Losing its id in the heart of the cosmos since 1949
Jeffrey Gibson
Noam Chomsky on David Graeber ruangrupa on documenta
Mendes Wood DM São Paulo Kasper Bosmans, Creatures, 27/08 – 05/11 2022 Paula Siebra, Noites de Cetim, 27/08 – 05/11 2022
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Robert Longo, Untitled (After Mitchell; Bleu, bleu, le ciel bleu, 1961), detail, 2022 Charcoal on mounted paper © Robert Longo / ARS New York, 2022
ROBERT LONGO The New Beyond Paris Marais October—December 2022
Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Dance at Molenbeek (year unknown) Design: NODE Berlin Oslo
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ArtReview vol 74 no 7 October 2022
Queens In case you missed it, the (British) queen just died. In the past, ArtReview, which reported (in the name of art) on the coronation (and its potential effects on the uk artworld) and on the 1977 Jubilee, would probably have shut its offices for a week. The same week during which, in the uk, many of art’s (social) events were cancelled as a mark of respect. ArtReview didn’t do that. So, what’s changed? For a start, ArtReview has broadly republican views. The natural product of a concern with issues of fairness, opportunity and equality. (Although no critic ever judges everything equally, so they’re exempt; a special case.) But more importantly, in its attempts over the past few decades to report on, and, it rather modestly thinks, contribute to the pluralistic discourse that should be (but is not… yet) the bedrock on which any notion of a ‘global’ artworld is based, it’s no longer exclusively shaped by a uk point of view. Naturally it’s a bit sceptical about the very notion of a global artworld too – different contexts will lead to different outcomes, based on different ways of viewing the world, different access to resources and different ideas as to what constitutes art. Read, for example, in this issue,
Global Seoul
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ruangrupa’s account of the process behind the development of documenta fifteen and Noam Chomsky’s examination of the late, great David Graeber’s legacy. But when it comes to conflicting ideas of the global and ArtReview’s relationship to them, hypocrisy is often the true bedrock on which the ‘global’ artworld is founded. And ArtReview has always reported on what it sees. Or something like that. That’s where differences of opinion (also a bedrock for art) come in. Perhaps what ArtReview is really trying to say is that when it comes to art and art history today, the winding path trumps the straight one. Being a critic is about opinions, of course. But it is also about the ability to change them, when change is justified. Which is why ArtReview is proud of the fact that its pages, over the years, have contained contrasting viewpoints, contradictory views and the occasional piece of plain bonkersness. (It tries to keep a lid on that obviously, but sometimes it’s important to go all the way, to dive right in, to push the pedal to the metal and see where you end up.) This issue though is bonkersness-free. Although you’ll have to be the judge of that. God save the king! (Only joking!) ArtReview
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The Realm of Matters No. 16, 2022 (detail), acrylic and porcelain pieces from kilns of the Song Dynasty with glaze writing on canvas, 150 × 110 × 16 cm © Hong Hao
Hong Hao
New Works
Hong Kong
pacegallery.com
Art Observed The Interview Giulia Cenci by Ross Simonini 28 Hello, Darkness by Mariacarla Molè 38
Shifting Sands by Martin Herbert 41 Call and Response by Cat Kron 42
page 42 Nancy Holt, Up and Under, 1987–98. © Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by Artists Rights Society (ars), New York
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Art Featured
Jeffrey Gibson by Chris Fite-Wassilak 50
Ruangrupa Interview by J.J. Charlesworth & Mark Rappolt 74
Noam Chomsky on David Graeber Interview by Nika Dubrovsky 58
Sylvia Schedelbauer by Ren Scateni 82
Tyler Mitchell by Fi Churchman 66
The Future Will Be an Out of Body Experience by Venus Lau 88
page 82 Sylvia Schedelbauer, False Friends (still), 2007, digital video, 4 min 50 sec. Courtesy the artist
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261 Boulevard Raspail, 75014 Paris fondationcartier.com
Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Nyinyilki – Main Base, 2009. Private collection, Adelaide, Australia. © The Estate of Sally Gabori / Adagp, Paris, 2022. Photo © Simon Strong.
Great Australian Aboriginal painter
Art Reviewed
exhibitions & books 94 Aichi Triennale 2022, by Mark Rappolt The Dark Arts: Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism from the East and North, by Phoebe Blatton Bill Lynch, by John Quin Mary Kelly, by Claudia Ross Black Melancholia, by Owen Duffy Carolee Schneemann, by Tom Denman Marcus Coates, by Adam Hines-Green Splendid Isolation, by Pádraic E. Moore Ghislaine Leung, by Maddie Hampton Out of the Margins: Performance in London’s Institutions 1990s – 2010s, by Bryony White Mark van Yetter, by Martin Herbert Desmanchar, Desfaz (Disrupt, Dissolve), by Oliver Basciano Sarah Sze, by Ben Eastham
How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents), by Hettie Judah, reviewed by Adeline Chia Illuminations, by Alan Moore, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak Folk Music A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, by Greil Marcus, reviewed by Martin Herbert I Fear My Pain Interests You, by Stephanie LaCava, reviewed by David Terrien Best of Friends, by Kamila Shamsie, reviewed by Toby Lichtig Amy Sherald: The World We Make, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Death by Landscape, by Elvia Wilk, reviewed by Alice Bucknell Our Santiniketan, by Mahasweta Devi, reviewed by Mark Rappolt
page 94 Kate Cooper, Infection Drivers, 2018. Courtesy the artist (as seen at Aichi Triennale 2022)
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from the archive 122
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Art Observed
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Photo: Luis Do Rosario. Courtesy the artist
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ArtReview
The Interview by Ross Simonini
Giulia Cenci
“It’s about the freedom of imagining and it’s about everything which cannot be killed by contemporary society”
Giulia Cenci creates sculptural beings struggling into and out of life. Like feral beasts, they can be thin and sinewy. Like livestock, they can be plump, dismembered and displayed like taxidermy. More and more, Cenci places her creatures in silvery environments, in relationship to other pseudo-lifeforms, suspended in grids of cold metal. This work is clearly in conversation with other emerging sculptors and with climate activism, but Cenci is particularly mining ideas posed in the twentieth century, by Yves Tanguy, David Cronenberg, H.R. Giger and Lee Bontecou
– artists offered shockingly new speculations on technological life. Cenci’s imagination, she says, has been stimulated by science fiction, and her practice has been a parallel process of world-building. In her daily life, Cenci is fiercely independent, leaning towards the lifestyle of an off-the-grid doomsday prepper. She seems to have thrived in the pandemic, creating her most ambitious and widely seen installations yet, including dead dance (2021–22) at this year’s Venice Biennale, a 150-metre alley of hanging sculpture, inspired
October 2022
by agricultural equipment, and evoking the dread of an abattoir. Cenci is generally suspicious of urban culture, and she recently moved to the Italian countryside, where she is freeing herself of corporate food sources and industrial fabricators. On her farm, she has spent the last few years alternately living alone and opening her doors to a kind of intentional community. Along with these friends and coworkers, she is now at work on a summer camp, which will, among other things, teach people how to be sovereign.
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A Kind of Anarchy ross simonini Where are you now? giulia cenci I’m in the south of Tuscany in the countryside, stealing internet from a friend because I have no internet at home. rs And you grew up in that region, right? gc Yeah. I left when I was 15, and I went to a small city, Perugia, to study art. Then I went to Bologna for the fine art academy, and came back here after 15 years away. rs Is your studio still in an old slaughterhouse? gc Yes. It was a farm. My father moved here from the area of Milano in the 60s. His parents were intellectuals – the father a journalist and art critic, the mother an illustrator – so they had nothing to do with farming. But he decided to buy this piece of land, which was extremely cheap, and start a farm with animals and a plantation. I moved back here because, when I had to produce the work for the maxxi Bulgari Prize in 2020, I needed space. There was this stable, which was used for pigs and is quite big and very nice, and which had been empty for 20 years or so. So I decided to turn it into my temporary studio. There is also endless space outdoors. I can try anything. So I started my own foundry,
where I melt aluminium. I use old car parts and everything is extremely cheap and easy to do, especially for me, because I like to do things by myself. The plan was to be here for a few months, but then I was kind of stuck because of many situations, including covid. rs Are you alone out there these days? gc The studio and the foundry are mine, but I had many people working with me. If anyone wants to melt, like, a piece of aluminium, they can just come here. Eventually this turned into a place where everybody lives together. We started to garden and eat together and have our own chickens. We wanted to be independent, especially in 2021. We can just use the food which is around us, and the same goes for the aluminium. We don’t buy pure aluminium, only leftovers. But after a while, the work became a little bit more insane in terms of production. So I moved away. I took a small house on the mountain, while the studio is in the valley. rs How did you go about building this community? gc The nice thing was that, because of the pandemic, the universities were all online. So the cities were all empty. And then through Instagram and other socials, I started to look for people who were based around here. And it became like a school, because if you didn’t know how to weld, we would teach you. You become
View of the artist’s studio, Pietraia, 2020. Photo: Luis Do Rosario. Courtesy the artist
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ArtReview
quite independent in this sense, which I believe is nice. I personally really like to know how to do anything that is part of my process. And now we make everything at the place. We never ask third parties. rs Independence seems to be a crucial part of your life and work. gc Yeah, quite a lot. I mean, we live in a society which is trying to erase our own ability. We are overwhelmed by premade products, services and platforms which are telling us how to be, how to act, how our profile picture must be, or how incorrect our words or images can be. I believe that when you are isolated and able to do things yourself, you get a little bit of freedom, a kind of anarchy, which I think is quite necessary in these times.
Organised Nature rs The work has been expanding over the last few years. Your works lento-violento [2020] and the Venice piece are like sculptural communities, filled with many bodies and heads. Is this related to the communal way in which the work is being produced? gc Absolutely. Recently I started to realise that I grew up in a very rural environment, but rural in a sense where nature is manipulated by humans.
So it’s organised nature. I will never forget the first time I went to Milano by car and I saw buildings and I thought, ok, this is truly weird. And then I started to realise there is all this huge infrastructure around me, which is the city itself, with so many rules and constructions, which is gonna make my life somehow quite precise. And the cities are also full of this animal population, called pets, and all of a sudden, a piece of nature becomes another product. And then you got your dog, and this dog is just amazing because this is your own dog. But we’ve forgotten the wild side of our behaviour. And I started to wonder a lot about how to create kind of wild habitats, and how to make environments which are not so divided into animal, human and object. I wanted to build up, not just like an object, but an environment, because I felt so, uh, disconnected. We create a difference between a pet animal, which is precious and necessary, and an animal that can just be killed. And we do the same with humans. There are humans who are more important or powerful or even who have a different value. And all of that made me try to think about a new population where these kinds of hierarchies are not so strong. rs Do you dislike civilisation? gc I just hate the idea that everything can just be a product, an economical value. And if
it’s not sold, it’s trash. This makes me incredibly crazy somehow. rs There’s a human hierarchy imposed on the natural world that you seem to hint at in the work: plants are lower than animals, and minerals are less than life. But, of course, minerals are at the foundations of life – and your work. gc And what happens when you start bringing in things like plastic and things made by humans into that hierarchy? I really don’t understand the term ‘artificial’. I don’t get why the product of an animal is natural and the product of a human is unnatural. It’s really this attitude of bringing ourselves among all the rest. It’s imperialistic. Compared to us, minerals are inert. They appear still, but actually, if you look at them from an energetic point of view, something is moving inside, and this cannot be defined as stillness. And they also come from life. Plastic, too. What I always love to think about with plastic is that to make it we need oil, and oil is made by probably the oldest forest of this planet, which in thousands and thousands of billions of years became oil. So when I see a plastic bag moved by the wind, I have to think about a little piece of that forest. So I guess we need to rethink categories. This is also something which, to me, became quite clear from making sculpture. It’s always the same. We are all made of the same thing.
It’s incredible. And if we look at our home environment and ourselves from a very distant point of view, you see that this is even more evident. You can see it even by looking at the landscape. The plant doesn’t exist if there isn’t an insect. This is something that you learn at elementary school. Life is interdependent. rs Do you think about the longevity of your work in these terms? What will your objects become when nature swallows them back? gc I really like to think that at some point things will merge. But I also could never really work with bronze because for me it feels just too endless, you know? It’s so related to this idea of making a monument or making something which has to last forever. Time in the work is quite funny because we compare it to our own life. So if something is gonna last more than, like, 80 years, this is a long-term piece. But actually if you look at life on Earth, that’s nothing. Even plastic is turning into something else and is gonna be eaten and is already in our water system. So it’s all related to our own point of view, which for the planet is almost nothing. rs Right, a lot of the dialogues around climate change are about the ‘planet’ in an abstract sense, which I think confuses the idea for a lot of people. The real conversation is about humanity hurting itself.
View of the artist’s studio, Pietraia, 2020. Photo: Camilla Maria Santini. Courtesy the artist
October 2022
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dead dance (guardians) (detail), 2021–22, metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint (installation view, The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, La Biennale di Venezia and SpazioA, Pistoia
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dead dance (scalata), 2021–22, metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint (installation view, The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, La Biennale di Venezia and SpazioA, Pistoia
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lento-violento (ininterrottamente) (detail), 2020, metal, acrylcast, found objects, studio dust, marble dust, volcanic ash, ash from the artist’s stove, bone black, dimensions variable. Photo: Giorgio Benni. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, maxxi, Rome, and SpazioA, Pistoia
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gc Yeah, it’s like a suicide. I don’t think the planet is really gonna have a problem by turning into something else. Maybe we are gonna see the end of our own civilisation or the end of certain kinds of lives, but that doesn’t mean the planet is gonna die.
Pathetic and Beautiful rs Are you interested in using your work to evoke certain feelings about nature in people? gc I’m not sure that mine is a precise message. It’s not an answer to anything, nor a definition. For me, sometimes the feeling comes from behind your neck or in your belly. It’s about the freedom of imagining and about everything which cannot be killed by contemporary society. rs Is this the same kind of thing you’re looking for in other works of art? gc I like art that is capable of letting me travel and abandon my own life, to bring me to another habitat. If I think about my favourite movies – Tarkovsky’s Solaris or [Yorgos Lanthimos’s] The Lobster – those are all situations where I experience a new world in which rules are destroyed and new rules are made by the artists. rs Do you read much?
gc I love poetry. One of the most important books of my life has been The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot. It’s a book which is able to get so much material from others and put it together to create a new narration, which leaves you so open, and so able to put yourself in it. It’s so experimental for me. I also love science fiction. During covid I enjoyed The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London, a pretty amazing short book. He’s talking about the end of culture from a fever, and actually what happens in the book is that the people who are gonna survive this fever are the ones away from the cities, who didn’t go to school or didn’t really have a cultural life. So they’re all super wild people, and they’re gonna grow this new society where they don’t even believe that something like a university should exist. But then there is this old man who survived who was a teacher at university, and he’s trying to tell people about painting and philosophy. He is both pathetic and beautiful, and for me there is a character like this in many of my works. rs Your work is often described as apocalyptic and dystopic. How do you actually conceptualise a word like ‘apocalypse’ at this point? gc I think it’s something that refers to another period of human history, but not now.
I mean, I remember when the Twin Towers collapsed and I was watching television and I could see it in front of my eyes. I was twelve years old. And I called my mom and she couldn’t believe it, because she was like, “You cannot watch this on television. It’s fake,” and I was like, no, Mama, I think that’s real. It’s like everything is so present. And even when things are very bad, we are watching it from a screen. And this isn’t the apocalypse, because you cannot get at it as an event. rs Is your art ever politicised as a tool in the climatechange conversation? gc To be an artist is already quite political to me, because I really had to decide on it. There were no artists around when I was growing up and it was not something common at all. But I would have to go to church a lot with my parents, and when I saw paintings in church, these were the most meaningful experiences I’d ever had. It’s such a beautiful thing to me. You decide to make something that no one else is making. You try to add something to the human view. For me, this is political. If one of my works could do what those paintings did for me, that would be something. Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb
dead dance (maniatoia), 2021–22, metal, acrylic resin, fibreglass, quartz paint (installation view, The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale, 2022). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, La Biennale di Venezia and SpazioA, Pistoia
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19—23 OCTOBER 2022 19—23 OCTOBER 2022 PREVIEW: 18 OCTOBER PREVIEW: 18 OCTOBER
After 8 Books, Paris Agustina San Juan AfterFerreyra, 8 Books, Paris Amanda Wilkinson, London Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia Amanda Wilkinson, London Artbeat, Tbilisi APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia BQ, Berlin Artbeat, Tbilisi Bureau, New York BQ, Berlin Ciaccia Levi, Paris/Milan Bureau, New York Champ Lacombe, Biarritz Ciaccia Levi, Paris/Milan Chapter NY, New York Champ Lacombe, Biarritz Crèvecoeur, Paris Chapter NY, New York Croy Nielsen, Vienna Crèvecoeur, Paris Deborah Schamoni, Munich Croy Nielsen, Vienna Delgosha, Teheran Deborah Schamoni, Munich Derosia, New York Delgosha, Teheran Entrée, Bergen Derosia, New York Ermes Ermes, Rome Entrée, Bergen Fanta-MLN, Milan Ermes Ermes, Rome FELIX GAUDLITZ,Milan Vienna Fanta-MLN, Femtensesse, Oslo FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna Femtensesse, Oslo
35 BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES, 75002 PARIS 35 BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES, 75002 PARIS PARISINTERNATIONALE.COM PARISINTERNATIONALE.COM
First Floor Gallery, Harare Foxy New York First Production, Floor Gallery, Harare Georg Fine Arts, Foxy Kargl Production, NewVienna York Ginsberg Galeria, Georg Kargl Fine Arts,Lima Vienna Good Weather, Rock/Chicago GinsbergLittle Galeria, Lima greengrassi, Good Weather, Little London Rock/Chicago The Green Gallery,London Milwaukee greengrassi, Gregor Staiger, Zurich/Milan The Green Gallery, Milwaukee Grey Noise,Zurich/Milan Dubai Gregor Staiger, Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo Grey Noise, Dubai HigherHagiwara Pictures Projects, Generation, New York Tokyo Hot Wheels, Athens New York Higher Pictures Generation, Iragui, Moscow Hot Wheels, Athens Jacqueline Martins, São Paulo/Brussels Iragui, Moscow JacquelineKayokoyuki, Martins, SãoTokyo Paulo/Brussels Kendall Koppe, Tokyo Glasgow Kayokoyuki, KOW, Berlin Kendall Koppe, Glasgow Lars Friedrich, KOW, BerlinBerlin Lefebvre & Fils,Berlin Paris Lars Friedrich, Lodos, Mexico Lefebvre & Fils, City Paris Lodos, Mexico City
Lomex, New York Lucas Hirsch, Dusseldorf Lomex, New York LylesHirsch, & King,Dusseldorf New York Lucas Max Mayer, Dusseldorf Lyles & King, New York Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Max Mayer, Dusseldorf Galeri Nev,& Ankara/Istanbul Misako Rosen, Tokyo P420,Ankara/Istanbul Bologna Galeri Nev, Project Native P420,Informant, Bologna London Rhizome, Algiers London Project Native Informant, ROHRhizome, Projects, Jakarta Algiers Schiefe Zähne,Jakarta Berlin ROH Projects, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna Schiefe Zähne, Berlin Sperling, Munich Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna Stereo, Warsaw Sperling, Munich Sweetwater, Berlin Stereo, Warsaw Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn Sweetwater, Berlin Theta, YorkTallinn Temnikova & New Kasela, Three Star New Books, Paris Theta, York vonThree ammon co,Books, Washington Star Paris DC Pipeline, Detroit DC vonWhat ammon co, Washington What Pipeline, Detroit
We live in dark times. I write this in midsummer, while Italy faces the worst drought in 70 years and a less-rare government collapse, and think of how the art that I got to see in July (at a ‘utopian training camp’ in Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, and as part of the performance festivals at Centrale Fies, Dro, and in Santarcangelo) seemed to be responding to a prevailing mood that the end of the world is nigh – ecologically, economically, socially, pedagogically. Nevertheless, those performances invited audiences to take another look at the world as it is, with new eyes, before it vanishes. From this perspective, performance attempts to act as an exercise in affirmative action. So, welcome darkness. Time is up at the Fondazione, where Jonas Staal reclaims, via his utopian exhibition-cum-workshop Training for the Future. we demand a million more years, the means of production for a future that is already here. Over three days, the workshops or ‘trainings’ (which any visitor can sign up to) took place in a series of afternoon sessions led by practitioners from a range of disciplines. The trainers in question are tellingly called ‘world builders’. In a session featuring artist and educator Charl Landvreugd, the audience built a collective ‘world’ by placing, moving and replacing a series of objects – among them hairbands, watches and pens – donated by the
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Hello, Darkness
Is there a place for performance art in this doomed world? Now more than ever, says Mariacarla Molè
Training For the Future. we demand a million more years, 2022, a project organised by Jonas Staal at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Photo: Ruben Hamelink
ArtReview
fellow participants. The trainers supervised this participatory process in which ideas are transformed into actions that reflect a desire to collectively write a possible and more inclusive future. By way of practices such as storytelling, rituals and tarot reading, the trainers tested out a community space that was cooperative and participative, safe and accessible. In this sense time was experienced as a trans-time: a time ruled by the ephemeral, the temporary and the elusive; a time that generates a form of knowledge unrelated to coherence, progression and linear narration, and one that works in illuminations and fragments, embracing a certain amount of randomness and chance. Similarly, the research centre for performative practices Centrale Fies (located in a former hydroelectric power station in Dro, Trentino) hosted the Live Works Summit, a three-day performance-oriented free school that tries to imagine a future mythology that embraces climate change, queer pain and multispecies parenthood. The result is exhilarating in Philippe Quesne’s postapocalyptic performance Farm Fatale (2019), in which five ecologist scarecrows discuss the effects of climate change, sing pop songs and hold up demonstration signs in a scene made up to look like a dystopian and abandoned farm. The future life imagined in Selin Davasse’s Multiplicity of Asia Minor (2022)
is feminine and foregrounds a multispecies society, one that demands a new mythology – a cosmogony with no founding father, but instead a nurturing surrogate mother. Sergi Casero, in El Pacto del Olvido (2022, and titled after the Spanish law approved after Franco’s death in 1975, which prevents legal investigation into crimes committed during the 40 years of dictatorship), insists on the importance of an oral and collective narration of history, especially when the official narratives are silent and criminally forgetful. Time is again embodied in Giulia Crispiani’s Mormorìo (2022), a love letter to bodies that multiply, breathe and pulse as one. Darkness also invades many of the performances in Santarcangelo. A postapocalyptic scenario appears again, in nomadic theatre company Motus’s performance Tutto brucia (2021), which draws on the myth of Cassandra (a prophet cursed by a jealous god so that no one would believe her premonitions) and mourns the end of a civilisation that’s trapped in its own nightmare, hypnotised by flames while everything around it burns. Sitting under a spotlight in a darkened space, Marina Otero tells her story Love Me (2022, cowritten with Martín Flores Cárdenas): she reveals her scars, and through her body evokes every pain (part of which relates to her departure from Buenos Aires to a new life in Spain) and the effects of time with heartbreaking strength. Meanwhile, Giovanfrancesco Giannini chooses violence in cloud_extended (2022). He forces his half-naked body to emulate poses from his digital archive of images and videos:
top Selin Davasse, Multiplicity of Asia Minor, 2022 (performance view, Centrale Fies, Dro, 2022). Photo: Alessandro Sala above Philippe Quesne, Farm Fatale, 2019 (performance view, Centrale Fies, Dro, 2022). Photo: Roberta Segata
October 2022
these range from the French-Italian singer Dalida, to different pictorial renditions of the goddess Venus, to tortured men accused of homosexuality in the Chechen Republic. A sense of togetherness and intimacy fill the dark space in which Alex Baczynski-Jenkins’s Untitled (Holding Horizon) (2018) is performed in fluid, long-lasting movements, something like a rave or a rite, but of the type you never wish to end. A picture emerges polyphonic, in terms of voices and practices, but quite uniform in premise, needs and hopes. Rituals return in a way that seems to be searching for a new language, but is nevertheless ready to leave behind narratives that can often seem trapped in the nihilist critique. And the same can be said of the rewriting of a mythology for our times. One constantly feels the not-very-reassuring sense of living in a time in need of major rehab. I saw broken people struggling to imagine a future, but working together in order to try. I saw bodies in need of radical softness, bodies that can provide it, bodies seeking to be together only as humans. I’m not sure if this time of darkness has made our eyes more sensitive, but I’m sure emerging from it will come with some pain. Mariacarla Molè is a writer based in Turin
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CICEK GALLERY GALLERY CICEK
20 20 20 29 20 29 29 OCT 29 OCT OCT OCT POLITICS OF CHARM: POLITICS OF CHARM: POLITICS OF CHARM: WOMEN, BAME, QUEERS PROGRESS WOMEN, BAME, QUEERS &&PROGRESS WOMEN, BAME, QUEERS & PROGRESS POLITICS OF CHARM: WOMEN, BAME, QUEERS & PROGRESS
FreeEntry. Entry.1313Soho SohoSq, Sq,London, London,W1D W1D3QF 3QF Free Free Entry. 13 Soho Sq, London, W1D 3QF CuratedbybyVittoria VittoriaBeltrame Beltrame Curated byLondon, Vittoria W1D Beltrame Free Entry. 13Curated Soho Sq, 3QF Curated by Vittoria Beltrame AbiJoy JoySamuel Samuel Abi Abi Joy Samuel AllaSamarina Samarina Alla Alla Samarina Abi Joy Samuel Annam Butt Annam Butt Annam Butt Alla Samarina BerfinCicek Cicek Berfin Berfin Cicek Annam Butt FiaYang Yang Fia FiaCicek Yang Berfin KayGasei Gasei Kay Kay Gasei FiaHazell Yang Naila Naila Hazell Naila Kay Hazell Gasei Naila Hazell
It’s not always easy to identify the prevailing trends in contemporary art: since the coexistence of Pop and Minimalism during the 1960s and the subsequent advent of pluralism, art has tended to constitute a jostle of conflicting aesthetic and critical positions, the picture varying according to standpoint and taste. Of late, though, the landscape has seemed quite legible. If you’ve been visiting biennials or institutions and a fair swathe of forwardthinking commercial galleries, the art there is increasingly predicated on giving voice to the formerly underrepresented or trying to right former wrongs. Hence, to take a few recent examples, a Venice Biennale composed of 90 percent women artists, a Documenta full of collectives new to even seasoned Western art-watchers – along with evidence, via the media shitstorm, of the pitfalls of decentralised curating – and museum shows that, when they do spotlight dead white males (Hogarth at Tate Britain, for example, or German ‘colonial’ modernists at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie), seek to preemptively point out said artists’ moral failings before the hanging jury of Twitter can do so. Also, and relatedly, living white male artists complaining, three beers in and off the record, that they’ll never get another show. And then there’s the art market, which, though it now leans more towards women artists and artists of colour than it used to, still seems primarily enraptured by eye-pleasing painting in dialogue with familiar historical aesthetics – witness the popularity of, for example, Anna Weyant, Christina Quarles, Flora Yukhnovich – which points in turn to an audience less interested in being challenged than in easy pleasure, handholding and maybe a quick profit. One can’t wholly blame said buyers, given the hurry of the auction houses to bundle art with any kind of luxury item in a kind of marvellous economic relativism, plus a phalanx of gallerists not too keen on wasting time educating new collectors towards knottier fare. Back in the museums and biennials, the much-needed shift in terms of who gets exhibited – and who decides who gets exhibited – is unthinkable without the righteous frustration and mobilising of social justice movements during the last decade or so, or the hair-trigger mood of social media. Given
Shifting Sands
Is contemporary art’s recent moral tide just a ‘moment’, asks Martin Herbert the spotlight, finally, underrecognised artists are naturally airing their grievances. Meanwhile, the ‘haves’ dependent on structural inequality in the first place are, as usual, shopping for baubles and using the biennials to network – the painterly Surrealism that was a signature of this year’s Venice Biennale is looking like a smart investment. Of course, this is a bit of a cartoon and there is art around, on show, that falls into neither of these camps – there are always exceptions, if you look – but the latter increasingly feels to fall outside of the larger, more pronounced dualistic paradigm. If you complain, though, especially from a position of longstanding privilege, that amid all of this you’re not seeing enough of the art you want to see (whatever that is), that moralistic gatekeepers are running scared or legislating for you, that you’re now aesthetically stateless, then you’re on sketchy ground. Jerry Saltz, on social media a few months back, opined that ‘in our time when art about “good causes” Jane Graverol, L’École de la Vanité, 1967, oil and collage on cardboard, 71 × 107 × 5 cm. © siae. Photo: Renaud Schrobiltgen. Courtesy Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
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is automatically called “good”, it feels like the anxieties of the criticalacademic-curatorialmercantile class is [sic] imposing the definitions of these things on artists & limiting art to being “responsible” according to its rules’, and I’m still pondering what I think about that. I see enough examples of, say, complexity – a core virtue of art, for me – not being sacrificed in socially conscious art, though it can be harder to see when the work is being instrumentalised by curators, framed as a consumable message. It is, at the very least, something to wrestle with, perhaps while looking a little harder for the art that you want to see, giving time to art that you think you don’t and checking in often enough on the stuff that’s historically rung your cherries so that you remember why you got involved in the first place, which is healthy practice whatever else is going on. What’s certain, amid all this, is that contemporary art doesn’t stand still. The last time vanguard art practice felt this urgently politicised and was given a substantial stage on which to perform was the early 90s – recall, for example, the controversial Whitney Biennial of 1993 – and identity politics was the focus until, somehow, it wasn’t. Artists of my acquaintance who have been lofted in part by the recent rising moral tide are already wondering out loud if this is, again, just a ‘moment’, a trend, and if the artworld – and the clout-chasers within it, once clout is secured – will soon have lost interest, moved on to something else. Maybe: some commercial spaces, at least, have started to return to showing old white dudes, which felt almost unthinkable a year ago. Or possibly, given that increasing disparity and extremism (of wealth distribution, of public opinion) seems to be the trend, we’re set for a more pronounced version of the same: a contemporary art scene – or pair of scenes – set against a raging hellscape of contemporary reality, in which there’s no justification for either subtlety or nonprofitability, in which he, or she, who is not busy yelling is busy buying. In the meantime, the binary landscape offers one conspicuous virtue. In pointing combinedly to inequality, anger, blissful ignorance and gilded pleasure-seeking, and a residual degree of hope that conditions can yet be improved, it shows us precisely where we’re at right now.
