerous nationally, the authorities also monitor the country’s art venues, with recurring arrests of staff members and intimidating surprise visits by groups of armed police. Two large, unframed paintings suspended from the basement ceiling, together titled Storyteller (2016), moderated my initial and ominous experience of the country. Both appeared unassuming: one reddish, the other yellowish, each featuring a circle at the centre of its rectangular picture plane. In the reddish painting, concentric circles pushed out to the edges of the canvas. Thin lines, so meticulously pencilled that they seemed to be part of some meditative activity, filled the gaps between each circle, giving the impression of radiating strings. The yellowish one had a collarlike shape in the middle, with red and black lines radiating outwards. It was obvious that these works represented a significant investment of time on the part of their author. In terms of their representative qualities, the works hovered between apparent depictions of cosmic geometry, closeups of filigree jewelry and renderings of ancient shields, sun wheels or simply wheels with spokes. In fact, as I learned later, they were partly derived from stitching charts, as used for example in needlepoint. Importantly, the canvases were coarse, almost like parchment, encouraging closer inspection. The paintings are by Mohamed Monaiseer, a twenty-seven-year-old artist who, prior to joining the Mass Alexandria programme, had gone through Egypt’s typically hyperconservative official art-education system. His seemingly introverted, contemplative paintings stood out in the dynamic presentation in that basement, shining on their own while echoing works with which I am more familiar – by historical figures like Hilma af Klint as much as by contemporary

after the tunnel, the light In a contemporary Egyptian artwork, curator Maria Lind sees creative forces overcoming coercive forces fellow artists like Doug Ashford. My outsider view, as a most-temporary visitor, also connected his skilled and laborious paintings, with their tremendous attention to detail, to one of the world’s great archaeological treasures (also found underground): the astonishingly exquisite grave gifts of Tutankhamun. Visiting the extremely dusty and in other ways neglected Egyptian Museum, I was, like so many others before me, Mass Alexandria 2016 final exhibition (installation view), with a video by Asmaa Barakat (foreground) and Mohamed Monaiseer’s Storyteller, 2016 (lower level). Photo: Fathi Hawas. Courtesy the artists

March 2017

startled by the incredible imagination and craftsmanship that had gone into the famous objects. They are simply superb, found in good condition in his underground tomb in 1922, originally meant to secure a pleasurable afterlife for the young pharaoh. What can art do in circumstances like the ones in today’s Egypt? Caught between a magnificent ancient past, colonial struggles, a turbulent last century, the transformative years immediately following 2011 and now severe recession and repression, under a form of military rule, contemporary art there might understandably exist at something of a remove from contemporary life. Maybe that is why Monaiseer’s paintings were glowing; tucked away below street level, they asserted their presence all the more. They testified to an indomitable and demanding activity by the artist, one that is based on an individual vision and conviction that cannot possibly involve carelessness. An activity that also indicates a certain amount of defiance, a refusal to play the game of the formal powers, whether governmental or of the artworld – a ‘weak resistance’, as writers Kuba Szreder and Ewa Majewska called it in a recent text for e-flux journal. Describing the political agency of the ‘weak’ in the context of Poland today, which is certainly different from that of Egypt, yet also comes from a place of fear and uncertainty that, according to the writers, is akin to the source of artistic creativity, they state that weak resistance is ‘much more appropriate than traditional forms of resistance for discussing artistic responses to the micro-fascist takeover of desires and souls’. The precision of Monaiseer’s production process extends to the display of his works: the choice to suspend them at eyelevel rather than place them on the wall makes their fragility an evident and essential quality of their materiality. Such palpable visceral presence, together with this kind of precision, seems to me to add to the potential power of weak resistance, taking it beyond a disentangling from the behaviour not only expected but increasingly demanded by the authorities. At the same time these paintings decline both popular artworld perceptions of ‘relevant work’ and common ideas of artistic resistance, gathering their own forces through self-determination manifest in precisely alternative definitions of artistic practice and the realm of interference. Despite their abstract nature, or perhaps because of it, these pictures become an example of withdrawal that should not be mixed up with escapism.

Remember when the world became an itch for a deeper level? When a lot of us started to get the sense that almost everything around us was a laminated parody trying to appeal to aesthetics and terror and assumed ignorance? When the world became as much spin-induced apathy and the contagion of scary thoughts / abstract capital / winsome graphics as anything intergalactic? When just switching between tabs on a laptop started to involve wading through multitude leagues of blubber between you and reality? When ‘reality’ appeared to be a viable alternative, somewhere out there, and not just an invention cooked up in a vat of desperately hopeful psyches? You know how the story goes – a bunch of wealthy white men in suits composing game-changing policies from behind sticky desks, inventing fear and workplace protocol, calculating risk and return, dismantling honesty and welfare. All of them proficient in hunting and winning and high-level smarm offensives. Hell-bent on protecting their inheritance. Turning everything they touch the regulated blue of a pricey ballpoint. None of them willing to back down, admit it, give over. Soon enough, it’s language they’re wounding, and it’s hurting most in the noun department: strivers, skivers, swarms, borders, walls, registers, reform, deficit, migrant… is it possible to encounter any of these nouns without thinking of the most tedious-dangerous binary party politics? A bunch of blameless words, now with tricky meanings behind every surface. The enormous stitch-up implied by the whole rhetorical system is almost palpable. It’s knackering, stumbling around, unable to find your footing inside the increasingly slippery substances. The minute you enter the simulation, the confused ache translates direct into your marrow. The worst of it is the banality. These nouns are like deaths. The banality of thoughts about death is exorbitant. I don’t know about you, but it makes me want to assert the right to be precise.

on the dump by

Heather Phillipson

When I read keen language, I feel I’m waking up in a time and place that’s not already written. I get proxy thrills of vitality, just wandering around it. We don’t have to call it poetry, but I’m surely mining for words and phrases that are sharp and eager, and at least a bit sexy. If language creates a reality, give me a language that isn’t oleaginous, or deferential, dripping with paranoia and tautology, that doesn’t preface every statement with, “Let me be QUITE CLEAR” or, “Well, what I would say is THIS”. (As Roland Barthes wrote, ‘The worst thing about (a show of) frankness is that in general it is an open door, and wide open, onto stupidity.’) Give me a language that hotwires my innards. In South Carolina, there’s a web-famous Border collie I admire from the home-comfort of YouTube. ‘Chaser’ can not only identify and retrieve a thousand-plus objects, she can also respond to sentences with multiple elements of grammar, distinguishing between parts of speech, demonstrating a complex handle on human semantics. Chaser has set the bar for my own BC, Marj, and, as we’re learning, the key is: specificity. Don’t just say ‘ball’! Say ‘tennis ball’, ‘football’, ‘basketball’. ‘Fetch’, ‘come’, ‘drop’. Heather Phillipson, SADDEST IMAGES, 2017, digital drawing. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

These interspecies comms, actually connecting each verb and noun with its action and object (FETCH TENNIS BALL), reboots words and their referents. Marj and I are shoving metaphorical dynamite up language’s figurative asshole! And then there’s Marj’s own proper noun, ‘Marj’, so we can get Marj to come running, which turns out to be another way to form connections and/or exert dominion. As it goes, I’m writing this from the island nation of Iceland, which is currently battling Iceland the supermarket over the use of ‘Iceland’, because Iceland the nation would like Icelandic firms to be able to use ‘Iceland’ and Iceland the supermarket’s not having it. ‘Iceland’ vs Iceland. Which is which? Who owns nouns? How to apply them – like ointment or tasers? ‘Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the’ (‘The Man on the Dump’, 1923, Wallace Stevens). On a recent morning train out of London, on the foldout table opposite, I saw FOOD THAT’s GOOD on a coffee & croissant bag (looking like a replica/missing prop from John Carpenter’s They Live – thought getting hammered and dictated by corporate slogans / alien lifeforms, until… MELTDOWN) – a sleight of homographic print so convincing as to render the words a truism, but, by the same tactic (SPELLING IT OUT), extreme horseshit, the implication being that maybe the FOOD ISN’T THAT GOOD and so, in the instant of their declaration, the words revealed their dumbness. What resembled a message was in fact a shutdown. Confirmation that we’re not really meant to read these slogans, let alone answer back, “I doubt it! The whole entrance reeks of a chemically simulated bakery and passiveaggressive bullying!” These abundant, financially motivated, debased nouns are intended only to be mainlined to the colossal echo tube of inner space – admitted to our store of deep trash: unflushable.

CONTEMPORARY: 1x1 Gallery, Dubai · Ab/Anbar, Tehran · Ag Galerie, Tehran · Agial Art Gallery, Beirut · Aicon Gallery, New York · Albareh Art Gallery, Manama · Sabrina Amrani, Madrid · Artside Gallery, Seoul · Artwin Gallery, Moscow / Baku · Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Pueblo Garzón · Athr, Jeddah · Ayyam Gallery, Dubai / Beirut · Bäckerstrasse 4, Vienna · Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York · Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo · Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney · Carbon 12, Dubai · Carlier | Gebauer, Berlin · Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai · Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana · D21 Proyectos de Arte, Santiago · Dastan's Basement, Tehran · East Wing, Dubai · Experimenter, Kolkata · Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai · Galerie Imane Farès, Paris · Selma Feriani Gallery, Tunis / London · MLF | Marie-Laure Fleisch, Rome / Brussels · GAGProjects, Adelaide · Galerist, Istanbul · Green Art Gallery, Dubai · Grosvenor Gallery, London · GVCC, Casablanca · Gypsum Gallery, Cairo · Leila Heller Gallery, New York / Dubai · Ikkan Art Gallery, Singapore · Inda Gallery, Budapest · Galerie Iragui, Moscow · Kalfayan Galleries, Athens / Thessaloniki · Khak Gallery, Tehran / Dubai · Galerie Dorothea van der Koelen, Mainz · Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna · Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai · In Situ - Fabienne Leclerc, Paris · Galerie Lelong, Paris / New York · Marlborough Gallery, New York / London / Barcelona / Madrid · Meem Gallery, Dubai · Kasia Michalski Gallery, Warsaw · Mind Set Art Center, Taipei · Victoria Miro, London · Mohsen Gallery, Tehran · NK Gallery, Antwerp · Galleria Franco Noero, Turin · O Gallery, Tehran · Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore · Pace Art + Technology, Menlo Park · Pechersky Gallery, Moscow · Giorgo Persano, Turin · Plutschow Gallery, Zurich · Project ArtBeat, Tbilisi · Revolver Galeria, Lima · The Rooster Gallery, Vilnius · Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Beirut · Sanatorium, Istanbul · Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg / Beirut · Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart · Sundaram Tagore, New York / Singapore / Hong Kong · Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris / Brussels · The Third Line, Dubai · Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam · Vermelho, Sao Paulo · Vigo Gallery, London · Waddington Custot, London · Zawyeh Gallery, Ramallah · Zidoun-Bossuyt, Luxembourg · Galeri Zilberman, Istanbul / Berlin · Kristin Hjellegjerde, London MODERN: Agial Art Gallery (Beirut, Mustafa Al Hallaj) · ArtTalks | Egypt (Cairo, Mamdouh Ammar) · DAG Modern (New Delhi / Mumbai / New York, Biren De / GR Santosh) · Elmarsa (Tunis / Dubai, Abdelkader Guermaz / Aly Ben Salem) · Grosvenor Gallery (London, Sayed Haider Raza) · Hafez Gallery (Jeddah, Abdulhadi ElWeshahi / Mohammed Ghaleb Khater) · Jhaveri Contemporary (Mumbai, Zahoor ul Akhlaq / Anwar Jalal Shemza) · Françoise Livinec (Paris, Georges Hanna Sabbagh) · Gallery One (Ramallah, Sliman Mansour) · Perve Galeria (Lisbon, Manuel Figueira / Ernesto Shikhani) · Shahrivar Gallery (Tehran, Masoud Arabshahi / Abolghasem Saidi) · Shirin Gallery (Tehran / New York, Hadi Hazavei / Hooshang Pezeshknia) · Tafeta (London, Ben Osawe / Muraina Oyelami) · Le Violon Bleu (Tunis, Ammar Farhat / Zoubeir Turki) · Wadi Finan Art Gallery (Amman, Ahmad Nawash / Wijdan)

Madinat Jumeirah is home to Art Dubai.

Versus, 2011. Photo Michael Richter

Welcome to the City Club – a programme of new art, performances, family activities, happenings and talks inspired by the original cultural plans for Milton Keynes. During 2017, MK Gallery will bring together artists and arts organisations from across Milton Keynes to celebrate the city’s 50th anniversary. Find out more about the project and how to get involved at: www.cityclubmk.org

A SPACE FOR EVERYONE

MEHDI GHADYANLOO

SPACES OF HOPE

At Ambika P3, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS 2 - 5 March 2017 | Howard Griffin Gallery off-site exhibition (+44) 020 7739 9970 | info@howardgriffingallery.com

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 53

Alfred Munnings on the return of the right Interview by

Matthew Collings

Alfred Munnings (born 1878) was president of the Royal Academy of Art from 1944 until 1949. He attacked all modern art except Impressionism. He became notorious for a speech given at a Royal Academy dinner, attacking Picasso, that was broadcast by the BBC. It led to his rejection by the liberal art establishment. He acquired great wealth after the First World War when he was engaged to paint portraits of horses and riders for the Canadian newspaper magnate and business tycoon Lord Beaverbrook. He died in 1959.

ArtReview

ArtReview What do you like about Impressionism? Alfred Munnings It’s pleasant. I don’t allow any of Impressionism’s visual distortions. I throw them out. I keep its sunny mood. I paint the horse or person very clearly without nonsense. The people always look clean. The good thing about Impressionism is dappled sunlight. Any decent chap likes to sit in a garden reading, or laughing and chatting with pretty girls, and you can’t do that entirely in the bright light if it’s a hot day: you’d get a headache. You need a bit of shade. Well Bob’s your uncle, with Impressionism – that’s a style where light and shade really play a role. AR How did you get into painting? AM When I was a teenager I was apprenticed to a printer, and I designed advertisements for them. I did it for years. It was the early 1890s. My father ran a watermill. We lived on the Suffolk/Norfolk border. When I wasn’t drawing and painting for the printers I went to Norwich School of Art and drew and painted. Then I left the printers and painted fulltime. AR What was happening in art in those days? AM Decadence: Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, it was disgusting. I expect they were Jews. Did you know John Berger was? Most people don’t know that. AR Did you ever meet any of them? AM No, I didn’t have to. Winston Churchill said to me once, “Munnings, if you saw John Berger walking down the street, would you join me in kicking his arse?” I replied: “Yes, sir, I would.” AR Wasn’t that Picasso? AM Him too! AR Why do you say these things? They seem so foolish. AM Kick a chap up the arse? AR Yes, and calling people disgusting, and using the term ‘Jews’ as an insult. It’s incredibly offensive and it makes you seem preposterous. AM You’ve got to take a stand. You can only take things falling apart and becoming utterly disgusting for so long. But culture will alter now that we’ve got a new Western leader with the right ideas. Hail Trump! We’re going to see some changes at last. AR What on earth do you mean? AM You’re a bit dense, aren’t you? For decades we’ve had intellectual poison drip-feeding into Western consciousness through the efforts of leftwingers posturing as art critics, and now it’s all over. We’re taking back control. A pretty girl’s a pretty girl, you can take your whip to

them, and they won’t be transgender or a hairy-legged feminist. AR What was it like running the Royal Academy during the 1940s? AM Very pleasant: I prefer it now, though, with the new climate coming in. AR What’s the difference? AM Well, in those days you never knew if a painting might pop up in the Summer Exhibition by a Royal Academician where there weren’t any horses and it looked as though the chap had absolutely no problem with the price of paint and was absolutely larding it on with a trowel, as well as not actually picturing anything. That kind of thing could make the ordinary exhibition visitor with his wife and children positively ill. And there was little I could do about it.

You can only take things falling apart for so long. Culture will alter now that we’ve got a new Western leader with the right ideas. Hail Trump! For decades we’ve had intellectual poison drip-feeding into Western consciousness through the efforts of leftwingers posturing as art critics. Now we’re taking back control AR And today? AM Now we’ve got the new system coming in. The whites-only constitutional change for the Royal Academy and Tate is only the beginning. I’m proud to say I was one of the cosignatories. We’ve got non-Jewish art schools on the way, and we’re going to be using abandoned NHS hospital buildings and doctor’s surgeries for Life Room classes, healthy Nordic models only. I’ll be the selector for Documenta next year. My portrait of Kellyanne Conway has already won the Turner Prize, which has been renamed the Michael Gove Prize. All this has really brought back the days when the Royal Academy was great. No foreigners would ever dream of trying to attend a lifedrawing class there, in the 1800s, where fine gentlemen used to sit on packing crates and discourse on anatomy. I’ll be giving the after-dinner speech at the Royal Academy Annual Dinner on the subject ‘Why Social Practice Artists Are Cucks’. facing page Alfred Munnings painting Brown Jack at Castle House, Dedham, 1934. Photo: A.V. Swaebe. © Barry Swaebe Archive and estate of the artist. All rights reserved, DACS 2017

March 2017

AR You’re just talking rubbish. The Royal Academy has a history of liberal tolerance. Johan Zoffany’s 1772 painting of Royal Academicians in the Life Room includes a portrait of one of the first Chinese visitors to London, the sculptor Tan-Che-Qua. AM That’s all fake news, nothing like that happened. Anyway, we’ve already had that painting altered with the finest spraypaint techniques. There’s no sign of anyone Chinese in it now. AR What did you think of John Currin last year at Sadie Coles, and Carroll Dunham at Inigo Philbrick? AM Currin’s a good painter – good eye: the other one’s filthy rubbish. Currin’s got some filth, too, needs to be washed off, but he’s getting there. You know, I believe Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso corrupted art. Dunham’s certainly infected. Currin avoids it. There’s some obscure stuff there. He’s struggling still. Sadie Coles needs to take him in hand. Give him a good thrashing. He’d probably like it, that’s the problem. I’ve asked her to rebrand the place as the Lord Baden-Powell Gallery. I think she’ll come round. AR Are there any women artists you like? AM No, I don’t think it’s a job for women, it goes against nature. It’s like Dr Johnson said. A dog on its hind legs: how did it go? “Sir, a woman painting is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” AR That’s preaching, not painting: a woman preaching. AM How do you know? There are facts and then there are alternative facts. It’s just one theory that he used the word ‘preaching’. There are working people, hardworking people, who believe he said ‘painting’. They’ve been ignored for too long. They’re what you might call the silent majority. I believe their time has come. I don’t think you’d want to put yourself above hardworking people, would you? But you’re right in a way. A woman preaching is an appalling image. AR I didn’t say that, Johnson said it. AM Boris Johnson is really who we should be thinking of now. Not so-called intellectuals living in a bubble away from the concerns of hardworking people. We must give him all our support as a consistent champion of men with families to provide for, who wish to see our borders controlled and our country’s educational institutions cleansed of the views of the likes of John Berger, who made films about art for the BBC in which he compared the Old Masters with advertisements and solicited

the opinions of miniskirted feminists. Apparently he was born in Stoke Newington. I suppose you know what ethnic group that area of North London is blighted by? AR It’s incredibly multicultural and tolerant, actually, with synagogues and mosques in the same streets, plus Turkish shops and restaurants. I should say Stoke Newington is a model of a successful society, with respect for difference going with ability to live peacefully and prosperously with one’s neighbour. Let’s leave social relations aside for a moment and turn to aesthetics: how did you get your first break as an artist living on commissions? AM You do come out with some obscure statements, old boy. Are you sure your wife isn’t entertaining foreigners in the bedroom as we speak? But since you ask, I painted horses for the Canadian Cavalry in the First World War. After that there was no end of commissions. I painted very well, and the works have always been successful and appreciated by people who have their heads screwed on. Paintings of mine at auction in the last few years have fetched prices of $8 million, $5 million, and I’ve had sales of over $1 million 35 times. There’s also an enormous Munnings industry of prints and postcards. AR Yes, it’s incredibly impressive. I must say I kind of like the real Alfred Munnings’s paintings. You’re not real, of course, you’re just a joke I made up about the alt-right and the way art might go, in a fantastical dystopian future. I’m satirising the ideas and use of language of the mad-right in the USA at the moment, and making a historical British artist known for being a bit conservative seem to have come back to life as a signer-upper to such notions. Nothing I’ve made you say so far bears the remotest resemblance to reality except the very basic biographical information I’ve artfully adapted from Wikipedia. The real Munnings wasn’t

particularly anti-Semitic, or antiforeigners. It’s all a mad fantasy. Do you mind if we go on anyway, even though it’s an ontological impossibility? AM Because I don’t exist, you mean? Of course, fire away. AR What do you think about de Kooning’s Women series? AM Ah, that’s an interesting question. I was looking at a group of pictures from the Women series in the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism show the other day. There they were, along with Dark Pond, from 1948, over in another corner. That’s a transition from a black abstract series to a series where an iconic feminine symbol is the theme. The three major Women paintings were from a number of simultaneously-worked-on developments emanating from Woman i, which he painted and discarded – and then painted again – for nigh on two years before deciding it could be regarded as a work that made any sense. The continuation-Women were explorations of the aesthetic territory he found he’d opened up with Woman i. I observed that in these Women every line echoes out to other similar lines. The woman appears and disappears within this play of independent lines. AR What did you make of the presence of the black painting in the same room? AM That there’s a development with the Women not just from Woman i but also from those black paintings of the 40s: they, too, are all about line. The Women make up an odd sort of experiment, it might seem, from a later historic point of view, where misogyny might be an

issue: our own times. But from the perspective of the abstract-expressionist times, you can see existentialist concerns in play. (Since you just raised the issue of being and not being.) What is a painting? It can be the internal workings of all paintings, the structures they’re made by, which the picturing element – the aspect the audience is interested in – rides on. That’s the contention of abstraction. But what is a painter? That could be an existentialist question: what am I? What decisions do I make? Am I the sum of them? Was I already something? Do I make myself what I am? An abstract structure can be interrogated from the point of view of the existential study of consciousness, Sartre’s development from Husserl’s phenomenology. The answer to the question of what a painting is, therefore, could be something like: lines describing space. And the existentialist thought could go: well, a woman is a disturbance of space, and paintings have always pictured them. You see where I’m going? On the one hand there’s a painting by de Kooning that’s a pure negative, all black with white lines. There’s no space, it’s all sucked out. And on the other, in a different part of the room, there’s a different painting where there’s lots of space, it’s in the form of a feminine icon, a subject for painting going back many centuries.s AR What did you think when Churchill, in a letter to you, refuted your speech about kicking Picasso? It’s on the record: ‘I do not think we have ever walked up a street together, and anyhow this is not the sort of statement that should be attributed to me.’ AM It was a forgery, I’m sure. Or if he wrote it, it was probably a weak moment of liberal conscience he regretted later. Or his wife pressurised him. You know how wives can be. They get all sorts of notions in their heads. Next month Socrates on why painting is over

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You got to take the breaks the way they come. Life is sort of like gambling. You can’t always win 61

Culture Clash by Sam Korman

Group of cowboys at the annual Flint Hills Rodeo, a major cultural event at Cottonwood Falls, a nineteenth-century ‘cowboy’ town in the heart of the Kansas Flint Hills region. Licensed to public domain

ArtReview

Can cowboys and social sculptors roam the same range?

