ArtReview October 2015 by ArtReview

Philippe Parreno

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From top to bottom: Paola Pivi, Senza titolo (aereo), 1999, Fiat G-91 aircraft, 300 x 1180 x 860 cm / 118 x 464 9/16 x 338 1/2 inches | Diego Perrone, La stanza dei 100 re che ridono, 1999, Lambda print, Detail Maurizio Cattelan, A Perfect Day, 1999, Electrostatic printing installed on aluminium panel, 258 x 192 cm / 101 1/2 x 75 1/2 inches | | All images are Courtesy of Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London.

In 1999.

When Europe adopts the Euro, power is questioned in the art world:

Paola Pivi turns a war aircraft upside down at the Venice Biennale,

100 kings laugh at Diego Perrone’s debut solo show at Massimo De Carlo,

and Maurizio Cattelan tapes his gallerist to the wall.

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2 2 O L D B O N D S T R E E T LO N D O N W 1 S 4 PY + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 3 6 9 6 5910 D O M I N I Q U E - L E V Y. C O M Gerhard Richter with Zehn große Farbtafeln (Ten Large Colour Charts), 1966, on the rooftop of his atelier at Fürstenwall 204, Düsseldorf, 1966. Photo © Gerhard Richter, 2015

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ArtReview vol 67 no 7 October 2015

On a wing and a prayer At the very beginning of September, ArtReview was in Budapest to be one of the judges for the Leopold Bloom Art Award. While ArtReview was in the Hungarian capital by choice, a far greater number of people had arrived there because they had run out of choices and were now sleeping rough, crammed in like so many sardines, in the subway passages around Keleti, Budapest’s main railway station. ArtReview doesn’t want to turn its monthly sermon into some sort of needy, anguished handwringing exercise about the rights and wrongs of Europe’s migration crisis (although clearly there’s a multitude of fucked-up things about that situation). But at the same time, ArtReview couldn’t help but be aware of the fact that it, along with many of the curators and artists it met, felt an overwhelming sense of frustration about the limits of what art can do in the face of such immediate human tragedies, where action speaks a lot louder than words. Particularly the kind of words currently fashionable in art discourse. What do people who have lost their homes and pretty much everything else care about defining the ‘post-Internet generation’ or about the relevance of ‘objectoriented ontologies’ to aesthetic production? Probably about as much as the governments of countries like Hungary or Great Britain appear to care about the plight of migrants arriving on their doorsteps. Now, ArtReview is not about to suggest that art can or should in any way solve these kinds of problems – that’s the task of society as a whole – but, at its best, art is pretty good at encouraging those who experience it to raise their awareness of and sensitivity to the world around them. Relatively speaking, that might sound like small bones, but one of the many things the situation in Budapest highlighted was that too often societies do blind themselves to what’s going on within and around them.

Scent of Budapest – for him

The issue of art’s relationship to sensitivity is one of the reasons that ArtReview invited this month’s cover artist, Philippe Parreno, and curator Tom Eccles to get together and discuss the former’s interest in art as an exercise in exploring the substance, content and potential of collective experience. Not just in terms of Parreno’s interest in treating the exhibition as an artwork in its entirety rather than as a collection of discrete artworks, but also in terms of his interest in exploring artmaking as an exercise in attempting to understand what constitutes a public and what can be done to shape one. The artwork’s status in relation to the world around it is a subject that also lies at the centre of Mark Prince’s study of the work of painter Frank Auerbach (hey, are you getting the feeling that ArtReview uses its magazine to record and analyse its subconscious motivations? ArtReview certainly hopes you are) and in this month’s feature on Omer Fast’s film version of Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel, Remainder. This last, for those of you who haven’t read it, is about a man who gets hit on the head, resulting in both memory loss and an appropriately large compensation package, and then uses the money to stage reenactments of those scenes he does remember from his preaccident days, an experiment that becomes a compulsion. The result of all this is that the novel’s protagonist becomes trapped in a consciously mediated reality, which might in turn be described as one of the central problems of art these days – the problem being that art can simply be one other way by which we, as a society, maintain a distance from what’s really going on in the world. ArtReview likes to believe that good art does the opposite: it’s revelatory and invites you to look at the world both from a distance and close up. And perhaps each issue of ArtReview’s magazine is really a means by which it tests whether that belief in art is based on something substantial or is nothing more than a wish or a hope. ArtReview

For her

Robert Rauschenberg

Saff Tech Arts, Photo by George Holzer Courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

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Art Previewed

Athena on painters apologising Interview by Matthew Collings 60

Previews by Martin Herbert 37 Points of View by Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind, Sam Jacob, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Laura Oldfield Ford 49

page 38 Jimmie Durham, Half off (detail), 1991, wood, paint, hair, glue and print on cardboard, 136 × 62 × 63 cm. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

October 2015

Art Featured

Philippe Parreno by Tom Eccles 78

Abbas Akhavan by Oliver Basciano 96

Omer Fast by Helen Sumpter 86

Frank Auerbach by Mark Prince 100

Mapping Totality by Nick Srnicek 92

Artist Project by Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski 111

page 96 Abbas Akhavan, Study for a Garden (detail), 2012 (installation view, Delfina Foundation, London). Photo: Christa Holka. Courtesy the artist and Delfina Foundation, London

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Madison East & Quintessa Matranga, by Dean Kissick Eirik Sæther, by David Everitt Howe Nikolay Bakharev, by Siona Wilson Yoko Ono, by Joshua Mack jj peet, by Iona Whittaker Objects Food Rooms, by Bill Clarke Stewart Uoo, by Claire Rigby Portia Zvavahera, by Matthew Blackman Dor Guez, by Keren Goldberg

exhibitions 120 fomo, by Natasha Marie Llorens Aldo Mondino, by Mark Prince Bill Lynch, by Raimar Stange Ametria, by Stephanie Bailey Aleksandra Domanović, by Gesine Borcherdt Fiamma Montezemolo, by Mike Watson Lofoten International Art Festival, by Oliver Basciano Under the Clouds, by Orit Gat Here We lttr, by Stefanie Hessler Variations on ‘An Andalusian Dog’, by Sarah Jilani Europe: The Future of History, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Jennet Thomas, by Laura Robertson No Shadows in Hell, by Robert Barry Parallel Oaxaca, by Chris Fite-Wassilak e-studio Luanda, by Gabriel Coxhead Magali Reus, by Helen Sumpter Beatrice Gibson, by James Clegg Tony Lewis, by Stephanie Cristello Drew Heitzler, by Ed Schad

books 150 Fuck Seth Price, by Seth Price The Miracle of Analogy, by Kaja Silverman Looking at Pictures, by Robert Walser The Wapping Project on Paper, by Helen Sumpter the strip 154 off the record 158

page 147 Stewart Uoo, Untitled (Choose Juice Large White), 2015, cotton, paper shopping bags, cockroaches (Periplaneta americana), pigment, polyurethane resin, synthetic fibres, dust, 232 × 112 × 1 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood dm, São Paulo

ArtReview

COntEMpORaRy aRt EVEning auCtiOn LOndOn 15 OCtOBER 2015

Viewing 10 – 15 October JOnas WOOd Rosy’s Masks, 2008 Estimate £200,000–300,000. Enquiries +44 (0)20 7293 5744 34–35 new Bond street, London W1a 2aa. sothebys.com/contemporaryart © jonas wood

Whitechapel Gallery Emily Jacir

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Free Entry 30 Sept 2015 – 3 Jan 2016

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Art Previewed

Note that a lady should be addressed as ‘Madam’ whether she is married or single, and that ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Dear Madam’ are falling into disuse. Deservedly so, since the ‘Dear’ does not mean anything 35

Previewed Jimmie Durham Serpentine Gallery, London 1 October – 8 November

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige Home, Manchester through 1 November

Elad Lassry David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles through 5 November

Mélanie Matranga Palais de Tokyo, Paris 21 October – 10 January

Phyllida Barlow Lokremise, St Gallen through 9 November

Prem Sahib Southard Reid, London 7 October – 14 November

Cerith Wyn Evans Museion, Bolzano 3 October – 10 January

Davis Rhodes Société, Berlin through 17 October

gerlach en koop De Appel, Amsterdam through 8 November

Sean Kennedy Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York through 25 October

2 Mélanie Matranga & Valentin Bouré, From a to b through e (still), 2014, hd video, b&w, sound, 6 min. Courtesy the artists

October 2015

artist’s work, this movement from intimacy 1 A brief performance I once saw: Jimmie Durham, boulders – in which a supplement causes chaos. at a desk, pretends to have a phone conversation, If connotation is pressured from without, though, untidily outward is a trait. Her videos, drawings quarrels, takes ‘advice’, tosses a rock towards there are political corollaries. The works are and installations elasticise the local and the seamed with references to colonialism (Durham the audience, retrieves it, then smashes the private, particularly when Matranga raises alarm clock marking his time limit. Fin, applause, muted, minimalist, apartmentlike installations is of Cherokee descent) and ecology. Of late, his laughter. Outwardly absurd, the event garnered from a mix of cheap materials and cast elements excellent early work has been increasingly aired, and so it goes at the Serpentine, where it mingles lucidity from the five decades in which the Amerfrom friends’ homes. The outwardly ordinaire ican artist has often charged situations with with ‘new sculptures and key installations’. assumes the shape of a discreet but significant For her series of online videos From a to b significance while also deconstructing them. code. Here, expect to progress through a number Poet, sculptor, performer and activist, Durham through e (2014, codirected with Valentin Bouré), of environments, encountering smoking rooms works flexibly towards this end. He assembles and mezzanines and a new film: a termite path filmed in crisp monochrome at a purpose-built faux ethnological artefacts (mixing skulls, through which Matranga aims, she says, ‘to excafé within the Frieze London art fair during press something without ever truly being able to’. psychedelic patterns, varieties of wood, car 2 setup, Mélanie Matranga had a couple discuss, Out on the periphery of signification, meanparts, oil cans, piping, etc) and appends texts and echo in their testy interaction, the parallels and photographs that would seem elucidatory between the global economy and romantic 3 while, one might also find Cerith Wyn Evans. relationships. What seems to be going well one For the couple of decades since he stopped but mostly trigger an unravelling; or he takes day, and is understood to be under control, making actual films, the essentials of cinema something and adds something else – perhaps can dissolve into chaos the next. In the French (light, narrative, props, sound) have been most distinctively by crushing cars with

3 Cerith Wyn Evans, Socle du Monde (Park Hyatt Berlin), 2008, digital scales, 36 × 36 × 9 cm. Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

1 Jimmie Durham, The Guardian (Free Tickets), 1992, wood, plastic, pvc pipe, paper, paint, insulating tape, text, 195 × 102 × 86 cm. Photo: Nick Ash. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

ArtReview

4 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Fidel, 2014, hd digital video, 11 min 48 sec. Produced by Villa Arson, Nice, and Home, Manchester

5 Phyllida Barlow, mix (installation view, Lokremise, St Gallen), 2015. Photo: Stefan Rohner. © the artist. Courtesy Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland

the Welshman’s materials, unencumbered by cameras or script. The latter, resultantly, is your responsibility as you negotiate nods to a bounded literary/artistic canon that ranges from Proust to Brion Gysin, James Merrill to Sturtevant, Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Andy Warhol, and a slowly augmenting taxonomy of materials. Of late, the familiarity of these elements has seemed almost the point. Among these pot plants and chandeliers and Morse-code signals and neons, we’re like characters in an Alain Resnais movie – we’ve been here before but it’s somehow not the same as last time, and the director is inveigling us, again, to improvise, deal with it, perform ourselves. Barely contained by the artworld, Lebanese 4 artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have made award-winning feature films starring

Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué (I Want of geopolitical turmoil – and, as before, to the question of what we can reasonably believe to See, 2008) and documentaries including The and how easily we’re hoodwinked. Lebanese Rocket Society (2012, which also seeded installations), concerning the forgotten Lebanese Following brake, swamp, siege, brink, scree space race, as well as being prolific writers and gig, another muscular one-word title and lecture-performers. At the heart of their 5 adorns Phyllida Barlow’s latest show, mix. practice, though, is the veracity (or otherwise) The Newcastle-born, storied former Slade lecturer is maintaining a propulsive exhibition of representations, an aspect that swings to the fore again in I must first apologise… (2015), in which schedule for her expansive vocabulary of ricketythey use film, sculpture, photography and looking sculptures, which, though predicated installation to explore the history of scam-based on a resistance to heroic and macho sculptural gestures and formerly thrown away after instalspam. Using correspondence with scammers, lation, are now fairly monumental (and very photographs extracted by spam-baiters, and valuable, even when the materials are cardboard videoworks featuring real and fictional spam victims, the pair contextualise spamming and polystyrene) in themselves. Barlow, though, in a continuum of confidence tricks dating back has ridden over that shift in status with painterly to the sixteenth century, their focus also leading verve and juicy colour, boisterous allusiveness to correlations between spamming and sites – her work always teetering on the lip of

October 2015

signification, whether it’s mock-phallic or mock-architectural – and playful polyvalence. Here, in a complement of works dating from 2008 to the present, she offers up battalions of hoops and greyish binlike containers, dangling tangles of rubber hose, tenuous architectural constructions and sprawls of gaudy matter resembling collapsing funhouses. Elsewhere in art-as-precariousness: Davis 6 Rhodes, who may appear to take a lackadaisical approach to the minimal, vertical-format paintings he’s produced since the late aughts. The New York-based Canadian has, by turns, applied paint to foamcore so that the support buckles inward, focused on simple motifs such as the number one or a ‘D’ and reduced fragments of advertising (such as a gesturing hand) to cutout negative space. On a formal level,

Combine style, and then finished with expresthe once-opposed styles of Pop and hard-edge painting collapse together while the artist resists sive daubs – the whole recalling the disconhis own presence in the work, which draws tinuous, punchy scatter of a computer desktop on physical processes and the hoardings outside and then refusing to offer any commentary his studio window. How you feel about such or even sense, while looking like highly marketable, Pop-scented art. That show was titled embodied pragmatics, with their sidelining Mixed Messages (2013), which seems apropos; of emotional investment, might depend on whether you’re the kind of person who, in cold the image released ahead of Kennedy’s second show finds, among fragments of logo-strewn weather, complains or says it’s ‘bracing’. ‘Sean Kennedy is not a great painter’ is a line painting, the show title successpool finger-written 7 that a Google search quickly brings up on the la in a layer of dust. artist (in a Frieze review by ArtReview contributor Proud affiliate of what he calls the ‘postJonathan Griffin, in fact), but it’s a backhanded Pictures-generation’ and nudging forward the compliment insofar as Kennedy is less techniinnovations of Christopher Williams and John cian than tactician. A couple of years ago he was Baldessari as well as the designating processes making complex agglutinations of material: 8 of Conceptualism, Elad Lassry trades in clean transcribed logo decals from model toys mixed graphic punch as a cover for categorical chaos. with real-world objects, in the Rauschenberg Here, in his third solo at David Kordansky,

7 Courtesy Sean Kennedy and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

6 Davis Rhodes, Untitled, 2015, oil on canvas, 183 × 132 × 3 cm. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

8 Elad Lassry, Untitled (Airshow), 2015, acrylic glass, silver gelatin print, ceramic bead, pigment, wire, steel ball, 59 × 44 × 4 cm. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

ArtReview

POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION

JONAS WOOD (B. 1977) Untitled (M.V. Landscape) oil on canvas 120 3/8 x 155 7/8 in. (305.5 x 396.5 cm.) Painted in 2008 © COURTESY OF THE ARTIST VIA ANTON KERN GALLERY

AUCTION

16 October 2015 Ť London, King Street

VIEWING

10–16 October 2015 Ť 8 King Street Ť London SW1Y 6QT

CONTACT

Katharine Arnold Ť karnold@christies.com Ť +44 (0) 20 7389 2024

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE SAATCHI GALLERY, LONDON

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9 Prem Sahib, bump, 2013 (installation view, Southard Reid, 2013). Photo: Guy Archard. Courtesy the artist and Southard Reid, London

the Israeli-born, la-based artist uses snappy, club-night runner, Sahib’s art refers to nightlife, self-shot, but stock-style photographic imagery its excitements and discontents. Alongside his first institutional show at the ica (24 September – and leftovers from real editorial photo sessions – his images including snakes and motor 15 November), for his second solo at Southard engines – and encases photographs in slabs Reid – he graduated from the Royal Academy of acrylic accoutred with plastic tubes and other in 2013 – titled End Up and referring to the closure of clubs and the limiting of social space, Sahib protuberances. Whereas earlier artists pointed plans a darkened interior, accompanied by neons to the constructed nature of commercial images, Lassry reserves the right to call anything and benches (made collaboratively, as is his wont, with ‘spatial designer’ Xavi) and, perhaps, a picture, to undo photography’s seduction technique and, along the way, to situate genre other sculptural elements. From what we know of him, expect a less-is-more aesthetic that as strictly last century. allows a melancholy and open-ended narrative Prem Sahib’s abbreviated sculptural vocab9 to gestate out of just a few elements. ulary tends to point towards absent bodies and Sahib, though, might still be bested in the aftermaths: crash mats, Puffa jackets, glasses of water for nocturnal rehydration, pairs of discs 10 modest-transformation stakes by gerlach en koop, connoisseurs of understatement, whose referring to the double-dot positive indication process since 2000 – often rooted in instructions – for hiv. Most particularly, for the artist and

ArtReview

gerlach en koop, Headlessness, 2014. Courtesy the artists

has regularly involved copying, appropriating and generating small disparities between otherwise identical things: human error as quiet collaborative force. In the past, they’ve carried a pair of invitation cards in their back pockets for seven weeks and exhibited the variably crumpled results; made sculpture out of exposed shoulder-pads while creating a backstory about their owners’ meeting; and made public sculpture out of a nested pair of fluted bins, No two things can be the same (2012). One might predict, then, that this, their first institutional solo show, featuring sculptural and graphic work, will travel – and it does, to Cologne’s Temporary Gallery in 2016 – and that the second show will be very similar to the first and yet, of course, fundamentally, ontologically different. Martin Herbert

JONAH FREEMAN - JUSTIN LOWE - JENNIFER HERREMA

SCENARIO IN THE SHADE SEPTEMBER 12 – DECEMBER 6, 2015

Red Bull Studios New York 220 West 18th St

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Future Greats 2015 Each March, in a feature made possible by the support of EFG International, ArtReview invites a panel of artists, critics and curators to select artists they think people should be looking out for in the coming year. Not necessarily young artists, or anything that might come under the heading ‘emerging’; rather those whose work is worth following but who are less well known to an international audience. This feature has been extended in a series of additional profiles, or introductions, as ArtReview likes to call them, throughout this year.

Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com

October 2015

Benjamin Senior selected by J.J. Charlesworth

You could talk about pattern and composition. London-based painter the world ‘over there’ – into something awkwardly, creepily selfBenjamin Senior’s paintings are full of patterns and composition – conscious. There’s a voyeur’s pleasure somewhere in this fetishistic tesselating, mid-century-feeling modernist geometrics on the walls attention to the choreographed poses of lithe bodies set in taut action of swimming pools or on the floors of gymnasia. Here, Senior’s sub- or casual repose. And yet at the same time there’s a utopian echo to jects – athletic-looking women, often – pose, stretch, dive, do sit-ups these healthy, happy people, who seem to live in a world so elegant or exercise with hula hoops, fitness balls and other gym accessories. that every moment, however banal, is always perfectly arranged. Elsewhere in Senior’s quietly perverse world, men and women stand No work here, just play. Naturalism merges with design, and the about in autumnal light in patterned overcoats and hats, and we see rhetoric of composition is taken to an absurd extreme. The history of them as if through the ornate ironwork of a gate or a balcony railing. realist painting always carried the hidden pleasures of composition, There’s something not quite right about Senior’s calm and pleasant while abstract art thought to do away with the image in the name urbanity, though. It’s as if everything depicted has been deployed of ‘pure’ form. But Senior lets abstraction’s ideal of flat design clash like pieces in a weird game where painterly composition has become with the illusion of depth, each contradicting the other, both tangled a narcissistic obsession: swimmers dive at precise angles to intersect in a strange embrace. Somewhere in Senior’s paintings is the queswith the curves of background elements; the outline of a head follows tion of who, in a painting, the human figure addresses, of whether the scrolling line of a wrought-iron tendril; gym balls are held aloft by that figure is a subject or an object, of who is looked at and who does carefully arranged pairs of legwarmer-clad legs. the looking. A question about the nature of this Rings vii (Light and Distance), 2014, Senior’s paintings turn the imagined pointpeculiar screen we call a painting, and the world egg tempera on cotton on plywood, 60 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and Bolte Lang, Zürich of-view of a painting – our eyes ‘over here’, and we see upon it.

AFRICA NOW: CONTEMPORARY AFRICA Thursday 15 October 2015 New Bond Street, London ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7468 8355 africanow@bonhams.com MAÏMOUNA GUERRESI Mohamed and Daughters (triptych) lambda print £12,000-18,000

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Points of View

‘Relevance’ is the word today most likely to appear in conversations about artworld approbation. Who is and what is relevant to art and to the discourse that surrounds it holds more weight than what was once thought to be good or even great, or, after Donald Judd, merely interesting. More than once I have found myself listening to an artist ask about a critic, “Is he even relevant any more?” Of course I have heard much the same thing in reverse, and more often: “I just don’t see how her work is relevant.” Some critics believe that art today is risking its own irrelevance, not because it’s not appropriately engaged, or critical, or skilled, but because its public no longer feels entitled to judge it on its merits. Michael J. Lewis took this tack recently in a piece for Commentary magazine titled ‘How Art Became Irrelevant’, in which he tells us how his students at Williams College were unable to muster the appropriate ‘shock or revulsion’ or moral ‘outrage’ when shown footage of Chris Burden’s perforating performance of Shoot (1971). The students could ‘contextualize’ – about legal liability, about the Vietnam War – but they could not judge. In Lewis’s own judgement his students, which he takes as proxies of an educated and engaged public, are ‘broadminded’ but lethally ‘indifferent’ to art. And an indifferent public equals the irrelevance of art. The importance of Lewis’s essay is that it identifies the concept of relevance as central to the way we think about the value of art in general today. The essay’s failure, though, is that it doesn’t seek to offer an explanation about how such irrelevance came to pass, or even why relevance itself is the value at issue, and instead offers a litany of familiar pronouncements on how, for example, ‘the American public has been thoroughly alienated from the life of the fine arts while, paradoxically, continuing to enjoy museums for the sake of sensation and spectacle, much as it enjoyed circuses a century ago’. Instead of traditional culture we have ‘mass

on the relevance of relevance and the rise of indifference… or

Must great art be selfie-proof? by

Jonathan T.D. Neil media, commerce, and advertising’; instead of museums crafted ‘akin to making a fine musical instrument’, we are given something closer to ‘a successful billboard’; and instead of a sincere commitment to Western ‘civilization’, we are witness to ‘a catastrophic breakdown of the belief systems that sustained’ it. For evidence of this last claim, Lewis draws on Google’s Ngram viewer to show how, around the mid-1980s, a decrease in the frequency of the sincere usage of the word ‘civilization’ was joined by a concomitant rise in its quotationmarked ironic appearance. This ironic usage has been in steady decline since the mid-1990s, which suggests a brief momentum investment on the part of intellectuals rather than a longterm trend. But while the frequency of the sincere usage of ‘civilization’ has certainly decreased by about 300 percent since 1940, the usage of ‘relevant’ has seen a 500 percent increase since then. Indeed, when matched with the term ‘contemporary’, the graph of ‘relevant’ more closely matches the frequency curve one would expect from that more fraught and familiar periodising adjective, which ‘relevant’ surpasses right around 1969. That was the year of Claes Oldenburg’s ephemeral Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,

October 2015

the artist’s critique of both aesthetic monumentality and us military adventurism, which Lewis identifies as a momentary ‘return to seriousness’ in the art scene, one whose political consciousness quickly devolved into a kind of bodily mannerism with Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972, another Lewis example) and Burden’s Shoot. According to Google’s Ngram, the usage of ‘relevant’ increased at its fastest clip through the 1960s, which is to say, on this measure, nothing was more relevant in the 1960s than being relevant. It’s an important point to make in the age of Instagram and in the face of withering accounts, such as Lewis’s, of the public’s threatening indifference to art. If Oldenburg’s antimonument represented a momentary coalescence of high liberal morals, its survival as such an emblem has required photographic evidence, a bit of media attention and a healthy dose of academic canonisation. A similar gesture at seriousness today, say Kara Walker’s massive white-sugar sphinx, A Subtlety (2014), with its explicit message about the historical exploitation and abuse of black labour, was made relevant not – or not only – by the gravity of that message, but by the ease of the work’s image appropriation – as a backdrop for smiling selfies – by a segment of the audience that was indifferent to that message. Had the moral sanctity of Walker’s monument weighed heavily on all those who had attended to it, its relevance as art likely would have been diminished. A Subtlety’s courtship with history and morality as well as image and spectacle is exactly what made it – makes it – particularly relevant, and not despite an indifferent public, but because of it. Indifference to art does not signal its irrelevance. If anything, such indifference is the necessary ground against which the figure of relevance strikes its clarifying pose, for ‘What is relevant?’ and ‘Why is it relevant?’ are the questions that need to be asked and argued over if we are to build a system of value and judgement equal to the world today and the art that is made from it.

There is a steep increase in traces of sticky fingers on contemporary art. Especially in the art that has been placed under the rather strange label of ‘post-Internet’. Those traces are what we leave behind on our portable devices: fingerprints on screens big and small that then turn up in artworks. But then there are the footprints too, the product of seemingly dirty shoes. Both give some old discussions around analogue photography a new digital twist and, in doing so, revive the postmodern discourse on representation. Whereas in the twentieth century Duchamp championed dust as an indexical sign in art, in the twenty-first century bodily grease is the ultimate mark of physical presence. Take for example Nadia Belerique’s images, which are made in the scanner. Simultaneously high-tech and handmade, these portrait-format inkjet photographs are mounted to aluminium and Plexiglas. They are made to scale, and the abstract shapes that are part of them show varying degrees of transparency. The edges of the shapes seem cut and sometimes ripped. Occasional green and red forms are interspersed within a mostly grey scale where everything is strangely luminous. Sometimes a recognisable object – a brass bracket, for example – has entered the space of the scanner. There is a certain effect of depth giving the pictures body, turning them into semi-objects, although they are both flat and thin. Covering all of the photographs are fingerprints. Reusing archival analogue photographs, sometimes from the holdings of a Toronto newspaper, and masking film used in that archive to manipulate press photos, Belerique makes old-style image editing and retouching the very material of her own work. In this way outdated cut-and-paste techniques return, much as 20 years ago we started to be flooded by work employing rapidly ageing technologies such as slide and film projectors. Today it happens in the midst of the proliferation of digital images on a variety of luminous screens, indicating a sort of migration of ‘the real’, of where something concrete can sit, and where the ephemeral is allowed to exist. In the otherwise clunky group exhibition are you experienced? (2015), at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, near Toronto, Belerique’s straightforward and yet

sticky fingers, dirty shoes Sure signs of the artist’s hand (and foot) in the touchscreen era, decides Maria Lind

from top Nadia Belerique, The Archer 13 and The Archer 9, both 2014, inkjet photographs mounted to aluminium and plexiglass, each: 71 × 51 cm. Courtesy the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto

ArtReview

complex images are accompanied by rephotographed and morphed cardboard cutouts, for example of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s hypersensitive Deanna Troi. Purchased secondhand online, the starting points are transported from the world of marketing of popular culture to the gallery space, in the meantime embodied in steel, occasionally painted white. Halfway between ghosts and shadows, they appear like suitable companions to the photographs, standing next to a thick milk-coloured carpet covering the floor. At first glance this looks pristine, but then you discover black footprints from sturdy rubber soles, as if trespassers have just come by. Made with Liquid Light emulsion, the footprints only develop when exposed to light. If the photographic indexical sign has in one sense almost disappeared with the demise of analogue photography and film, it has returned big-time in another format. It is the idea that the celluloid film has been in direct contact with light, leaving traces similar to a footprint in the sand and a weather vane in the wind. Whereas Duchamp with a poetic gesture allowed dust to come in through an open studio window, covering works like The Large Glass (1915–23) and thereby welcoming the surrounding world and daily life, artists of the last couple of decades have featured the dirt in archaic-looking slide and film works. And now Belerique, like many others today, is generous with greasy fingerprints. The interest in representation, the mass media and semiotics that the Pictures Generation and other artists around the same time expressed has mutated into a concern about the production and status of images in a more direct way. It is now more about perception and illusion, the oscillation between materiality and immateriality, the abstract and the concrete. However, besides – surprisingly – often ending up in white-cube commercial spaces, both the older and the newer projects share literal presence and concrete production forms, but now they are made by the use of digital cameras and scanners. Nevertheless, the human hand is still indexically present, through all those sticky fingers, whether belonging to the artist or not.

