ArtReview March 2018 by ArtReview

“Nobody understands what ‘performance’ is today” Joan Jonas meets Liam Gillick

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

NEW YORK Laure Prouvost 138 Tenth Avenue

Dan Flavin

in daylight or cool white February 21–April 14, 2018

Stan Douglas February 22–April 17, 2018

alternate diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd), 1964 daylight and cool white fluorescent light 12 ft. (366 cm) long on the diagonal

David Zwirner New York

6th Floor, 2017

Stan Douglas DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout February 22–April 7, 2018

David Zwirner New York

Installation view, artist’s studio, 2018. Courtesy David Zwirner and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. Photo: Jens Ziehe © VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2018

Isa Genzken

Sky Energy

February 22–April 7, 2018

David Zwirner

New York

Adriano Costa wetANDsomeOLDstuffVANDALIZEDbyTHEartist Kölnischer Kunstverein Cologne, Germany 17/02 – 25/03 2018

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy Le Consortium Dijon, France 02/02 – 20/05 2018

Neïl Beloufa Palais de Tokyo Paris, France 15/02 – 13/05 2018

Mariana Castillo Deball To-day, February 20th SCAD Museum of Art Savannah, USA

Mend e s Wood DM

20/02 – 05/08 2018 Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66th Street, 2nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info @ mendeswooddm.com Image: Adriano Costa

ArtReview vol 70 no 2 March 2018

Danish, Faisal and Asgar When you’re writing this from India, as ArtReview is, form is something of an issue. From the form of the nation with all the languages (India has 780, second only to Papua New Guinea’s 839), cultures and races it incorporates, to the lands and peoples it thinks it should incorporate. And, perhaps right now, those it thinks it should not be incorporating. Is ‘Hindu’ a religion or a race? Can it have been used to designate a race and then have become a religion (something that India’s Supreme Court has been forced to legislate upon on more than one occasion)? Is the whole thing the fault of foreign conquerors, be it the Mughals or the British, who forcibly shaped the subcontinent into forms that are not native to the landscape or its peoples and simply weren’t previously there? Before you interrupt to howl “wassaneeothisgottadowivart” or mindlessly turn the page, ArtReview’s not bringing this up because it’s ‘gone native’, as they used to say (because, naturally, ArtReview is partly native to this part of the world – explanations saved for another time), or overdosed on William Dalrymple books; rather, it’s because form (in the sense of how we express ourselves, how we shape our societies, how we address other individuals within those societies and how we define individuals and collectives within those societies) is subject to many of the key debates of our times: from Trump–Weinstein America to Brexit Britain, neo-fascist Austrian governments (on which subject – fascists, not Austrian governments – check out Mike Watson’s article on the rise of the right in relation

Rules and regulations

to art later in this issue), the eu as a whole and… well, you get the point, if ArtReview carries on you’ll just suspect it’s trying to fill up this space by listing every aspect of our current global malaise. Look out for more things to worry about next month, but in terms of these pages, form is of interest as being one of the fundamental components of the visual arts. And, as such, the visual arts provide a platform upon which form can be pushed around, experimented upon and ultimately (or hopefully, to be more honest about the whole thing) reformulated, if you like. It’s for that reason that the cover of this issue is devoted to one of our greatest living artists, Joan Jonas. And perhaps it’s also why ArtReview asked another great artist, Liam Gillick, both to interview his fellow creator and to shape her presence on the cover itself. For the past several years, Jonas has pursued a uniquely animate form, a form that flows both through traditional mediums, such as sculpture, drawing and performance, and through any holistic view of planet Earth: as a unity of humans and nonhumans, where one component of the planetsphere is intricately connected to the next. (Before you say it, ArtReview isn’t trapped in an ashram or some hippy commune that the past 50 years forgot; it’s in a microhotel next to a 24-hour market and is writing this because it can’t sleep: its travel agent described it as ‘authentic’, and you all know that ArtReview is a sucker for that.) So, as ArtReview settles down to the next instalment of Gangs of Wasseypur in the hope that this one will finally put it to sleep, it’s going to leave you with an issue that looks at how rigid form might be broken and a more fluid dynamics might make the world a more interesting place. (Granted, you need to extrapolate for that, but hey – you can’t expect ArtReview to do all the work!) Shhh, now: Danish, Faisal and Asgar are off to retrieve the body of their father, Sardar Khan… ArtReview

Choice

Fred Wilson Afro Kismet March 23 – April 28, 2018

6 Burlington Gardens

LONDON

July 10 – August 17, 2018

510 West 25th Street

NEW YORK

GRACE SCHWINDT Silent Dance

MICHAËL BORREMANS Sixteen Dances

September 3 - October 14, 2017

March 7 - April 28, 2018

ZENO X GALLERY Godtsstraat 15 2140 Antwerp Belgium +32 3 216 16 26 www.zeno-x.com

ZENO X GALLERY

GODTSSTRAAT 15 2140 ANTWERP BORGERHOUT BELGIUM INFO@ZENO-X.COM WWW.ZENO-X.COM

Bjarne Melgaard

Bodyparty (SuBStance paintingS) curated By julia peyton-joneS london March 2018 ropac.net

Outrageous Fortune JAY DEF E O A N D S U R R E A L I SM

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH 534 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK WWW.MIANDN.COM MARCH 1 – APRIL 7, 2018

Francesco Gennari Greetings from the Moon March 16 – April 14, 2018

Ceal Floyer March 16 – April 14, 2018

Potsdamer Strasse 81E D – 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com

KARLA BLACK

LUKE FOWLER

February 17 – April 14, 2018 Capitain Petzel, Berlin

The Armory Show, New York 8 — 11 March 2018 Booth #306 TEFAF, Showcase 9 — 18 March 2018 Booth S4

41 & 43 Maddox St. W1S 2PD London, UK

Corso di Porta Nuova 46/B 20121 Milano, IT

Via Frasca 5 6900 Lugano, CH

here and beyond, 2017. Oil on canvas, 140 × 200 cm (detail). Courtesy: Cortesi Gallery. Photo: Markus Muehlheim, Bildkultur, Bern, Switzerland

Cortesi Gallery London Angela Lyn, floating gardens 2 March — 10 May 2018 Opening day 1 March

www.cortesigallery.com info@cortesigallery.com

Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 29

Jonathan Meese Interview by Ross Simonini 44

Under the Paving Stones: Berlin by John Quin 37

Art Featured

Joan Jonas Interview by Liam Gillick 64

Tom Burr by Sam Korman 80

Irredeemable Form by Mike Watson 74

page 34 Judith Hopf, Lily’s Laptop (still), 2013, video, 4 min 50 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, and Kaufmann Repetto, Milan & New York

March 2018

Art Reviewed

Kathleen White, by Cat Kron Liz Magor, by Sam Korman Dreams of Solentiname, by Jeppe Ugelvig Survival Research Laboratories, by Aaron Horst John Bock, by Caroline Elbaor

exhibitions 90 Man Ray, by Jonathan Griffin Tomma Abts, by Mark Prince Tino Sehgal, by Oliver Basciano Sophie Calle, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel How It’s Made, by Stefanie Hessler The Electric Comma, by Barbara Casavecchia Ajay Kurian, by Moritz Scheper Evelyn Taocheng Wang, by Dominic van den Boogerd Otobong Nkanga, by Luke Clancy Gaylen Gerber, by Mike Watson Yan Pei-Ming, by Matthew McLean Larry Achiampong, by Richard Hylton Aaron Angell, by James Clegg Rachel Whiteread, by Louise Darblay Andreas Gursky, by Fi Churchman The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind, by Gabriel Coxhead

books 114 Avedon: Something Personal, by Norma Stevens and Steven M.L. Aronson Interviews on Art, by Robert Storr Calder, The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940, by Jed Perl yeah, by Tuli Kupferberg the strip 118 a curator writes 122

page 96 Daria Martin, Soft Materials (still), 2004, 16mm film, 10 min 30 sec (loop). Courtesy Kadist, Paris & San Francisco

ArtReview

MARCH 1ST – APRIL 7, 2018

JASON FOX BEWARE OF DARKNESS ALMINE RECH GALLERY BRUSSELS

2018/19 Chikako Yamashiro 15 March – 28 April 2018

Chim↑Pom 17 May – 7 July 2018

Aki Sasamoto 18 July – 4 August 2018

Taro Izumi

6 September – 10 November 2018

Meiro Koizumi

22 November 2018 – 12 January 2019

Mari Katayama 24 January – 2 March 2019

47 Mortimer Street London W1W 8HJ

white-rainbow.art +44 207 637 1050 Chikako Yamashiro, Seaweed Woman (2008). © Chikako Yamashiro, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Art Previewed

Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea 27

Previewed Affiliated with California’s neosurrealist assemblage scene from the 1950s onwards but a mystic-minded outrider even there, 1 Bruce Conner was determinedly elusive in life. He announced his own death twice, officially renounced art in 1999 and earlier operated under aliases including Emily Feather, bombhead and the Dennis Hopper One Man Show. Conner was also, as his recent resurrection within the artworld reflects, something of a visionary. He was a mocker of authorship who pseudonymously exhibited nineteenth-century engravings; his 1966 film Breakaway, featuring hyperactive dancing by Toni Basil, is considered the first music video; his 1975 Crossroads, 37 minutes of slow-motion

footage (soundtracked in part by Terry Riley) of the 1946 nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, remains bleakly mesmeric and is hardly his only film made from purloined imagery. A transformative out-of-body experience Conner had aged eleven gives its title to Bruce Conner: Out of Body, which focuses on his films but also includes photographs and works on paper, and which, as the artist might well have liked, you’ll venture to the Philippines to see. 2 Another adept of wilful difficulty, Lee Lozano is best known for quitting the artworld – she began Dropout Piece (1972) a year after she’d stopped speaking to women, also in the name of art – and staying quit until her death in the same year Conner announced his

retirement. But she was a supremely incisive and shapeshifting figure while remaining ‘in’, from her fluidly sexualised semiabstract canvases of the early 1960s through the more familiar, greyscale ‘Tool’ images that followed, with their overtones of gender inequality (and their origins in Lozano’s move to a studio ringed by industrial workshops). Her subsequent handwritten, conceptual instruction pieces, meanwhile, recorded bold experiments with drugs and unusual rules for social life. The show at Fruitmarket Gallery, anchored by four huge mid-60s paintings, covers the key phases of Lozano’s inquiry into containment and freedom, and brings to light previously unseen materials from the archives.

1 Bruce Conner, Breakaway (still), 1966, 16mm film transferred to video, b/w, sound, 5 min. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco. Courtesy Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

2 Page from Lee Lozano’s notes and ephemera, undated. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London

March 2018

Rising star Hardeep Pandhal has cornered (2018, showing simultaneously in the New the market in combining animation-driven, Museum Triennial) explores male fears of their environment, drawing on Charlotte Perkins rap-soundtracked videos with presentations of hand-knitted woollen jumpers. The backstory Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland, involving an allto these is cultural dislocation: Birminghamwomen society where conception happens via born, Pandhal is a British Sikh who doesn’t parthenogenesis, and Elaine Morgan’s aquatic speak the same language as his Punjabi mother, ape hypothesis, which recasts evolutionary and making the clothes creates a bond. This is theory by focusing on the female body. Vittorio Brodmann’s last gallery exhibialso work that balances a traditionally nonmas4 culine activity with the embroidered faces tion was titled Legs All Water, which figures: of American rap stars, and a darkly satirical the Swiss-born painter builds his chromatic, approach to the relationship between structural flowing, instinctively composed figurations racism and misogyny also underpins Pandhal’s on structural liquidity. In his older canvases, animations. So, too, do heterodox sources: faces and bodies dissolve into each other, for example, the new work Pool Party Pilot Episode social anxiety and claustrophobia and pleasure

implicitly melding; more recently, Brodmann has liquefied his aesthetic further. Contours melt as the artist picks up acrylic, gouache and charcoal rather than oils, his figures becoming misty hints and colours phasing into watery pastel that should suit this latest show’s Los Angeles context nicely. Brodmann’s art, which fuses soft lyrical abstraction, Surrealism and echoes of cartoons, perhaps ought to be anachronistic in an increasingly dematerialised reality. But, via old-school media, he catches something of the texture of our moment – the sense of entering, or even being outside of, a perpetual flow of fragmentary information – without being wearyingly doctrinaire about it.

3 Hardeep Pandhal, Pakiveli Mixtape Cover Art, 2017, India ink, gouache, chalk, wood, enamel, 44 × 36 × 2 cm. Courtesy the artist

4 Vittorio Brodmann, Again, 2017, watercolour, acrylic, oil, lacqer and charcoal on canvas, 200 × 170 cm. Courtesy the artist and Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles & Paris

ArtReview

6 Michael Raedecker, public, 2017, acrylic, transfer and thread on canvas, 158 × 224 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Grimm, Amsterdam & New York

5 Mathilde Rosier, Blind Swim 14, 2016–17, oil on canvas, 200 × 110 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan

Shuttling between painting, set design-like pointe emerging unnervingly from skirtsis working out on canvas. If he never fully knows sculpture, video and performative elements, cum-shells and the consistency of the artist’s what he’s returning to, nor can we; what’s clear, concerns signalling ongoing private compulsion. though, is that he’s endlessly removed from 5 Mathilde Rosier nevertheless regularly stalks a line between reality and warped fairytales. Another painter who refuses to just paint, closure with his work in formal terms, balancing 6 Michael Raedecker has salient reasons: comforting familiarity with some unexpected In the French artist’s light-touch paintings, humans merge with animals, or sprout abstract new twist (spacious, near-abstract composiin a recent interview he pointed out that his trademark use of embroidery places him right protuberances. Over the last couple of decades tional reduction; portraiture; a combinatory Rosier has built more angles on her oeuvre, up against the canvas, whereas painting keeps approach to his motifs). Even in coming back though as if while forever inhabiting another the artist a brush’s length away. The distinction to the Netherlands for this show, you suspect time: resembling childhood, but conveying might seem odd were it not for how deeply the Raedecker won’t feel to have reached home. no safe return to its certainties. In Rosier’s last Dutch painter, long since resettled in London, Pakistan’s first major presentation of Milan show, dancers spun both in drawings and inhabits his work: his motifs of ominous7 contemporary art, the 1st Lahore Biennale, looking houses and interiors, often in moody has faced a rocky road to realisation. After some on video; painted heads became conches. From pre-events were launched in 2016 and an open hues of blue and grey, always seem to arise from what we’ve seen, in the current one the emphasis psychological unsettlement that Raedecker call for submissions was announced in early appears again on painting, with balletic legs en

March 2018

8 Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2017, production still. Courtesy the artist

9 T.J. Wilcox, The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich, 2017, Duratrans print on lightbox, 115 × 153 cm. Courtesy the artist and vnh Gallery, Paris

considering ‘the conditional relationships 2017, later last year the inaugural artistic 8 fictional gallery Reena Spaulings, Carissa Rodriguez dwells on infrastructural concerns: between artist, artwork, and third-party agents director, Rashid Rana, announced that he was stepping down after differences of opinion (institution, caregiver, surrogate) in familial the mechanics of art’s distribution, presentation, valuation. Opposed to creating ‘signature with the biennale’s foundation. By December, terms’: the evolved social dynamics of the though, the event was back on the rails, with objects’, she tends to favour antiauratic remove 9 artworld, and the laws that underpin them. noted Pakistani academics, novelists and archiand, more recently, veer pointedly about: We like to check in on T. J. Wilcox every previous shows have involved photos of her few years, because he’s usually doing something tects joining the advisory committee. At the time of writing, it’s still on, albeit with no artist list own work in private collections, more recently, unexpected, even while favouring 8mm and 16mm film. He’s made, for example, tender and announced and the organisation still looking a project about how the ostensible transformapoetic collagelike studies of historical figures to hire ‘designers’. Fingers crossed, as the biention of the Bay Area relates to technology and creativity. In Rodriguez’s first New York museum and a 360-degree panorama of the view from nale’s goal – establishing Pakistan as a known site of contemporary art production – is perhaps show, and similarly to how a 2013 exhibition took his Manhattan studio (In the Air, 2013) relating unlikely to go ahead swiftly otherwise. its cues from La Collectionneuse, a 1967 film related to nineteenth-century ‘cinema in the round’ Perhaps unsurprisingly for a multitasking to art by Éric Rohmer, her new work The Maid presentations. As for pointers towards what takes a cinematic approach to sculpture, artist who directed the collectively authored he’ll do here, his last London show, at Sadie

ArtReview

ANTOINE ERTASKIRAN

1892 RUE PAYETTE, MONTRÉAL CANADA +1 514 989 7886 ANTOINEERTASKIRAN.COM

Coles hq , in 2017, suggested his retrospective gaze was turning somewhat on himself, and on his plush connections: it included a film from 1998 concerning the English aesthete Stephen Tennant (as considered by his great-niece, model Stella Tennant), plus filmic portraits of fabled London chef Fergus Henderson and New York jeweller John Reinhold, the former filmed in Scotland, the latter built on dozens of hours of telephone conversations and interjections by Debbie Harry and Marc Jacobs. Five years ago Judith Hopf cast a small 10 flock of concrete sheep from home-moving

boxes, completing them with sticklike legs and cartoonish faces. The unspoken word hanging over Flock of Sheep (2013), perhaps inevitably, was ‘sheeple’, given its precising of human acquiescence to relocating wherever, suckered by neoliberalism’s lauding of mobility. As such and also for their downbeat humour and empathy, Hopf’s blocky ruminants exemplify the Karlsruhe-born artist’s practice, which since the 1990s has tracked contemporary society’s homogenising demands on body and soul. This institutional show in her adopted city, Berlin, leans on her pivotal series of perverse

red-brick works, cemented and then sanded into the shape of hands, feet, basketballs, suitcases, robots and more – though these evocations of pliant malleability here occupy, we’re told, ‘an intermediary position that fluctuates between sculpture and (exhibition) architecture’. Expect, too, some of Hopf’s laptop sculptures – angular, recumbent, semifigurative geometric sculptures from whose midpoint a screenlike shape pokes up, body and machine fused – plus a new film and a commission for kw’s facade. We’d say go along; but hey, you’re not sheep. Martin Herbert

10 Judith Hopf, up, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Luca Meneghel. Courtesy Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano

1 Bruce Conner Bellas Artes Projects, Manila 24 February – 24 May

4 Vittorio Brodmann Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles 4 March – 21 April

8 Carissa Rodriguez Sculpture Center, New York through 2 April

2 Lee Lozano The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 10 March – 3 June

5 Mathilde Rosier Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan 14 March – 5 May

9 T.J. Wilcox vnh Gallery, Paris 15 March – 28 April

3 Hardeep Pandhal Cubitt, London through 8 April

6 Michael Raedecker Grimm, Amsterdam 10 March – 14 April

10 Judith Hopf kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin through 15 April

7 1st Lahore Biennale 18–31 March

ArtReview

Angel VergArA Axel Vervoordt Gallery participating at The Armory Show with a solo show of Angel Vergara March 8 – 11, 2018, stand 505

Axel VerVoordt GAllery www.axelvervoordtgallery.com

Lygia Pape: Ttéia 1,C 2.2–13.5 2018 Lygia Pape, Ttéia 1,C, 2003/2012 © Projeto Lygia Pape, courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Paula Pape.

