ArtReview May 2018

Art and Revolution

The Fetish for 1968 Catherine Millet Andrew Weiner Franco Berardi John Stezaker Marie Darrieussecq Cecilia Vicuña

KIM JONES May 23 - June 30, 2018

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LONDON Mary Corse 67 Lisson Street

Adonis blushes (from the series Venus & Adonis), 2015-2016

Marlene Dumas Myths & Mortals April 28– June 30, 2018

David Zwirner New York

Joseph Beuys

utopIa at the staG MonuMents cuRated By noRMan RosenthaL London May – June 2018 Ropac.net

London paRIs saLZBuRG FRItZ GetLInGeR, Joseph Beuys, Kleve, 1950 © MuseuM KuRhaus KLeve, nachLass FRItZ GetLInGeR

ArtReview vol 70 no 4 May 2018

And all that That art is in some way a ‘revolutionary’ force is something most art lovers take for granted. They’ll talk about how it envisions alterity, erases a sense of otherness, guides us towards tolerance, but when it comes to effecting actual change in society, how effective is it? That’s one of the more general themes ArtReview is seeking to address in its May issue, which comes out as various art institutions and other interested parties are looking back to the events that took place in Paris and elsewhere in this month 50 years ago.

Of course, all this looking backwards can be tainted by nostalgia for countercultures that never really achieved the kind of fundamental societal change they set out to do, and moreover have since been absorbed and incorporated into normative mainstream culture. ‘The question is not whether to remember 1968, but how,’ writes Andrew Weiner in ArtReview’s lead feature. ‘In what ways could we reject the sanctimony that so often distorts popular memory of that moment so as to grasp its present relevance?’, he continues, before arguing for a dialectical consideration of the past in which we might accept that the expansion of personal freedoms is accompanied, for example, by an expansion of markets and commercial forces.

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Elsewhere a series of artists who were alive at the time reflect on how the events of May 1968 impacted them and their work, while writer Marie Darrieussecq recalls her embryonic engagement with the revolutionary moment and traces its impact on her later life. Christian Viveros-Fauné offers a potted history of how the theme of revolution has been treated during the course of the history of art; and, finally, at the other end of the spectrum of history, Oliver Basciano looks at how the nature of protest has changed in recent times and how, in turn, art has responded to that.

Within all this, the notion of a ‘global 1968’ – the fact that dissent inspired by utopian thinking was not just the preserve of artists, thinkers and protesters restricted to the global North – is something that’s touched upon but not directly engaged with. Instead ArtReview has chosen to treat May 68 as a phenomenon of the Cold War West and the politics and policies of its time: a moment when the ruling order that defined life across Western Europe and much of Latin America, Africa and Asia – the overarching power of the United States, which the English Marxist E.P. Thompson named ‘Natopolis’ – was beginning to come apart. Which is not to say, of course, that there aren’t other ways of looking at this, from other perspectives or at other times. ArtReview

Revolution

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May, 2017 © Julian Schnabel / ARS, New York / DACS 2018

Julian Schnabel 6 Burlington Gardens

18 May – 22 June 2018

LONDON

Christian Andersson Juan Araujo John Baldessari Adriana Barreto Robert Barry Michael Biberstein Angela Bulloch André Cepeda Filipa César Luis Paulo Costa Tatjana Doll João Paulo Feliciano Sabine Hornig Lucia Laguna José Loureiro Jonathan Monk Matt Mullican João Onofre João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva Diogo Pimentão Rosângela Rennó Julião Sarmento Rui Toscano Lawrence Weiner Erwin Wurm Yonamine

Rui Toscano “I Am the Cosmos” 12 April - 10 May 2018

Elmgreen & Dragset “We Are Not Ourselves” 15 May - 30 June 2018

ARCO Lisboa STAND H01

17 - 20 May

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STAND R14 14 - 17 June

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Catch me if you can!

AA Bronson + General Idea, 1968 – 2018 April 27 – May 26, 2018

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

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from March—onwards

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Art Previewed

Previews

by Martin Herbert 29

Adriano Costa Interview by Ross Simonini 44

Under the Paving Stones: Hong Kong

by Fi Churchman & Mark Rappolt 37

Art & Revolution

by Christian Viveros-Fauné 51

Art Featured

“1968”

by Andrew Weiner 72 My Parent’s Revolution

by Marie Darrieussecq 82

Legacies of 1968

by Art & Language, Richard Barbrook, Franco Berardi, Stuart Brisley, Jonas Mekas, Catherine Millet, John Stezaker, Regina Vater, Cecilia Vicuña 85 The Shape of Protest

by Oliver Basciano 94

page 29 Mladen Stilinovic´, An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, 1992, acrylic on artificial silk, 140 × 430 cm. © the estate of the artist and Boris Cvjetanovic´ (included in Hello World. Revising a Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin)

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Art Reviewed

Kerry Tribe, by Aaron Horst Sylvie Fleury, by Lindsay Preston Zappas Jasper Johns, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Serge Alain Nitegeka, by Joshua Mack Anna-Sophie Berger, by Jeppe Ugelvig Robert Gober, by Ben Eastham

Exhibitions 110 Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture,

by J.J. Charlesworth Sebastian Jefford, by John Quin 'It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there', by Sam Steverlynck Lutz Bacher, by Martin Herbert Deborah Remington, by Phoebe Blatton J. Parker Valentine, by Moritz Scheper Nicole Wermers, by Kristian Vistrup Madsen Kahlil Joseph, by Dominic van den Boogerd Concrete Matters, by Sara Arrhenius Sofia Húlten, by Olga Stefan Tamar Guimarães & Kasper Akhøj, by Louise Darblay Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness, by Daisy Lafarge Faith Ringgold, by Isabella Smith Magali Reus, by Laura Smith Ilona Keserü, by Gabriel Coxhead Robert Colescott, by Andrew Berardini

Books 134 May Day Manifesto 1968, edited by Raymond Williams The Walls Have the Floor, edited by Julien Besançon New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, by James Bridle When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir,

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & asha bandele THE STRIP 138 A CURATOR WRITES 142

page 110 Forensic Architecture, The Left-to-die boat, Central Mediterranean Sea, 27 March 2011, investigation 2012. Courtesy Forensic Oceanography and Forensic Architecture

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ArtReview

Property from the Estate of Dolores Ormandy Neumann JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT Flesh and Spirit, 1982–83

CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION N E W YO R K 1 6 M AY 2 0 1 8 Viewing 4–16 May 1334 YORK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10021 ENQUIRIES +1 212 606 7254 SOTHEBYS.COM/CONTEMPORARYEVENING #SOTHEBYSCONTEMPORARY #FEARLESSNOW SOTHEBY’S, INC. LICENSE NO. 1216058. © SOTHEBY’S, INC. 2018 © 2018 ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK, NY

BARRY FLANAGAN THE HARE IS METAPHOR 515 W 27TH ST

JANE FREILICHER ’50s NEW YORK 293 TENTH AVE

ELLIOTT PUCKETTE NEW WORK 297 TENTH AVE

THROUGH JUNE 9, 2018

PAUL KASMIN GALLERY NEW YORK PAULKASMINGALLERY.COM Barry Flanagan, Large Monument, 1996, bronze, 116 1/2 x 52 x 43 1/4 inches, 295.9 x 132.1 x 109.9 cm, Edition of 6 + 2 APs. © The Estate of Barry Flanagan courtesy Plubronze Ltd.

Art Previewed

When do we say that a man has put his life in order? It is when he has achieved an understanding of his life and conformed his conduct to what he believes to be true 27

armay18.indd 1

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Previewed Revisionism has coursed through art institutions might look. Hello World’s 13 unfolding chapters – by in-house and external curators – each for a couple of decades, as they’ve awoken, however involuntarily, to biases in their collecunderscore a transatlantic artistic conversation: Joseph Beuys’s association with Argentine tions. This, ironically enough, has given such places a new lease of life: see Tate’s perkily eco-artist Nicolás García Uriburu, Japanese hotchpotch hangs, the widespread belated polymath Tomoyoshi Murayama’s 1920s recognition of other modernisms and remorsestay in Berlin, Heinrich Vogeler’s ultimately fuelled affairs like the Hamburger Bahnhof’s fatal migration to the Soviet Union in the 1 audacious Hello World. Revising a Collection, 1930s, etc. Necessarily too in this alternative which commandeers the entire venue. Here, history, attention is paid to how much with a roll call of 250 artists, approximately 100 of the Nationalgalerie collection was considworks from the collection of the Nationalgalerie ered ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and removed (collectively, Berlin’s five main art museums), or destroyed.

Over at MoMA, institutional commitment 200 from other local museums and 300 artworks and documents from elsewhere, the city’s to underrepresented voices is again visible: in primary art establishment reimagines how, had 2 City Dreams, Bodys Isek Kingelez receives his earlier buyers been more globalist, its holdings first, albeit posthumous, major US retrospective.

The work of the Congolese visionary, who died in 2015, revolved primarily around fantastical models of architecture – segments of imaginary cities spiky with little buildings – and in some previous shows he’s been classed as an outsider artist. As that category leaches meaning, though, he’s now simply acknowledged as a great: ‘overseeing architect and beacon of light’, Dave Eggers once called him. The marvel of Kingelez’s world-building, outside of its abounding resourcefulness, is in visibly humdrum origins.

He chivvies coloured paper, commercial packaging, soft-drink cans and bottle caps into colourful, detailed, festal cityscapes, rooted in the sprawl of his native Kinshasa but gifting it with harmoniousness. Balancing idealism and realism, his art alludes unblinkingly to issues

1 Keith Haring, Untitled, 1987, enamel on aluminium, 191 × 135 × 20 cm. © Staatliche. Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Sammlung Marx / bpk / Jochen Littkemann / Keith Haring Foundation, New York

2 Bodys Isek Kingelez, Kinshasa la Belle, 1991, mixed media, 63 × 55 × 80 cm.

Photo: Maurice Aeschimann. Courtesy CAAC – The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva

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including the AIDS crisis in Africa, postwar US/Japanese relations and the UN’s efforts in the Congo, but it is founded on optimism: ‘Thanks to my deep hope for a happy tomorrow,’ Kingelez wrote in 2003, ‘I strive to better my quality, and the better becomes the wonderful.’

A mind trick worth learning from and, here, seeing embodied.

In 1989, in her 24th year, Melanie Smith 3 neatly dodged the emergent Young British Artist movement by leaving for Mexico City, joining the artistic community there and using the megalopolis as source material – initially for paintings and assemblages, later for videos and films – for a twining of abstraction and sociocultural collapse. In Spiral City (2002), which riffs on Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty, Smith

films from a helicopter tracing widening circles the country at 2011’s Venice Biennale, Smith over an area east of her new hometown, identikit manages to frequently spiral into the past while, urbanism steadily dissolving into ominous in terms of our collective destination, appearing abstract patterning. Such prospective and ahead of the curve. actual entropy relating to modernity is a At Baltic, a victory lap of sorts for Lubaina 4 constant in her art, as her largest European Himid, fresh from securing last year’s Turner survey to date underlines. The 35mm Xilitla Prize; not that the Zanzibar-born, Lancashire(2010) tours the junglelike Mexican gardens based artist is big on complacency. The staple of British aristo Edward James, dotted with concern of her paintings, expanded paintings fantastical concrete monuments and unfinand multimedia installations is how black ished structures; in another nod to Smithson, history and black culture are, or aren’t, repreworkmen carrying mirrors ‘displace’ these sented in art – she frequently backtracks to objects, as if sending them out of time and buried histories of British colonialism, particuplace; Fordlandia (2014), meanwhile, was filmed larly as it relates to seafaring – and here, in in the abandoned Amazonian city founded an area that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, as a rubber-producing hub by Henry Ford. Now that foregrounding of marginalised narratives considered Mexican enough to have represented pointedly continues. Given the gallery’s ground

4 Lubaina Himid, Why are you Looking, 2018.

Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London

3 Melanie Smith, Xilitla: Dismantled 1 (still), 2010, video transferred from 35mm, 12 min. Courtesy Peter Kilchmann Galerie, Zürich, and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro & New York

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ArtReview

7 Karen Kilimnik, horses in battles, 1987, pastel on paper, 28 × 36 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, London, Berlin & Los Angeles

6 Jutta Koether, Straight Girl, 1984, oil on canvas, 24 × 19 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York

5 Lena Henke, work in progress, 2018. Photo: Katalin Déer.

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna & Rome

floor, Himid presents an outdoor commission involving flags made from East African kanga material, which she’s used before, sometimes turning it into paintings. Kanga cloths involve patterned borders and central texts, like jazzy tweets, and are worn as wraps by women: ‘everyday wear that quite often has a funny message… they’re quite often making remarks about men,” Himid told the writer Hettie Judah recently.

In Gateshead these subversive ensigns will sync with public events each Sunday, aiming to involve under-the-radar creative communities.

Last year, in Frankfurt, Lena Henke made 5 a work in the Schirn Kunsthalle’s rotunda that juxtaposed piles of sand with biomorphic metal sculptures that, from an elevated vantage point, resembled eyes; the prospectively painful inter-

relation of those two materials, and an aggresSince the 1980s Jutta Koether has framed 6 sive conception of contact, is typical of the painting in adversarial terms, first in heterogeBrooklyn-based German artist. Her recent neous if often bloodily red-tinted works Kunsthalle Zürich exhibition involved a spread responding to the macho self-importance of of chain mail mechanically dragged across a set German Neo-Expressionism; then, after moving of fibreglass sculptures, their polyglot sources to New York during the early 1990s, progresin turn including the work of architects and sively mixing painting and performance in urban planners: not least Robert Moses, a figure a recognition that the artworld there insisted of fascination for Henke due to his singular and artists perform socially; and subsequently in deleterious effect on New York (and, by extenher incorporation of materials and tropes from sion, New Yorkers). The kind of urbanism Henke punk and experimental music. Nevertheless prefers might be summarised by her proposal Tour de Madame is the Cologne-born Koether’s for the city’s High Line: a breast made of sand, first substantial survey show. (Blame its tardisteadily eroding, yielding, reshaping. If her ness on the artworld’s gender politics, though current gallery show skews towards her smaller, also a little on the artist’s longstanding dodging biomorphic sculptures, it’s still likely to offer of classification.) The retrospective arranges friction for the eye. more than 150 paintings in a chronological

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8 Julie Beaufils, La Nuit 2, 2017, oil on canvas, 30 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Balice Hertling, Paris

9 Katrín Elvarsdóttir, The Search for Truth, Simson’s Garden 6, 2016, archival pigment print, 65 × 44 cm. Courtesy the artist and Berg Contemporary, Reykjavík

display, making sequential sense of the artist’s swerves, and traces all her phases up to a recent oblique shift into history painting. Such an overview ought to establish Koether as less an elliptical, fidgety, dark-horse presence than a cornerstone influence on recent painting, repositioning the medium as not so much the product of particular materials, rather a conceptual space to work with and against.

When figurative painting hit the skids during the late 1980s and early 90s, the brilliant oddball among those who revived it (John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, etc) 7 was Karen Kilimnik. She segued from theatrical environments structured like 1970s scatter art to a style of deceptively casuallooking daubing – like something from

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a teenager’s bedroom – that eschewed cynicism French artists. It’s yesteryear but also not; these in favour of a gleam-eyed fandom for glamour, martial pasts, like the installation’s dual references to gay, transgender and ethnic-minority an ardency more profound than it first looked. revels, and to fascism, speak lucidly to our The Philadelphian’s latest show with Sprüth present. Expect, thusly, Kilimnik’s archival Magers doubles as a micro-retrospective; she works to feel remarkably if darkly undated. deserves a major one. We rewind first to the The days when painting was either in or out 1992 installation Paris is Burning (1991) / Is Paris of fashion seem far away now: painting, lately, Burning? (1944), which with its film stills, swastikas and tossed dresses establishes just is. (The market helps.) In her last show at Kilimnik’s manner of putting times and locales 8 Balice Hertling, the young French painter Julie into exploratory dialogue: here, the New York Beaufils’s canvases, all muted colour and inky drag balls in the cult 1990 documentary Paris curlicue, edged towards abstraction but involved is Burning and wartime Paris itself, as glimpsed scraps of imagery – recumbent bodies, painted through a 1966 Hollywood movie. The show fingernails, girlish references to Edie Sedgwick continues with paintings of fighter planes and and the American TV series My So-Called Life military horses, and copies, in Kilimnik’s loose (1994–95). Often Beaufils – a fashionista type hand, of historical canvases by English and whose Instagram gets recommended as a

ArtReview

must-view – employed a kind of split-screen world as if it were a cinematic narrative. In the effect that made the paintings appear unreIcelandic-born, us-trained Elvarsdóttir’s work, solved, like a film stuck between frames. Since made all across the globe, a half-shadowed flight then the divided frame has remained but she’s of steps with a slivered landscape visible through plunged into the nonrepresentational: recent a window beside it implies a place and a beforepaintings feature palely coloured, ambiguously and-after; roseate light blooming behind curscaled, rounded objects in implicit conversation. tains turns metaphorical with repetition; kids They draw and hold the eye because of Beaufils’s walking away on a woodland path, paired with elegant way with a line, but beyond that they a tenebrous image of a pale hand resting against stay enigmatically mute; which, given her dirt, hint at hazy menace; accumulated side-on earlier works’ self-aware gaming with simplistic shots of caravans in mountainous territory point versions of femininity, may constitute a stateto unknown hardscrabble lives going on within. ment in itself.

At least, that’s what we guess, though they could Through a parallel combination of withbe empty. Elvarsdóttir, an adept of the 9 holding and subtle accentuation, Katrín psychology of looking, gets us filling them.

The Bucharest Biennale, it would have Elvarsdóttir does something that sounds 10 us know, is not like other biennales. They’re simple but isn’t: she photographs the real

just emanations of the experience economy; the Bucharest Biennale, now eight editions deep, challenges all that. According to the curators, Istanbul-based Beral Madra and Bucharest native Răzvan Ion, it’s also going to expose the power structures that underwrite ‘current social, political and economic imaginaries’. Beyond that, it’s going to speak to the posttruth era, they say; it’s going to take a ‘minimalist approach’ involving one commercial gallery, one independent art centre, one artist-run space and ‘one public intervention’; it’s going to offer an eclectic tour of Bucharest while one travels between the venues; and it’s titled Edit Your Future – which syncs neatly with the fact that, at the time of writing, there’s no artist list. Martin Herbert

10 Naeem Mohaiemen, Der Weisse Engel, 2011, video, 17 min.

Courtesy the artist and Bucharest Biennale 8

1 Hello World. Revising a Collection Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 28 April – 26 August

4 Lubaina Himid Baltic, Gateshead 11 May – 30 September

8 Julie Beaufils Balice Hertling, Paris 1 June – 13 July

2 Bodys Isek Kingelez moma, New York 26 May – 1 January

5 Lena Henke Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna 15 May – 23 June

9 Katrín Elvarsdóttir Berg Contemporary, Reykjavík 11 May – 3 August

3 Melanie Smith macba, Barcelona 18 May – 7 October

6 Jutta Koether Museum Brandhorst, Munich 18 May – 21 October

10 Bucharest Biennale 8 26 May – 8 July

7 Karen Kilimnik Sprüth Magers, London through 26 May

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ArtReview

GALERIA VERA CORTÊS

www.veracortes.com R. João Saraiva 16, 1st (Alvalade) Lisboa, Portugal

André Romão May–Jun 2018 Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain Jul–Sep 2018 Céline Condorelli Sep–nov 2018 Group show Curated by Samuel Leuenberger nov–Dec 2018

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils André Guedes André Romão Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain Anna Franceschini António Bolota Catarina Dias

Céline Condorelli Daniel Blaufuks Daniel Gustav Cramer Gabriela Albergaria Gonçalo Barreiros Joana Escoval João Louro

João Queiroz John Wood and Paul Harrison José Pedro Croft Nuno da Luz Susanne S. D. Themlitz

GALERIA VERA CORTÊS

www.veracortes.com R. João Saraiva 16, 1st (Alvalade) Lisboa, Portugal

André Romão May–Jun 2018 Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain Jul–Sep 2018 Céline Condorelli Sep–nov 2018 Group show Curated by Samuel Leuenberger nov–Dec 2018

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils André Guedes André Romão Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain Anna Franceschini António Bolota Catarina Dias

Céline Condorelli Daniel Blaufuks Daniel Gustav Cramer Gabriela Albergaria Gonçalo Barreiros Joana Escoval João Louro

João Queiroz John Wood and Paul Harrison José Pedro Croft Nuno da Luz Susanne S. D. Themlitz

Under the Paving Stones

Hong Kong rolls on

by Fi Churchman and Mark Rappolt

The end of geography as we know it

above Cocktail? below Coffee?

In terms of its identity as an arts hub, Hong Kong has become so overrun by its primary art fair that when you tell your art friends in the area that you’re visiting the Special Administrative Region, they’ll immediately reply that they assume you’re ‘visiting Basel’.

That’s what art does to places (und natürlich, to people too): it fucks with their identity. Although art markets this fucking as a form of visionary alternative thinking. Did you know that the art fools think about Buenos Aires as a Basel City, not an Argentine city?

And that, for them, Basel itself is a tradeshow, not a city? Not content with its ostentatious attempts to decolonise itself, the artworld is now set on degeographising itself too. Which makes the decolonising rather pointless. In fact, to experience some of the structures of the artworld today is much like watching a group of macaques picking fleas off each other.

Of course, in Hong Kong there are some precedents for this kind of tomfoolery. While contemporary art is the opium of the elites today, actual opium was the opium of, well, anyone it could be sold to yesterday. The British initially occupied Hong Kong Island and began properly fucking with its identity during the first, brutal war with China over the right to sell and supply the drug the British had chosen for it. Before that (during the first half of the nineteenth century) inter-Asian exchange between countries such as India and China had meant the export of Buddhism from the former to the latter. Thanks to a Western ideal of progress, it was now drugs and everything that came with that.

So, beyond the art fair, what comes with the art that’s now being flushed through Hong Kong? And does any of it stick rather than pass straight through?

The end of work as we know it One of the things it’s supposed to stick to is M+, Hong Kong’s Herzog & de Meuron-designed and much-delayed-but-one-daysoon-to-be-built museum of art, design, architecture and film, which has already amassed significant holdings of works produced in Asia and elsewhere (yeah, so vague as to risk becoming meaningless). It’s called M+ apparently because it’s going to be more than a museum, so naturally ArtReview went on a site visit to check on progress. The ‘work jacket’ – the-more-casual-than-a-suit-jacketbut-no-less-casually-clean-pressed garment that no one actually

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works in (yes, someone has fucked with work and clothing too) – might be de rigueur right now, but for someone, like an art person, to look good in actual work clothes is an entirely different kettle of fish. Especially in the heat and humidity of Hong Kong, where kettles of fish tend to stink pretty quickly. Following a hastily given presentation (during the course of which executive director Suhanya Raffel was forced to acknowledge a colleague who was frantically waving a placard announcing a three-minute warning at the back of the room – ironic this, given how far the construction of M+ continues to fall behind any sense of a schedule: 2019 is the new 2017 in that respect) and decked out hardhat, high-vis, steel-toe-cap-style, we’re led on a tour around the building site. The museum is part of the ambitious and much bigger West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD), a ‘hub’ that’s being built entirely on land reclaimed during the 1990s, masterplanned by British (yeah, they’re still at it) architects Foster + Partners and funded both publicly (via the HKSAR government) and privately through spaces allocated for commercial use. Climbing several flights of an unfinished concrete staircase, we reach what will be the garden terrace of M+ (overlooking Victoria Harbour), and up a further set of temporary stairs, we finally stop on one of the floors of the museum. (It turns out the hardhat is not only useful safety gear but also acts as an effective sweatband, although you wouldn’t want any pauses in which you could start thinking about how many people have used it in this way before you did.) The top part of the building is narrow, so narrow that our guide jokingly suggests that you could touch the walls either side with outstretched arms. Luckily this will house the library, archive and study centre rather than the display of M+’s growing collection of more than 5,000 works (including 101 recently acquired works by Marcel Duchamp). These will one day be on show in the more generous, horizontal spaces that make up the lower parts of the building.

above and below Goldfish Market, Kowloon

below M+ construction site, West Kowloon Cultural District

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ArtReview

2018/19 Chikako Yamashiro 15 March – 28 April 2018

Chim↑Pom 18 May – 7 July 2018

Aki Sasamoto 19 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 Chim↑Pom, The Grounds (2017). Photo by Yuki Maeda © Chim↑Pom. Courtesy of the artist and MUJIN-TO Production, Tokyo

M plus In the meantime, since 2016, there has been a regular programme of exhibitions held at the M+ Pavilion, a (relatively) small venue on the edge of the site. The current show is Hong Kong-artist Samson Young’s Songs for Disaster Relief World Tour. Originally presented as the HKSAR’s contribution to last year’s Venice Biennale, it’s now ‘coming home’: the Queen of the Adriatic meets the Pearl River Estuary, if you like. The show itself combines sculptures, objects, videos and a livingroom-like installation, all inspired by charity singles from the 1980s and the problematic relations between ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds that they inscribed. Plus ça change… Until June at least: next up is a sampling of M+’s Southeast Asian holdings.

