1 0 3 M O U N T S T R E ET L O N D O N
Lucas Arruda 2 September - 23 September 2017
David Zwirner London
Suzan Frecon watercolors and small oil paintings 1 September - 23 September 2017
high ultramarine four arcs study, 2015 Watercolor on old Indian ledger paper 9 × 12 7/8 inches (22.9 × 32.7 cm)
David Zwirner London
LONDON Allora & Calzadilla Foreign in a Domestic Sense 27 Bell Street Daniel Buren PILE UP: High Reliefs. Situated Works 67 Lisson Street
NEW YORK Leon Polk Smith 504 West 24th Street Stanley Whitney Drawings 138 Tenth Avenue
WOLFGANG LAIB
THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING ELSE PARIS MARAIS SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2017 ROPAC.NET
LONDON PARIS SALZBURG
HA U S E R & W I R T H
MIRA SCHENDEL SARRAFOS AND BLACK AND WHITE WORKS 7 SEPTEMBER — 21 OCTOBER 2017
32 EAST 69TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10021 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM
SARRAFO, 1987 TEMPERA AND GESSO ON WOOD 89.9 × 180 × 21.3 CM / 35 3/8 × 70 7/8 × 8 3/8 IN © THE ESTATE OF MIRA SCHENDEL PHOTO: GENEVIEVE HANSON
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ZHONGGUO 2185 Curated by Victor Wang 21 September – 04 November 2017 Sadie Coles HQ 62 Kingly Street London W1B 5QN www.sadiecoles.com Lu Yang, Gong Tau Kite, 2016. Courtesy the artist.
Sadie Coles HQ
Grada Kilomba, still from Illusions, 2017. Produced for Kilomba's solo exhibition, the most beautiful language, at the EGEAC – Municipal Galleries of Lisbon; and MAAT Museum in Lisbon, from 26 October 2017 – 31 March 2018. Photo credit: Zé de Paiva
THE SILENCES BETWEEN Curated by Emma Laurence in collaboration with Tendai Marima
24 August – 23 September 2017
CANDICE BREITZ / ADAM BROOMBERG & OLIVER CHANARIN NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS / MOUNIR FATMI / KENDELL GEERS DAVID GOLDBLATT / HAROON GUNN SALIE / ALFREDO JAAR SAMSON KAMBALU / WILLIAM KENTRIDGE / GRADA KILOMBA PAULO NAZARETH / TABITA REZAIRE / TRACEY ROSE MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY /
/ / / / /
PERFORMANCES BY KUTALA CHOPETO, GRADA KILOMBA AND SAMSON KAMBALU
3 R D F LO O R FA I RW E AT H E R H O U S E , 1 76 S I R LOW RY R D, WO O DSTO C K , SOUTH AFRICA
C A P E TOW N J O H A N N E S B U R G
P. + 27 ( 0 ) 2 1 4 6 2 7573 /4 w w w. g o o d m a n - g a l l e r y.co m
KARIN SANDER JEAN-PASCAL FLAVIEN SEPTEMBER 8 – OCTOBER 21, 2017 — POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM
Paola Pivi “Did you rest ?” 2016. Aluminum, peacock feathers, engine. Ø 215 cm / Ø 84 5/8 in. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography / Courtesy Perrotin
NEW YORK LOWER EAST SIDE
PARIS MARAIS
HONG KONG CENTRAL
SEOUL JONGNO-GU
TOKYO ROPPONGI
WIM DELVOYE
CHEN FEI
JOHN HENDERSON
BERNARD FRIZE
PAOLA PIVI
SEPTEMBER 9 - OCTOBER 29
SEPTEMBER 7 - OCTOBER 7
SEPTEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 11
AUGUST 30 - OCTOBER 21
AUGUST 26 - NOVEMBER 11
KLARA KRISTALOVA
JESPER JUST
SEPTEMBER 7 - OCTOBER 7
SEPTEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 11
XAVIER VEILHAN SEPTEMBER 7 - SEPTEMBER 23
ALMINE RECH GALLERY BRUSSELS
SEPT 7– OCT 5, 2017
REOPENING OF LONDON GALLERY ON SEPTEMBER 29, 2017 WITH
GARY HUME MUM SEPTEMBER – DECEMBER 2017
7A GRAFTON STREET LONDON, W1S 4EJ SPRUETHMAGERS.COM GARY HUME CHEAP SWEETS 2016 (DETAIL) GLOSS PAINT ON PAPER 206,5 x 106 CM © GARY HUME / VG BILD-KUNST, BONN 2017
IRAN do ESPÍRITO SANTO SHIFT September 8 - October 8, 2017
475 TENTH AVE NEW YORK 212 239 1181 SKNY.COM
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ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO Retrospective Exhibition MOCA The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (\N\Z[ 5V]LTILY
ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO, LYGIA PAPE Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 Hammer Museum, Los Angeles :LW[LTILY +LJLTILY
3,6569 (5;<5,: *(936: .(9(0*6( 9,5(;( 3<*(: ),;6 :/>(-(;@ *3(90::( ;6::05 Condemned To Be Modern LAMAG Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles :LW[LTILY 1HU\HY`
(3-9,+6 1((9 3@.0( 7(7, Memories of Underdevelopment MCASD Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego :LW[LTILY 1HU\HY`
*3(90::( ;6::05 Mundos Alternos. Art and Science Fiction in the Americas UCA ARTSblock, Riverside :LW[LTILY -LIY\HY`
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel www.fdag.com.br | info@fdag.com.br
Alair Gomes & Robert Mapplethorpe Iran do Espírito Santo Não escondido, mas despercebido 03 Aug – 16 Sep Galeria
Gabriel Lima 19 Aug – 23 Sep Galpão
Paula Rego & Adriana Varejão 02 Sep – 04 Nov Carpintaria
Ernesto Neto 30 Sep – 04 Nov Galeria
Gerben Mulder 30 Sep – 04 Nov Galpão
@MDCGALLERY
MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY
** MILAN / BELGIOIOSO: PIAZZA BELGIOIOSO 2, 20121 - MILAN
* HONG KONG: 3F PEDDER BUILDING - 12 PEDDER STREET - CENTRAL, HONG KONG
INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM RUDOLF STINGEL , RUDOLF STINGEL, MASSIMO DE CARLO - MILAN / BELGIOIOSO, 2016
YAN PEI-MING, IT TAKES A LIFETIME TO BECOME YOUNG, MASSIMO DE CARLO - HONG KONG, 2016
IN 2016
HONG KONG
MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS IN HONG KONG
IN THE PEDDER BUILDING
WITH A SOLO EXHIBITION BY YAN PEI-MING.*
MILAN
MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS IN MILAN
WITH A SOLO EXHIBITION BY RUDOLF STINGEL.**
WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM
MICHAËL BORREMANS Sixteen Dances September 3 - October 14, 2017
ZENO X GALLERY GODTSSTRAAT 15 2140 ANTWERP BORGERHOUT BELGIUM INFO@ZENO-X.COM WWW.ZENO-X.COM
PETER LINDE BUSK , MIXED MEDIA , 2017
CHART ART FAIR, 1–3/09/17 / ART BERLIN, 14–17/09/17 / VIENNACONTEMPORARY, 21–24/09/2017
PETER LINDE BUSK
AND IN THAT PLACE HE DID SUCCUMB TO WHAT WAS OFFERED
30/08–21/10/17 A K DOLVEN WHAT DO I DO WITH THE WORLD
30/08–07/10/17
Callum Innes Kerlin Gallery 8 September – 14 October 2017
www.kerlingallery.com
ArtReview vol 69 no 6 September 2017
I’m special It’s autumn, when trees go leafless and galleries stock up on art. But not all of them. These days our quirky backstreets are littered with the husks of closed-down midlevel galleries (that last adjective relates to the money they make, not the quality of the art they show, btw). This epidemic is so great that artnet.com recently ran an article titled ‘Sorry We’re Closing’ about what happens when you want or have to close down a gallery. ‘Closing a gallery is a much more significant life change than moving from one 9-to-5 job to another,’ its authors, Eileen Kinsella and Caroline Goldstein, wrote. Apart from the fact that this glosses over the difference between owning a business and working for a business, their statement is filled with many of the assertions of difference and self-importance that make the artworld (and let’s define that as the group of people whose interest in art goes beyond the realm of museums and into commercial galleries, art fairs, etc) such an unattractive environment to a general public. Specialness does not lie only in artwork, but also in anyone even remotely ‘touched’ by its aura. That’s not to say that a less extensive or varied commercial gallery-scene is a good thing. Art is invariably better when its engagement is broader and its offerings more diverse. And of course only a total idiot would introduce a magazine dedicated to contemporary art with an argument suggesting that there was absolutely nothing special about its subject matter. The general principle is that the contents of the magazine make the argument about what’s special (or not) about particular works of art;
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for now, let’s concern ourselves with ArtReview’s fundamental belief that art’s specialness relies on the ways it interacts, whether physically, emotionally or conceptually, with lived life. Specialness that is not removed from the walking and talking and doing that happens in the streets between those art spaces (closed or otherwise). Michael Simpson’s paintings, for example, profiled this month, are meditative and almost compulsive; their formal subject matter – ladders and benches are recurring motifs – is apparently banal yet touches on universal and (if you’re in the mood) profound themes. At the other end of the scale, Nástio Mosquito (who has produced three different covers for this issue, featuring his alter egos ‘the preacher’, ‘the politician’ and ‘the joker’) offers an exaggerated, to the point of being grotesque and comic, view of the world in order to explore the complex web of social and political mores that govern it. But an interest in lived life remains at the heart of both artists’ work. It’s the interest in the connection between a life imagined and a life experienced that lies at the heart of a series of talks and discussions that ArtReview hosts this month (1–3 September), under the overall title ‘The End of the Artworld as We Know It’ and on behalf of chart art fair in Copenhagen. The likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist, Goldin + Senneby, Mark Leckey, Alex Da Corte, Maria Lind and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy will be there to keep it real. For more info see artreview.com. ArtReview
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John Hoyland Stain Paintings 1964 –1966
32 East 57th Street, New York September 15 – October 21, 2017
Art Previewed
Daniel Lie Interview by Ross Simonini 62
Previews by Martin Herbert 41 Under the Paving Stones: São Paulo by Oliver Basciano 53
page 62 Daniel Lie, Escroto, 2014 (installation view, 9th Redbull Station Residency exhibition, São Paulo). Courtesy the artist
September 2017
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Art Featured
Michael Simpson by Martin Herbert 82
Adrián Villar Rojas by Oliver Basciano 100
Nástio Mosquito by Matthew McLean 90
Jochen Zeitz Interview by Mark Rappolt 108
page 100 Adrián Villar Rojas, The Theater of Disappearance, 2017 (installation view, Metropolitain Museum of Art, New York). Photo: Jörg Baumann. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, London
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ArtReview
F.P.JOURNE AT THE BIENNALE DES ANTIQUAIRES HAUTE HOROLOGY IS HONORED AT THE GRAND PALAIS Paris - from 11 to 17 september 2017
For art lovers from across the world, the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris has been a must-attend event for more than half a century and quintessentially representative of the French “art de vivre”. Independent contemporary French watchmaker, François-Paul Journe conceives and produces haute horology timepieces for 40 years and has managed to place his brand as a benchmark among the most prestigious watch companies. In a never-ending quest for perfection, at the crossroads between Arts and Haute Horology, the F.P.Journe Manufacture is a world in itself, embodying excellence, know-how and innovation. Each calibre produced in precious 18K rose Gold, a unique specificity of the brand, is entirely invented and made in the Geneva Manufacture with the label Invenit et Fecit as reminder. Foremost reference in contemporary Haute Horology, with numerous world first, these innovative and timeless watches have granted F.P.Journe the highest horological distinctions all over the world. The collection of precision chronometers will be presented in the F.P.Journe ephemeral Boutique, identical to the brand’s 10 Boutiques around the world.
Boutique F.P. Journe Paris 63 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré 75008 Paris +33 1 42 68 08 00 paris@fpjourne.com Geneva Tokyo New York Los Angeles Bal Harbour Hong Kong Beijing Beirut Kiev
fpjourne.com
Art Reviewed
kriwet, by Joshua Mack Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin, by Sam Korman Doreen Garner, by Wendy Vogel Pieter Schoolwerth, by Rachel Wetzler Ridley Howard, by Scott Indrisek Paul Ramírez Jonas, by Laura A.L. Wellen Suzy Lake, by Bill Clarke Andy Warhol, by Christian Viveros-Fauné
exhibitions 120 Documenta 14 Kassel, by Martin Herbert Tidalectics, by Kimberly Bradley Braco Dimitrijević, by Robert Barry Ivan Andersen, by John Quin Miriam Cahn, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Skulptur Projekte Münster, by Sam Korman Candice Breitz, by Mark Prince Sarah van Sonsbeeck, by Dominic van den Boogerd Bill Viola, by David Trigg Stuart Middleton, by Ben Eastham Mark Leckey, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Greater than the Sum, by Skye Sherwin Philip Guston, by Gabriel Coxhead Chelpa Ferro, by Laura Smith Edgar Arceneaux, by Aaron Horst Invisible Man, by Ashton Cooper Andrea Zittel, by Lindsay Preston Zappas An Te Liu, by Andrew Berardini
books 148 Duty Free Art, by Hito Steyerl Play with Me: Dolls, Women and Art, by Grace Banks The Weight of Things, by Marianne Fritz I Fought the Law, by Olivia Locher the strip 154 a curator writes 158
page 120 Marta Minujín, The Parthenon of Books, 2017, steel, books, plastic sheeting. Photo: Roman März. Courtesy Documenta 14, Kassel
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ArtReview
AFRICA NOW Thursday 5 October 2017 New Bond Street, London
BENEDICT CHUKWUKADIBIA ENWONWU M.B.E (NIGERIAN, 1917 - 1994) Negritude on red oil on board £60,000 - 90,000 *
ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7468 8355 africanow@bonhams.com
bonhams.com/africanow 7S\Z I\`LY»Z WYLTP\T HUK V[OLY MLLZ -VY KL[HPSZ VM [OL JOHYNLZ WH`HISL PU HKKP[PVU [V [OL Ä UHS OHTTLY WYPJL WSLHZL ]PZP[ IVUOHTZ JVT I\`LYZN\PKL
Photo by Andre D. Wagner
SEPTEMBER 15- 17, 2017 South Side, Chicago
retreatforblackartists.com
FR ANZ AC KERMA NN COME ON! SEPTEMBER 14 – OCTOBER 15, 2017
DİRİMART DOLAPDERE Irmak Caddesi 1–9 34440 Dolapdere İstanbul info@dirimart.com | www.dirimart.com
Milan Grygar Antifona Opening Saturday 23 September 2017 23 September – 11 November 2017
P420 IS PARTICIPATING IN:
Frieze Masters, London 5–8 October 2017
Fiac, Paris 19–22 October 2017
Artissima, Torino 3–5 November 2017
Via Azzo Gardino 9, Bologna
P420
info@p420.it / www.p420.it
Art Previewed
Hurray for those who never invented anything 39
RINUS VAN DE VELDE 7 September - 21 October 2017
TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY
Previewed Pacific Standard Time: la/la Various venues, Los Angeles 15 September – January
Adam Jeppesen Martin Asbaek Gallery, Copenhagen 21 September – 21 October
Iran do Espírito Santo Sean Kelly, New York 8 September – 21 October
Moscow Biennale Various venues, Moscow 15 September – 28 October
Chantal Joffe Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan 28 September – 25 November
Josephine Meckseper Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City 22 September – 28 October
Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 1 September – 3 October
Hans Bellmer, Sascha Braunig, Matthew Ronay Office Baroque, Brussels 7 September – 21 October
Susan Cianciolo Modern Art, London 1–30 September
Martin Puryear Parasol Unit, London 19 September – 8 December
6 Sascha Braunig, Untitled, 2017, oil on linen over panel, 31 × 23 cm. Courtesy the artist and Office Baroque, Brussels
September 2017
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We like a vast and unpredictably timetabled exhibition project that bites back, so hats off 1 to Pacific Standard Time for calling their second manifestation in seven years la/la. Yes, Los Angeles has been dubbed ‘La La Land’ forever. But it’s notable that PST adopted their title in the wake of an eponymous, very successful, ethnically nondiverse Hollywood musical, and that the myriad shows in la/la – nearly 80 of them – consider, among other foci, ‘luxury objects in the pre-Columbian Americas, 20th-century Afro-Brazilian art [and] alternative spaces in Mexico City’. The title, of course, also neatly suggests manifold las, just as Pacific Standard Time’s mission seems to be to excavate alternative histories of Southern California and its peoples, plural. Expect, in exhibitions stretching across scales (museums, university galleries, performing arts centres, etc) and the region (‘Santa Barbara to San Diego, Santa Monica to Palm Springs’), everything from Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano la in
multiple Los Angeles venues, to Latin American kinetic art at Palm Springs Art Museum, to a David Lamelas solo show at the University Art Museum in Long Beach. The latest Moscow Biennale, curated 2 by Yuko Hasegawa – here branching out from directing biennales beginning with ‘S’ (Sharjah, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai) – is titled Clouds ͫ Forest, two things Russia has plenty of. Yet Hasegawa’s show, which radiates outward from the Manezh exhibition hall near the Kremlin, isn’t so literal. It’s themed around the idea of ‘creative tribes’ who are connected across geographical borders, perhaps see themselves as stateless and are necessary at a time of global crisis like this. The forest, then, is some kind of metaphor for the global movement of people, and statelessness, and the clouds above it represent the Internet: ‘It is between the forest and the cloud that new meanings and masterpieces are created,’ says Hasegawa. This would seem to offer scope for artistry that, variously,
skews digital and reacts against immateriality, and even though the artists’ list is currently hiding behind a cloud that reads ‘coming soon’, and despite the historical pitfalls of exhibiting in Russia in general (see, for example, Manifesta in St Petersburg), we’d bet on Hasegawa to pull off something noteworthy. Russia, at the dawn of the modern era, saw a movement emerge entitled Cosmism. The brainchild of Nikolai Fedorov, a heady mix of scientific and Russian Orthodox thought aimed at space travel and the overcoming of death via technology, its influence has waxed and waned over the years – plunging underground not least in the Soviet era, when Fedorov’s theoretical texts were banned. Right now, though, it’s ascendant again, being picked up by accelerationist thinkers, among others. 3 In Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism, which promises to be a classically essayistic Haus der Kulturen der Welt presentation (with exhibition design conceptualised by Hito Steyerl),
2 Michael Najjar, Space Garden, 2013, hybrid photography, 132 × 202 cm. Courtesy the artist
1 Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator (Yiwu) (detail), 2017, mixed-media installation. © the artist. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
3 Anton Vidokle, Immortality and Resurrection for All (still), 2017, video, colour, sound, 34 min. Courtesy the artist
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ArtReview
4 Adam Jeppesen, work no. 082 (The Pond), 2017, cyanotype on linen, 17 × 14 cm. Courtesy the artist and Martin Asbaek Gallery, Copenhagen
5 Chantal Joffe, Bella Reclining, 2016, pastel on paper, 30 × 40 cm. Courtesy Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan
we’re offered a tour of Cosmism’s historical and present-day effects: loaned Russian avant-garde works apparently influenced by the movement, selected by Boris Groys and including art by Vasily Chekrygin, Maria Ender, Ivan Kudriashev and Aleksandr Rodchenko, a film trilogy by Anton Vidokle orbiting around the subject titled Immortality and Resurrection for All (2017), an artwork-cum-library by Arseny Zhilyaev and, naturally, a conference. 4 Clearly not a party person, Adam Jeppesen has over the past decade spun large-scale photographic projects from his activities as a roaming solitary. The Danish-born, Copenhagen- and Buenos Aires-based artist’s calling card series/ book, Wake (2008), was assembled ‘in the secluded backwoods of Finland’ from photos made during seven years of nomadic wandering – resolutely minor-key images including overcast landscapes, spectral power lines, flickering shadows on old interiors – and merged a German
objective documentary approach with someFew painters today can pull off the kind of thing more impressionistic, mood-driven. astringent psychological portraiture mastered A later series, Flatlands (2015), documents a 487 5 by Maria Lassnig and Alice Neel; Chantal Joffe, who perhaps not coincidentally shows at day journey from the Arctic to the Antarctic, down through North and South America, Victoria Miro (which represents Neel’s estate), leaving society behind in the process and once is one: and like Lassnig, the St Albans-born artist often focuses – unsparingly – on herself. again mixing the urge to document – to prove In a recent interview, she described herself what he did, even – with a subjective overlay. as looking, in one painting, like an old banana. Here, Jeppesen allowed his negatives to get (Oddly, in another canvas, from 2012, she scratched, and manipulated the ensuing prints in various ways, from linking multiple sheets pictures her partner, the painter Dan Coombs, to sticking starry constellations of pins in them. eating the same fruit.) In the 21 years since she debuted in Britain’s annual New ContemIn his latest series, The Pond (2017), the landscape poraries exhibition, Joffe has built an oeuvre that was maybe always a cipher for an interior world has disappeared, though Jeppesen’s keyed to motherhood and self-portraiture. attention to analogue photography persists. Her style is a kind of virtuosic, melty smearHe’s been making cyanotypes, on linen, of hands, and-daub where everything nevertheless gesturing obliquely but intently – images that resolves into place and rides along on hot, feel, technically, like they could have emerged insistent colour, and where interior lives forever rise to the surface of the face. In her from any moment in photography’s continuum, first show with her Italian gallery in seven their subjects freefloating in time.
September 2017
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6 Hans Bellmer, Sans titre, 1937, gelatin silverprint hand-coloured with aniline, 14 × 14 cm. Courtesy the artist and Office Baroque, Brussels
8 Iran do Espírito Santo, Thread and Nut 2, 2016, stainless steel, 70 × 35 × 40 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Sean Kelly, New York
7 Martin Puryear, Big Phrygian, 2010–14, painted red cedar, 147 × 102 × 193 cm. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles
years, don’t expect that to change; her paintings, though, remain fresh because they’re translations of palpably vivid vision. The award for oddball exhibition of the month (a category we’ve admittedly just invented) goes to a tripleheader at Office 6 Baroque: Hans Bellmer, Sascha Braunig, Matthew Ronay. One connection for this time- and aesthetic-spanning show might be the presence, or suggestion, of models: the Canadian painter Braunig uses them, lit with coloured gels, to make her sheeny, technically superb trompe-l’oeil canvases, figures interlaced with Op-art patterning, inhabiting an interzone between Surrealism and cgi renderings. Bellmer, of course, based his chiaroscuro photographic art around his creepy relationship with pubescent female dolls. And virtually everything Ronay makes feels like a cartoon, or a model of something, his sprouting forms and totems evoking
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castaways from some fantasy territory, maybe to a headgear signifying resistance in the French Revolution and freedom in the American one. Loompaland. Expect the unnerving and the A 2.5m outdoor bronze here is titled Question childlike in equal measure – not that children can’t be unnerving anyway. (2013–14), and to an extent, that’s the subtitle of all Puryear’s work. Art’s job isn’t to give In London, a belated righting of wrongs. answers but to formulate better questions, 7 Martin Puryear is finally receiving an instituthe saying goes. These are better than most. tional show, at Parasol Unit: one covering four Iran do Espírito Santo also makes meticdecades of his brilliantly allusive and elliptical 8 sculpting practice, augmented by works on ulously honed, near-abstract sculptures that paper. If Puryear has a parallel in the uk, it’s echo the real. But the Brazilian’s artworks, probably the so-called Lisson sculptors, particumanifesting on all kinds of scales, are less larly Richard Deacon and Tony Cragg, in their internally troubled than they are a kind of catholic approach to materials and organic, consoling balm, an honouring of the everyday edge-of-recognition fuzzing of abstraction and that sands off the details and leaves Platonic ideals. A numbered series of marble works from figuration. But Puryear’s work is predicated on 2011–12, all entitled Globe, look a bit like sealed issues of race, liberty, injustice: see, for instance, the black ironwork Shackled (2014), which is bowls, or cakes on stands, or objects that a Buddhist monk might meditate in front half crouching creature, half restraint, elegant of. A series from 2014 depicts dropper bottles, and ominous, or the meticulously veneered in monochromatic coloured glass or brushed red cedarwood Big Phrygian (2010–14), which looks like a recoloured Smurf’s cap but refers steel, that are unopenable and hieratic, as if
ArtReview
the act of, say, applying eyedrops had been poetic tour of contemporary ills: in 2012 she installed sculptural oil derricks in Manhattan, elevated to an empyrean realm. A flat-ended and even her latter-day paintings, gridded lightbulb, similarly translated into stainless steel, becomes a gnomic, gorgeously still thing; suggestions of skyscraper windows serving as a structure for zipping blue smears, have while in a series of larger in situ painting an undertone of violence about them, as if interventions like Switch (2012), Espírito Santo moments from being smashed. Indeed, for creates the illusion of a soft, chasmal rectanall its stillness in the gallery, it’s the grim gular indent filling an expanse of grey, paired about-to-kick-off vibe of Meckseper’s work with a glowing white concavity. Go (to Sean Kelly, specifically) and feel a high-toned, smartly that really powers it – underscored by photoprepared becalming, if only temporarily. graphs, variously staged and documentary, And then, to undo that calm lickety-split, that consider the history of protest and the counterculture’s muzzling. As capitalism 9 there’s Josephine Meckseper, whose work is deeply worldly: vitrines and shallow glassed becomes ever more convulsive, it only veers boxes resembling window displays that refract closer to where she’s already standing. subconscious urges through the prism of ‘I feel like it has taken the past 20 years consumerism and the relentlessness of capi10 just to sit in my shoes,’ said Susan Cianciolo talism per se. (A characteristic work from 2006, in an interview a while back. That’s what titled Blow Up (Michelli), paired partial mannehappens, or used to, when you’re an artist who’s successful in fashion first, even if your quins clad in women’s underwear with a toilet fashion is filtered through an artistic mindset scrubber and a sign reading ‘endless deals’.) and seen, not infrequently, by the fine-art When she moves outside her stylistic wheelcrowd. Barred by her family from going to house, the German artist augments her blackly
art school, Cianciolo became a designer instead, but her first runway show was at New York’s Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1996, and she worked with Kim Gordon on Gordon’s label X-Girl, intersected with the skater crowd, sometimes included spoken-word performances in her presentations of collections and showed Fluxus-related art at a Tokyo gallery. Since the artworld has become relatively borderless, and recently fashion has also swung towards Cianciolo’s rough-edged mix-and-match style, she’s been included in Greater New York (2015), participated in this year’s Whitney Biennial and, after showing with Bridget Donahue (Fluxus-like boxes containing her archival materials), has another gallery show, in London, with Modern Art – whose director, Stuart Shave, began his career as a dealer in the 1990s by showing work that drew on skater, graffiti and fashion subcultures: a perfect circle. Cianciolo, meanwhile, is also making tapestries, homeware collections, whatever she likes. Someone send out for a box of hyphens. Martin Herbert
10 Susan Cianciolo, Notebooks Kit, 2016, mixed media, 6 × 23 × 30 cm. Courtesy the artist, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, and Bridget Donahue, New York
9 Josephine Meckseper, Theory of Progress, 2013, mixed media, 248 × 122 × 122 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart, and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City
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ArtReview
DAS MÃOS E DO BARRO Carolina Noguera Ediltrudis Noguera Julia Isídrez Curated by Aracy Amaral Co-curated by Osvaldo Salerno September 2 - 30, 2017
São Paulo www.galeriamillan.com.br
HAMMER MUSEUM Radical Woman: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 Letícia Parente | Martha Araújo | Regina Vater EXHIBITIONS Mario Ishikawa Ana Mazzei
FRIEZE LONDON Adriano Amaral | Rafael França
Martha Araújo Hábito/Habitante 1985 performance documentation
NICHOLAS HLOBO Unxweme Estimate £40,000–60,000
Modern & Contemporary African Art Auction London March 2018
Now accepting consignments 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5696 HANNAH.OLEARY@SOTHEBYS.COM SOTHEBYS.COM/CONTEMPORARYAFRICAN © COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK AND HONG KONG
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On the town
São Paulo is present by Oliver Basciano
I’m here – aqui – in Centro. Praça de República, the palm-laden square that forms this area’s epicentre, has become a home-from-home ever since I arrived on my first visit to São Paulo six years ago. It’s a recent novelty, however, to be able actually to see art around here. The galleries have come, as have new bars and restaurants. Yet gentrification in São Paulo is never a foregone conclusion. The botecos and kilo buffets do brisk business alongside the newcomer eateries. Still, the prostitutes work R. Marquês de Itu. Still, the city’s homeless congregate in tents, around fires, playing chess, lounging within this rare oasis of foliage in an otherwise concrete jungle. As the weekend wears on, the streets get a bit more shifty – a result of the new city mayor’s attempts to ‘clean up’ nearby Cracolândia and its community of drug users. The residents are momentarily dispersed, but they’re still here.