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1977–80, talking with worker of the New York City Department of Sanitation. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

March 2017

“I know what this is: it’s America,” I joked to my friend as the jumbo- the urban stadium, the dirt nonetheless conjures American pastures. tron at Madison Square Garden displayed mountain streams, hay bales It’s about land, and the years of violent spectacle that rendered it the in the backs of trucks, notable bridges and radiant wheat threshers testing ground for – or natural home to – rugged individualism and mowing a field at the golden hour. As if to confirm my comment, the the outlaw’s self-determined moral compass. America, a killer metaleathery face of a young cowboy appeared onscreen and solemnly phor. God, and so lonely. delivered his only line: “America”. Yes, any suspicions the crowd As the story goes, Joseph Beuys liked America. And if we take the might have had were calmed, and we could now take comfort in the artist on his word, America liked him back. Or so he says – it’s diffispectacle of our country’s splendour – eyes welled and sparkling with cult to confirm 100 percent. If we look closely at the story, he visited tears. A symbol of earnestness, the cowboy’s tone of voice – reverently America twice in 1974. There was the long weekend they had together plainspoken, with a twang of downhome confidence – sanctified the during the performance I Like America and America Likes Me, in which the beatific video, largely depicting pastoral themes such as family and artist was carted from the airport to New York’s René Block Gallery, farming. The conflation of the military with social service, however, where he spent three days with a coyote, and then was returned to the is the hallmark cliché of this brand of America: and so a soldier’s airport via ambulance. That fling is based on an ‘America’ of the Wild homecoming cuts to teachers in the classroom, cuts to Border Patrol West, involving the animal that serves as Native American symbol agents monitoring a dusty stretch of the wily trickster and friend in of border wall, cuts to ER doctors, the dark. Tonight, at the Professional Bull Riders cuts to... Almost everyone is white; Earlier that year, however, event, a nationally-touring competitive if there’s a person of colour, he or Beuys made an overture to the US bull-riding circuit, I was told to “go to she wears a uniform; if there’s a with Energy Plan for the Western Man, woman, she’s a teacher, nurse or a lecture tour that visited New York, hell, motherfucking redneck” by a group mom. Ordinarily I’d hear the word Chicago and Minneapolis college of animal rights protesters outside ‘America’ as a derisive belch when campuses. Against the growing dissomeone in my bubble made fun of some redneck shit. Tonight, at the illusionment of the Vietnam era – what the artist called an ‘energy Professional Bull Riders event, a nationally-touring competitive bull- crisis’ – he proposed social sculpture (not everyone loved it). The riding circuit, I was told to “go to hell, motherfucking redneck” by a medium staged society as an artwork, to which everyone contributed group of animal rights protesters outside. “It’s been a while since I got through conscientious actions. Collaboration with social and physical called a redneck,” one of my Southerner friends said as we entered. sciences propelled art to the spiritual core of democratic society, and, The PBR is a microcosm of an American mythology: for all its marrying activism to mythology, Beuys viewed public institutions – evocation of country, it’s an arena full of dirt that links national iden- artworks, political parties, universities – as the byproduct of personal tity to the blunt spectacle of competitive cowboying – pay atten- intensity of purpose, meaning and spirit. Does Beuys’s social sculption, though, the typical ride is less than eight seconds long, at ture seem compatible with the cowboy, though? The cowboy’s moral which point a rider eats dirt. Yet, at this event, half the riders were universe fortifies the world he carves out of the vast nothingness of Brazilian, Argentinian or Mexican; the remaining, branded ‘Our the plains, jiving with the wilfulness of the artist’s model. But the de Heroes’, were from Montana, North Carolina, Missouri, Texas and facto collectivist contradicts the American notion of choice that undervarious other states with high land-per-capita ratios. All their ten- writes political participation in this country: living by his own rules, gallon hats conjure a scene of a cowboy surveying his herd as he leads an outsider, the cowboy can always opt out. It’s this contradiction that the animals from pasture to sale and slaughter. Out of place within makes negotiating social sculpture in the US so challenging.

Brady Sims riding Mike Miller Bucking Bulls’ Mishap during the Monster Energy Buck Off at Madison Square Garden, New York, in January 2017. Photo: Andy Watson

ArtReview

Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974, week-long action with coyote at René Block Gallery, New York, May 1974. Photo: Caroline Tisdall. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

March 2017

“Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,” Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings cajolingly sang, calling out the romantic selfindulgence of life on the range. The ‘Outlaw Country’ stars exemplify the cowboy as witty iconoclast: their urbane observation is emblematic of a split between city and country. The PBR, however, is a reminder that the live-free-or-die spirit also aligns with selfserious social conservatism. A Christian prayer, an uncommon practice in New York public events, introduces the event celebrating man’s triumph over beast; and even this rugged sport has been instrumentalised by copious sponsorship and product placement (the Ford truck sideshow was especially boring). This contradiction clings to the cowboy like another sponsorship patch on his vest. The conflict represents the allure of American spectacle: violence fills seats, and offers an antidote to alienation. It is also similar to Beuys’s ‘energy crisis’, which, during the 1960s and 70s, American artists sought to engage, challenge and cure. In Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969!, she writes, ‘I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order) I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.’ The document revolutionarily shifted the focus of art from the production of objects to the provision of care, and emphasised Ukeles’s role within a wider social ecology of family or the art community. Whereas Beuys depended on shamanistic benevolence, Ukeles’s pragmatic humanism sought to make the actual labour of community and institutions visible, dramatising it in her performances of sweeping, dusting and mopping, or her ongoing residency, begun in 1978, at the New York Department of Sanitation, where she shook the hand of every sanitation worker, insinuating art into local bureaucracy. Cowboys, it could be assumed, are the type of people who give too-hard handshakes, but for Ukeles, it is a much more revealing and vulnerable gesture that embraces the hand sullied by its labour. What effect do these politics of work have on social sculpture in America? Though somewhat less alchemical, Ukeles nonetheless made invisible labours visible, charging them with meaning. It is also inspiring,

because it does not start from an institutional position to begin with, but rather originates in the artist’s home, reflecting an enterprising homesteading that paralleled the cowboy on the frontier. Beuys’s notion that ‘everyone is an artist’ begins to reflect its socialist democratic underpinnings. A university education is expensive, and many students incur gross amounts of debt; state-provided healthcare, gone. Though public institutions appear chiefly inaccessible, a down-for-the-scene mentality of DIY community-building runs through American social sculpture. FOOD, a restaurant cofounded by artists Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard and Gordon Matta-Clark in New York in 1971, straddled the line between entrepreneurship and artwork. Employing artists, and coproducing a place to meet and talk, FOOD intertwined service labour with the production of community and discourse – similar projects have sustained artist communities throughout the US, and have been a touchstone of alternative scenes, bright burning in often transient nodes of youth culture like Baltimore, Providence, Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles and others. ‘Creativity is common’, is writer, historian and publisher Ishmael Reed’s more pragmatic perspective to ‘everyone is an artist’. For Reed, this idea led to his research into black spiritual traditions during the 1960s. Originating in West Africa, and persisting through slavery and segregation, these traditions became foundational to Reed’s depictions of multiculturalism, and his satire of American culture, the novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), wherein black culture is a virus spread through dance. In a recent interview with The Paris Review, Reed tellingly describes how he fed his MacArthur ‘genius grant’, worth over half a million dollars, back into the production of an opera and other publishing projects, stating, ‘You just want to use up whatever equipment you can get… I said thousands of people would benefit if I ever got one of those grants, and, you know, thousands have.’ Reed, who early in his career was at the forefront of Black Nationalism, provides a go-for-broke model of cultural resistance in the form of localised institutions and publishing – he anthologised one-time poets and workers’ prose; collected and wrote blues songs and wrote black cultural histories; not to mention his own poetry and prose. As the long list of his various print-based projects indicates, it’s important to commit these things to print. Small-scale projects, like the volatile

ArtReview

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1977–80, handshake ritual with workers of New York City Department of Sanitation. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

March 2017

Group Material, Democracy, 1988 (installation view). © the artists. Photo: Ken Schles. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York

ArtReview

communities they serve, don’t have to last forever, and they probably shouldn’t. The comfort lies in the urgency of the work. Many of Reed’s activities predate or were contemporaneous with those of Beuys; this was a period when the relationship between an artist or the community and the art institutions that host them in turn became more contentious. In the 1980s, artists Julie Ault, Patrick Brennan, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Tim Rollins and Peter Szypula – later joined by Felix Gonzalez-Torres – founded Group Material, and opened a storefront gallery in the East Village. Opposing the art market’s ascendant influence, they collaboratively presented exhibitions that historicised the issues facing their immediate community, such as the AIDS crisis, and hosted talks and town halls. The exhibition was the medium through which Group Material spread authorship, and made the organisation inclusive to artists and nonartists alike; their activist iconoclasm cues us into the discursive space they’re trying to create, and undercuts its grandiosity. More than Beuys, who embraced spectacle as commensurate with his mythological tone, Group Material challenged this spectacle – though radical histories and activism appear in both projects, and the Free International University that Beuys founded was one of the groups from which Germany’s Green Party emerged. It’s worth restating: creativity is common. But leaping forward from Group Material to today, the localisation of an art practice has come increasingly under fire through rising rents in cities like New York; artists are also acutely aware of their role in gentrification. Artists like Harrell Fletcher, with his softened brand of social practice, turned to the university as host, founding the Art and Social Practice Program at Portland State University (of which I was a student). Fletcher’s projects – such as pre-YouTube user-generated-content platform Learning to Love You More, a collaboration with Miranda July, which prompted participants to ‘Feel the news’ or ‘Make an encouraging banner’ and upload their responses; The People’s Biennial, cocurated with Jens Hoffmann, which presented 25 artists from Portland, Rapid City, Winston-Salem, Scottsdale and Haverford – all supposed nonart centres; and The American War, a recreation of a Vietnamese war museum that toured throughout the US and hosted talks with scholars and veterans – have a commonsense appeal, offering accessibility

in lieu of critique. At the same time, it’s a suburbanisation of social sculpture that flattens the antagonism a community depends on for vitality, a kind of white flight back to the institution that bolsters its authority, and ability to stage community as a spectacle. In the end, it’s a question of scale, and many institutions are seeking to promote regionality and small-scale projects under their financial umbrellas. The situation is dire, as government funding has eroded over the last 30 years, with only a handful of artist-initiated foundations keeping the majority of nonprofits alive. In December it was reported that Rocky star Sylvester Stallone was being considered for head of the National Endowment for the Arts. What is also especially important to consider about this type of aid is these organisations’ insistence on funding projects throughout the whole of the US, and at the micro level, as with the Precipice Fund, a regranting programme that provides organisations in several American cities with funds to distribute to local projects throughout the year. These projects likely won’t last very long, but it’s for their incipient quality and often-youthful exuberance that they challenge the monolithic consolidation of resources necessary to found an institution. One such project is Home School, an informal art school started in the Portland garage of manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis, funded by the Precipice Fund via the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. The project offers a range of events, from karaoke therapy to Skype lectures and other forms of public and personal activism. For its scale and informality, and the fact that it’s run by young people, Home School demonstrates that social sculpture continues to find a place within the US as an agile organisation to resist and respond to privatisation. An organisation like Home School, based on documentation, also hosts healthy antagonism. Winslow Laroche, an artist whose work spans painting to discursive trolling, delivered an artist Skype talk critiquing the white cube and other institutional models that exploit artists of colour, and subsume them under a bland market share. “Art is not a way to make money,” he reminds us, before telling us to go be a financial analyst. Home School challenges the monolithic institutional spectacle that has come to define social sculpture in the US. But Beuys and his legacy is actually parked in the garage. It just never stays parked for long. ar

The People’s Biennial, 2010 (installation view). Courtesy Harrell Fletcher

March 2017

Dropout Artist Lee Lozano turned not doing into her final art project, one that endured until her death almost 30 years later. Two decades after that, her (in)action still speaks to the anxieties of the present by Karen Di Franco

Lee Lozano was a Scorpio. Investigating astrological alignments and setting questions for the I Ching, with responses notated in chart form, often (as the artist herself noted) through a haze of hash smoke in her New York loft, the artist (writing in her notebook in September 1971) observed, ‘I HAVE NO IDENTITY. I HAVE AN APPROXIMATE MATHEMATICAL IDENTITY (BIRTHCHART.) […] I HAVE SEVERAL NAMES’, before going on to conclude that ‘I WILL NOT SEEK FAME, PUBLICITY OR SUCKCESS. […] IDENTITY CHANGES CONTINUOUSLY AS MULTIPLIED BY TIME. (IDENTITY IS A VECTOR.)’ There are 11 such notebooks in Lozano’s archive and they include writing that records her life from 1968 to 1972 in a variety of formats: from staged dialogues to accounts of experiments with drugs, drink and masturbation to magazines. No subject is off-limits or beyond scrutiny; her life and art practice enmeshed what many might imagine to be irreconcilable domains – that of the personal and of the conceptual. As such, many of her ‘write-ups’ – a handwritten textual format that contained the material of her artworks – are explicitly personal. Through acts of self-production, various undetermined experiments (with Lozano as the guinea pig, testing, observing, writing up and moving on to the next idea) became her ‘art-life-work’, which culminated with Lozano dropping out of her artistic life completely. After her death (in 1999), the texts are all that connects us to the story of her practice. That story foregrounds and ultimately confounds a cluster of contemporary anxieties: labour – or the act of working – value and the politics of exposure. In these precarious times, a resurgence of interest in Lozano makes sense. In early life experiments such as Dialogue Piece (Started April 21, 1969) (1969), Lozano resolved to ‘CALL, WRITE OR SPEAK TO PEOPLE YOU MIGHT NOT OTHERWISE SEE FOR THE SPECIFIC PURPOSE OF INVITING THEM TO YR LOFT FOR A DIALOGUE’, while in General Strike Piece (Started February 8, 1969) (1969) she resolved ‘GRADUALLY BUT DETERMINEDLY’ to avoid aspects of the artworld in order to ‘PURSUE INVESTIGATION OF TOTAL PERSONAL & PUBLIC REVOLUTION’. Lozano was moving towards her final work, Dropout Piece (Started April 5, 1970) (1970–), which would be for the artist ‘THE HARDEST WORK

I HAVE EVER DONE’. Her directive was to ‘DROP OUT FROM WORLD, NO CALLS NO WORK NO OBLIGATIONS NO GUILT NO DESIRES, JUST MY MIND WANDERING LAZILY OFF ITS LEASH. THIS EVIDENTLY IS THE ONLY WAY TO TAKE A REST.’ With no write-up to accompany the progress (or indeed outcome) of Dropout Piece, we are left in a paradoxical position of understanding that the work is in production – but with no indication of its climax. In the audio recording of a talk Lozano gave to students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, in Halifax, on 16 July 1971, she describes her conception of travelling across time and space as “jumpbacking”, a shortcut via a wormhole into another time/space zone: “There are places where nets form or it comes closer together. And you take a shortcut and you jump across the gaps…, and you get from one world to another world.” When Dropout Piece concluded, Lozano left no net to enable a return to this world. As so much of Lozano’s practice is located in the intersection of dialogue, idea sharing and, frequently, experiments with the psychic transmission of ideas into another artist’s mind, it seems appropriate that my first material encounter with Lozano’s writing should be by chance, within the extensive and complex archive of the American writer and critic Barbara Reise, housed at Tate Britain. At first glance, the ephemeral short text, handwritten in biro on a plain postcard, resembles one of Lozano’s write-ups – the capitalisation, written with a steady determination; the absolute obliteration of words (in both biro and felt pen) that Lozano decided to omit prior to sending; neologisms such as ‘postcarded’. Tantalising in its brevity, the text leaves space for us to imagine not only the experiment mentioned but also the potential write-up that was never to happen. Such is the economy of her work at the time that these descriptive scraps of unmade projects hold equal weight to those produced and exhibited, contributing as they do to the continuing examination of the radical potential of Lozano’s practice. Dated 2 November 1971, the card was written between the exhibition Infofiction, which had taken place at Halifax earlier in the year, and Infofiction II, which was to follow in February 1972 at Lisson

ArtReview

Dialogue Piece, 1969, wet copy, 28 × 22 cm. © estate of the artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London

March 2017

General Strike Piece, 1969, xerography, 28 × 22 cm. © estate of the artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London

ArtReview

Gallery, London, and confirms that Lozano was determined not to produce unnecessarily: ‘I HAVE NO OCCASION TO WRITE UP WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT FOR’. What we do know is that Infofiction II at Lisson changed dramatically from its original pitch, shifting from a display of text works, similar to the Halifax show, to a sandpit installation on the gallery floor, with Lozano present throughout the exhibition’s duration. Almost nothing exists to document Lozano’s only visit to London – the exhibition invitation; a black-and-white photograph of Lozano standing in Regent’s Park, staring directly at the camera, looking incredibly cool in her leather biker jacket; two telegrams informing the gallery director, Nicholas Logsdail, of her arrival (one just states, ‘tough sh. I’m coming anyway’). This wilful intention not to deliver what was expected of her is at the crux of what still draws our attention to Lozano’s practice. Her deliberate, bawdy, often drug-induced graphic texts locate an innovative, overlooked original who produced material that directs you towards the intensity of a life being lived dangerously, in an era of overcelebrated, overwrought Conceptualism. Before dropping out, Lozano had already begun the journey towards another dimension, so it’s no wonder she saw Dropout Piece as the natural resolution to what was for her the problem of making art that was genuinely unconnected to an increasingly commercialised environment. Like many of her peers, Lozano struggled to reconcile experimentation and working within the gallery system, and whereas others sought activism through the Art Workers Coalition or the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee (an offshoot of the AWC), Lozano declared herself opposed to anything other than ‘A TOTAL REVOLUTION SIMULTANEOUSLY PERSONAL AND PUBLIC’, stating that ‘THERE CAN BE NO ART REVOLUTION THAT IS SEPARATE FROM A SCIENCE REVOLUTION, A POLITICAL REVOLUTION, AN EDUCATION REVOLUTION, A DRUG REVOLUTION, A SEX REVOLUTION OR A PERSONAL REVOLUTION’. That Lozano chose to refuse to participate in public meetings of committees that were attended by close friends and colleagues demonstrates her commitment to a position of resistance rather than one of quiet

withdrawal or silent retreat. This behaviour was very much in keeping with Lozano’s write-up for General Strike Piece – which instructed her to withdraw from the artworld ‘GRADUALLY AND DETERMINEDLY’ while maintaining a presence as a signifier of her preference not to call for change or debate the possibilities of activism – but this time declared the singularity of her decision not to do something, and that she would continue not doing for the foreseeable future. By 1972, Lozano’s investigations had advanced towards her embodied presence as artwork, Dropout Piece becoming a durational and ongoing project, and through it she retooled herself as her work, just as she had exchanged paint and Minimalism for text and language. Page 78 of Notebook 8 reads ‘TIME. MULTIPLY BY T = A COMPLIMENT. FROM NOW ON TRY TO LIVE IN 4 DIMENSIONS SIMULTANEOUSLY, LEAVE BEHIND FOREVER OLD 3 DIMENSIONAL WORLD.’ Lozano, now ‘LEE FREE’, would soon become E, multiplied by T, living fully in her fourth dimension. With the conclusion of Dropout Piece we are left to question the relationship artists build between success and failure within their own interpretation of their work, regardless of audience, collectors or patrons. This relationship, when extended outwards, becomes politicised – by markets, opinions and friendships. For Lozano, the only way to enact her PERSONAL REVOLUTION was to annihilate herself as subject, as Lee Lozano, artist, to become literally anything else. ar Lee Lozano’s 1971 talk to students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, was transcribed and published in Lee Lozano: Win First Don’t Last / Win Last Don’t Care (2006), p. 162. Lozano’s postcard dated 2 November 1971 is located in TGA 786/5/4/26: Barbara Reise Archive, Tate Britain. The quote from Notebook 8 is sourced from Joint Dialogue Book, published in conjunction with Joint Dialogue: Lee Lozano, Dan Graham, Stephen Kaltenbach (2010), exhibited at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles Work by Lee Lozano will be exhibited at Hauser & Wirth, London, from 19 May to 29 July

Lee Lozano in Regent’s Park, 1972. Photo: Nicholas Logsdail. © and courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York

March 2017

Intimacy and Anonymity What is Do Ho Suh revealing – and hiding – in the recreations and rubbings of spaces he has inhabited? by Mark Rappolt

ArtReview

March 2017

ArtReview

Tollund Man is a naturally mummified corpse dating from the fourth Suh began to make obsessive, beautiful 1:1 recreations of archicentury BC found in a Danish bog in 1950. During the time between tectural spaces during the late 1990s. Composed of planes of transluTollund Man’s immersion and retrieval from the mire, his skin and cent monochrome fabric (generally polyester) supported by a simple woollen hat (that’s all he’s wearing) have attained a uniform, glossy, network of steel pipes – “My architecture pieces are all basically leathery texture; his baggy body appears deflated and flattened, outlines,” the artist says – their ghostly presence is suggestive of some the skin collapsing around the bones, as if time has pressed out sort of archive of spatial memories prepared for the flatpack-furniture one of his three dimensions. Overall he looks a bit empty. But from generation (for whom furniture, like dwelling, is transferrable and the contents of his stomach, scientists discovered that his last meal temporary). No more so than in the latest iteration of this strand of was porridge, and from the contents of the porridge, they concluded Suh’s output, on view as part of the artist’s current solo exhibition that he was killed (as part of a rituPassage/s at Victoria Miro’s Wharf What really links these reconstructed Road gallery in London. The work al sacrifice) in late winter or early spaces is the one thing in this is a fusion of nine interstitial spaces spring. His fingerprints, meanwhile, are the oldest on record. Beyond ghostly construction that isn’t there at all: (corridors, entrances, etc, each a sepits record-breaking status, that last arate work created between 2015 the person of the artist himself detail feels like a weird celebration and 2016) recorded in one of six of Tollund Man’s physical longevity (by replacing his hat with a fabric colours, according to the details and proportions of buildings more contemporary marker of identity). Any further significance in London, Seoul, Berlin and New York, and then stitched together to form the architectural equivalent (one big corridor) of a transverse remains mysterious. What a peat bog has done for Tollund Man – preserved, emptied colon. As you enter this tunnel, you can almost feel the will of each and flattened – Do Ho Suh has done for the significant architectural of these nonspaces to move you on, as if the work is in peristalsis, spaces that he has occupied during his life. That life has incorpo- digesting you before excreting you out the other end. And yet, at the rated a childhood in Seoul, a postgraduate education in the US (at the same time, you’re distracted, held up by the architectural detail of Rhode Island School of Design and at Yale University), and then an each space and the potential cultural significances of the differences apartment and studio in New York, a studio in Berlin and his current (ornateness of detailing, variations in height, generosity of space) base in London. And various (ongoing) hoppings back and forth between one and the next. Which is itself ironic, given that a shared between those locations as well. The perfect global citizen, you might architectural function is what ostensibly links all these spaces in the think. Particularly if you’re looking at the connections and inter- first place. And amidst this push and pull, you become conscious of dependencies articulated in a drawing like My Homes/Staircase 2 (2012), the fact that what really links these reconstructed spaces isn’t stitches in which axonometric projections and elevations of the various or Velcro, but rather the one thing in this ghostly construction that spaces in which the artist has lived unfold vertically around a contin- isn’t there at all: the person of the artist himself. In a curious way, the uous flight of stairs twisting back and forth, from space to space, as work conceals as much as it so evidently and eloquently reveals in its if to create a single strand of DNA formed of the individual nucleo- obsessive detailing of everything from doorknobs to doorframes. tidic architectures. In 1989, two years before Suh travelled from Korea to America to That’s not to say that Suh’s work is all a slavish expression of the begin his studies, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama seamless connectivity that was prerequisite for membership of the was boldly announcing ‘the end of history’ (in an essay of the same transnational capitalist class during the decades following 1989. title – with added question mark – published in The National Interest). Revelling in the new world opened In fact, the artist, who represented The procedure was clearly erotic for Suh, up by the collapse of the Iron CurKorea at the 49th Venice Biennale, but at the same time it had the effect in 2001, recalls how in the US he was tain, Fukuyama breathlessly opined: ‘What we may be witnessing is not “pigeonholed as a Korean artist. of wiping clean every single fingerprint Critics looked for any element that just the end of the Cold War, or the from the space he once called home would fit. Even though there was passing of a particular period of postnothing I could do, I resisted it.” And perhaps it’s simply an unpleasant war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of truth that, in general, people look for difference rather than simi- mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western larity in order to organise the world around them (that thinking liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ In the certainly forms a foundation for populist politics today). Fallen Star current age of radical nationalism and state protectionism, it seems – 1/5th Scale (2008–9) is a sculpture featuring the scaled, lifelike model obvious that that fabled universalism – the anytime, anyplace, of the artist’s childhood home (a single-storey structure built in the anywhere of global capitalism and neoliberal democracy – didn’t style of a traditional Korean hanuk) crashed, like some angry mete- quite work out as Fukuyama and others on his ideological trajecorite, into the side of a detailed reconstruction of the mansion block tory envisioned. In an intriguing way, Suh’s architectural installa(and its contents) in which Suh lived while in Rhode Island. If it’s a tions might be said to exploit the benefits and reveal the flaws of this portrait of Suh’s life as a student (and armed with Suh’s biography, universalising plan. For in these works, while it may be possible to we’re certainly steered towards seeing it as trace a life lived in various places (successively or facing and preceding pages Passage/s, 2016, such), it represents both a union of and a clash at once), we lose any sense of what that life was polyester fabric on stainless steel pipes, between buildings that serve the same purpose actually like (did he eat porridge in spring?), of dimensions variable. © the artist. but that are iconographically and organisationwho the person living that life is and was. Where Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York ally different. Victor Hugo, back in the nineteenth century, & Hong Kong, and Victoria Miro, London

March 2017

Main Entrance, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2016, 336 × 229 cm, medium and other credits as on page 81

Staircase, Ground Floor, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2016, 354 × 227 cm, medium and other credits as on page 81

Entrance, Unit 2, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2016, 282 × 229 cm, medium and other credits as on page 81

ArtReview

characterised Quasimodo’s relationship to the Cathedral of Notre Dame as being like that of a turtle to its carapace, in that the hunchback’s misshapen form was perfectly suited to the misshapen hiding places into which he pressed his body, Suh compares his fabric work to clothing (going further to point out that Korean clothing is flat – space folded around a body – while Western clothing expresses volume); his spaces offer less evidence of a relation between habitat and inhabitant (he’s ‘dressing’ it rather than it dressing him). In its place is a desire to illustrate the implied presence of a series of emotional connections that motivate the labour involved in the artist’s painstaking recreations of space. Fallen Star took two and a half years, and the artist has spent the past three years working on his Rubbing/Loving Project, which involved covering every interior surface of a building – 348 West 22nd Street in New York, which housed his apartment for two decades and which has recently been sold – in paper and then taking its impression by rubbing it with pastels and coloured pencil. The procedure was clearly erotic for Suh, but at the same time it had the effect of wiping clean every single fingerprint from the space he once called home. It’s exactly that contradiction – between a sense of intimacy and anonymity – that provides a part of the thrill of Suh’s work.

