ArtReview October 2024 by ArtReview

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VENICE BIENNALE EDITION

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Sprüth Magers

Berlin John Baldessari Ahmedabad 1992 September – November Oliver Bak Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist September – November

London Gary Hume Mirrors and other creatures September – October Anthony McCall Raised Voices September – December Salvo, Andreas Schulze About Painting November – December

Los Angeles Arthur Jafa nativemanson September – December

New York Jenny Holzer WORDS September – November Hyun-Sook Song November – December

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ArtReview vol 76 no 7 October 2024

Simple truths The children’s entertainer Robbie Williams once told ArtReview that he hoped he would be old before he died. That he would live to relive the days gone by. Before going off on one about how he hoped he would live to see the Pope get high and how some mysterious woman was taking him to places he’d never been, while, simultaneously, confessing that he was confused about his sexuality. Now that ArtReview is old, it’s not prepared to entertain Robbie’s silly advice. It relives nothing! It’s all new! It’s all now! It’s in charge of taking people places! It long since transcended sexuality. (As Jeremy Corbyn’s dad, Billy Bragg, once told ArtReview, after he’d finished bragging, ha ha, about how he’d had relations with girls of many nations and made passes at girls of all classes, “Your rules do not apply to me!”) And it doesn’t plan on dying. Or getting older. Although it is seventy-five, if you must know. Back then, when it was born, Fred Hoyle had only just invented the Big Bang. Then it was the latest thing; not the beginning of everything. What ArtReview has learned is that the passage of time is all about changing perspectives. Like when the winds of change blew into Beijing. Also, back then, when ArtReview was born. (btw, ArtReview never forgot its fashion-consultant Mao Zedong’s advice from back in the day: ‘to read too many books is harmful’. That’s why ArtReview got into the magazine game in the first place – totally innocuous.) Of course, even you know about how the perspectives and the winds are altering how we perceive museums, curating, criticising and the very nature of art itself. Back when ArtReview was born, everyone wanted art to be a cornerstone for the building of a better world. From out of the rubble of the Second World War. When the world still meant Europe. And perhaps, at a stretch, the US. But it definitely meant a world that spoke English.

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Or didn’t speak at all. Anyhow, ArtReview’s doing the talking right now (and before you stick your oar in about the fact that it’s still talking in English, it now has a simplified Chinese edition, and you’ll find bits and pieces of Arabic in the pages that follow too). Like Billy said, your rules do not apply to ArtReview! Nowadays everyone wants art to be about, well… rebuilding a better world. (As Mark Twain – often confused with the military-type who invented fried chicken – used to incessantly preach at ArtReview, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of coloured glass that have been in use through all the ages.”) But a better world that includes everyone and everything. And isn’t necessarily speaking English, or indeed any other tongue invented by humans for that matter. So, what’s ArtReview trying to say, you might well wonder. On the one hand it’s saying that nothing has changed in its seventy-five-year reign of terror; on the other hand it’s saying that everything (literally) has changed. As Siddhartha Gautama once whispered to ArtReview (he’d been fasting – he was always very conscious about his weight), “Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” Which is why, on the one hand, it’s not doing anything special to celebrate its birthday, and on the other hand it’s continuing to do what it always has done: feeling the wind of change. As Klaus Meine (you might know him best as the lead singer of The Scorpions and a man who loved nothing more than the demolition of an old wall) told ArtReview, “The future’s in the air, I can feel it everywhere.” ArtReview

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Bruma M, Olga de Amaral, 2014. Photo © Diego Amaral Graphic Design © Agnès Dahan Studio

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Art Observed

The Interview Josh Kline by Jenny Wu 24

State of Emergency by Zoé Samudzi 36

Robin Hood for Artists by J.J. Charlesworth 33

Hard to Stomach by Suraj Yengde 38

Stripteaser by Mark Rappolt 34

page 24 Josh Kline, Submersion (detail), 2019, mixed media, 228 × 122 × 84 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; 47 Canal, New York; and Lisson Gallery

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Art Featured

Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst by Chris Fite-Wassilak 42

Maryam Tafakory by Gelare Khoshgozaran 62

Aby Warburg by Matthew Bowman 50

Mike Kelley by Martin Herbert 70

Norm and Form by E.H. Gombrich; abridged and annotated by J.J. Charlesworth and Mark Rappolt 53

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Art Reviewed

EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 78 Melvin Edwards, by Martin Herbert Steph Huang, by Cindy Ziyun Huang Mark Armijo McKnight, by Jacinda Tran Javier Téllez, by Qingyuan Deng Joanna Piotrowska, by Chris Murtha Troika, by Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas Ulla von Brandenburg, by Declan Long Nina Canell, by Nate Budzinski A String of Tongueless Bells, by Mira Dayal Hetain Patel, by Madeleine Jacob Cisco Merel, by Oliver Basciano Ed Clark, by John-Baptiste Oduor Nick Goss, by Digby Warde-Aldam Firelei Báez, by Leela Keshav Eric Wesley, by Gracie Hadland Ella Walker, by Tom Morton Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words, by Lisette May Monroe A Gathering of Tomorrow, by Adeline Chia Permindar Kaur, by Mark Rappolt Gary Hume, by J.J. Charlesworth

Roberto Juarez ’80s East Village Large Works On Paper + Downtown Amigos y Amigas, edited by Fabio Cherstich, reviewed by Mariacarla Molè The Coin, by Yasmin Zaher, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Poor Artists, by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente, reviewed by Rosanna McLaughlin The Proposal, by Bae Myung-hoon, reviewed by Yuwen Jiang Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images, by Jérémie Koering, reviewed by Brian Dillon Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews, edited by James Hoff, reviewed by Allie Biswas THE Naked truth 110

page 83 Joanna Piotrowska, Father I, 2022, silver gelatin hand print. Courtesy the artist and Phillida Reid, London

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Art Observed

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Courtesy Lisson Gallery

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ArtReview

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The Interview by Jenny Wu

Josh Kline

“We’re so far beyond authenticity. I don’t know if it can exist in a society where we’re crafting our identities through social media”

When describing Josh Kline, it’s easy to feel like the ardent proponent of a longstanding fandom. The Philadelphia-born, New Yorkbased artist’s decade-and-a-half practice unfolds like a complex narrative set in a very specific universe. This universe, an intensified yet far from inflated depiction of our current conditions, consists of three bodies of mixedmedia work, Creative Labor (2009–14), Blue Collars (2014–20) and a cycle of installations that began with a presentation titled Freedom (2014–16) and is now in its fourth ‘chapter’, Climate Change (2019–). Each chapter of Kline lore is composed of numerous standalone pieces, each a microcosm of the artist’s ongoing concerns relating to economic precarity in neoliberal societies, American culture and politics, and the dignity of the contemporary labourer.

In 2023, in front of riot gear-clad Teletubbies, plastic-wrapped office workers, shopping carts full of 3D-printed human limbs and an immersive ‘climate refugee camp’ in Kline’s first US museum survey, Project for a New American Century, at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, I found it difficult to tell whether Kline was being sincere. There were works like Universal Early Retirement (Spots #1 & #2) (2016), an HD video advocating for universal basic income in the style of a political ad, that I initially clocked as satire. What became palpable as I dug deeper into Kline’s oeuvre was an incessant negotiation between urges to dismantle the unsustainable structures around us and pangs of longing to preserve the good parts of who we are as humans. The ‘recycled’ white-collar worker

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in Productivity Gains (Brandon/Accountant) (2016), lying in a foetal position on the floor, his body stuffed inside a clear plastic bag, was both a debased object and a commemorated subject. As heated wax models of suburban homes gradually dissolved down the drain in Domestic Fragility Meltdown (2019), their gable roofs and meticulously sculpted shingles revealed to me, for the first time, their sad, fleeting beauty. Ahead of Kline’s solo exhibition Social Media at Lisson Gallery in New York (through 19 October), I spoke to him about the performative aspects of being a contemporary artist, ways for people to empathise with one another in the era of branded personalities and how property values in the city affect the way artists live and work.

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A One-Off Gesture ArtReview You’ve made everything from sculpture and installations to film and video, so naturally I’m curious how you decide what to make next. Josh Kline There’s a lot of planning ahead. One of my bodies of work is this big cycle of installations, which is broken up into chapters. So far, I’ve made Freedom, Unemployment, Civil War and now Climate Change, which just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. These are the four dystopian chapters in the cycle. Eventually there will be two more that are radical utopias. AR The works in Freedom – those Teletubbies resembling police officers – date back to 2015. Did you already know at that time how the works in your subsequent installations, like Climate Change, would look? JK The general ideas of the installations have all been outlined since 2014, but when I finally make these things, the projects always change. I’ve had a note since the beginning saying that I was going to make a climate refugee camp installation – what became Personal Responsibility,

which debuted at the Whitney. But that was just a sentence or a paragraph. Back then, I didn’t know what shape it would take or that there would be tents. I wake up in the middle of the night with ideas, they go in my notes, then I go back to sleep. AR Are you a fan of the Notes app? JK I’m hopelessly addicted to it. I feel like I outline like a filmmaker or a novelist. This is why I work out of a little office. I’m not really a studio artist, which is good given the cost of New York real estate. A lot more is happening in writing and in my imagination. AR Having all these projects, old and new, right at your fingertips must also affect how you think about medium. JK I do tend to rotate through media. I’ll work intensely with a medium or a set of strategies for years, and then I’ll need to let it lay fallow for a bit and pivot into something else. There’s a certain amount of restlessness in the process. AR Speaking of pivots, your recent gallery exhibition Social Media was billed as your first foray into self-portraiture. Much of it isn’t self-portraiture in the

traditional sense. The depictions of you are fragmentary and metonymic. I’m recalling, for instance, 3D-printed sculptures laid out on a table in Professional Default Swaps of just your arms and of computer keyboards, smartphones and other devices you use. But there is also a replica of your entire body in a plastic bag on the gallery floor – a work aptly titled Mid-Career Artist. Is this show indicative of a broader directional shift in your practice? JK Bringing myself into the work is something I’ve done a bit in the past, but this is definitely a one-off gesture. I’m not going to suddenly start making work about myself. But some of the forms that I’ve used over the past 15 years are coming back in a new configuration, and I’m the vehicle this time. I’ve never done this much self-portraiture before or self-portraiture on its own. It’s always been me with a bunch of other people. AR Right – for example, in Flattery Bath 2, the ‘spa’ you set up in a hotel on the High Line in Manhattan as part of the MoMA PS1 group show New Pictures of Common Objects. You’re pictured in the video documentation of that performance, but you’re with your collaborators and your ‘spa guests’.

Mid-Career Artist, 2024, 3D-printed sculpture in acrylic-based photopolymer resin, CNC-carved urethane foam with shellac-based colour sealer, epoxy resin, UV protective coating, museum wax and polyethylene bag, 57 × 56 × 135 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery

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ArtReview

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Professional Default Swaps (detail), 2024, 3D-printed sculptures in acrylic-based photopolymer resin, steel, low-iron tempered glass, plywood, custom tinted polyurethane paint, tinted acrylic enamel paint, UV protective coating and museum wax, 95 × 127 × 76 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery

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Josh Kline: Climate Change, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Sarah Pooley. Courtesy MoCA, Los Angeles

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JK I’ve been reticent to put myself in my work after that early experience. AR Did people recognise you from the video? JK Yeah, and it was weird. I realised that I prefer to be behind the camera, which is another reason why I think Social Media will be a one-off.

Other People’s Faces AR You do play with the idea of celebrity in your work, in a way that encourages empathy rather than pure voyeurism. I’m thinking, for instance, of Forever 27, your face replacement video – and proto-deepfake – of Kurt Cobain. His face glitches because it’s been digitally layered on top of that of an actor you cast, and he’s talking about his failed art career. He seems like he’s falling apart in more ways than one. JK I’m drawn to representation and figuration, and to real places, substances and phenomena. I think representation can be powerful because, as Judith Butler said, we have this innate empathy that gets activated by seeing other people’s faces.

AR ‘To respond to the face,’ Butler wrote in Precarious Life, ‘to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself.’ Curator Therese Möllenhoff quoted this in an essay on your 2020 show at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley, Antibodies. JK I think this is why cinema and television are such powerful media, because you see actors – characters – living out these stories, and you either identify with them or you imagine yourself in their place. Through those surrogate experiences, you come to understand something personal to you or something about the world we live in. When I made Blue Collars, the sculptural portraits of workingclass people, there was a casting process – in this case, not casting as in mould-making, but casting as in street casting and working with agents – during which I asked myself, ‘Is this person’s story relatable?’ AR It’s funny to think of relatability, which is perceived as this spontaneous connection with another person, as something that’s constructed through long, labour-intensive processes. At the same time, relatability is often associated with ‘authenticity’.

JK We’re so far beyond authenticity. I don’t know if it can exist in a society where we’re crafting our identities through social media, where everyday people are constructing branded personas like movie stars or celebrities that are affecting the way they behave in their private lives. AR With Social Media, it seems like you’re getting at this idea of presence, particularly the kind we expect from artists. We look for traces of ‘the artist’s hand’, we expect them to be available for openings and talks, and so on. In a sense, your work is performative, but in a way that hopefully starts a conversation about how we perform for social media, as well as for the artworld. JK It is absolutely a performance in the same way that an actor in a film performs. They’re not onstage every night. They do their work in front of the camera, and the images go and perform them, over and over again. I don’t know if I can be in the gallery with my self-portraits. It might be like being at your movie premiere and standing onstage while people are watching the film. I’m thinking I need to get even bigger sunglasses for the subway.

Desperation Dilation, 2016, cast silicone, shopping cart, polyethylene, bags, rubber, plexiglass, LEDs and power cord, 117 × 74 × 102 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

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ArtReview

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The Future AR Another side of social media is the part that makes us feel like we’re always ‘on’ and self-commodifying or at least self-surveilling. I’m reminded of the hands cast in silicone holding iPhones and cameras and arranged like convenience store items on a shelf in your earliest body of work, Creative Labor. That series spoke to the precarity of an artistic career. It’s odd to see how, 15 years ago or going back even further, the erosion of personal and professional boundaries was already something commonplace and accepted. JK The collapse of the boundary between art and life in the 1960s and 70s gave way to the erasure of the boundaries separating work life, personal life and family life. AR It seems especially relevant now to think about what effect this kind of precarity in the creative fields is having on art and artists. JK I’ve been thinking about real estate in New York and cities like it – what it’s doing to contemporary art. Because it’s not good. Most artists, except for the ones who are stupendously wealthy, are working five or six days a week and somehow scraping together

cash for a studio. Art is ultimately dependent on real estate. Unless it’s happening online, art requires physical space, and artists need to find a way to either get that space here in New York or break free of this place. It’s still possible to reclaim control of where art is going. Fundamentally, that’s always driven by artists, so artists always have to make that call. If you’re dissatisfied with where something is going, you have to break with it. AR Speaking of uncertain futures, your 3D-printed sculptures – Productivity Gains (Brandon/ Accountant), Aspirational Foreclosure (Matthew/ Mortgage Loan Officer) and even Mid-Career Artist – besides looking uncanny and synthetic, look particularly durable and archival, especially compared to works like Domestic Fragility Meltdown, which are designed to expire. Are they? JK Since I first started working with full-colour 3D-printing, the resolution has gone up, and the sculptures have gotten sturdier. I think some of the synthetic quality of the 3D prints comes from limitations of the technology. There’s something that creeps in when the model is generated. A distortion, an error. I have to go through this long process of art directing to try and get

the model to look more like the real person. The digital version of the work is also just a higher resolution than the printers are capable of right now, so the sculptures in the gallery look less realistic than the models in the computer. AR If there were no technological limitations, would you want your sculptures to appear as high-resolution and glitch-free as a person does IRL? JK It depends. I wouldn’t change those early face replacement videos – the glitches became part of it. Over time, as my sculptures fade in the sun or break and get reprinted, the prints will get better. These works will become more realistic in the future than they are today. AR I’m curious how future viewers will relate to an even higher-res iteration of Mid-Career Artist. Perhaps the remake will evoke more empathy than its low-res counterpart, and the low-res work will elicit some form of nostalgia for our present moment – a past from which they’ve hopefully distanced themselves. JK I guess what you’re making me think right now is that, as the sculpture moves into the future, maybe that distancing won’t happen. I think it has the potential of making the past more real for the people looking at it.

Religious Fragility Meltdown (detail), 2023, powder coated steel frame, epoxy resin (countertop), stainless steel, heating panels, soy wax, pigment, plastic bucket and liner, 97 × 100 × 100 cm. Photo: Sarah Pooley. Courtesy MOCA, Los Angeles; Canal 47, New York; Lisson Gallery

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‘CAPTIVATING’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Rediscover iconic masterpieces through the playful and provocative eyes of Banksy

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888–89

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Sunflowers from Petrol Station, 2005

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In the UK visual artists don’t make a great living from their work, while arts organisations have been faced with cuts or standstill-funding in recent years. With the arrival of Keir Starmer’s Labour government in July, many in the visualarts sector are hoping that the new administration might take a more supportive approach, after years of Conservative antagonism and indifference towards the cultural sector. In September, over 4,000 signatories, including artists Sonia Boyce and John Akomfrah, presented an open letter to the new culture secretary Lisa Nandy, offering a ‘manifesto’ of measures that might make things better for artists. Unsurprisingly, given Labour’s much trumpeted insistence that there’s a £22bn ‘black hole’ in the public finances, an assertion that only bolsters Starmer’s expectation-dampening claim that “things will get worse before they get better”, the manifesto being presented isn’t demanding a greater public subsidy for artists. Rather, it offers a raft of proposals to make the commercial and regulatory environment more beneficial for artists and cultural organisations; not more financial assistance, then, but the carving out of certain preferential arrangements for cultural activity. For instance, there are proposals for cultural spaces to be given their own status in planning law, in order to protect artists’ studios and artist-run spaces. There’s also a proposed Tourist Levy, presumably a ‘city tax’-type charge on people staying in hotels. It has been suggested that copyright-law principles be extended to cover activities like performances, workshops and artists talks (which, when they’re recorded and slapped onto gallery websites and YouTube channels, benefit the gallery and not the artist), alongside the now ubiquitous demand for the ‘robust regulation’ of AI, and compensation for artists if their work is used to train algorithms. Right at the top of the list, though, is the demand that the government adopts a ‘smart fund’ for artists. The Smart Fund scheme has been cooked up by a group of artist-management organisations, which handle all the fees paid for incopyright artistic content and collect royalties. DACS (the Design & Artists Copyright Society) manages licensing on behalf of artists and their estates. The Smart Fund is another levy, this time on the sales of smartphones, which would charge manufacturers ‘a small fraction’ of the value of smartphone sales. According to consumer analysts Mintel, the UK smartphone market was worth around £5.8bn in 2023, so even one percent would generate £58m, though

Robin Hood Roundabouts

The arts need funding, says J.J. Charlesworth, but will current proposals do anything more than create new gatekeepers? the Smart Fund itself sees the potential for raising £250-300m a year. For context, Arts Council England’s government funding for the last financial year came to £548m, so it’s no small change. The Smart Fund’s rationale is that creative content ends up on everyone’s phones, having been downloaded for free, which benefits Big Tech rather than artists who are put out Protests over art funding cuts at the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, October 2023. Courtesy Alamy

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of pocket – so it’s a Robin-Hood style scheme that, in effect, takes from the rich and gives to the poor. Yet the scheme isn’t just a straight rights-management proposal, and the rationale seems questionable. It isn’t, after all, the manufacturers of devices that profit from the sharing of copyright content, illegal or otherwise, but rather the online platforms that work through them. How fees would be distributed to actual content creators is not explained in any great detail by the Smart Fund’s advocates, but this is not the only purpose of the scheme. Alongside fees management, there would be a portion of income ‘flowing to local community projects with a focus on digital creativity and skills’, which is to say, funding grants for artists. It’s oddly convenient that the organisations who want to control this funding are the rights-management bodies themselves, helpfully pointing out that the Fund ‘does not need to be managed by Government or use taxpayers’ money’. Of course, what appears to be a tax on Big Tech is really a tax on everyone who owns a smartphone, and while artists should have their copyright protected, the broader trend of looking for levies is more than that – it’s a way of carving out special revenues for artists out of particular markets, rather than from general government taxation. Notably, Labour thinktank the Fabian Society, which in the same month published its own manifesto ‘Arts for Us All’, champions the Smart Fund, as well as the tourist levy and a music venues ticket levy, in which big music venues would pay into a pot that would support ‘grass roots venues’, a sector now badly hit by closures. All of these schemes raise the question of who will control funds, what the criteria will be for funding, and how managing bodies will remain accountable. That artists have been struggling, with unaffordable studios, sky-high rents and closing venues, is a consequence of a stagnant economy with very little growth and not much prosperity, and these challenges won’t be fixed by yet more taxes. But the proliferation of non-government, levy-claiming arts-funding bodies may be a sign of things to come, with artists receiving less and less support from the market or government, and the implementation of a new set of funding gatekeepers who are perhaps even less accountable to either government or the wider public. What’s certain is that the money won’t be shared out equally, benefiting all artists, but will be given only to those favoured by the new batch of decision makers and bureaucrats who will inevitably emerge to administer these new schemes.

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In the opening episode of John Berger’s celebrated television series Ways of Seeing (1972) the iconoclastic writer is seeking to strip art of the “false mystery and the false religiosity that surrounds it”. Mystery and religiosity that’s acquired mainly when art is presented in museums, which are constantly working to enhance their own cathedrallike aura. And which need to defend the ‘special aura’ of their holdings against an age of mechanical reproduction that has changed the way in which their holdings circulate and made the works they contain seem a lot less special. (Berger spends most of the episode riffing off the writings of the philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin.) The fact that Berger is using TV to present his version of art history, ‘live’ as it were, is both a sign of the new age and of the old symbiotic relationship between form and meaning. As part of the striptease, Berger introduces the UK National Gallery’s 14-page catalogue entry for Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Virgin of the Rocks (1495–1508), warning viewers that the publication in question is “for art experts” rather than, one presumes, those who do not pretend to be experts. He’s also making a distinction here between the old (books) and the new (TV). Flicking through the pages, he describes what’s in front of us as little more than an aggravated list: of “who commissioned the painting, legal squabbles, who owned it, it’s likely date, the pedigree of its owners”, all of it designed to prove that the painting in question is both authentic and the original (hence ‘special’), and conversely that a similar painting in the Louvre is not. (Nowadays it’s generally accepted that the one in the Louvre is the original and the one in the National Gallery is a second version produced after Leonardo had sold the original in a fit of pique over the paltry payment offered by the religious types who had commissioned it. But that doesn’t affect Berger’s point – that art history as practised by museums is about defending retail value, which in turn is connected to the powerful rather than the powerless – just the words he used to make it.) Indeed, what Berger was discussing half a century ago remains valid today. What is a museum, really, other than testimony to humanity’s basic need to produce and acquire objects? What are production, consumption and desire other than the building blocks of capitalism? A system that museums seem designed to defend. And what is the role of the museum director or curator other than to pretend that the value of an institution’s collection lies somewhere other than in the material value of the objects it holds? While generally failing to disassociate material value from its holdings, which are often described as ‘priceless’, which implies both that they are

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Striptease

How to give order and meaning to an excess of stuff? Mark Rappolt sees an old-fashioned museum model at work in a biennial celebration of the handcrafted

beyond ‘price’ and that they are so expensive that ‘price’ would never cover it. These two types of ‘value’ (material and… let’s call it ‘cultural’ – everyone knows that has no value) are the underlying theme of this year’s Homo Faber exhibition, presented at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. Although its official theme is ‘The Journey of Life’. That tale is told through 11 rooms designed by film director Luca Guadagnino and architect Nicolò Rosmarini. Homo Faber is a biennial exhibition (this edition is the third) billed as a ‘celebration of contemporary craftmanship’, staged by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Buccellati, 2024 (installation view, Homo Faber, The Journey of Life, 2024, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice). Photo: Alessandra Chemollo. © Michelangelo Foundation

Craftsmanship. What it presents at first glance is an excess of stuff: more than 800 objects made by more than 400 craftspeople from over 70 countries. The stuff on show ranges from cabinets and chairs, to cups, to watches, to dolls houses, to contemporary versions of traditional tribal masks, to dining tables, to embroideries and a 2011 tapestry (The Map of Truths and Beliefs) by British artist Grayson Perry. In the Afterlife room. And we’re only getting warmed up with that. While Guadagnino and Rosmarini’s design – to take one example, a refectory lined with pink drapery, decorated with a reproduction of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana (1563: the original is in the Louvre; the reproduction adds a smidgeon of Bergeresque ‘religiosity’ to proceedings) and housing a long, mirrored dining table on which an abundance of fanciful tableware (ceramics and glassware that look like foodstuffs, etc) is displayed like the aftermath of a wild feast – masterfully adds auras of various kinds to the work (a darkened room dedicated to dreams features a swimming pool, the collection of masks, some fashion dummies), it also transports one into a Disney-type fantasyland (you feel like a princess). You stand there wondering if the mirrored table (and, by implication, the objects on it) is designed so that diners might admire themselves, or, from a museological point of view, so that the objects might be admired from every point of view. Then you wonder if there is any difference between those two things. Still, the overall effect remains that of a highend pawnshop (some of the objects come from sole-trader artisans, others from well-known luxury brands – the Michelangelo Foundation’s chairman is the founder of the Richemont luxury group) filled with objects whose functionality has been buried beneath the excess of their design. Which really isn’t so far away from the image of the museum that Berger was attempting to present: the gathering of all this stuff, the shipping of it to Venice and its display to a certain type of tourist class corresponds to the now slightly suspect ambitions of old-fashioned universal museums. Of course, what Homo Faber is about is celebrating the potential of craft. And protecting what might now seem like the antiquated practice of making things by hand. (There’s even the odd demonstration of making among the displays, which, in terms of the aura that so much effort has been spent on generating, is a little like being asked to understand Pinocchio through the character of Geppetto – some of the magic is gone.) But the celebrating and protecting is the museum director speaking. What you really end up thinking as you move through this exhibition is how it is engineered to suggest that what’s on show is something more than a hoarder’s bedroom, an excessive accumulation of stuff.