Afros, the 1980s and being there (or here)
above left On the streets of Centro above right Renata Lucas outside Galeria Jaqueline Martins
Not here Throw open the windows of Galeria Jaqueline Martins, look across the street and see the letters ‘aqui’ appended to the housing blocks opposite. The ‘a’ graces the window of an apartment on the same road; the rest of the word is on the back of a building located on the street behind, just visible through a gap in the otherwise crowded architecture. This long-term architectural intervention by Renata Lucas is one that frustrates purposefully. ‘Here’, it says, in its native tongue. Yet when one stands on the site of ‘here’ one cannot view the work: one can only appreciate it at a distance, over there.
Inside Martins’s gallery Ricardo Basbaum has a solo exhibition of work from the early 1980s to mid-1990s. Basbaum is associated with the Geração 80 group, named after the 1984 group exhibition Como Vai Você, Geração 80? (How Are You, 80s Generation?) at the Parque Lage art school in Rio de Janeiro. Yet while the official art-historical narrative of that generation – Basbaum’s peers include Beatriz Milhazes, Leonilson and Barrão, who came of age during the emergence of Brazilian democracy – highlights an almost postpolitical identity in which art is primarily a mode of self-expression as opposed to a form of social consciousness, Basbaum’s sculptures, drawings, photographs and actions see the artist tie self-affirmation to the notion of the (still) political subject. In the first of two rooms, the walls are painted in pastel blocks. On each a different ‘manifesto’ is painted, typically a single line, or line repeated, written in the first person: ‘I re.fuse’, the artist states on a background of yellow. ‘I am against’, he repeats 22 times against a wall of pink. Much of this work falls under Basbaum’s ongoing project ‘New Bases for Personality (nbp)’, initiated during the 1990s, which the artist describes on his website as a ‘general motivation or pretext for work (almost a program of action), a means for impregnating space’, implemented under the subheadings of ‘immateriality of the body’, ‘materiality of thought’ and ‘instant logos’. In the gallery, this is materialised in the form of diagrammatic wall drawings that refer to the artist’s own body; a cagelike steel-mesh ‘capsule’ sculpture with two seats inside (a work that also harks back to the participatory legacy of the previous generation: Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape); and video documentation of Basbaum’s 1987 ‘eye’ project, for which he designed a pseudo-corporate eye, distributed across São Paulo (in the form of stickers) as a means to interfere with, or brand, the external world (in the vein of the modern pixação tags sprayed
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in spidery, heavy metal-inspired calligraphy throughout the city). Basbaum’s work can be dense, academic, at times to its detriment. But at its most accessible – of which type there’s plenty on show here, such as Untitled (1989), a photomontage of the artist varying the manner in which he styles his afro, accompanied by Cabelo (Hair, 1986), six drawings on paper of irregular forms made up of curling scribbles in Indian ink – it can be thought of as something akin to conceptual self-portraiture, through which the artist explores his own subject. ‘I am here’, it cries.
A whole lot of absence Presence – or rather the notion of presence highlighted by an absence – is also a running theme through a group show staged a few blocks away in the Biblioteca Mário de Andrade. Curators Jacopo Crivelli Visconti and Olivia Ardui have installed mostly international works, many of them by canonical artists, including Guerrilla Girls, Hans Haacke and Mario García Torres, across two rooms of the art-deco building; both art objects in their own right, and documentation of performances past. Central to Acordo de Confiança is Helmut Wietz’s video recording of Joseph Beuys’s performance I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), in which the Fluxus artist travelled to New York, was stretchered to the René Block Gallery and spent three days incarcerated there with just a wild coyote for company. The work has been interpreted and reinterpreted constantly within art history, but we can consider the position of Beuys as both absent and present. ‘Absent’ from America – in that the artist didn’t physically ‘set foot’ on us soil – but present in the gallery. If so much of Brazilian art has historically featured the active artist, or the activated art object, it is the absent artist, or the absent art object, that is central to this exhibition. Is presence – a thing, a material gesture, obvious labour
Ricardo Basbaum at Galeria Jaqueline Martins
– prerequisite for artmaking? Further historical works (the show, otherwise an education in early Conceptualism, also features contemporary names such as Maria Eichhorn, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck and Maria Loboda) demonstrate that it is not, and has not been for some time. Works on show range from 5 Telepathic Pieces, by Robert Barry, in which a handwritten note from the artist to a curator describes how the artist will psychically ‘transmit’ highly ephemeral ‘works’ for a 1969 exhibition in Vancouver (one of the works will apparently manifest itself as ‘particular emotions’; another consists solely of a ‘secret desire’), to Ian Wilson’s There was a discussion with Lawrence Weiner in New York City (walking up 6th Avenue to Kosuth’s place) (1968), in which the event described is only evidenced through the work’s title typed on a piece of plain paper, installed here in a glass display cabinet, and September 15, 2009 (2009) by Alfredo Jaar, an envelope, apparently containing a photograph of Karl Marx’s grave, with a note from the artist stipulating that whoever buys the work may only take the photo out to look at it once a year.
A large knobbly hoop
On the streets of Centro
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Holes are a preoccupation of Daniel Albuquerque (do I need to point out that a hole is the presence of absence? Well, you can never be too sure). Oral is the young Rio-based artist’s exhibition at bfa São Paulo and
ArtReview
comprises loose-woven wallworks, each with a painting semivisible behind (a little less coy than Jaar’s photograph, but only slightly), that look down upon delicate floor sculptures of messily combined industrial materials. Bandage (2017) is a large knobbly hoop consisting of built-up polyurethane, plaster, fabric and cement massaged and manipulated by Albuquerque, painted in white acrylic and propped up at an angle by a steel rod. Dashes of spraypaint (sickly fluorescent pink) dart across the sculpture’s surface. This hoop, depending on one’s perspective on the work, either frames the gallery’s parquet floor or Sunset Bazooka (2016), a 20cm-diameter orange-and-yellow-spraypainted ball of cement, likewise rough and lumpy, installed a metre or so away. The exhibition text describes the works as having ‘sexual nuance’. Perhaps that is going too far, but Albuquerque’s labour, and by extension his body – contorting to manipulate his materials, his hands mucky – can be felt throughout the work. In every detail of the sculpture, the artist is present.
Relief I travel by subway to the leafier, wealthier Jardins area for a varied trio of painting shows, which range from the austere, self-reflexive works of Valdirlei Dias Nunes at Casa Triângulo, to the rich, densely textured canvases of the late Maria Leontina at Bergamin & Gomide. Hovering somewhere between the minimalist and maximalist is Rodrigo Andrade at Galeria Millan. There is a lot of work here and, given the amount of the material piled onto each mdf surface, a lot of paint used. Approximately half the 30 works on show feature just two colours, used in compositions of flaglike simplicity: Untitled (2017) is typical, in which half of the 20-by-25cm mdf sheet is covered in yellow oil paint, which crashes, with a thick impasto curl, into the dark blue paint that pervades the remaining half. The rest feature strange cartoonish characters, simply rendered, but likewise with an excess of paint: a girl with straggly hair, a silhouetted and mournful-looking ogre. The latter stares at a white cloud. This uncomplicated formalist – and joyful for it – painting resists any great critical interrogation bar the acknowledgement of Andrade’s impressive paint handling. Dias Nunes’s work is likewise simple, but to such an extreme that Recent Paintings and Reliefs invites the viewer to ponder questions concerning framing and deconstruction, infinity and existence. This is a monochrome show in which roughly half the paintings are uniform matt black with a golden yellow grid painted over the top. In some of the grids, the artist has left an irregular gap. It’s an absence within the composition that draws my eye, a black hole through which
Daniel Albuquerque at bfa São Paulo
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Manhole and street scene
the viewer is sucked, a simple formal gesture that leaves us contemplating nothingness (and being). The ‘reliefs’ of the exhibition’s title are mostly painted (white enamel) sheets of mdf, framed with pale cedarwood. Sections of the latter, however, have been either removed or extended beyond the white composition. Likewise, for me, this neat move gives rise to questions of physical and metaphorical edges, mental borders and external control.
Identity politics It would be nice to say that Leontina’s work follows the neat abstract turn from early-twentieth-century figurative Modernism to mid-twentiethcentury Concretism. In truth the artist, who died in 1984 (in her late sixties) yo-yoed back and forth between both movements – as this excellent exhibition demonstrates. Natureza Morta, from 1948, is, as the title states, a still life, rendered in peach, pale orange, murky yellow and reddish browns, depicting a coffee table complete with cups and saucers, water jug and fruit bowl. Yet while these objects are identifiable as such, there is the beginning of a fuzzy kind of geometric abstraction in their composition. Blocks of paint divide up the canvas, such that the viewer is drawn to consider this formal device as much as the ostensible subject. One can see the leap from this work to a painting such as Os jogos e os enigmas (1954), a roughly painted deep and dense red-and-green jumble of rectangles. The walls on which some 30 of the artist’s paintings are hung have been painted a variety of colours, picking up on Leontina’s typically dark, warm palette. It’s an unnecessary, annoying curatorial device, though one that ultimately (and happily) does not detract from this vital exhibition. Leontina’s work has never received its just recognition – thanks to old-fashioned (or not so old-fashioned) sexism, her career was largely overshadowed by that of her husband, artist Milton Dacosta – so one hopes this show might go some way towards raising her profile.
ArtReview
William Kentridge, Drawing for ‘Johannesburg Second Greatest City After Paris’, 1989
Estimate: R2 000 000 – 3 000 000
Important South African and International Art, Decorative Arts and Jewellery Auction in Cape Town, Monday 16 October 2017
Sneak Preview 13 - 17 September 2017 Selection of highlights
Venue The Gallery, One&Only Hotel Dock Road, V&A Waterfront
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A diagonal groove and the prospect of jail The walk to Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, high on the hill of R. Fradique Coutinho, is always a bit of an effort. The road is steep and, because each property owner in São Paulo is responsible for the patch of pavement outside their building, in changeable states of repair. And though the gallery’s architecture is a pristine white cube – walls freshly painted, features attentively designed – it houses a series of ruins. Declive, one of four works from 2017 making up Manoela Medeiros’s show Swept Dust, mimics one’s walk to its venue. Five concrete steps protrude from the wall, a partial floating staircase that leads nowhere. There are a further five chiselled rectangular gaps in the walls, as if more steps are to be added, or perhaps evidence of steps that were there, but have since disappeared or been removed. Six concrete pillars, each with diagonal grooves carved into them, stand in the middle of the gallery: impotent and useless, holding up nothing. This exhibition-in-a-state-of-disrepair is completed by the artist’s removal of the plaster in two sections of the gallery’s wall, appending it to the wall alongside the respective excavations. The allusion
above left Valdirlei Dias Nunes at Casa Triângulo above right Manoela Medeiros at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, 2014
above Osmar Dalio at Galeria Leme below Parque Tenente Siqueira Campos
to ruins, the slow, melancholic disappearance of something – and this, admittedly, is me projecting onto the artwork as opposed to being led by it – chimes with Brazil’s political situation right now. The slogan of the Worker’s Party during the 2000 elections was ‘São Paulo Dá a Volta por Cima’ (‘São Paulo rises from the ashes’). During the run of this show, Lula, the former Worker’s Party president, wildly popular during his time in office (2003–11), was convicted for accepting bribes and now faces jail. The hope of that period feels absent now, as increasingly assiduous policing reveals more and more corruption every day.
On the bright side… It is hard for architecture not to become a reference at Galeria Leme, across town, located next to a busy road in Faria Lima. The gallery, designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha, is a cleaned-up brutalist cuboid, the 1sqm concrete blocks used in its construction left plain and unpolished, their joints combining to create a gridlike-effect on both the exterior and interior of the gallery. Here are four works by Osmar Dalio, who is taking part in his first exhibition after a 17-year hiatus. These are hulking, angular, multifaceted Corten-steel sculptures ostensibly made in the minimalist tradition. There’s something grimy and nonprecious to them, however – little lines of rust speckle the gallery’s gleaming floor – they feel like elements of the building that have fallen, perhaps Tetris-like, to sully this meticulously designed space. One, Planar III (2016/17), uneasily balances at an angle. In a way, describing these works is similar to describing the city that hosts them: messy, pragmatic, decaying and yet, despite all this, still possessed of a certain elegance.
Oliver Basciano is editor (international) of ArtReview
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ArtReview
Pedro Pires, Every Day Life 1, 2, 3 (2016) / image by Repro Pictures
Johannesburg I 52 7th Avenue, Parktown North, 2193 Cape Town I 170 Buitengracht Street, Oro Africa Building, 8001 www.gallerymomo.com
ATHI-PATRA RUGA – Umesiyakazi in Waiting (from the exile series), 2015
WHATIFTHEWORLD.COM INFO@ WHATIFTHEWORLD.COM MOHAU MODISAKENG MICHELE MATHISON ATHI-PATRA RUGA
12.09.2017 – 21.10.2017 25.10.2017 – 02.12.2017 06.12.2017 – 27.01.2018
1 ARGYLE STREET WOODSTOCK, CAPE TOWN +27 (21) 447 2376
Interview
Daniel Lie “Mystical experiences are all over art, but people don’t talk about them” by Ross Simonini
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For the most part, visual art stands before you – on the wall – or it rises up to meet you from the floor. Daniel Lie’s work arrives, most often from above. It drapes and sways and drips from the rafters. The relationship it describes is between the heavens and the dirt: looking skyward, falling earthward. Rocks cradled with rope, fruit sagging in mesh sacks, crystals the size of bowling balls suspended by a complex network of fibres. In the twenty-nine-year-old Brazilian artist’s recent installation Death Center for the Living (2017) at the Wiener Festwochen, viewers reclined on straw mats and gazed up into a hanging garden. Overhead, linseeds sprouted and died in a canopy of fresh soil, rotting fruit, cannabis plants, drying flowers and fermenting rice. In accord with Lie’s ‘conditions’, anyone who entered the space was to remain silent and leave ‘belongings’ outside the installation – wallet, watch, mobile phone, camera, shoes. Throughout all of this, Lie sat inside the environment and meditated. He is often directly present in his art, and performs rituals throughout the entire process, from conception to exhibition. In interviews and at openings, he paints his face and body in bright blues and sunset reds, and dyes his eyebrows canary yellow. He costumes regularly, particularly in workmen’s uniforms, and sees dressing up as a part of the art process. He wears a single thick tail of hair down his back and shaves the rest. For Lie, dress and body colours change frequently, and serve as an extension to his art. This kind of self-transformation began when he was working with Voodoohop, an art collective in his hometown of São Paulo, which inhabited local ‘natural hideaways and held dance parties influenced by indigenous Brazilian traditions’. Likewise, Lie’s implementation of materials is learned from traditional farming methods. Recently he’s been learning directly from the
source, spending periods of his time with the Tupinambá people in the rainforests of Brazil. On Instagram, Lie gives an intimate chronicle of his peripatetic life, floating through a series of installations and residences, both official and self-imposed. This autumn, he travels to Indonesia to make a season-long new work for the Biennale Jogja, where in preparation for the show, he will study with shamans and introduce himself to the home country of his father. ross simonini Is your art born from mysticism? daniel lie I think my work starts in thinking about death. Maybe the first mystical experience I had was the first time I saw a corpse. A relative of mine passed away, my Indonesian grandfather, and I saw the body lying on a metal table before getting his clothes changed for the funeral. I think this situation can be a democratic, open experience. A very basic question opened: where did my grandfather go? Then came another question: if we die, what’s the purpose of living? After that, when I was getting above Daniel Lie in collaboration with Vivian Caccuri, Death Center for the Living, 2017 (installation view, Wiener Festwochen, Vienna). Photo: Inés Bacher facing page Daniel Lie installing Podrera, 2016 (Kampnagel, Hamburg). Photo: Martin Meiser
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deeper in art, I tried to reach back into this experience. The way that I understood this was to reach beyond this constructed reality. So, I’ve been practising meditation. I’ve been practising Tai Chi Chuan, Vipassana meditation, Daimoku [nam-myohorenge-kyo]. I’ve been going to a Candomblé [Afro-Brazilian cult] here in Brazil. I’ve been going deeper into the understanding of female strengths in me. Also, I’ve been experiencing different types of psychoactive elements, and I think all of this gave me, and can give, a wider understanding of life and death. rs Is making the work a mystical experience for you? dl In my work, I think the first thing is the relationship I develop with it. In one part, I try not to look for complete control of the work. I put in elements that can change throughout time. Nowadays I develop my work for a specific space and I only do it once. And I try to find different layers to connect it to this space, by personal rituals or by meeting with people who had or have a personal connection with the place. Sometimes I sleep at the venue and through my dreams I access an image, a symbology. We’re using the word ‘mystical’ and I like to use the word ‘energy’ too, but we’re talking about a certain kind of energy. Science has many words for energy: gravity, heat, electricity, magnetic fields, etc. And all of them are energy. But maybe we can call this kind of energy a field of emotion. But these words are not enough. The experience, though – it can be beyond enough. rs Do you channel this energy with your work? dl I don’t think I am channelling. I think this energy can be accessible for everyone, the thing is I feel like it’s a language and it requires dedication to be able to communicate with it. But this vision of artistic channelling
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Guilhermina Esperança, 2015 (installation view, Casa Triângulo, São Paulo). Photo: Edouard Fraipont
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can be tricky. I don’t like to place myself, as an artist, as different from everybody else. I think our society is very romantic. Here in Brazil at least, when you are an artist you are either a semigod or nearly a vagabond. So where is the middle? Where is the human, the someone normal, just like you or I? In this field of art, it’s not something understood only by your brain, but with your emotions, your body. To understand can require a deeper, wider sense of time. Maybe you don’t understand the artwork now, but in ten years it will come back to you, and that’s the period of time this artwork needed to make sense to you. rs Do you find that there’s resistance to this kind of thinking in the artworld? dl Yeah, there’s tons of taboo, and one of the easiest ways to talk about it is through scientific language. Our society believes in science, we take it as truth, as reality. Lots of things from science are only theories, but science needs to be believed. When we talk about something that is not from this field, we’re going against what society believes, so it gets diminished. When we’re talking about this holistic side, we only have a few words to describe so many different energetic processes, and that’s very frustrating. These mystical experiences are all over art, but people don’t talk about them. Look at the construction of a museum. It’s built like a ‘sacred’ place – the way the objects are untouch-
able, the way these places can be very socially intimidating for some, the way the space and lighting are designed around pieces of art to enhance them, the amount of security, and even if we look at how people behave inside a museum – walking slowly, paying attention and being quiet. Or if we look at Joseph Beuys, his whole work’s about energy and material and shamanism and rituals, but texts written about him want to talk more about his political side, involvement with the university and so on. This whole other side is not taken seriously, and I think that’s a big mistake. At the same time, as I start to connect with other fields of art, like performance, dance and theatre, there this whole subject is not as taboo as in the visual arts. Even in the academic world they talk about energy, about the unified field and how to connect and work it or be involved with it. I think the United States and countries in Europe can be even more sceptical about the subject than South American countries. In the visual arts we are especially
“It’s not something understood only by your brain, but with your emotions, your body. To understand can require a deeper, wider sense of time. Maybe you don’t understand the artwork now, but in ten years it will come back to you, and that’s the period of time this artwork needed to make sense to you”
ignorant of this, and I personally think it’s a very irresponsible attitude. rs Your use of organic materials seems connected to this idea of energy – soil, live plants, rotten fruit. dl The material is the most important part of the work. I try to bring the material as it is – meaning it can change throughout time due to living-dying processes. I am not interested in the representation of something. I’m interested in the experience directly. I used to work with synthetics, like plastic, but in 2015 I stopped. I did three solo exhibitions at the same time in São Paulo, in venues that I dreamed my whole life to work in. But I got completely tired, physically and on a spiritual level. At first I couldn’t understand why. Then I realised I was making some type of mistake because if I was doing what I believed in, why was I so drained? So after, I thought about the cycle of organic materials, how life and death are not separated, how the fungi that rot also feed the plants. I realise the synthetics did not do that, so I stopped working with plastics. Then I felt like I was able to generate energy again. This was a breaking point in my work. rs When did this break happen? dl In 2016, in Chile, in this hundred-year-old house in this central neighbourhood in Santiago called Yungay. I made a work called Asumimos de ahora en adelante [We take on, from now on].
Lindinalva and the Balm, 2016 (performance, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo). Photo: Leonardo Matsuhei
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Asumimos de ahora en adelante, 2016 (installation view, calle Compañía de Jesús 2850, Santiago de Chile)
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I used hemp fabric, hemp ropes and dirt. The majority of houses in Chile are made with adobe, so I studied bioconstruction techniques and worked with these techniques for the first time. It was all handmade. I developed this adobe that was a mix of the dirt I gathered with horse manure and linseeds, and mixed everything with my hands. It was a very deep connection with the material. I spent a month doing this work. It was a very remarkable old house, almost a ruin, made of adobe. There were also a lot of dead pigeons in the place and I made some altars for them. I used the sacred cacti from Chile, Bolivia and Peru, which is called San Pedro. I worked with 55 cacti and, at the end of the installation, the people in the area could go there and collect one cactus to take home. So it spread throughout the neighbourhood. After the work was finished, all the biodegradable components went back into the earth. This was the first show I did addressing the question: how do the sacred plants influence an environment while they are alive? And this is especially towards sacred plants usually used in rituals or consumed to achieve other mind-states and living states. I also brought this question to my most recent work, Death Center for the Living, with the two cannabis indica trees. rs Do you see the artist’s role as a social one? dl I think the artist is very important for society because we can make other people
more sensitive. That’s how art has impacted me. I think nowadays the artist is very much needed for our society. To be an artist can be a calling, just like to be a shaman, a priest, a doctor – this occupation that is towards the other. I think it is a big responsibility. In Brazil a very, very important artist named Tunga recently died [in 2016], and he is a reference for me. He helped me to see art as shamanism. I felt energy from his objects and installations. I could feel it just like we can feel a living being. rs Does treating art as ‘work’ conflict with the artist’s spiritual role? dl In Brazilian Portuguese, work is trabalho. When you go to make some spiritual act, you need to bring an offering of organic materials or perform a specific ritual that we call trabalho. We call it work. The word is very open. It is a bridge between the spiritual and the labour we do every day. I want to purge myself of work, but I was born in São Paulo, which is a city completely made for work. Three years ago, Pedro França, a Brazilian artist, gave a talk at the event Longitudes,
“When you go to make some spiritual act, you need to bring an offering of organic materials or perform a specific ritual that we call trabalho. We call it work. The word is very open. It is a bridge between the spiritual and the labour we do every day”
at the institution Casa do Povo, about the artist as the producer of herself or himself. For us artists, we have to do everything. We have to be our administrator. We have to do the accounting. We have to clean up. We have to have all the skills that would make one company. We do it all by ourselves. I thought he was going to say how difficult it is and share the pain, but actually he started to say that this is the future of capitalism, the self-made person, the person that does everything, the company person. And that shocked me, to understand that I’m already creating the model of the future capitalism. I’ve been very privileged to be able to do what I do, with the historical, political and social conditions of Brazil – I would not be able to deal with all this professional side of the artworld if I hadn’t worked as an artist assistant for Leda Catunda for four years, to come to the understanding that with this type of labour we are also feeding this machine. It sometimes feels like there’s no way to completely escape, but this is the society where I was born. Biennale Jogja xiv Equator # 4: Indonesia Meets Brazil takes place from 2 November to 9 December Ross Simonini is an artist, writer, musician and documentarian. His first novel, The Book of Formation, will be published by Melville House and Penguin on 14 November
How low can you go?, 2016 (installation view, Change-Change, Budapest). Photo: Sári Ember all images Courtesy the artist
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Atrium, 2017. Mixed media and resin on wood, 200 x 150 cm
15– 30 September 2017
144-146 New Bond Street, London W1S 2PF www.halcyongallery.com
CAPE TOWN:
SEPTEMBER
LHOLA AMIRA 02 . 09 . 17 07 . 10 . 17 MONGEZI NCAPHAYI 02 . 09 . 17 07 . 10 . 17
JOHANNESBURG: GEORGINA GRATRIX 09 . 09 . 17 01 . 10 . 17
STELLENBOSCH X: PART II 12 . 08 . 17 30 . 09 . 17
ART FAIRS: FNB JOBURG ART FAIR 07 . 09 . 17 10 . 09 . 17 CONTEMPORARY ISTANBUL 14 . 09 . 17 17 . 09 . 17
LHOLA AMIRA www.smacgallery.com
LAGOM: Breaking Bread with the Self Righteous
18.8 — 21.10 2017 Variations Dodda Maggý bergcontemporary.is
Klapparstígur 16 101 Reykjavík / Iceland
Dodda Maggý, Étude Op. 88, No. 1, 2017, Video/Music
Galerie Rudolfinum Alšovo nábřeží 12 110 00 Praha 1 Czech Republic
General partner
Exhibition partner
Krištof 7.9.— Kintera —26.11. 2017
100th exhibition of the gallery Admission free — thanks to the AVAST Foundation
Media partners
www.galerierudolfinum.cz
Palexpo / 01-04.02.2018 / artgeneve.ch
Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 28-29.04.2018 / artmontecarlo.ch
International Art FAIR 19-22 octobER 2017 paris
#fiac r fiac.com 2UJDQLVHG E\
2IÀFLDO SDUWQHU
Fair for Modern and Contemporary Art
14–17 September 2017
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Art Featured
Hurray for those who never explored anything 81
Michael Simpson By Martin Herbert
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“It’s compulsive”
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Michael Simpson drives a Citröen ds, a curvy black beast from 1974. pointedly excluded. Another set of squints, painted, sits on Simpson’s Picking me up from a train station near his Wiltshire home/studio, studio wall, one of around 55 diversified multipanel paintings he has he mentions that its designer, Flaminio Bertoni, was also a sculptor – made of the subject in a nuanced, graphic style. His squints, though, which shows – and that his previous car was also a Citröen ds. He does aren’t exactly cuts, and the church is gone. They’re usually apertures not say, though I’d wager he knows, that it’s the model Alain Delon’s of a type, sometimes with a closable sliding panel; they look, in fact, existential contract-killer steals in Jean-Pierre Melville’s stylish 1967 like miniature modernist abstract paintings, and they’re accomthriller Le Samouraï. In any case, considering the seventy-seven-year- panied on the canvas by a kind of real-world geometry, objects as old English painter’s art, which for 37 years has revolved around what angles: leaning ladders, stepladders, steps. Stairways that don’t lead he calls, initially at least, “the infamy of religious history”, the consist- to heaven, leaving us, like lepers, on the outside of – well, something. ency and modernist cool of this car seem germane. In the studio, Simpson has explored this unnerving subject, or condition if you Simpson worries away at a handful of figurative subjects over and will, with steady inventiveness and pointed repetition since the end of over, presented frontally: long benches, the 1980s. Back then, the Dorset-born “It was a really desperate time for me, artist – who in the 1960s had studied confessionals, a fictitious version of a device called a leper squint. He’s only painting. Well, I’ve had a lot of desperate at the Royal College of Art alongside the future greats of British Pop and had a few vehicles, but he’s chosen them times; there’s nothing like painting had a successful early career himself, carefully and they’ve served him well. to underline your own inadequacy” leading up to a solo show at London’s In his studio, where a glassed Serpentine Gallery in 1985 – came to case of first editions and completeset modernist periodicals reflects his former sideline as an anti- the end of 14 paintings featuring angels, “falling through a void”, that quarian book dealer, Simpson – whose personality mixes deep civility, he wasn’t satisfied with. “They were called, despite my children being Eeyore-ish dejection, huge professional commitment and cultivated the centre of my life, The Debris of the Fuck. It was a really desperate time wit – offers an original Russian Constructivist stool, painted green, on for me, painting. Well, I’ve had a lot of desperate times, even now is a which to perch. Then he ventures further back in time. “Two hundred desperate time; there’s nothing like painting to underline your own fifty yards away, in a church over there,” he says, “happens to be the inadequacy. Anyway, there was one image of falling putti: I saw somelargest leper squint in history, 17 feet long.” A leper squint is a cut that, thing in it. I was very involved in reading Giordano Bruno” – the Italian from the Middle Ages onward, when leprosy was rife in the southern philosopher and cosmologist who, in 1600, was burned at the stake counties, masons made into churches’ facades: usually rectangular, for his heretical denial of Catholic doctrine – “and I had the idea that facing the altar so that the sick might witness the service, albeit this could become the genesis of the first Bench painting.