Winds of change Then it’s swiftly on to the other side of WKCD to visit another addition to Hong Kong’s cultural district, the Xiqu Centre, a venue that aims at promoting and conserving Cantonese opera as well as other types of traditional Chinese theatre. Controversially it will be run by an American, Alison Friedman, who, while fluent in Mandarin, has no experience of xiqu. With a main theatre (1,050 seats) and a smaller ‘Tea House Theatre’ (200 seats), the centre will also house studios for theatre troupes and a seminar hall. Our guide enthusiastically tells us that the atrium of the centre will be open 24/7, gesturing towards the gaping entrance as a gust of wind blows through – lovely in the stifling heat of a Hong Kong summer, but perhaps less comfortable during typhoon season.

top Samson Young, Carillon, 2018, Yamaha Disklavier player piano (prepared with personal documents, books, ink on book covers, silkscreen on paper, MTR ticket, tobacco leaf, Life Bread wrapping and videocassette), 3D-printed object, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist above Samson Young, Palazzo Gundane (homage to the myth-maker who fell to earth) (still), 2017, video and 10-channel sound installation. Courtesy the artist

Adrenaline rush

above Ceiling of Xiqu Centre, West Kowloon Cultural District

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Despite the ambitious intentions of the WKCD project, there is a lingering sense of culture (contemporary art, performance and theatre, as well as historical collections) as something that gets imported to the city. Anyone remember the Hong Kong Museum of Art? That closed in 2015 for HK$400 million (or 37,312,000 purchases from your local pound shop) of renovations and is also expected to open late-2019.

Set up during the colonial era, the museum traces its origins to the midtwentieth century, and it was for some time the best HKSAR’s government had to offer when it came to the visual arts. Its collection of around 15,000 historical artefacts and crafts (including the Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware in Hong Kong Park) was important in terms of maintaining a link to tradition (the museum has significant holdings

ArtReview

of calligraphy and local sculpture), but the contemporary side of its holdings was pretty stale. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Hong Kong’s contemporary art fetish can appear to be an injection of cultural adrenaline punched into the heart of the city. Of course, as is ever the case with Hong Kong, the money that comes with the art scene plays a part too, and the reality at the moment remains that much of what’s punched in flows out to collectors and art addicts, many of whom live overseas.

Art gamble It’s no surprise, then, that M+ is not the only protoinstitutional game in town. During this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Art (which begins a three-phased public opening later this year) offered its own hard-hat tour (albeit a ‘secretive’, invite-onlyno-photos-allowed kind of one) to promote its coming attractions. The project is led by one of the oldest institutions in Hong Kong: the Hong Kong Jockey Club (which had to drop the ‘Royal’ from its title in 1996, a year before sovereignty of Hong Kong was transferred to China), which has a government-granted monopoly on horseracing, ‘sporting and betting entertainment’ in the SAR. Their gamble on art (albeit, not so much of a gamble for an institution rich enough to donate several billion HKD to charity each year and the largest single taxpayer in Hong Kong, while charging joining fees of HK$500,000 for full members to be part of its exclusive social scene) is located on the restored heritage site of the former Central Police Station, and with art galleries designed

by Herzog & de Meuron (again), the complex incorporates 16 buildings, including a renovated (decommissioned) prison block and barracks (and, you guessed it, all this fully opens late-2019). The exhibition at the gallery, titled Rehearsal and including works by 20 artists (only two of whom are native Hong Kong-Chinese), is a ‘settling in’ of sorts: works are spread throughout the unfinished space as if to test out the new environment, like transplanted organs feeling out a host body. Indeed, Jason Dodge’s Changing the Lights – from rose light to white light, from white light to rose light, by hand, over and over (2014/2018), in which a technician climbs a ladder replacing fluorescent bulbs, seems to rehearse just that.

above Wolfgang Tillmans at his opening at David Zwirner below Iwan Wirth and Mark Bradford at the latter’s opening at Hauser & Wirth

Plus Since 1997, it’s China that’s imposing its ideals on Hong Kong, exerting an ever-increasing control over the lives and lifestyles of its residents and generally paying special attention to its SAR (there’s no doubt some symbolism in the fact that West Kowloon will also be home to a replica of Beijing’s Palace Museum, which will loan exhibits to its Hong Kong counterpart). But nevertheless, and in the spirit of Hong Kong’s many contradictory twists, Hong Kong’s art scene (unlike its counterparts in mainland China) continues to be dominated by the trading outposts of galleries like Pace, Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner – all three of which are housed in the newly opened, purpose-built (for galleries) H Queens Building. Given the prices of real estate here, that alone indicates the extent to which art is something Hong Kong’s elites are betting on these days. Of course, these exist alongside innovative local galleries such as Edouard Malingue, Blindspot and Empty Gallery, as well as not-for-profits such as Para/Site and Asia Art Archive. But for the moment at least, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Roll on 2019.

All photos but two Courtesy the authors

Fi Churchman is editorial assistant and Mark Rappolt is editor-in-chief of ArtReview and ArtReview Asia

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wetANDsomeOLDstuffVANDALIZEDbyTHEartist, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Simon Vogel.

Courtesy the artist and Kölnischer Kunstverein

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ArtReview

Interview

Adriano Costa “It is really nice to not have a house.

I don’t have one. Just the planet”

by Ross Simonini

Over 24 hours, Adriano Costa and I exchanged a flurry of emails. Back and forth, we volleyed with the kind of freshness that is usually absent in correspondence interviews. Throughout the day, I responded on my phone, wherever I happened to be: doctor’s office, market, car, studio. The process seemed appropriate, since Costa’s art is an accumulation of the moments of his life: an expanding catalogue of his ever-wandering attention.

Costa seeks observational freedom.

He absorbs the forms of his world – tiles, bottles, slabs, skis, umbrellas – sometimes integrating them into his work, sometimes making new work informed by their humble energy. Nevertheless, he rejects the notion of ‘found’ materials, seeing all things, from bronze to plastic, as equal.

Primarily a sculptor, he also brings his material sensitivity to painting, drawing, collage and writing, all of which fill his vast, meticulous installations. Much of Costa’s work is in the act of arranging. A wall of bricks lays flat on the floor; rugs hang from the ceiling; a constellation of detritus crawls across the corner of a room.

His environments suggest an idiosyncratic, anarchic culture of his own making, where he can do whatever he wants. He is both careful and sloppy, minimal and busy, highly formalist and crassly lowbrow. Often, he slips subversive humour into his gestures. He engraves the phrase ‘I see a penis’ into a chunk of marble.

He casts ratty doormats in gold and stick-figures in bronze.

Based in São Paulo – where he was born in 1975, and where he studied – Costa has the optic wit and haptic awareness that has come to define much of contemporary Latin American art.

Adriano Costa. Photo: Cassia Tabatini

May 2018

As we corresponded, Costa was putting the finishing touches to his show wetANDsomeOLDstuffVANDALIZEDbyTHEartist at the Kölnischer Kunstverein.

Between our exchanges, he posted to Instagram pop-cultural images, street scenes from Berlin (where he was staying) and work underway for the show: wild collages and permutations of colourful tiles, accompanied by poetic comments and titles. (From a recent post: ‘Have Another Little Piece Of My Heart N.O.W. You Know You Got It If It Makes You Feel Good – You Wanna Piss On Me, BritNy.’) Costa’s writing often makes its way into his work via philosophical declarations and cynical musings. Over email, however, his communication felt intimate and open, emotional and self-effacing, but always with a cryptic overtone.

His blazingly typed, second-language English required that I reread and decode whatever he had just sent my way, jarring me out of my mindless email routine and into engagement.

‘Man,’ he wrote at the end of our rally, ‘I go buy some bread is 7:10 Rewe [his local Berlin supermarket] is open. Speak later… Where are you?’

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THIS ME ME ME IS US, 2018 (installation view, Lungley Gallery, London).

Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, New York & Brussels

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ROSS SIMONINI I’ve heard you use the term ‘pre-sculptoric’ to describe what you do. What does that mean?

Adriano Costa This pre-sculptoric thing comes from a peculiar moment from my work, around my first series of ‘carpets’ [Tapetes, 2009–12, a collection of fabrics Costa arranged on the floor], when I was living a very delicate period of my life. I was just getting out of my first crack crisis (yes, I was addicted to crack) without a single penny and I suddenly started – I don’t know why, exactly – paying attention to the organisation of clothes, pieces of paper, etc. It was extremely beautiful.

And so: in a very meditational, serious, reverential way, I spent every single morning from 2013, I guess, making geometrical compositions with all sorts of things I found in my house, my friend’s house and my parents’ house.

It became a kind of delicious obsession. Every day, even if I tried really hard, it was absolutely impossible to repeat the same forms and dynamics. I went deep into the peculiar geometry of Brazilian artists from the late 1960s and 70s, when art was really close to meditation or therapy. When I look to them, I cry. It is so sophisticated, human, honest. C’mon, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica are still playing with our heads like kids, making fun. Haha. Love them.

So, my carpets were completely free, without anything to make them fixed. That was the reason I called them pre-sculptoric.

Antispeculative works, stillborn works.

Some collectors bought them. My position was and still is the same: do what you want.

They live without me. Hahaha.

RS Why did you lose interest in meditation and therapy?

AC I still think the spiritual way is THE WAY, the only way for changing something deeply, including the arts – I just don’t know how to do it and I am sure the way all those shows, big shows, have been doing it, calling it ‘shamanism’, is pure, outrageous bullshit. At least they are trying, perhaps. We are humans. We do bad things. Me, myself: I go for sculptures and paintings and drawings and videos. No messing with the Gods for now. Too many problems here in my kitchen. So many predators.

RS What ‘big shows’ are you referring to?

AC All the should see shows from the last four or five years have one or two works or a ‘segment’ dedicated to spirituality in Europe, in Brazil.

In my country, it is a shame because the curators install indigenous houses inside of museums and galleries, but actually did not contribute or try to make something against the genocide – physical and cultural – that the indigenous communities

are victims of. Seriously, they will disappear SOON, REALLY SOON. It’s terrible. Once I was in a group show at the Modern Institute in Glasgow and the work was hundreds of white T-shirts printed with the word ‘ayahuasca’, ’cause I was so mad with the exploitation of ayahuasca tea by white middle-class people. This was in 2014.

After this, someone [Noah Baumbach] made a movie [While We’re Young, 2014] of Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller drinking the tea in Williamsburg in a pretentious and stupid hipster New Yorker commune. Ha ha. In 2017 there were [ceremonial ayahuasca environments] at the Venice Biennale.

I am not judging any artist or curator. I’m just asking why the magic, the hallucination, the exoticism is so interesting, but it’s not permitted to talk about and count how many indigenous people (the owners of the Amazon forest where the plant, the tea grows) were killed today.

Closing our eyes to the pile of bodies is very easy.

Again: we are humans, we do wrong, but c’mon, leave the forest, leave the indigenous alone.

“I post everything on Instagram. Absolutely everything. I always have to hear friends saying, hey, keep your works secret blah blah blah.

I don’t give a fucking shit.

This is about sharing.

What’s the point of having diamonds if you can’t go to a gay club, take MDMA and shine with them?”

RS How did crack affect your work while you were using it?

AC Crack, like all other drugs (as I am addicted to all of them), doesn’t have any direct effect on my work. As I do respect my profession, I don’t mix the things. When I am high I prefer to not even look to my babies [meaning his art].

They don’t deserve my evils.

RS Do you find that your work has changed significantly while being in different places, such as Berlin or Brazil?

AC I love working in different places. Confronting myself with different realities, going to shops, always buying the wrong kind of glue ’cause you don’t understand Flemish.

It is really nice to not have a house. I don’t have one. Just the planet.

RS What function does Instagram have for you as an artist? You post a lot of work. Are there certain pieces you wouldn’t post?

May 2018

AC I post everything on Instagram. Absolutely everything. I always have to hear friends saying, hey, keep your works secret blah blah blah. I don’t give a fucking shit. This is about sharing. What’s the point of having diamonds if you can’t go to a gay club, take MDMA and shine with them?

RS Do you think much about the perception of you as an artist?

AC Ross, people are mean, ’specially the close ones. Hope it is different with you. I was a DJ and ‘owner’ of a venue in São Paulo called Torre do Dr Zero. An amazing, surreal, barbaric place.

Really wild. All Thursday, every week, for 12 years, we had an amount of cocaine that even Miami cannot imagine. It was beautiful. I’d guess 75 percent of the good artists from Brazil were there. We were all friends. I went to art school [1998]. I quit. I almost died. As soon as I started working properly, selling, living just with art, being the first and only South American punk working with Sadie Coles, for instance, I had lost almost all my former lovely friends.

Brazilians are jealous. They have so many fears.

They don’t like people like me ’cause I am openly mean. I might be aggressive. They prefer working behind curtains, making gossip, spreading all the middle-class cowardice shit behind your back. Come in front of me and talk.

Be a real person. I am very patient. Seriously, I am up to hear it. As a typical Gemini, you can convince me. But you can make me just fucking hate you if you bitch me. Man, it is a tough life.

RS Would you rather people pay attention to your objects than the idea of you as the artist?

AC An idea is an object.

RS After a show, do you destroy your work?

Do you keep it? Do you recycle it into new work?

AC No, I have hojerizah [Costa translates this as ‘more than scared’] of destroying my stuff.

Losing it. It feels like failure. I am obsessed with keeping pieces of drawings and paintings, small parts of metal, wire. Sometimes I find them again four years later and they change my life. Such a feeling. Very special. My studio in São Paulo is one of my favourite places in the world. It is magic there. But I hate studio visits.

RS Why is that?

AC In general, curators, collectors, ‘visitors’ come to my place to see themselves. Or something that fits in their bags or curatorial projects, as they call them. A Frenchwoman, for instance, came to my place ’cause she was – I guess – curating a biennale somewhere. She was late, almost missing her flight. I invited her to leave ’cause her face was scary. She broke my vibe.I’m also horrible when I visit other people houses.

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RS Why do you resist terms like ‘found’ and ‘trash’ when talking about your work? I think of a piece like Osso e Ovo [2015], a wall installation of string, cord, scraps – how else would you talk about these materials?

AC I don’t use found materials.

As soon as they are part of a sculpture, painting, video, etc, they are another thing. If you take a look to my production over the last four years, the most significant parts are constructed, or at least, transformed. My production changes a lot and I don’t really want to repeat myself as I am alive, so my work is supposed to be the same. I don’t do objets trouvés. I do sculptures in bronze, fabric, concrete, paintings, and I don’t care about the difference between an oil painting or a piece of fabric my poodle used to put in my schoolbag when I was going to college in São Paulo. They are all magic.

RS Why don’t you want to repeat yourself?

AC Artists have a duty. I feel myself so blessed for being an artist. We don’t need to be a good person. We can be boring. But it is a show.

Never forget we do shows. Ha ha! I just love it.

RS Do you have a style? Or do you reject that?

AC I don’t have any problem with style. I have style. Mine is free. I suffer and fight a lot, but I work essentially with freedom. That is my base.

RS When did you stop thinking about objects as temporary and start thinking of them as heavy and permanent?

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crossed the border. [Costa turned forty in 2015.] I am living the second half of my life. From here to death.

RS Has ageing affected the artmaking impulse for you?

AC Well, I guess it was a very natural progression and, obviously, it changed when I had the money to pay someone to cast something in bronze. Or to cut wood in a good way. I am not a tool guy. I am very stupid with things like money (people love that), sex (people love that), drugs (people love that), ha ha, and tools. Last month I bought a drill – that machine that makes lots o’ things! – and I am enchanted by it, ’cause I hate asking another person to make things for me. (It is a very difficult move to find a partner, in all senses. And there is an important thing: I like touching my stuff. Even the temperature of concrete, steel, bronze or a pair of Nike sneakers turns me on. I am gay cliché.) Perhaps this progression is related to the fact I just Novos Contemporâneos / New Contemporaries – tea time, 2015, print on fabric, dimensions variable.

Photo: Max Slaven. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, New York & Brussels

ArtReview

AC I think everything affects me.

It is a jelly of just everything getting dense with the everything on the top of it. You plus you. I’m making a show next week in London in a gallery in a basement of a pub in Haggerston, East London [Lungley Gallery]. I never met the guy and probably I won’t do so very soon.

He invited me from Facebook, saying he likes my stuff. The name of the show is THIS ME ME ME IS US. I think it gives you an answer. It is so delicate ’cause the artist has to deal not just with their own evils but the viewers’ also. That is pure beauty.

You affect me. Art breaks barriers. It doesn’t look like it sometimes, but c’mon, last year during the Documenta opening week in Athens, I was doing Pane Per Poveri, a project with Supportico Lopez’s crew from Berlin, and we were dancing with refugee people, having fun, connected with the city, the city Gods. This me me me is us.

RS When do you consider something to be finished?

AC The work is never finished. Even when it’s in your house or the Guggenheim, it is not finished. When it’s good, it’s on an endless journey. Imagine an Ancient Greek pot. Is it finished? No. Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California

Art and Revolution

In these extracts from his forthcoming book, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art (David Zwirner Books, 2018), Christian Viveros-Fauné looks at four iconic moments in art history when artists sought to frame revolutionary ideals May 2018

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Behold the image of revolution made heroic.

This painting, now hanging in the Louvre, represents a pivotal moment in French history – when violent protests led to the abdication of an unpopular king and his replacement by a more liberal monarch. More than that, it is the filter through which all subsequent images of world revolution are seen.

From footage of the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace (captured ten years after the event in a filmic restaging directed by Sergei Eisenstein), to UPI photographs of Fidel Castro’s barbudos entering a liberated Havana, to more recent iPhone captures of Libyan fighters during the Arab Spring, millions of similarly romantic images celebrate the glory of armed revolution – almost as if they had been pushed through a single stencil.

Painted by the world’s greatest romantic artist, Liberty Leading the People – like Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–20) – eschews the traditional heroic narratives of the Greek and Roman past, which up to then had dominated history painting, in favour of the heat of modern events. Delacroix began his most famous painting shortly after witnessing open warfare on the streets of Paris; he finished

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Eugène Delacroix Liberty Leading the People (1830) Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was the leading Romantic painter of his age. Besides depicting dramatic scenes from contemporary history and literature, he preferred emotional content over rationality in his paintings. His greatest artwork has been cribbed by, among others, a wildly popular Broadway musical and the British rock band Coldplay.

Liberty Leading the People, 1830, oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm. Photo: Michel Urtado. © RMN-Grand Palais (Louvre Museum, Paris)

ArtReview

the more-than-three-metre-high canvas three months later, just in time to show it off at the official 1831 Salon. The mother of all revolutionary paintings – as well as Sovietstyle Socialist Realism – Delacroix’s masterpiece stacks up as a morally simplified fable based on reallife events.

No wonder the monumental canvas has drawn comparisons to that other daughter of France that straddles New York Harbor. Like The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World – as the latter was christened by its maker, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, before being gifted to America in 1886 – Delacroix’s striding depiction of a halfnude Amazon is not intended to portray an actual bayonetand-flag-wielding individual. Rather, the figure serves as an allegory of liberty plumped by the raptures of romantic aesthetic and political ideals.

Delacroix portrays Liberty’s handsome head in profile, like Queen Elizabeth II on a £1 coin; atop it she wears the Phrygian cap, or bonnet rouge, a symbol of freedom that recalls today’s ubiquitous Malcolm X tees. Surrounding her secular highness are several stock characters: a grimy-faced factory worker holding an infantry sabre (left over perhaps from a previous war), a fancy-pants bohemian sporting a hunting rifle and a schoolboy brandishing two pistols. The painting’s not-so-subtle message is that everyone can become a heroic revolutionary. The rub is that Delacroix’s lavishly idealised scenario is only humanly possible in Les Mis (1980).

When corresponding with his brother soon after completing his famous picture, Delacroix enthused: ‘I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and although I may not have fought for my country, at least I shall have painted for her’. Besides confecting an up-to-date version of Peter Paul Rubens’s Consequences of War (1637–38) – without consequences, excepting the perfectly marmoreal bodies over which his revolutionaries clamber – what the Frenchman wrought was a heroic fantasy of egalitarian revolution. Myriad imitations have littered the world ever since. CVF

Journalism, declared Washington Post publisher Philip Graham in 1963, ‘is the first rough draft of history’. In art, however, things had already gone further: when the painter Édouard Manet tackled history, he served up drafts one, two and three.

Before the idea of making art ripped from the headlines achieved self-evident vogue, Manet set the standard for painting contemporary subjects so directly that they crackled with authenticity. Among his controversial themes – and there were many, including his depiction of a mousy prostitute as a prostitute – one proved especially radical in political terms: the 1867 execution by firing squad of the Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, who had been installed as emperor of Mexico (the Habsburg family had originally ruled the Viceroyalty of New Spain) by Napoleon III four years earlier.

A naive puppet, Maximilian did France’s imperialist bidding in North America. His rule depended entirely on the presence of the French army; when Napoleon’s troops withdrew, he was overrun by republican forces and quickly captured. On 19 June 1867, Mexico’s pseudoruler was executed, alongside two local generals, in the manner of Christ and the two thieves.

These events unleashed the nineteenth-century equivalent of a media frenzy – complete with eyewitness accounts, photographs and prints.

Fascinated, Manet recognised in the subject a great opportunity. He had recently seen Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814) at the Prado in Madrid, the world’s first great modern painting about death by fusillade (consider, in this light, Hans Memling’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, c. 1475). Mexico’s regicide, in fact, provided the perfect subject for a clean sweep: the French artist could tackle the fustiness of history painting, the conservatism of the Paris Salon (which predictably rejected his final canvas) and, into the bargain, Napoleon III’s authoritarianism.

Painted between 1867 and 1869, Manet’s painting of Maximilian’s execution exists in three versions. One is at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, another at the National Gallery, London and a third at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Two of these versions are either fragmentary or incomplete; the third,

Édouard Manet The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69) Édouard Manet (1823–83) is widely considered to properly deserve the phrase Baudelaire coined for Constantin Guys: ‘the painter of modern life’.

His groundbreaking works portrayed the nineteenth century in flowering transition into the twentieth.

About the Frenchman’s political painting, curator John Elderfield put it best: ‘political art does not reduce human affairs to slogans; it complicates rather than simplifies’.

pictured here, has had its painterly I’s dotted and its T’s crossed.

Manet’s last Maximilian painting was the only one to be exhibited in public during the artist’s lifetime. In 1879 it was shipped to New York and Boston and billed as a public attraction, with viewers charged 25 cents for the privilege. The business was a fiasco. Eventually, all three compositions were mothballed in the artist’s Paris studio; years later, the early twentieth century’s love of realism rescued them from oblivion.

An astounding depiction of the execution post-factum, the Kunsthalle Mannheim painting casts the viewer in the role of a fascinated rubbernecker: the triggers have just been pulled and the oaths shouted; the rifle smoke is yet to clear; the jury is out on the morality of the execution.

One of Maximilian’s dark-skinned generals rears back with arms raised (the pose is lifted from Goya’s earlier picture); the second awaits his own personal bullet with hands crossed in an attitude of beatitude. Maximilian, for his part, couldn’t look more surprised. Death has found him just as he was in life: gullible, wide-eyed and unprepared. CVF

The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1868–69, oil on canvas, 252 × 305 cm.

Courtesy Kunsthalle Mannheim

May 2018

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In 1968 a group of Argentinian artists, journalists and sociologists banded together to make the ultimate work of political art. To date, no one is sure whether the experiment was wildly successful or an epic fail.

In response to a laundry list of national and international crises – the Vietnam War, student protests in Paris (as well as in other cities across Europe and the Americas), the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, the myriad upheavals related to decolonisation and the Cold War, as well as the repression and censorship of the military government of Juan Carlos Onganía – the group banded together to form the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, or the Avant-Garde Artists Group (GAV). Their purpose: to turn art from something that hangs tamely on a wall into a force that might shake the foundations of power.

Among the group’s first steps was to affiliate themselves with Argentina’s largest labour union, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT). Next was the establishment of a set of rules: vanguard art would henceforth serve only the oppressed classes instead of an elite public; art could no longer be shown in galleries or museums; real art would aspire to the status of political action, but freighted with deeper significance.