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Copenhagen in the summer is for swimmers. I’d mentally blocked the glowing accounts I’d read of Danish waters, assuming those extolling its virtues were of a hardier constitution. But the sea water that cleaves the city is temperate and astonishingly clean, and I needed it after attempting to walk across town to v1 Gallery in Copenhagen’s Meatpacking District. The Meatpacking District, a still semi-industrial expanse of warehouses near the waterfront, is one of the few stretches in this historic, green-bowered city that, on a hot day, rivals in blinding exposure the cement expanses of newer, more hastily built and less elegantly planned urban centres. Copenhagen’s galleries were mostly packing up summer group shows or shuttered in preparation for late August’s Art Week; I was grateful to find v1’s cool, naturally lit gallery open, and a solo show by the New-York-based painter Grace Metzler still up. Metzler’s faux-naïf paintings alternate between swathes of abstract pastels and distinctly articulated barrel-chested figures with limbs that snake and snarl around potato heads. These figures, who roam through domestic interiors
Call and response
A summer of art in Scandinavia leaves Cat Kron charmed and flushed
Grace Metzler, Doing what we can to help Dad feel like a kid again, 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas, 178 × 170 cm. Courtesy the artist and v1 Gallery, Copenhagen
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and bucolic landscapes, are accompanied by narrative titles that manage to be both wry and tender. In Doing what we can to help Dad feel like a kid again (2022), an older male in shorts kicks his legs out as smaller figures extend a jump rope for him. Charmed and somewhat refreshed but still flushed from heat, I stumbled towards the harbour baths to be fully restored. An exemplar of Danish Modernist architecture and a mecca for modern and contemporary art for half a century, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art sits on Nivå Bay, facing Sweden, a half-hour north of Copenhagen. (You can swim here too, in the water visible just past the museum’s grounds.) I caught the tail end of the Dorothy Iannone exhibition, which maps the artist’s practice across six decades. The museum takes a variety of approaches to the challenge of the visual density of her work – mounting diaristic plates serially and reproducing spreads from sketchbooks as floor-to-ceiling wall dividers. The artist recounts periods of her life like erotic fairytales, chronicling her tumultuous relationships with lovers including artist Dieter Roth in An Icelandic Saga, a series of panels (from 1978, 1983 and 1986) whose magical-realist descriptions are undercut by frank admissions of Iannone’s own all-too-human struggles. An enlarged page from A Cookbook (1969) whose hand lettering could have been lifted from 1970s vegetarian dietary touchstone Moosewood Cookbook, features the following text, overlaid in all caps on a recipe that appears to be for creamed endive: ‘i had poisoned myself with tomato sauce infected with aluminum. i sadly sat on the toilet, expecting to die within 45 or 50 minutes, and studied my german.’ The text concludes, ‘i hope i live long enough to ____ what?’ In a 2016 interview with Maurizio Cattelan for Flash Art, the artist described her life and work as driven by a longing for ‘ecstatic unity’. And gathered here, her oeuvre registers as no less admirable for the periodic heartbreaks and other personal and professional setbacks of their author. On the far eastern edge of the Scandinavian Peninsula, the equally architecturally striking Bildmuseet was erected in 2012 on the Umeälven River, where it spills out into the Baltic Sea. Designed by the Danish firm Hanning Larsen, the spare, Siberian larch-panelled building is nestled into the university complex of Umeå, a college town in Sweden’s northernmost region and a hub of medical research, where the Nobel Prize-winning crispr gene-editing technology was developed. The institution’s mission statement is to showcase the intersection of art and science, a mandate in keeping with the generative principle behind the work of Nancy Holt, whose retrospective it organised over the course of the past several years while weathering the
global pandemic. Holt’s exploration into responsive design is encapsulated by her ‘Systems Works’, of which several ventilators from the series Ventilation System (1985–92) were on view. In her catalogue introduction, Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, writes, ‘Although largely assumed to be preoccupied with landscapes and the celestial realm, Holt was equally interested in manifestations and interpretations of architecture’, and the ventilators were envisioned as interior/exterior installations to highlight the bowels of tubing that course invisibly through the infrastructures of large buildings. They’re typical of Holt’s work, which in contrast to much of her Land-art peers is not only attuned to place as one finds it, but committed to working dynamically with its idiosyncrasies and specificities – extending in this case to the very air coursing through the building. This flexibility, exhibited during her lifetime, is evidenced by the works’ plans, which were designed such that the museum and foundation could in good faith present new iterations even eight years after her death. It was, however, no small task. In recreating the structures, the curators and Le Feuvre had to triangulate between archival blueprints and the specs of the museum to design a reiteration respectful of both the project and Bildmuseet’s sanctumlike architecture. My companion had booked a cabin on a pleasure cruise from Oslo to Copenhagen before our flight, and we needed to make it back to the west coast of the peninsula to meet our vessel. A Norwegian friend we explained this to was incredulous. Cruises in Scandinavia are, it turns out, regarded by locals much as they are everywhere else. (Personally, I say ignore the cynics.) Just as the region is a hub for artists spanning
the globe, it’s been heartening on trips made over the past five years to witness how artists within Scandinavia are supported and championed. We arrived the night before departure in time for the opening of Norwegian-born Gardar Eide Einarsson’s solo show at Standard (Oslo). The show bears the title Maybe It’s the Calm Before the Storm, Could Be the Calm, the Calm Before the Storm, quoting then-President Trump’s uncharacteristically lyrical comment made, seemingly apropos of nothing, to military leaders at a 2017 photo op. In one gallery, white-painted bricks are strewn across an otherwise bare floor. They’re arranged like tiny, rudimentary monuments, two bricks upright like bookends, with another resting on top, an arrangement used by prodemocracy protesters to slow the advancements of military vehicles during the 2019–20 demonstrations in Hong Kong. While the former us leader’s commentary seemed calculated for impact without a clear referent or intent, Einarsson’s referent was as explicit as his aim was unclear. What are we to make of these visual extrapolations of protest, however much we agree with the cause from which they have been taken? Ultimately however, that this exhibition felt unresolved was of less import than its maker’s conviction, and it was heartening to see work that challenges rather than answers given space. Cat Kron is a writer based in Los Angeles
top Dorothy Iannone, The Next Great Moment in History is Ours, 1970, serigraph on paper, 73 × 102 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Berlinische Galerie above Nancy Holt, Ventilation System, 1985–92 (installation view, Bildmuseet, Umeå, 2022). © Holt / Smithson Foundation. Photo: Mikael Lundgren. Courtesy Bildmuseet
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December 1–3, 2022 Photograph taken by Mateo Garcia / Belle & Company
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Jeffrey Gibson by Chris Fite-Wassilak
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In joyful, speculative work, the artist unpicks and repatterns mythologies around the depiction of native cultures
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above They Play Endlessly, 2021, canvas, acrylic paint, vintage beaded wallet, vintage wooden broach, archival pigment print on rice paper, beads, artificial sinew, sequins, nylon thread, 169 × 128 × 8 cm preceding pages The Body Electric, 2022 (installation view, Site Santa Fe). Photo: Shayla Blatchford
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A gridded metal frame on the wall pops with a colourful series of cultures: the solemn-faced men in ceremonial costumes, the halfembedded canvases and woven bead patterns. Some of the canvases naked naïfs immersed in nature – stereotypes of noble dignity and in They Play Endlessly (2021) bear dizzying geometric designs in bright strength in suffering that arose to paper over the erasure and eradicapurples and pinks, on top of which are set small faces made of beads; tion of native people. Such images still abound in American culture: several feature simplified depictions of Native Americans, one with a the kneeling maiden of the Land-O-Lakes butter logo; the Chicago profile of a man wearing a feathered headdress, another seemingly a Blackhawks ice hockey team; Saturday morning reruns of Disney’s children’s book illustration of a young boy with long hair, held back cartoon Little Hiawatha (1937) – continual reinforcements of native by a red headband, looking over a grass field. Next to these in the culture as something exotic, other, past. They Play Endlessly also holds grid, a few canvases spell out statements in chunky, stylised letters: some quieter material histories, with many of its patterns made up of ‘The myth persists’; ‘You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone’. a mixture of plastic, glass and crystal beads, as nods to the beadwork Myth, play and refusing to disappear: the kaleidoscopic swirl that existed in native cultures before the arrival of Europeans during of They Play Endlessly serves as a concise introduction to the work of the fifteenth century; the size and shape of traded glass beads, made American artist Jeffrey Gibson, encapin Venice and Bohemia, eventually led Dolled up in intricate beadwork sulating as it does his use of painting, to changes in the forms and styles of the craft and collage as means to unpick beadwork being made. And gliding over and bright kitsch plumes, and repattern what is understood as such stories are the endless patterns Gibson’s flamboyant artefacts mock and bold statements that feature across contemporary Native American culture. the anthropological impulse, Gibson’s canvases, murals, sculptures The designation ‘American’ is of course a reductive simplification, a convention while buzzingly suggesting new rituals and costumes; phrases deployed in previous bodies of work had drawn that belies its long trail; Gibson’s ancestors are of the Cherokee and Chocktaw tribes indigenous to the more from dance and club hits of the 1980s and 90s – from Mr Finger’s continent that only relatively recently came to be denominated as deep house track Can You Feel It (1986), to Whitney Houston’s It’s Not ‘North America’, though Gibson himself was raised, and has lived Right but It’s Okay (1998). Now they increasingly look to poetry and and worked, internationally, coming to be based in Hudson Valley, political proclamations, like ‘To feel myself beloved on the earth’, a New York. Nor is his work rooted in a fixed geographical location, line from Raymond Carver’s 1988 poem ‘Late Fragment’, or the phrase and as such it raises questions not so much of belonging but of affini- attributed to Frantz Fanon, via Malcolm X, ‘by any means necessary’: ties and proximities. As with They Play Endlessly, it often has an imme- statements that stop us and ask how we might rewrite the present. diate, vibrant punch, whose playfulness belies the knotted layers of Firebelly (2021) is a beaded sculpture of a simplified bird, its red history that shape it, with each work asking how we might continu- and gold wings flecked with turquoise, its eyes translucent heart shapes. Such sculptures, of various animals and uncertainly humanally reshape an understanding of what indigeneity is. The pseudo-quilt of They Play Endlessly, installed as part of The Body shaped figures that populate Gibson’s exhibitions, draw in part on his research and work reconfiguring the collecElectric (2022), Gibson’s recent solo exhibition at Site Santa Fe, displays some of the persistent tions of institutions such as the Newbury Library The Body Electric, 2022 (installation view, mythology embedded in depictions of native and the Field Museum of Natural History in Site Santa Fe). Photo: Shayla Blatchford
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i am a rainbow, 2022, found punching bag, glass beads, artificial sinew, acrylic felt, 127 × 36 × 36 cm. Photo: Max Yawney
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Untitled Figure 1, 2022, fringe, glass beads, artificial sinew, tin cones, sea glass, acrylic felt, steel armature, powder coat varnish, 180 × 79 × 61 cm. Photo: Shayla Blatchford
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Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House, 2020, plywood, posters, steel, leds and performances, 1,341 × 1,341 × 640 cm. Photos: Brian Barlow (top); Emily Johnson (above)
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Chicago, and the Brooklyn Museum, seeing what objects are held in their respective collections as representations of ‘native culture’. Some of these are simply offhand tchotchkes, sold at roadsides and tourist sites; such items aren’t high-end craft but are still framed as tokens of a culture. It could just be someone making what they thought was a nice design, but by virtue of the exchange it becomes a souvenir of the idea of authenticity. As Gibson has put it, he was drawn to how this type of object ‘wasn’t native enough and it wasn’t not native enough’. This statement provides a useful lens through which to consider his work as a whole – as a set of ambiguous props, emblems of a tangled, patchwork culture still in formation, yet to take flight. Dolled up in intricate beadwork and bright kitsch plumes, Gibson’s flamboyant artefacts mock the anthropological impulse, while buzzingly suggesting new rituals: ‘proposals’, Gibson has suggested, ‘for future hybridity’. Alongside such figures, hanging from the ceilings are often elaborate costumes and beaded punching bags from Gibson’s long-running series, usually bearing statements of character, intent and energy. On the punching-bag work All I Ever Wanted, All I Ever Needed (2019), the euphoric romanticism of the Depeche Mode lyric (from the 1990 track Enjoy the Silence) takes on a tinge of weary self-acceptance when it is cast in baby-blue beading on a punching bag made up with brown and yellow chevrons with a rainbow skirt, dangling expectantly above the gallery floor. The actions that have been continuously implied in Gibson’s installations – of boxing and weaving, sure, but most often of clubbing, dancing and other rituals of ecstatic movement – have more recently been realised, with works that act literally as backdrops and stages for meetings, discussions and performances. i am your relative, held earlier this year in the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, was an area of moveable seating, the furniture and walls all covered in posters of eye-popping patterns: a space to configure relations and relationships. Stickers that people could place as they saw fit were given out, bearing statements such as ‘Their Dark Skin Brings Light’; ‘They Choose Their Family’; ‘Respect Indigenous Land’. This last phrase was also blazoned across the pastel ziggurat Because Once You
Enter My House, It Becomes Our House (2020), a temporary sculpture that sat outside in Socrates Sculpture Park in New York for eight months, hosting events by native collaborators such as choreographer Emily Johnson and composer Raven Chacon. In the performances there, and at others such as Gibson’s exhibition in Santa Fe, performers wore long, colourful robes cut from the same cloth, as it were, as Gibson’s posters and murals, bearing yet more slogans: ‘She Knows Other Worlds’; ‘They Teach Love’; ‘Speaking to the Sky’; ‘She Rewrites History’. These are determined, unashamedly optimistic statements, casting their wearers as participants in an uncertain ritual, enacting a spell that might move beyond scarred histories and reshape what is to come. In their essay ‘Who Belongs to the Land?’ (2022), indigenous American writer Lou Cornum proposes an Indigenous Futurism that is ‘about the struggle for a different future as well as a distinctly different idea of “future” – one that goes beyond the conflict between tradition and progress, and asks us to inhabit the present’. While Gibson’s neon clubbing-nostalgia and nods to native ceremonial wear draw from the past, it is towards such an inhabitation of an unmoored present that Gibson gestures. In the video A Warm Darkness (2022), created from a performance held around the Our House sculpture, performer Mx. Oops dons a hot-pink hoodie and matching bowl-shaped wig, dancing angularly, happily alone within the scaffolding inside the sculpture. It’s joyful, spurious, obscured. The performance and video cast Our House as a tomb, a place to put things to rest; as well as a haven, a shelter, in which to dance just for yourself; and a site from which our rewriting of the present might take place, a place where, as Cornum puts is, ‘there is no pre-apocalypse or post-apocalypse, only perpetual revelation’. ar the spirits are laughing, a survey exhibition of Gibson’s work, will open at the Aspen Art Museum on 4 November; They Come From Fire, a new site-specific installation at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, will be on view from 15 October to 26 February; a selection of new works by Gibson will also be presented at Stephen Friedman’s booth at Frieze London, 12–16 October
A Warm Darkness (still), 2022, hd video, 29 min 19 sec all images © and courtesy the artist
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Manufacturing Enlightenment Noam Chomsky discusses true democracy, ‘bewildered herds’ and the fragility of the present in response to Pirate Enlightenment, the final book by late anthropologist David Graeber Interview by Nika Dubrovsky
Noam Chomsky at the Center for Art and Media (zkm) in Karlsruhe, 2014. Photo: Uli Deck / dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo
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As questions of decolonisation rub up against the legacy of Enlightenment thinking in the West, anthropologist David Graeber argues in his posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (to be published early next year) that Enlightenment ideas themselves are not intrinsically European and were indeed shaped by non-European sources. The work focuses on the proto-democratic ways of pirate societies and particularly the zana-malata, an ethnic group formed of descendants of pirates who settled on Madagascar at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and whom Graeber encountered while conducting ethnographic research at the beginning of his academic career. Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (written with the archaeologist David Wengrow), died in 2020, but in a wide-ranging conversation for ArtReview, his widow, the artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, speaks with Noam Chomsky, an admirer of the anthropologist’s work, about Graeber’s last project, neoliberalism and democracy, Western empiricism and imperialism, free speech, Roe v. Wade in the us, the war in Ukraine and how Germany’s Documenta art exhibition has barely coped with inviting non-Western artists to direct it for the first time. One of the left’s foremost thinkers, Chomsky has written major works that include Syntactic Structures (1957), Manufacturing Consent (1988) and, most recently, The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and Urgent Need for Radical Change (2021, with C. J. Polychroniou). nika dubrovsky Thank you very much for the interview. It’s a great honour. We wanted to discuss David’s last posthumous book, Pirate Enlightenment, which will be published in January 2023 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In this book, as in his other writings, David talked about the importance of dialogue. He describes how entire cultural traditions emerge from the creation of new stories and how these traditions are then remade and edited. noam chomsky That was very interesting. Both in his essay ‘There Never Was a West’, but also in the book about the extensive contributions of Native American thinkers [The Dawn of Everything, 2021, with David Wengrow], Chinese thinkers and others who, as they point out, as David points out, were recognised as contributors at the time, but then wiped from the tradition. It was regarded as just a literary technique or something. But
I think he makes it very clear that it was a substantive contribution. The discussion in ‘There Never Was a West’, about the nature of influence, was quite enlightening. The different ways in which influence takes place, in which it’s interpreted, and––as the tradition is constructed later – is filtered out, as he points out, on the basis of arguments that, if they were applied generally, would wipe out almost everything, including the tradition itself. One of the most interesting parts of The Dawn of Everything, I thought, were the sections on the interactions with the Native American philosopher and thinker, and his contributions to how Enlightenment thought was developed by leading figures. nd Just before Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he had seen a play by Charles Johnson, The Successful Pyrate, performed on an English stage. David suggested that this experience with Madagascar pirates may have
form. But when you go back to the original interactions, as David did and as they do in The Dawn of Everything, you see that what was filtered to become the accepted tradition is a sharp reconstruction of what actually happened – eliminating many interactions and many kinds of drawing on different voices, different experiences into something that was then reshaped by elite opinions. Particularly striking, I think, was his discussion, in ‘There Never Was a West’, of periods when state authority was inoperative for one reason or another, either not paying attention or weakened. It’s at that time that interactions at the ground level developed the basic meaningful contributions to whatever functions later as democracy. That’s where they arose, that’s how they can develop. But not the top-down conceptions that are reconstructed as our traditional heritage. It has lots of implications for direct action in the present. I think his emphasis is on things like the Zapatistas in the past, on relatives, work on pirates and so on. Pirate democracy in Madagascar and others is quite striking in that respect. nd In the Malagasy society that David lived in for several years and knew very well, dialogue is used as a political tool to shape public space. In your book Manufacturing Consent [1988, with Edward S. Herman], you describe how public space and the public imagination in Western countries is controlled from the top down by powerful ideological institutions.
