ArtReview Summer 2014

Expecting to me a special You You You, let’s explore how far we can go… uk £5.95

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vol 66 no 5

Summer 2014

9 770004 409093

Mark Leckey Hito Steyerl Bosco Sodi Ryan Trecartin Bridget Riley

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03.06 - 26.07.2014

Pittura Oggetto

Opening on Tuesday June 3rd From 5 to 8pm

A group show curated by Natacha Carron with Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Paolo Scheggi & Turi Simeti

A L M I N E R E C H G A L L E RY

11 Savile Row, Mayfair, London contact.london@alminerech.com www.alminerech.com Tuesday - Saturday (10 am - 6 pm)

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HAUSER & WIRTH

HAUSER & WIRTH SOMERSET OPENING 15 JULY 2014

PHYLLIDA BARLOW: GIG 15 JULY – 2 NOVEMBER 2014

PIET OUDOLF: OPEN FIELD 15 JULY – 2 NOVEMBER 2014

ARCHITECTURE BAR & GRILL COMMUNITY EDUCATION EVENTS EXHIBITIONS GARDEN LANDSCAPE RESIDENCIES

DURSLADE FARM, DROPPING LANE, BRUTON, SOMERSET BA10 0NL WWW.HAUSERWIRTHSOMERSET.COM

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Ai Weiwei

23 May — 12 July 2014 27 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com 012_AR.indd 12

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Richard Long

23 May — 12 July 2014 52 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com 012_AR.indd 13

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Bridget Riley The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014 13 June - 25 July 2014

David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street

In collaboration with Karsten Schubert

London W1S 4EZ 020 3538 3165 davidzwirner.com

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Elysium, 1983/2003. Oil on canvas, 261 x 236 cm (102 3∕4 x 92 7∕8 inches) © Bridget Riley 2014, all rights reserved

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REiNHARD mUcHA FRANKFURtER BlOcK ARBEitEN Am HOHlKAStEN 1981 – 2014 mAY – AUGUSt 2014

pEtER FiScHli DAviD WEiSS pHilip-lORcA DicORciA ANNA vOGEl tHOmAS ScHEiBitZ lOUiSE lAWlER ROSEmARiE tROcKEl EiNE ANSAmmlUNG vON GEGENStäNDEN mAY – AUGUSt 2014

HUStlERS mAY – JUNE 2014

JUlY – AUGUSt 2014

SEptEmBER – NOvEmBER 2014

NOvEmBER – JANUARY 2015

NOvEmBER – JANUARY 2015

ANDREAS GURSKY lOUiSE lAWlER BERND & HillA BEcHER ANDRO WEKUA EARlY lANDScApES ApRil – JUNE 2014

JUlY – AUGUSt 2014

SEptEmBER – OctOBER 2014

OctOBER – NOvEmBER 2014

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In 1992.

January Paul Schimmel curates Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles featuring works by Jim Shaw. That same year Massimo De Carlo starts representing Shaw, and organizes his first exhibition at the gallery.

February The largest Italian judicial investigation into political corruption causes the collapse of the system.

‘This work, while violent and crude on one level, reveals a sophisticated formalism, and is a cryptic quotation from Italian (art) history.’

Francesco Bonami, ET AL., Maurizio Cattelan, London 2000. (In the picture: Maurizio Cattelan,

-76.000.000, 1992, broken safe, 152 x 62 x 63 cm).

December UK Prime Minister Major announces the amicable separation of Prince Charles and Diana. Here a portrait of the Prince by Yan Pei-Ming. In the last twenty years, Ming has followed the world’s political and social events portraying its most significant icons from Obama to Bruce Lee, from Steve Jobs to Mao Zedong.

www.massimodecarlo.com info@massimodecarlo.com

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In support of

Time for life—with two limited edition timepieces in support of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. Each watch raises 100 USD, GBP, or EUR for the Nobel Peace Prize winning humanitarian organization. And still these handcrafted mechanical watches with the red 12 cost the same as the classic models from NOMOS Glashütte. Help now, wear forever.

Funds raised are donated to Médecins Sans Frontières USA, UK, or Germany, depending on the specific model purchased. For MSF UK, the registered charity no. is 1026588.

Available at selected retailers in the three participating countries, as well as online. Find your nearest NOMOS retailer at nomos-watches.com or order online at nomos-store.com

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The Swarm ‘The overgrown males now all sally forth from their cells, and disport themselves on the combs; and so crowded does the too prosperous city become that hundreds of belated workers, coming back from the flowers towards evening, will vainly seek shelter within, and will be forced to spend the night on the threshold, where they will be decimated by the cold. Restlessness seizes the people, and the old queen begins to stir. She feels that a new destiny is being prepared. She has religiously fulfilled her duty as a good creatress; and from this duty done there result only tribulation and sorrow.’ No, that’s not someone’s description of collectors arriving at last month’s Art Basel in Hong Kong (where, incidentally, ArtReview attended the launch of the latest edition of its sister publication ArtReview Asia which you should really make the effort to check out). Although it does bear an uncanny resemblance to the ‘report’ ArtReview’s Shanghai agent ‘filed’ in the early hours of a Hong Kong Sunday morning while slumped over the bar next to an Indonesian human jukebox in a rather seedy drinking establishment in Wan Chai where everyone seemed to be feeling sorry for themselves. Particularly ArtReview, as it was repeatedly propositioned by a scantily clad lady who kept asking whether or not the reason it wouldn’t buy her a drink was because it didn’t like pussy, before sticking her tongue between her index and ring fingers and waggling it energetically. ArtReview is sixty-five this year, don’t you know (if you didn’t, check the features section for a trip down memory lane in the form of a selection of reviews and interviews documenting its long-standing love affair with the work of Bridget Riley). At it’s age it should be drinking a glass of Charisma in Central and then perhaps stopping off at Culture Homes (‘Your 1st Elderly Lifestyle Store’) to buy a new Zimmer frame instead of hanging out in seedy bars in order to deliver you guys the skinny on art events around the world.

Home

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But back to that quotation. It’s extracted from Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee (1901), a complete analysis of the life and society of the stinging winged flower-botherers that aims to cause readers to reflect on similar structures in the human context. Alright!

So maybe you could view it as a report on one art fair or another. And yes, perhaps there is something about the exclusion of the working class that’s relevant to the social structures set up by art fairs. And OK, most chat circulating around the stuff on show at art fairs probably does imply that some vision of a ‘new destiny’ is being coughed up. Yes! We all know about art fairs and overgrown males sallying forth from their cells. But that’s not why ArtReview brought it up. Pure coincidence! Honest! Anyhow, let’s just try and stick to the point: more specifically, Maeterlinck is writing about ‘the swarm’ (hey, if ArtReview was seriously pursuing the whole art-fair thing, it would have directed you to the 1978 horror film of that name), something that is a focus in this issue, particularly as it relates to the swarm circulation of voices and images in digital culture. Three of the artists in this issue – Mark Leckey, Hito Steyerl and Ryan Trecartin – either explicitly or implicitly tackle this culture and the extent to which it configures a contemporary reality.

And ultimately what this means for the production of art and the potential for creating an active participatory society as opposed to a passive voyeuristic one. And although this is the point at which ArtReview’s marketing people would like it to start screaming hysterically about all this being part of a ‘new destiny’ for art, it’s not going to do that. You get enough of that at the art fairs. In any case, what is ArtReview? Your art adviser? (Drinks on the marketing department! Heh heh heh.) The only thing ArtReview’s advising you to do is to go to the features section and find out for yourself what it’s all about. ArtReview’s got important things to do. Like finding out whether or not the host of one of the gallery ‘dinners’ it went to in Hong Kong was lying when he said that we were all eating German chicken sausage burgers because it was the official food of art fairs around the world…

Everyone knows they only eat that kind of shit in Basel. ArtReview

The official food of art fairs

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ArtReview vol 66 no 5 Summer 2014

Art Previewed 33

Previews

by Martin Herbert 35

Virginia Woolf on Georg Baselitz Interview by Matthew Collings 64

Points of View

by Hettie Judah, Maria Lind, Mark Sladen, Jonathan T.D. Neil, Sam Jacob, Mike Watson & Jonathan Grossmalerman 51

The Law and Its Ideas

by Daniel McClean 68

page 40 Christopher Williams, Bergische Bauernscheune, Junkersholz / Leichlingen, September 29th, 2009, 2010, pigmented inkjet print, 51 × 61 cm (paper), 84 × 94 cm (framed). Collection MoMA, New York. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York & London, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Summer 2014

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Art Featured 85

Mark Leckey

by J.J. Charlesworth 86

The ArtReview Files: Bridget Riley 110

Bosco Sodi

by Christian Viveros-Fauné 92

Disobey!

by Hettie Judah 128

Hito Steyerl

by Paul Pieroni 98

Brazil: Being Local, Becoming Global A conversation between Luciana Brito, Pablo Lafuente and Pablo León de la Barra 132

Ryan Trecartin

by Gesine Borcherdt 104

page 110 Arts Review, vol 38, no 4, 28 February 1986, cover

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ArtReview

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MAX WIGRAM GALLERY

ICE FISHING MCARTHUR BINION BILL BOLLINGER CHARLES HARLAN VIRGINIA OVERTON MICHAEL E. SMITH

4 JUNE - 26 JULY 2014

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Art Reviewed 143

Richard Wright, by Mark Prince Viktor Rosdahl, by Jacquelyn Davis Benjamin Sabatier, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Matthew Benedict, by Olga Stefan Krystian Jarnuszkiewicz, by Barbara Piwowarska Flóra Borsi, by Sarah Jilani Mounira Al Solh, by Jim Quilty Theo Michael, by Gabriela Jauregui Casa Triângulo no Pivô, by Claire Rigby He An, by Iona Whittaker

Exhibitions 144 Alms for the Birds, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Ella Kruglyanskaya, by Helen Sumpter VALiE ExPoRt & Friedl Kubelka, by Brian Dillon Peter Doig, by Mark Rappolt Daphne Wright, by Charlie Fox AV Festival 14, by Oliver Basciano Science Fiction: New Death, by Richard Parry Bedwyr Williams, by Susannah Thompson Sharon Hayes, by Orit Gat Leigh Ledare, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Jumana Manna, by Joshua Mack Urs Fischer, by Brienne Walsh Math Bass, by Andrew Berardini Allen Ruppersberg, by Ed Schad John Tweddle, by Jonathan Griffin Elliott Hundley, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Thomas Bayrle, by Robert Barry Mark Manders, by Barbara Casavecchia Playtime, by Gesine Borcherdt Lina Selander, by Sara Arrhenius

books 174 Ghosts of My Life, by Mark Fisher Being Cultured, by Angus Kennedy Selected Writings 2000–2014, by Paul Chan Colliding World, by Arthur I. Miller thE stRiP 178 oFF thE RECoRD 182

page 146 VALiE ExPoRt, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, 1969, poster, silkscreen print, 70 × 50 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

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shades of black on white may 9—june 21 2014

darren almond aug 22—oct 18 2014 w w w.bjergga ard.com

a k dolVen—anna barriball—bo christian larsson brigitte waldach—daniel richter—erik steffensen erwin wurm—eVa schlegel—eVe sussman—federico herrero georg baselitZ—iVan andersen—janaina tschÄPe—jannis kounellis john kØrner—Per bak jensen—Per inge bjØrlo—Per kirkeby Peter linde busk—Poul gernes—tal r

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FutureGreats 2014

ArtReview and efg International are proud to present the third in a series of six specially commissioned poster projects featuring unique artworks created by artists following their selection as 2014 FutureGreats. Each artwork is reproduced in ArtReview and is available as a full-size limited-edition poster in subscriber copies of the magazine.

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Rachel Rose

Young American artist Rachel Rose’s background in painting does much to inform her practice, now primarily focused on videomaking. It is evident in the manner in which she builds up tranches of exquisitely edited sound and footage, as though she were working up layers of paint on canvas. For the poster commission she extends this interest in multilayered composition, taking scanned snippets of magic texts and iconography dating from 1540, and combining them into a single text. Laura McLean-Ferris

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Art Previewed

Loving the world, loving yourself Beijing_Party 33

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AN INSTITUTION OF THE MIGROS CULTURE PERCENTAGE

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Previewed Yokohama Triennale 1 August – 3 November Folkestone Triennial 30 August – 2 November

Paul Noble Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam 14 June – 21 September Marina Abramović Serpentine Gallery, London through 25 August

Shio Kusaka Greengrassi, London 24 June – 2 August Ross Sinclair Collective Gallery, Edinburgh 28 June – 31 August

Dorothy Iannone Migros Museum, Zürich 30 August – 9 November Krištof Kintera Schleicher / Lange, Berlin 14 June – 19 July Museum Tinguely, Basel through 28 September

Karla Black Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan through 2 August

Christopher Williams MoMA, New York 27 July – 2 November

2 Pablo Bronstein, Four Alternate Designs for a Lighthouse in the Style of Nicholas Hawksmoor, 2014, ink and watercolour on paper. Courtesy Herald St, London

Summer 2014

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Kudos to Morimura Yasumasa: invited to steer 1 the latest Yokohama Triennale, the Japanese appropriation artist has not only underscored its coastal location in his frothing title Art Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion, but simultaneously acknowledged the apparent craziness of handing such a big event’s reins to a mere artist. Inevitable tsunami allusions aside, though, Morimura’s chosen moniker also deliberately points to the risk-taking required to pull biennial culture out of its current stultification. Presumably as per his referencing of Ray Bradbury’s well-known dystopian novel, the artist has invented 11 ‘chapters’ (with two introductions): these, balancing Japanese and non-Japanese artists, include minimalist insularity by 13 figures ranging from Kazimir Malevich and Agnes Martin to Vija Celmins,

Kimura Hiroshi and Felix Gonzalez-Torres appealingly diverse, from Tim Etchells to (and, somehow, Josh Smith); a show by artists Sarah Staton, Pablo Bronstein to Emma Hart, who create borderline-regressive narratives plus the Folkestone Futures Choir. So: working and private worlds, from Gregor Schneider to port or defunct ferry terminal? Fish and chips Joseph Cornell (and, somehow, Andy Warhol); or fish and chopsticks? Yoko Ono or Yokohama? and, as a send-off, Drifting in a Sea of Oblivion, (Yes, really.) featuring Danh Vō, Bas Jan Ader, Akram Zaatari, While Agnes Martin (or her work, at least) Yanagi Miwa and more. It has promise, and we goes to Japan, a Japanese ceramicist avowedly look forward, in three years, to the event once 3 inspired by her is rising in America. Shio subtitled Time Crevasse calling itself Apocalypse’s Kusaka’s understatedly detailed pots have Gaping Maw, or similar. been lauded lately, a little squadron of them 2 Meanwhile, at the Folkestone Triennial, turning up at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Now maritime matters are met at a different angle. they’re coming, and not for the first time, to With a waterfront again in full view, the curators London, and slowly-unspooling pleasures are have lit on the theme of the observation post all but guaranteed: Kusaka is as much an incisor and called their show Lookout – which could be and painter of clay as a potter, a diversifier of a sneaky restitution of the concept of the avantwavering grids, shimmering colour and quietly garde, or a warning, but the 19-artist list is jaunty patterning. In play, overall, is a refreshing

1 The Ugly One, 2013 (film still), dir Eric Baudelaire

3 Shio Kusaka, (Elephant 1), (Lion 1), (Dinosaur 16), (Unicorn 1), 2014, porcelain, dimensions variable. Photo: the artist. Courtesy the artist

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6 Marina Abramović conducting rehearsal for Bolero, 2013, b/w portrait. Photo: © Rahi Rezvani, Paris, 2013

4 Ross Sinclair, Twenty Years of Real Life, 2014.

Photo: the artist. Courtesy Collective Gallery, Edinburgh

5 Paul Noble, Ye Olde Ruin (detail), 2003–4, pencil on paper. Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. © the artist. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York

of minimal geometric abstraction, a freshdecorated with placards, to billboards explorfeeling porting of craft aesthetics into the coning Scotland’s relationship to its history and culture; from performance, painting and music templative space of the gallery and a hymning of to placing a gaudily decorated Land Rover the handmade and gently wonky – which makes adjacent to the Aberdeen Art Gallery’s Edwin one wonder how Kusaka fared as assistant, in earlier years, to the famously finicky Charles Ray. Landseer paintings. Navigating that sprawl is one thing, doing justice to it in one 20-yearTwenty years ago Ross Sinclair had the 4 anniversary exhibition another – and also phrase ‘Real Life’ tattooed on his back, a lifetime hosting a new project in which Sinclair works commitment to a monumental art project that, with bands whose members have been born in he’s said, ‘aims to engage as wide an audience the last 20 years? Good luck, Collective Gallery. as possible in a dialogue around the paradoxical It’s now almost 20 years (18, actually) since gaps between life as it is lived by a society of 5 Paul Noble inaugurated Nobson Newtown, individuals, and the aspirations afforded by his imaginary metropolis envisioned through “spectacular life” as we absorb it through large-scale, intricate pencil drawings showing mediated images of ourselves and everything the place in isometric ‘cavalier’ projection around us – in other words, it’s ourselves alone – the sun hitting at a constant 45-degree angle, versus the world’. This approach has assumed because it’s always 10:45am in Noble’s drawings many guises, from a ‘fortress’ that visitors

Summer 2014

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– as well as animations and sculptures. Here, across 1,500sqm of space, Noble’s world, in which the buildings’ shapes spell out the names of each locale in the artist’s custom Nobson font (eg, the hospital ‘Nobsbital’, the cemetery ‘Nobsend’), will unfurl, repeatedly expressing an ambiguous but undeniable dynamic of competing building and ruin, order and chaos, as it does so. Is this grand design finished? The museum says it’s ‘ever-growing’, whereas four years ago Noble said he had one drawing to go.

Who’s in control?

Marina Abramović’s goal, in recent years, 6 has seemingly been not to govern an invented world but to dominate this one, with a decidedly mixed critical response. Her willingness to mount every publicity platform offered to her has, though, at least in part, been directed

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8 Dorothy Iannone, The Statue of Liberty, 1977, 84 × 60 cm.

Published by Studio Galerie, Mike Steiner, Berlin.

Courtesy the artist, Air de Paris, and Peres Projects, Berlin

7 Karla Black, Still Taking, 2013, aluminium tooling foil, nail varnish, petroleum jelly, 104 × 20 × 15 cm.

Photo: Ronnie Black. Courtesy the artist

towards funding her lifetime monument, ‘the capital of long durational work’ that is the Marina Abramović Institute. Her Serpentine show is emphatically a return to artmaking: Abramović’s first major performance piece since The Artist Is Present at MoMA four years ago will find her in the gallery from 10am to 6pm, six days a week, with visitors – who will be relieved of ‘bags, jackets, electronic equipment, watches and cameras’ on entry – acting as participants too. So you’ll have to be there, not eavesdropping via social media; we presume Tino ‘no pictures please’ Sehgal will be looking on amusedly.

Of course performance artists don’t have 7 a lock on performative work, as Karla Black – and, of course, the action painters whose DNA is in her work – makes clear. The Scots-born

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artist takes everyday materials (crumpled paper, 8 In 1969 Dorothy Iannone’s work was cosmetics, soap, dirt, Vaseline) and combines removed, for its sexual content, from a Harald them into space-colonising para-paintings, like Szeemann-curated exhibition at the Kunsthalle three-dimensional gestural marks, the results Bern – black fig-leaves had been offered, and being both physically precarious and, in the way refused. Following this, the US-born artist made they feel suspended between sculpture, painting The Story of Bern (1970), a self-defence of her work and performance, conceptually so. Her first show in the form of an artist’s book, her then-partner, in Italy since representing Scotland at the Venice Dieter Roth, quit the exhibition and Szeemann Biennale in 2011 comprises, we’re told, ‘a series resigned. (No stranger to controversy, almost of freestanding and hanging sculptures cona decade earlier Iannone was arrested by US nected by a yellow powder line’, is ‘basically customs for trying to import a copy of Henry Miller’s then-banned 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer.) a study in colour’ and offers a play of nuanced It’s likely she’ll have an easier time now. Her distinctions between outwardly similar forms. paintings, drawings, videos and sculptures, On past form, we can expect her to take some visions of ecstatic spiritual–carnal union, still formal risks; meanwhile, that the gallery is pulse with sexuality even though her figures showing Jessica Stockholder at the same time have increasingly been integrated into byzantine makes a great deal of sense.

ArtReview

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Brea Souders June 12th – August 1st, 2014 Bruce SilverS tein 535 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011 212 627 3930 www.brucesilverstein.com

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Film Electric #19, 2012

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chair covered in pink goo. This transfiguring patterning; but they’ve also been increasingly of everyday experience, though, opens onto critically acclaimed in recent years, as her art’s proto-post-feminist slant has chimed with a questioning of the possibility of change. other, younger practices. ‘Sometimes you must ‘It’s kind of my hobby, the ills of civilisation… also submit’, reads a text in a 2009 painting I feel nervous that neither art nor I can offer featuring a dominant woman. That means you any societal solutions,’ Kintera said in a recent too, Switzerland. interview. Cut to the animatronic sculpture Revolution (2005), in which a stumpy, hoodieThe country should, at least, have no wearing figure repeatedly bangs his head against 9 problems with Krištof Kintera: just a little a breezeblock wall, and consider the artist slap-and-tickle expected from the prankster-ish as a droll compatriot of Claire Fontaine, Matias Czech artist, whose previous works have inFaldbakken and other ethicists of negation. cluded armoured, camouflaged strollers and Christopher Williams has exerted a golemlike figure made out of lightbulbs.

10 such a huge influence on younger artists that Showing at the Tinguely Museum situates it’s extraordinary he’s only now having his him in the Swiss artist’s tradition of wild first retrospective, but here we are, and here contraption-building, though Kintera’s priis The Production Line of Happiness, which ought mary mode is upending familiar objects: to cement Williams’s place as today’s sharpest a tangle of interlocking bicycles, an office

updater of Conceptualism’s precepts.

What everyone knows of the LA-born artist is that he photographs deconstructed cameras and isolated objects of desire, and photography’s role – particularly that of editorial photography – in constructing experience is central to him. Here we’ll see that considered through works like Williams’s major series For Example: Die Welt Ist Schön (The World Is Beautiful) (1993–2001), early Super-8 shorts, architectural interventions and vinyl supergraphics. A politicised critique of power is at the heart of his work (not for nothing does the show take its title from Jean-Luc Godard), but so, increasingly, has been a defiant muteness.

Against a world of photography-based sales pitches, Williams’s oblique arrays of disparate images don’t sell, and don’t tell. Martin Herbert

10 Christopher Williams, Bergische Bauernscheune, Junkersholz / Leichlingen, September 29th, 2009, 2010, pigmented inkjet print, 51 × 61 cm (paper), 84 × 94 cm (framed).

Collection MoMA, New York. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York & London, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

9 Krištof Kintera, Nervous Tree, 2014, electromechanical sculpture, 320 × 185 × 150 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Schleicher/Lange, Berlin

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FOLLOW US DOWNLOAD THE FREE MAXXI APP

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hall 2 stand f 8 Willem de Kooning (1904–1997 ) Woman ( Arthur’s Woman ), 1969 Oil on canvas , 59 3⁄4 x 48 1⁄4 inches (151.8 x 122.6 cm )

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The Distant Sound Susan Philipsz

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CENTRO DE ARTES VISUALES FUNDACIÓN HELGA DE ALVEAR Las Lágrimas de las Cosas P ro yect o de Mart a Gi li 26 de abril de 2014 – 11 de enero de 2015 Cáceres, España

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Points of View Hettie Judah Come, hapless stooges!

Maria Lind Lisa Robertson

Jonathan T.D. Neil Do we moan about the dominance of the market over art to cover up the fact that we’re just too timid to value art ourselves?

Mark Sladen The nuance of ‘normcore’

Sam Jacob A quacking success Mike Watson In praise of beauty Jonathan Grossmalerman Well I…never!

Hettie Judah Come, hapless stooges!

In mid-June, London will host the fifth edition of LC:M – the menswear version of fashion week – promoted with much fanfare in the domestic media by buff ‘style ambassadors’ plucked largely from the world of light entertainment.

The inevitable disjunction between expectation and delivery has seen mainstream reportage of the four editions to date settle into a cycle in which the advance excitement translates into confusion – and even derision.

This cycle is exacerbated by the almost total absence of meaningful discourse (outside of academic circles) in Britain relating to contemporary men’s fashion, and in particular the more conceptual tendency that one could call ‘advanced fashion’. In part this is due to a pervasive failure to distinguish between ‘fashion’ and the fashion industry. Just as the mainstream media feels most comfortable discussing art in terms of its auction price, so it feels easiest discussing fashion in terms of consumer trends and turnover, rather than ideas or technique.

The paucity of critical discourse is particularly vexed in relation to men’s fashion and, in the UK and US, a culturally difficult relationship with decoratively accoutred men. Writing in 1930, British psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel posited a theory of ‘the great male renunciation’, suggesting that the Industrial Revolution stimulated a renunciation of beautiful dress in favour of sober functionality – the adoption of the proto ‘white collar’ uniform of the business suit that was promoted during the nineteenth

century as the global ideal of masculine dress (and which, by no coincidence at all, created an international market for then-abundant British-woven woollen cloth).

The hangover from this is still evident in the depiction of nonwork dress as a site of middle-class male anxiety. A recent issue of The Guardian’s Saturday magazine dedicated to menswear carried an instructive essay guiding readers through the ‘minefield’ of casual dress, endorsing a wardrobe dominated by navy blue as, in effect, the safest way to remain invisible

Little wonder that blending into the background seems so attractive when the alternative is a widespread mockery and even vilification of any group that steps out of line in plain sight. Little wonder that blending into the background seems so attractive when the alternative is a widespread mockery and even vilification of any group that steps out of line, be they ‘Dalston hipsters’ (now virtually a journalistic euphemism for ‘wanker’) or ‘Chavs’.

In a cultural and political landscape still dominated by white, privately educated men, London, despite its proud heritage of notable style subcultures, remains an uncomfortable site for fashion that doesn’t toe the bourgeois line. Most newspapers seem to find it hard to make space for new fashion that is culturally

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queer, black, gender-anxious, angry, bohemian, nocturnal or in some way disaffected. At worst it tampers unnervingly with long-established rules of masculine dress; at best, they simply don’t know how to talk about it.

Young designer Craig Green’s work runs heavily counter to the comforting bourgeois image promoted by LC:M’s ‘style ambassadors’: his last collection was dominated by full-length robes rendered in cotton canvas, hand-printed with colourful abstract designs reminiscent both of Persian carpets and the rose windows of a Gothic cathedral. These were silhouettes relating to multiple kinds of Britishness, ones – with ties still evident to the Middle East, Africa or some ilk of religious orthodoxy – that didn’t participate in the renunciation of the decorative.

His work has, typically, fallen foul of mainstream commentators (lacking any way in which to intelligently discuss his work, one of LC:M’s ‘style ambassadors’ distanced himself from Green’s designs on a television show); while fashion-world gossip widely pronounces him one of the most exciting talents on the scene, it currently seems to lack a means to explain why this should be, beyond the habitual fluffy superlatives. Britain may have a heritage of masculine dress to be proud of, but if LC:M wants to promote the UK as a meaningful force in men’s fashion once more, it needs to work out how to discuss and openly embrace Craig Green and those other independent designers treading the thoughtful nonconformist path of advanced fashion.

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Maria Lind Lisa Robertson It all began when a friend read me a section of Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (2001) while we were waiting for our flights at an airport. I instantly – and entirely unexpectedly – started crying, as if the words had been needles pushed deep into my flesh. It felt like mental acupuncture.

Crying had indeed been on the agenda for a little while, being the topic of dinner conversations and eventually also email exchanges between a group of friends. But it was ‘crying on aeroplanes’, not at airports. And here I was, with wet cheeks, long before takeoff.

The Weather is an airy publication following a rock-steady rhythm: the days of the week.

No matter how much we try and stretch time and squeeze in another job, one more project, an extra task. Dusk and dew and ripples and sun smoke fill the pages. It is the meanderings of ‘weather’ with some personality, not always reliable and yet not completely unreliable.

Human scale and meteorology dimensions at once; thus weather and not climate, landscape and not geology. Deep materialism and eccentric emotions hold hands.

The poem obviously had an unusual power, at that very moment at least. A sort of ‘referential stability’ in the midst of things fleeting, to use one of Robertson’s own expressions. For someone like me, who does not read poetry that regularly, not out of dislike or lack of interest but simply due to time being stuffed with other things, it was a bit of a revelation. Wanting to

find out more, I dug into Robertson’s writing.

A powerful practice emerged, one that stretches from urban deliberations with Vancouver at their heart and the founding of an ‘office for soft architecture’; to experimenting with pink-lensed glasses, to publishing poetry.

The author is not young but not exactly old either. She has published books with titles like Magenta Soul Whip (2005), XEclogue (1993) and Debbie: An Epic (1997). She writes for magazines and journals, and teaches writing at art schools. In a recent conversation with her old friend the poet and painter Etel Adnan in Bomb

The poem obviously had an unusual power, at that very moment at least.

A sort of ‘referential stability’ magazine, there is lengthy talk about love, and about how great philosophy is thinking and feeling at the same time, how great poetry surely means writing and feeling at the same time too.