And it’s that hinting at an essential but ultimately insubstantial emotional connection that makes the artist’s penchant for translucent fabric renditions of space – its ghostly presence – so fitting. It’s as if Hugo’s hunchback formula has been updated and complicated: today place tells us everything and nothing about the man. (That’s not to say, of course, that Suh’s work doesn’t open itself up wide to a discussion of identity politics, clashes of cultures, the impact of globalised capital or the psychological import of place.) Among Suh’s more recent projects is a series of works on paper produced at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. Among them is Main Entrance, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2016). Made of gelatin tissue (from which the gelatin is later dissolved and the threads merged with the paper) and sewn in the same way as Suh’s installations, the lifesize image looks flattened and crumpled into the cotton paper: caught somewhere between two and three dimensions. Much like Tollund Man in his bog. ar Do Ho Suh: Passage/s is on view at Victoria Miro, Wharf Road, London, through 18 March, after which it will travel to Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong, in an exhibition lasting from 20 March through 13 May

Light Bulbs, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2015, thread drawing, gelatin sheet embedded on STPI handmade cotton paper, 336 × 229 cm. Produced at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore. © the artist.Courtesy the artist, STPI, Singapore, and Victoria Miro, London

March 2017

Let’s Get Cynical by Chris Fite-Wassilak

For some American artists, the disguising of resistance in acceptance has revived an ancient form of protest as a tool to undermine consumer culture from within

ArtReview

We’ve been given more than enough reasons to be cynical recently, production in the work of an earlier generation of artists such as Seth a small sample of which include: the world’s major cities continue Price and Cory Arcangel towards what might be called a critical neoto be handed over to developers who cater exclusively to a legion of liberal existentialism. While artists have for several decades taken on Starbucks-sipping jetsetters; the electorates of several major democ- the role of the corporation or company – from Artist Placement Group racies have seen fit to put maniacal autocrats in charge; and, perhaps to Bernadette Corporation, or more recently with groups like DIS, most incredibly of all, not everyone can agree on what caused 2016 to K-Hole (of which Yago is a member) or MadeIn Company – embodybe the hottest year on record. The world’s going to hell, but what can ing, however ambiguously, a commercial structure, Bader, Yago et al we do about it? One answer, interestingly, might come from a group focus more on those who use or rely on such structures: the shopper, of seemingly cynical artists whose work is covertly engaged in reviving the patient, the temp employee. In a world where being a citizen an ancient tradition of civic activism. means being a consumer, they recognise that the modern individual, The typical modern cynic is intelligent, concerned; they’re not with all its quirks, accessories and likes, is itself the readymade. apathetic but simply realistic, Yago’s work revolves largely in tune with a version of reality around photography and the writThere’s a paradoxical rush that underlies where ‘realism’ equates to ‘pessiten word, with fragmented, static this new cynicism: a garbled, energetic poems that appear in books, permism’. They know better, but, by howl of the knowingly consumed, and large, keep to themselves and formances or sometimes short remain productive, invisible. All a double-feint of acceptance and celebration phrases dangling like pendants this is in stark contrast to the origalong the bottom of framed imthat seethes with unease inal Cynics, a bunch of half-naked ages. She began writing while ascetics who lived on the streets of ancient Athens, lecturing on self- working in the IT department at a New York law firm; in the dead sufficiency and masturbating in public. The Greek word kynikos, intervals waiting for computer operating systems to install or just to meaning ‘doglike’, was intended to be an insult; but those labelled avoid talking to colleagues, she composed lines like, ‘Watching the with it wore the term as a badge of pride, and took it upon themselves horizon form along lines of hard bodies, / rosebowl dust settles at the to make their lives a public display of their flaunting of normative stem of rose glasses. / Are you my hard drive?’ It’s reminiscent of Pilvi social conventions. They saw themselves as social reformers, pointing Takala’s ‘residency’ at the offices of the financial consultants Deloitte the way towards a better polis: live simply, and shamelessly. By the for her project The Trainee (2008), where for months she would sit in time Edmund Burke labelled Rousseau a cynic in the eighteenth her assigned office simply staring into space. In one video, the Finnish century, it was for different reasons: Burke saw Rousseau’s view that artist spends a full day going up and down in the elevator: to anyone society had strayed from our nobler instincts as smug armchair criti- who asks why, she simply answers: “I’m thinking a bit.” cism: opinions without action. That version of cynicism has become Andrew Norman Wilson described a more fraught occupation in the norm. Nowadays, as any self-respecting cynic might point out, the a text for e-flux last year (which expanded on his video Workers Leaving antics of the ancient Cynics sound like the performative preening of the Googleplex, 2009–11): working as a video editor subcontracted to punks hanging out on London’s King’s Road during the late 1970s: Google, reading Marxist theory and using photocopy privileges to making a show of their Mohawks and safety pins just to get a rise make flyers while files would render. Encountering the relatively lowout of passersby. But the Cynics, like the punks, provide an imagi- paid workers who were digitising books but weren’t given any of the native rupture in the social contract; a movement that, even after Google employee perks, such as food, access to guest talks and other being extinguished or reabsorbed into conventional attitudes, pro- freebees, Wilson attempted to document and discuss these disparities vides a necessary reminder of alwith them; he was promptly fired. ternatives, a reminder to question In each of these cases, the company In a world where being a citizen means how we might critique a society temp job seems to be a sort of formbeing a consumer, the modern individual, from within. Maybe, as philosoative cave, a space in which the artist with all its quirks, accessories pher Peter Osborne has pointed can reflect and begin to devise a set out, ‘the question is not whether to of responses before striking out as and likes, is itself the readymade that apex of neoliberal society: the be cynical, or how to avoid cynicism, but how best to be cynical’. freelance, self-employed content creator. The recent work of several artists suggests that there is a productive In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau describes mixture of the two types of cynicism: wearing the guise of the modern how we each individualise, adapt and transform mass culture. He put cynic, skating on its surface of seemingly flat affect, while using it forward the idea of the perruque (wig) to describe the form of disguising to enact the social criticisms of the earlier, more doggedly confron- that goes on when workers use time during which they are being paid tational Cynical adherents. In the work of American artists such as to perform someone else’s labour in order to get some of their own Darren Bader, Puppies Puppies, Andrew Norman Wilson and Dena stuff done. Almost 40 years later, as many of us willingly volunteer Yago, symptoms of mass and corporate culture – health-food prod- personal details to information-harvesting companies dressed up as ucts, children’s television characters, skater shoes – become part of ‘social’ platforms, updating images and statuses while sitting around introspective installations, texts and videos. Behind a distant, almost on zero-hour contracts, is it any longer even possible to ‘wig’ ourselves cold, impersonal facade, there’s a sharp irony in that way? There’s a sense of disguise, somefacing page Darren Bader, Chess (I–V), 2016, and personal conviction that moves beyond the times literally dressing up, in these artists’ work, dimensions variable, 5 variations, each unique. explorations of distribution and contemporary in their temporary inhabitation of popular © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London

March 2017

characters, products and even stock emotions. In several performances version of Sheryl Crow’s 1996 hit If It Makes You Happy, it somehow by Puppies Puppies, costumes for Spongebob Squarepants or Olaf manages to feel celebratory. It’s that paradoxical rush that perhaps (the heat-loving snowman in the 2013 Disney film Frozen) have been underlies this new cynicism: a garbled, energetic howl of the knowthe means to think about the death drive and the identities we secrete ingly consumed, a double-feint of acceptance and celebration that away, or try on for a spell. In Heck & The Divested Set, a solo show in Berlin seethes with unease. As Wilson himself wrote: ‘Perhaps a progressive last year, Yago included several images she had taken of Pioneertown, approach to commercial processes would be more like Death taking a few buildings in the desert of Southern California built by a group you by the hand at the best Sheryl Crow concert you’ve ever been to. (including Roy Rogers, the most popular Western actor of that era) Except even after you’ve accepted that this is what has to happen, to be a live-in Western set. In the text accompanying the show, Yago it’s still hard to hold Death’s hand because he’s wearing Ring Pops on uses her fairly unremarkable images – a broken-down windmill, each bony finger.’ Whether you actually like Sheryl Crow or not isn’t a church bell, a wagon wheel – to speak about how stock photography the issue; we’re all at the concert already. But the best way to underhas been replaced by user-generated content. It’s as if, from this arche- mine it might be to take Death’s candy-ringed hands and dance a flamtypal film set, she couldn’t have obtained a ‘unique’ image even if she boyant tango to her middle-of-the-road country rock. had wanted to. Instead, there’s just the suggestion that behind the Peter Sloterdijk, in his 1987 Critique of Cynical Reason, labelled veneer of each generic photo uploaded online is the grain of someone’s modern cynicism dismissively as a self-defeating ‘enlightened false personal, special moment; that, perhaps, one way to retain our indi- consciousness’. With its hints of dressing up, camouflage and disguise, viduality, when it’s incessantly co-opted and monetised, is to withhold we could now adopt his phrase as a positive, using a deliberately false it entirely from view. consciousness in order to critique current social conventions. These An animated scene in Wilson’s recent video Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016) artists’ cynicism is, for want of a better phrase, a ‘life hack’; or, if we poses our individual experiences more as an endless loop of commodi- want to update de Certeau’s ‘wig’, we might rename it in honour of fication that has been biologically internalised: a CGI synthetic artery the new American president’s own method of covering his head, and becomes a conveyor belt for a series of miniature mashed-up products term it a ‘weave’. It might have the appearance of the cynic’s sneer and – a bottle of booze with an airplane tail sticking out of the end, half a a shrug, but within it is a blueprint for occupation and finding new peach with a car engine sitting on it and a house linked up to a hookah identities woven from the bright advertising and product surfaces all around and inside us. It’s an invitation: get pipe – each getting drained by a mosquito, Andrew Norman Wilson, Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016, syringe and an oil pump. Set to an a cappella cynical today! ar HD video, 8 min 31 sec. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Dena Yago, Pioneertown, 2015 (Wheel), 2016, digital c-print, 78 × 53 cm, edition of 3 + 2AP. Courtesy the artist

March 2017

Power to the People by Jonathan Griffin

The politics of representation, and more specifically race, have come into increased focus since the recent US election, so how does contemporary portraiture capture our times? 86

ArtReview

Anyone who informs you that there’s been a recent resurgence of of powerful and wealthy white people, is seized and occupied by the figurative painting – especially the kind of person who says this in people it once excluded. relation to portraiture by artists such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Despite the relatively recent creation of new museums in the US Aliza Nisenbaum, Jordan Casteel, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer and for African-American, Latino, Asian and other underrepresented Njideka Akunyili Crosby – should be swiftly apprised that portrai- fields of art, museum wall space is limited real-estate, which made ture never went away. Throughout recent decades there have been Kerry James Marshall’s recent occupation of the Met Breuer (a retrooverlapping waves of painters returning to this most traditional spective that travelled from the MCA Chicago) all the more momenof genres. tous. This major museum retrospective of Marshall’s work was a long Portraiture is a practice too elemental, too fundamental to our time coming. An important early work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow aesthetic processing of human experience, to be influenced much of His Former Self (1980), was inspired in part by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 by trends or novelty. (How else to explain historic anachronisms like novel, Invisible Man, a description of the African-American protagoLucian Freud or Paula Rego?) Nevertheless, with each new genera- nist’s marginalisation by white America during the 1920s and 30s. tion there emerge modifications to portraiture’s conventions that The painting itself is actually not so much a portrait as a silhouetted reflect significant concerns about who is (and is not) represented in placeholder for a black head, individuated only with white eyes and a grotesque, gap-toothed grin. As with Kara Walker’s later silhoucontemporary culture. Portraiture, essentially being about what people look ettes, Marshall posits a bitter racist caricature in place of like – the revelations and deceptions of external a reflection of his own subjecthood. appearance – has in recent years naturally What Marshall shares with many of the younger figurative painters who have lent itself to discussions around race. And come after him is a sincere appremany of the most prominent voices in that discussion, as it pertains to ci-ation of Western art-history, even painted portraiture, are based in as he takes issue with its systhe US. The attention paid in temic racism. The strategy, in that country to paintings of America, of forcibly insertnonwhite people was gathing a black or brown narraering long before Kehinde tive into estalished whiteEuropean art-history would Wiley became a market darbe merely a symbolic gesling, before even Barkley L. ture if it did not also aim Hendricks’s portraits of the to absorb – and exceed – all 1960s and 70s, perhaps even the examples of beauty and before the strident midprogressive thought within century visions of Romare that history. This can lead to Bearden or Elizabeth Catlett or Jacob Lawrence. But after some fruitful cross-cultural and Donald Trump’s election, porcross-generational allegiances. traiture of racial minorities was Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s pictures of herself and her family are supercharged with an unprecedentinfluenced by Vilhelm Hammershøi, ed (and largely unanticipated) urgency, while Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has recently as the incoming president threatened to wage war on human empathy and tolerance, drawn on Edgar Degas’s paintings of ballet promising to reverse most of the modest immigradancers. Jordan Casteel’s paintings of young black tion, criminal justice and civil liberty reforms that had been made men in turn borrow their confrontational directness from Édouard under America’s first black president. Manet’s paintings of women. The dominant critical narrative attached to this work concerns When critic Karen Rosenberg interviewed Barkley L. Hendricks visibility. As the critic William S. Smith wrote of Aliza Nisenbaum’s last year, the seventy-one-year-old artist wasted no time in hotly paintings of undocumented Central and South American immi- rejecting Rosenberg’s assertion that his latest exhibition (which grants, ‘this bold work makes visible individuals who are effectively included a painting of a hooded black man, holding up his hands invisible within American society’. Painted portraiture’s gravitas and in the crosshairs of a gun, in front of a Confederate battle flag) was historical cultural dominance is what grants it legitimacy as a contem- first and foremost political. His position seemed contrarian to say the porary tool, co-opted by contemporary artists least; in another painting, Roscoe (2016), a man in above Barkley L. Hendricks, Roscoe, 2016, not in order to establish a new aristocracy but a ‘Fuck Fox News’ T-shirt grabs his crotch. There oil and acrylic on canvas, 103 cm diameter. © the artist. Courtesy the artist to democratise painted portraiture as a form fit were many other paintings in the exhibition, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Hendricks pointed out, but it was always the for the representation of everyday folk who look facing page Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, racially volatile pieces that were referenced in much like the painters themselves. The very Pale for the Rapture, 2016, oil on linen, diptych, thing that contrived the near-total absence of the (predominantly white) art press. He was just 200 × 120 cm (each painting). © the artist. nonwhite faces in Western museums, that is to painting people as he saw them on the streets Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, say the ubiquitous representation in paintings of New York. ‘Anything a black person does in New York, and Corvi-Mora, London

March 2017

Barkley L. Hendricks, Ruby, My Dear, 1982, oil, acrylic, aluminium leaf and copper leaf on linen canvas, 175 × 175 cm framed (framed by the artist). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1981, egg tempera on paper, 23 × 18 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Kerry James Marshall, The Academy, 2012, acrylic and glitter on PVC panel, 185 × 155 cm. Collection Daniel S. Berger. © the artist

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mother and Child, 2016, acrylic, transfers, coloured pencils, collage and commemorative fabric on paper, 244 × 315 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

terms of the figure is put into a “political” category,’ he said. ‘I paint can artists put black and brown bodies on display in their work without submitting them to the violent intrusions of the imperialist because I like to paint.’ Beyond fighting for the right to hang pictures of black or brown white gaze? How can I, as a white critic, write about these paintings – faces in Western museums, many of these painters demand simply to even admiringly – without perpetuating those same actions? The fact be received as painters, just as white artists are allowed to make figu- that painting, especially figurative painting, occupies the mainstream rative images, without challenge, that deal with issues other than of the global art market adds an extra anxiety over the commodificatheir own whiteness. Baltimore-based Amy Sherald’s work hangs in tion of such images. As Als observes, ‘black bodies have been bought Washington, DC’s new National Museum of African American History and sold for centuries’. and Culture, which opened last September. She has commented Fictionalisation is one strategy, as demonstrated not only by on how decisions such as colour Yiadom-Boakye but also by To be seen, in the flesh, is inevitably also to choices of clothing or backCrosby, whose apparently candid grounds, for instance, in her self-portraits and family scenes be read, interpreted, dissected. How can artists full-length portraits of Africanare carefully contrived and filterput black and brown bodies on display in their American men and women are ed through literary references, work without submitting them to the violent often interpreted as politicised particularly to Nigerian authors. – red, white and blue referring Indeed this approach is not limintrusions of the imperialist white gaze? to the Union flag, for example, ited to artists and subjects of in her painting Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2013) – when colour. Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, who is half-Cajun, half-Jewish, also takes broad liberties with her descriptions of the American class they are usually only aesthetic. The British-born Yiadom-Boakye, whose exhibition at the New system. Along with characters of various ethnicities based on people Museum, New York, opens in April, has spoken of the ‘normality’ in she knows, she has depicted Trump supporters and Occupy Wall her paintings of predominantly black figures dressed casually and Street protesters, rendering them neither caricatured grotesques nor positioned against nondescript dark backgrounds. Since she was specific individuals. raised among black people – her family originally hails from Ghana – As the novelist Zadie Smith recently said, when asked about her reshe says she finds it only natural to depict similar figures in her work. sponse to Brexit and the US election result, people “do not have one idea Her unfussy, direct compositions contain little in the way of biograph- within them”. They are pluralistic, multivalent. While Nisenbaum ical clues about their subjects; with allusive titles such as Pale for the chooses to paint a specific category of person – undocumented immigrants in New York City – she Rapture or Crowds of Autumn (both also insists on their resistance 2016), these paintings seem less to, and transcendence of, those concerned with individual idenreductive terms of description. tities or the politics of represenAlthough she titles her paintings tation than they are with atmosphere, or intimacy, or offering with her subjects’ first names, there is in her work a sense of threads of narrative potential. their unreachability, of their None of Yiadom-Boakye’s remoteness from the viewer, subjects are named in her titles. which is often explained in In fact, the people she paints don’t really exist at all, except terms of the subjects’ preoccupation with the distant places in the artist’s memory of people she has known or seen. Her agethey left behind. But is it not also less art is fictional, even literary a way for Nisenbaum to keep (she also writes short stories), them safe, to leave them out of and a world away from the social harm’s way? realism of earlier artists whose It would also be a mistake to objective was simply to reprepresume that the intended viewership for portraits of people of sent, as faithfully as possible, the people they saw around them. colour, by artists of colour, is necNjideka Akunyili Crosby, Ike Ya, 2016, acrylic, transfers, coloured pencils and charcoal Hilton Als writes, in an esessarily white. Crosby, in particon paper, 213 × 234 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London say on her work, ‘If I sound a ular, has talked in interviews little defensive about Yiadomabout how her work derives Boakye’s right to paint what she likes, it’s because when specta- from her own desire to see herself, and people like her, represented tors see coloured figures they see politics and not art: dark mark- in Western visual culture. Instead of mounting a direct attack on the ings are associated with sociology, the same old story of black op- white status quo – which anyway, it has been argued, implies the supepression writ large, obscuring the power of aesthetics at the heart of rior power of that status quo – many of these artists primarily address Yiadom-Boakye’s expressionist style.’ the very people whom they paint. It is this redirected address that Herein lies the paradox at the heart of visibility: that to be seen, reveals, and contributes to, the very real changes in the power strucin the flesh, is inevitably also to be read, interpreted, dissected. How tures that portraiture has traditionally upheld. ar

ArtReview

Aliza Nisenbaum, Gloria, Angelica, Jessica, 2014, oil on linen, 130 × 84 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mary Mary, Glasgow

March 2017

Art Reviewed

When my time comes, just skin me and put me up there on Trigger, just as though nothing had ever changed 95

Robert Rauschenberg Tate Modern, London 1 December – 2 April Few artistic careers are more front-loaded than that of Robert Rauschenberg, so it’s no fault of the curators that this chronological retrospective, the first since the artist’s death in 2008, feels like an explosion, followed by a gently diminishing reverberation. The period covered in the first few rooms, starting from the artist’s student work at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the late 1940s, through to his monochrome paintings, photography, foundobject sculptures, combines and transfer drawings, is surely one of the most fecund in the history of art. The combines, his painting/ sculpture/found-object hybrids starting from the mid-1950s, are both a culmination of ideas born in Black Mountain’s interdisciplinary syllabus and a ground note for the rest of his career. They’re his Cubism, and – as for Pablo Picasso – they represent a shortlived creative surge, born of a collaborative spirit, whose implications were so transformative that it took the rest of a lifetime to extrapolate their full potential. Monogram (1955–9), the one with the goat, is an emblematic example, cramming in allusion – abstract-expressionist slathers of paint, collaged images, fragments of signage, a painted tyre, the heel of a shoe – whose frenetic registers can still be discerned in the final rooms of work made during the 1980s and 90s. Rauschenberg’s combines fired questions at then-dominant abstract-expressionist painting: could a painting be made against the clock (and include that clock, as in First Time Painting, 1961)? Could a painting contain other people’s paintings? Could a

painting include a T-shirt, a parachute, a stuffed chicken, a handkerchief, a suitcase, a quilt? The answer to everything is yes. Rauschenberg’s answer to everything is always yes. That the Tate show lacks some important works from this period (such as Rebus, 1955, which will appear in the MoMA iteration later this year, a large collage of dribbled paint and found material, including a sketch by Cy Twombly) undersells the centrality of the combines to Rauschenberg’s work as a whole. An evenhanded hang, giving equivalent space to later, less significant moments, somewhat dampens their force. What does resonate is a sureness of aesthetic that is absolutely a product of his education with Josef Albers at Black Mountain. Albers’s Bauhaus belief in the primacy of design is never far from Rauschenberg’s work, in which a kind of visual perfect-pitch rules even the most trash-filled composition. The list of materials used in a work like Charlene (1954), for instance – newspaper, oil paint, T-shirt, umbrella, mirror, electric light and more – implies chaotic abandon, yet every element is made to serve a pattern of related shapes. The detritus such works are composed of becomes a means to parlay their way into the ‘gap between art and life’ in which he claimed his works operated. Later, when his designer’s sensibility superseded the antic collagist, Rauschenberg’s work became hermetic, merely ‘nice’. His early 1960s silkscreens were made contemporaneously with Andy Warhol’s, but lack the latter’s willingness to second-guess his

facing page, bottom Monogram, 1955–9, oil, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on wood platform mounted on four casters, 107 × 135 × 164 cm. Collection Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York

facing page, top Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, de Kooning drawing erased by Rauschenberg and mounted in a gilded frame with label inscribed using a metal plate in blue ink on paper by Jasper Johns, 64 × 55 cm. Collection SFMOMA. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York

own instinct for snappy design. It’s telling that after winning the international painting prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale for the Retroactive works, he asked a friend to burn the remaining examples left back in the studio. That insatiability makes for an exhibition full of exhilarating switchbacks. Each series – like the sewn fabric Jammers (1975–6) or the scrap metal Gluts (1986–9; 1991–4) – exhausts the artist’s interest in a material idea, like an itch being scratched. Almost every work is the result of a collaboration of some kind, from John Cage driving his Model A Ford over 20 sheets of paper for Automobile Tire Print (1953), to Merce Cunningham devising dance to interact with the combine Minutiae (1954), to Rauschenberg’s experiments with engineers and scientists, like the soundoperated Mud Muse (1968–71) and the Experiments in Art and Technology group formed in 1967. Making art into a social activity was Rauschenberg’s exit strategy from the sealed studio practice of the Abstract Expressionists. Even his Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), ostensibly a straightforward Oedipal statement – a new generation literally obliterating its predecessor – is a collaboration: the erasing hand is, after all, the drawing hand’s negative twin. For Rauschenberg, art was a means of talking to strangers. And yet, as this endlessly absorbing exhibition proves, the collaborative instinct that threaded through his entire career was never allowed to overwhelm his own slyly refined sensibility. Everything he touched turned into himself. Ben Street