ArtReview

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Hal Wildson RE-UTOPYA

8 - 31 OCTOBER SALA BRASIL

EMBASSY OF BRAZIL 14-16 COCKSPUR STREET LONDON SW1Y 5BL

BREEZE 2024 EXHIBITION BY GALERIA LUME CURATED BY LUCAS ALBUQUERQUE W W W. A R T B R E E Z E . I N F O

BREEZE IS AN INITIATIVE FROM THE EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON / INSTITUTO GUIMARÃES ROSA, HELD WITH SUPPORT FROM ABACT – ASSOCIAÇÃO BRASILEIRA DE ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA AND LATAM AIRLINES

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Belgian photographer Max Pinckers’s State of Emergency (2024), a self-published photobook responding to Kenya’s colonial history, was released mere months before the nation’s youth took to the streets in June to protest the 2024 Finance Bill, a series of proposed taxes and levies that would have dramatically increased the cost of living for ordinary Kenyans. Protesters were animated by how economic conditions disproportionately impacted Kenya’s young population (the country’s median age is twenty, and the highest unemployment rates were for workers under thirty-five years old) and were further angered by the bill’s neocolonial austerity measures. In an open letter published in June, famed writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o lambasted President William Ruto for allowing Kenya to become a non-member ally of NATO and for visiting the United States, one of the Kenyan government’s major creditors (that the government owes its lenders billions of dollars led, in part, to the austerity bill in the first place). By recounting the US’s ongoing destabilisation of Haiti following enslaved Haitians’ seizure of their independence from the French in 1804, wa Thiong'o laid bare the irony that Ruto would ask the Kenyan people to capitulate to US imperialism, as though they hadn’t resisted British settler colonialism less than 75 years prior. Wa Thiong'o’s letter deftly connected the present Kenyan condition to the legacy of the 1952 rebellion of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, more commonly known as the Mau Mau. Beginning in 1895, British settler colonialism in the East Africa Protectorate, which became the Kenya Colony in 1920, established itself through the mass expropriation of Indigenous land and the enclosure of that land from African residency and use. British colonial theft radicalised, among other peoples, the Kikuyu community, and after decades of nonviolent resistance, the Mau Mau was born of a militant faction of the Kenya African Union and began its armed struggle. The anticolonial uprising was brutally suppressed by British colonial forces using counterinsurgency strategies including imprisonment, torture and forced resettlement. In contrast to the 32 white settler casualties, at least 11,000 Africans were killed, according to conservative British estimations. Based on a close collaboration over ten years between Pinckers and members of the Mau Mau War Veterans Association (MMWVA), State of Emergency offers visual reenactments, or ‘demonstrations’, of both repression and resistance: the veterans perform vignettes of their experiences, which are juxtaposed against an extended cache of archival photographs and texts documenting British propaganda and colonial policy. The ‘demonstrations’ might illustrate a secret Mau Mau oathing ceremony or cadres carrying

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Docudramas

Zoé Samudzi questions the efficacy of a project to reenact events of the Mau Mau rebellion

from top Peter Irungu Njuguna, Murang’a, 2019; Peter Irungu Njuguna, John Mwangi and Paul Mwangi Mwenja (l–r), Gitoro Cave, 2019

a wounded fighter through the forest, as well as the torture and executions inflicted by colonial authorities through, for instance, the use of mobile gallows. One striking image shows a besuited veteran in a handstand with his feet up against wall: this, the caption tells us, is the position male detainees assumed when they were to be castrated. In addition to monuments and documentations of the ruins of colonial infrastructure, the photos include contemporary portraits of the legendary fighter Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima (who died last year at the age of ninety-two) and other veterans, demystifying the legendary faceless Mau Mau fighters as remembering elders. At the 2024 Arles Photo Festival, Pinckers received a special mention for the Photo-Text Book Award. At a glance, State of Emergency presents as a laudable history of the Mau Mau uprising: a potential history, a history that wholly rejects what theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay has described as ‘imperialism’s conceptual apparatus’. Pinckers, a co-initiator of the School of Speculative Documentary, seeks to subvert the imperial gaze and forensic impulses of mainstream documentary photography in his photographic approach, conjoining hegemonic and insurgent truth(s), highlighting the tacit choreographies of staging in the documentary genre and prioritising collaboration and exchange. In short, Pinckers creates images that compel us to question what it means to be a reliable narrator. How could this critical approach go wrong? * The images in State of Emergency utilise the same visual grammars as Pinckers’s previous works. Through a theatricality, which deliberately accentuates the orchestration of the ‘real’ image, Pinckers reiterates Western stereotypes of non-Western subjects, such as the Thai kathoey he depicted in Lotus (2011) and the Yakuza and salarymen in Two Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself (2015). Applying this rationale to the Mau Mau veterans acting out their own abjection, however, calls into question the veracity of the photographic demonstration rather than the violent imperial archive. A particularly revealing moment is Pinckers’s caption for his photograph of Beninah Wanjugu Kamujeru from MMWVA ‘demonstrating’ her interrogation by a screening team from the Kenyan police. Even as Pinckers holds Kamujeru as a reliable narrator, he notes on the following page – which shows a mirroring 1957 archival image of two suspected female Mau Mau associates surrendering to African colonial agents – that: ‘ I encountered this photo at The National Archives in London in 2021, two years after working with Beninah in Murang’a on the scene in

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which she demonstrates how she was interrogated… I was struck by the resemblance and accuracy of the demonstration. The members of the MMWVA in Murang’a were not aware of this photograph when they planned the scene [italics mine].’ The sharpness (or to use Pinckers’s forensic description, ‘accuracy’) of Kamujeru’s memory is hardly a surprise considering the general lucidity of elders’ recollections, the still seeping wounds of dispossession and the persistence with which stories of struggle are culturally reiterated and intergenerationally circulated. This caption makes evident that Pinckers’s epistemic starting point was the British archive, and indeed, it was a 2014 encounter with a trove of previously suppressed files belonging to the colonial administration that sparked the State of Emergency project. But if we take seriously his insistence that the veterans decided what scenes to recreate, why would these photographic ‘demonstrations’ of actual events be created identically to his other works? And why would he recapitulate and foreground the British narrative by positioning the ‘demonstrations’ as rebuttals against his archival roundups of imperial panics about a wanton and ‘terroristic’ native insurgency or corroborations of the archive’s reluctant admissions of torture? Despite his stated aims, Pinckers, in practice, perpetuates a sense of incuriosity about the African present and relies on a narrative approach that favours constant reference to the European archive rather than a fluid multidirectionality in which the violences of the past are readily made visible beyond the bodies of its still-living victims. In one photograph, her back to the camera, Susan Nyareri faces land ‘overlooking the mass grave site where she buried her two children while she was detained in an Emergency Village’. In another, Geoffrey Nderitu holds the bones of Mau Mau fighters buried on his land. He describes the relationship between his fruit trees and the soil containing the mass graves of fighters, explaining that he sometimes digs up the bones to show community members when teaching them about the sacrifices of their ancestors. Unsurprisingly, the images in State of Emergency that are most moving are not demonstrations of spectacular British brutality, but those that reference the relationship between the veterans and the land, whether previously lost or not returned to them by the Kenyan government after independence. Although land was the central concern of the Mau Mau’s struggle, it is merely a feature of Pinckers’s project. This feels

like a deep political betrayal, as land remains the beating, broken heart underpinning every single remark of loss and longing. There is, frankly, a failure of artistic care enmeshed in a dearth of political imagination in the belief that it is possible to ‘create new “imagined records”’ when the speculative gesture is constantly shunted into the same epistemic frame as the existing ones. The photo of Susan Nyareri is a simple, heartrending image of mourning and stillness, as well as a lost opportunity to offer a glimpse into the mind of someone grappling with the traumatic aftermath of internment, marked by the death of her children. Geoffrey Nderitu’s consideration of the deceased fighters as his friends and brothers evokes the intimacies between the living, the ancestral dead and the native lands upon which they are (or are not) buried. Without

erasing the agency of the participating veterans and their decades-long desire for reputational vindication, such weighty images simply become a part of the oppositional chorus within Pinckers’s ethnographic opus of demonstration. Yet even as the veterans take centre stage, the hyper-reliance on the colonial archive ensures I still know almost nothing about them. There is also a deeper ambivalence to the longue durée of suffering from, first, the British, and then the successive Kenyan government that State of Emergency seldom engages. It asserts itself, despite Pinckers’s oversight, in a two-page portrait of two elderly men, James Wachira Wambugu and Nehemiah Kirenga Muchinji, seated in a boat on the Chinga Dam. This is their first time above Beninah Wanjugu Kamujeru, John Mwangi, Ndungu Ngondi, Joseph Gachina and Wilfred K. Maina (l–r), Murang’a, 2019 all images Max Pinckers et al., State of Emergency, 2014–24. © Max Pinckers / MMWVA

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on a boat, and the first time in the dam’s waters since they were forced to construct it, in 1954, as concentration camp labourers. They lamented how the dam, once a stream that irrigated their farms, was blocked by the British and the land stolen without compensation, while celebrating it as a success and ‘asset to the local community’. How does one begin to weigh present materialities against historical wounds? Dissonances such as these within postcolonial states give rise to the bald political hypocrisies Kenya’s youth revealed in their protests this summer. They are also illustrated in the fact that part of the historical mythos of the decolonial struggle has been doctored by the complementary propagandas of British colonialism and the rebuke of the Mau Mau by early leaders of postcolonial Kenya. Even though the Mau Mau uprising was crucial in the actualisation of Kenyan independence in 1963, and while early leaders reconstituted the history of liberation struggle into what historian Terence Ranger calls ‘patriotic history’, the militants were demonised by Kenyan presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi as nonstate actors akin to terrorists. While Kenyatta had been a former political prisoner and participant in Kikuyu organising, he described the Mau Mau as a ‘terrible disease’ after independence and sent Kenyan security forces to fight against Mau Mau holdouts who believed that the postindependence government had abandoned the land question central to their struggle. In an aesthetic landscape that seeks to intervene in a truth-abnegating imperial archive, Pinckers’s approach begs an understated question: how does a focus on violent European colonial documentations lead to a failure to implicate the postcolonial African states responsible for perpetuating these centuries of dispossession in the present? How do we enable epistemic violence and foreclosures by failing to pointedly implicate the successor states? Before embarking on an archival project about Africa (or any non-Western place) such as this one, artistic projects always select a temporal starting point. But artists must consciously choose whether to proceed from and dwell in the colonial truth to present a historical-aesthetic challenge, or whether to altogether refuse its validity as a truth and instead proceed from a more challenging and fruitful political elsewhere. Zoé Samudzi is a writer and associate editor of Parapraxis Magazine

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When I went to the UK to study law, I was ill-prepared for the autonomy it demanded of me. I had never cooked before. Even though my father had encouraged me to assist my mother in the kitchen, she didn’t allow this. She was territorial. My mother hushed us if we were in the kitchen, the other part of our two-room house. That was the only space where no one interfered, and where she was allowed to be herself. Besides, if an additional person intervened, it added extra work. ‘Too many cooks spoil the food’ was the motto here. She had mastered techniques and was so aware of the kitchen dynamics that others would simply mess up the order of things. And if the food was spoiled, there was no quick remedy: the carefully budgeted and measured ingredients for that meal would already have been used up. We seldom had grains, rice, dal, spices or oil beyond what was needed for the day. One of us siblings had to run to a grocer to fetch 100 grams of oil and other required condiments for under 10 rupees. Each meal was timed and rationed. If an unannounced guest paid a visit, then our mother would ask neighbours for additional food. Thus, even in the face of scarcity, our kitchen sizzled. I can count on my fingers the few times when we had Amul-brand butter or ghee. The memory of eating this is still fresh in my mind. I can picture putting butter on some bread. Since we were used to frugality, the butter applied was the size of a pea. We did not know how to eat the shiny, slimy fat. Even now, many years and affordable luxuries later, I still cannot process the taste of butter or ghee. My mother was a minimalist in the kitchen. The peanut or flaxseed chutney that she made did not have any oil. It was a dry mix with garlic, salt and chilli powder. The jowar roti (bhakari) she made was tasteless and difficult to swallow, as it was baked with flour, water and salt, and no additional flavour-adding ingredients. Chapati, a staple in my region, was a rarity at points in our lives. The masala that my mother created was not readymade but hand-ground. We did not have a blender. The iron pan that acted as a roti maker and sabji sauté was heated on the electric stove. We never had a gas stove; for the earlier part of my life, we had managed on a kerosene stove that had to be pumped until one’s hand grew tired. The plates of food that resulted were carbintensive and protein-supported (thanks to beef, mutton, chicken and eggs). We ate functionally:

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Hard to Stomach

Suraj Yengde recalls his childhood horror of mealtimes while growing up in a budgetconscious Dalit household, and how he now looks favourably on a diet that once appalled to get nutrition and energy for the day. And when we sat to eat, the rule was to eat until full. There was, after all, no set time for the next meal. Desserts were a treat that we could afford once a month or fortnightly, on my father’s payday. This lifestyle continues till today. Now that I live in the US and work in academia, I have transitioned to a more sedentary lifestyle. With everyday access to excessively fatty, delicious food, I find myself going back to my mother’s recipes. Once I loathed them for their lack of taste and absence of fried oily things. Now, due to health reasons and for physical fitness, I cannot consume the glistening fatty food that once so appealed. When there is lavish cuisine served to me, on those occasions when I travel business-class or am invited The Yengde kitchen. Photo: Pranali Yengde. Courtesy the author

to a Michelin-starred restaurant, I ask for a healthier option. I keep thinking about my mother’s kitchen. I now recognise that Dalit cuisine is essentially a twenty-first-century diet. It is a stable and palatable approach to food. We eat as a culture of affection and sharing. Dalit food is a heavy diet that uses both vegetables and meat, and every part of each: even animal connective tissues are consumed in some parts of the country. The ingredients in the food are locally available and handpicked. Even in the face of modern lifestyles and urbanisation, food sourced from the villages is a delicacy to be shared with family and friends. We watched TV shows that made us hungry and desperate to seek the food that they prepared. We could never afford paneer, mushroom or capsicum. Cream, coconut milk and other vegetarian dishes were incomprehensible. We couldn’t have them. Whatever the world thought about Indian food was what a dominant caste, elite class and urban gourmands advertised as ‘Indian food’ – a ‘brand’ that is now popular across the world. But this never reflected our India. Show me any Indian restaurant outside India that serves beef or pork. Both items are consumed by Dalits but loathed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikh privileged castes. You may run into Khatri Punjabi cuisine, or South Indian Brahmin food. But Dalit food is absent from the dictionary of India’s vast gourmet culture. To confront this, writer Shahu Patole set out to inform the world about the Dalit kitchen. His book Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada (2024) brings Dalit culture and cuisine to your kitchen. It is written partly as a cookbook and partly as a cultural history. Artist Rajyashri Goody has also made her art project Eat With Great Delight (2018) intersect with senses of taste and Dalit social history. The project combines family photographs documenting culinary social gatherings with recipes documenting Dalit cuisine. It is a lip-smacking corrective to the dominant-caste history of South Asian food. A start for those who would wish to present Indian food in its true variety and to give an insight into how the vast majority of Indians really eat. After all, food is a digestible relationship – softened by munching crisps and swallowing pride. Suraj Yengde is a writer and academic based in Cambridge, MA

ArtReview

19/09/2024 11:17

Contemporary African Art Fair

London 10–13 October 2024 Somerset House

Dola Posh, Mother’s Day ‘Year 3’, 2023, Hahnemühle bamboo-fibre papers, 74 x 64 cm, Edition of 2. Courtesy of Dola Posh and Cynthia Corbett Gallery.

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Art Featured

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“Us in Aggregate” New work by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst explores how artificial intelligence can remain part of a fundamentally humanist project by Chris Fite-Wassilak

After returning from a disastrous expedition to Antarctica, the ex- own voice and compositions. Frontier’s promise of a new world to come plorer Ernest Shackleton recalled feeling an additional presence as he feels hopeful, but ultimately ambivalent: “This Earth doesn’t care trekked across the glaciers. He wrote in his 1919 memoir of an imag- for what we need, what we breathe / A frontier of green or of dust.” ined extra member of his struggling expedition: ‘Providence guided In both projects, the third entity being conjured – the otherworldly us’. Few believed him; though T.S. Eliot evoked the phenomenon in a companion – is a version of Herndon herself. The unexplained expestanza of his poem The Waste Land (1922): ‘Who is the third who walks rience of the ‘third man’ might have been a mystery and a novelty for always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / Shackleton or Eliot a hundred years ago, but by this point in time But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one we’ve traversed to the other side of the uncanny valley, where our walking beside you.’ The experience of the ‘third man’, an ambiguous mystery companions, still haloed by wonder and fear, are now artifighostly companion, came to mind earlier this year, at the staging of cial intelligence-generated versions of ourselves. Narratives around the use of machine learning and artificial intelartists and musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s work at the Whitney Biennial: in a series of digital images, a shapeshifting figure ligence often veer wildly between the utopian (create anything you appears to stalk a flat landscape. Their face changes from image to can imagine!) and the doom-laden (if not taking our jobs, then taking image, but recurring features across the series seem to be a helmetlike our lives, Terminator Skynet-style); a sort of binary that seems unavoiddome of bright red hair, braided and trailing down the figure’s thick, able when the most audible voices are generally the megalomaniacs financing these systems and those trying to stop being exploited by army-green suit, which is padded as if ready for a polar expedition. The images are portraits, of sorts, of Herndon, generated by a said megalomaniacs. While coming to prominence in creating music bespoke text-to-image model – brief excerpts from a seemingly end- that was both danceable and cerebral, that used technology to quesless quantity produced by Herndon and Dryhurst’s ongoing online tion how the voice and the body might exist in a hyperprocessed project xhairymutantx (2024). Having previously worked across music present, Herndon and Dryhurst’s work has, for the past decade, been (with Dryhurst as a collaborator on Herndon’s albums since 2013), more exploratory and cautiously optimistic about AI, trying to find digital art and digital advocacy, the two have ventured further into interesting and more ethical uses of what they have described as making exhibitions this year, after the Whitney, to create a series of humanity’s most recent ‘coordinating system’ – a way to collate and sound-based installations for a solo show, The Call, on view in the organise sounds, ideas and uses of time. Herndon has, in various Serpentine Galleries, London, this month. xhairymutantx continues interviews, described choirs as one of humanity’s most ancient coorto generate more visions of the morphing green suited figure, but dinating systems, and techno’s 4-4 beat as another. We might consider the image of the explorer venturing into unknown territory is one an art exhibition as yet another. Rather than some sort of uneasy the pair have drawn on before: at the heart of Herndon’s 2019 album, ‘other’, they cast AI as more of an unsteady reflection, something Proto, is the pulsing, anthemic song Frontier, sung by an impossible Dryhurst describes as “us in aggregate”. “Instead of being like, ‘Isn’t choir of voices that range from rumbling deep baritone to seemingly that some crazy alien intelligence’, it’s more like, ‘Isn’t it cool that helium-induced squeaks. The album came out of a process of devel- humans created this thing together, that’s from us,’” Herndon told me recently. “Let’s celebrate that and figure oping a machine-learning neural network to Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon in Berlin, create music, trained primarily on Herndon’s out what that means.” September 2024.Photo: Silke Briel

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Visitors to the xhairymutantx website can enter their own prompts, Proto, and their show at the Serpentine, involved training AI models same as any other of the image-generating products the curious have by recording and digitising hundreds of voices gathered from choirs, messed with over the past few years; though what emerges – whether while with the Holly+ (2021) project, any sound file could be uploaded a bloodhound, Super Mario, Funkadelic’s George Clinton or Donald and converted into something ‘sung’ by Herndon. Recently they’ve Trump in a bikini, as some users have requested, in styles from soft- been working on a series of tools that allow people to determine if, hued semirealist paintings to monochrome tintype photography – and when, their work might be used to train AI models, including will most often still be donning the same green outfit, and a jellyfish- Have I Been Trained? (2022), which lets you check if images of you or like dome with a web of the red hair. Herndon and Dryhurst’s model your work are already part of that process, and another that blocks has been trained to create an essential caricature of Herndon, but your website from AI scrapers. While useful to some, such tools also the aim isn’t just to fill the internet with knee-jerk-funny pictures, seem primarily there to pose an argument for awareness and choice: or even to ogle at what bizarre or accurate scenes AI can churn out. a conscious participation in these coordinations. The project began with seeing what public imagery of Herndon exTheir recent turn to exhibitions, and presenting their work more overtly as art, seems part of a shift to isted (as the more publicly promiWe’ve traversed to the other side nent performing figure of the two), find a more expansive and incidental and setting out to disrupt that. meeting point between the timeof the uncanny valley, where our squeezed spectacle of music gigs and While the project produces an endless companions, still haloed by wonder the obscured manoeuvring of techamount of imagery, the work itself and fear, are now artificial intelligenceis located more in the prompting: nology research; a chance to coordinate audiences encounters with the users are slowly reshaping the mallegenerated versions of ourselves sounds, and the ideas behind them, able mass of public data, effectively training models that scrape the internet and altering what their differently over time. Their output of uncanny AI singing and future responses to ‘Holly Herndon’ will look like. The mirror-entity gurning doppelgangers might seem to have more in common with wanders further into the wilds. the digital alter egos in the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson, or recent Behind the portraits are communally trained methods by which projects making use of AI by Marianna Simnett and Martine Syms we deploy data, and creating and manipulating such protocols has (with both of whom they’ve collaborated), or the steady stream of been the duo’s long-term focus. “The most interesting decisions start artists dabbling in machine learning. But it might be more approhappening upstream of the production of media,” Dryhurst says. priate to consider their work in light of conceptual art that focuses “How you train the model, what the model does, who gets paid, is on instructions and infrastructure – whether Yoko Ono’s text-perforkind of more interesting than any one output from the model. That’s mance pieces, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s work with cleaners and saniwhere all the conceptual work happens. The model itself can just tation workers or, more recently, Fernando Garcia Dory’s work with keep making stuff, but the data itself is what constrains the outputs bureaucracy and legislation. If we are to work with AI and machine of the model.” learning, Herndon and Dryhurst’s work argues, then it requires more The hidden groundwork behind making and performing music agency and understanding in how the models are trained in the first lies in training their own music-generating models; for example, place. Listening – and perhaps singing along – is the first step.