Maybe that was what happened to me? Reading/ listening and feeling at the exact same moment?

If not a quick fix, then at least instant poetics.

No delay allowed, but with strong effects.

Robertson and Adnan go on to discuss obscurity being as rich as luminosity. ‘Some things are not meant to be clear, obscurity is their clarity,’ says Adnan at one point. Then

I came across The Men – A Lyric Book (2006).

I was not prepared for such a precise and yet virtual dissection of contemporary men.

Here Robertson enters the realm of distant observations; men become the object of her scrutiny. Most likely unbeknownst to herself, she offers another revelation. Only that this time, crying is over. Smiling takes its place.

They are both sublime and Beautiful, delicate And copious, rolling and touching And rubbing one against another In their most serious actions But nothing makes them men But their word in the new-found world.

I study them more than any other subject Studying hard in this disordered rabble Remembering to drink water Judging soundly like a man The ceremonies and decorations The opportunities for ornament Inorganic and misty they exist Against gravity and they fail Glamorously their ideal which is to float In the air without any support So beautiful and sucking.

I flick through the pages and cannot hide my appreciation of her exact use of things obsolete: The funny pathos of men – I salute this.

I start laughing.

Lisa Robertson

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Mark Sladen The nuance of ‘normcore’ It isn’t often that an idea that originates from the ‘critical’ artworld becomes a global meme, but that’s what happened to the concept of ‘normcore’ after it was featured in New York Magazine this spring. Normcore is a term that was invented by the New York group K-Hole – which styles itself somewhere between an artist collective and a marketing consultancy – and that featured in one of the organisation’s trend-forecasting reports. Since it was founded in 2010 (by Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Emily Segal, Chris Sherron and Dena Yago), K-Hole has produced four such reports, based around neologisms and catchphrases that identify supposed marketing trends. In the normcore report, the group points to a trending form of consumer individuation: ‘The most different thing to do is to reject being different all together… Having mastered difference, the truly cool attempt to master sameness.’

The article in New York Magazine, and much of the ensuing coverage around the world – reaching even Britain’s Daily Mail – applied the notion of normcore mainly to fashion: a kind of nonfashion based on ubiquitous brands and bland styles, including fleeces, khakis and comfortable trainers. There was much talk of Brooklyn hipsters dressing like Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld. However, K-Hole and their supporters subsequently argued that the term is misunderstood when applied in such a narrow way, and they have a point. The kind of consumer understatement described in these articles is only one idea covered by the original report – under the heading ‘acting basic’ – whereas normcore is described as a more nuanced phenomenon, in which consumer nonexclusivity helps ameliorate deep-seated contemporary anxieties.

The normcore report, like K-Hole’s other documents, takes the form of a PDF that can

be downloaded from the group’s website.

Each of these reports features a framing text that outlines the central concepts, mixed in with examples drawn from contemporary products and brands. The text is drafted in anonymous, friendly language, mixing marketing speak and light sociology. The whole thing is set in bland and blocky sans serif, accompanied by stock photographs and clean infographics, giving the appearance of a moderately sophisticated corporate PowerPoint presentation. The first two reports stuck fairly closely to conventional principles of marketing, but the third report introduced ‘The K-Hole Brand Anxiety Matrix’, stating that ‘the job of the advanced consumer is managing anxiety, period’.

It is this focus on anxiety that is the most interesting aspect of K-Hole’s work. The fourth PDF, which introduced normcore, takes the title of Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom. The document (produced in collaboration with another consumer research group, the São Paulo-based Box 1824) was launched last autumn at the 89plus marathon at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and reflected the latter event’s rather vampiric preoccupation with the generation of ‘digital natives’ born after the advent of the Internet.

Commentators – such as the artist Huw Lemmey, writing on the Rhizome website – have agreed on the relevance of normcore to this generation, living as it does with financial and professional precarity, and with the instability produced by rampant technological change.

Speaking at the Rhizome ‘Seven on Seven’ conference in New York in May, the media theorist Kate Crawford went further, linking the idea of normcore to a larger fantasy of Page 17 from K-Hole and Box 1824’s Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom (2013)

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disappearance that, she said, “has become cool at the very historical moment when it has become impossible, because of Big Data”. K-Hole, she argued, “capture precisely this moment of mass surveillance meeting mass consumerism”, resulting in “a dispersed anxiety that seeks nothing more than to shed its own subjectivity: no longer having to worry about what it’s going to wear tomorrow, or whether it’s got the right settings on Facebook”. This fantasy is reflected in the report’s own words, according to which normcore ‘finds liberation in being nothing special, and realises that adaptability leads to belonging. Normcore is a path to a more peaceful life.’

One of the interesting things about K-Hole is the way that they employ this principle – let’s call it ‘blending’ – not only as a proposed marketing strategy to appeal to new consumer identities, but as their own organisational dynamic. The idea of artists adopting a group identity and a corporate facade is not new, and has a notable pedigree in New York, where it has often been employed to satirical ends. What makes K-Hole appreciably of our own moment, however, is how hard it is – in the bland, frictionless version of digital publishing that is the forum for their activities – to divine the point where the corporate might end and the critical might start. The adoption of corporate aesthetics and models is a notable characteristic of some of the work that, like that of K-Hole, has been corralled under the now-infamous banner of ‘post-Internet art’, and such an approach inevitably raises the question of the limits of blending as an artistic strategy. In K-Hole’s case, it is quite possible to imagine that the normcore report was generated with deeply satirical intent, but it is even clearer that the subsequent success of the term owed little to satire.

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Jonathan T.D. Neil Do we moan about the dominance of the market over art to cover up the fact that we’re just too timid to value art ourselves?

Not so long ago, deeming a work of art ‘derivative’ meant it was unoriginal, that its moves were too easily recognised in other, more significant work, often by older, more established artists. It was an easy putdown, and a defensive one too. Dissing something as ‘derivative’ was rarely followed by the question, ‘Of what?’ If you had to ask, then you were exposing your own lack of knowledge of the field. Best to nod the head and offer your coerced consent: ‘Yes, totally derivative, you’re so right.’

Lately, though, a different sense of ‘derivative’ has been making the rounds in contemporary art discourse. Mainstreamed by the financial crisis of 2008, One of the oldest when another kind of derivaderivatives is rice tive, the collateralised debt futures, which obligation backed by subprime have been traded on the Doōjima Rice mortgages, brought capitalism Exchange since to its knees, this financial sense the eighteenth of the term has been popping up century and have recently in commentary on the nothing to do with contemporary art market, Ai Weiwei which has been rewarding a small number of artists and estates with incredible amounts of money for work that appears to have no other significant qualities than its being highly desirable for the very, very wealthy.

For example, in an essay that appeared in the May issue of The Brooklyn Rail (full disclosure: I am the editor of the series in which this essay appeared), David Geers writes, ‘Though such investment in art as an asset is nothing new, the aesthetically blinkered mentality of this recent trend [in flipping art] is conspicuous in its

parallel to the trading of derivatives and other financial instruments that traffic in side-bets rather than the productive capacity of companies or the abstracted labor power congealed in the traditional commodity form.’ Steven Shaviro, in ‘Accelerationist Aesthetics’, published in the June 2013 edition of e-flux journal, wrote that ‘finance operates according to a transgressive cultural logic of manic innovation, and ever-ramifying metalevels of self-referential abstraction. This easily reaches the point where financial derivatives, for instance, float in a hyperspace of pure contingency, free of indexical relation to any “underlying” whatsoever.’ And as Suhail Malik, perhaps the commentator most committed to the analogy between contemporary art and financial markets, writes in the last issue of Texte zur Kunst: ‘Art prices are set only in terms of the market, the market price being an always tactical markup indexing a hybrid of capital and power accumulation liberated from production, consumption, use, et cetera’, and that the market most ‘instructive’ to compare this one to is the one for ‘financial derivatives’.

What these and other commentators are concerned to address is the apparent divorce between the ‘underlying’ intrinsic qualities that a work of art may be said to possess and the value it is accorded at some ‘higher’ level of abstraction by the social, political and economic networks in which it is caught up. So ‘liberated’ from categories of talent, taste, skill, history, innovation or critique, the work of art ‘floats free’ in an unregulated sea of differential value whose prices can inflate, bubble and pop according to their own autonomous dynamics.

The question, then, is what is to be done?

The underlying assumption of such comparisons is that derivatives markets, especially since 2008, are the specific roots of a general kind of evil called ‘finance’, and the more that contemporary art can be shown to be like derivatives, and the more the market for contemporary art can be made to look like derivatives markets, the more we might become fed up with the situation and demand something different from the ‘system’, or a different system entirely.

But dismissing art by demonising ‘derivatives’, or rather, demonising contemporary art by claiming, as Malik does, that it ‘is a transmission mechanism for the speculative pricing of everything, for universal financialization’, is at once nihilistic and aggrandising. Derivatives are meant to mitigate uncertainty through the modelling of risk. They can do this well; just think of a basic futures contract. Yes, when left unregulated and fed back into the financial system, they can generate greater uncertainty and augment risk to a perilous degree, as we witnessed in the last financial crisis. But finance, like capitalism itself, can do good as much as bad. The key is getting the incentives right, which means thinking hard about value, what it is and how it is meant to guide us and others.

In contemporary art today, by contrast, there is both very little risk and very little thought given to the hard question of value.

It is much easier to assert that price has crowded everything else out and be done with it. If we don’t address ourselves to the problem of value, then we are sure to end up with little else but derivatives.

Dan Colen, Boo Fuck’n Hoo, 2006, oil on canvas, sold at Christie’s ‘If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday’ contemporary art auction on 12 May 2014 in New York for $3,077,000, a world auction record for the artist

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Sam Jacob A quacking success I went viral, and I liked it. I posted a picture Howard envisaged the success of Garden Seeing ducks in fried-chicken-shop urbanism on Twitter of a man taking a pair of ducks for a Cities in turn transforming the centres of the mixes up our expectations of place. It shortwalk along Rye Lane, Peckham. The ducks were industrial city. Their slums would depopulate, circuits what we think the words ‘city’ and on leads and totally unflustered as they waddled the dirt and squalor transform to greenery. ‘country’ should designate. past a KFC. Equally unruffled were the good Yet the ducks tell us a different story of the rus The image also talks to the long-standing people of South London. Maybe, now that the in urbe, the real story of what happened to the tradition of rus in urbe (the country in the city). area is peppered with experimental art-spaces, centre of the city.

The estates set out by the aristocracy in the this is standard contemporary Peckhamism.

Since the 1960s, places considered slums eighteenth century, for example, brought a piece Five hundred retweets later, I was fielding calls a generation before – irredeemable and slated of the countryside to the parts of the city they from the kind of media I usually only dream were laying out; the Georgian squares of London for demolition – have become desirable. The of reaching: Daily Mirror, Metro, London Evening metropolitan centre, rather than leafy suburban forming a vestigial trace, or perhaps more Standard, The Telegraph and Time Out all wanted dispersal, has become the archetypal urban accurately reminder, of the intrinsic relationa piece of this surreal street scene. vision for the upwardly mobile middle-class. ship between aristocracy and the ownership The photograph came as part of a research Bubble after bubble, the centre of the city has of the landscape. turned into exclusive domains of village-in-city trip for the British Pavilion’s show (which Much later came the Ebenezer gentrified imagination – shopping parades I’m cocurating) about Garden City; instead of the Howard, nostalgic for a nonexistent past: specialist cheese postwar architecture binary opposition of ‘city’ 1850–1928, ‘A Clockwork Jerusalem’ loved Garshops, artisan bakers and craft-based producers, and planning for this and ‘countryside’, Ebenezer is on show at the British den Cities Pavilion, Venice, from past which we cycle on our retro bicycles, wicker summer’s Venice Howard imagined a third so much, he 7 June to 23 November baskets lashed to the handlebars, on our way Architecture Biennale: way, somewhere that could died in one to the farmers’ market. not the obvious source draw the best of each: the Contemporary modernity’s real effect on of a lighthearted news story. The exhibition health and beauty of the our cities is to render them less equal, less afwill describe how architecture and planning countryside with the opportunity and sociafordable, less accessible: they begin to exclude constructed new visions of a Britain facing bility of the city (rather than, say, being unemtheir own citizens, and in doing that, they kill the raging forces of modernity. From William ployed and lonely in beautiful surroundings). the very idea of the city. Meanwhile, out in the Blake’s ‘Satanic Mills’, through postwar reWe might call this rus et urbe: the city and country, mega-malls nestle among strategic construction and the New Towns, to the bleak country simultaneously.

Later still, techno-hippies began to imagine tree planting, their fibreglass-Victoriana images of Joy Division in front of the Hulme gadgets, gizmos and equipment returning us clocktowers poking above the treeline as their Estate and Cliff Richard rollerskating backlit signs glimmer between the leaves. to the pastoral: Reyner Banham pictured ecstatically around Milton Keynes The country channels modernity in ways that houses that were simply augmented Shopping Centre in the video for Peter Reyner pieces of landscape: purple glowing rocks the inner-city villages try to resist.

Wired for Sound (1981).

Banham, that emitted groovy domestic vibes.

Yet beyond these two options – the staleIt’s also an exhibition concerned 1922–88, loved Archigram imagined mate of contemporary urbanism with now: about how new forms of ‘ArtReview’ so much, he wrote things that looked like – there may be something far modernity are creating crises in our A British avant-garde for it architectural group logs that we could plug more exciting. Something emown cities, and about how architecformed during the 1960s bodied by the duck-walking man into as nodes of power ture and planning might once again and communication, rendered and his instant media profile; be a means of imagining new ways of living. with such fantastic technological precision that an electric jump-start to Howard’s Edwardian This is where the duck-walking man, the they looked more like nature than nature itself. vision; a place where modernity’s transforcacophony of social media ‘likes’ and serious mational power might supercharge radical urban thinking intersect. Behind the surreal collages of lifestyle. amusement was something more profound.

Courtesy the author

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Mike Watson In praise of beauty The critic Clement Greenberg’s emphasis on abstract beauty as the specific competence of the fine artist, which influenced a generation of painters from Pollock to Rothko, has given way since the 1950s and 60s to a focus within contemporary art on the rethinking of society and art’s role within it. It is rare that an artwork is absolutely devoid of any political, conceptual or social content, whether this be through a consideration of the body (Marina Abramović, Franko B), of metapolitical issues (Beuys, Ai Weiwei), of ontological issues (Duchamp, Magritte) or of a relationship between art and capitalist production (Warhol, Koons).

While one could argue that an absolute disregard for social content does and can exist, such a posture is often too well rehearsed to be genuine. One is reminded of Francis Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester in which the late artist absolutely refused to acknowledge any social content in his paintings, and the incredulity with which Sylvester treated this point. At the same time, however, the twin forces of art-as-politics, devoid of beauty as a central consideration on the one hand – embodied in the work and actions of Tania Bruguera, Ursula Biemann, the Guerrilla Girls, Grupo Etcetera, Teatro Valle, Voina, Pussy Riot and so on – and the marketisation of art to the nth degree on the other, risk losing something crucial due to their marginalisation of aesthetic beauty.

It is a return to aesthetic beauty as a consideration that underscored the involvement of Naples’s MADRE Museum in Un Giorno Così Bianco, Così Bianco this year, a major retrospective of the work of Ettore Spalletti across three sites: the MAXXI, Rome; GAM, Turin, and the MADRE itself. Of particular interest was La Bella

Addormentata (1965), a silhouette of a mountain in the Apennines that evokes the profile of a sleeping woman. The work prefigures Spalletti’s later, entirely abstract works in its depiction of the landscape as something that vibrates and cannot be defined or contained, as the mountain’s sharp yet subtle edges touch empty space.

The trinity of mountain, body and viewer somehow leads one outside the museum itself, echoing the intense physicality of Naples, overlooked by its volcano, Vesuvius.

Spalletti, born in 1940, came from a generation of artists for which formal considerations

Social art opposes itself precisely to the controlling auspices of rationality – which finds its zenith in the reduction of all things to a monetary value – which the experience of beauty, in its being beyond definition, evades remained crucial, in a country – Italy – where beauty is arguably valued as in no other. In the exhibition catalogue Spalletti is quoted as saying, ‘Contemporary art, in my opinion, assumes the responsibility of space, as opposed to old art, in which it was delimited by the frame.’ Taken on its own as implying a freeing of painting from its physical frame, this quote is not particularly novel, yet seen in the context of the exhibition and its relationship to Naples and Italy, it can help to highlight what in beauty is crucial for the success of art, even when it retains a rigidly social or market-oriented focus. For beauty – in Kant’s hugely influential

formulation as outlined in his Critique of Judgment (1790) – is a suspension of the capacity of cognition in a subject confronted with something it can’t fully comprehend and which yet holds a peculiar interest. Taking this into account alongside Spalletti’s quote, a further transcendence of the ‘frame’ is implied that may be yet more crucial to striking a balance between social and aesthetic concerns in art.

Social art opposes itself precisely to the controlling auspices of rationality – which finds its zenith in the reduction of all things to a monetary value – which the experience of beauty, in its being beyond definition, evades.

In Naples the frame the work of Spalletti goes beyond could be seen to be one that divides the site of art itself from the wider city and region in which it is situated while simultaneously uniting the viewer and the environment of which they are part. This arguably occurs as a suspension of the capacity for critical judgment takes place in the mind of the viewer in front of a work such as La Bella Addormentata.

The false categorisations that comprise rational thought are thereby put on hold: ie, dualities such as body–mind, subject–object, human–nature. As it is these very dualities that lead humans to abuse both the environment and each other – through a lack of recognition of the connectedness of one person to the environment and to all other people – perhaps beauty needs to be restored to art instead of being considered an effete preoccupation associated with Modernism and earlier periods. The risk otherwise is that ‘art-as-politics’, ‘artistic research’ and Conceptualism lose, in their detached coolness, precisely what in art may be exemplary of a better relationship between humankind and nature.

Ettore Spalletti, Dolce far Niente, 1997 (installation view, Venice Biennale, 1997).

Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy MAXXI, Rome

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WALTERCIO CALDAS Art bAsel / bAsel booth G2, Hall 2.0 June 19 - 22, 2014

Waltercio Caldas, How does the camera work?, 1978

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Jonathan Grossmalerman Well I…never!

I just now got off the phone with a very rude network lawyer who informed me that they are making a television series based on my life!

Understandably surprised and somewhat taken back, I protested… vigorously… but all to no avail! He explained to me that at some point recently I’d unwittingly signed away all the rights at a Union Square farmers’ market petition table. A petition that I had mistakenly thought regarded wind turbines and raptors.

But was in fact a contract signing over all the rights (in perpetuity!) to my admittedly fascinating story. Plus now I have a new mobile phone provider. This is why I hate dirty petition hippies!

They’re always doing things like this to me.

Ultimately, I suppose that it’s not so much their making a television series based on my life without any input from me that’s got me so upset. It’s that it’s going to be a ‘comedy’ series.

And not merely any old kind of comedy series either, but a classic three-camera sitcom shot in front of a live studio audience. And there’s a catchphrase! Yes, apparently, once each episode, my character is required to say, “C’mon, don’t I always make it up to you?” I mean, what kind of a person says, “C’mon, don’t I always make it up to you?” I’ll tell you who! A jerk! That’s who says that. And not just any jerk, either. No! It’s a jerk who owes you stuff. Like a suit… or a watch.

I really don’t know who greenlights these things. Visual artists’ lives are notoriously difficult to translate to the small screen. After all, Julian Schnabel’s Here Comes JJ was a terrible failure. Though NBC scheduled it right after The Cosby Show for three seasons running,

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it never found its audience. A few years ago CBS quickly pulled the plug on Maurizio Cattelan’s I’m Come Back!, despite its being suitably whimsical, and only last season ABC cancelled Tino Sehgal’s This Hilarious Situation after widespread complaints regarding its ‘being terrible’. How many more humiliations do you think the networks need to endure??

The more I contemplate it, the more horrified I become. My life reduced to a sitcom?

What are they going to do? Turn me into some two-dimensional, sex-obsessed, megalomaniacal buffoon with a mild stammer? A stammer

Will some ex-artist’s-model drop a kid off at my doorstep claiming it’s mine and disappear forever, forcing me to raise the child as my own despite my curmudgeonly demeanour? that in real life is considered quite charming, by the way! Though I guess I can see how, handled in the correct manner, it could pay real comedy dividends.

But what will become of Neal? Poor Neal, my idiot studio assistant? He may be a fucking retard, but is he now to be mocked for it by millions of people, as opposed to the relatively small number of people who currently mock him? Like the time he misheard “Test all the paint” as “Taste all the paint” and was sent Courtesy the artist

to the emergency room for acute cobalt poisoning. Good God is he stupid. But he’s my stupid, and I feel the need to protect him. And what about Joyce?! The love of my life! What archetype will they choose for her? Lovesick victim or scheming coke-whore? Come to think of it, I’m not actually sure which one of those suits her best. I should really ask her. Next time she comes around.

And Tracie? My ‘daughter’? What are they going to do with her? I’m pretty sure she’s eleven or twelve by now and pretty much aged out of the cute thing. Unless you consider talking back and not doing what she’s told cute! Plus in a year or two I suppose she’ll be going to college or somewhere. What then? Do I have to take in some cousin? Will some ex-artist’s-model drop a kid off at my doorstep claiming it’s mine and disappear forever, forcing me to raise the child as my own despite my curmudgeonly demeanour?

Will I, despite my nature, develop a fondness for the child and travel a great emotional distance?

Will I learn something? Will Elizabeth, my ex-gallery-director, see that I’ve travelled an emotional distance and fall in love with me?

And what am I going to do about that painting that returned from Moscow with $5 million worth of cocaine hidden in the frame that I didn’t even know about and was sold and has been auctioned off so many times that I can’t track it down and now there’s a Russian mobster who’s given me 28 hours to track it down before he kills me…?

Good God!!!

This thing writes itself!

ArtReview

28/05/2014 13:12

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Karen Archey Off-space No 21: The Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois After attending college in Chicago for five years, I packed my bags, hopped on the Naïve Idiot Dream Train and moved to New York.

It was 2008 and the global financial crisis was in full bloom. To a green, lifelong Midwesterner, the blue-chip galleries of Chelsea, Uptown and SoHo were striking not for their surplus of incredible art, but for the intimidating amount of capital flowing through them. “Where are all the project spaces at?” I wondered. Back in Chicago, besides the Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society, the two institutions dedicated to showing solely contemporary art, project spaces and apartment galleries are how new work gets shown. And most Chicagoans are pretty happy about it.

One such outfit is the Suburban, a 15-yearold exhibition space run by artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Michelle Grabner and her partner, artist Brad Killam.

While the Suburban isn’t even technically in Chicago (it’s on the border, residing in Oak Park, an idyllic middle-class American suburb about a half-hour drive west from downtown). The Suburban compound – a duo of cinder-block huts outside of the Grabner-Killam residence – could be understood as an anti-Chelsea, a space by and for artists that attempts to circumvent commercial and institutional means of distributing art. Since 1999 they’ve mounted about seven exhibitions a year, working with artists ranging from megastars including Luc Tuymans and Mary Heilmann, to longtime friends, such

as fellow SAIC faculty Scott & Tyson Reeder (who are also well known in their own right), as well as Grabner’s former students. From 2003 through 2013, Chicago dealer Shane Campbell occupied a third space in the Suburban compound that complemented his main gallery in Chicago proper. That space has since been taken over by Wisconsinites John Riepenhoff and Jake Palmert, who also run the commercial Green Gallery in Milwaukee.

The Suburban proper, a 2.5sqm cell abutting Grabner’s driveway, is a site as iconic as it is dinky. Programmed mostly by Grabner, the gallery has become something of a Chicago institution, despite solely relying on the economy of their household. What can art do when it’s not made to perform for rich people in a cavernous white cube? For one, the gallery has fostered indelible experiences for Grabner and Killam’s three children, who have shared hot dogs with artists and curators from around the world. (See the Suburban’s website for an incredible essay by Grabner and Killam’s eldest son, Peter, on growing up next to a gallery in Midwest suburbia.) Despite being a curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Grabner maintains she’s an artist organising an exhibition and shudders at the term ‘professional curator’, avowing that artists know how to install and contextualise their own and other artists’ work with more finesse than any administrator ever could. As of the publishing of this article, the Suburban is showing works by New York artist Daniel Gordon and Dutch artist Ditty Ketting

in their large space, while artist Seth Hunter, there on a long-term residency, is lending a hand repairing damage the small, original Suburban sustained during its preceding exhibition.

The story behind the damage to the gallery is a grisly one. True to form as both a laissezfaire programmer and art educator, Grabner gave the gallery keys to artist Dana DeGiulio, who rammed the diminutive building with a junked Buick LeSabre. DeGiulio, one of Grabner’s former students at SAIC, sold a painting that Grabner had given her to James Cohan, the elder artist’s representing gallery in New York, and used those funds to purchase the automobile. DeGiulio then backed into the space full-force, knocking the building off its foundation and cracking its walls to the roof.

As Grabner and the Suburban are Chicago icons, it seems to be DeGiulio’s desire, however credulous, to upend them in order to provide room for a less-established generation of artists.

During a recent phone interview with me, Grabner spoke fairly and plainly about DeGiulio’s piece, even insisting that the traumatic experience gave her pause to reconsider the Suburban’s programme amid an exceedingly hectic period managing both Whitney Biennial responsibilities and a retrospective at MOCA Cleveland.

Imagine a world in which a car hurtling into a gallery isn’t a frat spectacle akin to Dirk Skreber or Dan Colen’s commercial gallery gimmicks, but the honest processing of a clash of generations within a heuristic environment. Believe it or not, that world exists in Oak Park, Illinois.

Artist Seth Hunter repairing damage to the Suburban’s 2.5sqm exhibition space. Courtesy the Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois

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Great Critics and Their Ideas No 30

Virginia Woolf on Baselitz’s Upside-Down Paintings Interview by Matthew Collings

Born in London in 1882, abused sexually by her half-brothers as a child, denied a university education because of her gender, Virginia Woolf became a major twentieth-century cultural figure.

She experimented with the boundaries of literary fiction in order to express more fully the qualities and intensity of conscious experience. In 1927 she wrote in her diary of the need to invent a new term to supplant the word ‘novel’. She committed suicide in Sussex in 1941.

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Artreview What did you think of Georg Baselitz’s interview in Der Spiegel last year? virginiA woolf I noticed it. He says women can’t paint. I found it to be a foolish remark, from someone who understands the occasional use-value of foolishness. Whatever irony informs it, and acknowledging all the thinking from first this position and then that which might be going on when artists explain themselves, especially in a mass-media context, I can’t, in the end, support the unsupportable.

Ar What about his exhibition earlier this year, at Gagosian, in London? vw I noticed it too.

Ar The stupidity? vw In that case it was the visual intelligence that engaged me. He constructs something.

I do it myself in my work so I appreciate it in his paintings, especially the mode of the construction, the element of streaming. You allow looseness, but of course there’s a tailoring, too, since you’re making something and not just exercising freedom or having therapy.

Ar It was just his own head upside down, wasn’t it?

Repeated in a lot of big canvases.

vw The works had the theme of ‘the portrait’ as their basis or taking-off point, yes. There was one with a centrifugal arrangement that reminded me of Matisse’s Snail. I thought it interesting to see how discrete areas of delicate, painterly single-colour, sploshed around the perimeter were visually united with a fused combination of the same colours in the centre. This was a completely abstract spatial proposal. But the idea of a portrait might demand a centrifugal composition. So the device of something figurative, no matter how much he undoes it, or challenges it by inverting it, is simply a way of looking at whatever the spatial exploration of form calls for. There’s a fundamental contrast at the heart of the work: representation versus organisation. And alongside that he’s running other reprisals and reversals: of scale – tiny blobs and splots, and big ones; of line – inky and thin versus big writhing sploshes; and of colour – single and mixed. This particular painting seemed like a symphony to me. There just aren’t many people, male or female, who could do that. above Georg Baselitz, Licht wil raum mecht hern (Lef el rial bel), 2013, oil on canvas, 300 × 275 cm. © the artist. Photo: Jochen Littkemann. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London facing page Virginia Woolf

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Ar But how can you separate sexism from art?

How can resisting injustice be aided by just appreciating beauty? The Nazis appreciated beautiful music, but it didn’t stop them gassing millions of Jews. vw I think the particular visual enquiry Baselitz is involved in demands attention to fragmentation in a way that would not be attractive to Nazis.

Ar Uh? vw Or any repulsive ideologies – totalitarianism is all about a hysterical illusion of everything being seamlessly sewn up. You are not allowed to notice the cracks, even inwardly, as the terror of the system penetrates to the core of the individual’s being.

Ar Well, what’s intelligent about him? vw The paintings follow through a logic, they make something work, he sets up certain visual principles and he sees them through to a point of resolution, however absurd or undermining of expectations about picturing and painting, and so on, the results might be.

Ar He said the title of the exhibition, Farewell Bill, was about Willem de Kooning. Surely de Kooning’s much better – and Joan Mitchell?

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VW I don’t know what you mean by better.

It reminds me of a review by someone in Frieze the other day of a Schnabel show. It was long and there was an insistent rhetoric of inward reflection, for example about how few paintings by this artist the reviewer had ever seen. He approached the exhibition with a feeling of unease. He left it with the same feeling. Of this he was sure. Between the beginning and the end of the piece, though, it was hard to locate a visual observation. As if journalism’s sole task is to make sure you sound like you’re more or less of the same mind as the majority of readers.