Under the Paving Stones

In Berlin, forever changes words and images by John Quin

the federal elections of 2017: the left still controls what was East Berlin, the centre-right the West. Apart from voters in the outer eastern suburbs, nearly everyone here regards the far-right Alternative für Deutschland as beyond the pale. Berlin’s concerns are different; it is not Germany in the same way that London is not Brexit Britain and New York City is not Trump’s America. But if the politics have remained fundamentally unaltered, the city’s infrastructure is in permanent flux. Berlin is persistently, as Karl Scheffler wrote in Berlin – The Fate of a City (1910), a place ‘condemned always to be becoming but never to be’. The Wall is gone, but cranes remain ubiquitous. Currently under construction, there’s the new U-Bahn extension (U5) buried beneath Unter den Linden and the Rem Koolhaas-designed hq for press giant Axel Springer. These days the city isn’t the ‘poor-but-sexy’ art factory so beloved of groovy ex-mayor Klaus Wowereit. There’s money now, as evidenced in the enormous converted bunker where the grandiloquent Boros Collection resides. But what about the smaller galleries, those fabled gems, sharp as diamonds, in which the facets of the cutting edge were constantly polished?

top The after party above Future Axel Springer hq , under construction on Unter den Linden

Construction time again The streets remain a sump in the aftermath of psychotic pyrotechnical New Year’s celebrations. Spent rockets like discarded cigar stubs litter the pavements along with shards of smashed glass. Empty green bottles of yellow-labelled Veuve Clicquot rest beside old statues of Marx and Engels: the markers of ideological opposites sitting together in an uneasy truce. The Berlin Wall, astonishingly, has now been down for a longer time than it was up. More than 28 years have passed since the 155km Antifaschistischer Schutzwall – the so-called Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart – separated the city into two halves. So what has changed? Everything and nothing. Gentrification means there are fewer buildings pockmarked with shrapnel wounds, but look at the electoral map of the city following

March 2018

above Jarosław Kozłowski’s Green Wall, 1982/2017, at Zak/Branicka

Eastern promise Little remains of the old Wohnzimmer – ‘living-room’ – scene of the early 1990s. This centred on Auguststrasse, now upscale, as slick as the tango dancers at Clärchens Ballhaus. As part of the Boros effect, there are affluent collector depots, such as Me Collectors Room, home to Thomas Olbricht’s hoard. Olbricht, an endocrinologist, has a broad collection spanning genres and epochs that includes a selection of contemporary German greats such as Gerhard Richter and Thomas Demand. Currently on show is a terrific loan from the National Gallery of Australia that chimes with his eclectic treasury – a selection of works by indigenous peoples. Gifted colourists abound here, such as the late Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, whose Untitled (Rain Dreaming at Nyunmanu) (1994) has the dizzyingly optical impact of a Bridget Riley or Chris Ofili. Up the road is Pauly Saal, a restaurant favoured by the local art crowd, with Murano chandeliers and sculptures by Daniel Richter and Cosima von Bonin. All of this a far cry from the days when Leipzig’s Gerd Harry Lybke opened his then modest Eigen + Art outpost on this street. At kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Lucy Skaer uses high-production values to create sculptures that reference medieval hunting scenes, as with La Chasse (2017). Elsewhere there are Moroccan rugs and interlinked tables in One Remove (2016), a work that, we learn, responds to the abstract qualities of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931) – which makes one fear that Auguststrasse might smugly mutate into a twee outpost of Bloomsbury. Parallel, on Linienstrasse, is Neugerriemschneider and the large linen wall-weavings of Andreas Eriksson, among them Weissensee no1 (2017). The woody browns evoke the Swedish forest; laboriously constructed, they imply serious

above Detail of a wall weaving by Andreas Eriksson, at Neugerriemschneider below Jill Mulleady, Self Portrait, 2017, at Galerie Neu

northern graft. Up the street you buzz your way into a Hof where an old ddr block now serves as Galerie Neu. Here there’s a typically cryptic group show called in search of characters… inspired by artist Philippe Thomas and his exhibition at New York’s Cable Gallery in 1987. Imagine a corporate agency that flogs furniture as readymades. One of Klara Lidén’s trashaesthetic constructions is included, a Styrofoam sofa – Untitled (Quando in Roma) (2017). Here too is a memorable oil painting by Jill Mulleady, Self Portrait (2017), an angry slice of pained Woolfean domesticity showing a kitchen sink stuffed with things needing a wash-up, plus a pink rubber glove, a green scouring brush.

The landscape is changing

above Ahmet Öğüt’s The Swinging Doors, Germany Edition, 2009, at kow

Near Rosenthaler Platz, which is now a noisy hub of hostels for young travellers, kow is showing Ahmet Öğüt’s Hotel Résistance, a laconically smart series of political gestures. There’s a print photo of Angela Davis that those cool kids can freely walk off with, nodding to Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Let’s imagine you steal this poster (2016). This is followed by scale models of houses due for demolition but whose owners have blocked such plans, as with Pleasure Places of All Kinds, Zurich (2017) – a four-storey building with typical Swiss gables isolated on a mound of earth, surrounded by excavations. The videoworks downstairs are accessed through The Swinging Doors, Germany Edition (2009), a gate made from police riot-shields.

ArtReview

On the broad expanse of Karl-Marx-Allee is Capitain Petzel. Here, where Russian tanks once parked (replaced today by furniture outlets like Bo Concept), is Stephen Prina’s As He Remembered It, a show inspired by memories of a storefront at night in Los Angeles. Another fake showroom interior, then; another jibe at materialism made with manicured materials. Shiny, pink, planklike objects recall John McCracken. Berlin’s artworld now seems obsessed with the West’s decline and fall as seen through the prism of consumer excess. Just off Unter den Linden is the Schinkel Pavillon, where there are two displays. Oliver Laric’s Panoramafreiheit features work based on Max Klinger’s imperious Beethoven monument (1902). Laric has constructed his tribute out of 17 separate 3d-printed components. They look oddly like those Chinese ice-sculptures from the festival held every winter in Harbin. Prepared to distrust the other show at the Schinkel, of Eliza Douglas’s paintings (given the hype surrounding her collaborations with Anne Imhof), I was in fact tickled by it. In Old Tissues Filled with Tears, Douglas, with her scatter of disarticulated arms and a delirious Cookie Monster, succeeds in lightly amusing.

top Entrance to Schinkel Pavillon above Oliver Laric’s Panoramafreiheit, 2017, at the Schinkel Pavillon above Reproduction Hohenzollern Palace, under construction below Stephen Prina’s As He Remembered It, 2017, at Capitain Petzel

The Brits (and Belgians) are coming Round the corner, the former Palast der Republik is just a memory, while the Hohenzollern Palace is being rebuilt and awaits Neil MacGregor’s tutelage. On Museum Island there is a new Pergamon entrance being completed, but the city is asking, with increasing desperation: is there enough money to finish the renovation job? That evening we take in a dance event at the Volksbühne under its new boss, ex-Tate Modern director Chris Dercon. Fears that the radical line favoured previously at the venue will be ditched for a more mainstream approach may prove justified if the ropey performance of Jerôme Bel’s The show must go on was anything to go by. A bloke at the foot of the stage sticks pop songs on a cd player. We get Every Breath You Take (1983) by The Police while a line of ‘dancers’ stand still and stare at us. I imagine that the avid theatre-lovers of the East are keeping a beady eye on Dercon. They’re thinking: I’ll be watching you.

By the Wall Nothing symbolises persistent tension in Berlin as does the junction of Axel-Springer-Strasse and Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. The Springer

ArtReview

The West is the best? After many years of mouldering, West Berlin is staging something of a comeback. Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin has re-relocated to Charlottenburg. The photography gallery c/o has also moved from the East and is now at the Amerika Haus, hard by Zoo Station. Here Joel Meyerowitz’s photographs remind us that America’s best days may be past. And at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a revisionist show (comprising as much documentation as artworks) on the Cold War period reminds us of the city’s schismatic inheritance, and sticks it to the cia for its (massive and global) interference in the arts. Finding Edition Block is a challenge – the opening of K.P. Brehmer’s retrospective prodding at capitalist realism involves the intriguing sight of gallerist and supermarket heir Alex Sainsbury singing the praises of the late Mark Fisher. There’s still old money here in Charlottenburg, with its gleaming cafés named after George Grosz, the locals indifferent to his scabrous Weltanschauung. The Wall is long gone, but the city still tries to make sense of its mutability. Michael Hoffmann’s new translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), with its theme of urban metamorphosis, is therefore most timely. John Quin is a writer based in Brighton and Berlin

top Cognitive dissonance at the junction of Axel-Springer-Strasse and Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse above Isa Genzken’s Nefertiti, part of her Issie Energie, 2017, at König Galerie

newssheets were said to encourage the targeting of the student movement leader Dutschke before he was shot in 1968. The rightwing press conglomerate wallows in its hollow victory with its aforementioned extension opposite the brilliantly elegant curves of Erich Mendelsohn’s Mosse building. Across the road at Zak/Branicka is Jarosław Kozłowski’s Green Wall (1982/2017) – a polemical work, particularly when sited hard by the old Wall and the Springer empire. The artist’s News Games (2014), appropriately located in the press district, is a line of 17 bags of yesterday’s papers brightened by splatterings of paint in all the colours of the rainbow. Further along Lindenstrasse, the Jewish Museum has a large green road sign at its entrance announcing, confusingly, Welcome to Jerusalem. This proves to be a brilliantly balanced exhibition about the city, and a real curatorial gamble given Trump’s recent pronouncement on its status as capital of Israel. Yael Bartana’s video Inferno (2013) dramatises the destruction of the temple (specifically that of Solomon, in São Paulo) and finishes the show with a hard slap of sobriety. At the Berlinische Galerie, Jeanne Mammen’s pungently decadent Weimar drawings square off against the leather-clad sculptural shenanigans of Monica Bonvicini; the latter artist gets spanked. Over in the brutalist church space of König Galerie, Isa Genzken shows more of her showroom dummy mutations. More sneering at shopping, then, this time costarring one of the artist’s familiar copies of the Pergamon’s Nefertiti, here looking glam in shades.

ArtReview

above Suzanne Treister’s 30-work commission for Parapolitics, 2017, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt below Welcome to Jerusalem, 2017, at the Jewish Museum

Eduardo Paolozzi, Pop Art Redefined (Lots of Pictures – Lots of Fun), Ausschnitt, 1971 © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

Eduardo Paolozzi, Pop Art Redefined (Lots of Pictures – Lots of Fun), Detail, 1971 © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

09.02.–28.05.2018

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Interview

Jonathan Meese “I am suffering from reality, not Art” by Ross Simonini

Jonathan Meese with his mother, 2017. Photo: Jan Bauer. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

An excerpt from Jonathan Meese’s correspondence with Ross Simonini for this interview. Courtesy Jonathan Meese

March 2018

Jonathan Meese usually refers to himself in the third person, as if he were a character in the wild and tumultuous opera of his art. He is, of course, the protagonist, but there are plenty of supporting roles: Wagner, Hitler, Napoleon, Nero, Nietzsche and an ever-present, ever-erect phallus. Through sculptures, paintings, performances, videos and writing, the Berlin- and Hamburg-based Meese has built a nightmarish world of power-hungry European men. It’s a place of crude, juvenile figuration and German military iconography. In Meese’s paintings, which are at the centre of his work, colours smear and simmer together in an energetic maelstrom that is both brutal and chromatically stunning. For the artist, his entire project is one great deadpan farce. Meese is aggressively reappropriating the propaganda of the oppressor, draining any power that its language or imagery may hold. In this way, he sees his work as a denouncement of all ideology, political, religious or otherwise. He’s creating a visual manifesto of antiauthority, of true uninhibited freedom. He wants to be like an adolescent rolling around in the mud, and so it seems right that, for many years, his mother has served as his studio assistant. To break down the systematic thinking around him, Meese embraces contradiction. In his ‘dictatorship of art’ he is not the dictator – art is – but the agitator, the trickster, the spectacle. During performances, he has worn a bicorne, fellated an alien doll and given the Nazi salute, an illegal act in Germany for which Meese was tried and acquitted in 2013. (‘Art has triumphed!’ he said in response.) In February 2017 he called Donald Trump ‘the greatest performer on this planet right now, second only to myself’, a statement that manages to simultaneously mock and embody megalomania. His work is unabashedly slathered with his own image, and yet he is never the hero, always the fool. Meese’s critique of German history is potent, but he’s also provincial in his interests. His painting clearly emerges out of German traditions, from the Expressionism of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde to the New Fauves of the 1980s, and many of the artists working in this same lineage – Jörg Immendorff, Albert Oehlen, Daniel Richter and Tal R – have been his regular collaborators. If Meese has an ultimate goal, it seems to be the long-sought German one: the totalised, multidisciplinary artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk. For the following interview, I emailed questions and he responded in scrawled responses, mostly legible. The handwritten text, often stylised in all caps and punctuated by exclamation marks, echoed the same statements squeezed from paint tubes onto his paintings. In videos of the artist, he speaks

mostly at the top of his lungs, and even on paper he seems to be overflowing with the vehemence of a child playing an imaginary game of war. ross simonini How do you define ideology? jonathan meese Ideology is an invention of adult brains. Ideology is taste, not necessity. In nature there is no ideology. Children have no ideology. Objects have no ideology. Ideology is something that children are taught. Animals have no ideology, ideology seems to be only a need for adults. Every political system is ideological, so is religion, spiritualism, esoteric or self-fulfilment. Ideology consists of institutionalised thinking and behaviour. Ideology is always a devil circle of unnecessary activities. Ideology is never Art. Art is always totally free and absolutely contrary to ideological stupidity. Ideology is the worst obstacle against the future. Art destroys all ideologies. Art is the leader.

“Art is the future. Art is the room of future. Artists should work in their ateliers without disturbances. Artists should be hermetic! Artists should only trust in Art, not policies. Art is not another political system, Art is stronger than all politicians. Art is no anarchy. Art is Total Order. Art is the Total Order of the future. Art is the most radical future! (Art is Total Love. Art is Total Respect)” Art overcomes all ideologies. Art says no to all politicians. Art rules. Art leads and Art takes over! The ‘dictatorship of Art’ is the leadership of evolution: ideology is always the enemy of evolution. Art is the sum of all evolutions. rs But do you think people can truly escape ideology? jm Jonathan Meese has always successfully escaped ideology by playing. Playing like a child is the answer to all ideological influences. An artist has to play away all ideological indoctrination. Artists have to keep away from all ideological terror. Ideology is always the room of fear. Artists have to stay away from fear or even have to destroy these cynical rooms. In Art censorship is forbidden, especially self-censorship. Obedience to ideological concepts is deadly for art. Art is the future. Art is the room of future. Artists should work in their ateliers without disturbances. Artists should be hermetic! Artists should only trust in Art,

ArtReview

not policies. Art is not another political system, Art is stronger than all politicians. Art is no anarchy. Art is Total Order. Art is the Total Order of the future. Art is the most radical future! (Art is Total Love. Art is Total Respect.) rs So isn’t ideology just a natural human state? jm My mother and I fight daily over this question. She believes that ideology is inherent in human life. I think it is not. Children and babies are already human beings and do not need ideology… that need comes later. Why? Ideology seems to be a weapon of adults. These ‘teachers’ hammer ideology into the brains of the young, and I don’t accept this. My mother violently disagrees and thinks that human beings need ideologies to survive in a hostile world. She is eighty-seven years old and experienced a lot of ideological movements. Jonathan Meese truly awaits a world without ideologies. That will be the evolutionary step of total radicalism into a world of total Art. The ‘dictatorship of Art’ is the guarantee for survival. Art has no cynical aspects. Art is always the future. Art is the master. rs How does working with your mother affect your process? jm My mother is a natural authority. I did not ‘vote’ for her! My mother is chief, chief of evolution. My mother is not a God! My mother evolutionises Jonathan! My mother brings order into my life and my atelier! My mother disagrees with my visions but in the end she knows that something new must evolve. Dispute is totally necessary for future! Art is dispute, not discourse. Art is mother ‘Earth’. rs Do you think education is possible without ideology? jm Yes. Education itself is never ideological as long as there is no message, indoctrination or other political or religious influences! The education that leads to future allows children to play and learn without ideology. Ideology is always the jail of the past. Art is total freedom. In Art all ideological devil circles are destroyed. Evolution shows that we are not the masters but the children of the future. Evolution is the teacher of Art! Art is the education of nature. Art is total metabolism! Art is the pressure of the future. All children are artists. All Art lovers are Artists. Nature is Art. rs Why do you capitalise ‘Art’? jm Art is not God. Art stands above everything else. Art is the sum of all evolutions. In Art nobody has to kneel down, nobody has to pray and nobody has to make a pilgrimage. Art is no temple. Art is no holy ground.

zukunftssoldat ‘i.’, 2016, oil and acrylic on canvas, 211 × 140 cm. Photo: Jan Bauer. Courtesy the artist and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

March 2018

rs So why call it a dictatorship of art? jm The name ‘dictatorship of Art’ means the total declaration of total love towards Art. Art is like love, like friendship, like future, like mother, like father. Art is therefore not democratic but an evolutionary process! Art is, like the sun, a dictator, but an objective dictator, not an ideological one. rs Is visual art well suited to rejecting ideology? jm When people play, they serve Art, when people live in ideological systems and obey them, they are against Art. People have to free themselves from all ideological brainwashing! Ideology is the enemy of future. Ideological persons are brainwashed and brainwashers. Visual Art, like all Art is the guarantee for Evolution and Future. rs Do you think of yourself as working in the lineage of Joseph Beuys, who declared everyone an artist? jm Beuys became political in his later years. He suddenly trusted politics more than Art. Art is no political party. Art is no politician. Art survives. Politics vanish. Art is the counter reality. Art is the dreamland. Art is the

antireality. Art is total future. Art says no to all nostalgic governments. Artists never trust politicians. Artists should never follow ideology! Artists should work constantly in their ateliers. Artists should not believe too much in cultural networking. Artists should love lovely isolation in their ateliers. Artists are loners!

“Evolution is the teacher of Art! Art is the education of nature. Art is total metabolism! Art is the pressure of the future. All children are artists. All Art lovers are Artists. Nature is Art”

In these collaborations we are totally even but not democratic. We do what is necessary. In Art, real friendship is needed, but it takes a long time to develop. Art is family business! Art is the exchange of respect! In Art you need patience! Art is the chain of loners! Daniel Richter, Tal R and Jonathan Meese are children of Art and play Art. Art is the total game and Artists are toys! rs Is it true that you refuse to fly to exhibitions? jm Yes. I don’t want to fly any more because I want to slow down, concentrate on my work in the studio and let the art travel. Art is not the artist. I am not afraid of flying. I just don’t want to be available all the time and everywhere.

rs Do you consider yourself a loner? What about your recent collaborations with Daniel Richter and Tal R?

rs Evolution and future are clearly two key concepts for you. Evolution is an idea from science, which is of course its own ideology, and future is a construct. Aren’t these adult ideas?

jm Normally, I am a total loner and love to work on my own in my studio. Daniel Richter and Tal R are very, very old and close friends, and I trust them totally, so cooperation with them is no problem. We are three captains whose ships meet occasionally on the high seas of Art.

jm Future is no problem for babies, animals or objects. Future seems to be only a problem for grown-up people, only ideological brains produce future problems. Children just play into the future. Future is no ideological construct for children or objects. Evolution happens

Daniel Richter, Tal R and Jonathan Meese photographed for their group exhibition The Men Who Fell from Earth, 2017, Holstebro Kunstmuseum. Photo: Jan Bauer. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

without human interference. The only relevant question is: do we fear future or look forward to it? For an artist, future is the chief. An artist should never fear future. Evolution is Art. Art is Evolution. Evolution is future. Evolution is not revolution. We need people who serve evolution, not revolution. Evolution is not based on ideology. Revolution is always based on ideology. Nature needs no revolution. Only adult ideological brains produce revolution. Art is number 1! Art is the law! Art is the sum of all evolutions. Art is hermetic action. In art you don’t illustrate nowadays, you play future! Artists should never react on political day-to-day developments. Art is stronger than politics. Artists should never behave like politicians. Artists are baby animals. Artists are not left- or rightwing! Artists have no political ideologies. Artists doubt reality. Artists deny reality. Artists cannot serve reality. Artists are radical dreamers.

connected to the world. I am suffering from reality, not Art. I fight against all ideologies because I am not cynical. I am not a religious prophet. Meese cannot live in the woods just looking at his own navel. As an Artist you love Art and Art will change the world and rule the world. I love the total power Art, I know that only Art is the government of the future. I cannot hide away because this would only be self-fulfilment! Art expands… Art is no lifestyle. Meese is no prophet but Meese takes responsibility! Meese sees failure and points at these wounds. I have to play against all Art enemies. Art is the most fascinating neverending power of all. Art is the perpetual mobile. Art created everything. Art is the beginning with no end! Art is total Parsifal. Art rescues from reality!

jm Meese needs a uniform to protect himself against reality! I need a totally organised daily routine to be radical in Art. Everything in my life is structure, therefore I can totally concentrate on welcoming future. My home is my castle. My home is Art. Your home is Art. Everybody’s home is Art. We need to be based in our own homes. Art is as close as the point of your nose. Art is not far away. Very important! I wear Adidas because the three stripes frame the body and protect it. I love Adidas because it is simple, effective, not so expensive and practical. ‘Black’ is a very neutral colour and the opposite of white. White is too holy for me and too delicate. To wear a kind of Art-Uniform makes life easy. Artists should be radical in Art, not in real life. Reality should be banned and Art should take over. Art is Art!

rs When did this anti-ideology position begin for you? jm No ideological adult ever injected the ideological juice into my brain. Meese’s brain is too well protected.

rs Why do you exhibit at all? Why work with the market or institutions or the Internet? Why not just play privately in your studio? jm Jonathan Meese is no monk! To work alone in your studio does not mean that you are not

rs Why do you wear an all-black Adidas uniform?

Work by Jonathan Meese is on view in Always Trust The Artist, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, through 17 March, and in die nackteste freiheit der kunst, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, 14 April – 12 May Ross Simonini is an artist, writer and musician based in Northern California

mondparsifal beta 9–23 (von einem, der auszog den ‘wagnerianern des grauens’ das ‘geilstgruseln’ zu erzlehren…), 2017, opera, Berliner Festspiele. Photo: Jan Bauer. Courtesy the artist

March 2018

National Gallery in Prague, Trade Fair Palace 16. 2. 2018 – 6. 1. 2019 ngprague.cz

KATHARINA GROSSE

Wunderbild

ON VIEW THROUGH AUG 12

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T HE FU T U R E O F C R AFT 2 CO L UMBUS CI R C L E , N Y C

IN A S S O C IA T IO N WIT H V IG O G A LLE R Y , LO N DO N V IG O G A LLE R Y . C O M • # V IG O G A LLE R Y

Major support for Derrick Adams: Sanctuary is provided by Exhibition Chairs Michael and Patti Dweck. Additional support is generously provided by Mike De Paola, Barbara T. Hoffman, Esq., Shari Siadat Loeffler and Nicholas Loeffler, The Paulsen Family Foundation, Ron and Ann Pizzuti, Barbara and Donald Tober, and George Wein. Derrick Adams is proudly represented in New York by Tilton Gallery. Community Engagement Partner: The Africa Center

Forthcoming Exhibitions FEATURING

HARRODSBURG BLACKPOOL STORY ROAD WALLAH MADE IN CHELSEA SHOREDITCH WILDLIFE AND INTRODUCING

WELL HEELED BOOK LAUNCH

supported by OLYMPUS

SCREENING ROOM A BBC4 documentary following Wallace as he ﬁnishes his Magnum Award winning Harrodsburg project, capturing the super-rich in one of London’s most exclusive postcodes.