We’re deep in the Soane Museum, the house and office that Sir John Soane designed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It’s dusk: in the Dome Room, blue light filters down while candles cast a flickering light over relics of antiquity. These are the urns, statues and fragments of buildings that are part of Soane’s collection, a dense encrustation covering almost every surface of the complex spatial architecture. More than mere decoration, they were Soane’s carefully constructed essay on the nature of architecture. We’re cracking open a fresh pack of 2bs, here to draw among Soane’s stuff just like his students once did. Soane’s house is more than architecture: it’s an argument for architecture, an experiment and a pedagogical device rolled into one. We’ve assembled a game group of students to help us explore the relationship between architecture and representation. And the Soane acts as the perfect venue: a place where representation of architecture and architecture itself blur into a single scene. Take the ‘cupola’ above the study roof. It appears to be part of the ‘real’ architecture of the building, yet it’s actually a repurposed piece of a model from one of Soane’s schemes. Or Canaletto’s view of Venice, hung in the picture gallery such that, seen from the Dome area, it appears to be the view from the window. The house and its collection are a constant flux between reality and representation. In fact, this might be Soane’s central lesson: that architecture, even at the level of a building, is always a form of representation: its representational qualities are not different from its ‘real’ qualities as a building, but are simultaneous. It’s an argument that makes the act of drawing fundamental to the creation of architecture. Architecture starts with the drawing, and as it becomes more real, it carries with it that first conception of what space might be from the graphic plane. For Soane, this meant drawing as a form of measurement, an empirical system where even shadow is a register of distance. For Ruskin, drawing was something else, starting with an understanding of the phenomenon you were trying to depict. For Kandinsky, a different conception: about tension and gravity within the picture plane. From each of these examples we took a drawing lesson, and guided by them

inside a neoclassical marvel… A group of architects wield 2b pencils in order to

loosen the grip of computer-generated simulation over our spatial imaginations by

Sam Jacob George Bailey, Sectional Perspective of the Dome Area Looking East, 1811, watercolour. © Sir John Soane’s Museum 2012, London

October 2015

step-by-step, we used the Soane as a test bed, exploring the relationship between architectural space and representation. It proved surprisingly hard to switch between these different conceptions of drawing: lines mean different things in each, and the paper itself transformed – sometimes appearing as a flat surface, sometimes as a deep space. It seems anachronistic to think about the act of drawing and architecture now we have computing power that can almost instantly render a scene for us. cgi is the dominant mode of contemporary architectural communication. It presents an apparently ‘real’ image of the world – photorealistic and perspectival – and is a dangerously plausible fiction. The buildings that result are full of the kinds of things that cgi excels at: architecture that curves and shines as if it were still glowing on the screen of its designer. We’re smart enough to know now that photography is far from a transparent window onto the world: it frames and constructs its own image. If we think of cgi as the logical conclusion of the perspectival project, we should also remember that perspective itself is not really the way the world looks but an artificial construction. In opposition to these forms of image-making, we might deploy the vast processing power that sits on our desktops to other ends. And one of those ends might well be exploring drawings’ intrinsic artificiality. Architecture, it seems, has given over the act of representation – the way one constructs space on the picture plane, the projection that one might use, the way in which shadow is depicted (or not) – to the default algorithms of drawing programmes. And in doing so, it has relinquished the possibilities of drawing to act as the place where architectural ideas might begin. Now, I’m no technophobe. I’m not arguing that we should throw down our mice and take up quills. What I am arguing is that, especially now, with the incredible possibilities that digital tools have given us, it seems a dereliction of graphic duty that we are failing to take advantage of them in any meaningful way. After all, as Soane continues to teach us (as do Ruskin, Kandinsky and others), the way we represent the world is also the way we create it.

9 OCTOBER - 13 NOVEMBER 2015

21 DERING STREET LONDON W1S 1AL VIGOGALLERY.COM

LEONARDO DREW VIGO

vigogallery.com

How exciting! It seems my new gallery relationship is already beginning to pay dividends. I just received a call from Nozzlebaum & Gack saying that not only had they sold all the smaller works from my show (tiny vagina paintings I had earlier dismissed as mere trifles!) but the so-so review I received in the NY Times has unleashed a cavalcade of real, honest-to-goodness, actionable interest! For instance, I’ve been offered a winter artist’s residency in Terence, Utah, an honorary degree at Kumperagensdorf Polyteknik, a seat on the board of the Nyack Museum of Art, shows at Kunst Halle Amersfoort, the Center for Contemporary Art Kalamazoo, the Lewis Collection (Scranton, pa) and unbelievably the Daniel Grubstein Museum of Contemporary Art, South

what’s not to like? Following sales of minor labial works and a less-than-gushing review, Jonathan Grossmalerman yields to the warm bosom of online response

Beach. Which is in France! I’ve been asked to design a humorously irreverent wine label for an Australian vineyard, received several requests for interviews from something called ThisArtRocks.com and AintItCoolNews.com and also a teaching position at Arizona State University’s reasonably esteemed Ladies Painting Department. Also, as though in one seemingly magic stroke, Matthew Higgs, Lisa Yuskavage, Chuck Close, Marlene Dumas, John Currin, Nicole Eisenman, David Salle, Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Nick Cave, both Bob and Roberta Smith, Terence Koh and Oscar Murillo finally accepted my friend requests on Facebook! It’s as though, after this cold long winter spent wandering alone in the wilderness, spring has finally arrived, bringing with it in its damp and gentle bosoms all the hopes and possibilities of Mother Earth’s kindest season. What shall I do with all this newfound power, I wonder? Exact my revenge? Write snide comments on their posts? No! I must keep my head… After all, it’s only just beginning. Soon I will be back in my perch! I know because I’ve also been receiving exciting support from all across the globe thanks to the miracle of social media. For instance, a girl named Darla<3, who may live in San Diego, says she thinks my work is ‘super rad’. And there’s a girl in Brazil named DeeKa75k who seems sad about life in general

October 2015

but really digs my work, and a boy in Smolensk who loves my paintings as much as he hates his parents. A high school girl from Ontario named angel_cum6 says she wants to get a tattoo of one of my skull paintings! I know because I was online all night chatting with her. She also writes very emotional lyrics for the band she hopes to be in one day. It feels wonderful to be able touch so many young people! Not a night goes by where I don’t have a long, drawn-out, meaningful conversation with a young person. What can I say? The Internet is amazing! SCULLmaster33 has started following my Instagram account and ‘liked’ almost all the paintings I’ve posted there! So has artits671, young_SQRTR, mentholLIGHTS, sugarbomb20, sahin.muradov, goulorama, skrtskrrtskeetskeeet, booth_bitch, lukeyluwop, catsittinginmyroom, velvetpuss, sadgrrrlll, yung_sqrtr, spookyteenager and so many others. I can’t express my sense of elation and power. Why, just as I was writing this, jasman420 started following me. Out of the ether! If this continues I’m going to be right back on top where I belong! Sure, maybe Kumperagensdorf Polyteknik is no Yale University and the Lewis Collection may not be the Gaddafi Collection, but Gaddafi’s dead. Really dead! I’ve checked! And he didn’t leave anyone to manage his collection. The Nyack Museum of Art et al shall be my steppingstones, mere rungs on the proverbial ladder, corpses piled high upon which I shall climb from this trench of midcareer mud! The Lewis Collection is simply going to have to do! And look, I’m getting the most ‘likes!’ and sometimes, here and there, a comment! Zagreb_teener, H00kerproblemz_7, GrijzNL52, Me2, DEZZIE69, h377, dariastnova, home_advantage, new_ROSE, Con_ARTbae, HELP_IliveinSyria, soldierofGod and G0ldfinch_8 are in love with my paintings! I’m on top of the world! You try and beat that!

You walk back to the zone – lanes of traffic, a toxic trough, effective as battlements separating Canary Wharf from Poplar: Majestic Wines, Bacchus Bin’s, glyphs in a spiral subway, a submerged arcade that feels like China, banks of dried palms, scorched ivy and the tilting view of empty towers. Beneath the dlr, the elevated motorway, two glowing billboards acting as sentries, gatekeepers of the city when you sweep in from the east. A confluence of boundaries beyond the traffic barrier – triangular yards bounded by metal fences, container stacks, collapsing townships in the rubble – Robin Hood Gardens is suddenly there and you feel it intersecting, all these walks, this listless heatwave-pacing – you sense this point is the locus. Citadel bearing down – Citigroup, jp Morgan, Barclays. That pub, the Steamship, lying in wait in a sunken cobbled street. You searched for it that April night, full-moon eclipse, drifting in circles round Limehouse and Westferry. You had accepted its disappearance, let it fall into that reservoir of lost places; and now, without warning, it reveals itself – mildewed plaster, aerial fronds, George flags strewn across a desolate yard. You scale a brick wall, a heavy black expanse bordering East India Dock. A millennial garden with bronze statues. Streets named after spices brought into the docks – clove, nutmeg, saffron. An evocation of hallucinatory power, shamanic transformation. An arrangement of stones, public sculpture salvaged from the dock wall, can only be herma, an unconscious honouring of the navigator. Leamouth bus terminal, not an ending, but a point of departure. Feels like an abandoned holiday resort, empty wine bar, no one around but bored security.

scorched earth The spectre of resettlement threatens the last ties to old territory by

Laura Oldfield Ford New apartment blocks, Elektron Tower, Neutron Tower, reflected in the algae-puffed water, fluro cotton wool expanding beneath the surface. Grey silos looking like sealed conference centres. You know they house data systems, servers; the entire financial-services industry entombed, encoded in these eerie dromes – Selco, Global Switch – if you wanted to do something really mental, you could do that place. Grilles, cooling systems, disaster-aversion strategies. You’re not the first to have circled, thought, made a note. Roundabouts, intersections, crossings, sparse ovals of eelgrass. You stop at a 24-hour garage for supplies: snout, brandy, cans of Boost.

ArtReview

You are drawn into the gravitational field of Chrisp Street, the Festival Tavern. This is the point of intensity where your name, your biography are activated. You sometimes come in for karaoke on a Saturday night; scene on the pavement is spasming, demented – more and more piling in from the market, from the Lansbury Estate. There’s a tv high up in the corner, London 24, more madness going off on the tube, Liverpool Street this time. You stand outside with bottles of Heineken. The street is melting, white people with burning skin, the feverish hallucinations of daytime drinking – must be about 15 of you now, more gathered along the way, Ahmed, Asim, Ish slinking into the bar when imams come past. Skillsmatch, the job scheme on Heron Quay seems a long way away, no one’s going back. It’s early afternoon, unexpected September heatwave. You know the hours could collapse seamlessly here, but you need to get back to the Aberfeldy – just had a cascade of texts saying council are walking round with contractors and police. You cross Chrisp Street, the crushing heat outside caffs and eel shops – all these points on the covert map – the launderette, the bookies, Callaghans, where you hear the latest spiralling broadcasts. Balfron Tower. You move beneath it, dank concrete chambers, tomblike vistas opening behind metal grilles. You navigate the paths with an easy familiarity, the nest of concrete staircases, dense tangles of blackthorn and the woodland paths banking the Blackwall approach road. You feel the pull, the undertow of the tiled 1960s subway, the tessellated characters with Savage Messiah stickers for eyes. At each exit always a pile of stones, twin mounds of rubble. The Aberfeldy, so remote, held in by the a12,

the a13 and the Lea, almost impossible for the outsider to find a way in, apertures behind chevrons, a faultline opening in a wall of perspex panels, that’s where you squeeze through. You are in a bank of briars and convolvulus, a bindweed matrix. You scramble down through brambles, crab apples and the sweet scent of hay. Derelict car yard, metal shutters down, sump oil circles printed into the tarmac. Corrugated iron, bonfire smoke, the smell of diesel. Push through metal railings to the estate – the island. It’s all heating up again, Angolan, Somali, Pakistani, English, Irish, Bengali, forging new alliances, reimagining the zone. Since the yuppie flats went up and the shantytowns emerged, ties are dissolving, reconfiguring. Dormant seams of bnp are melting, families know which way it’s going; you’re pushing for occupations, know it’s your only chance of keeping your flats. They’ve threatened you with resettlement and this crew you have now are up for a fight, they despise the council, Poplar Harca, the Tory government: we’re not going to Birmingham, Hull or any of them places. Now, on the service roads around the new developments, it’s like Calais, husks interconnecting, black plastic sheets stretching over spindly plywood frames. You walk through overgrown rose gardens, the sweet vanilla scent of yellow roses. The Aberfeldy Tavern.

The pub sealed the autonomy of the island, stuff being fenced, ancestral habits brought over from the loop of Bow Creek. After the slum clearances, they all came here, the same families dominating: the Lammins, the Scanlons, a white working-class ambience. The scavenging for flotsam and jetsam, the sale of rope and coal round the neighbours, was translated into knockoff perfume, snide gear, boxes siphoned out of loading bays and fire exits – a self-perpetuating, self-contained economy. When the pub closed, the vigour was sapped from the estate. L-shaped bar, pool table, Sitex on the windows and those hoardings outside depicting the masterplan, Aberfeldy Village. You broke through plywood fencing, cut the razor wire and were in. Old scents of damp and cigarette smoke, the sugary stink of spilled coke. Everything preserved: mahogany bar, fluorescent posters advertising DJs and turns. Now you put nights on there, run caffs and legal centres, it’s a centrifugal force across the estate. You stand in the yard at the front, where the dealers used to circle, always white blokes with dank estuary accents. Your nan used to come in here. There was a corner they presided over, the ones who remembered Orchard Place. And at the other side the pool table and the jukebox and the lads playing darts. Burgundy

October 2015

walls, ochre ceiling, spider plants catching in your hair. A crew came in a few weeks ago from the Aylesbury, that big estate in Elephant & Castle, you knew quite a lot of them, some Scottish, mostly Leeds. You saw how the council had locked them out of their flats, tangled the whole place up with fences and razor wire. You knew they would do that here, if they could. You’re planning to take the six sealed blocks radiating from Blair Street; get the locks changed, use bolt cutters to prise off Sitex and get the electricity rerouted from the grid. The sense of isolation from the rest of London is intensifying. The pub stays open all night behind heavy black drapes, like the war. Militant techno and stretchy grime, sound systems stacked like pyramids in the yard. The little biro drawings, the notes and diaries that make up your life, are etched into this island. You keep coming back to it, drifting around London with the gravitational pull always there. You live with your nan. She’s got a two-bedroom place, a lounge with damask pink wallpaper and a view across Canary Wharf. There are coral-pink lamps with pleated shades and velvet curtains, a deep damson colour. In winter it’s like a cocoon, with the heating on and the glow from the lamp. You have a laugh watching Deal or No Deal, knocking back sherry. Your conversations span the decades, her teenage years in the Blitz, the glass factories and boatyards, the journey from Orchard Place. She was the last of the family to be born there, just a baby when they were forced over the twin peninsulas, the convulsing loop of the Lea, to Oban House, the flat you have now. She keeps the balcony immaculate, cascading red geraniums. Rosemary in earthenware pots. 4pm The yard is enclosed by a wall of plywood. Parched heat and the scent of sandalwood unfurling from a balcony, peng lemon fat bags, rum and cokes, bag of ice from the zr shop. A loophole, a hidden anomaly – all those dissociatives from that chemist on Chrisp Street, David’s Linctus, Robitussin. Metal beer barrels, palm trees in plastic containers. Psychedelic loopiness – mini rig, instrumental grime. L-shaped room with a crystalline brightness, maroon walls with marker-pen glyphs. You stand there reading them, decoding them, the proliferating dreams of revenge.

COVER_POSTER_final.indd 1

SET

NA KIM

10.8–11.5.2015

affect / effect transformation in the work of Li Wei

October 23 to December 31, 2015

191 South Suzhou Road, Shanghai, China 200002 +86 21 6333 7223 / contact@artplusshanghai.com www.artplusshanghai.com

Grazia Varisco, Reticolo frangibile. Quadrato rosso in quadrato nero, 1968 (detail)

Cortesi Gallery

Grazia Varisco 1960 – 2015

41 & 43 Maddox St. W1S 2PD – London United Kingdom

Opening Thursday, October 1st, 2015 6:00 – 8:30 p.m.

The exhibition will continue until November 28th, 2015

Via Frasca 5 6900 Lugano, Switzerland +41 91 92 14 000

41 & 43 Maddox St. W1S 2PD – London, United Kingdom +44 20 74 93 6009

info@cortesigallery.com www.cortesigallery.com

if…

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 41

Athena Goddess of Wisdom on painters apologising Interview by

Matthew Collings The mythical representative of (among other things) the arts, courage, inspiration, justice and civilisation muses on why otherwise credible artists feel obliged to relate painting to

anything but itself

Athena is one of the 12 major deities of the Greek pantheon. She presides over innumerable activities, from weaving, flute music and military strategy to building, industry and agriculture. Athena as the goddess of philosophy became protector of the city of Athens in the fifth century bc, but some historians speculate an origin 3,000 years earlier in Libya in a form half-human, half-bird, with wings and talons.

ArtReview

artreview Tell us about yourself. Where do you come from? athena Zeus swallowed my pregnant mother, Metis. I was born from his head when it was split open with an axe by Hephaestus, a male version of myself, cruder but with the same range of duties. I came out fully grown, and Hephaestus demanded a union. He attempted the rape, but at the last minute I disappeared and his semen fell on the ground. It impregnated Gaia, the earth mother, and thus Ericthonios, founder king of Athens, was born. I raised him myself as my foster child. I never had a lover or husband. One of my titles is Parthenos, meaning ‘virgin’. I enforce the rules of sexual modesty and ritual mystery. ar Why did Hephaestus split Zeus’s head open? a It was hurting. It might have been other gods, and a hammer, not an axe. Every cosmological story has variations. Zeus swallowed Metis, an older deity, also a goddess of wisdom, because Gaia warned him any product of a union with Metis would threaten his power. In his belly Metis forged my armour and helmet, and the hammering gave him a headache. ar What are all these stories for? a Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the religious formula to which life shapes itself, inasmuch as its characteristics are a reproduction of the unconscious. ar Is there anything else you’re the goddess of besides knowledge and wisdom? a Art. ar What’s on your mind about it at the moment? a A panel discussion at the Jewish Museum last year. It was the third of a series with the collective title ‘Painting Beyond Belief ’. I just caught up with a YouTube film of it. ar What aspect of it did you apply your wisdom to? a Apart from one participant’s articulate, self-aware statements, the whole thing seemed to be a message about the need never to be wise at all. ar Why would artists shrink from wisdom? a Well, they were painters, and painting today is supposed to be postpainting. You have to reference things like film and language to justify it. You can’t talk about it in terms of painting as such except with shame. The reason this event caught my attention is that I’m curious about the fact that although there’s a lot of knowledge about myths, gods and the unconscious today, there doesn’t seem to be much about the nature of painting now. You get subjective statements

that at best say something clear about one practitioner’s ideas, but as a rule you don’t even get that. It’s just fragments of cultural analysis that they feel under some kind of obligation in a public situation to pretend to identify with even though they never really seem to have much to do with them. The nadir wasn’t the YouTube film, in fact, but a written interview with Jacqueline Humphries I read online after it ended. She was one of the participants on the panel. I absolutely salute her work. Those paintings are powerful because you’re really looking at nothing but strokes. They’re free but ordered. Spontaneous but structured. The large scale is exhilarating. I hoped the interview would clarify her contribution to the panel discussion, which was muddled, but no more than the statements made by all the other speakers except David Salle. He has emerged recently as the only painter alive that can explain a painting charmingly and relevantly. ar And did it clarify it? a No, it was the same. She said her use of silver paint, with its reflective qualities, which creates visual confusion, related to her interest in film noir. When an actor is lit in such a way that they seem to be broken up – a familiar visual trope of the noir genre – it’s impossible to trust anything they say. But there was a slippage between exteriorising thought processes while working in the studio and summarising ideas found in a book. ar So the interview was worse than the film? a With the film, streams of hope-for-the-best subintellectualisms made one zone out sometimes, whereas in cold print they’re less escapable. The structure of the panel discussion was that participants had to show images of their work followed by one that wasn’t that but, rather, any image or object that meant a lot to them. Humphries showed a Cézanne bathers painting fused with a still from Orson Welles’s The Lady of Shanghai. One superimposed over the other. She was impressed by the fit: “This all-over colour field painting, essentially, with this black-and-white noir image.” I felt I was being offered compensation for a dissatisfaction I don’t actually have. I don’t think paintings are inherently incomplete or that the genuine thoughts involved in making them are impossible to admit. Why not simply state that maybe one finds value in the mere establishing of a surface? You might be shocked that so much really can be left out. You might find yourself

facing page Gustav Klimt, Pallas Athene, 1898, oil on canvas and inlay, 75 × 75 cm. © and courtesy Wien Museum, 2015

October 2015

sometimes wishing you could do more, even want more, and be more ambitious. But the fact is you find significance in this limited activity. You’re grateful you’ve got away with it and had sales for years, as well as international shows, publicity and official endorsement. ar It risks alienating listeners who want to be stroked. a Yes, and a great deal more could be said, of course, but it’s difficult to begin to do that from a foundation of statements that are nothing like this, just smokescreens of denial and irrelevant offerings. ar What else was said? a Humphries never thought about paintings, but always about “other things”. I find this assumption that other things are needed is everywhere now. ar Where, for example? a The National Gallery in London put on a show over the summer of a few of their paintings, with each work accompanied by a specially commissioned related installation created by an artist working in the medium of sound. The rationale was that, for visitors, it would bring new meaning to the works, in sound form. ar What’s unwise about that? a Paintings have enough meaning already in painting form. ar Did Jacqueline Humphries really think like that, too? a The common ground is platitudes being presented as ideas and ideas being thought of as necessary for a medium that’s short of them. The “other things” that Humphries – this genuinely formidable painter – thinks about instead of paintings turned out to be incredibly tame. They really were the equivalent of the National Gallery’s soundscapes, one of which was a recording of single violin notes played on different speakers, relating to the inclusion by Holbein in The Ambassadors of an image of a lute. There’s an effect of sogginess, not fieriness. Besides film noir, Humphries thought about Woody Allen. The paradox of his films is that “… he was a stand-up comedian but he loved Bergman”. Just as Cézanne can join Orson Welles, she implied, Allen fused with Bergman. “And he really does manage to do it. They’re comedies, but you come away thinking serious things. You might even be depressed.” There’s nothing you can do when someone drones on like that in an intimate chat, for example, stating the boringly obvious as if it’s a blinding insight. You can only look away and wait for it to stop. But with public discussion about art, it’s an arrested moment. It’s been going on for years.

ar Who else was there? a Charline von Heyl said of her fascination with verbal language: “You get to a point where you find a moment where it conveys what it wants without following the narrative of the words.” ar That sounds interesting. a I agree. But it was followed by an absurdly literal account of language and limits. It was the equivalent of someone explaining Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage by saying they literally remember being a baby and looking in a mirror and acquiring language. ar How did it go? a I should emphasise I admire von Heyl’s compositions because they cause the viewer to perceive in any individual work by her not one visual order but a multitude of them, constantly shifting. Sheer visual intelligence has an exhilarating effect. In any case, she said she recently used words to save a painting. It was an unusual format for her, wide and narrow, and she quickly discovered the middle threatened to be incoherent unless she found something to enable her to get a grip on it. A celebrated recent book by the author Jason Schwartz, a young reclaimer of classic Modernism of the Joyce and Stein kind, has been obsessing her because of its innovative use of language. Without a definite aim in mind, she copied lines from it onto strips of paper. Then she decided to use the strips to compose a structure in the middle of this painting, the problematic area. It worked. Language did the trick. The painting’s formality now solved and the words no longer needed, she got rid of them and retained only the strip forms. Again with this story, like the film noir and Woody Allen ones, no light has been cast on anything, and lip service is just being paid to concepts that sound important.

a Wisdom is at a low level where painting is concerned. ar What do you counsel? a There’s a lot that can be said about what really goes on in the making of a painting, which a panel of genuine achievers – another one was Carroll Dunham – had difficulty in attempting because of a nearly unanimous but unspoken agreement that intoning truisms and clichés from middlebrow chat about the arts is the only possible discourse. The purpose of it is to elevate works that are in a visual medium in ways remote from anything you can actually see with your eyes. Remember Frank Stella in the 1960s said what you see is what you see. But his selfexplanation 50 years ago, while logical and conventionally articulate, nevertheless leads to delightful surprises, because of his breakdown of what’s possible for art – for example, proposing that a viable subject could just be to find out if paint on canvas can ever look as good as it does in the can. By contrast the talk of these panel members in the Jewish Museum last year was anything but surprising. ar I see you’re wearing a cloak over your golden armour, trimmed with live snakes. a Yes, one of my forebears is the Minoan domestic snake goddess. ar And there’s an owl on your head. Isn’t there a saying about that? a Hegel wrote: ‘The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk.’ Minerva is the name of my

ar Can you bring your language down to earth a bit? a Think of the London artworld, this site of power. It wasn’t always so. If you were an artist in the 1970s you got used to an appalling sound every Saturday evening in the studio at 5.45pm. I’m referring of course to braying on Critic’s Forum on bbc Radio 3, about, for example, painted portraits. How the eyes always seem to follow you around the room. ar Haha, yes, I know what you mean. It really was insufferable. a There was a feeling of the inevitable about the limited artistic horizons that the redundant public honking of art critic Marina Vaizey, for example – a regular contributor on that programme – stood for. But now with hindsight the broader cultural stultification of spirit and mind it represented is perfectly clear – the dull provincialism of art in the uk, which had to be moved on from, as indeed it was. ar I think she still survives. a Good luck to her. next month The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce on the indexicality of the Simchowitz Collection

ar What do you conclude?

Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl, 1837, sepia ink and pencil on paper

Roman counterpart. The owl is my symbol. They see in the dark. Hegel was thinking about the philosophy of history. He meant that knowledge spreads its wings not at the height of events but at their ending. To return to art (and moving away from paintings as such), one of the tasks of thought about it is to fight the tendency whereby learning becomes its opposite, and meaning is considered deep only when it’s shallow – the narratives of explanation take a rigidly unchanging form, and genuine ideas are considered unhelpful for education. A typical representative of this upside-down system asks what is learned by a fresh set of perceptions and answers its own question with a smug and resentful ‘nothing much’.

ArtReview

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My dearest Love, I cannot rest until I have written imploring forgiveness for leaving you so abruptly, and in such jealous anger. What your thoughts to-day must be of me I dare not imagine. I have nothing to say by way of excuse for my churlish behaviour 77

ArtReview

Philippe Parreno Interview by Tom Eccles

October 2015

Working across a wide range of media, French artist Philippe Parreno came to prominence during the 1990s and is known both for his collaborative approach to artmaking (with artists such as Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon and Tino Sehgal) and for treating exhibitions as objects or artworks in themselves, rather than as a collection of discrete works, most notably in his 2013 solo exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and as cocurator of Il Tempo del Postino (2007–9), a group exhibition in which the participating artists sought to occupy time rather than space. Following his recent exhibition h {n)y p n(y} osis at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and in advance of a new solo show at Hangar Bicocca in Milan, ArtReview asked him to explore that process of exhibition-making with one of the New York show’s curators, Tom Eccles. artreview Your upcoming exhibition at Hangar Bicocca in Milan comes on the heels of two enormous projects: at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris two years ago and the Park Avenue Armory in New York this summer. How are they related? philippe parreno I didn’t plan them as a trilogy, or in three chapters. They can’t be related, because what I generally do is so specific to the place that will hold the exhibition. I don’t ‘travel’ shows. I find it impossible. You know, I have always been occupied by the same question: how does a form appear and disappear in space and time? You could say that this is the ontology of the work: what script needs to be invented? Under which circumstances can it appear as a form and an author? To me the work and the exhibition are a permanent negotiation. The Palais de Tokyo exhibition started with a reading – the same way that you might begin if you were working, let’s say, on an urban plan. Indeed, it began more like an intervention in a landscape than in a building. We learned that the space was blind to the city: even though it’s one of the most beautiful spots in Paris, it’s actually a blind space. There is no access to the outside view, and the building is layered to the river. So it all started with a blind space, and a schizophrenic institution. When I started working on the exhibition, I did not have any plan other than to think – to think about an exhibition as a public garden. The exhibition belonged, in a way, to a building. In the Palais de Tokyo there was a series of labels [on miniature screens] flickering with extracts from a book I wrote in 1995 called Snow Dancing, which Liam Gillick published with Jack Wendler. The book started with these words: ‘We are in a big building, and something’s about to happen. The original function of the building had been forgotten, but it remained, a certain aura.’