Talking of Nazis, he called the paintings ‘messy’ at one point, and ‘tatty’ at another, as if he were writing an opinion column in a Munich newspaper at the time of the Degenerate Art exhibit.

AR What, are you saying Schnabel is beautiful as well now?

VW I doubt if beauty is really an aim for art.

A painter, say, works in a painting from one experiment to another, following the principles that the painter has set up. It’s a logic, you don’t depart from it, you propose something within it and then you judge the result, and you correct it as part of the next proposal, and you continue the process, making these proposals somewhat in the dark but also in consciousness, working with what you’ve made.

AR Schnabel’s just bombastic, though. Where’s the logic in that? A friend of mine was his assistant once and said that all he did was smoke cigars in his pyjamas in the Ritz and order caviar. I liked The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though.

VW You’re expressing a common art-appreciation mindset of the present moment. What the Schnabel review inadvertently reveals is that today you can consume the art experience in innumerable ways, from innumerable entry points, but however you do it, it’s the same nothingness, and the sense that things are marvellously opened up nowadays compared to the old world of elitist art appreciation – the world I come from – is as yet an illusion. Yes, elitism is in the process of being broken down, and good riddance to it, as it is hateful and should have no place in culture. But unfortunately as yet there is only a dull chaos in its place.

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AR If it isn’t just stupidity going on in Baselitz’s paintings, what else is it you’re seeing there?

VW I see a figure from the transition point from Modernism to Postmodernism, that is, from the 1960s. I spoke of his working logically and I would say the particular logic he works with represents for him, probably, his idea of the ‘truth’ of art. There is a Dada element to his approach. The surrealisms in Baselitz, the upside-downness and the goofy motifs, are about art’s unreliability as far as meaning is concerned, as opposed to a modernist painterly meaning that gets its values from the history of forms. He engages with modernist meaning but subjects it to testing. Even at the most obvious level, an upside-down image forces you to consider abstraction’s relationship to reality.

The goofy side of the work has a lot to do with the inevitable nonusefulness of artistic enquiry, at least for nonartists or people who are not involved much with art. These latter categories are now overlapped – in a way that was inconceivable in my time – with a whole world of art hustlers; that is, professionals whose job it is to create the environment in which art is made and appreciated. Artists are part hustlers themselves, part truth-seekers. The difference with them – hopefully – is that in some cases they have

Reinventing the novel in the twentieth century got rid of a recently congested notion of artistic realism, a view of reality created by art that seemed false to the richness of reality. Modernist art wasn’t about getting rid of interpreting immediate reality as an aim of art, or even about getting rid of art’s past, but about clearing away artistic constructions of reality that seem inadequate: the past often provides genuine models by which to judge such adequacy and inadequacy.

After all, there’s no such thing as transparent reality as far as art is concerned

a moral position coupled with a position of being engaged with actual making: the latter entails a practical relationship to visual traditions that have built up over centuries.

AR You mean old classical art, but you helped throw all that out with your stream-of-consciousness novels.

VW Reinventing the novel in the twentieth century got rid of a recently congested notion of artistic realism, a view of reality created by art that seemed false to the richness of reality.

Modernist art wasn’t about getting rid of interpreting immediate reality as an aim of art, or even about getting rid of art’s past, but about clearing away artistic constructions of reality that seem inadequate: the past often provides genuine models by which to judge such adequacy and inadequacy. After all, there’s no such thing as transparent reality as far as art is concerned.

AR You’re making me dizzy!

VW Recently I’ve been visiting old haunts, going to Bloomsbury, having a quick pop into the National Gallery – and I was struck by the Veronese survey there. I certainly saw the streaming constructive process I described earlier, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer visual complexity, the folded space, the anatomical outrages, the way a foot is in a different dimension and apparently a mile away from the head and torso of the same body. Heads, feet, limbs are never where they are for anatomical accuracy but for the purpose of a visual arrangement, the power of something visually challenging, an off-centre composition whose complexity has been arrived at in exactly the bit-by-bit experimental procedure I’ve just been talking about. Art often presents a sort of old-fashioned set of laws: Baselitz’s paintings, with their gestural looseness and openness, are an example. They might go back to Venetian colour-painting in the sixteenth century. But where do we find the interpretative tools to understand the new working of these laws that he’s presenting us with? I think art writing could go more in this direction of enquiry.

Next moNth P.D. Ouspensky on the astral plane as something to be sold in Tate Modern’s coffee shop

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Sir Anthony Caro, ‘Rip Cord’, 1970/74, painted steel, 234 x 239 x 68.5 cm

NAC Summer 2014, ArtReview ad_NAC Summer 2014, Art Review ad 22/05/2014 15:01 Page 1

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Gallery Richard Deacon & Bill Woodrow

31 May - 6 July

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12 July - 7 September

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12 July - 7 September

Artists House Joseph Walsh, Daniel Naudé & Johannes Nagel

31 May - 6 July

Roche Court East Winterslow Salisbury, Wilts SP5 1BG

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28/05/2014 15:05

The Law and Its Ideas No 7

Animal crackers: authorship battles in the courtroom

by Daniel McClean

above Xavier Veilhan, The Monster, 2004 (permanent installation, Place du Grand Marché, Tours), painted polyester, 440 × 360 × 420 cm. © the artist / Adagp, Paris, and DACS, London, 2014 facing page Richard Orlinski, Kong Baril Aluminium, 2012.

Courtesy the artist

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Commentary

Background An unlikely trial began in early March in Paris’s Tribunal de Grande Instance involving two artists: the leading French contemporary artist Xavier Veilhan and the commercial artist Richard Orlinski.

Veilhan, along with his gallerist, Emmanuel Perrotin, issued legal proceedings in November 2013 for ‘unfair competition’ and ‘counterfeiting’ against Orlinski, his various dealers and the operating company of the Royal Monceau, reportedly claiming damages of €2.5 million.

In particular, Veilhan alleged the copying and ‘plagiarism’ by Orlinski of key elements of his ‘Animal’ sculptures: the common idea of creating faceted/angular sculptures of animals presented without a plinth, executed in identical materials, including the glossy, monochrome resin of their surface.

What appears to have offended Veilhan in particular were reports that people familiar with his sculpture had believed that he had created or licensed Orlinski’s ‘commercial’ sculptures. During the winter of 2012–3, the French ski resort of Courchevel hosted an on-piste exhibition of monumental works by Orlinski, including a three-metre-high white wolf that was wrongly recognised by skiers as being by Veilhan. (The LVMH-owned Cheval Blanc hotel in Courchevel has displayed a Veilhan sculpture of a faceted white polar bear – from Bernard Arnault’s collection – on its restaurant terrace since 2007.)

The Paris court, however, rejected Veilhan’s legal claims. In a judgment (delivered in late March), the court agreed that while Orlinski’s animal sculptures had been inspired by Veilhan’s work, Orlinski had not committed any ‘unlawful act’. The decision may be appealed by Veilhan and Perrotin before the Paris appeals court.

What is significant is that Veilhan’s action was not brought under copyright law, the conventional legal mechanism for resolving authorship disputes. Copyright narrowly protects specific ‘expressions’ or visual details that must be copied, rather than ideas behind a work or an artistic language/style: it is therefore ill-suited to protecting many types of contemporary art from plagiarism. Yet claims based on unfair competition laws (which potentially offer greater protection) are novel and for many reasons (including the need to demonstrate confusion) are difficult to bring, as is reflected in the French court’s rejection of Veilhan’s claim.

It is rare for artists to sue other artists in authorship battles. In contrast to cultural industries – for example, music and film – where reproduction is fundamental, artists rarely rely upon the mechanisms of the law to fight other creators, though artists including Dürer and Hogarth notably have relied upon the law to fight the publishers of their unauthorised prints.

The reason for this is no doubt linked to the economy of art, which centres on the production of unique, original artefacts (even when artworks are editioned and immaterial) rather than on reproduction rights, and above all on the value of artistic attribution. What has mattered historically in art have been fakes and misattributed copies, not artworks that are ‘clear’ copies. Furthermore, a culture of copying or ‘artistic commonwealth’ of shared forms and ideas is characteristic of many Western artistic practices, from classical and modern rites of homage and self-affirmation (Picasso’s repeated copying of Manet/Velázquez) to contemporary practices of ‘appropriation’.

Significantly, the recent major copyright infringement disputes involving ‘appropriation’ artists such as Jeff Koons and Richard Prince have been instigated by photographers (Art Rogers, Andrea Blanch and Patrick Cariou) outraged by the alleged exploitation of their work and the perceived snobbish denial of their authorship value by these ‘high’ artists.

Yet while artists have generally objected to the commercial exploitation of their work in advertising and merchandising (with some exceptions, such as Gilbert & George and, more recently, Richard Prince and the AriZona Beverage Co), their attitude towards other artists ‘plagiarising’ their work appears now to be changing. This change is no doubt symptomatic of the increasing commodification of the global contemporary art system as well as anxieties about authorship.

Whatever the motivation for these artists’ actions (and however justified they may seem), they also set a dangerous precedent: they encroach upon the culture of copying that is part of the art system as we know it. In turn, they suggest that the courtroom rather than the art system might be the arbiter of artistic authorship. So watch this space, as further legal battles over authorship between artists are likely to emerge.

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In the Cra

Curated by Arthur Fink Works from the collections of Maja Hoffmann & Michael Ringier / Ringier AG

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An exhibition by POOL 15 June – 14 September 2014 LUMA / Westbau Zurich www.poolproject.net

Featuring works by John Baldessari, Alighiero e Boetti, Troy Brauntuch, Allan McCollum, Nicole Eisenman, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jack Goldstein, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Matt Mullican, Nam June Paik, Richard Prince, Jim Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosler, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner

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CHARLIE SMITH london Alex Gene Morrison Same As It Ever Was | 27 June – 26 July 2014 336 Old Street, London EC1V 9DR, United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7739 4055 | direct@charliesmithlondon.com www.charliesmithlondon.com Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment Also exhibiting at: VOLTA10 | Booth C13 | 16-21 June 2014 MARKTHALLE, Viaduktstrasse 10, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland

‘Skull’, 2014 Oil on canvas 92x66cm

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Image: Jody Paulsen + Nico Krijno, Studio Happening, 2013

LOOP Barcelona

ORO AFRICA BUILDING (1st Floor) 170 Buitengracht Street, Cape Town, 8001 (T) +27 21 424 5150

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05 - 07 June Hotel Catalonia Ramblas, Barcelona

VOLTA10

16 - 21 June Markthalle, Basel, Switzerland

START Art Fair 26 - 29 June, Saatchi Gallery, London

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ICA

25 June – 7 September

Journal

www.ica.org.uk

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Edson Chagas, Highbury & Islington, London, 2014 Courtesy the artist

Supported by:

ICA is a registered charity number: 236848

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ADRIANO COSTA SAM FALLS SAMARA SCOTT MICHAEL E. SMITH 26 JUNE–10 AUGUST ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION LONDON SARVISALO NEW YORK zabludowiczcollection.com 176 Prince of Wales Road London NW5 3PT

ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION

Invites

RACHEL PIMM 26 June–10 August LUCY BEECH 2 October–9 November THE ARKA GROUP 13 November–21 December

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Discover The New. The 2014 Summer Exhibition

9 June – 17 August royalacademy.org.uk #RAnewandnow Media Partner Ian Davenport, Pale Blue/Lilac Duplex Colorplan (detail) , 2013. Etching with chine collé on Hahnemühle Bright White 300 gsm paper. Paper 116.0 x 112.5 cm / Image 98.5 x 96.5 cm © Ian Davenport. Courtesy Alan Cristea Gallery

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9 July – 14 September 2014

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Whitechapel Gallery Aldgate East / Liverpool St.

whitechapelgallery.org

Giulio Paolini Delfo (Delphi) (detail) 1965, photographic screenprint on canvas, collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, by exchange 2003, courtesy Archivio Giulio Paolini, Turin © Giulio Paolini.

Giulio Paolini Whitechapel Gallery

27/05/2014 12:19

calder foundation celebrates

25 years of the atelier calder

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE • Marina abraMović • ricci albenda • carlos aMorales • darren bader • Michael beutler • Pier Paolo calzolari • los carPinteros • Jean clareboudt abrahaM cruzvillegas • attila csörgő • duvier del dago • Mark dion • tara donovan • JiMMie durhaM • Marc fornes • Marie-ange guilleMinot • rachel harrison • JePPe hein roger hiorns • Marin kasiMir • tadashi kawaMata • kcho • Žilvinas keMPinas • stanislav kolÍbal • haroon Mirza • ernesto neto • richard nonas • Julian oPie • yazid oulab beverly PePPer • JauMe Plensa • alexander PonoMarev • Martin Puryear • david rabinowitch • klaus rinke • laurent saksik • toMás saraceno • sarkis • Patrick saytour • allan sekula • lucy skaer • Peter soriano • Monika sosnowska • Jessica stockholder • veit stratMann • sarah sze • sylvie ungauer • heMa uPadhyay • corban walker • haegue yang

Calder Foundation

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ARTIST ROOMS

ROBERT THERRIEN No Title (Table and Four Chairs) 2003 – Robert Therrien ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Acquired jointly through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008 © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2014

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mac birmingham Sat 21 Jun – Sun 7 Sep Cannon Hill Park Birmingham B12 9QH macbirmingham.co.uk Open Tue –Sun 11am – 6pm (closed Monday, except bank holidays) | First Floor Gallery | Free admission

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Art Featured

I’m in Tokyo now. I love the world : ) Sweetwenwen, 26 yrs, Taipei 85

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Mark Leckey What does it mean to ‘be’ in the midst of things?

In a world where images have become things, in a way that blurs the gap between self-image and self?

by J.J. Charlesworth Portrait by Jeremy Liebman

Mark Leckey photographed at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, May 2014

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Mark Leckey is busy printing objects, or perhaps they’re copies of worldview, in which things are no longer merely the inert, passive objects. It’s April, and between phone calls from my car and Skype objects of human intent, but become, in the explosion of the age of calls from his kitchen, Leckey explains what he’s putting together for the network, quasi-alive, enchanted…

A Month of Making, a May–June exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise So where does the current interest in 3D scanning and printing in New York, which itself anticipates a solo exhibition at Wiels, come from? “When I was asked to curate a show,” he says of The Brussels, this coming September, and which is a continuation, of sorts, Universal Addressability…, “I didn’t feel that comfortable with being an of Leckey’s remarkable curatorial project, The Universal Addressability of ‘artist-curator’, so what I tried to do as much as possible was to make Dumb Things, which was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and the curated show into my own work. And one way to do that was to toured the UK throughout 2013. For the Gavin Brown show, Leckey continue the exhibition somehow, to make something out of it. So is getting together some state-of-the-art 3D printers, which he’ll set when The Universal Addressability was at Nottingham Contemporary, to work to print out solid versions of already existing objects, objects I had as many of the objects 3D-scanned as I could. Later, I had some scanned to become digital information, which in turn will produce trouble with getting the objects printed in Brussels ahead of the [upcoming] Wiels show, so Gavin [Brown] suggested we bring some new objects: copies, or ‘dupes’, as he’s calling them.

There’s always been a restless, impatient enthusiasm to Leckey’s printers into his gallery [in New York] and do the production there, exploration of our culture’s mixed-up, obsessive relationship with as an event – what, in the geek world, they’d call a ‘maker space’. So both things and images, and the experience of our own fascination we’re going to produce those, and the rest of the works I couldn’t scan with and enthrallment to them. It’s an exploration that has become will be printed up as cutouts or something similar – I’m calling them increasingly ambitious as it has encompassed video, object, instal- ‘generations’ or, even better, ‘dupes’.”

He came up with a nice line for the press release, he muses: “‘They lation, ‘performance lectures’ and eventually, with The Universal Addressability…, the business of curating too. might be lossy, they might be “de-generations”, but they might be The 2008 Turner Prize-winner first came to attention for his break- better suited to the world as it is today, because they are more “bits” through video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) – a nostalgic elegy for [data bits] than they are atoms.’ But that’s getting a bit clever,” he says the energy of subculture in Britain during the self-mockingly. “I’m doing it more because I can. I just want to see what it might throw 1970s and 80s, a kind of biographical recolAs Leckey declared during lection composed of other people’s footage. up, and be a bit irresponsible.” a discussion at the ICA a few Sequences of people losing themselves in the Irresponsibility is definitely one of years ago: ‘I don’t want moment were edited in a manner somewhere Leckey’s strengths: not just as a suck-it-andsee approach to intuiting what might work, between documentary and decelerated pop to look at things, I want to be but rather in terms of not taking responpromo. But these were images, also, of people in them.’ It’s a desire that sibility for the consequences – political or adopting self-images – style, dance moves – seems to resonate with our ethical – of where your intuition takes you. becoming images, as it were. And closer in, It’s to be found in Leckey’s particular quest that video seemed to set up the question current moment for a kind of affirmation of oneself in the Leckey has been elaborating answers to ever since: what it means to be alive in a culture of images, and in some way, experience of an artwork, even if it reveals the ambiguities and probto live with and through them, while at the same time flirting with lems of such affirmation and risks the possibility of losing oneself to the possibility of becoming other to oneself, to become an object, or it. ‘Critical distance’ is something Leckey has a problem with: chatting a thing. As Leckey declared during a discussion at the ICA a few years for a moment about what he thinks he’s going to say on a discussion ago: ‘I don’t want to look at things, I want to be in them.’ It’s a desire panel that evening at Tate Modern as part of its Richard Hamilton that seems to resonate with our current moment, in a culture that, retrospective, he elaborates: “The big difference between British art though everywhere mediated by images and networks, puts huge and American art is about distance – Hamilton always had to mainstore in the transparency of connectedness, of our access to and impli- tain a kind of critical distance, he was never willing to just ‘succumb’ cation in everything virtual. ‘Always on’, in the thick of what is seen in the way I think American artists like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons and said onscreen, we have begun no longer to distinguish between do. Their relationship is about trying to be as ‘integrated’ as possible, the ‘here’ of the material and the ‘there’ of the virtual, the image. they’re trying to be that thing.” Whether there’s a critical residue in Things, objects, artefacts, artworks: plugged into and playing the kind of complicity that Warhol or Koons adopts – with commodity off the groundswell of recent cultural thinking around the ques- capitalism, with consumerism – has been hotly debated. But one gets tion of the division between man and machine, alternative states the sense that Leckey wants to go beyond this, to provoke and incite of consciousness and the terms of human subjectivity in the age of further thought about the purpose of taking a step back and the value the network, The Universal Addressability... was a wunderkammerlike of throwing oneself in. accumulation of incongruous objects, mixing artworks with manuImmersion and distance, thing and image, the febrile oscillation factured goods, ancient artefacts and ultramodern technology, the between the sight and sound of pop culture and how to step out of it, real and the virtual: a high-tech prosthetic hand next to a medieval to allow some reflection, some thinking to take place – all of this is hand-shaped reliquary; a Doctor Who ‘Cyberman’ helmet alongside perhaps given its most concise expression in Leckey’s ‘Koons bunny’ a stone gargoyle; video sequences from the virtual world of Second film, Made in ’Eaven (2004), a CGI mirage in which Koons’s iconic 1986 Life next to a video essay by the autism campaigner Amanda Baggs. stainless-steel sculpture Rabbit is recreated in a simulation of Leckey’s Crisscrossing ancient and modern, The Universal Addressability… London flat. As the virtual point of view wheels around the sculpture, riffed on the irrationalistic, ‘technopagan’ return of an ‘animistic’ we notice there’s no one reflected back in the mirror of its featureless,

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polished head. It is intoxicating to watch, an unreal doubling-up of impossibilities. Made in ’Eaven is something to do with desire – having what you can’t have, by just plain nicking it – but also a kind of crisis of materiality – of the sculptural object, and of the human body too. It’s a work that in many ways anticipates the scorching of the discourses of older media – sculpture, painting, photography, even video – in the critical fallout of the emerging networked culture of the noughties, though Leckey is cautious not to get too caught up in the voguish rush to see everything as entirely converted by the advent of digital culture.

“I’m apprehensive about what we’re doing in New York,” he says.

“One of the reasons is that there’s a bit of a rush [among artists] to be the first to get your hands on this stuff [3D-printing technology].

And it’s not a question of being involved in a post-Internet-art type of discussion – I’m not interested in that… Actually, it’s about the fact that I have a problem with experiencing objects in the world, so I have to turn that object into an image before I can experience it as an object.”

Rather than being tinged with digital-age anxiety, Made in ’Eaven is a celebration – not of an object, but of the desire for it, a form of wishrealisation in which the experiencing subject is removed from its own materiality, and that of the object, for both to exist in a moment of suspension, or resolution, or even oblivion. A sort of ecstasy.

Leckey mentions, half-joking, that he has sometimes thought of himself as ‘a bit autistic’. But it’s perhaps more the case that autism has become a kind of metaphor for a broader difficulty many of us face as society tilts from one where our relationships are with other people, to one where our relationships are increasingly with things. No doubt that could sound like an echo of Marx’s much misused discussion of ‘commodity fetishism’ – ‘a definite social relation between men, that

assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ – and it’s too easy to jump from there into the truism that, hey, we’re talking to our machines and they’re talking to us. Nevertheless, we soon find ourselves having to think through the consequences of a culture in which the division between man and technology, subject and object, has become a good deal more fuzzy than before, and we may be in uncharted waters… As Erik Davis, the Californian cultural critic whom Leckey cites as a big influence, anticipated in his article ‘Technopagans’ back in 1995, ‘we surround ourselves with an animated webwork of complex, powerful, and unseen forces that even the “experts” can’t totally comprehend. Our technological environment may soon appear to be as strangely sentient as the caves, lakes, and forests in which the first magicians glimpsed the gods’.

It’s a development Leckey has forayed into previously, with his GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010), a performance-into-video in which Leckey voices, through digital modulation, the inner monologue of a black Samsung fridge-freezer, as it tries to explain itself to itself and the world around it, in a doleful stream-of-consciousness that takes the matt-sheened appliance from its own dimensions and internal technology, to ruminate on the world of vegetables and subterranea, eventually finding itself drifting in space, between sun and moon – which recur in the fridge’s monologue as the quasi-mythic representation of the hot-and-cold of its heat exchanger circuit.

Leckey’s interests might have shifted throughout the last decade – from an obsession with pop culture, subculture and the figure of the dandy in earlier films such as Parade (2003), and in his band collaboration DonAteller, with fellow artists Ed Laliq, Enrico David and Bonnie Camplin; to the high/low culture face-off of his BigBoxStatueAction

above Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999 (still), DVD, 15 min. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York preceding pages A Month of Making, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Thomas Müller. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York

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performances (2003–11), in which Leckey’s giant speaker stack confronts icons of modernist British sculpture, such as Jacob Epstein’s Jacob and the Angel (1940–1); to his later multimedia performancelectures, the Internet-driven epiphany of dematerialisation In the Long Tail (2009) and its antithesis Cinema-in-the-Round (2006–8), with its more reflective inquiry into the physicality of images via, among others, Philip Guston, Felix the Cat, Gilbert & George, Homer Simpson and Titanic (1997). And yet between them one can trace the peregrination of Leckey’s restless attempt to grasp some form of truth about the predicament of experiencing and being in the current moment, as things, images and selves become interchangeable.

From a critic’s point of view, Leckey’s tracking and anticipating of the crosscurrents of contemporary culture, his promiscuous remixing of sources from popular culture and ‘cultural theory’, present an artist increasingly attentive to the relationship between an event and how we reflect on it, the immediacy of experience and its mediation – the loop between art and criticism. And Leckey’s work is looped in another sense, working almost always in and out of the work of others: the anonymous footage of Northern Soul and Rave clubs in Fiorucci; Koons’s Rabbit, invoked and wished into being in Made in ’Eaven; sculptures by Epstein or Henry Moore in the BigBoxStatueActions; Leckey’s own figure seen only in reflection in the curves of a stainless steel Pearl snare drum, in the video Pearl Vision (2012); the elaborate cultural composites of the lectures; or the scanned, recut objects sourced out of The Universal Addressability… Authorship and signature style are nowhere to be seen here in their old guises, and this relates, perhaps, to Leckey’s attitude towards how to embrace the experience of the currents that make up a moment in history. “I see myself in a tradition

of Pop culture,” he says. “I’m a Pop artist – I believe in the idea that you’re essentially a receiver, that you open yourself up to, and you allow whatever is current to come through you and absorb it into your body and somehow process that, and that’s how the work gets made.”

Leckey’s current efforts are focused on a new video, a sort of ‘memoir’, the first glimpses of which were seen in his recent exhibition On Pleasure Bent (2013), at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. In the ‘trailer’ video of the same name, we find a dense collage of brief sequences that might recall a British adolescence through fragments of music and film, invoking an woozy eroticism that drifts between the lattice of fishnet tights and of electricity pylons, the branding of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, cathode-ray-tube RGB dots, Kate Bush and Kenneth Williams. Seductive and seduced bodies of the past, absurdly rendered in the photocollage Circa ’87 (2013), in which Leckey has cut-and-pasted himself, stripped down to his shorts and sat at a snare drum, as an oddly scaled-down figure surrounded by an admiring throng of big-haired 1980s ladies. For all the attention to the impersonal future and past of technology and society in his recent work, it’s an awkwardly comical reminder that Leckey’s work remains rooted in the problem of remarking on one’s own being – on its capacity for memory and for action, for desiring and being absorbed, for being embodied while potentially ‘out of its head’ – being both subject and object. Of what it means to be in the midst of things. ar Mark Leckey: A Month of Making is on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, through 21 June, followed by a comprehensive retrospective at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, from 26 September to 11 January

Mark Leckey, Stills & Trailers, 2012 (installation view, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne).

Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin & Cologne

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Bosco Sodi The wabi-sabi painter and cultural entrepreneur

by Christian Viveros-Fauné Portrait and studio photography by Yasuyuki Takagi

Untitled, 2013, mixed media on canvas, 186 cm diameter, 16 cm depth. © the artist. Courtesy Pace, New York, London, Beijing & Menlo Park

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Today, save for the odd airmiles pilgrimage, we typically look to docu- day only after years of intense outreach, lobbying and cold-calling mentation of massive 1970s Earth art to communicate the ground- from Sodi himself. shaking power of the great outdoors. But in certain exceptional cases, ‘I spent three-and-a-half months in Japan and fell in love with the experience of hard-encrusted dirt, compacted rock and age-old Tadao’s work,’ Sodi told one interviewer, ‘and I found that his work geological matter can also be had under a roof and within four walls and mine had a great deal in common. They are both very wabi-sabi – as long as it’s in the right gallery or studio.

– simple and without pretension. My dream is for the residency to be This, in a nutshell, was my takeaway from several encounters with a place where artists can rest and recharge their batteries, not work the paintings and sculptures of the Mexican-born, New York-based all the time. If someone wants to bring their family, or two lovers at a artist Bosco Sodi. In fact, on my last visit to his studio, a persistent time, they are welcome to, and have my full blessing.’ thought took hold. Not since visits to one of Walter De Maria’s Earth Sited directly on the Pacific Ocean, Ando’s design for the complex Rooms or to certain dioramas in the American Museum of Natural incorporated one of the region’s most typical construction elements: History – the two-storey representation of the Bahamas’s Andros the palapa, or Mexican thatched roof hut. Starting from this basic barrier reef, for instance – have manmade constructions impressed building block, Sodi commissioned the Japanese architect to create a studio and living quarters for him and his family, in addition to themselves on your humble correspondent with such brute force.