The collective’s manifesto, authored by artists María Teresa Gramuglio and Nicolás Rosa, declared its intention to ‘reveal the

Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia Tucumán Arde (1968) Made up of important figures from the 1960s Argentine avant-garde (León Ferrari, Graciela Carnevale, Norberto Puzzolo and Roberto Jacoby among them), the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia (1966–68) made a single artwork that achieved a breaking point for political art – the choice thereafter became make art or pick up a gun.

Tucumán Arde Archive (detail), 1966–68, documents, photographs, press cuttings and other materials. © Archivo Graciela Carnevale. Courtesy MACBA, Barcelona

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fallacious contradiction of the government and its supporting class’; this they planned to achieve through a series of events, interventions and happenings. Their actions included a pair of exhibitions organised in the name of the millions of poor living in the region of Tucumán, the West Virginia of Argentina.

The group’s happenings received a fittingly combustible moniker –Tucumán Arde, or Tucumán is Burning.

Rather than stage their shows in museums, the GAV artists installed their works at the CGT headquarters of two major cities: Rosario and Buenos Aires. Together with other leftleaning professionals – among them economists, social scientists and advertising experts – they endeavored to take on the dictatorship’s control directly. Some members travelled to Tucumán to bring back firsthand accounts of the impoverished conditions of Tucumeños.

Others remained in Rosario and Buenos Aires to graffiti and paper over the streets with ‘counterinformation’ in imitation of clandestine political cadres.

In Rosario the group exhibited a collage installation by León Ferrari alongside Walker Evans-type photographs of Tucumán’s sugar plantation workers and synoptic charts designed to demonstrate the links between mass misery and corrupt government. There were also audio and video recordings, slideshows, text pieces, a lightwork that flashed on and off to signal the scandalous frequency of infant mortality in the region and an 18-page report explaining the root causes of Tucumán’s poverty.

In Rosario, the exhibition lasted two weeks.

In Buenos Aires, it closed after just one day, having been shuttered by the government.

According to artist and writer Luis Camnitzer, ‘Tucuman Arde was both a success and a failure’ – chiefly in that art came up hard against the limits of nonviolent politics.

After creating a powerful hybrid of art and activism, the collective’s members found they had a target on their backs.

A few went into exile.

Others stopped making art and joined the guerrilla movement. Several were ‘disappeared’.

At least one GAV member, Eduardo Favario, was killed in a shootout with the police. CVF

‘The world is not black and white,’ Graham Greene once wrote. ‘More like black and grey.’

Those words acquire special meaning when considering Gerhard Richter’s painting cycle October 18, 1977, one of the most moving works of political art of the last half of the twentieth century.

Made up of 15 paintings based on press photographs of four members of the BaaderMeinhof Group, or Red Army Faction (RAF) – a militant group whose bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies and assassinations kept Europe on red alert during the 1970s – Richter’s cycle commemorates the passing of an era. It dramatises the death of four leftwing terrorists, as well as the demise of the idea of Marxist revolution in the West.

Like other cultural products named after a particular day or year – think George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and On Kawara’s date

Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977 (1988) Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) is considered by many to be the world’s greatest living painter. His realistic greyscale paintings make a crucial and urgent point today: to see the world in black and white is to live within the contours of extremism.

October 18, 1977, Youth Portrait, 1988, oil on canvas, 67 × 62 cm. © the artist 2018

May 2018

paintings (1966–2014) – Richter’s canvases are titled after a unique calendar event.

On that baleful day, October 18, 1977, the bodies of three principal RAF members, Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin, were found dead inside their cells in Stammheim Prison, in Stuttgart. Though the deaths were officially deemed suicides, there was widespread suspicion that the radicals had been murdered by the German state. A fourth member of the group, Ulrike Meinhof, had also been found a year earlier hanged in her prison cell.

Richter based his subjects’ portrayals on newspaper and police photographs.

He rendered the evidence of these photographs unstable: their documentary value was darkened, their reportorial accuracy muddied and their sharp edges blurred via a process of painterly smudging that resembles seeing through a foggy car-window.

The results affirm a wavering realism. As Richter himself put it, ‘by way of reporting’, his 15 canvases ‘contribute to an appreciation of [our time], to see it as it is’.

Doubling down on his doubt about the truthfulness of images, Richter painted his subjects in greyscale (he is on the record as saying that grey is ‘the epitome of a non-statement’ and ‘only notionally real’).

The series begins with a portrait painting of Ulrike Meinhof: it’s followed by two paintings of three members of the group being arrested; three pictures of Ensslin on her way to an ID parade; Ensslin’s body hanged from prison bars; an image of Baader’s cell; a painting of the record player that hid Baader’s gun; two images of Baader shot and bleeding out; and three head-andshoulders images of Meinhof laid out terminally on her cell floor. A final image, originally cribbed from TV footage, confirms the radicals’ mass appeal – it shows three coffins being carried through a crowd during their multitudinous funeral.

According to critic Gertrud Koch, ‘what characterizes these paintings is their reference to the temporality of our imaginations, the haziness of our memory, its vagueness, the sinking into amnesia, the disappearance and blurring’. But there is also a sense of momentous grief: anguish over the loss of life taken early, but also over the epochal failure of ideology.

As Richter put it in one of the many interviews he gave to counter the false impression that he was glorifying terrorism in October 18, 1977: ‘[My paintings have] to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail’. CVF

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FERNANDA FRAGATEIRO For us a book is a small building

Ordinariness and Light, after Alison and Peter Smithson, 2018.

May 9 – July 15, 2018

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Contemporary art and architecture in the historical city of Bruges

The Bruges Triennial is a collaboration between Brugge Plus, Musea Brugge, Kenniscentrum vzw and Cultuurcentrum Brugge, commissioned by the City of Bruges

On view: Hernâni Reis Baptista, “The confession of the flesh”. Credits: Constança Babo

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HOPES AND FEARS | Flávia Vieira TRAPIOCA 101 | Emmanuel Nassar

Jane Alexander • Beth Armstrong • Lena Cronqvist • Latifa Echakhch • Frances Goodman • Lungiswa Gqunta • Lubaina Himid • Bronwyn Katz • Marcia Kure • Gunilla Klingberg & Peter Geschwind • Marianne Lindberg De Geer • Mwangi-Hutter Esther MahlAngu • Whitney McVeigh • Nandipha Mntambo • Sethembile Msezane • Zanele Muholi • Caroline MArtensson Yoko Ono • Claudette Schreuders • Mary Sibande • Ayana V Jackson • Sophia van Wyk • NelisIwe Xaba EXHIBITION venue NIROX SCULPTUREPARK, South Africa niroxarts.com WANASKONST.SE

Lubaina Himid, Vernet’s Studio, 1994.

Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens.

Photo: Stefan Baumann.

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April 7 / May 19, 2018

Rua Soeiro Pereira Gomes, Lote 1 – 6.º, Lisbon, Portugal From Wednesday to Saturday: 3pm – 8pm (except holidays) www.fundacaocarmonaecosta.pt

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Art Featured

The insurgent who in the disorder of passion dies for an idea he has made his own is in reality a man of order, having ordered his conduct according to a principle that was evident to him 71

“1968”

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by Andrew Weiner

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The 50th anniversary of the fabled ‘events of 68’, hailed at the time as a turning point in world history, is receiving less attention in the mainstream media and popular culture than one might have expected; hoary jokes notwithstanding, it seems that you don’t actually need to have been there to have forgotten the 1960s. Whereas underground movements once had to define themselves against that decade’s countercultures in order to gain credibility – whether by negating the hippie ethos (punk) or by salvaging aspects of it (rave, grunge) – such references are no longer mandatory, or even necessarily legible to younger audiences.

This change likely signals the waning influence of a senescent boomer generation; it also suggests that the postmodern amnesia first diagnosed decades ago has been exacerbated by data overload, screen dependency and so-called fake news. Yet while it might well seem more important to shift our focus onto other, less mythified histories than 1968, this would only strengthen the reactionary forces that have long sought to contain or annihilate the emancipatory movements of that era. The question is thus not whether to remember 1968 but how.

In what ways could we reject the sanctimony that so often distorts popular memory of that moment so as to grasp its present relevance? What strategies best enable us to understand the relationships between the art and politics of that period and those of today? And how might such constellations help those who wish to operate critically within the field of contemporary art?

To avoid the constraints of nostalgia and presentism, it is important to debate this history in terms that are unfashionable or untimely – to recover, for instance, the habit of thinking dialectically. We need to remember that the expansion of individual freedoms that we typically associate with 1968 also facilitated the expansion of markets; that the convergence of art and life enabled the convergence of life and spectacle, as in the work of Joseph Beuys, Jean-Jacques Lebel or Andy Warhol; that the liberation of sexual desires exposed bodily life to new forms of domination; and that the pronounced leftward shift of much cultural production, including experimental or neo-avant-garde art, was in many ways a compensation for political and economic revolutions that seemed imminent but failed to occur.

We also have to bear in mind that terms like ‘the 1960s’ and ‘1968’ don’t typically refer to chronological dates, discrete events, historical periods or specific critical concepts. Rather, they function as floating signifiers: their meanings shift and proliferate, often imperceptibly,

such that two people can use the same term to mean contradictory things. Over and against the utopianism of the 1960s, 1968 represents a much more ambivalent entanglement of emancipation with crisis, antagonism, failure, violence and contradiction. It also speaks to a historical horizon that extends well beyond the North, a subject that has recently been receiving belated (but welcome) attention in academic studies of ‘the global 1968’.

One apt way to register these complications would be to think of 1968 as a conjuncture – a concept developed by Louis Althusser, many of whose students were central to les événements de mai. For the Marxist philosopher, whose own response to the uprisings in Paris was largely sceptical, the term denotes a historically particular, intrinsically dialectical relationship between structure and contingency. Culture cannot be disaggregated from political economy, and every individual action must be thought in relation to the contradictions that serve as its conditions of possibility. These ideas were incisively developed in Fredric Jameson’s landmark essay ‘Periodizing the 60s’ (1984), which argued that the emancipatory movements of that moment – the decolonial revolutions of the Third World, the formation of New Left coalitions and the rights struggles of African Americans, women and other subjugated populations – must be thought in conjunction with the contemporaneous global expansion of capital, whether through the growth of international markets or the industrialisation of agrarian economies.

On this view, the 1960s did not end with the Manson murders or with Soviet tanks in Prague; they ended in the global economic crisis of 1973–74, after the last remaining vestiges of the preindustrial world had been enclosed.

Jameson’s thesis – that the achievements of new social and political movements are inextricable from the ‘liberation’ of vast new territories for the purposes of private profit – is both sobering and deeply discomfiting; even those of us who didn’t live through the 1960s don’t want to believe it.

Yet rather than succumb to left melancholy, we would do well to recall that art can think dialectically too, and in ways that can thwart the expectations we inherit from theory. This largely means bypassing the sort of work commonly associated with 1968: the slogans of the Situationist International and the posters of the Atelier Populaire; Christo and Jean-Claude’s oil-barrel barricades; anything Op or Pop or psychedelic; the often self-serving theatrics of artists like Lebel and Beuys. Instead, we need to attend to art that was (and is) uncompromising about its own compromises; art that

preceding pages Chris Marker, Gay-Lussac (Paris, May 1968), 1968, b/w photo. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

above Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965. Photo: Walter Vogel.

Courtesy Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York

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VALIE EXPORT, TAP and TOuch Cinema, 1968, b/w photo. © the artist, Bildrecht Wien, 2018.

Photo: Werner Schulz. Courtesy the artist

May 2018

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Artur Barrio, Situação T–T, 1 (detail), 1970, ten photographs, 30 × 40 cm (each). Photo: Cesar Carneiro. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Millan, São Paulo

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committed to radicalism or even a kind of extremism without fetishArt historians might also venture to rethink canonical works of ising transcendence or wishing away its own inevitable ambivalence; critical art in terms of their contradictions: one example could be a riven, dogged art that didn’t just acknowledge its own unfreedom VALIE EXPORT’s TAP and TOUCH Cinema (1968), which is typically read but openly struggled against it. as a feminist reversal of mainstream cinema’s gendered power relaThe most indelible example of such work remains Chris Marker’s tions, but which centres problematically around EXPORT’s voluntary A Grin Without a Cat (1977). Combining an unsparing analysis of the objectification of her own body and image. The same analysis might repression of the global New Left, a keening lament for the destruc- be applied to those cases in which artists incorporated signs of domition of emancipatory movements and a self-reflexive inquiry into nation directly into their work so as to make repression into a kind of militant aesthetics, the film functions as an autopsy, a requiem and a ‘medium’. One thinks here of Melvin Edwards’s series Lynch Fragments, call to arms. Integral to its power is what Marker calls the ‘trembling begun in 1963, or Artur Barrio’s ‘Bloody Bundles’ (1969–70); neither image’: a term that refers to the shakiness of handheld protest record- of these artists has the left-canonical status of Marker and EXPORT. That works like these feel relevant today, in ways that others from ings, and by extension to images marked by an exposure to contingency and potential injury. that moment do not, has little The question is not whether to remember 1968 but to do with their formal innoContemporary practitioners how. In what ways could we reject the sanctimony vation or stylistic prescience. could realise the potential of More important is their highly this precedent by thinking the that so often distorts popular memory of that trembling image more expanattuned relationship to their moment so as to grasp its present relevance? own conditions of possibility sively – not just by transposing Marker’s concept into other formats, but by tracing the ‘trembling’ or and, crucially, impossibility. As much as we might want to follow many resonance between the antagonisms of a given conjuncture and the feminist art-historians in claiming EXPORT’s TAP and TOUCH Cinema vulnerability of those who struggle within it. Among the artists to as a heroic victory over patriarchy, this would amount to a kind of have taken on his legacy, despite coming of age long after 1968, is the wish fulfilment. In reality, the performance marks the limits of such Portuguese filmmaker Filipa César. A decade ago she was introduced actions, which can function radically as representations but are incaby Marker to Sana na N’Hada, Flora Gomes and several other revolu- pable, like all art, of altering power relations at a more structural level. tionary filmmakers from Guinea-Bissau who had shot hundreds of It is this ambivalence that continues to link the work of artists such as hours of documentary footage during its war of independence (1963– EXPORT to the profound contradictions that characterised 1968.

74) and the following years of decolonisation. In the intervening years Art like EXPORT’s retains its sense of urgency because those César has worked to help restore and digitise this footage, much of contradictions are still largely with us, which is to say that 1968 can which was never screened for political reasons; she has also used it as be viewed as the threshold of the global geopolitical order typically material for projects across multiple media, most recently Spell Reel described as ‘contemporary’. That said, our current conjuncture has (2017), a feature-length film that perceptively gauges the relation also been determined by major developments that no one could have between the unfulfilled potential of that moment and the possibili- foreseen, whether in 1968 or 1984: the disintegration of the Soviet bloc ties of the present. in 1991; the outbreak of a third industrial revolution, encompassing

Spell Reel, dir Filipa César, 2017. Courtesy the artist

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Chris Marker, Demo (Paris, May 1968), 1968, b/w photo.

Courtesy the estate of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

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Chris Marker, Demo (Paris, May 1968), 1968, b/w photo.

Courtesy the estate of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

May 2018

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Melvin Edwards, Visa, 2017, welded steel, 34 × 22 × 15 cm.

Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

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biotechnology, mobile computing, automated production and seemAnother instructive example has been the wide-ranging proingly universal informatisation; the emergent hegemony of global gramming at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, which has neoliberalism; and the increasingly irreversible planetary climate addressed some of the most crucial aspects of the histories that crisis. These interlinking but distinct processes are frequently follow from 1968: the ascendancy of digital capitalism and the conflated under the facile rubric of ‘the global contemporary’ – a seem- California ideology (The Whole Earth, 2013); the legacies of transingly neutral but in fact highly ideological term that often serves to national left solidarity projects like the Non-Aligned Movement (After Year Zero, 2013); the nexus between aesthetics, media and naturalise conditions of inequality or exploitation.

It is therefore important to identify, analyse and reframe these nongovernmental activism (Forensis, 2014); the geopolitics of the relations, enabling specific subjects – especially non-elite audiences Cold War (Parapolitics, 2017); and the genealogy of our planetary – to recognise themselves as agents capable of collectively altering ecological crisis (The Anthropocene Project, 2013–). The fact that such these conditions. The world can do without pious, crypto-Maoist initiatives are often dismissed as didactic or insufficiently ‘aesthetic’ soixante-huitard homilies demanding our fidelity to the ‘events of only suggests the extent to which the liberal anticommunist ideology 68’; we need clearer diagrams of Greenbergian Modernism Over and against the utopianism of the 1960s, continues to condition current and sharper tools, we need voices 1968 represents a much more ambivalent that are brave, humble, indefaticritical discourse. gable. Such work is already under Such examples make clear entanglement of emancipation with crisis, way, due in part to the foresight that one does not need to have antagonism, failure, violence and contradiction ‘been there’ to engage with the of those who eschewed the antiestablishment orthodoxy of their moment to undertake the more complex afterlives of 1968. Like César, Naeem Mohaiemen has undertaken meticulous research into the histories of the transnapainstaking labour of rebuilding institutions over decades.

One site for such work has been the research exhibition, a format tional left in his multipart project The Young Man Was (2012–). His combining experimental art and exhibition design with academic and recent essayistic video installation Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) critical investigation. These projects have often been underwritten by reads in many ways as a critical rejoinder to Marker’s account progressive European institutions – a fact that speaks to the surpluses of 1968, attending to urgent political issues that often escape the notice accumulated by creditor states like Germany, and also to the need to of the contemporary artworld, like the conflict between fundamenoffset ensuing tensions through acts of preemptive cultural diplo- talist and secularist transnationalisms. In works like Mohaiemen’s macy. Among the most ambitious and generative of these has been and César’s, which are at once saturnine, sober and resolute, lurks Former West (2008–16), a multiyear research, education, publishing and a different image of 1968: one in which revolution might turn out exhibition project organised by Utrecht-based BAK (Basis voor Actuele quite different than we expect, in which the promise of justice seems Kunst), which aimed to radically reorder conventional art-historical somehow to be fatally foreclosed and yet forever present, however narratives by provincialising and historicising the notion of ‘West’. dimly, on a common horizon. ar Such objectives meshed productively with longstanding attempts across the global South to decolonise art history and theory.

Andrew Weiner is a writer and academic based in New York.

Naeem Mohaiemen, Two Meetings and a Funeral (still), 2017, three-channel digital video installation, colour, sound, 85 min. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata

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My Parents’ Revolution And what it means to me today…

by Marie Darrieussecq

I was conceived in France in May 1968. As a result, I can offer a first- contraception on the black market, through the post. It was banned in hand account of cellular division in an environment of protest. pharmacies. Women were straitjacketed: at work we were forbidden I should let you know that the maternal uterus had placed itself from wearing trousers or espadrilles, forced into closed shoes (it’s far from the events themselves: 800km from Paris, in fact, in the very hot in May in the Pays Basque). For the men, it was shirts and Pays Basque. But my mother, the daughter of godless Communists, ties. May 68 announced its arrival at our school with the appearance comes from revolutionary stock. A schoolteacher, she greeted May of turtlenecks – all our male colleagues turned up wearing them! We 68 with enthusiasm. She went on strike straightaway, which she held political meetings in the evening in our little flat, since I was was forced to extend due to a pregnancy with complications (me). confined there by my pregnancy. We were a little anxious about our My father, a technical draughtsman full of ambition, found that salaries, but in the end we were all paid. The women teachers won the the events in Paris interfered with his production schedule. “I came right to wear sandals and trousers, but the patriarchy carried on: all home every evening, and half the teachers from your mother’s the leaders of the May 68 movement were men.” school were there gulping down So that’s where I come from, from these two dear old human my whisky – that was my par“I came home every evening, and half the teachers beings of French nationality, but ticipation in 1968. But these from your mother’s school were there gulping are mostly good memories. We Basque, who fused their gametes smoked and drank a lot. We were in May 68 and tried to raise me down my whisky – that was my participation for a while. At age seventeen very poorly informed: on TV we in 1968.

But these are mostly good memories” saw students being beaten up I raced off to make a life in Paris. by riot police, but the newspaIt’s a French characteristic pers we managed to get hold of described the Sorbonne as a student to not fear disorder, especially in public spaces. If anything, disorder shagathon circulating STDs. I viewed May 68 as an interesting intel- is a sign of health: the country is structurally sound, democracy is lectual movement, but one completely detached from reality (their ancient, France is anchored despite everything. That’s true in the US admiration for Mao!), only able to connect with workers in the Paris too – the US is not healthy, but one can still protest there. Although it region, certainly not those in the provinces. And anyway, I think we certainly helps to have a look. Emma González, a student at Parkland’s owed De Gaulle continued respect.”

Stoneman Douglas High School, has an awesome look. Daniel CohnMy mother, long divorced from my father, doesn’t share this view. Bendit, the student leader of 68, also had a singular hairstyle and was “May 68 was the revenge of the young on the old. And women also nicknamed Danny the Red for his russet mane. Protest movements made some advances. We were really fed up with the all-powerful are powered by icons – the time it takes for one idol to be swept away De Gaulle, a fine man of course… but do you realise I couldn’t hold by another, especially these days, in the era of social media. But that’s a bank account without the permission of my husband! I got my in democracies.

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The author’s parents in 1967.

Courtesy Marie Darrieussecq

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As I write these lines, I have just come back from China. Now bad,” I said. “In China it’s always good,” they responded mischiethere’s a country that fears disorder, and fears it more than anything, vously. It’s also in China that I learned, through certain friends, what above all when it happens in the public realm. I was part of a confer- it really means to fear the police. You protest and you disappear. The ence in the enormous city of Chengdu. While there I learned that reelection in perpetuity of Xi Jinping earlier this year raised not a Chengdu is the most gay-friendly city in the country, that a gay and single audible grumble, the risks involved in protest making it appear lesbian organisation had even held a meeting in a small theatre there that the Chinese are simply happy to consume. Horrible memories last year. It had wanted to expand and rent a larger theatre this year, are very recent. Two eminent professors from Wuhan showed me the huge tunnel they dug with pickwith a capacity of 1,200: the meeting axes in 1968 when they should have was shut down. The authority of “May 68 was the revenge of the young on the been writing their theses. That was the state and the party are overold. And women also made some advances. during the Cultural Revolution, at whelming. Sometimes it’s deployed in the pursuit of just causes, air We were really fed up with the all-powerful the end of the Great Famine, which their childhood stomachs rememquality for example. Motorcycles De Gaulle, a fine man of course…” (whose two-stroke engines produce bered all too well. Meanwhile my a significant amount of pollution) mother’s colleagues were drinking have been banned from many of the country’s large cities. This goal my father’s whisky. And the great Paris intellectuals were celebrating was accomplished inside of a single month. The first week, a scrap- Mao, including Sartre, Sollers, Kristeva, Barthes. A young Chinese ping fee, the second week a fine, the third week a big fine, the fourth friend pointed to a few elderly people in the street: “You have to see week, if you still had a motorcycle in your possession, prison. At the them all as survivors.” She herself is discreetly dissident: she tries to same time as that was happening, a demonstration by angry motor- avoid using her mobile phone to make payments, a difficult task given cyclists back in France, their engines howling and smoking beneath that most daily transactions are made this way. The life of each indimy windows, blocked Paris from north to south because Emmanuel vidual is mapped with an astonishing efficiency. If, through protesting Macron had decided to lower the speed limit on secondary roads. in China, one risks being disappeared, the ultimate social protest of My first book, Truismes (Pig Tales, 1996), a protest fable, is now choosing to disappear is impossible. Everyone there told me the story of the BBC reporter who had been ‘impossible in China’. That’s despite found in seven minutes through the fact that it went through four My editor made it clear, with great respect, Chinese editions in 2006 alone. facial-recognition technology. that he would prefer me not to come to his My editor made it clear, with great After my flight back to France was cancelled due to a strike at Air respect, that he would prefer me not city (30 million inhabitants), which is the France, I returned the following to come to his city (30 million inhabonly time that’s happened in all my travels day on another airline. At Roissy, itants), which is the only time that’s happened in all my travels. One has a passenger was complaining loudly to assume the fable was read correctly and the animal metaphor fully about the delay. I was afraid that she was going to get picked up, that understood: a protest against all authoritarian and especially patri- she would disappear into the state’s prisons. But no, we had crossed archal regimes. It’s in today’s China that one best understands how the frontier into Europe, she could grumble. ar to protest with metaphors and undertones. Since I was complaining about not being able to access my prohibited Gmail account, my Translated from the French by David Terrien Chinese hosts, sidestepping the debate over freedom of the Internet, asked if I wasn’t missing the news from France. “In any case, it’s always Marie Darrieussecq is a novelist based in Paris

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Richard Barbrook May 68: a guide for the perplexed

Thesis 3 May 68 was the metamorphosis of socialist revolution into neoliberal counterrevolution. When the workers settled for a substantial pay rise, the young students’ dreams of a utopian society were betrayed by their proletarian heroes. With the class struggle discredited, academic and media chroniclers instead identified May 68 with the cultural rebellion of the baby boomer generation. The capitalist system might have survived intact, but France’s Catholic morality was soon swept away with the legalisation of divorce, abortion and LGBT equality. According to the postmodernist philosophers, the tyranny of the proletarian majority must be superseded by a multitude of identity minorities. The sexist, racist and homophobic workers are now the principal threat to the gains of May 68: in the twenty-first century’s global marketplace, vicious class exploitation is commendable as long as the ruling elite is 50 percent female, 10 percent BAME and 5 percent LGBT!