Photo of Holly Herndon used to train the image-generating model for the ongoing online project xhairymutantx, 2024–. Courtesy the artists

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Images of Holly Herndon generated by xhairymutantx, 2024–. Courtesy the artists

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Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon conduct a recording session with London Contemporary Voices in London for The Call, 2024. Courtesy Foreign Body Productions, London

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Images of Holly Herndon generated by xhairymutantx, 2024–. Courtesy the artists

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The halls of the former munitions store that make up the compression of the choirs’ vocal information into digital files means Serpentine North gallery (a remnant of another of humanity’s oldest that it can, hypothetically, be played on any number of instruments – in coordinating systems, war) will be mostly empty, filled instead with this case, dozens of small computer-cooling fans are ‘played’ to emit a reverberating choral swells, some more apparently chopped up and tangle of cascading notes. The show will culminate in The Oratory (2024), modified than others. The Call returns to the pair’s use of music as a two curtained spaces like prayer rooms, each equipped with active primary vehicle, while also attempting to foreground the training that microphones for visitors who wish to sing with, and through, the choir goes into shaping the work. “Some people might think, ‘Oh, you made model we’ve seen take shape. Each of these rooms carries an ornate, a model, and then just typed in a few words and have these finalised near-gothic aesthetic, as if sections taken from a cathedral or the more compositions,’” Herndon says. “That’s part of the material process, blinged-up version of a videogame rendition of a medieval church, with but that’s not it. There’s so much editing and composition and all that gold leaf-embossed detailing of patterns and figures seemingly inspired kind of stuff that goes into it. It’s not, it’s never, plug and play.” The by moments of the recording process. I wonder if the religious implicathree parts of the show are conceived tions weigh heavy here, in drawing on as an exhibition-size walk-through an architecture designed to impose Narratives around the use of machine on and subsume the individual, and of the steps involved: the gatherlearning and artificial intelligence whether this might be a nod to teching of material, the compression and conversion of that material, and nology as the church in which we often veer wildly between the utopian then the unlimited sounds that can genuflect these days. The two artists, (create anything you can imagine!) be shaped and composed from what though, see it more as drawing on and the doom-laden (if not taking the model creates. The Serpentine’s choral architectures, and on religious central space will hold The Wheel spaces as “archives or libraries of our jobs, then taking our lives) (2024), a circular metal object remintergenerational continuity”. iniscent of an ornate chandelier, from which dangle music-stands It’s here, perhaps, among a constantly shifting composition of bearing the songbook for the 15 community choirs from across the choral music, the voices an amalgam of the human and beyond, that UK recorded for the project; each choir sang a few tunes from their Shackleton’s evocation of providence returns. If we want AI companown repertoire, plus the five songs that Herndon and Dryhurst ions and collaborators, there is conscious and deliberate communal wrote, in order to capture the range of human sounds needed to train work to be done in how they are created and managed; and there is a vocal model. In one of the new compositions, O’er Wires, they intone, also some element of belief – to be willing to share and step forward “Submit yourself to something more.” (Integral to the work as well with this spectral aggregate entity. The Call models Herndon and is a governance body set up to manage the choirs’ collected voice data Dryhurst’s protocols for exploration, and it’s clear which hymnbook – while permission has been given to make use of the voices here, their they’re singing from. As another line from O’er Wires puts it: “Minds future use is the choirs’ to decide.) communing with other kinds, we have to learn to trust.” ar From that raw material we are then exposed to the ways it can be transformed, and what that submission might lead to. A set of panels Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst’s solo exhibition The Call mounted on the wall provide us with one unlikely version of that: the is on view at Serpentine North, London, 4 October – 2 February

Recording session for The Call, Open Arts Choir, Belfast, 2024. Courtesy Foreign Body Productions, London

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When the Past Refuses to Pass As the Warburg Institute reopens in London, why does its founder’s star burn brighter than ever before?

Remarkably, and unlike his contemas a viable intellectual means for apprehending the world, would seem poraries Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin, who are often credited a vital resource. with ‘founding’ the discipline of art Warburg’s importance to conhistory in its current form but have temporary art mostly relates to his remained mostly of interest only to Mnemosyne Atlas, properly begun, acart historians, fellow art-historian cording to the Warburg Institute, in 1927 and unfinished at the time Aby Warburg has become a key reference point for various contemporary of his death in 1929. Consisting of artists, critics and curators. Perhaps some 1,000 photographic reproduceven more so than during his lifetions of artworks and visual artetime. Not only is it remarkable that facts provisionally arranged by Warburg, who died nearly a hundred Warburg on numbered panels, the years ago, is now better known than his contemporaries, but also that Mnemosyne Atlas sought to recover and demonstrate through visual his writings – which are often somewhat fragmented and incomplete, means the survival of pagan antiquity in the Renaissance. Each panel partly due to his struggles with mental health – continue to resonate. was photographed on ‘completion’, with the aim of publishing a book Major exhibitions such as Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back? at that documented all the panels in sequence. In October 1929 he had Madrid’s Reina Sofía in 2011, curated by Georges Didi-Huberman, arranged a third iteration of the work, amounting to 63 panels, though read artists such as Christian Boltanski, Zoe Leonard and Walid Raad Warburg’s numbering system suggests that another 11 were still to be through Warburg’s work and his Mnemosyne Atlas, his large collection of added. Unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, the Mnemosyne Atlas photographic reproductions of artefacts arranged montage-fashion on reflected the rise of the photobook in Weimar Germany and has been panels. The Mnemosyne Atlas was itself the subject of an exhibition at understood in terms of 1920s avant-garde montage strategies. Later the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020 and served as the foun- artworks, such as Gerhard Richter’s Atlas and Hanne Darboven’s dation for the display at the Chinese Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Cultural History 1880–1983, resemble Warburg’s work, even if made And if there has been a revival of magic and occultism in contemporary without awareness of the Mnemosyne Atlas. Its influence upon contemporary art might temptingly give the impresart – Alice Bucknell’s online platform ‘New Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (last version), Mystics’ being emblematic – then Warburg’s sion that Warburg’s oeuvre is more looked at Panel 39 (reconstruction by Roberto Ohrt approach to art history, which acknowledged than read, though Warburg’s thought trouand Axel Heil, 2020). Photo: Tobias Wootton. bles that very dualism. Adopting a phrase the function of astrology in visual culture Courtesy Warburg Institute / Fluid, London

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from Walter Benjamin – who can, at times, strike one as a kindred spirit – Didi-Huberman proposes ‘reading that which was never written’ as a leitmotif of Warburg’s enterprise. Visual literacy, dependent on perceiving images assembled with other images, reveals temporal dynamism. But this dynamism isn’t restricted to the Renaissance; it’s a feature of our present, too. Mick Finch’s Book of Knowledge project, initiated in 2014, appropriates Warburg’s montage procedures by juxtaposing readymade photographs taken from a late-1950s edition of a popular encyclopaedia; rearranged and put into new relationships, the images become less tokens of their time than prefigurations of our present – almost as if they’re tarot cards becoming meaningful via interpretation. That constellating of images generates meaning (as if no image alone can perform that function) and parallels how machine learning requires feeding multiple images deposited according to categories in order to learn how to read, sort and then produce images. The Mnemosyne Atlas, perhaps, has become a primer in how to navigate an image world, although whether that lesson is extendable to the burgeoning panoply of AI-generated images is another question. But insofar as those images are products of human desires and biases, then a Warburgian art theory might well provide a means for comprehending the ghosts in the machine. Warburg, the scion of a wealthy Jewish banking family in Hamburg, elected to train in art history rather than head the bank. As a result of a childhood deal made with his younger brother, Max, the latter would inherit the bank on condition that he purchase any book the former desired. Aby thus amassed a huge library (the foundation for what later became the Warburg Institute) that reflected his conviction that the Renaissance was not simply the birth of Christian humanism, supposedly lifting European culture out of medieval

darkness into a new realm of achievement, but also the reappearance of a ‘daemonic’ worldview that was a ‘survival’ – in German, a nachleben – from pagan antiquity. For example, Warburg’s 1912 lecture on murals in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara affixed upon what he interpreted as astrological symbols taken from Ancient Greece. Art history, paraphrasing Warburg, was really a set of ghost stories for adults that disrupted linear history and showed how the past refuses to pass. Warburg’s library, organised according to his ‘law of the good neighbour’ – in which the books were not distributed on the basis of standard classification systems but through a subjective logic in which a volume on magic can sit alongside a study of Lutheran theology, thereby casting light upon each other – was a creative instrument for disclosing this hidden dialectic between Apollo and Dionysus (Warburg was a reader of Friedrich Nietzsche, in whose first book, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, this dialectic is explored) and their untimely continuation in later cultural formations. Fritz Saxl, an art historian and librarian who had been close to Warburg, was instrumental in converting the library into a research institute and relocating it to London in 1933, four years after its founder’s death, to safeguard it from the Nazis. A decade later, it became part of the University of London. But despite the prevalence of the institute, especially in the disciplines of art and cultural history, Warburg himself has largely had a subterranean presence in those areas, partly due to the influence of art historians Erwin Panofsky in the USA and E.H. Gombrich in England, although they were at the same time important conduits in determining Warburg’s reception in academic circles. Both Panofsky and Gombrich were Jewish émigrés fleeing Nazism. Panofsky had been directly connected to Warburg, researching in his library at Hamburg and even completing

Mick Finch, Book of Knowledge 141, 2020, archival digital print on Hahnemühle German Etching paper, 59 × 73 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Warburg’s unfinished project on Albrecht Dürer’s mysterious print Melencolia I (1514), which depicts an array of esoteric items clustered around an angel. Gombrich left Austria in 1936, becoming, in 1959, the fourth director of the Warburg Institute and writing, in 1970, a biography of Warburg. According to both, Warburg’s research into the Renaissance demonstrated a transition from the Dionysian (the irrational, the magical) towards the Apollonian (the rational, humanist). Whatever tension existed between the Dionysian and Apollonian in Renaissance culture testified to this transition being underway. Panofsky’s essay ‘Albrecht Dürer and Classical Antiquity’ (1922) and Gombrich’s biography problematically advanced an interpretation of Warburg in which he acted as the defender of Apollonian values. To some extent, how Panofsky and Gombrich summarised Warburg’s distinct art-historical approach held sway, especially in Anglo-American art history circles, from the mid-twentieth century until the 1990s. The complexity through which Warburg approached nonlinear time within Renaissance artworks was largely unrecognised. It was also as if the existence of the Warburg Institute was enough, and Warburg himself, or his ideas, were strictly secondary. Gombrich’s directorship, though, coincided with groundbreaking publications by scholars at the institute, Frances Yates and D.P. Walker; the former’s investigations into the reception of the Hermetic texts and the troubled career of Giordano Bruno in books such as The Art of Memory (1966), with their self-confessed speculative qualities and open-endedness, are closer to the spirit of the research methods used by Warburg than the image of the man posited by Gombrich. Like Warburg, they construed hermetic thought and occultism as compelling philosophical systems capable of illuminating facets of the Renaissance, thereby also complicating the apprehension of that

period afforded by mainstream scholarship. And also like Warburg, they acknowledged the tentativeness of their research, encouraging others to continue exploring the paths they opened. Interest in Warburg, a fascination even, has deepened in the last few decades, allowing the complexities of his thought to become visible. Translations of continental philosophy and the rise of postmodernism during the 1980s in many ways encouraged a framework through which Warburg’s art history can be viewed anew. Art theorist Margaret Iversen was a pioneer here; her 1993 essay ‘Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition’ critiqued the timid domestication of Warburg by Gombrich and Panofsky and cogently asserted that his position could be aligned with postmodernist and feminist perspectives. Similarly, art historians such as Matthew Rampley and Georges Didi-Huberman have succeeded in recovering Warburg’s conceptual approaches, especially his belief that time was not a straight line or a progressive march towards a better future but more like a constellation in which past and present exist simultaneously and haunt one another. As such, Warburg’s writings provide tools for understanding the complex temporalities examined by artists such as Doug Aitken and Tacita Dean, among others, while it impacts upon how the art historian comprehends the artwork in its ‘present’, since the notion of the present, for Warburg, is the survival of the past. Artworks, then, are perhaps defined by Warburg as being perpetually both in and out of context, and ‘anachronism’ is no longer a condemnation but a condition of art. ar Memory and Migration: The Warburg Institute 1926–2024 is on view at the Warburg Institute, London, through 20 December Matthew Bowman is an art critic and art historian based in Colchester

Paul Felix, Max Fritz and Aby Warburg, 1929. Courtesy Warburg Institute, London

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Eternal Returns 1 Norm and Form

This year ArtReview celebrates its 75th anniversary. But it’s never been one to look back. Unless the looking back is in the form of the serious business of art history. And that this history is somehow affecting the art of the present, which is the kind of art that ArtReview is really all about. So, in that spirit, ArtReview has decided to mark the occasion, not by republishing a greatest hits compilation of material from past issues, or by presenting a series of eulogies by those who supposedly constitute the great and the good (of art). Rather it has decided to launch a new series of articles that seek to update ‘classic’ texts of art history for use in the climate of right now. And what better way to kick it off than with a close examination of a key text by one of Europe’s most celebrated art historians, Ernst Hans Gombrich. The guy who wrote the global bestseller The Story of Art, which, despite being published back in 1950 (when ArtReview was a toddling one-year-old), remains the foundational textbook for European art history (‘widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts’, according to Wikipedia). But that’s not what we’re looking at here. ‘Norm and Form: The Stylistic Categories of Art History and their Origins in Renaissance Ideals’ is based on a lecture delivered in Italian

at the Biblioteca Filosofica of Turin University in April 1963. It would later give the title to the first volume of the Austrian-born British art historian’s collected musings on the Renaissance published in 1966. Gombrich had fled Austria in 1936 following the Nazi Party’s banning of his book A Little History of the World. In London he took up a research position at the Warburg Institute, becoming its director in 1959. ‘They all deal with the Renaissance climate of opinion about art,’ Gombrich stated of the essays in the collection, ‘and with the influence this climate has exerted on both the practice and the criticism of art’. He suggested that ‘Norm and Form’, in particular, examined the strong hold that the Renaissance still exerted on thinking about art, even in the minds of those who sought to dismiss the phenomenon as the founding moment of Western art as a whole. Of course, at the time that Gombrich was writing, all art was Western. Today he would presumably want to qualify his thoughts as such or seek to look further afield. More than that, though, ‘Norm and Form’ deals with the power of language as both a positive and negative force in art criticism, inasmuch as the discipline, at its core, translates something visual through the act of writing – the other updates are in what follows.

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Norm and Form The Stylistic Categories of Art History and their Origins in Renaissance Ideals by E.H. Gombrich Abridged and annotated by J.J. Charlesworth and Mark Rappolt

Sir Ernst Gombrich, leading art historian and director of the Warburg Institute, London, 1959–76, pictured here at the institute in 1976

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It is well known that many of the stylistic terms with which the art historian [Here Gombrich is referring to acolytes of art history in the sense that they are obsessed with a history that is inherently European. And equally obsessed by the Renaissance as the turning point of modernity, which was, in general terms, the received wisdom of the time.] operates began their career in the vocabulary of critical abuse. ‘Gothic’ once had the same connotation as our ‘vandalism’ as a mark of barbaric insensitivity to beauty, ‘baroque’ still figures in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary [This is an antiquated item from an age in which dictionaries were physical objects that one might want to be pocket-size in case one got stuck midsentence and needed to look something up. Today dictionaries are digital – unlimited by the restrictions of print costs and clothing fashion – and designed to be read on mobile phone screens.] of 1934 with the primary meaning of ‘grotesque, whimsical’, and even the word ‘impressionist’ was coined by a critic in derision. We are proud of having stripped these terms of their derogatory overtones. We believe we can now use them in a purely neutral, purely descriptive sense [These days, when it is generally accepted that no word is neutral and that all use of language is an expression of some form of prejudice, this belief might well be seen as quaint (at best) and delusional (at worst).] to denote certain styles or periods we neither wish to condemn nor to praise. Up to a point, of course, our belief is justified. We can speak of gothic ivories, baroque organ-lofts or impressionist paintings with a very good chance of describing a class of works which our colleagues could identify with ease. But our assurance breaks down when it comes to theoretical discussions about the limits of these categories. Is Ghiberti ‘gothic’, is Rembrandt ‘baroque’, is Degas an ‘impressionist’? Debates of this kind can become stuck in sterile verbalism, and yet they sometimes have their use if they remind us of the simple fact that the labels we use must of necessity differ from those which our colleagues who work in the field of entomology fix on their beetles or butterflies. In the discussion of works of art description can never be completely divorced from criticism. [By which Gombrich sets up what might be a fundamental difference between art history and art criticism, where critics write about the particular things, and historians go around gathering art and putting it all into categories, like ‘Young British art’, or ‘post-Internet art’, or ‘Queer aesthetics’ and so on. Gombrich suggests that such categories, while apparently descriptive, are actually based on value judgements made long before, about what to value and what might be worthless.] The perplexities which art historians have encountered in their debates about styles and periods are due to this lack of distinction between form and norm. [Gombrich here, with some degree of prescience, has tapped into some of the issues that will dominate art-historical discourse in our age. Today of course, the prevailing winds

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of art history in particular and cultural studies in general plot a course in which labelling anything reflects conscious or unconscious prejudice and is best avoided. As, more often than not, is saying anything at all.]

1. Classification and its Discontents There can be few lovers of art who have never felt impatient of the academic art historian and his concern with labels and pigeonholes. Since most art historians are also lovers of art [Interestingly Gombrich arrives at something of a paradox here. Having distinguished between lovers of art and art historians in the previous sentence, he now attempts an unlikely reconciliation in this one. The fundamental distinction seems to be one that early ArtReview contributor Peter Reyner Banham would articulate as the distinction between ‘common’ and ‘learned’ sense.] they will have every sympathy with this reaction, of which Benedetto Croce was the most persuasive spokesman. To Croce it seemed that stylistic categories could only do violence to what he so aptly called the ‘insularity’ of each individual and incommensurable work of art. But, plausible as this argument is, it would clearly lead to an atomization of our world. Not only paintings but even plants and the proverbial beetles are all individuals, all presumably unique; to all of them applies the scholastic tag ‘individuum est ineffabile’: the individual thing cannot be caught in the network of our language, for language must needs operate with concepts, universals. The way out of this dilemma is not a withdrawal into nominalism, the refusal to use any words except names of individuals. [Typically of his writing, here Gombrich is moving from discussions of popular sensibilities to high-end academia, anticipating some of the problems that would fascinate analytic philosophers and logicians such as Saul Kripke (in his 1970 Princeton Lecture Series, later published, in 1980, as Naming and Necessity). The ripples of which continue to wash over critical writing to this day, in particular in relation to the necessity or otherwise of the evils Gombrich goes on to describe in the sentence that follows.] Like all users of language the art historian has rather to admit that classification is a necessary tool, even though it may be a necessary evil. Provided he never forgets that, like all language, it is a man-made thing which man can also adjust or change, it will serve him quite well in his day-to-day work. [These days manmade things have been recognised to be all bad. It’s good to chip away at the monolithic heaviness of classifications, since they aren’t describing realities set in stone, but only interpretations of what artworks mean and have meant in the past. At the same time, if every art-historical classification is temporary, then revising them becomes an endless game, changing with the prevailing fashion. Why are there so many exhibitions about ‘overlooked women artists’, for example?]

Benedetto Croce was an Italian historian, philosopher (famously the author of a commentary on Hegel) and politician. Having initially supported Benito Mussolini’s fascist government, he went on to be instrumental in the return of democracy to Italy. In that sense he was living proof of the problematics of absolute judgement. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature no less than 16 times

2. The Origins of Stylistic Terminology For the student of style, experimentation with these dichotomies is relevant if it prepares him for the insight that the variety of stylistic labels with which the art historian usually appears to be operating is in a sense misleading. That procession of styles and periods known to every beginner – Classic, Romanesque, Gothic,

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Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classical and Romantic – represents only a series of masks for two categories, the classical and the non-classical. [Here Gombrich is doing his own pigeonholing, sweeping up a sequence of styles and putting them into one box, marked ‘classical’. This is itself an act of history-writing based on the historical distance between him and what he’s discussing. What happens after Romantic art, after all?] That ‘Gothic’ meant nothing else to Vasari than the style of the hordes who destroyed the Roman Empire is too well known to need elaboration. What is perhaps less well known is the fact that in describing this depraved manner of a non-classical method of building, Vasari himself derived his concepts and his categories of corruption from the only classical book of normative criticism in which he could find such a description ready-made – Vitruvius On Architecture. [Here Gombrich doubles down on the inadequacy of language when it comes to describing difference and, were such a thing actually to exist, novelty. Vitruvius was a Roman architect active during the first century BCE. He became famous because his book De architectura is the only instructional tome known to have survived from this time. It is to architecture what the Bible is to JudeoChristians.] Vitruvius of course nowhere describes any style of building outside the classical tradition, but there is one famous critical condemnation of a style in the chapter on wall-decoration, where he attacks the licence and illogicality of the decorative style fashionable in his age. He contrasts this style with the rational method of representing real or plausible architectural constructions.

Giorgio Vasari was a painter and art historian. In fact, these days most people think he invented the latter discipline. With his idiotically titled Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550). Today, of course, the fashion is to celebrate the not-excellent painters, sculptors and architects that history ‘overlooked’. Unless you’re Hans Ulrich Obrist, in which case it’s all excellent

But these [subjects] which were imitations based upon reality are now disdained by the improper taste of the present. On the stucco are monsters rather than definite representations taken from definite things. Instead of columns there rise up stalks; instead of gables, striped panels with curled leaves and volutes. Candelabra uphold pictured shrines and above the summits of these, clusters of thin stalks rise from their roots in tendrils with little figures seated upon them at random. Again, slender stalks with heads of men and animals attached to half the body. Such things neither are, nor can be, nor have been. On these lines the new fashions compel bad judges to condemn good craftsmanship for dullness. For how can a reed actually sustain a roof,

Detail of the Villa of Livia painted-garden frescoes, Prima Porta. Public domain

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Eighteenth-century painting of south end of east portico wall, Temple of Isis, Pompeii, by Aniello Cataneo. Collection Naples Archaeological Museum. Photo © ICCD/CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 IT

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or a candelabrum the ornaments of a gable, or a soft and slender stalk a seated statue, or how can flowers and half-statues rise alternatively from roots and stalks? Yet when people view these falsehoods, they approve rather than condemn. Basically Vitruvius, in the first century BCE, is doing art criticism still recognisable, in its basic forms, even today. He’s saying that some art is crap, and that other people don’t get that it’s crap, and instead say that it’s good. The fools. After all, how can flowers and half statues rise alternatively from roots and stalks? It’s crazy stuff, and looks stupid. Unless you’re one of the Surrealists, who were often very much into classical art. And nobody got them either at the time. Anyway, go Vitrivius. BTW, these days only a critic with a deathwish would call anything improper or monstruous. Not just because what’s improper today will become proper tomorrow (this is the point of Gombrich’s essay) or what’s monstrous today will be a thing of beauty tomorrow, but also because we are generally beginning to shun negative language. Even though, as Gombrich and ourselves have indicated earlier, we should know that all language is violence. So what’s to worry about? Turning from this description to Vasari’s image of the building habits of the northern barbarians, we discover that the origins of the stylistic category of the Gothic do not lie in any morphological observation of buildings, but entirely in the prefabricated catalogue of sins which Vasari took over from his authority. There is another kind of work, called German... which could well be called Confusion or Disorder [Today such stereotyping might well be considered racist. Particularly when coming from an Italian.] instead, for in their buildings – so numerous that they have infected the whole world – they made the doorways decorated with columns slender and contorted like a vine, not strong enough to bear the slightest weight; in the same way on the facades and other decorated parts they made a malediction of little tabernacles one above another, with so many pyramids and points and leaves that it seems impossible for it to support itself, let alone other weights. They look more as if they were made of paper than of stone or marble. And in these work s they made so many projections, gaps, brackets and curlecues that they put them out of proportion; and often, with one thing put on top of another, they go so high that the top of a door touches the roof. This manner was invented by the Goths…

Jan van Eyck, The Madonna in the Church, 1450. Public domain

I do not share that sense of superiority which marks so many characterizations of Vasari. His work amply shows that he could give credit even to buildings or paintings which he found less than perfect from his point of view. We should rather envy Vasari his conviction that he could recognize perfection [Perfection, for Vasari, seems intimately connected to deluded ideas of ‘truthfulness’. Even though everyone knew and continues to know that all good art relies on deception. Which is to say, that there’s an element of self-deception present here. But that perhaps such delusions are fundamental to the condition of being either an art historian or an art lover. Which may or may not be the same thing, as was suggested earlier.] when he saw it and that this perfection could be formulated with the help of Vitruvian categories – the famous standard of regola, ordine, misura, disegno e maniera laid down in his Preface to the Third Part and admirably exemplified in his Lives of Leonardo and Bramante.