DOUGIE WALLACE THE SERIES | 27 MARCH - 14 APRIL

DAVID ROYLE

Three Armchairs for Mr. M oil on canvas 2004

GIANLUCA PISANO

Icarus oil on canvas 2016

TWO PAINTERS LONDON - SARDINIA | 29 MAY - 16 JUNE 183-185 BERMONDSEY STREET (adjacent to White Cube) LONDON SE1 3UW TUESDAY-SATURDAY 11-6 telephone 0203 441 5152 abps@project-space.london www.project-space.london ARTISTIC DIRECTOR MIKE VON JOEL

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My Time Icon No. I: Polyptych Past – Present – Future Diptych Outer Gates: Terracotta Army Triptych Inner Gates: Hong Kong Stock Exchange Interior: 30 Robots in front of the Chinese flag Sculpture: H 235 cm x W 200 cm x D 80 cm

Hong Kong 27th March – 3rd April 2018 By Appointment Only Private view with the artist + 971501478316 info@antoniapiagordon.com www.antoniapiagordon.com

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February 10 – April 6, 2018 www.kunsthalltrondheim.no

Glasgow international 2018 20 April

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Ross Birrell, Joseph Buckley, Jamie Crewe, Jesse Darling, Graham Eatough & Stephen Sutcliffe, Cécile B Evans, Esther Ferrer, Duggie Fields, Urs Fischer, Lauren Gault & Sarah Rose, Michelle Hannah, Lubaina Himid, iQhiya Collective,

E. Jane, Sam Keogh, Kapwani Kiwanga, Mark Leckey, Linder, Rosie O Grady, Aniara Omann, Ulrike Ottinger, Mai-Thu Perret, Mick Peter, Ciara Phillips, John Russell, Tai Shani, Corin Sworn, Gary Zhexi-Zhang & many more

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Art Featured

So shall the sea be calm unto you 63

Joan Jonas meets Liam Gillick

preceding pages Reanimation, 2010/2012/2013, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Thomas Müller. © the artist / Artists Rights Society, New York / dacs, London. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

ArtReview

above Mirror Piece i, 1969, performance. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, 1972–73, multimedia performance. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

March 2018

They Come to Us without a Word (Mirrors), 2015 (installation view, us Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale). Photo: Moira Ricci. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Some subjects that Jonas Jonas has touched on over her 50-year career (in no particular order): nature, her dog, animism, Japanese Noh theatre, the moon and the sun, insects, masks (metaphorical and literal), ghosts, landscape, Hopi mythology, the female body, the female artist, the nature of presence versus representation, memory, her home in Cape Breton. Yet the artist never addressed this diverse range of interests directly. Instead they are filtered and reflected back and forth through the wide-ranging media she deploys, not least performance, drawing, film, video, sculpture and sound, often together in a single cacophonous installation. In Mirage, from 1976, the artist chalk-draws an image of the sun. She partially rubs it out, transforming the simple composition into a moon. The artist performs the same actions live, the blackboards left in the gallery in which the film of the action is installed. Over time Jonas has moulded a visual language that is shamanic, mystical and ecologically aware in equal measure. Her us Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, titled They Come to Us without a Word, took inspiration from the novels of Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness and other literary sources similarly concerned with the spiritual aspects of nature. As a survey of her work is set to open at Tate Modern, London, and her influence on younger generations is acknowledged in her appointment as a mentor in the Rolex protégé programme, Jonas spoke with fellow artist Liam Gillick in New York, who also took her portrait for the cover of this issue. liam gillick What’s difficult for some people to understand with your work is ‘What is a performance?’ and ‘What is an installation?’ In recent works you sometimes stand to the side of the stage manipulating objects. So it’s a strange role: like a performer one step removed. Does it matter that people might not know the difference between a performance or installation? Maybe a performance has to have you in it, or maybe it doesn’t? joan jonas So far it has. One of the difficulties in talking about my work is that I am referred to as a performance artist, and I don’t think it’s the right descriptive term. Because nobody understands what a performance is today. There are so many definitions out there that performance has become a meaningless word in relation to what I do and what other people do. lg Well, we are supposed to think it is radical. We are supposed to think it is good – that’s the recent idea – that performance is inherently good. Good and radical. jj I think of a performance as being live, with the performer appearing live in front of an audience. It is one of the underlying structures and mediums that I work with in combination with technology and handmade things.

For instance, when I am standing to the side in those performances and the video projection is dominating the space while I am working with the image on the table with a live camera, what I am really doing is manipulating and making images, and in a way I am performing with my hands. So, it is a performance because I am there, live on the stage. I came out of a sculptural background. lg You mean in terms of being in a studio and thinking, ‘How am I going to make something’, rather than starting from a theoretical position? jj Yes. I went to art school but I also studied art history. So, my concerns and references have been painting, film, writing, poetry, prose, literature. So, for me, when I was drawn to make live performances – inexplicably – I just couldn’t resist it because I could invent three-dimensional situations using all the different mediums: music, movement, visual elements, drawing…

“When the video projection is dominating the space while I am working with the image on the table with a live camera, what I am really doing is manipulating and making images, and in a way I am performing with my hands” lg There have certainly been moments in contemporary art history where the idea was to get rid of stuff. jj I am not a minimalist. When I started it was the time of Minimalism, and I had many friends who were minimalist sculptors and composers, and Minimalism was the language that interested me, and I was inspired by it and I learned a lot from it, but I think the structure was what I was able to observe and be interested in – how do you structure something? lg Yes, there is definitely something in the work like that. It’s like an invisible structural field – something to do with timing. And certain forms – like your use of cones and hoops, and maybe just the edge of the screen. There is something contained. There is some kind of geometric presence. jj Oh definitely, it has to be form: I really consider how something is formed, how something is structured. In Minimalism, even when I saw my first Sol LeWitt show at the Jewish Museum, I always saw a lot. I imagined a lot of content and elements beyond these cube structures.

March 2018

lg I remember seeing Robert Morris’s mirrored cubes as a child. And I remember the main thing that struck me – apart from the fact that there were these ‘special’ and ‘extra’ cubes in a gallery – was the view of people’s legs reflected in them. So, when you use so many points of reference and different elements in your work, I can’t tell if that gives a certain freedom or if it hides things. jj Some people would think it’s about hiding things, but it’s not at all. When I started doing my video performances – with the Organic Honey series [1972] – the first person to propose me for review was Jonas Mekas, because he came and he understood it, because it was like film in a way. Like a live film with video projections, and my performance was in relation to the technology of the video. So, I would say also that what bothers me about being called a performance artist as the main description is that in parallel I have always worked with video and other mediums. It is all a part of my language. lg It’s not just the framing or the sources that affect me but this idea that you are editing in real time. This act of editing interests me. It’s not just the framing of an idea but the chopping and cutting, breaking and interrupting. jj At the same time that I was looking at contemporary work and studying art history I was looking at film – going to Anthology Film Archives [in New York] and a lot of places that don’t exist any more that were showing film in the 1960s and 70s. So, the structure of film was a major part of my thinking and when I was first making performances and working with time I thought of film and the idea of the cut and the edit. It would be disturbing to an audience that you would suddenly have a cut. Although film people were not at all disturbed, I would say. lg So, you were embodying a procedure that is partly structural and changes the experience as much as the effect of a large projection might change the mood? jj It’s like Eisenstein – who is a major influence on many people, of course – putting one thing next to another and creating a language that way, and it is also related to Surrealism and juxtaposing disparate ideas, objects and images. lg Coming back to this editing-in-real-time idea. Even though you can be seen sometimes – especially when you are standing to the side manipulating objects for a camera and everything seems very lucid and clear – as a viewer, one still gets transported. The viewer doesn’t lose engagement with the event, even though you are clearly standing there making these things happen: moving around marbles and other objects, under a small camera, which are then overlaid on the screen. If anything, this process heightens a ritualistic aspect of the work. Are you thinking in terms of timing and do you change timings between one performance and another?

jj I think of those things of course, and those things can subtly vary from one performance to another of the same piece. But in terms of relating things to ritual, my objects don’t have a symbolic meaning, whereas they do in spiritual religions. I was always interested in magic shows growing up as a child, so when I first started working, I did think slightly in terms of magic shows. But I was interested in revealing the process. There was a Process show at the Whitney and I really identified with that, because at the time I thought of my work as revealing the process as well: revealing all the illusions. I am showing you how I make it. Right from the very beginning that was part of my desire. lg Misdirection is part of being a magician. jj That’s probably true in my work: there are several things going on at the same time, so you miss things. So, everybody has a slightly different perception. lg When I was a kid we had a big mirror above the fireplace and I used to hang upside down and look, not at myself, but at this doubled world that was upside down, and I would look to the sides to see if I could see anyone there who wasn’t in our world but existed only in this parallel universe. I never looked directly in the mirror but used a mirror as a way of seeing new worlds. People always write about your use of mirrors. I am not sure that people see a reflection in those mirrors. Maybe they see something else? jj They have a lot of references, you know. But when I was making those mirror pieces I didn’t see individual reflections; I saw how they changed the space. They altered the perception of the whole space – that’s what really interested me when I was working with those. So, it would be about looking until things changed in some way. I don’t know if the audience sees that. Maybe they do. And then the other thing that interested me is how people are so uneasy about people watching them as they view their own reflection: having other people see that they see themselves. lg Meaning that if you are sitting side by side in the audience you might be able to see yourself and who is sitting next to you, in front or behind you. jj What you said about hanging upside down was great. Kind of like a bat. lg Yes. And it was important that I was interested not just in reflection but inversion, and I use that still in work: the phrase reflected and inverted. I haven’t been able to escape from that feeling: seeing the world in a mirror I could accept more easily a world that was upside down. Sometimes in your work the sense of up and down and back to front is suspended for a bit. The mirrors and projections play with space and perception. When you are in a performance are you ‘lost’?

jj When I am performing – yes – hopefully. But not when I am rehearsing. When I am performing the time just goes – like that. That’s performance. lg But your sense of time is not dependent on the audience, because it is not theatre? jj No, but I can feel the audience concentrating. I have done bad performances where you can feel the audience reacting to that as well. But there is a reference to theatre. lg That comes to the question of drawing. When you were thinking about the question of art – in the beginning – you were drawing? jj I was drawing. I had this idea that I had to ‘learn how to draw’. lg Did anyone teach you how to draw? jj I had one artist, [the sculptor] Harold Tovish, in Boston who taught me. He just told me to follow the contour. That was very good discipline.

“My objects don’t have a symbolic meaning, whereas they do in spiritual religions. I was always interested in magic shows as a child, so when I first started working, I did think slightly in terms of magic shows. But I was interested in revealing the process” lg What a great piece of advice. jj So that was the only person who taught me anything about drawing – the rest was trial and error. For me that was the one discipline I brought with me from the sculptural – although I think of my work in terms of three dimensionality in relation to sculpture, in relation to space. But with every piece I do, I try and imagine another way to make a drawing – in relation to the sculpture and the content. lg In the end you had three types of drawing at the us Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 – in terms of almost pure drawing: the fish, the Rorschach bees and then the kites, which were not made by you but you painted them and put images on them. I can’t tell if they are a starting point or an endpoint. jj I am just dedicated to experimenting with and making drawings as a part of my work because it is another part of what I am trying to say – in some way. I don’t know how you perceive it, but I don’t want to just make video and performances – I like to have a physical

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moment which is making something on a page, and I like the idea of juxtaposing this to technology. lg You said in an interview with Ingrid Schaffner that when you were making the fish drawings you kept your eyes on old Japanese illustrations of fish – you were not looking at your own drawing. You were communing with another person’s work. jj That comes from the very beginning – drawing without looking. Another way of making a drawing in relation to the monitor. I would look at a monitor and only look at the drawing I was making on a monitor. I called it drawing without looking. And what interests me about drawing in performance is that the results are surprising. Something else comes out. lg A difficult thing to imagine when you are young is reanimation – metaphysically and literally bringing things back. Going back to older material and literally bringing it back to life. Giving it a new context. Tell me about reanimation in relation to the Tate exhibition. How do you approach a show like that? There is a lot of expectation. jj I have done several shows like this – survey shows. I make big models. I choose the works that are most interesting and significant for me and I go from there. And the curators have their ideas – which gives another perspective. I am much more open to that now than I used to be. This show comes out of a process I have been involved in since the 70s. lg So, this survey show at Tate is not contradictory to your working method – it actually supports it. jj Well, I have always considered my setups for performances as stage sets, and in 1976 I had a show at the ica in Philadelphia titled Stage Sets in which the central work was composed of objects and structures from earlier works in a formal arrangement. This way became more fully developed in 1994 [for a midcareer survey exhibition] at the Stedelijk Museum, and since then I have questioned ‘what is installation?’. The audience sitting and watching my performance: that’s one point of view. The audience walking through in relation to installation: there are many points of view. I think in terms of rooms. So, what am I doing? For Tate we chose several larger installations. Reanimation [2010/2012/2013] will be in one of the tanks and the other tank will only be available for the first ten days for the live performances, so in that way this is the first show that has included live performances. I have reintroduced my Mirror Piece [1969] just by itself several times and in this case we are developing the Mirror Piece indoors while the outdoor works will be performed on the banks of the Thames at low tide. We have to adjust the different elements to this new space. I don’t know how that will work.

They Come to Us without a Word ii, 2015, performance at Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, Venice. Photo: Moira Ricci. © the artist / Artists Rights Society, New York / dacs, London

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lg I used to live on the river about a mile downstream from there. Low tide is surprising. There’s a beach. jj But it’s very different from the locations where those works were first performed. I am also doing a piece called Mirage [1976], which is a solo. When I re-perform these pieces I don’t believe you could ever reproduce what had happened originally. So, they have to be tweaked. And then there’s my age, of course, and what are people looking at? They are saying, “What’s that older woman doing?” Things like that. But Jason Moran and I are performing an improvised duet. I enjoy this work. lg The Tate is still the Tate. It’s still a museum. They don’t always do big complicated installations. They don’t always do performances on the river. Like all museums they worry a lot about the public. So how do you deal with this question of interpretation and mediation? Do you get involved? jj As you know, my work cannot be experienced well in photographs and writings. It’s impossible. So, I am used to the fact that some people get it and some people don’t. What can I do? I don’t have any control over that. If I worried about that, I would get even less sleep than I already do. I try my best to communicate my ideas, my vision to the audience. lg I like to be involved in the mediation of the work. Sometimes I want more and sometimes less – it depends. Since 1994 there have been several moments or big steps in the work, so you must be used to these limits or possibilities.

jj When I did the Stedelijk show in 1994, people I knew in Amsterdam said, “You are missing from this, you know”. But that’s disappeared – I am much more present. lg I want to ask about working in an ensemble. You basically work alone? jj I am the director and the conceiver. And right from the beginning I did all the camerawork – except for a couple of times when I have hired a camera team. For example, in Venice I hired camera people because I couldn’t do it, and direct it, and film the whole thing myself. Also, the video backgrounds with children performing in them had to be recorded by professionals with better cameras. You could say I try and oversee everything. I work with a video editor because I don’t want to learn that technology any more – it has become too complicated for me. lg It’s a rabbit hole. Because once you get into it, you look for increasingly easy techniques. Modern video editing ‘facilitates’. You see too much information – in a timeline. jj I work with the editor. I sit there. I have an assistant who is a really good editor who I trust. lg That comes around to the question of timing – the time of the performance. Of course, I always think that you are a contradiction that disproves a rule. We are told that technology is something that works increasingly fast and makes everything shallow and empty, and even alienating, yet you have always been an early adopter of certain technologies, and this doesn’t seem to have an entirely negative effect. Tiny cameras now, Portapaks

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early on. I am trying to move away from talking about mirrors and water and shamanic activity and stories from Iceland. jj None of those things would be interesting without the structure and relation – not just to technology – but a way of visualising things. So, it’s not just the story – it’s the way the story is told. It’s the same with everything. lg I have watched a lot of early videowork by American artists, sometimes on the original Sony open reels of tape, and you get the sense that they are thinking, “What am I going to do with this video camera?” and as a result they are almost always in the work themselves. They would maybe set it up in the studio and think, “ok, now I am going to sing a song”. Now technology has become more discrete. Do you see a piece of technology and think – I could really do something with that – or do you have an idea and try and find the right kit? jj I think both of those things. In a way I am quite an old-fashioned video artist – I am not working on the Internet. I just saw an early film of John [Baldessari] where he is painting himself into the corner of a room. lg At art school in the early 1980s we had amazing Panasonic cameras that were really sophisticated. And I found the spaces where you could use these cameras were outside the normal time of the studio tradition. Time was different. The av people or the people into video weren’t into the traditional artist’s studio. And they were often hybrid people – they studied something else or had been filming modern dance or music videos. They often had a different politics.

Like the London Filmmakers Project – you felt they were living radicality rather than referring to it. jj There were always these different video groups in New York – more political than the artworld. I knew these people, but I was in the artworld. I was interested in Bruce Nauman and so on. lg There is no vanity in your work. I was thinking the other day – could I explain clearly what Joan looks like just from looking at old stills from videos and performances? And it’s quite a challenge. You are not merely asserting you exist by taking a photo of yourself. You become interleaved with stories and narratives and time. So many artists spend so much time asserting that they exist, but you have spent many years trying to dissolve. jj The radical thing about the Portapak was that you could sit in your studio and make things and see it right away. And see yourself. That was a radical moment, and there hasn’t been one like it since, except in relation to the Internet. People now ask me – did you know you were anticipating the selfie – and of course not, and no, I don’t think I was. lg I want to ask you about your relationship with galleries. The work you were showing looked quite radical even for Leo Castelli’s programme in the early 1970s. Looking back at photos, it is hard to tell where the work starts and ends. It is not the same as the conceptual work he was showing at the time. jj I remember when Vito [Acconci] first started performing at Castelli, I went there with people

who were slightly horrified. I liked it because I could see what he was trying to do. But for others it was very difficult. lg It is easy to forget now that performance was an implicit challenge. jj Castelli had been showing videos and collecting them, and there was a whole section in the back of the gallery. There were different periods for me. All of a sudden, the cameras got too expensive in the 1980s. Then I started editing at night in studios with brilliant editors, and you overdid it in a way. But then in the 1990s the cameras got smaller, so in the 1990s things became much more like documentary. So you started carrying cameras around with you for the first time. The Portapak you didn’t carry around – it was too heavy. lg Hence the classic Sony name – Portapak. Directly contradicting its potential. jj By the 1990s you started recording the things around you and picking up documentary footage, and that’s another kind of content that enters into the work. lg Performance and installation is resistant to the standard flow of a gallery. But you have always been in the artworld. jj I was always interested to be in that discussion. this and facing page They Come to Us without a Word, 2015, production stills. Courtesy the artist

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lg Were there times when you felt it was difficult? It’s easy to doubt yourself at some point. jj At the beginning, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I had the support of all these people around me who were in the scene. I never felt alone – also the worlds of dance and video were dominated by women. And then in the 1980s I did feel… I think it was mistaken, but I thought I shouldn’t show in galleries, so I actually avoided galleries for a while. But I kept working and kept showing, but not in the same way. And in the 1990s I did feel I had to kind of fight my way back. But I always had the support of other artists. lg Is there anything that is getting left out of the current discussion about your work? Are there any productive misunderstandings? jj The focus is sometimes on the pioneer – the pioneer performance artist. What does the word pioneer mean? As I said before – narrowing it down to the word performance creates a big misunderstanding. It creates nothing, in a way. It says it is all performance, and with the installations you are just seeing debris from a performance. I make a big distinction between performance debris, installation and what a pioneer might be today. ar Joan Jonas is on view at Tate Modern, 14 March – 5 August, with performances by Jonas included in the bmw Tate Live Exhibition; the Tate Modern exhibition will then travel to Haus der Kunst, Munich, 9 November – 3 March

