ArtReview November 2022 by ArtReview

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Sin Wai Kin

The Arts & Culture Podcast

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PAULO MONTEIRO November 5 - December 17, 2022

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Adrian Ghenie, Untitled (detail), 2022. Oil on Canvas. 200 × 178 cm. © Adrian Ghenie / Visarta, Bucharest 2022.

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ArtReview vol 74 no 8 November 2022

One idea or another Someone recently told ArtReview that its job was to separate good from bad, the wheat from the chaff when it came to art. Either because there was so much art knocking around that no one could see it all (particularly with new covid waves in the offing) or because people don’t have time to think for themselves these days. Which, going by the state of politics today (in the uk and in other places similarly in turmoil) seems like a very convincing argument. But anyway, ArtReview’s not here because it wants to be a prime minister or anything (except a prime minister of art of course, in which case it would only be a first among equals and be working with a cabinet of talents in which all wings of the party would be represented). Or maybe the statement about what ArtReview was supposed to be doing came up because art today is all about questions and never about answers and that’s what magazines like ArtReview are there for. To do what art does not. To gloss over its failure to be useful. Or for anything. Particularly after the recent Documenta and the furore that trailed after it. After which we all know that it must be for and against nothing. In case it triggers anything. Which it isn’t supposed to do either. Indeed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that in art these days it’s best to do nothing. But where would the ‘artworld’ be if that was the case? (What did you say? In London and Paris and Los Angeles and Miami and New York and Basel and Seoul for the fairs? Shame on you! You’ll be adding Shanghai and Singapore to that list next! And then you’d have a whole world… oh, right.) After the person had told ArtReview what it was supposed to be doing (and ArtReview did think that was properly artistic, because we rely on artists to tell

Taste

us what we’re supposed to be doing so that we don’t actually have to do it – care for each other, support the powerless, or those powerless people who have a spare £6.95 knocking around in their pockets, give voice to the voiceless, highlight inequity and inequality, give agency or an idea of it to people who have none) they walked off. They didn’t ask the usual questions: what makes something good or bad? Why do so many art magazines review the same group of exhibitions in the same venues while masquerading as diverse compendiums? Aren’t magazines like ArtReview just another tool used to support the imperialist supremacy of the English language in the sphere of art? They just walked off. Giving ArtReview an approving slap on the back. Leaving ArtReview to chew over the fact that it had better questions to ask of itself than anyone else did. Questions it’s been trying and failing to resolve since 1949. And the trying and failing and trying again is part of what keeps it going. That keeps it coming back month after month. (And you thought it was deadlines? Tsk tsk tsk, ArtReview is much more self-centred than that!) But in all fairness it’s not just ArtReview’s ego at work here. Or the need to give itself something to do every day, or its need to feel more busy and important than anyone could possibly imagine that drives it on and on and on… Rather it’s the cloud of uncertainty in which it operates, the fact that what might be good or bad, worth seeing or unworthy of a fixed stare, is something of a moveable or changeable feast. That there are not so many absolute values or essential truths to be found. Although, that said, you might be beginning to think that this all leads to a final statement of accounts that would read: 73 years, 1 idea (the moveable or changeable feast – pay attention!). Or another. ArtReview

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Art Observed

The Interview Lolo & Susaku by Ross Simonini 26

Death of an Artist by Rosanna McLaughlin 36

The State of Feminist Art History by Eliza Goodpasture 35

page 26 Lolo & Susaku, Torque (detail), 2022, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy the artists and Galería Alegría, Barcelona

Art Featured

Sin Wai Kin by Skye Sherwin 42

Orawan Arunrak by Max Crosbie-Jones 66

Stan Burnside and Tavares Strachan Interview by Mark Rappolt 50

Kim Bohie Interview by Mark Rappolt 72

Robert Nava by Owen Duffy 58

page 58 Robert Nava, Crunch, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 163 × 163 cm. Photo: Stan Narten. Courtesy Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 82 Wolfgang Tillmans, by Cassie Packard Walter Price, by Martin Herbert Remote, by Louise Darblay 58th Carnegie International, by Evan Moffitt Wolfgang Laib, by J.J. Charlesworth Cerith Wyn Evans, by Mike Pinnington Leila Hekmat, by Emily May 16th Biennale de Lyon, by Digby Warde-Aldam Andra Ursuţa, by Skye Sherwin Bergen Assembly 2022, by Rodney LaTourelle Jake Chapman, by Andrew Bracey Ana Prata, by Gaby Cepeda At Home / On Stage: Asian American Representation in Photography and Film, by Claudia Ross Gene Beery & Lily van der Stokker, by Terry R. Myers Flanagan’s Wake, by Jonathan Griffin Afterimage, by Francesco Tenaglia

The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, by Gregory Sholette; Artivism: the Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism, by Alexander Adams, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Faith, Hope and Carnage, by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan, reviewed by James Cook Tove Jansson: The Illustrators, by Paul Gravett, reviewed by Louise Darblay Crisis as Form, by Peter Osborne, reviewed by Jacob Koster Yunizar: New Perspectives, reviewed by Elaine Chiew

the takeaway 114

page 86 Aziz Hazara, Field Notes, July 2021 (as seen in the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh). Photo: Hassan Nazari, Mustafa Rasooli. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter Kolkata

UGO RONDINONE

THE WATER IS A POEM UNWRITTEN BY THE AIR NO. THE EARTH IS A POEM UNWRITTEN BY THE FIRE

OCTOBER 18 - JANUARY 8

Art Observed

that 25

Photo: Aleix Plademunt

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Lolo & Sosaku

“We have a lot of feelings with them, but some of them are very cold and they don’t even look at us. They don’t know we are there”

After failed attempts at painting and video art, the Barcelona-based duo Lolo & Sosaku eventually began exhibiting as a sound project in 2006. With machines and motors, they produced a sonic world that recalled noise and industrial and Lou Reed’s contentious 1975 album Metal Machine Music. These tracks are rich in timbral diversity: engines hum, instruments are methodically destroyed, tension hangs on taut wire strings. More recently, though, the duo have begun aiming their machines at canvases. In their Barcelona studio, small spinning robots stab away at paintings like brainless elves, scribbling with the wobble of a baby’s motor skills. These are analogue creatures from the

era of mechanical industry, made of wood and alloy, wires and pistons, tape and nails. To create their work, Lolo & Sosaku let the machines go about their business, occasionally adjusting them. One machine waddles to the right until it gets stuck and repeatedly slaps away at a corner, accumulating paint. Another wanders off to the far side of the studio. Still another crawls across the length of a painting, dragging a tenuous line. When the moment is right, Lolo or Sosaku steps in to interrupt, sending the devices off on a new streak of mark making. These motoric instruments are sculptural beings in themselves. Full of character, they thrum away constantly, just as we do: a ticking heart,

November 2022

breathing lungs, the regular tides of the nervous system. They live to work, and work to make art. On the phone, I spoke to Lolo, but not to Sosaku, whom Lolo describes as “shy” and resistant to interviews. Lolo is used to speaking for Sosaku, whose intentions he understands well after almost two decades of collaborating. In all our exchanges around this interview, Lolo was enthusiastically warm – ‘hugs’ in every email – and he continuously apologised for his poor understanding of English (his first language is Spanish). When we spoke, Lolo had just returned from a vacation to San Sebastián, and, as was apparent from the playful sounds in the background, had recently become a father.

A Crack in Time ross simonini Has fatherhood changed your relationship to being an artist? lolo No, it’s the same, actually. I think it’s – it’s more powerful. Yesterday my daughter was a bit sick and I was at home with her. But I do a lot of work from the phone and emails then. The days you cannot go to the studio, you can make drawings or think about things. But you cannot stop creating. This compulsion is something you have or you don’t have. If you have it, you are fucked. rs Do you feel that way? Like it’s a curse? l No, no. I was joking. rs But a little bit, right? l Yeah. You have to sacrifice a lot. You have to make terrible decisions about money and risks. And if you are really confident you take the risk always. And this is very dangerous. But Sosaku and I have taken the risk many times, and for many years we were super broke. For three years we were sleeping in a small studio room together, and then suddenly it started to go well.

rs When did that change for you?

rs How would you describe this place?

l It’s still happening. But we are always spending our whole commission budgets and also our personal fee to make the pieces better.

l Totally noisy. And mechanical and logical. There are no humans. There are water sounds, motor sounds and plants growing very slowly, but no humans in that place. It is not about the future or past.

rs Did you turn towards painting as a way of selling more work? l Our last exhibition in Italy, we sold paintings, but we are not successful artists. This is not our goal. Our goal is just to do what we want. When

“There are water sounds, motor sounds and plants growing very slowly, but no humans in that place” we are in the studio, we always think we are not in this timeline. This is where we want to be. We imagine a crack in our timeline and inside this crack there are things happening. It is really not happening in the present for us. Like in our piece Disco [2018, a disc-shaped sculptural installation in Catalonia’s Ebro Delta] – these things we take from another time, from this crack, from all time and space. It always happens the same: the images come.

Disco (still), 2018, video, 3 min 51 sec

ArtReview

rs A parallel time. l We figured this place out in 2018.

Less Than Great rs When did you start collaborating with Sosaku? l In 2004. We were experimenting with sound but we did not release anything. rs So you started as a band? l We actually started with painting. But that was horrible. Because I have my line and Sosaku has his line – each one of us has one style. You can recognise everyone’s drawing. So we started to do some videos in festivals. But that was also a little bit not good. Then we started to do sound for the movies. And then we experimented with just the sound and this became our place where we don’t have any

Stellar, 2017 (installation view, private collection, Suzhou)

November 2022

Torque, 2022 (installation view, Galería Alegría, Barcelona)

ArtReview

background. I don’t know anything about music, and Sosaku knows a little bit, enough to play guitar, but super badly. In sound, we have an immense white canvas to do whatever we want and experiment fully. rs Were you playing with traditional instruments at this point?

l You kind of get in the way. And in a way, this is also video art, because we use these videos

rs But you liked the paintings that you eventually did show in 2019?

rs And you have the tilted car sculpture [Torque, 2022, Alegria Gallery, Barcelona] in a recent show, which seems like a direct reference to that.

l Yeah. The painting has to transmit energy, vibration, the composition has to be nice. Many things have to happen to make a good painting, but in our case many paintings fail, because we are not totally controlling the process.

l Exactly.

l If you play with normal instruments or computers or samples, you have to really build your instruments and skills to find new sounds. So we started to build some instruments, just by looks. We were doing installations and festivals, and we got very tired because we needed 24 hours at least to set up and four hours for soundcheck. It was not easy. And then we started to imagine other things that relate to the movement but not sound. This is how our work started happening in the edges. It’s not like a proper discipline – what we are doing is actually happening at the edge of disciplines. With the painting machines project, we have sculptures making a painting, but we are changing them in a performance. rs You’re collaborating with your creation.

of these performances in exhibitions. We are like the mechanics for the artist machines.

rs Was there sound coming from that car?

“The whole universe is spinning. It’s the natural, the right way, how a motor works. Even at the level of elementary particles, everything is always spinning” l In the beginning, yes. But we took it out. There were originally three machines hitting the car from inside and from the top. rs So how did the new paintings come to be? l We started a few years ago with this project and we didn’t like the paintings. We did 50 or 60. They were horrible. We liked the process, but the painting itself was no good.

Repairing with Love rs Since you use motors, everything is about the motion of spinning all the time. You have to contain that. l Yeah, the whole universe is spinning. It’s the natural, the right way, how a motor works. Even at the level of elementary particles, the very small level, everything is always spinning. In the beginning we were working with pendulums, because we like natural forces. People think we do nothing but make machines, but we are near during the whole process. We choose the colours, we choose the composition. rs There’s a sense in your work that over time you’re sort of merging with the machines. Is that how it feels to you?

2a Metal, 2021 (installation view, Night Time Story, Los Angeles, 2021)

November 2022

2a Metal, 2021 (installation view, Night Time Story, Los Angeles, 2021)

ArtReview

l Yeah, in the future when I start to fail, my knees or my legs or whatever, I would love to put on a mechanic arm, a mechanic leg. I would love to have a mechanical part of myself, fingers or whatever.

for one painting once and changed the machines during the process – adding arms, taking out arms, adding legs, adding a very long thing, making something new appear. rs Are you –

rs You admire industrial-era machines, but you aren’t dipping into newer technologies, like cgi.

l One writer asked us what we really like most. Sosaku said insects, I said trees. And then she said, but this doesn’t relate to your work? But

l You know, we understand how these machines work, but artificial intelligence – we really don’t understand how that works. We like to see and touch the thing. We like the motors, to touch the motors. We like to work with our hands. We are kind of artists from the twentieth century. I love ai, but we don’t use it because we don’t understand it.

“We like the motors, to touch the motors. We are kind of artists from the twentieth century. I love ai, but we don’t use it because we don’t understand it”

rs Do you feel a connection with the machines? They each seem to have a personality. l We have a lot of feelings with them, but some of them are very cold and they don’t even look at us. They don’t know we are there. But some are beautiful and very kind. Some are very funny. Sometimes they don’t want to work. They go around the studio and sometimes one breaks and we repair it with love, and sometimes without love, and change it. We used 22 machines

in our work there is transformation. There is change. There is growing. Trees are open to change without their control, and insects are very similar to machines: it looks like they don’t have feelings. They don’t have expression in the faces. They also are transforming. Many of them change colours or change totally, as butterflies do.

l Yeah. My father likes cars, and my little brother does too. I like the smell of oil and gasoline, and Sosaku was into technology because he is from Japan, where they lead the way with technology. I was born in Argentina. But somehow we were both fans of the Japanese series Evangelion. rs I thought of the movie Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1989] when I saw your work. l Yes. We love it. Yeah. I like how he had a car accident and then from there he started to mix himself up with metal. Perfect. rs Are you building a science-fictional world in this way? l A few years ago, we started to realise that something like this is going on. But we need more time. Our work is basically investigation – investigation of movement and shapes – but something is building up there. You are right. We are starting to see it, slowly. We just need more time to be always following the mystery.

rs But industrial music and the philosophy around that was also attractive to you growing up.

Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subjet, Object, Verb

2a Metal, 2021 (installation view, Night Time Story, Los Angeles, 2021) all images Courtesy the artists

November 2022

December 1 – 3, 2022 Photograph taken by Mateo Garcia / Belle & Company

‘Women artists’ are trendy – their work fills my Instagram feed and its value on the secondary market is increasing 29 percent faster than the value of work by men. But for all the covetable pink coffee-table books about these artists currently filling the Tate bookshop, from Frida Kahlo children’s books to the Phaidon tome Great Women Painters (2022), few offer us anything truly original, or truly feminist. Katy Hessel’s recent bestseller, The Story of Art Without Men (2022), is a laundry list of Western women artists from the Renaissance to today presented in encyclopaedic fashion, their stories told with only fragmented social context because, as stated in the title, men have been (mostly) removed from the story. But unfortunately for these women, they didn’t have the luxury to live and work in a world without men. There is a difference between rightfully acknowledging the specific experiences of artists who were women in a particular historical moment and treating all women who were artists as a distinct and cohesive category across the ages. Hessel’s book is not alone in its mission to write a mirror image of patriarchal history, and despite its flaws, it means well. The many, many artists in its pages deserve to take their places in our collective understanding of the history of Western art, but that shouldn’t mean ignoring the complexities of their lives and work. Pioneering second-wave feminist art historians, among them Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock, argued that a feminist art history could not be productive if it cut-and-pasted women artists into the existing canon. They wanted to blow the canon open and ask bigger, fundamental questions about how the narrative of art history has been written since Giorgio Vasari. His Lives of the Artists, published in the sixteenth century, is still the prototype for Western art history: a list of monographs. Nochlin and her ilk asked what better ways there might be to tell the stories of artists’ lives, work and cultural reverberations. But feminist art history in the wake of these early scholars has been hindered by a lack of critical engagement with work that moves beyond the ‘Look, I found her!’ moment – within academia and beyond. The financial success of books, exhibitions, or galleries that have relied on this motif – the record-breaking 2018 Hilma af Klint retrospective at the Guggenheim, for example, or the decisions of blue-chip galleries to pick up older women artists like Rose Wylie

The Canon(s)

Why is it so hard to write a feminist history of art, asks Eliza Goodpasture

Elisabetta Sirani, Timoclea Kills the Captain of Alexander the Great, 1659, oil on canvas, 228 × 175 cm. Public domain

November 2022

or Martha Jungwirth, or Hessel’s book – is a heartening confirmation that there is public appetite for work by relatively unknown women. Yet to treat artists who are women as separate, as unable to withstand real criticism, or as props to a larger narrative, perpetuates the divide between them and the artists who do not need a gender qualifier in front of the word. It is true that some artists who are women had smaller, less conventional oeuvres compared to their male peers. Rather than acting as if this is not the case, or only looking at those who made work that competed with mainstream or avant-garde men, would it not be more worthwhile and more interesting to raise those old feminist questions about the canon itself? About what work we, the people who look at and care about art, consider impressive or important, and why, and whether those value systems still serve us? Rebecca Birrell’s imaginative, energising 2021 book, This Dark Country, does just that. She critically engages with the women who are missing from the archive, as well as those who are present, and brings the work and lives of these artists into crisp relief within their vast social and cultural contexts. The book is not academic but it is rigorously researched, suggesting a future in which art historical scholarship climbs out of its ivory tower. Birrell is not alone in this work – there are other thinkers, including the still-unrivalled Pollock, and those whose work is in academic journals or on the shelves of libraries but not yet on Instagram feeds, who exuberantly engage with the lives and work of the artists they study with inventive and determined methodologies that build on decades of feminist and queer theory. This work not only offers wonderful new ways of looking at the work of women artists, but also offers methods of thinking differently and creatively about art history that are not limited to the study of women. Queer theorists have successfully made the point that their ideas disrupt hegemonic structures of knowledge in ways that reach far beyond the study of queer individuals – feminist theorists are just starting to do the same. Writers like Birrell and Pollock point to a way past mere ‘discovery’ of women artists, towards a history of art that reevaluates centuries of rigid hierarchies of worth in favour of something more expansive, more equitable and more true. Eliza Goodpasture is a writer and art historian based in York

This September saw the release of Sony-backed podcast Death of an Artist, in which curator Helen Molesworth wheels the tale of artists Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre’s doomed marriage out for another spin. This time, Mendieta’s death, in 1985, and Andre’s possible involvement (Andre was cleared of her murder in 1988, though many still consider him guilty), is given the true-crime treatment. Over the course of six episodes Molesworth frames herself as a woman on a mission to break the oppressive silence around Andre’s suspected role in Mendieta’s death – no matter the professional cost. While dredging through what are in fact the now-familiar details of the trial and its aftermath, she describes her own political awakening. In the wake of #MeToo and blm, the former Andre fangirl, who recalls percolating with joy at the sight of his bricks and floor tiles in her youth – “father of minimalism” and “genius” are terms used – learns to curb her enthusiasm for a man accused of murdering his wife, a Cuban refugee, by throwing her out the window. Death of an Artist makes for a predictable, if unintentional, portrait of an art establishment in the midst of a protracted identity crisis – rejecting the canon it worked to secure, and publicly pledging allegiance to a new doctrine in which, as Molesworth says, “identity matters”. Yet while the podcast