All I am trying to say is that the shows are à propos: they are quite specific. The Armory went in another direction. If the Palais de Tokyo was conceived as a garden, then I approached the Armory like a plaza, because it’s an entire block of Manhattan. The reading of the space was quite easy to do: the Armory is a city block; how do you transform it into a public space? You leave it open, but then how do you produce attention and time in an open space? You have a given volume, and you want to produce the maximum of time in it. It’s actually the same topological problem you face if you want to produce an efficient voltaic pile. You have to increase the percentage points of electrolytes in a limited volume. I like to think about a space as a battery. The Palais de Tokyo was much more about parallel events running throughout a promenade in a consistent Euclidean space. You couldn’t actually see the space in one glance, but rather through a parcours. At the Armory, you had to embrace the space entirely right

All I am trying to say is that the shows are à propos: they are quite specific. The Armory went in another direction. If the Palais de Tokyo was conceived as a garden, then I approached the Armory like a plaza, because it’s an entire block of Manhattan when you entered, so it became much more of a linear journey that folds itself in a Riemannian space [a branch of differential geometry that enabled Einstein’s general theory of relativity]. ar What lessons did you learn, or more generally, what have you taken away from those two exhibitions that will inform what you do in Milan? pp At Hangar Bicocca, the exhibition pays less attention to the architecture. It’s again a space that fits pretty well with the ideas in Snow Dancing. There’s a legacy of transforming these kinds of industrial spaces into art centres. The story in Snow Dancing begins with the depiction of a building in which a party is going to take place, as well as a series of speculative comments regarding the past function of the historical site. The Magasin in Grenoble, where I grew up as an art student, was exactly that kind of space. So Hangar Bicocca is familiar, and this familiarity allows me to be more intimate or reflective. The show is called Hypothesis, so it’s an attempt to explain or understand. I don’t know what yet, precisely…

ArtReview

There is something interesting that I would like to develop in Milan with the Marquee series [2006–, in which the artist explores space through experiments with light and the format of the traditional cinema marquee]. So I will start with the Marquees, and see where it leads me. At the Armory we tried to assemble those objects into a coherent ensemble, into a functioning musical instrument. They became a gamelan. A gamelan is an Indonesian instrument that is made out of different objects. I don’t even really look at the Marquees like objects any more: they become puppets, automata. They are like those creatures invented by [Stéphane] Mallarmé just because they sound great in a poem. A ‘ptyx’ for example is defined as ‘Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore’, which translates as ‘Abolished shell whose resonance remains’. I like to think about the Marquees as ‘abolished shells’. It sounds great! Marquees are ptyx! I would not say that the Marquees produce music but musical anagrams to a certain extent. Tino Sehgal composed a piece in Paris for them. But in New York some musicians came after the opening hours of the exhibition to play the ensemble. Liam Gillick came one morning to play; Thomas Bartlett, Robert A.A. Lowe came a couple of times. So I have some great material to play with. In Milan the show now starts with a set designed by Jasper Johns for the Merce Cunningham piece called Walkaround Time [1968]. The Marquees look like those set designs, they cast shadows: it’s a beautiful series of objects. There will be a Disklavier piano, the travelling light of Solaris Chronicles [a 2014 exhibition at the Luma Foundation in Arles, based around the models of architect Frank Gehry] that I did with Liam Gillick, also producing moving shadows. Lined up among the Marquees there will be a film called Mont Analogue [2001], which is made out of monochromatic stills, projected with no lens. And the musical composition will be central to the show: I would like to see how the Marquees might even produce the soundtrack of movies. ar You’ve always maintained that the artwork can never be separated from its own mode of display. Can you explain that further? pp It’s true for any artform: there was a time when a painting formed a world in itself, so the accumulation of canvases hung next to each other did not ruin their individual valuation. The modern artistic sensibility started to envision holes and leave spaces in between the works. The artwork became incomplete. It’s a quasiobject; it becomes an object only when exposed, and each ‘exposition’ will change it. Like those objects used in rituals in Mali. Each time they come out they appear to be different because

above Anywhere, Anywhere, Out of the World, 2013 (installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © and courtesy the artist preceding pages h {n)y p n(y} osis (installation view, Park Avenue Armory, New York). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © and courtesy the artist

October 2015

Solaris Chronicles, 2014 (installation view, Luma Foundation, Arles). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © and courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Marquee Tirana, 2015, metal frame, neon, led, opalescent Plexiglas, 1200 × 400 × 83 cm. © and courtesy the artist

October 2015

the priest ‘feeds’ them when retrieved from the ceremony. When they come back in front of our eyes, the object is different. Paintings age, colours fade and museography affects them. They’re not finished. There is an incompleteness theorem in mathematics that goes along those lines. The emergence of the exhibition as a public spectacle in the nineteenth century set up a new genre, we see the emergence of a new type of reflexive judgement, but also interrogations of the strategies of display, of how a public is addressed, of the techniques of installation and the kind of narrative that is staged in the so-called Salon. These investigations have, for a few decades now, become an established part of art history, as well as a resource for contemporary curatorial studies.

pp You can find an audience for pretty much anything. A public comes together. When you go to see a movie, you’re always a bit embarrassed by the people in front of you, because you want to chop off their heads in order to read the subtitles. This is the audience. When I go into an exhibition, or a museum, I don’t mind the presence of the other. They are part of it; in a way, they are before you in time, not in space. They know a bit more than you, and the ones behind you came after you and know a bit less. So you negotiate your core presence, so there’s something a bit aristocratic

pp There is dramaturgy at work that contributes to the dematerialisation of the object in the gallery. The interest of an exhibition is that it’s impossible to capture or visualise in a single photograph. Towards the end of the parcours at the Palais de Tokyo you could see the control room, in which the computers were commanding every event in the exhibition. The authority of the control room is undeniable, and yet the key to the project was the ability of the dramaturgy to reprogram constantly through disruptions, fragmented moments, human contingencies

in the reading of an artwork, because you are in charge of your own time, and yet you need the other. So the public is on the side of the other, while the audience is on the side of the spectacle.

and outside phenomena leaking in. There was no way to escape the control room, but there is a possibility to reprogram its structure – a structure that triggered interactions between objects and subjects and impacted your own agency in turn. Baroque architecture invented the notion of a ‘scripted space’. A trompe-l’oeil after all is a marker in time. It appears in time. So an exhibition creates a temporary community, for an hour or two, based on unregulated behaviours, and that’s what, for me, was interesting to address in Park Avenue more than in the Palais de Tokyo.

ar It’s interesting that your work (and that of a generation of artists) often comes under the umbrella of that horrible term ‘relational aesthetics’, which we all tend to understand as: ‘the work is not complete without the audience’, or ‘the work is completed by the audience’. So I’d like to ask, because I don’t think it’s necessarily true, and it seems to me that you’re making the work for the work itself, and for yourself: do you consider the audience in the work, in the exhibition? pp The participation of the viewer in mechanisms of exhibition staging is interesting but not central. The manual and mechanical experimentations by Frederick Kiesler that introduced the temporal visibility of an artwork were really interesting. The subject/object interaction was more immaterial or virtual. Another important moment for me was [JeanFrançois] Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux [1985]. Les Immatériaux proposed a new way of articulating concepts and intuitions – a new way to understand the ubiquity of ‘immaterials’. What a strange thing: a philosophy that itself takes on the form of an exhibition. Could there be a way to understand, or rather do, philosophy spatially, so that the exhibition medium would present a possible solution to the problems of conceptual articulations, which thereby would cease to be purely conceptual, and instead come to invest in the field of the sensory, tactile, auditory and visual? Some years ago Matthew Barney said something really important. He said that our generation used video cameras not to make films but to measure art in time. I like that sentence. To go back to your question, I don’t like the word audience. I don’t think that as an artist you relate to an audience. I don’t want to deal with an audience. It’s not my problem. The public is another matter. There is dialectical difference. ar What is the difference between the audience and the public?

ar What about the idea of duration in these exhibitions? Because the pace of the exhibitions is very important. Many descriptions of the exhibitions have used this term ‘immersive’, but I’m not sure they are immersive, and they’re not a cacophony, they’re a polyphony. The Crowd (still), 2015, digital 65mm, colour, sound mix 5.1, aspect ratio 1.10, 24 min. © the artist. Courtesy Pilar Corrias, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels; Esther Schipper, Berlin

ArtReview

ar At the Armory, you made a film called The Crowd [2015] that seems to play upon the tension between individuality and collectivity, both in terms of being in space, but… pp … it’s not a film about singularities. Films may by definition be about singularities: in my case Marilyn, Invisible Boy, June 8, 1968, AnnLee. But AnnLee was different already: it had a symbiotic value. The project was all about how a sign – in that case a manga character – can produce a collectivity. The Crowd takes that direction. Of course it was

know? I will never sign a work, ever. I dropped a lot of these things through a series of negotiations. I negotiated my coming out as an artist! I was not against the production of objects, I always liked art objects, but the project was more important to me. Your subjectivity is defined by a project, through a conversation developing a project. Literally projecting yourself. ar When one thinks of your generation, one thinks of a group of artists who are antagonistic, or maybe better, agonistic towards institutions, and today not only are

pp Yes I do… Some should. I remember Liam Gillick sitting in a curator’s office designing the press release. He will do that really naturally, because it is part of the essence of his work, to do that. I’m interested in the exhibition as a process, as a way to understand things, ideas, as a way to formulate ideas. In the case of Albania, Edi Rama, the prime minister, sent me a message after the election saying, ‘I have this idea that the prime minister’s building should be open to the public, because it has been closed, it was a place of secrecy. I think your ghost of a marquee would be a great sign to send to the population that we open the place, actually open the archive, and we are working upstairs, where people can freely come in and out. It will not be a place that’s super highly guarded – of course there will be some guards – but people will be able to freely access the building where I am working.’ I found it really fascinating, because when I saw it yesterday, the object found its meaning. ar It found its meaning?

also dictated by the space. It was filmed within the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory. I wanted to have that kind of mirror effect. The film was a pre-vision – a pre-visualisation – of the upcoming exhibition. I invited a group of people to come to see a show at the Armory that did not exist yet… ar You’ve talked about the poetics of the work, and the metaphysics or ontology of the work: what are the politics of your work? pp In the end the politics is folded within the poetic. I have stated, for example, there will never be any pictures of my work, because there will be no work, only a collective project, you

you showing at major institutions, and in formats that you’re determining, but you are to some extent determining the format of surveys of your work. You’re trying to think, ‘How do I make those kind of institutional statements?’ in some ways, but also you’ve been involved in a number of the projects with institutions, in terms of building institutions. Over the summer you opened a space with Anri Sala and with Carsten Höller in the prime minister’s office in Tirana, creating a Centre for Openness and Dialogue, and also trying to build an art collection for the country of Albania. For the facade of the entrance you have given a large Marquee. How does this make you think differently as an artist, and do you think artists should be involved in institution-building?

October 2015

pp Or to say it the other way around: I think it became rather clear that they did not have much meaning to begin with. Again, my work is never about anything, but about finding the condition for something to happen. I remember starting to design flashing labels in an exhibition because I was interested in the way institutions were framing your attention to an artwork. You know, traditionally in a museum, you can see something for three months, and then it disappears, but that is never decided by the artist, this is true for a painting too, painting disappears too, nothing is permanent. An artwork follows some contingencies: it follows a ritual. So all these things were, for me, a starting point of my relation to art, in which narration is written… by whom? I started to see art as spectres, spectres coming from the past but also from the future. To go back to the Marquees, they were labels: they were where a naming device and the labels became the artwork. So it’s a bit like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the aliens replace men one by one, identical to humans but aliens. Now I have one Marquee for one film. ar Many times I’ve been with you, and we’ve been in meetings, and you’ve said, “Well, why don’t we just do something extraordinary?” What for you is extraordinary? pp It’s true I say that. I realise that I say that. I am not sure what it means. Let’s leave that question suspended. Words, words, words… ar

Philippe Parreno: Hypothesis is on show at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 22 October – 14 February

Omer Fast by Helen Sumpter

Trauma, amnesia and reenactment converge in the Israeli artist’s first foray into cinema

above and preceding pages Tom Sturridge on the set of Remainder, 2015, dir Omer Fast. Photo: Chris Harris. © and courtesy Tigerlily, London

It’s May 2014 and I’m on set with the production crew at a film studio in Fast often employs the interview process – interviews with porn Bromley-by-Bow, staring at a tiny black-and-white monitor on which actors and a former us military drone operator have also been the live footage is playing of the action taking place to my right. Four starting point for works. In the three-part film installation Nostalgia men in white jumpsuits and thick stocking masks run into a room. (2009), based on an interview between the artist and a West African Shots are fired: someone’s hit. The action stops, comments are made asylum-seeker, multiple viewpoints and screens are used to play out by the director, makeup is touched up, cameras are reset and then the repeated versions of a narrative, where roles reverse and the same process repeats. The film in production, two-thirds into the shoot, is character is played by different actors. The result affectingly depicts Remainder, an adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same how the physical wrenching away of people from their homeland can name and the first full-length feature to be directed by Berlin-based cause their memories and connections to that place also to unravel. artist-filmmaker Omer Fast. The scene I’m watching is the recreation It’s not the drama of the historical reenactment in itself that’s of of a bank heist that takes place towards the end of the book. interest to Fast, however, but the ways in which it can be sabotaged. It’s easy to see how a feature film project might appeal to Fast – Fast is no stranger to complex, accomplished and powerful filmwhose short films, often including elements of scripted dialogue and making, but back on set during a break for lunch I ask him what effect linear narrative, already have a strong cinematic the different context in which he is making this film is having. “There is an obvious shared feel – and why McCarthy’s story might resonate Fast foregrounds how with him. Remainder’s partly conceptual narraelement between my work and this film in that historical events and tive is driven by its unnamed thirty-year-old I have an interest in the creative thinking that their retellings can become is part of the process of trying to reconfigure or protagonist, who suffers the trauma of a freak reconnect to language, relationships or society accident that not only crushes his body but also equally authentic after a traumatic event, but the development wipes most of his memory. As his body heals he drives himself to increasing extremes to try and regain his memory process is very different. It’s not that I’ve felt hampered, but there is involvement from other people in the script and a lot of input into and so repair his mental as well as physical sense of self. Fast has explored similar ideas about trauma and regeneration, what kind of story it is, where that story’s going and what kind of film often in relation to conflict or war, in his own work. For the 65-minute it’s going to be. The artworld is blissfully free from that, but the flipSpielberg’s List (2003) he interviewed Polish extras from Steven side is that you do have more limited means.” Spielberg’s 1993 holocaust movie, Schindler’s List, some of whom were The most high-profile artist-turned-moviemaker of recent years, actual survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. Footage of these Steve McQueen, has been awarded both an Oscar, for 12 Years a Slave people talking about their experiences of both being in the film and (2013, also a book adaptation), and the Turner Prize, but is probably being in the camps is edited together with film footage of the remains now perceived to be more of a Hollywood filmmaker than an artist. of the camps constructed for the film, increasingly indistinguishable McQueen’s forthcoming six-part bbc tv drama set in London’s from the remains of the actual camps themselves. What Fast fore- West Indian community may shift that perception again. For Fast, grounds is how fact and fiction, historical events and their subse- however, the separation between ‘art’ and ‘film’ is problematic. “It’s quent retellings, recreations and reenactments, can become equally difficult for me to think that Remainder is for cinema and not necessarily for art. The structures may be very different and the timescales real and equally authentic.

from left Remainder 1st ad Nick Justin and dop Lukas Strebel with Omer Fast and Tom Sturridge on the film’s set. Photo: Chris Harris. © and courtesy Tigerlily, London

October 2015

much longer in film, but in terms of a single person making and what he undergoes in the film – in part to accommodate the looped thinking about things, having ideas and trying to realise them, structure – there’s very much a sense of trying to figure things out in it certainly feels strange to have this fragmentation. Now that I’m terms of a crime.” aware of both worlds, there just seems more of a possibility of making Remainder is scheduled to premiere at the bfi London Film Festival work in both.” (lff) – validation from the filmworld, then, but there will also be As a consequence of those lengthy timescales, it’s almost 16 an acknowledgement of Fast’s credentials as an artist, as the first months later, in late August this year, that I catch up with the artist screening is programmed to take place at Tate Modern, as part of its on the phone from Berlin, after I’ve just seen a preview screener of lff collaboration, rather than a London cinema venue. Fast acknowlRemainder, ahead of its scheduled release date at the end of 2015. edges that there is a gesture in this decision that the public will have There are differences from the book, but in its depiction of a an awareness of both his own work and the book – McCarthy already real location in which ambiguous and uncanny events can occur, being known in the artworld for various activities, among them the Remainder does feel both very much like an Omer Fast film and a believ- semifictional International Necronautical Society (ins). But I wonder able representation of McCarthy’s tale. And without giving too much what his feelings are about how the film will be presented – as an Omer Fast vehicle, a Tom Sturridge vehicle or away, the film’s looped structure also succeeds in making both the protagonist and the book’s ‘The important thing for us even a Tom McCarthy one? “I don’t think it more conceptual ideas about time and tempomatters to either Tom or myself how the film is is that the film finds an marketed. The important thing for us is that it rality convincing. Both of these aspects are a audience, wherever that is’ finds an audience, wherever that is.” challenge, as in print what the character goes through is described more through his thoughts At the time of speaking, Fast is in the prothan via speech or actions. It’s a credit that Fast is quick to share with cess of finishing his latest film project, which will be shown in the Tom Sturridge, the rising British actor who plays the role, and whose artist’s forthcoming solo exhibition, Omer Fast: Present Continuous, at onscreen presence and ability to convey vulnerability, loss and at times the Jeu de Paume in Paris. It’s another adaptation, but this time of one an explosive frustration at his predicament is compelling. “It wasn’t of his own works: the 40-minute Continuity (2012). This film depicts a character with a rich palette of emotions. In the book he chews your three versions of a narrative in which a middle-aged couple pick up a ear off, but in the movie, for the most part he’s quite reserved,” says young soldier from a train station, perhaps their son, though things Fast. “But Tom did a lovely job. Even when he’s just sitting looking turn out to be not quite what they seem. It’s not another feature film, at a cardboard model of a house, he makes you want to know what’s but Fast is expanding the work to feature length, including more going on in his head and what he’s feeling.” characters and new scenes. “Again it’s about absence and yearning and If there’s an aspect to the film I wasn’t quite expecting, it’s how the productive pursuits people engage in to make up for something strong the element of underlying suspense is – something that for ineffable that’s been lost.” ar Fast was very much in the book. “The book wasn’t written as a thriller and I don’t think the film is either, it’s more of a portrait, but very Remainder premieres at the bfi London Film Festival on 10 October. Omer Fast: Present Continuous opens at Jeu de Paume, Paris, early on the protagonist realises that there’s a crime scene outside his on 20 October front door. In the book it’s just a detail, but as far as the trajectory of

Nostalgia ii, 2009, two-channel video installation, colour, sound, 9 min 49 sec. Courtesy gb Agency, Paris; Aratia Beer, Berlin; and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv

ArtReview

Spielberg ’s List, 2003, two-channel video installation, colour, sound, 60 min, edition of 6 + 1 ap. Courtesy gb Agency, Paris; Aratia Beer, Berlin; and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv

October 2015

Mapping Totality Faced with the increasingly globalised political landscape of capitalism, can art rise to the challenge of representing it? by Nick Srnicek

Bureau d’Études, World Government, 2013. Courtesy the artists

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In the wake of crises, the question of representing the economy emerges with particular force. The global crises that wracked the 1860s led to the first attempts to represent the global economy; the breakup of empires and the Great Depression gave rise to new figurations of nationally bound economies; and today, after the 2008 crisis, the entire world is seeking new ways to imagine and visualise capitalism. In each case, there is an attempt to understand capitalism as a totality that forms the horizons of nearly every aspect of our lives. We intuitively grasp capitalism’s totalising nature all the time: in invocations of the impossibility of escaping it, of its ubiquity. When we see that unpaid mortgages in Florida can lead to a depression in Greece, riots in London, revolts across the Arab world and startling slowdowns in Brazilian growth – we recognise that capitalism is an interconnected totality. When we lament our inability to create subversive culture, when we lie awake at night worrying about rent payments or when we feel compelled to stay late at work – we see that capitalism’s demands impinge upon our lives at every point. And we

understand totality when we see that labour struggles in China lead to the return of manufacturing in America, or droughts in Australia raise food prices in Indonesia, or when immigration enables an outsourcing of household labour. This is not to say that capitalism is everything; but it does frame our historical horizons. All of our political opportunities and constraints are tinged by it, and any aesthetic creation or political action today remains grounded within this space – even as these actions attempt to transcend it. So if crises spur reflection on the capitalist totality, what role can art have in this process today? Since his 1984 essay ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Fredric Jameson has argued for artists to take up the project of ‘cognitive mapping’ – a form of art that attempts to connect the individual’s experience to the asubjective system of global capitalism. Cognitive maps, in other words, are the aesthetic means by which individuals make sense of global capitalism and situate themselves within its dynamics. Absent such

a representation, it would seem that political action is doomed to folk politics: a series of independent local and partial movements that never gain the scale and expansion needed to transform our situation. At its worst, from Occupy to localism to various forms of regressive fantasies, this partial politics becomes valorised in itself, and the dogma of immediacy gets taken as the solution to our political problems. Little parcels of noncapitalist space are carved out, and the strategic imperative to expand is abolished. Cognitive mapping is therefore as much a political project as it is an aesthetic operation. Now, when Jameson began arguing for an aesthetics of cognitive mapping during the 1980s, he prefaced his comments by saying that such art did not yet exist. In the intervening years, this situation appears to have changed. A recent book by Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (2015), lays out a vast inventory of attempts at cognitive mapping – from films to television shows to photography and more. But rather than being a celebration of art’s contributions, the insistent theme throughout the book is the routine failure of art to establish anything like an adequate cognitive mapping. Photography remains too static; better oriented towards a spectator than a navigator. It perhaps functions as an awarenessraising exercise – look at the brutalities facing workers here! – but fails to generate any levers for intervention. Film offers more support, introducing a temporal element that lets it formulate a narrative. Yet as Toscano and Kinkle’s examples show, these almost always cash out into a politics of the personal. We can think here of the first season of True Detective (2014–), in which the symbolism and rumours within the series continually point towards an impersonal evil lying behind the murders that drive its narrative, embodied in a vast and intricate conspiracy of shadowy figures. Yet in the end, this structural focus is dispensed with and the evil becomes simply a stereotype – a brutal figure, but boringly human. Other attempts at cognitive mapping leave us overwhelmed rather than empowered. The French research and design group Bureau d’Études, for all the beauty of its pieces, is one of the most prominent examples in this regard. Its artworks present global capitalism at a glance: intricate and detailed networks of financial, political and social relations embodied in alluring designs. Yet this work remains content with the technological sublime. The viewer remains overwhelmed at global capitalism’s complexity, and struck by the beauty of the connections, but their capacity for transformation is left unchanged. Equally emblematic here are Ryoji Ikeda’s audiovisual installations: majestic and exhilarating, but incapacitating in their overloading of our senses. Their reflections on data, complexity and computation simply serve to remind us of our lack of power rather than give us any leverage on the world. It is this leverage aspect that is the crucial hinge upon which an effective cognitive mapping relies – and upon which a future-oriented art, one that seeks to change the world rather than simply reflect it, might rely as well. We can productively contrast this sort of project with the artworld’s recent fascination with objects. Taking their cue from object-oriented ontology (ooo), a variety of artists have left the relational context and turned towards a focus on the art object itself. As understood by ooo, objects are ontologically defined by their withdrawal from any relational context; any given relation only partly expresses the nature of that object. Importantly, this withdrawn nature occurs between a human and a nonhuman (akin to Kant’s noumenal realm), as well as between nonhumans (a sort of generalised noumenal). This means that objects have their own life, outside

October 2015

of any relational system. Inspired by the thought of an art without too homologous to capitalism, we should assert that it in fact insuffihumans, a variety of exhibitions (such as Documenta 13 in 2012) have ciently mirrors capitalism. Without any means to grasp the structure since taken objects-in-themselves as their focus, attempting to give of capitalism, object-oriented art is constitutively incapable of generating anything like a cognitive map. voice to the object-outside-the-subject. This type of art has already been taken to task by a series of (mostly What then can be done? Reading Marx to millionaires won’t cut superficial) critiques. In one popular line of argument, ooo and its it, but what would the parameters of a proper cognitive mapping be? focus on individual objects simply repeats the individualising logic We should be careful to heed Jameson’s warning against taking cogniof capitalism. In its more brash forms, this argument claims that ooo tive mapping too literally – as though all we needed was a geocoded mirrors on a metaphysical level the structure and problems associated map of capitalists. That being said, we should take the metaphor seriwith hyperindividualism and commodification. In the slightly more ously. A map is a representation that carves up the world along specific sophisticated form propounded by Alexander Galloway in his 2013 lines, generates a certain perspective and is designed for navigation. essay ‘The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism’, ooo is If we shift our understanding of mapping from a representational deemed to look suspiciously like object-oriented programming and function to a navigational function, we can better clarify the stakes software, and therefore post-Fordist capitalism. The tenuous analogy of the task. A map that was equivalent to the territory – ie, an exhausbetween this philosophy and capitalism having been asserted, ooo tively representative map – would be useless for navigation. This can be denigrated as ‘problematic’ – that ubiquitous term of crit- means that the criteria for such mapping lie outside the categories of ical distancing – and no more need be said. The problem with this the true (or even the beautiful). Rather than having representational account is that it functions by a series of exceedingly loose analo- adequacy as our primary criteria, pedagogy and leverage become the gies – between capitalist individualism and objects, or software and key measures demanded of a ‘good’ cognitive map. Or in other words, objects, or commodities and objects. But in fact, the problem with cognitive maps should aim to both construct new subjects and give object-oriented art isn’t that it reproduces capitalist structures. The them the means to transform the world through practice. political problem is that it lacks the means to understand the totalIn the first place, therefore, is the pedagogical demand imposed ising and abstract nature of capitalism, and remains by cognitive mapping. If the abstract totality of capiTrue Detective too beholden to emphasising the withdrawn nature talism evades representation yet structures our every(still from season 1), 2014. of individual objects. Against those who claim ooo is day lives, and if cognitive mapping aims to illuminate © hbo

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the relationship between the multiple levels, then the initial dilem- a system. It must be capable of augmenting our phenomenological ma is of transitioning from our everyday existence to a perspective experience in such a way as to make clearer the structural elements on the totality. In other words, how do we escape the settled param- determining it, thereby making them visible and open to transforeters of our everyday lives? There are difficulties in achieving such a mation. It must be capable, in other words, of translating structural perspective on its own, given the complexity and vastness of global forces into amenable aesthetic perceptions. One of the political probcapitalism. But even if the totality were representable in full, it could lems of aesthetics is therefore not just how to represent power, but not be grasped all at once. It invariably has to be built up through a how to create power. How, in other words, does one use art in order series of steps. In dialectical thinking, this proceeds through a series to construct mechanisms of effective action? In a world where the futility of conscious planning is the default of reversals that reveal a previous result to be belief of neoliberalism, creating means to only a partial image. Similar principles hold Art’s role is not to reflect, but modulate complexity from the bottom up for the narrative arts as well. In Dan Georgakas to mediate between perception, are essential political interventions. It is and Marvin Surkin’s 1975 book, Detroit, I Do here where the particularly Promethean Mind Dying, the text proceeds by laying out the cognition and action aspect of cognitive mapping arises. Having challenges facing an urban black revolutionary movement as elements attempt to expand to the national and inter- taken up a perspective on the totality, the effort now is to implement national levels. While the movement is ultimately a failure, it does a total transformation. In this light, cognitive mapping becomes a highlight the pedagogy necessary in transitioning from individual cipher for gaining control over our lives. Subjected to a bewildering common sense to a new understanding of structural coordinates. array of abstract forces, the promise of cognitive mapping is that it The aesthetic challenge is in presenting this path in such a way that it gives us some semblance of rational control over our individual and enables individuals to escape their local horizons. collective lives. Its promise is that it can create levers out of the current If the adequacy of a mapping is not its correspondence with a nadir in the struggle for postcapitalism. In the end, art’s role is not world, but rather its pragmatic efficacy – its capacity to enable political to reflect, but to mediate between perception, cognition and action. action – then cognitive mapping only takes on political significance A daunting task, but one that is adequate to the imposing political when it also generates an active means for leveraging the dynamics of forces set against us. ar