Irredeemable Form Is art too polite to fight the far right? by Mike Watson

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Donald Trump’s particular brand of presidential communication of political art offerings, the works of artists such as Tania Bruguera has allowed him to dominate the cultural conversation globally (who aims to run for Cuban president next year), Theaster Gates (who ever since he came to power in January 2017. Out of this a number of is busy redeveloping Chicago to provide better facilities to the disadheinous cultural trajectories have taken hold, though surely none vantaged) and the art-activist group Artists at Risk (which offers resimore disturbing than the reemergence into the public sphere of an dencies to at-risk artists) propose real-world solutions to issues such incendiary far-right movement, replete with a hardcore element that as immigration, urban poverty and the plight of the stateless, and to embraces both Nazi aesthetics and racialist policies. artists experiencing the effects of these. Despite these positive examWhether the rise of the ‘alt-right’ represents millennial high- ples, it remains to be seen whether the artworld has the means or the jinks as the young try to distance themselves from their elders’ ethical appetite to fight a virulent strain of neo-Nazism – though two recent imperatives, or the powerful reappearance of a dormant political indications suggest not. archetype, the danger is clear. The normalisation of far-right political Firstly, in August 2017, Documenta responded to public presvalues and aesthetics risks immunising us to them, deadening our sure in banning Italian theorist and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s reflexes in the face of potential extreme rightwing policy-making at scheduled performance, entitled Auschwitz on the Beach. In the sweltering heat of a record-breaking summer, Bifo aimed to take the a governmental level. The problem is not, of course, confined to the us. Another indi- prescient symbolism of the beach – the favoured destination for cation of a massive nationalist shift in popular opinion came in the European holidaymakers embarking on their summer breaks – to the form of the Brexit referendum result art-admiring public in order to chalThe artworld’s enthusiasm for a broadly lenge a self-imposed blindness. In a in the uk in 2016. Since then, far-right electoral swings and protests have leftwing ‘political art’ seems to appease statement released by Documenta’s been seen across Europe, from France artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, it a deep need for a sense of usefulness was announced that the performance (where Marine Le Pen took 34 percent in a world that has made much of our of the final vote in the 2017 presiwould be replaced by a live reading by dential election), to Austria (where Bifo of the homonymous poem that heritage appear without value conservative Sebastian Kurz governs inspired the previously scheduled in a coalition with the Freedom Party of Austria, itself founded by performance, followed by a talk. The evening, entitled ‘Shame on Us’, former members of the Nazi Party), to Poland (where national inde- which went ahead on 24 August, aimed to, in the words of Szymczyk, pendence celebrations were marred by white supremacist marches in ‘seriously and responsibly locate the Holocaust as the ultimate border reference for the extreme, violent, and systemic injustice perpetuated November last year). As the growth of the far right continues, there appears to be no by national and transnational European institutional bodies toward diminishment in the artworld’s enthusiasm for a broadly leftwing the physical bodies of the refugees who attempt to flee to Europe…’ ‘political art’, also known as ‘social art’, ‘art-activism’ and ‘artivism’. Among critics of the original event, Boris Rhein – minister of The trend, which has developed without pause since the subprime higher education, research and the arts for Hesse, the state in which mortgage crisis and subsequent national bank-bailout schemes, Documenta is based – argued that ‘any comparison to the Holocaust seems to appease in the art audience a deep need and hunger for a cannot be allowed, as the crimes of the Nazis were unique’. While it is sense of usefulness in a world that has made much of our cultural impossible to disagree with such a sentiment – which points fundadiscourse and heritage appear without value. Within the full range mentally to the difficulty in doing justice via art to the specificity and

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‘Unite the Right’ rally, Charlottesville, 12 August 2017. Licensed under Creative Commons: Anthony Crider

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A swastika banner briefly on display in the main hall of Central Saint Martins, London, 15 November 2017. Photo: via social media

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magnitude of the Holocaust as an event – the difficulty in responding institutions and the disproportionate power and influence of large to the renewed threat of racialist supremacy without recourse to financial interests’ and at no point aimed to ‘give a platform to far artistic statements should be recognised. It would seem that in the right extremists’. artworld we are prevented from entering into the fullness of a debate While it is possible to sympathise with the university’s desire to on the resurgence of a white-supremacist politics by our own recti- head off a social-media backlash against an apparently wayward stutude. On this note it is worth recalling that twentieth-century German dent, the institution’s response to the action, albeit unreservedly philosopher Theodor Adorno’s famous injunction on the writing of apologetic, has inadequately explained how tutors did not manage to poetry after Auschwitz was followed with the proviso that we should dissuade the student from his choice on artistic grounds, a point that continue to try to make art anyhow, as a challenge to the cynicism recalls David Sylvester’s failure to adequately confront Francis Bacon of the rightwing. While Adorno favoured an abstract art, which was for his depiction of the Nazi swastika on an armband in his 1965 as such able to circumvent the difficulties of directly representing Crucifixion triptych. In the second of the seven interviews conducted human suffering, he was writing as a survivor of the Holocaust, who by Sylvester and published in Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962–1979 fled his homeland to the uk and then (1980), the painter claimed that he And yet it would seem that the United States to avoid persecumerely wanted to ‘break the continuity tion. As such, Adorno wrote of the best of the arm and to add the colour… You we are prevented from entering into course of action once all opposition to may say it was a stupid thing to do, but the fullness of a debate on the rightwing racialist tyranny had failed it was done entirely as part of trying to resurgence of a white-supremacist and the worst had already happened. make the figure work – not work on Today we face the problem of looking the level of interpretation of its being politics by our own rectitude a Nazi, but on the level of its working back to a past that we must do justice to while also having at our disposal the full range of available rhetorical formally.’ Here Sylvester missed the opportunity to point out that a and artistic devices in order to counter the far right. As it stands, the Nazi swastika can never be purely formal, given the weight of assosensitivity of the topic often leaves art professionals and academics ciations attached to it, not least the estimated murder of six million hamstrung when facing rightwing imagery. European Jews in an effort to eliminate Jewry from all existence. This On 15 November 2017, The Jewish Chronicle reported that a student is why the symbol will never be merely a symbol and why its frequent at London’s Central Saint Martins had hung a large swastika banner unchallenged display on Internet forums in close association with from the railing on the third floor of its central foyer. The article the current us president is cause not only for concern but for intense went on to state that the piece had been emphatically rejected by the debate and activity within the artworld and academia. student’s tutor (who remains unnamed) one day prior to its hanging Bacon’s refusal to take responsibility, together with Sylvester’s and was immediately removed when the university became aware failure to bring him to account, has set a dangerous precedent that of its display. The image has raised a number of questions about the universities and arts agencies need to challenge. The efforts of response of the university and the capacity of art to carry the weight Documenta and Central Saint Martins to minimise the damage and of Nazi symbolism. placate the offence caused by the direct intrusion into the artworld of My email correspondence with Paul Haywood, dean of academic Nazi symbolism are understandable. Though they point above all to programmes at Central Saint Martins, has revealed that the student the fact that a large part of the battle – one over the appropriation of – who the college refuses to name – intended to ‘critique corporate historical symbolism – is already being lost. ar

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from left Adam Szymczyk, Paul B. Preciado and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi at Documenta 14’s ‘Shame on Us’ evening, 24 August 2017

March 2018

Under Construction The never-ending renovation of Tom Burr by Sam Korman

On 14 May 2017, Marcel Breuer’s a sparse installation that, though Pirelli Building was revived. Eleclimited to the former showroom on tricity had been restored to the the ground floor, recuperated many long-empty tower, safety measof the artist’s themes in a grand ures put back in place and permisself-portrait. sion to use the space granted by The project was shaped by the the various powers overseeing the place and times in which the artist was raised. Brutalist Bathroom (2017) Brutalist landmark in New Haven, paired a bathroom door with a Connecticut. The opening of Tom portrait printed on aluminium of Burr/New Haven (2017), alternatively titled Body/Building, also marked J. Edgar Hoover, first director of the the eponymous artist’s prodigal fbi and a rumoured crossdresser, return: the building stands in holding a Tommy gun. Nearby, the artist had inscribed a set of railBurr’s hometown. ings with a 1970 speech delivered Work on this site-specific, ‘evolvby Jean Genet in New Haven (The ing exhibition’ had begun six months prior, when the artist and his team sought initial approval Railings (May, 1970), 2017) that took as its theme violence against African from the gods of state and local government, the building’s super- Americans in light of Black Panther-cofounder Bobby Seale’s recent intendents under the State Register of Historic Places; ikea, which arrest by the city’s police, part of a determined effort by Hoover to owned it; and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema), destroy the group. An image from Jim Morrison’s arrest on obscenity whose signature was required because the building stands on a flood- charges while performing at New Haven Arena in 1967 is reproduced plain. In the end, Burr dedicated Phase I: Pre-existing Conditions of the in People Are Strange (touch me) (2017), another aluminium-printed panel yearlong undertaking to the months of paperwork required to bring leaned against one of the storefront’s signature elongated windows. the corporate headquarters of first the Armstrong Rubber Company Laid on the ground beside a dusty section of floor tile is Cubicle (2017), a portrait of Anni Albers, who lived in New Haven when her husband, and then Pirelli back to life. With the transferal of responsibility for Breuer’s edifice to Burr Josef, was employed by Yale University, next to an aluminium sheet (and Bortolami, the gallery that represents him in New York and displaying a textile pattern of her design. All of these historic charwhich sponsored the project), there was also a transferal of energy: acters could be read as heroes, bad boys, villains, role models, idols the building became a surrogate for the artist. Burr or crushes, and Body/Building had something of the used the space to examine his life and career through secretive air of a teenager’s bedroom. Pirelli Building, New Haven

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Brutalist Bathroom, 2017, powder-coated steel guardrails, bathroom doors from Marcel Breuer’s Pirelli Building, direct-to-substrate print on aluminium, 207 × 633 × 305 cm

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The Pirelli was completed in 1969, when Burr was six, and this local preoccupation with the symbols of entertainment and the simple boy would have witnessed how the building’s modular approach, and economy of signage. Other images, such as a murky, untitled, desatits aspirations to create a better corporate labour structure through urated photograph from 1995, depict crude, bent-metal forms that design, failed to arrest the slow decline of the companies it hosted reinforce makeshift security measures. There are no people, and the and the entire regional economy. New Haven at the end of the 1960s photographs are tightly cropped. That one shows nothing but a sign and start of the 1970s encapsulated a turbulent period in American for 25-cent peepshows is enough to understand the selling point of history, and Burr’s representations of that time imbue the exhibition these establishments. That’s not a lot to pay for privacy. Borrowing from forerunners including Robert Smithson and Dan with a poignant sense of loss. This loss is figured in intimate as well as macroeconomic terms. Graham, Burr adopted a wry, documentary approach that sought to unearth the banal ways that power Genet, a key figure in the exhibition, was enacted through the city’s built appears in the prime of his youth New Haven at the end of the 1960s and environment. ‘Sometimes, it would and as an old man in the diptych Bae start of the 1970s encapsulated a turbulent be about the emptiness of time,’ Genet / Grey Genet (2017), two portraits Burr said about his afternoons and separated by a urinal divider. The period in American history, and Burr’s khaki trenchcoat, seersucker blazer evenings in Times Square, and particrepresentations of that time imbue the and loafers displayed on a wooden ularly about his growing interest in show with a poignant sense of loss pedestal in Body/Building (local layers) the rituals of cruising at the Gaiety, (2017) would have been a familiar an all-male burlesque that stood on sight on the upper floors of the Pirelli Building. Plain and neat, they 46th street. His street-view Polaroids suggest that Times Square was defined the tight-lipped academic chic in this university town. The a nonsite par excellence: he revelled in the mirrored window treatgarments were gleaned from Burr’s nonagenarian father’s wardrobes, ments, shabby lobbies and video-booths retrofit to the historic theawhich begs the question: what was he saving them for? tres, and the luxury of anonymity that they afforded him. Between the Burr moved to New York in the 1980s, so it made sense to meet immense losses the area suffered from the aids crisis and Giuliani’s for dinner in Times Square, which the artist described to me as ‘the raid on its character, disappearance was the defining characteristic of eternal New York’. During the early 1990s he’d spent a lot of time Times Square. It stood as a living ruin. here, in a neighbourhood threatened by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s Many artists shared Burr’s documentary impulse to record what ‘quality of life’ policies. A series of Polaroids, 42nd Street Structures, he describes, in his essay ‘Sleazy City: 42nd Street Structures and Some catalogues the area’s porn and burlesque theatres and exhibits Burr’s Qualities of Life’ (1998), as public spaces, in that ‘they constitute the

People Are Strange (touch me), 2017, powder-coated steel guard rails, direct-to-substrate, print on aluminium, 91 × 184 × 164 cm

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Bae Genet / Grey Genet, 2017, powder-coated steel guardrails, urinal, partition from Marcel Breuer’s Pirelli Building, direct-to-substrate print on aluminium, 122 × 419 × 305 cm

March 2018

The Railings (May, 1970), 2017, blackened steel, polished steel etched with Jean Genet’s 1970 ‘May Day Speech’, tempered glass, 107 × 1372 × 762 cm

ArtReview

Body/Building (local layers), 2017, trench coat, seersucker blazer and coat hangers belonging to the artist’s father, metal, clothing rack, wooden pedestal, 175 × 91 × 91 cm

March 2018

ArtReview

locations for the practice of public sexualities, and publicly accessible Lanes offered another option, given that Burr dressed up the artist’s sexual culture’. Alvin Baltrop turned his camera on the Chelsea piers legacy of kitsch with pleather-clad daisies in Bitch, Immediately After during the 1970s, and his archive presents a shared interest in dilapi- Vinyl (2004). But it had closed. By the time we visited, the Times Square dated buildings and the gay-sex scene that developed around them that Burr knew had been replaced several times over: even Señor Frogs, (Baltrop even recorded a nude man standing near the aperture cut a franchised party-restaurant beloved of tropical resorts, and Guy’s at the end of a warehouse by Gordon Matta-Clark for his work Day’s American Kitchen and Bar, a restaurant founded by Jersey-bro celebEnd, 1975). What industrial buildings and stock infrastructure were rity chef Guy Fieri, which catered to the same Parrothead clientele, to Robert Smithson’s Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967) had recently shuttered. They were as much a part of Times Square’s and his formulation of the nonsite, the civic architecture of New York post-Bloomberg, pro-development agenda as Snøhetta’s recent redewas to Burr’s understanding of the same (the series Unearthing the sign of the area, which magically opened a hectare of Broadway into a Public Restroom, 1994, for example, documented the stout, neoclassical public plaza. The most visible intervention is a series of benches that buildings that had become gay hookup sites around the city). Sarah ‘provide a clear orientation device for tourists and locals alike’. Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind (2012) argues that the aids Burr’s engagement with public spaces has always been countercrisis paved the way for New York’s eventual gentrification, not only balanced by autobiography, and much of his work possesses an in terms of newly available real estate, but also because it decimated inscrutable interiority. The mirrored surfaces of Folding Screen (Yellow) the culture that might have countered the real estate market’s delete- (2003) and Folding Screen (Pink) (2004) reflect disorienting images of rious effects. Burr’s documents are pervaded by absence, and he devel- the gallery environment in which they are exhibited; either sickoped a language to reevaluate whatever remaining monuments there ening or euphoric, doubling upon themselves, the coloured partiwere in the course of grappling with this loss. tions also speak to costuming and the interplay of surfaces. His Whenever my friend Jake sees a crane or scaffolding, he’ll enduring crushes and their importance to his practice are explored ask, ‘Haven’t they finished this place yet?’ New York is defined by in the essay ‘Make-Up’ (2002), which recounts the object of his affecrampant change, and a considertions at high school, James, as well as discussing more famous ation of places like Times Square There are no people, and the photographs models of the creative life, such reveals the city to be exemplary are tightly cropped. That one shows nothing as Jim Morrison. Dedicated to of prevailing attitudes to public Truman Capote, the 2005 works space over the last 30 years. Burr but a sign for 25-cent peepshows is enough admitted to me that he had not to understand the selling point of these estab- Worn (For Mr. Capote), Unhinged and visited the area, except as a pasWorn Out were each a set of hinged lishments. That’s not a lot to pay for privacy senger in a crosstown cab, in more panels arranged to resemble a reclining body, dressed with props than a decade. Our conversation, too, confirmed Burr’s nomadic appreciation for New York. His essay similar to those worn by the author late in life: a straw hat, a tie. ‘Eight Renovations: A constellation of sites across Manhattan’ Young, attractive and wearing a piercing expression, Capote had (1997) traced the disappearing clubs, hookup sites and galleries, been pictured on the cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) leaning and observed the slow migration from the East Village to Chelsea, against a wall. Burr, though, was aware of the hardship and isolation a neighbourhood that today boasts some of the world’s highest real endured by this gay icon in middle and old age. ‘And as for Truman,’ estate prices. Many of his sculptures could be considered tracking Burr wrote, ‘I still retain some romantic musings about him, specifidevices, mapping (among other things) the sexual politics of public cally the fragility of his character coupled with his pointed insightspace. For Circa ’77 (1995), the artist recreated a section of Platzspitz fulness.’ It’s indicative of Burr’s relationship to certain cultural Park in Zürich, a once-popular cruising ground, while Deep Purple figures that the passage refers to Capote personally, by his first name. (2000) reenvisions Richard Serra’s controversial Tilted Arc (1981) for During the run of Body/Building, from May to November of last the gardens at Kunstverein Braunschweig. Burr shrunk the design year, Burr made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to New Haven nearly of Serra’s original sculpture and painted it a sleazy purple. Its seduc- every week to give tours of the exhibition. I visited on the last day tive surface offers museumgoers a typical minimalist sculpture but, of the project and found the Pirelli Building inundated with people, standing barely as high as the hedgerows, it also conceals a potential many of whom had, like me, trekked from New York. Burr’s relations site for furtive sexual encounters. offered recommendations to visitors of local pizza restaurants, and Our dinner in Times Square came perilously close to happening at the exhibition even drew the attention of James, Burr’s high school Bubba Gump Shrimp Co, a restaurant franchise spun off from the 1994 crush. His presence infused the installation with a verité realism; feature film Forrest Gump. The ‘Warhol’s Factory’ room at Bowlmor it suddenly felt like each artwork knew where it belonged. ar

facing page Untitled ( from 42nd Street Structures), 1995, Polaroid photographs, 8 × 8 cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York

all images but page 86 Photo: Jessica Smolinski. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York

March 2018

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Art Reviewed

For I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you 89

Man Ray’s la Gagosian Beverly Hills 11 January – 17 February There he is, in the corner of the room: a dark, malevolent presence, glowering at the camera from under heavy lids, his crazily crooked nose and uneven eyes lending the photograph a quasi-Cubist appearance. It was an intense look that Man Ray often assumed in self-portraits. (An alternative guise was that of the debonair dandy, smoking in sharply tailored suits beside a sporty automobile.) Another notable thing about this 1943 photograph – the odd linchpin of an otherwise outwardly conventional selection of photographs taken by the Surrealist during what was arguably the nadir of his career, his 11-year sojourn in Los Angeles after he fled occupied France – is that he only has half a beard. One side of his face is clean shaven, and the other framed by neatly clipped hair. How do you like me, he seems to ask? With? Without? I will be whatever you want me to be. Except the problem was that he wouldn’t. Even though he adopted different personas throughout his career, Man Ray never played the role that Los Angeles had in mind for him – unlike fellow European émigrés such as Igor Stravinsky or Fritz Lang. Once he turned up to a meeting with film producers carrying reproductions of his paintings instead of his commercial fashion photography, telling them when asked if he wanted to be a special-effects man that he was more interested in being a ‘general effects man’. Hollywood was unimpressed, or unfamiliar, with Man Ray’s reputation, and he knew it. Of the 27 small silver gelatin prints in this exhibition, most are studio portraits – an unrepresentative sample from Man Ray’s California output, given that he claimed to want to focus on painting rather than commercial photography and told his dealer Julien Levy soon after his arrival, in 1940, that he would no longer be taking portrait photographs. His resolve appears to have been shaky; the earliest portrait in the show, of Isamu Noguchi, is from the following year.