Detectivism

Rosanna McLaughlin wonders what a true-crime podcast about Ana Mendieta’s 1985 death adds to… well… anything

Protesters outside Tate Modern, London, demanding the removal of a work by Carl Andre from Tate’s new collection display, June 2016. Photo: Charlotte Bell

ArtReview

is framed as a quest for justice in Mendieta’s name, in reality it is a lazy rehashing of a grim episode underpinned by a dubious relationship to the ethics it supposedly upholds. The silence that Molesworth says inspired her to action is by now a fallacy. You would be hard pressed to find an art student today who doesn’t think of Mendieta and her death when Andre’s name is mentioned, or vice versa. Over the past 37 years countless articles have been written, books published, academic theses submitted, protests at the display of Andre’s work mounted. A popular, macabre folklore has emerged – one that Molesworth mines, indulging novelistic embellishments and hearsay. The podcast includes an oftenrepeated anecdote about the pictures at an exhibition falling off the walls when Andre and Mendieta first met, as if this was a sign of doom rather than an inadvisable choice of adhesive. A recording of Andre saying he is no longer able to lift heavy loads while making his work – an innocuous and rather dull reflection on ageing – is used to invoke the image of him throwing Mendieta to her death. A woman who suffered a serious brain injury, and subsequently believed herself to be psychic, relays a premonition she had that Andre would kill Mendieta. None of this, of course, is evidence, and most of it is far from new. Perhaps the extent

to which this folklore has made Mendieta’s work synonymous with both Andre and her death is the reason her family and some friends declined to participate in the podcast. The majority of the insightful material Molesworth uses – audio recordings of the couple’s acquaintances, including fellow artists Carol and Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella and Lawrence Weiner, speaking candidly about their reactions to Mendieta’s death – was collected by the writer Robert Katz during the late 1980s. Katz interviewed many people involved in the New York art scene while researching his book on Mendieta’s death, Naked by the Window (1990). Perhaps it was also clear to those who declined to participate that turning Mendieta into true-crime fodder is a questionable way to remember the dead. True to form for the multitude of lacklustre podcasts hoping to emulate the success of Sarah Koenig’s wildly popular real-life murder mystery Serial (2014), episodes have cliff hangers, an archive of dodgy canned music has been raided – cue the ominous cello when Andre’s name is first mentioned – and Molesworth performs the obligatory role of maverick detective striking out against the establishment. Molesworth weaves in her own firing from moca Los Angeles in 2018, too – she signed an nda so she can’t discuss what happened, but by introducing this event next to an interview with a curator who describes quitting her job because of institutional racism, it’s clear how she would like it be framed. (At the time, two narratives appeared regarding Molesworth’s dismissal: she was fired because she challenged the privileging of white male artists; she was fired because, according to a report in Frieze, she made the working lives of her staff a ‘living hell’.) In the final episode she attempts to doorstep Andre, a charade of investigative journalism that begins and ends with handing a letter to the doorman of the building in which he lives. Unsurprisingly Andre does not reply. Nail-biting stuff. By now, surely, another kind of conversation needs to be had. Mendieta’s death raises many unanswered questions that are worthy of more than self-serving and corny attention. What do we do when it is believed that a miscarriage of justice has taken place, one that belongs to a wider pattern? Should there be a change to the threshold for proving guilt? If so, what would be the ramifications of revising the premise of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’? When should the cultural sector step

in, and if it does, who is assuming the authority to pass judgment? The same questions hang over the #MeToo movement, which has largely stalled at the point of recounting instances of abuse, first as testimony, then as vampiric cultural product that feeds on the spectacle of the cruelty it claims to uncover. (Marilyn Monroe’s treatment in the 2022 film Blonde, and Monica Lewinsky’s in the 2021 series Impeachment: American Crime Story, are but two examples. It would be no surprise to discover an Ana Mendieta biopic is in the works; by now the story writes itself.) The dilemma of where we go from here will not be solved by reheating hearsay and role-playing detective. It requires a good-faith engagement with complex societal questions. By the end of the podcast, however, only two half-baked suggestions emerge. Molesworth expresses a wish that Andre, who is now eighty-seven and has been tightlipped about Mendieta’s death, make a public statement acknowledging the harm caused. Yet short of him making a full confession, this would be highly unlikely to provide any kind of resolution. The many celebrity nonapologies that have circulated post-#MeToo have proven to be a chumming of the waters that largely serve the interests of the media machine. The second idea, originally proposed by the art group Guerrilla Girls, is that every time Andre’s work is shown it is accompanied by a caption declaring that he probably killed Mendieta. If this is to be seriously considered, there must also be a discussion of what precedent this would set for anyone accused or convicted of a crime, and whether those who are already disproportionately penalised by the judiciary system – or, indeed, feel themselves excluded from the art establishment – would be better or worse off as a result. Death of an Artist has no interest in such discussions. Instead the podcast concludes by arguing that we can no longer afford to separate the art from the artist – a flaccid and largely irrelevant sentiment, given that biography plays so dominant a role in contemporary culture that it is hard to view an exhibition without being schooled in the details of an artist’s life. The challenge now – one that would require a genuine disruption of the status quo – is to move beyond treating the past as a theatre of trauma to repeat ad nauseam, and find ways to change the script. Courtesy Pushkin Industry

November 2022

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in London

THE INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY ART FAIR IN ITALY

Art Featured

you say 41

Sin Wai Kin by Skye Sherwin

ArtReview

Dreaming of Me

November 2022

Sin Wai Kin first made a name for themselves onstage during the displayed body, which is as still as a poster pinup but for the artist’s early 2010s as Victoria Sin, a drag persona that turned up the dial visible breathing. Sin’s voiceover describes uncanny encounters with on Marilyn Monroe’s Old Hollywood glamour and the impossible a teasing image of a woman who gazes back and looks just like the physical proportions of blowup dolls. There were prosthetic breasts, narrator – or nearly: “It was like looking into a mirror and finding that custom-built corsets and a huge platinum blonde wig that “looks like there was something missing in the reflection”. The speaker’s desire it ate your wig for breakfast”, as the character snipes in Define Gender, to consume the image has both a sexual and cannibalistic dimension, a 2017 film portrait of the artist. The makeup was just as big: Pierrot- and this goes both ways. “I was eaten alive,” they purr. white face, exaggerated black-and-red mouth and fake eyelashes to A sweep of the films and sculptures that make up Sin’s presentasweep the floor with. It was a striking parody of the blonde bomb- tions in two current uk group exhibitions, this year’s Turner Prize shell. As Sin reflects during a visit to their studio, “Within capitalism, and British Art Show 9, make clear that the artist’s vision has expanded extreme representations are always considerably in recent years. The chargoing to be more successful because acters they play include members of “My reality seems like a madeup fantasy they’re unattainable, and more poa boyband who parade their literally for some people. We are living in a world singular qualities in a music-promo larised representations of things like where many different realities coexist” gender become normalised. Drag is a lineup and housewives with killer chopine platform shoes, bare fake purposeful doing of that, which also undoes it.” It’s an argument implicit in the iconic trans performer breasts and Cantonese-opera face-paint. There’s an extraterrestrial and Monroe-obsessive Amanda Lepore’s claim that she has ‘the most newsreader who broadcasts a contradictory report from another expensive body on Earth’. “How Lepore literally blows [gender] up is galaxy and an Asian action hero who struts down a midnight street very attractive to me,” says Sin. “Like, ‘You want me to do this? Here with a white fur draped off the shoulder. Steeped in personal history, Chinese culture and science fiction, their painted faces have moved it is.’” What gave Sin a critical edge in London’s more experimental drag beyond those of the early ‘gender clowns’. Sin’s voiceover – be it nights was that the performer then identified as a ‘femme-presenting velveteen and girlish, or deeper with a synthetic ring – spins dreamcis-girl’, as they once put it, a ‘female’ drag queen. As an outlier in a like scenes and poses probing questions through which binaries are scene dominated by white gay men, their position turned the dial set up and knocked down, be it male/female, fact/fiction or subject/ on what it means to knowingly put on a gender. For Sin, a Canadian object. In their universe, there’s even a dumpling that talks. of Cantonese descent, these initial forays It was in 2020 that Sin’s project underwent preceding pages A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (still), 2021, were born of the need to explore their relasome significant evolutions. Having cut their single-channel video, 4k, colour, sound, 23 min 3 sec. tionship with Western femininity. In the four long hair into boyish curtains and reverted Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London from Victoria to Wai Kin (their Chinese name), short films that made up Narrative Reflections on above Narrative Reflections On Looking, Part One / She they created the first fully fledged masculine Looking (2016–17), their graduate presentation Was More Than The Sum Of My Parts (still), 2016, at London’s Royal College of Art, the camera character to take an ongoing place in their work. single-channel video, 4k, colour, sound, 3 min 35 sec. moves up and down Victoria Sin’s adorned and With orange hair and makeup that channels Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London

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It’s Always You Cutouts, 2021 (installation view, Blindspot Gallery presentation at Frieze London, 2021), set of 4, uv cured ink on foamex, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, London

November 2022

the story changes the body changes (repeating) rehearsal, 12 May 2022, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Enid Alvarez. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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the story changes the body changes (repeating) rehearsal, 12 May 2022, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Enid Alvarez. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

November 2022

It’s Always You Signed Poster (The Storyteller), 2021 (installation view, Blindspot Gallery presentation at Frieze London, 2021), uv cured ink on matt white back poster paper, acrylic ink, acrylic showcase, 85 × 60 × 4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, London

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cosmic symbols, including a blue starry sky, white moon and red flames, The Storyteller looks like a being from outer space. (It’s no surprise to hear that speculative-fiction writers Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler have made an impression on the artist.) Inspired by that traditionally male figure of supposed authority, the newsreader, in Today’s Top Stories (2020), the Storyteller’s report is structured around opposing statements concerning certain death and immortality, dreams and waking life, cohesion and separation, as unstable as the blue star imploding in the background. His bulletins include the severing of self and other through language: “in the telling there is a dividing”, he informs us. (A poststructuralist riff on ‘fake news’ perhaps?) The instability is underscored by references to Zhuangzi’s third-century thought experiment, Dream of the Butterfly, in which the Daoist philosopher questions if he is a man dreaming he’s a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he’s a man. “I identified with it in that my reality seems like a madeup fantasy for some people,” says the artist. “We are living in a world where many different realities coexist.” The Storyteller has since appeared in a number of Sin’s films, including her brilliantly creepy take on boybands’ off-the-peg appeal, It’s Always You (2021). Here, the character is ‘the serious one’ in a fourman lineup of reductive types (alongside the childish one, the heartthrob and the pretty boy), as flat as mirrors onto which their fans can direct their own reflection. The artist’s interest in the butterfly dream meanwhile has led to their longest and most ambitious work to date, A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021), a 23-minute film shot on location in Taiwan. In it, the narrator’s voice takes on the lulling tones of a sleep meditation, guiding the viewer / listener through seven scenes inspired by the artist’s dreams. There are two recurring characters with traditional roots. The Universe, with blue hair and floral facepaint, draws on the warrior archetype from Cantonese opera, while The Construct corresponds to the female roles known as The Daan. Yet Sin strikes beyond the binaries of gender here, to shake up reality

on a grand scale. The voiceover veers from descriptions of trees, moonlight on skin and food, to nightmarishly being cut in two by elevator doors and, more hopefully, the ruined landscape of one’s forebears that is left behind. The images with which this narration is paired do not necessarily match up. The meaning of a description of oily glistening broth and thin-skinned dumplings turns extra-slippery when set against a shot of a bare-breasted character with long black hair posing on a windy rocky beach strewn with flowers. With psychedelic verve, there are moments when a talking tree-trunk, chess-piece and wonton soup take over speaking the characters’ lines. It’s a ‘carrier bag’ fiction of the kind advocated by Le Guin, its components left to jostle side by side, free from the prescribed journey and conclusions more linear tales might force us to take. Sin’s characters are category-hopping creatures of flux, donned for public appearances onstage or in front of a camera. Yet the artist has also found a way to memorialise the fleeting personas using a material ubiquitous in drag-club dressing rooms: the face wipe. Putting the emphasis on the ‘taking off’ as much as the ‘putting on’ of a persona, these works preserve the madeup faces on tissue, along with the sweat and skin cells mortal bodies shed beneath the paint. The face prints make us think about the ‘self’ underneath the fabrication, yet Sin exposes this perceived division between performer and role as another binary to be dismantled. After it was cut, the artist also turned the long black hair that had signified their ‘authentic identity’ offstage into a wig. It’s worn by The Construct and can be seen irl at the British Art Show. The title says it all: Costume for Dreaming (2021). ar Work by Sin Wai Kin can be seen in the Turner Prize exhibition, Tate Liverpool, through 19 March and as part of British Art Show 9, various venues, Plymouth, through 23 December Skye Sherwin is a writer based in Rochester

A Dream of Wholeness in Parts, 2021, single-channel video, 4k, colour, sound, 23 min 3 sec. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London

November 2022

“We Get to Make Meaning” Tavares Strachan and Stan Burnside Interview by Mark Rappolt

Stan Burnside, Sibling Sanctuary, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 119 × 119 cm. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli

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This month, Bahamian-born conceptual artist Tavares Strachan curates the first solo exhibition in the United States by his mentor Stan Burnside, one of the most revered practitioners in the Bahamian art scene and a pioneering voice in Afrofuturism. Burnside’s reputation evolved from his work in Junkanoo, the carnival-style street parade and sacred cultural rite that takes place across the Caribbean – generally on Boxing Day – and that originates in West African religious practices. Burnside was the principal artistic director of the Junkanoo groups Saxon Superstars and One Family. Alongside that, Burnside has pursued an individual practice as a painter. Having studied for an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania during the late 1960s, he returned to Nassau in The Bahamas in 1979, where he decided that the multidisciplinary, collective nature of Junkanoo ‘was it’, a practice he shared with the students he taught at what was then the College of The Bahamas through to 1990, when he began to focus more on disseminating his message through his own practice. ArtReview Tavares, when did you first encounter Stan’s work? Tavares Strachan I think that it was on a studio visit with a class at the University of Bahamas when I was seventeen. I was blown away by it. I was already a huge fan of Junkanoo and Stan was basically a mythical entity in that community. I started seeing his painting as I got into more formal art myself. But I think Junkanoo was more egalitarian. Stan, you were having a studio practice at the same time, right – doing the Junkanoo stuff and then making individual paintings? Stan Burnside Yes. I found that Junkanoo just created incredible energy to take back in the studio after Junkanoo season. It was working on a much larger scale than in my studio, and spending a whole lot more energy to produce works, so I would take that into my studio and just explode. The visit Tavares was talking about was to an exhibition I was hosting at my home. The students were all asking just those simple questions, but there was this one voice that was somewhere behind the majority of the students that kept asking me very penetrating questions. And when I would answer, he would follow up with another question. Eventually, it became just the two of us in the room because he was asking questions on a different level completely than the other students. But from the very beginning it was very obvious that he had

a very curious mind and a very active mind. In fact, he wore me out.

AR Given that we are talking Junkanoo, does that involve a collective practice or collaborative practice?

AR Can either of you remember what those penetrating questions were?

TS If you think of almost any West African traditional events – and I say West African because this is where most of the Bahamians descend from – they’re all an amalgamation of poetry, colour-production, mass-making food, sound. It’s only when you leave and you go to the West, where there are these traditional segregations of painting, sculpture, etc, that these things are split. Junkanoo is a good example of when all these things smash together, when you have everything happening at once. I think the challenge for the West is that Junkanoo basically contorts the language system because you can’t describe it. If you ask anyone to describe what Junkanoo is, you’re going to get like 100 different definitions of it. But that’s what’s beautiful about it.

SB Well, I think one of them was how the Junkanoo influenced the work I was doing in the studio. None of the other students were on a level where they experienced the whole process of creating festival arts but he understood it and so he was curious about it. And he talked about the fact that the majority of my work has to do with empowering Black people. Very, very intelligent questions way beyond his years. It was very engaging. AR What was it, Tavares, specifically about Stan’s work that attracted you to it? TS I think at the time I was very curious about the hierarchies set up between ‘East’ and ‘West’. Specifically, when you are from an Afro Caribbean community, there’s this

“The whole collaborative approach to art is something that in Junkanoo really tells it all, and it ties us, it binds us to our African heritage where works of art are created almost as community events rather than as works for the individual artists” idea that Western value systems were more important than the ones that we were growing up with, and specifically with regard to the art form of Junkanoo versus the art forms of traditional painting or traditional sculptors in the Western canon. Here was this guy who was actually solving that problem. He was involved in Junkanoo at a high level, he was also involved in the painting thing at a high level. He opened up this possibility that you could do both. This hierarchy didn’t really matter except again, when you think about how works were being discussed, how works are canonised, now they’re talked about in a public, or in a more international realm, there’s this limitation put on indigenous ways of thinking, making, being. I think a lot of my questions even then were about things like, ‘Is there a voice for me?’ and Stan was answering that question quite emphatically.

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AR So, how would you define it, Stan? SB Well, I think I remember when Louis Armstrong was asked ‘What is jazz?’ by a very well-known New York critic. He said something along the lines of, ‘Well, if you have to ask what it is, you would never understand even if I explained it to you’. I guess that’s what Tavares is saying. The whole collaborative approach to art is something that in Junkanoo really tells it all, and it ties us, it binds us to our African heritage where works of art are created almost as community events rather than as works for the individual artists. AR How does that work alongside of more conventional Western studio practice for both of you? TS I think my entire career has been unlearning what I’ve learned in these Western institutions. I’m trying to get back to that other way of thinking and making and being. I learned all this stuff. I learned that it was bad. I learned that it was not valuable. Now, I’m having to get back to my roots and to learn that all these ways of thinking and being and making are more valuable. I think my whole process has been about just basically unpacking and getting back to all the things I learned when I was fifteen. SB For me, I think when I was in graduate school and I had artists like Alex Katz come in and sit down with me, spend a whole day talking about my work, I realised that we had a lot more in common than our differences. I found that even though there are many roles leading to great art, the sensibilities of the individual artist are pretty similar. Alex Katz, is for me, a brilliant technician.