Ryoji Ikeda, data.tecture [3sxga+ version], 2015, audiovisual installation, 3 dlp projectors, computers, speakers. © the artist. Courtesy Dojima River Forum, Osaka

October 2015

Abbas Akhavan by Oliver Basciano

The Tehran-born, Toronto-based artist discreetly memorialises the impact of geopolitics and urbanisation on the natural world 96

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From tributaries trickling among the alpine heights of the Taurus with delicate purple petals and nodding, arched stem. In Akhavan’s Mountains in southeastern Turkey, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates sculptural facsimile it is frozen – somehow it does not feel dead – but are formed within 80 kilometres of each other. They travel southeast memorialised with the uncanny sense of life that haunts the figures alongside and through Syria, into Iraq, to combine beside the small of Pompeii. In this fashion it feels that the plants have come to exist town of Al-Qurnah, 70km northwest of Basra, eventually flowing outside time; or at least ‘time’, in the sense that man can fully compreout into the Persian Gulf. The once-marshy land surrounding these hend – the time of human civilisation. Looking at this quiet, poetic great waterways is Mesopotamia (the name coming from the Greek: work, it is as if, fancifully, the artist has found a way for his botanical ‘between rivers’), long held as the cradle of civilisation for the Western specimens to bow out of the here-and-now and return to a wild that world. The environment predates the first forays into empire building existed long before the miniscule human-dominated era – which, and territorial division, of course, just as it puts into perspective the in the context of geology, rolls the rise of ancient Babylon and the military battles, dictatorships and self-proclaimed caliphates that toppling of Saddam into an instant. have come to define the region more recently. Akhavan is Tehran-born and technically And yet the natural world is not exempt from Toronto-based, though for all intents and The work is frozen, not dead, the havoc wrought in the area during the last purposes he is nomadic, splitting his time memorialised with the uncanny among various cities around the world. We 60 years. Saddam Hussein’s government drained the marshlands below An Nasiriyah sense of life that haunts Pompeii first meet to speak about his work in a hotel bar in Istanbul this past spring, then later in in Iraq, enabling the dictator to hold control over the Marsh Arabs indigenous to the region. The result: between a café in London, and he has upcoming residencies on Fogo Island, 84 and 90 percent of the marshes have been destroyed since the 1970s. in Newfoundland and Labrador, and in Bogotá. His work studies the It is this juxtaposition of the macro history of ecology and the systems that human societies build around themselves – the borders relatively micro history of politics that can be read through, and was and political infrastructures – pointing to their corrosive dominance influential in the production of, Abbas Akhavan’s series of sculptures over our lives. The artist’s sculptures and installations take in big Study for a Monument (2013–15), originally produced for the 2014 Abraaj conceptual themes while critiquing the similarly steadfast framGroup Art Prize under the title Study for a Hanging Garden (with a ver- ing devices – traditional installation methods, for example – that sion shown at the Gwangju Biennale the same year). Laid out on white surround the presentation and distribution of art. His work Fatigues funerary sheets are a series of slightly oversize bronze (the material (2014) for the 2014 Biennale de Montréal at the city’s Musée d’Art alludes to the time period in which Mesopotamia was established) Contemporain is a case in point. Throughout the galleries, the artist casts of plants that are native to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates distributed taxidermy in locations that might be easily overlooked, or perhaps only glimpsed out of the corner of but, as war has further wrecked their habitat, above Study for a Monument, 2013–15, have become rare in this region. There is Iris the eye. The eight animals – all species native bronze on cotton sheet, dimensions variable. Photo: Dawn Blackman. to Canada’s vast boreal forest – were installed barnumae, recognisable by large petals that fold Courtesy the artist and Third Line, Dubai without spotlighting or signage and in posiin on each other, architectural in form. With a facing page Study for a Garden (detail), 2012 similarly tarnished metal finish is the cocoontions that hoped to engender ‘encounters’ as (installation view, Delfina Foundation, London). like milkvetch Astragalus lobophorus. In nature, opposed to the premeditated relationship one Photo: Christa Holka. the alpine Campanula acutiloba is so very pretty, Courtesy the artist and Delfina Foundation, London might have with an artwork more traditionally

October 2015

placed. A screech owl lay slightly twisted on its side against the wall that the thing we understand as ‘nature’ is merely a stand-in for the of a gallery that was otherwise given over to a large installation work long-lost natural state that existed pre-civilisation: the ‘nature’ we by another exhibitor; a red-eyed vireo songbird, supine, legs in the air, have now is a construction of man. Nowhere is this better demonappeared in the corner of another room empty save for the monitors strated in the artist’s work than through his longstanding interest in that showed a videowork, again by another biennale artist. In his gardens (it is worth noting that the specimens that formed the basis 1986 essay ‘The Case Against Art’, the anarcho-primitivist John of Study for a Monument were not from the wild, but found stored away, Zerzan wrote ‘art anesthetizes the sense organs and removes the heavily documented, in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens at natural world from their purview’, affirming later in the same text Kew and Edinburgh). In 2012 Akhavan undertook a residency at the that art essentially affirms man’s aggressive tendencies towards Delfina Foundation in London just before the private institution nature. ‘Art provided the medium of conceptual transformation by began renovating a neighbouring property into a new gallery space. which the individual was separated from nature and dominated, at In the entrance Akhavan installed a row of leylandii trees, a hybrid the deepest level, socially.’ Akhavan’s Fatigues can be seen as an effort species often used, at least in English landscaping, to mark property to exit the paradigm of art through its nontraditional installation borders (Untitled Garden, 2012); ivy growing through an existing floral – to reverse the anaesthetic – which attempts instead to confront carpet (Variations on a Garden, 2012); a ‘leak’ in the roof (Leak, 2012); and the viewer with something outside the realm of manmade society. a sprinkler system on the first floor that sprayed directly onto the While taxidermy invokes traditional natural history displays, and existing linoleum (Fountain, 2012). There was something disturbing, the collection of specimens is historically linked to the ‘ownership’ manipulative almost, about the work – it felt apocalyptic, of course, of the land, in subverting the orthodoxies of the specimens’ presen- the stuff of countless films and popular books – but it posed the very tation, Akhavan’s installation acts as a form of institutional, and soci- serious question of why we find the invasion of nature so disturbing. For Akhavan the subjugation of nature is a result not just of man’s etal, critique, one that runs parallel – in the legacy of Joseph Beuys’s performances with animals (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965, love of power, but of the unseen, arguably abstract and immaterial for example) and ‘as’ an animal (A Party for Animals, 1969) – to a wider systems that we have built up ever since we stopped being hunterquestioning of our relationship with animals and the natural world, gatherers. Perhaps turning to Zerzan again, the theorist’s 2003 and of the ‘civilising’ systems – most obviously, but not only, urban- description of agriculture as something that ‘encloses, controls, isation – that are in place to keep humans and nonhuman animals exploits, establishes hierarchy and resentment’ could by extension be used to describe politics and statehood. By forcing us to confront separate unless they are either dead or domesticated. If the sculptural elements of Study for a Monument feel like memo- nature, and championing it in its preagrarian sense, it is these systems rials, then there is a similar sense with Fatigues. The animals that of governance that Akhavan is damning as illiberal and divisive. ar Akhavan uses are not endangered – many are quite common – and instead here the memorial is to the freedom of these ‘wild’ animals. Abbas Akhavan’s Variations on a Garden is on show at Mercer Union, Toronto, through 31 October. His work is also included in Art In The Age Contained in the sanctified borders of the boreal forests, they are there by the grace of humans only – their habitat ‘protected’ by manmade Of… Asymmetrical Warfare, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, legal strictures. Akhavan tells me that he beRotterdam, through 3 January, and Regarding Fatigues, 2014, taxidermy animal, dimensions variable. Spectatorship, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, lieves nature, as we commonly understand the Photo: Paul Litherland. Courtesy the artist Berlin, 21 November – 17 January term, is metaphorical only. I take this to mean and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal

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Study for a Monument, 2013–15, bronze on cotton sheet, dimensions variable. Photo: Dawn Blackman. Courtesy the artist and Third Line, Dubai

October 2015

Frank Auerbach by Mark Prince

How repeat visits, Renaissance borrowings and a folding of time into gesture and process combine in paintings that are ‘like nothing on earth’ but what they represent 100

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Painting stops time more radically than photography because it as marks implying the drag of wet paint on a loaded brush begin to conveys relatively little sense of the temporal setting of its depiction. assert themselves over gesturally undifferentiated paint mass. Taking If we exempt its functional place in a depicted narrative, in which over the temporal reins from depiction, gestural process implies the an event or act implies what follows it, the instant that a figurative limits of a merely pictorial representation of a subjectively perceived painting represents does not transparently entail the time before or reality, as if the hand’s motion were pushing to liberate the image’s after, as a photograph does, because it is not causally connected to freeze. A series of paintings produced over decades and sharing a it. As if to compensate for this isolation, it defaults to the before and subject – a member of Auerbach’s family, a close friend, the view from after of the accumulative time of the process that produced it, which is outside his studio or across London’s Primrose Hill – communicate phenomenological, not illusionistic, and further obscures the depic- a diaristic impression, like a sequence of windows onto a world they ted instant’s place in a temporal continuum. The gestural wing of us comprehend as having aged between one portrayal and the next. Abstract Expressionism – Pollock, Kline, de Kooning, etc – ramped Reconciling modernist abstraction and empirical representation, up the dynamism of process’s trace to substitute for its foregoing of Auerbach shifted the parameters of his immediate context. Among the illusion of depicted time. We can imagine the slash of a de Kooning a group of London-based figurative painters, including Francis brushstroke having continued on its course instead of stopping where Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Michael Andrews, which it did, as we can imagine the legs of a horse in an Eadweard Muybridge emerged between the 1940s and 50s, he gained international recogphotograph extending the trajectory of their trot. nition during the late 1970s and early 80s when painting returned Frank Auerbach reconciles the modernist disassociation of depic- to mainstream visibility, having been marginalised by a decade in tion and process by combining the enhanced process time of Abstract which Minimalism and early Conceptualism had rejected traditional Expressionist gestural process with the depicted time of figuration. art media. Affiliated socially as well as artistically, these painters The two freezes – of image and process – are symbiotic. The momen- regularly appear in each other’s portraits. Their art shares a committum of gestural process resists depiction’s freeze, as though gesture ment to the empirical representation of subject matter that might could proceed where image stops. Process signifies a desire for con- be defined, to borrow a term of Jacques Derrida’s, as the ‘transcentinuance (every image calls a halt to what it depicts) as much as it dental signified’; transcendental because it is a cue for representation embodies the vitality of the subject – as in both the artist (the ‘I’ of the that comprehends its referent as lying beyond the parameters of the language that represents it, a condition of painting) and what his painting represents. Unpredictably, given that few painters Grudgingly but decisively, paint is which Derrida, for one, is sceptical. They reached maturity during the 1960s. To avow their work’s artifice so pointedly, the made to picture, its brute substance offset their work against linguistic decondynamism of Auerbach’s process hones our to convey a monumental stillness, struction, the dominant theoretical posisense of the instant it depicts instead of tion of the time, may help to highlight the obscuring it under traditional figuration’s but not stasis protracted accretion. refractoriness of their own positions within And yet accretion was probably the defining characteristic of a contemporaneous context. Their ‘transcendental’ representations Auerbach’s early work, with its layers of black, white, red oxide and defied a deconstructive definition of the artist, the work of art and earth-coloured oils gathering, by the time a painting had reached its subject matter as a triad of connected signs embedded within the completion, into a wrinkled and pitted crust. Material density gener- circuit of an artwork. According to Derrida, ‘the thing itself is a sign’. ates an internal glow that seems to assume the qualities of either the The artist’s subjectivity and his subject matter are equally continartificial light under which Auerbach worked by night in the residen- gent upon the language that embodies them. But for Auerbach and tial spaces in which many of the paintings were made, or the cool, his peers, to confine the subject to the bounds of language limited it wintry northern light that comes through the high windows of his to a generalisation. They assume the centrality of primary experience studio. The gravity of these paintings is contingent upon the conver- over the premediated imagery of the avant-garde of the time – such sion of stodgy facture into light and formal structure. Grudgingly as 1960s Pop – for which the subject is always already a sign. They but decisively, paint is made to picture, its brute substance to convey also rejected us modernist abstraction – Bacon dismissed abstract a monumental stillness, but not stasis. Texture imparts the illusion painting as mere ‘fashion’ – although its influence is detectable in the of potentiality to a deposit we associate with the subject’s immovable gesturalism of their idioms, even in the work of Freud, probably the weight. Depiction defies objecthood. The later four works in a series most reactionary among them. of six paintings entitled Head of E.O.W. i–vi (1960–1) are painted in But in Auerbach’s art, the impress of modernist abstraction, in black-and-white, with the black used for eye sockets, the shadow of a both its gestural and geometric manifestations, is clear, although the nose and the receding curve of a neck forming excavations in the urgency of its historical proximity is put into relative perspective by grizzled brilliance of the paint’s grey-white skin. Like reliefs, the sur- his engagement with the entire Western painting tradition looming faces literally reflect the curvatures, protrusions and depressions of behind it. His historical sense combines the allusive modernist’s vigthe sitter’s head and shoulders. orous, even hostile, transformation of the past with the emulousness Around the middle of the 1960s, however, the paint thins and of the traditionalist’s homage. We can intuit the paintings he has been speeds up, as Auerbach begins to scrape off his failed attempts at looking at – and until the 1980s drawing week in and out in London’s completing a painting, instead of leaving them to progressively National Gallery – through compositional configurations that find thicken its surface. The movement that is implicit their way, as if by osmosis, out of art-historical precedence into paintings of a subject and idiom in earlier work is channelled into the explicitness of facing page Primrose Hill, Summer, 1968, gesture. Process takes on a performative dimension, remote from their antecedents. oil paint on board, 122 × 122 cm

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To the Studios, 1979–80, oil paint on canvas, 123 × 103 cm. © Tate, London

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The Studios, 1994–5, oil paint on canvas, 138 × 138 cm. Private collection

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Bacchus and Ariadne (1971) is unusual in directly representing an But the geometric structure is also a barrier between viewer and existing painting: Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–3). It could be its depicted object, the pictorial equivalent of the separation between a primary-coloured skeleton, a severe distillation of figural dynamics linguistic metaphor and the reality it illuminates. In metaphor, the to a linear network. A more characteristically tangential relation to remove from an object, provided by the object to which it is compared, art history is found in The Origin of the Great Bear (1967–8), which also refreshes the reader’s vision of it. But the portrait-as-metaphor must began with a commission to interpret Titian. Although ostensibly a double as the resemblance of a simile in order to function as a likelandscape based on drawings of Hampstead Heath, it gestures to two ness of its subject. Venetian sixteenth-century paintings in London’s National Gallery: Auerbach’s art realises this paradox; that, in his words, ‘the living Bacchus and Ariadne and Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way (c. 1575), activity is something that feeds into an architecturally separate form’. each featuring a circle of stars in a blue sky. The title refers to the Matisse’s exposure of the occult alogic of painterly representation is myth, related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of Callisto’s transformation reinvented as an idiom of record in the British empirical tradition into a bear, then a constellation. The Titianof Holbein, Hogarth, Constable and Sickert. themed commission, the stellar conceit and Auerbach stresses that however Among modernist art and literature’s charthe link to the Metamorphoses returns us to objective a painting’s idiom, its acteristic tropes was the transference of Bacchus and Ariadne, but Auerbach’s title and emphasis from an artwork or text’s referonly causal link is to the artist’s composition draws Tintoretto’s painting ents to its writer/artist, from object to voice. into the equation. The dragonlike form in hand, not to what it represents Auerbach places a modernist turn on the the top left, which could be adumbrating tradition he adapts by emphasising that the dark side of a cloud mass over the Heath, follows the contours of however objective a painting’s idiom, its only causal link is to the the serpentine cloud in the top left of the Tintoretto. Auerbach has artist’s hand, not to what it represents. A painting is anchored to its suggested that it represents the descent of Jupiter from the heavens maker before its object, to its subjective cause before its objective in the Callisto myth. The compositional momentum of the Venetian effect. Empirical representational method is subjected to the disjuncpaintings, from top left to bottom right against a background of bril- tions of an abstract Modernism it would have rejected. When I talked liant blue – Titian’s motley tumble of figures down a diagonally- to him in 1986, Auerbach claimed that he wanted his paintings to be sloping foreground, or Jupiter’s dive towards Juno’s breast in the “like nothing on earth, but like” what they represent. That conunTintoretto – finds its counterpart in Auerbach’s yellow monochrome drum is realised by proposing that the artificiality of a pictorial strucground through which a concentration of dark shapes unravel, from ture is commensurate with the accuracy of its representation. right to left, as gestural impasto. To the Studios (1979–80) raises a weave of gestural contour lines The circle of stars, translated by Auerbach into stubby strokes almost to the top of an upright rectangle, leaving a margin of of sky-blue oil, converts the mythological licence of the Venetians yellowish sky so brief, the geometries of the canvas corners define it into a rhetorical manifestation of the gulf between a painting and as shape before space. These geometries are the metaphorical equivthe natural phenomenon it represents, by qualifying the yellow alent of architecturally heterogeneous alleyways and roofs receding ground as a negative representation of the ‘brilliance’ of night (in through a densely packed urban district. A dour spectrum of cobalt the sense that orange often predominates in Auerbach’s paintings of turquoises, chromium greens and greyish mauves evokes a degree of Mornington Crescent at night), a pictorial conceit as fabulous – in an daylight and temperature – autumn/winter, early evening – through empirical representational context – as the Venetians finding stars in chromatic and textural invocation before imaging. Connotative cola daylit sky to visualise their myths. Unlike the 1971 painting, with our is invested in a geometric structure that rejects, in its abstraction, its more mimetic relation to the original, The Origin of the Great Bear the contingencies denotative representation implies. The painting is a melting pot of allusions and percepissues a decoy, a synthetic abstraction that tions – literary, pictorial, topographical and The gate leading into the left side maintains that oil paint, applied with a large formal; an extreme example of Auerbach’s hog brush, must inevitably be artificially of To the Studios is a cartoonish circuitous method of discovering likeness removed from the facts of the cityscape it sign for a gate as much as a through otherness, in this case between the claims to represent, therefore it may as well idioms of twentieth-century empirical landgeometric cipher that replaces it stress that difference. Geometric gestures subordinate depiction to process. Auerbach scape representation and sixteenth-century confirms this esoteric equation between abstraction and accuracy: mythological painting. A predilection for cultivating the maximum disjunction between ‘I do like a clear expression if I can get it – something that seems to a painting’s forms and the perceived reality they transform draws him lock like a theorem.’ A theorem is a mathematical statement that is to accord pivotal significance, in the modernist period, to Matisse’s not contingent upon empirical substantiation, and what could be 1900–15 period, which dwells on a rift between representation and more removed from his representational method and the naturalistic reality in order to return us, at least in the portraits, to the specificity of subject matter upon which it is focused? a likeness. The lines dividing the geometric shapes of Matisse’s Head, The gate leading into the left side of To the Studios is a series of White and Rose (1914) – a painting Auerbach has spoken of as central to vertical strokes traversed by two parallel horizontals bridged by a his concerns – form an oblique metaphor for the head of the French diagonal. Bracing the rise of the cityscape, it is a cartoonish sign for artist’s daughter, Marguerite. Cubism, which the painting adapts to a gate as much as a geometric cipher that replaces it. The composiits purposes, purveys a relatively generalised depiction. A synthetic tion’s pattern of interlocking gestures resembles similar geometric geometry is presented as the equivalent of a unique, organic subject. networks that appear throughout the series of paintings (1977–)

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Sketch for To the Studios iii, 1985, oil paint on canvas, 41 × 41 cm.Private collection

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The Origin of the Great Bear, 1967–8, oil paint on board, 115 × 140 cm

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– variously titled To the Studios, The Studios, The House and Next Door – consciousness. Self-reflexively, Auerbach has a process designed to based on the view down the alleyway leading to the studio (in Camden forge an objective connection to a referent default to gestures that Town, north London) that Auerbach has occupied since the early 1950s. testify primarily to his own trace, and by implication, to his subjectivIn the context of his oeuvre, these variations on a single composition ity. This is a classic modernist inversion, a circling of subject matter extend a spectrum that, in sum, comprehends their shared inability (Primrose Hill) back to artistic subject (Frank Auerbach). Defaulting to categorically depict what they all connote. They suggest that the from image to gesture, the painting negatively qualifies the subjecscene that is unavailable to all of them lies somewhere between them. tivity of which it is a trace as solipsistic, producing what literary Compositional and chromatic discrepancies, viewed across the spec- critic Denis Donoghue terms ‘a subjective metaphor’, ‘an attribute trum of the series, have the converse effect of making their common of the narrator’s mind and no one else’s’. Describing his process of subject seem intimately familiar to us, although none of the differing drawing from the landscape, Auerbach transmutes his subject from versions provides us with a topographically reliable depiction. The objectively causal (‘projection on the retina’) to subjective terms (‘the axis of variations, revealing their mutual otherness from what they mind’s grasp’): ‘One looks – tries to understand what one sees as solid all represent, conversely measures the precision of Auerbach’s repre- matter in space – and then makes a pictorial image, not of the projecsentation by implying how profoundly a composition is altered by his tion on the retina, but of the mind’s grasp of the material… There is taking a fraction of a step to the left or right, or painting in different no one-to-one relation of mark to object (such as lamppost, branch, light conditions. Auerbach has claimed that to shift his easel an inch puddle, etc). The painting is a single indivisible image of my grasp or two in relation to a stationary model profoundly alters a painting’s of their relationship.’ But the performative dynamism of this process compositional variables. strives to bridge the separation between subjectivity and the world The interwoven gesture and erasure that composes To the Studios by pitching pictorial geometries as universally applicable metaphors. has a symbolic function. Paint is scraped away with a palette knife Auerbach’s attempt to universalise a subjective language may to leave blurred traces visible through the strokes that qualify be essentially modernistic, but it is also characteristic of a strain of them. The blur of absence offsets gesture’s assertion of presence, a British empirical painting, distinguishing, for example, Constable’s combined signifier of the subject’s remove from the pictorial struc- commitment to the prompt of primary experience from Turner’s ture. What we see ‘through’ the lattice of relative conformity to the natural specforegrounded gestures blurs into the image tacle of a Romanticism already pictorial In the context of his oeuvre, of absence, and by extension, pastness: a in essence. Constable’s insistence on the variations on a single composition circuitousness of the link between a paintpastness that is first the literal pastness of an extend a spectrum that, in sum, ing’s language and what it mediates chaloverpainted stratum and, second, the pastlenged the presumptions on which lateness of a superseded image. The overpainted comprehends their shared eighteenth-century landscape painting geometries are, by definition, self-negating; inability to categorically depict abstractions inserted into a depictive space – which was his departure point – was based. what they all connote that can only assimilate them by denying Romantic sublime painting proposes an equivalence between natural and pictorial its own logic. Auerbach has claimed not to be conscious of his geometrical ideo- splendour. But the dark foreground of the lower third of Constable’s grams as being of a separate pictorial order from the representations full-scale oil sketch for The Leaping Horse (1824–5) is a protomodernist they structure, as though they constituted the struts of an armature exercise in translating palette-knifed gestural process, leavened by that should be assimilated by the painting’s overall metaphor. The earth-coloured glazes, into a texture that conveys the sensory expered and green zigzags of Primrose Hill, Summer (1968) are only ‘space rience, more than the image, of soaked sedge and rotting timber dragons’ – abstractions that clash with their depictive context – if glittering under a slick of dew. Process (glazing) is a sign more than you insist on viewing the painting as conforming to a conventional facilitator of representation (dew). But in the 1825 exhibition version landscape layout of sky and land zones divided by a skyline. But of the painting, these passages have been brought to order, made the painting’s ground heckles this reading. A yellow monochrome to bear a more conventional depictive weight. The formal occasion field, nuanced by gestural process, is etched over with lines that do coerced a retreat from the full force of Constable’s initial perceptions. not function diagrammatically, but as structural underpinnings To emphasise the arbitrariness of the link between a painting and so concise their generalisations are posited as penetrating specifi- its subject is an index of subjectivity’s powerlessness to access the cities, distilled essences of collected perceptions. What we know of world. Juggling empirically objective and solipsistically subjective Auerbach’s process confirms this. A sequence of sketches is reduced modes – with the former cast as a bridge across the divide between to a geometric analogue that condenses the disparities of a series of the painter and what he depicts – Auerbach produces a record of separate viewings. He has described this process as traversing an axis consciousness isolated by the schism between the subjectivity a from information gathering to the acknowledgement that ‘one can’t painting embodies and the referent it can only denote by admitting that it lies outside its structure. The schism implies an existentialist make an image’. The monochrome yellow ground and geometric structure of heritage. Auerbach emerged during the early 1950s, as Sartrean exisPrimrose Hill, Summer are modernist tropes superimposed onto an tentialism – with its exploration, in a novel such as La Nausée (1938), empirical representational template. But this apparent clash has of the heroic and absurd isolation of subjectivity from the world in modernist roots. Empirical objectivity, after all, was among the which it finds itself – was in the ascendant. The extravagant buildup cornerstones of modernist method, with its imperative not to credit of materials that characterises the paintings of the 1950s and early 60s content that cannot be sourced from an identifiable fictional or artistic overloads the process end of the balance between process and image.