Why would Man Ray have given so much care and attention to the craft of portrait photography if he resented it so? Was it purely as a means to fund his ‘more creative work’ (his words) as it had during his years in Paris? Self-Portrait with Half Beard, as the 1943 photo is titled, was selected as the illustration for a diatribe the artist wrote that same year for View magazine, titled ‘Photography is Not Art’, in which he railed at the conservatism and obsession with technique of photography’s proponents. As in his self-portrait, however, Man Ray was divided. Ironically, many of the photographs in the exhibition, such as portraits of actresses Ava Gardner or Leslie Caron, both from 1950, or his untitled photographs of Los Angeles street scenes, do little to advance the medium beyond their technical proficiency. Things get interesting, however, when Man Ray cuts loose in the darkroom. In a portrait of Tilly Losch, from 1946, the dancer lifts her gypsy skirt from a dark dripscape of developing fluid, which reveals the white paper beneath the exposure. Elsewhere Man Ray deploys his trademark solarisation technique (actually an inadvertent darkroom discovery by his lover Lee Miller, which he appropriated) to lend a pearlescent aura to a dreamy portrait of the model and actress Ruth Ford. Ford, like Losch and other women Man Ray photographed, was not only a starlet but a peripheral member of his artistic circle (her brother was Charles Henri Ford, the Surrealist writer and editor of View). One gets – perhaps unsurprisingly – a rather sour taste of the sexism pervading the creative circles of the time, with women generally allowed only the supporting roles of sisters, wives, lovers or models, and then only on condition of their beauty. (Even the formidable and respected Dorothea Tanning, photographed here in 1948, also happened to be easy on the eye.) When Man Ray pictures the portly,

ArtReview

slumping figures of Roberto Rossellini, Henri Langlois and Jean Renoir, by contrast, no solarisation is required. The objectification of women is, admittedly, an easy issue to take with glamour photography of the 1940s and 50s, but in the photographic work of Man Ray it is especially obvious. Women look away demurely from the camera; men gaze squarely into the lens. (The beautiful and intimate photograph of Noguchi is a notable exception.) Man Ray had also, decades earlier, adopted the custom of posing his female models beside sculptures. In two photographs here, both from 1944, actresses Teresa Wright and Tamara Toumanova stand next to the pre-Columbian carved stone figures that were then in vogue, offering the viewer a chance to compare and contrast two modes of representation, and two forms of beauty. Man Ray’s misogyny is hard to dodge, but his preoccupations here may have extended further than desire alone. In photographing these actresses (and the occasional actor), some famous names and others anonymous, he was reflecting on methods for constructing identity that he had also long applied to himself. In 1948 his old friend Marcel Duchamp visited him in la from New York, and he contrived an apparently candid photograph of the pair sitting on a Parisian doorstep. The sign for the Rue de la vieille lanterne, however, is a fake; so is Man Ray’s depiction of himself as French. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, he was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and an American citizen. There is no doubt that his inability to assimilate – still less flourish – in his native country was all the more painful because of this heritage. His 1948 exhibition at the Copley Galleries, in Beverly Hills, was sardonically titled To Be Continued Unnoticed, and in 1951 he set sail from New York to Paris, where he remained – better recognised – for the rest of his life. Jonathan Griffin

Tilly Losch, 1946, vintage gelatin silver print, 34 × 27 cm (unframed). © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society/adagp, Paris. Courtesy Gagosian Beverly Hills

March 2018

Tomma Abts Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 10 November – 13 January Modernist geometric abstraction insisted on art’s presentness, proscribing memory, illusion, allusion – anything that pointed beyond the frame. During the early 2000s, several artists emerged, among them Martin Boyce, Sergej Jensen, David Maljkovic and Katja Strunz, who saw ironic potential in turning this bias on its head, using formalism to retrospectively allude to the absolutist claims – of transcendence and finality – that modernist artists had made for it. Tomma Abts is among the most distinguished survivors of that generation, but she has never been an ironist. She proceeds as if earnest persistence could overcome the nostalgia to which her paintings seem condemned, and, failing that, elegiacally acquiesce to the obsolescence of the languages they draw on. Abts’s paintings are puzzles, literally and metaphorically: literally because they might be examples of what W.H. Auden called art as a ‘contraption’ (he first approached a poem by asking, ‘How does it work?’). An Abts painting comes right ‘with a click like a closing box’ – as another great modernist, W.B. Yeats, described finishing a poem – resolving mechanism into image. But these are oddly purposeless illusions, picturing nothing but their own structures, their forms hermetically contingent on each other, committed to perpetual motion among themselves. Abts’s meticulous layering of hard-edged planes of colour fetishises her painstakingness, but the illusionism towards which it strives is self-concealing: the real time of painting gives way to the figurative time of an image’s retrospection, by sinking into

the shallowest of pictorial spaces. This sleight of hand is what traditional painting has always used its imagery for; it only seems paradoxical here because it is so exclusively self-reflexive. Repeatedly, Abts bets everything on this spartan payoff. She is ultimately unlike the modernists she alludes to, who sought to supplant latenineteenth-century aestheticism. For them, an emphasis on the artwork as a contraption was a vigorously realist alternative to a moribund formalism that had lost contact with life. Abts’s art has the pure aestheticism of the arcanely artisanal, the skill no one else has the patience to master. This is l’art pour l’art – like Fabergé eggs, or Flemish still lifes, but without the bonus of luscious fruit and flowers. Her paintings are almost always the same size (an upright 48 × 38 cm), and when they are not – like the fussily decorative I. (2016) – they stray into pictorial issues they seem unequipped to deal with. They are titled by names that sound like no one’s name, and therefore nothing one can empathise with, their alienation exacerbated by the aura-cultivating distance that always separates them. The relatively recent inclusion of shaped canvases, punning between composition and canvas, might be a sophisticated joke on what art historian Michael Fried called ‘deductive structure’ – the making of a painting’s design totally contingent upon its support – if it didn’t seem a category error to speak of Abts making jokes. This exhibition pivots around another extrapolation from her staple form: Jelto (2017) is a solemnly tarnished, slightly skewed rectangle of bronze, a painting-as-ingot, casting

Jelto, 2017, bronze cast, 48 × 38 cm. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York

ArtReview

what appears to be one of her paintings (the bronze registers the canvas’s tooth). Adumbrating form in the absence of colour contrasts, a spectrum of tracks, raised in shallow relief, recedes into the top left corner, diversified by three circles, like planets suspended in a burst of cosmic rays. The result is tautological: paintings designed to invest modernist presentness with the memory of its history are turned into what might be their fossils. Jelto’s receding vectors take the soberly consequential momentum of Abts’s process and freeze it into a sign for what it alludes to. They recall the fanning segments of Mark Grotjahn’s monochrome ‘Butterfly’ paintings, which, as hermetic formalism at the same time as an image of radiating light or a butterfly’s wingspan, reformulate welllauded tropes from the modernist past, while acknowledging that their original claim to formal autonomy is no longer viable. Abts’s art is both limited and distinguished by its inability to make such worldly distinctions. Jelte (2017) is a composite of painting and cast, divided two-thirds of the way across, as if one were metamorphosing into the other, present into past, image into the image of an image, across the force field between canvas and bronze. Its kitschy trompe l’oeil effects – pebbledash speckling, tonal gradation, drop shadows, the bronze’s representation of canvas – are less functional illusions than forms of ornament that embroider the painting’s language, as if to compensate for lapses of memory. Perhaps all of Abts’s ingenuity is only needed for lack of a real object to remember. Mark Prince

Tino Sehgal Tretyakov Gallery and Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow 1 August – 14 September Vsevolod Meyerhold lies languidly on a bed, his head propped up on two pillows. The bedspread wears a floral pattern in yellow and green, as vivacious as the theatre director’s eyes are dull and downcast. A dog rests on Meyerhold’s legs; an open box of sweets and a closed book sit atop an occasional table. Meyerhold had every reason to be depressed when Pyotr Konchalovsky painted him in 1938. He knew which way the political wind was blowing: in 1939 he was arrested and tortured. A year later he was dead. It is while I am staring at this oil painting hung in the Tretyakov, with a plaque detailing the influence upon it of Henri Matisse, that I hear a soprano voice drifting through the museum. “This is propaganda,” it soars. “You know… you know…,” it dips. I follow the refrain into the next gallery. Here the museum’s chronologically hung works lead visitors through to Socialist Realism (which Konchalovsky would adopt, the artist surviving Stalin’s reign). A crowd has gathered, and their eyes are on a middle-aged lady. Though not in uniform – none of the institution’s staff are – by the manner in which she paces the space, without apparent interest in the art, I take her for an invigilator. She starts again. “This is

propaganda, you know… you know…” At the end, this singing guard names the performance: “Tino Sehgal, This is propaganda, 2002”. It is a work I have seen before, at Tate Britain in 2006 (though it was conceived for the 50th Venice Biennale, three years earlier). Its rendition here, among the propaganda of Socialist Realism, blunts the work’s more general point that all art, regardless of place or time, has overt political sensibilities. Art is about shaping minds, and museums (and biennials) are tools of state narrative. Yet what nuance may be lost in this presentation, programmed by Moscow’s v-a-c Foundation, is justified in the awful pathos that replaces it. A few rooms along, in front of two vast paintings, one depicting Stalin and Marshall Klim Voroshilov in conversation, another of Stalin in his war room, surrounded by military officers, a couple are kissing. Their bodies intertwine on the floor. It’s a romantic affair, the pair, who appear to be in their late twenties, elegant in slow movement. A hand climbs up a thigh, slides down a back. Their eyes never leave each other. This is love, Kiss (2003) proclaims, love presented among a history of hate.

If the surroundings of the Tretyakov provides heavy context for this debut Russian survey of Sehgal’s work, then an empty annex of the Schusev State Museum of Architecture is a more neutral venue. Here This Progress (2006) is staged, a performance in which a relay of actors, progressively older, engage visitors in one-to-one conversations before handing them over abruptly to their colleague. From this series of intense exchanges the visitor goes into the pitch-black anonymity of This Variation (2012), where, shrouded in darkness, a choir performs a series of nonlinguistic noises a cappella. In Meyerhold’s theory of drama, action leads to emotion (the opposite of method acting): through stylised poses and gestures that eschew naturalism, the actor conjures feeling. Sehgal’s work, in its repetition and tight, elegant choreography, operates in this tradition. The staging of his work in such an emotive context – performing This is Propaganda in a room of propaganda – is manipulative, but that suits Sehgal. I don’t resent the pathos the artist and his curators inflict, fake or otherwise. Oliver Basciano

Socialist Realism gallery at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Evgeny Alekseev. Courtesy v-a-c Foundation, Moscow & Venice

March 2018

Sophie Calle and her guest Serena Carone Beau doublé, Monsieur le marquis! Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris 10 October – 11 February Last year, Sophie Calle received a very unusual request, something relatively usual for her. She was invited to take over the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, an exquisitely bizarre private museum dedicated to hunting, containing eclectic collections of historical and contemporary artworks, trophies, guns and other curios. She brought along some of her entourage: a dozen mounted animals from her own collection, and her sculptor friend Serena Carone. Rest assured that the latter isn’t stuffed, although she has an immobile equivalent in Calle’s menagerie: the French conceptualist, whose narrative practice revolves around kooky relationships and chance encounters, owns over a hundred preserved creatures, named after friends and family. Calle (and Carone)’s exhibition, whose title translates as Nice doubled shot, sir!, begins on the museum’s first floor, where the wall text Mes morts (My dead ones, 2017) discloses further information about her special ‘pets’. In her will, the artist has bequeathed her friends their respective beasts, but for those whose dedicatees don’t survive her, she’s thinking of taking their animals to the grave. The showstopper Deuil pour deuil (A death for a death, 2017) gives a splendid idea of what her dream mausoleum may look like. A lifesize recumbent statue, made in glazed

ceramic by Carone, represents Calle in fancy flowered dress and mourning veil, surrounded by animals including a giraffe for her mother, Monique, a tiger for her father, Bob, and a baby zebra for her cat, Souris. Most of the artworks on this floor are concerned with Calle’s current grief over these last two. In Le fantôme de Souris (Souris’s ghost, 2017), a framed text overhanging a photograph of the cat on her bed, she puts her sorrow into perspective by observing that at least she doesn’t fall asleep with her father’s ghost between her pillows every night. The exhibition continues upstairs in a maze of heavily decorated rooms and alcoves. Thirtyeight undated, autobiographical anecdotes from Calle’s ongoing series Histoires Vraies (True Stories, 1998–) are artfully camouflaged – for viewers to hunt – in kitschy frames representing bear cubs, deer, stags, partridges, etc. Personal belongings (eg lingerie, more carcasses) are spread around to illustrate these memories, whereas Carone’s weird, mixed-media animal sculptures simply fit too well within the museum’s collections. In one work from True Stories, ‘Les chats’ (The cats), Calle recalls three cats preceding Souris. One met a tragic end: an ex-boyfriend asked her to choose between sleeping with him or her pet. She chose the cat, he strangled it – nearby, a poor stuffed kitty

hangs from a scarf attached to a floral upholstered armchair. Murder aside, the most perplexing thing is that in another extract, ‘Chambre avec vue’ (Room with a view), Calle remembers having had no problem sharing her makeshift bed during a night-long performance in the Eiffel Tower with strangers who, in turns of five minutes, kept her awake and entertained until dawn (with stories, of course). In ‘Voyage en Californie’ (Trip to California), she even sent her mattress, pillows and sheets to some unknown heartbroken creep overseas who requested to sleep in her bed for the time needed to recover. He gratefully sent everything back six months later: plenty more fish in the sea. A practical hunt for love actually concludes the show on the museum’s third floor. For Le Chasseur français (The French hunter, 2017), 12 framed texts, Calle compiled, and highlighted key phrases from, personal ads published in the eponymous French hunting magazine between 1895 and 2010, summarising the changing qualities sought in women by men. Whereas at the turn of the twentieth century these debonair gentlemen preferred ‘not poor’ and ‘unsullied’, the dream since the turn of the twenty-first has been different: ‘not a pain in the ass’, for one thing, ‘not far’ for another. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Beau doublé, Monsieur le marquis!, 2017 (installation view). © the artist / adagp. Photo: Béatrice Hatala. Courtesy Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris

ArtReview

How It’s Made Carl Kostyál, Stockholm 7 December 2017 – 14 January How It’s Made is the first and, as it turns out, the last exhibition at Carl Kostyál’s new venue in Nacka, a municipality east of Stockholm. Having climbed two flights of exterior spiral staircase on my visit on a dark January afternoon, I am told that the gallery – situated in the former headquarters of the fashion company Gant, its 1990s open-plan office space mostly left untouched – will move again, since the area is undergoing real-estate development. In the exhibition, which was externally curated by Matt Williams, the central piece is arguably Ed Atkins’s almost-24-hour-long video How It’s Made (2016), lending the show its title. For this work, the artist, known for his high-definition hyperreal animated videos, has assembled silenced footage from the ongoing Discovery Channel programme of the same name. The show broadcasts manufacturing processes of everyday products, from paper to mascara. In Atkins’s collage of videos, ripped from YouTube, which he collected while waiting for hd files to render, the outcome is omitted: we never get to see the commodified, satisfyingly final product. Most works in the exhibition speak about their own production. Some look more final than others, for instance Anne Imhof collaborator Eliza Douglas’s To cancel out humanity (2016), a painting of three hands handing

out invisible visiting cards. The photorealist hands were outsourced to an anonymous Chinese artist, and subsequently connected by Douglas with broad pink brushstrokes. In contrast, Piotr Łakomy’s Twin (2017) appears more crude. It consists of two almost identical wall-hung collages, each comprising a beatup-looking wooden door covered in crumpled metal honeycomb sheets and a pair of attached golf balls suggesting eyes. Other works literally change over time, such as Nina Canell’s Gum Shelf (2017) in the shape of a minimalist rectangular volume made from pistachio tree rubber, which slowly gives in to the force of gravity. Yuri Pattison’s peace mode (default) (2017) offers a floor-mounted server and adjacent monitor, upon which crowd-simulation software orchestrates small humanoids moving across a greyish-blue globe floating in a black universe. Jean-Marie Appriou’s Trouble (2017), a sculpture in the shape of a dromedary standing atop a reversed second camel that looks like its own drained mirage, is there to remind us of the real and its constructed mirrored double, or perhaps vacant simulacra in hyperreality. Most works date to the past two years. One of the few exceptions, albeit from an artist whose career has revived lately (with institutional shows in Germany, London and Paris), is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Lynn Turning Into

Roberta (1978), a digitised 16mm film documenting the artist’s transformation into her alter ego. This work is a timely reminder that long before selfies, artists were already occupied with identity politics and constructions of self. In the same space, Yngve Holen’s Bagatelle (2017), a section of a ct scanner, conjures morbid attempts at self-perfection as we turn into commodities ourselves. How It’s Made, then, combines physical manufacturing processes with hints at identity politics and a Postinternet attitude. Most works on view are products fresh from the artists’ studios, and the opportunity to offer a more self-critical or even pathological view on processes of commodification is missed. We hardly learn how things – or artworks – are made, nor does the exhibition often take up the banal yet riveting profanity of consumer products and their manufacture, which are pointed to in Atkins’s video. Perhaps the clearest instance of these concerns is Violet Dennison’s Sick Building Syndrome (2017), a dissected Elkay EZS8L water dispenser wall-mounted on copper foil, dysfunctional with its guts out while displaying its inner workings. Another, corollary case is the gallery’s imminent move due to further gentrification in the area, exemplifying, today, how a city is made. Stefanie Hessler

Jean-Marie Appriou, Trouble, 2017, aluminium, 300 × 170 × 60 cm. Courtesy Carl Kostyál, Stockholm

March 2018

The Electric Comma v-a-c Foundation, Venice 26 November – 31 March Last summer, the story of a failed Facebook experiment went viral: Alice and Bob, two semi-intelligent chatbots instructed to trade objects with each other in order to develop a new negotiation software, were shut down after starting a conversation in a self-generated language (‘balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to’). The programmers had not instructed the machines to adopt human-only expressions, and the ensuing (temporary) human inability to interpret what was going on on the ‘other side’ was translated by the media into paramount anxiety. I was reminded of this after entering the new v-a-c Foundation in Venice, funded by Russian energy tycoon Leonid Mikhelson. Shannon Ebner’s video Dear Reader, installed across the entrance, records the flashes of a portable changeable-message sign, programmed by the artist to display her poem ‘The Electric Comma’ (both 2011) – the work lending this group show its title. An elliptical line like ‘the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet is a blank comma delay a language of exposures’ is almost illegible, because of the changing text’s fast pace. In the age of voice commands and ai policing of online content, the question of how language is articulated, and what it suppresses or silences, resonates with new meanings. In ‘hacking’ a sign machine

originally designed to safeguard humans by delivering intelligible instructions, Ebner makes room for blanks, glitches, strikes and asterisks, indicating that ‘there is more information elsewhere’ (as she explains in a conversation with Zoe Leonard in bomb magazine). Jointly presenting 27 works from the collections of the v-a-c and Kadist foundations (the show’s cocurators), the exhibition focuses on how contemporary art mirrors human encounters with the machinic sublime. Some works are literally based on encounters: in the striking (if much-shown) 16mm film Soft Materials (2004) by Daria Martin, shot in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zürich, two naked dancers meet with deep-learning robots. A flesh limb rubs against a metal one, steel fingers run along a smooth arm, resulting in moments of contact, intimacy and erotic tension, where touch is key; our notion of the digital is, after all, rooted in the digitus (finger). In Pedro Neves Marques’s video The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant (2016), a Mimosa pudica, a plant that protects itself by briefly folding its leaves when touched, is caressed by a robotic hand that behaves as if equally pudicus (shy). By contrast, The Brute Force – 1997 (2017) by Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, the second episode of the duo’s ongoing The Unmanned video series, follows the rigid

movements of a computer-programmed camera across an empty set, one that reproduces the room where, in May 1997, the ibm Deep Blue computer defeated chess legend Garry Kasparov. Cheyney Thompson’s gridded Stochastic Process Painting 11 (2014) mimics the structure of the Drunken Walk algorithm, used by investors to predict stock prices, while with Untitled #1, #2 and #3 (all 2007) Piero Golia stages an ironic ballet mécanique where the passage of time is embodied by a water puddle forming on the ground, a constantly revolving broom and a machine that fires clay pigeons against the wall once an hour, suddenly bringing noise, fear and destruction into the space, and possibly hinting at a future when the hunting abilities of robocops may be of global concern. Misting Miner (2016), a vapour sculpture by Alexey Buldakov from the Russian collective Urban Fauna Lab, turns the energy-consuming extraction, or mining, of fluid cryptocurrencies like Ethereum into a more familiar process generating heat, evaporation and condensation. Outside the window, the Giudecca island on the other side of the canal looks on the verge of flooding: in the age of algorithmic capitalism and its impact on climate change, Venice is sinking faster then ever. The line between the metaphorical and the real appears suddenly thin. Barbara Casavecchia

Shannon Ebner, Dear Reader (still), 2011, single-channel video, 3 min. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