preceding pages Bench Painting 73, 2009, oil on canvas, 245 × 518 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blain/Southern, Berlin & London
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above Bench Painting 1 (Death of Giordano Bruno), 1989–90, oil on canvas, 240 × 385 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blain/Southern, Berlin & London
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“The bench came in because in several of Bruno’s texts – they’re it’s circular if slowly changing, in the classic Beckettian style – three dialogues – he will occasionally talk about where people are sitting. characters come, they repeat phrases to each other and they go. This touched me, wanting to identify that. I was moved by it. And Meanwhile, they sit on a bench. the bench is an object in history where so many things happen; In the Bench paintings circa 2006, the bench starts to leave the it has this pathos. It also seemed a place where, thinking of Bruno’s ground, as if inhabiting the same void as the falling angels. “Yes, end, justice is served.” well,” says Simpson, “I’m really disturbed by gravity. My mother told The bench in Bench Painting 1 (Death of Giordano Bruno) (1989–90) me that when I was a child, I spent hours in the garden, throwing appears to consist of rusty iron, latticed like a Meccano construction, things up and becoming enraged that they came down. I’m still as the angel tumbling towards it. Simpson would make some 80 more bewildered by physical life now, and it bleeds into the paintings. You bench paintings, half of which he’d destroy, until 2009, the iconog- know: levitating ladders,” referring here to the Leper Squint works raphy gently mutating yet the that began after the Bench series “I’m really disturbed by gravity. My mother told broad consistency suggesting ended, where ladders propped a painter unable to outrun his against the wall sometimes me that when I was a child, I spent hours in the subject. Always a long empty hover off the ground, or sit garden, throwing things up and becoming enraged on the ground but, shadows bench, sometimes wood, somethat they came down. I’m still as bewildered by suggest, also stand somehow times metal, in a tiled cell or a blank greyish space, accompaphysical life now, and it bleeds into the paintings” upright; or the shadows contranied by an electric fly-killer, or dict our conception of space, a board showing the order of hymns to be sung, or a gnomic text – like retooled metaphysical painting. (Talking of shadows, Simpson ‘The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast’, ‘The Fastenings of Kind’ points to John Donne’s 1635 poem ‘Lecture Upon the Shadow’ as an – or with an interrogatory lamp floating midair, or an equally free- oblique influence.) In a work like the four-panel Leper Squint 16 (2014), floating grille (the formal antecedent, one assumes, of the leper where ladders rise towards a square-ish hole in a wall, the shadow squints), or other accessories. There is a bone-dry absurdist humour moves rightward across the wall, as if tracking the passage of time: about them. At another point in our conversation, talking more time passing while the artist, or the viewer, is stuck in a room – there generally, Simpson notes that Samuel Beckett, with whom he briefly are never any figures in Simpson’s art; we’re always the proxy – corresponded, has been a huge influence on him, especially his contemplating the unknowable behind that black square. short 1965 play Come and Go. Simpson included a video of one perforWe are held too, thanks to Simpson’s devices. “I have rules. mance in his 2014 show at David Roberts Art Foundation, London: One of them is that the principal object exists in a kind of island.
Bench Painting 31, 1994–5, oil on canvas, 244 × 534 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blain/Southern, Berlin & London
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preceding pages Squint 44, 2015–17, oil on canvas in four panels, 381 × 732 cm (overall). Courtesy the artist and Blain/Southern, Berlin & London
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above Squint 51, 2017, oil on canvas, 282 × 160 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blain/Southern, Berlin & London
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I also, in the Léger sense, paint the image up to the frontal plane of the born in 1940, was the right age to straddle two eras, and his art crosscanvas, so it has a formal strength. Another element is the economy splices the graphic punch of Pop, the austerity of Conceptualism of the palette…” Within this, though, there’s much subtlety. The grey and the propulsive angst of art made in the wake of the Second ‘wall’ he regularly paints as a background, for instance, is appropri- World War’s atrocities. For him, focusing on other concerns than the ately at once worldly and not. The paint is rollered on, mundanely, as absence of a meaning to life, and the violence of earthly explanations, a decorator would do it, but loosely and drily enough that, studded would be brushing the unanswerable under the carpet. And, perwith irregular gaps revealing the underpainting, it recalls fresco and fectly, his doggedness reflects the fact that he’s addressing questions religious painting per se: it’s stranded between the earthly and heav- that can’t be moved on from. He pulls another Leper Squint from the enly, and on a practical level offers a variegated surface that snags racks – an insidious, tautly painted thing in which the leper squint the eye. The grey is for a reason, meanwhile, pointing to Simpson’s has become a kind of freefloating, open-lidded metal case, hanging acute engagement with the mechanics of painting, the detail factored like the sword of Damocles – and clarifies that the enigma also drives in when you have fewer decisions to make. “Grey is very beautiful, him. “This one, I’m really not sure what to make of it at all – so many undervalued, like brown. It’s also a critical choice: if I’d painted that” times I’ve nearly painted the whole thing out, but I’ve kept going, on – gestures at a painting – “cherry red, it would be utterly meaning- and off. I don’t know what it’s about; I had some idea that it would less. It could also, in a more obscure way, be construed as the colour of be just a mystifying floating box. Just a threat.” It hangs in the air, timelessness. It has something to do with disappearance, this partic- waiting to be understood, powered by its gaps. ular grey: just an empty shell. I wanted to depict an inert, dead space. Unease aside, you’d rather look than leave; fundamentally Simpson is in the business of making paintings, and painting is a Without any sense of succour, without any sense of love.” And yet, I suggest – recognising that I haven’t wanted to look kind of animist category, bigger than its subjects and the language away from these coolly hieratic canvases, with their distant echoes clustering around it, though not extinguishing them. Simpson, as we speak, is completing paintof the Egyptian art that, alongings towards a show, opening side Vermeer, Simpson most this month in Berlin, composed reveres – doesn’t the painting entirely of Leper Squint works in all give you something else: some austere pleasures of structure and their refined variety; he’s also planning, he says, to revisit a shortlived harmony? “Hugely. I really pursue this idea of austerity, paintings series of works featuring confeshaving elegance and austere sionals. One thing connecting nature.” Here’s a paradox, then. all the paintings, I suggest to him, and despite the anxiety that Simpson’s paintings are of an inesundergirds them, is a condition capable existentialist chamber, of desire, the obscurity of which but we want to linger in it. The eye lends itself to universal concerns slows, appreciates small modula(why are we here?) and the painttions, suspended strangeness. er’s (why do I keep painting?): art, And, in the process, the paintings’ here, speaks of an endless search, ‘about’, eg the cruelty of religion, falls away. I ask what the squint the endless search leads back to art. means to him. “I’m glad you asked. I really don’t think any more that “I don’t even particularly like painting,” says Simpson. “I’ve never the squint is even historically linked to its origin. For me it’s a meta- regarded it as a pleasure. But it’s compulsive. That demonstration phor for something far more universal and bewildering: this idea constant in Beckett, the heroism of failure, is with me. I think, in a of a hole in one’s consciousness that you can never really be sure of. sense, the paintings are all about one thing: the bewilderment of not It’s this general sense of a great mystery, of what we are and who we understanding, and when you see them all together, the possibility are. It’s a very common statement to make, but that’s what I think it’s might come to mind that this psychological thing is going on, about all about. [Lucio] Fontana – it’s very interesting that he was interested yearning, and maybe that contributes to an atmosphere, the presin science fiction. That slit, I think it’s a similar thing – the beyond, ence of the work – which is paramount, like the presence of a human the beyond of death, the beyond of consciousness.” Still though, why being.” In the studio, we watch the angled shadows on the quartet of stay in this space, then, in front of these frightening questions; or, Leper Squint canvases, not moving but marking time, confusing space, for him, why paint at all? He considers it. “To pass time. Which is emplaced by their own logic. “I think that in most of the work I’ve produced there exist physical impossibilities,” says Simpson. “But what we all do, whatever it is we’re doing.” Simpson, clearly, is deeply marked by the midcentury questioning I still believe paintings contain their own truths. If they look right, of existentialism, and this makes him a rarity in today’s artistic land- as paintings, then they are right.” ar scape, even for a painter in his seventies. Waves of artists after the 1950s – with the exception of outliers like Bruce Nauman – didn’t Michael Simpson: squint is on view at Blain/Southern, Berlin, engage these bloodcurdling fundamentals, seemingly because, the 16 September – 28 October collapse of avant-gardism aside, art is Publications and archival material from Michael Simpson’s collection Martin Herbert is an associate editor expected to discover new concerns, and art (installation view, Study #6. Michael Simpson, 2014, draf, London). of ArtReview turned cooler during the 1960s. Simpson, Photo: Matthew Booth. Courtesy the artist
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Joker Politician Preacher Nástio Mosquito By Matthew McLean
A man stands alone in a dark room stripped to the waist, ranting image is pixelated, distorted by the fisheye lens: it could be an outtake messianically about sanity and betrayal. In a thick Russian accent, from a low-budget ripoff of The Blair Witch Project (1999). another tells an unseen conversationalist that members of royal The bareness of this work, in which Mosquito appears alone, families should be forced only to breed with other races. A politician, exclaiming to the audience, mostly shrouded in darkness, is typical: recording notes for a speech, reminds his assistant to edit out his plan his videos generally eschew breathtaking locations for empty conto gas the elderly of his country. crete wrecks, scrublands or bland corporate interiors. Similarly, his These characters and more populate the world of Belgium- characters’ movements are casual, apparently barely choreographed. based Angolan artist Nástio Mosquito. More specifically, they are, Costume and props, too, are never more than rudimentary. broadly, roles inhabited by the artist. With artistic noms de plume When postproduction effects are employed, the resulting including Cucumber Slice, Nasty-O, Saco and Zura Zurara, Mosquito aesthetic is no more polished, or painterly: Fuck Africa Remix (2015) cycles through characters across different works. Sometimes, he features found images and footage of American newscasters, white big-game hunters, British royals, revisits them, as he does Nástia The register of Mosquito’s art is direct, black bourgeoisie in shopping (a feminised form of Nástio), who malls and career politicians responds with gutter wisdom assertive, redolent with the language of – from Nicolas Sarkozy to Idi to questions posed by real-life self-help therapy, mass political platitudes Amin, David Cameron to Robert curator Gabi Ngcobo (in the and corporate motivational speech, but its video Nástia Answers Gabi, 2010). Mugabe – dissolving in and out of When Mosquito formally collabone another in a crude montage, seemingly straightforward, even trivial, orates with other artists, he often statements betray a tricksy, self-evading syntax saturated with brash colour. For all the grandiose vulgarity of adopts yet another identity, such as Nastivicious, the hybrid moniker under which he operates with Mosquito’s monologue in the video – “The Americas – fuck – I love the Spanish artist Vic Pereiró. To add complication, a Nastivicious that place,” he intones. “Good people. Black people, Chinese people, production might be nominally voiced by one of Mosquito’s charac- German people – it’s mine. I bought it. Great place, fantastic” – the ters, such as Nástia’s Manifesto (2008) or Nástia Answers Ryan (2014). For video gives the impression it could have been made by any amateur the viewer seeking clarity, Nástia’s Manifesto’s subtitle might offer a enthusiast on a desktop. retort: ‘Hypocritical, Ironic and Do Not Give a Fuck’. One effect of these apparently consciously ‘poor images’, to These characters are present across the range of Mosquito’s borrow a term from Hito Steyerl, is to put the emphasis on the one output, whether providing the authorial or narrative framework for element that knits them together: Mosquito’s language. Whenever his installations, or appearing in performances. But they come most he appears onscreen, or onstage, he speaks (or, sometimes, sings). The vividly to life in his videos. Despite being the part of his practice that primary content of his static artworks, too – whether projections, or circulates most widely, Mosquito’s videos are difficult to appraise, wall and floor decals, or posters – is, in the manner of big-C concepshowing consciously little visual technique and featuring neither tualists like Jenny Holzer or Lawrence Weiner, primarily verbal. beautiful frames nor expert editing. I Am Naked (2005), for example, While his performances vary in format, and employ a range of devices is shot with a single, static night-vision camera. Mosquito performs including lighting, sound, video projection – and, during The Age in the piece, approaching and then moving back I Do Not Remember, performed at the ica in London facing page The Age I Don’t Remember, 2015 from the camera, like a tiger pacing its cage. When in 2015, alcohol in plastic cups, distributed to the (performance view, ica, London). he presses his face to the camera for a closeup, the audience in order that they might toast Elvis, and a Photo: Jean-Christophe Lanquetin
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shower of stickers bearing Mosquito’s own slogans: ‘Don’t be cool – Be be taken at face value – since Mosquito’s body is being handily obscured Relevant’ – they are still primarily vehicles for Mosquito’s dialogue. in shadow from the waist down) exhorts repeatedly that “You must In this respect, they feel more reminiscent of the confrontational take care of your sanity”. This unobjectionable advice is complicated standup of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor than that of any other by the speaker’s wild, wide-eyed delivery, which implies something performance tradition, though Bartholomew Ryan, who included quite far from sanity. Now, a statement’s being spoken by a mentally Mosquito in 9 Artists at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2013, disturbed person might typically be grounds to doubt its veracity. locates Mosquito in the context of ‘spoken word’ – the first-person, But who knows the importance of protecting one’s sanity better than invective poetic tradition of the us that spans Langston Hughes and someone who’s lost it? Even when his statements are seemingly coarser, Gil Scott-Heron (and, arguably, prefigures rap). However, Ryan clar- cruder and more gaglike, Mosquito is capable of intimating equally ifies in an essay on the Walker’s website, while the spoken word vexing conceptual scenarios – as if smuggling them into the work, tradition ‘is attended by self-essentializing positions as a mode of under cover. In Nástia Answers Gabi, Ngcobo asks how Nástia undermaking visible/giving access to/ stands justice (her questions pushing into the public sphere “There is not much respect for the art of words. appear as text onscreen). Nástia hitherto marginalized identities’, When you paint, you’re just painting a surface, responds midway through defethere is nothing ‘self-essentializing’ cating in an empty field. After and you can make it more or less soulful about Mosquito’s art. This is not ruminating – “Justice is about – if you can paint. But anyone can talk. just a matter of the panoply of charwhat you know, and what you don’t know. And mainly it’s acters he employs, nor the various We are not careful with the danger of talk” about what you do with what ethnic and economic positions they inhabit (Nástia speaks with an air of entitlement, though seems to you know, and what you do with what you don’t know” – Nástia coninhabit only wastelands; al Moore, a political operator in the fictional cludes that “right now it would be very just if someone would give state of Botrovia and subject of Mosquito’s Transitory Suppository Act me some toilet paper”. Is this just a punchline? Or is there a genuine #1: Another Leader, 2016, lounges in hotel rooms in a luxurious dashiki, insight in the suggestion that justice might be demonstrated complaining that he’s been sent Eastern European prostitutes when through context-specific gestures – like, here, rescuing someone “I specifically asked for Brazilians”). Rather, it’s a matter of the very from shame? And if that gesture implies something like respect, care words they speak. The register of Mosquito’s art is direct, assertive, or attention, is that what justice concerns itself with? Or is Mosquito redolent with the language of self-help therapy, mass political plati- leading us down a path of speculation only to evade the question of tudes and corporate motivational speech, but its seemingly straight- justice entirely? Consider for a moment that, in developing countries forward, even trivial, statements betray a tricksy, self-evading syntax. in Africa and elsewhere, sanitation is a serious, indeed life-or-death For example, the speaker in I Am Naked (a claim that, as it happens, can’t business. How serious is Mosquito being?
Nástio Mosquito in collaboration with Vic Pereiró, Fuck Africa (Remix), 2015, video, 3 min 9 sec
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“There is not much respect for the art of words,” Mosquito tells me when we meet in person. “When you paint, you’re just painting a surface, and you can make it more or less soulful – if you can paint. But anyone can talk. We are not careful with the danger of talk.” It’s summer and Mosquito is in Berlin to present Embrace, a regular programme for the Documenta 14 radio project, Every Time A Ear di Soun, curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, director of the city’s Savvy Contemporary. Though Mosquito is an accomplished singer – Gatuno, Eimigrante & Pai de Família, an album of dark, Tom Waits-ish blues hybridised with beats, was released in 2016 – the format is not musical, but closer to that of a talkshow phone-in: ‘unruly behavior put to use, favoring the brutality of human limitations’, as it’s described on Documenta’s website. Limitations are not usually part of Mosquito’s story, so rapid, if not positively meteoric, has his ascent to acclaim been. Born in Huambo in 1981, he trained for and began his career in television production in Angola, directing and scripting documentaries. But having been “advised to leave my job a few times”, he realised that his ideas would find more purchase in the artworld than in broadcast media. With few concrete examples of professional artists to look to – “I did not know what video art was, what performance art was” – the realisation was arrived at only by a process of elimination. “I don’t like repetition,” Mosquito explains, “so I couldn’t do theatre. Not skilled enough to be a film director, not committed enough to be a musician, not disciplined enough to be an actor… So I’m an artist!” He started exhibiting in 2006, and was soon included in the São Paulo Biennial (2010), and group exhibitions at Tate Modern (2012) and the Walker Art Center (2013). In 2015 the vocal reception to his breakthrough solo show at Ikon in Birmingham led to a version of the exhibition opening at the Oratorio di San Ludovico in Venice alongside the 56th
Biennale; the same year, he was cowinner of the Pinchuk Art Centre’s Future Generation Art Prize. Last year, he was nominated for the Artes Mundi Prize, and opened commissions at moma, New York, and the Fondazione Prada, Milan. He still isn’t represented by a gallery or agent, he tells me proudly. Power preoccupies Mosquito. The headline of his homepage reads ‘be.power’, while The Age I Do Not Remember featured a long passage in which the artist declared to a furious piano riff: ‘i don’t need to be powerful, i am power’. His work is also populated with leaders of one shade or another – whether backstage agents, like al Moore, or public figureheads, like the monarchs and presidents who flash up in Fuck Africa. At the core of his pivotal Ikon exhibition, titled Daily Lovemaking, was a mural in the form of an ugly collage of found imagery, garish colour and cheap fonts: like something a teenager might scrapbook together from printouts of websites. At its centre was a foetus, over which loomed the figures of Adolf Hitler and Nelson Mandela, their raised arms crossing each other like ceremonial swords at a regimental wedding. Was this a sly reminder that Mandela was on a us terror watch list until 2008? In interviews, Mosquito gave nothing away, telling The Guardian in 2015 that: ‘They were both determined people, intelligent people, they had a capacity to lead’. Is that what being powerful consists in, I ask Mosquito. What does ‘power’ mean to him? “I think that there is nothing more powerful than what I consider,” he responds. “What I consider is the most powerful, possible thing. Looking at something, going somewhere. How many different ways that human life can be experienced. As individuals, we do get to determine how we look at something.” He gestures to a pack of Gauloises (mine) on the table. “You could think: the pleasure of having a cigarette. Or: it gives me cancer. We don’t have to be prisoners.” In the same vein,
Nastivicious, Nástio Answers Ryan (still), 2014, video, 19 min 22 sec
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we can indeed ‘consider’ if Hitler is like Mandela (he isn’t), or if the pleasure of smoking is worth it (it’s not). The value of the exercise is not to see if our opinions or values change, per se, but to realise that these values are ours to determine – that our perspectives are ours to frame, project, decide and, eventually, enact (going over my notes, I see Mosquito’s conversation is full of verbs). In other words, Mosquito is an idealist – not in the utopian, perfectionist sense of the word, but the philosophical one, going back through the existentialists to Bishop Berkeley and Arthur Schopenhauer – the conviction that far from being shaped by base materiality, all our minds have access to are ideas, and thus what we think of as reality is really mentally constructed. It follows that intention matters, perception matters, because in some fundamental microsense, they actually change the world. Or, in Mosquito’s own words: “To do things is just to think about it.” In an interview with Art South Africa in 2015, the artist described the theme of Daily Lovemaking as ‘how hard it is to come back to your partner’s “uterus,” a partner you love beyond feeling, after you’ve found her or him in your bed with a cucumber, condom, baby oil and the photo of their boss!’ When I recall this quote, Mosquito reaffirms: “You can decide ‘fuck my boss’, or you can go back and keep fucking your wife.” “To forgive”, Nástia declares in the 2010 video, “is an action you take. It’s a decision you make. It’s not a feeling you feel.” Betrayal, and forgiveness: Mosquito’s reflections on the topic remind me not a little of American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s argument, in Pursuits of Happiness (1981), that marriage and – per films like The Awful Truth (1937), in which couples prepare for divorce only to fall back in love with each other during the process – forgiveness and recoupling somehow figures our will to know: shows us that to know is to return, as we would to a former lover, to something that
we already know. Philosophy, in this picture, is, to use philosopher Stephen Mulhall’s phrase, nothing more nor less than a ‘recounting of the ordinary’. There is nothing, from this perspective, inconsistent in a statement being both very profound and very mundane. “You choose,” Nástia declares towards the end of Nástia Answers Gabi. “That simple. That complex. Not complicated.” In the video, this last phrase is repeated for emphasis. Not complicated. Except that everything is complicated with Mosquito’s work – or, rather, its complexity resides in its simplicity. “The public speaker, the preacher, the joker,” he tells me. “This is the triangle. There are always these three characters in my work.” Indeed, Mosquito plays these roles not sequentially, but each one at the same time, each position of perspective undermining and enhancing the other. Take his installation for the Artes Mundi exhibition, Transitory Suppository: Act #II No. Pruritus. No. Ani (2016), depicting a crate of airlifted relief aid, parachute still attached (nominally the brainchild of al Moore). What spilled out from the broken netting was not rations of food, or water treatment kits, but hundreds of packets of suppository pills, their boxes promising a ‘Quintuplet Action’ (‘Soothes/Shrinks/ Pain Relief/Locates/Awakes God’). Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto (1928) – another response to Portuguese colonialism – exhorts the postcolonial subject to ‘absorb the sacred enemy’. In Fuck Africa, Mosquito asserts that “We’re gonna grab Africa – we’re gonna make it spread – and we’re gonna fuck it in the ass.” So is the suppository a miraculous gift, or a fraud – or worse, a poison? The answer, of course, would not be found inside the boxes: one critic, who swiped a packet, found it empty. It may have been a simple matter of production budgets, but echoes of this black-to-the-point-of-nihilistic humour – the hollow cackle of the empty aid parcel – can be felt throughout Mosquito’s
above left 3 Continents (still), 2010, video, 7 min 45 sec. above right Nástia Answers Gabi (still), 2010, video, 19 min 44 sec preceding pages Nastivicious, Ending Bad People is Ambiguity The Strength, the Courage & the Audacity is in Trusting the Universe! Have Faith, a Violet Spirit, be an Eagle, never loose Hope Be Coherent & U will find (the) Tangibility of Life, 2015, wallpaper, dimensions variable
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Nastivicious, Acts (detail), 2012, video, 12 min 17 sec. Photo: Stuart Whipps
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corpus. “I don’t worry too much about being an asshole,” he tells me when I raise it with him. “I don’t want people to be excited to fucking meet me because they’ve seen a piece of mine that they like.” Yet it is easy to imagine someone being excited to meet Mosquito: his voice is honeyed, he is charming and extremely good-looking. I realise not long into talking with him that I want him to like me. I start to wonder if his interest in charismatic mass leaders – whether Mandela or Hitler – is in part connected with the possibility that he has enough charisma to be one himself. My desire to be accepted by Mosquito has another component, however embarrassed I am to confess it – which is his difference. In an artworld that increasingly fetishises a nebulous global ‘authenticity’, Mosquito being African is an element of his work’s reception as impossible to ignore as it is to articulate. This much is acknowledged by a 2016 commission from the Emdash Foundation, which took the form of a photograph published on the cover of ccq magazine, showing Mosquito (staring out at the camera, half-startled, half-bored) mobbed by a heap of blandly dressed white teens (I was reminded of the declaration in the 2014 campus comedy Dear White People that “the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised to two”). Indeed, that Mosquito might enjoy a kind of token, precarious privilege is, I think, key to his outrageousness: the scatology, the lo-fi aesthetic, the seemingly trite self-help assertions and the deployment of stereotypes like the vulgar Russian or the corrupt, horny African that, in another artist’s hands, would invite the charge of xenophobia. As a designated interloper, outsider, other, Mosquito can indulge, abuse and ultimately rebuke this unspoken special status. How else to understand the statement
in Fuck Africa that “Black on Black porn… That shit’s disgusting, man… Just big bellies?” Who else, we ask, gets to get away with this? And yet, again, the more I talk to Mosquito, the less simple things seem. Bar inclusion in two 2016 group shows in South Africa, his recent CV features only us and European venues. So, I ask, how does he feel making work in the West, for Westerners? Mosquito looks down for a moment, then away. “Sometimes I would like my grandma to see my shit. There are people I want to see proud of me: to go to the gig. I’d love to be able to do this at my local. So, on a personal level, yes, it matters to me.” His tone is, if anything, sad, rather than raging. “But my message,” he continues, “that you can live any life you have the capacity to imagine, to commit to, even if you die on the way – this is a message that people in Angola need just as bad as people here. In Europe, it just has space to happen, to sustain itself. I appreciate an audience no matter.” He starts to laugh. “An audience of midgets, or one-legged, one-testicle people – it doesn’t matter to me. I just need to share that energy.” Mosquito’s conviction in the power of mental intention does not much lend itself to acknowledging the determining legacies of grand historical processes, let alone feeling confined or crushed by them. Perhaps he doesn’t feel like an outsider here at all? “Context – Angola, Cold War, whatever – my vibe is that you cannot escape context,” Mosquito responds. “So why the fuck worry about it?” He tells me about a Catholic friend from Belgium who was so distraught about revelations of systemic tolerance of paedophilia in the Church, they decided to renounce their faith. This friend’s decision was incomprehensible to Mosquito, he says. Why should what others do in the name of a concept, a creed, alter your relationship to it?