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Process appears to be consuming the picture it articulates. The axis illusion of physical volume represents a striving for the reification of of representation – from artist to painting to subject – doubles as a pictorial embodiment, but one that always comes up against the that between alienation from and connection to the external world Derridean limitation of the signified to the sign. That limitation is towards which an individual consciousness reaches. Oil paint gathers here made synonymous with a Matissean gulf between language into a relief that testifies to the breakdown, if not failure, of two- and reality. It is in that synonymity, by which abstractions connote dimensional pictoriality. The swellings of ochre and earth-coloured a reality they can only elide, that Auerbach tasks a language that is oils that dominate Auerbach’s early portraits of Estella Olive West eminently deconstructive with invoking the transcendental ‘presmanifest an artistic distance between painting and subject as synon- ence’ that Derrida foreswore. But he charges that invocation of a ymous with the contingent one between a young man and his lover. presence beyond pictorial language to operate as a sign that someBut Auerbach proceeded, during the course of the 1960s, to attempt thing is not here that was. This is not the absence of a conventionto objectify his methods, converting a materialistic process into a con- ally depictive record, such as a photograph, which pictures as present ceptual structure that not only embodies but connotes and emblema- what its freeze implies is past. Reclining Head of J.Y.M. testifies to its tises its relation to the reality it invokes. In his portrait drawings, the subject’s absence even in its own depiction, and by extension in that distance between language and sitter is realised as a geometric aura of any painting, through a metaphor based, as Donoghue says, on ‘an surrounding a subject it can only surmise. The drawings are platonic occult likeness between things essentially unlike’. Depictive superin comparison to the paintings’ sensuous embodiments. Reclining session is equivalent to morphological otherness. But the physical Head of Julia (1994) encloses its subject’s bone structure in a web of resistance of gestural process, with its illusion of presentness, to this fraught scribbles that would be caressing if they were not contingent double remove from the subject is itself impeded by the freeze that upon the slight delay between a gesture and what it connotes. The makes it a trace of gestures enacted in the past. web of marks is a snare that This give-and-take between never quite touches its quarry. the pastness of depiction, the Auerbach has described drawpresentness of process and the pastness of its traces makes ing as ‘an immensely satisfying Auerbach’s paintings difficult intellectual activity’, contrastto photographically reproing it with a painting process subject to the intractable conduce, an implicit critique of tingencies of paint’s viscous photographic representation. entanglements. Photography transplants process into an illusionistic space His portrait paintings are more ambivalent about the that suppresses painting’s remove between gestural lanqualification of depicted time. guage and connoted subject. Material presence becomes Material fluidity is an embodan image of presence, superiment as much as a metaphor. imposing a conventional axis The ochre mass of the head of between a representation and Reclining Head of J.Y.M. (1975) its referent onto paintings that manifests an equation between question their access to their paint and human flesh that recalls Auerbach’s materially denser early subject. Glenn Brown has attempted to recreate this photographic portraits. The mauves surrounding the ochre’s deposit have been distortion in the series of paintings he has produced of reproducscraped back, thinning surround to background, as though the paint’s tions of Auerbach’s portraits of ‘J.Y.M.’ (Juliet Yardley Mills). He casts thickness were analogous to the physical proximity of what it repre- gestural process as a grotesque figment suspended in photographic sents. But the black line that zigzags between brow, temple, ear, cheek space, a tangle of gestural flourishes that have been assimilated by the and jawline is a geometric superimposition, and the eye is as impos- depiction they were meant to hold at arm’s length. But Brown illuminsible to distinguish from the shadow of its socket as hair from flesh. ates the originals negatively, by severing the empirically objective link Withdrawing into metaphorical abstraction, the portrait ghosts the between an Auerbach and its subject; its last-minute demand that a individual it portrays. Its structural specificity can only recall the spec- metaphor based on the unlikeness between itself and its object should ificity of the person it cannot grasp. This testimony to the subject’s assert their mutual resemblance. We recognise that the putative elusiveness makes the painting a statement not of possession but empirical representational link to J.Y.M. is lost to Brown’s depictively absence, of the subject’s presence beyond the language that pictures present images of Auerbach’s absenting abstractions. In contrast, by eliding, through metaphor, the subject his paintings are set on it, and therefore of an unmediated and unmediatable reality. Seen in this light, the painting is a much more equivocal reversal recording, Auerbach implies that their pathos lies not in claiming to of a Derridean deconstruction of representation than it first seems. return us to the past but in convincing us that it is gone. ar For Derrida, ‘transcendent’ representation is a repression of language because it qualifies it as a mere accessory after the Frank Auerbach is on show at Tate Britain, London, 9 October – 13 March; an exhibition of his work referent’s fact. As if conforming to this percepReclining Head of Julia, 1994, will also take place at Marlborough Fine Art, London, tion, Reclining Head of J.Y.M. avows its limitation pencil, graphite and chalk on paper, 57 × 76 cm 23 October – 21 November to painting’s language, but only equivocally. Its

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Reclining Head of J.Y.M., 1975, oil paint on board, 71 × 61 cm.Private collection all images but page 102 © the artist. Courtesy Marlborough Fine Art, London

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London Regent’s Park 14–17 October 2015 Preview 13 October Tickets at friezelondon.com

Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski

In a new series of artist commissions, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski reflect on their concerns about the place of the artist in contemporary society, which increasingly seeks to commodify creativity. Taking words and inspiration from activist Nicholas Saunders’s 1975 counterculture guidebook, Alternative England and Wales, they journey through uk towns and cities, reimagining radical ideas that are returning to the popular imagination. Additional poetic reflections on the homogenisation of art practice and the use of technology set the scene for a visionary exploration of the modern world. October 2015

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Chim Pom, Tokyo, July 2015. Photo: Monika Mogi

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Very few people realise that punctuation is, comparatively, a modern device, the object of which is to make more clear and certain the meaning of a sentence or paragraph 119

fomo Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille 14 May – 2 August Anxiety, impotence and irritation: these are the three central characteristics of fomo (‘fear of missing out’) according to Sextant et plus, the resident curatorial collective at Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille. In an ambitious exhibition named after what the curators define in the press materials as a ‘vector of modern romanticism’ and installed on three floors of the Friche’s postindustrial warehouse space, each work responds to the fear of being unable to show our participation in some ephemeral, transcendent event that will come to define the ‘now’. a.p 43° 11 ' 55 " n - 05° 13 ' 49 " e (2015), by Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, commissioned for the exhibition, is composed of two elements: a wall-size video projection of the horizon at sea, changing almost imperceptibly as an algorithm layers and aggregates more than 1,500 photographs taken by the artist, and a large generic office plant bathed in a light the colour of its own foliage. The installation, with slight variations in the video’s composition, is repeated on each floor, which produces the persistent feeling that one has visited this section already. If there is a key to the softly mocking romanticism of this show, it is Sauvage’s shimmering, tripled displacement of time and space. The exhibition’s first floor, organised under the rubric of ‘Dusk’, is the most conceptually cohesive. In Tacita Dean’s The Russian Ending (2001),

a series of archival photographs documenting the aftermath of various calamities are etched with annotations, cryptic stage directions. The work’s title refers to the standard convention of providing a different movie ending for American and Russian audiences, happier and more gruesome respectively. A three-and-a-halfminute video by Pierre Huyghe, Blanche-Neige Lucie (1997), presents an edit of a tv interview with a woman in her sixties who was the voiceover artist for the role of Snow White in the French edition of the film, released in 1937. She discovered that Disney was using her voice to promote the brand far beyond the original cartoon movie, and she decided to sue to have the rights to her voice returned. In each case documents are reused, reimagined, without respect for the places in time they were supposed to bear witness to. On the two other floors, the sections titled ‘Zenith’ and ‘Dawn’ are less focused, perhaps because the idea of time’s crescendo or some beginning to time is hard to imagine in these unrelentingly simultaneous times. When Marseille wakes up it is already midafternoon for Tokyo, so where, when, does the day begin? The best moments are surprises: Random International’s Self Portrait (2010) appears at first glance to be a painting-size blank canvas framed in aluminium, but in fact takes the portrait

Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, a.p 43° 11' 55" n – 05° 13' 49" e (detail), 2015. © and courtesy the artist

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of whoever was standing in front of it and prints it instantaneously (and temporarily) with light onto an emulsion surface. Its effect is to see one’s wish for inclusion in the very thing one has come to watch tantalisingly fulfilled. Robert Breer’s Floating Wall (2009–10) is just that – an entirely unremarkable, bare L-shaped white wall that moves at an imperceptible speed back and forth across the centre of the gallery. One moment it is crowding Marina Gadonneix’s photographs; 15 minutes later it is awkwardly marooned in the middle of the room. The specially commissioned Title to Come (2015) is Anita Molinero’s idea of a horizon – a series of extruded polystyrene plaques torched with a flamethrower, forming a horizon in multiples that is beautiful without the pretence of innocence. This is also the message of the exhibition: the documents of our collective anxiety about time may emerge as beautiful images of sunsets, horizon lines stretching out before us promising that we are entitled to adventure and romance. Still, it would be a mistake to overlook the fact that these same images also document a deep fear about the loss of an authentic relationship to time. Taken together, these works both represent and critique this fear, yet with a lightness perfectly suited to summer’s capacity for slow but lucid attention. Natasha Marie Llorens

Aldo Mondino Rules for Illusions Eden Eden, Berlin 29 April – 19 September Rules for Illusions, Part 2 Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin 7 July – 1 August There is a subcategory of early modernist art – including Matisse’s odalisques and Van Gogh’s painting of a Japanese courtesan – in which nineteenth-century Romanticism’s obsession with a vision of the exotic Orient hung over into a Modernism bent on a new objectivity that would seem to have precluded such fancifulness. Perhaps this paradox is responsible for the occasional dismissal of Matisse as a soft touch. It misses the conflict he cultivated between a disillusioned ground and an escape into illusion despite it. As the poet John Ashbery has said, ‘I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word “escapist”, but I insist we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.’ Like much of the art that emerged out of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, Aldo Mondino’s is not really ‘poor’ at all, although its flights into exoticism are always earthed by materialism. A trip to Morocco proved seminal to his subsequent development. Both Raccolto in preghiera (In Prayer, 1986) and Tappeti stesi (1990) are representations of oriental carpets made of materials that imitate fabric; the former of seeds and lentils, with wetted sugar for the tassels, laid on the floor like a mosaic; the latter of layers of chipboard, decorated with oil paint, and hung

on the wall. The connection between signifying medium and signified artefact is cultural as well as visual. The colourful grains evoke a Moroccan souk, part of a culture in which the prayer carpet they compose belongs. But they connote that link with a leap from bodily food to the transcendence of religion/art. The earthy and the ethereal are fused. Although Mondino is interested in transfiguring poverty – in Wallace Stevens’s sense of the word as spiritual lack – he is conscious of his illusionism’s limitation to the language of art. The painted chipboard is made of a compacted weave of strawlike fibre that connotes more than it resembles the hair of a carpet. Its sheets are so coarse and thick they undermine the illusion they ground. The illusion is Romantic, its frustration modernist, and Mondino traverses an axis between the two. The title of Jugen stilo (1993) – a collection of blue biros dangling from wire strung around a ceiling lamp – is a pun on the similarity between the German term for Art Nouveau, translated into Italian, and the Latin word for pen (stylus). The pun straddles cultures and historical eras as the work skips from a piece of humble stationery to the most ornate of decors. This would be a merely virtuosic play of signifiers if the pens’ transparent plastic sheathes didn’t spookily

evoke the intertwinings of glass and light typical of Jugendstil furnishings. But if Mondino were too rigorous a semiotician, he would suffocate the essential frivolousness of his art, seal all the valves of its escape from the tyranny of meaning. He spoke of beginning his career when Rauschenberg was still spoken of in terms of Surrealism. His installation Untitled (marshmallow swimming pool) (1982) asks us to see a gridwork of marshmallows as a swimming pool’s tiles. A stepladder is mounted on the wall to indicate that, according to the installation’s illusion, we are underwater. The sweetness of the marshmallows is irrelevant to the conceit, its irrelevance a metaphor for the extravagance of Mondino’s conversion of light into water, or time into space. Analogy is pitched as alchemy. Paintings of white-skirted dervishes have ceramic petals attached to their linoleum grounds, a simile comparing petals and skirts, which are each already similes (ceramic for flower, paint for skirt), and so conferring a reflexivity onto the works. For dervishes, dance is a form of prayer. Mondino’s proffering of art as a substitute for religion is only half tongue-in-cheek. The linoleum is an aggregate of coloured grains and glitter, a starry sky above the skirted dancers as well as a pattern camouflaging the dirt on the floor. Mark Prince

Sufi Fleur, 2004, oil on linoleum and ceramic. Courtesy Archivio Aldo Mondino, Milan, and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

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Bill Lynch Tanya Leighton, Berlin 7 July – 15 August Three thin-stemmed flowers, painted in oil on wood, emerge in bare elegance from a grey, streaky ground; dark, superimposed oval rings seem to suggest depressions; three additional flower blossoms line the painting’s background. In its poetry, as minimal as it is moving, the undated Untitled (Reflections), by the American artist Bill Lynch, subtly recalls not only traditional Japanese woodblock prints but also the comparably reduced and expressive flower portraits of Paula Modersohn-Becker. That Lynch was familiar with the work of the German artist from the first years of the previous century is not all that likely; nevertheless the kinship of their paintings is no accident. This affinity is the result of an aesthetic that attempts to evoke religious qualities through the concentrated observance of nature in order to visualise these qualities in the image. Such art-historical comparisons are also important to shield artists like Lynch from the hasty and ill-fitting categorisation of ‘outsider artist’. Shift in perspective: ‘Should one use artistic freedom to paint colourful pictures of flowers?’ is a question asked, somewhat polemically, in a recent interview with the Berlin art-activist group Center for Political Beauty, which is known

for its aggressive campaigns. Sensitive depictions of nature read simply as apolitical, oftentimes even as lyrical kitsch. Bertolt Brecht was famously among the pioneers of this critique of such naturalist images when, in light of the catastrophes of Modernism in the early twentieth century, he declared that ‘a conversation about trees is almost a crime’. Recently, however, the possibilities for new understandings of nature have been explored, not only in French philosophy (within the context of a critique of anthropocentrism), but also extending to a dialogue with nature within the framework of a ‘parliament of things’ (to quote Bruno Latour). Thus we might see anew the works made by Lynch, who died of cancer in 2013 and battled schizophrenia for years, and who used his artistic freedom to paint, among other things, colourful pictures of flowers, as well as trees, snakes, frogs, landscapes. They’re showcased in this retrospective compilation, curated by Matthew Higgs (in collaboration with the gallery he runs in New York, White Columns). Take, for example, the undated Untitled (Raven, after Kyosai), which Lynch painted, as he often did, on a piece of wood found in the streets of Lower Manhattan. With just a few brushstrokes,

Untitled (Raven, after Kyosai), undated, oil on wood, 51 × 38 × 3 cm. Courtesy Tanya Leighton, Berlin

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as precise as they seem spontaneous, he portrays the raven sitting on the dark limb of a tree. The brushstrokes and the clearly visible grain of the wood engage in a formal dialogue, explicitly intertwining the artist’s composition with the structure of nature. The small painting (51 × 38 cm) is thus defined above all by its empathy: by its harmony, so to speak, with nature. The raven as subject introduces symbolic references spanning from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ (1845) to Noah, who dispatched a raven to find land. The background, implied with spare but fluid strokes, again recalls Japanese art, unsurprisingly given the title (Kawanabe Kyōsai, who made his name as a caricaturist, also composed numerous nature studies). Greatly important for Modersohn-Becker, as well, was the effect of those Japanese woodcuts that largely renounced perspective and used colour to convey meaning, rather than as a means to realistic rendering. Like her, Lynch was never a mere copyist. His work unfailingly bears his unique signature, which registers as an unsettling presence in today’s artworld, not least by dint of its almost naive beauty. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

Ametria Benaki Museum, Pireos Street Annexe, Athens, in collaboration with Deste Foundation, Athens 12 June – 11 October Ametria is a dimly lit labyrinth of dark grey columns, vitrines and display cases that snake their way around the entire ground level of the Benaki Museum’s Pireos Street Annexe as if inducting the visitor into a mystery. The exhibition articulates artist Roberto Cuoghi’s interpretation of ‘ametria’ – ‘congenital disorder’, or ‘birth defect’ – in which density, disproportion, excess, a rejection of totalities and an acceptance of errors are seen as virtues. It draws on the collections of both the Benaki Museum and the Deste Foundation, with each item listed in an a3 foldout exhibition map that presents a plan of the show in the manner of an ancient temple. Titled ‘The Typo-Cartography of Ametria’, the map registers as a subtle joke in this exhibition, given the density of the information on offer: the entire exhibition surveyed in impenetrable detail. The experience of navigating the show via its corresponding handout is reflected in the exhibition proper, which opens with a multitude of maps and charts, presented in claustrophobic proximity, from an 1864 German-language map of Athens to projections for a future world taken from the archives of the Greek architect and father of ekistics (in which the history of human settlement informs a distinctly modernist approach), Constantine Doxiadis, such as a ‘Theoretical Ecumenopolis Plan’ for life in the twenty-first-century ‘World City’. Disorientation occurs immediately. There is not one point in which you’re more than half a metre from a map, making the one

in hand – which shows this section as a forest of columns – nearly impossible to use. The correct move at the outset, it seems, is to give in to the experience of the assemblage rather than study each of its individual parts. The claustrophobia of this dense first section, which also includes historical books and artefacts such as Laonicus Chalcondyle’s Histoire des Turcs, Tome Second (1662) and a nineteenth-century Koran manuscript, eases once the viewer reaches a corridor presenting works by contemporary artists including Dionisis Kavallieratos, Paul Chan and Judith Bernstein. Yet, though space has been opened up into one long corridor, this section continues the theme of density in bodily terms, as in Bernstein’s Horizontal Plus #3 (1975), a large black charcoal-on-paper study of a horizontal penis, and Chan’s archival inkjet print Orgy Before Man and Storm (2003), in which his young hermaphrodite ‘Vivian’ girls play with one another in a garden. Acting as conceptual bookends to this grouping is an extraordinary pair of Ralf Ziervogel panel drawings on paper. Facing each other from opposite sides of the corridor, Young German Art (2004) and Insolich (2005) imagine an absurd, orgiastic epic in which gorillas and humans battle it out as they fall from the sky: a beautifully illustrated splattersymphony of blood, guts and penetrated orifices. This part of the show is followed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greek textiles, a pair of paintings depicting battles from nineteenth-century Greek history and a corridor

with no columns or works at all, just seats, leading to the next sizeable chunk of the exhibition. Here, Terence Koh’s Untitled (Chocolate Mountains) (2006) – two giant pillars of white chocolate that smell more pungent as the exhibition continues its run – is presented in proximity to two jars by Anne Kern that contain delicate male and female forms constructed out of rayonlike thread. The result is a visual spectrum ranging from a monumental material form presented as a decaying body at one end to a tiny study into the delicate intricacies of a body’s construction at the other. The works sum up the conceptual movement thus far: from macro to micro. But Ametria closes on a transcendental note rather than a material one, with two groupings towards the end. In one, a first- or second-century ad sculpture of a headless man is positioned in front of a mirror, in which we see a reflection of a mask used in a 1930s production of Prometheus Bound, photographed by Greek photographer Nelly’s, hung on a wall behind the man. The mirror is actually two-way: part of Gregor Schneider’s Totes Haus u r, Gute Mutter (2002), a crate that forms a tiny closet room in which a bust of white hair gazes outwards to the scene. From inside, the mirror becomes a window through which the whole scene aligns: head, body, object, observer, history, present, spectre. Such an elegant arrangement is one way to describe this exhibition as a whole: a genuine experience rather than a spectacle. Stephanie Bailey

Judith Bernstein, Horizontal Plus #3, 1975, charcoal on paper, 274 × 790 cm. Courtesy Deste Foundation, Athens

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Aleksandra Domanović Hotel Marina Lučica Art Space Pythagorion, Samos 20 July – 10 October What story might you tell in an art space located at the edge of Europe? Ideally, perhaps, one about the continent itself, which we tend to think of as relatively safe, and how quickly communities there can nevertheless fall apart. Aleksandra Domanović has already lived through such an experience: born in 1981 in Novi Sad, then part of Yugoslavia, she witnessed that country’s split, through civil war, into seven nations. Today Novi Sad is in Serbia. This story formed her and constitutes a central theme of her art. In the small port city of Pythagorion on the Greek island of Samos, this past seems still current. Visible from here, not two kilometres away, is the coast of Turkey: a gateway to Europe for a stream of refugees, and a way station for is combatants headed in the other direction. Samos’s ancient past as an important commercial centre, as well as home to Epicurus and Pythagoras, seems as distant as an end to the Greek financial crisis. Three years ago the Schwarz Foundation in Munich completed the conversion of a derelict, dictatorship-era hotel here into a white cube. In other hands this might have felt pretentious, and attracted streams of art-collectors’ yachts. Instead, since the first exhibition, featuring Harun Farocki, the foundation has invited an artist each summer to engage politically with the location. Domanović uses the building to intertwine Europe’s history with her own. She has converted Art Space back into a hotel, specifically the famed Hotel

Marina Lučica near the city of Split on the Croatian coast. Built in 1971 by the modernist architect Lovro Perković, the structure drew vacationers from Italy and Germany; guests could bathe nude, the hotel a pocket of openness where genuine socialism seemed to reign. Domanović summered there with her parents in 1990, just prior to civil war. When the conflict erupted, the Marina Lučica was transformed into lodging for soldiers and refugees, and subsequently remained empty, decaying and overrun with graffiti. Its ruins serve today as an address for a Hungarian mailbox company, a symbol of the former Yugoslavia’s transformation into a neoliberal playground for investors. On Samos, Domanović revived the old spirit of the hotel. She attached a replica of the Marina Lučica sign to the roof of Art Space (which the islanders still refer to as a hotel) and decorated the lobby with portraits of communist leader Tito, the likes of which had hung in public buildings throughout the former Yugoslavia. Her three versions, digitally processed, are conflated with memories of her primary school teacher – the dictator now bears slightly feminine features. The main space is arranged with potted plants, as is done in hotels and offices to create an exotic atmosphere; the result is rather dreary, and here things take a turn towards the absurd. The videoworks presented here also embody an Eastern European aesthetic, for which

Domanović researched her mother country’s media archives: From yu to me (2013–14) traces the development of ‘.yu’, the domain suffix of Yugoslavia. Starting in 1958 the country broadcast an evening news programme, whose musically accompanied intros Domanović, in 19:30 (2010–11), juxtaposes with clips of techno events celebrating the war’s end. And finally, Turbo Sculpture (2010–13) shows the raising of monuments to Bruce Lee, Rocky Balboa and Tarzan in the former Yugoslavia. The effect is tragicomic, but feels a little too calculated in terms of subject matter and aesthetics. The entire exhibition is indeed astonishingly unemotional, despite the artist having lived through a war. However, Domanović does pose some questions: what exactly remains of an era shaped by ideology? What heroes can there be when brutal leaders ultimately prevail? And what role models is Europe currently producing? Particularly now, as Germany steps forward as an arbiter for a continent on which Greeks may, at the time of writing, withdraw only €60 per day from their bank accounts? Domanović’s exhibition revolves around a building where the degeneration of an entire society can be felt. Art Space, with its constructive political intent, is a countermodel: if only there were as many of these as there are collectors’ yachts, perhaps Europe would not be sailing so close to the wind. Gesine Borcherdt

facing page, top Untitled (Marina Lučica), 2012, 3 stacks of a4 paper (7,500 pages), inkjet print, each: 75 × 21 × 30 cm facing page, bottom From yu to me (still), 2013–14, hd video, colour, sound, 35 min both Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

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Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

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Fiamma Montezemolo Traces Magazzino Arte Moderna, Rome 4 June – 31 July The thin line between political artmaking and political practice itself has been well trodden in the last few years. Nevertheless, the inherent contradictions and tensions that exist when art is made with political intent remain firmly in place. The art featured in Fiamma Montezemolo’s exhibition knowingly walks this aforesaid line, conveying hope and resignation in equal measure. The show, which presents a trio of works in the gallery’s three rooms, approaches the link between ecology, the human mind and the social landscape, drawing on the output of psychologist/philosopher Félix Guattari and anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Named after Guattari’s 1989 essay, the installation The Three Ecologies (2015) comprises kilim carpets placed upon a woodchip-covered floor. Gallery visitors are invited to sit on the carpets, which feature several cacti growing through specially cut holes. The presence of the plants – with their potential to cause discomfort – represents the intrusion of nature into the safe gallery environment and, furthermore, relational art production, which, while always touching upon social issues, tends to fall short of incisive concrete political action. In the adjacent room, the film Traces (2012) builds upon Montezemolo’s ethnographic

research (trained first in anthropology and then in art, she now maintains a dual practice of sorts) by exploring the border between Tijuana in Mexico and San Diego in the usa. The result of years spent in the region, the film features long panned shots of the us-built border wall and dry surrounding landscape, giving a sense of the arduous lives of Mexicans who seek a better life by illegally entering the States. Further, it explores the constellation between man, nature and the social via an interaction with the border wall: a voiceover directly addresses this manmade construct. The ensuing monologue attempts a plea with the wall to renege on its divisive function, while acknowledging that such a plea is perhaps futile: “My protoscience makes you smile, I am sure, you are so arrogant, after all.” As the artist reflects, the wall – a hotly contested electoral issue north of the us–Mexico border, as Republicans vow to reinforce or heighten it – will likely remain, one day becoming a remnant and a curiosity for future generations of anthropologists. As an act of would-be alchemy, the artist collected ground-up metal dust from the wall, mixed it with pigment and displayed it in a glass vial hung adjacent to the video monitor in the gallery. This suggests

that in our minds we can transform things, so that even the most heinous objects can become, for example, ‘art’. (Though this ultimately seems more like an act of personal therapy than a political action.) Montezemolo’s third work here, Field Notes (2015), is an interactive projected video that can be explored by the visitor’s clicking on a remote mouse, which causes words to appear over an unspecified constellation. Clicking on several ‘stars’ clarifies that colours are linked to concepts and emotional traces connected to the artist’s research, as documented (according to the press release) in her field diary. Overall the show demonstrates an interaction with the problematic relationship between the personal and the political, an issue that looms large over the sphere of political artmaking. In particular Montezemolo personalises the human tragedy of immigration, an act that might imbue the dry process of policymaking with some sense of urgency, if only the policymakers were part of the intended audience. Striking the right balance is in many respects a thankless task, but one perhaps necessary if political art is to move forward and threaten any kind of concrete action. Mike Watson

The Three Ecologies (detail), 2015, kilim, 8 cacti, bark, dimensions variable. Photo: Giorgio Benni. © the artist. Courtesy Magazzino Arte Moderna, Rome

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Lofoten International Art Festival: Disappearing Acts Jern & Bygg, Svolvær, Norway 28 August – 27 September There’s a pervasive melancholia – and an oddly welcome sense of nihilism – that runs through Disappearing Acts, curators Matt Packer and Arne Skaug Olsen’s exhibition, housed in an old hardware store, for the eighth edition of this festival. To title a show thus, especially one located in the small Norwegian town of Svolvær, on the Lofoten islands, 186km above the Arctic Circle, might suggest some ecological concern. Instead, hand-wringing is little in evidence. In its place is an acceptance that the end of the world is coming, an apocalypse consequential of technology and the burning of fossil fuels that drive our psychotic obsession with progress. Cue a show of works that variously pull on themes of survivalism, futurology and cultish utopianism, and which, more than anything, seem uncertain as to art’s place among all this (a violin-based analogy might be apt, but the 22 artists seem uncertain as to whether they are Nero or the orchestra on the Titanic). Typical of the latter attitude is Tue Greenfort’s Flambant Neuf (2010), a circular architectural installation made from drywall that houses a film in which the artist and his gallerist, Johann König, alongside (presumably) their respective children, build a fire in König’s gallery. There’s an exhibition (not by Greenfort) installed in the space, but all eyes are on the slow buildup of smoke and the eventual licking flames. If the work demonstrates nature’s apparently timeless

ability to command our attention (and artistic impotence in the face of this), the hierarchy between humans and their environment is made explicit in Anna Ådahl’s three-screen projection and sculptural installation Impossible Image (2015). The work incorporates a pile of sand from one of the nearby beaches, a few grains of which are placed under a microscope and relayed via one screen. A second screen, meanwhile, shows digitally layered images of the dramatic Arctic landscape outside the exhibition venue. And the third, presenting a silent video portrait of Norwegian naturalist painter Christian Krohg – who, the work states in subtitles, described Lofoten as having a ‘relentless indifference to humans’ – reconnects to Burkean narratives of the sublime, a counter to contemporary art’s otherwise largely uneasy and arm’s-length relationship with nature, as compared to the embrace of centuries previous. Instead ‘sublime’ has come to mean ‘techno-sublime’ – a point aptly demonstrated in Elizabeth Price’s West Hinder (2012), a slick, mesmerising video that revels in the ludicrous visual and spoken language of car adverts. However, maybe we’re nearing a turning point (in art at least), and our breathless tryst with technology will begin to cool. Katja Novitskova’s Pattern Activation (Loki’s Castle) (2015), machinelike kinetic sculptures derived perhaps from hacked gym equipment and apparently inspired

by some Wikipedia-level scientific research, look oddly dated: art hungover from an era blindly obsessed with digital culture that seemed facile then and looks worse now. Instead, the work that holds its own against the macro-thinking themes wrapped around it by Packer and Skaug Olsen is that which engages nature on nature’s terms. Elizabeth Nolan’s series of formalist sculptural assemblages incorporating broken flagpoles suggest a world of crumbling manmade infrastructure; Jon Benjamin Tallerås’s photographs of small (but through his lens strangely significant) incidents of urban decay around Svolvær are poignant reminders of human transience. Most powerful, though, is Visitation Rights (2015), an installation by Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen. Made while camping on a nearby desolate island (a fact hinted at by the presence of a rolled-up tent), it’s a veneration of the landscape: here, a small dishlike object made of pine resin, which according to the materials list has been heated over a fire of moose dung, is suspended by twine from the ceiling. In the aforementioned Ådahl’s work there is a subtitle that notes, ‘If you lived in the Stone Age you wouldn’t know what you know now and the world wouldn’t be so simple.’ Laakkonen’s sculpture looks to a new, self-aware primitive age. The question of whether we should relish this or fear it is, however, left hanging. Oliver Basciano