influenced Hobbes’s political thinking. The very idea that people could negotiate with each other; that power could be organised not only top-down but also horizontally, as it was in many pirate communities, and in some indigenous cultures, came as a surprise to Europeans. David often said that his task was to decolonise the Enlightenment; to change our ideas of what kind of society we would like to live in. If we rethink our ideas about the Enlightenment, about where it came from, how do you think this will change the public imagination? nc I think we must pursue more carefully these insights into how that tradition, as he points out, becomes the reconstruction of the past by elite thinkers who reshape it into a particular David Graeber. Courtesy Goldsmiths, London
nc Ed Herman, who passed away recently, was the prime author of that. He was a specialist in finance and taught at the Wharton School. He was interested in the institutional structure of the media and how basic institutional factors lead to the shaping of the information system that’s created. We slightly differed on that, I should say. My own feeling is that while all of that is important, I don’t think it’s very different from the general intellectual culture. My own work has mostly been, actually, on elite intellectual culture, which doesn’t have those same institutional pressures, but nevertheless leads to a version of reality that’s not very different from what comes out of the media system. The phrase ‘manufacturing consent’, of course, is not ours. That comes from [American political commentator] Walter Lippmann. Also Edward Bernays, the main founder of the public relations industry. The two of them were members of Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the first major state propaganda agency, the so-called Creel Committee, which was designed to try to turn a pacifist population into raving anti-German fanatics
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from top A Betsimisaraka henhouse and rice barn, 1911, Fenerive, Madagascar, photo: Walter Kaudern; Betsimisaraka women in Madagascar, c. 1900. Both images in the public domain. A subset of the Betsimisaraka, termed the zana-malata, were a focus of David Graeber’s dissertation research, from which Pirate Enlightenment is derived
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as the Wilson administration moved into the war. Both Lippmann and Bernays were very impressed by the success in creating a fabricated version of atrocities and so on, which in fact did change opinion dramatically. Lippmann called this technique ‘manufacturing consent’, which he called a new art in the practice of democracy. He thought that’s exactly the way things should work. As David points out in his text, elite opinion has always been radically antidemocratic all the way through. Democracy is just regarded as ‘mob rule’, as Lippmann put it; the responsible men have to protect themselves from the roar and trampling of the bewildered herd. Lippmann, incidentally, was the leading liberal public intellectual in the twentieth century, a Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy liberal. But he was reflecting the general liberal conception of how the public has to be put in its place as spectators, while the serious guys – us – do the work of running society in the public interest. This is almost universal. It’s not just in the media. People like Reinhold Niebuhr [an American theologian] and Harold Lasswell, one of the pioneers of modern political science. Bernays went on to be one of the founders of the public relations industry, which devotes hundreds of billions of dollars a year to these efforts to control opinion and attitudes. But it’s all based on the same conception that the public is a bewildered herd, stupid and too ignorant for their own good. You have to control them in one way or another, not permit democratic tendencies. Perhaps you know the major scholarly work, the gold standard for scholarship on the Constitutional Convention, called The Framers’ Coup [2016, by Michael Klarman], the coup by the framers against democracy. They feared democracy, and they devised all kinds of techniques to prevent it effectively. If you look back at the Constitutional Convention, the only participant who objected to this was Benjamin Franklin. He went along, but he didn’t like it. Yes, it is correct that this shows up in the media, but it seems to me to show up in the media not only because of the institutional structures that Herman’s work mostly outlined but also because of deeper currents in cultural history. It’s the same thing in the English Revolution in the seventeenth century when you didn’t have these structures, ‘The Men of the Best Quality’, as they called themselves, must subdue the rebel multitude. When you read the history of the English Revolution, it looks as if it was a conflict between king and parliament, but that overlooks the public who were producing very extensive pamphlet literature and people travelling
around giving talks and so on. They didn’t want to be ruled by a king or parliament. The way they put it was, “We want to be governed by people who know the people’s sores, people like us, not by knights and gentlemen who do just want to oppress us”. That’s the English Revolution, the major current that was of course suppressed mostly by violence. The same thing shows up in the American Revolution a century later. David points out it’s a deep part of the Enlightenment. One of the striking points that he makes in the essay is that these concepts of human rights, Enlightenment, justice and so on, appeared in what’s called the West only at the time when they came into confrontation with other societies and cultures. In the whole long period before that, nobody ever bothered with such things. That can’t just be an accident. And I think we see it right through history, in a way, back to Aristotle’s Politics.
“Pointing out the many options that there are for developing more enlightened, more free societies, not just the ones encoded in our artificial traditions, which exclude lots of what happened and reshape the rest into fitting into convenient frames for existing power systems. I think that’s a tremendous contribution”
One of the arguments against allowing women to vote in the constitutional debates was it’s unfair to unmarried men because a married man would have two votes: himself and his property. This runs right through American history. It isn’t until 1975 that the Supreme Court officially determined that women are people, peers, who can serve on federal juries. So Alito’s opinion is quite right. In all of American history and tradition, there’s nothing to suggest that women have rights. Therefore, Roe is breaking from the tradition by saying, ‘Yes, women should have rights’. It’s not exactly the message he wanted to convey, but it’s the essence in which his opinion is historically accurate. It’s basically since the 1960s that there has been real pressure for not only women’s rights, but even freedom of speech. You look back at history, there’s no history of protection of freedom of speech. You begin to get the elements of it in the twentieth century, mostly in dissents. But it was not until the 60s that there was strong public popular pressure, sufficient for the Supreme Court to take a fairly strong position. Actually, in the current regression, major figures in the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, are saying they want to rethink those decisions that establish freedom of speech, like Times v. Sullivan. We may go back to the tradition, just as we’re doing with the revision of Roe. These are very tenuous achievements. We have to struggle for them every minute.
nd I found it very interesting how David links gender politics and the social status of women. Western societies in general are patriarchal, but the communities in Madagascar described by David in his book are not, so it is odd that it is us who are considered to be democratic.
nd The Paris salons, where many of these Enlightenment ideas were formed, mostly in endless conversations, were run largely by women. David’s Pirate Enlightenment talks a lot about war. He describes how the opposing sides put coloured signs on their foreheads, blue and yellow, to be able to distinguish one another in battle. War is also a dialogue, but a masculine one, where the instruments of communication are reduced exclusively to violence. For the characters in David’s book, however, the war ends in Assemblies, which restore complex human conversations. If we think about our current situation, what is most striking is the insistence on the abandonment of all dialogue and any exchange of opinions.
nc Actually, that has very interesting, very current implications. The Roe v. Wade case, if you read [Supreme Court Justice Samuel] Alito’s actual opinion, his decision, is quite interesting. What he says is that there’s nothing in history and tradition that supports the idea that women have rights, which is quite true. If you look back at the constitution, the framers – for them women weren’t even persons. They were property. That’s Blackstone [Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765–69, by William Blackstone], English common law. Women are property owned by the father and handed over to the husband.
nc Yeah. That’s again a very timely issue. As you know, the nato Summit [in Madrid at the end of June] received lots of attention, very positive attention. One crucial element of it, which hasn’t received much discussion, bears exactly on what you’re talking about. If you look at the nato strategic statement, I think it’s Article 41, the basic thrust is we cannot have discussions and negotiations about Ukraine. It must be settled by violence. Those aren’t the words that are used, but that’s the meaning of the words. What they say is that the question of admission of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine into nato is not up for discussion.
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No third party can have any voice in it. We will decide as we wish. That’s a way of saying, ‘There cannot be any negotiations’. It’s been understood for 30 years, long before Putin, that no Russian leader will ever accept having Georgia and Ukraine in a hostile military alliance. That would be lunacy from Russia’s strategic point of view. Just look at a topographic map or the history of Operation Barbarossa [Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union] and you can see why. That’s been understood by high us diplomats and directors of the cia. All of them have warned against this. But nato, meaning the us, just decided that doesn’t matter. We’re going to continue to insist that everything be settled by violence, not by negotiations. No dialogue. It’s probably the most important part of the nato Summit, and it’s consistent with what us policy has been. No discussion, just force.
makes the rules, and everybody else obeys or else. That’s the rules-based international order. And you can demonstrate that that’s the way it works, but you can’t penetrate elite discussion with this. I can talk about my own experience, but it’s just anybody in the same system can talk about it. My apartment in Cambridge was a couple of blocks away from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I wasn’t allowed to cross the threshold unless they couldn’t prevent it. Like, if I was invited by an international organisation or the foreign press or a student group, then they had to allow it. But otherwise it was considered contaminating the premises by even talking about these topics.
nd You are a prominent scholar who has worked in Western academia for many years. I know nothing about academia except that David thought it was conservative and almost reactionary, and wrote extensively about it. Perhaps the very idea that it is possible to substitute dialogue with others for direct violence while preserving democracy and freedom within our own space is shaped and supported by the Western academic community.
nd Sometimes it feels like we’re seriously close to the end of the world. David, however, was an eternal optimist. No matter what was going on, he would say, “Okay, let’s look on the bright side. What can we do? How can we find a way out of it?” He tried very seriously to help [former uk Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn, but when Corbyn got crushed, David almost fell into a depression for a while. Very soon, however, he focused on the Brain Trust Project, a group of academic and nonacademic activists and artists trying to create an independent thinktank to address climate change. Yet our current situation, the disasters we are facing on such a scale, it is difficult to keep being optimistic.
nc My academic life has been for 70 years at the elite institutions: Cambridge, Mass; Harvard, mit, others like them, Oxford and so on. All the same. Ideas of this kind can scarcely penetrate. They are immune to consideration of the fact that the system that they were embedded in is based on violence and suppression. The theories that are developed, like international relations theory, completely miss much of this. The security of the population is almost never a consideration in formation of government policy. Security of elite interest, yes. Not security of the population. In fact, this shows up very dramatically if you look at contemporary documents. Take the nato Summit again. The phrase ‘rules-based international order’ occurs repeatedly, over and over again. We have to preserve ‘the rules-based international order’. The phrase ‘un-based international order’ never appears, not once. There is a un-based international order, like the un charter, but the us doesn’t accept it. It bars all the activities that the us carries out. The big struggle with China, ideologically, is that China is insisting on the un-based international order. The United States wants a rulesbased order. The hidden assumption is the us makes the rules. We want an international order, which is basically the mafia. The godfather
nc Whatever our personal sentiments are about the likelihood of disaster, we have to maintain the ‘optimism of the will’. There are opportunities, whatever they are, and we have to devote ourselves to them. Take Corbyn. Very significant. I mean, if Corbyn had become prime minister, as it seemed in 2017 that he might very well do, it could be a very different England. Instead of being just a vassal of the United States, which it is, it could have been an independent element in world affairs. He could have joined with Europe to lead an independent Europe, which could have made accommodations with Russia prior to the invasion, when it was a possibility. Instead of just falling into the lap of the United States and becoming a total dependency, which is what happened. The British establishment knew what it was doing. The establishment all the way over to The Guardian, the so-called left. It’s very dangerous to allow a person to gain power who’s trying to create a popular-based political party that will reflect the interests of its constituents instead of concentrated private power. He was succeeding in that, and that’s much too dangerous to allow. So the whole establishment, from what’s called the left over to the right, just launched an incredible campaign to discredit him, very
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successfully. Totally fraudulent grounds, but a very interesting illustration of the manufacture of consent, which is much broader than just the institutional structures involved. It’s based on a real understanding that popular power is just too dangerous to permit. It will threaten elite dominance in all domains and could lead to not only an independent popular-based democracy in England but even to independent moves in world affairs, which would undermine the mafialike structure. Quite a lot is at stake in keeping somebody like Corbyn out. nd David vividly describes how the democratic structures of pirate communities were influenced by Madagascar’s traditions. The pirates chose a captain who had full authority over the crew during combat, but not in everyday life. Many of these pirate traditions are strikingly similar to anarchist practices and are truly democratic, allowing each member of the community to shape the social environment around them, unlike our current ‘democracy’, which is built on institutions that prevent people from access to decisions about how they might live. nc As he stressed greatly, you don’t have democracy if representation is of the kind that liberal theorists call for. So take the main liberal theorists of democracy, people like Walter Lippmann, for example, or Harold Lasswell, or others. In this picture, the public has a role. Their role is to show up periodically and cast their weight in favour of one or another member of the elite class that represents power, and then go home and let them run the world but don’t do anything more. That’s what’s called democracy. And as David stressed, that has no resemblance to democracy. Democracy means direct participation in decision-making at every level. You can delegate responsibility to someone temporarily to carry out or play some administrative or another role. For example, in the Native American tribes that he discussed, where you pick a war leader for a particular conflict and then listen to him during the conflict, then he goes back and joins everyone else. That’s like the pirates, in fact, electing a captain because they need somebody to make decisions and then take them back. But it’s the public itself that always has the power and can, if it wants, take over decision-making. If you don’t have a structure like that, it’s not democracy. And of course, such structures can be developed. Let’s go back to Corbyn. If he had succeeded in creating the kind of Labour Party he was working for, it would have been a constituent-based party with local groups putting their input into direct decision-making
David Graeber hosts a debate at the London School of Economics during the campus-wide programme Resist: Festival of Ideas and Actions, 2016. Photo: Peter Marshall / Alamy Live News
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Welfare State rally in London, 2010. Photo: Theodore Liasi / Alamy Stock Photo
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and so on. It’s not what the parliamentary Labour Party wants. They want to make the decisions and everybody else should shut up and listen. That’s [Tony] Blair’s party, [Keir] Starmer’s party. The weight of the establishment was so strongly behind them that the effort to create a popular party was just crushed. Interestingly, the campaign was successful among the constituency. I’ve talked to Labour activists who were knocking on doors. They said it really sold. People just didn’t want to hear about Corbyn, they didn’t want to hear about a four-day week or any of the economic proposals. Just save us from this person who’s trying to destroy Britain. It worked very effectively. nd I want to share good news from the artworld, which is also a very powerful institution, very much like an academy, very much built on exclusion and big money, seriously connected to financial capital, taxes and, ultimately, the state. One of the largest art exhibitions in the world, Germany’s Documenta, has been curated by a collective from Indonesia, who are exhibiting almost no artwork or famous artists, in the traditional sense of the word. They invited different collectives, mostly from the Global South. This is an amazing exhibition, in the sense that it shows not the artistic achievements of some individuals, but the useful, caring and beautiful human practices of different communities. But then again, as with Jeremy Corbyn, they are now under tremendous attack, perhaps on the verge of being destroyed. The only hope is that, just as with Corbyn, the current exhibition in Documenta can show us a glimpse of another world, as if it were an escape route that could one day save us. nc That’s very interesting. I remember about 20 years ago – unfortunately, I forgot the name – there was an art connoisseur, Canadian, I think, who curated exhibitions of rugs. He pointed out that for thousands of years there was a form of women’s art in the Middle East, creating these marvellous rugs with wonderful designs and structures and so on. But no one ever regarded it as art, because it was women’s work. But the materials were quite fantastic. He ran into plenty of resistance. Who cares about rugs? But if you look at Oriental rugs, they’re quite amazing. By now, this artform is disappearing because it’s being replaced by commercialised duplicates. But for literally thousands of years, it was a major collective creative artform. Individuals would create their own art. They would work with each other. Because, of course, it’s collective, you can’t make a rug yourself. They made some remarkable contributions to women’s work. nd The artworld first and foremost stands for the separation of production and consumption so it is
difficult for it to relate to collective works. Therefore, a significant artist, in the Western sense, is always a loner who is distinct from the rest of us. But the industrial workers, who collectively produce things we use every day, remain anonymous. The same separation results in all of us staying as spectators and consumers, and without engaging in collaborative creativity. Documenta 15 had changed this narrative. It brought to Germany artists from Bangladesh, Latin America, African countries, and their real stories of fighting for freedom, caring for children, cooking food and so on. They showed us Westerners that most people in the world are, in a sense, better off than we are, despite their lack of the art institutions, if only because a core value of their art is care. nc I saw something a little bit like that at the World Social Forum back 20 years ago. The first meeting of the World Social Forum, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. One of the collaborators was Via Campesina, the world’s major international peasant organisation. It facilitated areas where mostly women set up tables and shared their cultures – different societies,
“You pick a war leader for a particular conflict and then listen to him during the conflict, then he goes back and joins everyone else… If you don’t have a structure like that, it’s not democracy” different languages, different ways of cooking, different kinds of seeds, and a lot of complex lore and understanding. In fact, for the most part agriculture was a scientific activity in the hands of women. A woman would hand the knowledge down to her daughter, which seed you plant on which side of the hill because it gets the sun in the afternoon and all that kind of stuff. In fact, when scientific agriculture came in, it lowered yields because all of this knowledge was lost. But in these meetings of Via Campesina, it was all being brought back with individual understanding, complicated culinary arts, building things and exchanging ideas. It was quite amazing to watch. It’s disappearing, of course. The World Social Forum doesn’t have it anymore. nd In Pirate Enlightenment, David describes a Marxist attitude to Madagascar’s history, where the main driving force is the struggle of the elites among themselves for the expansion of power. David notes that it is a little strange to assume that any society is built according to this principle. But today’s Russia follows this logic: actively participating in the struggle between rival elites.
In the 1960s, the ussr pursued a different goal, supporting anticolonial movements worldwide with finance and arms. nc Remember that Russia itself is an imperial system. You go back to the Duchy of Muscovy, which expanded over much of the world: all imperial conquests. There’s an interesting book, if you haven’t seen it yet, Crusade and Jihad [2018], by William Polk, a great historian who died recently, which is about the thousand-year war of the north, including Russia, against the mostly Muslim south. That’s why the regions that Putin is visiting right now [in July] are Muslim. They were all conquered within the expanding Russian empire. What we talk about as Russia, it’s like the United States. We think of the United States as a sovereign country, but only after it exterminated the inhabitants. Russia didn’t exterminate them, but it incorporated them. It’s an imperial system, to begin with. And it’s mostly a war against the Global South, which happens to be mostly Muslim. As Polk discusses, it’s a major theme of the history of the past thousand years. Every form of resistance has been tried, and they all failed and end up being jihadis. That’s part of the sweep of world history. What’s bothering the West now is that it’s encroaching into Western territory. That you’re not allowed to do. You can kill anyone you want somewhere else, just the way we do. It’s very interesting to watch the reaction of the Global South to this conflict. You read Western journals. They can’t understand why the countries of the Global South aren’t joining in with us. But these countries are laughing. What they say is, “Yes, of course it’s aggression, but what are you guys talking about? This is what you do to us all the time. We’re not going to join your crusade.” nd A friend of mine who lives in the Middle East said: “With horror everyone watches white people kill white people. We’ve been living like this for a long time.” nc David’s insights into all of this are very illuminating, and it undercuts a lot of conventional thinking. Also just pointing out the many options that there are for developing more enlightened, more free societies, not just the ones encoded in our artificial traditions, which exclude lots of what happened and reshape the rest into fitting into convenient frames for existing power systems. I think that’s a tremendous contribution. ar Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, by David Graeber, will be published in January 2023
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Two-ness by Fi Churchman
A Glint of Possibility, from the series Chrysalis (2022), archival pigment print, 127 × 102 cm
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Reconciliation and resistance in the photographs of Tyler Mitchell
Cage, from the series Chrysalis (2022), archival pigment print, 127 × 102 cm
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Distillation, from the series Chrysalis (2022), archival pigment print, 41 × 51 cm
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Simply Fragile, from the series Chrysalis (2022), archival pigment print, 127 × 102 cm
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A young man sits in a dark pool of frothing water, with residues of mud clinging to the dip in his collarbone. He looks down at the water that’s foaming, lapping away at the silt collected on his swim shorts. ‘He surfaced like a bullet, iridescent, grinning, splashing water.’ That last sentence, from Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel, Song of Solomon, swims into my mind when I look at the photograph Distillation from American photographer Tyler Mitchell’s latest series, titled Chrysalis (2022). I think of that sentence because whenever the protagonist of Morrison’s novel, Milkman (aka Macon III), touches water it marks a transformative experience. And it feels like something transformational, or at least on the cusp of change, is happening in Distillation and in the other photos of Chrysalis, in which young Black men and women are pictured in bucolic settings, splashing, swimming, sleeping, daydreaming. In Song of Solomon, various events lead Milkman to travel to America’s rural south, away from his Black middle-class upbringing in an unnamed northern city, towards the lands where his father and aunt grew up, in order to find the stash of gold they (his father and aunt) discovered and left behind in a cave during their childhood. But the real treasure he uncovers is a deeper understanding of his family’s history, their relationship to the land as slaves, and then ex-slaves and freed people, and then just people, and how the traumas inflicted upon them created ripple effects through generations. The pervasive feeling of disconnection and disassociation Milkman feels at the start of the novel resolves into a kind of spiritual reconciliation of past with present, via a physical return to the rural, allowing him to move forward with his life. For Mitchell, Song of Solomon resonates with the collection of images that form Chrysalis, not only because many of the photographs feature those young men and women in and around water but also because for Mitchell – who grew up in Atlanta and spent his youth in the city’s parks and surrounding countryside – it speaks to the coming-of-age revelation that’s related to a similar psychological and physical disconnection. “You grow up and realise that there’s a really complicated history,” he tells me over a video call. “The violent histories that took place on those lands. And that seeps its way into everything, into every interaction, into every way that you construct ideas about yourself, and the lens through which you’re seen in the world.”