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These normative attitudes hardened into an inflexible dogma only when the stylistic categories were used by critics across the Alps who wanted to pit the classic ideals of perfection against local traditions. [This, basically, continues to define what is called art and what is not deemed worthy of the category, whether that be ‘craft’, vernacular stylings or local knickknackery.] Gothic then became synonymous with that bad taste that had ruled in the Dark Ages, before the light of the new style was carried from Italy to the north. [Interestingly, every age seems to want to set itself as superior to whatever went before it. Then hipsters get involved and revive the stuff that the uptight rulemakers say is bad. Which is why Britain is full of old buildings that look like they’re out of Harry Potter. But this usefully reminds us that while we too may think that old art is rubbish, we may not turn out to be right.]

3. Neutrality and Criticism

William Warburton was a writer, literary critic and clergyman (eventually becoming Bishop of Gloucester, in 1759). A frequent publisher of pamphlets on theological issues, he once described his critics as a ‘pestilent herd of libertine scribblers with which the island [Britain] is overrun’

Jacob Burckhardt was a Swiss art historian who was born and lived in Basel his entire life. Before it was home to an art fair. Der Cicerone (1855) was a comprehensive study of Italian art, which, in the context of Vasari’s earlier quoted comments about those on ‘the other side’ of the Alps might be considered ironic

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It is not my intention to give a full account of the gradual rehabilitation of these various styles or of the forces of historical tolerance and nationalist pride that contributed to the rejection of Vitruvian monopolism. What matters in the present context is only that those who questioned the norm still accepted the categories to which it had given rise. [Again, Gombrich’s text is prescient. This is the fundamental issue that haunts all those claiming to decolonise museums today.] Like Warburton in the eighteenth century, nineteenth century historians usually acknowledged the unclassical character of the styles they wanted to defend, but they stressed some compensating virtue. Mediaeval styles may have been less beautiful than the Vitruvian norm demands, but they are more devout, more honest or more strong, and surely piety, honesty and strength count for more than mere mechanical orderliness? This is Ruskin’s approach. [Well, it’s all a matter of taste, isn’t it? Or is it? But what is taste?] Burckhardt’s tentative vindication of the Baroque in the Cicerone is not very different when he writes about baroque church facades: ‘… yet they move the beholder sometimes as a pure fiction, in spite of their frequently depraved manner of expression…’ The phases by which this tolerance for the unclassical styles became a partiality in their favour belong to the history of taste and fashions rather than to the problems of historiography. What concerns us is the claim which arose in the nineteenth century that the historian can ignore the norm and look at the succession of these styles without any bias; that he can, in the words of Hippolyte Taine, approach the varieties of past creations much as the botanist approaches his material, without caring whether the flowers he describes are beautiful or ugly, poisonous or wholesome. [A belief in this claim is, once again, pretty much the norm for art history today.] It is not surprising that this approach to the styles of the past seemed plausible to the nineteenth century, for its practice had kept step with its theory. Nineteenth century architects and decorators used the forms of earlier styles with sublime impartiality, selecting here the Romanesque repertory for a railway station, there a Baroque stucco pattern for a theatre [Here Gombrich anticipates the artistic style of postmodernism, while suggesting in the process his adherence to the belief that there is no such thing as newness. That nothing comes from nothing. Which you might consider to be an argument for the importance of history or, depending on your outlook, an argument against the same. Because, as ArtReview has learned over the past 75 years, everyone always

John Ruskin was the most influential British art historian and art critic of the nineteenth century. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0

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Alexis Peyrotte, Floral and Acanthus Leaf Design, 1740. Public domain

desires the shock of the new. However imaginary that shock might be. But perhaps this too gets to one of the fundamental properties of art – that it is all built upon desire. And any attempt to remove emotion from the equation is a fool’s errand.] No wonder that the idea gained ground that styles are distinguished by certain recognizable morphological characteristics, such as the pointed arch for Gothic and the rocaille for the Rococo, and that these terms could safely be applied stripped of their normative connotation. Even this morphological approach has its roots in Vitruvius. It derives from his treatment of the orders. Doric, Ionian and Corinthian are such repertories of forms, easily recognizable by certain specified characteristics and easily applied by any architect who can use a patternbook. Why should this range not be extended to embrace the Gothic or the Baroque order as well, and thus merely increase the languages of form the architect learns to speak? As long as the labels for styles were mainly applied to architecture and patterns in such practical contexts things went reasonably well. But the defenders of these styles had higher ambitions. They wanted to advocate the unclassical styles as systems in their own right embodying alternative values, if not philosophies. The Gothic style was superior to the Renaissance not because it built in pointed arches but because it embodies the Age of Faith which the pagans of the Renaissance could not appreciate. Styles, in other words, were seen as manifestations of that spirit of the age which had risen to metaphysical status in Hegel’s vision of history. [There’s a lot to be said for trying to reinvest the art of the past with the meaning it might have held for those who originally made it. It’s an optimistic belief in being able to understand human beings in the past. Conversely, it can lead to projecting one’s own beliefs and value judgements onto the past. Like saying that Shakespeare must have been a racist. Which he was. Or was he? See how easy it is? These days it is impossible to write anything about art that does not treat it as a manifestation of the spirit of the age, or an embodiment of a philosophy or ideology.] This spirit in its unfolding manifested itself not only in certain architectural forms, it also gained shape in the painting, sculpture and pattern of the age, which pointed to the same outlook that moulded the literature, the politics and the philosophy of the period. To this approach such morphological marks of recognition as the presence of a rocaille for the rococo or the rib for the Gothic appeared hopelessly ‘superficial’. [Here Gombrich is being snarky about the possibility of big ideas, and grand narratives of history, which is perhaps understandable given how much Europeans had suffered in the twentieth century in the name of grand narratives. But still, that’s not necessarily Hegel’s fault.] There must be something that all works of art created in these distinct periods of human history had in common, they must share some profound quality or essence which characterizes all manifestations of the Gothic or the Baroque. K.R. Popper has taught me to recognize in this demand for an ‘essential’ definition a remnant of Aristotle’s conception of scientific procedure. It was Aristotle, the great biologist, who conceived of the work of the scientist as basically a work of classification and description such as the zoologist or botanist is apt to perform, and it was he who believed that these classes are not created but found in nature through the process of induction and intellectual intuition. Looking at many trees we find some that have structural features in common and form a genus or a species. This species manifests itself in every individual tree as far as resistant matter allows, and though individual trees may therefore differ, their differences are merely ‘accidental’ compared to the essence they share. One may admit that

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Plate from Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, The Five Orders of Architecture, 1562

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Etching of Plato by D. Cunego, 1783, after Anton Raphael Mengs, after Raphael. Wellcome Images. CC by 4.0

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Aristotle’s procedure was a brilliant solution of the problem of universals as this had been proposed by Plato. No longer need we look for the idea of the horse or the pinetree in some remote world beyond the heavens, we find it at work within the individual as its entelechy and its inherent form. But whatever the value of Aristotle’s procedure for the history of biology, the grip it retained on the humanities even when science had long discarded this mode of thought provides ample food for reflection. [The later work of the philosopher Michel Foucault, on systems of authority, control and classification, would, of course, undo this grip. But what Gombrich is onto here continues to concern the distinction between common and learned sense, and the desire of the learned to preach to and be followed by the commoners. As a form of validation. In a sense, then, Gombrich is anticipating the age of social media. While perhaps inadvertently demonstrating that nothing is new. Again. Which might, in turn, be said to be a demonstration of his point, and a return to the earlier subject of the relationship of form to meaning.] For the discussions which came into fashion during the last hundred years about the true essence of the Renaissance, the Gothic or the Baroque betray in most cases an uncritical acceptance of Aristotelian essentialism. They presuppose that the historian who looks at a sufficient number of works created in the period concerned will gradually arrive at an intellectual intuition of the indwelling essence that distinguishes these works from all others, just as pinetrees are distinguished from oaks. Indeed, if the historian’s eye is sufficiently sharp and his intuition sufficiently profound, he will even penetrate beyond the essence of the species to that of the genus; he will be able to grasp not only the common structural features of all gothic paintings and statues, but also the higher unity that links them with gothic literature, law and philosophy. I side with those philosophers who, like Sir Karl Popper, look with suspicion at what he calls Essentialism, but wherever one may stand in this modern battle of realists versus nominalists it is obvious that categories and classes which serve very well for one purpose may break down when used in a different context. The normative connotations of our stylistic terms cannot simply be converted into morphological ones – for you can never get more out of your classification than you put into it. The cook may divide fungi into edible mushrooms and poisonous toadstools; these are the categories that matter to him. He forgets, even if he ever cared, that there may be fungi which are neither edible nor poisonous. But a botanist who based his taxonomy of fungi on these distinctions and then married them to some other method of classification would surely fail to produce anything useful. [It is unclear how Gombrich intends to convert the idea of usefulness from the life and death example of botany into something similar in the field of art history. Perhaps it’s merely to avoid this problem that he has turned (once again) to botany in the first place. Or perhaps it’s another concession that art history struggles to appeal to the common sense.] I do not imply that the origin of a word must always be respected by those who apply it. The discovery that the Gothic style has nothing to do with the Goths need not concern the art historian, who still finds the label useful. What should concern him in the history of the term, I think, is its original lack of differentiation. The stylistic names I enumerated did not arise from a consideration of particular features, as do Vitruvius’ terms for the orders; they are negative terms like the Greek term Barbarian, which means no more than a non-Greek. If I may introduce a harmless term, I should like to call such labels terms of exclusion. [In the age of inclusion, this has become the primary problem of both

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art history and museology. You can’t label something without making it distinct from something else. And if things are distinct they cannot be the same or stand on the same level ground.] Their frequency in our languages illustrates the basic need in man to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’, the world of the familiar from the vast, unarticulated world outside that does not belong and is rejected. It is no accident, I believe, that the various terms for non-classical styles turn out to be such terms of exclusion. It was the classical tradition of normative aesthetics that first formulated some rules of art, and such rules are most easily formulated negatively as a catalogue of sins to be avoided. Just as most of the Ten Commandments are really prohibitions, so most rules of art and of style are warnings against certain sins. We have heard some of these sins characterized in the previous quotations – the disharmonious, the arbitrary and the illogical must be taboo to those who follow the classical canon. There are many more in the writings of normative critics from Alberti via Vasari to Bellori or Félibien. Do not overcrowd your pictures, do not use too much gold, do not seek out difficult postures for their own sake; avoid harsh contours, avoid the ugly, the indecorous and the ignoble. Indeed it might be argued that what ultimately killed the classical ideal was that the sins to be avoided multiplied till the artist’s freedom was confined to an ever narrowing space; [One might argue that a similar restriction on artistic freedom is being enacted by a form of moral policing in which the sins of today are a failure to support the ‘correct’ political or ethical cause.] all he dared to do in the end was insipid repetition of safe solutions. After this, there was only one sin to be avoided in art, that of being academic. In our exhibitions today we see the most bewildering variety of forms and experiments. Anyone who wanted to find some morphological feature that united Alberto Burri with Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon with Capogrossi would be hard put to it, but it would be easy to see that they all want to avoid being academic; they would all have displeased Bellori and would have welcomed his condemnation. It is no accident, therefore, that the terminology of art history was so largely built on words denoting some principle of exclusion. Most movements in art erect some new taboo, some new negative principle, such as the banishing from painting by the impressionists of all ‘anecdotal’ elements. The positive slogans and shibboleths which we read in artists’ or critics’ manifestos past or present are usually much less well defined. Take the term ‘functionalism’ in twentieth-century architecture. We know by now that there are many ways of planning or building which may be called functional and that this demand alone will never solve all the architect’s problems. But the immediate effect of the slogan was to ban all ornament in architecture as non-functional and therefore taboo. What unites the most disparate schools of architecture in this century is this common aversion to a particular tradition. Maybe we would make more progress in the study of styles if we looked out for such principles of exclusion, the sins any particular style wants to avoid, than if we continue to look for the common structure or essence of all the works produced in a certain period. [Here the prophet describes precisely what curators and art historians attached to Western institutions are frantically trying to do today. Go Ernst!] ar

Helsinki Olympic Stadium Tower. CC BY-SA 2.5

Abridged extract from Gombrich on the Renaissance Volume 1: Norm and Form by E.H. Gombrich, published by Phaidon (phaidon.com)

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Haunted by Gelare Khoshgozaran

ArtReview

What makes the experience of watching Maryam Tafakory’s avant-garde films so paralysing?

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above Mast-del (stills), 2023, DCP 2K, colour, 17 min. Courtesy the artist (still), 2024, DCP 2K, preceding pages Razeh-del colour, 28 min. Courtesy the artist

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Maryam Tafakory is part of a new generation of Iranian filmmakers prose and poetry by other writers. She writes in English and Persian, who engage the politics of memory through essay-films and exper- using fragments gleaned from texts by French poststructuralist imental cinema. The London-based Iranian artist’s work consists, authors such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, or from modern almost entirely, of archival footage and the meticulous rearrange- Iranian poetry by Nima Yushij and Forough Farrokhzad. The poetics ment of cinematic fragments selected from hundreds of Iranian films of Tafakory’s work stem from her surgical destruction of containermade after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Sourced primarily from her ised conceptions of knowledge. In their place, she weaves together personal archive and YouTube, the dissected and reassembled scenes references that form a kaleidoscopic interiority of postwar Iranian from the movies are later overlaid with anachronistic sounds from youth who came of age during a period of extreme state censorthe original audio, or deftly scored by contemporary composers (such ship and control of civilian life. The work is written and edited from the psychic and semantic strata of these juxtapositions, and herein as Canadian Sarah Davachi in Tafakory’s 2023 film, Mast-del ). Tafakory employs a queer feminist gaze to emphasise the Iranian lies the disorienting duality of experiencing Tafakory’s work in the government’s codes of modesty and censorship while simultan- West; not everyone is fully invited ‘in’. eously critiquing the limitations of WestThe titles of all her films are composed Tafakory’s films remind ern feminist film theory – most notably of the original Persian with English transnotions of voyeurism that have been lation or transliteration. Irani Bag , me that Iranian movie theatres prominent since Laura Mulvey’s 1975 Tafakory’s most didactic film, is a rumiare where my generation essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. nation on the role of bags as props in learned to erase the hijab from One of the scenes that best captures this Iranian postrevolutionary cinema and juxtaposition, which Tafakory makes use a prosthetic for touch under the eyes of the head of the women in the voyeuristic government that watches of in Nazarbazi (2022) and Mast-del our heads, so as not to let it and controls. Irani Bag , is of the blindfolded soldier in references determine the character’s traits. Kamal Tabrizi’s Sheida . In the 1999 a popular Iranian TV series, The English Bag film, an Iran–Iraq War veteran who has (Keef-e Ingelisi, 1999–2000) that depicts It was just a code the British diplomatic mission and impetemporarily lost his eyesight falls in love with the voice of his nurse Sheida, who awkwardly recites the Quran rial interference in Iranian politics leading up to the 1952 coup d’état. to him to alleviate his pain and PTSD nightmares: a sinless love affair In Nazarbazi she excavates the erotics of the omnipresent work of the fifteenth-century Iranian poet Hafiz, who had been renarrabetween a man and a woman in the absence of vision. The contradictions of public and private life as depicted in tivised as a pious devotee of God in postrevolutionary Iranian statepostrevolution Iranian cinema has been the subject of countless arti- media. In Nazarbazi – which can be translated to ‘eye fucking’ cles and essays, and is explored extensively in Negar Mottahedeh’s and ‘lustful glances’ – it is the eyes in the absence of words that book Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (2008). become the protagonist in a history of forbidden lust and disemTafakory is a filmmaker who speaks from within that memory space bodied love. of lived experience. Most presciently, however, there is a pointed Tafakory’s work consistently evokes a sense of out-of-placeness, voicelessness to her films, with text that overlays or sits alongside the often driven by the construction of anxious sonic textures from the footage as the primary vessel for speech. In her earlier works, such as looped crackling of archival sound. Through its complex compositions deploying mirroring, inversion, superimIrani Bag (2020) or Nazarbazi , the position and expressive colour manipulations, text that plays on the screen is composed from Irani Bag (still), 2020, commentary by the artist, as well as essays, the Del series is particularly haunting. DCP 2K, colour, 8 min. Courtesy the artist

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Razeh-del (stills), 2024, DCP 2K, colour, 28 min. Courtesy the artist

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Nazarbazi (stills), 2022, DCP 2K, colour, 19 min. Courtesy the artist

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CodeNames III

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(stills), 2023, colour, 47 min. Courtesy the artist

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In the eerie darkness of the movie theatre, the larger-than-life figures who have lit up thousands of Iranian screens over decades apparate anew, and stare at the audience in silence. The only audible voices are muffled, attempted enunciations between sleep and wakefulness. This ongoing series of films, of which Mast-del and Razeh-del have been respectively released in 2023 and 2024, takes matters to Del (‘heart’ in English). Her new films employ a more personal approach by narrating (through English and Persian text) specific memories, and recounting intimate stories of violence, desire and loss from the same era as the one to which the archival footage belongs. At no point during the film or in the end credits is it revealed whether these are the filmmaker’s own memories or not. Through this conscious choice the filmmaker invites the familiar audience to recall their own parallel stories of the time and place with her. From a queer feminist perspective, Iranian cinema is a minefield. Its avant-garde and contemporary champions, whether Masud Kimiai (with Gheisar, 1969) or Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider, 2022), are as deeply rooted in violence against women and queers as blockbusters such as Fereydoun Jeyrani’s Red (1999). The political guardianship of the country may have changed drastically since the revolution, but the misogyny of Iranian cinema has remained largely unchanged by new codes of censorship and innovative approaches to form. Conversely (and somewhat unsurprisingly) Western pundits and mainstream film festivals have commended the almost entirely male cohort of contemporary Iranian filmmakers for their ingenious bypassing of state censorship. Like Tafakory, my upbringing in Iran was largely influenced by religion and cinema; a male-dominated cinema persistently marred by the figure of the ‘deranged’ and ‘hysterical’ woman who is routinely punished with excessive violence. From the young woman who self-immolates to avoid an arranged marriage (Dariush Mehrjui’s Bemani , 2002), to the sacrificial wife who, upon learning of her infertility, goes searching for a new wife for her husband (Mehrjui’s Leila , 1997), to the disfigured, wretched prostitute who survives an acid attack by her ex-husband (Fereydoun Jeyrani’s Water and Fire , 2001). Drawing from this cinematic archive of violence against women, the end credits of Tafakory’s films read

like a damning who’s who of Iranian misogynistic filmmakers. The women in these films occupy supporting roles for the main antihero of the film, what I’d call the melancholic male, epitomised by the character Hamid Hamoon in the 1989 awardwinning classic Hamoon, directed by the late Mehrjui. However, under Tafakory’s close examination, they reemerge as a hybridised central subject. Tafakory’s films remind me that Iranian movie theatres are where my generation learned to erase the hijab from the head of the women in our heads, so as not to let it determine the character’s traits. It was just a code. We also learned to accept the brutal death of the prostitute, and the beating of the ‘whining’ woman by her husband. We learned to accept this violence and carry it with us as we walked out of the cinema into the light of day, adopting the codes we were taught in the school of cinema. The figure of bakhtak in Persian civilisations, among other West Asian and North African cultures, is a demon who paralyses you by sitting on your chest while you sleep. For those of us who grew up during the same era and with access to a similar cultural milieu as Tafakory, experiencing the cinema that she has created through the ghosts of postrevolutionary Iranian films is a paralytic experience. In the introduction to the 2008 edition of her book, Ghostly Matters, sociologist and theorist Avery Gordon asks: ‘What kind of case is a case of ghosts?… It is a case of the difference it makes to start with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or more commonly, with what we never notice.’ Reconciling with ghosts is only made possible collectively, however individualised the experience of a personal haunting might be. By conjuring the ghosts of this cinematic archive, Tafakory’s oeuvre brings an urgent queer feminist perspective into the heart of Iranian cinema. Her work disembowels the codes and the affect created over decades of cinematic depictions of gendered violence and creates an arresting environment for reconsidering our relationship not only to Iranian cinema, but cinema itself. ar Maryam Tafakory is a nominee for the Film London Jarman Award 2024 Gelare Koshgozaran is an Iranian artist based in Los Angeles

Sukhte-del (still), 2025. Courtesy the artist

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Remaking Mike Kelley A critic questions framing the American as an artist for all times by Martin Herbert

only known about through scant photoMike Kelley’s career can be divided, in retrospect, into three sections: the part most people didn’t graphic documentation. understand or even know about (the late 1970s In 1978 Kelley would graduate from Los Angeles conceptualist hothouse CalArts having through to the mid-80s), the part where the work constructed handmade birdboxes based on tightened up and yet got misread (beginning church architecture. A year later, the multiduring the late 80s) and the American artist’s reaction to these earlier periods, which led to part photo/text/drawing sequence The Poltergeist everything that came after (from the mid-1990s featured photos of him trailing ectoplasm to 2012, the year he died). The lesson learned from his nostrils, and writings that bundled along the way is that ‘Mike Kelley’ was, to some together uncontainable adolescent and superdegree, whoever the audience and the cultural moment wanted him natural energies in oracular, mediumistic cadences. The multipart, to be. With the American artist’s touring survey Ghost and Spirit – now multimedia project Monkey Island (1982–83) began with a diagram at London’s Tate Modern – this point is particularly felt. We’ll get to that purported to explain the world and spun off deliriously into a room-size installation of drawings, writings, sculpture and perforhow. But first, let’s back up. A working-class lapsed Catholic from Michigan with, it ap- mance suffused with erotic and nautical themes – (drawings of peared, a mile-wide antiauthoritarian streak, Kelley (born in 1954) giant-assed monkeys, handwritten texts speaking of ‘mount[ing] spent his early creative years making installations and performances the island’, anthropomorphic bells having sex). A throughline in the that leaned into conceptual and physical sprawl while valorising above works, and Kelley’s work in this era per se, is a generalised queswhatever was then quietly marginalised, unwelcome and repressed tioning of what can be known about reality and of those who would in contemporary art – whether craft aesthetics, occultism and uncan- purport to know, Kelley steadily reducing epistemological questions niness, irrationality, low cultural references or adolescent behav- to absurdity. iour. An instructive piece of juvenilia in the present retrospective, A few years later, though – as the retrospective’s timeline lays at least as seen in its previous iteration at Düsseldorf’s K21, is The out – and particularly as the artworld’s attention swung towards Los Futurist Ballet (1973): video documentation of a work made while Angeles, Kelley made a breakthrough in terms of profile with the Kelley was a first-year student at the University of Michigan. This series of discrete works and installations that he collectively titled ‘reenacts’, and tricks out with counterHalf a Man (1987–91), a newly punchy and Ahh… Youth! (detail), 1991. focused visual language of used, soiled and cultural sexual babble (eg about a female © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, performer’s successful stripping career), thrifted stuffed toys and stitched text banners: Los Angeles. All Rights Reserved / VAGA at ARS, NY a 1917 work by futurist Fortunato Depero eg ‘Pants Shitter & Proud / P.S. Jerk-Off Too and DACS, London 2024