An artist whose wildly coloured, five-centimetre-thick, extra- six residences to be occupied year-round by invited guests – mainly large abstractions and boulder-size sculptures speak a direct and artists, curators and critics. Also included with the finished group elemental language, Sodi has, despite his work’s ruggedness, become of structures are an Ando-designed sculpture garden and a 400sqm a darling of the highly urbane, distinctly nonoutdoorsy global gallery, built to display the work of leading artists during three exhiart scene. A Pace gallery artist bitions a year. who also exhibits with Mexico “I want Casa Wabi to funcCity’s Galeria Hilario Galguera, tion as a contemporary version he has spent the last years of Marfa,” Sodi told me, invokengaged with various museum ing the Valhalla of countrified Minimalism. “I want it to be exhibitions – among them a 2013 a place that offers an organic show of paintings at Valencia’s relationship to nature and the IVAM – while being simultaneenvironment, while also estabously occupied in at least two countries with several complex lishing connections between the aid and construction projects. residency and nearby communities.” In fact, Sodi and Casa Most prominent among the Wabi’s director, Patricia Martín latter have been volunteer relief (the ex-director of the Jumex work for artists devastated by Collection), stand fully commitHurricane Sandy (Sodi organised ted to making arts education an opera-fundraiser that also infor local children and their famcluded the auction of artworks ilies an integral part of Casa made by Mickalene Thomas, Ron Wabi’s remit. Funding presentGorchov, Douglas Gordon and ly exists for various kinds of Teresita Fernandez), and the onpublic programmes and is exgoing construction of a beachfront artist residency near the panding. Not surprisingly, Sodi’s village of Puerto Escondido. An vision continues to grow – it Atlantic Center for the Arts-type enterprise located on the shores of now includes a film festival, a food festival and, why not, possibly an Mexico’s own permanent sunshine state – the pre-Columbian and arts school. culinary mecca that is Oaxaca – Sodi’s Casa Wabi casts the painterOf course, none of this would be possible without Sodi’s critical sculptor firmly in the mould of the twenty-first-century mogul. An and financial success. A purveyor of an up-to-date combination of outstanding artist, Sodi is nothing if not also a cultural entrepreneur. all-over abstraction (think Rothko’s use of colour and Pollock’s physThe building of Casa Wabi is a perfect example of Sodi’s all- icality), art brut (Dubuffet’s pumice-stone surfaces) and landscape terrain ingeniousness, particularly as it translates his brawny artistic painting (the Grand Canyon as painted by Jay DeFeo), Sodi’s rapid practice from elaborate studio production to even more complex ascent from New York newcomer to celebrated Gotham artist took ‘real life’. Named after the Japanese ideal of wabi-sabi – an aesthetic place just four years ago. His breakthrough came with a 2010 Bronx philosophy that finds special beauty in the imperfections of rusticity Museum exhibition, in which he installed a six-panel, lava-coloured, – Sodi’s residency complex was designed by none other than Pritzker 4-by-12m painting as the centrepiece of his first museum solo. An Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando. Not exactly the sort of archi- accumulation of red and orange crust made from raw pigment, sawdust, water and glue, Sodi’s painting – tectural proposal that the celebrated Ando Untitled, 2013, mixed media on canvas, customarily accepts (it cost a fraction of his appropriately titled Pangea for the single land186 × 186 cm. Photo: Kevin Kunstadt. usual jobs), the 27-hectare site, featuring the mass that geologists say dominated the earth Courtesy Galeria Hilario Galguera, architect’s 5,500sqm project, saw the light of 250 million years ago – instantly impressed Mexico City

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above Untitled, 2012, ceramic glaze over volcanic rock, 100 × 125 × 85 cm.

Photographed in Bosco Sodi’s studio, New York, April 2014 preceding pages Pangea, 2010, mixed media on canvas, 400 × 1200 cm.

Photo: Kevin Kunstadt. Courtesy Galeria Hilario Galguera, Mexico City

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visitors while simultaneously mobilising hungry collectors and dealers all over town.

Fast-forward four years, and one finds the forty-four-year-old artist immersed in making similarly vigorous work inside a football-field-size studio in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Spry and athletic, Sodi willingly demonstrates how several of his finished surfaces – they resemble nothing so much as the cracked earth of the mineral-rich Atacama Desert – are made using a combination of deliberate and chance elements. In every case, his paintings are the result of sciencelike experiments with organic and inorganic materials that, once mounted onto a single canvas, can weigh as much as 450kg. This is when the artist’s planned pileups enter their important accidental phase – a period of ‘settling’ (the metaphor is intentionally geological) in which Sodi’s materials give way to unpredictable breaks and fissures produced as much by the artist’s purposeful combinations as by the elements themselves.

One XXL-size, silver-coloured number Sodi points to inside the studio took two-and-a-half months to set during New York’s wet winter; another, an intense, modestly-scaled, vermillion painting still protected by its travel crate, dried at Casa Wabi in just 20 arid days.

“I like that variation, chance,” Sodi confesses about the effects forces like heat and humidity have on his surfaces. “I don’t like total control.

When it gets predictable, it gets boring. I don’t like boring.”

As I look around at the differently hued and sized canvases in the studio – cobalt, fuchsia, halite and coal – I’m reminded that nature is rarely controllable or boring (unless it involves camping with artworld types). Sodi’s accidents give visuality and shape to that power like few other artworks seen anytime, anywhere. ar Fractais, a solo exhibition of work

by Bosco Sodi, is on show at Galeria Fernando Santos, Porto, to 18 June

Bosco Sodi in his studio, New York, April 2014

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Hito Steyerl Through her analysis and interrogation of the endlessly reproduced and degraded images and texts that make up our digital culture, the Berlin-based writer and filmmaker suggests that we can be more than just consumers: we can be active agents in the world around us

by Paul Pieroni

above and facing page How Not to Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013 (stills), HD video file, single screen, 14 min. Courtesy the artist

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The work of Hito Steyerl is attuned to the mutability of our increasingly globalised, digitised world. Her essayistic films combine exhaustive research with techniques of montage, voiceover, collage and interview, while her nonfiction writing – whether penned in her native German or in English – is marked by the clarity and precision of its language and analysis.

The relationship between her films and her writing is not without ambiguity. While the artist is clear that her films do not illustrate her essays, nor that her essays account for her films, she nonetheless admits that they share much thematic ground – in part overlapping.

Just such a point of imbrication is what Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle, editors of the e-flux journal, describe in the preface to The Wretched of the Screen (2012), a collection of Steyerl’s essays, as the ‘remarkably potent politics of the image’ contained within her work.

Steyerl’s reading of compressed AVI files, pixelated 72dpi JPEGs and low-bandwidth video streams – the so-called poor images of her landmark 2009 essay ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’ – is exemplary in this regard. No longer the ‘real thing’, the poor image is instead a bastard copy of a long-distant original (eg, a poor-quality pirated DVD or a glitchy, pixelated video live-stream), the product of a postdigital world in which information moves according to the logic of what Steyerl calls ‘swarm circulation’. As an image disperses, it becomes poorer; every rip, edit, upload and share further pushing it towards

a kind of visual abstraction. From this aesthetic observation Steyerl goes on to pinpoint the subversive quality of poor images and the networks that sustain them. Standing against the festishisation of quality and resolution commonplace in ‘audiovisual capitalism’, the poor image represents a ‘lumpen proletarian’ in the class hierarchy of appearances, depicting all that is the forgotten, unwanted or taboo in contemporary culture (from lost masterpieces of experimental and political cinema, to beheadings conducted by Islamic militants).

While the networks through which poor images flow constitute new possibilities for the dissemination of the alternative information – creating what pioneering Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov called a ‘visual bond’ between commensurate publics, a sort of communist visual language able to both entertain and organise the masses – they also contain vast amounts of pornography, trash culture and paranoia. Steyerl’s essay elevates the poor image as a political idea, then qualifies it; concluding that it is as much about ‘defiance and appropriation’ as it is ‘conformism and exploitation’.

The way in which images, as they travel, change in appearance and meaning is also the theme of November (2004), the film that first brought Steyerl to the attention of international audiences.

‘November’ is imagined as an epoch that comes after revolutionary October (the extolled month of the 1917 Bolshevik uprising) and a time during which possibilities narrow, ideologies blur and struggles become almost impossible to articulate with any sort of clarity.

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By way of this allegory, Steyerl introduces the story of Andrea in the vein of Varla, the central character in Russ Meyer’s 1965 sexploiWolf – her friend as a teenager growing up in Bavaria. As an adult, tation romp, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, is exchanged for another in Wolf was forced to leave Germany after being investigated in connec- which Wolf is the hero of an armed struggle. What November proposes tion to the 1993 Weiterstadt prison bombing – the last violent action is that contrary to the idea that this is a comparison between fiction of the leftwing terrorist group the Red Army Faction. In 1998, two and fact – cinematic illusion against true-life story – neither scenario years after joining the women’s army of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party can in fact claim authenticity. For Steyerl, both are visual represen(PKK) and five years after Steyerl last saw her, Wolf was shot and killed tations of given ideological frameworks. That their credibility is following a firefight with the Turkish Army in Eastern Anatolia. called into question equally can be read as a playful critique of the way Though her death was never officially acknowledged by the Turkish ideology constructs its ‘reality’ according to its desires and drives. government (one of many extralegal executions that pass by without November evidences exactly how crucial images have become in this any formal recognition in a conflict defined, like all wars, by its infor- process, showing how they serve as the building blocks for structured mational blind spots, half-truths and propaganda), Wolf, under her illusions that propagate (again, by swarm circulation), sometimes assumed name of Sehît Ronahî, has been immortalised as a martyr uncontrollably and quite independently, despite the basic instability by the PKK, her image transmitted globally via satellite TV, edited of their ideological origin. In this sense, images are conceived not only into emotive YouTube slideshows and printed onto posters paraded semiotically but also concretely – as ‘things’ – an approach that hints during PKK street protests alongside those of the party’s venerated at the materialist tendency running throughout Steyerl’s work. cofounder, Abdullah Öcalan.

In the main she outlines a relatively flat ontological horizon: a Neither a documentary about a lost friend, nor about the polit- digital image is treated like any other object might be. Discourses ical context of Kurdistan, November explores the meaning of an image relating to its immateriality are eschewed in favour of exploring its as it is drawn from one semiotic regime to another. Grainy, sound- physical properties and material capacities. This paradigm of equivaless Super-8 footage from an incomplete feminist martial arts film lence has, in recent years, led Steyerl to develop an increasingly elabSteyerl and Wolf attempted to make as teenagers orate approach to objects of all kinds – not only above and facing page November, 2004 images; a worldview at times nearly animistic in is contrasted with a PKK poster of Wolf as Ronahî. (film stills), DVD, approximately 25 min.

Courtesy the artist One scenario in which she is a man-beating outlaw its conception of the insensate thing.

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‘The Biography of the Object’ is a 1929 essay by Russian construc- somehow be reverse-engineered? The desires, affects, projections, tivist writer Sergei Tretyakov in which he advises abandoning human hopes and dreams congealed in what appear to be dormant biography in favour of studying the lifecycles of mass-produced commodity objects – could this totality of social forces somehow be objects. This is a possibility enacted as a kind of fantasy in a section of brought back to life?

Steyerl’s three-part film In Free Fall (2010). The film’s lead character, a Addressing precisely this possibility is Steyerl’s 40-minute Boeing 707 aeroplane, finds itself – like so many aircraft of age – aban- video lecture Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), one of five films in her recent selective retrospective at the doned as a ‘ghost’ plane in a small desert Steyerl’s practice retains ICA, London. Shot live at the Haus der airport in Mojave, California. By this time Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and commisthe 707 has already undergone multiple a clear message: agency is still identity shifts (from TWA charter service sioned by the 13th Istanbul Biennial possible; one can still act, to Israeli military deployment) – yet its and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, if only to needle and pick at movement still does not cease. Steyerl’s the lecture advances another fantasy reverie sees the plane renovated for the representations in order to expose in which the trajectory of a munitions purpose of being theatrically exploded case retrieved from the battlefield upon the conditions of manipulation, in the closing scenes of the Hollywood which Andrea Wolf perished is reversed exploitation and affect underlying in its flight in order to expose a circular action film Speed (1994). Emphasising the interminable circularity of the material network of relations between major intertheir appearance universe, the aluminium scrap resulting national museums and the arms industry from this cinematic explosion is sold on to China, reprocessed into (for example the support of London’s Royal Academy of Arts by the a thin, laser-readable metal surface and, together with two discs of chairman of defence manufacturer Heckler & Koch – a company that polycarbonate, made into a pirate DVD containing a low-resolution produces handguns, assault rifles, submachine guns and grenade launchers). Recognising her own complicity in this problematic rip of… you guessed it: the movie Speed.

In highlighting this improbable chain of material transforma- system, Steyerl states in the final moments of the lecture that rather tions, In Free Fall asks a very specific question: could this situation than withdraw from such spaces, her ambition is to try to show Is

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the Museum a Battlefield? in as many of them as possible. In doing so you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of the movement of such bullets, their transition from arenas of war to yourself and your boundaries.’ Linear perspective, an enlightenment those of cultural spectacle, can at least be laid bare for people to see exegesis, is countered with freefall: essentially the viewpoint of postand understand. Such acts of revelation are frequent in Steyerl’s work. modernity – an epoch, like ‘November’, marked by the evacuation Guards (2012) is a short film featuring interviews with museum secu- of universal ideals such as truth or reason, conditioned instead by a rity staff from the Art Institute of Chicago (who commissioned the fundamental sense of groundlessness. work), most of whom have either law enforcement or military backFaced with a world lacking the stable ground necessary to base grounds. The film sheds light on these often invisible institutional proper metaphysical claims or foundational political myths, one representatives, tracking them as they move through the institute’s populated by questionable images, institutions and identities, pristine galleries, speaking – even reenacting – harrowing experi- Steyerl’s practice – her example – retains a clear message: agency is ences from their former jobs. Guards pierces the fragile illusion of the still possible; one can still act, if only to needle and pick at representahermetic gallery space, populating its speculative void with bodies tions in order to expose the conditions of manipulation, exploitation otherwise concealed and narratives at odds with the safe privilege of and affect underlying their appearance.

From this perspective it’s possible to see why, in a mood of puckish high culture and its environs. Equally, Steyerl’s 2011 e-flux essay ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’ challenges speculation, one of her frequent interlocutors, Italian Marxist theorist the ‘scientific allure and objectivist attitude’ of linear perspective in and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, has proposed that in few hundred Western art, opposing its ‘universal claim for representation’ with thousand years, if some sentient force from another galaxy were to another perspective: that of the freefalling body. While linear perspec- take interest in ‘the agony of our time on this planet taken hostage by tive presumes a fixed, mathematically flattened, infinite and homo- the dogma of capitalism’, it would be Steyerl’s work that might lend geneous space that expands outwards from a grounded fixed point or a little meaning to the chaos, providing explanation for what Berardi describes as the ‘incredible mixture of techbody/viewer, freefall perspective lacks such November, 2004 (installation view), certitude. As Steyerl writes, ‘The horizon nological refinement and extreme moral DVD, approximately 25 min. quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and Courtesy the artist stupidity’ that defines our age. ar

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In Free Fall, 2010 (still), HD, 32 min.

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Ryan Trecartin The speedy, narcissistic, smartphone-slick hysteria of the LA-based artist’s films seem echoed in his life, but don’t be deceived: the chaos has a system

by Gesine Borcherdt

In art there seems to be a rule that states: the crazier the work, the are fossils of the postmodern era. “Hollywood is not that internicer the artist. John Bock, for example, speaks about his psychedelic esting. It’s everywhere, anyway. But you can do some great shopB-movie massacres with the calmness of someone spreading Nutella ping here, and the parking spaces are bigger than anywhere else!” on his bread at breakfast. Cindy Sherman poses in her city apart- In saying as much, he sums up the undertone of his films. A Family ment for home decoration magazines, yet can appear, in her work, to Finds Entertainment (2004), I-Be Area (2007), Center Jenny (2013) et al resemble an abused doll. And then there’s Mike Kelley, the pope of centre upon the unnerving, blabbering nonsense of a hypernarciscamp, whose films might include any number of crude expressions, sistic personnel somewhere between family craziness and a Facebook but who maintained a polite distance in person and actually wanted nightmare: they feel like the early underground movies of John to write books. Ryan Trecartin displays a similarly unassuming kind- Waters on speed, shot through the digital brain convulsions of an ness as he guides the visitor through his giant Los Angeles studio. avatar and spat out as a hysterical Boschian scene into the middle of And just like Bock, Sherman and Kelley, his work tends towards trans- rudimentary sets from sitcoms, Big Brother houses and star-making sexual Pop costume theatre – the difference amateur talent shows. Trecartin’s art is so fast The teens and tweens in being that Trecartin, born in 1981, appears and smartphone-slick, cyborgian and apocatoday as the most radical representative of lyptic, hypersexualised and exhibitionistic, his films – with whom greedy and broken, that afterwards you feel a generation of artists for whom the Internet Trecartin, wearing a wig and is always in the corner of their eye. compelled to move to the countryside. bra, mingles every now You can see the Webster, Texas-born “As a teenager I wanted to do video artist’s films either online or in gallery instaland then – reflect the standard dancing, like Janet Jackson!” says Trecartin lations into which one sinks as if into cheap hysterical marketing language as he plops down on a plastic garden stool in the courtyard. Beside him sits a laughing furniture. Curators adore him: in 2006 of a generation that erases woman with curls: Lizzie Fitch, up to now Chrissie Iles showed Trecartin at the Whitney the only consistent working partner in his Biennial, in 2013 Massimiliano Gioni gave questions about skin colour, him an entire room at the Venice Biennale. national origin and sexuality – crew, who, on the side, makes sculptures out of cardboard, tape and clothes: these lie His collectors include Julia Stoschek and and thus comes across as around like props in the office area of the François Pinault, and in September the KW studio. Trecartin and Fitch met each other Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, will having completely bought while studying at the Rhode Island School of present his latest large installation, at the in to conformity Design in the early 2000s. “At the beginning same time as other works appear in solo exhibitions in London and Beijing. No question about it: at the age of I knew absolutely nothing about art. Generally, I hardly read anything myself. Everything I know, I know from my friends. I remember somethirty-three, Trecartin has arrived at the summit of the artworld.

For the last four years, he has been living in LA. Formerly located thing when I learn about it through the passion of others. I am interin New York, New Orleans (where his house and studio were devas- ested in how people share things or feelings,” says Trecartin, smiling tated by Hurricane Katrina), Miami and Philadelphia, his studio is – as he talks, you realise that he somehow fits alongside his stuttering now in Burbank, between auto workshops and the spare wooden figures, with their constant outbursts of “I love that!”, ‘Fuck you!” and facades of the neighbouring houses, at the foot of Mulholland Drive “That’s so funny!”

The teens and tweens in his films – with whom Trecartin, wearing – naturally, one thinks, because of its proximity to both Hollywood and the gaping chasms within the American Dream. When it’s put a wig and bra, mingles every now and then – reflect the standard like that, Trecartin giggles and shrugs his shoulders; for him these hysterical marketing language of a generation that erases questions

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Item Falls, 2013

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Center Jenny, 2013

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Center Jenny, 2013

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Junior War, 2013 all images Courtesy the artist; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, Berlin & London

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about skin colour, national origin and sexuality – and thus comes “While watching his films I always think: I have never seen this before across as having completely bought in to conformity. In Center Jenny – Ryan’s pictorial language tells me something about our present time a purple alien-teacher sits in a plywood TV studio set in Trecartin’s that I could have never expressed myself. Apart from this, his films are atelier and explains: “Right before the second Big Bang, we were able simply smart: one must not be deceived by the hysteria that domito print weapons with a 3D printer!” The teacher’s grotesquely over- nates the figures. Ryan takes a close look at the American psyche and styled listeners shout out sentences like, “The further we move away its chasms and confronts us with the mirror. This can be very funny from humanity, sexism becomes like the coolest style!” and address but also unsettling.” the camera frontally as if in a YouTube video or Sasha Grey porno, as So, the same story once again about the dark side of the American if they might lick the lens at any moment. Images and words crack, Dream? Yes; but only insofar as man, in his pursuit of happiness, repeat themselves, are collaged together, brake and accelerate; there has always been driven by the same urges – which, even before that is neither a beginning nor an end; if a hundred years ago Futurism aforesaid pursuit was enshrined in the US Constitution, have someadded up to rightwing macho behaviour, here it leads to digital celeb- times propelled him into the grotesque. This morbid atmosphere rity narcissism. can already be detected in Hieronymus Bosch’s overpopulated depicAs a post-Internet artist – a term that has meandered through crit- tion of hell and Otto Dix’s doomsday parties, and in Kelley, Sherman ical discourse and, subsequently, the art blogs for the last half-decade and Bock’s abject art – which, alongside the camp cinema of John or so – Trecartin is certainly not working through any personal iden- Waters, Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, paved the way for Trecartin’s tity crisis: rather, despite his obtrusive aesthetic, he maintains a surreal chatter. distance from what he films: for a long time his films have been meticFollowing the popularisation of the label ‘post-Internet’, he now ulously elaborate – the chaos has a system and, despite the dialogue also carries an official sign around his neck that categorises him historseeming improvised, reflects an overall concept in which the artist ically. This, paired with the philosophy trend towards ‘speculative writes screenplays with sentences that are recorded up to 25 times. realism’ – a term that first appeared at London’s Goldsmiths in 2007 “But there is always room for everyone to make something of their – serves as an intellectual spam filter, one that shows how Trecartin’s own out of it,” he explains, adding that not generation removes itself from the subjective Today, however, in an age only his friends take part, but also lesserthought constructions of postmodernism.

According to the basic thesis of this philoknown actors like Molly Tarlov from the MTV in which Twitter has sophical worldview, the world also exists series Awkward. replaced the analyst’s couch, without the viewer’s individual perspective.

Nevertheless, these freakshows are also Trecartin’s virtual twisted The scanning perspective of today’s young a part of Trecartin’s own life. He lives a artists, who are more interested in online 15-minute drive from here with seven people media reflection exposes in a house where all the doors are open, in consumer behaviour than in superior utopias how much the camera the living room a huge flatscreen is stuck in and a gender-driven search for identity, has become an ally of one’s front of the fireplace, and next to it tower comes after Jean-François Lyotard’s declaragreen plants and a gigantic cat tree. A series tion of the end of ‘grand narratives’ in postown self-portrayal and modern society (set out in the French philosof unmade beds against the wall smell musty, communicative conditioning opher’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on cats jump over open boxes and computers; in the whole house there are at least 20 monitors. Built-ins made of Knowledge, 1979) – according to him, the overarching metanarratives artificial wood, eBay furniture, colourfully painted walls and dusty that had once been used to explain the world had been succeeded by knickknacks exude a communal apocalyptic mood. Stairs lead to a variety of private stories.

Trecartin’s room, which looks like a nerdy hippy hell. Socks, pens, As it is, Trecartin’s work comes across like a mixture of the TV bags and tissues fly around, a schedule is stuck to the wall that is studio and test laboratory, where everything and nothing are equally colour-coded for writing, thinking and filming; the bookshelf is lined a sensation: everything is worthy of being photographed, even if it’s with vitamins rather than books. Formerly Trecartin tended to film in nothing special. However, when you look at the artist, it seems likely similar houses across various cities, working with a different group of that he’ll subvert the post-Internet label that his work both exemplifriends in each. Now he prefers the studio, where employees take care fies and anticipates. As of recently, there’s a gigantic chicken coop in of the technology and props. However, Trecartin doesn’t act like an art his courtyard, which he has plans to employ in his forthcoming art. It superstar when he says that “galleries should provide us with a crea- seems quite possible that Trecartin is using that to hatch something tive environment!” Even as a schoolboy his anthropological tactile that is once again radical and new, and that will make him the foresense had led him to film friends, though in those days the idea of runner of the next label. ‘Posthuman’ is a term that’s been used before being constantly recorded still felt foreign. Today, however, in an age in the art of recent decades; Trecartin, though, may be about to make in which Twitter has replaced the analyst’s couch, Trecartin’s virtual it new. ar twisted media reflection exposes how much the camera has become Translated from the German by Emily Terényi an ally of one’s own self-portrayal and communicative conditioning.

“Ryan has a completely new way of dealing with images – one that, Ryan Trecartin has a solo show at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, from mid-September and an exhibition at the Ullens Center even early on, reflected the Internet’s aesthetic and its simultaneity for Contemporary Art, Beijing, which opens on 13 September. Trecartin’s of different image and sound levels, and that’s defining for so many Priority Innfield is on show at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, young artists today,” explains Ellen Blumenstein, director of the KW, from 2 October to 21 December who showed Trecartin for the first time in 2007 at ZKM in Karlsruhe.

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The ArtReview Files: Bridget Riley

by Louise Darblay

During the course of a career paintings, shattering the picture spanning more than 50 years, plane into multiple lozenges and Bridget Riley has established intensifying the sensation of herself as a major figure in rhythm and movement. Shapes abstract painting and printseem to advance and recede from making, relentlessly investithe surface, coming back to the gating the optical and emotional study of contrasts present in her possibilities of colours and early black-and-white paintings. shapes. Widely known as an In her more recent work, the icon of Op art, Riley first came very geometrical constructions to prominence in the 1960s – have evolved into more fluid and notably after her participation swaying arabesques defining in The Responsive Eye exhibition larger and uneven planes of at moma in 1965 – creating visusofter colours, reaching another ally disruptive black-and-white level of complexity. paintings that actively engaged Long stuck with the reducthe viewer’s perception, using geometrical patterns that were quickly tive label of Op artist, Riley has established herself as a major modern taken over by the fashion and design industries throughout the painter in line with a tradition that reaches back to Seurat’s pointillism and Matisse’s cutouts. Supported by her extensive body of ‘Swinging Sixties’.

Riley represented Britain at the 1968 Venice Biennale, at which writing, Riley’s art and continuous research has been – and still is – a she received the International Prize for Painting. Despite this early major influence for generations of artists, reaching beyond the realm fame and popularity, the artist refused to wallow in the formal inno- of painting. To mark its own 65th anniversary, ArtReview delved into vations of Op art, and pursued her experimentation by moving on its archives to retrace her career, reprinting a selection of reviews to colour in vertical stripe paintings. Her interest in the diffusion and interviews published in the magazine between 1962 – the year of light through colour resulted in variations of shapes and palettes of her first solo show – and 2010. ArtReview’s app, available through producing the effect of warmth and vibration. Her art became one of the iTunes store, features an additional commentary by contempopure visual sensation, with colour and shape as ‘ultimate identities’ rary artists who are inspired by her work. interacting on the canvas.

During the 1980s, Riley’s work took another Bridget Riley, The Stripe Paintings, 1961–2014 is on show at David Zwirner, London, 13 June – 25 July turn when she introduced the diagonal line in her Arts Review, vol 23, no 15, 31 July 1971, cover

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Michael Shepherd, ‘Bridget Riley’, Arts Review, vol 14, no 8, 5–19 May 1962, p 19

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Bettina Wadia, ‘Bridget Riley’, Arts Review, vol 15, no 18, 21 September 1963, p 12

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Peter Fuller, ‘Bridget Riley’, Arts Review, vol 23, no 15, 31 July 1971, p 459

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Pierre Rouve, ‘Bridget Riley Drawings’, Arts Review, vol 24, no 12, 17 June 1972, p 356

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Michael Newman, ‘Bridget Riley: Works 1959–78’, Arts Review, vol 30, no 19, 29 September 1978, p 526

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*

Bridget Riley interviewed by Andrew Smith, Arts Review, vol 33, no 11, 5 June 1981, p 228 *Ooops! Looks like something fell off the page here... [2014 eds to 1981 ed]

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Larry Berryman, ‘Bridget Riley’, Arts Review, vol 39, no 13, 3 July 1987, p 455

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Richard Cork, ‘Moving with the Times’, ArtReview, July 2003, pp 58–61

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Disobey!

When protest objects are exhibited in one of the world’s grandest museums, how does it change the objects?

And how does it change the museum?

by Hettie Judah

as they design and construct objects to use in the field of protest.

Debate surrounding political art in the last few years has yielded Whether we are contemplating modified concrete pipes for a number of imperatives – concerned with aspects ranging locking protesters onto barricades, riot shields painted as book from solidarity, to sites of display, to relationships with the art covers or Syrian graffiti stencils, by definition these are politiindustry – aimed, it would seem, at weeding out hipsterish politcally motivated ‘works’ created with strong consequences in ical dilettantes looking for an easy veneer of real-world credibility. Tania Bruguera has called for political art that ‘works on mind, for the widest possible audience and often with the knowlthe consequences of its existence’ rather than simply regurgitating edge that the maker(s) would be put in harm’s way as a result of their images and acts already in the public domain. Thomas Hirschhorn deployment. What such objects are emphatically not intended as has written about working for a ‘non-exclusive public’ and the differ- are units of quiet, static display, offered for isolated contemplation. ence between ‘making political art’ (bad) and ‘making art politi- They may succeed in being impeccably political creations, but few cally’ (good). Art historian and critic Barbara Rose has railed in The are conceived as art or even design objects. When such pieces are Brooklyn Rail against ‘superficial agitprop’ and made strong distinc- exhibited in one of the world’s grandest museums of art and design tions between ‘facile sloganeering’ and the work of artists profoundly – as they will be in Disobedient Objects at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum – how does this change the invested in their political subject matter. objects, and indeed, how does it change Such nice distinctions are unlikely to Coral Stoakes, I Wish My Boyfriend Was As Dirty As Your Policies, 2011.

Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London trouble members of activist movements the museum?

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Carrie Reichardt and the Treatment Rooms Collective, Tiki Love Truck (detail), 2007, mobile mausoleum and shrine.

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top Inflatable cobblestone, action of Eclectic Electric Collective in cooperation with Enmedio collective during the General Strike in Barcelona, 2012.

Photo: © Oriana Eliçabe/Enmedio.info

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centre You Don’t Even Represent Us / You Cannot Even Imagine Us, banner, St Petersburg, December 2011.

Courtesy Pavel Arsenev

bottom Dolls of the Zapatista Revolution, the Zapatista, Mexico.

Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Two years ago, Catherine Flood, the V&A’s curator of posters and torture during the military dictatorship of 1973–90 – and anti-Putin graphics, was struck by how subversive material had been embraced protest banners. by museums via collections of political posters, but seemed unrepOne revelation is how physical objects of protest continue to be resented in other departments. Further thoughts about what the relevant in an era in which so much activism seems to take place invissubversive, political activist collections of other departments might ibly online. The two modes have evolved in concert, with the quickhave looked like eventually led to collaboration with activist art click image culture of Instagram and Facebook supercharging the historian Gavin Grindon. Disobedient Objects is the result, an exhibi- potency of well-orchestrated images of protest, and Twitter (which tion intended to represent ‘design from below’; objects that operate was purportedly inspired by txtMob, an activist media project by the outside of the commercial process, and Institute for Applied Autonomy to connect Not only the subject matter a system of making that is often poor demonstrators launched during the 2004 in means but rich in ends. From simple Republican National Convention) now but the curatorial process behind button badges to giant puppets, the wideproviding a pithy training ground for Disobedient Objects reflects ranging display gathers items from interattention-grabbing placard slogans. an episode of broad institutional national protest movements over the last The anticonsumerist (and often antiau35 years and aims to show them in their thorial) ethos behind many protest and soul-searching by the V&A, own terms rather than as gallery pieces or activist objects gives rise to a creative ideal of which among other things has socio-political ephemera. infinite reproducibility and approprialed to an updating of the tion – designs that can be recreated by “These objects don’t need a museum to others within or beyond a group using legitimate what they’re doing or how they museum’s nineteenth-century readily available materials, and ideas that work,” Flood explains. “But that doesn’t object-categorisation structure can be picked up for use in multiple sites mean that they don’t gain something from being here; they’re afforded a different form of contemplation and multiple scenarios. (One such idea was the ‘Book Bloc’ – groups by being put into a wider history. Yes, there’s a strong idea that these carrying protest shields painted to resemble book covers as they pushed objects should only exist in the moment of their use, and don’t have through police lines; originating in 2010 at a student demonstration in any value outside of that, but if they’re not collected, that creates a gap Rome, these were rapidly adopted by groups in the UK, US, Spain and – it means that only one story is ever told.”

Canada). While one associates the aesthetics of such communitarian Not only the subject matter but the curatorial process behind skill-sharing with the radical independent presses of the 1960s and Disobedient Objects reflects an episode of broad institutional soul- 70s, here again the superconnectedness of post-Internet culture has searching by the V&A, which among other things has led to an played a key role in the rapid dissemination of instructions and ideas. updating of the museum’s nineteenth-century object-categoriFormally acquired skill also plays a role – craftivist Carrie Reichardt sation structure (to include, for example, contemporary architec- uses the superficial ‘polite’ beauty of ceramics or the dynamism of her ture, digital and product design) and a new rapid-response strategy anti-death-penalty protest vehicle the Tiki Love Truck (2007) to attract to collecting that has led to the acquisition of Katy Perry-branded attention. Young architects have become involved in the proliferfalse eyelashes and Primark jeans (both as commentaries on dubious ating protest-camp culture of recent years in sites from Kiev to Tahrir Square to Gezi Park and the global Occupy movements. labour practices).

To build up the untold story from unarchived objects, not repreDuring a roundtable discussion transcribed at the back of the sented in the museum’s collection, Flood and Grindon had to work exhibition catalogue, the question arises of what ‘obedient’ objects directly with the political social movemight be. Suggestions range from active The anticonsumerist (and often ments that made and used them, making tools of oppression, to quiescent decorative art, to fine art that participates in the cooperative decisions about which objects antiauthorial) ethos behind market system. Activist scholar T.V. Reed should be displayed, and how. Many of the many protest and activist objects notes the continuing relevance of Walter exhibits are still partway through their gives rise to a creative ideal Benjamin’s line ‘When politics becomes working life – pulsating with unfinished aestheticized, art must become politibusiness rather than stuck dead and lepiof infinite reproducibility dopterised in a glass museum case – and cized’ and returns to the question of site vs and appropriation will return to active duty after the show. intent, noting, ‘“Art” objects and protest “One of the things we wanted to acknowledge was that the signs may not be that far apart. Art objects that were once aimed at experts in this area weren’t curators or academics but the people the heart of capitalism now adorn the walls of multinational corpowho are making these objects,” explains Grindon. “They often don’t rations… There is no resolution to this situation, but only an ongoing have a great deal of representation in the artworld or academia, so dialectic.’ Whatever potency the disobedient objects have outside of the design of the exhibition was worked out in a series of workshops, their functional context, then, seems in danger of inevitable diminuwith these people getting their say on what the show should look tion as the objects become ‘museumised’ – that their territory within like, what its message should be and how it should be structured. the museum collection is confined to the poster department is perhaps So there was a publicness to the curating of it.” The workshops took something to be thankful for. ar place in New York and London, but the scope of the exhibition is much wider, taking in Chilean arpilleras – hand-sewn textile pictures Disobedient Objects is on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 26 July to 1 February documenting the harsh economic conditions, disappearances and

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Brazil Being local, becoming global Interview by Oliver Basciano

Joaquín Torres García, América Invertida (Inverted America), 1943.

Courtesy the estate of Joaquín Torres García

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ArtReview

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Brazil’s art history stretches back a long way, and from the era of western colonisation to the present there has been cultural exchange with Europe and North America. In the modern era, however, this dialogue has been dominated by the towering figures of Brazil’s mid-twentiethcentury avant-garde – the likes of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark – with little else besides the legacy of Modernism making its way into the global arena. Yet in conjunction with the country’s recent economic boom, the international art market has begun to sit up and pay attention: Brazilian galleries have multiplied, institutional attention has intensified and a whole generation of younger artists, along with overlooked figures from a previous generation, has come to wider attention and secured representation, critical coverage and collectors from abroad. The art scene, it would appear, is booming. But where does this leave the art and those who make it? What happens when an art object shifts from its local context into a global one? What nuances are lost, what new connections are forged? ArtReview puts these questions to a panel of knowledgeable insiders. Luciana Brito is the owner of the eponymous São Paulo-based gallery, which represents both Brazilian and Brazil-based artists – including Rochelle Costi, Héctor Zamora and the estates of Geraldo de Barros and Waldemar Cordeiro – and international names like Alex Katz and

Leandro Erlich. Pablo León de la Barra is the UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Pablo Lafuente is cocurator, alongside a curatorial team lead by Charles Esche, of the 31st Bienal de São Paulo, which opens in September. The discussion is moderated by Oliver Basciano, managing editor of ArtReview.

OLIVER BASCIANO Pablo Lafuente and Pablo León de la Barra, you are both outsiders to Brazil – albeit highly informed ones. At what point did Brazil’s art scene make an impact on you?

PABLO LEÓN DE LA BARRA Brazil has always occupied an important place in my mental map.

I’ve been travelling there once a year since 2001 and I’ve seen the economic transition happening, specifically since the arrival of Lula as president [in 2003]. So I’ve also been witness to the concurrent transition in the artworld.

As a person of Mexican origin, I’m going to say the ‘discovery’ of Brazil totally changed my world map. In Mexico we always had, as a point of artistic reference, New York, and then perhaps later a strong relationship with Madrid.

Suddenly discovering that there was another city, São Paulo, down south, that had all these above, from left Pablo León de la Barra, Oliver Basciano, Luciana Brito, Pablo Lafuente.

Courtesy Latitude: Platform for Brazilian Art Galleries Abroad, São Paulo

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buildings, that had this economy, that was not New York but that could be a New York of the south and that had its own references, its own very strong art history and art traditions; that totally changed my map of the world. I could say that something similar to Joaquín Torres García’s América Invertida [Inverted America, 1943] happened to me. My references were turned upside down and I started investigating the south, not only Brazil, but expanding my research and my work to latitudes in art that were not oriented towards the European–North American axis.

PABLO LAFUENTE I think something similar happened to me too, because if you are in Brazil for long enough – I’ve been living there since August 2013 – then New York, London or any of these supposed art centres become tiny, shortsighted, even arrogant. Suddenly the things that are supposed to be important when you are living or working in those cities seem not so significant any more.

OB Luciana, Brazil is your native country, and although it has a much-respected art history – with its modernist avant-garde in the mid-twentieth century and the importance of the Bienal, the second oldest biennial after Venice – do you think you can identify a point when a wider international market, and the attention this brings, for Brazilian art started to become apparent?

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LUCIANA BRITO I opened my gallery with only four artists in 1997. During this period it was very difficult to have a space to sell contemporary art in Brazil. Indeed, I think it still is very difficult to have this job in Brazil. In 1998, however, the gallery, alongside a couple of others, started showing at international art fairs – there were about five of us at ARCO Madrid, for example – and I think it was that that was the turning point in the internationalisation of Brazil’s art scene. The same year the 24th Bienal de São Paulo was staged, which was cocurated by Adriano Pedrosa, who is a key figure perhaps in the country’s recent art history and its internalisation.

PL I think Brazil is a country that has been intensely focused on telling its own history.

There have been a number of brilliant sociology, philosophy and cultural history authors throughout the twentieth century who have attempted to narrate the story of Brazil, and to articulate it through the notion of diversity: Brazil as a country that gathers up different elements, shakes them up, consumes them, even vomits them out and puts them together again.

That culture, however, does not exist in art with the same scope. At the Pinacoteca in São Paulo, the director, Ivo Mesquita, has organised a new display of the collection that attempts to tell the history of Brazilian art or of Brazil through art, and one of the revealing things about it, perhaps the thing that comes through immediately, is that at least in its beginning it’s not a history told by Brazilians. It’s a history told by recent immigrants. The production of this culture starts with French artists arriving, painting and others following. National narratives subsequently have had ups and downs, with the dictatorship, social inequality and economic crisis undermining the ability to articulate in a propositional manner. Around the period Luciana set up her gallery – around the new millennium – there was the beginning of a recuperation, the emergence of a certain pride and a new narrative of national construction, accompanied by a shift in the economy. That moment was remarkable, a moment in which the cultural and artistic sector became energised, at least in some areas.

OB So can we define Brazilian art, or is it dangerous to do so – is that turning the ‘local’ into a sort of brand for export?

LB I think it’s a little bit dangerous to try to fix Brazilian art with a label, because I think Brazil, in its origin, is a very mixed country, both culturally and socially speaking. Of course Brazilian artists find their poetics and their themes from Brazil, but from the beginning Brazil had been globalised. Our population

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originates from a mix of cultures, and of course Brazilian artists come from this too, and their work is a product of this mix.

PL When we started to work on the 31st Bienal we didn’t want to think of art in terms of passports or national borders; however, when you’re invited to curate the Bienal de São Paulo, you have to first start thinking about where it takes place. What is São Paulo in relation to what surrounds it? Rio de Janeiro is very close, and there’s an intense exchange mixed up with cultural rivalry. But there are many other cities within Brazil, like Belém, Salvador or Recife, which have their own particular cultural histories and contemporary scenes, and whose exchange with São Paulo is fragmentary and often unequal. Then there are cities outside of Brazil such as Lima and Buenos Aires, which are relatively close, and not necessarily in dialogue.

Part of our concern was how to deal with that, and even to facilitate an exchange that doesn’t take place according to its potential.

For better or worse, though, art fairs have historically been one of the key arenas in which Brazilian art has come to the attention of a wider, international audience PLdLB I agree we’re in a postpassport era, but still, I think, it’s sometimes helpful to identify certain specificities about Brazil that could be useful in changing, not only art, but also how society understands itself. Pablo says that intracontinental exchange is zero, but Latin American countries not only share a similar colonial history and similar languages, they also have similar recent histories: quick periods of economic growth, especially in the postwar era from the 1940s though to the 50s, followed by repressive governments and moments of economic crisis. Now in the 2000s these countries have either seen a turn towards new left policies, new socialism and new populisms or a turn towards a new neoliberalism and a new capitalism and relationships through free trade with the United States and Europe. Basically you have, in very broad terms, two Latin Americas.

So although this new economic boom has led to an art economy where galleries are selling and artists can live off their work on a scale that hasn’t been seen before, artists are also critical about what is happening, and there’s a strong awareness that things could change again at any moment.

OB One obstacle to the internationalisation – or wider communication – of Brazilian art and its nuances is the language barrier. While there’s undoubtedly an academic history to Brazilian art criticism, historically, popular criticism has been thin on the ground, and what there is tends to be in Portuguese. Outsiders therefore get to see the art but are cut off from the conversation that encircles it.

PL There has been some fantastic art theory and criticism published during the last 80 years, but largely this has not been translated into English, as far as I know. The Anglo-Saxon and wider European artworld, the context where I’ve worked for the last 15 years, seems uninterested in it until it impinges on their activities.

This material should be translated to allow for a more nuanced view of Brazilian art. Work also needs to be done domestically, though: I feel there is a need for more critical discourse in the country, for more writing platforms. There doesn’t seem to be enough critical writing around the art being made today, and about how the art system functions.

PLdLB What gets lost in the translation towards the global arena? What doesn’t translate or what specificities must be sacrificed in order to make what’s happening in Brazilian art understandable to a wider public? I think this is a key problem. A case in point is perhaps the work of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. Outside Brazil the work that is known is their constructivist period, which is also the work that gets the higher prices on the markets. Their whole contribution to art, however, was about the process of making; it was about the lived experience, and not just the finished artwork. An extreme consequence of not understanding that happened at Art Basel in 2013, where there was one of Lygia Clark’s works from the Bichos series, a work which she had not actually made herself, and that had been recently fabricated from a found maquette. It’s crazy to do that.

LB For better or worse, though, art fairs have historically been one of the key arenas in which Brazilian art has come to the attention of a wider, international audience. A gateway for Latin American artists to the rest of the world. For example at ARCO Madrid [in 2014] there were 12 Brazilian galleries taking part, many of them presenting younger artists.

It was the first big art fair to which Brazilian galleries were welcomed. Spain is possibly a key country for the European market – despite not sharing a language, we have, to some extent, the strongest cultural links here, and I think the discussion programme that surrounds the fair is very important for Brazilian artists and galleries to contextualise the work for international curators or institutions.

ArtReview

22/05/2014 17:57

OB Is there a downside to the economic boom?

PLdLB For me, there was a great frustration when the economic boom happened in Brazil, and I found myself nostalgic for something that was starting to be lost as the country grew financially stronger. A way of doing things that was being forgotten in the haste to accelerate economic growth. It seemed that everything had turned to this ‘mega-capitalism’, where it was only about the purchasing power of the middle classes and having access to those commodities that they hadn’t had previously.

PL Maybe the economic boom is creating activity for some artists, curators, gallerists… and these are benefiting, but many are not.

Rental prices in São Paulo and Rio are extremely high. I don’t have data to prove it, but often it feels as if São Paulo is more expensive to live in than London. The idea, then, of launching a nonprofit space is hard, and this way the freedom to work collaboratively, or to develop a collaborative practice, is being eroded. There are, however, interesting initiatives in occupation, where political and cultural activity are being addressed together. There is also very rich cultural activity developed in the periphery, with little or no contact to the art ‘centre’.

PLdLB The recent widespread street protests might not be in relation to art specifically, but they are cause for hope. In June 2013, as thousands of people came onto the streets of multiple cities in protest of the route the country was travelling down, I realised that maybe not all of Brazil’s radical spirit had been lost and

There was a great frustration when the economic boom happened in Brazil, and I found myself nostalgic for something that was starting to be lost as the country grew financially stronger that there is still a kind of resistance happening in Brazil. It a resistance to the kind of fast-paced macro-intensive capitalism of football games and major sporting events like the Olympics.

Let’s call it a kind of microrevolution.

PL It is as if an unknown social body had emerged, one that is refusing to say yes to

political and economic developments that are not good for them or for the whole of society.

This goes from large to small scale. For example, recently a group of teenagers occupied a cultural centre in the east of the city, in the periphery.

They were protesting the opening times of the centre, and the type of cultural activity programmed there. They wanted it to have longer opening hours, and to programme content that it didn’t include. This makes me optimistic about Brazil: you have teenagers occupying a cultural centre and saying, ‘That is not the way this should work, it should work this other way if it is meant to be a cultural centre for the community.’ This is happening all over: people are going out in the streets to demonstrate, even though the police are very often responding with extreme aggression.

Society at large is not conformist, it’s not depressed, it’s not pessimistic. And that is both an inspiration and motivation… ar This conversation is an edited transcript of a discussion organised by ArtReview, in conjunction with Latitude: Platform for Brazilian Art Galleries Abroad, at ARCO Madrid in February The 31st Bienal de São Paulo runs from 2 September to 7 December.

Rochelle Costi, O Tempo Todo, 2013 (installation view).

Courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo

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Art Reviewed

Life is short, Enjoy life while you can Dogpapillon, 26 yrs, Tokyo 143

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Alms for the Birds Cabinet Gallery, London 21 March – 26 April “Write down a desire,” comic book writer Grant Morrison advised in his wildly engaging talk at the 2000 DisinfoCon, held in New York. “Take out the vowels [and the] repeated consonants…

Turn that thing into a little image… Keep reducing it down until it looks magical.” Coming up on drugs, speaking to a crowd of conspiracy theory devotees, Morrison describes a simple entryway into magic, trying to revive the sigil practices of people like artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare, a spell of sorts meant to focus a wish into something realisable. “This shit works!” I tried it once. It didn’t work, but it says a lot about the self-fulfilling determination of magical adherents: if you’re looking for something hard enough, you’ll find it in some form. An undecipherable glyph of jumbled letters – an ‘e’, an ‘i’, a backwards ‘c’ and ‘k’ – painted in faded reds and blacks adorns the stained cloth banner of Elijah Burgher’s Mictlantecuhtli’s Grin (2013), which presides over Alms for the Birds, an eight-artist group show curated by Turner Prize-nominee James

Richards. This compact but pleasurably elusive exhibition is filled with remnants, tokens and traces that, like Burgher’s sigil, leave us to imagine the desires and strange rituals that led these artists here.

What does seem evident is that those rituals were fetishistic, sex-fuelled affairs.

Lining one wall is Maracaibo (1991), an edition of prints by General Idea reproducing 20 pages from a friend’s private photo album. They feature dozens and dozens of men, in various states of undress and arousal on the same bed; some are relaxed or coy, a few are defiant, arms crossed and stern-faced to the bulb’s flash.

Scattered on the floor is the work that gives the show its name, Adrian Hermanides’s Alms for the Birds (2009), itself referring to the Tibetan Buddhist ‘sky burial’ practice where a body is left outdoors for the elements and beasts to make of it what they will. Hermanides’s ‘burial’ is a collection of items found in a Berlin apartment, and from those remains we can struggle to piece together a personality: a felt uniform,

a leather mattress, some cameras, photographic magazines and lots of images of apparently homemade erotica. Hanging from the ceiling around this constellation of objects are Tony Conrad’s two Untitled works (both 2014): thick glass rectangular panels, each with a small hole drilled through them. Blocking the viewer from approaching some items and framing the rest of the small room, these begin to feel like windows into some sort of peepshow and suggest, as we pick at the remains of the German amateur pornographer and Maracaibo’s hidden photographer, that we are the birds that are being fed.

Haunted by these elusive, absent characters, Alms… holds up a set of vessels in which we can find and project a series of narratives and identities. Richards sets up a skilful balance of denial and intimate disclosure that poses our act of projection itself as a form of practical, banal and immediate magic: as Morrison suggests, magic can be found in anything, if we want it to be there. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Alms for the Birds, 2014 (installation view).

Courtesy the artists and Cabinet Gallery, London

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How to Work Together: Ella Kruglyanskaya Studio Voltaire, London 11 April – 8 June There’s nothing coy or reticent about the cartoonish but expressive modern young women depicted singly or in pairs in Ella Kruglyanskaya’s exhibition, which includes big colourful paintings, a wall work, two large cutouts – installed above the entrance to the building – and accompanying preparatory drawings. Whether up scaffolding with paint rollers in hand (Wall Painting, all works 2014), vigorously conducting an unseen orchestra (The Conductor), building a brick wall (Bricklayers), performing a song and dance while dressed as housemaids (Singing Maids), straining to zip a friend into a too-tight dress (Zip It) or sashaying down the street (Fruit Envy, Gatherers), these are ladies energetically getting on with life. At the same time, with the exception of the jeans-clad bricklayers, these women appear not to have compromised their sense of dress or expression of their sexuality for the sake of practicality. All normal-size women with curves, they’re dressed in the type of smart skirts or dresses, coloured tights and

heels more appropriate for sitting at a desk than stretching up on a scaffold.

The Latvian-born, New York-based Kruglyanskaya’s exhibition is one of three separate commissions resulting from a collaborative three-year project of shows and events called How to Work Together, initiated by established not-for-profit London spaces Studio Voltaire, Chisenhale Gallery and the Showroom. The exhibitions at each space are autonomous, with the collaboration taking the form of a general sharing of knowledge, research, ideas and promotion of the exhibitions and related events. The ‘working together’ theme is also responded to individually by each of the artists; Céline Condorelli at Chisenhale and Gerry Bibby at the Showroom being the other two exhibitions in this initial programme.

It’s too early to know how successful the project as a whole will be, but in terms of the working relationships between the women in Kruglyanskaya’s commission, the artist has introduced as much ambiguity

as exuberance, ably communicated through the flourishes of her economical but precise marks. In the mural-style Wall Painting, for example, two women are shown painting the alcove of the gallery’s back wall: the woman on the left is painting it mustard, whereas the woman on the right is painting it pink.

They may be working together on the task, but they’ve obviously got different ideas.

The two women building the brick wall: is the flushed, open-mouthed expression on the face of one and the defiant, almost aggressive posture of the other an indication of a serious disagreement? And the housemaids: is the dust being nonchalantly tipped from the dustpan of one onto the leg of the other an accident or deliberate? Either way, it’s this injection of personality, along with the exaggerated shadows that the artist paints around her figures, as if spotlit from the front, that gives these paintings not only a feeling of depth but of emotional high drama.

Helen Sumpter

Wall Painting, 2014, acrylic on wall. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York

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Valie eXPORT & Friedl Kubelka Richard Saltoun, London 10 April – 23 May In the spring of 1972 Friedl Kubelka, then a recent graduate of the Graphic Instruction and Research Institute in Vienna and a tyro fashion photographer with a taste for knowing, lush romanticism, began to photograph herself daily and arrange the square portraits in calendrical grids. At first the artist fills each frame with her Jean Seberg crop, her mock-demure gaze and the odd blurredly abstracted body part. But the Jahresportrait series (1972–) swiftly took on both a conceptual diligence – she kept the exercise up for a year and has since repeated it at five-year intervals – and a remarkable variety of compositional risks, emotional currents, degrees of confessional unmasking. In the examples from 1997 on show at Richard Saltoun, the middleaged artist appears gurning at her camera, slumped naked on the sofa, tightly framed in intimate exchange with her daughter and husband. You could easily get the sense from

these black-and-white matrices that hers is an art of frank if coolly serialised narcissism.

Not quite. For a start, the exhibition pairs Kubelka with her Austrian contemporary Valie eXPORT: an artist, at least avowedly, of a more incendiary sort. (Her Touch Cinema of 1968, for which passersby were invited to touch her breasts through a Styrofoam box, is a brazen exemplar of that era’s bodily provocations.) The present show is a sequel to the gallery’s recent exhibition of Viennese Actionism; both women featured in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MOCa, la, in 2007. For sure, the combination works here to invoke the Viennese milieu that both artists were part of, recalling almost solely through photography (and a couple of Kubelka’s films) the centrality of female artists’ bodies to their feminist practice at the time. eXPORT’s Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (1969), in which the artist is photographed in crotchless trousers,

wildly coiffured and clutching a machine-gun, sits instructively alongside Kubelka’s early-1970s Pin-Ups, where seminaked before a mirror she wields her SlR like a weapon, or a mask.

But the impression of seamless or at least fellow-travelling similarity is also a little misleading. Because Kubelka’s, if not exactly as self-involved as the Jahresportrait series might seem at first blush, is surely the more equivocal and even melancholy body of work. Not least, perhaps even more so, at the moments when she adopts apparently brash modes such as the soft-porn pin-up. The colour self-portraits she took in Parisian hotel rooms in 1973–4 are among her best works. The seminude artist, face obscured by the camera, regards herself in the mirror-tiled ceiling above the bed, invokes a good deal of photographic history (Rodchenko, Bellmer, Man Ray) then checks out alone with her secret intact. Brian Dillon

Valie eXPORT, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, 1969, poster, silk-screen print, 69.5 × 49.5 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

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Peter Doig Early Works Michael Werner, London 20 March – 31 May An exhibition titled Early Works suggests that we should view the work on show not simply in terms of what’s in front of us, but rather in terms of the later works that are not there.

In Doig’s case the ones that he painted immediately after the period covered by this show (the mid-to-late 1980s) – among them White Canoe (1991), which sold at auction for $11.7 million in 2007 and The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991), which went for $12 million last year – and led to him being nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994 and international acclaim in the years that followed. So, as we pass through this collection of around 40 drawings and paintings, we’re supposed to look for clues and hints of the later brilliance and construct a narrative or timeline that leads to its blossoming (which, here, comes in the form of At The Edge of Town (1986–8), a painting showing a figure emerging onto the kind of semiabstracted landscape for which Doig is best known).

The majority of the works on show were made during the period in which Doig was in London (although frequently travelling to New York), studying at Central St Martins.

And there are a fair few student concerns in evidence, among them the importance of fast food (most of the scenes are decidedly urban) – that of the Chinese, Burger King and kebabshop provide the subject matter for a number of works – sex – among these, ink drawings of strippers, Chez Paree 3 (1986) and cunnilingus, M. Courbet (1984) – and personal grooming – Uneasy (1984) is a small, comic drawing offering profile and bird’s-eye analysis of the artist’s worrying hair loss.

At the same time the works offer a wide spray of artistic concerns with nods to Basquiat, Pollock, Haring, Courbet, Cézanne, a bit of German Junge Wilde painting as well as classical painting and sculpture – a bird’s-eye view of art history as it spreads near and far, on either side of the Atlantic

and at opposite ends of time. The large painting Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom (The Sublime) (1982), for example, offers an awkward bird’s-eye view of Manhattan featuring a floating white car almost collaged on top of the spire of the Chrysler Building, the sky rendered in a manner evoking Pollock, the city in a manner loosely reminiscent of Haring. And while the whole, like many of the paintings on show here, feels a little overblown (perhaps even indecisive), there’s something quite liberating – even fun – in the excited range of references on show. Indeed, many of the works look like the 1980s – brightly coloured, with flying cars and a fetish for dressing up. Not the pressures of high prices and the art market, but the influences of everything that’s going on around the artist in art and in life. It’s not Peter Doig at his best, but perhaps it’s precisely because this is not the Doig we know – reminding us that artists are not fixed in place or style – that makes this show so entertaining. Mark Rappolt

Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom (The Sublime), 1982, oil on canvas, 180 × 150 cm.

Image: © the artist. Photo: © Thomas Mueller.

Courtesy Michael Werner, New York & London

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Daphne Wright A Small Thing to Ask Frith Street Gallery, London 13 March – 25 April In A Small Thing to Ask, Daphne Wright’s eerily dispossessed sculptures and enervated films represent an elegant but strangely becalmed body of work. Her pieces are melancholic and clinical, fetishising chloroformed blankness and faintly suffused with the air of the ghost story.

In the last decade, she’s produced a creepy abattoir of sculptures in which dead animals are cast in marble dust, making their flesh full-moon white and, in its own hushed and private way, turning their deaths into perversely magical occurrences. (Examine the sterile agony of Stallion, 2009, with its equine subject lying supine, limbs gone jagged and frozen in shock.)

There’s nothing so startling, so contorted and uncanny, in this show, because Wright has become a peculiarly diffuse sort of artist. She seems to wish for her pieces to be inscrutable and yet deeply moving, to play in the weird twilight of the unheimlich and suggest a certain erudite disenchantment. What logic there is binding these pieces together feels nebulous, a thread that vanishes and reappears: the point is, perhaps, that language has obfuscating depths or that repetition is sinister or that children still know what loneliness is.

Those animal ghosts continue to weave through her work: the two boys slumped in Kitchen Table (2014) seem to come from the same smooth mausoleum of chilly and vaguely alien figures. They are lifesize casts of two of the artist’s sons who appear again, a little more alive, alongside a third in a set of elliptical video pieces, their faces painted, playing a trio of glum tiger cubs.

These films try lazily to break your heart.

The boys mumble some riddles in an atmosphere of flagrantly simulated gloom that has no thoughtful undertow, and the whole exudes the low-grade pathos you’d find in a faux-naif painting of a wounded bird. Lurking beneath them in the gallery’s basement like a repressed memory is I Know What It’s Like (2012), a video of a fractured monologue on maternal cruelty read in winter half-light by an old woman.

Her words slowly dissolve, syllables drift, until speech becomes a spooky breeze of shallow breaths. As a transcription of dementia and its dark effects – words and memory decaying together – or a retreat into infant babble, the film feels too choreographed to catch the erratic textures those subjects ask for and too imperious to trouble the mind. (The actress has the regal,

disconcerting presence of a hungry Sphinx.)

The unsettling potential of these films, their investigation of language in all its subterranean strangeness, rabbit holes of secret meaning and disorientating echoes, aches to be explored.

Clay Heads (2014) seems to come from a wholly mute and deeper recess of disquiet.

Wright obsessively remakes the same object 11 times – with faces that are variously murky, frightened, expressionless – in purposefully crude forms that mimic the cryptic malevolence of art by a traumatised child. There’s something thrilling and aggressive in these pieces because they find Wright disavowing her icy thoughtfulness and insistence on the ‘lifelike’. Even if this attempt to suddenly appear spiky and ‘outsider’ish (whatever that peculiar classification means) is just a kind of thought game, an equally precise undertaking that carefully reconstructs the manic, unschooled energies of childhood to make something silent and still, Wright is trying to inhabit that time’s sense of vivid terrors and perceptual unsteadiness. Nothing else among Wright’s new works has such ghoulish resonance. Perhaps it’s the inside of the head, not the prone flesh that surrounds it, which she needs to examine now. Charlie Fox

Kitchen Table, 2014, oil cloth, Jesmonite, paint, dimensions variable.