ArtReview

Ajay Kurian American Artist Sies & Höke, Düsseldorf 17 November – 13 January There is a lucid, analytically trenchant text by Ajay Kurian, ‘The Ballet of White Victimhood’, about Jordan Wolfson’s Colored sculpture (2016), written with the anger of desperation. Kurian, an American of Indian origin, wrote it a few days after Trump was elected, looking for explanations in his colleague’s work for the victory of the self-proclaimed silent majority, ‘a breed of white males who believe they are persecuted while being the aggressor, and are powerful while maintaining a sense of painful fragility’. It is precisely this cognitive dissonance that Kurian continues to explore in his undoubtedly ambitious Düsseldorf exhibition American Artist. On the upper floor of the completely darkened gallery, a deep flokati rug in muted cream colour is laid out, conjuring the atmosphere of a filthy motel. Old pizza boxes are scattered about (Locavores Eat Globally, all works 2017), next to an overturned fridge full of broken salsa bottles, exuding an acrid stench (Master Slave Complex [Proleptically Speaking], ii). The sauces are labelled with slogans such as ‘Trump that Bitch’ and ‘Redneck Sauce’, suggesting the following interpretation: this is the parallel world of one of those hate-filled white men who believe in the ‘Pizzagate conspiracy’ and detest immigrants, but still eat Mexican sauces, because eating soy sauce makes you gay; due to the oestrogen, of course! Yet the brand of the fridge – Privilege – indicates that this supposed

war of cultures boils down to the fear of losing one’s privileges. Even though the works are quickly decoded, the immersive environment very convincingly breeds unease. Kurian’s case for necessary intervention is also persuasive, although one may be tempted to ask if he himself is not using the same divisive us/them rhetoric in reverse. The installation Satters and Pullman, previously shown at the last Whitney Biennial, is significantly more complex. Accompanied by Bobby Darin crooning Mack the Knife (1959), two figures hang from a rope, the upper kicking the lower in the face. The figures’ faces are made of sunglasses-wearing crescent moons, inspired by an old McDonald’s advertising character called Mac Tonight, which, like Pepe the Frog, is very popular in alt-right memes on 4Chan and 8Chan. Again one is confronted with the coarse social Darwinism of the American right, which here also turns inward, since one Mac Tonight is beating up another. Via the music, Kurian interlaces the whole thing with the chequered history of the ‘murder ballad’ Mack the Knife from Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 Threepenny Opera (incidentally also the song in the ad featuring Mac Tonight), which over the years has turned the criminal into a hero. Since the financial crash of 2008, the call for partisanship and political intervention has grown louder, especially in the artworld. Kurian

has taken up this call after previously making eclectic material composites that suggested he was turning into a contemporary revenant of Jason Rhoades. This is to be welcomed; the only question is whether his rhetoric is sometimes not too explicit, a rebuke frequently and rightfully levelled at political art in particular. I’m thinking of the completely black room in which a white vulture (Untitled, 2017) glances observingly at a light sculpture (Locked, 2017) recessed into the wall, which turns out to be a dying sun. Dimly lit, positioned on a red-veined travertine pedestal and fabricated using pricey Carrara marble, the vulture strongly recalls an eagle and thus the heraldic animal of the us president. Not very subtle, though the staging of this end-times scenario is once again stunning. How Kurian uses darkness, colourful light sources and dim lighting in this show to trigger bodily unease and defensive reflexes is particularly impressive. Intended or not, the relationship with the works is thus dominated by sentiment, precluding any rational access, which in turn suggests the absurd way Trump supporters deal with facts. In any case, Kurian’s ‘Murder Ballad for America in Sculptural Form’, as the press release has it, caters to an illusionism based on empathy, which Brecht had already rejected for any politically progressive art – yet his most famous counterexample, of all things, is The Threepenny Opera. Moritz Scheper

Satters and Pullman, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Achim Kukulies. Courtesy 47 Canal, New York, and Sies & Höke, Düsseldorf

March 2018

Evelyn Taocheng Wang Four Season of Women Tragedy Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam 24 November – 20 January A dark dress floats above a rock-strewn riverbed in Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s drawing Virginia Woolf on Riverside (all works 2017). The scene alludes to the eponymous writer’s drowning, achieved by wading into a river wearing clothes she had weighed down with stones. Ducks calmly swim past, oblivious to the tragedy. Life goes on. A matching dress lies on the floor in front of the drawing, as though it had just washed up there. The garment comes from the wardrobe of the artist, who is Chinese, transgender and lives in the Netherlands. It’s the dress she likes to wear to openings, she mentioned to me: it makes her feel feminine, European, glamorous. Many of the works on display here combine drawings, sculptures and paintings on canvas with fashion items. The dresses, blouses, bags and shoes, all from the brand Agnès B. (Wang bought them with the the Volkskrant Art Prize money she won in 2016), are indicators of a fascination with the construction of femininity. To Wang, the garments from the Paris fashion house stand for feminine elegance, sophistication and the freedom to be the person you want to be. Whether or not that’s objectively the case,

what becomes clear in this exhibition is that femininity doesn’t always come naturally, nor are its surfaces and effects straightforward. Take Save my baby first, a drawing that recalls a Chinese fable about a snake that changes into a woman through trickery and deceit. The scene depicts a young woman in danger of being deluged by urine, while she desperately holds her baby above her head. ‘Save my baby first’, she calls out to the holy monk on the horizon (the text is written on the drawing). But he’s not easily fooled. ‘She’s a real woman now? She just gave birth? No, no, this is impossible. She is not a woman! She is a false one!’ This surreal drama proves fatal. Beneath the drawing lies the red dress of the trickster. Four Season of Women Tragedy, the title of the show, is in Chinglish, a mix of Chinese and English, pointing up another commingled sense of self. The gallery walls are painted pink, as in a fashion boutique. Occupying the middle of the space are four wooden sculptures with garments that represent the seasons. Winter, a Jugendstillike fitting room, complete with wooden icicles on the edge of the roof, contains a winter coat

and woollen cap. The choice of what to wear naturally follows the cycle of the seasons. However, the appraising eye cast through the cloakroom is necessarily guided by imagination: does this suit me? What do I look like in it? Wang fantasises about what type of woman she wants to be, and we watch with her: a series of 50 colour photographs on the wall show the artist in 50 different creations in as many locations (Photosynthesis). This ode to ladylike beauty, intended as a foil for trashy drabness, is something of a cross between a Cindy Sherman series and a fashion shoot. According to the accompanying text, Wang sympathises with Lily Briscoem from Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, a restless painter trying to find herself, aggrieved because ‘women cannot write, women cannot paint’. Wang’s combination of fashion items and drawings here may not have produced a consistently cohesive result, but the exhibition as a whole is both uplifting and engaging: with spirit and wit, it stages feminine identity as a complex, highly personal melodrama. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Billy Nolan

Four Season of Women Tragedy, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

ArtReview

Otobong Nkanga The Breath From Fertile Grounds Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin 8 December – 10 February In his soap opera-like 1995 drama Buddleia, the Dublin playwright Paul Mercier settled on the plant then pushing its magenta blossoms through the brickwork of so much of halfderelict Georgian Dublin, using it as a delicately unstable and possibly romantic image of an unquenchable process finding its substrate in the spasms of economic upheaval. Otobong Nkanga, arriving in the city more than two decades later, quickly lighted upon similar metaphors, reading a resistance that grows parasitical on collapse, even if now – plant life being as susceptible as any other to rising urban price per square metre – sustained in an increasingly paved-over world by ever smaller lifeforms: moss, lichens and other myco-squatters. Following her appearance in Koyo Kouoh’s 2016 eva International (Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art), the Nigerian-born, Antwerpbased Nkanga has been exploring the Irish capital – its building sites with their rebar skeletons, its museums with their hordes of repoussé metals – all the while running sorties to the distant boglands so beloved of Seamus Heaney, themselves great and squelching deep-time archives of laid-down metaphors. The Breath From Fertile Grounds is explicitly the result of those various travels. The installation incorporates husky chunks of bricks (possibly

even the same ones that featured in Mercier’s stage set), along with a painted element that blooms like mould across the gallery wall; poetry in both the Irish and English languages printed on sheets of cloth and draped over iron rods; and, of course, those mossy, grey-green, teal and silver flora that love to expand from pocks, cracks, chips and transitional sites when the immediate trauma of demolition and rebuilding abates long enough. In Handshake (all works 2017) the artist has installed two columns built from reclaimed bricks – “locally sourced”, assures the gallery staffer, woke to locavore values – between which a slender metal baton holds in place a saddle, supporting another plaster-splattered piece of rubble, capped gently with a fine haze of green shoots of tenacious life. Or have they died? Even resistance has a best-before date. Nkanga’s transporting of bricks into the gallery evokes a cull of brick buildings in Dublin, while also activating the material’s biography, the deep history each clay brick retains and, consequently, what a fine substrate they make for thready lichens, friable mosses and other emblematic growths of a damp island. While not novel, her recognition of this merges productively into a rhizome of contemporary practice that thinks through the networks outside the animal kingdom, practice that stretches from

Camille Henrot back to Marcel Broodthaers, to the sculptural biosystems of Méadhbh O’Connor and, most notably here, Camilla Berner’s Black Box Garden (2011), another work that piggybacks on the ‘wild’ flowers of demolition sites. Such sprouts are everywhere, promising to break apart – albeit geologically slowly – once solid bricks; or equally possibly, to hold them together against the assault of time. All the same, the combined forces of plants and fungi work their way into the bricks as surely as death, as in 2017 ad (the letters, Nkanga said in an artist’s talk, for her refer to Antwerp and Dublin), a found totem, a clump of bricks and mortar from which a curved iron proboscis emerges, like an urbanised, abstracted elephant god on whose head sits, once again, a small colonial presence of spidery sprouts. For Nkanga, the way all this autonomous activity teems into the most visible scars of destruction, the most egregious insults to the space of the public, to civic life, offers an image of something that resists, though notably something nonand extra-human. If the earth, despite all its bad habits, abideth forever, perhaps it will be these ostensibly tender, functionally resilient shoots, rather than those most uncharismatic of noncharismatic microfauna, the cockroaches, who will endure. Luke Clancy

The Breath From Fertile Grounds, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Kasia Kaminska. Courtesy Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin

March 2018

Gaylen Gerber Galerie Emanuel Layr, Rome 26 November – 17 February Gaylen Gerber’s first solo show in Emanuel Layr’s Rome gallery offers cause for reflection on the diversity of objects that populate our collective global history. Indebted both to the readymade and the monochrome, the exhibition features 21 found objects from diverse origins, all of them uniformly painted by the American artist in one of two colours: an institutional grey and an off-white. These objects, all named Support (no date) and positioned on seven untreated mdf plinths, appear both homogenised and, at the same time, more clearly differentiated by their uniform colouring. This contradiction is met with another, as the works are somehow freed from their history in undergoing a process of standardisation, without effacing their origins. The positioning of, for example, an earthenware statuette of the Tang Dynasty (618–800 ce) next to an earthenware bowl made by the Anasazi (Ancient Pueblo peoples) – who populated the Southwestern United States from 800 to 1200 ce – appears to elevate both of them. Through a myriad of juxtapositions between objects placed on the same plinth and across different plinths, the uniqueness of each item is somehow emphasised. From aluminium drinks cans to protective statuettes and icons made to ward off bad spirits, to a Hindu musical trumpet

of the late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth century, something of the diversity of human activity is convened under one roof. Naturally the tendency is to look for, or invent, narratives spun from the correlation between objects. According to the laws of Gestalt psychology, we are bound to do so whether we intend to or not. In this light the first plinth seems particularly rife with associations, hosting as it does an off-white aluminium drinks can in a paper bag (a rare differently coloured element), a cinematic prop of a severed ear from the Hughes Brothers’ film Dead Presidents (1995) and a concrete fragment of 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles: the location of the hotel where Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968. Whether one is aware of the provenance of the objects or not, the suggestion of alcoholism is evoked by the can sitting in its paper sack – it is common in the us for vagrants to carry their drinks concealed due to prohibitions on public drinking. The severed ear suggests violence; the concrete block on its metal support might further support this assumption. We have all the inspirations necessary to write a short and very troubled story. Yet in a twist the viewer might find both endearing and infuriating, Gerber himself apparently claims no intention

Gaylen Gerber, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna & Rome

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behind the positioning of given objects within a constellation, which are intended to be seen as independent of each other. Once known, this fact presents a kind of task for the audience: to see each object as complete in itself. The result is a kind of antiarchive, as materials are freed by their institutional categorisation (in this case as ‘artworks’ in a contemporary art gallery) rather than captured by it. This arises as the sameness imposed on the objects, and the injunction to see them one by one, focuses the viewer on their individual properties in the present, rather than on a conjured historical association. In this light the offwhite-painted Cambodian lintel fragment depicting Kala of Angkor, a Hindu and Buddhist deity – placed on the plinth situated farthest from the gallery’s entrance – can be appreciated for its formal properties as much as for its religious associations. Gerber rids objects of the folkic peculiarities that tend to cloud our perceptions of them by making them conform to a uniform and institutional aesthetic, leaving us free to investigate their cultural associations if we wish. In our current political climate, where cultural appropriation can easily offend, he deftly balances the subjugation and enhancement of his objects’ cultural backgrounds. Mike Watson

Yan Pei-Ming A Short History of Power and Death Massimo De Carlo, London 4 October – 16 December If recounting A Short History of Power and Death, the title of Yan Pei-Ming’s second show in London, where would you begin? The first room of the show is hung with five paintings from the series Napoleon Crowning Himself Emperor (all works 2017). Based on a figure study by Jacques-Louis David, from whom the Corsican commissioned a gargantuan record of his 1804 self-coronation, the pose depicted didn’t in fact make it into the final commission (Napoleon demanding a less imperious gesture instead). Ten years later, he was deposed, as evoked by the vertiginous composition of one work in the series (Napoleon Crowning Himself – Purple), the emperor’s face squeezed low in a rectangular canvas. The fate of another emperor is recorded in The Execution of Maximilian, after Manet, which follows one of Édouard Manet’s five versions of the subject – one of which was at some stage cut into pieces, only being reassembled (by Edgar Degas) after the artist’s death. Across the room from this are monochrome portraits of four national leaders whose grip on power remains all-too-stable: Donald Trump, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un (Presidents D.T., B.A-A., V.P., K.J-U.). Ming began his career by creating portraits of Mao Zedong, and so while these tyrannical authority

figures are not unexpected subjects for him, what does surprise is how much sensory excitement he pumps from the planes and crevasses of their cold visages, the tense rhythm of light and dark that sweeps across the sequence. Ming may in this selection of subjects be gesturing to art’s continuing implication in the morally compromised circumstances of its production and circulation (aristocratic patronage may be less central to the contemporary art market than in First Empire France, but, as the likes of Hito Steyerl remind us, it is hardly independent of the ruling interests of the global economic order). Yet I think a different emphasis is present here. Wrenching visual pleasure from such austere, off-putting subjects as Assad et al feels almost like a kind of revenge: an affirmation of art’s perverse detachment from its subject matter, its ability to make the ghastly beautiful (or the beautiful ghastly). Napoleon is deposed, Maximilian shot – but Degas rescues Manet’s dismembered canvas, David’s sketch is recovered. When Putin and his ilk are gone, too, these pictures will still exist, and still be attractive. Very subtly, a counternarrative to the titular history of power and death emerges: one of conscious salvage but also art’s indifferent endurance and survival.

Upstairs, a vanitas-style still life of two skulls (Crown, Skulls and Flowers) – one bedecked with a crown just like the one Napoleon clutches – leads onto three paintings based on a photograph of the car crash that took Jackson Pollock’s life in 1956. The conjunction of the skulls and the car’s metal carcass could be read as a broad comment about the transience of earthly glory, whether that of a monarch or a feted talent. But the choice of subject feels more particular than that – and not just as an homage to Andy Warhol in the era of his Death and Disaster series (1962–63). In the years preceding his death, Pollock barely made work, painting seeming to fail him, or he to fail painting. Yet even in his artless demise, Ming shows, an image persisted: one which in this painter’s hands, 60 years later, becomes expressive, poetic and, in passages, quite mesmerisingly beautiful. Throughout the show, Ming’s gestural brushwork recalls entrails, smeared and slapped across the canvas, like the trail of a vulture writhing about in carrion. Just as a rotting body inevitably leaves guts and bones, Ming seems to say, in our image world, every life, every story leaves remains – remains with which, for good or ill, artists can do what they please. Matthew McLean

Presidents d.t., b.a-a., v.p., k.j-u., 2017, oil on canvas, 80 × 349 cm (overall). Photo: Todd-White. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan, London & Hong Kong

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Larry Achiampong Sunday’s Best Copperfield, London 23 November – 16 December Sunday’s Best (2016) is a contemplative short film that explores faith and history as a personal and collective experience. Presented as a largescale single-screen projection, it begins with the pulsating soundtrack of an African church service accompanied by a minute-long visual cacophony of historical and contemporary imagery drawn from archival, history-book and television sources. Fleeting and mesmerising, these images are barely decipherable, but last long enough to give the impression of seismic and even catastrophic events that have befallen and continue to shape the black diaspora: the Atlantic slave trade, the scramble for Africa, colonial rule, forced migration, xenophobia, the aftermath of police brutality. As sound and visuals fade, a vivid closeup of a young boy fills the screen, head bowed and eyes closed in deep contemplation. Organ music, reminiscent of the beginning of a religious service, here introduces our narrator. He recalls learning about religious figures and deities, and wearing his Sunday best for church. He also recounts the three types of imagery that could be found in his childhood home: historic Ghanaian freedom fighters, family members and images of Jesus, “the only white person important enough to share a place

on my family’s walls”. He continues, “I always wondered why someone from Bethlehem was as white as chalk.” This candour is purposeful, contrasting with the subtle interplay of image and sound, space and scale. The majority of the film centres on static shots of the inside of archetypal Christian churches, replete with details of white religious icons, stained-glass windows, altars, stations of the cross and church organs. Such sacred imagery is punctuated by the sound of African worship and is at odds with the narrator’s recollections of his family’s church in London, which was more akin to those places of worship located in less conventional environments such as vacated shops and pubs or decommissioned municipal buildings. The title of the work is itself a play on words. Its meaning is ambiguous: alluding to sartorial custom, it could also be someone’s name, or an assertion that Sunday is the pinnacle of the week. During the denouement, in the previously empty church we come faceto-face with a woman who emerges ghostlike in front of the altar. She is dressed in a striking traditional West African outfit. A closeup lingers on a detail of fabric, a signifier of her African identity; equally it could be a play

Sunday’s Best (still), 2016, 4k video, colour, sound, 15 min 47 sec. Courtesy the artist and Copperfield, London

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on the sanctity of ‘the cloth’. Animated in her gestures, the woman closes her eyes; tears trickle down her cheeks. She looks to be in a state of spiritual euphoria, or a mournful but dignified incongruous presence within a congregation-less church; here the discord between sound and image disrupts the narrative flow. The single authorial voice is itself subsumed by an almost otherworldly intervention. Presented in a former church and projected at a scale that covers the entire width of one end of the space, the result is a physically immersive and emotive experience, as the gallery becomes an extension of the church depicted in the film. African-led churches are today a prominent feature of a number of Britain’s cities. Their presence signifies a multifaith and multicultural society. While an integral part of the landscape, they also occupy a decidedly separate sphere to that of Britain’s more conventional Christian churches. Achiampong brings into dialogue these separate but historically intertwined manifestations of Christianity. In doing so, he constructs a compelling study about an often-overlooked aspect of faith and history in contemporary Britain. Richard Hylton

Aaron Angell Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow 8 December – 18 March Elusive narratives and bold aesthetics run through the works in British artist Aaron Angell’s latest exhibition. Villa wasp mattress demonstration (all works 2017) is a transparent inflatable mattress with crude pig’s-blood cement tiles laid out inside to resemble a hypocaust (the underfloor heating system Romans used). Sewer gas lamp demonstration sees the pig’s-blood cement take a cloddish, fencelike form. A gas canister feeds through to lamps at the front of this structure that are couched behind an enlarged ancient coin, cast in amber-coloured glass. Scalar cabbage demonstration is a giant cabbage growing within an oversize pig’s-blood cement pot. All of these works suggest antiquarian technologies, pig’s-blood cement itself an ancient formula with a remarkable capacity to endure for millennia. They also speak of bodily necessities – sleep, waste, food – admixing with matter. Their lumpen naivety belies a deep, holistic wisdom. In stark visual contrast, A Large Wardian Case (an early type of terrarium, c. 1860)

at the opening of the exhibition introduces an aesthetic Angell’s work inevitably spurns; a Victorian elegance rooted in symmetry, graceful lines and delicate ornament. Only the moss and ferns contained within it are comparatively organic. And herein lies Angell’s wonderful inversion, because once attuned to his outlandish sculptures, the erstwhile bullish case seems oddly lacking. For all its enlightened sophistication it can’t match the embodied knowledge that Angell’s bulbous yet magnanimous monuments evoke. Add to this spiral of ideas a series of contemporary ceramic takes on cineraria (Roman containers for ash or bone) and a reverse-painted glass depicting a Vision of the purgatorial ladder with frogs and toads (the exhibition text tells us this is derived from an eleventh-century image of such a ladder) and you’re in the midst of an intriguing assemblage. Angell’s cineraria, with their gritty, imprecise bodies and pooled glazes, seems to consign their

supposed contents to an afterlife devoid of conventional beauty or taste. And in this light, purgatory – where you await purification before moving on – speaks to the astute aesthetic dialogue Angell has honed within the field of ceramics, negotiating the fractious expectations of art and craft. Of course, one challenge of goma is its scale and imposing neoclassical architecture. Angell aims to counter this by appropriating, as he is quoted as saying, the ‘cliché of the loft, the archipelago of stations, objects, and pools of light’, but I think this strategy meets with mixed success. Priming viewers by isolating the Wardian Case, an affective miniature of the room, works well. Elsewhere however the freestanding plastered walls, with their slightly wonky arches and combed surfaces, break the seductive dialogues of the works, not declamatory enough to shake an unnecessary white-cube overtone. But let this not detract from a remarkably enticing exhibition driven by a seductive, protean energy. James Clegg

Sewer gas lamp demonstration (detail), 2017, pig’s-blood cement, cast glass, gas fittings. Photo: Max Slaven. Courtesy the artist and Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

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Rachel Whiteread Tate Britain, London 12 September – 21 January There’s something quite compelling in obsessive repetition, the way, say, French composer Erik Satie insisted on repeating musical motifs over and over, or 840 times in the case of Vexations (1893–94), as if on a mystical quest. Though here Satie was striving to test the virtues of ‘boredom’ in music, Rachel Whiteread, whose whole oeuvre consists of variations on a single approach, seems on a quest to capture the essence of memory. Her repetitive process is made bluntly apparent in this retrospective, which, housed in one large room, offers a panoramic view of her oeuvre. Throughout her 30-year career, the British artist has been casting – in concrete and plaster for the most part, as well as using a range of other materials including resins, glass, rubber and wax – the ‘negative spaces’ around domestic objects and structures (from toilet paper rolls to bathtubs to entire houses), revealing their imperfect surfaces and undersides, paradoxically preserving their presence by making their absence tangible. As these empty spaces materialise, they become lasting tributes not only to objects and places, but also to memory itself – giving shape to its abstract and fleeting nature.