ArtReview

March 2017

Leigh Ledare Place du jardin aux fleurs Office Baroque, Brussels 15 November – 23 December Any man who gets bored in the midst of a crowd is an idiot, said Charles Baudelaire, who considered enjoying crowds to be a form of art. Leigh Ledare seems to think the same, judging by his 16mm-film Vokzal (all works 2016). For this piece, the American artist filmed anonymous passersby in the vicinity of three Moscow train stations. If the setting is generic – the artist deliberately did not film inside the beautiful locations – so are the people. Ledare fixes his gaze on a crowd, none of them really standing out. The actions they are involved in are also rather ordinary: walking, smoking, calling, texting, fidgeting, intermittent drinking and drug dealing. Only the Cyrillic alphabet that appears every now and then in the background reveals something of the couleur locale. Most of the people appear oblivious to being filmed, making the spectator a voyeur – something further accentuated by the simple yet efficient architectural intervention Ledare has staged for this show. The gallery space is divided lengthwise by a narrow plasterboard corridor. Attached to it, a long stretch of wood functions as a low bench. Openings have been cut in the partition, through which the film – shown here in three parts on three screens – is projected on the opposite side of the corridor. In order to walk

through the exhibition, one has to pass in front of the projector, temporarily blocking the projection and casting a shadow on the screen, as if becoming one of the Moscow crowd. The device simultaneously disrupts and emphasises watching, resulting in – to employ an oft-used image – the spectator becoming an actor. The Walk consists of 32 panels for which Ledare put together four different elements: found photos of male and female actors from film casting books of Soviet times; a picture of a dog from a similar publication; a page torn from R.D. Laing’s book Knots (1970), in which the writer/psychologist sketches different kinds of human interaction by means of various dialogues; and stains from soap, food, shit or paint spilled on the page. Besides the relationship – and alleged similarity – between man and his dog, or different forms of human relations, the work tries to suggest a system of its own in bringing together disparate elements that are vaguely associated in a composition trouvée. The Large Group is a video that was produced for last year’s Manifesta 11 in Zürich, wherein artists were invited to collaborate with locals from different professions: in Ledare’s case, a group therapist/psychiatrist. Together they set up a three-day experimental group session for which 21 people were selected, supposedly

Vokzal, 2016, 16mm film, approx 60 min. Photo: Kristien Daem. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Office Baroque, Brussels

ArtReview

forming a cross-section of Zürich society, albeit clearly a very white one. The participants are installed on chairs in three concentric circles, making it impossible to have eye contact with everybody. They are only allowed to discuss the ‘here and now’. The session leads to a discussion that ends in argument and lukewarm apologies, and puts into question the (themselves questionable) conditions of the session and the consultants’ authority. Ledare is clearly no Stanley Milgram. Unlike real social psychology experiments, this session does not yield any interesting findings – unless we conclude that a group of people placed together in one room will start nagging each other about trivial matters and feel obliged to give their opinion, even though they have nothing to say. But for that you can simply watch an episode of Big Brother. As a social experiment, the work is superficial; as an artwork, it’s boring. Whereas in his earlier work Ledare insightfully tackled forms of social interaction in a very personal way by investigating his relationship with his mother – a onetime exotic dancer, besides her other, often conflicting social roles – here he seems to be trying to say ‘something’ about human relationships. What, exactly, is not really clear. It is doubtful whether it is even clear for Ledare himself. Sam Steverlynck

Jean-Luc Moulène Ce fut une belle journée Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris 26 November – 11 February Running in parallel to a supposed retrospective at Centre Pompidou that Jean-Luc Moulène twisted into what he calls a ‘retro-prospective of protocols’ featuring mainly new sculptures from 2015–6, Ce fut une belle journée presents another ensemble of recent works: 16 previously unshown hybrid objects, supported by knowingly naive drawings and two videos. Whereas the sixty-one-year-old Frenchman gained recognition during the late 1990s for his work in photography, his practice has since become essentially sculptural, leaving art critics chewing their nails over the impossible task of defining his overtly anarchistic, shapeshifting aesthetics. The way the artist verbalises his ideal sculptures should give you a hint as to why. Here is an attempt to paraphrase bits and pieces of conceptual gibberish from his latest interviews: ‘my utopia for artworks is to produce mind tools to describe complexity, using mathematical knot and set theories to affirm disjuncts based on Michel Journiac’s notion of body as conscious social meat.’ Got that? Me neither. Armed with the knowledge that mathematical knots are embedded circles with no ends to tie – not unlike Moulène’s heteroclite exhibitions – and for the sake of proceeding through this review without resorting to Journiac’s performed cannibalism in his 1969 Messe pour un corps (he offered his public a sausage made with his own blood), I’ll turn to Seule au sommet, Paris,

2016 (2016), displayed in the back of the gallery. According to the artist, this statuette, made from seashells and epoxy resin, was inspired by Bubu, mascot of the French literary review Le Grand Jeu (1928–32). This fictional character is the offspring of Baubo, a mythological female figure often represented with her face in the body and her vulva in the chin, and Ubu Roi, the leading protagonist of the 1896 eponymous play by Alfred Jarry, who was not only the French precursor of Surrealism, but also the inventor of ’Pataphysics, the wonderfully absurd science of imaginary solutions. (As chance would have it, for months I’ve contemplated joining the Collège de ’Pataphysique in exchange of a modest €40 fee, taking my commitment to useless research and nonsensical digression very seriously.) Now call me crazy, but I swear I heard Bubu whispering to me: “Don’t let Moulène fool you with maths, instead hijack his show with the first random idea that sparks a fire in your guts.” Surveying the images and captions of his curious artefacts – among others, the stunning, reptilelike Créature, Paris, 2016 (2016) covered with false nails, the wood knot Tête couronnée, Paris, 2013 (2013) crowned with five of the artist’s teeth, the portmanteau work ConquOs, Paris – Mexico (2016) joining together a bone and a conch shell, as well as Silex neufs, Barneville, 2013 (2013) and Poing, Barneville – Paris, 2016 (2016), both brain-shaped assemblages of flint chunks – the overall

ensemble begins to read as some kind of anthropological display, and by association, the name of an eminent French paleoanthropologist slowly emerges in my mind: André LeroiGourhan. Leafing through the latter’s 1965 masterwork Le Geste et la parole, one might stumble upon this passage, which roughly translates into: ‘Australanthropians seem to have possessed their tools the same way as an animal has claws [...] as if their brains and bodies had gradually exuded them.’ ’Pataeureka! It is now with a renewed faith in the nonsensical, then, that I’d like to advance the following hypothesis: whereas twenty-firstcentury technologies seem to alienate more and more of us, Moulène’s tools exude bodies back, as if the latter were surrealistically pulled over the former. For example, in the show, which remains mostly organic, this subversion additionally assumes the form of Inverse – Reverse, Barneville – Paris, 2016 (2016), an intricate assemblage of branches covered with blue and red paint, which suggests a vascular system, and Silver Puke, Paris, 2013 (2013), a rounded arabesque of spoons, whose shape is equally reminiscent of a rotavirus (the agent that causes vomiting and diarrhoea). Whether or not you’ll choose to validate my ’pataphysical proposition, Moulène’s art is to neurons what an oyster is to gustatory cells: an exquisite acquired taste. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Silver Puke, Paris, 2013, 2013, silver soup spoons, silver dessert spoons, epoxy paste. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn. © the artist /ADAGP 2016. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

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Dan Attoe Natural Selections Peres Projects, Berlin 16 December – 24 February Who wants a resuscitation of Impressionism? Dan Attoe does. The American artist was already known for spiky, contrarian canvases that impose a conflicted view on the rural idyll: nevertheless, this is an oddly archaic move. While there is intense toil in his small earlier paintings of deer hunters and homesteads, the seven new oils here – all works 2016 – are significantly looser in execution, and bigger both in size (three measure 152cm by 122cm) and ambition. Attoe, once a skate-punk kid, has previously admitted that he was never fully at ease growing up in Idaho ranger stations where his father worked. His sardonic take on rural Americana persists, as evidenced by the wry thought-inscriptions that whisper from the heads of his tiny figures. Rendered in a miniscule script, these peter out into an uncaring world. Such pitiful declamations are, Attoe suggests, just about all we have when confronted by the natural world’s immensity and blank indifference. His swoops and drips of paint are now spruce, as with Landscape with Free Time and Money, a serene vision of blue hills, a conflation – as with all the works here – of real and imaginary landscapes. But the dream of utopia is qualified by Attoe’s sarcastic texts, which are folksy and

devoid of sanctimonious windbaggery. His geographies are loci of pleasure – rest stops such as Mountain Lodge in Snow, which recalls the Timberlodge Hotel near Mount Hood in Oregon, a winter wonderland with an architecture similar to the Overlook from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Closer inspection reveals an inscription that reads, amusingly, ‘There’s nothing to worry about’. Visitor Center with Pines sees an empty A-frame cabin reflecting beams of a xanthic dawn before the tourists descend: given mankind’s jaundiced trashing of nature, that’s perhaps the best time to arrive. Another diminutive lady tries to reassure us: ‘Everything will be alright’. Maybe that’s all we need to hear just now. Attoe’s take on the landscape of pleasure, this belated Pacific Northwestern version of the genre, unsurprisingly majors in the use of blue. These blues are generally inclement, his seas colder, the glaucous hills more mulchy than the balmy vistas of the Southern California Impressionists. We see skies of teal and steel blue-grey peaks interspersed with wispy banks of white painted fog. Here, too, are streaks of Prussian blue that represent the giant trees Attoe grew up among, where the foliage is

hung thick and falls down deeply. And then there are his seas, turquoise grading into viridian waters as the coastal shelf nears. People struggle in Attoe’s bucolic world, but he’s sympathetic to their plight. In Mountain with Stage four actors stand apart from one another on a proscenium, an enormous painted mountain as backdrop. An actress confesses, ‘I can’t concentrate’; a male costar tells her, ‘It’s okay, nobody can’. In Light Water with Fir Trees, four female figures walk in spooky procession, like disembodied spirits: one of them thinks, ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve been here’. And in Mountain Lake with Floaters a tiny woman in the shallows says to herself, ‘Everything I did was planned the whole time’. She stares out, towards deeper waters, at two people of indeterminate age relaxing on rubber rings. The enigmatic script knowingly begs explication. Impressionism is most strikingly recalled in Beach with Cliff, which is unafraid to reference Claude Monet’s The Manneporte near Étretat (1886). Here a giant arch of rock, with its gargantuan foot, threatens to crush the scattered bodies on the sand. Despite hints of Thoreau-like skulking back into nature, Attoe’s arboreal worlds are honourable apparitions of a compromised placidity. John Quin

Visitor Center with Pines (detail), 2016, painting, oil on canvas on panel, 122 × 122 cm. Photo: Matthias Kolb. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin

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Candida Höfer Nach Berlin Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin 3 December – 29 January Compared to other successful acolytes – among them Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky – of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer has long remained unswerving in her commitment to her former tutors’ focus on striking architectural forms. Until recently, that is. Höfer’s technical virtuosity in colour photography, a contrast to the Bechers’ austere use of black-and-white, soon led her to a baroque inflation of their typological approach. A focus on public spaces during the 1980s led to an interest in ever-more-grand interiors and large-scale prints as her career progressed, which began to reflect the emptying out of conceptual rigour as it becomes style. These penthouse- and museum-ready works have retained formal consistency and technical precision, but have lost all connection to the socially engaged tenor of Höfer’s earliest work. Nach Berlin both reminds us of this narrative and demonstrates, at long last, a shift away from the bloated images for which Höfer is best known. Her newest work, Memories 2016 and Berlin 2016, comprises Höfer’s first engagement with digital photography. In contrast to the opulent spaces we have become used to seeing

in her work, the numerous shots showing architectural closeups with soiled pavements and cracked tiles couldn’t be more low-key. To further emphasise this shift in social coding, the images are presented as digital slide-projections as opposed to large-scale luxury prints. If not exactly Hito Steyerl’s ‘poor images’, the modest format, the pedestrian subject matter and above all the sheer number alludes to the massive growth of image production that digital technology has permitted. Still, the slide projection is not altogether new to Höfer. Indeed, it marks a return to her earliest, much less widely known colour-work. The very last of her series to feature human subjects, 1979’s Türken in Deutschland 1979 (Turks in Germany 1979), shown here as a sequence of 80 projected images, is installed so as to resonate both in format and urban theme with her newest work. Photographing in several German cities, including Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg, Höfer deploys a social documentary approach to depict the domestic, work and free-time activities of Turkish ‘Gastarbeiter’ (or migrant worker) communities. The slides are arranged in loose categories, not the strict typologies that would

define her subsequent work. Although there are hints of her later approach in this series, it’s the differences, the unlikely use of street photography and the directness of her social address that is most compelling. Families posing formally in their houses shifts to more familiarly ‘Höferesque’ views of empty interiors. With unexpected wry humour, this whole segment seems to be connected by the awkward misalignments in the boldly patterned wallpaper repeated from one interior to the next. The social precariousness of the migrant worker is made material as Höfer’s classical compositions threaten to unravel at these broken seams. One cannot help but read this more-than30-year-old project through the lens of the present, and we are clearly meant to do so. The total lack of religious identifiers and duallanguage signage in stores attests to an earlier commitment to assimilation in Germany, one that has now significantly waned. But we see no hint of the complex and contested reasons for this in the recent digital street views of contemporary Berlin’s beautifully stained pavements. Siona Wilson

Türken in Deutschland 1979 (Turks in Germany 1979) (detail), 1979, 80 images, projection, 8 min 01 sec (loop). © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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Reinhard Mucha Schneller werden ohne Zeitverlust (Getting Faster Without Time Loss) Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan 24 November – 1 April You go inside to find yourself above a giant roof. It occupies the entire floorspace of the groundfloor gallery, one of Milan’s most monumental private venues. The viewer’s gaze adopts an aerial perspective, while the sounds of aeroplanes and birdsong add to the feeling of being up in the air: Reinhard Mucha recorded the audio at the airport of Düsseldorf, his hometown, which is a constant presence in his work. The roof, 12.2m by 12.6m, is made of old, handmade terracotta tiles – 4,732, to be precise, and everything is extremely precise and measurable in Mucha’s world – arranged, in overlapping fashion, as has been common in Italy since Roman times. They rest upon a thin though visible layer of rubble, and I couldn’t help thinking of the recent earthquakes that pulverised so many ancient borghi across the country, causing the instant vanishing of centuries-old forma urbis, shaped by an inseparable combination of architecture, history and culture. The artist asked the gallery to make available a sheet with a pair of quotations from a book by Salvatore Settis, If Venice Dies (2016), which concern how Milan recently dressed up like an icon of modernity, all skyscrapers and curtain walls – ‘just like a boorish peasant putting on his best Sunday clothes in the comedies of the past’, Settis writes, so that now there are ‘two urban models completely at odds without any

correlation or sense of harmony’. On one side of Mucha’s roof, a white platform sustains a little turret made of six float-glass panes and six step stools, resting, slightly tilted, upon two metal tape-measures. It could be a model architecture, as well as a self-portrait: Lia Rumma’s architecture is composed of three white cubes piled on top of each other and occupies three floors, like Mucha’s legendary Merzbau studio, while the tower of step stools is a recursive element in his oeuvre, as a metaphor for art’s ability to generate pinpoint shifts in our ways of seeing. The title of this installation is Island of the Blessed (2016). Maybe this roof is actually a raft, and Mucha is casting us afloat on the Sea of Time and Space. How to deal with the remains of our recent past, both as haunting memories and manmade architectures and artefacts, is an eternal obsession for Mucha, whose vocabulary is formed of found building materials: wood, floorings, aluminium profiles, float glass, ladders, plywood, neon – ‘drawn from the pre-, heavy-, late-, and post-industrial ages’, as Jan Verwoert writes in the catalogue for Mucha’s 2016 retrospective at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. He rescues and painstakingly arranges them in minimalist wall-mounted ‘containers’ and ‘vitrines’, freestanding sculptures and complex installations, as detailed and absorbing as doll’s houses – and with chronologies constantly in

progress, because of the artist’s perennial process of making, unmaking and remaking. On the first floor, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 2016) assembles a miniaturised reconstruction of Mucha’s installation Mutterseelenallein (Solitude, originally created for Lia Rumma in Naples in 1989, reinstalled in the MMK in Frankfurt in 1991 and housed at the Castello di Rivoli since 2009), with a set of four LCD monitors, showing a loop of videoanimated photos and sound recordings at Macy’s in New York: a monument to the notion of display, where the spaces of exhibition and those of consumerist consumption collapse onto each other. On one wall of the last floor, a 2016 version of the historic The Wirtschaftswunder (The economic miracle), To the People of Pittsburgh, originally made in 1991, frames, inside round metal shoulder clamps, 16 found pages depicting tubes and pipes from a brochure put out by the Düsseldorfer Eisenbahnbedarf AG, the railroad supply factory that once occupied the building that now houses Mucha’s studio. On the opposite wall, in Twelve Lithographs (1983–2016), glass and frames enclose finely printed reproductions of posters of the artist’s main exhibitions: all the products issued from this same address, Mucha reminds us with bitter self-irony, seem equally deemed to obsolescence. Barbara Casavecchia

Island of the Blessed, 2016, roof tiles, rubble, float glass panes, stepstools, tape measures, wall paint, blockboard, audio equipment. Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan & Naples

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Fabio Mauri Retrospettiva a luce solida Madre, Naples 26 November – 6 March In these times of heightened political awareness and urgency, it’s often reassuring to look back at forebears who themselves confronted adverse social conditions. With this in mind, Madre presents a comprehensive retrospective of works by Fabio Mauri (1926–2009), with more than a hundred works from the 1950s to the 2000s testifying to the role of the Roman artist, a key figure in the Italian modernist avantgarde, as a critic of society’s maladies, albeit a hopeful one. The three-floor exhibition demonstrates that, as Mauri sought the most appropriate means to describe his era’s political and cultural tenor, the results were diverse. The exhibition begins in the foyer with Ebrea (Jewess, 1971), a lifesize sculpture of a horse wearing kneepads featuring the Star of David. The work was part of an eponymous performance referencing the objectification of the Jewish people, involving a young woman, vulnerably naked, cutting locks of her own hair and arranging them on a mirror, again in the shape of the Star of David. The horse’s accessories, together with other props for the performance, were made of leather produced from the skin of murdered Jews during the Shoah. In an accompanying statement, Mauri, a nonJew, argued that anti-Semitism was an example of a universal propensity towards racism that concerns all humans. One must, he argued, be vigilant against the potential rise of fascism,

as well as against totalitarian behaviours embedded in democracy. Moving on, and entering the Madre’s large, open ground-floor space (known as ‘Re_Publicca MADRE’), one arrives at Il Muro Occidentale o del Pianto (Western or Wailing Wall, 1993), a wall of leather and wooden suitcases whose scale impresses upon the visitor the epic human cost of migration. Passing this work, which feels very much like an object to be gotten around, the viewer encounters Sala del Gran Consiglio (Oscuramento), from 1975. The tableaulike installation, whose title translates as the Room of the Grand Council (The Obscuring), comprises three walls of a room and a U-shaped table: seated here, accompanied by an audio conversation, are 29 mannequins, representing Mussolini and 28 of his military staff, discussing how to combat the Allied invasion of Sicily. This unsettling scene conveys the tension as the Grand Council of fascism met for the last time. What Mauri brilliantly captures through his arrangement of almost-lifelike yet stilted mannequins is both the banality of evil and the extent to which we are all objects of history. The viewer feels not only subject to the whims of the assembled high-ranking officers, but that the assembled are themselves objects of historical destiny. This exhibition continues on the mezzanine – where a number of Mauri’s films are

projected – and on its third floor, where the artist’s fascination with television, film and screens per se is explored. The filmworks here are displayed in a chronological loop, beginning with Mauri’s 1950s explorations of mass media, his Schermi (Screens), which he would pursue for more than 50 years. Investigating the cinematic and televisual screen, these works varied greatly over more than 50 years, from monochromes on flat canvases to reliefs that evoke the fascia of a TV set (such as Schermo, 1970). The repeated image of the screen serves to reinforce the pervasiveness of its form in the life and consciousness of the masses in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the first floor, the Sala delle Colonne (‘room of the columns’) hosts a complete collection of the architectural models in which Mauri rehearsed his exhibition layouts. While these might be considered minor, they act as standalone works further conveying something that’s implicit throughout the show: a sense of reality always being somehow distant. The exhibition’s name (which translates as Retrospective in Solid Light) references the artist’s careerlong fascination with the notion that reality is a series of projections against which we must remain vigilant. Eight years after Mauri’s death, such a message could hardly be timelier. Mike Watson

Sala del Gran Consiglio (Oscuramento), 1975 (installation view). Photo: Amedeo Benestante. Courtesy Madre, Naples

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Natascha Sadr Haghighian Fuel to the Fire Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm 20 October – 15 January Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s exhibition Fuel to the Fire was sparked by an incident that took place in 2013 within the segregated Stockholm suburb of Husby near Tensta, during which police shot a sixty-nine-year-old resident through the head in his own apartment. Lenine RelvasMartins had controversially been accused of an offence involving knife threats when a special operations force fatally confronted him in his home. Neighbours waited on a balcony until late at night to photograph the dead body being carried out of the building, covered up with a red fleece blanket adorned with a heart. More than the police violence itself, it was the circulation of this image a few days after the incident that caused subsequent uprisings in Husby and many other locales in Sweden. The visual evidence proved that the authorities had lied in their report, when they claimed that RelvasMartins had merely been injured following the incident and had been taken to hospital alive. It was the final straw for frustrations over media misrepresentations, growing segregation and cases of racial profiling in the stigmatised suburb. Red fleece blankets and patio heaters are the sculptural elements through which Sadr Haghighian’s exhibition unfolds. Most of the heaters in the brightly lit space are dismantled and scattered, as if this were the aftermath of a riot. Blankets imprinted with images from

the Husby incident and other cases of police violence are hung over scaffolding, evoking a sense of barricades that is amplified by strips of barrier tape. The exhibition text outlines that Sadr Haghighian proposes the blankets and heaters as symbols of segregation: the warmth-bestowing objects are characteristic of Stockholm’s predominantly white centre. Here, Sadr Haghighian convincingly presents them at once as modifiers of the immediate environment for those living downtown who are sufficiently affluent to consume and therefore enjoy heated outdoor seating during Sweden’s long winter months, and markers of exclusion for those who have to remain in the cold or at home in the outskirts. The skeleton of a standardised balcony from a social-housing unit in Husby, like the one from which the photograph of Relvas-Martins’s dead body was taken, is installed – elevated slightly above the floor – in the centre of the kunsthalle. A reading station built from scaffolding and accompanied by a patio heater offers a free takeaway newspaper and in-house study materials, including interviews that Sadr Haghighian conducted with activists against police brutality and structural racism, as well as texts that relate the Husby riots to the Black Panthers civil-rights movement and the protests following the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991.