Thesis 1

Thesis 4

May 68 was the almost revolution: the world-historical moment 50 years ago when the young could have reshaped Europe in their own idealistic self-image. It began when a few militants challenged the puritanical authorities at Nanterre University, their demands were soon picked up by their peers at other campuses and these protests escalated into students and police fighting in the Latin Quarter.

Seizing this opportunity, the Stalinist and Social Democratic trade unions called a general strike and millions of workers joined in the massive demonstrations filling the streets of Paris and other major cities. With universities, factories and public institutions under occupation, the conservative government was on the verge of collapse.

President Charles de Gaulle had already fled to a French army base in Germany. Paris was once again the global centre of people’s revolution: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1936, 1944 – and 1968!

May 68 was the first nationwide uprising against spectacular domination. All previous revolutions in France had fought for political democracy, social equality and economic prosperity. Living in a media-saturated affluent society with universal welfare services, the most advanced sections of the proletarian movement could now dare to be much more ambitious. Taking control of the universities, factories and public institutions, they experimented with the self-management of wealth creation, social care, cultural expression and everyday life. As the bureaucratic hierarchies of the state and market dissolved, people were liberated from the emotional, spatial and temporal disciplines of capitalist alienation. They were no longer passively watching TV screens – they were collectively shaping their own destiny. Deliberately forgotten by the official commemorations, the folk memory of this brief moment of cybernetic communist emancipation is the greatest achievement of the almost-revolution!

Thesis 2

Thesis 5

May 68 was when the past betrayed the future. At this turning point in world history, the traditions of the twentieth century’s failed revolutions weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Trade-union activists did nothing but borrow the Social Democratic demands of the Popular Front and parody the Stalinist rhetoric of the French Resistance. Student militants reenacted the May 68 events in the time-honoured disguise and borrowed language of Trotskyism, Anarchism and Maoism. Tragically, the New Left was still the old left.

The leadership of this system-shattering movement couldn’t imagine anything more radical than higher living standards or a progressive government. When de Gaulle offered pay rises, welfare increases and new elections, they’d lost the game of revolution to a skilful general who understood his opponent’s weaknesses. Those who make a revolution halfway condemn themselves to defeat!

May 68 is both the inspiration and inhibitor of the 2018 left. For its 50th-anniversary celebrations, French workers and students are organising nationwide protests against the regressive neoliberal policies of President Emmanuel Macron. Their large demonstrations, campus occupations and violent clashes with the cops consciously evoke the May 68 struggles of five decades ago. Their mastery of social media has successfully subverted the ideological monopoly of the legacy broadcasters and newspapers. Equipped with better education and sophisticated technology, today’s left is more capable than its illustrious forebears of achieving the self-management of all social institutions. Yet, ironically, the most radical demands of the 2018 protests are those dismissed as reactionary back in May 68: higher living standards and a progressive government. Under neoliberal globalisation, there can be no alternative to the perpetual present. The serious reform of the decaying capitalist system is now the harbinger of the cybernetic communist revolution!

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Art & Language The events in Paris of 1968 should be seen in the context of contemIf during the late 1960s the formal announcement of the porary international protest movements against the depravities and victory of capitalism was (and seemed) only a remote possibility, absurdities of the Vietnam War. We do not remember 1968 as soix- the economic recession and the errors and dissuasions of the 1970s ante-huitards. As our practice developed as Art & Language, we were mutated so as to contrive the triumph of neoliberal capitalism. With not, however, bereft of a sense of the need for student self-activity some notable exceptions, the artist and his new best mate/boss, the in the conditions we faced at Coventry College of Art and other art curator, have become fully professionalised in practices that put schools before and after 1969. There was indeed a class dimension together generic art products in traditional and installational forms. to the origins of this practice – a material and social dimension. Both have learned to put their newly entrepreneurial shoulders to American Modernism had produced a discourse and a discipline that the ideological wheel of the neoliberal dispensation. As they have seemed essentially learnable and teachable irrespective of the social done so, we have seen them set up monuments that can be underbackground of those who tried to make something of it and with it. stood as no more than its passive reflection.

This was in marked contrast to the European Modernism of a quasiResistance is not, however, unimaginable. It will take the form of natural (ie socially privileged, class-based) sensibility. small and possibly malingering criticism and negation. This was in What became Conceptual art could be described as an almost fully fact always the case. But once, it was easier for artists to be afflicted integrated negation of the discourse of Modernism. The transmissi- by the delusion that they are somehow centre stage in the struggle bility of the discourse of Conceptual art was more or less accepted as for material and social change. a necessity by Art & Language and many of our early Conceptual art Mais oú sont les neiges d’antan? Elles demeurent, on l’espère, dans coconspirators. Art & Language’s critique of Modernism – certainly quelques lieux sombres. in its European form – refused the various discourses of authenticity and of the romantic stereotype of the artist as hyperindividual that had long penetrated art schools as an unchallengeable creed. As a consequence, Art & Language adopted a degree of anonymity – to a greater or lesser extent – as various contingencies allowed. The social practice of teaching and learning, which was essential to the development of Art & Language work after the first publication of the journal Art-Language in 1969, sought to abolish or diminish the dichotomous hierarchies that were associated with institutions and particularly with art schools, where what had begun as a kind of individualistic radicalism had been transformed into an arbitrary and conservative orthodoxy that students refused at their peril. They refused.

The revenge of this conservatism was not long in coming. Art & Language had managed to get an art theory course installed with some prominence in the curriculum and had extracted various other concessions from the authorities.

The Gesamtkunstwerk of Conceptual art discourse was able to reproduce itself for a couple of years or so between 1969 and 1972. In 1972 all the part-time staff who had been teaching this apostasy at Coventry were summarily dismissed.

But what of Conceptual art and Art & Language, Index 003 (Bxal) (detail), 1973. Courtesy the artists and Tate, London its critique of the institutions of art and of the social world that had given rise to them? It was shortlived; not ended in vengeful acts by the authorities, but by rapid co-option and assimilation into the light of institutions themselves. (Of course, it could be said that Conceptual art which embodied institutional critique as its raison d’être was always liable to such rapid assimilation.) By the middle of the 1970s, work whose self-description prominently included cultural critique had begun to sidle closer to the social and political space of the management.

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Cecilia Vicuña In 1968 I was studying art in Chile; we had begun occupying the universities to demand reform in 1967. Back then, the news intensely covered the civil rights movement in the us and student rallies against the war in Vietnam. Martin Luther King Jr’s murder felt like a blow to our hearts. When news of the events in Paris in 1968 reached us, we felt connected to it because it was part of a worldwide movement. The powerful association between students and trade unions and their fantastic demands were so close to ours, but there was a difference: in Paris they came up with the slogan ‘Power to the Imagination’. That unforgettable graffiti summed up our dreams and went around the world becoming the banner for a generation that wanted a different kind of human culture.

There was definitely a spirit to the 60s, a spontaneous emergence of rage against the violent powers ruling the world. As King defined Cecilia Vicuña, 1968. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong it, the ‘triple prong sickness’ of ‘racism, excessive materialism and militarism’; that is to say, capitalism and imperialism. For us, the young, that meant unhappiness and sorrow, so our movement was a rebellion against pain and abuse, an explosion of desire, a thirst for love, joy and justice. I remember the joy that came from participating in the decisionmaking process, what used to be called ‘the construction of our destiny’. Our meetings were hard, but our rallies were like parties, full of dance, fun and music.

I think that is what was most threatening to the system, our joyful, unafraid bodies on the streets.

The spontaneous emergence of the will to change the world in the 60s was massive and multigenerational. It involved workers, students, artists and intellectuals. It was a wave of discontent so powerful that it could bring people to power, as it did in Chile in 1970. Now we are witnessing amazing movements like #Occupy, #BlackLivesMatter, #MarchForOurLives, #NotOneMore, but will they coalesce into a majestic wave, a web of coalitions? For me, Paris 68, the Arab Spring, the indigenous movement and so many others that rise like flowers from the mud, are attempts to save the world or prevent its fall from grace.

I am thinking of the descent into hypocrisy, deceit and denial we live with now, when people are inclined to revert to nationalism and other dark forces. Perhaps the crushing of the rebellion of the 60s, silencing its call for justice and love, set the tone for today, when no one knows how to deal with the festering rage of the oppressed. Except now, the oppressed is all of us, the 99%. Maybe Paris 68 was our last chance, but every last chance calls for a comeback, because the raw aspirations that bred it are intact, however well hidden under a weird passivity.

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Franco Berardi 1968 is the peak of human evolution, when techno-scientific knowledge and social consciousness had finally converged to the fullest extent.

Then, after a decade of uncertainty, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs’s founding of Apple in 1977, and the Sex Pistols’ declaration the same year that the future didn’t exist marked the diverging of those two trends: the expansion of technological knowledge and of technological applications continued steadily and accelerated; while there was a sharp downturn in social consciousness. Fifty years later, as the kingdom of Artificial Intelligence is being inaugurated, humankind is officially entering the Age of Dementia. Technology has gained increasing power over social life, while society has a decreasing power on technology. No more able to govern itself, techno-automaton (the so-called governance) takes control of the economy and daily life.

I was eighteen years old when I entered the University of Bologna, and I started occupying in the first months of that year. And contrary to what conformists think, that was possibly the best condition for learning: occupation was a condition for sharing knowledge, for taking part in the social processes and for linking theoretical research, artistic expression and political action. Everybody was expecting a long-lasting process of social emancipation from misery and exploitation, but this expectation was totally false, as we now know.

Why have the expectations of 50 years ago been denied? What has provoked this sort of reversal of imagination? This is the question we should ask nowadays.

In 1968, imagination was reclaimed as a force for social transformation. In fact, imagination seized power. But this did not initiate a process of liberation. On the contrary, imagination has now become the hostage of power.

In Paris, the insurgents were shouting: “L’imagination au pouvoir!” Fifty years after, we might say that imagination now rests only in the hands of power. The social mind is obsessed by the repetition of the mantra of economic competition, and social impoverishment is pushing people towards the mythology of belonging: aggressiveEnrico Scuro, Demonstration against the criminalization of student struggles. Bologna, 22 January 1977, ness and war.

1977, b/w photograph. Courtesy the artist Is there a way out?

We should be able to act as Baron Munchausen, who, having fallen into a ditch, lifted himself out of it by pulling on his own pigtail. This self-creative act (the invention of something from nothing) is the effect of a movement.

This is why, in order to avoid the final suicide that will follow the long-lasting wave of depression produced by the obsession with neoliberalism, we need a return of the energy that sprang up in 1968.

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Catherine Millet

May 11, 1968, Rue Gay-Lussac, Paris, 1968.

Photo: Gökşin Sipahioğlu / sipa Press

I experienced the événements in a slightly schizophrenic way, since it was enough to step out into the street to smell the teargas. In 1968 I was living with Daniel Templon in a bedsit in Rue Bonaparte. Daniel and I were out almost every night in the streets. But not having any experience of student life, neither of us felt particularly involved in the movement, nor did we connect much with the students’ demands. I didn’t throw any paving stones. The only thing I had in common with the demonstrators was youth and energy, and with my generation, a very liberated approach to sexuality. Daniel and I practised free love, without qualms.

If we consider the immediate impact of May 68 on art production, I’d argue that nothing much happened. But 68 provoked a reform of art education. It wasn’t so much a revolt against academicism, since many of the artists who were getting recognition at the time hadn’t studied at the Beaux Arts in the first place, yet after 1968, art schools started admitting young, radical artists as teachers. It’s paradoxical, but I think the post-May 68 generations went to art school much more spontaneously than their predecessors.

I firmly believe that an artwork should, first and foremost, be about making ideas. Before making money! … Sadly, today’s artworld is marked by a profound shift; the majority of contemporary artists are caught in the nets of a speculative market, and some of them are willing to play by those rules.

But today’s globalised artworld, with its openness to a diversity of artistic practices, could also be seen as a more or less distant consequence of the open-mindedness of 1968.

Attitudes are more open than they once were, but compared to our ways in 1968, it seems the playful element has somehow withered; as for sexual freedom, it has only gone backwards since then. I feel like this spirit of openness is under threat nowadays. The May 1968 generation, those for whom it was ‘interdit d’interdire’ [‘forbidden to forbid’], can see censorship resurfacing here and there.

Censorship has today taken the shape of a certain brand of feminism. But we need to stop boxing women into the role of the victim. That’s what’s happening lately, in the wake of the Weinstein scandal. I am astonished to read testimonies by women who claim they have been the victims of men. How so? Are they paralysed? Stupid? They don’t seem to know how to react in a way that strikes me as elementary.

All of this nurtures the idea of women as eternal victims. I can understand that a woman working in a factory, whose job depends on an overbearing foreman, doesn’t dare speak out; but I find it harder to believe that a university student can’t stand up to their professor. A woman today must have the education and strength to fight back.

Sometimes, young people strike me as being much more serious, much more conformist, generally speaking. They have their reasons: we are the children of consumer society, we never had to experience unemployment, or face up to aids! Having said that, I still believe that morality should be able to free itself from contingencies.

This text is an abridged translation (by Louise Darblay) of an article originally published in French in Femmes et Filles. Mai 68, Éditions de l’Herne. © Éditions de l’Herne, 2018

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Regina Vater I was twenty-five in 1968 and living in Rio de Janeiro, very much inspired by Tropicália. I would listen to Caetano Veloso as I painted.

On seeing my gouaches, Veloso’s record label asked me to produce the cover for Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis, the album he made with Gilberto Gil and others (though my design was subsequently replaced by a photo of the musicians). Tropicália was a totally new culture, a radical counterpoint to bossa nova – inspired by the sound of the streets, as well as of the jungle.

One day in March I heard the news that a student, Edson Luís de Lima Souto, had been killed by police in a cafeteria. I couldn’t sleep that night, and to cope with my insomnia I made a painting of the boy from the pictures in the newspaper. He was shot by police during a sit-in. A friend, the photographer Evandro Teixeira, saw the painting and showed it to Alberto Dines, the editor of Jornal do Brasil.

The day after, it was published in the news section of the paper.

I joined the ‘Passeata dos Cem Mil’ (‘March of the One Hundred Thousand’), the huge demonstrations sparked by the student’s murder, with Milton Temer, then a journalist but now a politician and activist. We got very close to where Vladimir Palmeira, a student leader and later a politician, spoke to the demonstrators, but what I remember most clearly are the helicopters flying overhead. (It reminds me of the day John Lennon died, when I was in New York: something similar happened as we gathered in Central Park.) It was scary to hear them. At one point Palmeira called for everybody to sit down, and this whole ocean of people sat in silence for a moment.

It was a year later, in 1969, when Emílio Garrastazu Médici came to power, that the dictatorship was at its worst. Under him the repression was really bad.

Anyone who was thought to be a communist was killed: they were throwing people into the ocean from aeroplanes. I decided to make an installation on the beach and offer it almost as a prayer to Brazil.

Copacabana used to be full of altars to the gods of the sea, made by people following the old African religions.

It is so sterilised these days, especially now that we have this evangelical bishop as our mayor. So I too built an altar, which featured the figure of the Black Madonna.

Brazil protected by a Black Madonna; we are, after all, a dark-skinned country. I surrounded it with everything I could find on the beach, the natural stuff, the garbage, everything.

After that I won a prize and I planned to go to Paris, but a friend of mine told me not to. He said, “Paris has already gone. Go to New York.” I decided to follow his advice. I’m glad I did, because I met Hélio Oiticica there, Regina Vater’s painting of Edson Luís de Lima Souto, published in Jornal do Brasil, March 1968. Courtesy the artist and he was obviously very important to my life. Leaving Brazil I never thought I would ever live through something like the dictatorship again; I moved back in 2011 and I think the situation now is even more sinister. There is a veil of democracy, but we are in a state of deception. I have two knee replacements, but if I didn’t, I would be out on the streets again.

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Stuart Brisley After an absence of four-and-a-half years I returned to England in 1964.

Consumerism had finally superseded the austerities of the postwar period and there was a growing sense of the ‘modern’: more things to do, greater availability of goods, more entertainments, plenty. In the visual culture the source of a new art could be found in the margins. In other words, locations became less fixed. I realised that the surface of this new broad culture – of conspicuous individualism – masked a dreadful conformity vigorously promoted by the media. A call to volunteer as the unthinking servants of the status quo.

Today, this conformity can be seen in a more complex, expanded field, its ongoing spectacle one of the features of a shrinking common culture.

Ripples of the events in Paris were felt widely, not least in England, with sit-ins at the Hornsey, other art schools and a few universities (Essex in 1968, Liverpool in 1970, for example), in which a central demand of students was the lateral democratisation of the educational process. The Hornsey sit-in was an unexpected, exceptional collective experience, where the adage of teaching the teachers held sway. There was an optimism, which is perhaps why it is remembered more for the event itself than for having had an effective outcome. It was a reformist attempt to change education and society, but there was not a strong enough strucStuart Brisley, Pigeon Challenge, 1968, performance, Trafalgar Square, London. Courtesy the artist tural case made by the students.

At best it could be seen as a revolt.

The summer term came to an end and with it the sit-in faded away.

The Thatcher period has marked an acceleration of naked capitalism, morphing into neoliberalism, which, spreading through society, has changed the terms of education and art’s broader culture.

In the ethos of enrichment (the art market, the fair economy, etc) we see the deadly embrace of the corporate within high culture, drawing in the support mechanisms of its lower forms: tourism, heritage... art entertainment. Managed by an intelligent division of sororities and fraternities, this is the model of neoliberalism itself. It bears no relationship to the Welfare State there was in 1968.

The future. Stop.

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John Stezaker The events of May 68 gave me my first taste of the mischief and subversion which the Situationists injected into the student occupation. It was also my first encounter with what I later discovered was called ‘détournement’, an idea that fundamentally changed my work.

But in 68 I was two years away from reading [Guy] Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle [1967] in English, a tract that changed everything for me.

As a first-year student at the Slade I was an enthusiastic but naive participant in the occupation of the college to support the Paris sit-ins. I was also too naive to realise what an amazing moment it was to be a student at the Slade and ucl.

A new curriculum for art education based on Ernst Gombrich’s recently published Art and Illusion (1960) was being implemented at the Slade by William Coldstream and included a nascent film department, which later significantly contributed to film theory through the journal Screen. Gombrich was our art history John Stezaker, The End, 1968–73, image fragment, 11 × 16 cm. Courtesy the artist and The Approach, London professor. Leopold Ettlinger taught a course on neoclassicism. Richard Gregory, who had published The Eye and Brain (1966), did a course on the psychology of visual perception. Richard Wollheim opened his doors to Slade students to attend his aesthetics course, which became ‘Art and Its Objects’. At the time, Mary Douglas was doing her ‘Purity and Danger’ seminars and Frank Kermode was giving the lecture series which formed the basis for his classic The Sense of an Ending (1967). We were welcome to attend anything that interested us. The intellectual atmosphere was so intense and stimulating, it was difficult to find time for the studio.

I remember Stuart Brisley, fresh from the Hornsey sit-in, addressing us alongside sympathetic activists from other departments of ucl, suggesting an occupation of the college and several other departments in solidarity with Paris and Hornsey. I remember that the overwhelming majority voted to do so, my own hand enthusiastically reaching skyward with the rest. What did we need of art history, aesthetics, literary or film theory, perceptual psychology or social anthropology? We were taking possession of our own destinies.

We would take charge of what we learned.

The effect of the occupation was immediate and palpable. Art students were no longer welcome guests in other university departments. Contact with the Warburg and Courtauld ceased. The intellectuals either took flight or returned to the sanctity of their offices.

I remember after the revolution we were offered a course on Cuban poster design.

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Jonas Mekas I never think of the past. Every moment takes place now, every moment is in the present. Even when you are thinking back on events, or looking back at recordings from years ago, your response is in this moment. It’s so easy to be caught in the routine of what’s around you, to be dragged into the system. The only way to escape that routine is through some drastic break. Progress isn’t linear, you have to make jumps, otherwise you only end up repeating yourself. The Anthology Film Archives in 1970 might, like any artistic movement, have looked like a clique, but we were really a group of people who wanted to escape what surrounded us. That bound us together, we supported each other. We all felt in the 1960s that we could be different in the style of our filmmaking and yet together, supporting each other. We are in another moment of transition now. But we should not attach too much importance to what’s happening now, we should not make judgements about whether it is positive or negative. We should think of it like George Maciunas, take it with a smile, everything will pass, that’s the lesson of Fluxus. The most recent film on my website is about the students protesting guns in the United States on the March for Our Lives. I find their passion very inspiring. When those young people stood up and spoke to the crowds it was extremely powerful. I think what this generation is going through is very interesting. Good things are coming.

Outtakes from the Life of a Happy Man (still), 2012. Courtesy the artist

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The Shape of Protest

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From kettles to hashtags

by Oliver Basciano

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In Stéphanie Lagarde’s 16-minute video Déploiements (2018), the Paris- the building of barricades) would not easily flourish, and in which based artist cuts between footage of a military aerial display team, the Napoleon III’s troops could be easily deployed to quell unrest. planes’ vapour trails often taking the patriotic red, white and blue Watching Lagarde’s video recently I remembered how, in November of the Tricolore, and an animated rendering used to train police in 2010, through a neat bit of police choreography, I too was corralled at a crowd control. The latter is introduced via a simulated aerial view of demonstration. It happened while I was marching, alongside a thouan empty city, before a computer cursor appears, hovers over an imag- sand or so others, on London’s Whitehall to protest a rise in univerinary street and, with a click of the unseen animator’s mouse, adds a sity fees in England. At a certain point, a solid line of police appeared line of identical police officers to the scene. A crowd of demonstrators in front of us, blocking our path. We turned around and began to holding generic placards are conjured up in a similar fashion, and make our way back towards our rallying point at Trafalgar Square. begin to advance on the police.