In A Glint of Possibility, from that same series, a rubber tire hangs from a length of rope that extends beyond the photograph’s frame; a young man perfectly balanced horizontally through the hole of the tire is suspended above still water, gazing at his reflection. His face hovers close to the water’s surface, close enough that his breath seems to cause a series of creases across the glassy expanse. The man and his reflection appear like a visual metaphor that recalls W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of ‘double-consciousness’ first put forward at the end of the nineteenth century, while he lived and worked in Atlanta. ‘One ever feels his two-ness,’ he writes, pointing to a kind of psychical fracturing for the individual Black subject who is ‘always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ and ‘measuring one’s soul’ by a world that privileges a white perspective. This ‘two-ness’ also speaks to the uneasy tension Mitchell describes of the Black experience in green spaces. “In the back of my psyche,” he says, “is the constant reminder to be careful and vigilant about stepping on someone’s ‘yard’. In the South it’s not too far from reality that they would come out of their house armed. I’m certain that lies in the minds of a lot of other Black folks who grew up in the South.” In his first uk solo show, at Gagosian, London, Mitchell pairs individual photographs from Chrysalis so that they appear as diptychs, combining largescale images of idyllic scenes – “of embodiment,” he says, “agency or positivity, and of belonging to the land” – with smaller photos that are more expressionistic: of a hand reaching out of rippling muddy water, or a man half-submerged and covered in sediment. In one of those smaller pictures, titled Tenderly, a set of mud-caked footprints patter across wooden floorboards, the absence of a body made greater by the traces it has left behind. These siltfilled photos represent the immediate sense of threat that remains in the back of Mitchell’s mind, “moments that are on the eerier side, a reminder that Black folks have to remain vigilant while being in the land”. But Mitchell’s diptychs go beyond a formal representation of how that psychological state – that heightened vigilance and awareness of history – cannot be detached from the lived Black experience. It’s almost as if he is reaching for a way to visually articulate a different kind of double-consciousness: one that doesn’t so much
Tenderly, from the series Chrysalis (2022), archival pigment print, 51 × 40 cm
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Riverside Scene, from the series Dreaming in Real Time (2021), archival pigment print, 127 × 102 cm
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Georgia Hillside (Redlining), from the series Dreaming in Real Time (2021), archival pigment print, 160 × 198 cm
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parallel Du Bois’s proposition of ‘two-ness’, but rather sits obliquely to this concept; a version in which reconciliation and resistance are two sides of the same coin. “I’m trying to call forth the seductive and threatening elements of both the American Dream and the landscape in which I grew up,” says Mitchell, “and this can be applied to any number of global conversations in which Black people have felt that they both deeply and spiritually belong to a certain land, but who have also been rejected from, ran out, pushed out from that same land.” Chrysalis, then, is an attempt to address those tensions of Black presence within and absence from the landscape via what Mitchell calls an “optimistic vision of the way Black folk should exist freely in outdoor space”. That vision points to the historical, economic and social exclusion of Black people from leisurely pursuits, one that Du Bois says results in ‘little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth’. Take, for example, Simply Fragile, in which a smoothchested young man leans back in a patch of grass beside water, a mist of purple flowers blooming beyond his shoulders. He looks down, cross-eyed, at a green and golden beetle that has landed on the tip of his nose. It pictures a delicate, fleeting moment of carefree peace. And yet, set alongside those muddy photos, there’s a sense that this moment of idyllic relaxation is still a speculative idea, one that is in the process of coming into being; a pictorial echo of the desire that Hanif Abdurraqib writes of in A Little Devil in America (2021), to ‘go to the place where Black dreamers stare at the moon and remark loudly about signs and stars in a summer that feels as endless as those old summers’ of his youth. The bucolic scenes of leisure, of being at peace in nature, depicted in Chrysalis are a familiar trope in Mitchell’s work: in the series Dreaming in Real Time (2021), the photograph Riverside Scene depicts gatherings of Black folk enjoying a golden summer, picnicking, painting or contemplating on the bank of a river while three boys make their way into the water. It recalls Georges Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86), of white Parisians spending leisurely time by the Seine, and at the same time highlights Black absence from a genre of Western art history in which the pleasures of
nature were the preserve of wealthy white people. Mitchell is more obviously critical of this exclusion in another photograph from that series, Georgia Hillside (Redlining): a young man flies a kite while two people picnic, a woman lies in the grass, a family photoshoot is being set up and three women wearing luxurious white dresses appear to be waiting. Each of these gatherings is demarcated by a series of undulating red lines painted on the hillside, a reference to the us practice of ‘redlining’ that has been used to discriminate against Black neighbourhoods in order to deprive them of services primarily related to banking and finances. Not all the photos in Chrysalis are set in outdoor surroundings; others, like Cage, in which a young woman in a white dress lies propped up by her elbows, her legs crossed nonchalantly in the air, is photographed against a painted backdrop of a garden surrounded by a white picket fence. It references the kind of vernacular AfricanAmerican studio photography, popularised by photographers like Richard Samuel Roberts (who was active during the 1920s, in South Carolina), in which sitters would pose against elaborate, painted backdrops of natural scenery, with props and personal belongings. Those old studio photos, Mitchell says, “represent a hopefulness for opportunity and a new life. It says, ‘Here are the belongings we hope to have over time’. Wrapped up in those backdrops is the desire for upward mobility and freedom.” The painted backdrop as a prop itself appears in Mitchell’s triptych Protect from all Elements (2022). The series of images shows a young man at various stages of pulling a blue-sky backdrop over a tomblike structure of tilled earth, at once calling forth histories of working the land and laying to rest the trauma of that past landscape. Chrysalis is suspended in that moment of reconciliation between past and present, recognition of being unseen and seen, of reshaping identity and reclaiming a position in the world, and as Mitchell puts it, a more general “coming into one’s senses”. To emerge on the other side iridescent, grinning, splashing water. ar Chrysalis, an exhibition of Tyler Mitchell’s photographs, is on view at Gagosian Davies Street, London, 6 October – 12 November
above Protect from all Elements, from the series Chrysalis (2022), archival pigment prints, triptych, 76 × 61 cm (each) all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
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Who’s Exploiting Who? ruangrupa’s take on documenta fifteen Interview by J.J. Charlesworth & Mark Rappolt
above Gudkitchen karaoke, at documenta fifteen, Kassel all images Courtesy Iswanto Hartono
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Directed by the Indonesia-based collective ruangrupa, documenta fifteen, which opened in Kassel in June, confounded many assumptions about how this major survey exhibition should be organised, and who and what it should be for. Under their model of ‘lumbung’, the Indonesian term for a communal rice-barn, ruangrupa have attempted a radically different way of organising and sharing Documenta’s financial and institutional resources among a huge number of artists and associates. Add to this the controversy that has dogged the exhibition over allegations of antiSemitism in some of the works presented, and documenta fifteen will go down as one of the more provocative and polarising editions of the German mega-exhibition to date. As the show comes to the end of its 100-day run, ArtReview’s Mark Rappolt and J.J. Charlesworth spoke to ruangrupa’s farid rakun and Ade Darmawan about their hopes for and the results of ruangrupa’s artistic direction of documenta fifteen, and what happens next. mark rappolt How did you react initially when the invitation to curate Documenta came about? Was it something you were already interested in, or did you have to think about it? farid rakun We were not even aware of our candidacy. One of the finding-committee members had put our name in the hat for them to discuss further. We were surprised when they told us, because we never thought that something like Documenta would work with something like us. They run on two different ‘operating systems’. mr Can you say a bit more about that – what were the differences? fr We knew about Documenta, of course. But from secondary sources like the media. That type of object-based art, one curatorial voice, genius in art and so on – we haven’t worked liked that much before. So we knew it was going to be tough to act as a curator, or a classic, centred artistic-director. But we were transparent from the beginning that what we were going to do is what we are already doing anyway. People might argue whether what we do is curating, but for us, this is what we do. That’s the work that we agreed with the institution as well. ade darmawan I remember one of the finding committee, when he was coming to us, asked us if we would be interested in sending them a sort of plan; he was giving us this news as if it were bad news rather than good news, because it’s still a long process of selection. So we discussed it as a group. I think our hesitation at that time was because we had just moved into
a new space further to the south of Jakarta, where we were setting up a ‘collective of collectives’, with a few others with whom we had worked already for many years: Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara. That started in 2017 and 2018 with two big warehouses. We were still quite wobbly with many things – things that we thought we should work on in our premises, in our system artistically – and then we were setting up [the educational platform] Gudskul, and so on. The answer for us was that it would only make sense if Documenta should be a part of our journey as well. Rather than we go and be exploited by it… Which is what’s happening now, I think. [laughs] It’s more like how we envision our journey, and then how actually to do this Documenta as being part of this journey. The big question is, ‘What is it for us?’ ‘What does it mean for us doing things and working in different contexts?’, which is the question, in our mind, every time we do projects outside our locality: not only what it means for ‘us’, but also what it means for ‘them’ – for people, or for places that
“The answer for us was that it would only make sense if Documenta should be a part of our journey as well. Rather than we go and be exploited by it… Which is what’s happening now, I think” we’re involved with. We did it as well, not as a curator but as artists. So finally, we wrote those texts that they had asked for based on this way of thinking, and then we extended it to many practices or models that we might want to learn from. It’s not really thinking about making an exhibition, that’s not in our mindset. It’s really about who we should like to work with, be inspired by, learn from and so on in the longer term, rather than thinking about what to show, what to exhibit. That wasn’t in our minds. We were pretty surprised that it actually got to the next phase. So we wrote a longer plan. But we were thinking that with or without Documenta, we’re going to do this anyway. mr I guess I want to follow up on what farid was hinting at before, in terms of this not being a Documenta about individual artworks and individual geniuses. Did you set out, when you were planning it, to introduce a different model? To what extent is that model an attack on the prevalent model in, let’s say, Western museums or even places outside the West that adopt Western models?
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fr I think, if we reflect on what we are doing already anyway, that is the thread. We want to learn about models and we know about the extractive thing, we know that exploitative thing [of the Western exhibition model]. But there are some individual artists in the roster. What’s important is that they work not solely as one person, that it has function or impact, that it also works in the ‘ekosistem’, as we call it [the idea of collaborative network structures]. We are not against objects, of course. We like beautiful objects, beautiful videos, beautiful sculptures, all that kind of stuff, paintings… The question is just how do they function in real life as well, or in other people’s lives? I think that’s in the thread. Being ‘anti-something’ is a way of thinking that got imported into Indonesia; in our language there’s no word for ‘anti’. mr You’re talking about ways of working that are integrated into context and the reality of specific situations (Indonesia in this case). How do you import that to somewhere like Kassel? ad That’s actually a challenge that we find in many projects. We are already several generations in ruangrupa; many of us are also artists or studied art. I studied art. This thing has colonised our minds as well, even when we work as individual artists. It’s actually never really gone away. Also, as a language, it’s there. We use the artistic or poetic language, and we still believe in it in many ways, of course. But this translation, this bringing one practice to another place, it’s always a challenge when we are being curators, either individually or collectively, or being artists, individually or collectively. In this Documenta, I don’t know if it works – maybe it needs some really deep analysing – but at least we tried to see it from the perspective of how resources work. We always see it as a movement from one place to the other place, and then the work is either recontextualised or it’s a challenge. But this distance also makes the work representational. So, what we are trying to do – at least during our research conversation with a lot of artists and also between us – is think about how to make that movement into a cycle. That’s why there’s always this question: what does that mean? If we invite Jatiwangi Art Factory from Jatiwangi village in West Java, Indonesia, to Kassel, then it shouldn’t stop there; it should also be cycled back. That cycle only makes sense if we think about the logic of resources. I don’t know if it works or not, but at least we tried to tackle that question about this different context. We are thinking not only about Documenta as an exhibition that ends or stops, but also thinking about this as a ‘lumbung journey’ that goes beyond
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Documenta; can exhibition-thinking go beyond itself? I think that’s the only way, at least for us, now to tackle that idea of distance and time. We are stretching it. mr But I guess when you’re saying that, it’s also that a number of the collectives and participants (thinking of things like the Off-Biennale from Budapest, yourself and Taring Padi, to some degree) are constructed because of the denial of resources, the denial of facilities and the denial of – or nonexistence of – infrastructure. That seems to me to be a bit of a challenge when you suddenly arrive at an organisation that has resources and an infrastructure, that is the very opposite from the situation in which these collectives were born. fr Yes. That’s also another understanding of different ‘software’, a different ‘operating system’. At least for now, we learned that having more resources – in the sense of financial resources, spotlight or attention resources – doesn’t mean that it’s actually better. It’s not necessarily the thing that maintains or sustains certain things. What we learn is that while it is a privileged position to have something like Documenta as part of our journey, it’s also sometimes like smoke and mirrors. From the surface it’s as if it’s big and all that kind of stuff. But it’s not ‘the sky’s the limit’ – we know it’s not – especially when we want to make decisions together and be transparent towards each other. Compared to other big contemporary art events, the rhythm of Documenta is considerably longer – every five years. We worked on it for three years, but then – and covid made it worse – it’s still not enough time, always not enough time. The calculation, or the tradition of making an exhibition of a certain scale, hits you with certain things that you cannot rush. That becomes kind of a battleground, let’s say. mr Do you think after this, you would do another largescale exhibition as artistic director? [farid and Ade laugh] j.j. charlesworth I’m interested in the experience of the exhibition from the perspective of the visitor, which has something to do with what you mentioned early on about ‘operating systems’, and what the priorities are to make an exhibition. Even though I was running around like a crazy person, trying see everything and failing to spend time with works during the press preview, many of the works and events were being presented for very different reasons than to exhibit visual art to a public – to create spaces for different groups of participants, to stage meetings, provide documentation and information, and so on. This is something of a paradox. What I enjoyed in documenta fifteen was that there are lots of works that are ‘turning their backs’ to you. It caused quite a few problems, but it was worth doing, because it highlighted what you expect from a big
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show, who you expect it to be for. It’s interesting to come across some of the presentations like [Marrakech cultural space] le18, which had a long text by the group explaining why they had to resist the kind of ‘siren call’ to ‘make a show’. It poses the question of whether you wanted it to be an exhibition at all, and not a meeting or a conference, because there is no sense in which this is a beautifully curated, presented experience where nobody’s going to feel uncomfortable. ad I can elaborate on that from a different angle maybe. There is the development, over 22 years now, of ruangrupa; we started as artists and an artist group, and then slowly became more collaborative, more collective and so on. (Although we never really used that word ‘collaborative’ actually.) But that collaboration with different people from different disciplines comes from necessity as well: we like many things, we don’t only like one thing. We like music, we play music, we make festivals, we like to host, so there are so many things – we never really believe in just doing
“We are not against objects, of course. We like beautiful objects, beautiful videos, beautiful sculptures, all that kind of stuff, paintings… The question is just how do they function in real life as well, or in other people’s lives” one thing. We’re always trying to put other sensible or sensorial elements into what we do. We never really make a ‘singular’ exhibition, maybe because we never really believe in it. Or maybe we think that it’s not enough, or we think maybe it should also be experienced in a different and diverse way. We never really see space as a white cube that only functions for exhibiting work. For example, we use the space for gigs, for meetings, for gatherings, living, sleeping and so on. Which is also resonant with practices from different parts of the world. We can go from that to how we struggle with the space, which has a special practice and special contexts politically, in one locale. With opening up space – a contested entity in relation to many things surrounding it. So, when we involve other friends, partners, collaborators, who don’t have the same but similar ways of thinking of approaching the space, arts and audience in that way, it just becomes natural that this mixture of different languages and strategies towards space,
ArtReview
towards the exhibition, towards the audience, will emerge. For example, we never really decided that venues should become living spaces; it just came naturally. It’s coming from the needs of many practices that we invite, that they want to do that. Some part of [Documenta headquarters] the Fridericianum has actually become a dormitory, some part of wh22 becomes living space, the Hübner space as well. It’s actually a natural approach somehow. Maybe that’s why also it’s become strong, in a way, because it’s become a living form of action. jjc I remember saying in the office, slightly flippantly, that I had a feeling that ruangrupa were going to ‘crash Documenta’. But seriously, it is evident in a lot of the tensions that seem to have emerged that actually the Documenta structure, however willing it was to entertain alternatives, is still a very hierarchical or very centralising structure, with quite a few unscrutinised assumptions about what the exhibition should be. I wonder, were you anticipating that the different ‘operating systems’ would cause such friction, whether the Documenta team anticipated it? More generally, what did you think of or work through ahead of the situation? ad Well, it started not from day one but from before! When, finally, they appointed us, we had to deal with the contract. They sent us a contract and it’s actually for an individual artistic director while we are a collective. We hadn’t started yet but this is a sort of crash already. We know that maybe we underestimated that this was not going to be a big crash! It was tough, very tough, because this is not a show with a ‘theme’ in the middle, and then the works will react to it. And it’s not only based on the production mode, in the Documenta tradition, but also how the exhibition is perceived structurally. Lumbung is a practice, it’s a way of working based on certain principles and values. So we have to apply lumbung values in our modes and approaches: from how we do our artistic research, how we see audiences, the exhibition, the Documenta economy, time, space, resources, etc. I think it has also something to do with how Documenta, after Documenta 14 [in 2017] also changed their structure, which has become more controlled. Obviously, they had to restructure after… jjc … the deficit crisis of Documenta 14? ad Yes. It used to be that the artistic director and managing director were on an equal level. They used to be able to do whatever they wanted. But now they put in a ‘ceo’, they changed it. It has this element to it that is more controlled. So, I think when we started with all these changes within the organisation of resources – how we work with the management, and so
Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, The Rituals of Things, 2022 (installation view, documenta fifteen, Fridericianum, Kassel)
Lumbung Radio at ruruHaus, part of documenta fifteen, Kassel
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Britto Art Trust, pakghor – the social kitchen, 2022 (installation view, documenta fifteen, Documenta Halle, Kassel)
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on and so forth – it’s not easy. You have to fight for every inch. Decentralisation vs hierarchy, trust vs control… fr I think we knew it was going to be a negotiation from the get-go. This result, what you experienced, although it’s only for 48 hours as you say, is a result of that. We cannot say otherwise, we should not pretend that it’s the other way around. What we realised, after all these things, not only in ruangrupa, but also with the artistic team, with some of the artists and collaborators, is that we should not have started this with Documenta; we should have started working like this even before, so that the network would have been built before, basically. We also call it ‘Lumbung: Documenta version’, with covid included; covid makes everything different. But then it is a Documenta. Luckily, at least up until now, we’re still thinking together about what the next version could be. It becomes like a journey in itself or a type of music that can be revisited, revisited, revisited again. Technically, and also, of course, talking about resources, we put the economy in front. It happened. Yes, it’s still happening, of course, but then it’s the media furore about it. Partially, a German media furore about it. It becomes politicised. It came as a surprise for us. mr I guess to some degree that had already started before the show even opened. fr Yes. It was surprising for us. That’s why we needed time. We are also slow – meaning collective. We needed five months since January before we reacted as ruangrupa and the artistic
team. Before we just listened to other voices, because this is like a fight or a struggle that we came in the middle of. It didn’t start with us. It’s not going to end with us. Where should we position ourselves in all this? We know our voice, or we know our collaborators’ voices, but it’s much more like, ‘ok, how should we put ourselves into it?’ mr In hindsight, given the controversy of Taring Padi, would you have policed the exhibition more? Could you even do that?
“We never really see space as a white cube that only functions for exhibiting work. For example, we use the space for gigs, for meetings, for gatherings, living, sleeping and so on. Which is also resonant with practices from different parts of the world” fr The way we do documenta fifteen, participants are maybe staging ten different exhibitions during the hundred days, and we trust them. Also, with covid, we were never able to meet everyone in person before maybe two months, a month before an exhibition opens. So even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t be able to control everything. mr That’s in the nature of how a lot of the work is made as well.