Anna Ådahl, Impossible Image (still), 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto 20 June – 20 September Under the Clouds can be summed up with the image that accompanies the exhibition’s promotional materials: a stock photo of nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll superimposed with a drawing of a cloud from which curved lines radiate, emulating the Wi-Fi symbol. This awkward conflation of the mushroom cloud with today’s cloud computing is reasserted constantly in the 55-artist show, to the point of painful literalness, even when the choice of work is sophisticated and nuanced. This is the case with Thomas Ruff’s pixelated image of a nuclear cloud, jpeg biO1 (2007). Though the handout correctly states that the work is a reflection on image circulation in contemporary society and the experience of recognising historical events by way of familiar imagery, at the Serralves Museum it is almost impossible not to view it as merely an illustration of the exhibition’s subject. Even considering the number of artworks directly referring to clouds, like Ruff’s or Warhol’s Silver Clouds balloons from 1966, the meteorological metaphor serves only as a visual cue to discuss technology’s tricky role in society. This includes digital economics (Hito Steyerl’s video installation Liquidity Inc., 2014, which links economics, weather and the personal life of the main character, a former banker named Jacob

Wood; Melanie Gilligan’s wonderful 2008 multiscreen narrative video Crisis in the Credit System), digital aesthetics (the works of Ken Okiishi and Cory Arcangel), the digitised body (Frances Stark’s My Best Thing, 2011, the widely shown feature-length computer animation of her relationship with a young Italian in a chatroom) and, of course, the atomic bomb (via a great inclusion from the Serralves collection of works by the Italian group Arte Nucleare, whose project in the early 1950s was to make art that would reflect the atomic age). The attempt to prove a shift in the meaning of a symbol here turns a blind eye to the process of abstraction of terminology: the mushroom cloud is a recognisable image, while cloud computing uses the metaphor of something atmospheric and intangible intentionally in order to disguise the webs of power (geographical, corporate, monetary, legislative) that are at play in these all-encompassing information networks. The interconnected nature of these subjects is reflected in the work of a central voice in the conversation about networked technology and its societal implications: Trevor Paglen, whose photograph NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Point Arena, California, United States (2014) is part of a series of landscape images that

reveal the geography and materiality of systems of control. It also alludes smartly to the art historical sublime, its expansive seascape bringing to mind Romantic artists. In the catalogue, the show’s curator, João Ribas, draws on wellknown definitions of the sublime by Edmund Burke (the sublime overwhelms as a response to danger or terror, to something bigger than the self that cannot be contained) and Immanuel Kant (where the sublime comes to represent the boundless, that which cannot be imagined). Both ring true with regard to the ubiquitous presence of networked technology in our lives. But the way critically to confront the conditions under which we live is by questioning terminology rather than accepting it. The fault of Under the Clouds lies not in the selection of artworks, but in its approach to its theme. The historical material ends up saying little about the contemporary, both because the mushroom cloud and the digital cloud have little to do with each other, and in view of the paranoia–sublime dichotomy introduced in the show’s title. We should all be fearful of the tendency to abstract the terms we use to describe technology, which dissociate it from the system of control it has become. Step up the panic. Do it in the exhibition space as well. Orit Gat

Hito Steyerl, Liquidity Inc., 2014, hd video, architectural environment. Photo: Filipe Braga. © Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy the artist

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Here We lttr: 2002–2008 Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm 23 May – 27 September Here We lttr: 2002–2008 joins the ranks of recent exhibitions at Tensta Konsthall, the art centre headed by (ArtReview contributor) Maria Lind, that are in various ways connected to local or temporary communities. Tensta is a Stockholm suburb known for its 1960s-era modernist housing projects, which has since turned into a ghetto segregated from the rest of the city. The show Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden (2014) focused on the area’s history and its increasing economic and social disparity; Ane Hjort Guttu’s film This Place is Every Place (2014) in turn established a connection between the Arab Spring and the riots in Tensta in 2013. The current lttr retrospective centres on the eponymous journal published over a six-year span by the genderqueer feminist collective formed by artists Ginger Brooks Takahashi, k8 Hardy, Ulrike Müller, Emily Roysdon (now a professor at Konstfack in Stockholm) and Lanka Tattersall (who joined for the fourth issue), together with more than a hundred contributors from their community, invited and selected through open calls. The group’s acronym is painted in large black brushstrokes on a wall at the entrance to the exhibition. A shifting code defying fixed definitions, it has stood for Lesbians To The Rescue and Listen Translate Translate Record, among other things. Inside the open exhibition space, the total of five journals, diversified in design, are laid out on zigzag-shaped mdf shelves suspended from the ceiling, and in Plexiglas vitrines, their substructures covered

with pale-pink-coloured cloth. The texts, drawings and artist multiples in the open magazines include Zoe Leonard’s ‘I want a dyke for president’ (1992) and, from 2005, Liz Collins’s knitted red Merger Glove, directing the wearer’s hand into surprising configurations. Hanging freely in the space are embellished T-shirts and tote bags that were sold to finance the project; on an iPad, the out-of-print editions of the journal can be browsed, digitised by Tensta Konsthall and available also on lttr’s website, which has been redesigned for the exhibition. Alongside the journal-related items, the show includes videos such as Itziar Okariz’s To Pee in Public Places (2001–6) and Lynda Benglis’s Now (1973) that lttr presented at screenings it organised at, among other places, Mix nyc and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 2005 and 2006. These are shown on two monitors installed on wooden pallets, architectural elements that recur in a reading lounge covered with pillows in hand-screenprinted cases bearing the words ‘New Rage Thinking’. The do-it-yourself aesthetics and temporary feel of the exhibition design (by architect Sara Brolund de Carvalho) mirror the collective’s working ethos. Just as there is no fixed meaning to the acronym, the relations between the elements in the space appear mutable, reflecting lttr’s blurring of borders between art, fanzine and critique, and their quest to find new terms for negotiating sex, gender and the relationships between individuals and groups.

Here We lttr: 2002–2008 demonstrates that fun and politics, rigour and promiscuity are not opposites, as Roysdon states in an interview printed in the exhibition booklet. The show exemplifies the group’s approach, which engages the things its members want to see changed, such as normative thinking and prejudices with regard to gender concepts, with humour, joyfulness and perversion. And so a lo-fi stereo system placed on one of the vitrines plays back the CD accompanying the second journal, including Who Let the Dykes Out? (2003), a persiflage of the Baha Men hit from 2000. Perhaps most strikingly, the exhibition traces the networks of a community through email correspondence, snapshots registering get-togethers, bank account statements and contracts with, among others, Printed Matter, who published lttr’s fourth issue. It shows how, in pre-social-network times as well as today, a community’s enthusiasm, desire and pleasure can indeed be political tools, for all that they can also be channelled into commodity form. In a Sweden currently shaken by rightwing populist propaganda, with the far-right Sweden Democrats, who polled 13 percent in national elections, plastering the partially publicly owned metro with anti-immigrant campaigns (lawfully!), exhibitions like this one can provide that crucial norm-critical toolbox for creating a different space, without prescribing what that space might be. Stefanie Hessler

Here We lttr: 2002–2008, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Jean-Baptiste Beranger. Courtesy Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm

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Variations on ‘An Andalusian Dog’ X-ist, Istanbul 9 July – 18 August ‘Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why.’ So proclaimed Luis Buñuel (in his 1983 autobiography) of Un Chien Andalou (1929), which he and Salvador Dalí made when they were young and barely known. At the time, cinema was in its infancy and considered ‘low’ culture. Yet, or perhaps because of this, it was the perfect vehicle for realising the two artists’ surrealist vision and the disjointed pace of this new modernity. Buñuel and Dalí collaborated on the script and then shot the film on a small budget. The resulting silent, black-and-white short, exemplary of the Dadaist spirit, influenced thinking in fields ranging from film aesthetics to psychoanalysis. It is therefore both fascinating and unsurprising that this group exhibition of works inspired by the film has resulted in some strikingly varied artworks. Responding to its bizarre imagery and celebration of the irrational, 13 artists have created illustrations, paintings, sculptures and photography ranging from the slightly unnerving to the outright frightening. Our subconscious, luckily, remains as disturbing and creatively fertile as visionaries like Buñuel depicted it 86 years ago. As with any large group exhibition, the relationship between one work and the next can be tenuous. Curatorial intervention is minimal

at best, but as these are creative responses to a film that embraces nonlinear tempi and resists narrative, this does not necessarily make for an unsatisfactory experience. Instead, the viewer proceeds in a way that – fittingly – takes him or her to whatever catches the eye (unconsciously, again fittingly). The dreamlike pen drawings of Ceren Oykut grab attention for their intricate use of an overlooked and deceptively simple medium in The Trial (2015), a chaotically detailed drawing suggesting industrial encroachment and rural destruction – or perhaps simply a cluttered mind. Next one may latch upon Vault (2015) by Cem Dinlenmiş, an acrylic-onwood painting of geometric shapes in gradations of grey, distributed with a sharp precision reminiscent of Malevich’s uncompromising square. Creating an illusion of depth that pulls the viewer into a dark, circular tunnel, it could both be a commuter’s banal daily impression of the underground and the dystopia of a subterranean urban future. Indeed, circularity, amorphousness, natural decay and machines can be found in many an artist’s response. Arguably the surrealist view of modernity triggers similar anxieties in us today; at least, the film itself still communicates its era’s collective preoccupations well beyond its time and place. Photography, cinema’s foundation, is somewhat underrepresented in this selection. Maybe this is a reflection of our tendency to create directly from the imagination when we give

facing page, top Cem Dinlenmiş, Vault, 2015, acrylic and marker on wood, 45 × 45 cm. Courtesy X-ist, Istanbul facing page, bottom Ali Bilge Akkaya, 2a, 2015, archival pigment print, 45 × 45 cm. Courtesy X-ist, Istanbul

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our subconscious free rein, and nothing in our immediate surroundings is quite representative enough. However, the few photographs included in the exhibition showcase the surrealistic potential in a medium so singularly associated with the capture and analysis of reality. Ali Bilge Akkaya’s black-and-white 2a (2015) presents a familiar sight: the hard, shiny mirrors and hyper-lit surfaces of a shopping centre escalator. Yet captured, as here, from an angle of spatial disorientation, depth is flattened, up is down and nausea is our response. Works like Akkaya’s 2a and Bahadır Baruter’s digital monoprint Quo Vadis? (2015) deliver potential social and political context to the responses on display by drawing inspiration from the film’s stark visual aesthetics but choosing to critique subject matter a little closer to home. Quo Vadis?, though characteristically Dadaist in its depiction of two anthropomorphic characters, is all the more entertaining for those who recognise that their features are remarkably close to that of two Turkish politicians. It’s almost a shame X-ist chose the slowest period of the Istanbul art calendar for this show, in which any doubts one may have as to whether a response to a single artwork produces unoriginal or creatively limited pieces are banished. With the abovementioned contemporary Turkish artists in particular being ones to watch, seeing them produce independent shows in the future would be an encouraging sign of the championing of homegrown talent. Sarah Jilani

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Europe: The Future of History Kunsthaus Zürich 12 June – 6 September The case for a show on the eponymous subject of Europe: The Future of History scarcely needs to be made: while the last survivors of some of the worst horrors in Europe are dying and consigning the past to unremembered history, European postwar political solidarity is being severely tested by economic events and political actions. This mammoth show, curated by Cathérine Hug in collaboration with Austrian writer Robert Menasse, includes more than 60 artists, and around 100 works, and considers artistic manifestations of the desire for a peaceful continent. Those included range from Honoré Daumier, Félix Vallotton, Martin Kippenberger and Ian Hamilton Finlay to contemporary figures both established and unfamiliar. The selection of works is unabashedly idealistic, on occasion tipping into instrumentalisation. Menasse is a vociferous supporter of a postnational Europe and the overcoming of what he calls ‘a criminal history of nationalism’, and one of the first works in the show is Simona Koch’s grenzen/Europa (borders/Europe, 2010), a linear pencil animation that draws and redraws all the boundaries that have ever been set across the continent. In negative, a fuzzy white mass builds up as territories have shifted. Close by is Joseph Beuys’s Rose für direkte Demokratie (Rose for Direct Democracy, 1973), a fresh rose placed in a glass measuring cylinder on a marble-topped

table. Such lucid and aesthetic conceptualism is exceptional in the exhibition, however, which runs at breakneck speed from the myth of Europa’s rape by Zeus (including Vallotton’s portrayal from 1908), to a 1919 Dada poster installed alongside a flyposter of Emperor Franz Joseph’s 1914 declaration of war. After Paul Klee’s prophetic drawings of 1933, such as auswandern (emigrate), we plunge into the post-Second World War era, viewed primarily from the past two decades. Karen Geyer’s ongoing project gathering oral histories from New York émigrés who fled Europe in the 1930s is presented here as a sound installation entitled Der Stammtisch; Blick über den Atlantik (The Regulars’ Table; View over the Atlantic, 2008–15), and Remco Torenbosch investigates the development of the 12-starred European flag design in an installation of archival material. Migration, labour and global capital are major themes, as are the widespread precariousness of life and the opacity of major corporations. History is continually reconsidered, through more and less predictable lenses – an example of the latter being Anna Jermolaewa’s film Kremlin Double (2009), which features a Gorbachev doppelganger recounting his first career, in engineering, and his second as a stand-in, a reminder too that the continent of Europe reaches as far east as the Ural Mountains.

Anna Jermolaewa, Kremlin Double (still), 2009, hd video, colour, sound, 21 min, looped. © ProLitteris, Zürich. Courtesy the artist and Kerstin Engholm Galerie, Vienna

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Precisely as it starts, the exhibition draws to a close in helter-skelter fashion: Daniel Knorr’s Depression Elevation (Wien, Schüttelstrasse) (2014) is one of two polyurethane casts of street surfaces, the delicate rosy pink material making even the accidental potholes seem precious. These contrast sharply with Christoph Büchel and Giovanni Carmine’s ceau (Bootleg) (2007), a work consisting of books full of reproduced state portraits of the Ceaușescu family laid out on the ground here – within this privileged venue – like a street vendor’s wares and leaving an aftertaste like poverty porn. The final room is dominated by three works: the unsubtle Demo(n)cracy (2010) by Kader Attia, which spells its title out in white neon but for the ‘n’, which is painted in black; Ferdinand Hodler’s Die Wahrheit, zweite Fassung (The Truth, Second Version, 1903); and Fabrice Gygi’s Dérouleur de tapis rouge (Red Carpet Decoiler, 1999). Hodler’s painting presents several cloaked and crouching male figures, at the centre of whom the pale female figure of truth peacefully holds court. Sadly, though, it’s Gygi’s work that feels more apposite for the protectionist mood of the moment. A metal frame holds a long red carpet that could be unfurled in welcome, but has been messily bundled up; meanwhile, a blue revolving warning light waits, ready to fend off uninvited guests. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Jennet Thomas The Unspeakable Freedom Device Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool 4 July – 22 August “I’m back... and you knew I was coming…” What is Margaret Thatcher doing in a Blackpool art gallery? On second glance, this is a caricature of the so-called Iron Lady, the ‘Blu Lady’, a central character in Jennet Thomas’s excellent film installation The Unspeakable Freedom Device. Played with gusto by specialist impersonator Caroline Bernstein – from the blonde wig and handbag to the delivery dripping with vitriolic scorn – Thatcher’s doppelganger holds court, spewing soundbites via large video screens amid an array of props and sculptural elements from the film. But this is not a reenactment of 1980s British politics; Thomas uses the former Conservative prime minister’s era as a loose canvas for a hallucinatory dystopia. In Thomas’s world, voting is banned and citizens are persuaded to follow the Blu Lady, who (we are told) is prophesied to give true spiritual fulfilment. More like a goddess, she offers her followers the ‘Unspeakable Freedom Device’: a technology that ‘feeds’ them feelings of contentment. “These people”, says the Blu narrator, who watches over proceedings, “crave another kind of meaning.” However, this comes at a price: citizens are required to waive their rights to free speech, democracy and privacy.

If the Blu Lady is the antagonist in Thomas’s film, then Glenda is the protagonist: a cynical peasant, Glenda’s choices have been taken away, and as a consequence she desires a new political spectrum. She meets and decides to accompany anxious fellow peasant Mary, who is on a pilgrimage with her baby to ‘Blupool’ to purchase the Device. Along the way, Glenda weeds out who is and isn’t to be trusted – from surveillance spaceships to sinister party campaigners – by wearing sunglasses that reveal truths; much like Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s 1988 horror They Live. And the 80s pop culture references don’t stop there – low-budget bbc tv series like the 1981 adaptation of The Day of the Triffids (1951) and Robin Hood caper Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (1989–94) spring to mind. As with Thomas’s previous works All Suffering soon to end! (2010) and School of Change (2012), the film gaily highlights contemporary fears (in this case, of uninspiring politics and our dependency on technology) via wicked satire, as a result planting seeds of doubt – and therefore debate – among the laughs. Thomas avoids slipping into moral instruction by placing the conversation in an irreverent world;

the low-budget aesthetic (including the artist’s trademark unsteady special effects and handmade costumes) suits the film’s nod to presentday austerity. Yes, the messages are delivered through over-the-top acting and a sci-fi narrative, but as with all good satire, serious self-reflection lingers. Confronting the state of contemporary politics, Thomas mocks everything from electioneering to voting systems. It is worth mentioning here that the exhibition worried a jittery local council (which funds this gallery) so much that it was postponed until after the May 2015 general election, amid fears it might influence voters. Make of that what you will. Climaxing at the evangelical Blupool conference (filmed on location at Winter Gardens Blackpool, where Thatcher made many of her best-remembered speeches), Thomas’s film encourages the characters to break free from existing political structures. By using real Thatcher quotes throughout (including the 1980s epitaph, “There is no such thing as society”), the artist compares Britain’s current political climate with Thatcher’s, and notes the remarkable similarity. Laura Robertson

Jennet Thomas, The Unspeakable Freedom Device (still), 2015. Courtesy the artist

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No Shadows in Hell Pilar Corrias, London 16 July – 4 September On the gallery’s west wall hangs a set of what appear to be crumpled-up Scalextric tracks. For his series Global Positioning Harness (Grey Parrot Lineament) (2015), Sam Lewitt has blown up images of the gps cable in a mobile phone onto these great scarves of copper-clad plastic (they range from 112 to 183 cm long), rendering the paths of information flow as real tracks. The parallel black lines of the circuitry look like the lanes of some vast motorway, dozens of carriageways deep, seen from a great height. Lewitt has etched into these surfaces the silhouettes of grey parrot feathers – the bird most praised for its ability to mimic human speech – linking the themes of flight and communication to the life of an organism. The sculptures themselves, too, look lived-in: acid-scarred at the edges, folded in upon themselves irregularly. Like many of the works in this intriguing group show, Lewitt’s four etchings speak to the lifespan of information, and to information as life. Facing Lewitt’s works hang three large (160 × 120 cm) inkjet prints mounted on aluminium. Carissa Rodriguez’s Yesterday I Tried to Paint You (2012) are massively enlarged microscope images

of sperm cells (must information always be enlarged to be visualised?). But that is not all. As if caught somewhere between works-inthemselves and documentation of some curious ongoing performance, these images gesture beyond the gallery walls. The materials list includes ‘monthly cryogenic storage fee for donated sperm, legal contract between donor and artist’. Rodriguez has acquired some semen. She’s keeping it safe. It’s hers to do what she wants with. The prints on the wall, with their soft-focus tones of orange and teal, become a romantic – even Hollywoodian –portrait of a potential loved-one-to-be. (But what happens if someone buys the work? The sperm itself, crucially, is not included in the materials list.) They also raise the difficulty of visualising information – in this case the dna code of her donor. The very fuzziness of the enlargements stands as testimony to the ambiguities of the task. For his canvases xx28 and xx14 (both 2015), Jason Matthew Lee has taken adverts from the very first issue of Wired magazine and overlaid them with multiple coats of abstract designs.

The images we are confronted with, then, are whorls of crisscrossing lines in black and white, like impossible sci-fi scaffolds extending deep into the frame. Somewhere beneath it all, we catch glimpses of the original ads, blown up to a point where the intelligibility of the images and text is lost to the red-blue-green of the printer’s dots. But even if these adverts – and, doubtless, the now-obsolete hi-tech products themselves – are lost beneath layers of sedimented work, they remain active as palimpsests, shading the background of the image, and the way we interact with technology to this day. From the lifespan of information to the afterlives of its technologies, No Shadows in Hell casts multiple exposures upon the often intimate relationships we have with the data that surrounds and constitutes us, presenting a series of works at once pop and profoundly conceptual. This is a smart, appealing and engaging show that left me with just one question: what might it have been like if the artists had really interrogated the commodification of data instead of merely gesturing towards it? Robert Barry

Sam Lewitt, Global Positioning Harness 2012 (Grey Parrot Lineament), 2015, etching on copper-clad plastic, asphaltum, steel brackets, 163 × 117 × 18 cm. Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy the artist, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, and Pilar Corrias, London

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Parallel Oaxaca Supplement, London 8 July – 8 August Tucked away in the reliquary of the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem in Rome is a small glass cylinder that holds a bone from a human index finger. The bone, we are told, belongs to the apostle Thomas, who reportedly stuck his digit into the abdominal wound of a resurrected Jesus just to make sure it was him. The fragment of the doubting finger of St Thomas is, like all relics, an anchor for the tale, its presence only to bear evidence towards the story. This poised weight of the reliquary hangs over the fourperson group show Parallel Oaxaca, guest-curated by Oliver Martínez-Kandt of the project space Parallel in Oaxaca: the gallery’s two small rooms hold only six delicate and slight works, remnants of hands rolling and arms flexing and flailing, colourful fragments and homespun icons of unknown saints. A thin rope stretches from the entrance doorway diagonally across the room, only slightly bowed at one end with a set of almost 50 long, thin, ceramic sticks, each hanging by a thread.

They look like dried-out fingers, arranged in a muted rainbow from terracotta to bone white. There’s gallows humour in their grim pointingdownwards countered by the sky-gazing title of Kate Newby’s Treetops and the blueness (2015). On the floor in the next room is a faded pink rectangle of foam impressed with the profile of an elbow: Dropped things are bound to sink (Man flexing his biceps to show off his strength) (2012–15) by Tania Pérez Córdova is an undercut monument, preserving for our future appreciation a brief moment of macho swagger. These two sculptural works feel like the meat of the show, the remaining wall-based ones acting as decorative support; but all six works share the tendency for effusive titling. These works practically trip over themselves to provide their own interpretations and fill us in on the narrative behind their current states as artistic votives. A small watercolour by Rodrigo Hernández features a serene brown figure, sat as if in meditation: while the top half of his body is solid,

his legs are part absent, incomplete brushstrokes that suggest he is somehow dematerialising. This is, the title informs us, a Man Tempted by Abstraction (2014). The white bedsheet on the adjacent wall stained with bright, tie-dyed, aquatic blue and green swirls and a few curling brown lines by Reto Pulfer comes with a handwritten inscription across the top pinning down the scene: Die Schlangenwesen im Blaugrünen Sumpf (Snake-Beings in the Blue-Green Swamp, 2013). The success of any group show is the extent to which it creates its own context for the practices it brings together. While Parallel Oaxaca is immaculately hung, with a considerate, cautious balance between the works, somehow this isn’t enough. In the balance between showing and telling, the works gathered here emphasise the latter. Here we are told, and the possibilities and practices behind the works feel crowded out; the parallel place implied by the show’s title remains at a distance, something we can’t quite believe in. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Parallel Oaxaca, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Supplement, London

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E-studio Luanda African Industrial Revolution Tiwani Contemporary, London 10 July – 15 August E-studio Luanda is a studio complex and collective set up in the Angolan capital in 2012 by four artists – although for their first London show, African Industrial Revolution, it’s just two of the group exhibiting: Rita gt and Francisco Vidal. Perhaps that explains why the ‘e-’ aspect of their practice doesn’t seem very prominent here. Sure, the show’s subtitle promises that ‘the revolution will be downloadable’, and the exhibition partly takes the form of a website containing various slogans, sketchbook images and videos. Yet viewing their work online is far less intense or interesting than experiencing what they do in the gallery environment. Much of the pair’s ethos involves physically occupying the space: they ran an ‘open studio’ for the show’s first ten days, a sort of performance-residency where they produced work in situ, with the accoutrements from Rita gt’s performances – decorated clothes she designates Wearable Paintings (all works 2015) and clay balls derived from the Chokwe people’s religion – remaining on display. And although her image-based work, by comparison, certainly uses the Internet as a source, the resulting mashups feel more incisive, or less cursory, when printed in the form of physical posters and superimposed against Vidal’s vast, chaotic, immersive installation. It is, indeed, Vidal’s enormous, overlapping grids of paper, painted as the show developed

in delirious patterns or bright blocks of colour, that dominate the gallery, covering virtually all of the walls and much of the floor. The square sheets are handmade, giving them a rough, wadded appearance, while the papermaking screens themselves are stacked into a sort of impromptu sculpture in one corner. In the centre of the floor are his U.topia Machines: six wooden boxes that function both as signage – the letters on the lids, for instance, spelling out ‘utopia’ in the gallery window – and as containers for transporting his work and art materials: a sort of toolbox for a peripatetic producer, a mobile workshop for wherever the artist finds himself. The imagery in Vidal’s wall pieces similarly emphasises notions of movement and adaptability, suggesting a confluence of cultural routes. The largest paintings, formed from multiple tessellated sheets, depict black men or vibrant cotton flowers (pre-independence Angola was one of the world’s largest cotton producers) and are all titled If I’m free, it’s because I’m always running – a quote from Jimi Hendrix. Meanwhile, arrayed around the margins are numerous smaller, single sheets, monochrome ink drawings portraying hundreds of influential or inspirational figures, both black and white – a litany of artists, writers, musicians and African politicians – together with portraits

African Industrial Revolution, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Sylvain Deleu. Courtesy Tiwani Contemporary, London

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of many of the gallery visitors to the show’s open-studio phase. gt’s work, by comparison, is less effusive, more ironic. Chiming with recent, post-Internet discourse – marking the point where postInternet meets postcolonial, perhaps – her posters take episodes of racial stereotyping or cultural appropriation and filter them through digital formats. Screengrabs of online images of bananas, Google search results for African masks, anthropological photographs, computer glyphs, Photoshop scribbles, clipart of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) – the elements overlap or float vacantly about each other, their lack of affect unsettling. Only the final addition of a pink spraypainted exclamation mark, as if to highlight the virtual world’s proliferation of imagery, feels rather overstated. Both artists, significantly, share one motif: the colour spectrum – whether the slick Photoshop gradients in gt’s prints or Vidal’s rainbowlike sections that progress across the walls. There’s a racial allegory to be drawn, perhaps, from these continua of colours. But beyond that, the shifting hues also suggest a deeper organisational principle: a lack of hierarchy, a limitless equivalence between potential locations. The Internet, it seems, isn’t such a bad metaphor for e-studio Luanda’s practice after all. Gabriel Coxhead

Magali Reus Particle of Inch The Calder, Hepworth Wakefield 18 July – 11 October Seven sculptural arrangements of objects, each titled In Place of followed by a qualifying word or pair of words in brackets – Cross Bite, Mint, Pin Drop, Sundries, Appetites – have an aesthetic that’s neither Pop nor post-Internet, yet draws from both. Pop because most of these objects, even when broken, or merely fragments, as many of them are, come from the everyday – patterned dinner plates, twisted coat hangers, car air-fresheners, slices of lemon, a fold of rubber fabric, a fragment of printed pattern or text, bottomless mugs with broken handles that feature in each arrangement. Post-Internet because the precision of the fabrication of these objects – everything is made, not readymade – creates edges so exact and colours and surfaces so perfect that they look like they could be 3d recreations of 2d screen-based images. I might have expected to find all this attention to detail visually pleasing but probably not exciting, yet Reus’s work is both; the appreciation of how each individual

object is designed and crafted is accompanied by a strong desire to question what these precise arrangements of familiar-looking objects might represent and how they function in the Calder’s bare-brick industrial space. There are clues to the former question in the titles: In Place of (Mint) (2015), for example, includes white rectangular forms painted with mint leaves that resemble toothpaste-tube packaging; In Place of (Ordnance) (2015), a twisted metal pipe and a moulded form painted bluegrey recalls munitions. Surrogates, simulacra or substitutes of some sort, then, but still, what are they doing here? For an insight into that, a wider view is required. Reus tends to work in series: for Parking (2013–14), the objects she fabricates resemble stadium seating; for Lukes (2014), doorless fridge-freezers. With In Place of the reference structure is that of the street kerb. In each of these works the fabricated objects are placed on larger moulded forms that in turn are placed on low plinths or ‘kerbs’. And each

sculptural arrangement sits on one larger lowlevel platform with partial walls around its perimeter – more an architectural intervention – that the visitor has to step onto in order to view the works up close. Kerbs not only mark places of transition but also suggest permission – to step on or off. Permission also features in the second series of works that form Particle of Inch, itself the second incarnation of a touring show cocommissioned for the Calder with Sculpture Center, New York; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Nine wall-based sculptures, titled Leaves (2015), again with bracketed subtitles, each take the stylised form of an oversize padlock. These structures, also crafted with precision, expose the cogs, springs and cavities of their implied workings. And again the viewer has permission to look into and wonder at the structure of something everyday, only for it to remain a tantalising mystery. Helen Sumpter