Stan Burnside, The Architect, 2022, acrylic and pastel on canvas, 119 × 119 cm. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli

Stan Burnside, Portrait of Revolutionary Poet as A Young Man (Gil Scott-Heron), 2022, acrylic and pastel on canvas, 119 × 119 cm. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli

Stan Burnside, Simon’s Torment, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 119 × 119 cm

ArtReview

I went into the studio and he showed me his whole process. It’s very formulaic, but it’s very definite. It’s fast, it’s energetic, a lot like Junkanoo. The spirit in Alex Katz is very physical and very clear, quick decisions. It makes you realise that even though we are very unique in what we’ve created in the Bahamas collaborative approach, that’s only one community of artists and there is a global community of artists. I think the brilliance of Tavares, even more so than me – I’m pretty provincial and regimented – is that he has this ability to cross cultural lines and communicate with all of these different languages. AR Is there a sense, then, Tavares that your putting on the exhibition of Stan’s work in New York is an act of translation in itself? TS In the West, we have this way of thinking about value in numbers: like volume equals good. What happens to a language that only 250,000 people speak, which is the language of Junkanoo, and what happens when that language goes to the global scale? What happens when it goes onto that stage? To see Stan’s work on a global scale I think challenges the notion that you need 100 million people to be able to speak the language for it to be valuable. What’s the value of language, and what’s the value of a language that only a few people speak? Is there any value? That’s not to say that Stan’s work is only for people like me. I think the question is the question of jazz, it’s a question of reggae, it’s a question of how do we engage with these forms on a global scale? AR How do you then take the context with the work? I think gallery spaces have a tendency to strip context out of things. TS This work is about humanity, human experience. When you say humanity and human experience, I think you have to contest that with the idea that, for a lot of us, we weren’t seen as people 150 years ago. When you say human experience and humanity, I think it has to sit within that context, that framework. SB To add to what Tavares is saying, I never think of myself as speaking to a limited audience. In fact, to a great extent – I know it might sound egotistical – I think of myself as painting for history. I think that eventually, if my work lasts, people will find something truthful in how I have viewed the world. I’m not really interested in my market here in the Bahamas, or the market in the USA or in the UK. I’m really painting because I see certain things and I want to represent them.

The one thing that I am dealing with right now, is the idea of our people. When I say our people, people of African ancestry, and our place in the world in 2022. I’ll be seventy-five years old my next birthday. When I look back on my life, I don’t see the community of Africa as being any nearer to self-determination than it was when I was born. To me, nobody is speaking on that. This body of work really speaks to that. It’s an expression of the outrage that I feel. Then I have to accept that truth. TS I think it’s interesting to look at Stan’s generation and my generation (and obviously, there’s two generations after), to think about how the status quo functions in the context of these generational dialogues about personhood. To me, this is the idea that many, many, many, many years ago, depending on where you were from, you weren’t allowed to be

‘I had artists like Alex Katz come in and sit down with me, spend a whole day talking about my work, I realised that we had a lot more in common than our differences. I found that even though there are many roles leading to great art, the sensibilities of the individual artist are pretty similar’ called artists based on the Western canon. I think, obviously, that’s in the middle of being significantly changed. I think the framework of the West’s desire to hyperlabel you as a specific kind of maker or creative comes with a certain problematic edge, because it could be realised as another kind of colonialism: ‘Oh, by the way, I get to push you out and I get to welcome you back to the debate. To take credit for it all.’ AR As if it’s an external decision to say, ‘Now, you’re useful again’. But I think this goes back to what Stan was saying about writing your own narrative and your own history. SB I was there long before Black Lives Matter. I was there in James Baldwin’s time. I think a lot of the world is opening their eyes now – the so-called ‘woke’ spirit that just enveloped the world. I was there a long time ago. The

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burden of seeing things, seeing that so clearly, and not to be able to get others to even take notice of the plight of our people is extraordinary. It’s just a human phenomenon. AR Now that you’re seeing what you were trying to talk about years ago becoming relatively mainstream in terms of discourse, is that frustrating because of all the time no one was listening? SB Not really. To me, the most important thing is that we can come and accept certain truths about how the world has been split up. If we agree that all men are created equal, then we’re a long way from really showing that. I don’t care who gets credit for it. I think if the world could move in a direction for equity and equality and all of that, I’m all for that. AR Can you talk a little bit about the works you’ve selected for the exhibition? Some clearly have elements of religion in them but then there is also a quite broad-ranging series of decorative motifs and styles. SB Simon’s Torment (2022) is all about Simon of Cyrene. When I painted it, I was thinking of the story told about how Simon of Cyrene was forced to help Jesus carry the cross. Knowing history and the way people of our hue are treated, if Simon of Cyrene sacrificed himself and went and volunteered his services to help Jesus carry the cross, that would be too heroic for a Black man. But I wanted to picture him. I wanted to see him as a hero that is not pictured as a hero. A Black man who sacrificed himself to help Jesus with the cross. I thought it was a moment that showed the humanity of Simon. After Jesus was put on the cross, he went into his prayer room and was just in torment for the experience that he had. It has to do with as much the experience of Jesus carrying the cross as it has to do with the way Black people are treated and the way they are written about in history. AR Do you see that as one of the works of reclaiming those narratives? SB I think so. I think we have to be almost Disney-esque about writing our history. The facts that you know sometimes that are written down by others are not necessarily the true story. To a great extent, my father and Tavares’s father, and the older Bahamians, they have this habit of talking about historical figures, and of course, they’ve just created it in their own minds but it’s based on their experience of humanity. Badass MF (2022) could be anybody. Badass MF could be Bruce Springsteen. In particular, this painting is depicting the spirit of a young

Stan Burnside, Bad Ass mf, 2022, acrylic and pastel on canvas, 119 × 119 cm. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli all images Courtesy the artist and Perrotin, New York

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man born into a world where he is given certain hurdles that others aren’t given, and his ability to stand up and have the self-confidence to stare the world directly in the face without fear and to survive. To a great extent, Black people have to be badass motherfuckers in order to survive. There’s no way with the conditions and the circumstances that we’ve had to deal with that we could survive those just being normal individuals. AR It seems like you’re talking about two things: one is the idea of individual personhood – the act of being acknowledged as a person, a human being; the other is this more general acceptance of human dignity that seems to come through the paintings. SB I labour with that. I think so many things tell us exactly how people feel in the world. When we say ‘people’ in that sense I mean the powers that they feel in the world. The fact that Africans and to some extent non-white peoples never sit at the table when it comes to deciding what happens with the globe. Questions about the survival of the human species. You hardly ever see African communities sitting at those tables. That is something that I struggle with and that I have a lot of anguish about. The reality of that is what causes me to strike out in my work in a way that just acknowledges that I see that. That thinking allowed me to do a body of work called Whispers and Screams and it was all about paying homage to those hundreds of thousands of people who were lost in the Middle Passage. One of the most moving experiences I’ve had was going to a Holocaust museum and seeing how the Jews never forgot those people who perished. I just feel the same way about our people and I don’t want to pretend like it was just a slave trade that happened years ago. No, those were human beings and we need to call out their names and acknowledge what happened to them. It really has to do with that love and that empathy and that solidarity I feel with my people who’ve been through hell and who I love and who I think are as beautiful as any others in the world. I truly believe that all human beings are equal and all human beings are beautiful. I don’t judge anybody on the basis of colour or religion or sexual preference or anything like that. I believe we are all one family. That’s the name of our Junkanoo group, One Family. TS I think, as people of colour, sometimes we get caught in the web of having to carry the burden of sadness. I also see a lot of joy in the work. Can you talk a little bit about that? SB Joy is something that I feel in being alive and being able to face the world. I think the

festival arts that we do helps us to feel that sense of joy, because there’s a certain release that happens when we are in the process of experiencing Junkanoo. The music, the dance, the artwork and the theatre, and the community of individuals all just releasing joy into the world. My joy really comes from the sense of the resilience of my people. Joy is a very powerful word. In order for me to get the joy, I have to take a few steps because of where my mind is right now in my history. As I mentioned, I’ll be seventy-five years old my next birthday and so I’m on the other side of the mountain. I have a certain amount of time to say what I want to say, and I don’t want to pretty up the reality that exists. I love my people. I love the resilience. I love the fact that there is a community of human beings of all colours who are basically good people. I love that. There’s joy in that. However, I still come back to the fact that there is some young child being born somewhere in the world

“In the West, we have this way of thinking about value in numbers: like volume equals good. What happens to a language that only 250,000 people speak, which is the language of Junkanoo, and what happens when that language goes to the global scale?” who happens to be Black and who is starting out with nothing because he’s Black and nobody seems to really care. For me, to get to joy from there is going to require me to take a few more steps. My joy is in my hope for the future. I don’t know if that paints a dismal picture. TS I don’t think it’s one or the other. I think it’s like trying to ask someone what their favourite colour is on the colour wheel. I think sadness and pain are parts of it. I think joy and happiness are parts of the whole experience. I think that’s not to discredit the suffering of anyone, but I think when I look at the paintings I see all of it. I don’t just see one side of it. That’s just my interpretation of it. I think you could see the appreciation for the characters and the love and the personhood and the paintings that are not all about pain and suffering. It’s about the human experience, which is varied.

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I think that’s the beautiful thing about picture making. We’re not asking the painter to make meaning, we’re asking them to make the painting. We get to make meaning. The audience gets to make meaning. I think it’s a part of why art is so powerful, because if you think of it as a pyramid, you have the artist, you have the vehicle whether that’s an institution, or a gallery, or museum, or a public space, then you have the audience. I think if you take apart any of that triangle you don’t have a structure. I think all those things make the work. My reading of the work is to me as important as anybody else’s as a viewer. I’m seeing all of that pain but I’m also seeing all this joy. They could exist simultaneously. SB Yes, I don’t think my work is completely joyless. TS Stan, I’m not saying it’s joyless at all. I’m saying it’s full of joy. SB The way I express it, there’s a universal chord. Take a painting like Sibling Sanctuary (2021). It’s a brother and a sister who know what is going on in their individual lives, but they find a way to communicate and to be there for each other and support each other. That has very little to do sometimes with the fact that they happen to be Black, and more to do with the fact that they are siblings and they have this support system. They’re universal cords that I strike. Tavares has this incredible ability. He has that Da Vinci thing, the odd in the science. He has an appreciation for the festival arts. He has almost the Romare Bearden thing where he’s able to riff and play with images and colour. He has a lot of different things going. When I think of it sometimes his view of the world is like when I’m maybe 30,000 feet in the air, he’s already all the way to Pluto in terms of the space that he has travelled. His view of the world is completely different than mine. I enjoy watching him travel the cosmos. To a great extent, I am an intuitive painter who is dealing with basic feelings about the world on a very, I guess, limited level. Limited in the sense that I can sometimes get so focused on the feelings that I’m trying to express that sometimes it becomes very narrow and provincial. What I’m saying is I’m very selfish when it comes to expressing myself. Hopefully, it doesn’t prevent people from recognising something in the work that they can identify with. ar Stanley Burnside: As Time Goes On is on view at Perrotin, New York, from 3 November to 23 December

Superbad by Owen Duffy

Night and Day Separator, 2021, acrylic and grease pencil on canvas, 183 cm × 214 cm. Photo: Robyn Lehr Caspare. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery, London

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Robert Nava’s Angels and Demons

Nightmare Battle, 2022, acrylic, grease pencil and oil stick on canvas, 183 cm × 213 cm. Photo: Juan Trujillo. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery, London

November 2022

Half Angel, Half Alien 3, 2022, grease pencil, acrylic, mica and oil stick on canvas, 152 × 122 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery, London

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What’s the worst painting of all time? In 1969 it could have been Neil angel wings, painted with a series of golden, tooth-shaped forms. Jenney’s Man and Machine, a wonky image of a figure standing roadside Floating against a cloudy blue sky, and over a strip of green, the figure’s next to his midcentury land yacht. Puke-green abounds, hasty brush- torso dissolves into passages of white, pink and cadmium abstraction. strokes ooze from the unconfident hand. Today, it might also be one of A spherical eye – almost as if spritzed with a stencil – anthropomorRobert Nava’s paintings. Take, for instance, The Psychology of Ares (2022), phises this fleshy glob of paint. Nava adorns the canvas with a few an over-the-top brawl – reminiscent of a childhood fantasy – in which errant scribbles, footnoting Cy Twombly. Like many of Nava’s creaa lopsided great white shark, a dragon and a centaurlike creature enact tures, this angelic extraterrestrial is a chimera, a hybrid spliced from a battle royale as a diminutive (and crappy) castle burns. No gold star the artist’s mind and the endless wellspring of popular culture. here. In an artworld age of uber-slick production values, and when “What would 400 years of bad painting look like?” wondered everyone’s self-images are filtered and photoshopped, Nava offers Nava, when we spoke recently on the phone. It’s almost 50 years since an important, necessary return to the form of the ‘bad’. The painter’s Marcia Tucker popularised the term in her 1978 essay ‘“Bad” Painting’, slapdash scenes of angels and demons and dragons exist ‘somewhere written for her New Museum-curated exhibition of the same title. between watching Unsolved Mysteries and Ancient Aliens’, mused Nava, in Then, Tucker defined ‘bad’ painting (quotes included) as ‘figurative a recent interview with artist Huma Bhabha. work that defies, either deliberately or by virYes, they may sell for more money than I can tue of disinterest, the classic canons of good In an age of uber-slick hope to earn in a year, but by embracing the production values, Nava offers taste’. The best of ‘bad’ painting turns away brows low and middle, and so unabashedly from ‘draftsmanship, acceptable source maan important, necessary terial, rendering, or illusionistic representarefusing polish, Nava’s paintings bloom from a more egalitarian place of making. tion’ in order to avoid altogether ‘the convenreturn to the form of the ‘bad’ The year is 1997; I am eight years old and tions of high art, either in terms of traditional playing PlayStation in my friend’s basement. The quest at hand is art history or very recent taste or fashion’. Her essay presented an ironic the just-released Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a side-scrolling lens for a new criteria of the ‘good’, and the exhibition helped crown fantasy-horror game that follows protagonist Alucard, Dracula’s artists like Jenney, Joan Brown, William Copley and William Wegman. half-human son, in pursuit of Oedipal revenge. Nava also jumped, Idiosyncrasy and figurative distortion were praised as a means of chain-whipped and slashed his way through these demon armies, and advancing an ‘anti-rational’ and ‘anti-intellectual’ attitude towards he became absorbed with Castlevania’s perfection of two-dimensional art, as it emerged from spectres of 1960s formalism, Minimalism’s graphics that turned away from the promising dawn of 3d; likewise, austerity and conceptual art’s brainy rigour. Jenney’s Man and Machine Nava’s paintings and their sketchy, casual aesthetics are an antidote to featured prominently in the exhibition. ‘Even if I produced the worst the recent shiny hype of the metaverse and nfts. The side-scrolling paintings possible,’ Jenney wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue, ‘they language of fantasy and horror manifests in recurrent characters like would not be good enough’. Nava’s Half Angel, Half Alien 3 (2022). In this third iteration, through a The son of a steelworker, Nava grew up in the East Chicago of the visceral mass of acrylic and oil stick, viewers can make out a figure with 90s and 00s, and, ironically, found his process of deskilling, eventually,

Thunderbolt Disco, 2022 (installation view, Pace Gallery, London). Photo: Damian Griffiths. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery, London

November 2022

ArtReview

November 2022

above Meg with Algae, 2022, acrylic, grease pencil and oil stick on canvas, 183 × 213 cm. Photo: Jonathan Nesteruk. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery, London preceding pages Thunderbolt Disco, 2022 (installation view, Pace Gallery, London). Photo: Damian Griffiths. © the artist. Courtesy Pace Gallery, London

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through a desire to paint three-dimensional perspective. Through deskilling, Nava eliminates any attachment to, or lionising of, technical skill. He renders three-dimensional objects with a distorted sense of flatness and messy linework, leading to canvases filled with a cornucopia of errors and amateur brushstrokes. A seventh-grade fieldtrip to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he saw works by Goya, Ingres and Delacroix, kindled his love of painting. Before his MFA at Yale, Nava attended art school at Indiana University Northwest, a public university in Gary, and there he experimented with painting styles proffered by his teachers. Also well before Yale, he entered what he calls a “deconstructive mode”, and turned away from the pursuit of technically sound representation. In some of the works from his MFA years, we see a clunky, quirky and macabre sensibility that recalls Jenney’s first ‘bad’ paintings, like Man and Machine. In one example, an alligator severs the foot of an unlucky victim, as a fount of ketchup sprays against a blank background. Here, Nava’s hand is minimal and aloof, and the painting’s four forms (the reptile, the casualty’s bottom half, the dismembered foot, the cartoon gore) boast few defining features, outlines or shading. It points towards Nava’s penchant for absurdity, satirical violence and humour, but lacks the recent work’s turn-it-upto-11 maximalism. Nava’s work participates and advances the history and traditions of bad painting, and might be called, in his words, “superbad”. His paintings incite the encouragement of fellow artists, but the ire of Instagram trolls and uptight collectors. After Pace Gallery announced its representation of Nava in November 2020 (he had hustled for years in New York as a truck driver, among other odd jobs), consternation emerged as to why the gallery that advocates Mark Rothko’s estate and James Turrell would represent such a premier dilettante of contemporary petit-bourgeois aesthetics – the videogames and movies and other mass media that keep us opiated. ‘People are just furious, just furious’, Pace president Marc Glimcher remarked during a 2021

conversation reported by writer Nate Freeman. ‘What is this shit?’ Sébastien Janssen, of Brussels gallery Sorry We’re Closed, recalled in the same article, hearing from perplexed gallerygoers when he first showed Nava in 2018. These reactions aside, some artists in New York venerate Nava’s approach to showing just how constructed images of popular culture are. ‘He paints figures almost the way Cy Twombly would have had he painted figures,’ noted Katherine Bradford, the materfamilias of many New York painters, in a 2019 interview. Nava, in turn, feels there’s a kinship with Bradford’s work, and that “our paintings [could hang] on an oversized refrigerator” together, a reference to their shared embrace of unfiltered, naive aesthetics. Over the past decade, painting, at least in New York, has cycled through periods of doubt and scepticism about its use value and relevance, a side effect of the overheated art market and turbulent social and political conditions that demand art’s response. What unites Nava’s paintings with those of Jenney and contemporaries such as Katherine Bernhardt are questions of taste and style, and perhaps more importantly, an embrace of low-budget aesthetics. Nava’s works are the visual equivalent to chicken scratch, and his style mirrors the subject matter, doubling down on the low life, from side-scrolling videogames to B-movie horror, all of which offer an escape from suburbia. Nava’s paintings, however advertently, advance an ethical imperative that turns away from overproduced spectacle while simultaneously embracing its subject matter. To make ‘bad’ paintings now, when New York is more expensive than ever, is to refuse the contemporary art world’s capitalinfused obsession with production value and polish, and the charlatanic wizardry of LED lights and an algorithm. “There’s more room in the realm of incorrectness,” Nava says to me. The incorrect, the vulgar, the bad, still today, provide an artistic path absent a door-policy, just as they did in 1978, when Copley wrote to Tucker: ‘There is only bad art’. ar Owen Duffy is a curator and writer based in New York

Devouring Sadness, 2017, acrylic and grease pencil on canvas, 213 × 173 cm. Photo: Stan Narten. Courtesy Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels

November 2022

Selfhood Amid Movement Orawan Arunrak’s sojourns and social engagements prompt slow considerations of fast lives by Max Crosbie-Jones