Fondation Festival sur le Niger, Le Maaya Bulon / Vestibule Maaya, 2022 (performance view, documenta fifteen, Kassel)
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fr The way we understand it at least is two sides of the same coin. The way documenta fifteen would be achieved, let’s say, means this is not a bulletproof thing. This is, like you said, maybe a new way to do a Documenta. A lot of people, including ourselves, don’t know how to foresee things before they happen. We knew that there were going to be a lot of surprises. Some will be good, or most will be good, but also there is a big risk in some of the surprises. We see it as a challenge. The way we see it right now, at least, it’s part of that steep learning curve. Learning about institutions like Documenta in Germany, or even in the Netherlands, or maybe in the uk, there’s nothing like it. The closeness of politicians to an art show, and that it can be considered as a state project, and all that kind of stuff. mr Also the sheer hysteria of the German press. There was one really crazy article in Die Welt that said something along the lines of ‘if you thought Documenta was riddled with anti-Semitism, you should go check out hkw, because that’s a viper’s nest of anti-Semites’. jjc I have many misgivings about the controversy. First of all, at a trivial level, it was actually hard to see the works in question… fr Taring Padi, you mean? jjc Yes. You had to know what you were looking for and go and find it. I am careful how to frame this because I’m not a particular fan of, say, bds, politically, or rather the European artworld’s obsessive attention to Israel and Palestine. But nor am I a fan of censorship, whether it’s by the German state or by social media, or by people who want to exclude, for example, artists who are from Israel. There’s a lot of censorship flying around in the culture. So I think that the works in
question should be seen, so that people can judge for themselves. I think there’s also a level of absurdity and hysteria when you actually see some of the things which are being singled out. In particular, the most recent story was about material that was ‘discovered’ in the Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie [Archives of Women’s Struggles in Algeria]. If you’re telling me that Palestinian liberation movements are never going to caricature Israeli military or security forces, and also that we can never see this material, I think you must be out of your mind, because this is a historical document, it’s a political document, an archive. You may not agree with it, but the idea that one can never look at this material as a historical document seems very regressive. But I think there’s a lot of unacknowledged resentment and frustration in a lot of these controversies, and this one I think is also one of them, whereby the people are wondering why art has become so full of politics. Obviously, there is a partisan issue: there’s an issue about why a big official institutional or semiofficial institution like Documenta should appear to be presenting one side of what are bigger political controversies. I don’t particularly want to take sides, so for me it’s more important to try and work out how the presentation of political art is in tension with the institutions that present it. It goes back to what you were saying about how these two different structures may be incompatible. The context for this is a bigger discussion about how artists work with politics, and work politically, how they engage that kind of practice with institutions which may actually be quite conservative institutions. And yet, these institutions want to let you in. That’s the interesting thing. You were not excluded. You were invited in. ad I would like to go back a little, because we have a way of working, and then when we
expand our conversation, and we’re really interested in the models of struggles, speculation about models of education, economy, activism and so on, we’re interested in a certain model or approach, so we extend that similar approach in different places to connect and to enter a conversation. That’s actually how all the struggles are actually connected in many ways. They are marginalised, they’re really struggles within our contemporary world, in many ways. That’s actually the connection. There is no ‘theme’. Because many times, this is why maybe the sloganistic or rhetorical approach of lot of political artists, or of political art, is not working, not cracking the system, or not trying to make a space, or a different system, or different models. For example, many of the practices in this Documenta are really onto that, with a different language. Hopefully, people will see that it’s more inherently political, rather than being a representation of politics. Rather, it’s an action. You’re setting up a school with a different model. It is political in many ways and in many places. It’s not that we’re talking about how this world should be this way or that, this kind of shit, but really doing it. That’s why it’s actually also a different energy. I like when you mentioned the word ‘conference’, because I see it that way as well. It’s become a big conference, when actually the participants, the artists, the collectives, collaborators, just gather and meet each other. That’s why I’m really interested how it actually works after Documenta. I think for now the points are taken. That’s it. I don’t mind if it stopped tomorrow. I don’t need a hundred days. But if a hundred days can really facilitate people to meet, to conference, basically with all the
struggles, models, I think this, the hybrid, the ripples it causes, that should be really exciting to see, because again, talking about resources, we now meet – and before, all these struggles never met, never. Unless you were in the artworld elitist circle, with the stamp of political artists; then you can go around international biennials, which basically can be only afforded by countries that have infrastructure and resources to do that. Like, for example, how an Indonesian will meet other artists from the Southeast Asian region, but in Singapore. It would be great if these connections could be made directly, straightforwardly between and among them. We’ll see after this. I think that will be actually the work of documenta fifteen that I will be happy with. mr I guess we should briefly discuss some of the other bits of the controversy. I think, for instance, there were writers talking about how you had no Jewish Israeli artists in the show, and what your standpoint is on anti-Semitism – maybe you can talk a bit about that? ad We never see this [Documenta] in terms of representing nation-states. That’s one thing. I think many of the practices presented here are actually against state structures, ideas and so on. So we don’t see that way. It’s like that approach or statement is somehow for me irrelevant… mr Yes, but it’s a particularly Western institutional context – that need for everything to be represented… ad There have been no Indonesian artists in the history of Documenta… jjc I would come back to the idea that artistic directors get to choose who they want in their show, and that you have the authority to include or exclude. In the end, it’s
Panel Discussion ‘Oops! Petruk did it again’ at ruruHaus, documenta fifteen, Kassel, featuring Taring Padi, Richard Bell, Philippe Pirotte, Marienne Dautrey, Kiri Dalena
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Keleketla! Library’s concert, part of their event series Skaftien (2011–), at documenta fifteen, Kassel
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Interventions by Dan Perjovschi and Hamja Ahsan on the facade of the Fridericianum, as part of documenta fifteen, Kassel
ArtReview
Serigrafistas Queer, Rancho Cuis, 2022 (installation view, documenta fifteen, Kassel)
up to you, surely. I think that Mark’s point about representation is an interesting one because it goes back again to the idea that Documenta must have this kind of global authority. I’m not sure about that… fr J.J.’s reading is quite a generous one and useful as well for us to hear that from you, because up until now, a lot of times the questions become repetitive and it’s not challenging. On the matter of representation, as Ade said, we didn’t want to answer that particular accusation, because we never thought about Documenta as being representational. A lot of people, artists, don’t want to be identified as being from a certain country. We don’t want to say that we represent Indonesia, for example, nor Taring Padi either, I would say. Second, there are Israeli and Jewish participants, but we never ask people about their race or ethnic group, or whatever. For a long time, we didn’t know whether it’s true or not, whether there are Israeli or Jewish artists in these 1,500 artists that we are working with. Then we found out after that there are. Thirdly, although we didn’t ask, some later let us know that they were actually Israeli Jewish, for example, or Jewish, and some of them asked us not to disclose that, so we respect that. mr It’s noticeable that much of the criticism comes from a German perspective and from a German history – and a German psychology to some degree – without any acknowledgments of who you are, where you’re from, where the other people are from, who they are. ad It’s always self-centric, European-centric thinking, all the time in many ways, and in art as well. It’s really become a hurtful conversation. We can say that it’s a double standard, that it’s self-centred. I think the controversy really shows that it is like that. I don’t know how hopeful I am that people will learn and analyse this, but it is hurtful. In this tornado, a few times we were saying to ourselves, ‘Why are we doing this? Are we obliged to teach Europe? Are we obliged to fix Europe? What about our struggle? What about other struggles?’ and so on… It’s maybe like we have to choose. It’s really relevant also for us because we have a lot of people back home here in Indonesia, wondering what this lumbung will mean for us after Documenta and so on. Then at the same time we are being sucked into this discussion. It’s really about that as well, about which direction we should take this. mr Will there be a positive impact from Documenta within Indonesia and the art scene at home? I guess tourists will know one new word: lumbung. ad We are developing, together with many other collectives in different islands as well, Lumbung Indonesia. It has a different context
and challenges but it’s also a model that they are developing so everyone can learn from each other. A few of them are collectives or initiatives that have already been existing for many years, but most of them are from younger generation. We’re going to get busy with that and see. It is important to see that it will be more towards the direction of educational and economic models. Of course, many places like Indonesia have been modernised, Westernised, yet in some strange ways that aren’t quite there. Especially because Indonesia is vast and very diverse. It’s awkward. It’s not fully colonised as such… mr But it’s like when Indonesia had the revolution, you couldn’t decide what language it was to be in… ad Exactly, too many languages. I think that’s actually the homework that we have to do. Of course, we deal with art institutions here, and also educational institutions. We just have to go for it more and really envision that [lumbung] as a practice that can be adapted and can learn from many different localities. Because for example the economic model that we are proposing, it’s
“In this tornado, a few times we were saying to ourselves, ‘Why are we doing this? Are we obliged to teach Europe? Are we obliged to fix Europe? What about our struggle? What about other struggles?’ ” not there yet, but we have to experiment more, it needs time. There’s a lot of homework. I think people will also more and more be part of it. I have a suspicion that Europe will adapt this model in their own way faster because they have resources. We could see also from the last two years, during the preparation for Documenta, there were many people writing, and institutions, art schools, museums, really looking at what we were doing. But in Asia-Pacific, museums, big institutions, biennials, really still would like to be Western institutions. We’ll see how these two opposite streams will meet in the middle and overlap. mr At first all exhibitions I saw were in shopping malls in Singapore and Malaysia – because there weren’t really other spaces. It seemed normal after a while. ad Yes, in Bangkok also. jjc That is a function of what we assume an art exhibition to be. I think that many of the things that you have had to suffer in this situation in Kassel are coming from a crisis of the public institution in the
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European and North American models. Yet those models have been exported, or have been often assimilated by other cultures, particularly in Asia, where those societies are becoming much more wealthy and much more leisured, and much more middle-class, it’s clear that you’ve walked into problems that are internal to the institutional culture of contemporary art in Europe. My question to Ade is: ruangrupa has always been based on dealing with the lack of resources and dealing with the lack of infrastructure. But what happens when Indonesia has an exhibition institution as big as a Documenta? Will you still get into so much trouble? ad It’s a good question. I think Indonesia had that infrastructure actually pretty early in the region. Jakarta Arts Centre – Taman Ismail Marzuki (tim) was built in 1968, and Jakarta Biennale started back in 1974. That’s how in the 1960s the government played a role in the development and the planning of arts infrastructure in the context of the institutions and fields of modern art. During the Suharto regime (the New Order Era) cultural centres were built in each province as part of the cultural politics of national identity. When we started in 2000, we were writing a text about more or less why and how it was necessary that we start ruangrupa. One of the things that we pointed out back then is the lack of infrastructure, but to think back again that is actually not completely true. The real issue was that the infrastructure was part of the Indonesian national cultural identity campaign, which leaves very little space for other forms of art practice and critical voices. So the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s was the time that many small art initiatives – including ruangrupa, Taring Padi and many others in many places – emerged as a substitute or alternative to state-built art and educational infrastructure. In a different way we are actually always ‘in trouble’. Since the 1998 Reformasi [the period of reform after the toppling of President Suharto] we have very slowly come to a different people–state relation, particularly since many of those small-tomedium initiatives survive and have played an important role in many places and with respect to many of the challenges in Indonesia, now for more than a decade. It is actually a really crucial time to connect these different education and economic models of institutional practice. As a public institution I think Documenta should really think how it operates and try to find a different economic model, in order not to become centred, extractive and exploitative because of its scale… I think this concern with scale, wanting bigger, greater… it should be obsolete. But I think judging by the current output, many still operate within this logic. People still need that propaganda. mr Yes, and the state always needs rewards. ar
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Sylvia Schedelbauer by Ren Scateni
Wishing Well (stills), 2018, digital video, colour, 13 min
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A third-generation ‘veteran’ of the Second World War takes on silence, cultural dislocation and Orientalist myth in an increasingly experimental body of filmwork
Labor of Love (stills), 2020, digital video, colour, 11 min 30 sec
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Memories (stills), 2004, digital video, colour, 19 min
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“War has stayed unimaginably alien to me,” says Sylvia Schedelbauer stripped of the cultural coordinates to make sense of her mixed-heritage in her first work, Memories (2004). Yet the role that the Second World existence within the fractured geopolitical landscape of the late twenWar had in shaping the filmmaker’s identity connects the film – and tieth century. Memories ultimately reflects on the generational trauma therefore her oeuvre, in which the theme of war figure extensively – of the children of the Second World War – Schedelbauer’s parents – and to more contemporary narratives of displacement, often themselves the rippling effects it had on the filmmaker and her own generation. a consequence of conflict-ridden countries. After Memories, Schedelbauer abandoned linearity and narrative Schedelbauer, born in Tokyo in 1973 to a German father and in favour of an experimental approach, slowly building a pulsating, a Japanese mother, moved to Berlin in her twenties to study at the cinematic assemblage. In Anna L. Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End Berlin University of the Arts and has lived there since. Her films, of the World (2015), assemblages are described as ‘open-ended gatherwhich have screened at numerous festivals and institutions, were ings’ that ‘allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming presented in a retrospective at the latest edition of the International them’ and ‘show us potential histories in the making’. Although inspired by the ecology of mushrooms, Schedelbauer’s assemblages Short Film Festival Oberhausen, held each spring in Germany. are further qualified as polyphonic, hence Oberhausen, one of the oldest shortMemories strives to critique the shifting the attention to a specific mode film festivals in the world, kickstarted of observing their multiplicity, which Schedelbauer’s career with Memories, limits and fallibility of human encourages temporal and spatial simultaa profoundly personal short documentary memory, but it also demonstrates neity. Schedelbauer’s films are composed film on the unreliable nature of memory how much history is susceptible of manifold synergic strata – aural, visual, and cultural identification in a transnacognitive – that offer the viewer a heighttional context, which was presented at to distortion and subjectivity ened experience through the use of the the festival the year it was made. In it, Schedelbauer attempts to (re)construct her family history, using family flicker (or strobe effect), found footage and immersive soundscapes. photos to map out what led to her parents’ meeting in Japan, the details In Schedelbauer’s next film, Remote Intimacy (2007), words and of which were never disclosed to the filmmaker. In a voiceover the images are no longer in direct relation, meanings are often hidden filmmaker admits to having based her version of the family’s history and the rhetorics of dreams take control. The film relinquishes the (including mentions of her grandfather’s involvement with the Nazis) confessional commentary of Memories and embraces a multilayered on fragmented conversations she had with her father. Her mother, on narrative composed of personal experiences, fictionalised writing the other hand, had always been reluctant to share details of her past. and literary quotes. Schedelbauer’s early preoccupation with the Intriguingly, although Memories strives to critique the limits and falli- unreliability of memory here morphs into a grander discourse about bility of human memory, it also demonstrates how much history is cultural dislocation and the impossibility of identifying with a monosusceptible to distortion and subjectivity. Photos of Schedelbauer’s lithic national historical narrative. Various types of archival docuparents are presented in a slideshow, but the filmmaker’s voice is mentary footage are used in the film, including home movies, newsthe only one allowed to comment on them. reels and educational films, most of which were Because of her parents’ silence about their past, shot in the United States and Japan. However, Remote Intimacy (still), 2007, digital video, Schedelbauer grew up in an identity vacuum, locations remain unidentified in the credits, colour and b/w, 14 min 30 sec
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Oh, Butterfly! (stills), 2022, digital video, 19 min 20 sec
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meaning they are recognisable only to those potentially familiar with which is why any concerns about the ecological crisis we’re facing the trans-Pacific landscape of postwar American–Japanese relations. become apparent only when details about the film’s source materials To all others, these images are abstract and unplaceable, and yet they are disclosed. Ultimately, Wishing Well’s reading remains slippery, its seem to be drawn from a collective consciousness of shared media, visuals transcending clearcut spatial and temporal markers. However, the recollection of which resurges as in a hazy dream. Thanks to this such a thematic porousness complements the film’s visual structure, pervasive use of found footage, Remote Intimacy gestures towards a allowing the human and natural worlds to collide. In her most recent work, Oh, Butterfly! (2022), Schedelbauer orchessubconscious realm, a primordial soup of intertwined memories and experiential connections that lulls the viewer into an oneiric torpor. trates a symphonic and multifaceted critique of American imperialism Sounding Glass (2011) is another journey into these liminal, mnemonic via the Orientalist story of Madama Butterfly (1904), blending in elements spaces, in which Schedelbauer’s use of found footage, and particularly of her own family history, which thematically connects the work to here of 16mm ‘orphan film’ (an umbrella term that emerged during the Memories. Based on the semiautobiographical novel by Pierre Loti, 1990s among archivists to describe moving-image work abandoned by Madame Chrysanthème (1887), and the short story ‘Madame Butterfly’ its owner or copyright holder for lack of commercial potential; the con- (1898), by John Luther Long, Giacomo Puccini’s opera recounts cept was later expanded to refer to films the tragic story of Cio-Cio-San, a young Images are abstract and unplaceable, geisha who marries a us Navy officer and that had suffered neglect), is mirrored in eventually commits suicide after being the film’s own significance. A man, deand yet seem drawn from a abandoned by the man. Similarly to her scribed by Schedelbauer as ‘one of the collective consciousness of shared previous works, Oh, Butterfly! combines grown-up half-Japanese orphans’, stands media, the recollection of which in a forest and stares into the lens of the superimposed images – archive footage of camera, acknowledging and sustaining a nineteenth-century steamship, various resurges as in a hazy dream opera productions and film adaptations our gaze, before disjointed images of quotidian life are juxtaposed. The flicker is employed extensively in the of Madama Butterfly, 8mm home movies of Schedelbauer’s family – work with a hypnagogic effect, while the forest surrounding the man with text and sound to construct a kinetic palimpsest weighing in seems to allude not only to a place of personal introspection but also on a larger discourse on multiracial love and its historical connotato a spiritual locus, a mycorrhizal network of splintered human inter- tions, often dictated by colonialist power dynamics. Audio clips and connections reminiscent of Tsing’s organic assemblages. It’s an envi- scenes from David Cronenberg’s subversive M. Butterfly (1993) tesselronment visited again in Wishing Well (2018), a hallucinogenic collage late the film and perhaps illuminate a different and quite radical film that follows a boy as he roams alone in the woods collecting and interpretative path, in light of Cronenberg’s upending of common planting seeds. The images of the boy, which, as Schedelbauer explains tropes of Western dominance and Asian submission. Eighteen years in a statement, were taken from an educational short on environmental after the critical commentary of Memories, Schedelbauer rearticulates pollution made during the 1970s and then matted frame-by-frame her personal mythology by releasing problematic markers of national by the filmmaker, flick through the film, cross-dissolved on luscious and gender identity to the warm embrace of a communal psyche. ar pictures of trees and images of celluloid film damaged by water. ‘I didn’t want to make an instantly recognizable environmental film,’ she writes, Ren Scateni is a writer and film curator based in Bristol
Oh, Butterfly! (stills), 2022, digital video, 19 min 20 sec all images Courtesy the artist
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The Future Will Be an Out of Body Experience by Venus Lau
If memory defines who we are, does the rise of external data storage signal that the human being as understood today is already a thing of the past? 88
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“The root of men’s problems is memory,” states martial artist Huang (a popular vending machine selling capsule toys) with ‘manual’ Yaoshi, a character in Wong Kar-wai’s arthouse classic Ashes of Time videos presented on screens attached to the front of the dispenser (1994). The film revolves around the dialectics of remembering and explaining how this conceptual device works: the machines sell forgetting; in it an anonymous desert’s shifting sandscape suggests a plastic balls containing ‘nanobots’, which are then introduced to geological palimpsest of writing and unwriting memory at the same one’s neurosystem via inhalation. The nanobots multiply and create time. In the age of information saturation, people are entangled in new memory zones in the brains of the users (and memories then the present technoscape of an attention economy that keeps altering. become exchangeable and transferable between the purchasers). On In Lawrence Lek’s ongoing ‘episodic virtual world’ Nepenthe Valley the surface, this sounds like pure sci-fi fantasy, but at the same time, (2022–), ruins suturing ancient and futuristic architectural features it could also be a prophecy of our near future. are situated in a digital ‘natural’ Already, limited human memory If one sees memory as a neurochemical landscape. Named after the Ancient capacity may drive some people Greek (mythical) potion of forgetto externalise their memories to process and psychological ‘faculty’ then ting, the project suggests the possiexternalising memory provokes questions the Cloud (operated by a network of servers). If one sees memory as bility of a therapeutic oblivion via game playing, exploring the ‘doorway effect’ – a psychological status a neurochemical process and psychological ‘faculty’ for ‘encoding, under which one’s memory fades when passing from one place to storing and retrieving information’ (according to neuroscientist Larry another – in the liminal spaces between the virtual and the actual. Squire), then externalising memory to the Cloud provokes quesThe virtual ruins look uncannily strange-but-familiar and are tions of memory authorship and revision, and how it remains a space contained by sublime, hilly simulations, forming spaces for mental of privacy. walking, making it a mirror of Simonides’s method of loci (in which Scientists are now racing to explore the possibilities of synthetic the Roman developed a system by which humans could store large dna as a medium for digital information storage. Nature magazine amounts of data in their minds by linking the information to mental describes the technology as a combination of ‘dna synthesis, dna sequencing and an encoding and decoding images of places). facing page algorithm’. Binary data is decoded and If Lek’s Nepenthe Valley is an experiment for a Lawrence Lek, Nepenthe Valley encoded in dna’s four nucleotides. The techfuturistic mnemonic mechanism, aaajiao’s Memory (The Shrine) (render), 2022–, nology might drastically condense and make Vending Machine (2009) is a speculation on the episodic virtual world. Courtesy the artist durable memory storage: according to mit futures of memory. Based on the artist’s research top Aaajiao, Memory Vending Machine, into current nanotechnology and biotechnology, News, ‘a coffee mug full of dna’ could store all 2009. Courtesy the artist the artwork is a fictional ‘invention’ – a gashapon the current data in the world. and Tabula Rasa, London
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top Magnetic Rose (still), 1995, dir Koji Morimoto above a.i. Artificial Intelligence (still), 2001, dir Steven Spielberg. © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