Leaves (Scout, April), 2015, milled and spraypainted model board, aluminium tube, polyurethane rubber, powder coated, zinc plated, phosphated and blackened aluminium and steel, polyester resin, 40 × 14 × 49 cm. Courtesy the artist and the Approach, London

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Beatrice Gibson Crippled Symmetries Collective, Edinburgh 30 July – 4 October I just wrote ‘change’ but meant to write ‘chance’. That’s because I’m watching the film F for Fibonacci (2014) on a small monitor and the narrator intoned something intriguing about chance being the most complex form of serialism. But the newly commissioned Solo for Rich Man (2015) projects large over my shoulder, and the magnified sound of coins thrashing about on a tabletop washes out my thoughts. By far the loudest message of Crippled Symmetries is that capitalism pervades. “George, have you ever heard of George Maciunas?” asks composer Anton Lukoszevieze at the beginning of Solo for Rich Man. George, an eleven-year-old boy, is next asked if he can say Ma-ci-u-nas. Then the two play the eponymous 1962 composition, which involves ‘shaking coins, dropping coins, striking coins, wrinkling paper money, fast ripping of paper money, slow ripping of paper’, etc. It is one of five compositions throughout the piece, with two other Fluxus works and two composed by Lukoszevieze. Some of the scenes take place in an East London adventure playground with other children milling around. Gibson is influenced by radical educators and composers Brian Dennis and

John Paynter, who tried to import the ideas of John Cage and others into school curricula. George is asked to repeat words from our current economic lexicon: “austerity”, “bankster”, “capitalism”, “cost–benefit analysis”. He hijacks this task to prove his ability to be irksome, licking ice cream and putting on a range of strained voices. F for Fibonacci largely takes place in a virtual world created in Minecraft. Gibson commissioned eleven-year-old Clay Barnard Chodzko to create an office space for the child’s own fictional character, Mr Money, an la-born superhero with a spurious Japanese accent. Exploring the office, which includes a milehigh luminous parkour apparatus, chicken ranch and wild railway system, Gibson gently asks questions while allowing Chodzko to lead a somewhat tumultuous tour. Cut scenes – Karlheinz Stockhausen / drips of ink in water / a boy wearing a grotesque latex ‘old man’ mask and hanging out in a slick office space – intersect, alongside a narrative weaving together observations about Cage’s musical revolution and remarks on the vicissitudes of the marketplace. One line from an apparent stockbroker

sticks out among this fractured assemblage: “Noise is what keeps our observations imperfect.” I briefly consider if Gibson is at fault for leading situations that imply the omnipresence of a capitalist paradigm, whether in the open sandbox of Minecraft or the hallowed space of the playground. But both films delve into the space created by William Gaddis’s book jr (1975), a story of the eponymous jr Vansant, an elevenyear-old schoolboy who builds a formidable financial empire using his music teacher as a front. And this not only unlocks Gibson’s potent motif of boys gleefully playing capitalism, but significantly introduces Gaddis’s more general concern with what he felt was the linguistic, and by extension artistic, breakdown fostered by capitalism. With this, the impact of the project becomes clearer: Fluxus and idealistic pedagogies are repositioned. Not often do you wish Stockhausen would just shut the fuck up so you can string a few thoughts together – but here you do. In an anxious moment, you recognise that the music of the most prized avant-gardes is no longer audible over the noise of our contemporary world; a powerful metaphor for the deep changes that have taken place. James Clegg

Solo for Rich Man, 2015, 16 mm and dv transferred to hd, 15 min. Photo: Tom Nolan. Courtesy the artist and Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

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Tony Lewis Pall Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago 11 July – 29 August There’s nothing to––––––see! It’s–––ferocious–– and terrible. A series of monochromatic comics line the walls, featuring either completely darkened or erased frames. Their speech bubbles are sparsely peppered with words that were left untouched among passages of crossed-out text, reading like poems made by excision. Sentences amassed within the contained bands create a new narrative that rises out of the erasure: How / mysterious–––––and––Brave. While the sequences are not animated with illustrations, the relationship between the chosen text and the blankness of the image remains cinematic, as if each still were captured during a transition of a film reel: flash of white, fade to black. This opposition between light and dark is a trope within the work, though the division is never fully clean. The surfaces of the drawings are contaminated by smudges, as if the material that made the image were actively attempting to betray the paper to which it was affixed; underfoot, an expanse of graphite powder spreads across the entire floor of the space. In the centre of the gallery, a large crumpled skin of paper treated with the same powder anchors the room, personified and sullen, shrugged into being. Drawing is an interloper.

This is Tony Lewis’s Pall, the first exhibition in Shane Campbell’s newly minted South Loop space in Chicago. The demanding presence of drawing here challenges the speculative, propositional and theoretical traditions of graphite on paper. This challenge comes from two sides: first, as an environmental element, the work is undyingly formal in its response to the 280sqm of gallery space; and second, the physical installation echoes through the comics and works that have text as their primary component. The specificity that Lewis brings to his chosen materials is part of what one might call an ontological approach to the subject of race. He uses drawing as a means to conflate the formal contrast between black and white with the concept of authority, and to confront the accepted voice – a white male voice – that speaks to American ideals of morality. This approach begins with the original sources of his texts. The comics in the main exhibition space are lifted from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes (1985–95), which Watterson has guarded closely from the forces of merchandising and reproduction. In cancelling the images – essentially blacking them out – Lewis does such restrictions one better, all the while making the comics appear even more mischievous and sardonic than

the originals. In the wall drawing installed in the back of the space – the source of which is H. Jackson Brown Life’s Little Instruction Book (1991, a #1 New York Times bestseller) – Lewis undercuts the idealistic decency of that text’s intended message through the work’s crude installation. Each letter is translated to the wall using nails and elastic bands that are contaminated by the same grey graphite powder that suffuses the space. While drawing is an interloper, it is also a witness. In the face of one of the wall drawing’s quoted instructions, ‘879. Mind Your Own Business’, we are forced to do the opposite. For Lewis, and the viewer by proxy, these words are our concern. Like Lewis’s relationship to race in his work, drawing never adheres to the dictates of what it depicts, but instead mediates between a concept and its final form. The threat of graphite is the threat of ideas. The misconception of the medium, especially in relation to the temporary circumstances of Lewis’s installation, is that it can be undone or resolved at a later date. Pall stands as an exception to the common rule of drawing: while graphite may always be erased, these works cannot be corrected. Stephanie Cristello

Surface, 2015, pencil, graphite powder, correction fluid on paper and transparency, 28 × 22 cm.Photo: Robert Chase Heishman. Courtesy the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago

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Drew Heitzler Pacific Palisades Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 2 July – 22 August Drew Heitzler studies a particular piece of Los Angeles called the Pacific Palisades, which roughly constitutes the long arcing turn of coast between Santa Monica and Malibu. The Palisades today is famous for surfing and rich people, but as Heitzler demonstrates, the place is much weirder than it looks. All that money and sun combine in a history that includes German exiles from the Second World War, government aerospace contracts, religious cults and something called the Nazi surfers. This story of the Palisades reads like a Wikipedia page alive with links that drive one deeper and deeper through webs and vectors of unlikely connectivity. Heitzler does not claim to tell the exhaustive story of the area, but as in so many of his gallery historical explorations, he attempts to locate patterns and unlikely zones of associations that aim at deeper truths about the place as a whole. At the heart of this show is what Heitzler calls water logic, also known as lateral computing, which stands for thinking that goes beyond

or disrupts ‘if–then’ statements. Another way of looking at this logic, illustrated in Heitzler’s drawings and paintings, is to think of a book, fully annotated with either cryptic or illuminating notes, and then left in the rain. That blurring or bloating of information, that bleeding of edges leading to partial erasures of verbal data and its hallucinating into visual data, strike Heitzler as the very spirit that could be revelatory in the Palisades. He lays out his thesis in a large text that sits in the centre of gallery. Through water logic, Heitzler can get you from Bertolt Brecht to Taylor Swift. In Heitzler’s small paintings, Muscle Beach can be found adjacent to followers of Satan, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) is in the same context as beach parties. In larger works, such as Pacific Palisades (Doors of Perception #1) (2015), one sees the book covers rendered in ink, for example Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), allowed to bleed and drip as if soaking wet from a day in the surf. These images read like rudimentary evidence for the main event

of the Blum & Poe space, a large drawing of exploding constellations marked with multiple generations of Palisades residents arranged into family trees. In the drawing you can connect everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Greta Garbo to Charlie Chaplin to Arnold Schoenberg. There is something very much in the spirit of Los Angeles about Heitzler’s practice. In places like New York or Rome, there is a fundamental feeling of historical layering, a feeling that lives are built on other lives. History may function in la more akin to how Heitzler sees it, more like a surrealist assortment of unlikely subjects all finding themselves, suddenly, in close proximity. Heitzler, with 20 more years under his belt, may turn out to be la’s Tuymans or Kiefer, its very own history painter. I say this because the best history painters do not illustrate history but, instead, follow history’s logic into images. Heitzler does just that with la; he chases that mix of fantasy, hard environmental truth and zany circumstance that gives the city its character. Ed Schad

Pacific Palisades (Dialectic of Enlightenment #1), 2015, solvent and water-based ink on Arches, 135 × 107 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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Madison East Elbow Room in Paradise Quintessa Matranga Peasant Chin’s Push, Los Angeles 24 July – 15 August This show brings together two female artists in their twenties – Madison East from Los Angeles, and Quintessa Matranga, currently working from New York – who present solo projects alongside one another at Chin’s Push, a project space in a house in the Highland Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Both were invited by guest curator Eden Phair, and there are many overlaps between their works, such as their use of a monochrome palette and a graphic, figurative style that brings to mind comic books. Matranga paints scenes from a farming village and a fashion week in childlike black brushstrokes on white canvas, while East uses a wooden folding screen to display a found photograph of a geisha overlaid with a Japanese cartoon of a devil whispering mischievously into the ear of a naked young lady. East has also hung from the ceiling three glass mannequin heads filled with water, each containing a small Marble Lyretail Molly: a black-and-white fish that is naturally patterned like television static. Their choice of subject matter overlaps too. There are malevolent supernatural beings: East’s

devil, of course, and Matranga’s medusalike floor sculpture of a black wig draped over two bronze turtles with their heads peeping out. There are pets: as well as those turtles, Matranga has little 3d-printed sausage dogs who sit on the floor supporting her paintings, and cows and ducks wandering through her painted pastoral idyll, while East has her mollies. There are allusions to fashion, such as Matranga’s painted caricatures of four models with preposterously long necks and unhappy expressions, or her use of a wig in an assemblage. East uses mannequin heads as material, and hangs them in macramé rope cradles that evoke Japanese rope bondage and the fetish-like photography of Nobuyoshi Araki, while her folding screen suggests the act of dressing, or undressing. Both play with ways of displaying artworks as luxury objects, even in a lo-fi project space on a small budget. While East chooses a sexualised, slightly perverse mode of display and contrasts the fantasy world of the geisha against an unwholesome and temptation-laden devil

figure, Matranga juxtaposes the poverty of a farming village with the wealthy glamour of fashion shows; and by turning both of these subjects into desirable art-objects first and foremost, she alludes to the fact that the art market is another luxury-obsessed industry, much closer to fashion than it might care to admit. The slapdash nature of her paintings, the absurdity of the tiny dachshund sculptures holding them up, the fact that her project is titled Peasant (2015) and that its accompanying text contains confusing, provocative lines like, ‘It helps to have an open spec to workA complacent staff and well stocked kitchen. I’m a peasant’ – all this rather suggests that the whole thing is a joke at painting’s expense. While Madison East explores the seductive qualities of sculpture, Quintessa Matranga appears to mock the art market – the way it fetishises paintings, and poverty, and rags-toriches tales of young painters – through the exact sort of visually alluring works that are likely to flourish within it. Dean Kissick

Quintessa Matranga, Peasant, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Nik Massey. Courtesy the artist and Chin’s Push, Los Angeles

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Eirik Sæther innestemme Jenny’s @ 47 Canal, New York 25 June – 31 July From the looks of it, Oslo-based artist Eirik Sæther is actually a middle-aged mother who loves flowy dresses and homemade cookies. He seems to have raided a rundown Hobby Lobby in Cincinnati, Ohio, for his solo exhibition innestemme; it’s purposefully redolent of bad fibre-art, with handmade-looking fibreglass wall lamps and several totems of crafty Mom skirts – fashioned from patchworks of silk and polyester fabric – dotting the space. One of these, Ståplass (Stair Runner) (all works 2015), seems to have been doodled on by an untalented one-year-old. Squiggles of blue lacquer form poppy flowers, while the bottom of what looks like a skirt is lined with white fringe. Like the other Ståplass (translation: ‘standing room’) works in the show, the columnar fabric form is positioned atop a resin cast of the artist’s own feet, decorated with a dog collar and chain. Resting on a cheap stool, the whole thing pins down some gauzy fabric and a cut-up bath mat,

perhaps sourced from a Chinatown junk store. The skirt of Ståplass (Cupboard), meanwhile, is made of spraypainted patches of silk and polyester, pieced together onto a fleece blanket. Its white feet are posed on top of another plastic stool (this one pink), which holds in place more gauzy fabric. All of the Ståplass installations are a variant of this formula: some come with an extra pair of feet, some are perched atop a different kind of fabric, but all of them are pretty ugly. I get that the ugliness is ironic, but this gambit is tired. Hung on the walls are a few of Sæther’s lamps, which are cast in fibreglass from baking supplies and wooden letters sourced from – you guessed it – hobby shops. Tall and boxy, as if mimicking the shape of the Ståplass forms, they’re wonkily made, with uneven sides and varying thickness. They spell out nonsensical phrases like ‘ratch bakef romsc’ and ‘bakef romsc ratch’ in large blocky letters, spread out evenly in a vertical row on each face of the

innestemme, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy Jenny’s @ 47 Canal, New York

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lamps. The scrambled lettering is an obvious linguistic play with ‘bake from scratch’, as if that one-year-old also doubled as a subpar cook. Ostensibly a comment on how individuality manifests in clothing and language, the installation is overly formalised, and seems to touch on the topic in only a reductive way. In marked contrast is Sæther’s video Innestemme, which contains footage of security guards inspecting, and taking apart, a wooden crate in which the artist has hidden to avoid his studio building’s evening curfew. Sæther attached various decorative objects and a vase to the crate’s lid as a way to further disguise its actual purpose. The security guards laugh among themselves and marvel at the great lengths Sæther went to in order to remain in the building. The video is a hilarious sendup of artistic labour rubbing up against codes of conduct in the most ridiculous fashion. If only the other works in the show contained this much personality. David Everitt Howe

Nikolay Bakharev The People of Town N Julie Saul Gallery, New York 11 June – 21 August When I moved to New York City in 1999, with a keen eye for the idiosyncratic signs of a foreign culture, I was struck by what seemed to be an enduring atmosphere of post-Cold War celebration. I remember in particular a boastfully humorous ad comparing the glittering offerings of a us cinema chain with a lumpy Eastern European peasant family condemned to the fascinated observation of a large potato. Back in 1999, Nikolay Bakharev’s photographs of Siberian family groups posed at the beach and the seedy eroticism of young people in shabby interiors were not known in the West. Had they been, though, they may well have seemed like an artworld version of that cinematic potato. But times have changed, and these images, taken mainly during the perestroika years and through the collapse of the Soviet Union, now fulfil a different, more affirmative kind of cultural projection. Bakharev has only very recently begun to receive attention from the Western artworld, where his work appeared in Ostalgia, a 2011 survey of art from Eastern European and the former Soviet

republics at New York’s New Museum. Along with works by several other artists in that same show, Bakharev’s photographs were soon funnelled into the 2013 Venice Biennale. Both shows involved the same curator, Massimiliano Gioni. The People of Town N divides into the public face and the private secrets of its subjects. Hearty and sincere family groups wearing functional rather than fashionable bathing suits are carefully posed amidst wild grasses and trees. Located in centred compositions, these seated and standing figures project a quiet dignity through their restrained expressions and tender gestures. If the people in these bucolic daytime scenes seem more or less right with the world and comfortable in their skin, the private spaces of this unnamed Siberian town at night emit darker, edgier feelings. Young men and women alone or in twos and threes sprawl their awkward gangly limbs in poses of erotic self-assertion. In contrast to the outdoor scenes of family camaraderie and togetherness, here the gestures of sensual connection – hands grasping thighs and breasts – suggest

a kind of anxious sexual possessiveness. The soft natural lighting of the public images is exchanged for harsher spotlighted interiors with threadbare furnishings. The shambling, temporary arrangements of furniture, draped sheets and off-kilter compositions suggest that the whole scene – like Soviet society itself – might be about to collapse before our eyes. One cannot but compare these photographs to early Larry Clark or Nan Goldin, because of the shared intensity of a private, yet collective sexual world. But the despair of such us photographers is not so evident in Bakharev’s scenes. Invariably this work is framed by the gallery press release in terms of Bakharev’s implicit defiance of Soviet laws against photographing and exhibiting nudes. The desire at play behind his newfound marketability in the West is to uncover an authentic transgression; since ours has long been lost to a culture of anything goes led by big-business pornography. This latterday Western fantasy is tinged with nostalgia for an East we could only ever imagine via the image of ourselves. Siona Wilson

Relationship #80, 1994–7, gelatin silver print, 30 × 30 cm, edition 5/8. Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York

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Yoko Ono One Woman Show, 1960–1971 moma, New York 17 May – 7 September Well before meeting John Lennon, Yoko Ono had developed a substantial career within a then emerging avant-garde. Born to a prominent family in prewar Tokyo, she moved to the us in 1953 and studied at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, New York, before eloping with Toshi Ichiyanagi, a Japanese acolyte of John Cage. In late 1960 she hosted a performance programme with the musician La Monte Young in a rented loft downtown. Participants included Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton and Simone Forti; Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were in the audience. She presented her own work at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, and in Tokyo (where she resided from 1962 to 64) at the innovative Sōgetsu Art Center. During her time in Japan she also self-published Grapefruit (1964), a compendium of poetic instructions such as ‘Send a smell to the moon’ and ‘Draw a line until you disappear’, which she’d begun composing during the mid-1950s. While installing a show at Indica Gallery in London during the fall of 1966 she met Lennon. They wed in 1969. Ono continued to

work, for example publicising a faux retrospective at moma, the Museum of Modern (F)art (1971); performing in the pick-up Plastic Ono Band; and leveraging immense celebrity through collaborating with Lennon on happenings like the Bed–In (1969), a weeklong lie-in at the Amsterdam Hilton, which the pair repeated later in a Montreal hotel, to protest the war in Vietnam. Much that Ono produced was ephemeral: performances, mimeographed instructions for pieces, cards with the texts from Grapefruit; much of it is lost, such as the series of paintings shown at George Maciunas’s ag Gallery in 1961, which included a canvas on the floor titled Painting to Be Stepped On (1960–61). Remakes of these are exhibited at moma. Other works seem slight, like a coin-operated dispenser of cards reading ‘sky’, which Ono proposed placing on street corners in lieu of Coke machines, though this work does reflect the truth that we need nature more than cola. The physical manifestation of her pieces is, however, secondary. Speaking of her music, Ono said she intended it to induce a situation

of self-awareness. Similarly, the enigmatic texts in Grapefruit, for example, play on the self and its limits while shifting agency to viewers who complete the work (or don’t) in their minds. More than reducing art to concepts, they elevate it to a potential awaiting realisation. This dynamic carries on in the war is over! if you want it (1969–) slogan she continues to advertise in newspapers. Ultimately the ethos of Ono’s work is social, and she is as interesting for it as for her network, the latter a natural extension of her appeal to public participation and her manipulation of fame. While the moma show deftly surveys her early career, relying heavily on films, printed matter and recordings, like most retrospectives it argues for the precedence of its subject, namely ‘Ono’ herself, a format antithetical to the inclusive core of her work and one which fails to elucidate the complex overlaps of influence and collaboration that make her emblematic of a multidisciplinary and transnational approach, one that both blurs the line between art and life and exploits the media equally as tool and platform. Joshua Mack

Painting to Be Stepped On, 1960–61 (installation view, Paintings & Drawings by Yoko Ono, ag Gallery, New York, 1961). Photo: © George Maciunas. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York

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jj peet magicstance On Stellar Rays, New York 17 June – 31 July magicstance is a small exhibition, the first impression of which is quite modest. Attached to the walls are several mixed-media sculptures from New York-based artist jj peet’s Stilifes series and one large work on canvas. For those who merely glance round the show, the sculptures may appear naive or simply quirky, like little protruding stage sets. Closer inspection of them, however, reveals the depth and sensitivity of peet’s practice. ‘Sculpture’ feels inadequate as a description of these intricate and multifaceted works, an example of which might combine ceramic elements, a newspaper photograph, pine, aluminium, acrylic, rope and paint (into, 2013). Rather, each piece comes off as a kind of microcosm – a marvel of subject matter distilled not into minimal or highly finished form, but into a new configuration infused, literally, with the artist’s touch and characterised by an idiosyncratic approach to composition. into, for example, features a coil of cream-coloured rope hanging from its left side and a turdlike ceramic shape

(one suspects peet wouldn’t object to the simile) with six even holes punched through the back of it and dimpled all over by the pressure of the artist’s fingers; puttylike, it curls over the side of a ceramic cutout of a camera. Two tiny orangered cylindrical shapes are affixed to the acrylic base, which protrudes horizontally and also supports a small earthenware disc with a hole in the middle and a horizontal black rectangle whose bottom right corner has been painted white. The left side of the composition is pockmarked, scratched aluminium, the right a page taken from an American newspaper, the title of which has been roughly painted over in broad strokes of black, leaving only a central phrase, ‘late city final’, and the price, ‘$1.00’. Below this is a horrifying photograph of men on motorcycles brandishing pistols and dragging a half-stripped body along the road. A pinkish stain marks the tarmac, and all the faces have been whited out. If the above description appears to shift from drawing quite a personal, tactile sensation

from humble or found materials to a subject altogether less intimate, this would begin to introduce peet’s approach in Stilifes. The series is partly addressed to a passive mode of receiving news from media sources and through electronic devices. peet’s work has been likened to guerrilla journalism. But as reflections on contemporary society and imagery, these works come across as a very pure, direct kind of art in which the surrounding context is absorbed and reformatted by the artist into a new, interpretive object or community of forms. As such, the exhibition conveys real confidence in the power both of materials and of objects to convey meaning. Also clear is peet’s attachment to and respect for the media in which he works (though it should be noted that his practice extends to painting, drawing and video). There is an underlying awareness of the potential of relatively small scale work to invite and reward curiosity, and of collage to conjure productive visual relationships. The Stilifes are affective sums of carefully chosen parts. Iona Whittaker

into, 2013, stoneware, photograph, pine, aluminium, acrylic, rope, paint, 48 × 81 × 18 cm. Photo: Lisa Albaugh. Courtesy On Stellar Rays, New York

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Objects Food Rooms Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York 1–31 July This group show, curated by Andria Hickey of New York’s Public Art Fund, brings together 12 international artists working mainly in sculpture. The first work in the show, however, is a large wall text, or (2015), by Haim Steinbach. Further on, one finds its companion, either. But ‘either’ always comes before ‘or’ in a sentence, doesn’t it? Not if you’re Gertrude Stein, from whose book Tender Buttons (1914) this show draws inspiration. The three sections in Stein’s book, titled ‘Objects’, ‘Food’ and ‘Rooms’, play with associations we make between words and the objects they describe. Building on that premise, the artists here create associations between materials (including words) and forms in works that reside somewhere between the familiar and the uncanny. On the first floor of the exhibition, sculptures by Rachel Harrison, Arlene Shechet, Ursula Mayer, Darren Bader and Frank Benson reflect our tendency to anthropomorphise objects as a means of relating to them. For example, Harrison’s © 2004 Hasbro Inc. (2015) is a structure of wood and cement wrapped in plastic, draped with links of fake sausages and a toy gun, topped with a helmet painted with the Stars and Stripes, and seated in a wheeled cart. The helmet rests on a vertical protrusion that could be interpreted as a head, giving the sculpture the appearance of a stooping figure. It made me think about war veterans, partly because of the flag, gun and cart, which is like a wheelchair, but also because

the American toy company Hasbro is the maker of G.I. Joe action figures. Harrison’s sculpture sits before Luis Jacob’s Album xi (2013), a row of 40 wall-mounted panels consisting of montages of found images. Four sequential panels with pictures of blank movie screens, bare canvases and other rectangular white surfaces are followed by panels depicting clocks and wristwatches. Individually, such images convey little, but in combination they become something more – a meditation on time’s passing, perhaps. Adjacent are three sculptures by Roula Partheniou, a Canadian artist making her New York gallery debut. Partheniou recreates common items using painted fibreboard and polymer clay. Packed Boxes with Clutter (2015) looks like cardboard shipping boxes with other items – dinner plates, board games, tennis balls – sitting on top. Insulated Partition (2015) appears to be an unfinished gallery wall, while Caution Yellow (2009) looks like a discarded banana peel. Seeming authentic from a distance, these meticulously crafted simulacra raise questions about how much visual information we need in order to recognise an object for what it is. In the second-floor galleries, three enigmatic 2015 works by Esther Kläs initially appear as outliers. Half Moon, Double Sun resembles two casts of skateboard decks sandwiched together, while 2/1 (blue) consists of two contrasting rodlike shapes, one conveying rigidness, the other malleability. These two works lie on the floor at either end of In between/self, a sticklike mobile

with two parallel rods lying beneath on the floor. Like Richard Tuttle, Kläs’s intention here may be to communicate a visual experience without requiring the forms to mean something. For a quartet of individually titled but related found sculptural works from 2014, Turner Prizewinner Laure Prouvost composed fanciful texts that imbue the mundane objects with auratic qualities. For example, the wall panel beside a piece of nondescript pink carpet reads: ‘This is the carpet that Grandma had in her dreams covering every fields [sic], every trees, every building in the world.’ Our impulse to humanise inanimate objects reappears in Prouvost’s goofily surreal installation An e-cigarette and a butter (2014). The items of the title sit silently on a pair of shelves in a darkened room until spotlights and a recording of a man’s voice (the butter) and a woman’s (the e-cigarette) come on. The objects engage in a brief flirtation: “I wish I was in your lips,” leers the butter. “In mine? Or the person’s who is looking at us?” replies the e-cigarette, implicating viewers in their saucy exchange. Other works, including Magali Reus’s wall-mounted sculptures resembling padlocks and Nairy Baghramian’s wire Waste Basket (Bins for rejected ideas) (2012), its contents oozing onto the floor, confound description since they cannot possibly fulfil their implied functions. Like Stein in Tender Buttons, these artworks, and the exhibition as a whole, prompt reconsideration of the assumptions we make about the everyday objects around us. Bill Clarke