The two aisles formed by the plaster-cast rows of cabinets in Untitled (Book Corridors) 1997–98) evoke library shelves stacked with books, but take a closer look and you’ll realise these are not casts of bookshelves, but rather of the spaces between them, revealing the books’ pages rather than their spines. The same goes for the haptic Torso series (1991–99), which renders the emptiness inside a hotwater bottle in plaster, rubber, resin, wax and concrete. Some of the resulting objects actually look their part (the cast of a cardboard box’s interior ultimately looks like its original), but the most intriguing ones differ enough from their model to keep things interesting. The experience of looking at Untitled (Stairs) (2001), for instance, a freestanding concrete sculpture of two flights of stairs facing each other, is something comparable to trying to figure out whether the edges of a cube drawn on paper are projecting out from or receding into the page: you’re never quite able to project what the ‘positive’ version of the stairs would look like. But perhaps that’s exactly the point:

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the sculpture is not so much a reference to a specific staircase as it is a means to speaking about the people who used it, and capturing something of the sense of a place. A surprising addition here is a selection of the artist’s works on paper. Rarely shown, these denote Whiteread’s poetic inclination towards abstraction: a painted, semifolded cardboard work, reminiscent of Richard Tuttle’s compositions, looks like a template for an unrealisable structure; details of a chevron-motif floorboard, painted on graph paper, suggest an Agnes Martin-like grid; the perspective of a zigzagging staircase, outlined in correction fluid on black paper, collapses under the repetition of vertical lines, seemingly dripping from each angle of its steps. These works offer a refreshing counterpoint to an exhibition that risks running out of steam. Whiteread’s recent series, including almost-pristine translucent-resin casts of doors and window frames as well as shed facades in papier-mâché, seem to lack the poignant presence of so much of the other work here. Repetition can only run for so long before it starts to lose any virtue. Louise Darblay

Andreas Gursky Hayward Gallery, London 25 January – 22 April Andreas Gursky’s photographs are infinity mirrors. At least here, in the newly renovated Hayward Gallery, this is the illusion: all ten rooms are filled with photographs of other spaces. Works that are large-format behave as portals to other places – such as Dolomites, Cable Car (1987), in which a single orange cab seemingly floats midair among fog-heavy mountains, the cables rendered near-invisible, or Mülheim, Anglers (1989), which presents a sweeping river that ends in the distance where a concrete overpass bridges the waterway and grey sky. These are set alongside smaller-scale works that appear more like windows presenting scenes of the quotidian: people engaging in football practice or paddling at a public swimming pool (Zürich I, 1985, and Ratingen, Swimming Pool, 1987), or a field of chickens amidst which a cockerel is photographed mid-strut (Krefeld, Chickens, 1989). The austere aesthetic of these photographs makes them formally beautiful to look at, reminiscent of the objective vision of Gursky’s teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who were famed for documenting industrial buildings. As a member of the Düsseldorf School, a group of students taught by the Bechers, Gursky’s works carry traces of influence from the new topographics photographers; a term coined in 1975 for a group of mostly American

photographers, but also the Bechers, who were known for formal and stylistically dispassionate works that addressed the urban banal and man-modified landscapes by combining a traditionally ‘objective’ documentary style with the formal elements of fine art. For example, Rhine ii (1999/2015) is a landscape split into six horizontal strips: a grass bank divided by a pathway, the river and opposite green bank make up half the photograph, the rest is sky. It turns out this image is digitally altered – a power station was removed from the scene. This linearity, a compositional technique favoured by Gursky, recalls the abstract style of Lewis Baltz. Aerial shots are a reminder of Joe Deal. The colour and subjects of Utah (2017) and Ibiza (2016), both drive-by photographs, look like a homage to Stephen Shore. But these associations are also a harbinger of how one might perceive other works in this retrospective. Aletsch Glacier (1993) is a landscape that evokes the sublime, akin to the works of twentieth-century American photographer Ansel Adams, and hangs next to Niagara Falls (1989), a photograph of passenger ferry Maid of the Mist as it heads towards the crashing falls, two birds wheeling above – a postcard trope. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that these are images and subjects that have been seen many

times before – which is where this retrospective starts to feel repetitive, particularly among works produced in the last two decades, which appear to focus on large crowds of people, scenes of late capitalism, the environment and mass production. Perhaps this is the point, as demonstrated by the rows of stock shelved in Amazon (2017) and 99 Cent ii, Diptych (2001) (both of which represent capitalism) or by the lines of tulips on a farm in Untitled xviii (2015). But in these examples, as in photographs like Nha Trang (2004) and Pyongyang vi (2007/17), I am further reminded of Ron Fricke’s 1992 documentary film of the human condition in the age of globalisation, Baraka, in which fast-flowing imagery of factory production lines and mass choreographies of people performing either religious ceremonies or civil celebrations feature. In this survey exhibition, Gursky’s oversize photographs trigger a psychic Google Image search result, making it difficult to find what French philosopher Roland Barthes called the punctum – that small detail or accident in a photograph that ‘pricks’ or ‘bruises’ the viewer; that which etches the image into your memory. Instead, there’s the sense you could be here for hours scrolling through an infinite number of similar searches, staring into endlessness. Fi Churchman

Rhine ii, 1999/2015, inkjet print, 238 × 408 × 6 cm. © the artist / dacs, London. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

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The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind Hauser & Wirth Somerset 20 January – 7 May We’re living through a period of radical change in our relationship to the rural. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, more people in the uk are moving to the countryside than are leaving it. And this is echoed by all sorts of ongoing cultural trends, from the growth in organic eating to the publishing boom in nature writing. So it’s with a certain sense of inevitability that Hauser & Wirth Somerset should mount an exhibition exploring our connection to the land, and its shifting meanings over time – after all, the venue itself is a former farm, with an attached restaurant serving locally sourced produce, and seems to extol many of the presentday pleasures of country living. The potential scope of the subject, of course, is vast – and that’s even with landscape as a genre being only briefly touched upon by the show. Rather than aiming to cover the whole territory, then, the exhibition takes the form of a curatorial essay (as put together by Adam Sutherland of Grizedale Arts, another ruralbased organisation), one that ranges across all sorts of curious highways and byways, both contemporary and historical – taking in not only works of art, but also rustic artefacts, and ephemera from lp covers to postcards. And for the most part, it’s a rich harvest. With hundreds of items on display, it seems invidious to name

just a few, but any list of highlights would surely include the exquisite, bucolic etchings of Samuel Palmer and William Blake; Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s iconic quartet of portraits depicting seasonal figures formed from plants and vegetables; a lovely little botanical drawing by Beatrix Potter that verges on abstraction; and an early Paul McCarthy photowork of dirt being thrown (arguably a metaphor for how the rest of his career would develop). Still, this roving, transhistorical approach also presents certain problems. The show is organised into thematic sections – but corralling so many pieces together can sometimes feel slightly indiscriminate or cursory. The second section, in particular, ostensibly explores social movements and back-to-the-land ideologies; and much of the material, from ‘Arts and Crafts’ publications to ornate Women’s Institute tea towels, is engaging. But scattered throughout are old-fashioned farming tools and items of dress, which feel rather out of place, and need a fuller explanation to seem more than tokenistic, while other pieces appear merely to invoke concepts rather than address them: John Ruskin, for instance, may have been a crucial figure in reviving rural handicraft traditions, but his own selfportrait doesn’t tell us anything relevant. And besides, such historical works tend to sit rather

awkwardly alongside the contemporary ones, a large number of which convey a less earnest, more ironic take on nature – led by Marcus Coates’s whimsical animal-roleplay projects. Other thematic strands, however, are far stronger. The real meat of the show is its engagement with ideas of production and social systems – whether that’s the food-generating installations at the exhibition’s start, such as Hayatsu Architects’ Community Bread Oven (2017), or Fernando García-Dory’s cheesemaking hub, Mobile Dairy School (2016), or the examples of countrified advertising adorning the walls in the final room. The point, ultimately, is about manufacturing – whether manufacturing meals or manufacturing meaning – and how we, as human beings, for good and for ill, have always necessarily lived in an inherently processed world. In that sense, perhaps the most powerful piece, certainly the most visceral and distressing, is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s feature-length film, Our Daily Bread (2005), which depicts mechanised techniques of industrialised farming: the crops being automatically harvested and sorted; the conveyor belts of battery animals being grotesquely butchered; and the human workers being also reduced, through their mindless repetitions, to merely another sort of machine. Gabriel Coxhead

Marcus Coates, Apple Service Provider, 2017, performance. Photo: Andy Gott. © the artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Somerset

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Fernando Garçia Dory and Hayatsu Architects, Goat Pavilion, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Ken Adlard. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Somerset

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Kathleen White A Year of Firsts Martos Gallery, New York 14 December – 27 January ‘Life doesn’t compute,’ the critic Bruce Hainley once offered as a summation of the oeuvre of Hanne Darboven (an armoury of endless looped scrawls and unequivocal equations, neatly inked on graph paper and filling up calendar grids). One is reminded of the resolute will with which the German artist produced those obsessive ledgers when viewing Kathleen White’s A Year of Firsts (2001), a suite of 40 drawings in paint, ink, pastel and other media on rag paper, many accompanied by explanatory pencilled captions and each marking a separate day in 2001. The New York-based artist is perhaps best known for her work commemorating friends lost to the city’s aids crisis during the 1980s and 90s – a time in which death appeared to strike at random, picking off members of her community without logic or reason. White, who died of lung cancer in 2014, created these modest works on paper in response to the death of her father early in 2001 (also to lung cancer) and loss of her brother to a prison sentencing in March of that year. The spare, abstract compositions, arranged in chronological order to span three gallery walls, track her emotions on each date. The paintings commemorate ‘firsts’ not in the sense of new beginnings, but rather in terms of the inaugural steps of a slow march ever farther from

an irrecoverable past. Their oblique, sometimes tortured scrawls are testaments to the impossible task of wresting sense from tragedy. Some dates are milestones: White dedicates one painting to her brother’s first birthday spent incarcerated, another to the first time she found herself forgetting and then remembering that her father was gone. Others are prosaic: the first trip to the corner store since his death; the first Labor Day since his passing. These are interspersed with still other drawings dedicated to loved ones lost to aids as well as to her sister Charlene, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1998 and whose death haunted the White family. In each, the artist’s dating is overshadowed by the gesture’s seeming insufficiency in the face of the passage of time. In another week, it would be a year and a week since the anniversary in question. Would the date’s resonance still hold? While Darboven’s precise notations are intentionally oblique and incoherent, as if to underscore the futility of attempting to create order out of trauma (in the senior artist’s case, the experience of witnessing the Second World War and its aftermath), White’s are tender and confessional in their frank admission of personal loss. Even more direct, albeit less

overtly autobiographical, is her four-channel 1988 video installation (mounted in the centre of the gallery), The Spark Between L And D. On four monitors, which play the looped 11-minute video at varying points in its duration, the artist is shown, in a nurse’s dress emblazoned with international flags, intoning the chorus from On Broadway and slapping her face until it appears to bleed profusely. She then proceeds to bandage the entirety of her body while continuing to sing, until her mouth is muffled by gauze, stopping only when she can no longer move. The application of these bandages, stopgaps that do nothing to redress the violent assault upon the artist’s body in the video’s opening, and which ultimately silence her into submission, is an obvious allusion to New York City’s inadequate response during the 1980s to its escalating aids crisis. Yet the work additionally calls to mind inner turmoil and the desire for self-harm exacerbated by cosmetic attempts to suppress this urge. Perhaps it also speaks to personal guilt. While The Spark… finds White fuelled by anger, in her subdued, elegiac paintings of 2001, she has transitioned to – if not acceptance – acknowledgement of the inherent chaos of loss. Cat Kron

A Year of Firsts (detail), 2001, 40 works on paper, 42 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Martos Gallery, New York

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Liz Magor Previously… Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York 27 October – 13 January I am embarrassed to admit how much time I spend looking at dog memes. I’ll spend hours on Instagram profiles called ‘pupflix’, ‘doggosbeingdoggos’ or ‘doggosdoingthings’, so much time that I’ve lost track of all the places propagating captioned canine content to my phone. My favourite trope is the owner who has caught an overzealous pup in the act – she’s fetched more than one ball, or she has human food in her mouth. The dog’s expression anxiously acknowledges her human companion’s presence, though the caption reads: ‘Who’s a good boy?’ Oh, doggo, I can’t get enough of you. I love you no matter what. I doubt that I’m the only person whose mind wanders to canine love in the presence of Liz Magor’s exhibition Previously… Historically, Magor has dedicated a large portion of her work to studying the intimate relationship between pets and people, and issues of submission and control, habit and compulsion, companionship and codependency, and love and need are evident in this new crop of sculpture and wall work. The latter hit right at the heart of these matters.

Care comes across as compulsive in Toolshed (Wood Stain) (all works 2017): Magor has crafted a neatly folded cellophane covering for a wool blanket scarred with what look like chemical burns – God, why on earth would this old rag need a wrapper? The same could be said for Toolshed (Marine Paint), a similar wall-mounted piece with a hole-ridden blanket. Whatever has brought the textile to its bedraggled condition is beside the point. At best, it is only fit for a dog. Magor’s deftness with materials and craft come across in another series of sculptures that could double as dog beds. They’re plaster-cast from discarded cardboard, and are raised an inch or two above the ground. Our New Sweaters stages a scene of tenderness and friendship: a pair of teddy bears embracing on a blanket of Mylar (the kind typically seen in gift-wrapping) at the centre of this platform. Magor appreciates these moments of care and intimacy. In Valley she has created plastic sheaths to protect a series of otherwise goofy dog toys. Nest is a plaster cast of a peaceful dead bird, and though the material speaks to impoverished origins, the periwinkle

with which she has pigmented the sculpture gives it high-end, artisanal appeal. The three series of sculptures makes for a decent introduction to Magor’s work, but I might expect a more focused presentation for the artist’s debut New York solo show. Then again, the Vancouver-based Magor has been at it for nearly 40 years, and the title of the exhibition could be read as a rejoinder, particularly to New York audiences: where exactly have you been for the last four decades? The remaining sculptures also attest to her rigorous sculptural dialect. Doe-eyed stuffed animals dangle perilously from sweaters in Oilmen’s Bonspiel, Pembina and Ladie’s Garment. The titles come from the patches sewn onto each sweater’s chest, which would also signify membership in the labour unions and social clubs that are a central part of life in Canada’s oil and gas boomtowns. Judging from their condition, I’d be damned if both the toys and the garments hadn’t been found in thrift stores. Nobody wants to be out in the cold, and everybody deserves a friend. Sam Korman

Ladie’s Garment (detail), 2017, textile, polymerised gypsum, 104 × 121 × 53 cm. Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

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Dream of Solentiname 80wse, New York 1 December – 17 February When Thomas More wrote Utopia (1516), he envisaged his invented, idealised realm as a reclusive island of the ‘New World’, a republic with social, religious and political customs reminiscent of a monastery. Perhaps utopias have always been deemed impossible sites precisely because of their envisioned and exotic isolation from the global forces of power and capital, which in reality surround and affect every community on the planet. Yet one is tempted to apply such a narrative to the remarkable story of Solentiname, the isolated island at the southern end of Lake Nicaragua. Consisting mainly of farmers who had suffered greatly from a lack of basic resources under the country’s long-reigning Somoza regime, it was transformed into a revolutionary artistic community by the priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal upon his arrival there in 1965. Practising his own take on liberation theology from a chapel distinct for its colourful, glassclad facade, Cardenal’s society would attract several us artists and poets during the so-called Central American crisis, which saw violent us intervention in the region in order to dismantle several pro-communist revolutions, and would come to play a central role in the 1979 revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Dreams of Solentiname bravely sets out to mediate this complicated history of political resistance through aesthetics, and its resonance in a North American context. Spread over five galleries, the exhibition begins in reverse, with a partial display of Group Material’s Timeline: A Chronicle of U.S. Intervention in Central and Latin America, a 1984 installation by the New York artist collective originally shown at P.S. 1. The work conveys in factual and chronological fashion the political history of the region from a North American perspective, focusing specifically on the centurylong history of intervention by the us government. Below a bold red line, running horizontally along two walls, a disparate group of cultural artefacts (from works of art to revolutionary propaganda) recounts a material history of the conflict-ridden relations between the us and its southern neighbours, while documents from the group’s own activist engagement (shows, fundraisers, rallies) under the Reagan administration sit above. Group Material in many ways spearheaded the New

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York artworld’s response to the Central and Latin American crises, and actively speculated on the politics of narrative authority: who gets to speak, who is represented, in a conflict? If Group Material provides a factual contextualisation, Susan Meiselas’s meditative photojournalism adds a haunting visuality to the story of Nicaragua’s violent dictatorship and subsequent revolution, which displaced tens of thousands of people. The American photographer travelled to the region to document the lived experience of the Nicaraguan people during the late-1970s insurrection and published her images in magazines and newspapers around the world, as well as in her book Nicaragua: June 1978 – July 1979 (1981). Here, selected images – striking and paradoxical scenes of a war-torn country – are installed on a dim corkboard background: a desperate mother fleeing with her naked child; revolutionary youths veiled in homemade balaclavas and practising throwing contact bombs; President Anastasio Somoza, cool and dressed all in white, entering the National Congress from his armoured car. Nicaragua’s unruly and radiant green forests serve as background to all of this, most stunningly depicted in Cuesta del Plomo (published in Nicaragua), wherein a decaying corpse, half-eaten by vultures, is enfolded by the bucolic landscape of the dense rainforest. Across the room, tear sheets from magazines collected by Meiselas track how her images were consumed as they were distributed in the global media. Meiselas, too, remains ambivalent towards the skewed representations of war: images aestheticise violence and pain, but can nonetheless possess a power as documentation and as monuments. Meiselas herself has continued to gauge this, returning to the region in 2004 to install 19 mural-size reproductions of her images around the country in collaboration with local communities, creating, according to exhibition materials, sites for collective memory. That art serves a meaningful function to the victims of war was the basic ethos of Cardenal and the Solentiname community, to which the rest of the exhibition is devoted. Born in Granada, 20km outside Managua, Cardenal enjoyed a moderately successful career in the us with his sculptures – modernist wood-carved and glossily painted animal figures reminiscent

ArtReview

of Brancusi – before entering the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where, under the guidance of fellow poet and monk Thomas Merton, he developed his popular theories of liberation through communist interpretations of Catholicism. At Solentiname he spread his gospel while encouraging creativity, bringing along young Nicaraguan artist Róger Pérez de la Rocha to teach technical aspects of painting to the increasingly autonomous community, which they adopted as a way to make sense of the devastating experience of the unfolding revolution. Striking are the many densely detailed oil paintings in their one-to-one allegorising of political violence via classic biblical motifs: in Esperanza Guevara’s La Traición (The Betrayal, 1975), Somoza soldiers acts as stand-ins for Romans in a ‘Judas kiss’ scene; while Julia Chavarria’s La Matanza de Los Inocentes (Murder of the Innocents, 1984) directly renders the regime’s merciless slaying of children as Herod’s infanticide in Bethlehem. In a palette of luminous greens, purples and reds – echoed, too, in Cardenal’s shiny sculptures – one finds, amidst all this violence, a persistent longing for the idealised image of Paradise, an image to which Solentiname’s lush landscape so easily lends itself. Over the course of a decade, Solentiname would house several us and Latin American artists and poets (such as Juan Downey and Julio Cortázar), some of whom were even invited to exhibit their paintings at institutions in the us. After the revolution, Cardenal would serve as the re-formed country’s first minister of culture. A site of faith, aesthetics and revolutionary politics, the story of Solentiname feels more unreal in the context of today’s ongoing conflicts in the small Central American country, where the leftist reformist president Daniel Ortega, a founding member of the Sandinistas and former close ally of Cardenal, has been criticised for severe human-rights violations and a progression towards autocracy. Yet, if the nature of politics and power is as cyclical as Nicaragua’s history suggests, there might also be hope that the utopian organisation of civil life is a recurrently possible scenario, one that again and again spurs radical political imagination through the productive synthesis of art and politics. Jeppe Ugelvig

top Susan Meiselas, Nicaragua: June 1978 – July 1979 (detail), 1981, photobook. Courtesy the artist

above Esperanza Guevara, La Traición (The Betrayal), 1975, painting, 36 × 55 cm. Courtesy Hermann Schulz

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Survival Research Laboratories Marlborough Contemporary, New York 6 January – 10 February Lucretia My Reflection (1987) by the Sisters of Mercy queues up in my mind at the sight of Survival Research Laboratories’ big, nasty, overaccessorised machines at Marlborough Contemporary: “I hear the roar of a big machine / Two worlds and in between / Hot metal and methedrine…” On that note, near the entry is Mr. Satan Head (2007), a malevolent milledsteel visage attached to a furnace and mounted onto a reconfigured military munitions loader. Satan’s firepower suspended, the gaping eyes and mouth loom with the threat of some pyrotechnic pagan performance. srl has titled the exhibition Inconsiderate fantasies of negative acceleration characterized by sacrifices of a non-consensual nature – a clunky, overwrought, wilfully disturbing manifesto, perhaps. The Sisters’ lyrics often seem, on closer examination, rather empty, describing nothing more particular than a mood or generic apocalyptic tableau. Prior to the reveal/roar of srl’s misaligned industry, there emerges a veritable press kit in a wall of self-promotional posters at the gallery entry espousing srl’s flaws, or virtues, as it were – ‘Useless Mechanical Activity’, shouts one; ‘A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief’, sniffs another. That srl might, in the form of their own promotional material, attempt an end run around likely criticism of their work speaks to both the juvenility and the overwhelming character of much of it: machinery alternately clanging and wickedly inert, capable of awesome, random, arguably pointless destruction.