Transitory Suppository Act ii Another Leader, 2016 (installation view, Artes Mundi 7, Chapter Gallery, Cardiff). Photo: Ric Bower
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The only thing that matters is the meaning that you bring. “What do you buy when you buy a slave?” he asks me. “My mind? Who I am? No. You are trying to reach a place you will never imprison.” Belonging, put simply, is not Mosquito’s vibe: not if it means being responsible for someone else’s bad faith, or being distracted from your own choices. “The whole Belgiums [sic],” he continues, “they have done some fucked-up shit. So: are you going to give them back your passport? And then where the fuck are you going to go?” As Ryan writes in the Walker essay, Mosquito’s work contains an acknowledgement that ‘we are all caught up in this mess – yesterday, today – where it is becoming increasingly difficult to trace the tendrils of history back to some definitive moment of “Oh yes! That is it. That is where it all began.”’ If assigning cause and responsibility is so vexed, Mosquito seems to ask, why not just move on? In 3 C0ntinents (2010), the artist addresses the camera, flaunting his proprietorship of Europe, America, Africa, announcing the figures (Bill Gates, Muammar Gaddafi) who will or will not be involved in each “new venture”. There is a frisson here of the implicit upturning of power dynamics between the developed and developing world, resonating with the manner of the late 1990s Diesel advertising campaign ‘The Daily African’, in which newspaper reports gave news of African aid missions to Europe, or 2012 parody charity single ‘Radi Aid’, which ostensibly aimed to ship radiators from Africa to Norway (“We can’t take advantage of Europe – don’t use their fucking funds!” Mosquito exclaims during Fuck Africa). But, in view of Mosquito’s comments, a different emphasis comes to the fore. “I bought Europe, not Europeans,” Mosquito says to me with emphasis, quoting from the video. With that distinction, he says, he offers the possibility
of a break. If the population is not the territory, then the agents might be separable from their history. Some guy may have bought Europe, but he doesn’t own Europeans; maybe Europe, like ‘the Belgiums’, did some fucked-up shit – but that doesn’t mean Europeans will always be fucked up too. Instead of a hair shirt, an eternal burden of deserved white guilt, then, what Mosquito seems to offer is grace: absolution. If that seems surprising, note that for his Fondazione Prada show, T.T.T.–Template Temples of Tenacity, he mimicked stained glass, rendering cartoonish fables in candy-coloured window decals, bathing the space in soft light; the performance through the space, I Make Love To You. You Make Love To Me. Let Love Have Sex With The Both Of Us. I Make Love To You (2016), brought a group of figures dressed in baptismal white to scatter and come back together, gradually harmonising strains of the Christian spiritual Jesus Loves Me (1860). “I am a Christian,” Mosquito tells me when I ask about his faith. “No running away from that.” Is this where we are, then, finding a veiled belief in salvation animating some of the more controversial, vulgar, bracing contemporary art of the last half decade? Or is Mosquito the joker so deeply undercover in the role of Mosquito the preacher that I can’t distinguish the two? And to whom do I think I’m asking these questions? I hear Nástia’s voice in my ear all of a sudden. “You choose. You choose.” ar Nástio Mosquito is presenting work during Copenhagen Art Week, 24–31 August, and will be performing Respectable Thief at the Fondation Cartier, Paris, on 15 September Matthew McLean is a writer and editor based in London
I Make Love To You. You Make Love To Me. Let Love Have Sex With The Both Of Us (Part 1 – The Gregorian Gospel Vomit), 2016, performance by the Golden Guys. Photo: oknostudio. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan all images except above Courtesy the artist
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Absent Presence How Adrián Villar Rojas’s work finds ends in beginnings and beginnings in ends By Oliver Basciano
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In March 2015 I walked through the lanes of Büyükada, an island that chronologically, taxonomically and geographically, here intermingle lies an hour’s slow ferry ride from Istanbul, eventually coming to the with the aborted feast. The sad, petrified bodies of Pompeii are an track that leads down to the ruins of the villa in which Leon Trotsky obvious reference point. A knight reclines close to a vase. A replica of lived between 1929 and 33. The garden, its grass long and pocketed an otter sculpture stands near the edge of the roof. A thin layer of dust with wild alliums, ends at the shoreline. I walked to the edge and covers the entire installation. The uniform palette of these copies all stared out to the Sea of Marmara. I remember thinking this place had a but erases the details that otherwise might tie them to a particular strange, almost magical quality. It seemed out of time, despite evidence time or place (in fact the knight is derived from a thirteenth-century of time’s march surrounding me in the building’s decay and over- French statue in the museum’s collection, the vase is late sevengrown grounds. Here the natural world operated on its own terms, teenth-century Mexican, the otter is an icon of the Ptolemaic Period). Villar Rojas’s play with temporal confusion serves a greater end: time, unhindered by human presence. Later that year, in September, the 14th Istanbul Biennial opened. in essence, is a human tool to measure and keep record of our finite Trotsky’s old home-in-exile was the presence on the planet, so such Artifice, the environment, the confusion of venue for The Most Beautiful of All confusion of chronology – or its Mothers, a largescale installation by absence – here and elsewhere in the time – and indeed spectacle – are abiding Adrián Villar Rojas. A few feet out artist’s work suggests the absence themes of the Argentinian artist’s work… in the water an elephant stood on a of humanity. The recurring presplatform. It was flanked by a gorilla and a giraffe, each marooned on ence of animals in the work directs our attention towards the natural its own island. More creatures – a menagerie – were scattered farther world. Put these interests together and one has a practice that is loaded out. The animals, imposing and classically sculpted, dazzled white towards tackling the Anthropocene, the suggestion that humanity’s in the late summer sun (the work’s caption merely noted that these effect on the earth’s ecosystems is so great that it can be deemed a new sea-weathered sculptures were made from ‘organic and inorganic geological age and will ultimately lead to our destruction (and that materials’), the effect only broken by the mass of debris the artist had of many other species). heaped over the backs of these beasts: a bison shouldering driftwood, Villar Rojas has made repeated use of Michelangelo’s David (1501– disintegrating fabric and slowly rotting fruit; a kangaroo managing 4), or rather the legs of the young shepherd, as a motif, placing them a bundle of sticks, ivory and fur; a big cat cowering under a rusting in installations that mimic an imagined postapocalyptic landscape. anchor. Others were burdened with creatures – or parts thereof, fash- These muscular limbs first appeared in Lo que el fuego me trajo (What ioned in unfired clay – the head of a moose for example could be seen Fire Has Brought Me), a 2008 exhibition at Ruth Benzacar gallery, a little way out, fused to the back of a rhino. This scene, in which seem- Buenos Aires. There they stood among rubble the artist had spread ingly once-proud statues were overcome by flotsam and jetsam that across the floor of the gallery’s basement space, surrounded by looked to have accumulated over an extended period, or had freak- ruined walls and other crumbling statues. Shelves lined the gallery ishly mutated, led me to the fanciful notion that these works weren’t walls, hosting a vast array of disparate objects and characters, which, a newly arrived addition to the landscape (despite my knowledge to modelled in unfired clay, came together like fossils of the future. the contrary) or temporarily installed (despite all logic), but had been The limbs returned in Villar Rojas’s exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London five years later, again as just one of many here for an age. Artifice, the environment, the confusion of time – and indeed unfired clay sculptures (depicting animals, agricultural implements, spectacle – are the abiding themes of the Argentinian artist’s work. bones and abstract geometric shapes) on shelves that lined the space; Villar Rojas is best-known for his substantial installations, and his but this time a kitten played at David’s feet – a clay copy, the artist exhibitions tend to be ambitious, both formally and philosophically. has stated, of a kitsch objet d’art he had bought in a Buenos Aires The artist’s current projects, for the rooftop of New York’s Metropol- pottery shop, another example of the artist envisaging a future in which manmade cultural hieraritan Museum of Art and the Na…but his primary subject is ultimately a por- chies lose their relevance. Both tional Observatory of Athens, both titled The Theater of Disappearance (as trait of human presence, a rumination on the display cracks in their surfaces (as was the artist’s recent Kunsthaus the clay expanded while drying) and results of human activity on the planet Bregenz show and as will be his are in a state of disrepair. The image upcoming exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at moca, Los of David – the ‘perfect’ human of classical imagination – is imagined Angeles), are cases in point. New York has seen myriad apocalyptic decaying in a world that humans have vacated. fates befall it at the hands of Hollywood, but Villar Rojas’s installaVillar Rojas has said he wants to be ‘parasitic’ in his approach to tion at the Met is one of the more sublime visions of Armageddon. these largescale projects, working in a symbiotic relationship with We don’t see the fall of civilisation, just the apparent aftermath: the host institution, in which the work takes from the venue as much replicas, or partial replicas, of almost a hundred objects from the as it gives. This approach is apparent in his decision to plant approxmuseum’s collection rendered in both white and black plaster are imately 46,000 plants from 26 plant species on the land around the installed alongside sculptures of human figures – their haircuts and observatory in Athens – including wild grasses, grains, fruit and clothes modern – and everyday objects, likewise in plaster. Arranged vegetables – which will turn this normally politely landscaped haphazardly across the Met’s roof are several dinner tables, rendered space into a wilderness, the foliage perhaps becoming, during the in ghostly white, the remnants of a meal still evident, wine glasses four months of the show, as long and overgrown as the alliums and overturned as if catastrophe has interrupted celebration. Artefacts grasses of Trotsky’s garden. (In actual fact, due to strict preservation that, downstairs, within the museum, have been carefully sorted rules, the planting is done into soil that sits on top of a membrane
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above The Theater of Disappearance, 2017 (installation views, National Observatory of Athens). Photos: Panos Kokkinias. Courtesy Neon, Athens preceding pages Unknown Soldier (stills), 2016, video, 21 min. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
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The Most Beautiful of All Mothers, 2015 (installation view, 14th Istanbul Biennial). Photo: Jörg Baumann. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, London
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The Theater of Disappearance, 2017 (installation view, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Photo: Jörg Baumann. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, London
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Casa de Vidro, which the Italian that protects the existing ground; architect built for herself on the this sort of spectacular artifice is a outskirts of São Paulo, and this recurring theme in the work.) is also where the work was first While so much of Villar Rojas’s shown (in a group show, The Insides art over the past decade has sought Are on the Outside, curated by Hans to present a world in ruins, devoid Ulrich Obrist in 2013). It captures of humanity, his primary subject is ultimately a portrait of human presence, a bitter (if also poetic) rumi- Villar Rojas’s ‘studio’ team (a large group of multiskilled people, nation on the dangerous results of human activity on the planet. many of whom he has worked with for years, and who travel with This explains the melancholic feeling that hangs over so many of his him en masse wherever he shows) working on various projects inside installations. That said, I think there’s also an often overlooked strain and outside the house: moulding small clay figures, stripping back of admiration for our species in the artist’s practice, a wonderment bamboo on the grounds, erecting a structure of unknown purpose. for an animal that can produce all the treasures of the Met, or build an The 21-minute video is dialogue-free. As in Unknown Solider, shots observatory housing telescopes capable of seeing stars far into space. linger over workers’ fingers as they go about their work, inviting the The artist has described man as having ‘extra powers’ that nonhuman viewer to marvel at the dexterity of the human animal, at the ingeanimals do not. nuity evident in the experimentation and problem-solving. As we see Nowhere is this rueful admiration clearer than in the artist’s occa- these people making a living, moving through the space inside and sional forays into videomaking. Both Lo que el fuego me trajo (2013) and out, leaving traces of their finite time on this planet, all that can be Unknown Soldier (2016) are slow, beautifully shot studies of human- heard is the sound of crickets and rain hitting the lush, dense forest kind at work. Ahead of the 6th Marrakech Biennale, at which Unknown that threatens to envelop this place. ar Soldier premiered, Villar Rojas travelled to the nearby Moroccan villages of Tameslouht, Ourika, Oumnass and Asni, capturing on The Theater of Disappearance is on view at the Metropolitan Museum camera vernacular craftsmen, particularly potters and brickmakers, of Art, New York, through 29 October, at the National Observatory of Athens through 24 September and at the Geffen Contemporary at moca, going about their business. In Lo que el fuego me trajo (Villar Rojas often Los Angeles, from 22 October to 26 February settles on a title that he’ll then apply to a wide The Theater of Disappearance, 2017 (installation view). variety of works) the artist turns the camera on Photo: Thierry Bal. © the artist. Courtesy the artist his own craft. The video is set in Lina Bo Bardi’s Oliver Basciano is editor (international) of ArtReview and Marian Goodman Gallery, London
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Jochen Zeitz On the opening of Zeitz mocaa Interview by Mark Rappolt
Zeitz mocaa, Cape Town. Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy Heatherwick Studio, London
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This month sees the long-awaited opening of Zeitz mocaa, a museum of contemporary African art in Cape Town. Housed in an imposing former grain silo, which has been converted by British designer Thomas Heatherwick, the museum is a not-for-profit partnership between the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront – the mixed-used neighbourhood where the building is located, which is equally owned by the South African Government Employees Pension Fund and by Growthpoint, the country’s largest listed property development company – and former Puma ceo Jochen Zeitz, whose privately held collection of African art is on loan to the museum (“for his lifetime or 20 years – whichever is longer”, according to v&a ceo David Green). And, of course, it’s Zeitz’s name on the institution. Zeitz’s focus on creating a body of African art and art produced by diasporic African artists was triggered following a meeting in 2008 with Johannesburg-born curator Mark Coetzee, then director of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, whose 30 Americans exhibition, which launched in that year, was sponsored by Puma. Coetzee subsequently joined Puma, helped Zeitz build his collection and is now Zeitz mocaa’s founding director and chief curator. Zeitz himself is German and partly resident in Kenya, first came to Africa in 1989 and built much of Puma’s later success on the sponsorship of African football teams and the company’s environmental engagement. He set up the Zeitz Foundation in 2008 with the aim of supporting socially and environmentally sustainable projects built around what he calls the ‘4cs’: conservation, communities, culture and commerce. In 2012 he opened Segera, a 20,000hectare wildlife conservancy and luxury tourist retreat (with an artist residency programme and a sculpture garden, or ‘cultural safari’) in Laikipia, Kenya. The v&a Waterfront, where 22,000 people live or work, comprises around 300 buildings. “It’s privately owned, but people just think it’s a neighbourhood of Cape Town, more often,” says Green. Which, in many ways, is increasingly the case with public space in cities worldwide. Discussions for developing the area around the silo, which had been derelict for 20 years, began six or seven years ago. Of the decision to use it as a gallery for contemporary art, Green says, “I think what’s in it for my board was the idea that it was a platform showcasing Africa. Part of the attraction for them was that we were the World Design Capital 2014. There is a very strong creative design culture, capability, talent, in South Africa, and it is gaining international recognition. I think what appealed to my people was this idea that by inspiring schoolchildren, right from the heart, in culture and industry,
you’d uplift and help them. More particularly it was for locals, telling African stories, raising questions, all the good things that a proper cultural institution should do.” While anyone who lives in London, a city whose main contemporary art institution bears the name of a founder who built his fortune in the colonial sugar trade, should be wary of casting stones, it’s hard not to observe that this new platform for showcasing African art resides in a neighbourhood with a colonial name and in a building repurposed by an English designer, and houses the collection of a German national. “The Waterfront does not, in any way, advocate the benefits of colonialism,” Green replies. “But it does, in a sensitive way, repurpose our 350 years of history, because this is where the original harbour and port was. Our aim has been to create an inclusive place and a relevant place.” Furthermore, alongside the Zeitz Collection, the new institution is working to build up its own holdings. “We are collecting, and getting a quite strong interest in this,” Green says, “in that the museum will have an august curatorial body, who will set the direction and vision,
important for the African continent and help create a platform for artists to express themselves and share their incredible talent with the world.
“This is not about personal taste. It never is. When you buy art you need to separate personal taste from the message. Aesthetics do play a role, but it’s more a question of how the artist has expressed himself”
ar Does that mean that there are works in the collection that maybe you don’t necessarily like, from the point of view of personal aesthetic taste, but that represent some movements in African art that you feel need to be included?
and then we will speak to artists and we’ll speak to collectors. Mainly to collectors: we’ve already had some donations given. Many of the seminal works are kept in vaults in Europe and in the States and all around South Africa. We will look to buy and add to our collection. The Zeitz is purely the founding display, but it will hopefully be eclipsed by other donations and other loans.” artreview Perhaps we should begin with the fact that the museum is called Zeitz mocaa. I wonder how much it will tell me, when it opens, about Jochen Zeitz and his interests (and the ‘4c’s), and how much it will tell me about African art? jochen zeitz You know, my philosophy has obviously led me to believe that I could make a contribution by helping to create this enormous project and bring it to life. I believe in the importance of living a value-driven life and in the opportunity to evolve culture through art. I wanted to use the opportunity that I was given to make a positive impact in the world. I’ve been a great lover of Africa and a resident of Africa for several decades. I felt that by helping this project come to life I could contribute to something very
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ar Do your interests inform the choices of art that you collect? jz We built this collection with the museum in mind: primarily with the curator (and museum director) Mark Coetzee and I working together, and then at a later stage with others who helped us inform ourselves about representative artists for this collection. We always said that the ultimate goal of the museum is to build a cohesive collection that’s as representative as possible of Africa and the diaspora, and that it needs to have strong messaging: political, social, environmental, personal. So this was not about a private man’s collection. That was never the purpose of building my collection. It was not for my own sake, but with the institution in mind, which I guess differentiates this collection very much from those of others who collect and then later on decide that they want to put the art in a museum. Hence it had a clearly defined vision from the beginning.
jz Well, I think anything that has a strong message I usually like, but this is not about personal taste. When you buy art for a museum you need to separate personal taste from the message. Aesthetics do play a role, but it’s more a question of how the artist has interpreted and expressed himself through various mediums. Of course, I evaluate the quality of the art itself, but it’s not necessarily a question of personal taste. There are many factors that are part of the decision-making process if an artist or artwork ends up in the collection. I also never made my decision alone. It has always been teamwork. ar Africa’s a big place. There are lots of different contexts and issues that vary quite widely across the continent. How do you accommodate those in a single institution? jz This is a process. It’s not an institution that is built in a day that will live for a year. This is an institution that hopefully will still be successful many, many decades from now. My collection is the founding collection. The museum will build its own collection and there will of course be art donated or lent to the museum by others. So the collection grows over time. It’s with the evolution and future development in mind that we’ve decided to focus on the twenty-first century, and not to try to look back and have a historic representation. In order to be trans-
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formative we feel that we want to be contemporary and present Africa today – which ultimately is also a reflection of the past. We’re not trying to look at history again, but look at art today and tomorrow. ar What kind of potential do you think art has to shape societies? Some people might say, for instance, that it’s easy to have a kind of political discourse in art because it’s not a real discourse in the realm of actual politics… jz I think everything that leads to critical discussion is beneficial to society as a whole. If we look at history and the transformative power of art, there are a lot of examples where art has sparked a dialogue in the public realm, and ultimately shaped the viewpoint of the public, which, in turn, ultimately had an impact on politics. I truly believe in that transformative power.
that will ultimately decide. I have a collecting strategy that complements the museum’s strategy, but it’s ultimately the curators who then decide what is being displayed. So we hope that these things will be complementary and work together, but will also be kept separate, because whatever the museum acquires is a decision that is entirely based on the curators and the curatorial committee. ar Did you always imagine that the museum would be in South Africa, or are there other countries or cities that came into consideration? jz There were other countries considered for sure. We were very open-minded in terms of potential locations, and looked at many other cities and countries across Africa, but at the end of the day we honed in on South Africa, as it met
ar That brings us to the fact that public attendance is part of the equation. I guess you’re looking to make the museum self-sustaining, partly through the revenues generated by entrance fees, for example. How much does the collection reflect what the public might want? jz That’s for the curators to decide. I’m not the curator. I think that, because it is so diverse in its presentation, it will be very relevant to visitors, because it is really capturing contemporary issues and topics. I think that the focus on the twenty-first century makes the ideas very tangible, because it’s relevant to today’s world and the dialogues that we are having every day looking into the future. ar Relevance tends to change over time with historical and political events. Are you continuing to add to the collection now, and will the stuff you add to your collection also be part of the loan to the museum? jz I’m committed to continuing to acquire art that will then also be exhibited in the museum, so yes, absolutely, for many years to come. ar Does that also mean that you have to be in dialogue with the museum foundation itself about what they’re doing in terms of collecting? jz The great thing about the museum is that we don’t have to worry about raising funds for an amazing building or for building a founding collection, as we already have both, so you’re taking two elements out of the equation that usually are big fundraising obstacles to open an institution like this. So we’re now focusing on the museum operation itself, and the museum has already received donated artworks before we’ve even opened the doors. As they continue, there is an acquisition committee
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all the criteria we had in mind. So ultimately, after many years of searching, thanks to the partnership with the v&a and this iconic building and a fantastic designer in Thomas Heatherwick, his studio and the South African architectural team, all the stars aligned and we came to the conclusion relatively quickly that this was the right place and the right city. ar Yes, and were you not worried at any stage that the building itself and the kind of history it embodies would somehow overshadow the art in any way? jz Not at all. I think it’s incredible to have evolved a building like the silo for a new, contemporary purpose. I don’t like the word ‘cathedral’ that some people use, because I don’t appreciate religious connotations with an art museum. I think that to get people who are interested in art – or may not yet be interested in art – to come, you need to be luring in visitors with as many draw points that you can have;
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a great city, a great location, a great building and great art. If you look at successful museums around the world today, a disappointing building will be a problem for the art because people love to see art exhibited in exciting and innovative buildings. I think the architecture and art need to have an interesting symbiotic relationship. I also like the symbolic effect that this museum can have – the fact that this is an old grain silo that used to export grain into the world – for an institution that is now exporting art into the world, is, in addition to the art itself, a huge plus. ar So, basically, it’s a German collection in a building refitted by a British architect, on a development with a colonial name. Is that something that you address in the museum? jz This is not a German collection. It is a collection of contemporary art by artists from Africa and its diaspora, on African soil, discussing issues pertinent to Africa, with a conversation and dialogue led by artists and curators from Africa. This debate of Africa representing itself on its own terms is intrinsic and central to the dialogue that the museum is engaging with. I am honoured to be able to contribute to the platform for this important dialogue to take place. A group of Africans selected to entrust the refit to Heatherwick Studio as lead architect and three African architectural firms: vdmma, Rick Brown Associates and Jacobs Parker. I respect their choice in who they wished to entrust this important job to. Heatherwick brought a unique solution to the museum’s needs and the architectural problematics of the original structure. The museum is built in a historical harbour whose name refers to Queen Victoria, it is a colonial name, like many harbours around the world. This is the colonial heritage of the people of Cape Town and South Africa. They will self-determine how to deal with this colonial heritage. It is their choice and their prerogative. ar Can that dialogue be productive? jz Artists will always address critical questions with their works. That is what a progressive museum should encourage and support. This institution is operating not as a South African institution but a museum that is built by and for Africa and its diaspora, a museum that intends to be globally relevant through the art that it exhibits, made by artists from Africa and selected by people from Africa. To have a truly global team involved is a big plus. This project is about the teamwork of passionate people from Africa working together with people who have a deep love and dedication for the project. Others could have done it but didn’t.
This museum is truly an African project, but also an international one, which is exactly what a museum of this calibre needs to be. I think we’re living in a global world, and I truly believe in cooperation and partnership based on diversity in every respect, so it’s not just a museum for South Africa, it’s a museum for the world. ar You started your own art collection in the us, if I’m not mistaken. jz Well, I never thought of myself as a collector before I embarked on this journey. In the 1980s I lived in New York and bought some Pop art: Lichtenstein, Warhol, but it was never meant to be a collection. I just bought art because I liked it and I put it up on walls in my apartment. I never really aspired to become collector. So this time it was different. This collection always had a purpose in mind from the beginning. I purchased art all my life – not significant amounts – but whether it was American art or whether it was African art or anything else, the real collecting only came into play when I decided that this was a project I would love to take on. ar Why did you feel that you needed to take on that project? jz Well, because I believed there was a very real need for an institution for African contemporary art in Africa. And I saw an opportunity to share this incredible art with the world. ar It’s a big undertaking. jz (Laughter) I know. That’s why a lot of people thought I was crazy. But I had my passion for Africa and the legacy of everything I had done while I was still with Puma – where Africa played an important role as well – and my life in Kenya, having set up a wildlife conservancy there. And I just felt that contemporary art from Africa – besides a few amazing established artists that were already recognised and well known – was just not well represented as a whole. There was just not the institution in Africa that we thought was needed. Somebody else should’ve done it maybe, but they didn’t, so I just felt, ‘Why not?’ That’s when the journey began, and meeting Mark Coetzee when we sponsored the incredible 30 Americans show during Art Basel Miami was the trigger that started us on the journey. ar And was there a first work in the collection of African art that triggered it? jz Not really. I bought some of Isaac Julien’s work before I decided to engage in this project, simply because I love Isaac’s work. But once the decision to start a museum collection was made, we went out and bought quite a lot of art quite quickly. ar Do you ever sell anything from the collection?
jz I haven’t sold a single piece. The beauty of the collection is that we always knew it would end up in a museum, so all the art was imagined as being part of an exhibition. It’s not just an amalgamation of a lot of art that isn’t fit for purpose, so I think from that point of view we were very focused in what we acquired and why we acquired it. I believe there’s very little redundancy. All the pieces are important in their own way. ar Do you have a favourite work in the collection? jz I don’t, and simply because this collection was never about what I like and what I don’t. I think what will be the most exciting thing for me is when I see a piece of art in the museum and visitors are excited about it – if people love what they see and are starting a dialogue around the art, that will make me very happy. ar Was the idea of displaying the collection in a museum something that people were quick to embrace or was there a certain hesitancy? jz You know, there are always critics who will say you can’t do this and you can’t do that. I listen to critics carefully and take onboard the things that are helpful and deserve a critical review, but it’s not something that ever stops me, especially if criticism just comes for the sake of being critical. And because an institution like this hasn’t been created before on the African continent, there wasn’t a blueprint, which has been both very liberating but also makes it more complicated. In the conceptual phase, when we said, ‘Let’s do this’, it was really Mark and I who developed this idea together, and it was not something tangible that others could get their heads around. It wasn’t even tangible for us. It was just an idea that then became a project, and then eventually became a museum thanks to us meeting the V&A and Growthpoint, who were thinking about a museum for the old grain silo that they own. In the beginning it’s like a dark tunnel, you don’t really know what’s at the end of it, but then the lights start to appear in the distance. The closer we’re getting to the opening, the bigger the enthusiasm has become. And I would say, especially in the past five years, there has been definitely a more significant interest in art from the African continent, which you can see in the artwork at galleries, biennales and auction houses all over the world. It’s great to see that while we were developing the project, the interest in contemporary African art has already grown quite substantially. ar Do you have particular measures for the success of the museum? Would it be visitor numbers, or more African artists represented in collections around the world, or education? jz I think it’s a lot of things. Yes, education plays a very important role. The museum will be run
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by curatorial trainees, 24 in total, who will get trained at the museum, and then go on to work elsewhere in Africa and internationally in the future. We will also have a substantial school outreach programme, as our connection to the local community is important. We really want kids to be exposed to art – often for the first time – during their experiences at the museum. We want exhibitions that will hopefully travel around the world showcasing African artists, as well as having other international museums support us and contribute their own exhibitions in the museum. So, we have a lot of criteria by which we will measure success, and at the end of the day our goal is really to make this an important museum for Africa, run by Africans, that is recognised for its global significance. I think that will be its biggest success. And hopefully, in the long term, we will be supported by as many people as possible. This is a museum for everyone; it’s not a museum only for those who can afford to pay an entry ticket, and that’s why our ‘access for all’ initiative, where entry is free to citizens of African countries at certain times, was also a very important criterion from the beginning. ar What happens with your collection at the end of the loan period? jz Well, that will be a decision to be taken by my children, once my lifetime is over. ar Will you be involved with the museum’s own collection? jz No, firstly because I have enough on my hands with my own collection, but also because I think that it’s not appropriate for me to be reaching into the museum’s collection. Our curators will ensure that there’s another point of view being expressed, which I think is very important for the cohesion of the museum, so I have no intention of getting involved in that. Of course, as a trustee of the museum, I have my role to play and will be dedicated to making the museum a success, but when it comes to the programming, the exhibitions and everything else, the museum’s curatorial team is in charge. ar Do you imagine, looking far into the future, that maybe there will be other institutions in other parts of Africa connected to Zeitz mocaa? Maybe in North or West Africa? jz Well, I certainly hope so. Africa is a massive continent with so many diverse voices that I would certainly hope that there will be many more institutions in Africa one day. If we can play a role in that, I would be very happy. Zeitz mocaa opens on 22 September Mark Rappolt is editor-in-chief of ArtReview
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Floor at sketch Gallery by Martin Creed, Work No. 1347. Photography: Luke Hayes.