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(And I Wear Glasses)’ in 1987’s Three Point Program / Four Eyes. These photos of what he termed ‘folk performances’ – ‘Religious Performanfabric-centric works continued to establish his interest in what the ces, Thugs, Dance, Hick and Hillbilly, Halloween and Goth, Satanic, artworld disdained, from female-coded stylistics to the unstable ener- Mimes, and Equestrian Events’ were his categories for Day Is Done gies of immaturity. Take 1987’s landmark More Love Hours Than Can – suffused with a creepy sense of reenacting the repressed, probing Ever Be Repaid, first shown at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles psychic wounds. ‘I wanted’, Kelley said of this show to Artforum in that year. A wall-hanging assemblage of stitched-together, often in 2005, ‘to create a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk that is not utopian handmade teddies and gonks – one that also reads, if you squint, in nature but is an extension of our current victim culture.’ as an infantilised take on colourful abstract painting – it sets up Read from the perspective of the present, this is interesting terridiscomfiting psychodynamics concerning other invisible power rela- tory. It might, at the time, have appeared to be in conversation with tions: specifically, between parents and children. Yet the feedback Robert Hughes’s widely read broadside against political correctness, that Kelley got, particularly concerning the overfondled dirty toys Culture of Complaint (1993), which essentially analysed America as a and general vibe of abjection, suggested that audiences thought the culture of self-pitying whiners enabled both by conservatism and work was simpler than that, and that its linkage of childhood and ab- liberal academia. In suggesting that the US had become a nation of jection pointed directly at grievance-mongers (and using child abuse – the artist’s own. a title, repurposed from a song This was a hinge point. by doomed folkie Nick Drake, “So”, Kelley recalled in 2005 that implies a downward during an interview for a PBS slide), Day Is Done could be condocumentary series, “I said, sidered as anticipatory, and diagnostic, of that more fer‘well, that’s really interesting. I have to go with that. I have vent and visible sense of white grievance and perceived victimto make all my work about my abuse – and not only that, but hood that has gripped the US about everybody’s abuse. Like, in the past decade particularly, that this is our shared culture.’ with the results that we’re all aware of. Or it might, to some, This is the presumption, that sound implicitly delegitimisall motivation is based on some kind of repressed trauma.” ing of genuine grievance. (This aligned with, though In any case, perhaps minddidn’t necessarily espouse, ful of the latter, this is not where the essayists in the Repressed Memory Syndrome, a concept traceable back to catalogue for Ghost and Spirit Freud, popular during the choose to place their empha1990s, and largely debunked sis, instead building a context since.) Kelley’s work thereafter for Kelley that figures him, steered into memory, forgetin various ways and however ting and the mutable definihe might have felt about it, tion of truth that might be ocas something of a multidireccasioned by a materialisation tional ally. Artist Cauleen of false remembering. Smith’s text, which analyses an This narrative is what early performance/video work, structures the second half of is titled ‘On Mike Kelley, The Banana Man, and the Refusal Ghost and Spirit. For Educational to Accept the Invisibility of Complex (1995) he built a tabletop architectural model that hybridised all the schools he’d ever been Whiteness’, and sees the artist in his banana-coloured suit as to, not only including the parts he could remember about this early ‘refusing to accept the privileges of the way whiteness functions site of institutional control and inculcation, but also rendering as as an invisible force and enclosure’. A transcribed conversation between ominous blank blocks the parts he couldn’t. The sprawling, multi- artist Suzanne Lacy and curator Glenn Phillips probes, evenhandedly, media, apparently uncompleted series Extracurricular Activity Projective Kelley’s relation to feminism. In her synoptic essay, exhibition cocuReconstructions (2000–11) was intended to generate 365 videos; it spun rator Catherine Wood notes his interest in queer cinema and drag, off into discrete, but already unwieldy projects like Day Is Done – suggests that his gaming with identity anticipates how the postintexcerpted in Ghost and Spirit – his 2005 Gagosian exhibition of sculp- ernet generation experiences selfhood and finds resonances between tural/video ‘islands’ between which the viewer channel-surfed, his practice and younger artists like Cally Spooner, Pamela Rosenkranz as it were. Here Kelley aimed to fill in the gaps in his memories and Mire Lee. Mark Leckey, a later adept of intermingled video and of schooling in a way that technically wasn’t sculpture, hymns him. The spiritualist aspects Mike Kelley as The Banana Man, c. 1983, true, but in a way was. The films and photos of Kelley’s work are pretty au courant too, and with (in the background) Last Tool in Use, 1977, in it are based on found high school yearbook artist Grace Ndiritu – whose work has been enamel, 74 × 55 × 8 cm. Photo: Jim McHugh

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founded on a questioning and respiritualising of art institutions – video Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works By contributes ‘Grief: A Love Letter to Mike’. All of this serves to situate Sylvia Plath – would take on a grim resonance a few months after the him in a shifting present. It’s also a reminder that a practice as profuse show opened, upon Kelley’s death at age fifty-seven, apparently by his and many-angled as was Kelley’s (the abovementioned works barely own hand. But at the time, this presentation, with its myriad expenscratch its patchwork surface) can, sive variations on two sculptural as Andy Warhol’s proved, be made formats, primarily felt like a onceA practice as profuse and many-angled without much distortion to speak to unbridled artist reduced to glitzy as was Kelley’s can, as Andy Warhol’s variations, serving up dismayingly successive eras. proved, be made without much The last show of his that I saw high-production-value product for during his lifetime was Exploded Fora megagallery’s clientele: a fate – distortion to speak to successive eras tress of Solitude at Gagosian, London, again, becoming who others want in late 2011. It expanded on and reframed Kelley’s major series, you to be – that has befallen many an inventive creator since; Kelley, the Kandors (1999–2011): sculptural renderings in varicoloured resin of bleakly, got there early. Superman’s birth city, Kandor, shrunk and placed under a preserving Though there are Kandors in Ghost and Spirit, the ruins, and this bell jar – images of which in his Fortress of Solitude were rendered moment, are excluded, a part of the past that it can’t quite or doesn’t variously, like an unstable or half-inaccessible memory, want to remember. Instead, the exhibition sedulously retools in comic books over the years. The Kandors, particularly Kelley for our time: for emphases on identity and spiritin light of Kelley’s diagnostics of American decline, are uality, for the present near-orthodoxy of video-infused multivalent and ambiguous, an attempt to preserve postmedium art practice. Kelley’s practice, it’s clear, something from Superman’s past, or that of the US, is sufficiently spacious and sprawling, even fundathat is inaccessible, reduced, not necessarily true. mentally unmanageable in its totality, to allow it. In At the gallery, myriad high-tech iterations of them years to come, he’ll surely return from the beyond again, glowed in multicolour amid a catacomb of big blackand anew. ar ened sculptures suggesting Superman’s ice-ringed stronghold as a blown-apart ruin. This, along with the Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is on view at Tate Modern, London, 3 October – 9 March associations offered by the bell jars – see Kelley’s 1999

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16—20 OCTOBER 2024 PREVIEW: 15 OCTOBER

After 8 Books, Paris A Thousand Plateaus, Chengdu a. SQUIRE, London Adams and Ollman, Portland Amanda Wilkinson, London anonymous, New York/Mexico City Bel Ami, Los Angeles Bridget Donahue, New York Champ Lacombe, Biarritz Chapter NY, New York Ciaccia Levi, Paris/Milan Cibrián, San Sebastián Clima, Milan Company, New York Crèvecoeur, Paris Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw Derosia, New York Derouillon, Paris Don Gallery, Shanghai Drei, Cologne Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles Empty Gallery, Hong Kong Ermes Ermes, Rome Federico Vavassori, Milan Femtensesse, Oslo

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17 Rue du Fbg Poissonnière, PARIS 9e PARISINTERNATIONALE.COM

Francis Irv, New York Gaga, Guadalajara/Los Angeles Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi Good Weather, North Little Rock/Chicago greengrassi, London Gregor Staiger, Zurich/Milan Gunia Nowik Gallery, Warsaw ILY2, Portland Jan Kaps, Cologne Hussenot, Paris Kai Matsumiya, New York King’s Leap, New York KOW, Berlin Linseed, Shanghai Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris Lodos, Mexico City Lodovico Corsini, Brussels Lombardi—Kargl, Vienna Lovay Fine Arts, Geneva Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai Magician Space, Beijing Management, New York Martins&Montero, São Paulo/Brussels Molitor, Berlin

MORE Projects, Paris N/A, Seoul Noah Klink, Berlin Öktem Aykut, Istanbul Parliament, Paris Records, Athens SISSI club, Marseille Sofie Van De Velde, Antwerp Sperling, Munich Stereo, Warsaw suns.works, Zurich Sweetwater, Berlin Tabula Rasa, Beijing/London The Breeder, Athens The Wig, Berlin Theta, New York Tomio Koyama, Tokyo Tonus, Paris Turnus, Warsaw Ulrik, New York Vacancy, Shanghai Veda, Florence von ammon co, Washington DC • •

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Art Reviewed

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Melvin Edwards Some Bright Morning Fridericianum, Kassel 31 August – 12 January In 1941, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives; Melvin Edwards was four then, he’s now eighty-seven and his second act is a decade deep. In 1970, after five years of showing publicly, the Houston-born artist was the first African-American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum. His primary aesthetic at the time – Minimalism using materials of containment such as barbed wire and chains – is represented, in his first European retrospective, by works like the corner piece Lines for the Poet (1970): a big V-shaped arrangement of lengths of barbed wire strung from adjacent walls and meeting on a cantilevered, outthrusting L-shaped length of stainless steel. It’s ethereal and almost invisible from a distance, lethal up close. In the years and decades after this, though, and not least as abstract art fell into disfavour, Edwards’s star waned, especially in Europe. His rising profile now, buoyed by the contemporary artworld’s belated interest in Black artistry and in older practitioners more generally, began with the 2015 Venice Biennale. There, curator Okwui Enwezor showcased a startling row of Edwards’s long-running Lynch Fragments series, a goodly number of which are included among the present show’s 51 works dating from 1963 to 2019. They’re blackened metal agglutinations of machine parts, chains, sharp tools, horseshoes and other discards that the artist collected while walking railroad tracks, welded together in ways that often resemble distorted, dehumanised faces. Some Bright Morning (1963) is the earliest work here: dating from the early years of the

civil rights movement, it features threatening cleaverlike planes attached to a circular central form; a pendant length of chain dangles a chunk of what could be ore, or a bodily organ. While technically abstract, this work points towards racial violence in America – its title refers to a section of Ralph Ginzburg’s 1962 book, 100 Years of Lynchings – and appears utterly uninterested in the inward-looking formalist conversations that dominated so-called advanced art at that time. Like other works from the series, it’s small, but its wall power is immense. Yet this is only a fragment of Edwards’s story. Equally striking are his freestanding steel sculptures from the 1970s and 80s: big, typically multipart and composed of angled upright planes that are often curved and end in sharp upright points. See, for example, 1988’s twopart, stainless steel Adeoli Goacaba, a series of welded silvery hemispheres and rough triangles that feel in conversation with a host of artists (Tony Smith, Alexander Calder, surrealist-era Giacometti) while also insistently resembling blades; you might, involuntarily, imagine getting impaled. That said, Edwards isn’t a monomaniacal equation-maker, forever insistent on abstraction cut with real-world pain. Other works, like 1974’s Tan Ton Dyminns – a freestanding fusion of rhombus and triangle next to an upright ladder with a curving swoop of midnight-blue metal attached, a snaking slide from the ladder’s heights – have the insistency and dreamy elusiveness of poetry. (Indeed, several works here allude to the artform or are named in tribute to poets.) The same year’s

Augusta is one of a sequence of works that burst into faux-cheery hot colour (sunny yellow) and has a rustic vibe, faintly suggesting the brokedown remnants of a farmer’s cart, squished wheel attached to bowed lengths of metal. Brightness contains its inverse, as the show’s title reminds us. Edwards began as primarily a painter, first in Los Angeles, where he studied at USC, and then – during the late 60s – in New York, developing out of social realism into abstraction along the way. By the 70s he’d put his own wrinkle on the medium: spraypainting over ominous loops and lengths of chain, adding watercolour washes and daubs. The show goes light on these, but they still demonstrate Edwards’s ability to bend an aesthetic – here, post-painterly lyrical abstraction – to his will; these works are equal parts featherlight and as heavy as, indeed, chains; repurposing the tools of bondage, they make purely abstract painting feel frivolous. An early highlight in the show, Agricole (2016), does the same for abstract sculpture: suspended from the ceiling by three chains, or strung up, is a welded metal hybrid that suggests, from various angles, a piece of sharp-edged harvesting machinery, a soldier’s helmet, a tribal mask, a warped head; the French title, in context, suggests colonial exploitation unto torture. Agricole radiates brutality and points towards forced labour and racially motivated violence but floats free of narrative, time, place. It was made in the year of Trump’s election. It could have been made during the 60s; it could have been made yesterday. Martin Herbert

Augusta, 1974, painted welded steel, 168 × 157 × 144 cm. Photo: Nicolas Wefers © the artist, documenta and Museum Fridericianun gGmbH. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

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Agricole, 2016, welded steel and chain, dimensions variable. Photo: Nicolas Wefers. © the artist, documenta and Museum Fridericianun gGmbH. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin

October 2024

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Steph Huang See, See, Sea Tate Britain, London 12 July – 5 January Jam jars, soft drink bottles, aluminium cans – food containers that are often discarded after being emptied – punctuate sculptures by London-based artist Steph Huang. Between found materials, handcrafted elements and a film, Huang questions the processes of production, trade and consumption underlying the industries of both art and food. Spotted across the air-conditioned, woodenfloored gallery, and on a low curved platform swelling out from one wall, jars that used to hold fruit conserves and gherkins join an elegant composition of handblown glass spheres, slender metal stands and dainty details, such as the glass cherry of Cherry Bakewell Sundae (all works but one 2024) and the bronze-cast scallop shell of Water Puddle. Elsewhere, two stacks of retired seafood crates, one standing in the gallery, the other hanging on a wall, all marked as from Brixham Harbour, form a harmonious minimalist visual rhythm of colours, forms and textures. Although integrated into the exhibition’s landscape of pastel greens and blues, the found objects stick out, reminding visitors

of what is rarely seen in a stylish restaurant or a hushed art gallery: evidence of waste and labour. A similar concern with the invisible cycles of production and trade underpins Huang’s film, the eponymously titled See, See, Sea, which documents fishing off the coast of Devonshire. Through a series of long takes and closeups, the film zooms in on moments of intimacy between the world of the sea and local fisherfolk during what seem like arduous and slow processes of production. In the film, masterful hands grip slippery fish, weave willow baskets and collect scallops from the seabed. It becomes apparent that such intimacy with the marine environment and its products will be lost on a city gourmet’s dinner table, a culture implied in the classy tablecloth, spotless dinner plate and bite-sized seafood that make up Supper. Perhaps because consumers’ alienation from food and the disappearance of traditional fisheries are familiar topics in public discourse, See, See, Sea at times feels like a journey down a well-trodden path. While its brochure and wall texts do contextualise the exhibition within

the artist’s research and practice, they ultimately allow little space for contemplating anything thornier than ‘our relationship to food consumption’ and ‘another way of life’. However, much like the found objects that lead visitors’ minds to unseen grime and sweat, Huang’s artworks themselves inspire adventures beyond the exhibition’s thematic focus. Visitors drift towards the gallery’s periphery, guided by objects positioned in obscured corners and margins: irregularly shaped glass bubbles atop the projection wall, tiny bronze figs lying under Between Sunrises and Sunsets (2023) and a small wind chime dangling far above anyone’s eye level (Lantern). As a space opens up for wandering minds and imaginative interpretation, the noises of boat motors from the film morph into sporadic bursts of rat-a-tat that might be easily mistaken for a machine gun’s rattle. For those who choose to tune in, these nervous noises hover above the gallery like a vague shadow of the violence associated with maritime trade and migration, both historical and contemporary. Cindy Ziyun Huang

Water Puddle, 2024, and Frankfurt in Brine, 2024 (installation view). Photo: Tate/Joe Humphrys. © the artist

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Mark Armijo McKnight Decreation Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 24 August – 5 January Decreation consists of five large-format photographs in black and white, two icy limestone sundials and a film projection, which together transform a single room on the first floor of the Whitney. However minimal this monochromatic exhibition, Mark Armijo McKnight succeeds in folding the vastness of the New Mexican desert into the confines of a Manhattan museum: two spaces that appear, at first glance, utterly opposed, save their supposed sterility and sublimity. Philosopher Simone Weil’s neologism ‘decreation’ describes fulfilment attained through annihilation of the self. Armijo McKnight foregrounds this paradox, mining the banal for hidden potentialities, evoking a sense of creation-through-eradication, as evinced in two pairings of figurative and landscape photography. Anti-Mater (2023), a gelatin silver print in which a woman masturbates in a placid field of flowers, is hung next to Ez Ozel (or: Father Figure) (2023), an identically sized print of a goat skeleton carefully set upon blackened greenery. The playful paired titles carry parental valences: mater (a homonym of ‘matter’) is Latin for ‘mother’, while the Hebrew phrase ez ozel is commonly – though wrongly – translated as ‘scapegoat’. The images therein – a woman engaged in nonreproductive pleasure

and a decomposed animal – queer preconceived ideas about the ‘natural’ world that defamiliarise implicitly gendered and biological notions of birth and death, being and nonbeing. The exhibition also pairs the figurative photograph Somnia (2024) with a landscape titled The Black Place (ii) (2024). Somnia depicts three nude figures entangled in embrace, their piled bodies mirroring a mound of boulders in the midground of its rocky terrain, recalling Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self-Portraits of the 1990s. Black Place pays homage to Georgia O’Keeffe’s favourite painting site, an assortment of unending desiccated yet fleshy hills, rolling forward as if extending beyond the frame. Subsuming the faces of the figures in Somnia and Anti-Mater into their environs, Armijo McKnight’s form of photographic decreation finds furtive and fertile openings in omission, meeting absence with neither longing nor melancholy but with receptiveness and empathy instead. Conjuring a sense of communion between temporalities and topographies – and indulging in contours of light and shadow – he makes dreamscapes of solid matters, softening what appears unyielding. Without a Song (2024), an 11-minute 16mm film of the Bisti Badlands/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in New Mexico, fills an entire gallery wall, its

sound suffusing the space. Duet (2024), a pair of minimalist limestone sculptures with clocklike inscriptions, shorn of sun and shadow, doubles as seating for the film. Without a Song begins on a closeup of a ticking metronome, gradually zooming out to reveal its setting in an ad hoc amphitheatre composed of undulating hoodoos. Additional pendulums, steadily swinging asynchronously, join the audible fray; but as more metronomes become visible within the landscape, the sustained rhythms whittle down until we see at least a dozen active tickers strewn across the Badlands, yet hear only one. The soundtrack eventually settles into a blanket of ambient noise as the camera continues to pan out, as though wishing to extricate itself from the scene and eradicate any proof that it was there. We are left with a direct view of the sky, a sun dappled with clouds. For a moment, this scene resembles the photograph Clouds (Decreation) (2024), the smallest work in the show, which features a lonely-looking puff of white and errant wisps of grey against a voidlike black background. The film’s wall label quotes Weil: ‘If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there.’ Armijo McKnight seems to share this desire, having made kin in this exhibition with absence and its possibilities. Jacinda Tran

Without a Song (solo ii) (still), 2024, 16mm film transferred to video, black and white, sound, 11 min 19 sec. © and courtesy the artist

October 2024

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Javier Téllez Amerika Research and Alliances, New York 1 June – 11 August A film plays in a dimly lit, carpeted gallery draped with velour curtains, one of three rooms occupied by the work of Javier Téllez. Emblematic of the New York-based Venezuelan artist’s broader practice, the film, AMERIKA (2024), cruises in the gaps between image and language, fact and fiction. The reference-packed 24-minute mise en abyme begins with a small audience attentively watching Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) in a setting the exhibition materials identify as Village East, a vintage Manhattan movie theatre. Suddenly, the audience members onscreen become characters in their own black-and-white film, migrants on a gloomy transatlantic sea voyage based on scenes from The Immigrant and Karl Rossmann’s exile from Europe in Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika (1927), which terminates at a port city much like New York. There, the migrants confront a Spanish-speaking authority figure reminiscent of the character Adenoid Hynkel in Chaplin’s antifascist satire The Great Dictator (1940), who decrees their deportation and jails them when they protest. In AMERIKA, the process of being implicated by power is rendered farcical and fantastical by Téllez’s decision to cast his actors, eight Venezuelan asylum seekers currently living in New York, in dual roles. Each actor plays both a migrant and a fascist, categories separated

by little more than a costume change in the film. The blurred line between oppressor and oppressed, presented innocuously at first as a facet of meta-cinematic intrigue, sharpens into a point of political self-criticism in the final scene, which shows the escaped migrants eating leather boots – a reference to Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) – seated in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495–98). Téllez’s allusion to Leonardo’s painting, which depicts the biblical passage in which Jesus predicts betrayal by one of his disciples, ominously hints that the migrants’ revolution in AMERIKA, too, has been compromised from within. Revolution in Téllez’s sense thus seems akin to a series of nonlinear transformations marked by repeated setbacks, cyclical implosions and reconfigurations of allegiance. Recursivity is likewise explored in two assemblages in the neighbouring gallery. The first, titled Caminantes 1–4 (2024), consists of two politically charged props from the film, namely the migrants’ protest placards and leather boots. Like its formal reference, Dürer, ich führe Baader und Meinhof über die Documenta V (Dürer, I’ll Guide Baader and Meinhof Through Documenta V Personally, 1972), Joseph Beuys’s ambivalent tribute to the Red Army Faction, Caminantes 1–4 acts as an ambiguous stand-in for the migrants’

bodies. Moreover, visitors are invited to write on the blackboards. As a result, at any given time, the work presents a record of multiple simultaneous conversations; over the course of the exhibition, it becomes a palimpsest of politically charged slogans, written, erased and rewritten by countless anonymous hands. In the second assemblage, Salta Lenin el Atlas (2022), titled after a cartographically evocative Spanish palindrome that translates as ‘Lenin jumps over Atlas’, taxidermy cane toads, historically exported to the West for pest control and now considered pest in their adopted homeland, peer out from the slats of 15 wooden crates stacked like a staircase in the centre of the gallery. These amphibians are juxtaposed with a nineteenth-century illustration of children leapfrogging, pasted atop the starting step of the ‘stairs’. Soviet coins wedged in the toads’ mouths and four oversize copies of The Atlas of Venezuela (1969) – a collection of maps produced in the democratic period preceding the country’s authoritarian resurgence – point to how eroded political systems might survive, however provisionally, in books and visual culture. Here, as in all of Téllez’s works on view, a dense web of citation models one way to safeguard oppositional histories against contemporary amnesia. Qingyuan Deng

AMERIKA, 2024, film installation (velour curtains, screen, carpet, movie theatre seats, flag, wood, metal bracket), 16mm transferred to digital film, colour, black and white, sound, 23 min 46 sec. Photo: Kris Graves. Courtesy Research and Alliances, New York