Close to the sculptural barricades, six mobile phones are spread out on the floor. They are connected to a web of earphones faintly emitting sounds of heartbeats and riots into the space – the latter of which could have been recorded and shared by protesters with these same devices, while both are noises from which the wearer of such headsets might otherwise become isolated. Here, in the exigencies of individual agency and solidarity, lies the core of the exhibition, which in turn forms part of The Eros Effect, Tensta Konsthall’s multiyear enquiry into the term sociologist George Katsiaficas coined, inspired by Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of crowd behaviour and Gustave Le Bon’s contagion theory. The Eros Effect acknowledges the simultaneously emotionally charged and rational political dimensions that spark the intuitive spread of solidary mass movements without direct organisational intervention. Just as blankets and heaters allow some to modify their surroundings for personal comfort, technologies like smartphones mediate public and private space and produce pictures and sounds that sway our perception. The exhibition is timely and to the point, not least because 2016 was the year of ‘fake news’. Fuel to the Fire pointedly reopens the case of Husby and asks us to look and analyse, and to feel and rise up again, together, publicly, in solidarity. Stefanie Hessler

Fuel to the Fire, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Jean-Baptiste Beranger. Courtesy the artist and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm

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Jos Näpflin NACHTEN Counter Space, Zürich 29 October – 28 January Given Robert Walser’s dramatic and tragic life, it is a challenge to separate the writing from the man, all the more so as the Swiss writer’s works drew on experience and were frequently semiautobiographical. Jos Näpflin’s exhibition NACHTEN (Nights), based on research on Walser, adds further strands, such as geography and life expectancy, to this existing tangle. Walser wrote novels and a greater volume of short-form fiction, driven foremost by moods and ambiance rather than narrative. He observed feelings and objects ‘as ordinary as they are remarkable’, as he once described an apple painted by Paul Cézanne. He died on Christmas Day of 1956 during a walk from the asylum in Herisau, Switzerland, where he had spent the last 23 years of his life. Though admired by fellow authors including Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti and Hermann Hesse, his writing did not gain widespread fame until it was rediscovered in recent years, first in literary circles and latterly in an art context. So while reflecting on his countryman, Näpflin is working with a figure whose reputation has taken on its own dynamic of late. NACHTEN presents the viewer first with a dividing wall placed in the middle of the

exhibition entrance, obscuring sightlines – or, Walser-like, giving us pause to contemplate what might be of interest, and otherwise overlooked, in the show structure. To the right a videowork and other installations occupy the larger space, while a smaller gallery to the left contains four more elements. Here Der lange Schlaf (The Long Sleep, all works but one 2016) clarifies how Näpflin employs Walser – author and individual – as his raw material. On the wall is a print of the story Der Träumer (The Dreamer) of 1914, which describes a man lying on a mountain meadow in summer, carelessly allowing day to pass and night to fall. In pen, Näpflin adjusts the heading to ‘Der lange Schlaf’, as well as other details, so summer turns to winter, the live idler to a peaceful corpse. A documentary photograph of Walser as found in the snow is stuck to the page, and in an accompanying audio piece an actor reads the revised version, his spoken authority and the image making the new scenario seem more credible than the original. J.M. Coetzee, in secondary literature on Walser, has written disparagingly about the use of that photograph, which shows dark footsteps

in the snow and his supine body, hat at a remove. It is an unspectacular yet keening memorial for Walser, who also wrote of how ‘times do come when one knows that one is no more and no less than waves and snowflakes’. Näpflin uses and reuses the image delicately. In The Last Walk (Footprints) (2015), the shapes of those last steps Walser made are cut out of polished steel and hung on the wall, where they make a path into illusionistic distance while reflecting the space they are in. Nach dem Frost (After the Frost) is an installation of three pillars that clone the gallery’s central structural pillar; one of them has toppled into a wall. Amid the forest the columns evoke, a further cut-off pillar serves as a plinth for jagged pools of liquid, like meltwater; monuments can be fragile, all that is solid melts. Informed by the currently fashionable conflation of Walser and his work, Näpflin leaves his history and fiction entangled. The artist does not try to create clarity by virtue of facts, but instead forms a composite overview to which hindsight also contributes. The optimistic fatalism of this exhibition – the message that we, too, will disappear – is an apposite homage to the author. Aoife Rosenmeyer

The Last Walk (Footprints), 2015, polished steel sheets, 17 parts, approx 95 × 174 cm. Photo: Tashi Brauen. Courtesy Counter Space, Zürich

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Marion Verboom Gesh The Pill, Istanbul 24 November – 20 January Marion Verboom’s exhibition is an exercise in dismantling narratives of difference. The works are an aesthetic relaying of outwardly unrelated research: from knot theory as it pertains to DNA, to Dmitrij Mendeleev’s breakthroughs with the Periodic Table of Elements, to the study of works that span art history. Yet while these topics vary greatly, they are all examples of a search for commonality and continuum. Importantly, they are also analyses reliant on the visual, having to do with humans from an atomic level upwards. Effectively the works represent a partial topography of the products of humanity up until the present moment, albeit without a trace of standard chronological history and its rooted hierarchies. A move away from a historical chronological narrative is also a move away from written and spoken language. It makes sense, then, that at the entrance of the gallery is the exhibition’s sculptural namesake, an oversize, gesturing hand. The thumb and pointer finger of Gesh (2016) are angled to create an invisible line between them, denoting a human measure of something: an unspoken, primitive signage. Placed at the start of the exhibition, this work

surreptitiously invites the viewer into communication through the visual and conceptual on a human scale. Behind Gesh sit several columns formed by the stacking of pieces from Verboom’s series Achronies (all examples 2016). Each is a detailed sculptural copy of a work of art or architecture, the whole spanning time and place, from an ancient Chinese representation of a crab to a Picasso sculpture. The varied colours and materials of the sculptures, meanwhile, relate directly to Verboom’s watercolours, also on view. The watercolours are a play on knot theory, and their colouring is akin to Mendeleev’s weighing of elements – the basis for what would later become the colour-coded Periodic Table. Therefore the art-historical period from which any one Achronie comes is rendered unimportant: rather it is the material Verboom chooses, be it resin or plaster or clay, along with the natural feeling of the thing represented, that colours it. There appears to be no logic or hierarchy; the pieces are equal components of a larger whole. The column titled Achronie III consists partly of the feet of a Hittite lion, while another part is reminiscent of brutalist architecture, with its

raw concrete and modernist lines. Achronie V is part Archimedes’ screw and part replica of a piece from Jean Baptiste Carpaux’s sculpture Ugolino and His Sons (1865–7). Combined as a composition, the group of columns reframes art as not bound to the era or civilisation in which it was produced but rather something that reforms visually and contextually throughout time. While several earlier works are also included, the work that completes the exhibition is another new one, Cornucopia (2016), looming from a corner, bridging two walls – a cast-iron and resin sculpture of a wooden beam covered in grains, fruits and leaves, coloured muted brown. This is the ‘cornucopia’ of Greek mythological origin, depicted throughout art history. An appropriate image and emblem to use, then, in an exhibition that is both contemporary and canonical. Verboom’s Cornucopia acts as a totem of this exhibition’s premise: the language of our shared visual history is abundant and is as ingrained as it is borderless and timeless. Encountered during a time of rampant nationalism, anxiety over borders and the destruction of ancient monuments, it feels like an extremely appropriate proposition. Nicole O’Rourke

Cornucopia, 2016, sculpture, resin, cast iron powder, 30 × 235 × 30 cm. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur. Courtesy the artist and the Pill, Istanbul

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Mustafa Hulusi Negative Ecstasy Dirimart, Istanbul 10 December – 8 January Two things. First: the emphatic presence of strong colour and graphic clarity among the works in this solo show – from the Mediterranean-blue skies that backdrop the hot, translucent pinks of the flowers in the large Oleanders paintings (2016), to the dazzle motifs and starburst designs of the wall of ceramic tiles that comprises Ambient (2013), and the buzzing colours of the vertical stack of neon outlines Cyprus (2010–16), suspended near the centre of the main space, describing the perimeter of the eponymous island. Second: the evening after the opening of the show, two bombs exploded in central Istanbul, outside a football stadium and in a nearby park, targeting police officers and killing over 40 people. Without overdramatising things, it’s a reminder that Turkey currently knows something about borders, about being a border state, about the stresses of geographical and political division, and, on a grander historical scale, about being a point of passage and transition, between worlds and cultures. These apprehensions, less or more topical, weave in and out of Hulusi’s works, which in various ways dwell on histories of migration and exchange between Europe and Asia (themselves historically mobile entities): natural, as with the North African, Mediterranean and Asian spread of the oleander;

cultural and economic, as with The Mediterranean Paintings (2013), six reproductions of hyperrealist paintings, each of elaborate, virtuosocrafted sixteenth-century Venetian and Mediterranean glassware, some inscribed in Arabic. Cyprus, also, refracts and divides into the flag colours of the eponymous, now-divided territory, between the gold and green of the Turkish-held north and the white and red of the Greek south. And to these background references one could add Hulusi’s personal position and history – Turkish-Cypriot-born, London-raised, his family emigrating to the UK following Greece’s 1974 coup d’état and the subsequent conflict with Turkey over control of the island. But these are documentary and discursive contexts that, while shaping the work, serve as vehicles for Hulusi’s charting of their antithesis – the ‘ecstasy’ of the show’s title, the claim of a kind of delirium and self-obliteration that might be a part of what could be called aesthetic experience: the expansive vitality of the (toxic) oleanders; of the obsessive manufacture of the glass vessels; of the dizzying patterning of Ambient; and the recombining of the split colour spectrum of Cyprus into the neon white of the uppermost of the five outlines. In these last two, perhaps, Hulusi offers traces of a more occidental, everyday interpretation

of self-obliteration: the delirium of 1980s rave and acid house, the ambivalence of a druginduced ‘ecstasy’ as both sacred and profane. Literal representation and abstraction, then, turn around a hidden pole of politics, where division and partition oppose reconciliation and reunification. It’s a politics of subjectivity too, since the aesthetic is, after Kant, troubled by the disappearance of the self in the face of the sublime; and psychoanalytical, since the partition of the self from the world becomes a political question. These polarities come together in the show’s standout work: Mood Reel (2016), an eight-channel video stack, counterpoises digitally animated abstract patterns with film clips from nouvelle vague films, postcolonial ‘Third Cinema’ and later ‘World’ Cinema. Hulusi’s edit focuses on the eyes, gazes, stares of his protagonists of various ethnicities and race, and images of a hypnotically intense tactility or corporeality – hands counting cash or caressing flowers, a sheep being slaughtered, reeds in the wind. Viewing and being viewed is a familiar trope of film theory, and Hulusi’s subjects radiate a sense of their worldly, historically situated contingency – but here, against the optical absorption of the digital patterns, there’s a different intimation of a commonality, or universal experience, without borders. J.J. Charlesworth

Cyprus, 2010–16, neon lights, 300 × 200 cm. Courtesy Dirimart, Istanbul

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Monica Bonvicini her hand around the room Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 18 November – 26 February The first obstacle you encounter when visiting Monica Bonvicini’s exhibition is a huge halfpipe of fluorescent light tubes hanging from chains across the entrance to the gallery like the hull of an incandescent boat. Blinding, this mass of light – Light Me Black (2009) – is at once seductive and physically overwhelming, and draws you, bedazzled, into the artist’s first major survey exhibition at a British institution. Bonvicini’s sculptures and installations aim to provoke an awareness of the architecture that surrounds them – be that public, private, institutional, urban or domestic – and the physical and psychological roles that that architecture plays in shaping a viewer’s identity – in terms of class, gender, sexuality and power. Making use of industrial building materials such as bricks, scaffolding, steel chains and sheet glass, Bonvicini’s work is neither polite nor apologetic. It is confrontational, derisive and antagonistic, as well as, at times, humorous. Often recalling the modernist canon, several of the works that Bonvicini has placed in the fourth-floor gallery (where the exhibition begins) seem to embody a tongue-in-cheek play on the uber-masculinity and dogmatism of minimalist sculpture – Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes, for example, or Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966), which is called to mind by Bonvicini’s 7:30 hrs (1999–), a series in which she asks local bricklaying students (this time from Newcastle College) to build fragments from plans for their final exams. The result is a collection of awkward brickwork shafts incorporating dead ends, precarious mantels and bottomless holes, teasing Minimalism’s earnest seriousness.

Further obstructions fill this first space. A huge freestanding wall the height of the room splits the space. One side is covered with tiny collaged magazine images of limbs, a kaleidoscope of legs and arms opening and closing, while on the other side a series of eight peepholes at waist height ask the viewer to bend over to look through them, revealing images of exhibitions under construction elsewhere, and making us all expectant voyeurs. In this same gallery, an extravagant rococo-style silver staircase leading nowhere: Scale of Things (To Come) (2010) reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be made entirely out of scaffolding and chains, while five of Bonvicini’s black-and-white tempera paintings depict the damage wreaked on domestic architecture by environmental disasters such as forest fires, hurricanes and tornadoes. Downstairs in gallery three, one of Bonvicini’s largest projects to date extends her probe into stereotypical power-plays in architecture and construction. A vast grid of framed A4 sheets, What does your wife/girlfriend think of your rough and dry hands? (1999–), consists of a series of questionnaires delivered to builders internationally, asking a selection of questions, some straightforward, others belligerent or penetrating: ‘Is your trade creative? Have you ever designed your own building? Is your work erotic? Do you get on with your gay colleagues? What does your wife/girlfriend think of your rough and dry hands?’ The handwritten answers vary between outrage, amusement, honesty and deflection: a candid introduction to the second section of the show. In a sprawling installation of passageways, dark corners and dead ends,

facing page, top Scale of Things (To Come), 2010 (installation view). Photo: John McKenzie. Courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

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whose own plasterboard construction is left bare to see, Bonvicini has installed an assortment of works spanning her career that play on the idea of the artwork as fetish. Hammers, saws and pickaxes neatly laced, corsetlike, in black leather wait in low-lit display cabinets; a builder’s harness smothered in black polyurethane dangles from the ceiling (Harness, 2006); and a hammock made of chains and black leather tassels floats above a black carpet (Chain Leather Swing, 2009). Elsewhere Corner Boy (2015), a minimal cuboid (nodding to Robert Morris), is strapped up with black leather belts adjacent to a similarly bound couch. The climax to this labyrinth is a strap-on dildo blown from Murano glass (Tears, 2011), blatantly surreal in its violent combination of material and form. The fug of S&M is heavy in the air in the lower gallery, while upstairs the artist’s wry wit feels stark and exposing. Some of the works contain overt references to art history. Others are palpably fetishist, asking us to watch, bend, explore. If at times these inferences feel a little too obvious, too tangible, perhaps they need to be in order to confront – unashamedly – the power structures and contradictions of the constructed environments (including the artworld) that Bonvicini seeks to expose. While it is difficult to pin down an overarching tone to her sculptures and installations, what remains constant is the interplay of unspent potential and disappointment that Bonvicini’s works, and indeed the contexts that she exploits – architecture, the artworld and the gendering of construction – continuously enact. Laura Smith

facing page, bottom Light Me Black, 2009 (installation view). Photo: John McKenzie. Courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

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Gillian Lowndes The Sunday Painter, London 18 November – 23 December On a faded, upside-down metal label, you can just make out ‘STILL LIFE’. They’re the only words that appear in the exhibition, barely there, loosely stuck onto the bottom of a bedhead hairdo sprouting out of the wall. The sculpture Almost off the Wall (2001) is an untidy bun of straggled wires that spray out of a pale blue rose of speckled, cracked ceramic, with a few bulldog clips around the sides pretending to hold it all together. The room is filled with similarly gnarled and rent artefacts, for which the term ‘still life’ seems apt, carrying with it the sense of arrangement, of attempting to freeze a moment for others to later pick up. This gathering of British artist Gillian Lowndes’s work is the largest in London in 20 years (she died in 2010), a set of almost two dozen intricate, bristling objects that were made between 1981 and 2009 but feel like rediscovered tools, small seemingly domestic tchotchkes and bits of fossilised beasts from another planet.

A spotted, diseased claw extends from a melted glob of wire and rubber in Small collage with puffball (1994). Mesh Collage with Loofah and Hooks (1991) is a tangled fight of white ceramic that has been pushed through knots of wire mesh to make small islands of miniature coral reefs. The familiar parts of the assemblages – for example bricks, cups, hair clippers and a can opener – ground them and let us see how these once-workaday objects have been transformed to become frayed and hairy. The process in which the works pass through the extreme heat of the kiln becomes a ready metaphor for any number of disasters: these objects look like they’ve been left underwater for 40 years, or are the dusty remains salvaged from a bombed-out house, unmoored relics of the apocalypse. Part of their unease is that unsteady presence – these disasters could have happened on our planet or another, but their presence, their survival, feel like a precious

Gillian Lowndes, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Ollie Hammick. Courtesy the Sunday Painter, London

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warning from a vanished culture. This was my first time encountering her work, and it was a quietly unsettling revelation; there’s an energy and experimentation to Lowndes’s art that makes a lot of the other futzing about with clay at the moment pale in comparison. Princelet Street Miden Collage (2005) is a bent fork attached to a used paint stick by disintegrating rubber bands and clips, a small branch of wire reaching up from one of the prongs like it was sprouting. More of her sculptures are part of the That Continuous Thing exhibition of ceramic work reopening Tate St Ives this month, although this work doesn’t need to be contextualised by pottery and the kiln. The world these still lifes portray is a place of transformation, where clay is bone, and metal becomes hair, skin and fertile soil. For our planet’s unravelling present, Lowndes’s spindly creations are from an otherworldly past whose time has come. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Huma Bhabha Stephen Friedman Gallery, London 22 November – 28 January Darkness, punctured only by a solitary spotlight, shrouds the first of Stephen Friedman’s two galleries (located opposite each other on the same street). The ray of light illuminates the only artwork in the first of two rooms: a sculpture, titled Special Guest Star (all works 2016) that, with the barest of gestures, simulates something akin to a sacrificial ritual. In it a length of wood is propped up at a 45-degree angle by a one-metre steel pole. Stretched out on the plank is a gnarled, hulking abstract sculpture made of clay and wire. A dirty and ragged blue T-shirt wrapped around its lower half suggests a figure on a rack. A pair of horns stick out from the top of the clay lump, the blunt, circular, thicker ends of which pop through a gap in the upper half of the ‘body’ and, meeting each other, give the suggestion of a pair of breasts. A trickle of black paint seeps out from the bottom of the T-shirt. Am I jumping too far in assuming this is blood coming from between this ill-formed beast’s legs? Either way, this half-animal, half-human abomination is super-creepy.

In a series of four collaged and defaced photographs in the second room at this address, all more than two metres in length, portraitoriented and untitled, Huma Bhabha further blurs the line between explicit representation and visual suggestion. A few oil-painted scribbles superimpose the scrappiest of bodily forms over the photograph of a scrubby landscape in one, for example; a collaged fragment of magazine, in which a fashion model is photographed with her chest almost bursting from a tight-fitting top, is stuck upside down twothirds of the way up another, where cleavage might appear were this a conventional portrait. The gender of the subject is indeterminate, however: the artist has scrawled two black circles just above where a log appears in the bottom half of the original landscape image, suggesting a crude masculinity. Across the road, two totemlike sculptures are constructed from burnt cork and Styrofoam: Castle of the Daughter is corpulent, with pendulous breasts, while In the Shadow of the Sun is skinnier with a painted-on vagina

that dominates the lower half of the tall body. A third statue is the most threatening – two dark, hollowed-out eyes behind a masklike face – made from just burnt cork. Given the foreboding atmosphere concocted in the previous spaces, with the pseudoethnographic display of Special Guest Star, this conventional installation of sculptures on plinths, neatly addressing the gallery window, lights on full-whack, comes as a disappointment. It’s a shame, because it undercuts the shamanistic drama that Bhabha has created. There’s no knowing what any of these ad hoc monstrous icons are supposed to symbolise – what gods or devils they might render incarnate – and indeed the burlesque of an indeterminate ‘primitive’ iconography would be problematic were there not a hint of schlocky, voodoo-horror B-movie to the work. In the darkened environs of the first space, this spectacle is amplified and knowing; under the bright lights of the second, we’re brought back to the mundane safety of the art gallery. Oliver Basciano

Castle of the Daughter (detail), 2016, cork, styrofoam, acrylic paint, oil stick, wood, 239 × 61 × 92 cm. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

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Bruce McLean A HOT SUNSET and SHADE PAINTINGS Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London 2 December – 28 January Art that makes you laugh is always in short supply, possibly because when that is its aim it usually ends up as facetiousness. But Bruce McLean’s comic art has always had a harsh, satirical edge that keeps it serious. In the late 1960s, he was the joker in the British conceptual art pack, a Dennis the Menace, with Brillo-pad hair and a Glaswegian bruiser’s snub-nosed face, flouting his studiously earnest context. From his early Pose Works to his recent paintings and videos, a constant has been his preoccupation with sending up forms of modernist abstraction, which he, as much as others of his generation, were set on superseding. Posing for Pose Works for Plinths (1971, not on view), he impersonated a Henry Moore reclining nude, with fist on hip to imitate Moore’s trademark sculptural holes. The blend of registers was key to the humour: poking fun at formalist orthodoxies that had been reduced to mannerism and pomposity, even while expressing nostalgia for their outmoded certainties. The six semiabstract paintings (Shade Paintings, all works 2016) and two striped aluminium reliefs (Sunset, 2016) at Bernard Jacobson Gallery may look initially like a surrender to the modernist conventions that McLean made his name by satirising; but they turn out to be only more surreptitious in their

subversions. The works on canvas – each 265sqcm – use assortments of geometric, abstract shapes to atomise silhouettes evoking trees and clouds. Their imposing scale and silhouetting recalls Patrick Caulfield’s still life/ interiors of the 1980s and 90s, but McLean’s execution is blunt and sceptical in comparison. The serialised formats court the look of an established artist churning out colourful but shoddy abstract art for a gullible market. Because this is painting, the difference lies in the specifics of its facture: the knowingly crude stencilling, the too-clever-by-half chromatic transitions, his playing the Romantic cliché of a sunset silhouette a little fulsomely off the stylistic antithesis of freefloating geometries, each disabusing the other of its pretensions. His diffident finish conveys a refusal to collude with the idioms he co-opts. The difference between rehash and reappraisal is as touch-specific as the tone of a voice, distinguishing between different meanings of the same statement. His most telling critique of the merely decorative formalism he is pastiching is that the critique comes in a form which implies that formalistic nuances need not be merely form but vital, critical content. But it’s a fine line he walks. He risks satire resolving as a failure to realise the kind of art

Shade Painting: Red, 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas, 265 × 265 cm. Courtesy Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

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he is satirising. His ironic relativism is most explicitly figured in the clash of the industrialised formalism of the multicoloured striped reliefs – each over six metres wide – with the paintings’ organic semiabstraction. The rigours of formalist stripe painting – from Kenneth Noland to Bridget Riley – are converted into Day-Glo decor fixtures, implying the irrelevance of the arcane aesthetics they reference to the context they occupy. In juxtaposition, the two idioms – glaringly incompatible, according to any proper, formalist precepts – surrender to the condition of art-historical karaoke. A four-minute video on a backroom monitor has McLean dancing to a rock-’n’-roll soundtrack. There is a foil crown on a shelf above his head. The song’s refrain is the video’s title – “I want my crown” – an allusion to King for a Day, the title of McLean’s one-day retrospective at the Tate in 1972. Coming out of the latter part of a 40-year career, this self-referencing emphasises that McLean has always been making fun of himself as much as of his predecessors, preventing him from succumbing to the superiority of critique. While he dances, he points up pathetically to the crown. His own past is now as remote as the modernist precedents from which his painterly standup routine measures its distance. Mark Prince