18—22 OCTOBER 2017 PREVIEW 17 OCTOBER
Exhibitors 2017 1857, Oslo Aoyama | Meguro, Tokyo Antenna Space, Shanghai Antoine Levi, Paris The Approach, London Arcadia Missa, London BFA Boatos Fine Arts, São Paulo Bodega, New York BQ, Berlin Carlos/Ishikawa, London Caro Sposo, Paris Chapter, New York Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles Company Gallery, New York
Crèvecoeur, Paris Croy Nielsen, Vienna/Ker Xavier Daniel Marzona, Berlin Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw Deborah Schamoni, Munich Edouard Montassut, Paris
Emalin, London Federico Vavassori, Milan François Ghebaly, Los Angeles Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Basel Gianni Manhattan, Vienna Goton, Paris Gregor Staiger, Zurich High Art, Paris Hunt Kastner, Prague Jack Hanley, New York
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Jan Kaps, Cologne Jenny’s, Los Angeles Joseph Tang, Paris Koppe Astner, Glasgow Kristina Kite, Los Angeles Lefebvre & Fils, Paris Maria Bernheim, Zurich Marfa’, Beyrouth Marta Cervera, Madrid Mary Mary, Glasgow Max Mayer, Dusseldorf Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin Norma Mangione, Turin Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles Project Native Informant, London Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles
Sandy Brown, Berlin Sans Titre, Paris Section 7 Books, Paris Shanaynay, Paris Simone Subal, New York SpazioA, Pistoia Stereo, Warsaw Sultana, Paris Svit, Prague Tanya Leighton, Berlin Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin Tonus, Paris Treize, Paris Union Pacific, London Paris Internationale
Shanghai Center of Photography, 2555 - 1 Longteng Ave, Shanghai
肿木丳砹均簽3666.2俯倠 肿塘漂钫襄胺浦｜www.scop.org.cn
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MUSE 2017.9.7- 10.29
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Documenta 14 Various venues, Kassel 10 June – 17 September On the opening day of Documenta 14 I finally gave up on a press conference that, entering its third doleful hour, had included a lengthy violin performance and a fair bit of theorising but little about the art. Tetchily disregarding artistic director Adam Szymczyk’s request that we begin our tours in a disused railway tunnel, I elected to start in Kassel’s northeast and work diagonally southwest. This meant encountering, in short order, a piece of space-eating eco-kitsch, The Living Pyramid (2015/17), a ziggurat covered in pot plants by the usually dependable Agnes Denes; a makeshift Cuban bar/ performance space that wasn’t quite open (and would later be rented out for private functions); and the first of several scrappy group exhibitions that felt like degree shows. But at least these could be relatively easily found. Soon after, alongside a couple of befuddled museum directors, I was looking in vain for signage to the huge yet hidden-away Neue Neue Galerie (a former post office renamed for the occasion). When located it featured another disjointed sprawl, from Rasheed Araeen’s archive of his Third Text magazine plus multihued abstractions (The Reading Room, 2016–7), to Dan Peterman’s iron ingots, to a shut-down performance space by Otobong Nkanga, to things I couldn’t identify because they weren’t labelled. Some of the wall labels present were handwritten and had question marks after the artists’ names; ‘soft launch’ would be a kind characterisation here. Back at the press conference, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (of Berlin art lab Savvy Contemporary) had spoken of positive uncertainty, and Szymczyk, at Documenta’s first half in Athens, had relatedly encouraged audiences to ‘unlearn what you know’. Any irritation at slapdash presentation and organisational chaos, then, is merely a teachable moment in disguise. Szymczyk’s vision for Documenta is laudable in theory. Pointedly internationalist, his show features few biennale darlings among its 160-plus artists, making it an antimarket statement of sorts; and in its contrast of German prosperity and Greek austerity, it aims at some kind of core critique, many-tentacled, often
curving back to the toxic upshots of capitalism, though also wildly tangential. The opening sequence of works in the nineteenth-century Neue Galerie, for example, indicts money as the root of all evil, from two fifteenth-century tempera paintings of Saint Anthony Tempted by Gold, to etchings and sculptures of beggars, to cloudy alternative-currency concepts including Pierre Zucca’s nude-woman-laced performance photographs The Living Currency (c. 1970). Soon after, we’re in a cool roomful of R.H. Quaytman paintings where, as one might half-expect, Paul Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus makes an appearance in reproduction (leading, of course, to Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History). And then we’re processed through flotillas of historical works – for the first time, Documenta is using this large museum’s entirety – that dwell on war, colonialism, famine, racism, disasters of all stripes. Much of the art is fascinating, from Indian artist K.G. Subramanyan’s fragmentary terracotta reliefs to Polish avant-gardist Władysław Strzemiński’s filtering of Nazi horrors through quivery pencilled semiabstractions, but the sheer girth and relentless tone of bleak realism are exhausting. And then there are 32 other exhibition venues. The most navigable is the suavely postmodernist, airy Documenta Halle, where intertwining subthemes of listening and the libidinal manifest in works engaging with sound, scoring and bodily movement, from Alvin Lucier’s confections of speakers and framed paper, Sound on Paper (1985), to archival images relating to Anna Halprin’s 1960s and 70s dance workshops, to Igo Diarra and La Medina’s funky minishrine to Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, Learning from Timbuktu (2017). There’s also an audio archive of sound-based activities from the Athens leg of Documenta: a literalising, really, of the metaphoric notion of ‘listening to Athens’. (In the Fridericianum, meanwhile, listening becomes looking, in the shape of a giant info-dump of works from Greece’s National Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection.) This tickling of senses other than the visual brings one back to the bodily, hence the room of Miriam Cahn’s paintings – vivid,
facing page, top Vivian Suter, Nisyros (Vivian’s bed), 2016–17 (installation view, Glass Pavilions, Kassel, Documenta 14). Photo: Fred Dott
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pained, ripe-coloured bodily figurations – might seem to belong too. Mostly, though, one lingers amid these because they’re tangibly great, not because they’re a stitch in the curators’ giant tapestry. One of the dreamier-sounding venues is the Glass Pavilions: whatever Oz-like destination one pictures, though, this turns out to be a series of boxlike, glass-sided abandoned shopfronts on a busy main road, a number of them containing mini-exhibitions you can’t enter, and a few – like a relaxed hang of Vivian Suter’s warm unstretched abstract paintings – that you can. It seems pivotal that this is a particularly cosmopolitan part of Kassel, where migrant communities intersect: Turkish, Ethiopian, Bulgarian, Syrian. As with Athens, Szymczyk and co are evidently bent on having the viewer explore the city’s extramural textures, even if often searching for something while doing so. Yet aside from largescale single works like Marta Minujín’s The Parthenon of Books (1983/2017), a giant architectural mirroring of the Athens landmark in whose plastic-sheet wrapping countless historically banned books are sealed, moments like the Glass Pavilions – where one can traverse a section without getting footsore or forgetting how it started – are welcome exceptions. Documenta 14 may present itself as antimoney, outwardly at least (the curators nevertheless borrowed from private collections), but it also determinedly chases cultural capital for its makers via darkly symphonic epicness and default handwringing. The result, inadvertently pointing up some of the artworld’s more pressing structural problems, is overwhelming but not in a good way: despite featuring many strong individual works, it’s simply not humanly scaled, continuously blurring its position, losing its signals in the noise of stymied reception. That doesn’t seem to matter to the organisers, who aren’t suffering continuous fomo because they’ve seen it all – maybe – and aren’t mindful of hurrying to the next grand event, ie Skulptur Projekte Münster, which opened a couple of days after Documenta did. As for the viewers? They can get lost. Martin Herbert
facing page, bottom Igo Diarra and La Medina, Learning from Timbuktu, 2017, mixed-media installation (installation view, Documenta Halle, Kassel, Documenta 14). Photo: Michael Nast
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Tidalectics Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Academy, Vienna 2 June – 19 November Six years ago, Francesca von Habsburg quietly launched tba21-Academy – the ‘exploratory soul’ of her art foundation, tba21. From the beginning, the Academy, founded as a small research team, was set on exploring our oceans and seas. On a vessel called the Dardanella, von Habsburg’s many sea expeditions have been manned by multidisciplinary teams consisting of invited artists, oceanographers, writers, curators and others (including von Habsburg herself) researching, engaging with locals and making art in Jamaica, Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Iceland and beyond. It’s stunning, considering the Academy’s activity, that Tidalectics is its inaugural exhibition. It’s also the final exhibition in tba21’s Augarten venue in Vienna: von Habsburg, as has been widely reported, is moving the foundation’s exhibition programming and her collection to Prague as part of a long-term loan. So, this exhibition is a first and a last. Several works come directly from Academy journeys. (Some others, meanwhile, are pulled from tba21’s collection.) Tue Greenfort’s Tamoya Ohboya (2017), an underlit sculptural tank filled with hypnotically moving jellyfish, sits on a stainless-steel table across from a video showing wild jellyfish shot on Dardanella trips. In the same darkened space is Susanne Winterling’s multipart installation Glistening Troubles (2017): the spinning figures in her cgi-animated videos are riffs on bioluminescent algae, which light up when touched or moved, but modern minds invariably also read them as screensavers or
touchscreens. Cameroonian Em’kal Eyongakpa’s full-room installation Gaia beats/bits III-i/doves and an aged hammock (2017) pairs a movable wooden floor (an old boat’s weathered deck?) with a fishing net suspended from the ceiling and filled with detritus like driftwood and litter, a constellation that (for me) evokes ideas of forced migration. Janaina Tschäpe, who shares a first name with a Brazilian sea goddess and has long collaborated with marine biologist David Gruber, shows two long leporellos that display their deep-sea research; the ‘inventory’ of visuals in Fictionary of Corals and Jellies and Blood, Sea (both 2017), colourful pencil drawings of sea life as well as chemical formulas scribbled almost like school notes in the margins, recalls historical sea explorers’ logbooks. Grounding the exhibition are several films that combine documentary footage with innovative use of sound. Julian Charrière’s Iroojrilik (2016) traces the effects of the us’s nuclear experiments on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands; the underwater and beach footage is as dramatic as the suspenseful soundtrack by Edward Davenport. Alexander Lee’s Me-ti’a – An Island Standing (2017) uses drone footage of Mehetia, a volcanic area east of Tahiti (where the California-born artist grew up) to highlight, perhaps, our lasting Western notions of exoticism. And in Darren Almond’s A (2002), Antarctic ice formations appear to ‘dance’ in the sea to a bass-heavy soundtrack. Almond went to Antarctica in 2002 on a ship clearing waste from the icy continent’s shores.
Fifteen years later – a trillion-ton iceberg broke off an Antarctic ice shelf in July 2017 – the work is startlingly prescient. Thematically, a lot is going on here (ecology, migration, biology, physics, history). Perhaps too much, despite the clear exhibition choreography. But the show, curated by ArtReview contributor Stefanie Hessler, succeeds in combining the accessible and abstract, emotional and intellectual, political and aesthetic. Although the Academy does plenty of philanthropic work, the exhibition manages to avoid becoming a pleading ecological call, or a cheap riff on The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (1968–75). Here, artistic research – a term that sounds promising but whose results are so often overintellectualised and formally underwhelming (why make an object when a good text is enough?) – appears engaging and meaningful. Tidalectics shifts the viewer’s perspective from the fixed to the fluid – the titular term comes from Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite and indicates exactly this. At the opening, artist Jana Winderen performed a sound piece in which hydrophonic sounds engulfed listeners (her sound installation bára, 2017, runs at announced intervals that correspond with the tidal patterns of Trieste, the closest coastal city to Vienna). Listening was like diving into an aquatic soundscape, a natural language whose syntax is about transition, ambiguity and change rather than specificity, rigidity. Nature is perhaps telling us to be more like water; we’d do well to listen. Kimberly Bradley
Tue Greenfort, Tamoya Ohboya (detail), 2017, stainless steel table, Aurelia aurita, aquarium with technique, single-channel video projection of Chironex, dimensions variable. Photo: Jorit Aust. Courtesy tba Contemporary Academy, Vienna
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Braco Dimitrijević A Retrospective Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb 27 April – 21 June Braco Dimitrijević certainly has some balls. Who else would put Van Gogh’s 1889 Self-Portrait in a wheelbarrowful of citrus fruit and claim authorship, as Dimitrijević did with his Van Gogh Goes to Paradise at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in 2005? Or take iconic works from Zagreb’s own modern collection, like Vilko Gecan’s 1920 Self-Portrait, and hang his grubby old coat over them, as he does here? (and, nota bene, these are the original canvases, not postcard reproductions like Duchamp’s 1919 l.h.o.o.q.). Who else would choose to start his own retrospective with a couple of paintings he made when he was nine years old? ok, so the paintings are quite nice – Peasant and Man with a Black Hat (both 1957) combine an almost constructivist vision of machine-men with a series of fleet informale paint swirls in a palette of stark primary colours – but they are more or less the only works on display in this generous exhibition, spread over two floors of Zagreb’s lavish new contemporary art museum, that depart from the artist’s otherwise ruthlessly
consistent conceptual focus. One suspects that, like so much of Dimitrijević’s oeuvre, their presence is intended primarily as provocation. He seems to be appropriating his own child-self as a kind of artiste brut, just one more of the many everyday people who populate his artistic universe. Walking around A Retrospective, one is constantly reminded of one of Dimitrijević’s most famous sayings. ‘The Louvre is my studio,’ large black letters proclaim high on the gallery walls, ‘the street is my museum’. The two halves of this statement also roughly structure the show as a whole – albeit in reverse, with the first floor largely taken up with the Casual Passer-by series he began in 1971 and the second concerned with his Triptychos Post-Historicus (1976–) and other appropriations of the well-garlanded ‘great works’ of various museum collections (like those of Van Gogh and Gecan mentioned above). The conceptual link, appropriately enough, can be found framed just by the stairs between
the two. A brief fable (Story About Two Artists) written by the artist in 1969 and engraved on a bronze plaque tells of two painters and an ancient king in a place ‘far from cities and towns’. The king loses his dog one day, only to find the mutt in the garden of one of the two artists, who is immediately invited to the castle. ‘The name of that painter was Leonardo da Vinci,’ the plaque concludes. ‘The name of the other painter disappeared forever.’ The history of art, Dimitrijević’s tale declares, is contingent on effects of power and chance circumstance: no more than a series of accidents. So why not build a monument to David Harper, the casual passerby Dimitrijević happened to meet on the streets of London one lunchtime in 1972? And why not treat canonical works by Gecan and Van Gogh like so many mundane objects in a still life? For Dimitrijević, most irreverent of conceptualists, everything is available to be reappropriated, reframed and reincorporated – even his own childhood daubing. Robert Barry
Triptychos Post Historicus or Artist on Holiday, 2017, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Photo: Ana Opalic. Courtesy msu, Zagreb
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Ivan Andersen La Nuit américaine Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen 21 April – 17 June We’re greeted by a painting executed on plywood. It depicts a man standing in a doorway, wearing a Stetson. The darkness of the interior frames him as he stands in front of a desert landscape. His shadow encroaches on the room he has just exited; his right hand clutches his left elbow. It is John Wayne with that lonely pose at the end of The Searchers (1956). This work is called Saloon (all works but one 2017); the cowboy reappears in Blue Screen, this time astride a horse, alone beside a tree and below an enormous sky painted in swirling hues of blue. An empty Western landscape recalling the cinema of John Ford follows, Silver Lining, where a rocky outcrop dotted with vegetation rises from a central plain. While these images are redolent of the Western frontier, Ivan Andersen’s show – La Nuit américaine – actually refers to François Truffaut’s 1973 film, also known as Day for Night. The French title is a technical term used in moviemaking that refers to filming during the daytime while using special stock and lighting techniques to create an illusion of nightfall. Such visual trickery fools our retinal rods and cones, and appeals to Andersen’s
painterly talent – as with another pair of nocturnal views here, La Nuit américaine I and II. Here are two sides of a lonely motel. Aside from unadorned windows and a satellite dish, there are few other details; all is still. Each canvas is executed with much overpainting and scraping, giving the works a flat appearance as if they were thinly stitched rectangles of embroidery made from delicate thread. Andersen’s obfuscation of colour mimics the effect experienced by the eye at night: that vague dimmed view of gloom. His mastery reaches a pitch of skill in Fuldkorn, a work on linen using oil, acrylic and spraypaint, where we see a tower block after dusk, its random pattern of rooms alive with a crepuscular luminosity. Each small window is a near-abstraction done in a flickering lambency of, variously, yellow, orange and violet. In contradistinction to the glimmer of these night scenes, Andersen also gives us the stark sharpness of bright light and its whiting-out effect on vision, as realised in an unpeopled Danish landscape, Ingenmandsland, with its green dappled hills, blanched clouds and pallid sky. Collage is recalled in other works here, such as Fiskeben, where each element in this aquarium scene appears isolated – the fish relatively muted
in colour in comparison with a solid central chunk of cocoa-brown wood and a blue and white effervescence of bubbles on the far right of the canvas. In another bucolic scene, Rollespil, we see the collaged effect again with mirroring swirls of more sky-blues reflected in the lake below, which is lined with streaked emerald bushes and bleached orange reeds. Andersen asks us to look carefully at each element – in his paintings and in reality – as if there are too many features crying out for our attention. We are implored to slow down and concentrate. There is something of Robert Walser’s hushed literary tone in these terse, noiseless works. As he wrote in his sketch ‘A Little Ramble’ (1914), ‘We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.’ Lastly there are the Topografi series of works (2016), sculptural hillocks made from paintings, folded canvases done in oil and acrylic and mounted on mdf and plywood constructions with oak table legs. Here a painting plays at being a small mountain. Andersen, this show suggests, has a cosy Danish favouritism for rural calm over the Hollywood of Ford and his violent Americana – more wistful visions than VistaVision. John Quin
Blue Screen, 2017, oil, acrylic, spraypaint and beeswax on canvas, 110 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen
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ArtReview
Miriam Cahn devoir-aimer Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris 29 April – 17 June Upon entering devoir-aimer (literally ‘mustlove’), Miriam Cahn’s fourth solo show at Jocelyn Wolff, I was immediately struck by unklar (7.7.16) (2016), one of seven recent oil paintings displayed alongside a selection of pastel, chalk and charcoal drawings. This half-length portrait represents a humansize naked female figure standing against the murk of a rapidly executed bluish-green background, which evokes the desolation of a burnt land. Wearing what appears to be a bright azure, yet completely see-through niqab (the type of veil traditionally worn by some Muslim women that leaves only their eyes uncovered), she’s caught glaring at us as she tries to conceal her exposed crotch behind her joined hands; her pubic hair remains loose. Whereas this particularly unsettling view may suggest that some kind of sexual abuse is taking place, putting us in the ambivalent position of potential eyewitnesses or voyeurs (if not the otherwise unidentified offenders), unklar isn’t the only painting here to lay bare one or several elusive beings seemingly emerging from nowhere – the hazy horizon of subdued, desertlike landscapes – and glancing at us on their way. Next to it, the naively rendered amputee figure of winken (19. + 22.5.16) (2016), another painted female nude featuring the sixty-eight-year-old Swiss artist’s signature round face and wide-open eye sockets, even waves at us. Five little white brushstrokes
delineate the hailing character’s right and only hand, a graphic gesture whose childlike yet masterful candour is simply astounding. Cahn is known for hanging her paintings and drawings at eye-level so that the face of her protagonists – at least those standing in the foreground – directly confronts that of the viewers. Meanwhile, she has made the depiction of refugees and exiles a recurring motif in her expressionist art since the early 1990s, following the outbreak of the decadelong Yugoslav Wars. As of now, the current European migrant crisis and the Syrian Civil War inform her politically charged practice for the most part, even though her archetypal pictures aren’t, as such, that openly referential. Rather, Cahn is interested in capturing a tone of raw vulnerability to perhaps inspire us with much-needed empathy towards those forced to flee hardship at home, wherever that may be. For instance, the single male figure portrayed in expressivmüssen (2015 + 1.6.16) (2015/ 2016) is abnormally twisting his neck a full 180 degrees to look directly behind him, which conveys an almost palpable sense of alertness. Just like the featherless bird depicted in o.t. (mai 2016) (2016), he appears as defenceless as a preyed-upon animal, the complexion of both their bare pinkish-yellow skin also evocative of wounded flesh. The other three paintings on display – herumlaufen (08. + 30.1.16) (2016), schnell weg!
(2007/2008 + 4.10.16) (2007–8/2016) and desaster (27.7.16) (2016) – each represent the flight of larger groups of people, ranging from two to seven male and female subjects, some of which are silhouettes of children. These figures aren’t centred in the compositions; instead they seem to aim towards the edges, ready to exit the indistinct no-man’s-land of their respective backgrounds, which verge on colour-field abstraction. The exhibition continues with 8 tage (raum) (13.10. – 15.11.16) (2016), a face-to-face room installation of 22 drawings, as well as o.t. (19.12.14 – 25.9.16) (2014–16) and vergessen und rekonstruieren (ordnungsversuch) (20.3 – 6.4.2014) (2014), two sketchbooks left beside the front desk for viewers to leaf through. Presenting a much more contrasted palette than that of the paintings, mixing saturated black marks and vivid hues, these works on paper further depict fleeing, wildly staring, cringing or even drowning figures, along with cities on fire, flowers, weapons and architectural abstractions. Cahn didn’t apply fixative on any of these drawings, which is particularly noticeable in her sketchbooks, where deep black or colourful traces delicately smear from one page to the next. I believe these dislodged particles of pastel, chalk and charcoal sublimely echo the hazardous journey of refugees and exiles. They are going to need much love indeed, and it’s up to us to welcome them accordingly. Violaine Boutet de Monvel
desaster (27.7.16), 2016, oil on canvas, 206 × 300 cm. Courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris
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Skulptur Projekte Münster Various venues, Münster 10 June – 1 October For Kasper König, who founded Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1977 and has directed it ever since, contemporary sculpture offered a de facto tradition in postwar Germany, a dose of internationalism that would provide an antidote to the trauma that still seethed under the surface of German culture. Every ten years, artworks would be situated in the public realm, establishing sculpture as the vocabulary through which the Westphalian city of Münster, in particular, and the international community around Skulptur Projekte (ie artists and arts professionals, as well as other culture workers and tourists), generally, could register larger, more tectonic shifts in culture. Now in its fifth edition, the permanent installations the city has purchased, and decently maintains, demonstrate that it has become a dictionary of received sculptures, a repository of each decade’s prevailing attitudes towards sculpture. Overall, the direction has shifted towards installation, a term that belies a holistic understanding of an artwork; indeed, the show’s utopian promise burnishes the fiction of public space, and because it eschews theme, it requires that everything be read with Münster as its backdrop. Even the most austere artworks, like sculptures by Donald Judd or Tony Smith, are softened by this magnanimous spirit. Though many of this edition’s 35 projects continue in this tradition, it is somewhat divided by countervailing sentiments. Those that belong to the high-spirited camp are motivated more by long-term engagements and long-range forecasts, attitudes central to Jeremy Deller’s Speak to the Earth and It Will Tell You (2007–17), for example. Culminating a work originally commissioned for the 2007 edition, Deller asked the proprietors of allotment gardens to keep a diary of their activities until 2017, and has reverently exhibited the hardbound tomes like a set of Proust in one of the furnished sheds that litter the site. Emeka Ogboh similarly takes the public as his medium, homing in on transitional spaces. Passage through Moondog (2017) plays audio inspired by Moondog, a shamanistic American jazz/classical street musician who in later life lived, and died, in Münster, within a pedestrian tunnel underneath the railway station; Quiet Storm (2017), another contribution, is a beer brewed ‘to the sounds of the city of Lagos’. Cycling around Münster – the most important consideration to your experience of the sprawling show might be a decent bike – one finds a city flush with dreary reconstruction-era housing. This is a university town, and
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though equipped to shelter an ever-fluctuating population, the social models developed under reconstruction are reflected in this brand of housing, and, we can imagine, they continue to have an influence long after they were devised. Rethinking social architecture underscores Alexandra Pirici’s daily performance, Leaking Territories (2017), presented at the Historisches Rathaus, a building that has witnessed the Peace of Münster, which helped establish the notion of sovereign statehood in the seventeenth century, as well as the Münster Rebellion in the sixteenth century, in which radical Anabaptists, a small-scale insurrectionary group who bear resemblance to the apocalyptic spirit of modern, minoritarian fundamentalism, took control of the city for a year (after the failure of the rebellion, the leaders’ bodies were displayed in cages hung from St Lambert’s Church; the cages remain on display to this day). Pirici touches on this local legacy, presenting a performative essay of sorts: borrowing the form of the montage, it melds history scenes of revolution, as well as the signing of constitutions, into a historic soup seasoned with transgressions. (Spoiler: it ends when they form a live-action search engine.) Michael Smith’s Not Quite Under_ Ground (2017), a tattoo studio offering discounts to seniors over the age of sixty-five, also reflects on the shifting nature of protest and iconoclasm. Today, a boutique tattoo studio is as much a signifier of neighbourhood renewal as a coffee shop once was, and Münster exhibits the telltales of redevelopment: condos upcycling real estate. Aside from this, a postapocalyptic streak runs through the Skulptur Projekte, seeming to reflect a broader shift among artists, and perhaps the left generally, from utopia to speculative, dystopian futures, that runs counter to Skulptur Projekte’s social optimism. The survivalism emphasised in Aram Bartholl’s 5v (2017), which converts a campfire into electricity for phone chargers, strings together with Christian Odzuck’s off ofd (2017), an absurdist, Frankenstein-like ruin resurrected from a recently demolished public building. Hito Steyerl’s video installation HellYeahWeFuckDie (2017), meanwhile, intertwines the history of robotics and insurgency in a dark-hearted romp. She converts the lobby of the lbs West bank into a training facility – for robots or militants? – in one of the few works not immediately accessible to the public. Flanked by
ArtReview
an image of a golfer and a castle, respectively, the yellow sign in Ludger Gerdes’s Angst (Fear) (1989) reads, indeed, ‘Angst’. Thomas Schütte’s architectural sculpture, located in parkland, is eerily titled Nuclear Temple (2017). Some works nevertheless remain connected to the utopian spirit of the 1960s and 70s. John Knight’s A work in situ (2017) is a massive spirit level mounted on the exterior of the lwl Museum. It’s reminiscent of a time when such institutions held a more significant monopoly on the critical fundament, though it thumbs its nose at our present moment, too, asking why the contemporary art museum would be showcased in the historic city centre. Tucked away in a driveway courtyard also in the city centre, Koki Tanaka’s bunkerlike installation is the result of a series of workshops with a diverse set of volunteer Münsteraner. The volunteers’ job was to figure out ‘how to live together’ over a ten-day stint in this musty, secluded apartment. It would feel too doomsday-prep were it not for Tanaka’s sensitive knack for group dynamics. Through games, exercises and prompts, the group breaks down their assumptions, and videos display candid documentation throughout several furnished rooms. It feels like a letter from the future, in part because Tanaka refuses to turn his camera away. It’s perhaps the most hopeful work in the show. Elsewhere, however, the overriding feeling is fear, appropriately enough, since by many accounts the catastrophe of the Anthropocene is already happening. It’s what leads to the equivocal atmosphere in Pierre Huyghe’s majestically scaled After ALife Ahead (2017). For this, he precisely excavated the concrete floor of a former ice rink, installing bee colonies, a fishtank and puddles filled with semiaquatic plants throughout the calm subterranean landscape. Skylights open and close, a pneumatic pump discharges – a combination of computer and environmental systems are at work, the processes of which are apparently determined by fluctuations in HeLa cells, so-called immortal cells originally derived from the cervical cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks (whose family was never compensated) in 1951, and kept alive in labs since. The notion of the public has morphed into an ecology, and Huyghe’s landscape vibrates with the subtle horror of a posthuman sublime. After ALife Ahead, it seems worth noting, can be found in a nondescript industrial estate, and behind a Burger King. Sam Korman
top Koki Tanaka, Provisional Studies: Workshop #7 How to Live Together and Sharing the Unknown, 2017. Photo: Henning Rogge. © Skulptur Projekte Münster above Michael Smith, Not Quite Under_Ground (still), 2017, video, colour, sound. © Skulptur Projekte Münster
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Candice Breitz Love Story kow, Berlin 29 April – 30 July Candice Breitz’s film installations come with the ponderous air of a media-studies department already about them. They roughly divide into appropriated clips of celebrities and of ordinary people imitating them. Think of those odd glitches in Jean-Luc Godard’s early films, when characters would jadedly fix their gaze on the camera, as if to say, I know I’m in a film, and what of it? In Breitz’s work, Godard’s exception is the stifling rule: everything is framed as ‘mediated’, in heavily inverted commas. Her recent installation Love Story (2016) is a single-screen projection that alternates between clips of two A-list Hollywood stars – Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore – acting for Breitz, not excerpted from their movies. This is obviously an artist with clout. Like exotic specimens pinned to a baize board, within the minimalistic frame of the concrete-walled gallery, they are dressed in black and seated in director’s chairs against a green screen used by filmmakers to enable alternative backdrops to be inserted during postproduction. When the camera pans out, reflector screens on stands are visible, as if casually placed. Like the green foil, they are signposts signalling ‘film production’. The projection is screened at one end of a severe bunkerlike room, curtained off from the rest of the gallery – another sign for the huis clos of cinematic experience: the darkening of the theatre, the curtain parting onto fantasy. So far, so conforming to the conventional lineaments of a filmmaker’s critique of her medium.