Photo: Andy Stagg. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

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av Festival 14: Extraction Various venues, Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Sunderland 1–31 March In 2002, the price of indium, the heavy metal leached from slag and the dust of zinc production, hovered around $94 per kilogram. Today it’ll set one back up to $740. The reason for this remarkable upshot in the element’s international trading price stems from its use in the production of LCd screens. LCd screens that adorn flatscreen televisions like the one Hito Steyerl menaces with a hammer and chisel in her 28-second looped video Strike (2010).

The connection between raw material and its consumption by the immaterial systems of global capitalism is the main theme running through Metal, a group show of five artists at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, which forms part of the AV Festival, a biennial programme of art, film and music in the northeast of England, now in its sixth iteration.

It is a subject the curators are happy to plot transparently through the selected works. So while a video like Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s An Italian Film (Africa Addio) (2012), in which a Yorkshire foundry reenacts the nineteenthcentury colonial-era melting and recasting of looted Congolese copper treasures, is perhaps an obvious one to include, it nonetheless keeps the curators’ narrative ticking over without, for better or worse, too many tangents for the viewer to get lost among. The viewer can happily follow this line of thought through Anja Kirschner & David Panos’s film collage Ultimate Substance (2012), in which scenes of slaves

(supposedly from Greek antiquity) smashing rocks intermingle with images of furnaces and antique coins; and on to the four scratched and scuffed half-metre copper cubes huddled in the corner of the gallery. These are examples from Walead Beshty’s 20-Inch Copper series (2009), in which the artist sends the works, without packaging, through FedEx to any gallery that wishes to show them. The surface damage, alongside the courier labels, is a souvenir of the sculpture’s time in transit and a deceptively simple, but brilliantly effective, testament to globalisation and networked labour.

Partnering Metal is a second thematic show, Stone, staged at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland. If Metal was about the effect that nature has on social and economic structures, then this deals with our environmental impact on nature. The theme is introduced via Gabriel Orozco’s video Boulder Hand (2012), in which a hand is shown rubbing a stone, the infinite looping of the image suggesting that it was this action itself that resulted in the stone’s highly polished surface.

This is a bigger, much looser show than its partner. From the ten artists exhibited, highlights include Thiago Rocha Pitta’s Danae nos jardins de górgona ou saudades da Pangeia (2011), a 15-minute romantic video documenting a trickling saplike substance meandering over rock crevices and into the sea; Il Capo (2010),

Yuri Ancarani’s sublime portrait of an active quarry, the workers dwarfed by the manmade landscape; and Transmission (2007), Harun Farocki’s engrossing 43-minute film detailing pilgrimage sites, from Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial to the worn feet of the statue of St Peter at the Vatican, united in their use of natural stone.

From these two central curatorial essays – and they definitely feel like they have an authorial voice – the rest of the festival concentrates on various solo presentations, from Jessica Warboys’s painterly installation and accompanying video at the Laing Art Gallery to Rossella Biscotti & Kevin van Braak’s minimalist reimagining of Soviet-era figurative sculptures in a shopfront gallery on platform one of Middlesbrough Railway Station.

In the central chamber of Newcastle’s grandly beautiful Mining Institute, Anna Molska’s 2009 film The Weavers is shown: it’s a portrait of a rather desolate contemporary Polish mining community, but Molska has given the miners lines from Gerhart Johann Hauptmann’s 1892 play of the same name (dubbed into English in this version), which chronicled an 1844 textile workers’ revolt. Molska seems to suggest that despite the nature of our abstract, global networked economy, and the supposed ideals of freemarket capitalism, most of the world remains chained to the land. Oliver Basciano

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, An Italian Film (Africa Addio), 2012 (still), hd. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marcelle Alix, Paris

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Science Fiction: New Death fact, Liverpool 27 March – 22 June With its abundance of derelict tunnels and vast, monumental buildings recalling a past age of transatlantic glamour (and slavery), Liverpool can at times feel like the backdrop for a novel.

In recent years this has taken a turn towards science fiction, through the epic £10 billion proposed development for ‘Peel Waters’, whereby the Mersey riverfront has been astronomically reconceived as a Manhattan for the north of England.

Against this context, curators Omar Kholeif and Mike Stubbs have developed an exhibition proceeding from a set of commissioned short stories by ‘weird fiction’ writer China Miéville.

From this starting point the exhibition becomes, as the intro text states, ‘a deconstructed film, in which the curators play the role of the director, artists that of actors, and the gallery itself becomes a set upon which the story unfolds’. Liverpool-based the Kazimier, described as ‘experience designers’, have transformed the galleries into a set of eidolic dystopian environments, within which artworks are periodically encountered. Entering the show through a set of bleeping portals, the viewer is confronted by a labyrinth of corridors with identikit white doors eerily lit from the inside. It’s bold and atmospheric, although also a touch hammy – less Blade Runner and

more Crystal Maze. Turn a corner and there’s a door with a handle: you’ve found your first artwork.

Obsession, self-enclosure and endless circularity figure highly in Jon Rafman’s installation assembling two videoworks, Main Squeeze and Still Life (Beta Male) (both 2013).

Rafman evokes a disturbing world of individual isolation at the hands of technology in our hyperconnected world; themes that surface again in an early Ryan Trecartin video (TommyChat Just E-Mailed Me, 2006). Here self-absorbed characters inhabit an oversaturated world where babies and librarians scream and play to the camera with a total absence of attention span.

This is a place where the threat of the other is revealed not in the classic sci-fi form of alien invaders, but ourselves; where the everyday narcissism of posting selfies and videos online is amplified to a chaotic conclusion within perpetual cycles of screen-based self-obsession, self-promotion and consumption.

‘Resist!’ is the message from Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, whose film Deep State (2012–14), coscripted with Miéville, introduces the figure of the ‘riotonaut’, or eternal rioter, and is a jolting call to arms against the incursions of the ‘state within a state’. Larissa Sansour’s Nation Estate (2012) also offers a commentary

on statehood – this time on the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, in a work that is as sardonic as it is probing.

Moving upstairs, the tone shifts to one of elegiac melancholy and playful stoicism in the face of endgame. Jae Rhim Lee has designed an ecologically conscientious body suit – Infinity Burial Suit (2009–) that assists human decomposition after death – while Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders’s Accomplice (2010–13) sees robots (of the nonanthropomorphic kind) having minds of their own. But rather than seeking to take over the world, these robots seem, despite their artificial intelligence, bored or perhaps mischievous and frustrated: they lurk behind a wall, ‘watching’ viewers as they come in and occasionally punching a hole through it.

Miéville’s eponymous short story at the core of the exhibition examines our cultural distancing from death, suggesting our desensitisation through oversaturation of images depicting it. But the sense here is that the real death being described is not one of corporeality but of political consciousness. ‘This is not a manifesto.

This is a call for a manifesto to be written.’

The quote looms large on the stairs, goading visitors and artworks alike to awake from the all-too-real reverie that surrounds them.

Richard Parry

Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate, 2012 (production still).

Courtesy the artist

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Bedwyr Williams Echt Tramway, Glasgow 4 April – 25 May In his introduction to a 20th-anniversary edition of Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker, Will Self claimed that ‘every generation gets the end-of-the-world anxiety it deserves’. If this is the case, the inhabitants of the postapocalyptic world of Bedwyr Williams’s film Echt (2014) must have been very bad indeed. One enters the gallery through and beyond a perimeter fence into a darkened clearing – woodchips on the floor. The film beams out of the luggage compartment of an abandoned coach, lights left on. Suitcases, spilling out of the hold, act as makeshift seats.

In a work commissioned as part of the director’s programme of this year’s Glasgow International festival, Williams’s comedic dystopian vision leads us through a picaresque sequence of events and situations set 20 years on from the so-called Big Squabbles. The action opens with the artist – who plays the omniscient narrator of the film – lying in a sports hall surrounded by a few hundred sleeping oaps and plates of their half-eaten biscuits, caught up in some undisclosed emergency situation. By this point, order has disintegrated “steadily and grimly, like a lung collapsing”, Williams’s narrator tells the viewer, and societal structures have almost inverted. The kings and queens of this

fantastical new world are hoarders on a prodigious scale, taking up residence in nightclubs and dancehalls, and piling high the fruits of others’ labour in increasingly absurd scenarios.

The most compelling feature of Echt, in common with some of the best British television comedy of the past two decades, is in the recounting of minutiae. Echoing the obsessive observational precision of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge persona (1991–), the shenanigans of Williams’s characters are described with a delight in the trifles and trivialities of their customs and clothing.

Along with verbal attention to detail, often relayed in witty neologisms or reappropriation of existing slang (“the Dry Run became something terrifying”), the visual gags in Echt similarly revel in the idiomatic peculiarities of the age. In the “nasty harvest time”, for instance, we learn that those who were once important are now lampooned – councillors are forced to perform dances conveying their fall from power, auctioneers become town criers and a very special punishment is meted out to planning officers. They are immured in tiny bungalows, left to suffocate and decay, their rotting heads still visible through the windows of miniconservatories.

The hyperbolic reliance on the grotesque and corporeal is often hilarious, and owes as much to The League of Gentlemen (1999–2002) and surrealist comedic duo Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer as it does Voltaire’s Candide (1759) or Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64) in terms of its absurdity and implausibility.

The jester whose guts fall out at the punchline of Williams’s film, the high heels made from a pair of staplers and the layering of cardigans to form “felty humps” could all be straight from a P-Funk-themed version of Vic and Bob’s Vic Reeves Big Night Out (1990–1). But in line with these sources, Echt could be read more broadly as an (extremely heightened) ‘state of the nation’ piece. Is it really so implausible that status should be measured by the conspicuous consumption and accumulation of things on this nausea-inducing scale? Does anyone with sense still believe in teleological sense?

Is there such a thing as a postlapsarian world, or aren’t we continually lapsing and falling?

The film could be seen as a visual essay, a taxonomy of the accoutrements of excess, modelled on Dick Hebdige’s 1979 sociological study Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Ultimately, Echt has got gumption and is great fun, qualities that should be revered in contemporary art.

Susannah Thompson

Echt, 2014 (production still).

Courtesy the artist and Glasgow International

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Sharon Hayes Fingernails on a Blackboard Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York 15 March – 26 April Less than two years after a memorable solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sharon Hayes is back in New York in a very different context, showing two works at Andrea Rosen’s Gallery 2, a small space down 24th Street from the dealer’s main Chelsea location. ’77 (all works 2014) consists of large panels with one word –‘woman’ – in black acrylic over a neonyellow background. The panels are freestanding and arranged diagonally from one corner of the room to another so as to block off half of the space. In the remaining corner sits a monitor playing a 16-minute video on a loop, which is titled, like the exhibition itself, Fingernails on a Blackboard.

Unlike the chill-inducing sound that echoes in your mind just reading those four words, the video is silent. In white text scrolling against a blue background, it describes the process of teaching someone how to make sounds: ‘First thing is you open the mouth… blah. Right? Now you start to close over the humming sound.’ In response to a series of stipulations (eg. ‘breathe’,

‘watch your shoulders’) comes, ‘I don’t know what you mean… Blah, blah, blah, blah’, which in turn only leads to more probing: ‘What did you have for breakfast?’

Without the press release, you wouldn’t know the story behind the piece. And as long as you don’t know the facts, and in light of the panel reading ‘woman’, it’s hard not to associate the instructor’s voice with that of a man imposing a certain enunciation on a woman. Onscreen it reads as a very intimate, almost forceful engagement. With no soundtrack, your imagination can run wild, inventing tone and circumstances.

But it is actually the transcript of former US congresswoman Bella Abzug (d. 1998) working with a vocal coach to soften her rough New York accent. Abzug was part of the planning commission for the National Women’s Conference of 1977, initiated by Jimmy Carter’s administration to further gender equality.

The panel installation recreates a banner that hung onstage at the conference, which was

supposed to present the president with a plan of action to promote women’s rights, though the proposed amendments were never passed.

Hayes is an artist with a strong voice whose work never shies away from the political.

This was evident in the Whitney show, much of which also dealt with speech. There, the viewer had to dedicate time and attention in order to listen to archival recordings of female politicians and activists, and to watch documentation of Hayes’s performances, many of which involve public speaking. While the work on view here draws from the political history that informs Hayes’s practice, it seems compromised by the location, and comes off like Hayes’s grappling with showing at a Chelsea gallery (and one that represents primarily male artists; only seven out of 23 are women). It’s an important stake for Hayes to claim, and she succeeds in doing it. Still, her work belongs in a venue where it isn’t fighting for space, both literally and figuratively. Orit Gat

‘77, 2014, acrylic on panel, dimensions variable. Photo: Lance Brewer. © the artist.

Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

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Leigh Ledare Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York 21 March – 26 April Artists curious to understand what ‘commitment’ means in the practice, let alone the discourse, of the visual arts, would be wise to pay close attention to the work of Leigh Ledare, because no other young artist I’m aware of approaches artmaking with as much honesty as he does. But of course such words of praise demand defence.

This is easily mounted with the resources of the two projects presented at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Neither body of work, Double Bind (2010/2012) or An Invitation (2012), is brand new, though this is the first time that either has been given a public airing in New York (Double Bind was shown in LA in 2012, and reviewed in these pages by Andrew Berardini; An Invitation has never before been shown in the US).

Both projects involve Ledare personally.

For Double Bind, he spent time photographing his ex-wife during a short sojourn in a cabin in upstate New York. He then arranged for her and her new husband, also a photographer, to

undertake a similar sojourn and photographic campaign at the same cabin. The results are juxtaposed against one another and clippings from old print magazines (from porno to fashion to culture). With An Invitation, Ledare accepted a commission from a European high-society couple to make erotic photographs of the wife (who is some 20 years her husband’s junior) over the course of one week in July 2011. A set of these pictures were kept by the couple, but as per their agreement, Ledare kept a set for himself and produced a series of screenprints that show the pictures, with the wife’s face redacted, juxtaposed against the front page of The New York Times from the days of the shoot.

There is much to be said about the language of photography in both cases, about questions of power, both statutory and otherwise (a redacted version of the contract and confidentiality agreement that subtends An Invitation is also on view, for example), and about the kinds of subjects that photographs and photographic

imagery produce or interpolate. But in these projects – as well as others that Ledare has pursued, such as, perhaps most significantly, Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2008), a portrait of the fraught, Oedipal relationship that Ledare shares with his mother – there is always a palpable feeling of risk.

Ledare hazards what we cheaply call ‘difficult situations’, not by staging them but by getting into them. His aim isn’t transparency, however, but complication – at the affective rather than intellectual level. Ledare does work as much inside of photographic theory as practice, yet without his work becoming either esoteric or didactic, as so much contemporary conceptual photographic work does today.

Perhaps this is because the central paradox of photography – this image is there, fixed; but its meaning can never be – serves Ledare as an amplifier of the many vulnerabilities – his own, those of his subjects, ours – that we all try to keep from public view. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Double Bind (detail), 2010/2012, silver gelatin prints, assorted print media, magazine pages, newspaper clippings and personal and found photographs, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

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Jumana Manna Menace of Origins SculptureCenter, New York 2 March – 12 May Commensurate with her transnational bona fides – born in New Jersey, raised in East Jerusalem, educated partly in Oslo, currently resident in Berlin – Jumana Manna’s work considers Palestinian experience through broadly resonant categories such as agency, self-mythologising and machismo, without mitigating the specific urgencies that distinguish it. An explication of desire and possession, her installation at SculptureCenter extends the subtlety of her already keen analyses.

The show pairs Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010), a video shot in car repair shops and gyms frequented by disaffected Palestinian youths in East Jerusalem, with a group of sculptures resembling architectural fragments that clearly reference the fabric of that oft-conquered city.

Inspired by Kenneth Anger’s film Scorpio Rising (1963), a fast-cutting portrait of biker culture in LA, Manna’s film follows Ahmad, a blazingly sultry petty thug, as he pumps iron, smokes hash and describes minor thefts and

incidents of domestic abuse. Passing visual references to the Palestinian struggle – a copy of an Israeli police report, the poster of a martyr – suggest the exigencies that differentiate life in Manna’s East Jerusalem from Anger’s LA, but what’s striking is their similarities. Both films focus on male bodies and tokens of masculinity like watches and bikes, and the protagonists in each idolise figures such as James Dean or American muscle men, avatars of toughness as much as of rebellion. Ahmad’s acting out suggests a stifling impotence and the complementary need to appear powerful.

By noting that resistance becomes eroticised and is meaningful, in part, for its sexualised charge, Manna reveals an underlying, and nearly universal, connection between efficacy and self-worth. The sculptures, constructed mostly from paving stones or egg cartons slathered with plaster, and variously titled after Israeli politicians or the nineteenth-century

British explorers who mapped the region, link the projection of masculine identity to broader histories of colonialism and occupation, and to the national myths of righteousness and enlightenment that bolster them. The schematic look and equivocal title of two oversize discs (Roman or Byzantine Coin, 2014) furthermore suggest that the past is fungible and that value does not rest in things a priori but is imposed through the distorting prejudices of interpretation.

Similar to the objects, those same outside narratives have rendered the youths that Manna films as empty vessels, figures forced to play at being manly. But as the camera lingers on Ahmad’s full lips and long curly hair, Manna seems seduced. Playing on his comeliness, she draws her viewers into the complex dynamics of desire, projection, effacement and possession that underlie the current social and political consequences of which Ahmad’s life is symbolic.

Joshua Mack

Blessed Blessed Oblivion, 2010 (still), HD video, 22 min.

Courtesy the artist

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Urs Fischer Mermaid, Pig, Bro w/ Hat Gagosian, 104 Delancey Street 3 April – 23 May Last Supper Gagosian, Park & 75 3 April – 8 May In Manhattan, real estate is prohibitively expensive, which is why banks inhabit so many street corners. Another sort of institution that can easily afford rental prices in New York is the mega-gallery, and more specifically, Gagosian, which in April opened a temporary space in a former Chase bank branch on Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Rather than renovating the space, the gallery chose to keep it untouched, as if the bank employees had moved out in a hurry the day before, leaving behind empty vaults, cheap office furniture and a prominently featured Chase logo hanging on the wall. All Gagosian did was add Urs Fischer: Mermaid, Pig, Bro w/ Hat, an exhibition of 25 cast bronze sculptures, and a bevy of black security guards in cheap suits to watch over them.

Is it horrible to say that I loved it? Without the typical gallery apparatus – the ice-queen gallerinas, the sign-in book, the white walls, the stuffy attitude – I could actually see Fischer’s sculptures. These works were cast from clay

sculptures made for Fischer’s show Yes last year at the Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles.

Fischer had 1,500 participants help him make the clay sculptures, which were inspired by, among other things, The Rape of the Sabine Women (1574–82) by the sculptor Giambologna.

The sculptures in Yes were crudely rendered, resembling less the work of a skilled artist than that of a thousand drunk elves. For example, Small Girl (all works 2014), set in the gaping hole left behind by the removal of an ATM machine, looks like an endangered waif from a Hans Christian Andersen story; whereas Mermaid depicts a reclining nymph on a craggy pedestal whose head is half missing, as if it had been blown off by a bomb during some long-ago war; and Bro w/ Hat, a thick hulk of a figure, looks like the mythological twin of the shyly smiling security guard that stood by him.

None of the references in the works were specific, but each resonated as familiar, as if I had read about them in a fairytale or seen them in an art-history lecture. The show as a whole

looked as if it had been made by some future generation attempting to recreate cultural relics of the past. The sculptures were not ‘good’; but they were art, and in a former corporate bank branch, I could identify them as such.

Less shocking to the senses is Last Supper, a related exhibition of just a single sculpture, also from Yes, in another new Gagosian space, on Park Avenue at 75th Street. This eponymous work, based on the New Testament scene, shows Jesus Christ (resembling the Statue of Liberty) eating a taco and drinking a Budweiser.

Rather than feeling like I had walked into some sort of nonplace that doesn’t exist in real time, as I did at the bank, I knew exactly where I was here: standing in an art gallery, looking at something made by the hands of some Los Angeles hipsters who volunteered for the Urs Fischer show.

Perhaps the context was at fault, not the work. My neural pathways may be wired in such a way these days that all I can feel in a white cube space is apathetic disgust. Brienne Walsh

Mermaid, 2014, cast bronze, 103 × 122 × 213 cm. Photo: Melissa Christy. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery, New York

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Math Bass Lies Inside Overduin & Co, Los Angeles 16 March – 19 April Snakes and ladders: the sinuous occult reptile and the solid rational hierarchy (according to Salman Rushdie); unknowable mysteries and empirical knowledge. An ancient Indian game for children, resting on my shelf between Candyland and Clue (the snakes got lately ‘chuted’, but the plot remains the same).

The random roll of the dice takes your avatar forward. Good deeds shoot you up a ladder.

Bad ones take you down. The 1952 Milton Bradley edition shows a girl planting a garden who rises to a basketful of veggies at the top of a ladder. Another square depicts a boy pulling pigtails plummeting to a disembodied adult hand wreaking corporal punishment on the weeping miscreant. Curiously, the spot that leads you straight to the top pictures a boy and a girl painting at easels. Just good old-fashioned moralistic binary code, a simple one, but readable.

Though as uncomplicated in its elements as the board game, the code deployed by Math

Bass here is less so, whether stacked as symbols in the paintings or as objects shaping space.

The ladders lead nowhere, the dismantled reptiles angle rather than curve. A seasoned gamer can’t but wonder which deeds lead to what, or if this game can even be won. It’s hard not to summon Guy de Cointet’s cryptography and performances as they filled the same room a few years back: the absurdist Frenchman living in LA played like a mad poet with signs and text no one could read but his characters, and not uniformly even then.

The simple, painted clipart arranges and rearranges itself into almost random patterns in the paintings, like some undecodable code (though a few look awfully like faces). Gators and cigarettes, steps and arches, stacks of smoking cigarettes and sleepy Zs, a scattered set of flat flowers – all interrupted by the intermittent ladders tucked between them.

Arcing rolled steel malingers in the middle of the room. Here and there in powder-coated

metal and painted-on wall decal are the kind of security gates found on storefronts in the rougher parts of town.

Everything is exceptionally clean, an unplayed game or unperformed play, neither quite product nor prop, though shiny enough to look retail-ready. The flat bright colours of the paintings lit by the flat bright fluorescents and the gleam along the yellow bars of the security gates and brushed steel of the arches look too untouched. The steel arcs round just so, formed into objects that looks like they’re built to prop up a person or to shelter one, making everything feel physical, brightly staged and controlled. I yearn for some bodies to smear it up (and maybe they will in a performance scheduled mid-run). Perhaps these works plunk into that uncanny valley between humans and things, another binary code interrupted. Both and neither/nor. All the stairs and ladders, reptiles and chutes, never lead up or out, but only ever between. Andrew Berardini

Newz!, 2014, gouache on canvas, 86 × 81 cm.

Courtesy Overduin & Co, Los Angeles

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Allen Ruppersberg Drawing and Writing: 1972–1989 Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles 22 March – 17 May When it comes to classic Los Angeles conceptual art, the historic debates over the primacy of the art object or the categorical definitions of mediums or the notion of whether or not mere ideas and concepts could be art rarely step forward as central to the experience of looking at the art itself. Instead, what does step forward is the humour. In removing images and objects from their contexts and recombining them, LA Conceptualism was often kooky and offkilter. Allen Ruppersberg, for example, once served his visitors ‘Patti Melts’ at his conceptual restaurant, Al’s Café, in 1969. The art sandwich consisted of marshmallows and a picture of the actress Patti Page, a culinary delight straight from the kitchen of Surrealism.

It is hard not to laugh out loud occasionally when looking at Ruppersberg’s drawings from the 1970s and 80s. Many of the images are taken from old postcards and book collections, have a nostalgic bent and, in Ruppersberg’s hands,

take on new meanings. In one drawing, Searching for Passion and Sex (and an even exchange, people in boat in cave) (1979), a viewer gets exactly that, a group of straitlaced sightseers boating inside a dark cave. In another work, a well-used copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is flatly titled A Quiet Sketch of a Novel (1975). No more, no less.

Ruppersberg admits he got his deadpan delivery from Ed Ruscha, but such humour is incredibly common in Los Angeles: one need only look to John Baldessari, Raymond Pettibon and Larry Johnson.

However, Ruppersberg’s drawings go deeper than the mere delivery of strange associations and retooled contexts. The friction between his images and the captions he applies to them seems to suggest the longings of an entire generation, a group of people coming to maturity in the 1970s, with a memory of the prosperous 50s and their devolution to the social

unrest and Vietnam War of the 60s. A deeper look at that group of people in the cave, for example, can lead to something haunting: yes, it is a joke on 1950s sexual repression, but it is also revealing of the unhappiness such repression could cause, a genuine alienation from one’s desires.

This alienation can exist in the mere fact of representation, and Ruppersberg is deft at demonstrating it. The Old Man and the Sea can be seen but not read. It is not a book at all, but a drawing, and the drawing will give up none of the book’s secrets or its lessons. The book is a mere image of itself. In another drawing, Reading Time (The Elements of Style) (1973–4), Ruppersberg writes, ‘Reading Time: 2 hrs. 58 min.’ under a copy of William Strunk, Jr & E.B. White’s famous handbook. What’s deadpan and factual on one hand is representational arrest on another – meaning seen from a distance but not grasped. Ed Schad

Self-Portrait Making a Face Like Barney Bear, 1975, pencil on paper, 58 × 74 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles

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John Tweddle Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles 15 March – 3 May John Tweddle is one of those artists who never really fitted into any scene he found himself in.

The astonishing, eccentric body of work that he has produced during his lifetime may be both the cause and effect of this condition. Born in 1938, he left rural Kentucky to go to art school in Kansas City and Atlanta, then moved to New York at the end of the 1960s. A decade later, appalled by the commercial artworld, he turned his back on the city and moved back South.

Today he lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which seems about right for an artist of his bent.

This exhibition of Tweddle’s intense paintings and drawings, guest-curated by fellow Kentuckian Alanna Heiss, focuses on work he made between 1969 and 1971 – just after arriving in Manhattan. His folkish sensitivities were already being affronted by the venality of the New York art market, which was then consumed by the war between Abstract Expressionism and Pop – both movements that influenced his work.

In these paintings, a struggle plays itself out on the surface of the canvas. The term

schizophrenic is ill- and overused, so let’s call them internally conflicted. On the one hand, they are ecstatic, devotional objects that seem to aspire to the highest orders of human value.

The majority of these paintings consist of a central image or motif surrounded by layer upon layer of decorated borders. They nod to the folk woodcarving genre of Tramp art, and to the aesthetics of quilting and Navajo tapestry. Every canvas but one is stretched over a form with gently scalloped edges, reinforcing their association with objects such as rugs or blankets.

At the same time, Tweddle presents his paintings as desecrated, ironical statements declaring their own corruption. Sold (1969) is a case in point: a central image of a ploughed field has been defaced with powder-blue slashes.

‘Sold’ reads Tweddle’s inscription over the horizon. Dollar signs (which feature in almost every painting) ring the inner picture, over and around the writhing patterns that constitute Tweddle’s elaborate borders. While the painting is interpretable as a protest of the desecration

of the American landscape, other works, such as Art World (1971) and Art (Truck) (undated), make it clear that Tweddle’s overriding concern at the time was the commodity status of his artworks themselves.

These paintings are conflicted because one does not get the sense – not for one moment – that Tweddle considers his paintings worthless or undeserving of a purchaser’s covetousness.

(As it happens, this entire exhibition is drawn from the collection of Robert Scull, one of the artist’s most devoted patrons.) In one of the most captivating works, Tweddle has painted an abstract composition with red dollar signs arrayed across it; then, perhaps in a change of heart, applied torn strips of masking tape and rollered the entire canvas with sky-blue acrylic. Where he removed the tape, the original image peeks through the blue. There is no sense that Tweddle is disavowing the painting, however; an inscription, which is also the work’s title, was carefully masked off: ‘Made in U.S.A. Oct. 1970

by John’. Jonathan Griffin

Art (Truck), undated, acrylic on canvas. 199 × 305 cm.

Courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles

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Elliott Hundley Regen Projects, Los Angeles 12 April – 17 May Since 2006 or 2007, just after he earned his mfa from ucla and began to gain serious institutional recognition – Eden’s Edge at la’s Hammer Museum; Unmonumental at the New Museum, New York; The Shapes of Space (all 2007) at the Guggenheim Museum, New York – Elliott Hundley has relied heavily on straight pins as a kind of signature material. Those pins have held together, precariously and variably, accumulations of all kinds of flinty detritus, from photo cutouts to Styrofoam insulation, and this work walked a fine line between painting, collage, relief and sculpture, though Hundley made singular moves into each of these genres as well.

His new work is more self-consciously painting and sculpture. The pins are mostly still there, of course – what would a contemporary artist be without a signature material standing in for style? – but the precarity is not. Instead, Hundley has toned down the manic accumulations in order to more earnestly address composition, which has the best works coming out as straightforward, considered, compelling abstractions – and lacking pins! – such as Silent

Factory (all work 2014), which channels the palette of a Frankenthaler while weaving in the feel of Rauschenberg’s Canto series (1958–60).