Another wall of helmeted officers The amorphous mass of disgruntled students The video runs through various began to form ahead of us. And possible behavioural scenarios behind them we could make out and their supporters ended up contained in a for the demonstrators – their a clutch of their fully armoured, neat police-lined cage for several hours. Tempers mounted colleagues. Panic began movements hectic and confused frayed and violence broke out. It would be seven to ripple through the crowd. compared to the calm advances of the uniformed police – most hours before the demonstrators were allowed out With a few others I dived down of which end in their containan unguarded alley, somewhere ment by the authorities. What becomes clear in Lagarde’s work is close to the South African High Commission and the Lord Moon pub. the tension between the rehearsed order of the authorities and the I escaped. And checking Twitter later it became clear that that escape emphatic (and deliberate) disorder of the demonstrators. The move- had been a lucky one. The amorphous mass of disgruntled students and ments of the police follow a pattern (akin to the dance of the aerial- their supporters had ended up contained in a neat police-lined cage for display teams), while the demonstrators’ explicit aim seems to be several hours. As the day wore on, tempers frayed and violence broke to use disorder and the disruption of the normal choreography of out. Shaky mobile-phone footage documented examples of apparent the street to gain control of it. The computer animation plays out police aggression, each social-media post eagerly picked up by news a centuries-old battle: when Georges-Eugène Haussmann demol- organisations. It would be seven hours before the last of the demonished the rabbit-warren lanes of the Parisian slums during the 1850 strators were allowed to leave, by which time 41 arrests had been made and 60s to build the city’s wide boulevards, it was with the specific and injuries sustained by individuals on both sides. Since the early purpose of creating an urban realm in which demonstration (and 2010s the ethics of the so-called police ‘kettle’ tactic has caused much

preceding pages Stéphanie Lagarde, Déploiements (stills), 2018, digital video, colour, stereo, 16 min 14 sec. Courtesy the artist

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debate. In 2011 campaign group Liberty said it was having ‘a chilling thinking among psychologists is that demonstrators retain their effect on many people’s rights to freedom of expression and assembly’, individual personalities (with their varying propensities to violence, and various reports make clear that the threat of kettling was a worry illegal actions, desperation to escape, etc) but will unite when faced for all but the most hardened demonstrators (a cynic would say that with a common, hostile force. ‘You didn’t lose your identity,’ the clinthis was precisely the police’s intention). In 2012, following legal ical psychologist Vaughan Bell notes of a demonstrator, ‘you gained action in the UK challenging kettling, it was deemed a lawful means a new one in reaction to a threat.’ The threat is not just of physical of policing demonstrations. ‘Containment of a crowd involves a violence or arrest, but also that the crowd’s control of the street will be serious intrusion into the freedom of movement of the crowd,’ the imperilled by the defensive actions of the police (a common chant of judge warned in his ruling, noting that ‘it should only be adopted demonstrations globally is “Whose streets? Our streets!”). Speaking where it is reasonably believed of her 2007 performance Tatlin’s It is this expression of power, in which political that a breach of the peace is imWhisper #5 (2008), for which she minent and that no less intruaction by the people elicits violent state reaction, employed two police officers on horseback to round up visitors sive crowd control operation will that plays out in several recent works of in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall prevent the breach.’ moving image, in which the politics are given using established crowd-control A demonstration, which the techniques, Tania Bruguera historian Eric Hobsbawm deless prominence than its spatial form noted that “mounted police is fines as ‘some physical action – marching, chanting slogans, singing – through which the merger of something you can see in the photos in 68. You can see it in 1935, 1968 the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective expe- and 2000, you know, so it’s a kind of historically recurrent image of rience, finds expression’, relies on those protesting taking control of a power. And always linked to a very specific political action.” Indeed, (usually public or semipublic) space to articulate, or appear to articu- it is this expression of power, in which political action by the people late, the will of the people (the demos). The ‘breach of the peace’ the elicits violent state reaction, that plays out in several recent works of judge refers to is in essence an undermining of state authority (the moving image, in which the politics or the motives behind a demondefinition of breach of the peace under UK law is ‘against the peace stration are given less prominence than its spatial form: the shape of of our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity’), which the state’s the crowd and the area that crowd occupies. enforcers, the police, must in turn counteract. But it is the presence of Like Lagarde’s artwork, Greek artist Manolis D. Lemos’s video the police – modern crowd theory dictates – as much as any uniform dusk and dawn look just the same (riot tourism) (2017) recalls a philosophphilosophy that gives a demonstration its unity. The most up-to-date ical history stretching from the Commune of 1871, through to the

this and facing page Hiwa K, This Lemon tastes of Apple (stills), 2011, video, 16:9, colour, sound, 13 min 26 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, KOW, Berlin and Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Lucca & Milano

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student uprising of 1968, and the Reclaim the Streets and Occupy Hiwa K’s 2011 film This Lemon Tastes of Apple the Iraqi artist documents movements during the 1990s and 2000s (and, more obviously, the a performance he made during a demonstration in the Kurdish city Greek antiausterity protests during the early 2010s), in that it exam- of Sulaymaniyah, through edited-together footage filmed by others ines how a group of people can enact a radical and antiauthoritarian present. Occupying a street en masse, demonstrators command attenagenda through their collective presence in a public space. The slow- tion through shouts, declamations and chants, their fellow protesters motion video, recently shown at the New Museum Triennial in New capturing the commotion by way of camera phone. Groups moving in York, opens with a group of 26 figures pictured from behind walking opposite directions thread between each other. The video follows the down the middle of an Athens street, all dressed in identical spray- artist and an accomplice, who, weaving their way through this throng, painted overcoats. A rebetiko plays as soundtrack. This gang gets the play Ennio Morricone’s melancholic refrain from the spaghetti western occasional odd – perhaps even Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) In this haunting work the sound of the fearful – look from passersby. As on harmonica and guitar. The the work progresses, the figures title of Hiwa K’s work (which has crowd and sirens gives way to the lonesome pick up pace, their speed again a political complexity far greater figure of Lee Han-yeol, a man in his twenties out of sync with the normal than my outline here) refers both who explains the circumstances of his death, behaviour expected within this to the aroma of apple said to have environment. As they arrive in been given off by the poison gas killed after being hit by a gas canister Omonoia Square, a commercial that Saddam Hussein’s regime district, tourist destination and site of those antiausterity demon- deployed in Kurdish settlements in 1988, and to the use of lemon to strations, the gang eventually fans out, weaving among taxis, their counteract the effects of teargas fired against contemporary demonstrators by the armed forces of their own Kurdish regional governunpredictability co-opting this urban space as its own.

Containment is a weapon used by the police to neuter the unpre- ment. The firing of teargas canisters and rubber bullets is heard dictability of demonstration tactics and the manner in which they midway through the six-minute film; the crowd scatters, demonseek to colonise space (as one blogger on a far-left activist forum strators escaping in all directions, some bleeding, others helping the bemoaned in 2011, after a particularly unsuccessful outing, ‘It is diffi- wounded. To restore the order – and the predictability – of the streets, cult to imagine anything quite so moronic as chanting “whose streets? the authorities elected not to imprison the body of the demonstration, Our streets!” inside a police kettle. If they are “our streets”, why aren’t but to destroy it. Of course, given that one aim of a protest action is specwe marching down them?’). The other option at the disposal of the tacle, this could have backfired, police aggression often only raising the police when presented with an unwanted crowd is dispersion. In visibility of a protest in the media (both social and traditional).

this and facing page Ahmet Öğüt, United (stills), 2016–17, single-channel video animation, colour, sound, 2 min 50 sec.

Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

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The violence present in This Lemon Tastes of Apple is taken to its As much as these works occur during a moment of reengagelogical conclusion in Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt’s United (2016–17). ment with demonstration internationally, they also mark the end An animation in the style of Korean manhwa, the opening scenes of the demonstration as a merely physical form. While the artists follow the arc of several canisters of teargas fired at a protest in Seoul. discussed here illustrate the visual power of street protest, they In this haunting work the sound of the crowd and sirens gives way also reveal its limitations, showing how easily the state can contain to the lonesome figure of Lee Han-yeol, a man in his twenties who or disperse the voice of the demonstrations. It is striking in this explains the circumstances of his death, killed after being hit by a gas regard that the demonstrations of the Arab Spring were charactercanister while taking part in the June Struggle of 1987, the movement ised by constant mediation (in his 2012 performative lecture, Pixelated for democracy that formed after the South Korean military dicta- Revolution, artist Rabih Mroué details how activists had posted tor Chun Doo-hwan unilaterally extensive instructions online As much as these works occur during a for how demonstrations should nominated a successor. The video be filmed and photographed returns to another street battle moment of reengagement with demonstration for maximum effect on social but this time in the Turkish city internationally, they also mark the end of the of Diyarbakır (where Öğüt was media); no demonstration would demonstration as a merely physical form: they born). Teargas has again oblitebe deemed successful today if rated a demonstration, claiming it did not garner viral coverage. illustrate its power and reveal its limitations another victim. The animated While in the simulated protest avatar of eight-year-old Enes Ata, who attended a demonstration in presented in Déploiements the protesters are waving placards, This March 2006, describes his death and how a gas canister had fatally Lemon Tastes of Apple demonstrates that they would be more likely to hit him also. Both occupations of the public realm that Lee and Ata be holding their phones aloft. The co-option of online attention has participated in threatened the state authorities, and both were the become as important as the occupation of physical space, giving rise victim of fatal retaliation. United was originally commissioned for the (for better or worse) to global conversations over localised battles.

Gwangju Biennale in 2016, an exhibition founded to commemorate Indeed, the most vocal protester movement of 2018 has not been the Korean democracy movement, where it was exhibited on a vast enacted through marches and megaphones, but through the digital video-display board overlooking a crossroads in the Korean city; in force of #MeToo. It is, after all, hard to kettle a hashtag. ar choosing this site for the video, Ögüt neatly takes back a small slice of the urban environment on behalf of the two victims.

Oliver Basciano is editor (international) of ArtReview

Stéphanie Lagarde, Déploiements (still), 2018, digital video, colour, stereo, 16 min 14 sec. Courtesy the artist

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Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More 02 June – 28 October 2018

Curated by Katerina Gregos rigabiennial.com

JOANA LUCAS ABOUT URBAN / SOBREURBANO

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B von Bartha Guido W. Baudach elba benítez Bergamin & Gomide Berinson Bernier/Eliades Fondation Beyeler Daniel Blau Blum & Poe Marianne Boesky Tanya Bonakdar Bortolami Isabella Bortolozzi BQ Gavin Brown Buchholz Buchmann

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K Kadel Willborn Casey Kaplan Georg Kargl Karma International kaufmann repetto Sean Kelly Kerlin Anton Kern Kewenig Kicken Peter Kilchmann König Galerie David Kordansky KOW Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Nicolas Krupp Kukje / Tina Kim kurimanzutto L Lahumière Landau Simon Lee Lehmann Maupin Tanya Leighton Lelong Lévy Gorvy Gisèle Linder Lisson Long March Luhring Augustine Luxembourg & Dayan M Maccarone Kate MacGarry Magazzino Mai 36 Gió Marconi Matthew Marks Marlborough Hans Mayer Mayor Fergus McCaffrey Greta Meert Anthony Meier Urs Meile Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Massimo Minini Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Mnuchin Stuart Shave/Modern Art The Modern Institute Jan Mot Vera Munro N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nagel Draxler Richard Nagy Edward Tyler Nahem Helly Nahmad Neu neugerriemschneider Franco Noero David Nolan Nordenhake Georg Nothelfer O Nathalie Obadia OMR P Pace Pace/MacGill Maureen Paley Alice Pauli Perrotin Petzel Francesca Pia Plan B Gregor Podnar Eva Presenhuber ProjecteSD R Almine Rech Reena Spaulings Regen Projects Rodeo Thaddaeus Ropac S Salon 94 Esther Schipper Rüdiger Schöttle Thomas Schulte Natalie Seroussi Sfeir-Semler Jack Shainman ShanghART Sies + Höke Sikkema Jenkins Skarstedt SKE Skopia / P.-H. Jaccaud

Sperone Westwater Sprüth Magers St. Etienne Nils Stærk Stampa Standard (Oslo) Starmach Christian Stein Stevenson Luisa Strina T Take Ninagawa Tega Templon Thomas Tokyo Gallery + BTAP Tornabuoni Tschudi Tucci Russo V Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Van de Weghe Annemarie Verna Susanne Vielmetter Vitamin W Waddington Custot Nicolai Wallner Washburn Barbara Weiss Michael Werner White Cube Barbara Wien Jocelyn Wolff Z Thomas Zander Zeno X ZERO...

David Zwirner Feature Raquel Arnaud bitforms Bernard Bouche Bureau ChertLüdde James Cohan Monica De Cardenas Fonti Galerist Grimm Barbara Gross Hamiltons

Hanart TZ Hollybush Gardens hunt kastner Kalfayan Lange + Pult Emanuel Layr Löhrl Jörg Maass Max Mayer Lorcan O‘Neill P420 Franklin Parrasch Nara Roesler Richard Saltoun Pietro Spartà Supportico Lopez The Third Line Upstream Zlotowski Statements The Box Sandy Brown Carlos/Ishikawa Croy Nielsen Essex Street Experimenter Freedman Fitzpatrick JTT Jan Kaps Antoine Levi Madragoa Mary Mary mor charpentier Moran Moran One and J. Deborah Schamoni Stigter Van Doesburg White Space Beijing Edition Brooke Alexander Niels Borch Jensen Alan Cristea mfc - michèle didier Fanal Gemini G.E.L. Sabine Knust Lelong Editions Carolina Nitsch Paragon Polígrafa Susan Sheehan STPI Two Palms

PUTPUT Popsicles 2012, Courtesy Galerie Esther Woerdehoff

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Art Reviewed

But we will never consider a man of order the person of privilege who got three meals a day all his life, kept his fortune in secure assets, and came home whenever he heard a noise in the street. He is only a man of thrift and fear 109

Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture ICA, London 7 March – 13 May What really happened? As it’s always been with the great private investigators, this is the question that drives the ‘cases’ dealt with by Forensic Architecture in its ‘counter investigations’. The research agency, based at London’s Goldsmiths and led by architect and theorist Eyal Weizman, has made it its business over the past decade to take on states and politicians who habitually deny documentary evidence – of unlawful killings, unacknowledged drone strikes and other state-initiated violence – presented by journalists, political activists and citizens. If ‘plausible deniability’ has become part-and-parcel of politics in an era of the ubiquitous digital-mediation of events, then what Forensic Architecture attempts is to up the ante on how the documentary record affirms ‘what really happened’, through the use of advanced digital techniques of spatial reconstruction and simulation, cross-referenced with multiple, often crowd-gathered and open-source information: CCTV, TV journalism, camera-phone footage, satellite maps, etc.

A typical case is Drone Strike in Miranshah North Waziristan, 30 March 2012 (investigation 2013–16). For years, the Bush and then Obama administrations had refused to acknowledge their campaign of drone strikes in northern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. Here we’re presented with 42 seconds of video footage of a ruined domestic building, seen from a higher adjacent window, then footage inside the battered space, with a hole in the concrete ceiling and shrapnel marks across the walls.

The female voiceover takes us through how these frames are mapped onto a computer model – a sort of collage of overlapping image surfaces, checked against satellite views of Miranshah’s streets. Inside, the pattern of shrapnel marks is analysed to suggest the point of detonation – midair in the room – while the areas free of marks suggest the outline of where the human victims must have been standing, the room’s walls ‘exposed to the blast like a film is exposed to light’, the narrator suggests, her tone dispassionately objective. From all this, the conclusion is of the use of a building-piercing Hellfire missile, a weapon only the US could have deployed.

Is this still conjecture, or beyond reasonable doubt? The problem of inference, of uncertainty, shadows Forensic Architecture’s investigations. The most bitterly fought case here is also the visual centrepiece of the ICA show, the huge information-wall, timeline and floor map that contests The Murder of Halit Yozgat, Kassel, Germany, 6 April 2006 (investigation 2016–). A significant presence in last year’s Documenta 14, the work took up a longrunning controversy over a series of murders of local Turkish shop owners, initially attributed by state authorities to Turkish gangs, but ultimately to the neo-Nazi terrorist group the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

The Murder of Halit Yozgat… however addresses inconsistencies in the testimony of Andreas Temme, a security agent for the state of Hessen, who was at the Internet café in Kassel that Yozgat managed, around the time he was shot dead. As Weizman put it to The Intercept, ‘We’re trying to demonstrate that his statements are questionable enough that the files need to be opened’. The work succeeded in reigniting the debate over an investigation that was mired in secrecy and obfuscation among local and national politicians and security agencies regarding what those agencies knew about the NSU, and how their agents managed informant sources among Germany’s neo-Nazi groups.

Forensic Architecture’s sophisticated and intensive projects have taken shape at a time when human rights organisations, independent activist networks and NGOs increasingly assume the role of challengers to official narratives, or to official attempts to suppress counternarratives. Institutionally, the group’s activity is indicative of how both academic and curatorial cultures have become entwined in this wider shift in the locus of political activism, with the art gallery becoming just another channel of dissemination for this broader political culture of independent and quasi-institutional activism.

But there are political limits to that culture.

The ICA show presents a range of subjects – from the gratuitous shooting of two Palestinian teenagers in the Gaza Strip by Israeli soldiers, to the Israeli bombing of the city of Rafah in Gaza,

both images Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture, 2018 (installation views). Photo: Mark Blower.

Courtesy Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

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to the disappearance of Mexican student protesters (in The Enforced Disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa Students in Iguala, Mexico, 26–27 September 2014, investigation 2016–17) to the mapping of the Mediterranean calamity of drowning migrants and EU officialdom’s furtive denial of the consequences of its policies (in The Left-to-die boat, Central Mediterranean Sea, 27 March 2011, investigation 2012). The political perspective of Counter Investigations is that of a generalised denunciation of human rights abuses across the world, driven by the assumption that if only irrefutable evidence were presented to the world and if state power could be made more accountable, greater justice would prevail.

Forensic Architecture’s techniques of presentation – the vast infographic boards of timelines, the sophisticated video simulations, models and data visualisations – are attempts at cohering dense combinations of information.

But they also produce their own aesthetics, the aesthetics of objectivity, which, ironically, has the goal of persuading us of its objectivity.

Forensic Architecture is well aware of this irony, noting in an accompanying text that the legal tradition of establishing truth often relies on performative techniques of persuasion that are never entirely objective. But in this gallery presentation, it raises the question of what is being proved, and to whom. After all, it doesn’t take Forensic Architecture to reveal to an audience of liberal-minded gallerygoers that there are innumerable injustices around the world. If the agency’s campaigns have already yielded their results in the public sphere, then what we are presented with here is a celebration of a technique, and the affirmative spectacle of political agency reclaimed through the mastery of technology, along with the vicarious feeling of political participation.

For all its display of truth-telling technique, Counter Investigations is not a place for deliberating bigger political ‘truths’. How we respond to the catastrophe of the migrant crisis, for example, or to conflict in the Middle East, are big political questions with no easy answers.

Beyond the endless stream of particular injustices and abuses, they require us to develop much bigger pictures of what is ‘really’ happening. J.J. Charlesworth

May 2018

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Sebastian Jefford Procrustean Flatulence Gianni Manhattan, Vienna 10 March – 28 April The title of Sebastian Jefford’s show begs for explication. Procrustes, a bandit from Greek mythology, stretched his victims (or cut off their legs) in order that they would fit his bed.

For the paranoid exhibition reviewer, ‘procrustean flatulence’ might be read as a provocative metaphor for the reviewing process itself, suggesting that writing about art is all so much trapped wind produced under tortuous circumstances. But more largely, this recent Royal Academy graduate’s pointedly unconventional mixture of aesthetics – sculpture plus a fictional narrative – suggests Jefford would prefer that we adapt ourselves and our preconceptions to his work, rather than vice versa.

His show takes its cue from a short story written by the artist and titled ‘In the City’.

In this city of Jefford’s invention, the law states that if a citizen ‘needed to enter any dwelling or building… [they were] required to witness its entire construction, beginning to end’. More disturbingly, the artist-author adds that if said person wanted to enter a building constructed after their birth, they ‘would have to make an application to the council to have it demolished… [and] then be required to witness the entire process of its reconstruction before they could enter’. We know this because a flatscreen suspended from the ceiling approximately in the centre of the space shows a video titled after said story (all works 2018), in which Jefford’s tale is narrated by a synthesised voice that sounds

Welsh. (Jefford, who is in his mid-twenties, hails from Swansea.) We hear that the son of a city minister has rebelled against the building regulations and, in a bizarre state of independence, chosen to live, Gregor Schneider-style, in a 30cm cavity between two walls. On video, the cityscape is scanned from left to right – we see threatening night-visions of the city with its wire fencing, its dimly lit apartment windows.

Meanwhile, mounted on the gallery’s walls is a sequence of odd assemblages. Some have bits of clay incised to look like giant mouthfuls of rotting teeth, and sit cradled by brown plastic pipes – as with Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re my world or my Wilson. These mouths, the press release suggests, might be imagined as the maw where the ruins of the city are ingested.

Another construction, staying with the gastrointestinal theme, is called Borborygmatic Hearsay, perhaps so named to conjure the gurglings and rumblings of brickwork as it is digested.

Titles are important to Jefford – his are ludic but somewhat strained, such as Aggressively Indeterminate Biscuit, for example. Then there’s the wall-mounted Lovely Pungent, a parallelogram construction where green and orange pins tack down flattened pieces of clay, on whose surface are drawn what appear to be two sleeping marsupials. The rectangular Dandruff Castle is inscribed with another animal – possibly breastfeeding – and looks as if it were blackened by tar and unearthed from a bog.

On the floor of the gallery, and propped against the walls, are several giant keys, Jefford’s Buried Earth Motors. His sculptural forms are well constructed: you want to pick them up, use them. In an interview with the website Young Artists in Conversation, he has discussed his pleasure in contrasting hard and soft, and accordingly there’s reference here to Claes Oldenburg’s gargantuan constructions.

Overall, though, Jefford’s installation – which, it should be said, scans as somewhat muddled – mixes Ed Kienholz’s Popflavoured pessimism with the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, a hell in which – in the artist’s story – the minister’s son’s cadaver is discovered by the smell of decomposition. Such addled musings on architecture seem somewhat appropriate at Gianni Manhattan, which is located only a few hundred metres from the chaotic construction experiments of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, as they chime with the latter’s advocacy of natural forms of decay. Also nearby is the Haus Wittgenstein, designed (in part) by the eponymous philosopher, who here drove his coworkers to exhaustion with antiprocrustean demands such as raising the ceilings by 30mm. Similarly, Jefford’s conceptual crosscurrents call for more room, albeit in cognitive terms. He asks that, figuratively speaking, we don’t cut off our legs to fit the bed but make it longer instead. John Quin

Borborygmatic Hearsay, 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Photo: Simon Veres. Courtesy the artist and Gianni Manhattan, Vienna

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‘It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there’ Gallery Sofie Van De Velde, Antwerp 25 January – 18 March Named after a 1955 poem by William Carlos Williams, this seven-artist exhibition investigates how the mainstream news media frame – and manipulate – our perception of the world. The show is cocurated by Joachim Naudts and Belgian photographer Max Pinckers, whose Margins of Excess (2018) exemplifies the themes. The series shows the lives of individuals who briefly became famous after their idiosyncratic behaviour, often the result of a dream or obsession, was sensationalised by the US press. Darius McCollum, a train buff with Asperger syndrome who has been jailed almost thirty times for crimes such as impersonating a New York subway employee, is portrayed in his prison uniform. In a text alongside, McCollum admits the trouble he has with the term ‘imposter’ that was used in the media to describe him. Next to his portrait are other pictures related by association to the subject: the control chamber of a cruiser instead of that of a train; a burnt-out bus.

With May 1, 2011 (2011), Alfredo Jaar repurposes the iconic picture, distributed by the White House, depicting leading members of the US government watching live footage of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound

from a situation room. The scene looks rather staged; it evokes a historical tableau vivant, with Barack Obama frowning and Hillary Clinton covering her mouth in disbelief. This is shown on one LCD monitor; the other, a white screen which the politicians appear to look towards, evokes the out-of-shot TV they are watching.

Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Boris Mikhailov and David Birkin also deconstruct official media images, in distrust of their supposed truth.

In Parliament (2015–17), Mikhailov captures the moment he unplugs his TV and then plugs it in again as parliamentarians or newsreaders report on the conflict between Russia, the fleeting image as distorted as these versions of the events relayed by the talking heads. Van der Auwera presents a series of LCD screens with lacerated polarised filters, creating a fragmented and hard-to-decipher image of the inauguration of President Obama (VideoSculpture II (Victory Speech 2), 2015). In the Embedded series (2011), Birkin changes photos of mass executions from jpeg to tiff format, leading to pixelated images which he combines with computer codes indicating the names of the victims that feature in it, uncovered through his research. Though these

three artists use different techniques, the central doubt of the official narrative is comparable and the curators could have perfectly made their point with one work less.

Matthias Bruggmann’s pictures from warzones are presented without contextualising information. They have a glossiness about them that leaves the spectator in doubt as to whether they are real or staged, reinforcing the general mistrust and questioning of media images that runs through this show. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), the masterpiece and contemporary classic with which Johan Grimonprez brought the art of montage of found footage to the next level, sketches the history of airplane hijacking as portrayed by the media, encapsulating the climate of fear – reinforced by Hollywood – during the Cold War and Cuban missile crisis.

Though restricted in size, the exhibition gives a coherent yet sometimes rather literal interpretation of a theme that has lately become more and more topical. It unquestionably speaks to post-truth times, in which it’s not only difficult to get the news from poems – as per the show’s title – but also from mainstream media. Sam Steverlynck

Emmanuel Van der Auwera, VideoSculpture II (Victory Speech 2), 2015, multiple LCD screens, polarisation filter, video, 120 × 140 cm. Photo: Evi Peeters. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Sofie Van De Velde, Antwerp

May 2018

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Lutz Bacher The Silence of the Sea Lafayette Anticipations, Paris 10 March – 30 April A rare project in Paris by Rem Koolhaas and his architectural firm OMA, Lafayette Anticipations is a renovated nineteenth-century industrial building for Galeries Lafayette’s art fondation, which in turn commissions new work by artists, designers and fashion designers. Located in the swish Marais, encompassing exhibition space, workspaces, café and shop, it’s described in press materials as a ‘curatorial machine’. Since the main architectural feature is four mobile platforms within a steel-and-glass ‘exhibition tower’, one might also call it modular, in which sense it echoes previous OMA projects: the Maison Lemoine in Bordeaux, the Wyly Theater in Dallas. For Lafayette Anticipations, then, it likely seemed appropriate to reach out to Lutz Bacher, an artist who embodies the unfixed.