But the scripts are transcribed from interviews with six asylum seekers. The casting of the stars as ‘talking heads’, playing the interviewees, recalls Breitz’s earlier films of fans performing favourite tracks by Michael Jackson or John Lennon, but with the roles of celebrity and anonymous conduit inverted. Downstairs, in an even more isolated – ‘subterranean’, the press release resonantly puts it – room, the original interviewees speak on plasma screens, headphones attached. Among them are a homosexual professor from Caracas, an Indian transsexual, a Syrian teenager and a musclebound Angolan, each recounting the persecution that prompted their uprooting, and a perilous journey to the havens of Berlin or New York. Three women and three men are acted by Moore and Baldwin respectively. The difference in presentation is telling. The refugees are effectively silenced on monitors, while the famous voices, speaking their words, boom through the architecture. Relegating the original to the basement’s menagerie of screens displaces the refugees’ stories behind the facade of cinematic artifice, while their presence undermines the attempt to impersonate them, making the actors’ performances a remote second-best to the more direct trace of experience on offer downstairs. The spectacle of the main projection reverses this priority in the interests of symbolically assenting to our demand for the celebrity image as a prerequisite to gaining our attention. The scripts touchingly acknowledge this bias when the refugees thank the actors for extending the reach of their accounts.
The theme is topical, and Breitz is not the first to adopt it. I recently saw an installation by Bouchra Khalili, also consisting of interviews, on simultaneous screens, with refugees describing the ordeal of getting from an African or Middle Eastern A to a European B. The accounts were onerous. Love Story is relatively light viewing; it is in the virtuosity of its editing that it most eloquently evades the self-indulgence of taking its painful documentary material as a pretext for medium self-reflexivity. The staccato rhythms of the main projection – rapidly switching between the actors registering the halting, apologetic delivery of the refugees’ stuttering English – resemble a rehearsal, and what might be being rehearsed is the loss of identity, even subjectivity; that of the actors who submit themselves to impersonating the refugees, and of the refugees who submit their words to the actors. Both are metaphors for the loss, through forced flight, of the culture that confirms an individual’s identity, as for our vicarious investment in the surrogate presences of the celebrities we idolise. Lines from different transcripts are spliced into a stream that creates narrative by subordinating individual testimony to a relay between Baldwin and Moore. Paradoxically, these two epitomes of the process by which a star’s recognisable presence invests a spectrum of identities, in one film after another, have become vehicles for the dissolution of the trace of personalities they are strenuously labouring to capture. The last line of the main projection is “Here I am”, which of course is exactly where he or she is not. Mark Prince
Love Story (detail), 2016, seven-channel video installation, colour, sound, 73 min 42 sec (loop). Photo: Ladislav Zajac. Courtesy the artist and kow, Berlin
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Sarah van Sonsbeeck We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now Oude Kerk, Amsterdam 19 May – 17 September Consecrated in 1306, the Oude Kerk (Old Church) in Amsterdam’s red-light district is the oldest building in the city: now a museum, it was originally a port church, and has never been deconsecrated. For centuries, it faced almost directly onto the waterfront. Ships received blessings for a safe journey right in front of the church doors; fishermen could repair their nets in the vestibule, shielded from the elements, while it is here that naval heroes found their final resting place. The massive, wooden barrel-vaulted ceiling, made by ship’s carpenters, evokes the hull of a capsized ship. It was the special link between this church and the sea that inspired Sarah van Sonsbeeck’s installation We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now (2017). The floor of the church is almost entirely covered by 333 emergency blankets, each measuring 211 × 160 cm, with narrow walkways in between. The coverings are made of Mylar, a shiny, gold-coloured insulation foil, which has come to be familiar from news images of refugees on lifeboats. The emergency blankets offer shelter against cold and wind,
much as the church itself once offered its protection. While the flimsy material has, here and there, been crumpled by visitors stepping on it, the gleaming reflection is mesmerising. The bluestone slabs of the floor have been transformed into a glistening sea that glitters in the warm sunlight flooding through the huge church windows. The folds in the emergency blankets echo the pattern of the stained glass. The rescue blankets are clearly a reference to the unfortunate migrants who, seeking to escape unbearable situations at home, set out to sea in rickety boats attempting to reach Europe. Van Sonsbeeck previously used Mylar in her Anti Drone Tent (2013), a construction that shields users from the heat-scanning gaze of drones. In the Old Church – and the location doubtlessly plays a role in this – Mylar takes on a heavenly connotation. Its golden glow is reflected onto the tomb of Vice-Admiral Abraham van der Hulst, who died in 1666 in a naval battle against the English. The relief on the tomb monument shows the deceased hero lying on his back, eyes closed, while above him angels blow on golden trumpets. Death is marble; eternal life is golden.
In one of the chapels is a steel rack with three large oxygen tanks hanging from it: one original and two replicas cast in bronze, one of these last dull, the other polished to perfection. The blue original comes from Tristan da Cunha, one of the most remote places in the world, somewhere halfway between Africa and South America. It washed up there having fallen off a lifeboat that was cast adrift from a sunken oil rig. On this sparsely populated island with no Internet access, van Sonsbeeck saw the empty tank being used as a gong: when the weather was favourable, this was rung to call fishermen to the harbour to set out to sea. Van Sonsbeeck’s gong is rung regularly by the church’s bell-ringer. He strikes it three times 37, three times in a row: 333 strikes in total, the same number as the emergency blankets (and, coincidence or not, exactly half of the Number of the Beast, as stated in the Book of Revelation). The sound is deafening, the frenzied rhythm alarming – an inescapable wakeup call that continues to reverberate for a long time afterwards. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Emma Rault
We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now, 2017, golden Mylar blankets, dimensions variable. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy Oude Kerk, Amsterdam
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Bill Viola A Retrospective Guggenheim Bilbao 30 June – 9 November Bill Viola was among the very first artists to exhibit at the Guggenheim Bilbao during its inaugural year, 1997. The museum’s arrival breathed new life into the Spanish city, kickstarting its postindustrial reinvention. Renewal and transformation are major themes for Viola, and so it’s fitting that this retrospective is included as part of the Guggenheim’s 20th anniversary programme. Yet for an exhibition claiming to offer ‘a comprehensive overview of Viola’s oeuvre’, there are some gaping omissions. Pivotal works such as Nantes Triptych (1992) and The Crossing (1996) are not included, and surprisingly, neither is anything from the 1980s. Despite expectations of a far-reaching survey that joins the dots between the American artist’s position as a 1970s video-art innovator and current status as a master of the grandiose spectacle, the majority of the show’s 23 works date from the millennium. Nevertheless, the thoughtful selection is a convincing demonstration of why Viola is today regarded by many as one of the foremost proponents of moving-image art. Visitors to Viola’s 2014 retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais will recognise many works here,
though it’s pleasing to find lesser-known works punctuating the showstoppers. Take Slowly Turning Narrative (1992), a mesmerising exploration of human consciousness where partially glimpsed images and chanted words envelop the viewer as a large mirrored screen rotates in the centre of the room. Elsewhere, tucked in a side gallery, is Four Songs (1976), a compilation of early videos that includes The Space Between the Teeth; this work, in which the camera repeatedly hurtles towards a screaming man, contains several elements familiar to Viola’s practice: the notion of a passage between worlds; a human figure in extremis; purification by water (the man’s image is literally washed away at the video’s end). These motifs, which appear throughout the exhibition, are powerfully present in the monumental Inverted Birth (2014), a remarkable meditation on spiritual purification. A five-metre-high screen in a large, cavernous space shows a man covered in black liquid. Slowly, the fluid rises from his body, soon becoming a roaring reverse torrent that shifts from oily black to blood red to milky white and, finally, to clear water before the figure is left perfectly clean and dry.
Inverted Birth, 2014, video installation, 8 min 22 sec. Photo: Kira Perov. © and courtesy the artist
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Viola is a critically divisive artist who treads a fine line between exquisite lyricism and grandiosity. This is best exemplified by the epic five-part installation Going Forth by Day (2002), which addresses the complexities of existence through the themes of life, death and rebirth. In Fire Birth a human form emerges from a submerged world, while in The Path a stream of people process through a forest. Such imagery invites quiet contemplation, but one quickly becomes distracted by the activity of adjacent projections: the weary rescue workers of First Light, the raging flood in The Deluge. While the production values are superb, the power of each section seems diminished by the decision to exhibit them together in one space; one can’t help feeling that, like the exhibition itself, the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Indeed, while everything has been beautifully installed, it seems the very notion of a retrospective does not serve Viola well (it takes over five hours to experience the show in its entirety). As the strongest moments attest, the artist’s works are at their most potent when shown in isolation. David Trigg
Stuart Middleton Beat Institute of Contemporary Arts (ica), London 6 May – 2 July When Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The lights going on and off was nominated for the 2001 Turner Prize, one member of the public registered her disgust by launching a volley of eggs against the white walls of the Tate Britain gallery in which it was installed. Stuart Middleton’s exhibition at the ica preempts even such a futile protest by dematerialising not only the work of art but also the institutional architecture. The lower gallery has been stripped of its suspended ceiling and temporary walls, exposing the building’s tarnished steel entrails and crumbling masonry. An invigilator sits forlornly on a rickety wooden platform constructed of reclaimed domestic floorboards, backdropped by an inverted ziggurat of burnt ochre and sickly yellow brickwork from which the concrete filling spills. Her presence, more closely resembling the vigil of a mourner than of a security guard, contributes to the pervasive sense of loss. The upstairs gallery is equally bereft, the shadowed lines and extruding nails on the bare walls contrasting sharply with the stuccoed grandeur of the ceiling. The space is empty apart from a large screen on the far wall of the second gallery displaying
a stop-motion animation. The video depicts a mangy black dog trapped in a shallow white space, not unlike the gallery prior to its renovation, moving through a series of everyday behaviours. Curled up in a corner dreaming of rabbits, its legs kick out in fitful chase; it licks and barks noisily at the screen; wags its tail left and right against the floor to beat out a rhythm against the boredom. The video lasts only a few minutes before looping, but amidst these bare rooms, the black dog – traditionally a portent of death or depression – offers a melancholy companionship. Beat’s most obvious precursor is Cerith Wyn Evans’s 2006 exhibition at the ica, which emptied the downstairs gallery, exposing it to scrutiny from the street, and featured two looped films upstairs. Yet the desolate space causes the mind to wander, encouraging associations with things as diverse as Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), for which the artist spent three days locked in an empty New York gallery with a coyote, Jean Genet’s description of Giacometti’s sculpture of an emaciated dog as the ‘supreme magnification of solitude’ and even the canine pseudonym (‘R. Mutt’) with
which Marcel Duchamp signed Fountain (1917) (some wag has tagged the signature on one of the urinals in the gallery’s male toilets). But the work is strongest when considered as an exercise in absurdism – a darkly humorous meditation on futility and the possibility of at least partial redemption – and weakest when understood as satire: the reclaimed floorboards and bare brickwork as, for example, a comment on the fad for distressed interior architecture. A short story written by the artist to accompany the exhibition upsets the balance. The narrator delivers an embittered tirade on the failure of his ex-colleagues in ‘motorway network hospitality’ to recognise his ‘raw creativity’, lampooning a culture in which everyone believes themselves to be an artist. The story reads like a disavowal (it finishes, ‘I quit’), and its sardonic tone undermines (at least for me) the productive ambivalence towards the production and exhibition of art that the rest of the show implies. By seeming to ironise his own practice, Middleton distances himself from it, and at least partially defuses it. This is the least convincing of his assaults on the structures that frame a work of art. Ben Eastham
Beat, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Andy Stagg. Courtesy the artist and ica, London
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Mark Leckey Affect Bridge Age Regression Cubitt Gallery, London 23 June – 30 July The ‘Hey Man’, as we called him, used to roam the train tracks that ran behind my house as a kid, regularly calling out a long, mournful “Heeey”. We never saw him, though we did come across a matted tangle of sheets under the adjacent bridge that must’ve been where he occasionally slept. Once, hearing his cry, I yelled a similar “hey”: he immediately returned with a shorter, almost cheery, “hey!” Maybe, I thought at the time, all he’d been yelling for was a response, for some sort of communion. That ambiguous moment, of a shouted sharing with an unseen homeless man over 30 years ago, was just one such reverberating flashback brought forth by Mark Leckey’s concise, dense show Affect Bridge Age Regression. The gallery, thick with the trippy yellow-orange light from lamps that line highways, echoes with a chant, a chorus shouting, “Out, demons, out!”, the artist calling on an unusual pantheon including Minerva, the ‘weird sisters of Albion’, the Levellers and Clement Atlee. The song is a sort of cover version and update of The Fugs’ performance Exorcising the Evil Spirits from the
Pentagon, Oct. 21, 1967 (1967), though instead of anti-Vietnam War magic, this is an exorcism directed at a highway overpass, a model of which squats solidly in the centre of the room. Its small columns and surfaces are covered with tiny graffiti: Megzy, Simo, Prunes, Buddy Holly Lives. The overpass has appeared before in Leckey’s video Dream English Kid 1964 – 1999AD (2015), and is, the press release claims, modelled after an actual place, but it doesn’t matter: it’s almost innately recognisable, it could be anywhere. As the song calls to cast out this ‘cybernetic ruin’, a ‘memory palace of the underclasses’, the spell begins to work on you, the lights giving everything a halo of bright blue, as it elicits memories of all the time spent in such timeless nonspaces: sitting listlessly in the back of the car on endless roadtrips, watching street lamps go by; hanging around on blank patches of grass next to dual carriageways as a teenager, just because there was nowhere else to go. Leckey’s bridge becomes a black hole, drawing you back to the dim corners of our perpetual para-urban adolescence.
Affect Bridge Age Regression, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy Cubitt Gallery, London
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Leckey’s performative role as an artist has long been like that of an eccentric, pontificating uncle who likes to dabble in the occult, who somehow manages to make your defunct dial-up modem play an ancient hymn. Affect Bridge Age Regression is Leckey in high techno-shaman mode, tapping into the twentieth-century paradigm of the highway, that ideal for countless drifters, and – for a while – a central metaphor that let us understand the world’s connectivity (remember when the Internet used to be called the ‘information superhighway’?). Now merged into a wider network model, it would seem Leckey is attempting to discard the overpass and the highway that runs beneath it altogether. But the potency of the exhibition rests on its ability to draw those liminal moments into the weird light of the present, shouting at them to see what echoes and responses come back. We can’t deny the bridge, with all the misdirections of history that it houses, or forget those cringey teenage years; but we can face it, and say hey. Chris Fite-Wassilak
Greater than the Sum David Roberts Art Foundation (draf), London 5 May – 29 July During the past few years Lisbon has emerged as a casually dressed art outpost where experimentation and conviviality are prized over the commerce that dominates suited-andbooted market centres. There curators Luís Silva and João Mourão’s not-for-profit Kunsthalle Lissabon has been welcoming international artists to make work in a sunny, small and affordable city. Their modus operandi seems particularly attuned to the Portuguese capital’s social and economic landscape, foregrounding ‘diy ethics and aesthetics’, institutional critique and the political potential of collaboration and friendship. They see ‘sociability’ as a ‘curatorial tool’, putting the process behind a show on equal footing with what’s in the gallery. Silva and Mourão, the tenth guest curators at draf, face the task, then, of not only conveying their thematic interests, but of translating energies generated in another, quite different place. Exploring collective action, Greater than the Sum begins with a tea party and ends with a piss-up. Laure Prouvost’s gdm future franchise (2017) reimagines the museum as a tearoom tribute to her fictionalised granddad.
Multispouted teapots sit on tables balanced on stacks of art-historical tomes: a cute pun on the critical support structures that bolster traditional museums. Other works take a questioning approach to collaboration and rethinking rules, in both art institutions and the society they reflect. Céline Condorelli invites visitors to say ‘to hell with health and safety’, and climb her old-furniture assemblage to see Amalia Pica’s stamp drawings installed high on the wall. It echoes John Lennon’s much-mythologised first encounter with Yoko Ono, when he climbed a ladder to read ‘yes’, written in tiny letters, on a piece of paper affixed to the ceiling. Pica’s drawings however use rubber office stamps that record when an item has been paid for, received or delivered to create imagery that includes flowers and abstract patterns. Anyone hoping for creative connection is met with global capitalism’s workaday machinery, the hollow endnote of the economic liberalism that John and Yoko’s creed of individualism could be seen to have enabled. Similarly, Diogo Evangelista looks at a previous era’s dreams with open eyes: his silhouettes of nude gymnasts are upscale versions
of figures gleaned from magazines about an early-twentieth-century German naturist movement, one of the failed utopias that foreshadowed the Nazis’ far darker dream of forging the world anew. The show’s final work, Mounira Al Solh’s video installation Dinosaurs (2012), captures the heady, volatile nature of group activity, with her friends reenacting, in Arabic, hard-drinking scenes from John Cassavetes movies. Yet for the majority of the audience, the untranslated dialogue ensures that what is witnessed is less a traceable narrative and more a changing of moods: from boozy conversational highs to strip-bar alienation. Such works rehearse a nimble debate about the potential and pitfalls of friendship as an agent of change. However, for anyone looking for the exhibition text’s promise of ‘the public materialisation of friendships produced by the institution’, there is little that suggests precisely what makes Kunsthalle Lissabon’s approach distinct. As Al Solh’s revellers imply, friendship is a nebulous, shifty creative force, one that happily evades fixed exhibition spaces. Skye Sherwin
Mounira Al Solh, Dinosaurs (detail), 2012, five-channel video installation. Photo: Tim Bowditch. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg & Beirut
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Philip Guston Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975 Hauser & Wirth, London 19 May – 29 July In 1971 Philip Guston returned to the us from Italy, having spent half a year getting over the negative response to his latest show of paintings. His apparent rejection of abstraction in favour of a strange new figurative direction had elicited bafflement and anger from his New York peers and most critics, and Guston at this point could easily have been forgiven for reverting to his previous style. Instead, upon his return he produced, in just a few frenetic months, hundreds of deliriously satirical drawings on the subject of President Richard Nixon, caricaturing him as a depressive, manipulative schemer, a bollock-cheeked, schlong-nosed grotesque who was out, indeed, to screw the world over – pretty prescient, given that the damning scandals of Watergate were still some way off. As well as acting as a channel for Guston’s political ire, then, the ‘Poor Richard’ series (as he titled his personal selection of 73 of these drawings) can be seen as a statement of intent, an affirmation of his commitment to the clunky style and peculiar motifs he was developing. It’s fascinating to witness, for example, how the Klansmen imagery, which had debuted in that controversial painting show the previous year, is brought in, with Nixon at points depicted as a sort of ghoulish, empty cowl. Indeed,
if anything, Guston was accentuating the very tendencies that had produced such a mystified response to his new work. The paintings had been stigmatised as crude and cartoonish? Then he would produce actual, out-and-out cartoons. He was being accused of abandoning abstraction, of retreating from its purist prohibitions against subject matter? Well, how about possibly the grandest subject matter of all, the topical events of national politics? Not that all the events Guston portrayed had literally taken place. About a quarter of the current exhibition – the original ‘Poor Richard’ drawings plus scores more discovered posthumously – covers Nixon’s famous trip to China. But in 1971, the China trip, which Nixon intended as his political legacy, was still at the planning stage: so the images of Nixon shovelling his penis-nose into bowls of rice or dressed up like Fu Manchu were pure, scabrous speculation. Nor do the works focus exclusively on Nixon: Spiro Agnew, the vice president, and Henry Kissinger, secretary of state, also feature – the former portrayed as a lumpen, triangular head, the latter identified simply as a pair of freefloating, sinister-looking spectacles. The political triumvirate together forms a sort of demented, pathetic posse, rife with power
Untitled, 1975, ink on paper, 61 × 48 cm. © the estate of the artist. Courtesy the estate and Hauser & Wirth, London
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struggles and codependency issues – whether mooching around the beaches of Nixon’s socalled Winter White House in Key Biscayne or squabbling among themselves at the golf course. In that sense, the works are clearly informed by George Herriman’s surreal, magisterial Krazy Kat cartoon strip (1913–44), which Guston read avidly as a child, and which featured a similarly tangled trio of characters. Herriman’s influence on Guston’s late work is well known; but the fact that these are drawings means it’s far easier than it is in Guston’s paintings to trace direct borrowings: the black, saucer-ish eyes; or a brick being thrown, clearly a homage to one of Herriman’s recurring gags. Above all, what Guston inherited was a certain tone: figures mordantly playing out their assigned roles in a sort of theatrical, symbolic space. That tendency is pushed furthest in a smaller series of later Nixon drawings – the ‘Phlebitis’ series (1975). Yes, Nixon had problems with an occasionally swollen left leg. But in Guston’s savage depictions his limb becomes monstrous, an elephantine mass of veinengorged, suppurating flesh – a portrait not just of the president but of the post-Watergate us as a whole, utterly maimed and dragged down by corruption. Gabriel Coxhead
Chelpa Ferro Spacemen/Cavemen Sprovieri, London 30 June – 22 September Nothing touches the floor in this exhibition of work by Brazilian artist-collective and band Chelpa Ferro. Nothing except my own feet. A web of coloured climbing ropes and straps – of the sort that you might find tying down a tarpaulin covering the bed of a truck – crisscross the room, joined to one another and connected to the walls around them by big, heavy-duty aluminium clips or steel hooks. This web supports three hammocks – two white and one a deep, salmony pink, in which viewers are invited to lie – as well as two totem-pole-like constructions made up of old wooden posts, timber offcuts, a used frying pan, lumps of brick, breezeblock and polystyrene, a single hammer, rusted scaffold poles and an empty, inverted oil carton. These modules float or hover just above the ground, functioning to pull the entire web of strapping taut. One pole is festooned with coloured lightbulbs dotted up its length and crowned by a red beacon. The other holds an assortment of old speakers: some megaphone-esque, others home hi-fi or Tannoy-style, all connected via a rainbow of cables to an amplifier, which is in turn strapped to a polystyrene block with some old wire. As you might expect, the pole of lights illuminates at various intervals and rhythms,
sometimes one bulb at a time, sometimes in sequence, climbing up the pole, and sometimes in concert, flashing or holding their luminescence in unison with the sound that the speaker-pole is emitting. This nonmelodic noise consists of a mixture of low rumbles, urgent knocking, highpitched tinkering and pulsating taps, and creates a discordant mood in the whole space. The sense is that you have stumbled across a communication network for somebody whose language you don’t know – somebody distant in time and place whose messages are being transmitted into the gallery by these modules made of previously unwanted materials. The work seems to layer histories or times, as the title suggests – an old junkyard assemblage meets a futuristic floating invention. It is simultaneously postapocalyptic (I am strangely – embarrassingly – reminded of the floating towns and communities from the 1995 Kevin Costner film Waterworld) and utopian in its celebration of salvage and recycling, making us increasingly aware of the objects we discard. Chelpa Ferro, which roughly translates as ‘old money’, consists of sculptor Barrão, painter Luiz Zerbini and film editor Sergio Mekler. The trio formed in Rio de Janeiro
in 1995 as a band making improvised music using debris and objects found in the street, as well as traditional musical instruments, which they then translated into installations or works of art in a gallery setting. By incorporating discarded materials into the resulting complex audiovisual networks, Chelpa Ferro gives these items a new purpose or function, resuscitated by new technologies that synchronise or connect each constituent part into a bigger whole. Perhaps this urge to scrutinise the way that we, as a society, understand commodity and excess is a little heavy-handed, but the reminder that objects persist once we are done with them is certainly welcome. As viewers, it feels as though we (and our own consumption/waste decisions) are implicated in this sonic, radiant web of superfluity. The atmosphere of the room feels charged, as though you might get an electric shock if you touch something; or, because you are the only ‘thing’ touching the floor, that you are somehow earthing the entire situation. This feels grounding, and reinforces your connection to the mesh of reinvigorated debris around you, allowing the layering of histories and times – apocalyptic futures or old-fashioned junkyard invention – to communicate with your today. Laura Smith
Spacemen/Cavemen, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Milo Hutchings. Courtesy the artists and Sprovieri, London
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Edgar Arceneaux Until, Until, Until… Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 27 May – 1 July One enters immediately upon a stage set. Over a ghostly scrim plays a projection of a 2015 performance, written by Arceneaux, after which the exhibition is titled; one scene shows a man singing Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (1912) – poignant at a time when monuments to the rebel confederacy are being taken down throughout the American South. Arceneaux’s projection periodically reveals an audience, sitting in the gallery on folding chairs, along the same wall against which visitors to the gallery now sit, watching Arceneaux’s video. Footage of this audience intermingles with that of another, televised audience from an earlier era. On the walls to the left and right of the scrim are two more abstract projections, one in green light, the other in blue; the lighting of the recorded performance periodically descends into a lurid red. Arceneaux, in a tour of the show, noted his fascination with the rgb matrix of a television screen. The televised image – as the abstraction and restructuring of a light beam – is always in the process of forming. Its ability to be seen depends on power, of both the electrical and the darker, more metaphorical, corporate sort, in control of the distribution of broadcast images. It’s in the context of such power that one arrives at the video’s most striking wrinkle, that of its content, and subject: the 1981 performance, at an inaugural event for then-President-elect
Ronald Reagan, of Ben Vereen, in blackface. Vereen’s blackface comes in the context of a tribute to Bert Williams, an early vaudeville performer from an era of which the tv host Johnny Carson, in his introduction to the 1981 programme, said that a black performer, in order to perform in “a white man’s show, would have to put on blackface, so no one would know”. Vereen’s performance consisted of two parts; the second, apparently critical take on the first, was cut from the broadcast, and Vereen was subsequently ostracised, and hated. One may rightly argue the efficacy of protest or performance art employing blackface – whatever the intent, the symbol, like a swastika, overwhelms its content. But the very literal, televised taking-out-of-context (which cultural critic Neil Postman would warn of, just a few years later, in 1985, in Amusing Ourselves to Death) represented in Vereen’s severed performance raises the question of an alternate timeline, in which his piece might be judged in the fullness of its original intent. The televised image is, by design, encountered at a distance, often within a context of comfort and privacy – as such, Arceneaux’s reworked footage of a largely white audience applauding a performer in blackface disturbs, even as the context mutes, and palliates, the content. Elsewhere in Arceneaux’s exhibition are a series of shadow boxes, each showing a mirrored
print of headlines related to the 1967 Detroit riot over a sumptuous mountain landscape. The boxes are deep, the distance between the two signifying languages vast – romantic landscape paired with hysterical coverage of a violent protest. The mirroring by turns implicates the viewer, conjures the spectre of narcissism and challenges the coherence of the text and the reading of the overall image. Arceneaux also includes a series of technological and judicial treatises half-encased in the natural bloom of sugar crystals. Visually striking, particularly in their formal dimension, these pieces nevertheless feel tentative, as though still in process. Arceneaux’s exhibition moves from a visceral, yet hard-to-quantify, immersive experience to rooms of beautifully crafted, obscure objects. The formality and procession is theatrical, and back-to-front. Until, Until, Until… begins the exhibit as theatre with its edges frayed. Frank Lawson, who performs as Ben Vereen in Arceneaux’s piece, conjures a highly discomfiting emotional experience, including a long, cathartic scene of his character crying, after thanking (with teeth clenched) the Presidentelect for his “graciousness”. But Arceneaux’s crystallised books evince a kind of textual hermeticism, and a certain opacity to the viewer. He weaves a deft, subtle, often convoluted thread throughout – a heavy, but selectively rewarding lift. Aaron Horst