Ken Price A Survey of Sculptures and Drawings, 1959–2006 Hauser & Wirth, London 9 December – 4 February Ceramics have been enjoying a comeback as an art medium in recent years, increasingly capturing the imagination of a new generation of artists such as Caroline Achaintre, Klara Kristalova and Jesse Wine, to name but a few, and making regular appearances in art fairs and exhibitions worldwide. During the early 1960s, however, when West Coast artist Ken Price (1935–2012) started to work alongside the group affiliated with the recently established ceramics department at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (later renamed the Otis Art Institute), the medium was largely regarded as a minor artform by the artistic establishment (along with textiles, another popular medium among young artists today). This was a view that only began to fade during the first decades of the twenty-first century, with the expansion and diversification of the art circuit. Spanning four decades of Price’s artistic production and bringing together more than 180 works, the current survey is the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since the 1970s, and it occupies both of the gallery’s Savile Row spaces. The bulk of Price’s abstract sculptural work is concentrated in one of the galleries, where pieces dating from the late 1950s to the 2000s are

displayed chronologically on 16 plinths arranged in a gridlike manner. The earliest sculptures on show, Avocado Mountain (1959) and Untitled (1960), are both dome-shaped volumes, glazed in dull greens and browns that retain an artisanal quality commonly associated with traditional ceramics. While their contained palette and rough surfaces seem quite at odds with the lysergic range of hues, pristine finish and intricate forms for which Price is renowned, these works already reveal the masterful interplay of colour and form that permeates his entire practice. Later pieces are painted rather than glazed, and often fired several times in order to create elaborate patterns that produce mesmerising effects. For example The Lug (1988), a bulbous, rugged shape, is mostly covered in purple and traversed by bright orange swerving lines like the veins in a rock. On closer observation the seamlessly integrated surface reveals vibrant red and turquoise undertones, as though created by natural weathering and erosion. In contrast to the organic element, one of the top ends of the work is a smooth turquoise plane, as if a section of the volume had been sliced off. At its centre is a small black peanut-shaped form that suggests an orifice, although one

cannot tell if it’s real or painted. The relationship between inside and outside – and its erotic connotations – is a constant in Price’s sculptures, appearing as bodily cavities in later bloblike pieces such as Bubbles (1995) and Humpback (1998) or as distinct geometric cuts on otherwise organic volumes, as in Pastel (1995). In the second gallery, a wide selection of functional yet inventive ceramics that Price kept producing during his lifetime includes several early cups incorporating biomorphic details, like the colourful protruding shapes in Nose Cup – Late 30s (1969) and Untitled (1968–9). The same space also features hundreds of beautifully executed preparatory studies that reveal the fundamental role played by drawing in his practice. Ranging from more speculative exercises like Von Bayros Snail Cups (1968), where three penis-shaped snails crawl beside a pair of cups, to detailed technical drawings that often feature the artist’s unrelated notes about personal affairs, these works on paper provide invaluable insight into his thinking process. Ultimately, they are a testimony to Price’s commitment to and intimacy with his medium of choice, which he helped reinvent way before ceramics became cool. Kiki Mazzucchelli

The Lug, 1988, fired and painted clay, 23 × 30 × 22 cm. © estate of the artist. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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Thomas Struth Nature & Politics High Museum of Art, Atlanta 18 October – 8 January German photographer Thomas Struth’s latest work is beautiful yet dehumanising. Rarely does it feature people, only the machines, themeparks, settlements and science labs that provide the infrastructure and support for people. In this jaw-dropping survey of the photographer’s recent large-format photography, the various series on display feature monumentally scaled prints of twisting cables and cords, hulking relics from the industrial age and vast cities that together, in their quiet detachment from human activity, impart an almost apocalyptic vision of technological mediation. This might seem surprising for some, considering Struth is most famous for a series of photographs during the 1990s that did largely the opposite, which was to show groups of museum visitors gazing at very nontechnological things – ie paintings. Of the works at the High, however, few feature people (most notably Aquarium, Atlanta, Georgia, 2013, a print showing a gaggle of families gazing through the window of a large tank at the Georgia Aquarium). Typical is Figure, Charité, Berlin (2012), a terrifying photograph of a patient at a hospital where

most surgeries are performed with the use of robots: his or her body is almost entirely obscured by machinery, tubes and plastic. In Space Shuttle 1, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral (2008), we’re given a wide-angle view of the underside of a space shuttle, though the area is so cluttered with ladders, cables and other equipment that one almost misses the fact that there even is a space shuttle here to be seen. Struth’s prints always seem to decentre their primary subjects. This is in no small part because, by its very nature, large-format photography gives every centimetre of the print enormous detail, so the stress here is on everything. The tiny detail in a corner is just as vivid as the thing right in front of your face. In this, some of the works appear strangely redolent of Abstract Expressionism’s ‘all-over’ painting. For example, Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Periphery, Max Planck IPP, Garching (2009), which features an interior view of a device that confines plasma for the purposes of generating fusion power, consists entirely of a riot of cables going every which way. If it were any more abstracted, the colourful wires would actually look like

Mountain, Anaheim, 2013, chromogenic print, 212 × 332 cm (framed).Courtesy the artist

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paint. Ditto for Epitaxy, JPL, Pasadena (2014), which details a heap of cables and monitors filling NASA research equipment. Disneyland is featured too, which might seem odd, until one considers the elaborate technologies that support today’s themeparks. Struth is interested in Disneyland’s highly calibrated artificial environments, where, for example, a Swiss mountain can jarringly abut a pair of submarines (Mountain, Anaheim, 2013). Then there’s the series of photographs taken of conflict zones in Israel: the context is politically loaded, but Struth trains his lens on the landscape itself, largely devoid of people, which seems to reflect the dehumanising impact of the ongoing occupation. No matter what subject he’s featuring, the artist finds common cause in the way humans are exerting greater control over their environments, while losing it all at the same time; the prints feature feats of human engineering, yet in these machines’ vast scale – and often total lack of human presence – the human seems dwarfed by its own creation. David Everitt Howe

Ciprian Mures,an Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles 10 December – 21 January Ciprian Mures,an is part of a generation of artists, including figures like Adrian Ghenie, S,erban Savu and Victor Man, from the Cluj region of Romania, who are old enough to have witnessed both the privations Romanians endured under the communist regime (which collapsed in 1989) and the failures of the nationalist government that succeeded it. This experience has largely informed Mures,an’s diverse mix of realist drawing, video, sculpture and installation, much of which is concerned with challenging the norms and traditions of his homeland. Mures,an’s exhibition at Nicodim Gallery is sparse. It features only a pair of installations and a wall of drawings. The first of two galleries is occupied by ten wooden workstations (each comprising a table and a bench), modelled after school desks from Mures,an’s childhood. Arranged closely in two tightly packed rows, yet surrounded by empty space, the desks evoke some claustrophobic environment of enforced learning. The surface of each desk is fitted with a brass panel whose burnished surface is engraved with scenes from Christian theology. These same images can be found in pencil drawings on the adjacent wall and include saints, scholars, crucifixions and ascensions, all copied from Renaissance-era altarpieces and paintings. The wealthy benefactors that commissioned the original works feature

prominently. Some of the drawings resituate the same content in a variety of contexts. For example, Mures,an has copied the Christ figure from one Last Judgement scene into another drawing, but isolated him from the original context, so that he is divested of holy symbolism and free from clamouring sinners. In this second incarnation, Christ appears as a secular figure and the drawing as a study of the body in contrapposto. By repurposing religious iconography, Mures,an highlights the myriad ways in which the same information can be presented to suit a visual storyteller’s purposes. This cautionary note – against the blind acceptance of metanarratives – is sounded again in the next gallery, the floor of which is covered with fragments from a shattered plaster mould that, according to the exhibition text, was cast from a figure by the social realist sculptor Ion Irimescu. While Irimescu’s sculptures, which reflect the mythmaking apparatus of Nicolae Ceaus,escu’s autocratic regime, remain resonant for older generations, they represent a distant past for those born after the dictatorship collapsed. The shattered mould, a dramatic act of deconstruction, forms a striking counterpart to the more orderly setup of the opening gallery. Faint imprints of the original figure’s face in negative are visible in some pieces, but most are unrecognisable fragments. The notion of reproduction echoes throughout the exhibition,

both in the drawings and in the broken mould, which once had the capacity to produce multiple replicas. Throughout his career, Mures,an has repeatedly, and sometimes ironically, examined the act of duplication (he once enlisted a group of monks to hand-copy painstakingly the exhibition catalogues of artists such as Elaine Sturtevant and Joseph Beuys). Mures,an’s position seems to be that every reproduction is an act of interpretation. This is a common enough trope in contemporary art, but Mures,an’s examination of institutional oppression imbues his work with an urgency that feels particularly pertinent today. If the broken mould symbolises the totalitarian past of Mures,an’s native country, the desks point to the subsequent prescription of religion through the country’s educational system. In this formulation, communist doctrine and religious instruction are equally restrictive ideologies, neither admitting to the possibility of different versions of the same tale. The Irimescu mould – and the glimpses of the patrons who commissioned those sixteenthcentury altarpieces – serves as a reminder that those who possess power usually decide upon the official story. Mures,an’s provocative probing of grand narratives, be they religious or political, warns of the dangers of dogma and resounds strongly in today’s climate of fake news and alternative facts. Ciara Moloney

Ciprian Mures,an, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles

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Fred Eversley Black, White, Gray Art + Practice, Los Angeles 12 November – 28 January Most of the Light and Space artists of the 1960s focused on the sunshine, blue skies and surf idiosyncratic to Southern California’s perpetually pleasant weather – the examples of James Turrell’s Skyspaces, John McCracken’s surfboard-like plank sculptures and Peter Alexander’s Cloud Box (1966) come to mind – but Fred Eversley had his eye higher than the horizon. Eversley’s father was an aerospace engineer and, before choosing to become an artist, the younger man worked as a senior project engineer supervising acoustic and vibration testing for NASA. Here he presents a body of work begun in the 1970s that departs from his typically jewel-toned colour palette. Eversley started experimenting with black after McCracken, his Venice Beach neighbour, gave him a can of black paint in 1972. The sculptures are in part inspired by, as the artist states in the exhibition materials, ‘stars expanding their energy and becoming black holes, white dwarfs, and neutron stars’. All the works on show are untitled, apparently because Eversley does not wish to limit the significance of the sculptures in any way; indeed, with references ranging from the cosmological to the historical and cultural, the sculptures aim to have relevance and connections nearly as deep and infinite as the boundlessness of space. A group of parabolic disk-shaped sculptures that Eversley refers to as ‘lenses’ splay out in

a triangular formation on the gallery floor in front of the visitor. The first piece in the group, Untitled (1974), is a black disk with a clear centre, appearing like a milky nebula in deep black space. Placed at the pinnacle of the sculptural group, its semitransparent centre acts as an oculus through which all the other works can be viewed. The crystal ball-like effect lends an almost occult mysticism to the minimal sculptures. The pieces are also connected to the complicated history of the nuclear age: the circular sculptures are formed by pouring liquid polyester resin onto a turntable once used for casting the casings of atomic bombs, the result of which Eversley then grinds and polishes by hand. In 1968, fellow sculptor Charles Mattox proposed that the two artists share studio space in exchange for Eversley’s engineering advice on Mattox’s kinetic sculptures (the following year, Eversley would move into painter John Altoon’s studio, which was offered to him by Altoon’s wife after his death). Mattox became an important mentor, leading Eversley to make his own form of kinetic sculpture, though without the use of moving parts. Instead, he harnesses the movement of the audience, their roving vision and perhaps even the mind’s eye. Two white lens sculptures (from 1974) are imbued with multiple possibilities in hue. One emanates warm traces of pink and yellow, depending on where the

Untitled, 1974, cast polyester resin, 51 × 51 × 15 cm. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy the artist and Art + Practice, Los Angeles

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visitor stands in relation to it. The other glows with a dusky blue-grey, green or even a hint of violet at times. The gossamer hues within these round white objects encourage viewers to orbit the sculptures, as if they were aloft in space, amid cosmic bodies. Installed on the back wall are three works from Eversley’s ‘Laminated’ series, which dates back to 1980. Here, precast triangles of black and white resin are placed on top of each other to form a curvilinear chain. Perhaps due to their prefabricated nature, they are not as successful as the lenses, and they hang curved on the wall like parenthetical asides. In Eversley’s ‘Vertical’ works, cast polyester resin cylinders are cut on the bias to create angled upright slices. From afar, a black example from this series looks as dark and opaque as obsidian. Closer viewing, however, reveals a tip that gleams with brilliant emerald-green before disappearing into a delicate translucent edge. Sited in Leimert Park, a Los Angeles enclave once dubbed the ‘Harlem of the West’ for its being a hotbed of African-American cultural activity during the 1960s and host to the first black-owned commercial art gallery in the city, Black, White, Gray also proclaims important symbolic sociopolitical connotations. Here, black and white are much more nuanced than they appear, proving that complicated shades of grey will always prevail. Jennifer S. Li

Ho King Man, Cici Wu, Wang Xu Mosquitoes, Dusts, and Thieves 47 Canal, New York 12 January – 12 February How can we work together? This question will be urgent, if not existential, to those of us seeking, over the next four years, to build a coherent opposition to America’s hard-right and xenophobic turn. Modelling new forms of collectivity, at once sufficiently flexible and intrepid, is no straightforward project for seasoned activists, let alone contemporary artists. In their group show at 47 Canal, Mosquitoes, Dusts, and Thieves, New York-based Chinese artists Ho King Man, Cici Wu and Wang Xu present an exhibition about forming relationships between things, humans and each other. Ho, Wu and Wang are no strangers to working together. In 2015 they founded Practice, an exhibition space, studio and residency project on the top floor of a building in New York’s Chinatown, a rare vestige of an alternative space in Manhattan. While preserving a distinct sense of autonomy, accord shines through this visually and conceptually tight exhibition that is dense with feeling, but never saccharine. Wu smuggled a device that records ambient light into a screening of the film Moonlight (2016) and then projected her collected light-data through a suspended strip of Plexiglas; the light flickers occasionally like a dysfunctional strobe. The viewer watches this installation, titled Closer, Closer, Says Love (2017), unfold while sitting in a movie-theatre chair bolted to the gallery floor.

Wu’s small light recorder sits on the armrest. The latter is a separate work, titled Foreign Object #1 Fluffy Light (prototype) (2017). A bubble of opalescent glass crowns the recorder as a soothing orange light blinks inside, a gentle reminder that this device’s power remains on. There’s a mesmeric wonder to Wu’s art, which is reinforced by the contraption attached to the Plexiglas strip: a motor and pulley system that would operate an automatic door. In irregular spurts, it pulls two silicone-coated sleeves closer and then apart, like the material ghosts of two unknown individuals, brought together and separated by forces larger than them. If the human element in Wu’s work is presented as an absence, then Wang places an interpersonal relationship centre stage. The video Summer Wind Before Rain (2017) follows Wang during a residency at Storm King Art Center as he makes the clay that will become a portrait of the sculpture park’s gardener. The video splices empty shots of the lush upstate landscape, spectacular God’s-eye footage of the gardener mowing crop circles and an intimate moment as Wang sits with and sculpts his subject. A head is conspicuously absent from Wang’s A Stand (2017), a slightly larger-than-life kouros-like figure made from the same Storm King clay. Several coat hooks are embedded into the dried, gruff surface – a gesture that suggests sculpture can carry physical, and emotional, weight.

Peppery notes of chilli sauce – the recipe of Ho’s grandfather – waft through the gallery. Breathing in the garlicky scent, coming from a multifaceted work titled Bloody Flavour Won’t Go Away, Squeezing Juices Out of the Time (2017), viewers can appreciate the quiet theatricality to Ho’s translation of Beijing photographer Ren Hang’s poems, printed out and stacked in a wood and silk-lined case on a spot-lit pedestal, which also underscores human relationships. Several of the poems contained in those pages, such as ‘I’m lonely’, are crass and irreverent: ‘still make your mama tell you / that is shit / don’t eat it’. In a work titled (having thai takeout during christmas eve) (2017), wateringcan roses, cleaved in half, dot the gallery walls and seem to grow like brass fungus. Ho positions himself as mediator here, as a translator with privileged access to original sources of knowledge, be they his grandfather’s or fellow artist’s. Wu, Wang and Ho conclude their poetic and ambiguous exhibition text with a Foucault quote. ‘They have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship,’ says the French theorist in a 1981 interview. ‘That is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.’ The sum of Mosquitoes, Dusts, and Thieves is a collective statement of empathy between people and things. Owen Duffy

Mosquitoes, Dusts, and Thieves, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artists and 47 Canal, New York

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Dineo Seshee Bopape sa ____ ke lerole, (sa lerole ke ___) Art in General, New York 19 November – 14 January Dineo Seshee Bopape has transformed Art in General’s L-shaped Brooklyn space by bringing into being imposing earthworks that provide us with mysterious topographies adorned intricately with minutiae. An accomplished South African artist living in Johannesburg, Bopape used 25 tons of soil to create a new work, titled sa ____ ke lerole, (sa lerole ke ___) (all works 2016), which translates from Sepedi (a Bantu language commonly spoken in South Africa) to that which is of ____ is dust, (that which is of dust is ____). In it, we navigate two daunting, kneehigh rectangular volumes of compacted dirt and straw, an age-old mixture that has been used to construct ziggurats, churches and homes across the world. Rather than pursuing a relationship with the built environment, Bopape’s installation functions as a tapestretic landscape, a surface upon which an unknown history of human presence is inscribed. The metaphysical-sounding exhibition title lends itself to a sense of timeless

enigma that coalesces with the formal and material decisions of the installation. A variety of holes, mounds and marks mar the surface of both masses. On the larger mass, with a footprint of almost 25sqm, a bronze uterus rests in a shallow gilt grave near sheepskin. Piles of rosebuds accumulate over the dried dirt’s cracked surface. Charcoal, burnt sage and fired-clay forms of the interior of a fist suggest power and creation through controlled and nuanced physical transformation. These objects are joined by easy-to-miss concentric rings scrawled into the dirt. Verdant shoots of grass sprout from the barren-looking soil. The result is a cosmology of human presence, so convincing that it could have plausibly existed somewhere in the world before time eternal. Bopape executes this installation with intense presence and precarity. One cannot but wonder: when will this earth structure fall apart? Will it collapse under its own weight?

sa ____ ke lerole, (sa lerole ke ___), 2016. Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist and Art in General, New York

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Signs of material transformation ripple through the show. At varying heights, Bopape colours five gallery walls with a humble wash of water and dirt. Collectively titled how deep is your love, these amalgamations of elemental matter remain as subtle, rusty stains. Water evaporates, leaving behind transparent streaks that lead our eyes up and down a vertical axis. These works are intimate and sincere, eliciting the type of earthly serenity that one might find in the most spiritual Agnes Martin paintings, recently suspended in her Guggenheim retrospective. While most of Bopape’s work evokes a boundless passage of time, moya, lerole, letsopa, matla, leswika sets up a more contemporary situation through technology. On a pedestal of soil, a slide projector continuously clicks through sepia images – at once contemporary and archaic – of hands holding the fired clay forms. This metronome pulls us into the future, and troubles us with the sound of its own obsolescence. Owen Duffy

peter campus, circa 1987  Cristin Tierney, New York 19 January – 4 March Peter Campus, a restless and too-often-overlooked pioneer of video art, emerged from a circle that included Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt and Robert Grosvenor. During the early 1970s, influenced by Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman, he mounted installations using then-nascent video-editing technology to layer and dissolve images, as well as closed-circuit cameras that confronted people with images of their bodies screened at odd angles. Later in the decade he turned to still photography, realising large projections of dimly lit faces that dominated gallery spaces and bore down on viewers with an enigmatic and confrontational intimacy. He showed in New York at Klaus Kertess’s seminal Bykert Gallery and then with Paula Cooper; but he withdrew from the scene in 1979 and began taking black-and-white photos of landscape details that, at the time, seemed old-fashioned. Around 1987 he began a series of large-scale projections of shells and stones that recalled his series of faces and his photographic work.

This new series united and clarified the underlying logic behind what had previously seemed disparate activities. Five of these pieces, all of stones and all dated 1987, are projected at Cristin Tierney in a room divided by a half wall. They provide barely enough light for visitors to manoeuvre, transforming the space into a sort of maze in which each rock, its outlines hazy, floats on a black field that seems to extend ad infinitum. It is impossible to intuit their scale. Surface details dissolve into abstract patterns of ridges and divots, speckles and bands. Blacks read as negatives, greys as positives, indicating that some materials reflect more than others and underscoring that what we are seeing is ultimately not an object but light. What is important, then, is not the rocks or the images thereof, but the spaces around them: the field of the projection that isolates them, the room in which the works are presented and the darkness with which they visually merge. Viewing becomes a spatial, physical experience

that compresses the geologic time implied by the surface details of the stones, a hint of some past process of erosion or eruption, the photographic moment at which each object was recorded and the transitory duration in which the images are presented and seen. Titles such as schism for a stone with a ridge down its centre, or half-life, both suggest lithic occurrences and open each piece to individual readings, creating tension between the objective and the subjective. As in Campus’s earlier videos, photography and projection slip a stage between object and eye to implicate vision as contingent, abstract and always dependent on time and space. Campus’s aim here does not seem to be deconstruction per se, but a poetic resonance, in a Buddhist sense, of the vastness outside of momentary experience. In a 1976 interview Campus said, ‘It’s basically my understanding that we are temporarily just a flash of light in the void,’ much like a simulacra of rocks isolated on dark fields in a barely lit gallery. Joshua Mack

peter campus, circa 1987, 2017 (installation view). Photo: John Muggenborg. Courtesy Cristin Tierney, New York

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Jimmy Wright New York Underground Fierman, New York 4 November – 23 December For those looking to assuage the woes of shuttering gay bars and queer assimilation, Jimmy Wright’s 11 glowing drawings at Fierman are something of a salve. Made between 1974 and 1976, they capture the then-thirty-yearold artist’s firsthand experiences of pre-AIDS New York nightlife at Club 82, the Anvil, Club Baths and Max’s Kansas City, among others. A swirling chimera of leather-clad cruisers, glam rockers, encounters in the dark and one spectacular ass leaping out of a leopard-print leotard, the works put us directly into a frenzied moment of gay liberation. Across these storied spaces, there is a glittering collision of gender expressions and sexualities, each as multifarious and shifting as the next. Crucially, Wright’s drawings point to the great multivalence of his experience and his community, and in that way they resist being flattened into nostalgia 40 years later. Although they are diaristic, the drawings look as though they might have had many

authors. Wright drew with a melange of materials (graphite, ink, gouache, watercolour, coloured pencil) and in a wide range of styles. Tea Room (1975), a scene of two men in a bathroom – one wearing a trenchcoat and fedora – employs smudged graphite to invoke a noirish intrigue, while in Anvil #1 (1975), violet and magenta ink spreads across the paper in pools that almost obscure the bare butts and gymnastic sex acts of eight or so figures. In four ink drawings on paper napkins from Max’s Kansas City, all dated 1974, Wright uses clear black lines and exaggerated postures to caricature the people sitting at the bar. It seems that Wright, a Kentuckian via Tennessee, was trying out styles and materials as much as he may have been trying out his own identity and sexuality. His sampling, on paper and in his actual lived experiences, results in a quality of fluidity. While one might easily look back at this period and pin it down with a series of binaries (gay/straight, sub/dom, top/bottom,

Anvil #1, 1975, colour ink on paper, 26 × 26 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fierman, New York

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etc), Wright’s work resists this kind of limited historicising by participating in a tradition of queerness that is born out of elasticity. This emphasis on queerness-as-flux is commonplace now, but, looking at these drawings, we can trace its occurrence in queer artmaking to Wright, and even back further: Frank O’Hara wrote, ‘Grace/to be born and live as variously as possible’ in his 1956 poem ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, a work in which the poet (who was also thirty at the time) describes his own self-formation as utterly mutable and slippery. ‘Variously’ describes this body of Wright’s work quite well. His promiscuous use of genre and medium is a gesture of queer messmaking. In trying everything, the artist refuses stricture or fixed coding. Things don’t need to fully resolve: his figures are unbound and his use of materials is mercurial. In a time where the mainstream queer political agenda tidies us into homonormativity, this is just the kind of liberated mess we need. Ashton Cooper

Johan Grimonprez | blue orchids | Sean Kelly, New York 27 January – 11 March There is a moment in Johan Grimonprez’s short arthouse documentary | blue orchids | (2017) when Chris Hedges, former war correspondent and now well-known leftwing author and activist, describes the emotional toll of being exposed to the trauma of war – sleeplessness, nightmares, fatigue – but more than just these symptoms, Hedges explains how their aggregate effect makes it increasingly hard, and sometimes impossible, for one to connect with another human being. Exposure to the horrors of war creates a chasm across which love – love in the sense of being oneself by being with and through others – cannot reach. When faced with that radical alienation, not just from others but from oneself – from one’s own humanness – Hedges confesses that it’s understandable why the suffering choose suicide. Through Grimonprez’s camera, Hedges is a mesmerising figure. Deliberate, weary and earnest, Hedges describes the war machinery of modern states with a knowingness that suggests one is hearing about the internal operations of some secret society. And one suspects that this is very much the point, as the other character that dominates the screen is someone named Riccardo Privitera, whose credit in the film describes him as an ‘arms and equipment

dealer’ for Talisman Europe Ltd (‘dissolved’). Privitera has the best lines – “politicians are just like prostitutes, only more expensive” – and spins titbits of conspiracy for the camera through what can only be described as a shit-eating grin. (At one point he pulls out a submachine gun as if to burnish his arms-dealer credentials.) Grimonprez flits back and forth between Hedges and Privitera, who are talking about the same thing: the arms trade and state-sponsored violence. The interviews derive from Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (2016), Grimonprez’s feature-length documentary, but in | blue orchids | their juxtaposition is meant to take us past this editorial content, past the documentarian’s favoured terrain of truth, falsity and revelation, towards something more intimate: Hedges and Privitera are interesting not for what they know and can tell us, but because they are damaged. They appear to need the camera, the audience, to reconnect them to themselves. In this | blue orchids | is a kind pornography of grief and denial (the title is lifted from the name of an escort service that Privitera supposedly used to help him close his deals), but it is also a labour of love, the kind of love that Hedges describes as the only saving grace for the traumatised.