For those needing a recap, Bacher has been postmedium since the 1970s, an enigmatic and reclusive American wrapped in a German pseudonym, her age and gender long obscured.

She’s a figure who, even though she now does commissions for art fairs and the like, moves slantwise – and so it is here. Permitted to scale the spaces of Lafayette Anticipations to her liking, she has – almost comically – seemingly ignored the opportunity; the floors sit in a regular, defaultlike position. There is nothing on the ground level except loudspeakers,

emitting a vaguely thundery rumble. Go up a level and you get what still feels like a prelude, with nothing on the central floorspace except a scatter of glitter and, projected around the mezzanine, multiple videos showing a beach scene. The soundtrack you’ve been hearing, you now realise, is wind blowing into a camera’s (or smartphone’s) microphone. The footage centres on some Second World War bunkers, now slathered with graffiti.

First we see them at a distance, then we move in – the occasional plucky beachgoer scooting around despite the unseasonal weather – and we’re privy to the sprayers’ tags. The filmmaker roams as if trying to figure something out. It’s ominous, as if predicting more war to come, and yet you see how the trick is done: Bacher has taken something in the world and added atmosphere and opacity, as she typically does.

Her position, past works have suggested, is that things mean what they mean in the moment, and this is a kind of freedom.

You keep moving and this footage repeats on the next floor up, the artist seemingly throwing the space away. At the top, a glassed-in viewing platform looks out over the greyish city, and Bacher has again seemingly rejected it – thanks to reflective

The Silence of the Sea, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’Entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris

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gauze on the windows, you see yourself as much as what’s out there. There’s more glitter on the floor. The artist is well aware, and wants you to be aware that she’s aware, of the glitziness of this commission.

The dynamics of the whole, then, are very ‘now’. Perennially edgy artist, aware of how the divisions between cool and commerce are collapsing, agrees to dally with cultureleveraging commercial enterprise but still doesn’t want to be bought. She acts up, but does so in a way that serves the commercial enterprise’s – and the architect’s – needs: because there’s not much to look at, the space becomes the star. And yet Bacher’s etiolated project, if you’re open to it, still gets the last word, the last twist. The show is named after, and pointedly anglicises, Le Silence de la Mer, a 1942 novella by Jean Bruller (who himself worked under the pseudonym Vercors).

Published clandestinely in occupied Paris, it concerns an act of resistance by an old man and his niece, whose strategy is muteness; they refuse to speak to the German officer occupying their house. Knowing that, you look again at what Bacher has and hasn’t done here, listen to the soundtrack’s abstract roar, and maybe the floor moves under your feet.

Martin Herbert

Deborah Remington The 90s Kimmerich, Berlin 27 February – 14 April Two years ago, Kimmerich staged the first solo exhibition in Germany of American painter Deborah Remington (1930–2010), showcasing 16 works from 1972 to 82. Now, the Berlin gallery presents another deceptively modest showing: eight oil paintings, completed between 1991 and 2003. Each one measures 163 × 119 cm and bears Remington’s hallmarks: her preferred portrait format, her signature restricted palette of black and white, yellow, red and blue. Nevertheless, Remington always said that ‘if the vision changes, then the technique should change’. The vision, towards the end of her life, was very much changed by invasive treatments for lung cancer, depression over waning sales and recognition, and then the catastrophic attacks of 9/11, which were made all the more palpable as a thick layer of toxic dust settled over her Lower Manhattan apartment. What is astonishing is that this period arguably hailed some of Remington’s most vigorous painting.

Remington had always sought what she called ‘equilibrium through dis-equilibrium’ in her art. The abstract works of the 1960s to 80s, for which she is best known, frequently depict empty reflective surfaces, eerily backlit and suspended in space, like machine-made Rorschach blots or warped heraldic motifs.

Her art defies clichés of ‘feminine’ aesthetics, and is fascinating to view in the knowledge that it was made by a so-called difficult woman

(as gossip would have it) in twentieth-century America. Remington had studied at the California School of Fine Arts – now the San Francisco Art Institute – in the 1950s. She was the only female cofounder of the legendary Six Gallery, whose other founders included Jack Spicer and Hayward King, and where, in 1955, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg first read his landmark ‘Howl’. A photograph from the time shows the founders standing in a queue.

Remington, at the front in paint-splattered jeans, has about-turned to face the men she considered her equals. Their expressions betray the playfulness of the confrontation, but her expression is deadly serious. ‘Beats don’t smile’, she is quoted as once saying by writer Frank Beacham.

The ‘dis-equilibrium’ for which Remington had such an affinity was clearly taking a personal toll by the 1990s. The late paintings are testament to a sustained, deeply contemplative practice that could overcome physical suffering and harness her fears into art. Where earlier work possessed a contained theatricality, the drama here is intense. Elements haemorrhage across the canvas. The deco-like veneer of the 1960s–70s canvases is only barely there, with something akin to a Chaim Soutine carcass cracking through the paint. Here, Remington’s loosened technique also suggests her work being haunted by much earlier visions: namely, her beginnings in Abstract Expressionism.

Remington’s paintings always have intriguing titles, often as abstruse as their imagery; Mechelen (1989–91), named for a historic Belgian city that was also a centre of deportation to Auschwitz, visually suggests a flower. Its dark reds evoke velvety petals, set off against a leaf of green and shards of white, a bloom trampled into glass. As dissimilar as it seems, this painting, alongside Quanta (1991), recalls something of the small, final flower paintings of the dying Édouard Manet. Occupying the back wall of the gallery (so that it is likely to be the last encountered) is Calyd (1999–2003), named after a plant in the funereal lily family. Reworked like other paintings over a number of years, it is the only work here that crosses into the post-9/11 era and, uniquely, revives the more hard-edged style of Remington’s better known period. A deep-space darkness seems to have been blasted from behind, revealing an icy infinity that is also strangely glimpsable in the foregrounded shards of the exploded ‘fourth wall’.

Style and fashion have seen an explosion of 1990s nostalgia in recent years, mainly enjoyed by those too young to remember.

There often seems to be a collective longing for what we imagine the decade was: pre-9/11, pre-President Trump, pre-Big Data, etc. It must be with some knowingness of this cultural mood, then, that Kimmerich titled this exhibition, and presented the formidable Deborah Remington as a response. Phoebe Blatton

Mechelen, 1989–91, 0il on canvas, 163 × 119 cm.

Photo: Roman März.

Courtesy the artist and Kimmerich, Berlin

May 2018

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J. Parker Valentine Transients in the High Plains Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf 16 March – 5 May Critical appraisal of J. Parker Valentine’s work tends to focus its basis in drawing. This perpetual focus on the graphic content presents a narrow view of the Texas-born artist’s work, undoubtedly failing to do justice to the complexity of her approach, as illustrated by her current show at Galerie Max Mayer.

The artist has covered the gallery walls with floor-to-ceiling swathes of unprimed, unmounted canvas, into which she has sewn four discrete works of thread, pencil, charcoal and ink on canvas. The works do not, therefore, hang on the walls but are instead embedded into a receptive background. Untitled (2018), from whose sides three strips have been torn off and reattached in different places, is with its faint traces of green reminiscent of so-called provisional painting. As in older works by Michael Krebber, the notion of a still life might be suggested here.

That this reading is mistaken, though, is evidenced by the nearby Untitled (2017).

Valentine has draped a marked strip of muslin over a blank canvas, before folding it in two

on the diagonal, meaning that the picture drawn onto it can only be surmised through the fabric. The focus falls on a delicately curved line that has imprinted itself from the muslin onto the underlying canvas. Mirrored in the muslin pulled back from the canvas, it creates the semblance of a semicircle. This shift of emphasis subordinates each composition to the production process, yet in a more fundamental way than David Joselit’s idea of ‘painting beside itself’ allows.

Valentine counters the integrity or immanence of pictures (if we can call them such) by treating their fronts and backs equally, refusing to physically set them off from their backgrounds, and by tearing up and reassembling them. Untitled (2018), a composition of rededged shapes given depth through grey graphite marks, is a case in point. The abstract composition is so dominant here that one cannot help but think that Valentine deliberately resisted the beauty of her own work by ripping up the canvas.

Yet any talk of traditional composition in connection with Valentine seems misleading

Transients in the High Plains, 2018 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf

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in the end. She defines geometric bodies with coloured lines and exposes surfaces with oil or graphite, but this seems to happen around a few pale, unintentional lines; as if everything that presents itself as composition had been created on the basis of traces that emerged while working on a different textile. This impression is reinforced by the pale shimmer of those lines and by the fact that in some works recurring forms can be found that seem to stem from the same template. Rather than standing for themselves, the works turn out to be different transitory states of migrating forms (maybe this is what the titular Transients refers to).

One could look at this from a sober, technical perspective, yet the artist’s work, with its production of forms based on contact between two image carriers, also has a highly sensual dimension. It’s even possible to read this as a kind of social affiliation between elements, always comprising a trace of – or indexical connection to – the next, without which it would be inconceivable. Moritz Scheper Translated from the German by Kevin Kennedy

Nicole Wermers Women Between Buildings Kunstverein in Hamburg 3 March – 6 May Nicole Wermers achieves her cleverly comedic art by turning the familiar on its head – sometimes literally. At least this is the case with the early video Palisades (1998/2017), which features handheld footage of conference and shopping centres presented upside down. The simple inversion renders the structures unrecognisable, surprising, somewhat silly. Following suit, her first survey exhibition is a humorously subversive journey through the sombre, and often masculine, authority of commercial, professional and public spaces.

Mood Board #2 and #3 (2016), a pair of baby-changing stations, extend the journey to the restroom. In the gallery this setup, which normally anticipates being soiled by human offspring, looks like a display shelf, but what is on show is a savvy parental trick: faux terracotta flooring, beloved for its ability to hide dirt, might here serve the same function, Wermers proposes. Another brilliant lifehack, Double Sandtable (2007) is a large table of the type that you might find in an office meeting room; covered in sand and littered with cigarettes, though, it spares everyone the

nuisance of reaching for the ashtray or, worse, breaking up the gathering. These works, together with The Long Hello (2017), a 20m stretch of adjacent doormats, transform throwaway moments or socially liminal spaces into primary events.

Collectively such gestures work to undermine a gender dynamic that tends to devalue what is traditionally considered women’s work (such as changing nappies and taking on domestic responsibilities) by upending normative assumptions of womanhood.

Wermers’s Dishwashing Sculptures (2013–17) – half arte povera, half Baroque still life – seem the outcome of a mad challenge to balance as many items of kitchenware on the drying rack as possible; one teetering pile includes a porcelain lobster. Meanwhile, Earring (2006), grotesque in size and pinned to the wall, is a cross between an invertebrate sea creature and a single testicle, and Untitled Chairs (2015–17) infuses the modernist ethos with a strong measure of female camp, as fur coats are installed as backrests for Marcel Breuer’s famous Cesca design.

Several works perform similar domestic interventions on twentieth-century culture, deftly projecting the everyday battle between the sexes onto the male-dominated history of modern art and design. A case in point, Vertical Awnings (2016): these six upright, rolled-up terrace awnings in candy-coloured stripes, the exhibition text tells us, parody the sky-high ambitions of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. Opposite, some 20 photo-collages, Croissants and Architecture (2016–17), pair one photograph of the French delicacy after another with a monochrome sheet of sandpaper within the same frame. As if a hilariously more palatable variant of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s tireless quest for photographic objectivity, the puff pastry becomes with each iteration more absurd, and its connotative relation to the sandpaper, given Wermers’s customary gender-games, more convoluted.

Above and besides all this, croissant-yellow, it turns out, looks great with matt sandpapergrey and awning-burgundy. Beauty, the argument seems to go, doesn’t have to justify itself by high-flown conceptual pretences.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen

Women Between Buildings, 2018 (installation view).

Photo: Fred Dott. Courtesy Kunstverein in Hamburg

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Kahlil Joseph New Suns Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht 1 December – 25 March The watchful camera brings you in close – closer to what it films, probably, than you’ve ever been before. You find yourself in Compton, California, in nondescript vacant lots; in the chapel of a mortuary; on the backseat of a car. Everywhere you go, you hear the merged sounds of hip-hop, shooting, prayer and laughter. In the pulsating flow of images, bare-chested African Americans show off muscular bodies in the burning sun; a black man, seemingly lynched, dangles headdown from a lamppost at night. Amid the overwhelming sound, in this atmosphere of menace and brooding eroticism, you can’t stop watching, nor asking yourself what the hell is going on. m.A.A.d (2014), outlined above, is the first work you see upon entering New Suns by Kahlil Joseph, the Los Angeles-based artist known for directing music videos for Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. Its footage, projected onto two giant screens arranged in a V shape, combines documentary, surveillance-camera imagery, staged scenes and nocturnal aerial views. Some of the material was produced as a backdrop for a 2013 Lamar concert tour: it was Joseph’s late brother, Noah Davis, an artist himself, who suggested turning the footage into a video installation. m.A.A.d. marked the start of Joseph’s rapid rise to fame, with shows in MOCA, Los Angeles, the New Museum in New York and Tate Modern in London inside three years.

‘There’s nothing new under the sun,’ wrote the Afro-futurist science-fiction author Octavia

Butler, ‘but there are new suns’ – a line quoted in the exhibition brochure as having strongly affected Joseph. Wandering through the show, this new sun appears to be a dark star. Take Wildcat (Aunt Janet) (2016), a three-channel video with a soundtrack by Flying Lotus projected onto transparent screens hung in a triangle.

Dawn blends with twilight in a silver-greyish continuum to create an eerie new sunlight in which you can vaguely discern the gigantic head of a horse, a silhouette of a Southern belle and two men on a motorbike. The footage was shot at the annual African-American rodeo in Oklahoma; the floor of the installation is covered with dirt from the bull rider’s ring.

Other video installations, featuring music and musical instruments, echo with the affective power of jazz, hip-hop and reggae. Wizard of the Upper Amazon (2016) reconstructs a room in the backstage area of a gig, a scenery that is also the subject of two black-and-white films beamed onto the walls. In them, dreadlocked Rastafarians in sunglasses sit on folding chairs lined up along the wall, smoking, chatting, waiting. You sit on the same chairs, at the same table that holds, and held, a cassette player and rolling paper. Being here, around the old tech, throws you decades back in time. On the wall hangs a painting by American artist Henry Taylor – whose memories of meeting Bob Marley during the 1970s inform the making of the film – suggesting cross-disciplinary connections in the way black identity is expressed.

m.A.A.d. (still), 2014, double-channel video, 14 min.

Courtesy the artist

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In this way, crossing between film and physical space, Joseph’s hypnotising visual riffs are edited into chains of suggestive impressions, confusing time and place, blurring the narrative.

The Philosopher (2017), consists of ten variously sized flatscreens loosely distributed across pitch-black walls. They show looping images of majestic tropical trees, a man waiting on a pier and a young boy swimming in the ocean, all filmed near Freetown, Sierra Leone. It’s more rewarding to submerge yourself in this flickering sea of disconnected events, which deliberately avoids a legible storyline in favour of reverie, than to try to make sense of it.

Alongside the video installations – of which there are seven, each exhibited in a separate room – here and there you see works by the artist’s family and friends. These include a wall piece of fluorescent lights by Davis, glowing like a modern-day halo, and spiritual paintings by his mother, widowed by the untimely death of Joseph’s father. Such personal additions reinforce an overall atmosphere of existential loss and grief, intimate and alienating at the same time. Although comparisons with other artists occasionally spring to mind (Doug Aitken, Steve McQueen, Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Joseph has developed his own style of expanded videomaking, mixing private testimonies on black culture with pensive meditation on time passing irreversibly by.

The sunshine here is bright, but the shadows are long. Dominic van den Boogerd

Concrete Matters Moderna Museet, Stockholm 24 February – 13 May ‘The age of representational fiction in art has come to an end. Man is less and less sensitive to illusory images.’ The first lines of the Manifiesto invencionista (Inventionist Manifesto), signed by 16 members of the Buenos Aires faction of Concrete art in 1946, aspire to an art liberated from history, symbolism and banal attempts to represent. Yet however bold it might have been to pursue an art of pure form and colour, the lasting impression of this extensive presentation of Latin American Concrete and Neoconcrete art – over 80 works from 1934 to 76, drawn from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros – is how elegantly and inventively the works escape the lofty demands of the writing.

The Concrete art movement was from its outset full of charming contradictions, unanticipated paths and inventive interpretations.

This is obvious from the start here, in the small, dark oil paintings on cardboard of Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García. Including both ancient and contemporary signs of daily life in Montevideo in his works (the sun, water, fish; clocks, trains, cars), he fuses concrete and pre-Columbian traditions. With this exhibition, accordingly, the Moderna Museet shifts the balance of modernism away from the Paris– New York axis represented by its own collection, inviting the visitor into a much wider history of modernisms that follow different trajectories and speak other languages. Such has been a tendency within institutional curating for

some years, but here this shift of perspective also rediscovers and makes visible existing connections within the museum’s canon. A small room with beautiful examples of Swedish Concrete art, by figures such as Otto G. Carlsund and Olle Baertling, underlines the intention to rediscover global networks of influence. Another example is Jesús Rafael Soto’s participation in Swedish art collector Pontus Hultén’s 1961 show Art in Motion at the Moderna Museet, which led to the Venezuelan artist’s inclusion in the museum’s collection. Two of his kinetic works, a cube, Kinetic Box (1955), and a wall work, Vibration avec forme noire (1959), playing with optical illusions created by the movement of the viewer, are vital inclusions.

For all its initial aspirations to universalism, the Concrete art movement diversified by moving through different cultural and political landscapes. The artistic exchange between Europe and Latin America could be described as a long-term effect of colonisation, as artists often had connections with their country of origin, as well as exile caused by war and political repression, with the European diaspora left in the wake of the Second World War as the obvious example. Concrete Matters shows several stunning reflections of this, such as the three-dimensional drawings made in steel and copper by the Hamburg-born Gego, a trained architect who as a student escaped from Nazi Germany to Venezuela.

The show also encompasses several important works from the Neoconcrete movement, formed in 1959 in Rio de Janeiro by artists such as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape.

These artists radically reinvented and invigorated the Concrete tradition by including the body and audience participation. Neoconcretism was an unorthodox brew of Concrete art, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Gestalt therapy, Brazilian samba and Cariocan street culture, fermented into an art vibrant with multisensory experiences. Here one of Clark’s rubber sculptures, Estudo para obra mole (1964), is evocatively draped over a plinth, appearing at once corporeal and abstract. One of Oiticica’s cloaks, made to wear, is suspended from the ceiling, immobile on a wooden stick, but put into play in the neighbouring room in a film about the artist by Ivan Cardoso.

The exiles, following the repressive political climate in Brazil, of artists like Oiticica and Clark connected Brazilian Neoconcrete art with the London, Paris and New York art scenes; Oiticica’s influential Tropicália installation at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1969 and Clark’s involvement with art as therapy in Paris in connection to the French school of psychoanalysis are examples of this. These meetings set in motion important ideas, such as participatory and relational aspects of sculpture and installation, that are still at work in the art of today. Sara Arrhenius

Lygia Pape, Livro da criação (Book ofCreation), 1959–60, gouache on paper. © Projeto Lygia Pape. Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth, London

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Sofia Hultén Here’s the Answer, What’s the Question?

Tinguely Museum, Basel 24 January – 1 May I’ve always had a soft spot for the ‘history of everyday things’, to use French historian Daniel Roche’s phrase. To reconstruct the past lives of common objects is an act of invention as much as an archaeological process, a collaboration between the interpreter and the object in the production of a story. The power of Sofia Hultén’s most comprehensive exhibition to date derives from its persistent reimagination of the role of everyday stuff.

In contrast to other artists who work with found objects, the Swedish-born, Berlin-based Hultén isn’t content only to form new objects out of existing ones, attribute new functions to them or recontextualise them to imbue them with new meaning, though these are also characteristics of her work. The video Altered Fates (2013), which greets visitors at the cloakroom, sets the show’s tone and offers a key to understanding Hultén’s approach. We watch her pick out various discarded items from a large dumpster, intervening in some manner (cutting, adjusting, painting, nailing) and then returning them, repeating the process and varying only the mode of alteration. This reads at once as a manifesto and as an answer for which – as per the show’s title – we now must invent the question. Art is figured as a cyclical pursuit

with no clear purpose, no end and no beginning: a process that preserves the artist’s mark, but for whom, for what? Evoking existentialist concerns with the absurd, this proposition about the nature of art is concerned with time, change and possibility. The playful title hinting at a preference for the fluidity of the unknown, rather than the perceived stability of being.

Immovable Object/Unstoppable Force (Skips) (2012) shows the artist in front of a dumpster – an emblematic object in her work – trying to use telekinesis to lift detritus from it, alas to no avail, opening up various interpretations and offering some comic relief. Several installations compel the viewer to reflect on mostly mass-produced and industrially fabricated materials and objects in their new composition, manipulated and transformed by the artist.

See, among others, History in Imaginary Time (2012), grey hoodies painted with green stripes placed seemingly haphazardly on several freestanding fences, as if forgotten; Particle Boredom (2016–17), found particleboard reshaped and placed in space; Nu Cave (2011), a workshop shelving unit on which lie various objects, some connected to such an environment and others not, decayed by time and wear. But Hultén is strongest in her videos, performing

Nonsequences I, 2013–14, single-channel video, 5 min 48 sec. © the artist / ProLitteris, Zürich. Courtesy Daniel Marzona, Berlin, and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

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these philosophical concepts in humorous and playful scenarios that disrupt expected narratives, sequences and patterns. In Nonsequences I (2013–14), for example, wherein, in various orders, she wipes an apple on her trousers, throws it in the garbage, places it in a garbage bag and eats it, or Truckin’ (2015), in which she walks around the city putting on different shoes at different locations before continuing her walk.

The intended piéce de résistance, as promoted by the museum through its texts and layout, is Pattern Recognition (2017), a wall sculpture composed of groupings of sheeting used in workshops, on which hang tools and materials in varying arrangements. This work assembles the preoccupations visible in other works and combines them with the research of a Russian computer scientist, Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard (1924–1971), who developed diagrams used as benchmarks for determining the sophistication of artificial-intelligence machines in terms of their ability to recognise patterns. The title of Hultén’s exhibition here comes to fit even more tightly, as the patterns she creates on the wall ask to be decoded, and thus offer the viewer the possibility of formulating the questions: an action, ultimately, that lies at the core of what it means to be human. Olga Stefan

Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj I blew on Mr Greenhill’s main joints with a very ‘hot’ breath De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea 24 February – 3 June There’s a party at Oscar Niemeyer’s Canoas House. Guests drink around the pool, dance to some swinging music, comment on the champagne and meander around the iconic modernist villa, surrounded by the lush Brazilian forest. Contrary to what the guests’ outfits and the vintage quality of the 16mm film suggest, this is not documentary footage from the 1950s, but rather a fictional restaging of one of the many festive gatherings held at the abode, orchestrated by Tamar Guimarães for her film Canoas (2010). Through a game of transparency and reflection played out via the house’s undulating exterior glass wall, the film reveals what Niemeyer’s apparently open architecture hides: the division between the white guests and the black servants who are seen discreetly circulating around the house, picking up empty glasses or taking breaks in the kitchen. The film is interspersed with still shots of decrepit social-housing blocks and fragments of discussion in which we overhear the guests theorising on the ideals of Modernism in Brazil and its relationship to class and race – notably on the myth of racial democracy (the contentious idea, originating in the writings of sociologist

Gilberto Freyre, that Brazil has escaped racism due to the miscegenation of its people), which proved an instrumental argument in the construction of Brazil’s image as a modern nation.

The contrast between the discourse and the reality put forward in the film points to the uncomfortable inequalities that have divided – and still divide – Brazilian society.

Canoas is one of three films presented in this joint exhibition of work by Guimarães and longtime collaborator Kasper Akhøj, alongside a series of black-and-white photographs by Akhøj.

Their shared interest in modernist architecture fits – perhaps a bit too neatly, at risk of conflating distinct narratives – the International Style of the De La Warr Pavilion. The exhibition space, lined on one side by wall-to-wall windows offering a scenic view to the sea, is shaped by undulating pleated grey curtains – echoing the curves of Niemeyer’s house – that shapes the visitor’s path while creating temporary viewing rooms.

The two other collaborative films – Captain Gervásio’s Family (2013–14) and Studies for A Minor History of Trembling Matter (2017) – are set in Palmelo, a small town in the Brazilian state of Goiás. Half the population practises Spiritism,

a movement based on the belief that humans possess immortal spirits that pass through numerous bodies and, even when disembodied, can be accessed via mediums. Captain Gervásio’s Family, shot on black-and-white 16mm film, presents one such medium’s vision of 20 astral cities (“like those on earth but infinitely more perfect”) that hover over actual cities in Brazil; adopting a more documentary approach, Studies for A Minor History of Trembling Matter follows members of the community as they gather for healing or communication sessions, achieved through a ‘magnetic chain’ of linked hands.