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Joanna Piotrowska unseeing eyes, restless bodies Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 13 July – 1 December Hands predominate in Joanna Piotrowska’s black-and-white photographs of staged human interactions: they caress, comfort, hold and protect, but they also grab and intrude and maybe even abuse. The tension in the Polish artist’s images stems from the ambiguous nature of the physical contact she portrays. The hand that tightly grasps a woman’s shoulder in Untitled (2014), for instance, could be passionate, consoling, possessive or violent. In this cramped closeup, we see only the woman’s jaw, thrust back, and a bulwark of body hair and skin pressed against her sternum. By withholding clarifying context, like facial expressions, Piotrowska exposes the vulnerability implicit in any physical encounter and encourages viewers to project their own meaning onto the image. In this, her first solo exhibition in the United States, Piotrowska’s photographs from the last decade are presented in a custom-designed installation that enhances their claustrophobic unease. The chalky pink carpeting covering half of the floorspace eerily records visitors’ footprints and mimics the stifling cosiness of her photographed domestic interiors. By nesting two small rooms within the exhibition’s larger

galleries, she creates intimate spaces and narrow, mazelike corridors that disorient and confine. Piotrowska’s exhibition design, which prevents viewers from taking in more than two or three images at a time, echoes her photographic strategies for revealing and concealing content. With two multimedia collages (both Untitled, 2024), she guides our eyes to the interplay of hands by replacing large sections of the prints, including an entire figure, with inlaid wood veneer. In Strokes (2022), an off-centre window similarly draws our attention to a trio of hands, while piquing our interest in what is not shown. Despite their grainy, documentary aesthetic, Piotrowska’s photographs are carefully choreographed. In a series of small, colourfully framed snapshots (Untitled, 2017–23), adults awkwardly inhabit makeshift forts they constructed from couch cushions, chairs and bedsheets – the type children build for imaginary play. Occupied by grownups, with their large, cumbersome bodies and heightened self-awareness, these cramped shelters look alarming but also unspontaneous, like stage sets. At times, she derives her subjects’ poses from group therapy and self-defence tactics. In Untitled (2017), two figures interlock

at the shoulders in what could be either a backyard scuffle or a team-building exercise. In the four photographs that constitute Untitled (2014–23), women mime vaguely self-protective manoeuvres alone in residential settings. One contorts herself on all fours, for example, while another cowers in a foetal position. Their unhinged performances gesture to the threat of physical harm just outside the frame, to the spectre of unwelcome touch. For her film Tactile Afferents (2023), Piotrowska turns to sheep and their handlers to further illustrate the complex dynamics of touch. A voiceover narrates excerpts from Irish philosopher Richard Kearney’s recent book on the subject as human hands groom, prod and pet the mostly compliant sheep. Heard throughout the galleries, Kearney’s musings on the power, vulnerability and reciprocity of touch complement Piotrowska’s work but threaten to literalise it as well, flattening our readings of her unsettlingly ambiguous pictures. “There are wanted and unwanted embraces,” the narration explains. The trouble, as Piotrowska illustrates, is how to distinguish between the two. Chris Murtha

Untitled, 2022, silver gelatin hand prints and cherry wood, 39 × 32 cm. Courtesy the artist and Phillida Reid, London

October 2024

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Troika Terminal Beach MAK Contemporary, Vienna 1 May – 11 August On a monumental LED screen, Troika’s fourminute video animation Terminal Beach (2020) dominates the darkened gallery, beaming out over a large rectangular, water-filled basin that covers much of the floorspace. The Londonbased collective’s video features a furry robotic form – suggesting a fusion of a primate’s limb and the kind of computerised arm commonly used in the production industry – chopping down what appears to be the last standing tree in a vast, desolate landscape of rising sea levels and mountains. Against a sonic background reminiscent of birdsong (produced in collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey, using radio waves generated by lightning

and geomagnetic storms recorded by their researchers) and punctuated by the axe’s echoing, rhythmic boom, the viewer experiences the action from different perspectives. From the cinematographic eye of the camera and the surveillance eye of a drone, the point of view shifts to that of the robotic figure itself and, in the final sequence, that of the tree, which perceives the action from within. The tree does not fall; it continues to resist the persistent chopping that, as the film loops, goes on into infinity. The distant sky and land reflected in the basin form a flooded landscape, sometimes lit bright green, sometimes dark purple by the

changing light emanating from the screen and the colour-matched LED lights behind it. The basin is inhabited by seven glossy white sculptures of hybrid creatures, each about a metre tall, as if emerging from future waters ready to adapt to changed conditions. Titled Crossers (all but one made in 2024), the 3D-printed objects are a continuation of the series Compression Loss (2017) and I woke to find myself scattered across continents (2023), in which Troika have researched public collections of various museums in person as well as through publicly accessible online databases of digitised artefacts and artworks to explore the overlap between the virtual

Heron Sphinx, 2024, fused deposition model with lacquer, dimensions variable (with wax model sphinx, left, from Imperial Royal Vienna Porcelain Manufactory, c.1850–99; and Heron with Rhinoceros Beetle, right, by anonymous maker, Japan, late-19th century). © MAK / Christian Mendez. Courtesy the artists

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and the physical, combining fragments of data into new hybrid entities, scanned, collaged in software and then 3D-printed. With Crossers, Troika focus on figures from Ancient Greece and/or Egyptian mythology (such as the phoenix, the sphinx, Horus and Anubis), said to have the ability to transcend boundaries, whether between life and death or heaven and hell; creatures who are themselves composites of humans and animals or plants, at once earthly and afterlife beings. Take, for example, a heron-headed sphinx (Heron Sphinx, 2024), created by ‘breeding’ two smallscale artefacts from the MAK collection: a wax sphinx made by the Imperial Royal Vienna Porcelain Manufactory in Vienna in the mid-to-late eighteenth century and a bronze cast of a heron (with a little beetle) made in Japan in the late nineteenth century. Existing both digitally and physically, the motionless

figure is a marker of the world to come, unstable and unknowable, where the divisions between beings, disciplines and hierarchies begin to merge. But could the Heron Sphinx also have been born out of past waters? Rising, reaching the pinnacle of its life, sinking and then collapsing, only to emerge and undergo a similar process again? Terminal Beach borrows its title from J.G. Ballard’s 1964 collection of dystopian science fiction short stories, including the 1961 story ‘Deep End’, in which Earth is almost deserted due to the overexploitation of its resources in order to colonise other planets. A young man, Holliday, decides not to join one of the last voyages to Mars and instead stays and observes what remains of life on Earth before its inevitable extinction. How to see beyond the approaching horizon of the catastrophic end? Here, Troika, in search of their own coping

strategies, confront a sense of ambiguity and disorientation at the heart of addressing the environmental crisis, linked to a worldview inherited from the Enlightenment that places humans at the top of a hierarchy, with the rest of nature subordinated. The exhibition challenges this monolithic worldview by focusing on the questions of transition (and permeability) that characterise our time, suggesting that even after the climate catastrophe that marks our Anthropocene ecologies, the evolution of life-forms will continue; radically new ways of being will emerge. ‘In the next few decades, [AI] will be likely to gain the ability even to create new life forms, either by writing genetic code or by inventing an inorganic code animating inorganic entities,’ writes Yuval Noah Harari in his new book, Nexus. What stories will future structures/configurations tell about our time? Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas

Terminal Beach, 2020 (installation view). © kunst-dokumentation.com / MAK. Courtesy the artists

October 2024

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Ulla von Brandenburg Under Water Ball VISUAL, Carlow 6 June – 25 August Asked in an interview which category best suited his books – memoir, travel, fiction, history or another – the late W.G. Sebald answered “all the categories”. Fellow German Ulla von Brandenburg might, if so prompted, express similarly teasing resistance to being creatively boxed in. Her exhibitions can comprise, all at once, theatre, dance, film, sculpture, drawing, painting and more – each element gesturing towards moments, major and minor, in the history of these disciplines. Von Brandenburg is a cultivated time-traveller, knowledgeably collecting and combining recherché references to artistic styles from multiple periods and places: pairing, for instance, concepts from modern dance with principles from Greek theatre, or using 1960s Super 8 film technology to capture performances based on nineteenth-century tableaux vivants. Her staged scenes and constructed environments are nonetheless both retrospective and speculative. Gathering souvenirs of high-cultural and countercultural histories, reflecting on diverse visions of coming-together and coexisting through art, she maps the past to find alternative paths to the future. At VISUAL, von Brandenburg is accompanied by an evolving troupe of performers – longstanding associates and locally recruited fellow-travellers with whom she develops, in a multitude of forms, artfully stylised experiments in choreography and dramatic

interaction. Bringing together new and preexisting work, Under Water Ball is a combination of live performance, film and sculptural installation, themed around visions of an imaginary subaquatic community. Huge fabric hangings fill the high-and-wide main gallery, individual textile pieces from 2019–24 repurposed as a loosely unified composition. These draped curtains – some in a strong, single colour (orange, purple, yellow), others decorated with expressively painted abstract shapes (their patterning and palette paying tribute to the geometric designs of Sonia Delaunay, a key aesthetic influence) – brightly designate a space of unspecified play: part theatre-stage, part circus-tent. Around us and above us, the luminous fabrics form unemphatic enclosures containing pure-white sculptures, including sticks, hoops, a ball; props, perhaps, for past or impending action: tools for acrobats or actors, dancers or magicians. (Early in the show’s run, the exhibition’s mise-en-scène became the setting for group performances: nine players in antiquated theatrical costume enacting slow, swaying, gentle movements, punctuated with intermittent musical refrains, simple tunefragments on flutes, fiddles and more, improvised with purposeful naivety.) At the rear of the gallery, the operatic film Un bal sous l’eau (Under Water Ball, 2023) portrays the collective’s core group of regular actors readying themselves for, then

participating in, a play centred on the titular undersea event: a celebration of death-defying existence beneath the waves, explored through song and puppetry. As they prepare, the players sing to each other of what acting means, weighing the value of wearing a mask, becoming a character. Pinned to the dressing room wall, a playbill announcing a production of Hamlet underscores this investment in theatrical artifice (‘the play’s the thing…’). (Hamlet, additionally, was by some accounts first staged at sea.) And yet this allusion to a work of tragedy is in some ways a sly misdirection. If there is, occasionally, a studied solemnity to some of von Brandenburg’s dramatic situations – characters in Un bal sous l’eau muse on ageing and lost love – her artistic worldbuilding is equal parts comic too. The daftness of dreaming of a life underwater – among much else, we hear songs delighting in the irrelevance of dishwashers and umbrellas, or exalting the powerful sexual pleasures of aquatic society – is indicative of an enduring, ebullient openness to the absurd. We share with her the awareness that the ‘under water ball’ is a foolish fantasy: just like, perhaps, any number of earlier utopian or avant-gardist pipe dreams. But, as von Brandenburg’s art suggests, through the buoyancy and joyful purpose of its imaginative questing, such fantasies might yet contain undiscovered treasure. Declan Long

Un bal sous l’eau (still), 2023, Super 16 film transferred to hd video, colour, sound, 26 min 25 sec. Courtesy the artist and Visual, Carlow

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Nina Canell Future Mechanism Rag Plus Two Grams Simian, Copenhagen 1 June – 1 September A series of eight sculptures by Nina Canell in this subterranean space play perceptual tricks on the viewer. Each piece is a variation on the same format: on the floor is a small frequency generator, like something you’d find in a laboratory, fronts covered in knobs and buttons, screens blinking with rapidly changing numbers (presumably showing the frequency each is generating). These are hooked up to small black plastic cylinders, also on the floor, vibrating softly from the frequency generators’ signal. Attached to the cylinders are thin cords made of some humble material – string, shoelaces, wire, etc – fixed to the gallery ceiling and pulled taut like a guitar string. Along these suspended cords Canell has affixed various oddments that jangle from the vibrations of the cylinders below: Tea Leaf Paradox (2024) features fragments of tea bag labels; strands of glittery foil from party decorations adorn Negative Hair (2020); bits of copper wire tangled with bottle caps, pull-tabs from drinks cans, a seashell and more on the titular piece, Future Mechanism Rag Plus Two Grams (2020).

Canell has a hoarder’s fascination with the alchemical potential of these lowly materials. Maybe there’s a hope that all this detritus can be reenergised and made useful again, recomposed into something novel, valuable. At the same time, the work feels fleetingly provisional, about to fall apart: I go tip-of-the-nose close to Pistachio Pangolin on the Continuous Fingernail Transmitter (2020), fighting the urge to give its cord a little pluck. I can barely hear the faint clack-clacking of the pistachio shells and fake fingernails bouncing on the string. Which is when the perceptual trick happens: I stand back and can now hear how the rustle and buzz of each sculpture are made louder by echoing off the hard, whitewashed concrete surfaces of the gallery. What at first seemed an effectively silent space – only filled with easily ignored, everyday ambient sounds: air-conditioning, distant traffic and so on – is charged by Canell’s sculptures producing a background white noise, making my auditory awareness of the environment acute. I scuff my trainer on the floor and the resulting squeak rips through

the space. A fellow visitor whistles and the gallery seems to fill with piercing feedback. In the centre of the space is an eight-minute single-channel live-action video, Energy Budget (2017–24), looping on a large, horizontal screen of tiled LED panels. In it, we watch the gleaming white chassis of an unfinished car gliding along the assembly line of a sterile automobile factory. Soon, the chassis is eased through rotating columns of ostrich feathers that lightly brush against the car, soft organic matter polishing cold, hyperreal industrial shell. Made with regular collaborator Robin Watkins, it’s a far more sober and clinical affair than the surrounding sculptures, with their eccentric gardenshed-inventor aesthetics and playfully evocative yet slippery titles. But it echoes Canell’s interest in how materials meet and change each other. Rather than using sculpture as a way of anchoring material, placing the viewer as distinct from it all, Canell wants to show how all this seemingly still and silent stuff around us is actually in constant flux, and that organic creatures like ourselves are a material part of that mix. Nathaniel Budzinski

Negative Hair (detail), 2020, string, foil, tape, cable ties, scraps, vibration generator, frequency generator, cables. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy the artist and Simian, Copenhagen

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A String of Tongueless Bells Francis Irv, New York 13 July – 17 August As a phrase, ‘a string of tongueless bells’ conjures the form of sound, absent resonance itself – bells without clappers are open mouths that do not speak. Does this absence of sound draw us closer to the instruments, the objects themselves? As the title of an exhibition, the phrase seems to describe the problem of the group show form, in which works by different artists are strung together, their individual power often stifled. When the assembly does work, the linked objects produce the semblance of a chorus, muted but well choreographed. A String of Tongueless Bells takes on this challenge, foregoing a press release and thus making each work stand for itself, motivating associative readings and attention to form and process. Isolated on a long wall in the one-room gallery is Win McCarthy’s Untitled (Orange Angles) (2024), a sculpture made of several aluminium L-square rulers whose perpendicular arms were amputated before they were welded together, end to end. The numbers are of course not continuous, and the vigorous grinding of the welds further obscured some of the figures, but the checklist reveals that this ruler is now 69 inches tall. What was this jig made to measure? Is this the height of Win McCarthy? His other work nearby, 7 x Lucy (2024), is fashioned from nine pairs of eyeglasses stacked lens to lens and emphatically soldered together. The arms of the glasses have been wrapped together with wire, also soldered but left with loose ends, some of which pin the sculpture to the wall,

and all of which look like the flailing antennae of a squashed bug. If the idea is to open a file on McCarthy – to study him as he seems to be studying himself – the joke is that we just need to see him more clearly. While several works here read as anxious assemblages, others emphasise pointed interruptions. Standing opposite Untitled (Orange Angles), a sculpture by Phung-Tien Phan establishes a lurking sense of violence: the circular blade of a table saw has been inset into a small wooden dining table such that, though static, it seems to threaten to divide and collapse the table in a loud interruption of a domestic scene – or perhaps, in line with McCarthy’s objectsas-portraits, the work visualises an ongoing family dynamic, as the work’s title, Senior (2024), implies. If there is a vulnerable subject or silent witness in the room, it is Osama Al Rayyan’s small untitled bronze sculpture (2024) of what might be a sleeping child, scaled to fit in two cradled hands and coloured an almost matt black. Its sombre, unsettling quality is accentuated by the bloated, almost puckered appearance of the skull, and the rough-hewn textures of the clay from which the bronze was cast. The figure seems to have begun decomposing even before it was fully formed. Interpreting a show is often like piecing together an elusive narrative but still wanting to sit with the mystery. Here that impulse is enhanced by the gallery’s dark wooden fittings, which give it the feeling of a 1980s detective’s

office – furthered by Paul Sietsema’s dark painting, above the built-in office desk, of a rotary dial telephone, made sleek, almost forensic, with greyscale hues and crimson undertones. It is rendered silent in multiple senses: according to a press release from a 2023 show, Sietsema unplugged the phone, took the receiver off the hook, smothered the whole machine in paint before photographing it from above and then meticulously painted this work from that image – bubbles, dust and all. In Diane Seuss’s 2022 poem ‘Allegory’, from which this exhibition’s title was taken, the writer grapples with having left behind ‘a place filled with plotless stories’. As with the bells’ lacking tongues, those stories’ absence of plot is not considered negative – they are, rather, like ‘chalices in which wine would be superfluous’. Several of these artists have previously resisted explaining their works, perhaps hoping, as many of us do, that they have created such chalices – open forms that have space for, but do not provide or overdetermine, content. Apparent here is the simultaneous significance, in that absence of explanation, of the larger ‘place’ – the context in which those plotless stories exist, the studio or practice from which the works are drawn, the companion pieces on view that help triangulate a larger world, the string along which those tongueless bells are hung. A rich group show balances absence and presence, and lets us see the loose ends of the string itself. Mira Dayal

Phung-Tien Phan, Senior (detail), 2024, vintage table, saw blade, 75 × 122 × 122 cm. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges. Courtesy the artist and Schiefe Zähne, Berlin

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Win McCarthy, 7 x Lucy, 2024, eyewear, solder, wire, 30 × 30 × 10 cm. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin

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Hetain Patel Come As You Really Are The Hobby Cave at Grants, Croydon 18 July – 20 October British artists habitually reach for the creative capital of craft practices. It’s a history streaked with both snobbery and philistinism. Grayson Perry fondly recalls selling pots made in evening classes for a far higher price than the class’s teacher ever could. Tracey Emin capitalised on quilting and appliqué techniques before endorsing Tory austerity in 2011. A century ago, the Bloomsbury Omega workshops made lampshades look like upturned colanders, while Roger Fry wrote in repulsion of the cheap pattern-clash of middlebrow interiors. Artists who play with ‘high art’ and ‘low culture’ often direct their scorn towards both. Hetain Patel and the more than 250 hobbyists contributing to this Artangel-commissioned show make an exception. Inside Grants, a defunct department store on Croydon High Street, is an ex-Wetherspoon pub that Patel has rechristened ‘The Hobby Cave’. The temporary name aptly describes its labyrinthine interior, stalactitical with colour and texture. Cabinets of curiosities display K-pop merchandise, fortune-telling school rubbers marked with ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and pebbles painted with iconic packaging and cartoon characters (think Brillo and Feathers McGraw).

Each display demands a description as meticulous as the attention their eclectic contributors bring to the objects of their enthusiasm. His name on the playbill, Patel invites pop culture and amateurism into the fold. By itself, this approach is familiar and unremarkable: Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s similarly pseudoanthropological show Folk Archive dates to 2005, itself no great innovation. Artists’ fascination with folk cultures is a neo-Romantic story traceable through Perry and Deller to Paul Nash to William Morris and William Wordsworth. Artists might turn the telescope on the rituals and craft practices of England with radical intent, but that radicalism is questionable. Fine art, distinguished from craft in the eighteenth century, has continually defined itself by transgressing that distinction. In contrast, being too broad and pluralistic to stake a claim to a single class or cultural position, Patel’s Hobby Cave evades romanticism’s ethical dilemmas. Patel’s own contributions are more cuddly than arch: Ford Fiestas and Escorts turned real-life Transformer robots, or covered with carpet the pattern of his grandmother’s living room rug. Patel’s handmade Spiderman suits

perch on seats styled as stylish cord-handled shopping bags, off-duty heroes running errands. Behind a partition of hanging quilts, a mesmeric short film plays on repeat, depicting hobbyist wild swimmers, dancers and cosplayers as if it were the extended cut of a BBC One ident. Patel foregrounds the tactile pleasure afforded by hobbies and craft practices. His Spiderman and Ford commodities are retrofitted with vibrant patterns and soft textures, manual craft techniques which demand that each object be touched. The mass-made is rehabilitated with a physical and emotional hospitability. It’s a cosy space, but it’s haunted by the absent presences of the contributing hobbyists. There are strong feelings here, obsessive and nostalgic, appropriating whatever’s at hand to produce objects as unhinged as they are impressive. Unlike his winking postmodern forebears, Patel has made earnest work. Here, craft as a hobby is a source of manual pleasure and a gaping repository of cultural memory. Come As You Really Are’s biblical flood of hobbyobjects knocks aloof discernment off its feet and demands to be aesthetically appreciated in its own terms. Madeleine Jacob

Fiesta Transformer, 2013. © the artist

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Cisco Merel Âncoras atemporais Zielinsky, São Paulo 3 August – 5 October It might seem like a recent trend: that the objects filling up contemporary art galleries and museums are being treated by curators as though their purpose is merely to signpost the identity of their makers (see the main show of the recent Venice Biennale, which also featured Cisco Merel in the Panamanian Pavilion). Yet this beguiling show of sculptures by Merel suggests that art has always been a way of working out who we are. In the gallery, comprising two corridorlike spaces separated by a small internal garden, the Panamanian artist has installed half a dozen large clay sculptures on the wall. Two freestanding versions have been placed on the floor near the entrance. Each wall work takes the form of a heavily abstracted silhouette. Ramaje (Branches, all works 2024), almost two metres high and a metre wide, has the appearance of a compound leaf; four pairs of leaflets, each with a hole, branch off a central stem. On a similar scale, Floramiga also boasts a botanical quality, while Amuleto (Amulet) is semicircular in form, like a fan; and Sol y luna (Sun and Moon) might be presumed – though it’s the most stylised of forms in the show – to depict an eclipse. The floor works are a pair of angular,

blocky, flexing figures, both titled La Danza (The Dance), likewise reduced to a hieroglyphic shape. The ceramics have no visible glazing, the material a deep ochre, and the surface of each sculpture is rough, cracked and lumpy – it is as if Merel has cut each directly from a particularly parched stretch of earth or that these sculptures are ancient treasures dug from the dirt and yet to be cleaned. And there is an archaeology to them, although one devoid of actual excavation: Merel draws on the forms and motifs found in molas, the traditional textile consisting of collaged scraps of fabric made by the Guna people of Panama, resulting in works that reflect on Merel’s ethnicity (the artist having Indigenous, Black and Chinese ancestry). The use of clay is an undoubtedly political gesture: Merel symbolically reclaiming the land that once belonged to the first people of Central America (before the waves of immigration, forced and otherwise). Completing this compact display are two abstract geometric paintings of incredible vibrancy, the colour of the flatly applied acrylic paint popping out against the reddish brown hues of the sculptural work. In Espiritus Fluviales

(River Spirits), elongated blocks, of green, purple, blue and more, snake round each other to create a pattern akin to an impossible architectural floorplan, while Eterno Presente (Eternal Present) uses a similar system, with Tetris-like blocks of yellow, green, red and pink symmetrically piling on top of each against a blue background. The forms are reminiscent of those that appear in the La Danza sculptures but also owe something to hard-edged abstraction (Merel worked in the studio of Venezuelan Op Art pioneer Carlos Cruz-Diez). The title of this last painting gives a clue to Merel’s interest in the fiction of history, in which periods and cultures are delineated and ghettoised. Instead, here, in this work, is identity as it really exists: an eternal, evolving present and multifaceted experience in which the so-called traditional and local, combined with the modernist and internationalist, are rendered indistinguishable. Merel’s symbology, ancient and modern, reflects how life and identity are far more muddled and complex than the contemporary curatorial orthodoxy credits. Oliver Basciano

La Danza, 2024, clay, pva glue and pvc, 66 × 52 × 12 cm. Photo: Filipe Berndt. Courtesy the artist and Zielinsky, São Paulo & Barcelona

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Ed Clark Turner Contemporary, Margate 25 May – 1 September The work of the African American abstract painter Ed Clark, who died in 2019, emerged out of, and then outlasted, an era in which art was concerned with its own historical development. Today, the dominant approach to writing about and curating art is to focus on biography, understood both as cause of, and interpretative framework for, an artist’s oeuvre. Eschewing this outlook, this retrospective produces a narrative of its subject’s formal development, told confidently but sparingly in a succession of rooms dedicated to different periods in the artist’s career. On each canvas Clark grapples with the constraint that he imposed on himself when, in 1956 in a loft in Montparnasse, he adopted the push broom as his preferred instrument for applying paint on a canvas. It was in Paris that he encountered the work of the Russian-born painter Nicolas de Staël who was, alongside Cézanne, Clark’s greatest influence. What he seemed to have admired in de Staël, who produced images of footballers made up of thick strokes in which the bristles of the brush were legible, was the idea that the singular movement of a mark made on a canvas could become the subject of a painting. This is a possibility that Blacklash (1964), one of Clark’s early experiments with the broom, reveals to be exhilarating and terrifying. A bloodred block frames the left side of the canvas, producing an ominous sense of order. Running parallel is a black block, which juts out in a stream of

tentacular lines. Some spit out reds and oranges, the product, perhaps, of flicks of paint from a broom suddenly halted. The combination of these elements is a bravura performance: Clark manages to depict frenzied, almost slapdash, movements alongside lines made with the precision of a laser pen. That this necessitated placing the canvas on the floor, Jackson Pollock-style, meant that his paintings had, in his words, an element of physicality. But this was an element that Clark sought to restrain, almost as if he were leaning on the brush and pulling himself away from it at the same time. In Locomotion (1963), Clark moves between two modes of using the tool: in the top left corner, delicate lines separate turquoise and black. On other sections of the canvas, bright oranges, blues and greens – dragged along by the sheer speed of the painter’s movement – blur atop a white underlayer visible beneath the thin paint. Although Clark hung out in the same bars as Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, he was a relative latecomer to Abstract Expressionism: Pollock died in 1956 and five years later critic Clement Greenberg was already giving talks with titles like ‘After Abstract Expressionism’. A movement that even its acolytes proclaimed to have been running on fumes by the 1950s would perhaps seem irrelevant today. But what makes this show compelling is its attention to the internal variety within a genre often understood to be monolithic.