It’s late Saturday afternoon at Hua Lamphong train station, 4.30pm precisely. The concourse of Bangkok’s fading, Neo-Renaissance-style train station is busy, a mixture of masked Thais and tourists killing time, buying snacks, lugging bags. Here, I spot Orawan Arunrak milling around beneath the central clock, clad in the utilitarian attire of the snack hawkers who pace up and down the carriages: matching brown shirt and trousers, bright white plimsols. As I approach, she reaches into the large basket weighing down her left arm, hands me a portable audio player and bids me farewell as I head off gingerly at my own steam. Over its roughly one-hour duration, the audio walk Rituals on Walking (2022) – the Thai-born, Berlin-based artist’s contribution to Ghost 2565, a video and performance art festival cofounded by Korakrit Arunanondchai – seems to satisfy many of the attributes of the dérive, Guy Debord’s influential strategy for playful drifting through urban ambiences. But while the choreographed route is clearly designed to have us study the terrain and renew our relations with the everyday environment, the whole experience is mediated by the voices of Arunrak, her friends and her family. Its six stories, each beginning at a certain location that her prompts guide us to, each opening a gap between what we see and hear, are also prefaced by her family’s story: the tale of how her parents loved and laboured on and beside the tracks. “Dad and Mum started selling lozenges, inhalants and balm.” It is also the tale of a peripatetic childhood, split between Prachinburi province and weekend visits to the community beside Hua Lamphong where her parents lived, defined by the otherness of the perpetual newcomer: “I think this feeling of always being an outsider will always be present as long as there’s movement”. This confessional then ends with an invitation to the listener, to “wake, be awakened, be enlightened in places where I have always observed from the past to today”. Selfhood – what it is to dwell, connect, listen, think, meander, take your time, belong, simply be – amid movement: this is the emotional core of Arunrak’s artmaking. Recent years have seen her using the

little she began with – her own observations of the everyday world around her, shaded and coloured by her own itinerancy, and often delicately captured with pen and paper – in a run of residencies and research trips internationally. Indivisible from her sojourns, these projects have sought to create empathetic connections across cultures. For each, a slow process of social engagement in the urban centres of Cambodia, Vietnam and Germany, among other places, has resulted in playful installations and humble objects – drawings mostly, but also texts and videos that articulate feelings of crosscultural dislocation and translation, explore notions of home, test and trace the possibilities and limits of language. Typically, an Anurak exhibition is a curious accumulation of personal experiences, associations, processes and labour – hers and hers alone, but hers to share in environments that sometimes possess an air of prefab domesticity. Centred on multilingual conversations with ten Berliners, from a Thai monk to a German anthropologist, Exit-Entrance (2017) at Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery offered up missing links, moments of being lost in translation, in a living room-like space where a balmy yellow paint scheme contrasted with a wallpaper of repeating, semiabstract forms. The handdrawn shapes were at once elusive responses to the conversations and agreeable decoration. However, not all her outings evoke mellow home life. Counting (2019) at Bangkok CityCity Gallery, by contrast, offered a warehouselike inhospitableness. Twenty-one breezeblocks, sanded off by Arunrak in the yard of a concrete wholesaler, then inscribed with colour pencil drawings as passersby and staff looked on, were arranged in irregular columns across the harsh white space to create a conceptual mapping. Joined by 21 handwritten stories in English and Thai, the uneven stacks evoked cemeteries or the foundations of buildings. For the artist Ho Rui An, writing in a conversational exhibition essay, the allusions of the chosen material in this context – wherein Arunrak’s words and drawings reassembled conversations

ArtReview

both images Rituals on Walking, 2022, audio walk presented at Ghost 2565, Bangkok. Courtesy the artist and Ghost Foundation, Bangkok

November 2022

top Counting, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Wolfgang Bellwinkel. Courtesy the artist and Bangkok CityCity Gallery above Exit–Entrance, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Wolfgang Bellwinkel. Courtesy the artist and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin

ArtReview

and encounters over recent years – were key. ‘As that which builds Kanagawa Arts Theatre. With the bottles containing, on closer inspechouses but is in itself too rugged to evoke the domestic, concrete can tion, simple black and white doodles on scraps of paper, the work, thus be said to speak to the impossibility of migration constituting as art historian Roger Nelson writes, ‘could not be grasped through a home unto itself,’ he wrote. Our journey through the space, mean- a quick or passing glance’ – implicitly the audience was being urged while, figuratively replicated literal states of moving and transla- to slow down, take a while. tion. ‘Drifting from one story to another,’ he added, ‘the details bleed Looking back, however, Arunrak remembers Come In (2014), the into each other, gradually lending form to a kind of migratory way of outcome of a six-week residency at Sa Sa Art Projects in Phnom Penh, as a pivotal moment when she herself began slowing down to being, a migratory aesthetic.’ “All my work relates to and connects with where I’m living at that spend time with people across cultures. During her stay at the White moment,” the artist says when asked about this aesthetic. All are also Building – a since-demolished modern apartment block then home indebted, she adds, to the experiences that predate her peregrina- to hundreds of tenants, as well as Sa Sa – she placed self-portraits on the walls in the hope of garnering tions, experiences that shaped not just invitations into homes and lives. the everyday materiality of her work “I think this feeling of always being But after making little headway, she but also calibrated her sensitivity to an outsider will always be present spent her days drawing architectural the audience’s reception of art. After features and daily routines outside studying printmaking at Bangkok’s as long as there’s movement” the building instead. Curious tenants King Mongkut University, Arunrak spent a couple of years as a volunteer, then an assistant curator, at and their children were soon having their portraits done, asking her the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (bacc), the capital’s state-owned in. Drawing became a language, a leveller, a form of exchange. Come art institution. Discouraged by how superficial and fleeting most In, an onsite display of these sketches presented alongside borrowed audience encounters were, she found herself craving work that furniture, ran for one day only. “It was about visiting, not showing,” “stopped people, made them stay or read, just for a moment”. All the she recalls. while, she would head outside during breaks to draw, not big landThis experience set in train a series of regional residencies, to marks, but liminal spaces, found objects and peripheral details she which she claims to have travelled light, metaphorically speaking. “I don’t carry the subject with me,” she says. After being struck at felt deserved attention. Her simple notepad sketches – the continuation of a love of how close yet far, how familiar yet foreign, Cambodia felt, the goal drawing that stretches back through childhood, when she would was simply to embrace sameness and difference and explore chance draw for friends in exchange for toys – found their way into the group connections across Asia –and to do it through drawing. “It helps me exhibition and broadsheet newspaper for Temporary Storage #01 (2012; digest reality,” she says. During a six-month residency at Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, she a multiplatform bacc project curated by Chitti Kasemkitvatana). They also appeared in her first solo exhibition What Are They Doing asked people from Vietnam’s north and south: ‘What place would Inside (2013, at Bangkok’s Speedy Grandma) you like to own?’ The whimsical question led Counting, 2019 (installation view). and Breathing Bubbles (2013), within a display of to the 30 responses being displayed alongside Photo: Wolfgang Bellwinkel. Courtesy the artist clear glass bottles for a festival at Yokohama’s sketches and fingerprints, all rendered in lurid and Bangkok CityCity Gallery

November 2022

top Zones and Verbs, 2016, performance at Cartel Art Space, Bangkok. Photo: Surat Setsaeng. Courtesy the artist above Where Are You Living #1, 2022 (installation view at Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh). Photo: Lim Sokchanlina. Courtesy the artist

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pink in a veiled commentary on the quixotic fantasy amid Vietnam’s away from home, and is not simply a clean or quick transcendence internal divides and breakneck development (The Owner, 2015). Other of circumstances: sojourns – to Chiang Mai, the Laotian capital Vientiane and a famous The Aunty loves to learn English. Bangkok Dharma learning centre, the Buddhadasa Indapanno The Thai language has too many vowels, she says Archives, where she installed a temporary drawing studio – fed into English is clearer Zones and Verbs (2016) at Bangkok’s Cartel Art Space. Its four zones (Meditating, Painting; Cleaning, Praying; Keeping, Waiting, Hiding; These admittedly gauzy connecting threads extend to elements Growing, Changing) collated her process, engagements and concerns of Rituals on Walking. While Counting’s stories were paired with drawup to that point. ings – of Cambodian migrant workers at work, or a flask covered The move to Berlin paused this pan-Asian trajectory, but has in German supermarket stickers – this audio tour’s six stories interenriched her practice in unforeseen ways. Being marooned in her face with our impressions, our movements, our bodies as we explore studio during the pandemic, for example, forced a wholesale change Hua Lamphong and its immediate environs: the place where generaof methodology: unable to travel to Cambodia for Where Are You Living tions of migrant dreams have started and Arunrak’s rootless itiner#1 (2021) at Sa Sa Art Projects, she used found packaging to create a ancy began. dichromatic mental cartography of local places. For her, the cardIn the second story, Living with the Body, Living with the Mind (read board packing materials that filled our lives during lockdowns, which by Arunrak in the English version, her younger sister in the Thai), she coloured, stencilled, rearranged and tore to form abstracted land- oratorical flourishes accompany the dissonant sights of Maitri Chit Road, a part of Chinatown where clear signs of gentrification such scapes, also speak to migration and homemaking. The move has also expanded her practice’s conceptual horizons, as boutique hotels and artisanal coffee shops contrast with derelict so to speak. Arunrak lives – for now – in a place where migration is shophouses and a community of mature streetwalkers, many parked a generalised condition, where almost everyone comes from some- on plastic chairs. Each step resonates with what I hear – “A chair to where else. But the cosmopolitan dream that fuels cities like Berlin make a living. A chair that wants wellbeing. A chair for visitors” – but – a dream rooted in the idea that migration is opportunity, a force for some more than others. good that improves our lot in life – is probed and interrogated in her Out of such gaps between my seeing and my hearing emerge the imagined legacies of movement past and present – thoughts about work, not unduly celebrated. Based on conversations in Thai, German, English and Vietnamese intersecting lives, belonging and alienation, cycles of travel and elusive (conversations that were not fully disclosed, except via a qr code self-realisation in endless motion. Casting aside her go-to artistic vocabon the wall that was joined by a request to ‘read and translate at ulary, Rituals on Walking is a bravely minimal attempt at involving us in home’), Exit-Entrance explored unconscious attitudes arising from her work’s completion, at broadening the participatory potential of her the clash of different languages and cultures. Many of Counting’s migratory aesthetic. As we drift with open eyes and open mind around 21 gnomic stories of people she met across different nations and local- a zone of arrivals and departures, leaving and returning, Arunrak ities obliquely remind us that movement often moves sensitively through us, not for us. ar The Owner, 2015, participant leaving thumbprint requires continuous labour – incessant transduring visit to Sàn Art Laboratory, lation and adjustments if we’re to feel at home Max Crosbie-Jones is a writer based in Bangkok Ho Chi Minh City. Courtesy the artist

November 2022

What’s Going On Kim Bohie on how her painting and worldview is rooted in the natural world Interview by Mark Rappolt

Kim Bohie in her studio

ArtReview

In some ways it’s true to say that Kim Bohie’s work, as it has evolved over the past four decades, emerges from a curious fusion of techniques derived from both Korean and Western traditions. Traditional Korean paper, canvas; inks, acrylics. Aspects of Buddhism and animism; aspects of Christianity. Her representations of plantlife (often of the tropical variety) and seascape oscillate between flatness and three-dimensionality, between the blurred and the precise, between near monotones and fabulous displays of colour. Between the indexical – such as in the Jungmoon series, capturing particular street scenes at dusk – and the individual, as in the focus of her Towards series of plant studies from the late 2000s onwards. Throughout, she manages to focus on nature and landscape as both a real, existing thing and an imaginary, a thought or a feeling, without sacrificing the one on the altar of the other. Consistent in her work is an exploration of nature as both a whole and a series of parts: an interconnected structure dependent on light, colour, and a variety of beings. While the human being has appeared less and less in her work, the sense of seeking connection still remains. A series of untitled paintings executed on traditional Korean paper and dating from the early 2000s onwards are almost purely abstract colour studies, albeit with definite horizons, that reinforce a sense of looking, searching, or just paying attention to all that is around us. Such a theme extends that of early figurative works such as Graduation (1981) and Immersion (1984), in which solitary female figures sit with blank or bored expressions, as if they are trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on – something that most of us are trying to figure out these days. The message Kim’s work seems to suggest: look outside yourself.

of the season to the fullest. The reason I moved to Jeju Island is that, unlike other regions in Korea, the fresh green energy still remains in winter due to the warm, subtropical weather. I do love all four seasons, but winter scenery appears rarely in my paintings. I adore the summer the most as it brings great bursts and vibrancy of leaves in full greens. ar What motivated you to become an artist? artreview Your paintings tend to depict verdant landscapes and lush scenes of vegetation. What subjects attract you and why? kim bohie I have always been interested in my surroundings, and I always am full of adoration for every scene of nature I find around me. I moved to Jeju Island over 20 years ago, and so the subject of my painting has become rooted in the natural landscapes of Jeju Island, its flowers and palm trees, the sea around my house and Leo, my beloved black Labrador Retriever. My garden, especially, has become an alternative version of my own world, planting Washingtonia palms, Canary Island date palms, agave, hydrangea, rosemary and cactus, and my daily life within them becomes my paintings. The daily scenery that might be unnoticeable to others, things that other people may just pass by rather than an idealised perfect beauty of nature, is more magnetic to me. ar What is it about nature and landscape that attracts you? Do you find yourself favouring particular seasons? kb Jeju is beautiful in all four seasons; each has its own beauty. It is hard to feel the change of the season in the city, but here you can feel the energy Jungmoon 1905, 2020, colour on canvas, 162 × 130cm

November 2022

kb I liked drawing since I was very little, and my parents were very supportive and let me learn with good teachers. I studied Korean-style painting at Ewha Womans University in Korea, where I learned more about the spirit of artists, about the way artists think, along with how to hold a brush, draw a line, and draw an orchid in the style of Korean painting. At that time, the professors did not like colour painting and nude painting was not welcomed, but I didn’t mind and freely made those as I wanted.My work gradually developed as a combination of techniques. I worked with ink-wash paintings in the past, but this has very unique characteristics as a certain genre of painting. I think the medium has the advantage of allowing the viewer into an imaginary world more freely, because the inner world is expressed only with ink. Writing about my past works making use of ink wash painting, Korean art critic Oh Kwangsoo referred to it as a ‘landscape of meditation’. Gradually, I began to use fabric instead of hanji (Korean mulberry paper) for my paintings, as I started to work on a larger scale. The pigment paint of Korean painting is not easily absorbed into fabric, so it has to be applied multiple times to become vivid; as a result, I began also using more Western painting materials, such as acrylic, in a limited way. I tend to work openly,

Towards, 2017, colour on fabric, 160 × 130 cm

The Seeds, 2020, colour on canvas, 162 × 130 cm

Towards, 2017, colour on fabric, 160 × 130 cm

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making use of traditional materials and influenced by Korean aesthetics, while also drawing on my experience of a diverse array of international fine arts, crossing two boundaries depending on what I want to express and pursue. ar Given this combination of techniques and influences, where do you draw creative inspiration from? kb I tend to listen to lots of various music when I work: Johann Sebastian Bach, Korean gayageum instrumentalist Hwang Byung-ki, in a wide range from pop music to classical music. I have always been interested in the field of architecture because I wanted to be an architect when I was little; I still especially love Luis Barragán’s unique use of colour and formal beauty, and the sculptural architecture unique to Zaha Hadid. Aside from the influence of the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson’s writing is a recurring inspiration, in the way she deeply feels the beauty of the earth and takes a careful look at the wonder of nature. Psalm 8 of the Bible could be said to be an inspiration to me as well. ar Some of your work is more abstract, some more representational; how do feel these two aspects of your work come together?

to express both the abstract and realistic characteristics of nature. ar Your early work included people; why are there by and large no people in your more recent landscapes? Why did you shift away from the human form? kb In my early phases, I often drew portraits of people based on my thoughts that humans were the centre of the world. But as I get older, I believe we are just a very small part of nature, and that we have no choice but to coexist with nature. So I began to draw mainly nature and landscapes, where humans were not directly expressed in the work, more in a metaphorical way through the depiction of trees, animals and rocks. ar How else has your work changed as you have matured? kb Looking at a sunset, I sometimes feel like this is my moment in life, its scenery sad and beautiful at the same time. There are things that I have realised over the years, and I think about relationships that are embedded in the landscape. The Jungmoon series, which I worked on from 2020, features road scenes at dusk. The road signs, such as speed bumps and ‘narrow lane’ signs commonly found in daily life, feel to me now like signals for wider moments in life: rest,

kb There are some objects that need to be expressed in a more realistic aspect, and sometimes it is necessary to express a more abstract portrayal. Ultimately, what I’m talking about is the same. Among my works, the paintings of the sea can look like abstractions. I believe that nature does not only have figurative features; nature itself holds abstraction, and I only express it as it is. Rather than thinking dichotomously, I want

pause and arrival. The recent series of paintings The Seeds (2020 –) aims to express the condensed potential energy inside seeds: the colours and various shapes aren’t based on reality, but are all from my imagination. Seeds contain both destruction and creation, and through their depiction I hope to capture some of the intense vibrancy and order of nature. Through embracing the wonders of nature and of time, I feel I have developed a sensitive and delicate approach to how we perceive our surroundings. ar Given this relationship to the natural world, do you feel there is there a spiritual aspect to your work? kb Just as all artists in the world dream of their own utopia, I am trying to express the wonders of nature, the joys of life that are allowed to me every day, and the gratitude for the creator in my painting. I believe that humans should ultimately get closer to nature. I hope through experiencing my work, viewers might feel the mystery and wonder of nature, the world around them, and gratitude for our presence in it. ar Do you think the shifts and developments of your work reflect in any way the changes in Korea of the past 50 years? kb It is impossible to say precisely, but implicitly, my work reflects changes in society and the environment. The artist is always influenced by the environment in which they work. Recently, the boundary of Korean painting has become more flexible, open to alternative materials. It is an active exchange, and just as Korean art is not limited to local meanings and impressions and can be appreciated as art and painting in and of itself, I also would like to create works that can be universally appreciated anywhere. ar

above Jungmoon 1911b, 2020, colour on canvas, 162 × 130 cm all images Courtesy the artist and Gallery Baton, Seoul

November 2022

JIMEI X ARLES CURATORIAL AWARD FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOVING IMAGE Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and CHANEL jointly launched Jimei x Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image in 2021, to promote and foster young Chinese photography curators and researchers. We congratulate Jiang Feiran, who won the 1st award with the project Unnamed River, presented in Beijing and Shanghai this year with the support of the award. The 2nd Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image will be announced at the 8th Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen , which opens on 25 November 2022.