It Will End is another good example, tipping as it does over into the anamorphic dreamscape of some lesser-known science-fiction set designer.

The confidence manifest in these paintings is matched in the ribbonlike meshes of a series that Hundley calls Scaffold. Perched above rough-hewn wooden ladders, these works are composed of lengths of heavy-gauge bronze wire held in near parallel by solders of the artist’s signature straight pins. Like some latter-day ‘cold structures’ of a Karl Ioganson, the Scaffold works are constructivist in their simplicity and transparency, yet resolutely bourgeois in their aesthetic – one wishes Hundley would have made these with something other than the pins, which, even as ‘found objects’, remain too closely identified with his self-legislating and self-marketing ‘I’.

One also wishes he had left behind the two biggest works in the show, Destroyer and The Hesitant Hour, both large, four-panelled tableaus

that rely too heavily on staged photographic portraits. The images are clumsy, and for all their supposed theatricality, the works come off as quick and amateurish. They play at being big, but bear none of the balance of the abstractions.

From the other direction, pieces such as Changeling and The Sound of Its Own Ringing are too fussy and bogged down with little images and incident. That Hundley has broken into the surfaces of these largely two-dimensional works – the centre of Changeling bears a double fan-shape accordion fold; the centre of The Sound of Its Own Ringing appears pierced and shattered – suggests that they somehow buckled under their own weight and needed these moves into relief to salvage some sense of coherence.

‘When in doubt, keep working it’ is not a mantra Hundley should stick to. Whether the unevenness here is a fault of his needing to fill a big space or just a lack of self-critical judgement in the studio doesn’t really matter. The modestly scaled but hugely effective abstract paintings and sculptures are enough to keep one wanting to see more. Jonathan T.D. Neil

It Will End, 2014, inkjet print, oil and paint and paper on linen, 198 × 152 × 5 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

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Thomas Bayrle All-in-One Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne 21 March – 11 May It is fitting that this touring retrospective of the work of Thomas Bayrle should stop off in a suburb of Lyons, birthplace to the Jacquard loom. The German artist, now seventy-six, worked for several years in a textile factory during the 1950s, recognising in the warp and weft of material an image of the social relations between people. Half a century later, as Bayrle himself recognised in a recent talk at London’s ICA, it’s impossible not to see in that an uncanny presentiment of the founding metaphor of the World Wide Web. (The word for weave in the artist’s native German, for example, is weben.)

The corporate logos of the Internet browsers Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox even make an appearance in one of the most recent works on show, projected onto the body of Jesus in one of 14 computer-aided designs for The Stations of the Cross (2013). But for the most part, this exhibition, which stretches back to the early 1960s via more than 200 works, finds Bayrle more interested in pursuing other icons, from Mammon to Mao. The large photographic collage on canvas Himmelfahrt (Heaven-Bound, 1988) presents Coppo and Salerno di Marcovaldo’s 1274 image of the crucifixion from Pistoia Cathedral in Tuscany, here composed entirely of different distortions of a single bird’s-eye view onto a stretch of autobahn. With a duplicity typical

of Bayrle’s work, the title captures both the utopian promise of motorways and their homicidal potential. The circulation of traffic becomes the circulation of holy blood. It’s such a striking image that Bayrle returned to it 20 years later, this time as a video, made in collaboration with Daniel Kohl. In this film, Autobahnkreuz (2006–7), as the image scans across multiple bulging video feeds of the same stretch of road, we are immediately reminded of the banks of monitor screens that fill up a CCTV control room. As the view pulls back to reveal the Marcovaldos’ image, Christ’s face looking down upon us becomes a picture of surveillance and discipline, his frankly disappointed expression that of a traffic cop who finally – as the loop comes to an end – becomes indistinguishable from the endless fisheye videos he stands watch over.

The figure of the highway winds its way around the galleries like a red thread, becoming here a dollar sign in cardboard and Plexiglas ($, 1980), there an image of hell as imagined

by Piranesi after reading J.G. Ballard (Gotischer Schinken, 1980–4). This last is the only oil-oncanvas in the show and the work is notable for the absence of any human subjects – this is an inferno strictly for the machines. But even engines have a hope of salvation, hence the obeisant windscreen wipers (Prega per Noi, 2012)

and pendulating Porsche engines, readymade sculptures extracted from their vehicles, plonked on pedestals and soundtracked by Catholic rosary prayers (Rosary, 2012) to be found a few rooms further on.

These last were inspired by a trip to a small country church full of old women piously fingering beads. It was the sense of quantity that struck Bayrle, as he noted at the ICA, that ten prayers could somehow count for more than three, and this is really at the core of everything he does. In the small garden enclosed by the Institut d’Art stands Bayrle’s famous Watering Can (1996) composed of dozens of ordinary green plastic watering cans. Facing the sculpture is something the artist did not place there, but that seems apposite nonetheless: a shipping container.

Efficient, stackable and radically oblivious to its own contents, a container is capable of bearing any commodity – be it household goods, weapons, people or contemporary art – and reducing it to a pure vector of trade. Like Bayrle’s image of Stalin (1970), made entirely by the repetition of the general secretary’s moustache, contemporary capitalism is threaded and composed by the multiplication of these interchangeable steel boxes. It is the icon that reveals the nature of the whole, the all-in-one.

Robert Barry

Stalin (Red Version), 1970, silkscreen print on paper, 85 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Mark Manders Cose in Corso Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia 9 March – 28 September Sitting outside his exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti on a quiet March afternoon while waiting for a photo shoot to end, Mark Manders talked softly, flipping through the pages of Cose in Corso (Things in Progress), the artist book printed on the occasion by Roma, his own publishing house. I was lucky to see the book before the installation inside, Isolated Bathroom/Composition with Four Colors (2010–4), because it made palpable how the Flanders-based artist’s work unfolds on a continuum wherein single elements (sculptures, installations, drawings, fake newspapers) evolve and reappear down the years, as both mental and concrete characters of a plot that also serves as an ongoing personal diary. A ‘self-portrait as architecture’, as Manders defines it – or a Mind Study (2010–11), as was titled the main installation (‘a short three-dimensional poem’, he wrote in the caption) of his Dutch Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale.

Cose in Corso is a collection of photographs, all taken by the artist in his atelier. On the first page, as an ode to organic growth, is a sculpture of thin metal rods with twigs, branches and herbs attached to them. On the second, a corner of the studio containing a ‘draft’ of Isolated Bathroom, made from a couple of wooden beams, polystyrene sheets, plaster, two chairs, a towel

and a sculpture. On the third page, the same corner with the same installation translated into different materials, in a version closer to the final one. The rest of the volume documents other works and details (including a book opened on a scene from Piero della Francesca’s frescoes in Arezzo) in no obvious order, except Manders’s own. Here – as with Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–9), nowadays surviving only in the form of documentary photos of the original panels, as Warburg immortalised his mosaics of images phase by phase before modifying them – photography keeps the record without freezing the flux. And it further complicates Manders’s play with mimesis, since the materials he uses are made to look like others. It’s an endless ‘precession of simulacra’ – as Jean Baudrillard put it in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) – whose self-proclaimed matrix is the artist.

Isolated Bathroom/Composition with Four Colors is a room on its own, located right at the centre of the exhibition space. On a floor made of metal tiles, four characters of sorts stand like pieces on a chessboard: a bathtub filled with wet clay with a yellow towel on a side; a chair covered with a pink cloth right in front; a light blue towel rolled up; and a green chair on which rests

one of Manders’s signature armless sculptures, modelled in clay on a wooden beam, the head gently tilted up. Things are obviously not what they seem: the towels are painted canvases, the bathtub is painted aluminium, the clay is painted epoxy and the apparently massproduced chairs are handmade in iron and aluminium, while the green fabric supporting the sculpture is in fake newspapers in offset print, painted green. Painting is thus the explicit protagonist onstage. Finally not afraid of red, yellow and blue, Manders has here allowed some bright colours to appear, instead of adopting his usual palette of greys and browns.

It’s a lively work, akin to a sacra conversazione as well as to a mundane conversation piece, with a hint of light parody to it. The bathtub looks like the sarcophagus of another famous fresco by Piero, The Resurrection (1463–5) in Sansepolcro, with Christ rising from his grave, in a pink robe, above some soldiers asleep in front of it, dressed in green and blue. Art and immortality are old bedfellows, as Manders must know. As he writes in a booklet tucked into the book: ‘All my works, also my figures, always stay things. They are dead objects…

What I want to keep alive, though, is the artist who made all these works’. Barbara Casavecchia

Isolated Bathroom / Composition with Four Colors (detail), 2010–14, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: C. Dario Lasagni © the artist. Courtesy Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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Playtime Lenbachhaus, Munich 15 March – 29 June It might be a good thing, or it might simply be creepy: in the world of manufacturing, humans are now only needed for the use of their fingertips. They skim over the car paint and check that no mistakes have crept in. Machines cannot do this – at least none have been created thus far that are as sensitive as fingers. Meanwhile, robots do everything else perfectly and make sure that in Ingolstadt, Germany, one Audi after another rolls across the production line. In the video Automobile Factory (2012), the Turkish artist Ali Kazma – who represented his country at last year’s Venice Biennale – documents this mechanical ballet without commentary: work becomes an energy field in which man only takes care of the reflective finish.

Curated by Lenbachhaus’s new director, Matthias Mühling, together with Katrin Dillkofer and Elisabeth Giers, Playtime borrows its title from Jacques Tati’s famous 1967 film.

In the film, Tati’s character wanders through a world of glass facades that is organised around and controlled by production; in the exhibition, works by more than 40 artists are brought together. This, despite the title, is not really a game. After all, the kind of work that mainly shapes our world is not just about securing one’s livelihood; today, as compared to 20 or 30 years ago, work is inextricable from the foundation of one’s identity and social recognition.

The paradox of this development is that, since industrialisation, man has increasingly

disappeared behind technology – which is why Kazma’s work is one of the most powerful works in the show (which, by the way, explores a fashionable curatorial topic: see the 8th Berlin Biennale, for just one example).

The subject of art and labour is not wholly a recent one, however: artists have been delivering visual counterparts to Marx’s theory of alienation since the industrialisation of the nineteenth century. The issue only became explicitly political with the advent of conceptual art. Nevertheless, in Playtime, Charlie Chaplin’s assembly-line grotesque Modern Times (1936) – in which Chaplin gets into the machinery of a factory – appears, with its simple symbolism, as a precursor of the reductive aesthetic of the 1960s and 70s. Prominent in this regard is Allan Sekula, who, with his photo sequences that reflect sociopolitical issues, is among the most important forerunners of the younger, socially oriented generation.

The show includes Sekula’s well-known series Untitled Slide Sequence (1972), the emotional Minimalism of which is typical of the artist (who passed away in 2013). The slides show workers leaving an aeroplane factory that is producing weapons for the Vietnam War, the transition from work to private life characterised by tired, distrustful faces. Equally radical, Martha Rosler celebrates an aggressive anticommercial for the perfect housewife with her widely shown video Semiotics of the Kitchen

(1975), in which whisks and paper towels become metaphors for rage and servitude.

Younger representatives of the show choose a more entertaining, although similar, choreographic language – besides Monica Bonvicini’s questionnaires for construction workers, through which one learns about expletives and raw hands, the music videos for She Works Hard for the Money (1983) by Donna Summer and Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) (1986) by the Pet Shop Boys are the most appealing works in the show. By contrast, Harun Farocki’s documentary film about management consultants, Ein Neues Produkt (A New Product, 2012) unfortunately lacks any poetic aspect; although the models for optimisation and increased efficiency, in their neoliberal language, read as instructions for the abuse of human capital, aka the labour force. Overall, what stands out in the show is that most of the artworks are stuck in an image of labour that dates from the last century, when work was still concretely visible. Missing are artistic commentaries on the blending of work and leisure time, which encapsulates the feeling of our current epoch, on the threshold between an industrial society and an information-based one. In an era when labour and leisure have been made to overlap, so that one no longer knows if one is still playing or is already creating, Playtime manages to miss the ambiguity of its title.

Gesine Borcherdt Translated from the German by Emily Terényi

Harun Farocki, Ein Neues Produkt (A New Product), 2012, video, 36 min.

Courtesy the artist and Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin

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Lina Selander Silphium Kunsthall Trondheim 6 March – 27 April When the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, it emanated a light so strong that it penetrated every building. The shadows of cremated bodies were burned onto the city’s surfaces as photographs. These ghosts, the imprints of ultimate destruction, figure as recurring images in Lina Selander’s recent films To the Vision Machine and Model of Continuation (both 2013). As in most of the Stockholm-born artist’s layered and complex works, a decisive historical moment becomes the starting point for a longer chain of reflection on how our visual culture is intimately linked to technological and political shifts in human history. Model of Continuation is ingeniously set in the artist’s studio, where the viewer sees the earlier To the Vision Machine being projected on the wall.

The screening of a film within a film creates a stunning stratification of different image spaces.

As the camera shifts viewpoints, you become aware of your own gaze as well as the technological apparatus enabling the flow of images on the screen. It’s an elegant Brechtian trick, further intensified when the film repeatedly shows the artist disassembling the object that made the film: her camera.

I’m watching the film on a monitor in a narrow, corridorlike room in the miniscule Kunsthall Trondheim. It’s a newly opened institution, temporarily residing in a former shop in the city centre. For almost a year the space has been energising the local scene with a low-key but challenging contemporary programme, as well as an artist residency.

This show also includes Selander’s new film Silphium (2014), in which she further develops and refines the montage method that has become her artistic signature. Images are interwoven with found footage, other artworks and texts. Here fragments from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533), with the famous anamorphic skull, are keys to a dark story about man’s destruction of the earth’s natural resources.

Packed with such more-or-less-hidden quotes, Selander’s work could be read as a series of learned riddles posed to the spectator and demanding to be solved. However, I prefer to take another way, at the risk of getting lost in her labyrinthine montage of image and text, and move through her works as if through a

dream where all images and stories are possible at the same time. The point of departure in Silphium is the eponymous, ancient and now extinct plant, which once grew on the coast of North Africa in the Greek colony Cyrene.

Its medicinal qualities made silphium valuable; intensive trade finally made it extinct.

In Selander’s film, an ancient coin that bears the plant’s imprint becomes the catalyst for a vertiginous image-essay travelling through the collection of the NTNU Museum of Natural History and Archaeology in Trondheim and onwards to the bizarre and paranoid surveillance technology at the Stasi Museum in Berlin. A persistent trope in the film is the futility of our efforts to exert control over nature and matter by creating technological systems that contain the potential to ultimately make man obsolete. As Selander underlines with her recurring visual references to the robotic qualities of the camera, our technologies for seeing don’t need us any more. Like the camera drones flying over us, they function independently, constantly filming what they see without the help of the human eye.

Sara Arrhenius

Model of Continuation, 2013 (still), HD video, 24 min, colour, sound. Courtesy the artist

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Richard Wright Nine Chains to the Moon (Chapter 1) BQ, Berlin 15 February – 14 February Formalist art might be defined as that which confines itself to the interplay of formal elements, and is therefore, in an essential sense, nonreferential. Over the past decade, however, it has become complicatedly referential of its own history. Richard Wright emerged around the millennium among a generation of artists – such as Martin Boyce and Sergej Jensen – who conferred a historical perspective onto the formalism they practised, as though to liberate it from its perceived solipsism. Wright approaches painting with the deliberation of an artist of an age prior to formalism’s advent. His neat squares and triangles might have been painted by a master purveyor of medieval book illuminations. They give vertiginously onto tradition.

Literally so at BQ , on a three-metre-long table that dominates the main gallery.

(Luxuriously crafted out of walnut, it was a copy of one that stands in Wright’s studio.) On it, vintage books and watercolours by Wright are placed into an arrangement that functions as an exquisite composition. Wright’s painterly interventions qualify some of these found artefacts and, in turn, are qualified by them.

The designs he painted onto the pages of two books of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s plays absorb, by association, the constructivist aesthetics of the writer’s visual art, and his historical context.

Although this is a book of texts, it allows Wright to allude tangentially to early modernist art.

Similarly, Max Ernst’s eerie etchings claim the symmetry of an ornate Wright watercolour, placed next to them, as that of the self-mirrorings of Surrealism. An early-twentieth-century engraving of fern leaves appears to relinquish its referent when seen in conjunction with a Wright abstract of equally microscopic patterning.

Wright’s connotative method characterises formalistic painting as insular, myopic even, only to situate it, tendentiously, in conjunction with references that offer the illusion of the spatial and historical expansion of its vantage.

BQ’s facade is a graphic demonstration of this dynamic. Posters dividing a rectangle diagonally into black-and-white triangles are affixed in irregular configurations to the shop windows, forming either bold diagonal lines or complex chequered patterns. A basic seed extended into an architecture it seemed scarcely capable of producing, and one that reveals the seed’s potential for generating chaos as well as order.

The principle of exponential expansion deriving from an unassuming starting point is evident in the exhibition’s concept as well as its title. This is the first of a three-part Wright exhibition that will occupy BQ for a year, each instalment to be produced out of remnants

of the last. One thing leads to another, giving rise to unforeseeable complexity. The exhibition’s title, Nine Chains to the Moon, refers to that of a book (which is on the table) by the esoteric American architectural visionary R. Buckminster Fuller. From its blurb: ‘If, in imagination, all the people of the world were to stand upon one another’s shoulders, they would make nine complete chains between the earth and the moon. And if it is not so far to the limits of the moon, then it is not so far to the limits of the universe.’

This might be the principle on which Wright’s painting operates. Untitled (2010) is a two-part work, the upper half a formalistic abstraction; the lower an image of a face, painted out of an agglomeration of tiny Benday dots. The connection between these otherwise disparate idioms is the materialistic accretion of process into a transcendental image, its transcendence a function of the surmounting of its pedestrian ingredients. The spectacular illusionistic space of an abstract painting proves to be contingent on the modest shuffling of a formalist vocabulary, its sublimity structurally objectified by its simple geometric parts; as, below it, infinitesimal hand-painted dots agglomerate into a glowing, silver face.

Mark Prince

Nine Chains to the Moon (Chapter 1), 2014 (installation view, facade).

Courtesy BQ , Berlin

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Viktor Rosdahl Quorum Sensing Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö 27 February – 29 March Upon viewing Viktor Rosdahl’s ambitious, perplexing solo exhibition, one is entranced when gliding between paintings and sculptures that display the Helsingborg-born artist’s characteristic iconoclastic and murky aesthetic, more playful works and others that display an emerging psychedelic tendency – as seen in Last Secs of Che (all works 2014), a vibrant clash of colours splayed across the canvas, as if an unwarranted explosion had occurred or was imagined in a distant fictive locale. Alongside this intense painting stands the monumental canvas A Certain Promise of Death and Defeat, where the artist convokes a Swedish flag that could be burning, whirlpool pits, a vortex with a peephole and a tyre, all floating atop a dirty grid of intersecting lines.

The show’s title suggests that Rosdahl wants to address and weave together political and societal states of being: a quorum is the smallest number of people required to make a democratic decision. Yet by appropriating related symbols floating ambiguously out of any original context, the nature of each ‘situation’ created by grouped materials here proves to be cryptic and at times indecipherable.

This leaves interpretation free – the spectator only gains according to the effort she puts

forth. Pairing ‘quorum’ with ‘sensing’ can be read two ways (the way in which a quorum senses versus sensing for quorums) and begs the question: whose ambitions, dreams and emotions are part of any collective sensing?

In addition to these fresh paintings are numerous spherical sculptures, such as the floating, bent hula hoops of Untitled #3, while oversize rags, taken from the artist’s studio and originally used for cleaning – remnants of the artist’s reality – are introduced as elements of new work in the sculptural mix of oil-on-canvas, stainless steel and cloth that is Untitled #7 (View from Studio).

Generally, Rosdahl’s previous works have not been overtly political; they instead consist of foreboding black-and-white cityscapes, gothic industrial panoramas, warped suburban scenes or eerie portraits. Yet the artist recently adopted the dual position of curator and artist in the Malmö-based strand of events – first initiated in Sundbyberg, Sweden, by Joakim Forsgren and Mikael Goralski – known as Kosmisk Kastrering (‘Cosmic Castration’): his ‘happening’ included site-specific performances and works by artists such as Petr Davydtchenko, Tris Vonna-Michell and Mattias Bäcklin.

This project additionally addressed the politics

of space and Malmö’s sociopolitical dynamics.

If certain peripheral spaces in Malmö are neglected, then the decision to enliven an ignored gravel lot might define the artist as activist and instigator.

Is Rosdahl reacting to modern-day propaganda and ideals with visually provocative alternatives, or is he simply responding to the latter with an emergent, otherworldly chaos and energy in flux? With works such as Love & Devotion, a spraypaint and collage piece on found carpet, where Rosdahl collaborates with controversial graffiti artist Nug, the artist has moved from one mode of operation into another – more insistently absorbing and circulating the energies of other creative types. Perhaps this is the quorum (‘of whom’ or ‘who’ roughly translated from Latin) that Rosdahl highlights – an imaginative, experimental assembly.

Considering the recent knife assaults instigated by neo-Nazis that followed the International Women’s Day demonstration in central Malmö (occurring at the same time that this exhibition was on display), exhibitions focusing on charged frequencies such as this one demand closer inspection and praise, for many Scandinavian artists choose a safer, even seemingly ‘silent’ route. Jacquelyn Davis

A Certain Promise of Death and Defeat, 2014, oil on linen, metal frame, 159 × 270 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö

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Benjamin Sabatier Storage Jousse Entreprise, Paris 17 April – 17 May Standing at the crossroads of Concrete art and design, as well as masonry and carpentry, the works displayed in Benjamin Sabatier’s first solo show at Jousse Entreprise were inspired by a visit to Sheffield’s Park Hill housing estate, back in 2012, and his ensuing discovery of British brutalist architecture, especially its formwork building technique and exposed concrete frames. The artist having been previously represented by Jérôme de Noirmont, Philippe Jousse opted to reintroduce his latest recruit to the public via a strong, concept-driven show. Gathered within ten ensembles of serial sculptures, Form Work I to VII and Valise I to III (all works 2014), nearly 50 rough concrete rectangular modules – each about 43 × 50 × 20 cm and 59kg and equipped with an (ornamental) aluminium handle to suggest transportability (don’t bother trying to move one, though: you’d break said handle, if not your wrist, while the object won’t budge) – make, indeed, a solid point.

Besides Valise I, which was the prototype for both series, all the works are arrayed in pairs or bigger groups, some arranged like materially impractical drawers in the wooden containers

that served as their formworks, others scattered on the gallery’s floor and resembling orphaned suitcases without their shutters on (you can actually see the texture of the boards used as casts on the surface of these concrete blocks, an approach that was often a part of brutalist aesthetics). In the case of Form Work IV, V and VI, the modular constructions take on much larger dimensions, the wooden shuttering moulds being piled up so as to shape and likely serve as usable bookcases (minus of course the areas occupied by the poured-concrete units). This analogy is not without significance – Jousse’s other gallery space in Paris is after all dedicated to architect-designed furniture. But this is also an opportunity to quote royalty (the first time I’ve done so), thinking of the words used

by Prince Charles in the 1988 BBC documentary A Vision of Britain to describe the Birmingham Central Library, designed by architect John Madin in the brutalist style: “It looks like a place where books are incinerated, not kept.” In this light, to stack or not to stack books in Sabatier’s artistic shelves is left to the collector’s sensibility.

That said, what the artist retains here from Concretism, as theorised by De Stijl founder

Theo van Doesburg in his 1930 manifesto of Concrete art (which shares some of the concerns of the later Brutalism), is the following principle: ‘construction must be simple and visually controllable’. In Sabatier’s understanding, as he told me during the opening: “The structure and materials are apparent, rough; a gesture that within brutalist logics is not only economical but also political and social. As with all my artworks, the mode of fabrication and components are completely visible to the users.” In his aesthetics, the absolute lucidity of the modular technique he employs (here, simply pouring concrete into formworks and piling up wooden cases) and the systematic use of humble materials that are easily purchased or even gleaned (cans, blister packs and tins of paint being among the most recurrent in his previous works) are meant to perpetuate the DIY culture of the 1960s. In this regard, his ongoing series of sculptures Kits IBK (2002–), which are sold with a user’s manual to be built by the collector, speaks for itself. Sabatier’s art is essentially processual and moreover a concrete invitation for the viewer to become, in turn, a producer of art. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Form Work V, 2014, brushed aluminium, wood and concrete, 212 × 205 × 54 cm.

Courtesy Jousse Entreprise, Paris

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Matthew Benedict The Lost Island Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich 14 March – 19 April The sea, seen as a place for the ultimate confrontation between man and nature, has exerted its pull on writers, poets and artists for centuries.

But the sea is also a space of mystery, magic, and superstition, where man, even today, can be at the mercy of invisible and unexplained forces. Jacques Lacan’s understanding of man’s death drive is clearly manifested in seafaring, where pleasure and suffering form part of the same experience; in these terms it is an almost transcendental calling.

Connecticut-born Matthew Benedict, who was raised near the New England ocean and its long tradition of whaling, fell for the mystique of the sea early on, and his artistic practice has been strongly informed by it.

His fourth solo show at Mai 36, The Lost Island – a reference to Billingsgate Island, a now sunken lighthouse island off the coast of Cape Cod – features paintings on wood panel and paper as well as photographs, and focuses on the mythology surrounding whaling and its ‘heroic’ protagonists.

Benedict’s large-scale paintings are mostly derived from photographs, and their style is similar to paint-by-numbers or advertisements

from the beginning of the last century.

There is no colour-mixing or nuance; rather, there are patches of colour placed next to each other. This Pop- or illustration-style aesthetic eliminates the sentimentality often associated with imagery of the sea and sailors, and instead offers a more humorous take on this history. In one painting, for example, we see a tanned, muscular man smoking a pipe while sitting down fixing his fishing net. It’s an iconic scene, familiar from history and legend. Another painting depicts a man from behind, standing on the tip of his boat and ready to cast his net into the sea.

The position of the figure is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818); without the archetypal romantic painter’s emotional intensity, though, it remains a stoic reproduction.

The whaling history that Benedict thematises in this show is also referenced in one painting of a ship made directly onto a map of Cape Cod that belonged to him as a child.

The map locates the 200-plus shipwrecks that took place around the peninsula and thus juxtaposes the tragic reality of whaling

– an industry that attracted immigrants from all over the world – with its mythological construct.

And to push this tension between reality and myth even further, a photograph taken at a Cape Cod whaling museum shows various items associated with the industry, some rescued from shipwrecks. The photograph is framed in the style of a historical museum, not of an art object, with a grey mat and brown frame, an aesthetic that is anathema to the art.

The other photographs in the exhibition recreate the atmosphere and setting of nineteenth-century photo studios, placing characters dressed in marine-themed costumes in staged poses. These photographs are not only works of art in their own right, but are also used

by Benedict as studies for his paintings. The integration of these photographic compositions within the paintings creates a stillness and sobriety in the work that, rather than propagating the myths, reveals the mechanisms of their making. Benedict ultimately deconstructs a history that is at its base the American immigrant experience, characterised by the mixture of pain and pleasure that led to such spiritual subtexts. Olga Stefan

Wreck at Wellfleet, 2013, gouache, latex on wood, 122 × 152 cm.

Photo: © Joerg Lohse. Courtesy Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich

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Krystian Jarnuszkiewicz Hard Asleep Under an Oak Tree Pola Magnetyczne, Warsaw 21 February – 10 May Surprisingly, Krystian Jarnuszkiewicz didn’t participate in the famous Sculptors Take Photographs exhibition in 2004 at the Xawery Dunikowski Sculpture Museum in Królikarnia, Warsaw. This project, organised by Grzegorz Kowalski and Maryla Sitkowska, extensively documented the relation between sculpture and photography – interpreting it as a local phenomenon, one that inspired and influenced an important current in Polish sculpture. The exhibition also explored the pedagogical and spatial experimentation that resulted from three influential artistic and intellectual legacies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw: the classes and studios of Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and Oskar Hansen (who, from the 1950s, ran the Studio of Composition of Spatial Forms and Planes), and later their erstwhile student Kowalski’s ‘Kowalnia’ studio – all of them formally linked to the sculpture department. They were the most important and radical art laboratories among academies in Poland between the 1950s and the 90s, going far beyond ‘sculpture’, developing creatively Hansenian Open Form , and ending up with performative radicalisation and ‘socially applied arts’. (Open Form, derived from architecture, as opposite to the Closed Form, was Hansen’s theory-practice and didactic system – a ‘relational’ approach to the space, social sculpture sculpted by people.) And if Sculptors Take Photographs presented mostly students’ and professors’ exercises, activities and graduate projects from the 1960s and the 1990s, Hard Asleep Under an Oak Tree can be read as an update and the rediscovery of a forgotten artist.

This exhibition focuses on Krystian Jarnuszkiewicz’s photographic liaison with his own sculptures, and his auteur photographic documentations of his spatial activities and ephemeral installations (such as the eponymous garden-outdoor installation Kamienny sen pod debem (Hard Asleep Under an Oak Tree), 2011).

Born in 1930, Jarnuszkiewicz was part of Hansen and Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz’s pedagogical legacy, and also the latter tutor’s younger brother.