Cut throughout | blue orchids | is CCTV footage compiled by the Dubai security authorities of a Mossad hit squad that assassinated Hamas military leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. In it we see figures identified as members of the Isreali security organisation arriving at the Dubai airport, arriving at the target’s hotel, getting off the elevator on the target’s floor, etc. One presumes that this bit of archival footage is meant to give us a picture of the true stakes of the global arms trade (al-Mabhouh was in Dubai to do an arms deal) and that all of the actors in this geopolitical theatre are bad ones, morally, but the effect is to distance the viewer from the upfront humanity, flawed though it may be, of Hedges and Privitera. Grimonprez cuts in other imagery as well, such as the famous photograph of three gents perusing the stacks of Holland House library, in London, after it was bombed by the Germans in 1940. But these appear as one-offs, and can be granted their claim to montage poetics. Not the al-Mabhouh throughline, however. There’s no humanity there, no meaningfulness, just the unblinking eye of the security state, which, again one must presume, will never do itself in no matter what it sees. Jonathan T.D. Neil

| blue orchids | (still), 2017, video, colour, sound, 48 min. Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

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SANGREE Temporary Stone Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City 6 October – 12 February Operating under the collective name SANGREE – a play on sangre, Spanish for blood – artists René Godínez Pozas and Carlos Lara have developed a subterranean-like exhibition that offers an accelerationist notion of the amusement-park-style presentations of nationalism that often characterise cultural-heritage tourism. The duo have shrink-wrapped every surface and aspect of the gallery, from ceiling to keyhole, in digitally printed faux-stone vinyl, creating the sensation of being in a Raiders of the Lost Ark themepark experience (done on the cheap). Scattered throughout this rectilinear plastic gallery-cave are large geometric sculptures covered in a similarly hued stonelike composite. In fact the sculptures ape a model of a pre-Columbian artefact made by the architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez during the construction of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City during the early 1960s. The replica was built to determine where to place a monumental Nahuatl figure of the rain god Tlaloc that was controversially removed from its site of discovery in Texcoco to the nation’s capital. According to the gallery text, it’s the model rather than the original figure of Tlaloc that SANGREE are interested in, though without an image of either in the exhibition, the faithfulness of SANGREE’s reproduction to Ramírez Vázquez’s copy is anyone’s guess. Indeed, the sculptural shapes filling the room have more in common in terms of scale and aesthetics with office cubicles or refrigerator boxes than any Aztec or modernist works.

The cultural sphere in Mexico is often saddled with the weight of twin duelling pianos: pre-Hispanic heritage and Mexican Modernism. The National Museum of Anthropology happens to consolidate the weight of both narratives, as the building that houses the nation’s treasure trove of ancient artefacts is in its own right a jewel of Mexican modernist architecture. The museum’s construction, commissioned by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), included a nationwide effort to collect preColumbian relics to be housed in the capital. Therefore, as an institution, the National Anthropology Museum is an embodiment of symbolic demonstrations of state power, a hallmark of the PRI’s propaganda playbook. Remember, this is the party that controlled Mexico uninterrupted for 71 years, leading author Mario Vargas Llosa to pronounce it ‘the perfect dictatorship’ – they knew how to manage a message. Seven decades, however, is plenty of time to grow wise to governmental propaganda. People in Mexico are well aware of Mexican Modernism and pre-Columbian history as instruments of state-sponsored nationalist narratives. They know how these mythic idealisations of Mexico are carefully constructed to set stars in tourists’ eyes, romancing them with the ancient legacy of the Sun Stone, infecting them with ‘Frida[Kahlo]-fever’ and finally sending them to exit through the gift shop. SANGREE’s practice can generally be described as humorous ruminations on the

packaging of history as consumer goods. Past works have included making stone mosaic mobile-phone covers of Aztec-ish motifs and tattooed concrete replicas of Mesoamerican figures. With Temporary Stone their focus on Ramírez Vázquez’s modernist-Nahuatl hybrid object suggests that it is more revealingly symbolic of the state-sponsored drive to build a consumer-friendly narrative of national authenticity corroborated by ancient history than the stockpile of ‘real’ relics in the museum. But by picking up on the themepark-simulacrum parallels inherent to the construction of the national myth, they start to tug at the neoliberal threads of histotainment in contemporary Mexican state ideology. The main issue with the show is that SANGREE’s artistic proposal doesn’t seem to evolve. Their last several exhibitions have all played on the same commodification-of-fakehistory joke (including a bar commission from the Absolut Vodka brand). Since their works seem to offer summations more than questions, they have the effect of a one-liner at risk of wearing thin. Walking out of the museum (through the gift shop), I passed by the museum’s street-level window that the artist duo had populated with concrete Aztec à la American Apparel figures seductively modelling SANGREE-branded graphic tees in the posh Polanco neighbourhood. With winking drollness, the humour of their millennial Mel Brooks-like parodic merchandising of casually sexed-up faux-ancestry held, for now. Kim Córdova

Temporary Stone, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy the artists and Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City

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Pablo Accinelli Cae la tarde Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo 22 November – 28 January Stepping into Pablo Accinelli’s world on a blazing hot morning in São Paulo, one’s immediate, incongruous sensation is that, true to the exhibition’s title, a day is drawing to its close. Near the entrance of the cool gallery space, a slim, delicate polished-steel stand holds a single broomstick (10 cm, all works 2016), its business end missing, as if already unscrewed and stored away. In an invitation to pause and wipe your feet – to transition from one part of the day’s activity to the next, to shake off the dust – a pair of doormats titled Duración interna (Internal Duration) lie close to one wall, five neat sections cut from the edge of each and attached to their opposite end, so that if each mat were to be curled into a cylinder, the edges would slot together like dovetail joints. Work is over, say the pieces in this absorbing show by the young São Paulo-based Argentinian artist. Five sacks of concrete lie in a row (Duración interna / Internal duration), a pillow laid on the first like a summons to a construction worker’s siesta. Time passes, and the sculptures prove it by their incorporation of elaborate measuring and counting rituals: the first broom stand cradles a solo broomstick in a series of 11 steel rings set at 10cm intervals, while another on the other side of the gallery, 20, 25, 50, 100 cm, holds two

more broomsticks, one slotting neatly through three rings at 50cm intervals, the other held between two rings set 100cm apart. The mechanistic sense of time that Accinelli sets up, in reference to Henri Bergson’s ideas of durée réelle (affirmed by many of the artist’s titles for the works in this show), sits at odds with a far more subjective sense of time passing. Time to rest, comes another message from the floor, where the edges of two circular daises are lined with playing cards laid end-to-end in continuous wheels. The surface of one dais is inset with a glass ashtray, while the other has five shot glasses sunk into it, of the kind used in Brazil for sipping cachaça between swallows of beer. Beside them, a newspaper cutting has been scribbled all over in black marker, leaving only the headline, ‘Il mondo cambia’ (‘the world changes’). But the sense in these works is that it doesn’t change much at all for many; or at least not as dramatically as it is seen to change at the level of global political events. In the languorous world conjured up here, work happens, then you leave and take your leisure. Inertia and motionlessness dominate: in Duración interna (Internal duration), a concrete cylinder is set in a solid white plinth and etched with urgent black arrows, the space between them ingeniously appearing as grey arrows

pointing the other way. The arrows beg the viewer to spin the wheel; yet the concrete resists all but the most determined rotation. A fretful stillness permeates 14 works on paper hung along one wall (Frottage: archivo), in which queues of home-time traffic, lit by the glow of hundreds of red taillights, are seen in delicate tracings transferred by frottage from newspaper photographs. As in most of Accinelli’s work, there’s precision and geometry in every detail, but also warmth, and an inexorable familiarity: a product, perhaps, of the simplicity of the materials and the deep resonance of the dialleddown, late-afternoon atmosphere. A poem by the late Buenos Aires poet Ricardo Carreira is presented on a gallery handout. ‘Baldosas, ciudad, paso, pies, campo, tierra’ (‘Paving stones, city, step, feet, field, earth’, 1996) includes lines like ‘dust, wind, movement’, ‘light, trunk, ground’ and ‘continuation, houses, street’, which conjure a spare, resonant landscape and tap out a rhythm in transitions from city to field and from concrete to earth; from dust on the wind to light slanting onto a tree. In turn, Accinelli’s work zooms in, in steel, paper, concrete, wood and glass, on a similar epochal zone between stages – the traffic lights, the lunchtime siesta, the switch from day to night – that thrums with a powerful poetics of its own. Claire Rigby

Internal duration (151,3 cm Ø) (detail), 2016, cards, cups, newsprint, marker pen, wood, 151 cm (diameter) × 6 cm. Photo: Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo

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The Universe and Art: Princess Kaguya, Leonardo da Vinci, teamLab Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 30 July – 9 January There’s a strange, juicy creature about midway through this show. Imagine a baby hedgehog curled up, but instead of spikes you have a husk of smooth, pinkish skin; and rather than an animal’s face peering out, there is a human child’s – weak chin, stubby nose, huge moist eyes. Over its head there is a wispy brown pelt, and on its arms and legs a hint of prepubescent fuzz. It’s giving me a serious case of the puppy eyes, but I can’t tell if it’s begging me to love it or kill it. This hyperreal sculpture, ominously titled The Rookie (2015), is by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini. It features in the ‘extraterrestrial’ section, and I wish there were more freaks like it in this otherwise scrupulously well-behaved exhibition. Make no mistake, The Universe and Art is a solid, old-money blockbuster show. It covers how the cosmos – literally the stars, planets and outer space – has been observed, imagined and interpreted throughout human civilisation. Following the hybridity of the Medicine and Art exhibition held at the Mori in 2009, the show displays 200-plus artefacts, ranging from the antiquarian – such as rare astronomical tracts by Galileo and da Vinci – to the futuristic, like the prototype of a Mars ‘ice house’ that won first prize in a NASA design contest. There’s even a supercool Meiji-era sword forged from meteorite iron, and a 1.5m Edo-period illustrated scroll showing The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, which, coming on the back of Studio Ghibli’s popular anime The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013), based on the same story, is a great populist nod. So this isn’t just an art exhibition, it’s a full-on cultural history and science expo. In this busy emporium of wonders, contemporary art is just one part of the equation, and a lot of it is urbane and suavely technological. My only niggle is that the show, curated by Nanjo Fumio and Tsubaki Reiko, while encyclopaedic, tends towards the illustrative. It very rarely achieves imaginative blastoff. In the speculative last section, about space travel and the future of humanity, the first artwork to be found is

Sorayama Hajime’s naked silver fembot in heels called – wait for it – Sexy Robot (2016). Really? The show is divided into four parts, and most of the art is packed into the section titled ‘The Universe as Space-Time’. Among other things, this section aims to tackle ‘the wonders of space – 11 dimensions of it apparently – and astounding advances in astral observation that have revolutionized our perceptions of space and time’. This sounds pretty trippy on paper, but most of the works here are earthbound and literal. Little catches you out. Mariko Mori’s superstring theory-inspired fibreglass sculpture takes the predictable form of a Möbius strip (Ekpyrotic String ii, 2014). Meanwhile, there is the rather on-the-nose inclusion of Björn Dahlem’s Milky Way spinoff, comprising fluorescent tubes nailed together (Black Hole (M-Spheres), 2008). It looks like a blown-up version of the molecule models we used to make in physics class. More effective are works linking the wonders of Big Science to the mythic religiosity of the ancients. Take the play on scale in Andreas Gursky’s hyperbolic panorama of Super-Kamiokande, the world’s largest underground neutrino observatory (Kamiokande, 2007). At first you see a black wall studded with golden thumbtacks, but the immensity of this scene only becomes clear when you notice the miniscule human technicians on little boats in the bottom-right corner. The ‘thumbtacks’ turn out to be huge spheres that function as phototubes to detect subatomic particles. Just like that, the entire superstructure is transfigured, and it could well be some temple from some far-off time. In other zones, the art is massaged into the historical displays to provide a call-and-response effect. There’s a section called ‘A New View of Life – Do Aliens Exist?’ Well, do they? French artist Laurent Grasso, who has a fetish for ancient extraterrestrials and cosmic phenomena, certainly hopes so. His series inspired by the 1803 story of a mysterious woman arriving on a beach

facing page, top Tom Sachs, The Crawler, 2003, foamcore and hot glue, wood and metal frame, dimensions variable. Photo: Philippe Servent. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris & Salzburg

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in Japan in a ‘hollow ship’ (1803, Utsuro Bune (Hollow Ship), Unknown Object Found in Hitachi Province, Japan, 1992) is displayed opposite actual archival paintings of the incident. Executed with the artist’s trademark flat affect, Grasso’s work includes an exquisite oil-on-wood painting painted with the finest of brushes, and a bowllike sculpture that is the recreation of that UFO. Elsewhere, French artist Pierre Huyghe and Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto conspire to show that life on earth can be as weird as life on the stars. Huyghe’s extreme closeup video of petrified insect fragments in amber conjures up the best of Ridley Scott’s Alien film franchise (De-Extinction, 2014), while Sugimoto’s photo of a museum diorama reconstructing life 300 million years ago, a time when crinoids (plantlike marine animals) flourished, resembles the scorched terrain of a grey planet (Carboniferous Period, 1992). Finally, the last part of the exhibition deals with the forefront of space exploration. It is exhaustive and exhausting. The busy display shows so many photos of US and Soviet astronauts, space stations and shuttles, as well as prototypes for lunar rovers and housing, that at some point everything threatens to blend into one gigantic Apollo 13 poster. But one artwork stands out. It is The Crawler (2003), an obsessively detailed 1:25 scale model of the doomed NASA space shuttle Challenger, which broke apart 73 seconds after takeoff in 1986 and took seven lives. By out-otakuing everything else in the show, American artist Tom Sachs has struck a real note of pathos. We are all made of starstuff, and Sachs shows that this stuff is achingly vulnerable. His version of Challenger, comprising white foamcore glued together in a faithful copy, and painstakingly engineered down to the little staircases, pipes and fire extinguishers, touched me in a way that only kids’ projects can. I can only imagine the heartbreak if it all went up in flames. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom teamLab, Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as well, Blossoming on Collision – Light in Space, 2016, interactive digital installation, 4 min 20 sec. Courtesy the artists

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Art Life New York What kind of art is being spawned in the place that spawned Trump? by Bridget McCarthy

Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000–17 (installation view, Times Square, New York, 2017). Photo: Ka-Man Tse. Courtesy Times Square Art, New York

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Body and soul During the early days of winter 2016–17, bodies were on display throughout the New York artworld. They were presented in a variety of forms: assertive or elusive, fragmented or whole, at times seductive and politically charged. These representations of the human figure spoke to notions of identity, history, memory and power – and who and what assigns those qualities to a given body, a question that has become particularly potent in what is a moment of political soul-searching for many Americans.

Gloves off In Troy Brauntuch’s recent series of dark canvases, images reveal themselves quietly, like whispers. Three series were shown at Petzel, and in the first, bodies appear as fragments: a sculptor chiselling a giant head; two small hands reaching up to hold the middle finger

of a giant hand; a naked female body hanging in a crucified posture, head tilted back (in pain or pleasure?) – vulnerable and erotic. Seemingly innocuous, the works turn out to have deeper, sometimes sinister underpinnings not readily apparent on the canvases themselves: as one of the gallery directors explained to me as we walked through the exhibition together, the chiselled sculpture is by Josef Thorak, one of Hitler’s favourite artists, and the image of the naked female is derived from a photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann, the führer’s personal photographer. In the second series, couture gowns are ghostly presences filling the humanscale canvases, floating without bodies to support them. The director told me that Brauntuch photographed the dresses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2014 retrospective on Charles James, the early-twentieth-century AngloAmerican fashion designer who approached his designs with the sensibility of a sculptor. In the third group, six double-panel works appear to depict black-and-white abstract

forms, but in fact each contains a fragment capturing the now infamous moment when O.J. Simpson tried on the bloody glove that didn’t fit – Simpson’s plastic-gloved hands stretching into the too-tight black leather gloves. Violent or erotic, absent or activated, directly or indirectly political, the body haunts Brauntuch’s canvases. It’s cliché, I know, but the thought that lingers is that images aren’t always what they seem; and I wonder what these images, and indeed these bodies, would have meant had they not been explained to me.

Han Solo Between 2000 and 2010, Mike Kelley made approximately 100 works in a series known as Memory Ware, and Hauser & Wirth displayed nearly two dozen of them at its Upper East Side location. The pieces feel like isolated archaeological sites: hundreds upon hundreds of knickknacks and miscellaneous materials

Mike Kelley, Memory Ware Flat #24 (detail), 2001, mixed media on wood panel, 216 × 154 × 12 cm. Photo: Stefan Altenburger. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts / VAGA, New York. Courtesy the foundation and Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Gloves 1), 2016, pigment on cotton, 274 × 252 cm. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York

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fill the surfaces of these two- and threedimensional works. But the embedded bits aren’t just detritus from an artist’s studio; they are, for the most part, all somehow tied to the human body: jewellery – gold bracelets, backs of earrings, charms; collectable pins – in the shape of the state of Minnesota (my home state) or an American flag; cultural memorabilia – fan badges for Michael Jackson, Culture Club; beads of all colours, shapes and sizes; even a Han Solo figurine. On the one hand these seem like discarded bits, the ossified contents of a junk drawer (we all have one). On the other, they are potent reminders of the memory-laden nature of objects: as a viewer, it’s hard not to discover glimpses of oneself reflected in them, or to wonder whose identity they once helped define. It’s not a longing to return to the remembered past: as with the genre from which the series takes its name (memory ware is a type of folk art), these pieces of Kelley’s Memory Ware feel like cultural artefacts preserving and presenting

a fragmented portrait of all the people (in the sense of individuals and as a generational collective) for whom the objects hold meaning.

Fade to grey It’s always something to look forward to when a major retrospective on a female artist fills one of New York’s museums (which, of course, tells you something about New York’s major museums), and Agnes Martin’s at the Guggenheim was no exception. Frank Lloyd Wright’s unique ramped space inevitably affects the experience of any work shown at the Guggenheim – for better or for worse – but in Martin’s case, it turned out to be the perfect complement to the work: the successive isolated niches, where one to three works were hung, allowed the meditative quality of Martin’s pale grids and neat stripes to shine through; the works had space to breathe. Born in 1912, Martin was of the abstract-expressionist generation (an influence that is apparent

in her early work), but she had minimalist leanings – and she made the grid expressive and human with her delicate and at times imperfect lines. As Martin herself once explained, ‘When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.’ While her grids and stripes are perhaps the more familiar of her works, the exhibition, which arrived in New York after runs at Tate Modern, LACMA and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, revealed a number of less familiar yet compositionally-striking works, including Homage to Life (2003), a black trapezoid hovering on a grey background, imperfect but monolithic, timeless and universal, like a ziggurat; and Friendship (1963), a shimmering yet masterfully understated gold-leaf grid. Two dark grey canvases at the end of the exhibition, dating towards the end of Martin’s career, were a pleasant surprise: it may be winter, but it turns out that grey is not always bleak.

Mike Kelley, Memory Ware Flat #58, 2009, mixed media on wood panel, 129 × 112 × 11 cm. Photo: Stefan Altenburger. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts / VAGA, New York. Courtesy the foundation and Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

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50 shades of black Another major retrospective that arrived in New York – Kerry James Marshall’s – was the undeniable highlight of the Met Breuer’s inaugural year. It was a sight to behold: in 80 works spanning 35 years, Marshall’s dedication to his goal of making the black body – both the artist’s and the painted subject’s – visible in the canon of art history was abundantly evident. Marshall’s figures assert their presence and embody the notion that black is dynamic and not static. As Marshall explained during a conversation with the author William C. Rhoden at the Met in early December, black is a colour: “There’s carbon black, there’s iron oxide black, there’s bone black; and I make those even richer by adding other colours… I’m working with black chromatically, not as a limitation, which is the way almost everyone thought about how black functioned in paintings up till this time.” In the same conversation, Marshall and Rhoden discussed what it means to have real power in the context

of a network or system like the artworld – to win, so to speak – and they seemed to agree that the ability to define oneself and assert that vision is one way to achieve that. And that makes sense. As Marshall himself acknowledged, entry into the collections of museums like the Met (and by proxy, although not necessarily, the canon) is controlled by those with appointed power (curators and the like) – which amounts, to a certain extent, to being defined by someone else. The visibility Marshall gained and the acclaim he received with this show, through work that holds true to his own vision, speaks to the truth of his definition of real power. Interestingly, however, Marshall’s goal of reshaping the canon falls more in line with ‘traditional’ power; whether or not he will achieve that will be seen with time.

Show-and-tell What does real power – of the admirable kind – look like outside the artworld? Refer to the

December issue of American Vogue, which featured First Lady Michelle Obama on its cover, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. In this and three additional photographs by Leibovitz, Obama appears empowered, confident, relaxed and glamorous – at ease in her body and comfortable where she poses. The images are striking, offering the characteristic drama of a Leibovitz picture and deriving their power in large part from the contrast of three simple colours: black against white against green. The colours are sharp and pure, and their metaphorical significance within this setting (a whitecolumned home in lush green landscape) resonates. In a draping creamy-white sleeveless dress by Carolina Herrera (one of the designers who has said they will dress the next first lady, Melania Trump), Obama appears majestic against a white column, in the manner of the Winged Victory of Samothrace (circa second century BC). In a formfitting Atelier Versace dress and jacket, Obama reclines on a secluded staircase, her head titled back, eyes closed – seductive but

Kerry James Marshall, Past Times, 1997, acrylic and collage on canvas, 290 × 396 cm. Photo: Nathan Keay / MCA Chicago. © the artist

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very much in charge of her own seductive powers. On the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton, Obama delivered what was arguably the most inspiring and inspired speech of the election cycle. In it, she spoke of wanting young girls to know that “the measure of any society is how it treats its women and girls… they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect… they should make their voices heard in the world.” Echoing Marshall and Rhoden’s conversation, Obama shows and tells us that ownership of your body and voice equates to real power.

Timely reflections William Pope.L once wrote, ‘To be raced by another is a choice that can ossify choice. To race oneself is a choice that can liquefy choice.’ The Window and the Breaking of the Window, a small but impactful show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, derives its title and curatorial theme from one of Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings,

an ongoing series that, according to the artist, is intended to interact with language at the level of the mixed message: Black People Are the Window and the Breaking of the Window (2004). A play on the name for the ‘broken windows’ model of policing famously implemented in New York City during the 1990s that aimed to maintain order through policing low-level offences and thereby prevent more serious crime, this phrase written by Pope.L seemingly suggests that black people are both the victims and perpetrators of the crime, but it may in fact refer to the harm that the policy is causing the black community. The other 20 or so works in the show speak in a similarly poignant fashion to the current sociopolitical climate of the black body: from Steffani Jemison’s grainy looped film of unidentifiable black figures jogging through an anonymous, industriallooking landscape (Maniac Chase, 2009), constantly and steadily moving forward (but is it to a destination or from a threat? The cycle repeats itself), to Dave McKenzie’s Self-Portrait

Piñata (2002), a hanging piñata of a legless black man in business casual attire (the artist himself), the reference to lynching impossible to ignore. Notably, most of the works in this show are either owned by the Studio Museum or are by former artists-in-residence from the museum’s studio programme – supporting the museum’s mission to foster a community while delivering a timely call for reflection.