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The technology may also herald a new round of technological and battery has been depleted, by a new generation of ai robots. By this corporeal integration. Would it be possible, for example, to reinter- time, humans are extinct and cities are buried beneath glaciers. The nalise (or ‘download’) massive amounts of externally stored memo- advanced androids read David’s memories and reconstruct his home, ries and data into human bodies? Will there be a seamless brain as well as clone his human ‘mother’ (or owner), Monica, from a strand implant for memories? (Farewell to Johnny Mnemonic-style headset of her hair. As a mass-manufactured machine, David is supposedly devices!) When straddling the computer coding of the Cloud and the devoid of individuality – yet he does have ‘personal’ memories of his genetic coding of dna, will there be a doorway effect in which we beloved mother. Are the recollections of David, who is a machine, forget our bodies? And in that event, who or what would own those just volatile memories? Or are they memories that construct his memories that migrate between the body and the servers that store ‘consciousness’? a.i. not only rethinks the psychological mechanism that information? Who will have the right to edit, interpret, formalise of a nonhuman via an old fairytale, but also raises the question of and present memories in the future? If memories are stored in dna how memories might be archived for the future. In both Magnetic – the old medium for biological information – and synchronised on Rose and a.i., memories bleed beyond the flesh. The recollection of multiple digital devices, what connects these sutured temporalities? undying love possesses and haunts both human and robotic bodies, And what, in fact, is memory in this case? and new memories are created and stored. Futuristic conceptions of how memory functions abound in J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World (1962), an early climate sci-fi. Magnetic Rose, a short animation directed by Koji Morimoto fiction, imagines the role of memory in the human and terrestrial and scripted by Satoshi Kon, is the first part of Memories (1995), an sense – the wrestling between human memory and the geological anthology film produced by Katsuhiro Otomo based on his manga memory of Earth. It is set in 2145, when most of the world’s landmass stories. Set in 2092, Magnetic Rose follows two engineers who work is underwater, and solar storms have weakened Earth’s ionosphere, on a salvage freighter called Corona. Responding to a distress signal causing rapid surges in temperature and sea levels. Wilderness takes coming from an abandoned space station, the engineers find gravity, over urbanscapes, ‘rekindling archaic memories of the terrifying oxygen, opulent European interiors, holographic blue sky and white jungle of the Paleocene’, while relics of the manmade world disinteclouds outside the windows, and even a sumptuous feast laid out on grate and are forgotten (people don’t even remember where London is) as the wilderness builds up. Does a table. The engineers keep encouna drowned world with giant mosquitering the spectre of an opera diva How might memories be archived named Eva Friedel, the long-dead toes and ferns represent a regressive or in the future? In both Magnetic Rose owner of the station. As music from progressive future? While the former and a.i., the recollection of is compatible with a linear, anthropoan aria in Madama Butterfly (1904) floats centric temporality, a zero-sum game through the station, the two engiundying love possesses and haunts in which humanity’s ‘advancement’ is neers (who have become separated) human and robotic bodies, while start to hallucinate: one sees his late marked by the conquest of nature (and new memories are continuously child; the other falls in love with Eva regression when nature fights back), and reenacts the romantic memories the latter might resonate with the idea created, added and stored of the opera singer and her onetime that Earth is an organ with its own will fiancé. The hallucinations take the form of holograms and melting (and that this future is inevitable, regardless of human impact). white sculptures resembling 3d-printed objects that embody the Wax tablets could be used as a metaphor for how memory works, past personal memories of Eva and the engineers. It turns out that emphasising the relationship between writing and recording, and the haunting diva is in fact an ai robot ‘living’ Eva’s consciousness; the physical manifestation of the writing and recording. In Ted Chiang’s short sci-fi story ‘Exhalation’ (2008), the wax of the metaEva’s corporeal form is nothing but a skeleton. Magnetic Rose recalls the plot of Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris phorical tablet is replaced by flakes of gold leaf interwoven with air (1961), where the psychologist Kris Kelvin sees his dead wife in a capillaries, whose patterns change as air flows through the brains of space station – an embodiment of Kelvin’s shared memories with mechanical inhabitants made from titanium, and onto which the his spouse. But in Magnetic Rose the singer’s ‘apparition’ is the reifica- humanoid’s experiences are inscribed. Here, then, consciousness is tion of the memories of a stranger, reformalised via technology into merely a ‘pattern of airflow’. If our memories are also just patterns physical objects and entities; each character’s memories gravitate between neurons, and if the foreseen externalisation of them slowly and intertwine with the others’ to generate seemingly ‘real’ experi- blurs the boundaries between personal memories and all the data in ences, and thus more ‘memories’. In the closing scene, Eva sings from the world, will we remember everything? And does remembering a floating bubble, sirenlike, while the station’s powerful magnetic everything mean remembering nothing? field starts to pull in and devour Corona and everything around it. In the event of drastic future developments in our understanding a.i. Artificial Intelligence (2001) similarly explores ideas around the of consciousness, neuroscience and time, when the gaps between our exteriorisation of memory. David is a robotic ai child – a futuristic internal and externalised memories narrow or even seal up, will we version of Pinocchio – who is able to love, and, having been aban- forget ourselves? And will we reinvent again and again ways to encode doned by his human family, goes in search of the Blue Fairy (a char- memories, like Funes in Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’ (1954)? ar acter from The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1883), who he believes can turn him into a ‘real boy’. At the end of the film David is unsuccessful in Venus Lau is a writer and editor based in Shanghai his quest to find the Blue Fairy (who turns out to be a statue in an abandoned themepark), but is revived 2,000 years later, after his Translated from the Chinese by Claire Li
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Cerith Wyn Evans ....)(
mostyn 12 Vaughan Street Llandudno LL30 1AB Open 10.30 - 4.00 Tuesday to Saturday 08/10/22 - 05/02/23 +44 (0)1492 879201 www.mostyn.org x @mostyngallery
Aspen Drift, 2021 © Cerith Wyn Evans. Photo © Carter Seddon. Courtesy the artist, White Cube and Aspen Art Museum
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Aichi Triennale 2022 Still Alive Various venues, Aichi Prefecture 30 July – 10 October The words in the title of this year’s Aichi Triennale – ‘Still Alive’ – come from the output of a dead man. And the irony – conscious or unconscious – rings through the exhibition as a whole. But we’ll come to that later. More specifically, the words are borrowed from On Kawara (who died in 2014), and the series of telegrams (eventually numbering almost 900) containing the declaration ‘I Am Still Alive’ that the Aichi-born artist initiated in 1969. They form the initial display of the triennale’s main exhibition at the Aichi Arts Center in the prefecture’s capital, Nagoya City, where a selection of the telegrams, individually mounted and framed, are displayed in spotlit, glass-topped cabinets. Like precious relics. It’s at once meaningful and monotonous; an archive; the trace of a life (and, like much of the artist’s output, a meditation on time); and a display of both presence and absence (Kawara himself, who eschewed public appearances and began the I Am Still Alive series with telegrams sent as a contribution to a Paris exhibition reassuring the curator that he was still alive and did not intend to commit suicide). Collectively they form something of a map (the outlines of which are given by the various formats offered
by the places from which they were sent) and a chant. While the first chimes with Marcel Broodthaers’s Carte d’une utopie politique avec petits tableaux 1 ou 0 (1973 – a political world map with the word ‘world’ crossed out and replaced by ‘utopia’) that forms a type of foreword to Kawara’s work, the second echoes though the remainder of the Arts Center display. Through Korean-American Byron Kim’s diaristic Sunday Paintings (2001–), capturing clouds in the sky on Sundays (those here executed during 2020–21 – the covid era), each containing a brief handwritten summary of his thoughts and feelings on the day: commentary about the weather, the wellbeing of friends and family, the spread of the virus. And through Fukushima-based Wago Ryoichi’s Pebbles of Poetry (2011–22), a series of poems – in the form of epistemic and existentialist musings posted on Twitter – begun in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake, extended during the covid-19 emergency and internationalised earlier this year in collaboration with Kharkiv-based artist Olia Fedorova. And through Roman Ondak’s sliced tree trunk, Event Horizon (2016): 100 pieces of wood stamped with the years between 1917 and 2016
On Kawara, Telegram to Sol LeWitt, February 5, 1970, from the series I Am Still Alive, 1970–2000. © One Million Years Foundation
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(corresponding to the rings in the trunk) and a historical event from that year. And, more obviously and subversively, in Zimbabwean painter Misheck Masamvu’s Still Still (2012–22), a video about (and the sliced-off side of) a white Volkswagen Kombi bus with slogans such as ‘Still hiding’, ‘Still held in prison’, ‘Still in a hole’ and ‘Still waiting’ stencilled onto its surface. To which, in the context of the exhibition as a whole at this point, you might be tempted to add ‘still stuck in a rut’. Although others would say this is a ‘tightly curated’ show. With that in mind, the words ‘Still Alive’ might also be read as an acknowledgement of the triennale’s endurance following the scandals surrounding censorship in 2019 (of a sculpture display that referenced the plight of ‘comfort women’ – women from occupied countries forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during the Second World War). And yet, overall, despite both that and the centrality of a dead man, this is not an exhibition about ghosts or the exorcism of them. Though perhaps it should be. Of course, as you will have gathered by now, the phrase ‘Still Alive’ is also a reference to the pandemic era in which this exhibition was
conceived and executed by artistic director Mami Kataoka (also director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo) and a curatorium of nine advisers, spanning Rhana Devenport (director of the Art Gallery of South Australia) through to Victoria Noorthoorn (director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires), who suggested artists to fit the theme, given that travelling to see them was not an option. Under the still-being-alive rubric, the exhibition, which features work by 82 artists and 11 performance groups as well as an extensive education programme, also explores issues relating to health, racism, indigeneity, artificial intelligence, migration, gender and ecology. But perhaps this form of control, in which the exhibition twists around to gnaw on its tail, also introduces questions about what museums are, or are for (Katoaka is also the current director of the museum association cimam). Not least because the remainder of the Triennale takes place in a series of offsite presentations spread across sites in the wider prefecture, namely Ichinomiya (one of Japan’s ‘textile capitals’), Tokoname (known for its pottery) and Arimatsu (situated along a historically preserved road in Nagoya’s suburbs). Places where people still live, and go about their daily lives. After you’ve seen Theaster Gates’s contribution, The Listening House, a reactivated and redesigned residence at Tokoname (where the
Chicago-based artist studied ceramics during a residency in 1999 and has periodically returned ever since), which has been transformed into a studio, workshop and club-type social space (complete with turntables and a collection of Black soul and jazz records), you get the feeling that ‘alive’ means something different outside the museum. The records were bought from a now-dead friend: the ceramicist Marva Jolly. The work celebrates the conversations and social relations between artists, rather than merely their formal relationships, and consequently is a space in which the visitor is welcomed as more than just a viewer. Similarly, Anne Imhof’s Jester (2022) a two-(jumbo-)screen videowork documenting a performance (a drummer and dancers) that took place during her solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo last year, is screened in an ice rink (without the ice) in Ichinomiya. The sound is loud (so loud, apparently, that the neighbours complained after the first day) and echoes round the rink; the dancers move together and apart, seemingly at once spontaneously and rehearsed. It’s a raw, at times animal form of conversation. Something that doesn’t quite fit with the refined and genteel space of the museum galleries, and something, in the context of your imaginary of what’s normally going on at a public ice rink (some pirouetting, some circling), makes you think about your relationship to the artworks
on show (in the museum you witness and applaud the pirouetting and perform the circling). Similarly effective are videoworks dealing with migration by Tuan Andrew Nguyen (particularly The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019, which deals with issues of identity in the entanglement of Vietnam, France and Senegal and is shown in a shipping agency in Tokoname) and Ngura Pukulpa–Happy Place (2022; a videowork shown in a former nursing school in Ichinomaya) by Kaylene Whiskey, in which the Australian Aboriginal Yankunytjatjara artist fuses Aboriginal and aspects from globalised Western culture in a desert party that both celebrates and defies aspects of the Aboriginal (and indeed, more generally, indigenous) as we imagine it to be (while also highlighting the absence of any reference in the exhibition to the plight of the Ainu people in Japan). In short it’s the messy bits of the triennale that work best. Nowhere more so than in Bunsho Hattori and Ryuichi Ishikawa’s The Journey with a Gun, and No Money (2021) – an account of a two-month trip to the south of Japan with the items listed in the title. In a former pipe factory in Tokoname it’s presented as an installation of their survival equipment, the skins of deer that they hunted for food, recordings of the sounds of the journey, photographs and texts and a modestly priced booklet. The living and the dead working together. And, like Kawara used to do, it performs what it says on the label. Mark Rappolt
Kaylene Whiskey, Seven Sisters Song, 2021. Courtesy the artist; Iwantja Arts, South Australia; and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
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The Dark Arts: Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism from the East and North Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw 3 June – 2 October This transhistorical, feverish trip through Balto-Slavic symbolism centres on Aleksandra Waliszewska, a Polish painter in her forties, whose visions – always untitled – court a camp kind of horror: a man leaves a house made of raw, oozing flesh; a litter of demonic kittens erupts through the orifices of a girl’s face; a six-breasted spider-woman catches men in her web. Primarily executed in fine strokes and misty washes of gouache on paper, 132 works here conjure the intimacy of fairytale books, or cramped adolescent bedrooms and the tortured intensity fermenting therewithin. Woven into the install are another 80-plus works from the Middle Ages through to the 1970s, many from the symbolist period. This integration emphasises Waliszewska’s relationship to her predecessors and the historical and mythical pasts of Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Baltic states, with a clear individuation of these countries and their cultures signalling a pointed refusal of Russia’s imperialist pan-Slavic circumscription. The curators never sneer at the artist’s – or symbolism’s – popular appeal: rather, through Waliszewska’s prism, they illuminate the possibilities afforded by this topography of swamps, sirens and vampires, exalting its potential to transgress ‘contemporary identitypolitics discourses’. But variously grounded in symbolist, surrealist, expressionist, religious and outsider territory, the exhibition’s elders prove a tricky proposition. They seem ‘authentic’ – no matter that nostalgia for folk culture and mythology was as resonant circa 1900 as it is today – and often channel ‘authentic’ currents of ethnonationalism or female objectification. Waliszewska is presented as an antidote: her women slay Nazis in a ‘girl-power revision of
history’ or embrace carnality while confronting the viewer instead of being passive vessels for ‘feminine evil’. The idea of women channelling animalistic impulses against very human indignities compels but also reinforces a mythologised image of the ‘strong Polish woman’. Her female hybrid creatures might gobble up ‘the animal within’ cliché, but considering the scope that speculative realms afford, they don’t transgress the boundaries of gendered bodies; hers is a world of women and men. But Waliszewska doesn’t claim to be a feminist, so perhaps it is a mistake to seek more nuance in regards to such discourse. Also, where Waliszewska offers more interesting notes, they are often overwhelmed in the cacophony of works; especially by artists such as Marian Wawrzeniecki, whose icky painting Old Truth Lies in Books (1910) delivers a woman’s fleshy body with a skull for a head, collapsed upon an open book and gripping a bloody root while another female figure succumbs to a serpentlike coil. Furthermore, it is difficult to regard the hooked noses of Marian Henel’s creepy voyeurs and not consider anti-Semitism; or to note the trope of dark vs. light repeated in various artworks throughout (including Waliszewska’s); or to look at self-taught artist Bogdan Zie˛tek’s Monkey (undated), of a woman in her underwear, sat on the floor in an uninhibited pose – without wondering if those attacking ‘foreigners’ or cultivating incel fantasies could as easily find gratification amidst this exhibition as those benignly scrawling poetry by candlelight. Would the curators flinch at this or concur that such age-old depictions of horror and subjugation have deep, specific cadences that continue to resonate and aren’t
˙ facing page, top Marian Wawrzeniecki, Stara prawda w ksie˛gach lez y (Old Truth Lies in Books), 1910, oil on canvas, 58 × 49 cm. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
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easily stabilised for any specific audience? Is Waliszewska really serving something radically different, or does her work exemplify the kind of Balto-Slavic self-exoticisation that’s lapped up in the West? (Nick Cave, a fan, featured Waliszewska’s work on an album cover.) As such, it’s worth considering how perspectives from West and East meet in such territory via the curatorial duo at the helm. Alison M. Gingeras, who devised the exhibition Dear Painter, Paint Me: Painting the Figure Since Late Picabia in 2003 at the Centre Pompidou (which predicted the latter-day elevation of figuration and realism, advanced by a vital reckoning with the dubious foundations of taste and elitism) curates alongside Natalia Sielewicz, whose 2019 survey of women painters, Paint, also known as Blood, featured Waliszewska among a generation who plumb a very Polish preoccupation with trouble through figuration. Their curating also delivers moments of disquieting repose: for example, Bronisław Linke’s watercolour Pink Track (1948), an incongruously pink scar of railway track, thrumming through a barren landscape that speaks acutely to Holocaust trauma. Finally, when confronted with a painting by Czech artist Karel Šlenger, dated ‘1930s’ and titled Jellyfish (a ‘medusa’ in Slavic languages), which depicts a Bibendumesque-stylised woman surrounded by impish sea-creatures, hands on hips, her expression tantalisingly ambiguous yet challenging – all this executed in a brown palette redolent of ‘East European’ interiors – it is obvious that The Dark Arts couldn’t resist casting its net wide. In doing so, it has retrieved a trove of bewildering treasures. Phoebe Blatton
facing page, bottom Aleksandra Waliszewska, Untitled, 2020, watercolour and gouache on paper, 31 × 23 cm. Courtesy the artist
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Bill Lynch The Exile of Dionysus cca, Brighton 6 August – 15 October Here’s Bill Lynch in correspondence with his friend Michael Wilde: ‘Sometimes an Affliction can press you to become more human. Those without an infirmity can slack off more freely their obligations. When we are aware of our limitations a battle plan to fight illusion can be drawn.’ Draw and paint he did, but what exactly was his affliction? Schizophrenia? We can’t be sure. Little is known about Lynch; he died in 2013 in his early fifties. That he was Dionysian, as with this show’s title, is suggested by another friend, Verne Dawson, who reports that Lynch loaded himself with Olde English 800 malt beer and a nickel bag of pot while working. The drugs worked. Lynch cannily painted on scraps of found plywood, neatly using the knots
and natural patterning as background textures to his paintings. Take No title [White Blossoms] (all works undated), where delicate chlorophyllcoloured stems end in whorls of white pigment tinged with peach pinks on a backdrop of the grain with its gold and brown tiger-stripe striations. Or No title [Snow and Birds], painted on five long planks, narrow and adjacent, that conjures a bucolic winter scene where white flakes drift slowly downwards. A camouflaged owl hides among the branches, each sketched quickly, expertly, as dark smears, evidence of Lynch’s acknowledged debt to Zhao Shao’ang (1905–98). Still Life with Milkweed Seed sees Lynch rendering a succulent pomegranate, the scarlet
No title [Snow and Birds], n.d., oil on wood, 206 × 89 cm. Courtesy The Approach, London
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sarcotestas bursting with juice. And in No title [Trees, Center Tree Pink Blossom] the forms of the blossom, all those loops and curls of oil paint, are set in a near symmetrical arrangement, like a set of lungs, the flowers as alveoli, little life-enhancing sacs. Simple pleasures. Lynch was a man out of time; he had little in common with the New York art scene of the 1980s, the era of NeoExpressionism and the Pictures Generation. In 2014 Roberta Smith wrote: ‘Genius lands where genius will, and I’m pretty sure some alighted on Bill Lynch’. I’d agree. Lynch’s organic forms are as ecstatically sumptuous as the opulent botanical pastels of Odilon Redon. They are that good. John Quin
Mary Kelly Corpus Vielmetter, Los Angeles 3 September – 15 October It is the mark of a truly successful artist that her work may feel forever contemporary. Corpus, restaged here at Vielmetter Los Angeles, is no less provocative than it was in 1990, when this first installation in Kelly’s larger Interim series debuted at New York’s New Museum. Finished ten years after her seminal Post-Partum Document (1973–79), Corpus examines the condition of women after motherhood. The 30 silkscreened and collaged panels, shown in the us for the first time in over 30 years, propose a rigorous, striking examination of ageing women and the fraught history of psychoanalysis. Kelly structures Corpus around nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s five-part classification of female hysteria, pairing evocative images of clothing with a scrawled, diaristic narrative by a first-person speaker contemplating the social experience of older women. In an American summer stamped by
the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision, Kelly’s work explores the vast territory beyond reproduction, challenging our focus on the young. Hysteria, no longer considered a viable diagnosis, classified a series of then-unacceptable behaviours in young women – sexual forwardness, emotional expression – as a medical disorder. In a world still centred on the desirability of youth, Corpus reanimates Charcot’s ideas to explore the experience of nonnormative femininity in older age. Five sets of six rectangular panels form the installation, each grouped by language from Charcot’s original taxonomy: the word ‘Supplication’ accompanies a pair of beat-up laced boots; a gauzy black nightgown looms above ‘Érotisme’. Alongside Kelly’s visual glossary, her handwritten protagonist ruminates over self-help books and antiageing advice, with key phrases highlighted in blood-red acrylic paint. Kelly presents older womanhood
without an actual depiction of the body, forcing a confrontation with preconceptions about gender and ageing. Corpus renders the clothing and language associated with the performance of an outcasted femininity – with hysteria – both absurd and enduring, as relevant now as they were in Charcot’s era. ‘I think that being a woman’, Kelly noted in a 2011 interview with Art Monthly, ‘is only a brief period in one’s life.’ The statement resonates with the work in Corpus, where hysteria is recast to envisage the socially abject position of women no longer considered desirable in a persistently sexist popular culture. Absent any visual representation of the body, Kelly’s work places the viewer into the literal shoes – the boots – of her older feminine subject. From here, American feminism’s focus on reproductive justice feels no less important, but newly limited. Corpus asks a difficult question: and then what? Claudia Ross
Interim, Part i: Corpus, Menacé (detail), 1984–85, laminated photo positive, silkscreen, acrylic on Plexiglas, 30 panels, 122 × 91 × 6 cm (each). Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles
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Black Melancholia ccs Bard, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 25 June – 16 October Recent years have witnessed the increased importance of melancholy in radical Black theory. Some theorists, such as Stephen Best, view melancholy as part of attempting to recover the irrecoverable past, an affective response to the collective traumas of Black people. Others, like Joseph Winters, think of melancholy as a ‘return to a wound that can never be sutured’, a lost object that can never be ‘anything other than a ruin’. Featuring the work of 28 artists of African descent, Black Melancholia deftly crystallises these theoretical currents. The blues, literally and metaphorically, becomes a key theme for the exhibition’s design. Black Melancholia begins through a cerulean
portal: glass doors, tinted by blue transparencies, open to an azure-carpeted gallery filled with representations of anguish by twentiethcentury Black artists. Paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints all depict Black subjects in poses of hunched and agonised introspection. In the centre of the room, a dyad of sculptures occupy a circular plinth: William E. Artis’s The Quiet One (1951) and Selma Burke’s Despair (1955–67). The motif of the curled wretch, memorialised here in limestone and bronze respectively, and repeated elsewhere in the gallery, suggests that Black artists have long been invested in representing their pain via gesticulated melancholy because it is so intrinsic
Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, The Meeting, 2021, Yupo paper, cotton paper and acrylic.Courtesy kach Studio
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to their experience of the world. The persistent image resonates with pathos, making an empathetic appeal to viewers, who would have difficulty denying this art historical wave of pensive despair. In the same gallery, three photographs float on a white curtain of gauze, and point towards melancholy’s vanished objects and the impossibility of their resuscitation. A now-anonymous photographer documented three views of a now-lost sculpture: Augusta Savage’s Realization (c. 1938), an allegorical, lifesize bronze of two former slaves. Seated in intimate exhaustion, the woman and man manage to lift their heads and gaze outwards at an unknown future,
capturing the moment they realise their freedom from the bonds of slavery. A history, twice lost. The endurance of pain emerges as a key theme. Ja'Tovia Gary’s video collage Giverny i (negresse imperiale) (2017) contrasts the leisure of Monet’s gardens with other clips, from the searing reality of Philando Castile’s murder at the hands of police during a traffic stop in Minnesota in 2016 (horrifically livestreamed by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds) to Fred Hampton, the assassinated Black Panthers leader. Idyllic visions of waterlilies splice with moments of colourful glitch and images that document police violence against Black people. Pope.L’s The Great White Way (2001–06) captures the artist’s epic performance as he crawled up the entire length of Broadway, satirising the American myth of upward mobility. Arcmanoro Niles’s Love I Try Even Though I’m Going to Fail (Rock Bottom Was Calling My Name) (2020) beams moody
and tender intimacy. It is a book-size portrait of a bearded Black man, perhaps a love lost, radiating with pink and red undertones that glow from beneath his amber skin. The subject’s hair dazzles with glitter. In its title the work suggests heartache and the inevitability of loss. Melancholy becomes a psychological consequence of the torrent of live-streamed videos of police violence against Black people; of the racist ghosts of Jim Crow; of the hierarchies and laws that enshrine the status quo. After the black-and-blue-painted galleries, the exhibition concludes in a white cube. While the Black figure is prominent throughout Black Melancholia, the final room turns to on abstraction. Rashid Johnson’s Ask Ellis (2012) and Charisse Pearlina Weston’s of the. (immaterial. black salt. translucence) (2022) use different modes of abstraction to engage with the tides of melancholy. Weston’s installation of rippled
glass sheets and vellum (supported by benches the artist’s father made) becomes a landscape of poetic text and image. Ask Ellis is a signal example of Johnson’s ‘cosmic slop’ work, a series that floods black wax, black soap and shea butter over wood flooring. Crowned with an oyster shell, five copies of Ellis Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class (1993) – a text that considers the anger of a Black middle class that continues to encounter racism daily – stack on a small shelf affixed to Johnson’s panel. Now a decade old, Ask Ellis becomes contextualised anew through Black Melancholia, and by the events of the past few years. The decades have advanced – 1993, 2012, 2022 – and with them inequality. Rage, and something much quieter, but no less psychologically encompassing, persists: the wounds and ruins of the past, haunting us now in hopes that we might be better attuned to others’ suffering. Owen Duffy
Augusta Savage with her sculpture Realization in 1938. Collection of The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center, New York
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Carolee Schneemann Body Politics Barbican Art Gallery, London 8 September – 8 January Carolee Schneemann died in 2019, and this rich survey offers a welcome opportunity to consider her now-canonical performances of the 1960s and 1970s in the frame of her six-decade career. Schneemann’s trajectory is marked by continuity, self-reflexivity and disjunction. From the beginning, she is bodily; her agency-reclaiming nude self-portraits – similar to Untitled (Self-Portrait with Kitch) (1957), featured here – were probably the reason she got temporarily expelled from Bard College in 1954. Her paintings from this period display a corporality in excess of itself, the figures at once muscular and contourless, merging with her dancelike brushwork as they writhe in and out of abstraction. Now we can
witness these works prefiguring the messy entanglements of her group performances with New York’s Judson Dance Theater, most famously Meat Joy (1964), in which the seminaked participants rough-and-tumbled together amidst raw meat, paper and paint; and of her early film Fuses (1964–67), a cut-up, burnt, overexposed and lyrically intimate montage of Schneemann and her boyfriend, James Tenney, having sex. During the 1960s, pushing painting beyond its object-based parameters meant escaping the homosocial institution of Abstract Expressionism – the ‘Art Stud Club’, as she called it. Her key: an informed ritualism, which she harnessed to collapse aesthetic distance.