Until, Until, Until…, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
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Invisible Man Martos Gallery, New York 3 May – 24 June This debut show in Martos Gallery’s new Chinatown space takes its name from Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel. The press release features an excerpt: ‘it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination.’ The artists in the show – Torkwase Dyson, Kayode Ojo, Pope.L, Jessica Vaughn – have adopted a strategy of refusing legibility outright. It’s as if they have taken that ‘hard, distorting glass’ and put it to their own uses. Here, opacity is a tool to deny control, and ambiguity is a mode of discourse. There is a lot of good work being done lately around the issue of opacity and marginalised bodies, much of which looks to ideas laid out by Édouard Glissant. ‘Why must we evaluate people on the scale of the transparency of ideas proposed by the West?’ the writer and philosopher said in a 2009 interview with Manthia Diawara. ‘As far as I’m concerned, a person has the right to be opaque.’ A wry meditation on transparency sets the tone for the show in the form of Pope.L’s Well (elh version) (all works 2017), a single glass of
water perched atop a slim white shelf hung 178cm high (just slightly higher than the top of this writer’s head) and occupying a small room of its own. The water may be translucent, but it doesn’t reveal anything about itself. Two more such water-glass pieces populate the main gallery space along with the artist’s Pedestal, a water fountain hanging upside down from a pedestal attached to the ceiling. The sides of the fountain are removed to reveal the internal mechanism, and a photo timer is rigged to it so that water squirts into a hole in the floor directly below it every two-and-ahalf minutes. Transparency is at play here too. We can see the internal mechanics and the countdown on the timer, but none of this reveals any underlying logic. By using a public water-fountain, Pope.L also invokes a potent symbol of racial segregation in the us, which suggests his timed water drips are governed by a system without sense. The history of segregation also feels embedded in Vaughn’s choice of worn seatbacks and bottoms taken from the Chicago Transit Authority in After Willis (rubbed, used and moved) #005. Arranged in a large grid on the wall measuring about two-and-a-half-by-six
metres, the seats reveal threadbare spots, brown smudges, and host little hairs here and there. Though not actual relics of segregated public transit, the seats evidence the residue of the bodies governed by such systems, historical and present day. Moreover, Vaughn pokes at the primacy of the supposedly neutral grid in the history of conceptual and minimal art by blemishing it with very real bodily marks. Dyson’s abstract paintings are gestural and expressive while simultaneously exploring the scale of objects tied up in histories of oppression. For example, the three paintings on view here deal with the Dakota Pipeline, and Dyson’s white, rounded forms correlate to the circumference of such pipes. Dyson challenges the abstraction/figuration opposition by allowing shapes to function formally and politically. With Invisible Man, curator and gallery director Ebony L. Haynes gives us a primer for how to make a show about identity that is subtle, thoughtful and forward-thinking. She doesn’t rely on reductive truisms, but instead points back into history to consider the evolution of ideas about identity and visibility. Ashton Cooper
Pope.L, Well (elh version), 2017, wood, glass, water, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Martos Gallery, New York, and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
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Andrea Zittel Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and A-Z West, Joshua Tree 8 June – 12 August It’s 40 degrees. A dry heat. A light wind rustles through the sagebrush. My dog – a city slicker – pants desperately as we walk through a desert field, ambling about Andrea Zittel’s new permanent installation of her Planar Pavilions series (2017). The works are installed on Zittel’s property at A-Z West – her studio, residency and lifeproject in the California high-desert next to Joshua Tree National Park. Against the landscape’s harsh elements, the Planar Pavilions, black cinderblock constructs, stand silent and still. While evoking a macho minimalist language, Zittel’s oeuvre is staunchly dedicated to a more human-centric space. Though the artist longs for isolation, her work often implies a communal use. (‘To live Alone or Together?’ the artist pondered in her 2013 series How to Live Billboards.) Her Planar Pavilions are skeletal suggestions – or ruins – of interior spaces meant to be shared: living rooms, bedrooms, places where friends might join for a meal, or a nook where one might read the paper in the early morning light. Highly considered and articulated spaces abound across the artist’s multiacre property (elsewhere, shipping-containercum-apartment-units use minimal materials to articulate the essentials: bed, desk, storage area). Basking in the dry heat, and sited among similar structures (such as Zittel’s Wagon Stations – small one-person podlike structures offered to resident artists who stay on the property)
– the Planar Pavilions feel at home geographically and conceptually. Two hundred miles away, amidst the bustle of Santa Monica Boulevard, Regen Projects houses a concurrent exhibition of sculptural installations that echo the desert works. But where the Planar Pavilions feel expansive and open for potential use, the gallery counterparts, titled Planar Configurations, feel limited and less open for interpretation of use. These powdercoated aluminium works use arrangements of vertical and horizontal planes to divide compact spaces, which give the slightest hint of proposed function. While the Planar Pavilions suggest architecture, the Planar Configurations, at a smaller scale, suggest furniture. Zittel is deeply invested in her analysis of the plane: vertical planes create privacy, while horizontal planes imply function (depending on its height, a horizontal plane might be a table, a rug or a bed). In a videowork from 2014, Dynamic Essay About the Panel, she calls horizontal planes ‘energy accumulators’, as they host our daily actions. Yet here, shrouded in a high-finish powder coat, the panels feel cold, as if they might keep energy out rather than warmly accepting it. A ‘fluid panel state’, as Zittel has explained, involves a plane that ‘transcends two dimensions and assumes a three-dimensional nature’. In its application to the body, Zittel’s ongoing Uniform (1991–) work gives movement to hand-
Planar Pavilion, 2017 (installation view, A-Z West, Joshua Tree). Photo: Sarah Lyon. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles
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made fabrics. For years, she has worn the same handmade outfit every day for a whole season; wear and tear is a given. At Regen, the fluid panel comes in the form of two large weavings. These works, produced in her weaving studio at A-Z West, add a necessary element of the handmade to the slick sheen of the Planar Configurations. While they are precisely made, the nature of the material allows them to bow slightly, responding to gravity. One can imagine them in their ‘fluid state’, wrapping around bodies or slumping over a couch – although here they hang conventionally in the space, severed from their implied utility. In many ways, the weavings act as studies for the sculptures, plotting perpendicular lines across a gridded space. The small watercolour works included in the back gallery similarly draft linear connections, even as they are looser and more primal. Here, the artist allows flourishes of colour to bleed across the paper in a gorgeous wash hemmed in by thick solid black lines. Zittel’s work is at its best when it lets in moments of imperfection that are deeply at odds with her geometric rigidity. Her works, as proposals for living, are meant to be weathered. In the gallery space, though – where we are trained to look and not touch – Zittel’s creations become metaphor rather than function, embodying a cool remove that leaves a longing for the desert. Lindsay Preston Zappas
An Te Liu Transmission Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles 9 June – 15 July Insectile, mechanical and almost totally mysterious, An Te Liu’s sculptures look like alien cargo-cult relics and ritual masks from some postapocalyptic religion. Modernist body parts, sliced and curved, jaunt and squirm on clean plinths and from mounts on the smooth walls. A battered disco-ball like a dead moon hangs above it all. The ball has its own story, but most of these shapely sculptures come by way of artistic intervention and bronze casting from polystyrene repurposed from old packaging – known more commonly by chemical manufacturer Dow’s proprietary epithet Styrofoam. Expanded into odd geometries to slide into boxes and protect products almost as disposable as their packaging, this inventively nonbiodegradable material will easily outlive the last unlucky human. Even if it easily chips and breaks in your hand, Styrofoam (encased and floating amidst the rest of our garbage) might
be one of humanity’s most lasting legacies, making it all the more fitting that Liu elevates these discards into odd monuments, riffing on this altogether-disposable material with classical elegance and modernist abstraction (along with a wink and a smile). What ideals and essential truths can be cut from an easily tossed but enduring modern material? While some works entice with smoothed skins and polished surfaces, others wear a weathered patina, a rough texture that makes them look curiously ancient (or at least resilient enough to become so). Staged on a long platform that hugs the long wall of a narrow gallery, these sculptures look like an anthropologist’s reliquary or funereal statuary, a study and memorial dedicated to the tragicomic theatre of our own trashy hubris. Some of the found Styrofoam required only bronzing without intervention; its odd bodies were already so futuristic and menacing, like
some of Lee Bontecou’s more severe wallworks. But others were carved with a hotwire before finding their way to the foundry. These sculptures evoke some of the natural forms found in Isamu Noguchi’s designs or hunks of the abstracted figures of Henry Moore or Umberto Boccioni, but stare long enough and you can see the lingering shape of packaging and the scars of the artist’s shaping it just so. The gravitas of these things as elegant objects tenses against their humble substrate’s toxic reputation. The artist plays with the found foam in particular ways, slipping in sly allusions and soft jokes in their titles. The idealistic classicism of Ancient Greece gets namechecked in Eidolon VII–IV (2016) and Eudaemon (2017), both of which are spirits, as does the chortlingly punny Edifice Complex (2016). The name for the hanging bronzed disco ball (dated 2017) pithily punctuates the whole show: The Party’s Over. Andrew Berardini
Transmission, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Michael Underwood. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles
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kriwet mediawake Luhring Augustine, New York 29 June – 11 August kriwet (Ferdinand Kriwet), a precocious jack of artistic trades, emerged in the postwar German Rhineland during the wildly creative 1960s. He published his first book – a mass of words lacking punctuation – in 1961, when he was nineteen and West Germany had a single national tv station (the second was launched in 1963). He made recordings, broadcasts and films; designed exhibitions; and created visual works printed or stamped on commercial materials like pvc and aluminium. In 1968 he performed with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in Essen. This exhibition offers a fair overview of kriwet’s work. Two 16mm films, Apollovision (1969/2005) and Campaign (1972–3/2005), montages of news coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the 1972 us presidential campaign respectively, are screened sequentially on opposing walls. kriwet filmed them directly off television sets, and each is leavened with ads, football games and other noise from the American mediascape. A grid of Text-Signs (1968), concentric circles of words
stamped on commercial aluminium squares, hangs nearby. Several pieces from the series Text Dia (1970), rings of words printed on clear pvc sheets measuring over three-by-three metres, are draped from the ceiling. Together they form an immersion in near logorrhoea. The vinyl-printed texts appear, at first, to be nonsense, but they coalesce into overlapping words such as ‘gamemeatyumyum…’. The mix in the Text-Signs form more obvious combinations, for example ‘sodomestick sadomasorry’. The films, however, are more potent, deftly revealing the mix of commercialisation and entertainment that has increasingly degraded American politics and intellect. Campaign begins with a commentator’s statement that “tv is politics and politics tv”, though given current circumstances one may be forgiven for feeling nostalgic about the hazy black-and-white footage of Richard Nixon. Collages from 2004, deforming and reforming words in patterns that recall concrete poetry, supplement but don’t add much to the earlier works.
In 1970 kriwet described himself as a ‘personalized word collecting society’, and referred to his work as PubLit or ‘public literature’. It’s best understood as language liberated from its standardised packaging and invading space much as information invades the contemporary landscape – a realisation inflected by Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street, in which Benjamin describes ‘locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what city dwellers take for intellect…’, and also part of a decades-long development in how information is understood and refracted in art. For kriwet, language has its own sensual quality, and his works provide a key to unravelling the legerdemain practised on content by contemporary media and politicians: through their sensory physicality, his texts encourage a form of active reading that, as Roland Barthes once described it, shifts the onus of creating meaning from ‘author’ to ‘reader’. Doing so remains a potent gesture today, when too many have ceded the responsibility of critical engagement. Joshua Mack
Text-Sign, 1968, light aluminium with stamping, varnish, 60 × 60 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and bq , Berlin
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Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin ...circle through New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and other venues, New York 1 March – 31 August At St Philip’s church, the second oldest Black Episcopal parish in the us, Reverend Chloe Breyer referred to it as “the Guggenheim project”. ‘It’ is ...circle through New York, a project by Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin that, in addition to this Harlem church, is sited at Jus Broadcasting in Long Island City, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World on the Upper East Side, Pet Resources in the South Bronx, the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum itself. Clayton and Rubin have brought these organisations together in a rotating, six-point call-and-response, wherein contributions from each location are installed or reinterpreted by one of the other locations on a monthly basis. That the project was commissioned by the Guggenheim’s flagship Social Practice programme shakes up a clear understanding of authorship; that it also began from the premise of drawing a circle on a map around the museum’s location on the Upper East Side, and cherry-picking participants from along its edge, is another problematic act. While goodwill buttresses the artists’ and institution’s intentions, if you throw a stone anywhere in any of the five boroughs of New York, it’ll hit something damned interesting. The project’s full title includes each organisation’s contribution to the project: A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi
tv show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York. In the weeks I traversed the circle, the ‘museum artwork’ – Felix GonzalezTorres’s Untitled (Public Opinion) (1991), black-rod liquorice candies installed flat on the floor and running the length of the wall – was presented at Jus Broadcasting, where it was used as the prompt for some of their in-house television programming. (I, along with people solicited from the street, responded to the GonzalezTorres work on Jus Broadcasting’s regular programme Honestly). I witnessed Pinkie, the ‘talking parrot’, demure from so much public attention in the rotunda of the Guggenheim, and listened to her explore the church’s acoustics as part of the congregation during a service at St Philip’s. I was told to leave the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, down the street from Jus, when I asked a security guard about the ‘oldest song in the world’ – apparently they’re just lyrics, and each participating organisation may interpret them as they wish. I had missed the students’ performance a few weeks before. I didn’t see everything, and people aren’t really expected to. ...circle through New York’s virtue is messiness: too unwieldy, and contingent on too many voices, it powerfully resists critical resolution, and hopefully embraces
intimacy, between participants or audience members, as the metric for understanding. It would seem that though Clayton and Rubin authored the project, and the Guggenheim presented it, the entire thing belongs to those people involved, and their experience thereof. But the project doesn’t stop there, and indeed, the press release, the website, the blog and Instagram, and their insistence on behind-thescenes processes, overplay the idea of accessibility and supplant it with the individual responsibility involved with democratic forms of artmaking. Additionally, artists submit this type of grassroots artmaking to a large institution precisely for its ability to authorise it, and impose a narrative – it’s the Guggenheim project, after all. At the church service I attended, members of the congregation excitedly considered Pinkie’s role within the service, and the bird became a foil to better understand the care with which they undertook their ceremony, and community. It reinforces the mission of St Philip’s contribution, a ‘call to action’. It reads, in part: ‘We fervently ask that all who hear our story take action against these injustices, including self-examination of your own participation in discrimination and injustice. Always be just as ready to listen as you are emboldened to speak out for or against others.’ Sam Korman
A talking parrot from Pet Resources in the Bronx at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, as part of …circle through New York, 2017. Photo: Kristopher McKay. Courtesy the artists
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Doreen Garner Doctor’s Orders Larrie, New York 21 May – 18 June One’s attention could be drawn in one of two directions. To the left is a modest tattoo-parlour setup – with inks, sample drawings (mostly simplified versions of medical illustrations) and a padded table where the artist administers, per the exhibition’s press release, ‘needle and ink as treatment, and authentic interaction as cure’. To the right is a confrontational, tumorous sculpture: Big Pussy (From the Back) (2015). Laid out on a mirrored plinth, the clear glass work is stuffed with polyester fibre and adorned with such objects as teddy-bear eyes, brass screws, Swarovski crystals, condoms, dentures and a hair weave. Doreen Garner has become known for ghoulish, sexualised objects that address the dark history of medical experimentation on people of colour. Her practice draws on such texts as Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid (2007), which details the practice of doctors like J. Marion Sims, the so-called father of modern gynaecology, who innovated surgical techniques while conducting harrowing experiments on enslaved black women in the nineteenth century. There is a cruel irony to Sims’s lifesaving work, which he performed on slaves without the use of anaesthesia, believing (as did many of his peers) that people of colour had a higher pain threshold. In Garner’s work, femaleness and blackness become dissected and disembodied. At thirty years old, Garner seems to channel a new wave
of feminist rage against the continued abuse of racial and sexual others. She rejects the surface of the female body as an easy object for consumption – even when transfigured through a ‘feminist lens’, as artists like Marilyn Minter have attempted to do, with her photorealistic canvases of models’ zits and eyebrow hairs. Garner pushes her visual language to the extreme, with staging elements both dramatic and pedagogical. Some sculptures are titled for historical figures, like Reliquary for Henrietta (2016) (a golden skull resting atop a hairy red silicone mass, memorialising Henrietta Lacks, an African American whose cells were used without her permission to develop the HeLa immortalised cell line). The cold, spotlit illumination of the exhibition design recalls operating theatres. Her black-and-white Medical Study (2013–17) series depicts, with clinical exactitude, a sawed-off jaw with contemporary gold-capped teeth and a skeletal hand bearing colourful nail-art. A shelf of books includes her source material, from Medical Apartheid to Richard Barnett’s medical illustration compendium The Sick Rose (2014). In developing a (morbid) genre of portraiture, Garner’s practice is the inverse of Kehinde Wiley’s. Where Wiley recoups traditional painterly styles to render black figures adorned with symbols of royalty and contemporary hip-hop regalia, Garner bedazzles the insides
of tortured bodies, forcing viewers to examine their relationships to seduction and repulsion. Interestingly, in a 2015 video interview for Brooklyn public-access bric tv, Garner explained with equal fascination and frustration how the personal gets mapped onto the artistic. “No matter what I combine, it’s going to look sexual, because that’s how we see objects and that’s how people see me, too.” She mused, “I wonder if the work would be read the same way if it was a white woman making it.” In the performance Observatory (2014), Garner positioned herself in a glass vitrine with her sculptures, making unceasing eye contact with what she described as a mostly white audience. With the heavily mirrored surfaces that pervade this show at Larrie, Garner turns the gaze back on the viewers themselves. In the show’s most visceral moment, the sexual and the surgical come together. In the video Endoscopy (2014), a doctor’s spoken explanation of the gluteus muscle segues to graphic operating footage, possibly of a butt implant. The round lens of the surgical camera becomes conflated with the fisheye views of 1990s hip-hop videos, as footage switches between closeup shots of erotic dancing and operating gore. The music unnervingly shifts between hip-hop tracks and the theme to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a reminder that body horror is part of our shared, whitewashed cultural heritage. Wendy Vogel
Medical Study #7, 2017, ink on paper, 13 × 20 cm. Courtesy Larrie, New York
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Pieter Schoolwerth Model as Painting Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York 21 May – 30 June Pieter Schoolwerth’s most recent body of work riffs on the title of art historian Yve-Alain Bois’s influential 1990 book Painting as Model. The latter is ostensibly a collection of essays on modernist abstraction, but it also serves as something of a manifesto for formalist criticism – not of the dogmatic Greenbergian variety, but a formalism that treats painting as ‘a theoretical model in itself’ rather than a screen onto which theory might be projected. Schoolwerth is also preoccupied by abstraction, albeit of a different kind: the works in this exhibition, split between Miguel Abreu’s two Lower East Side locations, attempt to register what the artist has described in the press release to this show and elsewhere as ‘forces of abstraction in the world’, particularly one in which everyday life is increasingly colonised by digitisation. Drawing an analogy between the virtual spaces of the screen and the canvas, Schoolwerth’s paintings compress layers of information into jigsawlike depictions of generic nonplaces – waiting rooms, student centres, suburban housing tracts – populated by the blank silhouettes of equally generic figures.
To create these works, Schoolwerth employs an elaborate iterative process, moving between analogue and digital modes of production. He begins with photographs of shadows cast by live models; these photographs then form the basis of drawings and photocollages. After working out the basic composition, he creates three-dimensional models in hand-carved foamcore, which are assembled into wall-mounted reliefs and then photographed. Schoolwerth digitally edits the resulting image, often filling the compositional template with fragments of photographs found online. The edited image file is printed onto the canvas, at which point paint finally enters the equation, with Schoolwerth adding dramatically textured, gestural brushstrokes as ornamental flourishes atop the surface. Using this multimedia substrate or ‘painting’ as a ‘model’, Schoolwerth produces a new version in wood relief through the use of a computer-controlled router. Though the works are playful in appearance, they are also profoundly disorienting in their impossible, multidimensional illusionism, and unsettling in their portrayal of atomised social relations via affectless avatars. In Break Up #5 (2017), the ghostly form of a male figure sulking
on a couch interlocks with that of a woman heading for the door; in Student Center #1 (2017), overlapping figures adopt conversational poses, literally talking past each other. Their material presence is equally confounding: on the canvases, areas of thick impasto sit alongside the simulated texture of pixelated jpegs, while the enamel paint coating the wood reliefs gives them the look of plastic. At the gallery’s larger Eldridge Street space, the paintings, sculptures and collages are set within an installation based on the set for the film The Casting Agent (2017), a collaboration between Schoolwerth and Alexandra Lerman. Screened in a small side-room near the start of the exhibition, the film features animated shadows – a bit of green-screen trickery – representing the titular casting agent, described as a stand-in for the artist, and his aspiring model. The two move in and out of painted wood sets, speaking in a garbled approximation of human language. It’s weird and fun to watch, but seems to miss what makes the paintings successful: the way in which they crystallise the experience of the digital space, embedding theory within their form. Rachel Wetzler
Mailbox #2, 2017, oil, acrylic and giclée print on canvas, 183 × 231 cm. Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
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Ridley Howard Travel Pictures Marinaro Gallery, New York 3 May – 18 June Plonking a title as generic as Travel Pictures on this group of wonderfully surreal, oddball paintings is a savvy move by Ridley Howard: you expect anodyne, decorative scenes from some grand tour; you get an artist showing off his formal chops. These paintings, some of which are ostensibly set in Italy, put me in mind of the photographs of the late Italian Luigi Ghirri: peripatetic snapshots, colourful dispatches from some land of the weird. Howard has long experimented with complementary modes of working. Abstract and figurative strains have occasionally entwined, or at least tickled each other. Around 2012 he was showing them side by side: soft-focus portraits juxtaposed with gentle, geometric workouts. A year later, and continuing with Travel Pictures, the artist fully collapses these modes into single compositions, the simple-but-revolutionary strategy that seemed to be sitting there all along – a way simultaneously to paint architecture, sex, shapes, the patterns on a dress, cruise ships ploughing through cool blue rectangles of ocean. Here, the viewer is basically a tourist in the uncanny valley. The archetypal Howard protag-
onist has always had something airbrushed about him or her, a blank facial smoothness that I can’t help but associate, horrifyingly, with Jared Kushner. In these latest paintings, the artist seems even less concerned with verisimilitude: vaguely cyborgian humans cavort in literally dreamy settings. (In Miami Beach View [all works 2017], a woman’s hand simply dematerialises where it touches her bedsheets: a glitch in the system.) Howard has previously spoken about his affinity for 1970s European movie-poster design – for films by Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, et al – and Travel Pictures is often operating in a distinctly Felliniesque groove. What would otherwise be polite, even fusty, landscapes are punctured by illogical cameos. The effect is a bit like what you might find in a travel agency advertising vacations in the afterlife. In Passeggiata, Rome, the curve of a tree-lined road is jarred by a pair of legs, sporting high-heeled shoes, that hang suspended in midair. Kissers in the Mountains sneaks two paintings into one: a fuzzed-out mountain on the bottom and, up top, two
Miami Beach View, 2017, oil on linen, 102 × 127 cm. Courtesy Marinaro Gallery, New York
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disembodied sets of heads making out against a pale yellow background. (The two images are separated by a border of grey, white and pink lines, a little Neapolitan moment.) In Benvenuti Lovers (the painting here that is closest cousin to Ghirri’s photographs), two women pose in front of what is either a picturesque, boat-filled harbour, or merely a picture of a picturesque, boat-filled harbour. Howard has always had a delicate touch and an eye for the drama of small gestures. That’s evident in this exhibition, perhaps nowhere so much as in its smallest painting: Winter Painting, a shoulders-up portrait of a young man in hip glasses. A kind of arctic paleness prevails – white walls, white T-shirt – but the eye is drawn to a single red line, like an unfurled Kabbalah bracelet, which is either embossed on the man’s shirt or, perhaps more likely, floating in space before him. Lazy journalists are fond of asking artists that hoary question: how do you know when a work is finished? I can imagine Howard struggling with this portrait, mulling it over, and then – with that thin, graceful mark – putting it happily to rest. Scott Indrisek
Paul Ramírez Jonas Atlas, Plural, Monumental Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (camh) 29 April – 6 August Paul Ramírez Jonas’s first career survey in the Americas considers how we participate. That is, the Californian artist asks: how do artist and viewer influence one another, in what ways might we collaboratively write history, how do we enter narratives of exploration and how does participation redraw the lines of community? At once generous with his viewer-participants and rigorous with his interrogation of the cultural commons, Jonas’s quarter-century of sustained inquiry is, above all (and not naively), optimistic about what we can make – together – now. The centrepiece of this exhibition, The Commons (2011), is a lifesize equestrian sculpture made of cork, upon which visitors are invited to pin their own contributions, such as drawings, notes, business cards, photographs, etc. The piece embraces ephemerality as it reenvisions the voices represented by monuments. Instead of a quotation etched in marble about military exploits, the viewer might find a sheet of paper with a child’s script reading, ‘I love nature. Take good care of it.’ Similarly, Dictar y recordar (2010) considers who writes history and how. This 24-hour event, held in Honduras, was a public invitation to write the history of the country: spoken narratives were transcribed by typewriter, then compiled into a book that the artist gifted to the National Archives
of Honduras and the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. On view at camh are the typewriter, the written document and a description of the event. The collaborative history existed not only in the moment of the event, but became part of an official narrative, inserted into institutions that often define our relation to the past. Exploration is a recurring theme of Jonas’s early works. Album: 50 State Summits (2002–) includes a series of book pages with space for a photograph of the artist at the highest point of each state in the us. Some pages are filled, while others await the artist’s journey. ‘The book charts possibilities, shaping my future, and daring some trips into existence,’ he writes. Using the visual conventions of explorer imagery, Jonas situates his gesture more modestly than a moon landing or discovery of the South Pole. His exploration is one that most of us could make; he invites the viewer to envision herself there. Indeed, Jonas includes a smaller pinnacle within the exhibition: Top of the World (Red Ball) (1997) is a curved red rubber platform that the viewer can stand upon. At once intimate and imaginative, Top of the World makes exploration quotidian, and gives value to a heroism (and tourism) possible within small gestures.