Saturation point Pipilotti Rist’s retrospective at the New Museum was a transportive experience of colour, sound and material texture, particularly the crowd-pleasing Pixel Forest (2016) – like a pixelated screen brought into three dimensions, inspiring lots of wide-eyed gaping by visitors. Even more exciting, though, was the news that Rist’s Open My Glade (Flatten) (2000–17) would be shown on 62 screens in Times Square every night in January between

Dave McKenzie, Self-Portrait Piñata, 2002, papier-mâché and crepe paper, currently approximately 124 × 56 × 30 cm. Photo: Sasha J. Mendez. Courtesy the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

Devin Allen, Untitled from A Beautiful Ghetto series, 2015, chromogenic colour print, 51 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist

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11:57 pm and midnight. It’s a homecoming of sorts for the piece: working with the Public Art Fund, Rist created Open My Glade for the Panasonic board in Times Square, where it was exhibited at intervals throughout the day during the spring of 2000. Having only seen images of the first installation, I was glad to have a second chance to experience it, even if it meant making my way to Times Square, which, like many a New Yorker, I typically avoid at all costs. Even though I knew that Times Square has only become more media-saturated and frenetic in the intervening 17 years, I expected Rist’s face to be the predominant image for those three minutes. But there were so many lights and images and general visual stimulation to compete with; Rist was everywhere, but she wasn’t alone. I found myself wondering if the relative impact of the image in this space was actually the same in 2017 as in 2000. But perhaps that doesn’t really matter. It’s hard not to take pleasure in Rist’s work, even if it’s in Times Square.

‘New No’s’ Despite moments of pleasure, the general mood right now, at least in New York (or maybe just my social circles), is one of fear and disbelief. How does one respond to that fear, anger, frustration and confusion in a way that doesn’t feel futile? Within a little over a week of Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, Paul Chan delivered the most poignant, poetic and clear articulation of the collective fears of one swathe of society in the form of his ‘New No’s’. Part poem, part manifesto, ‘New No’s’ takes a stand against, in Chan’s words, ‘the drift of American society toward what is most un-American’: racism, fascism, Islamophobia and the untruth of art, among other potential threats. In an echo of language of sexual consent, the final stanza repeats the simple phrase ‘no means no’. What comes next when the ballot as consent form fails you? Clarity of expression is empowering, at least. Translated into a number of foreign languages – including

Spanish, German, French, Hindi, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Russian and Swedish – by friends of friends of Badlands, ‘New No’s’ embodies inclusivity. And Badlands’ means of distributing ‘New No’s’ was apropos: first glimpses were posted on Twitter – now a favoured means of political communication – followed by a posting on their website and a free e-book that compiles all the translations. But most powerful is the poster: simple black type on white paper. In an early demonstration of what is becoming an increasingly widespread form of political activism/speech, Chan was donating part of the proceeds from the sales of the poster to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU – organisations that support the freedoms that many fear are in danger. Art can sometimes speak truth more clearly than facts, particularly when alternative facts are gaining ground and the credibility of traditional news outlets is being challenged by the highest office in the country. For that reason alone, the need for art has never been clearer or greater.

Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000–17 (installation view, Times Square, New York, 2017). Photo: Ka-Man Tse. Courtesy Times Square Art, New York

Badlands Unlimited, New No’s, 2017. Courtesy Badlands Unlimited

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Books

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Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra Allen Lane, £20 (hardcover) They’re not to blame; we all are. That, in a nutshell, is Pankaj Mishra’s rationale for the rise of radicalism and the anger that’s fuelling it, from Brexit Britain and Donald Trump’s America to the Hindutva movement in India and the devastation that follows ISIS through the Middle East and beyond. ‘Gun-owning truck drivers in Louisiana have more in common with trishulwielding Hindus in India, bearded Islamists in Pakistan, and nationalists and populists elsewhere, than any of them realise,’ Mishra announces early on, later pointing out that Atatürk’s liberation of Turkey and subsequent programme of Turkification was delivered alongside a ban on the fez and the replacement of the Muslim calendar; that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh befriended Ramzi Ahmed Yousef (mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993) in a supermax prison in Colorado; and that ISIS hostages are dressed in jumpsuits made infamous as the uniform of those incarcerated in Guantánamo. For Mishra, an Indian novelist and essayist who considers himself an intellectual ‘stepchild of the West’, today’s radical movements share a common intellectual ancestor: the Enlightenment and related thinking that saw the absolute government of religion and monarchy replaced by less-certain notions of progress, humanity and republics, and in so doing made public the ‘death’ of God. Into that void, Mishra posits, slid intellectuals and artists, who ‘located the meaning of life in politics and art rather than traditional religion’. In the

process, nationhood became about a shared culture – most prominently in Germany (through the work of writers such as Goethe and Herder, and the music of Wagner) – rather than a shared ruler. Before long the principal means of defining a culture (and thus a nation) was by declaring war on another culture. And by the early twentieth century, F.T. Marinetti, founder of Futurism, had fused all that, praising ‘the sculpture wrought in the enemy’s masses by our expert artillery’. And we haven’t yet got to Hitler. It’s not just writers and artists who are to blame, although, for an astonishingly well read man of letters like Mishra, there’s certainly a convenience in being able to place the fault there. Into the Enlightenment void of authority also flowed another new aristocracy, this one the product of individual freedoms expressed and ‘earned’ via international commerce. Mishra recalls how at the turn of the century George Santayana was disturbed by an America in which, in Mishra’s words, an ‘aggressive new individualistic culture, in which human beings suddenly seemed to have no higher aim in life then diligent imitation of the rich’, left ‘most human beings unfit to run the race for wealth [suffering] from impotent resentment’. In 1946, this kind of feeling was formulated by Søren Kierkegaard as ressentiment, a form of repressed envy. Ressentiment, according to Mishra, is exactly the feeling Jean-Jacques Rousseau encountered in the context of the inequalities caused by the rise of commercial society during the eighteenth century, and that many of us feel

when we experience the distance between the theoretical promise of individual freedom and its availability in actual fact. The weakness of intellectuals running things, Mishra notes, is that they have a profound ignorance of practice. Although whether or not those who do practise have any knowledge of Kierkegaard is left mute. There’s a hint of mournfulness over the loss of shared spiritual purpose that religion once offered. Not least when Mishra identifies Pope Francis as ‘the most convincing and influential public intellectual of today’. Like the pope, Mishra’s persuasiveness lies in his ability to return a discussion of globalised issues to the level of the personal. Not that that makes the present situation any easier to stomach. ‘Advertisers stand ready to sell things that help people keep counterfeiting their portraits’, Mishra writes. ‘Human identity, frequently seen as fixed and singular, is always manifold and self-conflicted,’ he asserts. ‘It is also why I emphasize the subjective experience… and rely more on novelists and poets than historians and sociologists.’ V.D. Savarkar, the founder of Hindutva, was an atheist, forced to argue that Hindu was a cultural rather than a religious identity; al-Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki sermonised against fornication while concealing his own use of prostitutes; America, viewed again through the eyes of Santayana, ‘has always thought of itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even when it was covered with slaves’. Perhaps then the real problem is that we’ve lost the ability to admit who we really are. Mark Rappolt

Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter by Paul Gauguin David Zwirner Books, $12.95 / £8.95 (softcover)

‘Criticism teaches us how to think,’ Gauguin writes in ‘Racontars de rapin’ (as this essay is titled in the original French). ‘We are grateful and would like to teach critics something, too. Impossible! They already know everything.’ And it’s with no less irony that Gauguin chose his author’s persona to be that of a man of letters who dabbles in painting. His real goal however is to write about what it means to be a visual artist, hiding within that a lesson in how to look at art. ‘Criticism is our censorship – a watching watcher!’ Gauguin thunders in his opening line, identifying at least part of what it means to be an artist: the harbouring of a special distaste for ‘Professional Typographers’ and other members

of the ‘Literati’. And in case that wasn’t clear, he goes on to mischievously select some choice examples of critics who have missed the mark. There is something disorienting in reading a granular analysis of the Paris art scene and its actors written some 115 years ago by a towering figure in the lineage of modern art, who at the time was living on a small island on the far side of the world. Names, many obscure, are dropped into the text as conversational asides. Their identities and the arguments they represent pop up (and are efficiently footnoted by editor and translator Donatien Grau) and drop off. Sentences are short and witty. Past and present lose their sharp distinctions. ‘Don’t be misled!’,

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Gauguin continues, ‘I read what people write. Reading in the wild woods is not the same as reading in Paris.’ It is from this distance that he develops, discursively, his main point: that an artist’s ‘Emotions’ are autonomous, unknowable and not subject to the critic’s assessment; and furthermore that they ‘are of an entirely different nature from those of the writer’. That the artist conveys this belief in his final piece of writing, months before he died, in a work that would not be published for another 50 years, adds a layer of poignancy to the irony of the project’s framing. It is republished here by David Zwirner Books as the first in a new series of overlooked masterpieces. David Terrien

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Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? by Kyung An and Jessica Cerasi Thames & Hudson, £9.95 As Kyung An and Jessica Cerasi declare in their introduction, Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? ‘brings together all you need to give you the confidence to hold your own in conversation about contemporary art… If we can talk about topics as complex as the latest technology, an art-house film or the next general election casually with friends’, they ask, ‘then why does the idea of chatting about contemporary art fill us with so much fear?’ Like lifestyle coaches or writers of fashion articles that list ‘the ten skirts your wardrobe needs this season’ or the inflight features about everything you should do in Bratislava on a weekend break, An and Cerasi seem to have a peculiarly hipsters-at-a-party vision of the status anxiety that motivates the likely reader of their 26-point guide to not-sounding-likeyou’ve-no-idea-about-the-artworld. So Who’s Afraid…? turns out to be a sort of neophyte’s guide whose easily digested, breathlessly written A-to-Z-style entries offer the eager novice a potted summary of how contemporary art got to be what it is, and how the artworld now functions institutionally to perpetuate it. Don’t know much about how the art market works? Here’s two pages on auction culture. Ever wondered why Jay Z is so keen to be seen around the art scene?

An and Cerasi explain how art’s ‘revered status’ allows him to ‘shake off the shackles of pop culture and elevate himself to the rank of the greats’. What’s art history all about? It’s all about rewriting the narratives that privileged ‘a bunch of white dudes’, right? In a reassuring prose style littered with copywriters’ clichés such as ‘at the end of the day’, ‘in the comfort of your own home’ and ‘so next time you find yourself in sunny Miami in December’, Who’s Afraid…? blends an intense reverence for the machinery of the contemporary artworld with a desperate desire to explain the self-evidence of what presents itself as contemporary art without making critical judgements. So behind every exhibition, ‘the guiding hand of the curator is always present, setting out the rules of engagement between you and what you experience’. And although we ‘need to think about how we define what art is good and what’s bad’, there turns out to be ‘no hard and fast rule here, just a general consensus’, while ‘nine times out of ten we know “contemporary” art when we see it, not when we check the label’. Indeed, it’s the book’s overanxious insistence on making contemporary art palatable to a mystified reader that ends up generating the peculiarly oppressive sense that this is

just how things should and must be: supercurators are ‘so super’ because ‘they curate shows that are almost always worth looking at’. Museums of contemporary art ‘are more than fancy buildings with overpriced cafés, they are among the most powerful forces in the art world’. Why is art so expensive? Because, ‘at the end of the day, it simply comes down to what people are willing to pay’. Rather than risk too much critical inquiry on behalf of the reader, Who’s Afraid…? is thoroughly on the side of the system. But then An and Cerasi admit that the book came out of the ‘many awkward conversations we shared with friends and relatives while showing them round our first curatorial endeavours’. Dutiful disciples of the professionalised infrastructure of art (though, perhaps symptomatically, they don’t dwell on how curators come into being), the authors – no surprise here – think that contemporary art ‘is a specialist field like any other, and can lend itself to informal understanding and dinner party conversation in much the same way’. In other words, we’re the ones with the jobs in this system and you’re just the onlookers, but relax – you can talk about it at your dinner parties, just as long as you know who’s in charge. J.J. Charlesworth

Particular Cases by Boris Groys Sternberg Press, €22 (softcover) When I was a teenager, an urban legend circulated about the Ramones having a ‘secret’ chord, a unique chord that they used in every song. It was no doubt BS, considering the Ramones’ songs weren’t all that complicated: the same basic structure and same three power chords. But the legend came to mind when I was reading Boris Groys’s latest collection of essays (19 of them, originally published between 1994 and 2006). It’s premise – an attempt from one of art writing’s most dogmatic writers to avoid dogma, to focus on specific artists and, as Groys says, ‘to follow an impulse that a particular artwork gives me’ – is a promising one. But quickly in this set of short essays, most originally written as monographic catalogue entries, his repeated formula becomes clear: an intro of overly general positioning of twentiethcentury aesthetic developments, a chorus of

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unsubstantiated declarative (but not particularly insightful) statements (like, ‘Time-based art is, in fact, art-based time’) and his ‘secret chord’, appearing in every essay: the word ‘radical’. The artworks in this book possess ‘radical materialism’, ‘radical seclusion’ or, his favourite, ‘radical modernism’. In one essay he quotes Heidegger’s 1950 essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’: ‘“The art dealer looks after the market. The art-historical researcher turns the works into the objects of a science. But in all this many-sided activity do we ever encounter the work itself?” The answer, of course, is no.’ The same is to be said of this dense book, which takes each artist, from Marcel Duchamp to Anri Sala, merely as an opportunity to measure the strength of modernist ideology; everything, for Groys, is just an echo of Modernism’s attempts to break with history.

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The art-historical canon as we know it is a given: regular invocations of Kazimir Malevich, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol reinforce the author’s points. And make no mistake, this is a boys’ world: there is no Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to his Duchamp or Gabriele Münter to his Wassily Kandinsky; Rebecca Horn, Olga Chernysheva and Yael Bartana are the only woman artists to be written about in the dozens of artists featured here. The texts on Manzoni and IRWIN stand out as slightly more interesting angles on their subjects, by delving into an exploration of philosophical mundanity, in the first case, and in the second, introducing an unexpected personal note. By and large, though, these are a set of samey texts that don’t offer new perspectives on the artists discussed, but bolt them into and bolster a patriarchal art history. Chris Fite-Wassilak

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For more on Matti Hagelberg, see overleaf

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Contributors

Jonathan Griffin is a freelance writer and critic, born in London, currently living in Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor for Frieze and has written for various publications, including Art in America, Financial Times, Art Agenda, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Modern Painters, Tate Etc. His book On Fire, a survey of artists’ studio fires, was published in 2016 by Paper Monument. Here he writes about the politics in contemporary portraiture.

Karen Di Franco works as an archivist and curator, and is currently a PhD candidate with Tate Britain and the University of Reading. Recent projects include the exhibitions The sun went in, the fire went out: landscapes in film, performance and text, Chelsea Space, London (cocurated with Elisa Kay, 2016), Carlyle Reedy: Icons of a Process, Flat Time House, London (2014) and the development of the Book Works online archive and publication Again, A Time Machine (2010–12). In this issue, she writes about Lee Lozano.

Bridget McCarthy

Contributing Writers Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Barbara Casavecchia, Adeline Chia, Matthew Collings, Ashton Cooper, Kim Córdova, Karen Di Franco, Owen Duffy, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Stefanie Hessler, Sam Korman, I. Kurator, Jennifer Li, Maria Lind, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Bridget McCarthy, Ciara Moloney, Nicole O’Rourke, Heather Phillipson, Mark Prince, John Quin, Claire Rigby, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Laura Smith, Sam Steverlynck, Ben Street, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Mike Watson, Siona Wilson

Chris Fite-Wassilak is an editor at Phaidon Press in New York. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, in Evanston (IL), and a candidate for a masters in art history from Hunter College, New York. In a previous text for ArtReview she interviewed critic Calvin Tomkins about, among other things, his thoughts on Marcel Duchamp. In this issue she takes the pulse of the New York artworld at the beginning of the Trump era.

Contributing Editors is a writer, critic and curmudgeon based in London. He has been a practising cynic for 35 years. His short book of essays, Ha-Ha Crystal (2016), is published by Copy Press. In this issue he looks at the work of American artists who use cynicism as a form of resistance to corporate and mass culture. Ben Street

Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Matti Hagelberg, Anna Vickery

is a freelance art historian, museum educator and writer based in London. He lectures for the National Gallery, Christie’s Education and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, among other places. In this issue he reviews the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at Tate Modern, London.

Matti Hagelberg (preceding pages)

As his medium of choice, Finnish comics artist Matti Hagelberg favours British Scraperboard, in which, piece-by-piece, he carves light from darkness. When manufacturers Essdee replaced its boards with somewhat cheaper, thinner material, Hagelberg took it as an opportunity to energise his rather burdensome approach by incorporating marker pen into the process, allowing him to now add black. This faster, hybrid method, resulting in what he calls a “poor man’s Gustave Doré”, perfectly suited a new project, Läskimooses (2012). As he explains: “After drawing with marker for some issues, the style evolved into something less rough. And this brought out the series’ theme of evolution, from simple to complex.” What Hagelberg started as a ten-episode experiment set on Mars now numbers 34 issues of an expected 50, with perhaps 1,500 pages by the time it’s finished. Published by Kreegah Bundolo, each is a pulpy stapled black-and-white comicbook

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with a two-colour cover. “Serialising lets me play with the imagination of the reader,” he says. “There’s always something hidden, something untold, something yet to happen. Läskimooses is like this kaleidoscopic, ever-changing space of words and pictures, [which makes it] really hard to ‘consume’.” The initial spark for Läskimooses came from Hagelberg’s son, who on being tucked into bed one night told his father how he envisioned the beginning of the universe. With this as a spark, the story’s other early elements include a pseudoscientific prophecy regarding the ‘killer planet Nibiru’, allegedly heading for a collision with Earth, and Hagelberg’s childhood memories of reading the 1960s British comics oddity Mytek the Mighty, and one panel in particular, which showed people trapped inside the eponymous giant robot-ape’s chest. Hagelberg’s narrator is often out of frame and interrupted by others as he compulsively

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explains the universe. Some panels are abstract, as if confirming the narrator’s revelation that ‘knowledge came to me as images and first the images were geometrical shapes’. The writing, mostly in captions, has a mythic potency, building from one phrase to the next, as if intended to be preached aloud, an intentional echo, Hagelberg says, of phrasing in Finland’s epic poem Kalevala, in Samuel Beckett’s plays and in the five books of Moses. Hagelberg’s new Strip for ArtReview, conceived of as an addendum or deleted scene between two panels in issue 23, conveys some of this. Expansive and expandable, Läskimooses is part retro-neurotic science fiction, part outsider creation myth, part Finnish origin story, part oddball Gospel, part long-lost cosmogony, part alien encyclopaedia, part never-ending pulpy saga, part pithecophobia, part cultish evolutionary theory. And ultimately like nothing ever before seen in the medium. Paul Gravett

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on the cover Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger. Photo: Reuters / Alamy Stock Photo

Quotes on the spine and on pages 35, 61 and 95 are all from Roy Rogers, the second and third spoken by his characters in Bells of San Angelo (1947) and My Pal Trigger (1946) respectively

on page 132 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 136 Roy Rogers, 1940s. Photo: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo on page 142 illustration by Anna Vickery

March 2017

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A Curator Writes March 2017 “Edgar, I have an SMS message.” I poke my assistant in the ribs with my James Smith bark ash crook and shake my mobile telephone at him. Edgar, a bespectacled lad who didn’t click at the watch department of one of our less-esteemed auction houses, peers at it. I pick up my generous glass of 2014 Le Clous Poulsard. “It’s about some sort of event going on tomorrow,” he says. “Yes, I’ve got that,” I snap back at him. “My question is whether it is a must-visit. I hired you specifically to tell me what events and canapéand-cocktail receptions I need to go to in order to get my profile as a leading curator back. I used to think that my work as a curatorial adviser to De Opening at De Pont in 1992 would be ‘de opening’ for me. Instead, doors are closing, Edgar, closing!” I spin away from him in my swivel chair in disgust. I’m not sure my appointment of Edgar is working out, but to be honest, I didn’t have terribly many replies to the small classified advertisement for a PA that I placed at the back of Men’s Fitness magazine. After a couple hours of assiduous work on his large, handsome computer, Edgar comes back to me: “Well, Iwona Blazwick is definitely going, and from her Instagram feed it looks like Sarah McCrory is going to be there too.” I lower what’s now my fourth glass of the cheeky red with some interest. “I hear McCrory is on the rise,” I reply enigmatically. “That journalist Louisa Buck, too…” adds Edgar. “Right, well that’s splendid. I must go. I’ve always wanted to be prominent in ‘The Buck Stopped Here!’” “…the only thing is that this event is a Women’s March.” “Ah.” I am momentarily deflated. “But surely I can go along too? Solidarity with the sisters? I mean it worked for Victor Burgin for years! And I’ve long been a supporter of lady art: remember Wings of Courage, my 2012 group show for Bath & Baden in Basel? ‘Looking at Val Kilmer’s recent artmaking within the lineage of Jean Tinguely and Joan Miró?’” Edgar looks askance. “Well, the march is directed against the white patriarchy that is epitomised by Donald Trump, and you are, well…” He trails off. “Look,” he says after a while, “I’ll make you a placard. Something that recognises your own subjectivity and is also a well-known slogan. That’ll help you fit in.” Perhaps Edgar wasn’t such a bad choice. I drop off into a slumber and am equally troubled and aroused by dreams of angry ladies putting me in my place. The following day Edgar and I make our way to Green Park. I insist that Edgar follow me a few paces behind so that I don’t look too patriarchal. He carries a broomstick and a large plastic bag that contains the placard. The crowd is made up largely of ladies, but

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I am glad to see the occasional chap interspersed. When we get nearer Trafalgar Square, I gesture at Edgar. He produces the placard and, with remarkable dexterity, attaches it to the broomstick. I have no idea what slogan Edgar has chosen. I look at the ladies milling around me and wonder if he has referenced another great show I helped with, Punishment and Decoration, at Hohenthal und Bergen in Cologne in 1994. “Have you seen Iwona?” I hiss. “Or McCrory? It would be great if the Buck could see me with them!” “It’s difficult,” he replies. “I think that might be Frances Morris over there, but she’s not the tallest, to be honest…” “Just give me the fucking placard.” I grab it off him and manoeuver through the crowd. The whole thing reminds me somewhat of my fellow Dulwich College alumnus Jeremy Deller’s work Procession, albeit without the Scouts. The shorter lady who might or might not be Frances Morris keeps bobbing out of sight. I wave the placard around. “Jump, white man!” A few in the crowd start chanting. It must be something about that rogue Trump. There’s more shoving, and then oddly a few of the protesters start addressing the jump-white-man chant at me. I have no idea what’s going on. The woman who might or might not be Frances Morris has disappeared. I look up at the placard: White Men Can’t Jump?! I wonder if Edgar’s slogan refers to Bas Jan Ader’s unspeakably beautiful films of him falling off rooftops and into canals. Did our hopes as an international liberal democracy disappear when his boat was lost at sea? I look at Edgar. He’s making that silly sign with his hands that one uses in charades to signal that “it’s a film”. He must mean that the Buck is around with a film crew! I didn’t even know she had a film crew. I have to do something to grab her attention. Luckily the crowd is now baying at me. I hop from foot to foot. “Where’s Buck?” I mouth at Edgar. But now I can’t see Edgar. The crowd is building. “Jump, not hop! Jump, not hop!” the bevy of ladies chants. I look up at my placard and then back to the crowd. There’s only one way forward. I can do this. I can do this. I can jump. I think of Yves Klein. I hold on to the placard with my life. Leap, goddammit, Ivan, leap into the void. I bend at the knees and feel strength in my tensed backside. And then, with all the vigour I can summon, I leap forward and outward, experiencing a thunderous feeling of release while joyfully yelling, “Catch me!” I. Kurator

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