The principle here is machines up to no good, retooled by srl with the heady, high drama of mechanical power. Pitching Machine (1999–2017) features a Lexan and steel cube into which a series of gears, armatures and power sources hurl, at speeds well over 300kph, 2×4s, which then splinter against a heavily armoured wall, and accumulate. Pitching Machine represents a tamed weapon into which material is mauled, and trapped, to little end other than a demonstration of power. Taming it further is a gallery setting, to say nothing of concerns for public safety – Pitching Machine was operated only at an inaugural event for the exhibition; within the show, the only machine actually moving (thankfully) is Fanuc Robot Arm (1992), in which a robot controls the panning, sweeping movement of a large television screen attached to a rotating arm. On the screen plays footage of one of srl’s demolition derbies, their machines fighting each other in a battle with no concept of victory. Rotary Jaws with Squirrel Eyes (1987) seems to mock the magical realism implicit in the fear that machines, which we create and control, might gain sentience. The rusty teeth of a bear trap form a skewering grin, above which two glass spherical ‘eyes’ watch – actual dead squirrels form each eye’s ‘iris’. The sculpture is googly-eyed, cartoonish even, but still scary: a power supply looms at its base, suggesting that all it needs to begin its nihilistic chomp is a grounded outlet. The padded ‘fingers’

of Track Robot (2015), though similarly powerless, beckon with a grasping touch that might quickly escalate from soft to crushing. Lucretia continues: “…I hear empire down”. In a recent interview, srl’s founder Mark Pauline states, ‘As an artist, it’s more exciting to think of yourself working in a super right-wing dictatorship where you can’t say anything directly and everything has to be implied. Like in the old Soviet Union.’ srl’s work comments on the industrial as an appendage of state power – mechanical production being the ultimate model worker, threatened annihilation the ultimate assurance of peace. This fundamental perversion forming the core of authoritarianism, whether allegorical or practical, extinguishes the soul from whatever it aspires to fully control. So what does that leave? A YouTube clip from 2012 shows srl’s Spine Robot (2012–14) sluggishly, but menacingly, taunting an outdoor audience, its fourpronged claw lingering at the head of a long, coiled, snakelike ‘arm’. The lateral undulation and speedy movement of snakes is still not completely understood; uncanny, it leaves an uneasy feeling in the stomach, mine at least. It’s tempting to read Spine Robot, in its domesticated setting at Marlborough, as little more than industrial taxidermy, Frankenstein without the electricity. Lost in the threat of destruction is its beckoning: “Lucretia, my reflection, dance the ghost with me…” Aaron Horst

Fanuc Robot Arm, 1992, steel, aluminium, hd television, Fanuc rt3 robot, electronics, 234 × 183 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Contemporary, New York & London

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John Bock Dead + Juicy The Contemporary Austin 23 September – 14 January Dead + Juicy, John Bock’s new film and exhibition, highlights the bizarre and near-perverse elements that have characterised the German artist’s work since he came to prominence during the early 1990s. The film, clocking in at precisely one hour, is a circuslike delve into Bock’s view of Texan culture as seen through the lens of the state’s capital, Austin. Bock’s interpretation is rife with what appear to be misguided ideas of Texan archetypes mined from the state’s long-maintained mythical aura, one that lends itself to fairytales filled with Southern belles and gun-toting cowboys who wistfully recall the days of Texan independence over a bottle of Shiner Bock, and then, three whiskeys later, remind themselves of their right to secede. The film portion of the exhibition, which was shot entirely in South Austin, sees our hero – a barber named Lisa – travel to various locations throughout the city, including: the backyard of what one might assume is a suburban household (we see outdoor furniture, a freestanding grill sizzling with steaks, and parental figures, one of whom

is inexplicably covered in a plastic mask, the other in a Jackie O-like ensemble); a traditional barbershop, the sole Texan particularity of which is a taxidermy rat (though Texans traditionally prefer to stuff big-game items); and a wooded swamp – one of the rare exactitudes in this film, as the Hill Country and its many lakes make for tree-laden, marshy terrain. Austin, however, is known for its liberal tendencies and an affinity for live music that dares venture from the country genre. It is arguably Texas’s cultural epicentre, surrounded by fanatically conservative areas like both a reject and self-proclaimed rebel – a role not unlike the one Bock’s adopted hometown of Berlin plays in Germany. The problem is that Bock attempts to address contemporary America, and its cartoonish political situation under a conservative administration, through an extreme depiction of a Texan city that is the exception to the state’s right-leaning norm. The result feels undercooked, not due to a lack of ambition, but out of ignorance of the subject matter.

Throughout his artistic oeuvre, Bock is known for performing nonsensical lectures, after which the props from these gibberishfilled talks are left behind as exhibited art objects. The artist has continued in the same vein here, but the aforementioned items used in the film – the grill, a red barber chair, a vintage record player – do little to complement it, and fail to stand on their own. In the accompanying text, Dead + Juicy has been billed by the artist as an ‘uncanny musical’, though I would argue that the description suits neither the film nor the object-based exhibition. Admittedly, Bock’s latest commission is indeed strange, but this eccentricity is commonplace for the artist, a repeated trait that only serves to heighten this particular exhibition’s overall absurdity. One does not leave feeling unsettled or mystified by an intellectually stimulating strangeness; rather, the dominant sense is one of exhaustion over continued nonsense that feels, at times, intentionally bogus even for the artist himself. Caroline Elbaor

Dead + Juicy (still), 2017, hd video, colour, sound, 59 min 46 sec. Photo: David Schultz. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Anton Kern Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

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Books Avedon: Something Personal by Norma Stevens and Steven M.L. Aronson Spiegel & Grau, $40 (hardcover) ‘All photographs are accurate,’ Richard Avedon once said. ‘None of them is the truth.’ The same could be said regarding biographies, but especially this recent doorstopper devoted to the legendary photographer. An entertaining but slapdash book penned by the artist’s collaborator and business partner Norma Stevens and writer Steven M.L. Aronson, the breezy 700-page volume proves substantial in the same way Perez Hilton is revealing. A succès de scandale even prior to publication because of reports that the twice-married Avedon was bisexual and had affairs with, among other boldface names, his high school classmate James Baldwin and the film director Mike Nichols (according to Stevens and Aronson, Avedon and Nichols had plans to leave their wives and elope to ‘Gay Paree’ but eventually ‘chickened out’), Something Personal found public repudiation immediately after hitting the bookshelves. The book’s chief challenger: the Richard Avedon Foundation, which alleges that the biography is ‘filled with countless inaccuracies’ and, additionally, is based on a work of fiction Avedon was working on when he died. Presented as ‘equal parts memoir, biography, and oral history’, Something Personal is less a traditional biography than a collection of reminiscences, many of them from celebrities, ex-celebrities and the celebrity-adjacent. Crammed to bursting with flashbacks from figures like Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields,

Naomi Campbell, Kelly LeBrock, Bruce Weber, Jann Wenner and the mononymous hairdresser Oribe, the book floats on clouds of vernissage gossip, dinner-table backbiting and after-party innuendo. Tellingly, the relentless march of trivial anecdotes quickly forces a sobering realisation – one does not need to be a millennial to feel blasé about the better-known titanosaurs of the pre-Twitter and Facebook age. Which is not to say that more crucial stories about the famous photographer’s life and career are without interest. Avedon was – together with Irving Penn, with whom he kept up a dogged Picasso-Matisse rivalry – the most famous fashion photographer of his time. His renown notwithstanding, he also struggled to be taken seriously as an artist. Stevens was particularly well placed to document what the photographer himself believed was a textbook case of acute cognitive dissonance. As Avedon’s longtime studio director, she spent 30 years in the photographer’s sparkling company (the man seemingly knew everybody and everything on at least six continents). She also helped orchestrate both his increasingly demanding and lucrative day-job and the museum exhibitions he craved like a mother’s love (Anna Avedon was, predictably, adoring, even smothering). No wonder the celebrated photographer remains, to date, the only artist to have had two Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospectives during his lifetime.

Avedon attended to his personal history like Edward Scissorhands tending a holly bush. Into his eighties he submitted, unsolicited, new obituaries to The New York Times several times a year (his greatest fear, Stevens writes, besides getting fewer column inches than Penn, was dying the same day somebody ‘even bigger’ kicked the proverbial can). But, claims Stevens, the artist left the matter of telling the truth of his life to her. ‘Don’t be kind – I don’t want a tribute, I want a portrait,’ he supposedly said to her. ‘Make me into an Avedon.’ One wonders, after reading the umpteenth anecdote about the man’s fastidiously secretive nature, whether he really intended for his friend and confidante to let it all hang out quite so flabbily. A master portraitist who was not above staging his warts-and-all photographs of, among other subjects, movie actors, politicians, writers, civil rights workers, ranch hands, newly married couples, swamis, ex-slaves and wide-beamed Daughters of the American Revolution, Avedon subscribed to the idea that his sitters’ peculiarities crucially also matched his person. ‘My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph,’ he said. With Something Personal, a similar phenomenon is at work. Charming and engaging at times, like Avedon, the book is also unfortunately glib, windy and unreliable – like its writers. Christian Viveros-Fauné

Interviews on Art by Robert Storr Heni, £35/$45/€40 (hardcover) Storr is a chummy interlocutor in these 61 conversations conducted between 1981 and 2016. Some artists the critic evidently knows from his former role as curator at moma, New York: Richard Serra, Gabriel Orozco, Ellsworth Kelly and Chuck Close, all included here, had exhibitions during Storr’s 1990–2002 tenure at the institution (the 1997 interview with Close was conducted on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective there). Other relationships run deeper: there are three separate interviews with Louise Bourgeois, for example, and Storr feels

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compelled to note that ‘Yvonne [Rainer] and I have known each other over quite a long time’ at the beginning of their 2009 conversation. If Storr isn’t too pushy with his subjects, this ends up working to his advantage. He manages to tease out personal anecdotes that might not be forthcoming in a more formal meeting; stories that bring new insight into these much written-about names. Painter Peter Saul is happy to speak of being bullied at school, for example (and how he started an art club as a result), and Felix Gonzalez-Torres talks poignantly

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of his partner Ross Laycock, who died from an aids-related illness. Storr is comfortable asking Charles Ray if he thinks the artist’s sister’s schizophrenia influenced his sculpture (Ray answers in the affirmative), and the artist goes on to say he was once abused as a child. This highly personal biographical detail cannot fail, for me at least, to cast works such as Boy With Frog (2009) or Huck and Jim (2014), both featuring nude adolescent figures, and the orgiastic Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992) in a new, more uncomfortable light. Oliver Basciano

March 2018

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Calder, The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940 by Jed Perl Alfred A. Knopf, $50/£35 (hardcover) One doesn’t make it five pages into Jed Perl’s new biography of Alexander Calder before getting something close to Perl’s theory of biography itself: ‘There is a physics of biography, one that involves the facts and how they are related to one another. And there is a metaphysics of biography, especially the biographies of creative spirits, that involves determining how the facts of the artist’s life somehow fuel the imaginative life.’ It’s a bit perplexing as to what Perl is after here. By ‘imaginative life’ are we meant to assume Perl means the artist’s work – presumably the most direct manifestation of the artist’s own imaginative efforts? Or is it meant to indicate something broader, a ‘sensibility’, say, that goes beyond the dry ‘physics’ of an artist’s life to get at something like the spirit of his time? Are we to learn something about Calder’s work by learning about Calder the man? Or are we to learn about the ‘age of Calder’? I’m not sure Perl is clear on the answer himself, or indeed if it’s a question he feels needs posing, at least on the evidence of Calder, The Conquest of Time: The Early Years, 1898–1940, which remains, to use Perl’s own terms, at the level of biographical physics, and rarely rises to anything like a metaphysics, either about Calder or his age. Could this all be Calder’s own fault? Alexander ‘Sandy’ Calder is a curious giant

in the menagerie of modern art. A figure at once immensely visible (what childhood of the past 50 years has not been introduced to, or produced, a variation on Calder’s greatest contribution to the history of art: the mobile?) and admired (by giants of Modernism, eg Cocteau, Duchamp, Miró), and yet oddly without acolytes. Calder’s mobiles, his Cirque Calder (1926–31), even his wonderfully deft and economical wireworks have not posed challenges for subsequent generations of artists. Not in the way that Constantin Brancusi or Alberto Giacometti remain artists with whom a young sculptor often must contend – or avoid. Calder’s greatest work, by contrast, requires acknowledgement, even admiration, but no one today is wrestling with it, or crediting it with opening up new horizons of artistic practice, or damning Calder for getting there first, or doing it better. Could it be that Calder the man just isn’t all that fascinating? Perl’s early chapters on the Calder family – on A. Stirling and Nanette, Calder’s very accomplished artist parents, and on the family’s moves from East Coast (Philadelphia) to West (Pasadena) and back (Croton-on-Hudson) following Stirling’s career – on Calder’s exposure to a wide range of top talents at the turn of the century and

on Calder’s education at the Stevens Institute of Technology and at the Art Students League in New York, all combine into a dense portrait of a young artist who appears more or less at ease with the advancing artistic life that in many ways was destined to become his own. Then there’s Paris, where Calder falls in with the right crowd right away, makes important friends (Duchamp), gains recognition and all through the interwar years never sheds the impression that he is the big American boy, the ‘man cub’, a title that Calder’s father had given to one of his own early sculptural portraits of his son. Calder’s peers in the 1920s and 30s may have been fascinated by him, but on the page, in Perl’s hands, exactly what animates Calder and his own ‘imaginative life’ is difficult to parse. Mostly Calder’s life comes across as rather charmed: ‘On the boulevard Arago…,’ Perl writes, ‘Sandy and Louisa plunged back into the rounds of entertainment that had always characterized their life in Paris.’ On the same page, Perl tells how Matisse and Duchamp show up one night, and that ‘it’s unclear, but Henry Miller may have also been among the group’. Unclear? With numerous statements of this sort salting the pages of Calder, one feels the need to ask Perl if there is a physics of gossip as well. Jonathan T.D. Neil

yeah Edited by Tuli Kupferberg Primary Information, $40 (boxset) This boxed facsimile reissue of the ten staplebound pamphlets published as yeah (1961–65), a zine put together by the New York poet and musician who would go on to form The Fugs, is an antic compendium of its editor’s interests and preoccupations at this inflection point in American history and culture. Subtitled ‘a satyric excursion, a sardonic review, a sarcastic epitome, a chronicle of the last days’, yeah comprises a mix of literary matter and newspaper clippings. Poems, facetious contracts, film reviews by bureaucrats and short stories by men and women (mostly) of the underground address social mores, racism, military blunders, the pursuit of sex and love, pomposity, toilet habits, nuclear annihilation and much else besides. The tone, overwhelmingly satirical with a pinch of beatnik, is aimed at highlighting

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the absurdities of modern life, and, implicitly, carving out an alternative space in a conservative society (Kupferberg’s Birth Press, founded with wife Sylvia Topp, also published ‘1001 Ways to Live Without Working’, 1961, 25¢). In one poem we meet the familiar ‘Lord High Curator in Charge of Castrations and Paper Clips’; in ‘A yeah Extra’ titled Kill Magazine, we are treated to an appreciation for Adolf Eichmann on the occasion of his execution (‘Eichmann was a small clerk in the German government…’), and a political ad foreshadowing another: the drawing of a noose over the line ‘Impeach the Traitor John F. Kennedy’. And then an entreaty: ‘Come lover / Carpe penem’. The balance of the material consists of unlikely headlines, small-town perspectives

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and, most enthusiastically, advertisements – want ads, ads for police dogs or the latest circumcision tool, fur-lined potties, a suspiciously vibratorlike ‘clipper’ advertised with ‘special low price for nuns’. Over the lifespan of yeah, these excerpts from other media, arranged by Kupferberg in dense collages, crowded out and then entirely replaced the literary material, a sign of confidence, perhaps, that the absurdity spoke for itself. I prefer to think that his interests and energies had passed to The Fugs, founded with fellow poet Ed Sanders between issues 9 and 10, and sounding, in its mordant, bawdy celebration of an unshackled, political life, like nothing so much as an arrangement in guitar, drums, keyboard and raspy voices of these typewritten, mimeographed pages. David Terrien

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A Curator Writes March 2018 I am sitting in front of the splendid neon work Run from Fear, Fun from Rear in Bruce Nauman’s Artist Rooms at Tate Modern, and my thoughts turn to the tremendous largesse of dear Anthony d’Offay. His gifts to Britain’s artworld have been many and varied, and I ponder them as I move to Nauman’s seminal work Good Boy Bad Boy. I settle down as the figures on the two screens chant, “I am a good boy”, “You are a good boy”, “We are good boys…”, but then my telephone rings. I fish the vibrating device out of my pocket. It is Alexander, my new trusty assistant. “Ivan, it’s urgent,” he begins. “Venice wants to see you this afternoon. The Biennale people. Perhaps they want to talk through the misunderstanding of a few years back.” I get up and scurry out of the gallery towards the inexplicable lifts of the Blavatnik Building. Queues of tourists watch the lift indicator lights go up and down without the lifts ever reaching our floor. I think of dear Len Blavatnik and wonder if part of the $1 million he donated to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee might have been better spent on more effective elevators. Still, Maria Balshaw must be proud of her institution’s ability to attract such high-calibre philanthropists as d’Offay and Blavatnik. As Maria said when she took the job, ‘We need to speak to the whole of society’, and with these two fine gentlemen leading the charge, who can doubt her? Eventually downstairs and outside, I hail a good oldfashioned black taxi and direct the driver to head to Cecconi’s and not spare the horses. We trundle along the river and over Waterloo Bridge with an entertaining and counterintuitive conversation about how cycle routes are the main cause of increased air pollution in London. I must say I rather find myself agreeing with my new friend from Essex as we pull up in Mayfair. I am ushered to a corner table where a small group awaits me. “Gettar le margherite si porei!” I greet them in the simple Italian vernacular that I remember from reading Lodovico Dolce’s Il dialogo della pittura, intitolato l’Aretino during my days at the Courtauld. “Ivan, it is good to see you,” one of the group replies, clearly appreciating my mastery of his language by responding in my own. “Look, Gianluigi, if this is about the incident at the end of Utopia Station in the 2003 edition of the Biennale, I can only apologise. I thought no one would see the assistant convener of the Lithuanian Pavilion and myself having an urgent meeting under Liam and Rirkrit’s wooden platform. How was I to know that the slats were removable? As for the denouement in Tobias’s communal showers, what can I say? I frutti proibiti sono i più dolci and all that, eh?” “Ivan, we have moved beyond that now. La necessità non ha legge. We know you are a man seeking aesthetic perfection

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and unalloyed pleasure. That is why we are here. We need to talk to someone from this country who we can trust.” The waiter brings me my usual plate of spaghetti lobster and glass of Barolo without asking. “What is it, Gianluigi?” “Well, the thing is, it’s Ralph. You know, we’ve appointed him as director of the next edition of the Biennale? We were all so impressed with his curatorial gesture of deconstructing the public spaces of a museum by refusing visitors for two years at the Hayward Gallery. Such a brilliant act of subversion! It reminded us of Cattelan’s firstever exhibition, when he padlocked the gallery and claimed he’d be back soon. Torno subito!” “Ah…” I look up from the spaghetti. “But now we hear of this artist who took down the painting of the nymphs in Manchester. And then she put it back a few days later! Another radical gesture! No to nymphs and then yes, go on then, yes to nymphs! And we are thinking that this is perhaps even more radical than Ralph. We wanted to talk to a real expert and I knew you would take my call.” “Well, Gianluigi, Ralph hasn’t just curated 20 shows, he’s curated one show 20 times. Scene of a Crime, Psycho Buildings, psycho killer, psycho guy! Then again, the nymphs going up and down is very compelling. But I feel you need something more. Someone who will be able to phone a friend to do the first interview into their new job and exclusively reveal that he is very attractive, has three gym memberships and a Bernie Sanders mug, and freely offers wine, tequila and Xanax in that order.” “Pronto!” an excited Gianluigi exclaims. “Phone David Velasco at once!” I. Kurator

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