You can find more info here： https://www.threeshadows.cn/jimei-arles/curatorial-award

Unnamed River Installation Image Chasing the Sun Artist: Yu Hang

Art Reviewed

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Wolfgang Tillmans To look without fear Museum of Modern Art, New York 12 September – 1 January Wolfgang Tillmans is boiling peas in the kitchen of his erstwhile East London studio. The camera is fixed on the pot, and as it simmers the puckered green spheres rise and fall, whirl and crest; temporary allegiances forming fluidly as they surge, disperse and reaggregate in new configurations, evoking a social organism. The muffled calls of a Pentecostal preacher across the street filter in from beyond the frame, periodically ebbing and dissolving into steam. The 2:42 minutelong video Peas (2003), one of 417 works on view in the German artist’s ecstatically sprawling MoMA survey, offers a meditation on the beauty – spirituality, even – of everyday life as it highlights the broader networks of exchange, community and place in which such activities

are sited. There is tenderness and gravity to this kind of beholding, perhaps particularly when what – or whom – is being beheld is routinely dismissed societally as insignificant. Tillmans’s constitutional sensitivity, which we might call attunement, is among the unifying threads of the wildly disparate photographs, videos and mixed media installations on view here. The long-awaited exhibition, organised loosely chronologically, spans more than three decades of the artist’s practice, from the greyscale, increasingly closeup photocopies that were his entrée into photography during the mid-1980s – skyscrapers along Sixth Avenue disintegrate into diagonal lines – to a music video for a 19-track album he produced last year, featuring

To look without fear, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Emile Askey. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York

ArtReview

rhythmic vignettes focused on sundry subjects: a gymnastic routine, hermit crabs, a scanbed. The show has no fealty to genre; portraits of friends, lovers, strangers and occasional celebrities are interspersed with still lifes, appropriated media imagery, nudes, cameraless abstractions, landscapes and skyscapes. Queer youth subculture and nightlife are longstanding touchstones for Tillmans, whose photographs on these topics began gracing the pages of magazines like i-D and Purple during the 1990s. (Taken at the velvety edge of visibility and conceiving of the club as a space of intimate togetherness and radical possibility, his nightlife images from this period are particularly striking.) Yet he likewise turns his lens on subjects as varied, random and

inevitably interconnected as photographic apparatuses, celestial bodies, mass media, technologies of travel, fashion, mass protests, architecture, and, and, and… The democratising effect of this omnivorousness, which rejects hierarchies of image production and consumption that place one subject or style over another, is amplified by his hallmark mode of installation, which he first explored in a gallery exhibition of his work in Cologne in 1993. Tillmans frequently presents his photographs unframed; instead, they are neatly affixed to the wall with binder clips or tape, sometimes mounted in the magazine spreads in which they once appeared. He builds Warburg-inflected cosmologies of images, clustering and constellating his photographs at a range of heights and intervals. (The dimensions of the photographs themselves also vary, though Tillmans regularly returns to certain standardised formats.) Here, photos are positioned at obfuscating altitudes, hung in underutilised

interstitial spaces like doorways, or laid flat alongside media clippings and scientific reports in tabletop collages, a strategy the artist developed in 2005 for his ongoing Truth Study Center series, mining the pernicious cognitive biases and the circulation of destructive misinformation about topics like the US invasion of Iraq or the global AIDS crisis. (Tillmans, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1997, is a longtime AIDS activist and LGBTQ+ rights advocate.) The artist’s unorthodox installation tactics provoke active viewing. Viewers are prompted to think relationally and contextually, excavating affinities between neighbouring photos. Located by a photograph of an LGBTQ+ protest (NICE HERE. but ever been to KYRGYZSTAN? Free Gender-Expression WORLDWIDE, 2006), a photo of fuzzy television static (Sendeschluss/End of Broadcast I, 2014) pictures the potential for state censorship or hacking by dissidents. A string of images depicting objects like air conditioning units (Movin Cool, 2010) and an automotive

headlight (Headlight ( f ), 2012) constructs an open-ended rumination on globalisation and the movement of commodities as part of Tillmans’s Neue Welt (New World) series. While Tillmans often looks outward, toward the people, objects and systems that make a world, his abstractions – a strain of his practice since the late 1990s – are concerned with interrogating photography itself. In the Freischwimmer (Free Swimmer) series, started in the early 2000s, the artist manually exposes light-sensitive paper to handheld lights. Delicately hued, soft and smudgy, the resultant abstractions feature dark filaments that seem to snake and skitter in enigmatic, watery expanses. Taking photography back to its fundaments, these nonrepresentational examples of ‘drawing with light’ draw out the sensuousness of the photographic unconscious – and contribute to the heterogeneity that keeps Tillmans’s practice protean and slippery. Cassie Packard

Freischwimmer 230 (Free Swimmer 230), 2012. Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner, New York & Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin & Cologne; Maureen Paley, London

November 2022

Walter Price Pearl Lines Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin 10 September – 21 January That Walter Price isn’t about to spoon-feed viewers is apparent everywhere in Pearl Lines, whose title the thirtysomething American painter has used for all his shows since 2016, steadily dilating or dissolving its meaning. Eleven of the works here are sketches in black (acrylic, marker, ink, pencil), somewhere between drawing and painting, emerging slowly from blood-red grounds and made harder to see by the dark-tinted acrylic they’re framed under. What’s evoked, fragmentarily, as you twist and crane, is inequality and conflict along gendered and racial lines. Four works feature black figures referred to in the titles as ‘Panthers’ (Panthers making a plan, 2022, Panther parade, 2021, etc), suggesting the militant Black Power organisation founded during the 1960s. Women appear either undressed or, as in Strong woman doing squats (2022), muscling up. The lantern-jawed

trio seen in A gathering of Mad men (2021), meanwhile, might be paired, for interpretative purposes, with the larger, unframed panel painting Designated Area (2022): a bunch of mournfullooking men playing musical chairs around an armchair reserved for ‘Alpha’. That work, like the six further panel paintings here, is also predominantly red-toned, an atypically narrow palette for Price. In an interview reprinted in the handout, he says he chose the colour as it’s the dominant shade on the German flag and because he recently ‘stared at Matisse’s Red Room painting for about seventeen minutes’. These are playful-serious rhetorical feints, like Price’s pointing to fractious human dynamics while also swerving into luscious near-abstraction in small, smeary redand-black panels like Double checking my high hopes (2020). A frieze of five small, abutting canvases,

featuring loosely head-shaped black outlines on red, is titled Conversations (2022); the implied toggling between people speaking feels consonant with the exhibition’s aesthetic ping-pong and conceptual cat-and-mouse. You feel Price consistently a few steps ahead, frequently hoisting open an interpretative trapdoor. You can’t even call this a painting show, due to the sculptural, floor-based circle of canvases (Talking in circles, 2022), and a prominent found object: The weight of thought (2022) is a burgundy suitcase (perhaps a nod to David Hammons’s use of the same object as freighted readymade) with two books zip-tied to it. One, suggestive of getting from A to B in career terms, is Rosey Grier’s inspirational All-American Heroes: Today’s Multicultural Success Stories (1993). The other, something like a leather-bound diary, is sealed shut – not for you. Martin Herbert

A gathering of Mad men, 2021, acrylic, ink on paper, 68 × 56 × 4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist, Greene Naftali, New York, and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin

ArtReview

Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi Remote Feature film on general release Mika Rottenberg’s first feature film, codirected with Iranian-American Mahyad Tousi, starts with the murmur of lockdown life, albeit set sometime in the future. We follow Unoaku, who lives and works in a highrise retrofuturistic apartment, as she goes about her regimented routine, from yoga sessions and cooking rituals to tending her hydroponic garden to online working. She politely but numbly joins her neighbours at the window to bang on a pot each night (for whom or what is left unclear), and finally unwinds in front of programmes played through an elaborate vr headset. Filmed using long static shots, the first part of the film feels deliberately slow and repetitive, with some obvious nods, notably in the kitchen scenes, to Chantal Akerman’s slow-boiling drama Jeanne Dielman (1975). Except here the domestic routine is interrupted by something less

gruesome and more millennial: a South Korean YouTube-style dog-grooming show, featuring the quirky Eunji and her Westie Soju, that Unoaku watches out of boredom and via which she inexplicably finds herself connected virtually to four other women living around the globe. Bringing them together is their shared perception of an anomaly: they seem to be the only ones able to see that the kooky mechanical puppy-in-a-bath novelty clock on the set of the dog show is going backwards. The pace of the film quickens as the mystery turns to obsession: Unoaku skips her yoga sessions, orders takeaway and spends increasing time online, gathering every night with the avatars of her newfound community for virtual viewing parties in search of an explanation of this bizarre phenomenon. There’s something magnetic about Remote: the polished cinematography combined with the

nostalgic, colourful sets, its projection of a future in which remote life has become the norm, the silly but hypnotic dog show, the stunning all-women cast. Not to mention the absurdist surrealism Rottenberg is known for, and into which the film eventually spirals entirely, complete with overgrown fingernails, space portals – and the promise of physical contact. At its climax, though, the narrative is interrupted rather grotesquely (the final scene strikes somewhere between The Matrix and SpongeBob) and exposes what is perhaps the film’s limitation. Where Rottenberg’s zany, looped videoworks have a unique way of staging the absurd logic of our capitalist world, Remote’s linear narrative doesn’t have much to say, except a not very original tale about the potency of human touch in an increasingly digitised world. Destination aside, it’s still worth the ride. Louise Darblay

Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi, Remote (still), 2022. © the artists. Courtesy the artists and Hauser & Wirth

November 2022

58th Carnegie International Is it morning for you yet? Various venues, Pittsburgh 24 September – 2 April An exhibition is a living body, a curator once told me. If that’s true, biennials have lately needed some resuscitation. In response to this year’s Documenta, The New York Times declared, ‘The dream of a global art world has died’. I’m not so sure, but I’ve lost track of all the glorified group shows that have buried market trends beneath woke discourse and inscrutable poetics. To cast the latest edition of the quinquennial Carnegie International with the lot would be to ignore the earnest success of curator Sohrab Mohebbi’s endeavour. This capacious and heavily researched exhibition features 142 artists and collectives from 40 territories. Many of them are little known in the us, putting Carnegie’s internationalism to the test.

Anchoring the show is a series of historical capsule exhibitions featuring works from parts of the world that have been subject to us imperialism (an almost impossibly broad category). In ‘Refractions’, one moving presentation – mostly focused on us intervention in Latin American from the 1960s to the 1980s – includes photographs by Susan Meiselas documenting the struggles of the Sandinista revolutionaries in Nicaragua’s bloody civil war; Isabel De Obaldía’s watercolours of gruesome atrocities committed by Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega; and posters designed by Claes Oldenburg and Thuraya Al-Baqsami to protest us support of totalitarianism in the region. Several works reflect on the legacies

of the Vietnam War, most powerfully Võ An Khánh’s ethereal photographs of Viet Cong soldiers training and tending their wounded in jungle camps. In this tensely agitprop atmosphere, a rarely exhibited work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres stands out for its quietude: Forbidden Colors (1988), comprising four monochrome canvases painted green, red, black and white, respectively – a combination, the artist notes in a wall label, then forbidden in the State of Israel for its association with the Palestinian flag. Alongside ‘Refractions’, loans from the Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende in Santiago de Chile, founded during Allende’s presidential-election campaign and continued in exile after his 1973 assassination, include

Fereydoun Ave, Rostam in Late Summer, 2000, digital print, 100 × 74 cm. Courtesy the artist and Dastan Gallery, Teheran

ArtReview

works in support of the Chilean resistance from as far afield as Mongolia. More astonishing still is a dense salon hang collected over several decades by Iranian artist Fereydoun Ave, who ran a gallery in a disused Tehran garden shed until 2009. Many of the works – including homoerotic, painted-on photographs of wrestlers by Ave himself and intricate, surrealist coloured-pencil drawings by Reza Shafahi – are unabashedly feminist and queer. Although Ave is now based between Paris and Dubai, it feels like a minor miracle to see these works in Pittsburgh, especially as protesters fill the streets of the Islamic Republic demanding an end to the ayatollah’s regime. Counterposed to these historical works is a newly commissioned presentation by younger artists, many from the Asia Pacific region. Of note are dreamy erotic paintings by Balinese artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, recalling the canvases of Christina Ramberg. Tith

Kanitha’s sculptures, made from coiled and cut wire, resemble those of Ruth Asawa, but with an unsettling frailty, as though at any moment they might unspool. A ‘temporary garden’ by Truong Công Tùng, comprising chains of hanging gourds threaded with plastic tubing, a monumental curtain made of cacao beads and gorgeous wooden panels in which plants and animals recede into layers of darkening lacquer, invoke the industrialised farmland near the artist’s home in Ho Chi Minh City. You won’t find many Instagrammable moments here, with one exception: towering gold balloon sculptures by Banu Cennetoğlu that fill the Carnegie’s grandiose neoclassical atrium. Each bunch of letter balloons spells out an article from the un’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but impossible to assemble here. They’ll slowly deflate during the exhibition, a devastating commentary on the erosion of democracy around the globe. Around the perimeter,

haunting photographs by Hiromi Tsuchida of objects left behind by victims of the us bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki make their neighbours resemble gilded mushroom clouds. The pairing reminded me of Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), a classic meditation on the ways language often fails us when we’re faced with love or loss. At its best, this Carnegie International tackles tough subjects without didacticism, preferring to show rather than tell. The curatorial statement suggests that the exhibition considers ‘the geopolitical imprint of the us’, though most of the younger artists thankfully seem preoccupied with other subjects. “Like any political structure, art works against it,” Mohebbi noted at the preview, an admission more in spirit with the exhibition. Art, here, works against pat chronologies and regional divisions; it trades the internationalism of the market for cross-cultural solidarity. If this show is a body, it’s very much alive. Evan Moffitt

Mockup of Banu Cennetoğlu, right?, 2022, string, helium and Mylar balloons, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo Gallery, London & Piraeus

November 2022

Wolfgang Laib City of Silence Thaddaeus Ropac, London 8 September – 3 October Made from beeswax – glistening ochre yellow and milk-coffee brown and filling the gallery with its mellow, vaguely bitter aroma – the City of Silence (2020) is a loose gathering of softly cartoonish gabled houses, tall thin towers and stepped triangular forms, somewhere between pyramids and ziggurats. Primal archetypes of human architecture, perhaps also devotional, Wolfgang Laib’s settlement appears uninhabited. Rectangular windows and doors open onto dark interiors. And yet, as the other forms shaped in profile of a human head and shoulders suggest, these structures might be dwellings of a more spiritual kind, attentive and meditative at once. Laib’s long attachment to non-Western spiritual traditions, his fascination with ancient architectural form and his use of organic substances connoting plenty and fecundity

(pollen, rice, wax, milk) make for work that hovers between a sense of the archaic and of what is historically enduring. It’s not much enamoured of modernity, but it retains a commitment to tropes of civilised human being – building, raising, cultivating, travelling. Along Thaddaeus Ropac’s long marble hall, on dark wood shelves, a line of shining boats rest on mounds of rice, the boats cut and folded from thin bright brass sheet (Untitled, 2011–12). Laib’s forms are crafted distillations of human mythos, tensed between nature, spirituality and the secular space of contemporary art. But while the making of these objects from natural stuff can sometimes seem arbitrary and performative – why make the buildings specifically from beeswax, other than because this is one of Laib’s ‘signature’ materials? –

City of Silence, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Eva Herzog. © the artist. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac, London

ArtReview

that ambiguity doesn’t extend to the many works on paper shown together in an upstairs gallery. Pencil and oil pastel trace and fill out zigguratlike towers, in sunny yellows, vivid reds and ghostly whites, a recurring motif among other hieroglyphlike graphic forms – triangles, archways (or perhaps headstones) and a device that suggest a flaming bowl – mapped in grids and more complex patterns. Photographs of tombs in Turkey and shrines in India, hung alongside, insist on the drawings’ roots in Laib’s New Age globetrotting. But the drawings themselves, in their abstracting, platonic simplicity and their absorbing patterning and symmetry, remind us of the connection between thinking, imagining and making that comprises the enduring ideal of human society in its world. J.J. Charlesworth

Cerith Wyn Evans ….)( Mostyn, Llandudno 8 October – 4 February In this homecoming of sorts, the Llanelli-born Cerith Wyn Evans has been given free rein, his work occupying all of Mostyn’s available spaces. Those familiar with his work – addressing language and perception through sculpture, photography, film and text – will expect the largescale neon pieces for which he is best known and the tall led columns, here suspended to hover neatly above the floor. Anticipation and encounter are rarely the same. These sculptures dominate your visual field; their impact matched by their intricacy. One such piece is reflected in another work some will hear before they see. The glass panels of Pli s=e=l=o=n Pli (2020) have been transformed into speakers, from which a piano composition (performed by Wyn Evans) is heard. The aural

effect verges on white noise; like trying to tune the sweet spot of a local radio station, forever dipping in and out of the ether. When Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23) was damaged in transit, he embraced the work’s chance ‘completion’. Wyn Evans channels this in the three “phase shifts (after David Tudor)” (all 2020) – a trio of transparent mobiles made from cracked windscreens moving in the air currents of the building. I’m not sure casual visitors’ minds will leap to the Duchampian as much as they do automobile accidents, but its effect resonates, adding yet another sensory layer. Upstairs is No realm of thought….variations after “Who’s sleeves”? (2022), a video shot on smartphone and presented on flatscreen. A plane is heard overhead; there

are trills of birdsong. The sun casts weaving shadows of an old tape measure against a garden wall as water cascades mellifluously into the shot, catching the rattling tape measure; this quotidian vignette captures a bit of serendipitous backyard beauty. Wyn Evans has long communicated through such serendipities, visual or auditive, that reflect on the world and create spaces in which we may consider it. ‘Strategies of refraction’, he calls them. Here, those strategies are applied and tested at a gallery whose natural light will change according to time, affecting the nature of our interactions and experiences; and, perhaps, response. Something that Wyn Evans, forever with one eye on Duchamp, will no doubt be hoping for. Mike Pinnington

....)(, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Jason Roberts. Courtesy the artist and Mostyn, Llandudno

November 2022

Leila Hekmat Female Remedy Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 15 July – 8 January Female hysteria was a ‘disease’ commonly diagnosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when a woman behaved in any way that made men feel uncomfortable. Its ‘symptoms’ including anxiety, fainting, insomnia and loss of appetite for food or sex, symptoms thought to be caused by the fragility, laziness and irritability of the female disposition. Feminist historians later argued that these were caused by women’s oppressed social roles. Many patients were sent to asylums and even received surgical hysterectomies. The notion of female hysteria, and its links to sexuality in particular, offers a lens through which to consider Los Angeles-born, Berlin-based artist Leila Hekmat’s first institutional exhibition. Female Remedy transforms the idyllic lakeside villa Haus am Waldsee into a satirical, surreal sanatorium where nurses and patients engage in debauched, erotic activities. This so-called ‘infirmary for an illness which needs no cure’, recasts the symptoms of female hysteria as positive forces, confronting the misogynistic notion that stereotypically feminine behaviours require medical attention. However, ‘Hospital Hekmat’ is no relaxing female haven. Walls are draped floor-toceiling with fabrics printed with intricate lacelike patterns and Hannah Höch-esque collages of hybrid women: one pairs the head of a young girl, dark hair in two plaits, with a sculpted, tattooed torso, voluptuous breast on one side, muscular pectoral on the other. Elsewhere, hotchpotch mannequins are dressed in patients’ robes, nurses hats, erotic lingerie (one doll’s red leather knickers read ‘big girl panties’) and blue jackets with ‘Krankensister’ embroidered on the back, and posed suggestively: one bent over an

examination table, others reclining seductively like Renaissance nudes. Like their 2d counterparts, their faces, smothered in lipstick and eyeshadow, are collaged, distorted or digitally manipulated while body parts are augmented: bustles accentuate buttocks, limbs are covered in black lines as if marked up for plastic surgery. These amalgamated creatures are at once unsettling – as if created, and modified, by some mad scientist or unethical cosmetic surgeon, and recalling Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 play A Man’s a Man, with its First World War soldiers whose injured bodies are patched up with makeshift prosthetics – yet the collages’ combination of male and female body parts, as well as the decadent costumes and makeup worn by her mannequins that appear to reference drag aesthetics, suggest Hekmat is interested in blurring gender lines and working with a wider definition of femininity than was commonplace when hysteria was diagnosed. There are other highlights, such as a wooden platform punctured by a grid of upturned metal nails and painted with the phrase ‘trust me with your troubles’. However, there is little change in the situations Hekmat’s dummies are positioned in, or in the barrage of hanging fabrics covered in superficial Instagrammable feminist phrases (‘tampons should be free’, ‘bad girls go to hell’). Other elements, including a room full of beds with patients’ comical diagnoses printed on the white sheets – ‘a hippy who hates hippies’, ‘Jewish lesbian witch’ – and a soundscape of characters’ voices, draw attention to what’s missing: the living, breathing individuals who would bring Hekmat’s stage set to life.