In the subsequent rooms, the use of the broom to create rough violent patterns with paint and the play with the canvas’s shape – as in the irregular shaped Untitled (1957) – was supplanted by more controlled compositions and conventional canvases. The paintings that represent Clark’s output from the 1970s to early 80s, most of which were completed in New York, are exemplary here. Ife Rose (1974) and Blue Umber (1975) both show the artist attempting to insert control and precision back into his work more forcefully than in previous paintings. It is as if in a battle between the dominant forces in his art, a Cézannesque sense for colour and a de Staël-influenced painterliness, the former has won out. In Ife Rose, precise horizontal lines constrain his brushstrokes, and in Blue Umber he adds to these an internal oval frame. The effect of this more regimented style is to focus the viewer’s attention firmly on colour, which when combined with horizontal lines appear to be zooming past like multicoloured cables seen from the window of the tube. The period of wild experimentation turns out to have been an interregnum, followed by geometrically precise paintings still completed with the broom but in a spirit closer to Piet Mondrian than Helen Frankenthaler. This is a story free from the biographical drama prevalent within discussion of postwar art, but this show is all the better for it. John-Baptiste Oduor

Untitled, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 216 × 320 cm. © The Estate of Ed Clark

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Untitled, 1957, oil on canvas and paper, on wood, 117 × 140 cm. Photo: Elyse Allen. © The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY

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Nick Goss Isle of Thanet Perrotin, Paris 31 August – 21 September The seed for Nick Goss’s latest exhibition was planted when he learned that the Isle of Thanet – the coastal headland of Kent, Britain’s southeasternmost county, accommodating the towns of Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate – really was an island once. Centuries before the mini-Bilbao effect triggered by the opening of Margate’s Turner Contemporary gallery in 2011, the region was separated from the mainland by a strait. By the sixteenth century it had silted up, yet the Anglo-Dutch Goss was struck by the fact that residents still refer to their home as ‘the isle’. The artist is drawn to places that, in his words, ‘express a type of limbo’: you can see why an island that exists as such in linguistic memory alone might have appealed to him. While there are allusions to the Thanet landscape in this body of work – a line of electricity pylons stretching out across a coastal vista in Passengers (all works 2024) and in titles such as Walpole Bay or Madeira Walk – it is less a literal articulation of place than a meditation on a state of insularity informed by historical memory. Consider Bread and Puppet, one of several works here to feature a recognisable

human presence. Goss conjures a tightly packed crowd from a jumble of arcs in maroon, yellow, blue and brown, two thirds of the canvas filled with a disco-fied homage to French modernist painter Robert Delaunay. In the middle distance, a bunting-draped stage is set with microphones and a stepladder: the context could be anything from a nineteenth-century political rally to a present-day street festival. The blurring of past and present manifests itself more explicitly in terms of process, through Goss’s signature technique of incorporating into his canvases screenprinted imagery from preexisting sources, in this case including eighteenth-century engravings and motifs from Dutch textile designs. Newgate Gap, for instance, presents us with three foregrounded bicycles, lined up against the kind of grubby arched racks typical of British towns. Above and behind, this view gives way to a cavelike central aperture bursting with depictions of lush foliage appropriated from one such Lowlands source: the screenprinted imagery plays on the imagined cliché of the ‘desert island’, contrasted by the sad strands of creeper dangling from the cave’s mouth and

marking the boundary between the picture’s division of the naturalistic and the fantastical. What Goss really excels at, however, is the study of neglect: when he paints an interior, its plug sockets will be yellowing and its formica laminate surfaces peeling (Sun Cafe), or elsewhere, shelves full of half-empty liquor bottles fogged by dust and grime (Old Dixie Down). The rooms he tends to focus on have seemingly been vacated in a hurry: in the latter composition, depicting what might be the unpeopled dining room of a seafront café, he goes so far as to include a plate of hardboiled eggs split down the middle, abandoned and left to congeal. It’s unclear whether the artist would agree, but you could reasonably read these paintings as articulations of a particularly British kind of nostalgia, one engendered by a perceived sense of national decline and made material in the condition of faded seaside resort towns such as those on Thanet. Goss has spoken about how, ideally, he would like his paintings to project a ‘sound’; yet if his work is to be interpreted in synaesthetic terms, what they really give off is a smell – and it is unignorably musty. Digby Warde-Aldam

Walpole Bay, 2024, distemper, oil and silkscreen on linen, 150 × 200 cm. Photo: Eva Herzog. Courtesy the artist and Perrotin, Paris

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Firelei Báez Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream) South London Gallery 28 June – 8 September Firelei Báez’s first solo exhibition in the UK is a transportive synthesis of folklore and ritual, history and memory that weaves plural ways of gathering knowledge and sensing environments, reaching from Vodou symbolism to critical retellings of colonial archives. Báez’s immersive installations and meticulous miniatures converge in her fascination with the ciguapa, a mythical creature found in Dominican folklore. Tricky and wild, these shapeshifters are characterised by flowing manes and backwards-facing feet, their reverse footprints dissembling their tracks. Inspired by the artist’s memories of growing up on Hispaniola and her knowledge of the Caribbean island’s turbulent histories of enslavement and revolt, Báez’s ciguapas dance between rooms, unruly, untamed and ambiguous in form. Often, they’re only identifiable by their feet, barefoot or in high heels. In the main gallery, two rows of ciguapas – Numinous (the beautiful terror of eternity) (all works 2024) and Joy out of fire (speaking to the space you fill and you keep) – are portrayed as large aluminium silhouettes poured in swirling acrylics and mounted so as to appear as if floating from the walls. They are surrounded by folds of blue tarpaulin draped from the ceiling and cut with eyelike slits. Grouped together as if in a cabaret lineup, the ciguapas’ dancerly legs hover just above the floor. From these legs, their bodies fuse and grow into windswept

trees, necks indistinguishable from trunks. The ciguapas seem to inhabit a space between myth, memory and speculation, simultaneously in the past, present and future, and scale is constantly distorted: Báez’s poured paint glistens on the silhouettes’ surfaces, resembling satellite imagery of rivulets and dunes. Stepping into the main gallery, one enters a dimension at once celestial, vegetal and aquatic. On the floor, Labyrinth (to all the good and pleasures of this world) appears as a body-length Haitian Vodou symbol in LED neon, glowing in a bed of sand like a hot poker. A soundscape blends London traffic with Caribbean cicadas and the lapping of waves. It is immersive, but not entirely: the gallery’s doors remain wide open to the bright bookshop and the street beyond. Rather than transporting viewers to a new realm, Báez invites them into multiple intersecting worlds, real and imagined, a pluriverse that defies any single vantage point or universalising epistemology. The exhibition continues at the gallery’s nearby Fire Station building with the series A power visible to itself, four wall-size canvases of the artist’s poured-paint technique, an enthralling, kaleidoscopic celebration of colour and form. Here the ciguapas are green feet and reclining bodies that morph into nebulous patterns. From a second gallery’s walls float two clusters of works made from yellowing found

pages. A modest mythology of walls (to think thought but stay away from its chaotic journey) and Amidst the future and the present, time is a memory table include carefully etched plantation scenes and measured drawings of Caribbean islands, these maps and manuscripts offering a glimpse into the colonial imaginary. Báez paints over these attempts to classify, own and racialise Black bodies with intricate designs: maps become horses with flowing manes, poxlike circles infest old engravings, faces are obscured. Five other ciguapa cutouts occupy the next gallery, their forms suggestive of an otherworldly fusion between plant and human. Painted in swirling acrylics, they look vulnerable positioned against white walls, each Rorschachlike figure its own cosmos. Like the paper pages, the ciguapas seem to hover: forever at the brink of flight, uncatchable, unknowable, defiant. Perhaps Báez has herself taken on the role of the ciguapa: the competent conjurer, reluctant to provide answers. I am reminded of Dionne Brand’s book A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), which charts the impossibility of returning to the world that existed before the transatlantic slave trade. Both real and metaphorical, the door is a haunting presence shaping Black diasporic identity: to ‘live as a fiction – a creation of empires, and also selfcreation’. As a storyteller, Báez cracks open many doors – it is up to the viewer to find the courage to step through. Leela Keshav

Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream), 2024 (installation view). Photo: Above Ground. Courtesy South London Gallery

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Eric Wesley Turning Tables Timeshare, Los Angeles 19 July – 10 August Eric Wesley has set up shop at Timeshare. A Samsonite black briefcase full of cash greets viewers at the Los Angeles artist’s solo exhibition. Staged on a table as if in the back room of a casino in a mob movie, the cash is organised in stacks and bound with rubber bands. Upon closer inspection, the purple bills seem to be two pieces of printer paper pasted together and illustrated with what looks like a Classical Greek bust in an astronaut helmet. This cash is not only a work – titled Timbuktu Money Case (all works 2024) – but a functioning currency invented by the artist. If purchased, the artworks in the show must be paid for in so-called Timbucks (aka ‘Timbuktu cash’), which have a conversion rate of 6.66 Timbucks to 9.99 US dollars. The artworks in question include three wooden parallelepipeds. Two of them stand like tilted monoliths about the height of a typical gallery plinth, one lies horizontally like a coffee table. With five exposed surfaces, these versatile, ‘turn’-able tables are purposefully provisional in appearance, unpolished and unfussy (at the opening, they wobbled when guests leaned on them). Their surfaces are painted in loose strokes: one has a lined yellow surface like an index card and is covered in drips of acrylic paint sealed in resin and ink, and a pat of green slime. One,

titled Working Model, seems to bear the stain of an oversize coffee mug – a reddish, impastoed ring of paint layered on a variegated, but mostly black, surface. On the back of another – Floor Sample Model – is the painting of an oyster. Wesley’s show is arranged like a showroom, as if to parody the kind of contemporary art/ design hybrid space that showcases ‘custom artist furniture’ and charges a small fortune for it. Each sculpture has a label with a serial number, a company name (‘Standard Modeling’) and the artist’s address and phone number. Aside from the briefcase of Timbucks, the tables display five similarly labelled binders of Wesley’s drawings on index cards, each card in a plastic sleeve and available for 66.66 Timbucks. Most of the cards feature doodles and scribblings, some contain as little as one line drawn in pencil, a splatter of pen ink or nothing at all, but others include obscure, handwritten aphorisms. (One reads: ‘Metro Pictures Gallery Conspired w/ China to Ruin Me’, likely referencing the time China Art Objects, Wesley’s LA gallery during the early 2000s, arranged a show for him at New York’s Metro Pictures, where he purportedly overdrank and was repudiated for damaging gallery property.) Wesley’s ambitions often extend beyond art objects and beyond the gallery, to engage

the institutional, corporate and economic structures and apparatuses imposed upon working artists. This is not the first time Wesley has created a mock business, to undermine the gallery system with irreverence and wit. In 2019, at the Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair, instead of showing a specific body of work, Wesley set up a wood-panelled administrative office in Bortolami Gallery’s booth. The office contained a desk with some objects he had made and others that he had collected, a green bank teller lamp and a small ceramic bust of George Washington among them. The work being sold therein, for a sum of $1 million, was the artist’s entire estate. (At the time of writing, the estate remains for sale.) At a moment when so much of the artworld is professionalised and the contemporary artist’s studio is expected to double as a small business, Wesley turns the tables on his clients. With his funny money, the artist upends the stereotypical dynamic between the penniless artist and the philanthropic collector. By creating his own economic system, Wesley asserts his refusal to participate in this tired, imbalanced exchange and, in turn, entices potential patrons to participate in his world rather than him having to participate in theirs. Gracie Hadland

Timbuktu Money Case, 2024, briefcase filled with custom currency by the artist, referred to as Timbucks. Courtesy the artist and Timeshare, Los Angeles

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Index Card Pictures (detail), 2024, drawings by the artist on index cards stored in six binders, construction paper, plastic sheet protectors. Courtesy the artist and Timeshare, Los Angeles

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Ella Walker The Romance of the Rose Pilar Corrias, London 11 September – 9 November Like Caryl Churchill’s seminal feminist play Top Girls (1982), Ella Walker’s paintings feature a cast of female characters apparently gathered up from farflung epochs and then transplanted to what seems to be a stage set, which sits curiously outside time. Graphically rendered, mannered of pose and often half-clothed, the women in the British artist’s work sport wimples and zippered fetish knickers, Breton stripes and harlequin’s motley, as though they’ve been rifling through the costume box of history, trying on identities and then casting them off again. Far less fluid are their faces, which have the frozen, exaggerated quality of Grecian theatre masks. In The Bridled Sweeties (all works 2024), open mouths let out silent songs, or screams. Teeth are bared and tongues protrude from parted lips. Now and then, Walker’s figures notice they have an audience. Their eyes fix us with a tractor beam stare, or else roll back in their sockets, exasperated at our attentions. Mostly, however, they’re preoccupied with their own strange dramas. These play out in architectural interiors whose sparse fixtures and fittings (Ionic pillars, Modernist stools) feel more like scenery and props than genuine objects. Employing

a shallow, almost frescolike pictorial space, Walker channels the precision of Piero della Francesca, and the eeriness of Giorgio de Chirico – witness the mathematical rigour and near-metaphysical intensity she brings to her depiction of marble inlay floors. Walker’s show is titled after Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s thirteenth-century French poem The Romance of the Rose (c. 1230–75), in which an amorous youth goes on a quest to ‘pluck’ the ‘perfect rosebud’ – that is, to seduce and deflower a virgin. Success depends on him mastering the conventions of chivalric love and navigating his way past a series of wearingly sexist allegorical female figures, among them Avarice, Envy and Hypocrisy. No such macho swain is present in Walker’s painted world, and it follows that the women she depicts are not constrained by the patriarchal imagination. Contemplating these smart, often very funny paintings, one senses that roles are not only being rehearsed but also subverted; that archaic scripts are in the process of being workshopped and improved. In Caryatid, a young, crop-haired woman resembling Renée Jeanne Falconetti in the film The Passion of Joan of Arc

(1928) is pictured turning her back on an anthropomorphised and decidedly phallic column, a look of vicarious embarrassment on her face. For her, the caryatid’s dedication to immobile feminine servitude is clearly as cringeworthy as it gets. Pierced with arrows, the gormless, vaguely medieval-looking nude in The Loyal Bride seems to have been struck by Cupid’s bow. And yet it’s not a husband who carries her off, but a group of gurning, cackling female figures, who we might read equally as maenads, a coven of witches and as a raucous contemporary hen party. In Medea, the titular vengeful sorceress of Greek myth dances a frenzied jig. To her right, a floating, disembodied hand clasps a pair of secateurs, with a single cut rose suspended from its blades. Perhaps this is a warning to amorous young men. The severing of bodily extremities, after all, is an age-old punishment for those who ‘pluck’ what they should not. Behind Medea, a girl in a black bikini contemplates a second hovering hand, which points outside the frame of the image, beyond Walker’s stage. What might happen, we wonder, when her women step out into the real world? Tom Morton

The Pleasures Dance, 2024, acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk and pencil on canvas, 220 × 190 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

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Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words Stills, Edinburgh 2 August – 5 October During August in Edinburgh, the various festivals, particularly the Fringe, ramp up the city’s already saturated tourist market. Amid the festive atmosphere, it’s easy to forget that, elsewhere, wars continue to devastate. Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words cuts to the heart of this. The work is hard: emotionally, beautifully, heartbreakingly hard. A group show, where photography is used to define or, because of Russia’s invasion, redefine notions of home. One of the first images in the show is an emblem of this redefinition. Andrii Rachynskyi’s Hiding designations on a traffic sign (2022) shows a large multijunction road sign, the destinations blocked out in thick black paint, as if deleted by industrial-size Tippex. During the early stages of the invasion Russian forces only had paper maps, so local defence committees would travel Ukrainian intercity highways and obscure any identifiable street names or destinations on road signs, using the knowledge of their home landscape to disguise target locations.

Another series in the show is Elena Subach’s Chairs (2022), a collection of still lifes made when the artist was deployed with a catering regiment to the city of Uzhhorod, who organised to feed the refugees waiting to cross the border into Slovakia. These photographs of chairs piled with the abandoned belongings of escaping refugees are a document of what is left when the core of a home is ruptured. In one image, two blankets have been hastily folded on top of each other, one red and one pink; a bodily heap like a parent with a wriggly child on their knee. In another, some mismatched dinnerware, relics of domestic life now exposed and vulnerable in the open air. Alexander Chekmenev’s Passport (1995) is one of the only works here made pre-invasion. Chekmenev was commissioned by the Ukrainian government to make passport photos for those who were ill or elderly or unable to pay for the service, so he travelled to his subjects’ homes. With Ukraine no longer under Soviet rule – when making such documents of domestic life was

forbidden – Chekmenev widened the frame to show the grim conditions under which people were living. In one image a woman sits regally, hands poised, wearing a dress that blooms with the colours of summer, the passport photo background, a sheet of white cloth, held up behind her by a faceless friend. Outside this ad hoc frame is the woman’s day-to-day: a single bed, a wash basin alongside, clothes and bags overflowing. Her life here is stark, in contrast to the presumed outcome of the commissioned governmental snapshot. What often goes unrecognised is that artists, too, are members of communities, and that when a community is displaced an artist’s practice loses its centre. In these images the artist’s work is forced to become a home for the artist, the only familiar place available to return to. In times of war, the usual mechanisms by which art is shared and circulated become more fragile. But at Stills the works endure, giving those of us who now live in peace some understanding of the violent fractures of life experienced by others. Lisette May Monroe

Alexander Chekmenev, from the Passport series, 1995. Courtesy the artist and Stills, Edinburgh

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A Gathering of Tomorrow Starch, Singapore 6–28 August “I come from a future you probably cannot imagine.” Dressed in a white spacesuit, and with a traditional Nepalese gold nose ornament hanging from her septum, the time traveller is trekking through the pristine mountains and rivers in present-day Indigenous Sherpa Nation and Yakthung Nation in East Nepal. Her voiceover narrates her personal story – she has jumped timelines to look for her missing father here – and gives a brief outline of the society from which she hails. There, Indigenous peoples remain sovereign owners of their native lands, their cultures are preserved and their advanced technology enables intergalactic and time travel. The current world, in which Indigenous peoples are disenfranchised, enrages her.

“Even as a kid,” she says, “it didn’t take me long to realise that colonialists, Brahminists and capitalists were complete fuckers. I would have kicked their asses if I was [here], I used to think.” But because of the ‘Thakthakma protocol’ – a noninterventionist directive – she is forbidden. Instead, the fight is still ours. This is Ningwasum (2021), a feature film by Subash Thebe Limbu. The film, with its earnest and urgent political messaging, has become a classic of Asian Futurism, the wide-ranging movement that explores alternative futures through Asian cultures, histories and experiences. It is one of the works in A Gathering of Tomorrow, a group show of four artists curated by Gillian Daniel and Kristine Tan. They ask: ‘How do we connect the coordinates of our past

to orientate ourselves in the present and look towards the future?’ Despite the future-oriented title, the show is mostly rooted in the now. The works here (all but Ningwasum made in 2024) present interpretations of Asian cultural heritage combined with technology to explore nonWestern ways of thinking and being, by a tech-savvy generation of Asian artists who are also connected with their local cultures and aesthetic traditions. Advocating for a peaceful coexistence between Asian traditions and more contemporary, globalised influences is the sound installation Antara Muka, by musicians Syafiq Halid and Rosemainy Buang, who work together as ANTARMUKA. The work comprises a series

Subash Thebe Limbu, Ningwasum (still), 2021, 4K video, colour, sound, 44 min, Yakthung with English subtitles. Courtesy the artist and Starch, Singapore

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of Malay and Indonesian musical instruments, including drums and gamelan pieces, which hang from wooden frames in the gallery. Placed on and around these instruments are speaker cones, whose vibrations are used to ‘play’ these instruments. On the floor, another set of speakers play the metred clicks of a Western metronome. Elsewhere, other speakers play tracks composed by the artists on the pentatonic or heptatonic scales found in Malay music, and which have a less rigid rhythm that expands and contracts depending on the performers. The overall effect of the installation is an easygoing drift of beats and melodies that flow in and out of focus. The patchwork quality of the music, in which old and new, East and West, exist in suspension, suggests a syncretic form of creativity that values conversation between different musical forms over resolution. Meanwhile, Arabelle Zhuang’s Interpolations, a group of installations inspired by her travels to Mount Bromo and the Ijen volcano complex

in Indonesia, and the caves of Perak and Sarawak in Malaysia, suggests a loose affinity with the environment and native craftwork, with the use of natural materials and traditional matweaving techniques. Jute weavings hang from the ceiling; a heavy pile of brown mat is crumpled up to resemble a mountain, on which images of caves are projected; and spindly twigs and sticks, tied together to make fragile geometric structures, are propped against a wall. The curators write that the work ‘meditate(s) on the possibility of a closer relationship to the natural world based on care and consideration’. Perhaps. But the work’s intentions and efforts are too diffuse, and feel more like a work in progress as the artist continues to digest and process her experiences of these sublime volcanoes and caves. Operating at the more advanced end of the tech scale are Chok Si Xuan’s kinetic assemblages made from machine parts or technical materials. Her works often play

in the entanglement between the organic and the artificial, bodies and machines – which speak to a current reality of increasingly bionic bodies with the use of pacemakers, credit card chip implants and so on. Are bodies an extension of technology, or is technology an extension of bodies? For the sculptural installation Prosthesis, Chok dismantled body massagers – very big in the Asian market – tying the motor parts together to make weird machines that jerk and roll against their bindings. They look a little like malfunctioning robotic dogs. Society is awash with anxieties about the ‘rise of the machines’. But these machines, originally made to service the human body, seem themselves broken, their actions compulsive, clacking and clumsy; they are animate but not really intelligent. If this is a vision of the future, it’s a postapocalyptic one in which these servile machines have risen up and eventually gone to seed. But who says ‘Asian futurism’ has to be optimistic? Adeline Chia

Chok Si Xuan, Memory, 2024, mild steel rods, stainless steel heart stockings, silicone, nitinol coils, fishing weights, metal trinkets and magnifying soldering hands. Courtesy the artist and Starch, Singapore