No proposal of Jonas’s is so rigid that it can’t be informed by participants and viewers. In many ways, this openness replicates the act of conversation, and its assumed commitment of mutual understanding, between two people. In Public Trust (2016–) Jonas contrasts this kind of interpersonal commitment with the scepticism with which we often view promises made by politicians and institutions. Here, visitors are invited to make a promise and to swear to it (using any number of objects or books with which we make oaths). That personal promise is then written in large letters on a marquee board that includes promises made in the news that day: ‘Drug shows promise against blinding disease’ sits alongside ‘Sharad will co-explore/ share/grow with Lily’. Others, in their contrasts, show the difficulties of promises, the potential for both personal and systemic failure: ‘Atlanta commits to running on renewable energy’ is paired with ‘I promise to be true to my wife, girlfriend, and mistress’. Jonas makes a case for the individual as part of the collective; he suggests that we are active agents inside those bigger terms of art, community, politics and history. We define them, activate them, change them and make them ours. Participation, Jonas reminds us, is at once doable, ambitious, generous and hopeful. Laura A.L. Wellen
Atlas, Plural, Monumental, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Nash Baker. Courtesy the artist and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
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Suzy Lake Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto 29 April – 13 August Originally from Detroit, but a Canadian resident since the late 1960s, Suzy Lake has pursued a photo- and performance-based practice concerned with forms of social and institutional control that impress themselves on our lives. Like her contemporaries Martha Wilson, Hannah Wilke and valie export, Lake has created work critical of the mass media’s representations of women, often using herself as the subject. This survey brings together approximately 50 images, as well as maquettes and contact sheets, produced between 1976 and 2014. It’s a solid introduction to Lake’s work but falls short in fully demonstrating how truly prescient her five-decade career has been. The exhibition begins with a video projection of Choreographies of the Dotted Line (1976), which shows Lake on the floor, wrapping herself in a long piece of fabric printed with a row of black bars. The phrase ‘sign on the dotted line’ springs to mind, which suggests one reason why the artist seems to resist her voluntary encasement – the act of affixing one’s signature to a document, whether to secure a bank loan or a lease, usually requires relinquishing some control over one’s life. In the end, Lake extricates herself, but that process is no less arduous.
Her constrained body reappears throughout the exhibition. Two large prints from the series Impositions (1977) depict Lake struggling against bindings wrapped around her torso, knees and wrists. She manually heated and stretched the original negatives, producing small rifts in the acetate that, when scaled up, appear as daggerlike shapes aimed at her figure. Lake’s body becomes a blur in Choreographed Puppets (1976–7), a series that finds her trussed up, and her arms and legs tied like a marionette. Although Lake doesn’t see this work as specifically ‘feminist’, it is easily read through that lens since the two figures sitting atop the structure surrounding her, pulling the straps that swing her around, are men. Lake’s production slowed somewhat in the 1980s and turned towards installation and site-specific work, much of which now exists only through documentation. For such reasons, this decade is represented by just a few images from two visually linked series sharing the title Pre-Resolution: Using the Ordinances at Hand (1983–4), picturing Lake hammering at a wall with a mallet. From there, the show jumps ahead by more than a decade to works that take on the theme of the ageing female body. Confrontational yet wryly humorous, the
Thin Green Line, 2001, chromogenic print. Courtesy the artist and Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto
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images comprising Pluck (2001) and Beauty at a Proper Distance (2012) focus on the artist’s chin and immaculately lacquered lips, photographed in the glossy style of fashion magazines; however, the artist has let wiry hairs grow in. This jab at the media’s (lack of) representations of women beyond a certain age builds on Lake’s critiques from the early 1970s. Regrettably, none of that work is here. Series like Miss Chatelaine (1973), for which Lake cut out models’ hairstyles from the Canadian women’s magazine Chatelaine and collaged them onto photos of herself, or On Stage (1972–4), in which she examines the ‘performance’ of female identities (eg the vamp, the girl next door), set the stage for artists such as Cindy Sherman (who has acknowledged Lake as an inspiration). Including such works would have strengthened the exhibition’s positioning of Lake as the groundbreaking artist that she is; however, this lack is partially made up for by the inclusion of some rarely – if ever – seen works. For example, the photographic series Puppet Studies (1976) feature Lake in a white bodysuit against a dark background, with threads stitched into the paper transforming her, once again, into a marionette. Such works remind us that our interactions with institutions or other people always come with strings attached. Bill Clarke
Andy Warhol: Dark Star Museo Jumex, Mexico City 2 June – 17 September According to curator Douglas Fogle, the word disaster can be traced back to a late-sixteenthcentury Italian word for ‘ill-starred event’. It’s only fitting then that the curator has turned to this etymology to title his major survey of Andy Warhol’s early works. Warhol called his silkscreened paintings of celebrities and suicides, car crashes, race riots and other tragedies his ‘disaster paintings’. Fogle, for his part, has pegged his hard-edged show with a dash of Dashiell Hammett – Andy Warhol: Dark Star. An exhibition of more than 100 works in various media, including film, installation, sculpture, photography, archival material and, of course, silkscreen paintings, Fogle’s Warhol show bracingly concentrates on the permafresh works the artist created during the first decade of his career. Featured most prominently are three dozen paintings he made as he first ransacked the leavings of commercial culture. Nowhere in evidence is late Warhol: the frightwig-wearing, money-obsessed, popculture mercenary who made silkscreened paintings of dollar bills, accepted portrait commissions from Imelda Marcos and appeared on the 1970s–80s sitcom The Love Boat. From an early fascination with consumer images – in 1962 Warhol hand-painted a tiny
image of a us Air Mail stamp and also executed a corporate-scale portrait of 100 Campbell Soup cans – to his dark obsession with Hollywood fame and the sort of infamy that attaches to gruesome images of anonymous death, Dark Star charts the early development of the artist’s career through a central insight: the idea that affectlesslooking art matches the alienation produced by mechanical reproduction to a T. During the early 1960s, Warhol mined advertising, tabloid newspapers and glossy magazines to capture imperial America’s mercurial zeitgeist. A half-century later, many of those same images crackle with an energy that can only be termed enduringly voyeuristic. Starting with two hand-painted canvases – a 1961 number titled Where is Your Rupture? and the 1962 painting 129 Die In Jet! (cribbed directly from the New York Daily News at the behest of curator Henry Geldzahler, this last painting kicked off the artist’s representations of death) – Dark Star demonstrates Warhol’s conflation of fame and destruction. By the time he graduated to repeated images of Marilyn Monroe painted in the months following her death, Warhol had uncovered the lasting connection between Eros and
Thanatos, but also the incredible timeliness of his serial silkscreen process. ‘I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of the newspaper; 129 die,’ Warhol said in a 1963 interview that Fogle cites in both the exhibition wall text and the catalogue. ‘I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been death… That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.’ About the latter, Warhol was clearly wrong, as Fogle’s often brilliant juxtapositions of the artist’s paintings attest. Take the faceoff between several dutifully banal Campbell Soup can paintings and Tunafish Disaster (1963), a silver and black silkscreened painting of 15 cans of supermarket tuna and the guileless visages of two unlucky ladies who had succumbed to botulism poisoning – per the Newsweek photo caption Warhol repeats in the title. If these serial images perfectly mimic the numbing reiteration of death available through the modern media, they also point to America’s dark side: an epic land of destruction where, often as not, celebrities and everyday folks equally and sordidly get it in the neck in the end. Christian Viveros-Fauné
Andy Warhol: Dark Star, 2017 (installation view, Museo Jumex, Mexico City). Photo: Moritz Bernoully. © 2017 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York
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Duty Free Art by Hito Steyerl Verso, £16.99 (hardcover)
Being Hito Steyerl must be intense. On the evidence of the entertaining, often thoughtful, breathlessly inconclusive, yet voguishly insistent public talks and short essays that comprise Duty Free Art, the artist sees reality as a global hell of indefinite civil wars, ‘deep state’ surveillance, delusional populations churned through social media, financialised capitalism floating improbably on seas of debt and thousands slaughtered by algorithmically guided missiles while artificial intelligence seeps relentlessly into the catastrophic postdemocratic consciousness of a networked society that hasn’t yet realised the net isn’t the utopia we were looking for. And somewhere in all of this is the artworld: broken, corrupt, complicit, idiotic, with perhaps just a hint of agency and value to be rescued from the surrounding wreckage. If all this sounds familiar, that’s simply a measure of how Steyerl’s hyperactive, wiredin attention to the critical currencies of art and politics, post-Internet, has influenced the artworld’s awareness of these themes over the last decade. Duty Free Art isn’t the Steyerl of austere, melancholic early films such as November (2004) or Lovely Andrea (2007), but the artist’s response to the postcrash world, where economic crisis merges with Web 2.0 hegemony and contemporary art turns out to be neoliberalism’s court jester. Steyerl is at her most original when gleefully hacking away at those old binary, philosophical, aesthetic and political distinctions between images and everything else, between subjects
and objects, between representations and what they represent: ‘reality now widely consists of images; or rather, of things, constellations, and processes formerly evident as images’, she writes in ‘Is the Internet Dead?’, while ‘humans and things intermingle in ever-newer constellations to become bots or cyborgs’. And the image is no longer an object to be beheld by an active human subject; discussing the weird imagedream of one of Google’s ai machine-learning experiments, Steyerl sees in it not comic weirdness but the ‘ubiquitous surveillance of networked image production, a form of memetically modified intelligence that watches you’. Images aren’t representations of reality, but the products of digital systems actively responding to humans: ‘As humans feed affect, thought and sociality into algorithms, algorithms feed back into what used to be called subjectivity,’ she writes in ‘Proxy Politics’. For some of us, though, it’s still called subjectivity, and it becomes apparent that Steyerl’s greatest trouble is her unwitting denigration of selfhood: supposedly we’re helpless against the system. Servitude is a recurring trope: while the creative sector’s always-on ‘economy of presence’ demands that ‘the encounter with the artist [be] more important than the one with the work’, the rest of us are forced to make ends meet in ‘dysfunctional, collapsing just-in-time economies’. That acceptance of human passivity in the face of technology and capital means that
Steyerl’s proposed alternatives are often lukewarm and hesitant – deploying a Bartlebyesque form of absenteeism as a response to the ‘economy of presence’, or making a very conventional demand for more regulations on the art trade. No wonder. Behind her manic engagement with the rabbit holes of contemporary technopolitical paranoia that so fixate the liberal-left is an abject lack of a bigger idea of what the future could be, or any confidence that humans would even be capable of making it happen. But human agency in making history is passé: riffing on Walter Benjamin’s famous 1940 text on the ‘Angel of History’, who looks helplessly back on the ‘unceasing catastrophe’ of history piling events like ‘rubble on top of rubble’, Steyerl decides that ‘we, the spectators, might be the rubble’. Underpinning this is a very prosaic confusion about contemporary capitalism, and the nature of liquidity’s relationship to the art economy. Steyerl vividly pictures the frantic financialisation of art through art fairs, global megamuseums and freeport art storage. Yet the sea of liquid value that art has come to embody isn’t accelerated ‘turbocapitalism’, as she seems to think, but its opposite: a stagnant, torpid system incapable of generating future prosperity, with art objects and institutions as the desperate store of fictitious capital that has nowhere to go. Steyerl definitely has her finger on the pulse of what artists like her already think. But Duty Free Art starts to reveal the limits of dwelling in this particular echo chamber. J.J. Charlesworth
I Fought the Law by Olivia Locher Chronicle Books, £12.99 (hardcover)
American photographer Olivia Locher has collected ‘the strangest laws’ from each of the 50 us states – of which some remain on the statute books, some have been removed or are no longer enforced and some are often cited conversationally but are in fact myth. Deciding to withhold whether each selected ‘law’ is fact or fiction, Locher represents each state with a photographic demonstration of the chosen ‘law’ being broken, alongside a brief description of the statute that is being violated. Locher’s photographs are crisp, staged and often didactic in their revolt: spitting on a (fake) seagull in Virginia, licking a (fake) toad in Kentucky, eating a picnic in a (real) graveyard in Georgia. This thread of artificiality is mirrored in Locher’s aesthetic, which utilises the direct
communication of product advertising alongside bright geometric, flattened forms reminiscent of John Baldessari. Representing American law, Locher’s populist, packaged visuals manifest as satirical critique, ridiculing outdated and absurd laws that can continue to inform daily life in the face of logic or reason – and, at times, be manipulated to enforce political agendas. Locher’s decision not to differentiate between law and invention-cum-legend – so we do not know if it really is illegal to walk down the street carrying a violin in a paper bag in Utah – underscores this stubborn irrationality. However, in this democratic representation, there are inclusions that jar: ‘In Massachusetts photographing up-skirt photos can be considered a crime’ is accompanied by a photograph
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of a woman willingly peeling back her skirt to be photographed by a man spread-eagled on the floor. Locher’s interpretation replaces a common predatory act with a complicit one. Moreover, the author’s ‘system’ places this on the same level as, say, the Tennessee ‘law’ that ‘hollow logs may not be sold’. While Locher’s images are lucid and at times arresting, the relationship between text and image is exclusively tautologous, so ‘in North Dakota it is illegal to fall asleep with shoes on in bed’ is accompanied by an image of shoe-clad feet in bed. Although each photograph is a clear rebellion against the chosen statute, the repetition in caption and photograph ultimately comes to undermine the playfulness and significance of Locher’s ambiguity and ridicule. Kathryn Lloyd
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The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz Verso, £19.99 (softcover)
Marianne Fritz has a reputation. Not just because the Austrian author, who died a decade ago, won both the Robert Walser Prize (1978) and the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize (2001). And not because two of the more prominent figures in late-twentieth-century German literature – Elfriede Jelinek and W.G. Sebald – number among her admirers. But rather because the majority of her work, which deploys multiple neologisms, diagrams and drawings, and idiosyncratic spelling and grammar (to the extent that proofreaders tended to give up on the proofing, while the just-under7,000-page, ten-volume Naturgemäß, published between 1996 and 1998, had to be reproduced directly from the author’s typewritten manuscript), is deemed difficult and untranslatable. Thomas Bernhard described Fritz’s Dessen Sprache du nicht verstehst (Whose Language You Do Not Understand, 1985) as ‘mindless proletarian trash’ and the very fact of its publication ‘a world record of stupidity’. In German, many of Fritz’s works are now out of print, while in the Anglophone world, when she is mentioned at all, she is often compared to ‘outsider’ artists such as Henry Darger or ‘complicated’ authors such as James Joyce. For which read (such is the way with polite criticism) that she is mentally suspect and her work difficult to read. That last is not the case with her first novel, The Weight of Things, a dark satire that
won her the Walser prize (when the author was thirty years old), and which is, naturally, the first to have been translated (published in an American edition in 2015). Its language (spread over a little under 130 pages) is relatively straightforward, banal even. But that only serves to accentuate the horrors that are slowly unfurled during the course of the plot. These last centre on the character of Berta Faust, a woman whose life spins around two men – the first, Rudolf, a music-teacherturned-soldier who gets her pregnant (having seduced Berta with a rendition on violin of Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube) towards the end of the Second World War (and then gets his head blown off in action); the second, Wilhelm, the first’s best friend, who ‘looks after’ Berta (by marrying her and then giving her a second child) on the instructions of Rudolf (who also orders Wilhelm, a chauffeur, to learn violin). Until committing the central act of the novel, Berta, who never even gets to move away from the Viennese apartment in which she grew up before it is done to her, forcibly, has no agency (other than having squeezed out the sprogs) at all. Instead she attempts to conform, slavishly, as do the characters that surround her, to outmoded customs and notions of propriety – the certainties of a world that had been rendered uncertain by the war – and ideals of ‘correct’
behaviour in a land in which ‘correct’ behaviour was most recently defined by Nazism. The result? As Fritz says of Wilhelm, ‘He believed all and nothing, doubted all and nothing, was a born dreamer who never dreamed. In a nutshell: he was a worthy representative of his nation.’ The trouble comes about because Berta dreams. And because the novel’s other female protagonist, Berta’s cleaning lady and best friend, turns out to be a jealous, greedy manipulator. Ultimately, The Weight of Things is an attempt to understand how a society can rationalise cruelty and hypocrisy, and keep things plodding along. At the heart of this is a clash between what Fritz terms ‘the weight of things’ and ‘life as such’. The winners are those who can ignore the former (which encompasses guilt, morality, religion and tradition) and face the latter (the practical reality of what lies directly in front of them, and only them). Berta, naturally disposed to deal with the weight of things, but attempting, for the sake of her children, to deal with life as such, is destined to be excluded from society and to lose. Eerily, this reflects the later life of Fritz, who after the publication of this novel became something of a reclusive workaholic, increasingly bound to her writing room in a modest apartment in Vienna’s seventh district. Mark Rappolt
Play with Me: Dolls, Women and Art by Grace Banks Laurence King Publishing, £24.99 (softcover)
As John Berger succinctly put it in Ways of Seeing (1972) ‘A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you... By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.’ With that in mind, the portrayal of women as dolls is violent and loaded – especially when grouped under the provocative title Play with Me. Grace Banks’s stated goal – to look at ‘reclaiming the ownership of the female body from the pervasive male-defined tropes and spaces for the female in contemporary art’ – is a worthy one, about which there is much (admittedly leaning to the Freudian) to be said. But this book’s fault is in its inclusiveness – what is ostensibly a study of the well-defined and pithy subject of dolls in contemporary art becomes, within the first few pages, a book about images of women
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by female artists, and then, more simply, about the representation of women. Five brief essays cover everything from the gendered pricing of razors to transhumanism, and Banks very generously includes sculpture, mannequins, robots, sex dolls (it turns out a lot of artists use sex dolls), photography and live performance alongside dolls. Quite a few of the artists aren’t female, and some, such as Eddie Peake, don’t even portray women or dolls. A chapter on women reclaiming their place in art history sits, bizarrely, alongside a page praising Jeff Koons’s album cover for Lady Gaga’s artpop (2013) as a feminist artwork, while Hans Bellmer, the overshadowing daddy of fetishistic doll-art, doesn’t get more than a passing name-check. This is an ambitious project that could have told us a lot about women’s place in art history: a vast 43 artists are profiled via q&a, to give a good
ArtReview
survey of contemporary (mostly) female artists who work with a particular medium. Unfortunately Play with Me is broadly ahistorical and atheoretical, with little analysis or comment from Banks to draw these artists together. Other than, naturally, their formal interest in (in most cases) having dolls present in their work. And ultimately, the formal premise of this book – Banks’s evidence is concerned only with the physical, human appearance of the dolls and how they are, variously, unsettling or amusing to look at – seems to have prevented the author from getting to a more interesting analysis: that of what all this doll art might actually mean in terms of the ownership of the female body and, in connection to that, to truly differentiate between the creation of a hypersexualised female object by a male artist, and its desecration by a female artist. Lucy Watson
TATE MODERN 10 M AY – 10 S E P 2017
S O U T H WA R K u F R E E F O R TAT E M E M B E R S The Eyal Ofer Galleries Supported by
Maryam and Edward Eisler With additional support from the Giacometti Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Patrons, Tate Americas Foundation and Tate Members Media partner
Alberto Giacometti Man Pointing 1947 Tate © Alberto Giacometti Estate, ACS+DACS, 2017
31.08 - 07.09
Turiya Magadlela Bronwyn Katz Herman Mbamba 08.09 - 10.09
Joburg Art Fair 05.10 - 08.10
Frieze London
10 Lewin Street, Cape Town blankprojects.com
Bronwyn Katz, Koebye Hoerikwaggo
Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Video Still “I was her and she was me and those we might become” (2016) 20 mins, multichannel HD Video projection. Image courtesy of the Artist and ROOM Gallery & Projects
KITSO LYNN LELLIOTT I was her and she was me and those we might become 02.09 - 14.10.2017
ROOM GALLERY & PROJECTS ELLIS HOUSE, GROUND FLOOR 23 VOORHOUT STREET, (CNR 4TH STREET) NEW DOORNFONTEIN, JOHANNESBURG, 2094 GAUTENG, SOUTH AFRICA GPS COORDINATES: -26.19835,28.06413
GALLERY WORKING HOURS WED - FRI 11h00 - 16h00 SATURDAY 10h00 - 15h00 +27 (0)11 074 4944 (Tel) roomforinfo@roomgallery.co.za WWW.ROOMGALLERY.CO.ZA
An international rare book and art fair with an emphasis on luxury and quality David Murphy, Long Ending (blue). Image: Colin Mills
30 respected European and American dealers in rare books, manuscripts and works or art.
25-27 October 2017 Two Temple Place, London
www.inkfair.london In Partnership With
Jerwood Space 171 Union Street London SE1 0LN jerwoodvisualarts.org Join the conversation: @JerwoodJVA #JDP17
Cph Art Week ‘17 City Artist – Nástio Mosquito → Performance
Respectable Thief Aug 24, 8 pm @VEGA
FNB JOBURG ART FAIR 08 - 10 SEPTEMBER 2017 SANDTON CONVENTION CENTRE | BOOTH C15
CATHY LAYZELL, HEIDI FOURIE, KIRSTEN BEETS, KIRSTEN SIMS, LINSEY LEVENDALL, PAUL SENYOL
→ Video installation
Nástia’s Manifesto Aug 24-Sep 2 Various Beer bars in Copenhagen
Masterclass: SOUND & VISION With Nástio Mosquito, Den Sorte Skole and Dark Matters
Sat Aug 26th, 2-4.30 pm @VEGA → Video installation
SALON NINETY ONE WWW.SALON91.CO.ZA INFO@SALON91.CO.ZA +27 21 424 6930
Ser Humano Aug 28 - Sep 2 Every night from 9.30 - 11 pm. → ArtBar /Concert
Nástio Mosquito & Kids Aug 30, 7-9 pm @ArtBar, Paper Island
Aug 24 → Sep 3 cphartweek.dk
Untitled Hanneriina Moisseinen
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For more on Finnish artist Hanneriina Moisseinen, read Paul Gravett’s text at artreview.com/thestrip
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Art and photo credits
Text credits
on the cover artwork © Nástio Mosquito, 2017
The words on the spine and on pages 39, 81 and 119 are taken from Cahier d’un retour au pays natale (1939), by Aimé Césaire. Translation as quoted in PanAfricanism (1962), by Colin Legum
on pages 148 and 156 photography by Mikael Gregorsky
September 2017
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A Curator Writes September 2017 For some time, the so-called editors of this magazine have been badgering me to write something about actual curating on these pages: “Everyone wants to do it, so you should tell everyone how!” they keep belching at me, chasing bits of crispy pork round a plastic bowl while using two hands to make stabbing motions with bamboo chopsticks from the takeaway next door. Who do they think I am? Hans Ulrich Obrist or something? As it happens, though, I’m currently working on a major exhibition. Partly inspired by a summer spent touring Venice, Kassel, Athens, Stromboli and Hydra (hey – first expert tip: be present at everything). It’s called The Potato-Print Biennial and it’s by the art people for the actual people and in a medium to which the latter can really relate.I’m inviting a series of international artists to produce images exclusively created using the artworld’s preeminent vegetable-printing method: a working-class medium that requires artists to do some actual work. It’s important always to remind people that artworking is real working. And that curating is all about keeping things real. In fact, all-in-all, things are more equitable this way – everyone using the same medium, no one hogging attention with their hourlong video installations. Democracy is a big thing these days. It’s made America great again. And I’m going to get it all sponsored by Tayto crisps (or ‘chips’, as our illiterate American cousins know them). Here’s their story: ‘Set deep in the heart of the Ulster countryside in Tandragee is Tayto Castle where Tayto crisps and snacks have been made for the past 60 years.’ It’s important that everything in your show has a story. Everything. You can’t rely on punters and critics to think for themselves. They’re not used to it any more. Of course, it’ll be good to get some potato-famine references in too. I learned at Documenta that it’s important to get a few references to colonial atrocities and oppression into a show. People take you more seriously if you do. And an economic crisis. I learned that from Athens – when it comes to being the centre of art, they’ve never had it so good. Well, not since the fifth century bce, which is so long ago it doesn’t really count in the contemporary art game. In any case, the point is that art = economic prosperity. That’s why there are so many biennials. But I digress. You want concrete tips. The centrepiece of the show will be a lifesize reconstruction of Belfast Castle made entirely out of blighted Irish potatoes (you see, I can allow the sponsors to refer to it as Tayto Castle – that’s how you lock down a sponsorship): the potatoes that got censored. I’m going to stick it in the faces of the colonial masters by erecting it in the Victorian-era suburb of Nunhead, so that the bastards can come face-to-face with the price of their insatiable consumerism and historic exploitation. As London expanded, Ireland declined: those guys from Mousse (nb: very curator-friendly, unlike the brutes who run this organ) will be running a potato-print press to reproduce historic records (designed by Maria Eichhorn, of course) documenting how the rise of one was built on the fall of the other. It’s important that an exhibition
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be a literal site of production: people don’t believe in things they can’t see. That’s why witchcraft isn’t as popular as it once was. By now the observant among you will have begun to notice that there is a bit of an international flavour to my exhibition. You’re right! I’m going to move the Nunhead Art Trail on from its pathetic insularity and make it truly global! Like Tate Modern did to Tate Britain. Welcome to Tayto Modern; you may refer to me as Sir Ivan! But enough about me. The ‘editors’ tell me that you people are always bothering them with questions about how to commission art. It’s tricky. Because artists don’t understand the point of a commission: they never really manage to stick to what you tell them to do; they always want to have ideas of their own. I know! They think they’re the curators! But in Nunhead I’m in charge. I can’t tell you much about my plans, though, because like all biennials, peace negotiations, Brexits and day-to-day White House operations, secrecy is paramount. Curators are not for leaking. Just because you’re ArtReview readers, however, I can reveal – exclusively (yes, you can put that word on your cover once you’ve finally caught the pork, Mr Editor) – the details of two other non-print-related commissions (as Walt Disney used to say, you always need to dangle a wiener in front of your hungry punters). I’m going to be commissioning Ibrahim Mahama to cover Nunhead Cemetery Chapel in jute sacking that was formerly used to transport Irish potatoes. In case it’s not obvious, that will highlight the redundancies in capitalist transactions, take Mahama’s concept to an international level and allow him a subtle wink at his recent legal issues with Irish gallerists (thus invoking art’s all-to-cosy relationship with commerce) and me a tip of the cap to the genius of Adam’s Documenta. The biennial will conclude with a relational performance by Rirkrit Tiravanija in which he serves people the used potatoes (the ones used to make the prints) reformulated (and recycled – never forget ecology and environmentalism) into a traditional Tom Yang Koong (he’ll be using the kitchens of Chai’s Garden, Nunhead’s finest Thai eatery – taking art out of the white cube and into people’s faces, literally). It’s important that he’ll be using none of the traditional ingredients, though, in order to create a commentary about the losses and profits of globalisation. And, of course, it’s a nod to that celebrated Irish staple: potato soup. For those of you who care (and remember, curators always do), Rirkrit will be using the recipe from irishamericanmom.com (‘I’m Irish. I’m American. I’m Irish American. Welcome to my melting pot’). It’s important to see your themes through right to the bitter end. I. Kurator
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