facing page, bottom Female Remedy; Shirley, 2022, digital collage. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

facing page, top Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels, 2022 (performance view, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin). Photo: Harry Schnitger. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

It’s unsurprising that Female Remedy feels more mise-en-scène than installation: Hekmat is best known for performance work referencing the Theatre of the Absurd and Commedia dell’Arte. Yet Symptom Recital: Music for Wild Angels, the 90-minute performance accompanying the exhibition, did not take place in or interact with the theatrical setup. Instead, in the back garden, the five-strong cast of female characters – though several make references to their penises; more gender-blurring – are dressed in costumes referencing their inanimate counterparts inside. Weimar cabaret style, the patients and nurses shared stories, symptoms, desires and fantasies, mostly explicitly sexual. However, as with the installation itself, it was easy to become immune to the incessant, would-be humorous/outrageous onslaught of innuendos. In one of the standout moments, the performers executed a seated choreographic routine, spreading their legs, thrusting their pelvises, licking their fingers and caressing their bodies while letting out erotic and deranged sighs and screams. Its success lay in the performers’ embodiment and distillation of Hekmat’s theme, which in the installation feels too surface-level to provoke deeper conversations. Her show sets a satirical, candy-coloured stage for reflecting on society’s expectations of what a woman is and isn’t, but ended up, from what I saw, as social media fodder. Perhaps Female Remedy is an intentional critique of the shallowness of contemporary feminist politics. These days, it’s much easier to reshare a photograph without further comment to demonstrate your allegiance to a cause (free sanitary products!) than to take direct action to achieve it. Emily May

ArtReview

November 2022

16th Biennale de Lyon manifesto of fragility Various venues, Lyon 14 September – 31 December “What was it like to be electrified for the first time?” The question booms out from a loudhailer overlooking a manmade lake in Lyon’s idyllic Parc de la Tête d’Or. It is addressed to the city itself, the hilly skyline and distinctive architecture of which lie resplendent in the distance. Further queries follow every few minutes, the pauses just long enough to suggest that the interrogator, a female voice acting as a proxy for South African artist James Webb, genuinely expects answers from France’s third-largest city – and might be a little disappointed not to have received any. The work is a component of manifesto of fragility, the sixteenth edition of Lyon’s contemporary art biennial, an event that exploits the locale’s peculiar urban pattern – a combination of former industrial quarters, implausibly steep hills and haut-bourgeois enclaves – with mixed but largely positive results. Webb’s installation, entitled A Series of Personal Questions addressed to the City of Lyon

(2022), is one of five interrogatory sound pieces he currently has scattered around Lyon: other ‘interviewees’, whether addressed at a distance from loudspeakers or displayed in individual installations, include a Roman coin discovered nearby, a medicine vial that once contained an astonishingly popular quack remedy and the city’s contemporary art museum, itself a principal biennale venue. The adjectives you might use to describe Webb’s contributions could pretty well sum up the biennale itself: whimsical, but interesting. The biennale’s title can be interpreted on at least two levels. Curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath say they wanted to underline how a collective acceptance of fragility can actually be a source of strength; and, whether formally or thematically, many exhibits here could be seen to reflect this perspective – however vaguely. Just as palpable is the reverse reading, that apparent strength can belie fragility: throughout, we are constantly reminded how quickly and irreversibly seemingly

solid entities (empires and nation states, for instance) can spiral into chaos. It’s to Bardaouil and Fellrath’s credit that only rarely is this true of the biennale itself. The central venue (of six) is the Usines Fagor, a temporarily repurposed former car factory. Brobdingnagian in scale, it is a dubious structure in which to showcase contemporary art. While some works stand out – particularly Nicolas Daubanes’s Je ne reconnais pas la compétence de votre tribunal !’ (2022), a building frame containing an exhaustively researched recreation of a Lyon military courtroom, in which Algerian resistance fighters were sentenced to death in show trials – much is lost in the chaotic arrangement of the space. There are misfires: the acres of space given over to the neo-Boschian nightmare paintings of Sylvie Selig could have been scaled back, and Spanish street artist Julio Anaya Cabanding’s ripped-up reproduction of Théodore Chassériau’s Le Christ au Jardin des Oliviers (1840) is just wilfully inane.

Nina Beier, Kingdom, 2022 (installation view, Parc de la Tête d’Or, Lyon). Photo: Lucie Colleu. Courtesy Biennale de Lyon

ArtReview

Happily, things improve. Perhaps inevitably for the first postlockdown edition of the biennale, much of the more arresting work here is studiously postapocalyptic: elsewhere in the Parc de la Tête d’Or, Nina Beier has filled an abandoned pavilion – closed because of asbestos – with huge mounds of organic and mineral detritus; only just visible through the structure’s dusty windows, it’s a monumental and remarkably uncanny proposition. Meanwhile at Lugdunum, a magnificent brutalist museum complex devoted to the city’s Gallo-Roman origins, Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová’s installation Sound of Hatching (2022) sees a room-sized window recess filled with busted-up furniture and long strands of textiles and epoxy casts of unidentifiable objects. The window itself is covered with rust-coloured, semitransparent foil, filling the space with an eerie Martian light. Similar dystopian flourishes creep into one of the biennale’s two genuine showstoppers, a display at the Musée Guimet. Formerly housing Lyon’s natural history museum, this place has stood vacant since 2007 and the neglect shows. In a state of progressive decay, the building’s labyrinthine service corridors and mothballed galleries propose a thrilling venue

for a contemporary art exhibition, its otherwise empty display cases yet to be cleared of the caption cards for the exhibits they once contained. At the centre, in a cavernous central atrium, is Ugo Schiavi’s enormous installation Grafted Memory System (2022), composed of huge stacks of blinking lcd monitors and tall vitrines stuffed with fossils and rotting foliage.There’s a fair bit of gross-out daftness – for example Puck Verkade’s Plague (2019), a stop-motion animation in which a woman is devoured by a giant fly – but overall it’s an enthralling group presentation, mixing site-specific installations like Evita Vasiljeva’s Impulse (J or Imp) (2020–22), a terrifying display of flashing light and white noise, with the likes of Leyla Cardenas’s delicate offering, Self-contained Withstander (2022), in which photographs of the museum as it was are sublimated onto hundreds of strands of polyester silk. The other undisputed triumph is an exemplary exercise in rediscovering the unsung modernism(s) of the Middle East. Bardaouil and Fellrath have form in this area, having been behind a widely praised showcase of Egyptian surrealism at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, but Beirut and the Golden Sixties, a thematic survey of the

Lebanese capital’s art scene prior to the 1975–90 civil war, is a fascinating dive into a tragically lost world of cosmopolitanism and creativity. Previously presented standalone at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, the show mixes archival material and documentary photography with some frequently first-rate art, much of it by little-celebrated practitioners. Among the highlights are Paul Guiragossian’s 1960 painting of Armenian refugee camps on the city’s periphery and painter Huguette Caland’s fleshy, erotic Surrealism; later, she would put her name to the devastating Guerre Incivile (1981), an impasto-heavy, candy-pink abstract canvas, its surface pockmarked with deep crimson lesions, like weeping sores. Lyon is a fabulous setting for this sort of event. Carved up by the Rhône and Saône rivers, which make their confluence here, its dramatic topography, size and transalpine character make it the kind of place that could pass for some platonic ideal of what a central-western European city should look like. Yet by and large, the location does not eclipse the art itself – and while many such affairs are merely convenient tourist itineraries through the lesser-explored parts of secondary or tertiary cities, that is very much to be applauded. Digby Warde-Aldam

Ugo Schiavi, Grafted Memory System, 2022 (installation view, Musée Guimet, Lyon). Photo: Blandine Soulage. Courtesy Biennale de Lyon

November 2022

Andra Ursuţa Joy Revision David Zwirner, London 22 September – 29 October Pathetically, the skeletons are still game. In the first gallery of photograms on velvet, their macabre rainbow-hued silhouettes strike cute, come-hither poses on designer chairs. Coloured light shoots outward from skulls: a headdress of desiring arrows. They’re like a horror-film sendup of the women, naked and solo at home, depicted in countless postimpressionist fantasies of the bourgeois good life. Get up close and you can make out a delicate latticework encasing the ribs: it’s a body stocking. What a sad joke: don’t they know that this waiting and wanting is in vain? Ursuţa has long explored the twin drives of sex and violence in her sculpture, most recently

in glassworks suggesting mutilated bodies cast from empty plastic bottles, Halloween masks and bondage wear. The knowing poor taste and black comedy still resonate through Joy Revision, where skeletons are as likely to recall the ways we try to laugh (or scream) away our anxieties around mortality via grotesques drawn from scary movies or heavy-metal T-shirts, as from grave memento mori. Yet this latest exhibition, inspired by a sudden, recent bereavement, offers a more focused meditation on how art has wrestled with the impossible-to-imagine reality of death. Created by draping velvet soaked in photographic chemicals over skeletons and

sculptural assemblages and exposing it to light, the photograms look back to various funereal and occult practices. These include death masks intended to guide the soul back to its body in Ancient Egypt or those made by artists to fashion posthumous likenesses – the Shroud of Turin with its supposed miraculous imprint of Jesus’s face – as well as nineteenth-century spirit photography. On one hand, Ursuţa seems to position these different takes on life after death as an elaborate avoidance strategy; a refusal to acknowledge our inevitable, irreversible annihilation. The skeletons who open the exhibition are stuck

Body Stocking Stuffer, 2021–22, photoreactive dye on velvet, 169 × 141 × 8 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, London, and Ramiken, New York

ArtReview

in denial, apparently waiting for a lost lover to return. Yet in the attempt to render invisible presences in the physical world, those bygone practices also speak to bodily concerns about death in a way that our present culture of fleeting digital imagery cannot. This is not just about the physicality of the corpse but also the need for material preservation in the face of deterioration, and the way traces of the dead are imprinted in the bodies of the living, surviving in our memories and daily habits. The expectant skeletons could be seen as a kind of living dead, still hooked to shared dreams cut short. The uncanny hinterland occupied by those left behind is explored across the three floors of the gallery’s Regency townhouse setting, envisioned by Ursuţa as different rooms in a home whose seeming solidity has been

shattered. Beginning with an optimistic blue, the walls are painted to subtly call attention to their construction, à la Blinky Palermo – an artist known both for his abstract paintings highlighting architectural features, and for dying young. Props used in the photograms nod to different interiors, and the occasional glass sculptures that punctuate the show are conceived on a domestic scale. At times their size and shape suggest commemorative busts or those statues of Anubis as a jackal, guiding spirits to the underworld – as well as a family dog. One standout work in rippling marbled lilac and opaque black glass, Grande Odalisque (2022), is cast from an assemblage that echoes how the photograms are made, with a cloth draped over what seems to be a skeleton wearing a crown. All at once, it’s Queen Victoria in mourning, a rudimentary ghost costume,

dust-sheeted furniture in a shut-up room and the Holy Shroud. Throughout, high culture and low, the sombre and silly, are deftly layered, drawing energy from the contrasting extremes of feeling provoked by death: the profound loss, the bad punchline. Across its three ascending levels, the show’s structure explores grief as an ongoing process. It ends with brown walls – a literalisation of everything turning to shit – in the room that no one enters: the one with the untouched gym equipment. Misintegration (2022), a glass sculpture made from a composite of cast plastic junk, suggests a malformed Batman. This broken-down superhero stares at Terminal Fitness (2021), a photogram featuring an exercise machine that it doesn’t have the limbs to use. Though far from becalmed acceptance, it suggests a recognition of sorts. Skye Sherwin

Misintegration, 2022, lead crystal, 85 × 47 × 69 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, London, and Ramiken, New York

November 2022

Bergen Assembly Yasmine and the seven faces of the Heptahedron Various venues, Bergen 8 September – 6 November Like a song whose lyrics we learn as we sing it, the fourth Bergen Assembly invites visitors to join the fictional character ‘Yasmine’ on a playfully epic quest for the titular seven-sided body. Identities are slippery from the outset: the artist Saâdane Afif is the show’s ‘convenor’, but he credits one ‘Yasmine d’O’ as its curator, a seemingly fabricated figure related to another Yasmine from Afif’s own art practice: Yasmine d’Ouezzan, the first French female carom billiards champion, whose hybrid North African-French roots reflect Afif’s own. If this slippage is confusing, Afif’s destabilising strategy is working: the emphasis here is on multiple, subjective interpretation as a poetic/political strategy, with storytelling

– rather than the thematic exposition common to large exhibitions – creating a neverthelessaccessible exhibition framework, light on art jargon. Following ‘Yasmine’, the audience meets seven ‘characters’ who provide leitmotifs for tightly focused, three-artist exhibitions at different venues. These characters, drawn from a play by Thomas Clerc, itself written after a performance by Afif for the 2014 Marrakech Biennale, are named after their occupational roles. For example, when encountering The Bonimenteur – French for ‘huckster’, the character evokes a master-storyteller figure – the audience enters an environment titled Bonfire (2022) by the group grau, centred

grau, Bonfire, 2022, glass and aluminium, dimensions variable. Photo: Thor Brødreskift. Courtesy Bergen Assembly

ArtReview

on a multimedia evocation of fire around which people can gather, and which is used for public events. Issues of circulation, exchange and especially interpretation characterise many of the invited artists’ works, which pointedly link the exhibition’s character-driven structure with the cultural and civic life of Bergen: the character of The Professor is ‘hosted’ at the University of Bergen kmd building, where fine art students collaborated on several episodes of Gruppo Petrolio’s film project and installation titled after the collective, led by artist/professor Lili Reynaud-Dewar, who plays the group’s wayward, alcoholic, continually undermined leader. The film, which ostensibly explores

the political nature of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death and yet develops into a comedy, presented across eight monitors, about collective work itself and the dilemma between choosing artistic creation or militant action. Nearby stands a facsimile of George Grosz’s Self-Portrait as Warner (1927), a painting critical of pedantic authority that slyly warns about then-coming fascism, and an exhibition of largescale self-portraits from the class of kmd professor Lars Korff Lofthus; each presentation, again, complicating and faceting personalities. A different agenda surfaces in The Coalman at Gyldenpris Kunsthall, which presents Nothing More (2022), Augustin Maurs’s exploration of the human voice’s extremes, presenting graphic and audio preparatory materials for a live concert in collaboration with the local Volve Vokal choir (and others) at Bergen Cathedral, alongside an astonishing

collection of vernacular coal sculptures and a display devoted to Claude Debussy’s composition ‘Evenings Lit by the Burning Coals’, composed in exchange for a bag of coal in 1917, a time of extreme privation. This farewell to dirty energy is echoed by a fascinating film by Shirin Sabahi, Mouthful (2018), devoted to the restoration of a sculpture made of used motor oil – along with Pocket Folklore (2018), an installation of the random objects dredged up in the process – as part of The Moped Rider at the archaeological Bryggens Museum. Here, too, Denicolai & Provoost ‘sample’ the cultural life of Bergen by showing diverse objects borrowed from various eye-height displays seen on their wanderings through the city, while Katia Kameli’s installation Stream of Stories (2016–22) explores the migration of stories themselves, tracking the previous non-Western origins of animal fables attributed to Aesop.

So through the unfolding of an offbeat yet accessible narrative across the city, Yasmine’s quest continually returns to questions of authorship and identity, most often exploding or dilating them. The exhibition’s whimsical sensibility, it turns out, is a Trojan horse that opens character and selfhood beyond mere signification to multiple subjectivities, communal perspectives and, importantly, delight, while foregrounding the potential complexity of encountering art. This is nowhere more apparent than in Venezuelan-born Sol Calero’s work, La Cantina de la Touriste (2022), a restaurant constructed with vibrant tiles and hand-painted furnishings in her self-consciously ‘exotic’ style, which explores the shifting interpretation of tropical symbols from a personal perspective. Made in collaboration with a migrant education organisation and located at an elderly care home, the fact that this work for The Tourist is permanent speaks volumes. Rodney LaTourelle

Sol Calero, La Cantina de la Touriste, 2022 (installation view, Kafe Mat & Prat, Bergen). Photo: Nicolas Rösener. Courtesy Bergen Assembly

November 2022

Jake Chapman hintergrund Turntable Gallery, Grimsby 10 September – 8 October In one shop window along Grimsby’s towncentre Victoria Street, two dioramas revolve atop paired white plinths. A distracted passerby might think that a miniature wargaming shop has recently opened. A closer look at the apocalyptic horror depicted suggests a Chapman brother has arrived; in Hell Souvenir 1 and 2 (all works 2022), miniature toy figures reenact scenes of human depravity, albeit with Nazis, Klan members and capitalist icon Ronald McDonald as the victims. Further in hang Annihilation Extinction, large cloth banners with smiley faces below the titular slogan, one seemingly at odds with the other. hintergrund, at maverick newcomer Turntable Gallery, is Jake Chapman’s second show as a solo artist, and premieres a new work appropriating George Grosz’s 1928 satirical print portfolio Hintergrund, made in reaction to the German artist’s experience of the Great War. Grosz was tried for this ‘insult’ to the German government and the church, leading to many of the prints being destroyed, but one complete

portfolio has rested in Chapman’s plan chest for years. The Chapman Brothers had previously defaced Goya etchings and Hitler watercolours; here the original Hintergrund’s 17 monochrome prints have been coloured-in by Jake using watercolour hues to create, in the artist’s words, ‘a deviation upon the deviant’: in Bald wieder: “Je grausamer, je humaner” a plume of colour emerges from a hose held by a skeleton, positing a deceptive sense of cheer. Grosz’s original depicted the undead with a gas cannister poised to fire in a no man’s land, while Chapman’s saccharine colour choices add frenzy to the composition. In Wolfür?, a bright rainbow now rises above a large pile of human skulls; Chapman’s amendment is chilling in the lack of optimism and hope commonly associated with this symbol. On the surface, the work in this solo show appears indistinguishable from the Chapman Brothers’ collaborative output. Spending time with hintergrund, however, I came to modify

Maul halten und weiter dienen, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Turntable Gallery, Grimsby

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my opinion that Chapman has a ‘parasitic’ approach to making art, where both physical and interpretative ‘harm’ is caused to the appropriated artist’s work. Chapman’s scratchy marks on top of Grosz’s drawing of one soldier stabbing another in Mit Herz und Hand für’s Vaterland might have been produced when distractedly cleaning a paintbrush or in frenzied passion, but they do furnish schizophrenic and psychological undertones, amplifying the original drawn content and adding to its meaning. I left the gallery more convinced that Chapman is engaged in a productive conversation with Grosz’s work. Here, the contemporary artist contributes generative possibilities to the deceased artist’s work that are more sensitive to the original than I have seen in the Chapmans’ collaborative work. It is timely that Chapman has decided to work on these images now. The rise of the contemporary right, alongside the current conflict in Ukraine, suggests our society would do well to return to the testimony of those such as Grosz. Andrew Bracey