Blossoming at the same time in Brazil, both Spiritism and modernist architecture attempted to engineer social structures – one through increased rationalisation, the other through spiritualism. Making the same connection, the exhibition’s title is taken from the diaries of Arthur Spray, a popular spiritist based in Bexhill during the 1930s, when the De La Warr Pavilion (originally a centre for health and leisure) was constructed as one of the first major modernist public buildings on British shores. Perhaps, Guimarães and Akhøj suggest, they are two sides of the same coin. Louise Darblay

Tamar Guimarães, Canoas, 2010, 16mm film transferred to video, colour, sound, 13 min 30 sec. Courtesy the artist and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo

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Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness Dundee Contemporary Arts 10 March – 27 May Whether the term ‘shonky’ is familiar depends on where and when the reader learned English.

The curator of Shonky, artist John Walter, offers a dictionary definition – of dubious integrity or legality; unreliable, unsound – with the intention of exploding these pejorative connotations.

In this group show of 14 artists, shonkiness is to be celebrated: amateurish, badly made, tacky, in poor taste and outlandish. ‘With shonky you hover in the middle of not knowing if the work is good or bad,’ Zoë Strachan and Louise Walsh explain in the catalogue essay; ‘shonky is the fake leopard-skin coat of literature.’

There is plenty on display in Shonky to confirm this metaphor’s extension to visual art. More discriminating viewers may not even make it into the gallery space, as the entrance is cloaked with a floor-to-ceiling printed gauze curtain depicting a facade by architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Hundertwasser’s buildings are considered by most architectural historians to be in embarrassingly bad taste, with primary-coloured walls and wonky windows like Ikea doing Gaudi. I saw someone shudder at the curtain on entering, a successful outcome for a show that champions transgressions of good taste and received artistic norms.

As far as advancing an ‘aesthetics of awkwardness’, several features recur in the show: lurid colours, sequins and glitter, fragility to the point of collapse. There is also a wealth of softness, embroidery and stuffed toys; Kate Lepper’s soft sculptures are strapped to pillars like awkward, oversize snails.

Implicit in this fidelity to DIY processes is a stake in radical politics, drawing on punk, queer and drag aesthetics, and in dissonance with the cultural mainstream. Here, kitsch is reclaimed from the factory-finished quality of a Jeff Koons, and Niki de Saint Phalle’s drawings and small sculptures – mostly of women/animal hybrids – provide a series of joyful encounters with the presiding arch-muse of shonkiness.

Painted in desktop-blue and greenscreen green, the walls and plinths seem to revolt against the idea of the conventional white cube. Walking through the galleries is a frenzied, apophenia-inducing but somehow benign experience; installations by Benedict Drew and collective Plastique Fantastique incorporate film, cultlike murmuring audio and detritus that indicate rituals have taken place. Yet tangible through this occult veneer

Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness, 2018 (installation view).

Photo: Ruth Clark. Courtesy Dundee Contemporary Arts

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are familiar anxieties of the self and the state as shaped by capitalism. Collectively, the components of Drew’s Dyspraxic Techno (2017) overload the visitor’s faculties; taken individually, they are harmless, almost pathetic in their ability to cause distress: a hand-painted declaration of ‘Excell Spread Sheet Horror’, and a circling projection that reads ‘hand eye coordination fuck off’.

Shonky is notable for its generational sweep of artists, from the canonical Saint Phalle, to those fallen out of artistic vogue like Andrew Logan, Louise Fishman and Duggie Fields, to Walter’s own peers – including Drew and Lepper, as well as Tim Spooner and Justin Favela. This is a deliberate gesture; in an interview about the show, Walter describes his need to create a context for his own work, to assemble an alternative canon and art history. In this respect, Shonky is a riotous success; as a Hayward Gallery touring show selected from an open call, time will tell whether shonkiness makes a dent in the cultural status quo, or how far, as aspects of drag culture have been recently, it will be welcomed into – and politically diluted by – the mainstream. Daisy Lafarge

Faith Ringgold Paintings and Story Quilts, 1964–2017 Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London 23 February – 28 April Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die (1967), a largescale painting of blood-spattered limbs during a race riot, introduced the artist’s work to the UK with a bang when it was included in Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern last year.

For her first solo exhibition in Europe, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery highlights two related strands of Ringgold’s practice: paintings from the 1960s and the story quilts that she’s been making since 1980 (and for which she is best known). Each of the five quilts on display belongs to a different narrative series, in which they act as chapters. These hybrid works are richly detailed, combining acrylic painting with carefully crafted patchwork and handwritten text. They are clamorous and – even at their most joyous – activist in intent. Ringgold has long fought against prejudice: in 1971 she founded the campaign group ‘Where We At’, Black Women Artists, and telling stories through quilts began as her riposte to a publishing industry uninterested, as she saw it, in narratives of black lives.

The small gallery is full of rich, interconnected stories. In the four early oil paintings on show, European Modernism combines with traditional Nigerian and Ghanaian masks to devastating effect: everyday racial and gender tensions are conveyed through stark, blackedged figures filled with saturated planes of colour. American People Series #16: Woman Looking in a Mirror (1966), for instance, sees a black woman impassively consider her own reflection. The composition is both homage to and subversion of Pablo Picasso’s post-Cubist phase (see his Girl Before a Mirror, 1932), and highlights the importance of self-definition in a racist, sexist society. Or take the quilt-edged painting Subway Graffiti #2 (1987), in which Ringgold gathers together dozens of characters she was either close to or admired – from her studio assistant to Jean-Michel Basquiat – in a joyously sprawling portrait of late-1980s New York.

There’s the poignant tale of Coming to Jones Road Part II n.2 We Here Aunt Emmy Got Us Now (2010),

in which a fictionalised family of slaves who have fled a cotton plantation and followed the Underground Railroad in search of freedom are finally reunited. The latest quilt, Ancestors Part II (2017), is an unabashed paean to hope for the future. Multiracial children dance together in a dreamlike state, with an accompanying text describing their song for a ‘world at peace’ filled with ‘love not hate’.

Combining an advocate sensibility with a clarity of graphic imagination, the piece is – almost – an effective stand-in for Ringgold’s project as a whole. There are so many threads to unpick here, so tightly packed in, that the show’s only failing is its necessarily limited scale and reach. Though lauded in the US – Ringgold’s many children’s books feature on school curricula and her work is held in over 50 public collections – the eighty-seven-year-old artist is relatively little-known on these shores. Let’s hope we won’t have to wait much longer to see her given the space she deserves. Isabella Smith

Coming to Jones Road Part II n.2 We Here Aunt Emmy Got Us Now, 2010, acrylic on canvas with fabric border, 173 × 160 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York, and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London

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Magali Reus As mist, description South London Gallery, London 23 March – 27 May 34, 36, 38, 40, 42… Magali Reus measures an imagined water level rising throughout her first institutional solo exhibition in London.

Appearing to reference those on a ship’s hull or a flood-level marker, these numbers reiterate across the space, quietly incised into the curving walls that Reus has installed to move the visitor fluidly through the exhibition. Yet there is no water here, and this obvious lack, coupled with the repetition of the numbers, seems to imply either that a deluge is coming or that a drought has arrived, lending the exhibition a subtle sense of foreboding.

In addition to the fateful engravings, Reus includes sculptural works from two series: Hwael and Sentinel, as well as a standalone work, Crane (all works 2017). Reminiscent of a hotel welcomedesk, the bulky body of Crane is topped by toppled casts of buckets and vases onto which are printed images of tickets – lottery, delicatessen, cinema, etc – and that spew out rawconcrete-coloured casts of Styrofoam packingpeanuts and slender white numbers. On the panels of the ‘desk’ are a series of jauntily positioned grey reliefs that appear to be zoomedinto sections of mountain maps or tourism brochures for hiking. And on the left of the front panel is the water-level indicator again, a ghostly white-in-white engraving. The impression is

of an abandoned ski-lodge in the not-too-distant future, or perhaps in a parallel world. Something about Reus’s play with materials – she applies industrial processes to objects that would ordinarily be handmade (and vice versa), and uses materials antithetical to her objects’ everyday functions (fragile packing peanuts, for example, or – later – diligently embroidered firehoses) – means that the familiar remains ambiguous.

The overall effect of her accumulated works being a sort of unsteady sculptural transformation of the world around us.

The three works in the Hwael series (the title derives from the Anglo-Saxon word for whale) each consist of a dislocated skeleton of powdercoated metal tubing – evocative of handrails on a public bus – adorned with boilerlike forms, weights, counterweights and the holes you might find on an adjustable crutch. The series reveals Reus’s characteristic layering and repeating of diverse, seemingly recognisable objects, modified through playful shifts in scale, materiality and contextual associations. The frame of Hwael (The Flat), for example, supports a rectangular box containing a scrap of card on which the words ‘FOX GLACIER’ are painted, while from the card hang a camping spoon (engraved with the letters ‘AM’) and fork (‘PM’). Hwael (Fully Automatic Time) sports scratchy engravings of football

tactics and a selection of athletes’ signatures, while Hwael (Soft Soap) holds blank silhouettes of ‘do not disturb’ signs and a floral coathanger that peeps from a fibreglass cupboard.

As a trio, these works collide references to routine, repetition, practice, necessity and leisure. Yet they seem to be frozen in time, as though abandoned one day and left to become shrines to the quotidian passage of time. The five Sentinel works have a greater sense of urgency. Consisting of reels of embroidered cotton webbing, reminiscent of firehoses, these works are attached to the wall by way of a small molten-looking resin plaque, on which sits a unique matchbox design. Therein containing both a cause of and means of extinguishing fire.

The pace at which Reus guides her audience around the space ensures the works never appear schematic. The prevailing atmosphere is somewhat melancholic, questioning the permanence of the world that we are so keen to categorise. As mist, description bears memories of human, architectural and technological existence, yet the human body feels pointedly absent. Instead, Reus’s objects slip through a chain of associations that seem to threaten calamity, whether past or impending, flood or fire. The only certainty being that here, everything is different. Laura Smith

Hwael (Fully Automatic Time), 2017, mixed media, 232 × 340 × 203 cm

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Ilona Keserü Stephen Friedman Gallery, London 23 March – 21 April The news from Hungary is pretty ominous these days, so it’s cheering to be reminded of a time when progressive art and culture flourished under an even more repressive regime. The country’s so-called neo-avant-garde – the generation of experimental artists who emerged under Communism during the 1960s and 70s – has recently been attracting attention in the artworld, where it is often regarded as a parallel to developments in Conceptual art in the West. In fact, it was a much more heterogeneous movement than the comparison implies, with space for abstract painters such as Ilona Keserü – whose work, or at least the selection displayed in her first solo exhibition in London, doesn’t align so neatly with Western art-historical narratives. Instead, the show comes across as fascinatingly multifarious, a stew of diverse ideas and influences including geometricism, hard-edge abstraction, gesturalism, even folk-art homages.

One formal element connects Keserü’s various bodies of work, though: her predilection for curving shapes, specifically the repeated motif of an undulating line, a horizontal, sinusoidal ripple. The design features in Double Form 3 (1972), for example, as a series of rolling, hilly bands of colour, created by attaching layers of slightly crimped, drapelike fabrics to the

surface of the canvas. In the two-tone silkscreens, part of her June Variation and Accord series (both 1976), the wavy shape becomes more bowed and flared, repeating as stripes of contrasting colour – the overall pattern now resembling a ribcage, perhaps, or some other skeletal form, such as a tessellated stack of pelvic bones. A later silkscreen, Forming Space (1981), pushes the curves even further, extending their trajectories upwards or downwards towards the work’s top and bottom edges to create rounded, delineated areas – the resulting shapes vaguely recalling a schematic diagram of an open mouth, with the broad sweep of soft palette and tongue and the pendulous dimple of a uvula.

Such corporeal associations are inevitable, given Keserü’s palette for these works: zingy, fleshy pinks; lipsticky reds and oranges.

The sense is of playfully revelling in colour, of becoming immersed in its warmth. So it’s perhaps surprising to learn that her particular curvilinear motif originally derives from a cemetery in a village called Balatonudvari, in western Hungary, where the headstones are famously heart-shaped (though apple-shaped might be nearer the mark). Keserü’s line, then, is the curvature from the headstones’ top edge, and it functions as a way of linking modernist

experimentation with older folk traditions – as well, presumably, as being intended as a sort of memento mori. Beyond their surface delights, beyond the pleasure principle of their fizzing colours, these works are meant to indicate some hidden, sepulchral truth, to hint at some unnerving fusion of Eros and Thanatos.

Other series also explore ideas of corporeality or death. Four sculptural pieces from 1970 use tangles of string – more curves – as a metaphor for intestines and innards, either packed tightly into glass bottles (as in Bottle 2 (Angular)) or spilling messily down the front of a fibreboard column. The earliest work, the mixedmedia collage of Television (1965), uses lace and scraps of metal to depict a TV set as something like a leering skull-face. But perhaps most intriguing of all are her paintings featuring rainbow colour effects – a smoothly blended gradient in Panneau Design 2 (1978), scribbled background flurries in All 2 (1981), patterns of hexagonal blocks in Space Taking Shape (1972) – where the bright hues are contrasted or interact with more sombre, overtly skincoloured tones, as if making clear the distinction between the resplendent colours of art and the fleshy, impermanent matter of lived existence.

Gabriel Coxhead

Forming Space, 1981, silkscreen print and Indian ink on paper, 70 × 50 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

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Robert Colescott Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 10 March – 28 April Rich and flat and saturated as hell, all the colours in this decades-spanning exhibition by late painter Robert Colescott (1925–2009) cream and matt across history, from ancient pools through Old West skirmishes into more modern dalliances clipped from dirty magazines and canned ads. Colescott’s soft, bright pigments beam from lavender walls as a scantily clad lady gets peeped in her boudoir. They splash turquoise from Elysian swimming holes and harden into electric-blue skies where cottony white clouds are just as fluffy as the gunsmoke pouring from the pistols of assassins and banditos. His colours plump into the ripe skin and extreme curves of ladies in various states of undress, as well the ruddy lust of men on lascivious bosses, porno directors and smoking cowboys. In Midnight at the Mustang Ranch (1977), one such cowboy shuffles with his blue jeans wrapping his ankles, red long johns bursting as he wolfishly pursues a nudie sex worker.

Then there’s the colour of all Colescott’s characters’ skin: black, white and brown humans act out satires and tensions in assassinations

and in battles, on movie sets and in racial dramas. The cartoonish features of the men and women possess a tricky tension, and you’re never sure in any given painting if he’s being satirical or sincere, political or mythological, erotic or sleazy, mockingly comic or terribly serious. In the same painting, there’s playful eroticism alongside a critique of racial stereotypes, a celebration of the bright, crass chroma of American pop culture that also takes it down for the ease of its exploitation. In the mockadvertisement painting Black Capitalism: Afro American Spaghetti (1971–73), it’s hard to tell whether he’s centralising an African-American family into a mainstream culture reference or chortling at capitalism’s cloying attempt to sell spaghetti to black folk (‘It is soul food…

Two meat balls in every can’). It’s all of these things at once, of course. In an admixture of high and low, Colescott refuses easy cultural readings and facile politics. And when you clock all the fun he’s clearly having, it’s easy to see what makes his paintings and drawings so damned satisfying.

In the ‘Bathers’ series (1984–85), Colescott lingers in mythological moments through allusive titles and suggestive scenes. With a side glance at Cézanne and a jab at neoclassical whitewashing, Colescott paints his nudes with a darker palette.

The bodies wetly frolicking here are primarily ancient black and brown goddesses with purple hair (with the very occasional shy, peachy-blond). As thick, sultry, and powerful as any of the women in Robert Crumb’s comics, Colescott’s cartoonish style of shaping bodies never entirely disappears even in these more classical, less jokey paintings. The expressive movements of his figures border on the mystical joy of William Blake but with a use of paint that remembers Philip Guston as both an abstract expressionist and a cartoony painter. Colescott took his references in a long career from the classical and commercial, the pop and pornographic, trawling history with a wet humour, but his colours and their bend are all his own. Andrew Berardini

Cactus Jack, 1977, acrylic on canvas, 212 × 163 × 4 cm. © 2018 Estate of Robert Colescott / Artists Rights Society, New York. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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Kerry Tribe Standardized Patient 1301PE, Los Angeles 24 March – 5 May The doctor’s office is a perennial site of anxiety – a blandly impersonal environment that would seem designed to maximise the feeling of one’s own bodily vulnerability. In the video installation Standardized Patient (2017), Kerry Tribe offers a handful of seemingly privacy-violating glimpses into the discomforts of a doctor’s visit – until we sense that something isn’t quite right.

A young woman’s ‘test results’ come back to her after a brief pause in the conversation; elsewhere, a young maybe-doctor is gently interrupted, and corrected, by an older woman for talking at too great a length of his own religious faith to a patient. The viewer slowly realises that she is watching actors.

Well, half of them are actors; the other half are students at Stanford Medical School and the University of Southern California. This being California, a place seldom shy about crashing headfirst into its own stereotypes, actors pretend to be patients to help ease these students into their profession. Each actor plays a type: say, a woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, or a

professional in too much of a hurry to absorb the significance of her angina diagnosis. One encounter regarding the sexual health and history of a woman in her early twenties, examined by a man not much older, has the air of particularly unvarnished educational television. The students, aware that they are ‘treating’ actors, engage in a stilted fashion either because of this knowledge or due to the unnatural condition of being filmed (the actors of course are used to this).

Standardized Patient is dutifully, perhaps suitably, antiseptic and clinical; the tacit threat of death, disease and disorientation looms throughout, giving the falsehood of the whole scenario the aftereffect of an unfunny joke.

Tribe’s piece is dual-screened: one side shows the encounters between students and ‘patients’, while the reverse displays a series of closeup, cropped images of medical documents and photographs loosely related to the spoken dialogue. Aluminium stools on casters pepper the room around the screen, further recalling the

milieu of a doctor’s office while lightly underscoring the comparative comfort and cool remove of a gallery from the anxiety of a clinic visit.

Standardized Patient’s feigned reality – the documentary trope of a casual, even detached, observation – hinges on the illusion of information withheld, never quite squaring with Tribe’s axiomatic rendering of this curious aspect of medical training. As both mystery and demystification are forced in equal measure, the latter has the perhaps unintended consequence of making full empathetic identification impossible, leaving the viewer with a certain anecdotal randomness – the patient’s turmoil or confusion, no matter how well acted, is always put on.

Given neither the veil of fiction nor the promise of reality by which to mitigate the experience, we instead watch the students practising hushed, serious, comforting tones until the clock runs out. Some appear to get lost within this action, suspending their knowing unbelief and straining for empathy while delivering hard truths – or rather, falsehoods. Aaron Horst

Standardized Patient, 2017, two-channel HD video projection, colour, sound, 17 min 30 sec.

Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles

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Sylvie Fleury LA Bougainvillea Karma International, Los Angeles 20 March – 5 May If you go to Sylvie Fleury’s website, you will be barraged by a storm of flashing images that flip through at the dizzying pace of subliminal messages. Glossy magazine photographs of women shooting guns or draped over cars are interspersed with her own works of art, luxury goods and advertising slogans that read ‘miniskirts are back’ or ‘yes to all’. The assault is typical of Fleury’s aggressive brand of feminism meets consumerism meets art object.

For her solo exhibition at Karma International, she has collaborated with the Parisian lipstick brand La Bouche Rouge to create four new shades of lipstick based on the bougainvillea, ubiquitous in Southern California. Along with these cosmetics, which the gallery sells for a price that straddles highstreet cosmetics product and art object, are a series of purple sweatshirts inlaid with an oversize tag quoting Gloria Steinem: ‘The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off’. Next to the clean white lipstick boxes, the neatly folded stacks of clothing look like sets of cultish uniforms. Fleury offers us the lip shades of the season, and the feminist aphorism to match.

A second ode to Steinem can be found in Gloria’s Triumph (Kawasaki 100, 1973) (all works 2018). The found motorcycle, with a custom purple paint job on the engine, plays on Steinem’s belief that, ‘inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle’. This sits in the gallery among a series of Soft Rocket sculptures that slump, Claes Oldenburg-style, against walls or on a catwalk-cum-pedestal (Catwalk). While the Steinem bike invites independence, movement and rebelliousness, the tear-shaped rockets are downtrodden and inert, phallic symbols transformed into plush pillows. Here, Fleury presents femininity as contradiction: bad-ass biker and soft, supple repose are perhaps both equally apt forms of opposing the patriarchy.

Nearby, a series of shaped canvases take their cues from eyeshadow compacts and are named after the products they resemble: Precious Rocks (Hollywood Glamour) by Dior and Envy Blush (Rebel Rose) by Estée Lauder. Fleury strips the reference down to colour and shape, inlaid into a deep matt black; these works engage with the history of Colour Field painting as much as recent fashion trends.

Exfoliate, 2018, neon, 156 × 40 cm.

Courtesy the artist

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Exfoliate, a purple neon hanging above in an AC/DC-style font, reads both as criticism and command. Take up your arms and work towards that perfect skin, ladies!

In Bad Feminist (2017), Roxane Gay describes the feminist sisterhood that ‘menaces me, quietly, reminding me of how bad a feminist I am’. Because she likes the colour pink, misogynist rap songs and orgasms, Gay imagines herself to be a disappointment to feminists of the bra-burning variety. ‘If I take issue with the unrealistic standards of beauty women are held to, I shouldn’t have a secret fondness for fashion and smooth calves, right?’ Fleury reifies Gay’s implication that the feminist and the feminine don’t have to be oppositional, but rather might be bedfellows; the compact mirror and high heel are celebrated as weapons of war.

That these symbols may have been opposed by a strain of feminism that rejected symbols of a certain ideal of femininity – high heels and makeup among them – further complicates Fleury’s output. As if through owning conventions of beauty one might find a kind of punk-rock freedom. Lindsay Preston Zappas

Jasper Johns ‘Something Resembling Truth’ The Broad, Los Angeles 10 February – 13 May Could Jasper Johns be the most strategic of conceptual painters working today? By strategic I mean the most calculated, the most perceptually acute and the most decisive, particularly at a moment when painting – one might say the enterprise of art in general – can’t decide on its purpose, save some weak sense that it’s locked in a game with its own history, one that still allows for cursory gestures at selfexpression when not succumbing to decorative self-conscious formalism. On the evidence of ‘Something Resembling Truth’ at The Broad, the only US venue for this thematic exhibition of Johns’s work (organised by London’s Royal Academy of Art), I’d wager that this is the case.

And it takes a show such as the current one to demonstrate how Johns’s strategies – reticence, irony, quotation; they’ve gone by many labels – have all been marshalled towards the renewal of how it is that painting might come to mean anything at all.

Let’s begin with Johns’s Catenary series (1997–2003), one of the artist’s most recent.

These works have been nearly universally lauded since they first appeared in 2005 in the artist’s first solo exhibition with Matthew Marks (itself something of a strategic move given the painter’s long association with dealer

Leo Castelli). That’s where I first saw them, and I didn’t like them. There was something about the precarious awkwardness of the hinged slats that lean off the sides of many of the works, and the seeming hobby-store quality of the hanging strings, whose curves give the series its name, which didn’t seem either well designed or fully intended. These works just didn’t cohere, and most of Johns’s work had been nothing if not coherent, sometimes internally so (e.g. the Targets, 1955–), and sometimes in conspiracy with the viewer (The Critic Sees, 1961, or Painting with Two Balls, 1960).

In a work such as Bridge (1997) that awkwardness remains, but the incoherence now reads more like a necessary feature of the work, as when the challenges of intellectual inquiry or research remain as yet unresolved. I’m sure this is what Johns is after: the venture of thinking, as it tarries over the rules of its own delicate physicality (the string, the slats), grounded, as it were, by the generic images of thought – the painted mimesis of the frame’s wood grain, the painted picture of a stellar galaxy, the symbol of the Big Dipper, the harlequin pattern, the word ‘BRIDGE’ – all different means and modes of representing, of disciplining the riot of the real and making something meaningful.

Perhaps this search began in the mid-1980s, with Johns’s cycle The Seasons (1985–86), in which picturing this venture of thought required a detour through picturing something like a self – hard to commit to it being Johns’s self – through references to some of the artist’s earlier image strategies (flags, devices) as well as icons of philosophical thinking such as the Platonic forms, Joseph Jastrow’s duck-rabbit diagram (the latter made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s inquiry into ‘seeing as’ in the Philosophical Investigations, 1953) and Pliny’s origin story of the birth of painting as the tracing of a loved-one’s silhouette in shadow.