To the collage and painting of One Window Is Clear – Notes to Lou Andreas-Salomé (1965) Schneemann affixed a tangle of magnetic tape with a recording of her reading aloud from the titular female psychoanalyst’s writings. As we can’t hear it, the paint-splattered tape acts as a fetish, animating the action of painting and assemblage in a ritual of communication. Among the show’s highlights are the Joseph Cornell-inspired ‘box constructions’ from the 1960s, some of which Schneemann made by setting wooden boxes alight, closing and opening them to reveal glass-strewn, massacred theatre sets – like elaborate mockups for her first public performance, Glass Environment for Sound and Motion (1962). As metaphors for
Two film strips from Fuses, 1964–67, 16mm film transferred to hd video, colour, silent, 29 min 51 sec. © Carolee Schneemann Foundation / ars, New York, and dacs, London. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; Carolee Schneemann Foundation; Galerie Lelong & Co, New York; Hales Gallery, London & New York; and p.p.o.w, New York
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the body (and body politic), the home and the studio, they ambiguously suggest an interior that is violent and magical, a room of one’s own that defies domesticity. Such optimism ceases to be felt in the more geopolitically engaged works of the 1980s and after. Passage becomes impasse, the body mediated by readymade stand-ins. While in Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–76) she swung naked from a harness, More Wrong Things (2000) consists of televisions dangling within a spaghetti of wires. The screens show recent (at the time) war footage constantly interrupted by static, with the occasional closeup from Schneemann’s earlier performance Interior Scroll (1975). The scroll itself, as she pulls it from her vagina, seems to become another cable, her once-revolutionary subjectivity strangled amidst global atrocity. In War Mop (1983) the motorised mop – an emblem of female labour – drums on a monitor showing a Palestinian
woman in her destroyed home. The absurdist hammering grabs our attention as if with the certainty that, in the setting of the gallery, it won’t make a difference. Already her protest film, Viet-Flakes (1962–67), questioned the rhetoric of empathy by juxtaposing images of the Vietnam War with songs of peace and love. Yet there is still hope in this remove; whereas in the later works, such empathy has failed. Made in response to the deaths of 15 close friends who had all died in the space of three years, Mortal Coils (1994–95) is a poignant and considered expression of personal grief and public mourning. Charmed ropes twirl upright on the floor, each representing a deceased person whom Schneemann loved; overlapping slide projections of their faces evoke human contact. Metaphor and disembodiment preserve human dignity, as the mysticism of the work’s kinetic component challenges the sanitised presentation of the printed obituaries
on the wall. In Known/Unknown: Plague Column (1995–96), Schneemann reckons with her own mortality, having been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and breast cancer in 1995. In the centre of the room is a witches’ sabbath of straw, cast-silicone breasts glowing like embers and four televisions emitting images of erotic, medical and animalistic carnality. On the walls, set in (phallic) columnar frames, are scientific images of Schneemann’s cancer cells, accounts of wildly conflicting medical advice and photographs of a seventeenth-century sculpture – once believed to have healing powers – of an androgynous woman triumphing over a witch. Again, ritual confronts the structures surrounding it, in this case the gendered history and categorical imperatives of science. Whether the witch will rise again is uncertain, but in works like this, the fight goes on. Tom Denman
Up to and Including Her Limits, 10 June 1976, performance at Studiogalerie, Berlin. Photo: Henrik Gaard. © Carolee Schneemann Foundation / ars, New York, and dacs, London
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Marcus Coates The Directors Churchill Gardens Estate, London 4 September – 30 October The psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) described two ways of acquiring knowledge about mental illness: explanation (through observation) and understanding (through empathy). However, as he wrote in his magnum opus General Psychopathology (1913), ‘with understanding there are limits everywhere’. He suggested there were some psychotic symptoms – experiences dislocated from what we agree to be reality – that were ‘ununderstandable’; where the shared foundations of reality are so lacking that another person cannot be said to truly understand. The Directors centres on Marcus Coates attempting to understand. He presents a film
in each of five venues in Pimlico, including a residents’ association building, a shop, a former curry house, the bedroom of a flat, and a gp conference room. Each film is made in collaboration with an individual with lived experience of psychosis who has responded to a call from the mental health charity Mind to participate in the project – Marcus Gordon, Stephen Groves, Lucy Dempster, Anthony Donohoe and Mark Banham. Coates casts himself as these individuals in each of the five films and is, as he says in a conversation with psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr Isabel Valli which accompanies the exhibition, ‘a willing conduit; someone they could use to project their experiences onto’.
The Directors: Marcus (still), 2022, single-channel hd video, 16 min 51 sec. Courtesy the artist and Artangel, London
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The directors instruct Coates throughout, heard but not seen as off-screen voices. For the viewer, the films involve a threefold witnessing: the description of psychotic experience, the process of Coates’s understanding coming into being, and how this manifests in his performance. Coates often struggles to understand, or to perform, and these moments are embraced and generate the momentum necessary to make the films feel unpredictable and alive. They prompt continuous feedback and welcome debate between Coates and the directors: he confronts a director on whether a man in a cherry picker outside the window could really be spying on him, and directly argues with an auditory
hallucination. Coates’s overarching tone is of probing curiosity and has the feel of a psychiatrist trying to maintain an alliance while also gleaning maximal information and testing the extent and solidity of a belief system. But the psychiatric assessment is often centred on establishing a diagnosis, risk, appropriate legal frameworks, and management plans. This is all set aside in The Directors; the more pressing question for Coates is ‘how does it feel?’, and the recurring feeling revealed is of fear and loneliness, because of how psychosis isolates the individual from society, but also because society willingly isolates them too. The result is that we are often presented with a spectacle of suffering, sprinkled though it is with flashes of humour. In the film with Gordon, Coates repeatedly has stinking offal paraded under his nose, heaters brought to his skin; with Banham he is blindfolded, punched and pushed
to the ground. There is a discomfort in witnessing this torment, but it stems not so much from empathy with Coates, the willing visitor in this world hoping to produce an artwork, but from the directors who were forced to experience it with no known end in sight. In the film with Donohoe, when Coates is visibly shaken after performing a scene where he believes his mother has been replaced by an impostor (known as Capgras syndrome), Coates confirms he is “feeling a bit overwhelmed”. “Welcome to my world”, says Donohoe, prompting Coates to sardonically reply, “Don’t say it with such glee”. “I don’t like that that’s my experience”, Donohoe retorts, and Coates has to remind himself that being welcomed into Donohoe’s world is the entire purpose of the project. It’s refreshing that the work does not proclaim that it is offering care or support; nor does Coates position himself as an artist
somehow entitled to become a temporary healthcare professional. He acknowledges his amateur status and ignorance, and is willing to learn. And despite attempting to perform his director’s actual life he does not claim these experiences as his own. He is willing to fall short in his ability to understand and perform, and inevitably does, but these are not failings. To achieve what he has takes trust, when trust in the world, in others and in one’s own perceptions is often lost in psychosis. It also takes time and a willingness for both parties to feel discomfort and be happy to expose it. As Coates says to Dr Valli, ‘I didn’t have the tools to empathise’ to begin with. Perhaps the true lesson of The Directors is in identifying some conditions and tools required for such individual and isolating experiences to be shared and begin to approach a more public understandability. Adam Hines-Green
The Directors: Mark (still), 2022, single-channel hd video, 27 min 16 sec. Courtesy the artist and Artangel, London
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Splendid Isolation smak, Ghent 14 May – 18 September In 1972 curator Harald Szeemann presented the then little-known art brut of Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli alongside works by world-renowned artists in Documenta 5, and Roger Cardinal published his groundbreaking book Outsider Art, drawing attention to a constellation of visionaries and self-taught makers. In the half-century since, formerly arbitrary definitions of what constitutes contemporary art’s inside and out have grown more porous, and this exhibition at smak is the latest contribution to that process. Prompted by the enforced confinements of recent years, it’s a wide-ranging reflection on isolation and its psychological and cultural repercussions. Only a handful of the 22 artists here could be considered ‘outsiders’ in the original sense of the word: indeed, this show includes established artworld names such as Louise Bourgeois, Derek Jarman and Nalini Malani alongside lesser-known and local figures. But what unifies this heterogeneous group is that they have all been sequestered from society in some way, whether through metaphorical ‘outsiderness’ or literal isolation. Their circumstances and fortunes, though, vary dramatically. Some withdrew voluntarily in pursuit of an ascetic existence, such as Guernsey-born Benedictine monk and concrete poet Dom Sylvester Houédard, represented here via several collages and ‘typescripts’. Others, such as the sculptor Judith Scott, who was born deaf and with Down Syndrome, were marginalised as the result of a disability. And in several instances works were made in response to places of captivity, as exemplified by the wistful
paintings of the reclusive David Byrd, who worked as an attendant in a psychiatric ward. Elsewhere, the extent to which punishment and imprisonment shape our society is indirectly highlighted by works depicting the dehumanising reality of being locked up or living under martial law. In 2017 Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan was jailed for almost three years, having been charged with ‘terrorist propaganda’ after she shared images, on social media, of her painting portraying the devastation wreaked by the Turkish military on a mainly Kurdish village in southeastern Turkey. The series of drawings on display here capture the brutality of prison life and possess the quality of a graphic novel, with narratives presented in sequential frames. There is an element of reportage to Doğan’s work, but this is ultimately a form of storytelling that uses animal imagery and symbolism, and to further accentuate the full extent of injustices she and others have been subjected to. A storytelling impulse also governs the work of Shuvinai Ashoona, an Inuit who spent much of her early life in remote outposts of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Ashoona’s drawings offer insights into her everyday life, but also feature visionary details that evoke nature myths. In Composition, Woman Battling Walrus, Elephant, Octopus and Bird Creature (2019) a woman is pictured from behind wrestling a chimerical hybrid of the named animals. Ashoona’s impressions represent both her individual experiences and, on a more universal level, also revivify voices and
David Byrd, Patient Pondering, 1995, oil on canvas, 61 × 79 cm. Courtesy smak, Ghent
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worldviews previously marginalised by the long-term cultural homogeneity imposed by settler colonialism. In bringing together such a diverse assembly of artists, Splendid Isolation reveals commonalities and shared tendencies, rather than fetishising or reinforcing otherness. It’s evident that all the works here were made out of necessity: art created as a means of sublimating or communicating. The majority of these works, most of which are wall-based, possess a handwrought quality produced via manual processes such as stitching and drawing, which lends a distinctly intimate and human character. Additionally, while many of the inclusions show a propensity for figuration and narrative content, some of the most intriguing pieces employ abstract vocabularies or self-devised systems of notation. Belgian artist Danny Bergeman’s idiosyncratic drawings – consisting of grids of geometric forms, seemingly intended to demarcate time’s passage or to record observations, and hung in a monumental installation – were produced daily over a seven-year (2011–18) period at De Zandberg, a welfare organisation established for artists with disabilities. The potency of Bergeman’s work stems partially from its formulation and execution according to criteria we are not party to; nor need we be to glean something valuable from it. Like many of the creations here that emerged from margins and solitude, Bergeman’s work possesses an intensity and unselfconsciousness that, even in art’s now-expanded purview, are all too rare. Pádraic E. Moore
Nalini Malani, Exile – Dreams – Longing: My Reality is Different, 2020–21, drawings on paper, 31 × 23 cm. Courtesy the artist and Burger Collection, Hong Kong
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Ghislaine Leung Balances Maxwell Graham / Essex Street, New York 8 September – 15 October Parenthood has shaken up Ghislaine Leung’s practice. Where before her work strove to illuminate and critique the constructed neutrality of art institutions, Balances would suggest Leung has shifted to examine the implications of agency in the personal sphere. Presented as a series of objects and interventions set in scores – a conceptual framework borrowed from Fluxus and Sol LeWitt where the work exists primarily as instructions for its own realisation – the exhibition is intimate, a visual negotiation of Leung’s new competing roles as mother and artist. Leung conjures the unruly by presenting work that adheres to a strict, antithetical neatness. The pieces exist beyond the objects themselves, meaning that the high-precision scale that sits on the floor and comprises Balances (all works 2022) could be any such model of laboratory weighing instrument, so long
as its lid is left open, allowing the movement of passersby to alter its exact weight reading. In fact, depending on when you visit, the gallery may be empty. Her most sweeping score, Times, calls for the exhibition to be on view only during the hours Leung has allocated herself studio time (Thursdays and Fridays from 9am to 4pm), necessitating a regular deinstallation and subsequent restaging of the scores. While cleverly visualising the obvious but easily overlooked fact that her artwork is entirely reliant on her art work, Times moves further to recontextualise Leung’s practice itself, positioning it, via the show’s fluctuating presence and absence, in constant compromise with her parental responsibilities. But both the starkness of deinstallation and the tidy grids of Hours – a wall painting of 168 rectangles demarcating each hour of the week with her 14 studio hours blacked solid – seem
to mock their own implication: that her parenthood could ever be turned off, fully separated from her art practice. This inescapable overlap is perhaps best articulated by a baby monitor installed to broadcast an image of the gallery’s back room and offices. Monitors proves dependence transcends material presence; a tool to enable a parent’s momentary separation from their child, the monitor is, in reality, a tether, testament to the absolute reliance of a child on their parent – a reliance ignorant of gallery shows and studio hours. In looking for the edges defining her role as parent and as artist, Leung comes up empty – the boundary is porous, the contexts themselves intertwined. Ultimately, the exhibition’s greatest strength is Leung’s play on simplicity and her masterful use of the sparse to communicate the vast and the contradictory. Maddie Hampton
Monitors, 2022, a baby monitor installed in one room and broadcast to another. Courtesy the artist and Maxwell Graham / Essex Street, New York
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Out of the Margins: Performance in London’s Institutions 1990s – 2010s Whitechapel Gallery, London 30 August – 15 January Although performance art emerged during the 1960s and 70s as a dissident, anti-institutional rejection of the social and political injustices of the time, the last 20 years, in the uk at least, have been crucial to the institutionalisation of performance and live art in galleries and art institutions. From Lois Keidan’s role as director of live arts at the ica during the 1990s to Tate Modern opening its dedicated performances spaces The Tanks in 2012, Out of the Margins surveys the shifts in the institutional engagement with live art, highlighting key moments in London’s visual-art institutions that pushed the radical practices of live art from underground and marginalised to an acknowledged (and commodifiable) artform. Out of the Margins is a small exhibition, displaying curatorial records from the Whitechapel archive as well as short interviews and documentation of performances such as Franko B’s I’m Not Your Babe at the ica in 1996 – in which, posed like Christ on the cross,
covered in thick white paint and slowly collapsing to the floor, the artist bleeds from his arms until he is surrounded by a viscous pool of his own blood – and Vaginal Davis’s Memory Island, which formed part of ‘Trashing Performance’ at Tate Modern in 2011. For an iteration of Hermann Nitsch’s performance The Orgies Mystery Theatre at the Whitechapel in 2002, a typewritten note details a list: ‘sheep (slaughtered), blood, eggs, brains, fresh lungs, red grapes, milk, raw milk, raw fish’. It is in discovering archival moments such as these that we get a sense of performance’s practical implications for the art institution – how do you stage this work in a gallery space? How do we conserve ephemeral performances for the future? If the show sets out to assert that performance has entered the mainstream, it is only a partial framing. Among the archival institutional records and performance documentation is a small timeline that attempts to narrate
London performance and live art’s scene through the programming of institutions such as Gasworks, the Roberts Institute of Art, lada, Matt’s Gallery and Tate. These spaces certainly played a crucial hand in supporting and developing innovative and transgressive performance and live works, but the problem of focusing on such a linear and totemic institutional history is that it forgets that performance and live art are the unwieldy product of a much more diverse and heterogenous set of forms, spaces and disciplines; from (still) underground drag and queer cabaret, to musicals, theatre and opera of London’s West End, which are noticeably absent in this slim historical framing. If the reason for such an exhibition might lie in the burgeoning presence of performance programmes and departments across art institutions today, Out of the Margins maps a very specific ecology of London’s live art history only to bolster this retrospective narrative. Bryony White
Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 21 April 2002 (installation view, A Short History of Performance: Part One, 2002, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London). Photo: Manuel Vason. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery Archive, London
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Mark van Yetter Plunderbund Charity Ebensperger, Berlin 5 September – 23 October Everything about Mark van Yetter’s art speaks of between-spaces. The Pennsylvania-born artist, who’s in his mid-forties, makes oil paintings, but here at least only on paper and with a fair amount of crayoning folded in. His compositions – often multipart, suggestive of absurdist comic-strips or montaged film frames and painted on time-yellowed scraps – are full of describable objects and figures, but their parts don’t fit. Fifteen of the loosely brushed paintings (all Untitled, 2022) in Plunderbund Charity offer two triptychs stacked one above the other, often with an altarlike symmetrical feel. In the upper half of one, a bearded priest feeds a communion wafer to a battleship-grey supplicant pinioned by an attendant; this image is bracketed, mutely, by giant pot plants. Below, framed by blue and pink fronds, a white cat strides across a rug, intent on unknowable business. You have to zoom out beyond the individual work to parse
this optical stuttering at all. Animals, often elevated in stature, populate van Yetter’s deadpan broken narratives – dogs wear crowns or stand Snoopyishly upright between blue humanoid legs and above dangling testes – while people often seem to be tangled up in religion and miserable. (See van Yetter’s hatchet-faced nun.) Patterns emerge, then dissipate. Other paintings, when cross-referenced, point mordantly towards unlikely rituals, from sumo fights and weightlifting to tuba-playing and ice skating. There’s an impression, amid anachronistic touches like a man wearing an Elizabethan ruff and modern glasses, of the self-seriousness of human beings and their varied divertimenti; but note that van Yetter, in a 2018 interview, said, ‘I’m not a storyteller and I’m not trying to teach anyone anything’. Instead, he gets you wriggling on hooks, via
Untitled, 2022, oil on cardboard, 87 × 87 cm. Courtesy Ebensperger, Berlin
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a complex of familiarity, estrangement and a skewed humour that, more than anything, redeems fairly commonplace broken-narrative antics. Six oil paintings on paper break the multipart pseudo-narrative format and present ostensibly standalone images. One, a headand-shoulders portrait of a balding man with a handlebar moustache and pursed lips, is in black and white; visual coherence delays your noticing the pair of erect penises jutting towards his cheeks. This single image somehow still feels collagelike; old-fashioned psychological portraiture upended by a crass punchline (or two), debonair past meeting pornographic present. Right next to this, meanwhile, van Yetter has placed another, somewhat Kippenberger-esque painting, a rocky landscape overlaid with the handwritten legend ‘If you can afford it/Reach for it!’ Read that, and its smutty neighbour vibrates anew. Martin Herbert
Desmanchar, Desfaz (Disrupt, Dissolve) Quadra, São Paulo 13 August – 15 October The three or four figures – it’s hard to tell – of Tatiana Chalhoub’s wall work O Sepultamento (The Entombment) (2018–22) seem to be slowly fading from view. Made up of a grid of eight ceramic plaques, collectively almost 1.4m in width, the artist’s scene delineates their outline by the absence of colour against a scenery of washy blue and turquoise enamel. As the title suggests, Chalhoub is portraying the inevitable end of us all, bodies rotting back into the ground. ‘Behold this compost!’ as Walt Whitman would have it. (Chalhoub’s figures are literally made of ceramic mud.) The work is one of almost two dozen paintings and sculptures by young Brazilian artists brought together by guest curator Guilherme Teixeira that ruminate poetically on notions of breakdown, fragmentation and
disintegration. A small painting by Ana Cláudia Almeida, Sol em queda (Falling Sun, 2022), lurid in its abstract expressionist freeform brushstrokes of orange, yellow, blue and green, is coupled with a second, much larger canvas by the artist. The latter, unstretched, hangs by just a corner from the wall, the rest of the canvas falling to the floor as if the composition is disintegrating into an oily, painterly, puddle. Ana Clara Tito’s collage Cinema (2022) combines torn blue photographic prints with fragments of concrete and masonry. Like Almeida’s work it also speaks to a state of ruin. An upturned bench, a sculpture by Marcelo Pacheco seemingly flytipped, the stretched spring of its seat devoid of the furnishings, stands at one end of the gallery. At the opposite end is Coluna Infinita (Infinite Column, 2022) by Manu Costa
Lima, a Brâncuși homage made from balanced foam bricks, each sandwiched between slices of sandstone – the finite countered by the apparently limitless. There is, naturally, an ecological undertone to all this, though the politics is kept refreshingly subtle. Animals, as representatives of nonhuman life, only make appearances in two artists’ works: Arorá’s series of five faint chalk and pencil drawings depict jellyfishlike forms on graph paper and Marian Woisky’s Tapetes (2020) – a show highlight – is a printed, stuffed and sewn fabric diptych of a big cat on the prowl through a forest. Instead Teixeira’s curatorial reference points seem art-historical, mingling timeless questions of the sublime with today’s more pressing anxieties about our decaying world. Oliver Basciano
Tatiana Chalhoub, O Sepultamento (The Entombment), 2018–22, high temperature enamelled ceramic, 100 × 140 cm. Courtesy the artist and Quadra, São Paulo
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Sarah Sze Gagosian, Athens 8 September – 20 October On the first floor of Gagosian’s Athens townhouse stand three modest sculptures. Each presents a fractured block of clay, its surface a dull meteorite silver, on a low and unfussy wooden plinth. A roughly torn photograph of the night sky is trapped beneath each brick like a bill beneath a paperweight. Through this simple combination of mundane materials with cosmic referents, Sarah Sze establishes the tension that animates her work: between the boundless dimensions of time and space and the limits of human perception. The title of the series, Proportioned to the Groove (2019), is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson
that meditates on the incommensurability of love with the physical world. If ‘love is all there is’, Dickinson asks, then how do we proportion it against people and things? How do we put it into perspective? As Dickinson hints that love is too much for the body to bear – that its burden is not proportioned to our ability to hold it – so Sze’s bricks seem to break under their own symbolic weight. Yet the night sky was photographed at the moment that the clay was fired, has been printed onto cheap paper, has been literally pinned down. It might be argued that time and space are real only when related to
Proportioned to the Groove (next day still dark), 2019, clay, wood, archival pigment prints, 23 × 38 × 33 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Gagosian, Athens
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materials and subordinated to consciousness. Or, in Dickinson’s terms, love must be scaled to the body if it is to be felt. Dickinson is also responsible for the title of the polished steel floor sculpture Wider than the Sky (2021), a version of Sze’s monumental homage to prehistoric ruins at Storm King Art Center in New York State, scaled to these more domestic dimensions. It is the brain that exceeds the sky in Dickinson’s poem, and the placement of Sze’s parabolic stone circle in a room ringed by floor-to-ceiling windows allows it, too, to reflect and expand the landscape
beyond. As henges function as cosmic calendars, so the paradox of this sculpture consists in the capacity of a singular material object – whether brain or ring of standing stones – to count itself king of infinite space. The confusion of mind and matter is like Vladimir Nabokov’s assertion, in Speak, Memory (1951), that his love for his wife exceeds the distance to the stars. Sze’s work rewards reference to literature because she is concerned with the same problem as poets: how the organisation of such everyday objects as words (or clay bricks or magazine clippings or tinfoil) into new sets of relation can conjure the irreducible strangeness of being. This impulse finds its most literal expression in the room-sized installation Travelers by Streams and Mountains (2021), which combines video projections, torn scraps of
paper, a swinging pendulum, a stepladder, adhesive tape, stones and other objects into an experience of visual overload. There is too much to process, and so the work relies on the same precarious and shifting balance between constituent elements that distinguishes good poetry. The feeling it provokes is of being suspended between certainties, caught somewhere between the realms of thought and things. This relation between the chaos of the world and the order that our minds impose on it finds best expression in the ten paintings hung through the gallery’s two floors. They are similarly maximalist, with digital prints, paint and torn images (hands, skies, roads) layered onto thick wooden boards. In each case a horizon line suggests a landscape, but the dominant
composition is set by a still image of either fire or water at the work’s centre from which it ripples out into the spiral patterns that are characteristic of Sze’s work in any medium. In the standout Signature Echo (2022), radiating lines of flat brushstrokes in vivid oranges, blues and yellows are reminiscent of the swirls that give Van Gogh’s late paintings their sense of a living force running through whatever objects they happen to represent. Another poet, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, comes to mind: ‘My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body according to the same laws by which stars shine’. The same force runs through all of Sze’s work, however difficult it is to disentangle from the material it organises: something about balance, proportion and the distance between things. Ben Eastham
The Night Sky is Dark Despite the Vast Number of Stars in the Universe, 2022, oil paint, acrylic paint, archival paper, acrylic polymers, ink, diabond, aluminium and wood, 102 × 127 × 5 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Gagosian, Athens
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Books How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) by Hettie Judah Lund Humphries, £19.99 (hardcover) Events that start at 6pm; no parental leave or benefits; near-obligatory travel to biennales, fairs and forums; foreign residencies that require months of commitment… One could say that the artworld is structurally inhospitable to parenthood – or as Hettie Judah argues, particularly hostile to mothers. How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) is a reckoning with the problematic artworld conventions that exclude mothers and caregivers. These could be due to simple thoughtlessness to unquestioned legacy practices. ‘The timing of the private view to clash with the “witching hours” of childcare is of course coincidental’, she writes, ‘a hangover from the era in which gentleman collectors popped into the gallery for culture and a glass of wine… nevertheless it broadcasts a set of preconceptions about who is important in this world.’ Preconceptions that are basically misogynistic; so while Judah says the book applies to all parents, her focus on mothers acknowledges the gender gap in domestic burdens and the systematic prejudice against female artists, especially those who had taken time off to care for their children. Judah’s target audience is the institutions and structures that influence art careers.