Ana Prata Em volta desta mesa Travesía Cuatro cdmx, Mexico City 22 September – 26 November Ana Prata’s Em volta desta mesa (Around This Table) feels like a revelation, even if a modest one. At first glance online (as most first glances happen nowadays), her paintings are unassuming, inconspicuous about the moving earnestness they are able to conjure in person. Her fixation on the genre of still life makes it easy to step into her playful realm of images. And there are many: 24 mostly oil paintings fill the lofty gallery space, ranging from very small to wall-sized, all in bright colours worked into unexpected combinations and textures. With delightful stubbornness, Prata’s works are inhabited almost exclusively by tablecloths, jugs, fruits, flowers, vases and other domestic objects abstracted into recognisable yet gawky versions of themselves. A highlight is Dia de lua

(Moon Day, all works 2022), a small oil painting of five vases and flowers rendered on a plaidflannel-like fabric. The blues in the flannel and those in the painting combine to create an uncanny effect of flat-depth, a trick of texture. Two vases are blue, one is a jade-green with hints of blue, another a dazzling ruby, and there’s a tiny orange one holding a dainty pink flower. They stand, or float – as Prata’s perspectives tend to be mischievous – on a pale blue background painstakingly covered in white dots. Arco (Arch) is another high point. It is a simple yet striking composition featuring an arch slightly off-centre, part black, part white, with a strip of brown mimicking wood grain on an interior section. Within the arch sits a black vase and a sphere. A painted frame completes

the flimsy equilibrium with sections of flowerpatterned black and white, and this works to contain the whole piece, as it is painted – another one of Prata’s effective tricks of texture – on semitransparent polyester screen with the ribs of the stretcher visible behind. The role that tactility plays in Prata’s works appears as a purposeful refusal of the flatness of paintings encouraged by their online circulation. irl, Prata’s paintings are tiny phenomena, unique events. They elevate the mundane, but also the practice of painting, to an obsessiveness as improvisational as it is aware of its powers of illusion. The works may appear naïf, but in their unironic love of painting and their sly use of texture, they are always cunning. Gaby Cepeda

Arco, 2022, oil and acrylic on polyester screen, 150 × 120 cm. Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy Travesía Cuatro cdmx, Mexico City

November 2022

At Home / On Stage: Asian American Representation in Photography and Film Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Palo Alto 31 August – 15 January In a small second-floor gallery at Cantor Arts Center, At Home / On Stage charts a rich legacy of Asian diasporic communities and their visual representations. One of three inaugural exhibitions from Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative, it examines public and private spaces in Asian American life through archival photographs and artistic works, chronicling the intrinsic role of media technology in the formation of Asian American identity, beginning with the first major wave of immigration during the 1800s. From early cartes-de-visite to multichannel video installation, At Home / On Stage presents an incisive rendering of Asian America through the lens of media history.

The stereotyping and marginalisation of Asian Americans undergirds the exhibition’s contemporary selections. Stephanie Syjuco’s standout Afterimages (Interference of Vision) (2021) is an intentionally crumpled archival photograph of three Filipino Igorot dancers. The original image, used to promote the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, advertised a Filipino ‘human zoo’. The pictured figures are folded on each other and obscured from view, an act that simultaneously calls attention to the violence of the initial display while foreclosing contemporary access to the dancers’ faces and bodies. In Miljohn Ruperto’s Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper (2006–10), the artist collages clips from

Gloria Wong, Ngan, 2020, archival pigment print. Courtesy the artist

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films that featured the eponymous midcentury Filipino American actress, blurring out any other figures in the frames. Cooper’s ‘appearances’ are brief – she twirls in a dance hall, recites a line to a scene partner. Both Syjuco and Ruperto emphasise the marginalisation of their Asian-American forebears, offering ways to negotiate this history without recreating its harm. The documentary photography by Asian Americans casts a light on diasporic community, homing in on twentieth-century negotiations of the medium. In one astonishing print produced by 1920s San Francisco-based May’s Photo Studio, a composite portrait includes

family members located in both China and America, collaged together in a single scene. One man, clothed in a black blazer and tie, sits next to a young boy who wears a Chinese tangzhuang, or Tang suit. Michael Jang’s 1970s series The Jangs explores the cultural milieu of Chinese-American life via images of the artist’s family: Study Hall (1973) shows a group of children browsing a range of popular print media, from Archie comics to mad magazine. Here, American cultural products obscure – both literally and figuratively – the individual faces of Jang’s family members. In these photographs, immigrant communities develop singular relationships to mass media, forming an artistic space that encapsulates the Asian American household. An equal investment in fatigue and death matches the occasionally lighthearted tone of the exhibition’s domestic portraiture. Patty

Chang’s Que Sera Sera/Invocations (2013–14), a two-channel video installation, shows the artist holding her baby while singing to her father in hospice care. Another screen reveals an iPad, which Chang’s mother scrolls through while reading a series of unusual prayers: “invocation of vocal cord paralysis” follows an “invocation of artificial respiration”. Opposite Chang’s film, Reagan Louie’s photographs are especially resonant: in Cousin, Wing Wor, China (1983), a vivid colour print depicts a man lying on a couch. The accompanying photograph, Jiao, Shenzen, China (1980), presents the artist’s best friend, Jiao, in a similar pose, on a bed with his eyes closed. Chang and Louie’s works capture moments of exhaustion that converse with the exhibition’s focus on violence and displacement. This penetrating look at media and identity investigates the ramifications of oppression in

the Asian American community, a heritage embedded in the museum itself. Indeed, there is an elephant in the room – or just off the lobby, where two permanent exhibitions laud Leland Stanford Sr’s family history. Stanford, the university and museum’s founder, oversaw the construction of the American transcontinental railroad, a project that depended on the underpaid labour of roughly 15,000 Chinese Americans, an estimated 1,200 of whom died due to hazardous working conditions. In an age of institutional apologia, At Home/On Stage feels both refreshing, in its particular focus on artwork by Asian Americans, and circumspect, unable to acknowledge Stanford’s exploitative practices. As I left the museum, I thought of one of Chang’s incantations, an “invocation of bureaucratic waste”. The artists included here challenge Stanford’s legacy, even if the institution does not. Claudia Ross

Michael Jang, Monroe and Cynthia Watching tv, 1973, gelatin silver print on fibre-based paper. Courtesy the artist

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Gene Beery Portrait of the Artist as a Spandex Tuxedo Lily van der Stokker What is it Parker Gallery, Los Angeles 18 September – 29 October Sidelining for the moment the magnetic force between these two shows, installed on different floors in a wonderful house in Los Feliz at the base of Griffith Park, anyone who has been paying attention to Parker’s programme of thoughtfully juxtaposed exhibitions might still have been surprised by a condensed survey of the work of Gene Beery. He has been hiding in plain sight ever since his years in New York during the late 1950s and early 1960s (where he was championed by Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst), ending up in the Gold Rush town of Sutter Creek, California. As Lucy Lippard

suggests in her new essay accompanying the exhibition, Dada might be the one movement he belongs to after the fact, apart from the ones he has ‘stalked and evaded over the years (expressionism, conceptualism, pop, folk)’. The earliest works here are dated ‘1960s’, a manner of identification that continues as the show reaches the ‘2010s’ – a sort of sly, spread-the-credit-and-the-blame methodology that anchors Beery’s entire enterprise, and which has everything to do with his ability to creep up on those movements mentioned above without getting caught.

Gene Beery, Fishing Trip, 1960s, acrylic on canvas, 61 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles

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His key format, existing across the inspired variety of his work, is a small white canvas with scrawled black text in acrylic: starting with Fishing Trip (1960s), running through numerous works (predominantly from the ‘2000s’ and filling the show’s second room) and ending with Actual Size (2021), ten small canvases installed in two vertical rows and hung in the stairwell leading up to Lily van der Stokker’s show. Fishing Trip’s single canvas reads like a list one might put on the studio door to remind oneself of what to take when you’re going to escape (‘intinearay [sic], rod

& reel, food, car’), and Actual Size repeats the punchline of its text on all ten panels, adding a literal ‘bang’ to the last one. Away from these works it could seem unfathomable that such a simple procedure could span decades; standing with them, you think: how could it have been any other way? (I’m tempted to invoke On Kawara.) Other paintings incorporating colour and imagery reinforce Beery’s pictorial agility: for example, A Nice Triptych to Remind Us All of Our Mortality (1973), installed below a window overlooking the front yard so that we take it in not unlike an altar-shaped grave marker planted in the ground of the floor. Its panels are painted the colour of stones, its title is its epitaph, and it’s critical that it’s nice about reminding us of death’s inevitability. Van der Stokker has had mastery over her version of ‘nice’ from the beginning of her work; for all the apparent differences between

their approaches, she’s not so unlike Beery. Represented here by a small selection, her work holds its own, and then some. Flanked by five small coloured-pencil designs for her signature wall paintings, the wall painting is called How About This (1996–2002). Ostensibly organised as a rectangular ‘frame’ around and over which bulbous oval painted shapes are attached while somehow remaining floating (the cartoonlike ‘motion lines’ around the perimeter of the entire wall work support this effect), the overall structure gives it the look of a playful yet totally productive organic machine (I’m channelling Duchamp’s ‘malic moulds’ here). Its candy-coloured linearity and shape-making, meanwhile, generate an art deco-y shelf in the upper right corner where part of the phrase of its title perches. Van der Stokker is one of only a few contemporary artists – John Wesley is another –

capable of creating magic with colour, hues that can be vibrant and subdued all at once. The mystery of this contributes to the complex attitude of her work, a way of being that challenges cuteness without undercutting it, all the while reminding us that using the term ‘decorative’ as a pejorative may be a defence mechanism against the open-ended staying power it can have. Van der Stokker and Beery both have utterly recognisable hands in the words and phrases they incorporate into their compositions, and these ‘looks’ extend to the hand that guides everything else in their work. To be clear, this doesn’t have much of anything to do with touch; instead, it’s the hand as a transmitter of thinking, particularly when the thinking is as simultaneously playful and nuanced as it is in the work of these artists. Terry R. Myers

Lily van der Stokker, How About This, 1996–2022, acrylic paint on wall, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles

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Flanagan’s Wake Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles 10 September – 5 November ‘Flanagan’s Wake’ was the title of a 1996 eulogy in Artforum by Dennis Cooper to his friend the poet and performance artist Bob Flanagan, who had just died of cystic fibrosis. Cooper tells how they met during the late 1970s at Los Angeles’s Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center; early on, Flanagan stuck to ‘gentle, Charles Bukowski– influenced poetry’, wrote Cooper, but his predilection for sadomasochistic kink soon infiltrated his work. After he fell in love with Sheree Rose, a photographer, performance artist and dominatrix, he became notorious for his provocative performances, usually in collaboration with Rose. For their collaboration Nailed (1989), Flanagan nailed his penis and scrotum to a board while singing If I Had a Hammer. Sabrina Tarasoff, the writer and critic who curated the exhibition Flanagan’s Wake, has nailed her own colours to the mast of Beyond Baroque’s history. (The institution still operates, though without the same cachet that it cultivated during the 1970s and 80s.) For Made in la 2020 (2021), Tarasoff built a hair-raising hauntedhouse installation filled with material related to Beyond Baroque, including an nsfw section on Flanagan and Rose. At Kristina Kite, a more lyrical and sentimental tribute to Flanagan’s legacy unfolds, including only one artwork attributed to him – a collaboration with Rose and his friend Mike Kelley – appropriately sequestered in the back room. (That video, 100 Reasons, 1991, documents Flanagan’s bare arse turning incrementally redder as it is spanked by Rose, while Kelley

reads out a hundred suggested names for a paddle.) The primary conceit of the exhibition is that we are encountering the aftermath of a party: at once a postfuneral wake, a bdsm orgy and a metaphor for a wildly generative and uninhibited life now extinguished. The gallery (once a bank), with its chequered black and white floor, sometimes feels less like an art space than a vacant venue, opportunistically squatted. Everywhere loll the cast resin and latex balloons of Michael Queenland’s Black Balloon Group (2018), mordantly floorbound. Amy O’Neill’s Post Prom Dance Floor Version Two (In Memory of Bob Flanagan) (1999/2022) takes centre stage, both figuratively and actually: a low square podium is flanked by coloured stage lights and strewn with streamers, a balloon and confetti, irregularly hand-shredded so that it appears as the debris of some terrible explosion. Her work overlaps, almost uncomfortably, with George Stoll’s sculptures, which are indistinguishable from desultory scraps of tinsel taped to the wall or hanging streamers turning in the breeze. So self-effacing they almost disappear, Stoll’s interventions are in fact lovingly handcrafted from Mylar, aluminium foil and painted brass. Hyperrealistic mimetic handicraft continues with Robert Gober’s Heart in a Box (2014–15), a cast glass heart packaged in an astonishing simulacrum of an Amazon box made from painted aluminium, and Julie Becker’s photographs of the corners of tawdry interiors that may or may not be studio reconstructions. But where these works collectively take flight

is in their conversation with Nayland Blake’s bondage restraints, which literalise structural codes (social, aesthetic, art-historical) through artworks that are, as with these other pieces, nontraditional craft objects. Pink Posture (2019) is a steel ‘spreader bar’ with pink leather cuffs at each end; Single Restraint (1990) is a wall-mounted triangle of canvas with buckles that turn it into a kind of straitjacket. Of all the artists in the show, Blake gets closest to the ethic of self-control and restraint (not constraint, the word I at first reached for) in Flanagan’s work, touching also on the ecstatic freedoms it could unleash. Kelley, incarnated here as a kind of patron saint of the scene – his series of printed banners Pansy Metal/ Clovered Hoof (1989/2022) hanging high over the room – understood this duality too. It took me a while to come around to the inclusion here of Becker’s video installation Suburban Legend (1999), in which she projects The Wizard of Oz (1939) overdubbed (intrusively) by Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). In a photocopied handout, Becker recounts the longstanding rumour that the psych-rock concept album functions as an alternative soundtrack to the movie, replete with uncanny coincidence. She admits to getting bored after the first hour, but highlights some good bits anyway. Suburban Legend, like Blake’s restraints, like this exhibition, involves two (or more) things shackled together. I’m not sure if Flanagan’s Wake led me to deeper insights into Flanagan’s work, but it certainly added to my understanding of work by another diverse group of artists. Which is quite a legacy. Jonathan Griffin

Amy O’Neill, Post Prom Dance Floor, 1999 / 2022, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles

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Robert Gober, Heart in a Box, 2014–15, corrugated aluminium, paper, paint, ink, plaster, cotton thread, plastic, cast glass, 16 × 33 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles

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Afterimage maxxi – L’Aquila 2 July – 19 February Shapes that remain in the visual field after intense light hits, or as the result of contemplating an image too long: these optical illusions ostensibly give Afterimage its title, but this 26-artist group show – held at the recently opened branch of Rome’s maxxi museum in the Abruzzo region – isn’t centred on the visual per se. ‘Afterimage’, here, refers to a trace of an event that persists enough to trigger an emotional coda, settle a memory or give time to rationalise. An afterimage is also an alienating moment of superimposition between a memory momentarily imprinted in the retina and the surrounding reality. The balance

between an event’s strength, persistence and transience allows this exhibition to call into question, indirectly, the recent history of the city of L’Aquila, the region’s capital hit by a tragic earthquake in 2009 – a terrible wound followed by a tiring and not yet completed period of social, economic and urban reconstruction. The restored palace that houses the museum, Palazzo Ardinghelli, is a notable example of the local late baroque, sitting on previous Renaissance constructions lost in a previous earthquake in 1703, though the exhibition’s curators, Bartolomeo

Pietromarchi and Alessandro Rabottini, avoid turning this echo into a ‘theme’ to burden the multiple suggestions elicited by the concept in the works. In extracts from Ana Miletić’s Materials series (2015–), for example, the show’s theme of transformative resilience takes the form of handwoven textiles based on photographed acts of repair in urban space (roofing, fencing, wrapping) taken in Zagreb and Sisak after earthquakes that occurred in 2020; Benni Bosetto transfers memories from collective history in the installation Saturniidae (2022) – large iron necklaces hanging from the walls that refers to a craft tradition of producing

Afterimage, 2022 (installation view, featuring photographs by Thomas Demand). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist / vg Bild-Kunst / siae 2022

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auspicious toy amulets for infants; Stefano Arienti has transformed photographs of the surrounding mountain landscape into tapestry through a digital process that destroys the original image to give it a second life; Thomas Demand, in a permutation of his long-running Model Studies series (2011–), focuses on the paper patterns the late French-Tunisian fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa used to construct his influential garments and pushes the archival material toward a seductive geometric abstraction. In other cases, the overlap between past and present is conveyed through practices that cross historically distinct technologies of representation (such as Frida Orupabo’s representations of bodies collaged from colonial image archives, or Mario Schifano’s ‘Inventario (Inventory)’ series from the early

1970s, in which he transposed television images onto photosensitive emulsion on canvas, adding details with enamel paint). But Afterimage is not a nostalgic show – the state of constant change is invoked as an instrument producing the present and the future: as with the carousel of mutated creatures inside iPads in Massimo Grimaldi’s Scarecrows (2021–22), or in the hybrid figures captured in the process of remixing in Pietro Roccasalva’s The Skeleton Key ii (2007) and Marisa Merz’s Untitled (2009–10). Or, more openly, He Xiangyu’s Asian Boy (2019–20) a pensive, underdressed and hunched sculpture that, in context, suggests the titular youth facing, alone, untold futures and possibilities. Afterimage resonates with meditations central to the histories of art: the technologies of representation (photography, audio

recording) that have often served as a challenge to the passage of memory and time; the role of the modern(ist) artist in dialoguing with, distilling and analysing – more or less critically – what surrounds them (as in the words of Charles Baudelaire: ‘Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent; it is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable’); and the long-debated status of the museum as an institution that determines what enters a stable ‘history’. It’s tempting to imagine one Latin-speaking poet as the (occult) inspiration of the exhibition: Ovid, born less than 40 miles from L’Aquila, who, in his major work The Metamorphoses (8 ad), handed down and renewed many classical myths, influencing future generations, infecting them with awe and wonder, and making transformation itself his protagonist. Francesco Tenaglia

Massimo Grimaldi, Scarecow, 2021, slideshow on 12.9" Apple iPad Pro. Courtesy Fondazione maxxi, Rome

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Books The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art by Gregory Sholette Lund Humphries, £29 (hardcover)

Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism by Alexander Adams Societas, £14.95 (softcover) The us-based art activist and writer Gregory Sholette opens his new book with the observation that ‘the prevailing desire by artists to transform their practices into a form of highly focused protest is the most prominent – and in many ways the most perplexing – constituent of contemporary art today’. Tracing the emergence of art-as-activism to the political radicalism of the late 1960s – when artists across the western hemisphere began to challenge both orthodox politics and the dominant models of artistic practice – Sholette sees the current explosion of art-activism as the final, if somewhat ironic, realisation of the unrealised project of the twentieth century avant-garde; ironic, because ‘the avant-garde, in conjunction with neoliberal capitalism, has at long last brought about the merging of art into life’. It’s an interesting conclusion for a book that is otherwise enthusiastically committed to the relentless advance of art-as-activism-as-art: The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art is staged in punchy historical summaries of key movements and moments, from the Situationists’ influence on the events of May 1968 through the turn from conceptualism to feminist, Black radical and leftwing projects during the 70s, to the interventionism of collectives such as New York’s Group Material and the ‘culture jamming’ and ‘tactical media’ approaches of art groups during the 90s. As Sholette notes, the forms of art-activism that emerged from the 80s onwards ‘were focused less on seeking broad political transformation or establishing a progressive alternative counterculture, than on targeting highly specific social issues’. Today, of course, it’s impossible to miss how the earlier boundary between activism and art has blurred. While earlier artists took their skills and energies into, say, political activism or direct social action, or protested against the privileged and exclusionary nature of the gallery and museum, now those distinctions – between aesthetic and political worlds – have become porous. This, Sholette argues, is because of ‘the full-on aestheticization of the social itself’, by which he

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means the way that capitalism has invaded and ‘aestheticized’ every part of social reality as the final realisation of the ‘society of the spectacle’ of which the Situationists had earlier warned. Sholette’s argument tries to explain how it is that artists now make art about political and social issues as if they were activist campaigns, yet at the same time protest and denounce the institutions in which they show. He remarks on what makes the new blm- and decolonisation-inspired protest groups of recent years different to the art activists of the 1960s and 70s: ‘the leading edge of the new wave of institutional critique’, Sholette notes, ‘is far less interested in reforming high culture than in calling for its abolition’. The ambiguities of demanding that ‘high culture’ be abolished while its institutions remain, and in effect get taken over by progressive artists-as-activists, is a problem that Sholette doesn’t address, since he doesn’t really see it as a problem. The more conservative British critic and commentator Alexander Adams definitely does, taking a profoundly critical view of what he terms ‘artivism’, the contemporary nexus of ‘fine art that is intended to effect political/social change’; and ‘political action that is described as fine art’. Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism is a caustic polemic against what Adams identifies as the political-utilitarian turn in art during the last decades, which, unlike Sholette, he sees as incorporating activist art into a state-led takeover of culture that serves the outlook of the global ‘managerial elite’ – interests that in fact are largely shared, Adams argues, by many artists and functionaries of the artworld. ‘It does not occur to an artivist’, Adams notes ironically, ‘that the institutions she rails against are filled with individuals who believe as she does. It does not seem strange to her that such huge entrenched forces of patriarchy and capitalism seem unable to resist a guerrilla movement of the oppressed and that concessions come regularly… and lavishly funded’. Adams is certainly not against political content in art, nor ‘artivism’ as such; Artivism surveys the long history of artists aligning

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with political causes – from the painters of the French Revolution, the Surrealists’ alignment with communism, and the Chicano, Feminist and Black art movements of the 70s – while he treats with respect the courage of an artist such as Claude Cahun, who (with Suzanne Malherbe) ran the gauntlet of Nazi occupation, deploying forms of artivism as anti-Nazi subversion. But in Adams’s artistic conservatism, the problem is not so much activity whose goals are primarily about changing social attitudes or using culture therapeutically, but that the shifting priorities of cultural policymakers and administrators have allowed this to take place in the spaces of, and with the resources supposedly committed to, art. You don’t have to agree with Adams’ defence of ‘traditional values’ (artistic or social) to take the point that a certain kind of progressive politics tends now to dominate contemporary art programmes. Nor does one have to agree that art (state-funded or otherwise) should reflect the tastes of the majority. But Adams’s wider point, that publicly funded culture should at least reflect the plurality of perspectives and opinions that exist in society, needs addressing when an art culture is becoming increasingly orthodox, even if this is a supposedly liberal, ‘progressive’ orthodoxy. Adams does flirt with reversing the same instrumentalism (‘there has never been a piece of publicly-sponsored artivism that encouraged viewers to be less anxious about the environment… or celebrated traditional marriage’) and bunkers down for majoritarian ‘traditional’ values, which ends up sounding like a rightwing version of the ‘leftist’ identity politics he scolds. But therein lies the problem for both writers: Sholette celebrates the Occupy protesters and their slogan ‘we are the 99%’, but then panics about the rise of ‘populism’. Clearly artivism, or art-as-activism, has a significant problem today: over how it relates to mainstream audiences who may not share its values; to its patrons in the new ruling elite who do; and, finally, to the fate of artistic freedom at an increasingly illiberal and polarised moment in history. J.J. Charlesworth

November 2022

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Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan Cannongate Books, £20 (hardcover) In 2020, during the first weeks of the covid-19 lockdown, journalist Seán O’Hagan spoke regularly on the phone with Australian singersongwriter Nick Cave. The pair had known each other for over 30 years professionally, but as the pandemic deepened O’Hagan found their chats becoming more ‘open and illuminating’. An idea for a book hatched, inspired by the long-form interviews pioneered by the Paris Review, ‘revealingly intimate’ discussions ‘exploring the impulse to write’. And so, from August 2020, their interviews over the course of the following year formed the basis of this extraordinary, intensely personal book. At first, the notion of ‘a conversation’, as the book bills itself, seems disingenuous – by the nature of the project the majority of the words on the page must be Cave’s. But as the book unfolds, and Cave begins to ask O’Hagan his opinion on work in progress (the recent Carnage album), a conversation does indeed evolve. Cave, who claims to hate interviews, opens up about ‘creativity, collaboration, belief, doubt, loss, grief, reinvention… the endurance of hope and love in the face of death and despair’: big, serious – even unfashionable – subjects that he discusses with eloquence and humility. We warm to his voice: compelling, lucid, entirely devoid of self-pity, fiercely intelligent. On his reason to make art, and its beneficent value

to his audience, he submits: ‘The work I do is entirely relational, actually transactional, and has no real validity unless it is animated by others.’ This synergy is necessary for his creative process, too. On his collaboration with Warren Ellis for the Ghosteen (2019) album he writes, ‘we are trying to arrive at a formal song through the perilous process of improvisation.’ Elsewhere, Cave talks about his complex relationship with religion – ‘doubt becomes the energy of belief… It is the unreasonableness of the notion, its counterfactual aspect that makes the experience of belief compelling’ – and his early creative impulses. At art school in Melbourne during the 1970s Cave had set out to be a painter, but confrontational rock music took over. ‘The vitalising element in art is the one that baffles or challenges our outrages… As a young musician, I felt it was my sacred duty to offend.’ Later, Cave’s formal training is put to use in his songwriting: ‘I seem to experience the world visually, through stories and symbols and metaphors… And that is the way I write songs – as a series of highly visual images.’ There are flashes of wry humour, too. Cave describes his younger self as ‘an egomaniac with low self-esteem and a sex drive’, although forays into his past as the hellraising singer of The Birthday Party swiftly peter out – such stories belonging in a rockstar memoir, and Faith, Hope

and Carnage transcends such a tired genre. This is largely because the overarching subject of the book is the death of Cave’s teenage son, Arthur, in 2015, and the ensuing maelstrom of grief he and his family experienced. ‘It felt like our lives had been poured down a fucking hole’. Cave describes feeling in ‘a place of acute disorder’; throwing himself into work recording the album Skeleton Tree (2016), while admitting ‘I didn’t know what I was doing’. At times, it’s almost unbearable for the reader to be close to such visceral, private grief. This, though, is one Cave’s themes – people don’t discuss grief, they find it uncomfortable or impossible; words prove to be inadequate tools for the job. Through O’Hagan’s sensitive questioning, Faith, Hope and Carnage is one of the most powerful and affecting meditations on grief and loss published in recent years, alongside books like Nick Blackburn’s The Reactor (2022). Cave’s ongoing recovery, which has seen him turn to making a series of ceramic figurines depicting the life of the devil, has resulted in a benevolent, life-affirming worldview. He concludes that we must extend ‘a quiet but urgent love for those who remain, a tenderness to all of humanity, as well as an earned understanding that our time is finite’, a sentiment that the reader, having followed Cave’s arduous journey, will find hard to dispute. James Cook

Tove Jansson by Paul Gravett Thames & Hudson, £19.99 (hardcover) At age seven, inspired by a sculptor father and a graphic-designer mother, and moved by the urge to get her work out there, Tove Jansson set up the ‘Tove Publishing Co’ to sell her illustrated stories to classmates in Helsinki. This anecdote, recounted in Paul Gravett’s informative – if rather bland – survey of the Moomins creator’s work, sets the tone for the rest of her extraordinarily prolific career: as an illustrator and author behind the globally famous family of cute hippolike creatures, but also as a painter, graphic designer, costume and set designer for the theatre, and author of short stories and novels. Focusing on Jansson’s graphic universe, the book is filled with images of her work from early on: the cartoons and illustrated children’s stories she got published during her teenage years;

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paintings produced while attending art school (her dreams of becoming a painter were set aside after a critic dismissed her work as ‘illustrative’); the daring political covers she started creating for the satirical Finnish magazine Garm. But much of the book revolves around the Moomins, Jansson’s life project, from their genesis as a 1930s graffiti on the wall of the family house to a fully fledged world, that outlives Jansson (she died in 2001) in both its original print forms (seven illustrated novels, later reworked into picture books and comic strips for the uk’s Daily Mail) and its many adaptations (to the screen, theatre and opera, into 3d models, bespoke museums and infinite paraphernalia). Throughout, Gravett picks up on some of the revolutionary aspects of Jansson’s storytelling

ArtReview

(challenging gender clichés, for instance), creating parallels with her own nonnormative lifestyle (Jansson lived with women most of her life, referring to her homosexuality in code as the ‘spook side’). What feels missing from this account however is a bit of critical engagement with Jansson’s work: what exactly makes the little Finnish creatures so appealing, their illustrations poetic or unique, is for the reader to know or figure out. Perhaps what this book does best is revive the urge to (re)turn to the books and, as Jansson herself admitted while writing the first Moomins book during wartime, creep back ‘into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign’. After all, fantasy is never as appealing as in times of crisis. Louise Darblay

Crisis as Form by Peter Osborne Verso, £19.99 (softcover) Crisis as Form continues philosopher Peter Osborne’s attempt to construct a critical concept of contemporary art. This project was begun in 2013 with Anywhere or Not at All and elaborated in The Postconceptual Condition (2018). Osborne’s idea is that ‘the contemporary’ articulates a new experience of time, as the coexistence of different times in a ‘disjunctive conjuncture’: this is the time of an increasingly globalised society, in which different social and historical times meet in the messy nonunity of the present. Contemporary art is the art that corresponds to this situation. Osborne previously argued that contemporary art is conditioned by the legacy of conceptualism, the implication being that the barrier between art and nonart breaks down. Here the emphasis is on contemporary art’s ontology (what it most fundamentally is). Osborne argues for ‘the constitutive function of time in the artistic ontology of works’. Artworks are not just conditioned by the period in which they are made, they are retroactively transformed when activated in new contexts. Osborne illustrates this with a photo he took of a work by Juan Enrique Bedoya, itself a photo of Ed Ruscha’s 1962 painting of the word ‘oof’. Osborne explains that his photo contains nine ‘layers’ – references to various artworks and localities, to himself, to the symposium at which he presented his ideas, and so on. The claim is

that Ruscha’s painting is transformed by subsequent engagements with it. This isn’t so different from the idea (once widely held) that artworks are ‘completed’ by the act of criticism, but Osborne makes the argument at the level of ontology, not meaning, implying that once upon a time this wasn’t the case. It is, in other words, specific to contemporary art. Whether this is plausible or not (Osborne takes the idea that ‘art is what it has become’ from Adorno, a thinker who predates ‘the contemporary’), the deeper claim is that works of contemporary art refract the experience of time that Osborne associates with ‘the contemporary’. All those ‘layers’ in Osborne’s photo of a photo of a painting are ‘temporalities’ that the artwork (here a snapshot) brings together in ‘disjunctive conjuncture’. But what makes contemporary art’s relation to ‘the contemporary’ more than symptomatic? The answer appears to lie in the concepts embedded in the title: ‘crisis’ and ‘form’. If Osborne had previously defined ‘the contemporary’ as an effect of globalisation, he now conceives of it as a time in which crisis becomes permanent. ‘This destroys the subjective core of the concept of crisis’, since crisis no longer ‘registers a moment of decision within a process of transition’. In other words, we no longer experience crises as opportunities to change the world. This results in the contemporary political situation:

‘anti-capitalism without a post-capitalist imaginary – a series of received abstract ideas (freedom, equality, communism) severed from their historical meanings’. The suggestion is that contemporary art gives form to the ‘crisis of crisis’, thus raising it to critical consciousness. But the case studies develop this idea only tentatively. Generally, Osborne is more interested in the nature of art as such than its contemporaneity. The works he discusses – by Matias Faldbakken, Luis Camnitzer, Cady Noland and Marcel Duchamp – span nearly a century. The resonances between these works are found at the highest level of abstraction (their ‘ontology’), not the experience of contemporaneity. In short, the specificity and social significance of contemporary art are lost in Osborne’s analyses. It is at times difficult to find a guiding thread in Crisis as Form. Concepts elaborated in previous works undergo subtle shifts of meaning; ‘the contemporary’ is periodised ever differently; artistic form, which Osborne had previously claimed was irrelevant to contemporary art, makes a comeback; the book’s central concept – ‘historical ontology’ – is ‘without a sustained theoretical development’, Osborne admits. This is not ‘tantalizing’, as he coyly suggests, but sloppy and irritating. Osborne’s wide-ranging project demands a systematic exposition. Crisis as Form fails to provide it. J.A. Koster

Yunizar: New Perspectives Gajah Gallery, sg$200 (hardcover) This catalogue is an extensive analysis of the Indonesian artist Yunizar’s playful, nonconformist 25-year oeuvre. Featuring an interview with Yunizar and essays by Aminudin T.H. Siregar, T.K. Sabapathy and Ahmad Mashadi, it also contains over 100 images of his paintings and sculptures. Siregar’s intimate dive into Yunizar’s background, education and early influences illuminates the artist’s practice and preoccupations, particularly his rejection of the kind of sociopolitical art that dominated the postSuharto reform era, which led to his paintings being criticised as ‘anti-meaning’ or art for art’s sake. The manifesto-less collective Kelompok Seni Rupa Jendela (‘Jendela’), of which Yunizar is cofounder and member,

is a pivotal influence on his work; Siregar likens Jendela to a ‘jazz group’ jamming. Sabapathy’s focus on Yunizar’s arresting bronze sculptures offers a further line of inquiry. Though Yunizar’s sculptural foray is formally credited to the Yogya Art Lab, founded by himself and Gajah Gallery, in fact it was presaged by his participation in a large exhibition in 2011, which catapulted him into the company of reputable Indonesian artists working in threedimensions. The crossover between his paintings and sculptures is fascinating, and in his Garuda works (2014–16) the kinship emerges as subconscious commentary on the relationship between object and symbol, despite his disavowal of connotations to the Indonesian national emblem of the Garuda Pancasila.

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Siregar’s essay casts light on ‘purity of feeling’ as the impetus driving Yunizar’s paintings, while the inclusion of Mashadi’s previously published text adds less insight. Mashadi’s conclusion that Yunizar and Jendela’s oeuvres remain open to interpretative contextualisation reads as noncommittal, raising again the charge that the ‘crude’ or childlike nature of Yunizar’s paintings is self-indulgent. Also touched on, but deserving of more investigation, is the Minang artistic tradition of scribbles and words, and Yunizar’s works that continuously plumb this influence from, as Siregar describes, a ‘mental state of the alienated’. As much as this publication elevates the importance of Yunizar’s oeuvre, it also suggests exciting possibilities of further study. Elaine Chiew

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Art credit

Text credits

on the cover Sin Wai Kin, The Story Cycle (still), 2022, video, 17 min 7 sec. Courtesy the artist

Words on the spine and on pages 27, 47 and 89 are from A-ha, Take On Me, 1984, by Magne Furuholmen / Morten Harket /Pal Waaktaar. © Sony / atv Music Publishing llc

November 2022

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takeaway Social engagements are socially engaged

You know, when we discovered that our great grandfather had made his fortune supplying toothpaste to the Nazis, it came as a great, great shock to our family. A historical trauma. All those white teeth, you see, it was almost like a metaphor for purity. So that is when I decided that I must do something which would erase this stain. Erase the whiteness, if you like. If that is possible. So that is when I decided to start collecting – this was in the mid 1990s, and art was very cheap. However, as I am always saying to my husband, collecting is a practice, social engagement is a practice – I need time and space for my practice. So we asked Amira if she wouldn’t mind extending her hours. She used to start at 7am – she’s such a delight! – she comes in at 5am now to get the kids ready and run the baths. With that extra time, I started to socially engage with a very many like-minded folk for weekly sunrise breakfasts and meeting once a month for a delightful family supper. Amira positively embraced the late nights, always hovering while my colleagues and I discussed the latest Hauser & Wirth or our trip to Paramaribo Triennial. At 3am she’d inevitably bring out a tiramisu to calm our nerves after a particularly fraught discussion on ecologically-responsible textiles, or what to wear for the opening of Paris Internationale, or whether Muslims should be allowed to run Documenta again. Klaus said that my little meetings were something of a salon (which confused me as I had been there the day before – the new stylist Alessandro works the most gorgeous balayage!), and that the natural thing would be to invite artists to present their work to us. Sandie offered to invite Eloise Gore, a very talented site-specific painter who had installed a mural in her dining room. Sandie told me how she wasn’t allowed any input into what was painted, after Eloise had

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explained that if she was serious about her practice she just needed to transfer £30k and be out one afternoon. (Eloise refuses to have the client around while she works, because she is making a statement about class inequality, Sandie says. I told her to check if the jewellery is still in the safe…) Eloise had said she wished to make a commentary on the plight of the Spix’s macaw. Well, after Sandie passed round photos on her iPad, I was spitting feathers in jealousy: across the wonderful walls of her West Hampstead home Eloise had illustrated a positively beautiful bright bird emitting a speech bubble aimed evidently at the Climate Emergency. ‘Fuck off stupid rich fuck face prick nonce’ the bird squawked. This is wonderfully challenging. Instead, however, we settled on a collective. I loved Eloise but maybe she’s a little too white. And I think collectives are so important. It was Klaus who thought of them. Four weeks later six representatives from the idf came round, a wonderful group from the Middle East engaged in social practice to do with housing and identity. They showed us some incredible videos of their work, though I forget now where they had been exhibited. Some museum, probably. It was obviously very important art though because the videos were all grainy and they accompanied them with maps and gave a great performance lecture concerning the history of their region. Then they encouraged us to make donations to help with their practice which we were obviously very happy to do. They told me £100k should be enough to finance the multimedia technology needed for their next project – drone swarms, long-range cameras – all incredibly exciting stuff ! The whole night was a terrific success, only mired by the fact that halfway through idf’s performance, with a funny look on her face, Amira dropped the baklava. I hope she’s not pregnant.

26–29.01.2023

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