Roula Partheniou, Packed Boxes with Clutter, 2015, acrylic and enamel paint on wood and mdf, flocking on foam balls, 137 × 71 × 71 cm. Photo: Brett Moen. Courtesy the artist; mkg127, Toronto; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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Stewart Uoo Viva la Juicy Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo 15 August – 25 September Viva la Juicy represents a transition for the New York-based Stewart Uoo, away from the visceral, postapocalyptic grotesquery of his recent work and towards a subtler, prettier kind of degradation. Gone, at least for now, are the misshapen mannequins of the series Life is Juicy (2012), and of No Sex, No City, the latter made for a 2013 exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Those sculptures – raddled cyber-zombies riddled with flies and maggots – are set aside in favour of a series of paper objects, based around distressed, deteriorated shopping bags Uoo left out on his Brooklyn roof to the mercy of the sun, rain and snow, or on his studio floor, gathering dust and stains. The bags, in various states of decay, have been air-dried into thick, paper-pulp bases studded with bedraggled bits of pigeon feather; flies again; and whole cockroaches, embedded in the surface with their backs, legs or articulated bellies protruding. Tattered pink Juicy Couture bags are inlaid into dense, matt black-and-white, paper-pulp surfaces (Untitled [Juicy Couture Small Black] and Untitled [Choose Juicy Large White]; all works 2015); and on a trio of works based on bits of Hollister packaging, the model couple in

the photograph on the original bags kisses over and over on the badly disintegrated scraps, their bony jaws jammed together in a dismal pastiche of love. Skilfully incorporated into the bright-white and matt-black paper, the vestiges of death and decay – the flies, the cockroaches, the rotting bits of paper – make an unexpectedly cheerful contrast to the grim, fake glamour of the branded paper bags; and if you don’t already find those ‘luxury’ artefacts dispiriting, just Google ‘lv unboxing’, and marvel as YouTube starz cream themselves over the stiff paper bags, cardboard boxes, tissue paper and drawstring dust bags that lie between them and their ugly old-lady handbags. But real glamour, too, is to be found in this show, in the form of a set of glossy-magazinestyle portraits commissioned by the artist from fashion photographer James Giles, then mounted on salvaged plywood board. Far from the crummy glamour served up by Hollywood these days, little more than a parade of $10,000 dresses in heels topped by radiant, chemical-peel faces, here’s a dash of the real glamour and mystique

of transgender and gender-fluid beauty, in the form of hairstylist and performer Bailey Stiles, one of Uoo’s many fabulous friends. Lingering on the Louis Vuitton logo tattoos that swarm up Stiles’s sleek torso, the images reference David LaChapelle’s 1999 portrait of Lil’ Kim – an ad for Louis Vuitton in which the rap star’s naked body was ‘branded’ with painted lv logos – and perhaps too Wim Delvoye’s live tattooed pigs, some of which sport vivid lv logos between the Russian prison tats and Disney princesses. Uoo’s work hasn’t always struck the mark, the postapocalyptic dummies being one example of a risky, slightly forced eccentricity; and there’s a strained relationship between Uoo’s ‘crazy club-kid’ personal brand and his real potential as an artist, forever walking the line between genuinely edgy, transgressive art and parody. But it’s clear that he’s striving to say something real with these works. There’s a moving ruined elegance to the paper objects, in their careful preconstruction of an imagined future world, hacked, garbled artefacts and all, that seems to signal the way forward to something potentially important. Claire Rigby

Untitled (Thicket), 2015, self-adhesive colour print, salvaged plywood, latex paint, 244 × 122 × 1 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood dm, São Paulo

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Portia Zvavahera I Can Feel It in My Eyes Stevenson, Cape Town 23 July – 29 August Portia Zvavahera’s exhibition, a series of paintings of figures embracing among the flowers of Harare’s Central Park, is a perfect example of the new movement of contemporary Zimbabwean painters. What distinguishes this group from its predecessors is the dramatic difference in their interests when compared to the current trends in South African painting. Whereas most Zimbabwean (largely multimedia) artists of the past 15 years (for example Dan Halter, Kudzanai Chiurai and Gerald Machona) were educated in and influenced by South African art movements, the new crop of painters like Zvavahera, Misheck Masamvu, Richard Mudariki and Wallen Mapondera have not been. One recent incident that perhaps explains some of the differences between young painters from South Africa and Zimbabwe occurred during a discussion panel at the Cape Town Art Fair some months ago. Here Mudariki had stated that he saw painting as a way of “visually expressing ideas”, after which a recent South African painting graduate said to me: “Doesn’t he understand that we have moved on from that? That the discourse of painting is no longer

about expressing ideas? Contemporary art is about referencing the problems of the twodimensional surface and markmaking.” Certainly Arthur C. Danto’s definition of the difference between ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ art begs to differ. That is to say that Modernism was largely underpinned by the lone discourse of painters addressing ‘flat surfaces’, while contemporary art is defined by ‘no single narrative direction on the basis of which others could be excluded’. With a plurality of interests shifting from painted surface to postcolonial politics, it is Mudariki who seems more engaged with a contemporary approach than those young abstract South African artists like Zander Blom and this graduate, who have reduced their practice to the singular modernist concern. In this regard Zvavahera is no different from Mudariki. Certainly she is interested in visual expression; this much is clear from the title of the exhibition. But her work goes further than that. Although her stated influences may be modernists like Schiele and Munch, she is also clearly influenced in a work such as I Can Feel It in My Eyes [26] (all works 2015) by fellow

I Can Feel It in My Eyes [26], 2015, oil-based printing ink and oil bar on canvas, 188 × 265 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Stevenson, Johannesburg & Cape Town

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Zimbabwean Masamvu. Here one sees the round patches of bright colour and the awkward horizontal figuration, almost camouflaged within the patterns, that has been a feature of Masamvu’s work for the past four or five years. But Zvavahera’s work is also a complex gathering of other influences and ideas. There are the appropriated African waxprint patterns in paintings such as I Can Feel It in My Eyes [25] that are synonymous with Yinka Shonibare; the exhibition’s theme, of love set in Harare’s own ‘Garden of Eden’, contains both her muchspoken-of interests in religion and politics; and throughout the dozen or so paintings in the exhibition there is the heavy sense of political and social irony communicated through grotesque figuration, aggressive brushstrokes and opaque purples, reds and blues in works like I Can Feel It in My Eyes [20], [22] and [27]. Zvavahera’s art, like Masamvu’s, has the vitality of an artist influenced by a range of powerful personal, political, art historical, religious and social sources. It is this that not only makes her works contemporary but also makes them objects of profound interest. Matthew Blackman

Dor Guez The Sick Man of Europe: The Architect Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv 5 March – 6 May Through his photo and video works, Dor Guez, the son of a Palestinian Christian and a Tunisian Jew, typically explores the complexity of his own origins. However, for The Sick Man of Europe: The Architect, Guez shifts the focus onto the persona of Kemal P., an architecture student who, on graduation towards the end of the Second World War, was recruited by the Turkish army. The show is the second of a five-part project, examining the stories of five creative individuals from different Middle Eastern backgrounds, each of whose artistic practice was interrupted due to their obligation to fight in various twentieth-century wars. In the ground-floor gallery, a two-channel video installation focuses on 13 photographs documenting the Turkish Republic’s Victory Day Parade in Ankara and the state funeral of its first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in 1938. The images are shown on one screen, while on the other, a hand draws mesmerising sketches of the buildings and monuments surrounding the two public spectacles depicted in the photographs.

The narrator, speaking as Kemal, describes the images, and in doing so two other figures come to the fore: Atatürk, who Kemal obviously admires, and Ahmed, Kemal’s close friend, who is seen in most of the photographs and is the photographer of some. Homoeroticism is strongly evident, especially in an image taken by Ahmed, in which Kemal is “sitting between the legs of glorious Turkish soldiers next to the statue of Atatürk in Ulus Square,” as he explains in the narration. This queering of history is continued on the second floor, with a selection of photographs from Kemal’s private collection, arranged inside an architect’s steel plan chest, almost all depicting muscular uniformed men. A couple of these images, documenting soldiers in naive situations – rolling in snow or standing in fields of flowers – have been transformed to scanograms – the result of an X-ray-like scanning technique that reveals every little crack or defect in the photographs, its handling and age laid bare – enlarged and wall-hung.

Guez, who founded the Christian Palestinian Archive in 2009, tries to tackle many issues with this show: European imperialism; forbidden homosexuality; national and military identities. Yet his apparent interest in the formal photographic object regrettably takes over, flattening the politics and important historical questions in favour of a simplistic aestheticisation of the past. To some extent, this is reminiscent of the critique of Atatürk’s secular revolution: that it dealt with formal symbols rather than pressing social problems, and homogenised an entire people. This critique is not addressed in the show, and Atatürk’s revolution is presented, through the photographic fixation, in an overly aestheticised fashion, just like the ‘Architect’ himself. Walter Benjamin’s warning against the aestheticisation of politics is well known, but especially relevant in this case, where the reflection of the past tends to become nostalgic, rather than critical. Perhaps alongside the yet-to-be-realised parts of this project this show could be seen in a different light. Keren Goldberg

The Sick Man of Europe: The Architect, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Youval Hai. Courtesy Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

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Books

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Fuck Seth Price by Seth Price Leopard, $20 (softcover)

Seth Price is really good at writing about art. I’m not so sure he’s a particularly great fiction writer, though. In this work, subtitled ‘a novel’, the narrator notes that ‘his oft-used strategy of “smuggling familiar materials into the realm of synthetic” made for a good description of the process of fictionalization’. He’s right, because the good news is that this is basically a wide-ranging, insightful, factual essay examining the stuff being pumped out of studios internationally, with just an occasional needless Paul Auster-esque foray into melodrama (the odd murder here or there that is of such little consequence that telling you about it is in no way a spoiler).

The protagonist of the ‘story’, whom we can assume to be Price, is on the money, for example, in his analysis of the two defining strands of the hipper side of the art market: art that takes its cues from digital culture, and the new wave of abstract painting that is flooding art fair booths. For Price they are cut from the same figurative cloth, representing ‘the digital process of abstraction’. This he adds is ‘a direct, materialist portrayal of our historic moment, when the alien productions of computers and their apparent meaninglessness redefine all human values including expression itself’. In Price’s view, technology is an omnipotent presence. For art to have any effect, he states,

it must play by tech’s rules. He describes painting (which he has worked in) as being essentially formally anachronistic, regardless of the cues taken from digital culture in its subject matter: ‘Painters could join a more or less continuous chat room hosting every painter who’d ever exhibited.’ He concludes instead that sculpture is the medium of the future, because from the Bronze Age to the information age, it has been open to every new tech development thrown at it. While weaving together myriad themes (architecture, careers, labour), Price, in his conviction of art’s dependence on tech, places the vanguard of culture not in the world’s artist studios but in the start-ups of Silicon Valley. Oliver Basciano

The Miracle of Analogy, or the History of Photography, Part 1 by Kaja Silverman Stanford University Press, $21.95/£14.99 (softcover)

Sometime in the summer of 1826 or 1827, Nicéphore Niépce pointed a camera obscura out of his studio at window frame, outbuildings and trees in the distance. Eight hours later he pulled a specially coated pewter plate from his apparatus, washed it with lavender and petroleum, and watched an auspicious image yearn into view. The ‘first photograph’ is well known to the point of obscurity. As Kaja Silverman remarks in her ambitious and frustrating book, Niépce’s barely tenable image has come down to us via more or less tricked-up reproductions. It’s a wavering picture that lives on in conservators’ efforts to fix its dark lustrous details, and in later artists’ digital games – Joan Fontcuberta’s chromogenic print Googlegram: Niépce (2005) the most recent – with its apparent originality. In these respects, View from the Window at Le Gras stands for photography itself: a medium ever caught, and fraught, between luminous being and mechanical reason. The Miracle of Analogy is a wide-ranging argument for the world’s capacity to stare back at us through the images of it we pretend to ‘capture’. Silverman’s ‘analogy’ is neither the effect of technical reproduction nor the ‘indexicality’ that theorists spoke tirelessly about for decades. Drawing on Jeff Wall’s 1989 essay

‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, Silverman posits a kind of unformed insistence of things and bodies in the earliest photographs. She discovers it in Niépce’s rooftops, in the algal fronds of nineteenth-century botanist and photographer Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes, in the lowering architecture and fleeting human presence of Louis Daguerre’s 1839 view of the Boulevard du Temple. And ghosting Silverman’s reflections is a dispute – never quite fully developed – with Walter Benjamin about the relative political and aesthetic radicalism of the copy versus the ‘original’ auratic emanation. If much of this – the frame of reference, at least – sounds rather familiar, that is because The Miracle of Analogy is an odd book that might have been written at any point in the last 20 years. Silverman is careful and suggestive and revealing about the language early photographers used to describe the apparition of their images: nobody could exactly say if such views had been ‘taken’ or ‘received’. But the research into the practices and thought of figures like Niépce and Daguerre, Lady Eastlake and Julia Margaret Cameron is all decades old. No bad thing, you might think, so long as Silverman’s critical-philosophical insights are new. But she frequently rehearses arguments made many times in the past about photography’s capacity

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to show us a universe of becoming, with its own intentions and its own implacable gaze. It’s frequently as if Silverman is writing at some hampering or disdainful remove from detailed photographic history – the sort of work that fellow academic Geoffrey Batchen has done, for example – and from recent descriptions of photography’s visual recalcitrance, such as essayed by art historian James Elkins. There’s a problem of tone also. Silverman suffers from the familiar tendency of the esteemed academic to assume we know and care about the rest of her critical and theoretical oeuvre – ‘In the last chapter of Flesh of My Flesh I suggested…’ and suchlike – so that the writing feels curiously pulled elsewhere. The Miracle of Analogy is the first volume of two on the history of photography, and it’s to be hoped among other things that the second book isn’t also quite so literal-minded regarding contemporary photography. From Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura works, through Hiroshi Sugimoto’s positive versions of William Henry Fox Talbot’s negatives, to John Dugdale’s cyanotype of himself with a death mask of John Keats, most of Silverman’s approved examples here are dutifully dull and only minimally knowing retreads of nineteenth-century experiments. Regrettably, that quite suits her own antique approach to things. Brian Dillon

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Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser New Directions, $24.95 (hardcover)

‘It is to this picture I owe these thin or plump, artless or clever lines,’ writes Robert Walser in his ‘The Kiss (iii)’, a text about Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Stolen Kiss (c. 1786). Owing something to pictures, however, doesn’t necessarily mean writing about them. In fact, more often than not, in this collection of the Swiss writer’s texts on art, the painting is an excuse for a narrative. Though Looking at Pictures compiles very different forms of writing, from short stories where art plays a central role to essays published in art magazines and newspapers, none of them can be considered art criticism per se. But with an undying curiosity to understand human beings, Walser creates an expanded landscape of the artworld, writing about the artist (‘Beardsley’, ‘A Tiny Little Bit of Watteau’), the model or subject (‘The Van Gogh Picture’, in which he discusses the Dutch painter’s portrait of a woman in Arles), the patron (‘A Painter’, in which a collector and an artist fall in love) and the viewer (often a Walserlike, introspective character). Art in Walser’s stories brings people together but also tears them apart. In ‘A Painter’, the artist who falls in love with his patroness leaves her pretty much immediately, because ‘Love wants nothing to do with art… Love is

a form of squandering, art of saving.’ In ‘Apollo and Diana’, the narrator recounts how his landlady took the painting by Lucas Cranach off the wall, presumably in view of the nudity in it, but once he explains to her what he sees in the work, she is convinced. It is never said but only hinted that she grasps how art is different from her earthly propriety, and as a material return for that understanding of the spiritual, she mends his torn trousers. The link between the aforementioned examples – alongside most of the texts compiled here – is a belief in art that seems almost outmoded today. For Walser, Fragonard’s The Happy Accidents of the Swing (1767) is ‘a poem’, other pictures are ‘exquisite’, artists are allseeing beings who are so committed to their work they cannot afford a normal life and the experience of viewing art is a dreamy one, discussed in flowery terms. Reading it can be an interesting experience of the way in which jargon and approaches to art-writing can be dated (oh, how levelled the language of press releases will seem to a future reader, when words like ‘multimedia’ will be as historicised as ‘etching’ is today). But this collection, with its brilliant translations and variety of material, is a wonderful example in the way it interlaces concerns of fiction – love, relationships,

emotions – with those of art: looking, telling, nature, portrait, process. Art is never the centre of a Walser text. The focus is always individuals: those who make art, who model for it, who view it. Though the concern in all the texts compiled in this book is related to art, Looking at Pictures cannot be read as art criticism. But Walser’s reflection on the way people interact with one another by way of art can be an example to art critics. The discussion of the task of criticism often focuses on the (difficult, productive) shift from a visual means of communication to a textual one. But art criticism also involves a movement from the personal experience of looking at art to the venture to make a statement. This is where fiction can come in as a model for art writing: in the departure from the personal – one character, one scene – to a universal experience. Art criticism is a literary form. It need not just be an account of what is on view but also make something of the work it deals with: a statement, a viewpoint, a larger claim. Though Walser may not tell us much of the art he is responding to, reading him clarifies more about the sentiment of standing in front of a painting than many accounts of the quality of the brushwork. That’s a good model. Orit Gat

The Wapping Project: On Paper by Imogen Eveson, edited by Jules Wright Black Dog, £29.95/$39.95 (softcover)

Published in 2014, this book not only provides a record of the background and 20-year history of the Wapping Project, London’s ‘other’ power station that was renovated and relaunched as a successful arts venue in 2000, but also serves as a fitting tribute to the vision and energy of its director, Jules Wright, who died of cancer in June this year, at the age of sixty-seven. It was Women’s Playhouse Trust cofounder Wright who came across the derelict power station in pre-gentrified Wapping in 1991 and, recognising its potential, acquired and used the building and its garden to stage ambitious exhibitions, performances and events encompassing art, dance, theatre, film and fashion.

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These she organised both during the building’s semiderelict state from 1993 to 98 and, following its two-year renovation, from 2000 until the building’s sale and eventual closure in December 2013. Eveson fills the book’s 500 pages with numerous photographs and documents of these events, many of which I have my own fond memories of: Anya Gallaccio’s monumental melting ice sculpture, Insensities and Surfaces (1996), Jane Prophet’s electro-luminescent light installation, Conductor (2000), Richard Wilson’s crushing and unfurling of a scrapped Cessna aircraft, Butterfly (2003). Not forgetting the outdoor film screenings, the bookshop in a glasshouse that also held

ArtReview

readings and events, and the onsite restaurant that provided the majority of the funding for all of the above. Wright’s always generous but equally no-nonsense approach may have contributed to the fact that her achievements aren’t as acclaimed as they should be, but the book’s many first-person accounts by those she worked with over the years are proof that where it counted – in her nurturing of artists, in hosting and producing inventive installations and events, and in employing a business model that funded its activities through food rather than private patronage or public subsidy – she deserves the applause. Helen Sumpter

Philippe Parreno, Tokyo, August 2015. Photo: Monika Mogi

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For more on Miriam Katin, see overleaf

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Contributors

Tom Eccles

Nick Srnicek

Contributing Writers

is executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. His most recent curatorial projects include Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler (with Beatrix Ruf) for the Luma Foundation in Arles and Zürich; Visitors, a group exhibition on Governors Island, New York (with Ruba Katrib); and Philippe Parreno’s h {n)y p n(y} osis at the Park Avenue Armory in New York (with Hans Ulrich Obrist). He is currently organising an exhibition with Lauren Cornell celebrating ten years of the Hessel Museum of Art in 2016. This month he interviews Parreno. He is currently reading Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1966), Roswitha Mueller’s valie export: Fragments of the Imagination (1995) and the poetry of Ben Fama.

is the coauthor with Alex Williams of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) and author of the forthcoming Postcapitalist Technologies (2016). This month he writes an essay titled Mapping Totality. He is currently reading Jairus Banaji’s Theory as History (2010).

Stephanie Bailey, Robert Barry, Matthew Blackman, Gesine Borcherdt, Bill Clarke, James Clegg, Matthew Collings, Gabriel Coxhead, Stephanie Cristello, Brian Dillon, Tom Eccles, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Keren Goldberg, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stefanie Hessler, Sam Jacob, Sarah Jilani, Dean Kissick, Maria Lind, Natasha Marie Llorens, Laura Oldfield Ford, Mark Prince, Claire Rigby, Laura Robertson, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Ed Schad, Nick Srnicek, Raimar Stange, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Siona Wilson, Iona Whittaker

Monika Mogi is a photographer based in Tokyo. Having moved from the us to Japan at age twelve, she explores her experience of a mixed upbringing in her work. Her most recent project, Working Class Beauty (2015–), focuses on personal portraits and the landscapes of her hometown, Zama, in Kanagawa, a suburb near an American military base. In her personal work Mogi confronts issues of social class and shoots to empower herself and her community. For this issue she has photographed Philippe Parreno.

Mark Prince is an artist and writer living in Berlin. This month he profiles the work of Frank Auerbach. He is currently reading Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop (2015).

Contributing Editors Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski are London-based artists who work collaboratively in film, installation, music and performance. Recent exhibitions and performances include Now Age (2015), Garage Rotterdam; A Bright Night: Technologies of Affect (2015), Serpentine Galleries, London; and Das Hund & the Pilgrim Shells (2014), Whitstable Biennale. As the band Das Hund, they make and perform spoken word and experimental music with elaborate stage sets and film projections. They also run French Riviera, a gallery and project space in Bethnal Green, London. For this issue of ArtReview the two artists have created a work that takes inspiration from a mid1970s countercultural guidebook to England and Wales. Levack is currently reading Flash Boys (2014), by Michael Lewis, while Lewandowsi is working through The Dark Monarch (1962), by Sven Berlin, and Heaven & Hearth: A Seasonal Compendium of Women’s Spiritual & Domestic Lore (1997), by Beverly Pagram.

Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Miriam Katin, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, Monika Mogi, Luke Norman & Nik Adam

Miriam Katin (preceding pages)

The Second World War has cast a long shadow over the life of Miriam Katin, born in Budapest in 1942. “The stories my mother told me about our life and survival and the fate of our family, they were always with me. A daily uninvited and unwanted presence.” Katin fled the Nazi invasion on foot with her mother, who faked their deaths and then evaded the Germans by acquiring false identity papers. Meanwhile, her father fought and died in the Hungarian army. At the age of fourteen Katin emigrated to Israel and later served in the Israel Defense Forces as a graphic artist. She went on to become a background designer for animation there, moving to New York in 1991 to work for Disney, mtv and other studios. Katin came to comics late in life, starting in 2000 with short stories, several from her childhood. “My mother saw these and asked if I was going to do many more. I detected an apprehension in her voice, so I said no. But there was always that question: how did you survive the war? I couldn’t do it with my mother around, but then I said to myself, what am I waiting for anyway?” She also felt that Art

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Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus (1980–91) gave her the ‘permission’ to tell her own survivor’s story. So at the age of sixty-two, Katin sketched out her first graphic novel. “I only showed the roughs to my mother when they had been approved for publication. I let her read it, and she was very moved and told me that I had done something very beautiful. What a relief that was.” Katin chose to draw We Are on Our Own (2006) in pencil to build up layers of grey textures that were reminiscent of the old black-and-white family photos she incorporated. Her memories and imagination from the time were underscored by “enormous research so that facts, dates, uniforms, weapons and such would be correct”. Wary of any notion of catharsis from sharing her experiences through autobiographical comics, Katin nevertheless confides that “before the book, if someone asked me how we survived, I would choke up and not be able to talk. After the book, I noticed I could deal with the subject.” For her follow-up, Letting It Go (2013), Katin channelled “the enormous need to deal with

ArtReview

my trauma of my son’s decision to move to Berlin. The process was very difficult but most helpful. I poured my anger and fears into the story.” Switching to coloured crayons, freeing her drawings from the confines of panels, she does not downplay her emotional and physical reactions, as she visits the German capital twice and witnesses how the city is coming to terms with its past, much as Katin tries to do herself. An exhibition in 2012 of early American furniture at the Metropolitan Museum’s American wing sparked her new Strip for ArtReview. “One chair by Duncan Phyfe, inspired by the ancient Greek klismos chairs, took my breath away. This particular chair is now in a private collection, so I can no longer visit him.” While preparing further short projects, Katin has recently come full circle back to her native Hungary. “A brave publisher, Antal Bayer, has translated a number of my short comics into Hungarian. Also right now some pages from my books are on exhibit at the Israeli Cultural Institute in Budapest. I am very touched by this.” Paul Gravett

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 153 photography by Monika Mogi

Phrases on the spine and on pages 35, 77 and 119 come from Foulsham’s Letter Writer: A Complete Guide for Man, Woman, or Child, by George Vasey, published in 1934 by W. Foulsham & Co Ltd, London

on page 150 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 158 photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

October 2015

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Off the Record October 2015 I was in the gallery in the dog days of late August, sending out a few hopeful emails to collectors asking how their holidays in Puglia were going, when the letter arrived. As soon as I opened it I grabbed the phone and called Pierre, the aged lothario who ran the gallery. “Peter –” I began. “ – Pierre! You know it’s Pierre: it hasn’t been Peter for years, no one has called me that in the artworld since –” “– Peter. We’re in Frieze London.” There was no response. “Are you ok? Christ, Peter: are you sobbing?” “It’s just what I’ve always wanted, I never, I never –” I put down the phone. He clearly needed to pull himself together. To be honest, I was as surprised as he sounded. Our programme was largely the dregs of the New Neurotic Realists, a movement that fizzled out almost as soon as it was dreamt up. Getting into Frieze London was unlikely to say the least, but perhaps Peter’s persistence and change of name had finally done the trick. Just as I was about to phone him back, my mobile went. “Gallery Girl, it’s Frank. You won’t believe it: we’ve got into Frieze London! I didn’t even know we were on the waiting list –” “– Francesco –” I interrupted. “– Don’t call me Francesco, please, no one has –” I hung up. This was also kind of good. Frank might have been a terrible gallerist since opening his space in Peckham, but we’d had some great times back in the day at Piccolo Mondo when he was merely Francesco Bonami’s boot boy. It was peculiar that he had made Frieze as well, but I figured that a few dropouts had forced the waiting list to be put into action – not that I recalled us being on the waiting list, either. A few weeks later and I steered my Citroën Picasso madly around the western part of Regent’s Park, the boot filled with the finest parts of our stockroom and Pierre precariously holding onto bubble-wrapped items. He was still sobbing. It seemed a bit strange that Frieze had to move the tent because of a last-minute reunion concert by Oasis, but I’d checked with Francesco and his gallery had the same message. My fears that something was amiss were allayed by the familiar sight of the white tent looming towards me. Having parked up and got out, I spied many familiar gallerist faces, none of which had ever participated in Frieze to my knowledge. This was the revolution, rather than mere evolution, that Matthew and Amanda had promised when they stood aside and made way for Victoria Siddall, the undoubted star of Apollo magazine’s ‘40 Under 40’. Of course Apollo had then ruined it by immediately having another ‘40 Under 40’ list, which to my mind made ‘80 Under 40’, but anyhow. The installation seemed shorter than I would have thought was appropriate for a major art fair, with the Chinese Frieze assistants making it very clear that everything had to be up in two hours. I tossed the drill to Pierre and told him to get cracking. In the mid-distance I noticed Francesco arguing with one of the assistants. “What’s going on, Frank? Installation issues? Pierre should be done in 20 minutes, you can borrow him.” Frank didn’t laugh.

“Look, Gallery Girl. I’ve worked something out.” The Chinese Frieze assistant stared at his feet. “What?” “This isn’t Frieze.” I stared at Frank, momentarily speechless. “What do you mean, Frank? We’re here in a big white tent in Regent’s Park with Frieze logos everywhere. It’s got to be Frieze.” “Do you recognise any of the galleries?” “No. But this is the revolution-not-evolution that Matthew –” “– and Amanda promised. Yes, yes, I’ve read that press release as well. Look, didn’t you read about that copy of the Anish Kapoor silver bean in Karamay in northwest China where the local tourist bureau said that any similarities were entirely coincidental?” “Fuck! Yes, I read all about that.” I turned angrily to the ‘Frieze’ assistant. “Don’t tell me you’re going to come up with that crap when you’ve simply cloned the tent and invited a bunch of hapless gallerists who’ve never got into Frieze to come and exhibit.” “No,” he said quietly. “I was going to talk about Rodin’s Gates of Hell and Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay in October about the myth of originality in the avant-garde. Look, if it helps, we’ve paid lots of people to come in and pretend to be private museum owners from Szechuan.” I nodded. Then I turned to Frank and pointed in the direction of Pierre, who was standing admiring how he had managed to hang seven New Neurotic Realist paintings on a four-metre wall. “Do we tell him, Frank? Do we tell anyone? After all, we all need Chinese collectors. Or people who look like Chinese collectors.” Frank looked at me. “What did the Chinese guy from the tourist bureau say again about the not-Kapoor?” he replied. “While we use similar materials –” he started. “– the shapes and meanings are different!” we chorused, together. Gallery Girl

Somerset House, Strand London WC2R 1LA www.1-54.com @154artfair 15-18 October 2015

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