Accordingly, the book’s chapters are titled ‘The Studio’, ‘Residencies’, ‘The Commercial Gallery’ and so on, delving into exclusionary practices in each area, then providing remedial suggestions: residencies split into multiple periods. Biennales with creches. More daytime events. Inspiringly, the book also presents case studies of alternative working models, including studios and residencies that allow artist mothers to work alongside their children, like Mother House Studios in South London; Pilar Corrias, a gallery 65 percent of whose artists are female; and various artist parent networks around the world. Why should we include mothers and other parents? Judah makes the pro-diversity case that inclusion lets the artworld draw from a richer well of ideas and insights. This might convince public institutions, given their mandate of free access and creating public value, but could be a harder sell for profit-driven galleries. Judah seems to acknowledge this commercial reality. When dispensing advice to women reentering the artworld after some years away, she admits she has ‘no good answer’ for success. ‘The best I can offer is a vague set of suggestions: work from a studio complex rather than from home so that you have other artists around you;
form a mutually supportive group that promotes one another’s work; collaborate; organise shows; apply for residencies; network like a fury.’ These tips are mostly predicated on a capitalist, goal-driven professionalism. They are also more applicable to a Westernised artworld, which has infrastructure like studio complexes and residencies that enable and legitimise artistic practice but are not considered necessities everywhere. For me, there is something about the messy realities of being a mother and artist that might be inimical to any central career planning. And what might be most supportive to women during this time is not only being given more opportunities to succeed, but being seen, understood and given time. But perhaps that’s the subject of another book. Judah’s focus is on changing the current practices of arts infrastructure, so that family commitments are seen as an integral part of creative life. Achieving parent-friendliness is a challenge in all sectors, but it is heightened in the freelance and youth-worshipping artworld where parenting can be seen as some deeply uncool, unspoken secret. This book breaks the silence. Adeline Chia
I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava Verso, £9.99 (softcover) “I really don’t feel anything,” says the narrator of Stephanie LaCava’s slim, absurdist novel about the ways in which a young woman, when it comes to matters of the heart, finds herself mistreated by men decades her senior. (LaCava’s last novel was set in the artworld and she is a contributor to a number of art magazines.) Margot, in her early twenties and self-exiled from Manhattan to Montana, means it literally: she has had a mishap on her bicycle, and though she is bleeding from a gash in her leg, she hasn’t noticed it and so carries on with her plan to visit a grave. Fortunately – sort of – she is met at the cemetery gate by a tall, handsome stranger with bedroom eyes and a ‘pathological calm’.
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He removes his shirt to use as a tourniquet. Later he kisses her and then pulls hard on her hair, gauging the effect from her expression. Misinterpreting the basis for his interest, Margot embarks on a relationship with the man, who will henceforth be called Graves, and who, it turns out, is a former neurosurgeon with a specialty in ‘congenital analgesia’ – the inability to feel physical pain from which Margot has suffered since birth. Much wooden dialogue and exposition follow, the pronounced artificiality of the writing effectively outlining and setting apart for closer examination the varieties of pain Margot does feel. Although there are elements
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to her story that allow for intriguing observations relating to ‘the throb of prying eyes’, this is a curiously retrograde story about an economically privileged, emotionally deprived daughter of famous musicians and granddaughter of an improbably controlling matriarch and recordproducing grandfather (whose name graces an auditorium at an Ivy League university that Margot attends and is later expelled from), who is drawn to older men who ignore her emotional needs. The story’s high-concept, self-consciously mannered plot and trade in the poetry of therapeutic language relating to bad relationships go only so far in disguising a thin, depressingly conventional storyline. David Terrien
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Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk Soft Skull Press, us$16.95 (softcover) Elvia Wilk’s new essay collection is a series of reflections on the meaning of ecological storytelling in an age of mass extinction – by way of medieval mysticism, solarpunk, vegetal sentience and the limits of language, the pleasures of (self-)annihilation and possible futures for this shared compost heap we call Earth. Expanding across three porous sections – ‘Plants’, ‘Planets’ and ‘Bleed’ – these essays draw the molecular and cosmic into focus as they stitch together an unruly batch of subjects. In a nimble first text that’s indicative of the kaleidoscopic inversions to come, Wilk makes a case for the transformative capacities of storytelling. It references a story – one of Margaret Atwood’s weirdest, and the titular inspiration for this collection – about a girl who dissolves into a landscape, but continues to speak from it. Unearthing other literary examples of becomingplant, Wilk outlines an ‘ecosystems fiction’ wherein the human body and the ecosystem meld, blurring binaries of known-unknown, inside-outside and person-planet. Other essays from the first section of the book make it the strongest. In ‘This Compost’, Wilk speculates on a world where contamination, copenetration and compost seed new forms of interspecies life. ‘The Plants Are Watching’ opens with cia-conducted plant telepathy research and unfurls into a dizzying web of plant–human
communication that ranges from Victorian-era colonists’ phobias of nature taking its revenge, to a vegetal consciousness hypothesised by artificial intelligence. At the root of these findings is Wilk’s critique of the anthropocentric assumption that plants communicate in a language system like ours – or that they’d even want to talk to us anyway. In part two Wilk toggles to a macro lens. ‘Future Looks’ examines the politics and aesthetics of solar technologies, from the internet-born ‘solarpunk’ movement to the colonial-era invention of the greenhouse. Here, Wilk asks who green technology serves, and what kind of worlds speculative design and fiction are capable of building without being co-opted. She argues for a kind of ‘dislocation, rather than utopianism’ – where both the technologies we invent and the stories we tell refuse a top-down solutionism and instead nurture new forms of collaborative survival. ‘Bleed’, the book’s final section, is named after the roleplaying phenomenon where boundaries between player and character dissolve. In ‘Ask Before You Bite’, Wilk attends a vampire larp in Berlin and gets slapped in the face by another character. The slap triggers a realisation that ‘roleplay can be a testing ground for new forms of intimacy outside of prescribed social rules’; it can reshape social life long after the game is over.
Many of Wilk’s fixations – from medieval mysticism to nonhuman communication systems and body-led trauma therapy – focus on experiences and relationships that occur beyond language. My favourite essays in the collection – ‘The Word Made Fresh’ and ‘Extinction Burst’ – integrate ecosystems fiction with reflections on illness, spirituality, alien intelligence and love. In the latter, Wilk dives into her own immunological condition, which causes inexplicable episodes of ‘crossing over’, or unpredictably passing out. She returns with a reparative reading of this phenomenon, which eschews the cool finitude of a medical diagnosis in favour of ‘seeking unexpected possibilities rather than preventing them’; an opening up to the unknowable, where ‘illness can be a methodology for making sense of the world’ – not through language, but with feeling. You could also read these essays through a different, though no less entangled, categorical trio: bodies, language and stories. Bodies leak, language surrenders to the ineffable; stories are both the technology that ties these things together and the compost for sowing new worlds when things fall apart. Death by Landscape is less a book than a portal into seeing our weird future in a more open-ended way. Whether you come back is up to you. Alice Bucknell
Our Santiniketan by Mahasweta Devi, translated by Radha Chakravarty Seagull Books, us$10.99 (hardcover) Written in 2000, shortly before the author’s 75th birthday, this book is an account of Mahasweta’s childhood experiences at the celebrated Visva-Bharati school, founded by Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan. Her studies took place between 1936 and 1938, under the supervision of India’s most celebrated poet-playwrightcomposer-philosopher-environmentalist, and the book is a record of a magical, Hogwarts-type experience, with the fantastical factor upped by Mahasweta’s uncertainty over facts and truths as a result of her advanced age. ‘Am I recounting all the details accurately? Who knows?’ she asks. In a sense though these are her truths. Even if she constantly doubts them. And the suggestion throughout is that any history will be constructed in this manner – not exactly
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subjective in the strictest sense, but a product of both the mental and physical circumstances in which a narrator finds themselves at the moment of writing. A friend made her do it, the author points out, before lamenting, ‘Alas, the occasion for writing this book has come at a juncture when, what with my advanced age and frustrating challenges of my activism [championing the causes of India’s women and marginalised peoples], I don’t get time to write’. This is shortly before conceding that even in the twilight of her life (she died aged ninety in 2016) she writes an awful lot, but not what she would call ‘literature’. Although others would. If this book is in part a meditation on the process of ageing, it is also an explanation of the idyllic experiences and philosophy on which
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Tagore’s education system was based. Classes were intense but mainly outdoors. Animals listened in. Students were required to learn the names and the uses of the plants that surrounded them. Class and background counted for nothing. Work was not graded (as far as Mahasweta remembers). Physical education was part of the core curriculum, as were music, and theatre. All this, Mahasweta asserts between lyrics from schooltime songs remembered correctly or incorrectly, prepared her to embark on the literary and activist career that made her famous. The overall impression, however, remains one part fact and one part fairytale. You had to have been there (as the author continuously and mischievously hints) to know which is which. Mark Rappolt
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99 (hardcover) Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel is a tale of contrasts: England and Pakistan; public and private; personal and political; ideology and opportunism; rich and … well, not quite so rich. The best of friends of the title are Maryam and Zahra, fourteen-year-old girls who attend a posh school in Karachi. It is 1988. Maryam is the pampered scion of a leather-goods dynasty, run by her hard-nosed grandfather; he intends to bypass his feckless, dilettante son and hand the company reins to Maryam when she comes of age. This expectation informs her attitude to everything. Zahra’s home life is less opulent but nonetheless comfortable. Her father, a sports journalist, fronts a new – and wildly popular – cricket show on tv. Zahra is head-girl material and dreams of an Oxbridge scholarship. Headstrong Maryam flirts with a slick older boy, Hammad; Zahra is demure, but enjoys being looked at. The rarefied Karachi these girls inhabit is also a place of oppositions. There’s talk of Jackie Collins, Bruce Springsteen and boys fit for snogging, but also military dictatorship, banned poetry and judicial flogging. Both families are broadly secular; there are opportunities for women. But authoritarianism presses in. Zahra’s father receives a visit from General Zia’s goons; he is asked to say something obliging on his show about the Pakistani leader. Maryam’s
grandfather has other matters on his mind: he has ‘little time for democracy, which brought too many variables into play’. The novel’s opening sections are wonderfully realised. Shamsie captures the fizz and fissure of teenage friendship, the rivalry and trust, the secrets shared and hidden. The Karachi glimpsed from car windows is thrilling and dangerous, and, when Zia is assassinated and the liberal Benazir Bhutto becomes prime minister, Pakistan seems to be at a crossroads. This crux is mirrored by a defining episode in the girls’ lives: after leaving a party, they get into a scrape when they go off with Hammad and another man. Zahra manages to emerge with her reputation untarnished; Maryam finds herself in disgrace. In the novel’s second half, Zahra and Maryam are now in their mid-forties and living in London. It is 2019 and the traits and themes laid out so carefully by Shamsie have hardened into something more programmatic. Zahra, a lawyer by training, is the head of a civil liberties organisation. Maryam is a venture capitalist, whose portfolio includes a sinister ‘photo-andvideo-sharing app’ that boasts state-of-the-art facial-recognition software: the stuff of civil liberties nightmares. But Zahra and Maryam remain close. ‘You can’t let politics get in the way of friendship’, another character proddingly reminds us.
To spice up this opposition is the friends’ approach to private life. Zahra is divorced and single; she has sex with awful men. Maryam, by contrast, enjoys a perfect domestic setup with her wife, Layla – a sculptor – and their delightfully (and not always credibly) mature ten-year-old daughter. While we can well imagine Zahra and Maryam turning out this way, Shamsie seems intent on highlighting her schema at every turn, then plonking it back in the context of Karachi 1988. Accordingly, the characters have a maddening habit of reflecting on past events as if they happened 30 pages, rather than 30 years, ago. This intensifies when the past comes back to haunt them, following the return of Hammad. With character relegated to theme, sympathy falls away, and, by the end, Shamsie appears to have developed a distaste for both of her protagonists. Yet Best of Friends is not quite a satire or morality tale. Shamsie’s observations about social media are clever and incisive, as are those about Pakistani and English social mores. There are some excellent vignettes, including the spectre of a Boris Johnson-like prime minister cutting a grubby deal with Maryam. What it all amounts to is rather more disappointing. But this novel of contrasting fortunes remains worth reading for its first half alone. Toby Lichtig
Amy Sherald: The World We Make by Jenni Sorkin, Kevin Quashie & Ta-Nehisi Coates Hauser & Wirth Publishers, us$55 (hardcover) Opening up this monograph (billed as the first ‘widely available’ book on the American painter), art historian Jenni Sorkin declares that Amy Sherald is widely known for ‘frank, front-facing portraits of black people, subjects who have long been overlooked in both the history of art and American civic life’. She then rattles off some standard catalogue fodder, linking Sherald to an art-historical narrative that features painter Romaine Brooks, photographer Ansel Adams (from whom, collectively, Sorkin suggests Sherald draws inspiration for her signature use of greyscale when representing Black skin) and painter Laura Wheeler Waring (who used street casting). In an interview at the end of the book, Ta-Nehisi Coates will
state to Sherald that ‘I’ve heard you refer to the influence of photography from the nineteenth century. Until I read that, it hadn’t even occurred to me how classic your work really is.’ The idea, for Sorkin, is presumably to correct that perception. And in so doing, to build up a connection to approved art-historical greatness. The price of which is the implication that what Sherald does is nothing new. So Sorkin has to pivot at times to suggest that Sherald is also doing the reverse: challenging tradition. The Bathers (2015), for example is ‘a direct affront to the long tradition of French modernist painters such as Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Henri Matisse admiring – but also leering – at women’.
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Next up is academic Kevin Quashie (‘I quote his work often’, Sherald says later, crediting him as the inspiration for her greyscale skintones), who describes, in terms at once more personal and more abstract, the operations of desire, ideology and the aesthetic of what he calls ‘mere beauty’ in the artist’s work. Coates goes in for a more personal look at the artist in an interview that eventually, but too slowly, becomes a conversation. It’s biography that is the key to Sherald’s work here. We learn about Sherald’s heart transplant, the role of faith in her life and how important the experience of painting a portrait of Michelle Obama in 2017 was to her career and her sense of being a public figure afterwards. Collectively it’s a little confused. But the illustrations are great. Nirmala Devi
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Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs by Greil Marcus Yale University Press, £20/us$27.50 (hardcover) In the half-century that he’s been writing about Bob Dylan, Greil Marcus has published four books solely on the storied singer-songwriter, most recently the omnium-gatherum Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings, 1968–2010 (2010). Dylan, in turn, has released a few records since then, but really, what can there be left to write? Marcus’s answer – despite his subtitle’s suggestion that he’s screwing with a commissioning editor’s project – is not a biography, not really. Starting from the position that ‘the engine of [Dylan’s] songs is empathy’, he sees his subject – not controversially – as endlessly slipping into other lives, other voices, and as such almost an ungraspable cipher. The biography, Marcus seems to reason, must emerge prismatically, if at all, through Dylan’s core achievement: the songs themselves. As such, the Life – from Dylan’s birth in Duluth, Minnesota, to a 2021 tour announcement, via the Pulitzer Prize – is dispensed with in two opening pages. Then the owlish, nobody’s-fanboy author who notoriously began a review of Dylan’s 1970 album Self-Portrait with the question ‘What is this shit?’ makes a skewed, oracular selection of songs-as-signposts. So yes, 1962’s Blowin’ in the Wind (which gets some 80 pages), 1964’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ (which gets a scant eight) and, almost inevitably, 2020’s late-style epic Murder Most
Foul. Oh and nothing, nada, from 1966–91. Dylan’s huge, adoring fanbase might rightly feel trolled. The section on Blowin’… delivers wholly on Marcus’s apparent aims. The song, which the writer says he disliked until 2011, when he saw how ‘unfinished’ it was, how its lack of specifics made it a vessel for changin’ times, is exploded as artefact. Talking about its genesis, Marcus traverses Dylan’s rapid-fire rise through the Greenwich Village folk scene (which led to drug deaths and suicides, he says), the composition’s roots in and transcendence of other, earlier songs; how the nuances of various performances shift its meaning. Marcus, with the song as a thread, passes through Dylan’s motley 1970s and addled 80s, Obama’s election, the murder of George Floyd. It’s criticism-asdare, almost: how far outward, and inward, can you go with one subject, how discursive can you be and stay on-topic, how granular? On occasion Marcus ventures into the extra-auditory, hearing ‘a hum that seems to have been in the air of history: the sound of bodies going back to dust, the hum of thousands of insects…’. Well, ok. But his attention to the modulating weight of sung delivery, version to version, is something anyone listening back can grasp anew, and Dylan’s onstage recounting of an academic’s misunderstanding of the lyric – he thought
it advised listeners to blow into the wind – is priceless. (Dylan: “This guy is going to be a teacher! He’s got a master’s degree!”) For sure, Folk Music is a book to argue with, to squint at, as Marcus rattles through polymathic lanes of argument. Dylan’s 2006 philosophical ramble Ain’t Talkin’ is framed in terms of Roman poet Ovid’s exile to the Black Sea, a semiobscure musical antecedent from 1950s Detroit and a scrap of writing by Machiavelli. A long, much-pored-over track like Desolation Row (1965) gets given short exegetical shrift. By the time Marcus reaches Murder Most Foul, though, he’s closed the book’s circle, returning to Dylan-as-empath, ‘putting on Kennedy’s bloody suit’, before the song transforms, to the writer’s ears, into a sonic Hieronymus Bosch painting. There’s a touch of ambulance-chasing in Marcus’s closing line, ‘What will go out of the world with him?’, but it’s counterbalanced by how alive, present-tense and contentiously textual he’s made the music discussed up to that point. This, then, isn’t my favourite of Marcus’s Dylan books (that would be 1997’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes), but it might be his most resonant tribute to His Bobness: a primer in how seriously to take major art and how to live alongside it in real time, delivered with an idiosyncrasy and crooked grace worthy of its subject. Martin Herbert
Illuminations by Alan Moore Bloomsbury, us$27 (hardcover) Alan Moore came to prominence during the 1980s scripting comic creations that offered cosmic updates to Gothic horror, like Swamp Thing (1984–87), and postmodern commentaries on superhero lore, like Watchmen (1986–87). Moore’s work had an air of self-referential archaeology, giving literary weight to a medium that had been used to just seeing how far it could flex its spandex. His work since has been less revolutionary, leaning more into the pomp of superheroes with things like Tom Strong (1999–2006), and further into the occult, to the point where Moore officially declared himself a magician. But this collection of nine stories – several written during the 80s and 90s, but for the large part new – is not magic. They are entertaining enough, darkly comedic tales and pulp
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vignettes; some ape horror in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, and there’s a Borges–Beat mashup where Moore academically annotates a prose poem in the style of Allen Ginsberg. At the heart of the book is the 270-page ‘What We Can Know About Thunderman’, an overly detailed riff on the histories of Superman, comics publishers dc, Marvel and horror line ec, and the overworked chumps who produced such tales. But overabounding all this are laboured adjectives, indulgently labyrinthine descriptions and two-dimensional characters. And just as his Lost Girls (1991) evidenced a predilection for literary smut, most stories here just feel like elaborate setups for sex scenes: a hipster Jesus bedding a property lawyer who is the unexpected steward for the Apocalypse in Bedford; an elevator that
ArtReview
reveals a multilegged monster that turns out to be just a couple screwing; a pair of nascent intelligences at the dawn of the universe discovering their delight in what they term ‘clattersmashtinkling’. The interplay between words and images in comics allows for productive loss; here, laid out in Moore’s elaborate prose, there is no between-the-lines, and every metaphor is spelled out to make sure you get it. Moore’s collaborations with illustrators clearly focus, and hone, his incandescent brain. For many of the same ideas found here, you might turn to Moore’s Promethea (1999–2005) or his illustrated performance A Disease of Language (2005) to find some of the darkness between frames missing from Moore’s overlit Illuminations. Chris Fite-Wassilak
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Art credit
Text credits
on the cover Jeffrey Gibson, Stars In Their Eyes, 2022, mixed media, 69 × 66 × 38 cm. © the artist. Photo: Max Yawney. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Words on the spine and on pages 27, 47 and 93 are by Shukri Mabkhout, The Italian, 2014 (trans Kate McNeil and Miled Faiza, 2021)
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from the archives Bruce Conner interviewed by Sturt Penrose, 26 December 1964 sturt penrose I know that you are a painter, sculptor and a film-maker but I believe that it was as an assemblage artist that you first attracted widespread attention. In turning to the assembled medium were you in some way riding with the popularity that it now enjoys in the United States and Europe? bruce conner It may look that way but in point of fact I was interested in objects for their aesthetic merits and importance long before the post-war assemblage movement got significantly underway. Even at High School in 1950 I was engaged upon quite advanced forms of collage alongside my ordinary studies as an art student. But assemblage, in some form or other, has been known to every civilisation. I certainly didn’t invent it. I merely fashion it to suit my own expression as an artist and, of course, to the times in which we live. sp But the renewed interest in assembled objects as works of art in their own right has no doubt influenced your direction and development? At least your audience has become accustomed to the more bizarre aspects of your medium. bc Shall we say that the climate has become more receptive for the particular type of assemblage upon which I am working. But I have always taken a highly individual and personal path in whatever I am doing as an artist. For example, when I was living in San Francisco from 1957 to 1962 I found myself repeating the same theme in my painting. Always expressionless white faces emerging from blackness. Whatever I started out to achieve in terms of paint would end up the same way. I wanted to communicate something but it was becoming impossible. I almost decided to give up being an artist. sp And so it was at this time, almost in desperation, that you turned to assemblage? bc Yes, I did. I began in San Francisco and then went to live in Mexico for a year. Many of the works in the present exhibition at the Fraser Gallery are the result of my stay in Mexico. I began to see more clearly that there is always a dialogue going on between objects and people. And in my assemblages I wanted to show the important and special relationship that I felt about objects that I’d seen
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and found. This is somehow difficult for some people to understand. At least if they have conventional ideas about painting. sp Perhaps you can explain further by way of an example? bc Well, not long ago I attended a dinner party in the States with Roy Lichtenstein and other well-known American artists. The party was given by Daniel Spoerri. We sat at the dinner table and the host asked each guest what he would like to eat and drink. I chose bread and wine. Some chose pretty large meals, others small meals and so on. After the meal was over Spoerri asked each guest to leave the table. You can guess that the table was pretty littered with objects of all kinds: half-eaten food, silverware, glassware and the like. It was a regular jumble. But then Daniel Spoerri began to fix the objects of each guest in exactly the position they had been left. You see the individual left-overs had become assembled in such a way that they revealed something of the character and the personality of the guest. And it was done unconsciously. How much more an artist can reveal when he works with objects in a consciously creative manner! sp And so the assemblage medium has added greatly to your vocabulary as an artist? bc It’s taught me many things. One is that to get your message across to your audience you must change your means of saying things. In my Homage to Jean Harlow I am trying to show how objects – discarded now – once had some very real meaning to the person who wore and owned them. I want to strike at the importance and the meaning that lies behind objects. And the fact that there’s nothing very new in this. Isn’t the British Museum one gigantic assemblage? [...] Bruce Conner’s the white rose, 1967, is on view at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, through 12 November 2022
26–29.01.2023
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