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Permindar Kaur Nothing is Fixed John Hansard Gallery, Southampton 8 June – 7 September Permindar Kaur’s latest exhibition, arranged across three galleries, broadly tackles the twin subjects of childhood and domesticity. In practice, that means creatures lurking under beds, monsters bursting out of walls, and chairs that appear to be walking or are otherwise terrifyingly high (accessed by a ladder). The opening gallery features a salon-style hang (that, in turn, projects a somewhat Victorian vibe) of works from the Camouflage series (2012–24). Featureless copper-clawed animals – perhaps some sort of comic cross between a sloth and a teddy bear – appear to bubble up out of panels of variously patterned fabric, captured just before what could be a full emergence. Like costumes mounted on the wall, they might be thought of as some sort of trophy (Antlers, 2016, four fabric trophy mounts crowned with steel antlers that are shaped like some baroque curlicue, literalises this association). The patterned colours, operating like some sort of dazzle camouflage, enhance the feeling of something there but not there: a trick of perception or the light. The feeling you get from looking at these fabric creatures was clearly the reason psychoanalysis was invented. Untitled: Bed (2020) is a stripped-down bedframe underneath which nests a flock of colourful fabric globules, copper spikes

protruding from their soft surfaces. Seen together, they’re reminiscent of a virus viewed under a microscope (unless that’s just the effect of viewing the work through the filter of viewing the work in this post-COVID moment). The true point, perhaps, is that you’re invited to project what you want onto them. As if the experience itself was designed to provoke some form of psychoanalytic self-knowledge. Albeit, thanks to the soft-toy allusions, reached in a safe, non-threatening way. Even if Green Figure (1995–2024), a fabric form reminiscent of (a flaccid interpretation of) the green signal on pedestrian crossings, ‘clad’ in copper boots and the copper outline of a Norman helmet (minimal, ineffectual armour), appears to have been hung out to dry next door. The following room contains Hunting Chair (2024) a steel rendition of the high seats used by hunters in mainland Europe to await their prey. It’s been arranged so as to command a view through the windows of the John Hansard and out across the public square opposite, as if awaiting a person prepped for a deranged mass shooting event. Though in the gallery the principal danger seems to be that involving the scaling of its height. And, of course, there’s a narrative beginning to form: about how the trophy ends up on the wall (and perhaps about the relationship between violent fantasy and

violence performed). All of which is offset by the colourful red-and-yellow daisies stencilled on the floor (Floor Flowers, 2024). As if the nightmare could be too hot to handle. The final gallery is home to assemblies of inky black fabric figures that look like cartoonish, grape-flavoured, devil-horned jelly babies. Armoured Truck (2016) features a cluster of them that have been crushed into a copper cage; in Black Curtain (2015) a small army emerge from a piece of black fabric that might equally be a part of the Camouflage series. A solitary figure straddles what looks like an antler (Branch, 2016); while in the largest installation (Ten Teddies & Barrier, 2017), five pairs of the creatures sit as if talking, stand as if plotting and lie down as if dead, in a room divided by a steel barrier constructed from what look like giant nails. While there’s a palpable sense of no-go areas, conspiracy, surveillance and undercover goings-on at play here, it remains mitigated by the sensation that you’ve also stepped into a child-friendly world. You can imagine the gallery requesting that the fabric figures be repurposed as merchandise for the gift shop. And while that might be a jaded or cynical view of how such spaces operate, it nevertheless prevents the full horror of the forces with which the artist is engaging from being successfully unleashed. Mark Rappolt

Grey, 2012, copper and fabric, 180 × 154 × 20 cm. Photo: Reece Straw. Courtesy the artist

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Gary Hume Mirrors and other creatures Sprüth Magers, London 13 September – 19 October Gary Hume’s paintings have long refused the easy way through to an image. Painting with everyday household paints in wonky, glossy compositions of bright, flat colours, where only line and outline could do the job representing something, Hume emerged during the 1990s perfectly attuned to the cheery cynicism and performative vulgarity of the Young British Artists. Some of his first paintings of note were of brightly coloured circles and squares – jokey postmodernist abstractions, but really the designs of hospital doors slammed in the viewer’s face, the artist laughing somewhere offstage. It would be trite to say that older age has made Hume more serious, but Mirrors and other creatures presents paintings that hone and refine his long-term preoccupations, while not leaving much to play or whimsy or bombast. If there’s a recurring motif here, it’s the outlines of the head and long neck of a bird, a goose maybe, or a swan. A large diptych (all works Untitled, 2024) sets out overlapping outlines of the birds, the lines standing proud of the otherwise uniform surfaces of paint they circumscribe. The top section is the upside-down twin of the part below, even if the colours are different: the birds in a mute khaki green against a dull

cream in the top part, a lifeless mauve in the other. The birds are, representationally speaking, neither here nor there, hovering somewhere in the mind’s eye. As an odd accent, a tracery of pink threads its way along the line of a beak. This game of overlapping outlines, ridged and filled in with colour like enamel cloisonné, dissolves away Hume’s older reliance on flat colour and bold outlines to singular subjects, even if these were always obscured, silhouetted or blocked out. There’s a deadpan humour to this idle filling-in of crisscrossed lines, the kind of doodling exercise that generates itself, such as the skewed assembly of apparently abstract Calderesque blobs and warped offwhite geometries of another Untitled, but which reveal, once more, the presence of two (or three?) beaked heads hidden in the intersections of the surrounding black. These optical games are reduced to their essence in the almost art nouveau-stylishness of the charcoal-on-canvas works, where the birds are reduced to interpolated blacks and whites. It’s tempting to see these birds, with their animal muteness and watchful attention, as Hume’s further comment on the treachery of images and image-making. This a painter almost puritanically opposed to naturalism,

modelling, light and shade, and illusionistic space, so much so that blankness and opacity become rebuttals of the pleasure of looking ‘into’ a painting, pushing us back to the more materialistic delights of colour, line and surface finish, flirting all the while with the latest colour fads of interior design. But at the same time, they’re flirting with the presence of the image too, making for an odd object conceptually hovering between these two registers of artistic culture and design value. To make the point, compositions are exactly reproduced in oil-on-aluminium and charcoal-and-pastel-on-canvas versions, notably one wobbling black mass with coloured insets, looking faintly like a forgotten Hans Arp painting, oozing midcentury modernist pretence. There are jokes, too, to alleviate the conceptual and art market irony: in another gallery a tall painting, black columns either side of a deep green, is obscured by a silly curtain of silver tinsel strands, dangling from the top edge. What becomes apparent is Hume’s commitment to a sort of awkward self-consciousness – to do with seeing oneself seeing, experiencing the shifting sands of taste in real time – and to the playful fiction that these paintings (though it’s an absurd thought) might be looking back. J.J. Charlesworth

Untitled, 2024, satinwood on aluminium, diptych, 145 × 239 cm each. Photo: Joe Hume. © Gary Hume / DACS, London, 2024. Courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers, London, and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

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Books Roberto Juarez ’80s East Village Large Works On Paper + Downtown Amigos y Amigas Edited by Fabio Cherstich Fabio Cherstich, $25 (softcover) I suppose the word that comes to mind is ‘family’. As I leaf through the pages of this book, the names and voices of the American artist Roberto Juarez, his artist friends working in the East Village and the people who had the chance to meet them intertwine in a story that increasingly takes on the features of a family album. And like all family albums, this compelling collection of texts and artworks edited by Fabio Cherstich is entrusted with sampling places, people and situations: of the 1980s New York art scene, its studios and exhibitions, artists and galleries; the Lower East Side’s gay bars; pages from gay liberation magazine Fag Rag – a spiderweb composed of dazzling initial encounters and passionate friendships. But it’s a paradoxical monograph, since while it’s ostensibly the story of Roberto Juarez, which contains within it the story of his group of friends, it ends up becoming a study of a group of artists. Cherstich comments on the relational nature of Juarez’s identity as an artist and person, such that his life and work cannot be separated from the East Village art scene and the New York queer community devastated by the AIDS crisis, nor from the

glam-rock fluidity that informed him or his Latino roots. As it emerges from the materials that compose the book, Juarez is simultaneously an artist (whose paintings are analysed through the lens of art history by Edward J. Sullivan in a critical text); a friend (who poses with his arm around artist Jimmy Wright’s shoulder in a photograph taken during the early 1970s); and a confidant (of longtime friend Mark Tambella; captured here via an interview). The book is published in conjunction with two exhibitions that opened in Italy during 2023–24 (at Apalazzo Gallery, in Brescia, and Palazzo Tiepolo, Venice). During lockdown, Juarez rediscovered oil-on-paper works made between 1981 and 1985. The paintings had been in storage for four decades. Twenty-five of these form the core of the book, and are recounted by Juarez himself through brief thoughts arranged alongside the reproductions. The paintings are an investigation of Latino identity in New York by a Mexican American who feels neither American nor Latin enough: Pac Man Pico (1984), for example, presents an orange ghost and a Pac-Man (respectively the victim and executioner from

the popular 1980s videogame), surrounded by three packets of El Pico coffee, a drink popular with Latinos in New York. Thus, Juarez comments on Latino American identity as not comprising enough of either, and on the violence of their coexistence. The book also deals with queer identity; bodies in the paintings are rendered in vivid colours like red and green, shapes are primitive, built with paint and layers of brushstrokes. The bodies are strong, mostly male – even Mother Nature in Earth Mother (1983) looks like a bodybuilder. Desire is palpable even if it always exists alongside a fear of contagion. In Phone Sex (1984), a little red man holds a disproportionately large erect penis in both hands, above a rotary telephone: an exiled desire, as well as a profound longing to be connected to another. This feeling haunts the pages of this book, and together with the frequent mention of his close friend Arch Connelly, who died of AIDS in 1993, inflects the narrative with a mournful tone. Through such haunted pages, the disappearance of a whole generation that vanished in a matter of years is felt – and it is still painful. Mariacarla Molè

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher Footnote, £14.99 (hardcover) ‘Women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.’ So reasons the narrator of Yasmin Zaher’s striking debut novel, an orphaned Palestinian living in New York and teaching in a school for deprived boys. Boys she wants to ‘fix’. She herself is not deprived; she’s wealthy. She obsessively cleans her apartment, her minimal, designer wardrobe, the classroom and, above all else, herself. She even sorts her building’s collective recycling bins. In the classroom, when she’s not cleaning it, she rebels against the curriculum and authority of any kind, perhaps, we are constantly reminded via the author’s minimalist, occasionally aphoristic, staccato prose,

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because of how her countrymen have been treated: ‘If you forget a quote it’s not a big deal,’ she tells her students, ‘you can make it up, newspapers do it all the time.’ She, however, constantly exercises her need for control. Yet the source of her wealth, doled out as an allowance, is beyond her control; she struggles to form meaningful relationships with the men in her life; has a distant relationship to her homeland (‘I come from a land that is a graveyard,’ she recalls at one point) and finds that her students begin to rebel in ways she has not dictated. All of which upsets her, even as she pretends it does not. ‘Maybe pretense is all there was,’ she muses, in one of several moments that read like an echo of Bret Easton

Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). ‘Fashion is pretense, education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense.’ On the face of it, this is a novel about how an immigrant expects and is expected to fit into a new home. About what they pretend to be and what they really are. And the bizarre ways – extending, here, to both scamming and a curious form of immersive installation art – by which they keep a grip on which is which. But most of all it’s about defying our expectations of what it means to be Palestinian. To be homeless, unrooted, without agency. ‘Orgasm is dignity,’ the narrator proclaims at the onanistic climax of the novel. ‘I pissed myself in dignity.’ Nirmala Devi

ArtReview

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Poor Artists by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad Particular Books, £20 (hardcover) ‘I’m dying. Or this is a panic attack,’ begins Quest Talukdar, protagonist of Poor Artists, a fable about the ills of the artworld by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, aka millennial art critics The White Pube. Billed as a mix of fact and fiction, Poor Artists attacks an industry it characterises as bigoted and riddled with inequality. The moral of the story: if the artworld doesn’t kill you, it will suck the life out of you. The only way to resist? Refuse to play by its rules. This is not a book that deals in political or literary nuance. Quest, a working-class Muslim artist from Liverpool, burnt out from chasing a career in an industry that worships wealth and whiteness, must learn to love art again – solely for the pleasure of making it. From panicking in the airplane loo en route to an art fair, we later see her struggling to make ends meet after graduating from art school while white men who wear cravats hire galleries to show their work. Eventually she ditches the London rat-race and joins a studio collective in Liverpool, where she is taken under the wing of salt-of-the-earth northerner Sheila. Her new mentor encourages Quest to make art that the builders down the road can afford (‘my own people’, Sheila says). Since meeting at art school in 2013, The White Pube have built a brand as purveyors of first-person art criticism, becoming social-media microcelebrities. Eschewing established art publications, they publish on their own website,

adopting a writing style peppered with emojis, diaristic musings and political grievances that often reads like an extended Instagram post. Part of their appeal has been a willingness to go for blood in the culture war. Their combination of confessional writing and moral policing successfully tapped into the zeitgeist – agitating for those accused of holding transphobic views to lose their jobs, or calling for the removal of Tate Britain’s ‘racist’ Rex Whistler mural. Celebrated as artworld outsiders, they have become cultural darlings who are written about in Vogue and who create sponcon for Nando’s. At times, Poor Artists reads like JacquelineWilson-does-art-criticism: a novel in which a plucky underdog with a corny name struggles to get by in a harsh world, with a plot engineered to school readers in progressive orthodoxies about social inequality. But The White Pube’s foray into fiction lacks the parasocial allure of their criticism. The prose is often stodgy and uneven, the authors overly reliant on repeating the identitypolitical catechism and more comfortable listing familiar resentments than offering a compelling vision of what good art might look like. The book’s moral crux – and Quest’s political awakening – occurs in a long conversation with an old friend she bumps into at an art fair. It quickly turns into a litany of political statements about the failures of capitalism, the effectiveness of anarchy and why Surrealist art

is anticapitalist. (This last because it ‘creates a plastic state in which things can start to change’; though the inclusion of Salvador Dalí’s ‘lobster telephone’ as an example is odd, given his well-documented love of making as much money as possible.) Choice pronouncements include, ‘Capitalism tells us that there are certain materialistic things we need in order to be happy, but the closer we get to obtaining them, the further we are from happiness.’ Part of The White Pube’s USP is not being experts, favouring subjective responses over research-based expertise. But here, what might elsewhere pass a marker of authenticity comes across as muddled, dogmatic and – in their choices of art historical references – unwittingly conservative. In moments like these, where there is a lot of telling and hardly any showing, the story suffers. Bashing the reader over the head with Anarchism 101 also highlights the elephant in the room. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to reach the widest audience, but publishing with an offshoot of commercial behemoth Penguin Random House does little for the book’s anarchist credentials. Inevitably this undermines the hundreds of pages of proselytising about how detrimental it is for artists to chase mainstream recognition, showing just how far The White Pube are from a nice lady called Sheila and her grassroots, countercultural artist collective. Rosanna McLaughlin

The Proposal by Bae Myung-hoon, translated by Stella Kim Honford Star, £13.99 (softcover) Narrated in the first person, Bae Myung-hoon’s 2013 novella, newly translated from the original Korean to English, is a tale of lonesome cosmic warfare, glazed with a saccharine love story composed of 11 love letters addressed to the protagonist’s Earth-bound lover. The novel’s narrator writes from outer space, an empty zone in which he and the Allied Orbital Force, in which he serves, are stranded. What begins to feel overwhelming is the vast distance and isolation of space–time. At the Allied Orbital Force, every spaceship in the fleet is stationed 6,400km from the next, a distance approximate to that of Earth’s radius. It’s a state of ‘absolute isolation: being unable to reach a place even though there is nothing in your path’. And while this generates an incredible sense

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of loneliness, distance serves to obscure as much as it isolates. The force is constantly hunted by a mysterious enemy, who, emerging at a great distance, it takes tens of seconds for the fleet to detect and double that time for its weapons’ particle beams to reach. What can be observed is only the image of what has already passed. It’s what people on the fleet call ‘the Boozer’s Paradox’ – perhaps riffing off Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – which states that in between what they see and where things actually are, there’s a frustrating gap that renders everything unknowable or slightly off. Distance brings fear and loneliness, as well as longing. When it comes to our hero’s lover, his sweetest memory is of when they’re together on Earth, when the Boozer’s Paradox between

interstellar lovers – the fear that, if they were to text, ‘after thirty-five minutes and twentyeight seconds’ of signal delay ‘the heart of your missed one would not be in the same place as before’ – did not apply. This, however, is not the only problem. When she does visit him in space, combat is all the narrator can think of. As to the title of the book, it’s somewhat lost in translation. Towards the end we learn that it refers to a marriage proposal (the book’s Korean title, Cheonghon, is more literal about this) – until then the idea of a proposal is lost beneath the technical, strategic analysis of interstellar warfare. Nevertheless, this is an odyssey with an epic sense of tragic, heroic love, albeit one that, like the universe itself, is as empty as it is vast. Yuwen Jiang

ArtReview

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Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images by Jérémie Koering Zone Books, £30 (hardcover) Inhale this detailed academic study of the practice of eating images. Inject it in your veins. Jérémie Koering (professor of early-modern art history at the University of Fribourg) ate – no crumbs. Metaphors of bodily apprehension – more or less ravishing, more or less cringe – are not new in descriptions of how texts or images work on us, though the terms may go stale more swiftly now. What else is taste but the most venerable assertion of a short alimentary slide from digestion to understanding, from the fussy menu of forms to the full belly of aesthetic satisfaction? But who would think of actually eating a picture or drinking a sculpture, pulverised? Koering’s subject seems initially a kind of madness or the stuff of horror: the first images reproduced in Iconophages show Ralph Fiennes as a serial killer in Red Dragon (2002), ravening down William Blake’s watercolour The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun (1805). It turns out that swallowing images, artefacts and even artworks has a long and complex history, especially but not solely religious. The Egyptians employed stone figures and stelae for healing purposes, the patient drinking water that had been poured over the object. (If an artefact was engraved with text, the flow of liquid became a kind of reading, as if the therapeutic message had been scanned before ingestion.) Early Christianity was built on scenes of material-spiritual migration: death

into life, body into soul, flesh and blood into ceremonial wafer. But the Church became troubled by its own veneration of martyrs – their remains, physical relics and images, edible or otherwise. On the one hand, saintly virtue was said to travel from the uncorrupted corpse to any remnant that might have touched it, and onwards even to mirrors placed before the body or objects, including foodstuffs, reflected in those mirrors. A blessed chain of saintly influence, which the faithful were in danger of worshipping (or relishing) above Christ himself. Iconophages is filled with instructive, comical or grotesque examples in this vein. When Thomas Becket was martyred at Canterbury in 1170, his blood-drenched shirt was soaked in water, the infusion of which then cured a woman of paralysis. In the same century, depending on the image, the abbot and mystic Bernard of Clairvaux was pictured either drinking the breastmilk of the Virgin Mary, or receiving same from a statue; either way, engravings show the Virgo Lactans directing laserlike streams in his direction. Not pictured in Iconophages: the legend that Bernard later suckled his own monks. Of course, none of this will seem especially outré if you have been around the Catholic liturgy, let alone private or public invocation of the saints. (I grew up with all of this – reliquaries to be kissed, a light

rain of holy water and a photograph in my childhood prayer book where I thought a priest’s hand, reflected in a chalice, were the actual Christly meat, transubstantiating.) As Koering notes, it was ample material for antipapist outrage during the Reformation and later satire such as Hogarth’s Enthusiasm Delineated (1760–62), with its statue-munching congregants. So rich and suggestive is Koering’s medieval and early-modern material – and so exhaustive his research, with almost a hundred pages of notes – that his treatment of more recent instances of image-eating, in modern and contemporary art, may feel like a helping too far. Not to say that Piero Manzoni’s Uova (1960), Dennis Oppenheim’s Gingerbread Man (1970) or John Cage’s series of Wild Edible Drawings (1990) don’t invoke the earlier history in canny or absurd ways. But the real fascination of Iconophages is in the way in which it retrospectively explodes certain categories in art and art history, including representation itself and the nature of aesthetic experience. If you are kissing, licking or eating images because you think they contain and transmit a saintly virtus or healing power – does that make you a mystic or the basest kind of materialist? An angel is an idea with wings, but a saint is all body, all of the time and everywhere. The terms all dissolve in delirious consumption. Brian Dillon

Glenn Ligon: Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews Edited by James Hoff Hauser & Wirth Publishers, £32 (softcover)

‘Words are pictures the way I paint them,’ Glenn Ligon pointed out in an interview from 1997. A few years later, his interest in words would begin to reveal itself in another context: through the medium of the essay. This anthology of Ligon’s luminous writings, all commissioned, puts together an evocative portrait of the artist’s subject matter – America – by someone who can tell a story. He considers artists (Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons), legends (Marsha P. Johnson), spectacles (Graceland) and the street (The Wire). New York City, Ligon’s home, is a recurring backdrop to all of this. Ligon is also skilled at scrutinising himself. ‘The small stuff matters. Don’t compromise,’ he notes in ‘Advice for Young Artists’. It’s an insight that shapes the tone of the collection,

as signalled by its straight-talking title – a reference to Reverend Al Sharpton’s declaration that one should be able to tell if someone is pissing on them and calling it rain. This life lesson is first brought to Ligon’s attention by his mother, whose decision to send her Black son to a predominantly white private school is finalised on the basis that he, too, can ‘differentiate piss from rain’ This anecdote is disclosed in a review of a 2013 public art project by Thomas Hirschhorn installed at a social housing complex in the South Bronx where Ligon was raised. The essay is typical of his approach: Ligon is masterly when correlating life with art. Relatives who star in his essays are particularly inspiring: dapper guys whose elegance is synced to bigger things. Uncle

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Donald ‘was everything’ with his white vinyl boots, which referenced ‘both the future and the past’, not unlike the teleporting ‘moon boots’ worn by Sun Ra in the 1974 film Space Is the Place. Uncle Tossy, meanwhile, ‘stylish in a Pierre Cardin suit’, had a gift for turning precariousness into something plentiful. ‘When I first saw the work of David Hammons, with its attention to the poetics of emptiness,’ Ligon writes, ‘I saw in it echoes of my Uncle Tossy’s life.’ Blackness is considered by Ligon throughout, and its presence, as explored through those close to him, as well as those who are not, sets the scene for what America might mean to him: the picture he creates, though unnerving at times, is propelled forward by those with an unrelenting inclination to make something out of nothing. Allie Biswas

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Classified Advertisements

Female painter (24) wants penfriends anywhere (Sep 1981)

for individual artists, sculptors etc. Very reasonable rates.

JOB

1949–1999

Painter has for sale over 50 framed/ unframed male nude paintings approx. 6 in × 9 in. Good colour, original technique; also sales offer of reprints of Arts Review pages and announcement of the availability of ‘jet’ subscriptions to the US and Canada (Mar 1969)

Model

Bearded male model, 30

Available days, evenings and weekends (Sep 1969)

Lady wants a change, capable driver, typist, country lover, traveler (Apr 1960)

Young striking girl models African/ Chinese, Others, required by lady artist (Aug 1961 )

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Female models, white, slender, young (Sep 1961)

Gallery wants young man University education and or experienced in Art Gallery work to live in Sydney. (Sep 1965)

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LIFE MODEL (MALE)

Young painter, 23, urgently requires part time job, 3 days per week, up to 16 hours a day.

Anything considered, anywhere (Jul 1983)

Life Model; slim, muscular, patient. London. (Jul 1983)

FREE LODGINGS IN SPAIN Through a London gallery we have received the following letter: Dear Sir, I Take the liberty to bring to your attention the following. I am the owner of the house in Bellvey which is 60 K. from Barcelona, 40 from Tarragona and much obliged if you would recommend young painters if possible already known, willing two accept lodging for one or two months because I arranged a studio where they can paint and have vacations at the same time. I will accept for the rent one of their pictures. Regarding food they may use the cooking facilities. At the beginning of May the house will be open until the end of October. I am ready to receive offers. If they like to come with their wives I would be delighted. Waiting your kind answer I am sincerely yours Carlos Serra P.P. Will any artist interested in this invitation write to The Editor, who will forward replies. Please mark envelope Spain.

Are you genuinely seeking marriage ONLY within reasonable time (Jan 1960)

Please phone: 01923 772061 (Dec/Jan 1999)

Collector wishes to buy bronzes of male nudes by known 18th and 19th century artists (Mar 1966)

INFORMATION WANTED Re: Whereabouts of a collection of original letters, missing after two journalists associated with an ‘erotic’ publication visited the owner’s studio. The hand-written papers verify that architectural sculptures claimed to be the work of J.R. Skeaping during the 1950s were in fact designed and carved by Rita Ling. (Proof with-held due to concern for living people mentioned in the letters). (Sep 1999)

Sculpture Holidays in the South of France, large studios & accommodation in 13th Century château. £180 full board including wine (Sep 1993)

Young Man, 22 Non-muscle-bound, smooth, slim, defined, youthful physique and boyish features.Will model for any medium at reasonable rates – private or classes – in the London area. For further details and a chat, phone Luke on 071 582 3540 (Mar 1994)

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