It is quite possible that all of this is thrown into the work to throw us off the scent of its meaning – like cleverness that covers up a fear of hard thinking, or a wilful determination not to state what the work is about, which is what defines so many of Johns’s iconic imagestrategies of the 1960s. But in light of the last 30 years, Johns’s work now seems defined, or rather challenged, by the prospect, the very real difficulty, of how making paintings – how making art – can be considered a means of making the obdurate stuff of the world, including such obdurate stuff as words and marks, meaningful. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Untitled, 1975, oil and encaustic on canvas (four panels), 127 × 127 cm. © the artist / VAGA, New York.

Courtesy Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles

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Serge Alain Nitegeka Personal Effects in Black Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York 11 January – 24 February Over the course of his career, the Johannesburgbased artist Serge Alain Nitegeka has articulated an increasingly, and impressively, mature take on the fraught meanings of black as a social and formal force. Much of this exploration is inflected by references to the Middle Passage and the artist’s history as a refugee from ethnic violence in both Burundi and Rwanda. It is most obviously expressed in his early self-portraits drawn in charcoal on wooden packing crates and in the obstacle-course-like installations of overlapping black planks through which visitors can thread, and to an extent it carries over into his geometric compositions on wood that seem to riff on modernist precedents such as Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, which have an architectonic quality and are often crisscrossed by black lines that recall massed two-by-fours.

There is much of the above in this exhibition. A long corridor filled with overlapping boards links the two gallery spaces in which

the show is installed. Coloured planes painted directly on the wall are surrounded by painted two-by-fours. Five forms that resemble attenuated exclamation marks, titled Personal Effects II (all works 2017), sit and lie on the floor and might suggest hastily abandoned baggage.

But where the hallway has a carnivalesque feel, the minimal quality of the sculptures eschews easy interpretation. Several paintings in which similar forms are rendered in blues, blacks and whites on bare plywood, as if the sculptures had been excerpted and flattened, hang nearby. These establish dynamic formal and visual relationships within and between two- and three-dimensional space. Rooted in the visitor’s perception, these effects are far subtler than the sensation gained by traversing the corridor. This nonphysicality suggests that the titular personal effects Nitegeka are not object-based but experiential and abstract.

Moreover, despite the show’s title, black does

Personal Effects I, 2017, paint on wood, 180 × 33 × 67 cm.

Photo: Object Studies. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York & Aspen

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not predominate. Rather, Nitegeka uses it to divide or cross the coloured planes in his paintings, giving diagrammatic and architectonic energy to what otherwise might seem like flat geometric compositions in a way that complements the interaction between painting and sculpture.

Black functions as an accent, an absence of colour that gives colour form. On a metaphorical level Nitegeka seems interested in an understanding of nothingness as an opposite that defines and impinges on the something that we each are. In the show’s press release he’s quoted discussing the ‘heaviness of the unknown’. ‘At the end of the day,’ he writes, ‘while we close our eyes asleep in the black, the heaviness catches up. No one is spared. Black is ever constant.’

That’s not quite what comes across from the perceptual effect of this work, but Nitegeka does provoke a visual sensation that pushes towards the poetic. Joshua Mack

Anna-Sophie Berger The Fool at Sea JTT, New York 4 March – 15 April The figure of the artist is in peril: revealed as a co-opted producer of speculative value under neoliberalism, thriving on the commodified gesture of transgression, her game is up. Instead, she must act like a professional fool, a jester: half-entertainer, half-trickster, she offers fleeting moments of wisdom and deception, dressed in borrowed harlequin robes. This appears to be the suggestion of Austrian artist Anna-Sophie Berger, whose interrogation of postconceptualism’s vocabulary displays epistemological depth as well as formal brilliance. Her exhibition at JTT gathers works from the artist’s recent span of production, and speculates the complex process of how commodities are made, appear and become coded signifiers within and outside the charged space of art.

A variety of assemblages and assisted readymades sparsely populate the gallery with an almost parodic cleanliness, evoking the familiar fashion of ‘contemporary art’. Of these, it is the small, wall-based Freedom (designed by Claudia Berger) (all works 2018) that most precisely examines the logic of the objet trouvé. The work consists of a pair of tin-owl earrings designed by the artist’s mother for the high-street fashion

retailer Topshop, back when tin owls constituted a microtrend within fashion accessories (initiated by Prada, if you don’t remember).

To avoid copyright issues, her mother added small necklace locks to the side of the owls’ bodies, a cheap and readily available material in Berger’s mother’s factory (which closed shortly after this production), acquiring a charge of capitalist realist cunning. The irony of the jewellery line’s name – ‘FREEDOM’ – is only accentuated when presented as art by Berger in the white cube. Who creates, and to what ends, in this process of appropriation and resignification?

Such a chaotic game of semiotics happens everywhere in our encounter with production, exchange and consumption, Berger shows.

In onion, a colour photograph depicts a yellow onion whose skin has been embellished with mysterious Chinese symbols in ink: the meaning of the signs remain unclear to the viewer, as well as to the European artist, who discovered it in a Chinatown vegetable stall. But this strategy of aestheticised disassociation and untranslatability (a trope of much art and culture) follows a completely formalised logic, and, in Europa

Hölzer, Berger inverts the process. A matchbox cover featuring a depiction of the EU flag is reproduced photographically: what would pass as a nonmotif in a European context suddenly acquires an air of exoticism in the space of a New York gallery (particularly in thinking of the symbol’s recent appropriation by nihilist fashion brand Vetements).

Indeed, the artistic gesture exists in close proximity not only to the riddled logic of the joke, but to the meme, and the trend. Sincerity is the most treacherous of all positions. Several loaded symbols in the exhibition – a silkscreened NYC Parks and Recreation logo, a repurposed steel box commonly used for the disposal of charcoal briquettes in parks – seem to advance towards some kind of larger political argument (the production and distribution of public space, the press release offers); such a concretion, however, contradicts the diabolical undoing of the artist-as-social critic that many of the exhibition’s other works strive so skilfully towards articulating. Berger’s hand works best when revelling, not in the possibility, but in the feebleness of art’s vocabulary of critique.

Jeppe Ugelvig

Freedom (designed by Claudia Berger), 2018, iron, tin, lead alloy, plastic, 5 × 8 cm. Photo: Charles Benton.

Courtesy the artist and JTT, New York

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Robert Gober Tick Tock Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 23 February – 21 April That Robert Gober opens this exhibition with a drawing made in 1967, when he was just thirteen years old, suggests that past and present will share its stage. On a page torn roughly from a spiral-bound notebook, Icarus is shown gliding blissfully towards the sun and also plunging into the sea, his legs poking out from a splash in the same corner of the composition that claims Bruegel’s shortlived aviator. Discrete moments in time are, here and everywhere in Gober’s work, collapsed into a single frame.

If his drawings and sculptures are to measure time – as Gober’s exhibition title promises – then Icarus (1967) implies a nonlinear version of it. All of the composite parts exist simultaneously, a flat plane marked by fixed points between which it is possible to draw patterns, in this case the line connecting the drawing’s three elements: a burning sun resembling the monstrance that carries the Host during Eucharist, Icarus ascendant and Icarus fallen.

This is a work of art that functions like the memory of someone’s life after their death, their tragedies bound up with their triumphs.

The possibility – or, in Icarus’s case, impossibility – of escape from imprisonment is alluded to by the dollhouse-size, balsa wood Maquette for cellar door (2001) that extrudes from the opposite wall and then, in the gallery’s second room, by a series of 14 pencil and pastel drawings. Each depicts a smudged torso cropped at the neck and hips, and covered, as if lightly tattooed, by a forest of crisscrossed bare trees.

Over the heart is a barred window through which a clear blue sky is visible. As with the sink, drain and urinal sculptures for which Gober is best known, the works imagine holes in bodies through which something might move.

The reversed signature at the bottom left of each drawing offers a clue as to what that something might, in this case, be. The viewer is looking at the verso of images executed on tracing paper, and so it is her gaze that moves through the figures and, by extension, towards the artist on the other side of the sheet. If the artist is absent, or perceptible only as a bright light in the sky, then a replica of the missing heart can be found in a shallow box frame, backed by a scrap of wallpaper patterned with budding leaves (Plaster Heart on Fabric, 1988– 2017). This is one of 16 assemblages that, like more tender Joseph Cornell boxes, repurpose Gober’s studio leftovers as works of art. They operate according to a metaphoric logic evoking birth and death in its symbols – dead leaves, broken eggshells and Edenic apples are combined with more domestic signifiers like crushed cigarette packets and soiled diapers – and its ineffability. These trapped and frozen relics of a life, reminiscent of the shrines that line the streets of Southern Italian cities, are mysteries on which to dwell rather than puzzles to be decoded.

The prospect of escaping the lifetime described by this exhibition is raised by the sculpture (Untitled, 2000–1) that concludes it. A lifesize trapdoor leads down a set of steps

to a distressed cellar door, below the gallery’s floor level, through the cracks in which light leaks out. The sculpture calls to mind the distressed wooden gates of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés (1946–66), but where that work offers a peephole through which the viewer can peer into an intricately coded dreamworld on the other side, this door offers no such possibility of revelation. What lies beyond remains obscure, and the portents are contradictory: the warm light carries the promise of redemption, while the prospect of being trapped underground is frightening. This sense of being at the same time drawn to, and repelled by, a combination of signs lends the work its uncanny power.

The cellar door is typical of Gober’s ability to seamlessly interweave personal narratives – the door is modelled on one built by the artist’s father in his childhood home – with art-historical allusion. The effect is to create works that are at once familiar, in their play with the strategies of surrealism and the forms of minimalism, and inscrutable, in the significance of certain signifiers to the artist’s own lived experience. In this respect, the work might also function as a metonym for Tick Tock, which invites the visitor into the artist’s life without offering a way out. Placed in the final room of Matthew Marks’s narrow gallery, against the wall furthest from the entrance, the cellar door reads like an exit. But it is locked, and so the visitor is forced to loop back from the exhibition’s end to its start, reappraising the latter in light of the former. Ben Eastham

facing page, top Untitled, 2000–01, wood, paint, concrete, cast plastic, human hair, 203 × 122 × 183 cm facing page, bottom Untitled, 2017, graphite and coloured pencil on vellum, 31 × 23 cm both images © the artist. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

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Books May Day Manifesto 1968 Edited by Raymond Williams Verso Books, £10.99 / $17.95 (softcover) The writing of May Day Manifesto (begun in 1966, first published in 1967 and reworked and republished the following year) was a collective project led by figures of the British ‘New Left’ – the nonconformist movement of British socialists that emerged during the late 1950s – intellectuals and activists who came together as much in response to the looming threat of Cold War nuclear confrontation as for their open criticism of Soviet communism.

By the late 1960s the political and cultural revolts, of which the Paris événements of May 68 were only one small part, had become a diverse, global phenomenon. What tied them together was the growing rejection of the consequences of Cold War capitalism – US-driven militarism and economic imperialism, the subservience of Europe to the US and the subjection of the Third World to the old Western colonial powers and the United States’ ascendant power.

Against that backdrop, May Day Manifesto offered an analysis that tied this disparate global antagonism to the national situation in Britain, to show how the economic and social problems besetting the country were intimately tied to the oppression faced elsewhere. But its national focus was the growing disillusion with the Labour party, which had come to power in 1964.

Reading Manifesto in 2018, it’s remarkable how methodical and far-reaching its analysis

still appears, just as the problems it presents – and the answers it proposes – are still nowhere near being resolved today. A hasty contemporary reviewer might easily claim every kind of insightful parallel between Manifesto and our current moment; from the still-very-apparent inequalities of a supposedly affluent Britain, to the subordination of the UK economy to international finance capital, to the catastrophic consequences of Western military intervention for millions around the world.

And yet, looking too eagerly for such parallels obscures the differences that mark 50 years of history. Owen Jones, in his distracted, boosterish introduction to this new edition, clearly wants to believe that a ‘radical transformative socialist agenda’ might still be implemented by a future Labour government. But Jones is prone to wishful thinking: ‘Under pressure from a broad mass movement,’ he declares, ‘Labour should be pushed to radicalise in power – and begin the process of definitively breaking with capitalism.’

Overlooking the problem of where that broad mass movement might be (not in the trade unions, whose membership by 1970 stood at 12 million: now it’s half that), ‘definitively breaking with capitalism’ is here the unanswered problem.

Jones’s suggestion that the British public is more favourable to a ‘left agenda’, from ‘public ownership to progressive taxation’, is hardly very

radical – more a wind-the-clock-back nostalgia for the welfare state capitalism of the 1960s.

But in fact, the Manifesto’s politics wasn’t a claim for a ‘definitive break’ with capitalism – only its better control in the interest of the majority; a middle way, which would involve, among some of its more concrete proposals, ‘extensive intervention in the banking system’, a ‘major tax on private wealth’ and, critically, ‘the creation of new institutions to make national decisions on production and investment’.

What’s striking about May Day Manifesto, then, is its lucid understanding of the failures of capitalism and its inevitable propensity for inequality, militarism and racism; and that a radical left agenda has to be built on mass support, not just votes in an election. But more striking is its ambiguity over the goal of intervening in the economy – much of the text’s emphasis is on redistribution and workers’ control; but the need for greater economic prosperity, and how to achieve it, remains Manifesto’s blind spot. Fifty years ago, a booming economy was just beginning to falter.

Today, Western capitalism has itself given up on growth, while the left prefers to call for wealth redistribution rather than ask the harder question of how to make more of it. It may take more than another Labour government to come up with the answer. J.J. Charlesworth

The Walls Have the Floor Edited by Julien Besançon The MIT Press, £10.50/$14.99 (softcover) Originally published just two months after May 1968, this collection of graffiti slogans (gathered and edited by radio journalist Julien Besançon) that appeared on the walls of Paris during the événements must once have felt like the freshest form of live documentation and reportage. The book has a landscape-format notebook form, the slogans are transcribed rather than photographed and the transcriptions are credited with nothing more than a location, giving the whole thing the feel of a collection of weird, wild and wonderful haikus. The slogans themselves range from the simple – ‘I’M STUPID’ (Room

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C20, Nanterre) – to the complex – an 11-line description of the democratic organisation of the University of Salamanca during the late sixteenth century (Nanterre) – taking in the politically naive – indiscriminate praise of Mao Zedong – and the ominously humorous – ‘Fuck each other or they’ll fuck you’ (Richelieu Hall, Sorbonne) – along the way. Now that it’s been translated into English, bulked out with a glossary (in which, rather alarmingly, ‘German Jews’ appears as an entry), notes and a bibliography, sandwiched between a foreword and afterword written by a pair of anglophone

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academics (Tom McDonough and Whitney Phillips, respectively) and served up for the 50th anniversary of 1968, fresh is the last thing this feels. Still, perhaps time causes everything to stink a bit. For Phillips the graffiti exists as a precursor to current online vernacular, in a way that stages the past as being redundant unless it provides a stepping-stone to the present.

Stripped from the walls from which it was once broadcast, here we have a social commentary that feels lost in space, lost in time and perhaps, given the nature of some of the entries in that glossary, lost in translation too. Mark Rappolt

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New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle Verso Books, £16.99 (hardcover) That no one any longer fully comprehends the economic, political and climatic systems upon which civilisation depends might seem self-evident. Recent and interrelated crises in each field have exposed infrastructures so complicated by technology that they defy human understanding. Yet still the public is asked blindly to trust that algorithm-driven financial markets will self-regulate, that automated information-gathering systems will not undermine the privacy of citizens, that bot-driven news-distribution networks will not subvert the public discourse underwriting democracy, that a global ecosystem catastrophically unbalanced by manmade emissions will, through further technological intervention, right itself.

In this startling call to arms, Bridle warns that this abdication of control leaves us all vulnerable: to exploitation by those able to manipulate these systems at the local level and, by extension, to the unpredictable escalation of local crises into systemic failures. If the subprime mortgage crisis or global warming illustrate the point most starkly, then most of us can also provide anecdotal evidence: this morning the Glasgow hotel in which I am staying suffered a software malfunction that locked guests out of their keycard rooms.

Meaning, according to the member of staff I talked to, every guest in every room in its numerous franchises across the world.

The sense of powerlessness that this reliance on invisible infrastructures engenders is, Bridle proposes, at the heart of recent social unrest and political upheaval in the West. It shouldn’t be surprising that voters suffering from the unequally distributed effects of automation, globalisation and climate change, and told by their elected governments that it is impossible to effect structural change in a global economy, are vulnerable to the simplifying falsehoods put forward by the far right. It is in the interests of those who profit from them to render these vast infrastructures opaque, invisible and illegible, in order that discussion over such change can be stonewalled.

So, in chapters devoted to themes including ‘complexity’, ‘computation’ and ‘climate’, Bridle attempts to shine a light into the darker corners of the ‘network’ in which we are enmeshed.

He cites the Amazon warehouses arranged by computers into inhuman logics that its workers are forced to follow; the racial prejudices reinforced by supposedly neutral technologies like digital cameras; the always shocking fact that at the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide predicted for the century’s end, human cognitive ability drops by 20 percent. Many of these examples will be familiar, but their collective impact illustrates Bridle’s point that the issue is not the availability of this information – we are, as even the NSA has complained, drowning

in data – but its organisation into legible and compelling narratives. So New Dark Age functions as a call for literacy rather than Luddism, on the principle that the apparatuses of oppression should be reclaimed rather than destroyed.

Acknowledging that is impossible to imagine these complex ‘hyperobjects’ (the term is borrowed from Timothy Morton’s description of the Internet) in their entirety, and yet seeking to counteract the cowed awe that their contemplation entails, Bridle instead puts forward that the reader should embrace a ‘clouded’ state of ‘practical unknowing’. This attempt to formulate a unifying theory from a selection of scattered insights, however sharp, is the least convincing aspect of the book. It is not hard to see how the promise of a ‘new dark age’ might be corrupted and co-opted by those with a less progressive agenda (a fate that Bridle, who coined the term the New Aesthetic, has suffered before).

Ultimately, his efforts to reconcile the limited capacity of the individual with the possibility of agency lead the author to an old-fashioned conclusion: that to effect meaningful change, it is necessary to share knowledge and build coalitions. Rather than disentanglement, New Dark Age argues convincingly for a more informed integration with the technologies we have created, made possible by new solidarities between citizens armed with the facts.

Ben Eastham

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & asha bandele Canongate, £16.99 (hardcover) ‘Close your eyes and come close. Try to imagine this with me,’ Patrisse Khan-Cullors writes towards the end of her memoir (cowritten with journalist and activist asha bandele), as she launches into the story of a middle-of-the-night home invasion by police.

Her husband is pulled from bed, handcuffed and interrogated, then has his details recorded before being cleared of ‘fitting the description of’, a phrase the reader will come to recognise as meaningless in this gripping account of the upside-down world in which black Americans live. Who exactly is the terrorist, she asks, rhetorically.

When They Call You a Terrorist is a calling-out of white supremacy in the US told through the interweaving of the author’s own story with

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analyses of the country’s structural racism.

Raised in LA’s Van Nuys neighbourhood during the 1980s and 90s, Khan-Cullors, who would go on to cofound the protest movement Black Lives Matter, was on the frontlines of Reagan’s ‘war on drugs’ and California’s threestrikes-and-you’re-out judicial policy (‘a living death sentence’). The author argues that these were both outgrowths of Nixon’s 1970s war on drugs and, prior to that, the end of Jim Crow laws that had institutionalised segregation: the US response to gains in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements during the 1960s was to double down on a historical policy of subjugating its black population for economic gain, albeit now by subtler and more insidious measures. What this meant for

ArtReview

Khan-Cullors, among countless other heartbreaks, was an overburdened mother, a beloved father cycling in and out of prison and, most horrifyingly, a mentally ill brother criminalised and tortured rather than treated. Nonwhite readers are unlikely to be surprised by either storyline – the personal or the political – but this memoir stands apart in its circular telling and retelling, reinforcing the power of each while charting the author’s transformation of a litany of hardship into a mantra of self-actualisation. ‘#BlackLivesMatter’, written beneath a friend’s outraged Facebook post following the 2013 acquittal of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin’s killer, is Khan-Cullors’s radically self-evident response to a country that seems to be saying the opposite. David Terrien

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John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell in the film Diabolik, dir Mario Bava, Photo: Mondadori Catherine Millet1968.

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Colouration

by Isabel and John Morgan studio 1-2

Text credits Albert Camus, ‘On Social Order’, 12 October 1944, in Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper ‘Combat’, 1944–47, ed Alexandre Gramont, 1991 02/05/2018 15:25

on pages 135 and 140 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

May 2018

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A Curator Writes May 2018 According to my assistant Chuck, today’s art connoisseur demands ‘the experiential’. I have no idea what he is talking about. For me there is no greater experience than standing in front of Barnett Newman’s Eve imagining the primal woman behind Barnett’s softedged fields of colour. If the light is right and the moment just so, I feel like Adam on the brink of falling into sin. But Chuck insists that something more theatrical is what the zeitgeist demands.

To me, this seems absurd. And yet I feel I have to prove that my curatorial hand is not wizened and can deal with this cultural shift. So when the invitation comes in from Frieze New York to do some ‘performative curating’, I naturally agree. For one thing, I am penniless. The Arts Council has withdrawn its handout for the small publication Avalanche that I claimed to coedit after one of the young scallywags discovered it hasn’t been in print since 1976, and that when it was in print, I had nothing to do with it.

And my memories of previous springtimes in New York hanging out with David Salle, Ross Bleckner and Julian Schnabel are strong pulls too.

It is an unusual assignment. My brief is to make my way to Randall’s Island for the opening day of the fair, where I will curate ‘live’ in front of an audience of leading collectors, curators and attractive art-advisers whom I might persuade to join me for aprèsfair chowdowns. I imagine performances, happenings and interventions around the intersection of art and food. I have my copy of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook and skim through it on my Norwegian flight over. I feel it is a crucial moment to revive Marinetti’s Tavern of the Holy Palate. So I shall present a marriage of art and gastronomy soundtracked by Wagner, where the audience is asked to stroke small pieces of sandpaper while eating Marinetti’s Excited Pig, a whole skinned salami topped with coffee sauce and eau de cologne. I am also determined to revive Marinetti’s call for the abolition of pasta.

When I finally reach the outpost of Randall’s Island, I am alive with excitement. I make my way to an open-air space overlooking the East River just outside the billowing fair tent that has been marked with a scrawl on my fair map by one of the hipsters in the fair office. But when I get there I am momentarily taken aback.

A number of my fellow curatorial brethren are already there.

We look suspiciously at each other. I spot a desolate-looking Jean-Hubert Martin with 37 suitcases of cheese and immediately work out that he wants to restage Dieter Roth’s piece Staple Cheese (A Race). Nicolas Bourriaud clatters around with a number of curry pots and pans. So predictable. I want to ask him when he might consider having another idea but also don’t want to alienate him as a I fancy a spot of free curry. Achille Bonito Oliva sits in another corner behind two tabletops filled with dirty plates and crumbs of bread that I immediately recognise as a partly rebuilt Daniel Spoerri Fallenbild. Despite the competition, I feel that I am in good company. Perhaps after all these years of sniping at each other we can finally work together, a collective of great minds joining in a triumphal return to serious art and thinking, rounded off with a massaman curry.

I sit in a corner with the cookbook and nod at Martin. He turns

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away. I wonder if that’s the smell of vacherin wafting out of his luggage.

I make a mental note to get hold of some crackers.

My reverie is broken when the hipster who scrawled on my map appears. He beckons to Oliva and leads him off into the tent.

Technicians pick up the Spoerri and follow them in. As another set of technicians turn up and wheel in the cheese suitcases, Martin takes the opportunity to hop onto the lead case. He waves dismissively in my direction. Then Bourriaud is whisked in, although I note a few of the relational-aesthetic plates and pots are left behind. After a short wait, I too am approached by the hipster. I start towards the tent, but he stops me.

“Your slot is actually out here.”

I look around. Builders are putting the finishing touches on what looks like some sort of shack. It has a large oven in it.

“You’re not unionised, are you?” he asks brusquely.

“God forbid,” I reply, shaking my head.

“Good. Here, put this on.” He shovels some sort of apron over my head.

“But what about…?” I gesture in the direction my fellow curators have been ushered.

“Some sort of mistake,” he quickly answers. “We only needed the three great curators, so we’ve found another role for you. Very performative. Very audience-focused.”

I nod vigorously. I can be audience-focused. And more importantly, I need the cash.

“Okay, what you need to remember is that there are three types: Margherita, Bee Sting and the Famous Original. All pizzas are available in two sizes. The preview starts in two hours. Get to your station!”

He hands me a pizza cutter. It is time to get to work. At least it’s not the pasta counter, I think, remembering Marinetti. I. Kurator

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