He studied with them between 1956 and 58, graduating in 1959 with Composition at Kepa Potocka Landscape (presented here in a photocollage version), a work essential to the understanding of how Jarnuszkiewicz works with mineral-organic and industrial materials (metals, tar, pottery) and concurrently with photography, displaying – or playing with – the landscape and its ‘integrazione scenica’.

The sculpture was only c. 60 × 40 × 40 cm, but photographed and presented as if it was an architectonic object on the Vistula River, with vertical wires and tarred roofing felt.

Accordingly Landscape (1967), existing both as a cast-iron object and a photograph, teases us with its enigmatic scale and form.

It could be a nuclear mushroom cloud, stoopshouldered man, surrealistic fetish – half organic, half humanoid.

There are more samples of such gestures and photographed sculptures (such as Seed and Totem, both 1968). They recall Brancusi or Man Ray taking photographs of their own sculptures or objects; or Marcel Duchamp creating misleading spatial surroundings

and antilandscapes – but also the gallery name (Pola Magnetyczne), which makes direct reference to André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields, 1920), considered the first surrealist book.

That title might here be also very suggestive of Jarnuszkiewicz’s interest in reversing structural, spatial and mental orders. The exhibition reflects this playful, reversible thinking about sculpture through photography (and conversely photography through sculpture), analogically to the artist’s practice. At the entrance, we are introduced to this mindset by a recent spatial construction consisting of framed photographs, alternating right-side-up and inverted images of ephemeral spatial situations (such as Every Hole Waits for a Feather, 2010, or the aforementioned Hard Asleep Under an Oak Tree). There is no right point of view. The viewer has to go around and look at it from different angles and sides.

It is neither photography nor a sculpture, rather a photographic ‘participatory’ object bringing in mind those made in the circle of Hansen, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and especially Kowalski.

Its reversed structure also helps to understand the Pall for a Horse (1996) – a precise iron construction of shelves with movable drawers, inviting us to encounter an archaeology of matter and existence; remnants, relics, tar replicas.

This structure is a ‘matrix’ for each part of the exhibition, following the logic of trace and repetition, moving from object to photography, from drawer to tar, where transition from one substance to another is performed through the gaze. Barbara Piwowarska

Landscape, 1967, gelatin silver print, 11 × 17 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Pola Magnetyczne, Warsaw

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Flóra Borsi Pieces of My Mind ART350, Istanbul 20 March – 20 April Despite the myriad forms that photographic manipulation takes within digitally produced visual culture – from celebrity touchups to hyperreal special effects – there is still something basically jolting about the simple geometry and shrewd trompe l’oeil of two unassociated elements that, suddenly, just fit. The pre-Photoshop days of John Stezaker’s collages spring to mind: his surprisingly straightforward cut-and-paste juxtapositions, and their many predecessors, such as Hannah Höch’s dadaist photomontage or even Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘collision’ editing, remind one that less is often more, regardless of whether scissors or Ctrl + x is your method of choice.

With a similar kind of eye for formal coherence and an uncrowded, bold aesthetic, newcomer Hungarian artist Flóra Borsi showed promise in this solo show. That she titled it Pieces of My Mind suggests insularity and a preoccupation with subjective experience, yet what is most striking about Borsi’s work is how open every image is to multiple interpretative points of entry. Sure, her pieces tend thematically to jump around a bit – but at the ripe old age of twenty (at the time of the exhibition), the temptation to showcase your current bests

may come out top. Stylistically harmonious, however, Borsi’s work is fortunately visually strong enough to withstand the rather confused setting that is ART350 (is it a cafe? A gallery?

A hall of pictures with a grand piano in one corner?) and its consequent lack of much in the way of curatorial intervention.

In her own words (in a statement on her website), Borsi attempts through her photo manipulations to both ‘visualise the physically impossible’ and to communicate ‘emotions, dreams and humour’ – a wide spectrum of intent with fair results. The Des Monstres series (2013), for instance, features strongly backlit female nudes with ethereal silken extensions flowing forth from body parts. The stylish, monochromatic aesthetic looks straight out of an haute couture photoshoot; however, there’s a palpable rhythm to the figures’ contorting forms that makes for an image more emotively expressive than fashionably poised.

Elsewhere, a wry sense of humour is indeed evident in works like Borsi’s untitled 2013 portrait of a morose greyhound in a velvet jacket, but this hangs among striking and sinister pieces like Push and See (2014), Subjective Freedom I & II (2013) and Essäché (2013), where the

communication of the other vaunted aspects, emotions and dreams (and their surreal physical manifestations), seems to occupy the foreground.

And at no loss: featuring Borsi herself as model, these autobiographical works are particularly memorable for their interplay in obscuring, then revealing identity. Essäché could be a traditional portrait, given its model’s over-the-shoulder look, but her face is smothered in glossy black feathers that render the uncovered eyes all the more haunting. Push and See plays with our perceptions: it seems, at first, again to feature feathers, but reveals itself as a multitude of black-clad hands encroaching upon a nearsubmerged face – a dark sister-image, if there ever was one, to the iconic Guy Bourdin photo of red-nailed hands covering a red-lipped face.

Although pushing the medium of photo manipulation towards its conceptual and aesthetic capabilities, Borsi’s vision ultimately sustains its clarity and originality thanks to her surprising ability to strike formal balance.

Her photos transform the familiar just enough to challenge perception, while remaining on familiar ground by offering what appears to be a good old peek into the subconscious.

Sarah Jilani

Essäché, 2013, digital photo, 61 × 51 cm.

Courtesy ART350, Istanbul

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Mounira Al Solh All Mother Tongues Are Difficult Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut 3 April – 19 July The work of Mounira Al Solh is often described as playful – a never-ponderous, performanceembracing practice infused with a wry, intelligent sense of humour. And there is plenty of play at work in this solo show of videos, installations, embroideries, canvases and drawings at Sfeir-Semler, which hosted the Lebanese artist’s solo debut, Exhibition No. 17, in 2011. A comic impulse drives Reclining Man with Sculpture (2008–14), a series of mixed-media-on-canvas works. Four of these are caricatures depicting figures from Lebanon’s sectarian political system in the midst of (fictive) encounters with contemporary art – each accompanied by the anecdote being depicted. One work finds a caricature of a Lebanese cardinal taking part in a performance he was, in this fiction, invited to stage at the Venice Biennale – whose object was to avoid being photographed gazing at the same point in space at the same moment as four clerical lookalikes. The series’ title piece, meanwhile, depicts Iran’s former president at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art, arguing with a Lebanese sheikh-cum-political

leader about the merits of Francis Bacon’s use of colour. Deep down, the sheikh believes the painting’s online picture looks better than its original.

Al Solh’s work has changed since 2011.

Young enough – a generation below Walid Raad, Rabih Mroué, etc – to avoid Lebanon’s civil war in her work, her wit has seldom hinged on viewers knowing Beirut’s political obscurities.

Reflecting a career divided between Amsterdam and Beirut – and the noa Language School project, her collaboration with curator Angela Serino, in which people are invited to share and ‘unlearn’ the tongues they know – All Mother Tongues Are Difficult is concerned with language.

The documentary-style 30-minute Vrijouiligers (‘volunteers’ in English; ‘vrijwilligers’ in standard Dutch; 2012–4) finds the artist visiting Belgium’s Flemish education service, where she chats with immigrant volunteers and remarks drily upon the diversely broken Dutch they all share.

Her other liminal preoccupation is Syria’s disastrous civil war, which has displaced over

a million refugees to Lebanon alone. This grisly business inspired several works here.

In the 25-minute video installation Now Eat My Script (2014), for example, the artist (via a subtitled ‘voiceover’) muses over the obstacles to scripting this work while pregnant – trapped in her body, ravenous, horny and easily distracted by the sounds of Syrian refugees in her neighbourhood. Alighting upon seemingly random anecdotes – a man filming his wife’s suicide on his iPhone, Al Solh’s Damascene aunt ferrying a slaughtered lamb across the border for a family barbecue – the piece’s camerawork commences with a slow pan over an automobile weighed down with a refugee family’s possessions and concludes with an equally detailed assessment of a dismembered sheep, displayed upon a white tabletop, settling on eyes, brain and heart.

Here, her body obsessed with devouring a slaughtered lamb to sustain her foetus, her mind appalled by the visceral metaphors of ‘slaughter’, Al Solh’s work ponders the impossibility of depicting trauma. Jim Quilty

All Mother Tongues Are Difficult (Mother Tongues), 2014, embroidery on textile, 36 × 64 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

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Theo Michael Reptile Dialectics Galería omr, Mexico City 24 April – 27 June Waxing Homeric, and yet also quite cartoonlike, there is something distinctly antiheroic going on in Theo Michael’s Reptile Dialectics. One feels a sort of new daring oozing, dripping, stacked and omnipresent in the works created with dirt, foam, debris, found bits of cardboard and Styrofoam, tennis balls, etc. It’s not just heroes who are brave; to be antiheroic requires audacity as well. One senses that is something the artist has granted himself – and the works extend this feeling to the viewer. For this show, Michael has taken a different approach to his past exhibitions. He opted for a work-per-day production schedule, running a tight ship that is nevertheless almost opposite to the obsessive and painstakingly slow process behind his wellknown drawings. But for those who admire that aspect of his work, there is no need to be disappointed: one could say that the Reptile Dialectics begin there, with a duo of graphite seascapes. The sea is perfectly dramatic and drawn in Michael’s customary detailed pencilwork, yet on top of this, cartoonish bubbles with dialogue mock any sense of grandeur or

pretentiousness, as in Too Much Career Strategy and Now You Look Like This (2013), where one drowning artist says, ‘I’m serious can we erase all this?’, and in Cutting Some Edge Right Now (2013), where a castaway artist of sorts rows a small boat that looks like a coffin, while an ongoing dialogue prattles away, coming from outside the frame: ‘At the same time there is an ambivalent attitude towards painting, and a particular disregard for style… Cutting edge, cutting edge…’

From this self-conscious reflection, the work is liberated and becomes an explosion/exploration of found materials, polyurethane foam and sense of humour: dirt paintings, eyes that droop out of masks on the wall and a large plinth that holds Michael’s army, or his antihero with a thousand faces. Masks on stick pedestals, these turn ritual into game, begging to be worn for some play-acting or a mock battle. Michael’s cunning humorous work is full of such graciousness: his various sculptures such as his masks, made of found materials, not only echo avant-garde neoprimitive works by Picasso and others in Western art history, but also cut

straight to the heart of the masked matter: in their many layers, one finds the smile of the world’s oldest mask from the Neolithic period, an ancient Greek mask with Titans, Aztec masks blended with West African ones, all made of ephemera and detritus, as too are other masks reminiscent of cartoon heroes (out of a medieval knight extravaganza) and villains (the KKK, and even a fake sea-monster reminiscent of Scooby-Doo).

The series title again points to the irony: Fuck You I’m Civilized (followed in each case by a pertinent subtitle, such as Motocross Etruscan, 2013, or Flatscreen Snowman, 2013). Everything is up for grabs: past, present, high, low, ancient and crappy, West and Other, and Michael runs with it. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake sings, ‘The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.’ Michael altered his mind and his work process with it: like the unstill waters of his drawings, his approach for this show is in flux and breeds fresh, funny work full of finesse.

Gabriela Jauregui

Reptile Dialectics, 2014 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Galería OMR, Mexico City

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Casa Triângulo no Pivô Pivô, São Paulo 5–27 April A floor-to-ceiling riot of red, white and black decals and freestanding artworks in Pivô’s entrance way, an installation by the FrenchBrazilian duo Assume Vivid Astro Focus that greeted visitors to the downtown artist-run space throughout April, was utterly São Paulo in its explosive, disorderly energy – in the red, white and black of the flag of São Paulo state; in the decals’ layer upon layer of angular forms, with their elements of Concretism and Neoconcretism, touchstone Brazilian art moments; and in the neon squiggles on the ceiling overhead, tracing out variations on the city’s cryptic, omnipresent pixação graffiti.

A mashup of a number of previous AVAF series (Neons, 2008, Transgeométricas, 2013, Acebolada Vadia Anabolizada Fascinante, 2014), the installation’s impact, upon stepping off the grey street into a world of form and colour, was almost overwhelming, and a beautiful use of a part of the gallery that is more often empty.

Infiltrating AVAF’s area and beckoning visitors upwards, hanging pendulously in the stairwell was the brilliantly coloured, tasselled and sequinned bulk of Joana Vasconcelos’s Valquíria Amazônia (2014), an immense, stuffed, tentacled form plunging through the stairwell from top to bottom and insinuating its way horizontally into Pivô’s main gallery space with its gaudily sensual, unstoppable immensity. Against the concrete backdrop of Oscar Niemeyer’s mighty Copan building, in which Pivô is housed, the piece was a dazzling conduit into a show featuring all 25 of the artists currently on the roster at the gallery Casa Triângulo, celebrating its 25th year with this brief return to Centro, close to the louche street Largo do Arouche, where it first opened in 1988.

But this is no retrospective, and there’s no sign of some of the most famous of the artists who have passed through the gallery since it first started out as an incubator for young talent – the likes of Dora Longo Bahia, Rivane Neuenschwander, Rosângela Rennó and Sergio Romagnolo. Instead, the show is an absorbing infusion of (mainly Brazilian) art in 2014. With the exception of a short film by Stephen Dean (Pulse, 2001), none of the works dates from before 2008, and the vast majority were made in 2013–4.

Many of the pieces, site-specific or otherwise, interact with the building and its beguiling brutalist interior, rendered organic by a sensitive recent renovation that uncovers and almost excavates original features, leaving them stripped interrogatively bare. Across one long, curved sweep of window, Albano Afonso’s fractallike adhesives Cristalização da Paisagem (Crystallization of the Landscape, 2011–4), created digitally from photographs of foliage, sent a contagion of angular, geometric shards of jungle green creeping across the glass. Further inside, a purpose-made piece by Sandra Cinto, Tanto Mar (So Much Sea, 2014), brings an almighty monochrome sea hissing across one huge wall in the form of a 16-metre polyptych in acrylic, its rearing waves pointing the way to a narrow, tapering space in which Guillermo Mora’s No Consigo (I Can’t Manage To, 2014) is a mess of painted wooden frames, joined with hinges to form one long, tangled whole, hung like an untieable knot.

It’s in the exhibition’s smallest space, deep inside the building, that some of the most delicate, intimate pieces are to be found. Like his paintings, Eduardo Berliner’s exquisite sketches and drawings for a book of Aesop’s Fables show their workings and the process of creation

to the extent that it almost becomes the subject of the works. In the case of these 2013 ink drawings, the paper is turned and sketches made facing every which way, depicting a macabre world beset by cautionary and absurd written phrases, in which besuited bears and foxes don aprons to dissect people, and donkey masks dissolve on human faces to reveal more animals beneath.

Also suffused with a sense of something happening or imminent is Tony Camargo’s trio of tableaux vivant videos (all 2012), where preposterous but beautifully balanced scenes feature boots, balloons, plastic buckets, rickety structures and the artist himself, arranged beneath a sheet like an ungainly pantomime ghost. In the similar still-photograph versions of this series, he seems perpetually on the brink of blundering into life and ruining the ramshackle scene. And as each video gets under way, that’s exactly what he does, with a choreographed awkwardness that’s simultaneously graceful, contained and laugh-aloud funny.

In Max Gómez Canle’s paintings in oil on wood and oil on copper (from 2011 and 2012), delicately realist rural scenes are subverted with the insertion of ramrod-straight edges into the landscape, namely in the form of sharply ruled riverbanks, their waters rendered in solid shades of blue that contrast with the delicate light and shade playing across the rest of the landscapes.

It seems an innocent enough trick to play on the viewer, but in a final work by the artist – also the final work in the show, if you take the exhibition clockwise – what looks like a simple visor painted with a bucolic scene has had a pair of cruel-looking copper cones attached to the inside, ready to put out the eyes of anyone who should dare to look through it. Claire Rigby

Joana Vasconcelos, Valquíria Amazônia, 2014, handmade woollen crochet, felt appliqués, fabrics, ornaments, polystyrene, polyester and steel cables, 1200 × 600 × 330 cm.

Photo: Edouard Fraipont. Courtesy Casa Triângulo, São Paulo

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He An It’s Forever Not Magician Space, Beijing 29 March – 27 April This is the fifth in a series of what can be called ‘architectural’ installations by He An that began in 2010. Direct interventions in a given exhibition space, these have to date involved altered gradients, heights, widths or entry points and infill. The first two works of this kind were painted pure white and kept smooth to appear seamless with the white cube interiors they occupied. More recently, at TOP Contemporary Art Centre, Shanghai; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; and now Magician Space in Beijing (also the site of the first two shows), plaster infused with Chinese ink, rough concrete paving slabs, neon light elements and thin rubber tubes seeping engine oil have comprised the materials.

The consistent themes of He An’s work are urban development, loneliness, dislocation, poetic longing, filmic references and the exploration of human relationships to architecture in a psycho-physical or emotive vein.

The current work is an instance of the latter impulse – the rawness of the installation’s

form casts aside the refinement of the earlier interventions in favour of rough visceral surfaces, cracks and leaking fluid. The floor of the gallery has been overlaid with large square concrete slabs; the rubber tubes lie around and protrude from the cracks between these slabs at random, and watery oil is visibly soaking into them. In the far right corner, a rectangle of black marble has a small coil of blue neon light on it; barely noticeable is a patch of gloss paint on the white wall, as if it were the reflection of the marble.

The ceiling of the main space is now much lower – its surface and lighting replicated as if the whole thing had simply been pulled down. Numbers appear on the walls at divisions between the slabs, though without apparent sequence. The adjacent smaller room of the gallery is now occupied fully by giant blocks around two metres high, covered in the ink-stained plaster. A straight vertical crevice between them invites one to peer in, but yields nothing.

It’s Forever Not is a title that aptly evokes a common atmosphere around He An’s work – a distinct statement resting on a broad foundation of negation or want, which in turn is born of the emotional backdrop to his life in China; implicitly, the artist acts somewhat in the manner of a poet, distilling these sensations as those shared by millions. The form of the installation in Beijing is brutalist (to borrow an architectural term) and melancholic in an impassive way. Emotional lack or loneliness translates, conversely, into a filling-in of space (one might suppose like the will to fulfil oneself). Grey surfaces and wasted liquid might imply unclear zones of human relations – grey areas, definite but unclear.

Yet all is not pathos – there is also a hint of the absurd here. You are still encouraged to climb onto the raised floor; and that the lowered ceiling exactly replicates the original makes it feel something like a game, or a virtuoso touch.

Despite a landscape of concrete structures, it seems a certain spirit persists. Iona Whittaker

It’s Forever Not, 2014, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Magician Space, Beijing

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Books

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23/05/2014 10:24

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

by Mark Fisher To anybody paying attention over the past decade, and more especially anyone invested in the aesthetic and political afterlife of theory, the writings of Mark Fisher have felt essential if at times frustrating. From the haunted screeds that appeared on his blog K-Punk, through the untimely meditations on precarity and the administration of affect in Capitalist Realism (2009), to his generalised presence today as melancholic – better, dysphoric – provocateur, Fisher’s has been a voice of relentless intelligence and (at his best) unabashed vulnerability in terms of fleeting personal revelation. A collection of his occasional pieces promises many things, chief among them a frank appraisal of the valence today of ‘hauntology’: the concept that he copped from Jacques Derrida and which has perhaps now had its time (again) as a way of thinking about culture and politics.

If there is fretful life in that philosophical spectre yet, it must surely reside in Fisher’s later turn to the realities of contemporary depression: the vivifying potential of feeling belated and bullied, the whisper at your shoulder that what might have been may yet be the dream that saves you. This is essentially Fisher’s thing when it comes to music, film and (less so) writing: the vestige of a future lost in half-remembered

Zero Books, £12.99 (softcover)

fragments from half a life ago. And yet, taken simply as a set of cultural coordinates, the contents of Ghosts of My Life seem remarkably comforting and familiar rather than energising, a veritable playlist of fortysomething faves.

Here again are Fisher’s thoughts on Kubrick’s The Shining, Japan’s Ghosts (whence his title), the films of Chris Petit, the aftermaths of rave and jungle. We, that’s to say his contemporaries, may all agree that the Beckett-for-the-kids sci-fi TV series Sapphire and Steel (1979–82) was genuinely unsettling and worthy of resuscitation. But wait, what year is it again? 2004? Or a grey Saturday evening in England, circa 1982?

It’s unfair to censure Fisher for the specificity of these reference points – we all have our touchstones, teenage ones hardest to kick – but not for the way they restrict his view of the present, or even other pasts. At times he’s a brilliant analyst of the current occlusion of the proper strangeness and political import of past cultural artefacts, as here in his pointed critique of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the 2011 film that stylishly misses the grubby purchase on history and haunting essayed by le Carré’s 1974 novel and a 1979 BBC adaptation. Elsewhere, though, you have to wonder at a critic so immured among his favoured landmarks

of weird England – albeit great ones: Brian Eno and M.R. James – that he takes W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) for a botched guide to Suffolk instead of what it is: a work of imagination. (Mind you, Fisher is a writer for whom ‘literature’ is merely an insult, so he consistently overrates adolescent stuff like H.P. Lovecraft or the bloke-lit of David Peace.)

It’s a dismaying thought, given how necessary Fisher’s voice seems politically now, but what appeared ten years ago like a truly ghostly irruption of past futures into present predicaments has resolved itself in his writing into a soft canon of sorts. Or maybe it’s not so dispiriting after all, because any such anthology of past writings – mea culpa, in this regard – is necessarily also a way of putting an end to a phase in your work, preparing the ground for something more exacting. What I’d love to read from Fisher is either a sedulously researched cultural archaeology of the period to which he gives such weight, or a frankly personal and properly writerly account of his own intellectual and affective trajectory (not to speak of the question of class, on which he has lately been eloquent). It may be that those are the same project – there are strong hints of it in Ghosts of My Life. Brian Dillon

Being Cultured: In Defence of Discrimination

by Angus Kennedy If the demand to ‘defend discrimination’ can raise alarm today, that reaction only reveals how the idea of discrimination in its positive sense – of being discriminating, of being able to assign value to things – has been eclipsed by the more sinister notion of discrimination – of dividing, excluding and oppressing. The former signifies an act of subjective freedom, the latter an act of violence and subjugation.

Angus Kennedy’s Being Cultured unapologetically remakes the case for good and bad art, for our capacity for (good) discrimination and the necessity of critical judgement. And it doesn’t stop there, not only arguing for the place of tradition in culture, but also making the case for the enduring value of the Western artistic canon, finishing with the heretical suggestion that

Imprint Academic, £14.95 (softcover)

Western culture is historically superior to others – postcolonialist academics and intersectionalist activists will be choking on their soya lattes.

Kennedy is no rightwing conservative throwback, though. As it turns out, he takes the idea of cultural judgement back to where it should be – into the space of individual agency and collective civil liberty, as a facet of what it means to be free as a human subject, and to treat others as equals. Contemporary ‘culture’, Kennedy argues, is more omnipresent than ever, but as it aspires to total inclusivity (as well as relativist tolerance), to ‘relevance’ and an ephemeral fascination with the ever-new, it has little meaning, is estranged from the past and cannot endure in the future. Rather than passively bobbing about in the sea of what

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now gets called culture, Kennedy argues that it is only through the effort of ‘being cultured’ – of becoming more discerning, judging subjects – that we credit art with historical value and articulate our historical and collective capacity to act according to something more than instinct or necessity.

To be free, in other words.

While current artworld polemics seem unable to get beyond pessimistic accounts of art market excess and neoliberal cultural globalisation, Kennedy’s fierce defence of aesthetic judgement at the very least forces us to see ourselves as responsible for giving art value. If we refuse that task, then art of course will appear to be worthless, venal junk. And that will be our fault. J.J. Charlesworth

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Selected Writings, 2000–2014

by Paul Chan Back in 2009, Paul Chan took a timeout from making art. This summer sees his first major solo exhibition since 2008, at the Schaulager in Basel, an event marked by the publication of this substantial collection of his writings. Given that sabbatical (during which the Hong Kongborn, New York-based artist set up his Badlands Unlimited publishing house), perhaps it’s fitting too that the first section of the book brings together a series of texts – ‘What Art Is and Where It Belongs’ and ‘On Art and the 99 Percent’ among them – that, at their heart, consider questions concerning the definition of art and its role in society, with a particular focus on its relation to ideas of home and community, much of it in the context of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the subsequent global economic recession.

In the main, these texts were originally presented in art magazines or as lectures (a form that Chan, often deploying an extremely entertaining mixture of philosophic reference – Hegel figures prominently – and personal experience, is particularly skilled in delivering), but as you read through them collectively, they offer up a series of aphoristic statements concerning the nature of their author’s profession: ‘I am an artist. And artists are one way or another, obsessed with form.’ ‘For outsider art, the duty is to the law, not to the new (or more precisely the longing to the new), which is the calling of contemporary art.’ ‘Art uses things to make its presence felt. But art is not in itself

Schaulager / Laurenz Foundation / Badlands Unlimited, $25 (softcover) a thing.’ ‘To find the courage to say the very last words and to make them sing like the recessional to the very last service, this is what I call art.’ And you’re left with a sense that despite the clarity and assurance of Chan’s writing, he’s responding to a series of widespread insecurities about art and its purpose in the world today (in the context of a general view of art as a commodity available only to an economic and social elite, and at risk of becoming disconnected from the ‘real’ issues that affect contemporary living – military and economic conflict, political oppression, the effects of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, etc – many of which Chan has taken the trouble to engage with, travelling to Baghdad and New Orleans).

It’s a theme that continues in the next section, which collects texts relating specifically to Chang’s own work and practice. The short text ‘On the Difference between a Work and a Project’, for example, begins with the statement, ‘I make work and have done projects’, and leads to a discussion of how, in 2011, the idea of ‘work’ has changed given that 9.6 percent of the American population lack it. A ‘project’, Chang states, ‘encompasses the making of something that is not dependent on work’.

Which in turn leads to the presentation of a series of Chan’s artworks – the Alternumerics – involving computer fonts that replace letters with text and graphic fragments (in Oh Bishop X, 2008, ‘m’ becomes ‘useless…’ and ‘n’ ‘a dud…’;

others have included a ‘self-portrait’ font that enables you to write like Chan) and that both reduce (‘I got greedy. I wanted language to work only for me and no one else,’ Chan says) and expand (download the font – it’s free – connect to a printer and you can make an artwork) the possibilities of language, technology and artmaking. ‘Think Diderot’s Encyclopedia.

Think Socialism.’ Chan writes.

The final section of the book collects Chan’s writing on others, among them artists – Chris Marker, Rachel Harrison, Marcel Duchamp – thinkers – Theodor W. Adorno – and even curators – Hans Ulrich Obrist. It’s a personal artworld, if you like. There’s also the introduction to a 2012 Badlands publication (coinciding with the US presidential elections) of three idealistic speeches on democracy written by Saddam Hussein during the 1970s that expose the slipperiness of language (Chan points out that Hussein’s thoughts are not far removed from the idea of democracy peddled

by US politicians) and, perhaps more pertinently, the gap between discourse and action.

‘I am not at all sure what I achieve in my writing. I am pretty sure nothing much is achieved in the art,’ Chang recently stated in an interview with Noelle Bodick on artspace.com.

On the evidence of this collection, Chan is one of the more important commentators on the state of art today, not least for giving the impression that we are able to shape, rather than accept, what art is and can do. Mark Rappolt

Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Contemporary Art

by Arthur I. Miller Colliding Worlds explores the various forms of contemporary collaboration/crossover and integration between science and art, or ‘artsci’, the term for creativity influenced by and in many cases employing the latest developments in science and technology, chosen by the book’s author, science philosopher and historian Arthur I. Miller. Beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, Miller highlights how groundbreaking scientific ideas – including four-dimensional geometry, relativity and quantum physics – influenced the contemporary artists of that period, Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp, Malevich and Mondrian among them.

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W.W. Norton & Company, $29.95 (hardcover)

From the 1960s onwards, Miller charts the development of artsci through contemporary examples, many of them drawn from his own extensive series of interviews with artists and those involved in artsci-friendly institutions such as CERN, the Wellcome Trust and the annual Linz-based Ars Electronica festival.

More thematic sections cover experimental music and sound capture by artists and composers such as David Toop, Sam Auinger and Jo Thomas; the ‘transgenic’ art of artists such as Eduardo Kac, who turned a white rabbit fluorescent by implanting it with a jellyfish protein gene; the body modifications of ‘human cyborg’ artists such as Stelarc and Orlan; and

artists using software to transform data into visual imagery, such as the inventor of the Fractal Flame algorithm, Scott Draves.

An accessible and knowledgeable resource for all things artsci, Colliding Worlds also brings in related key areas such as aesthetics, becoming problematic only when Miller equates a perceived reluctance of the art establishment to embrace artsci with its initial rejection of movements such as Impressionism, accordingly proposing artsci as the new avant-garde. Perhaps the more relevant area for the book to have discussed here is the differentiation between science and technology as invention, as a subject within art and as a tool for making it. Helen Sumpter

ArtReview

23/05/2014 18:18

Pig out on ArtReview this summer

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For more on Anne Opotowsky & Aya Morton, see overleaf

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Contributors

Christian Viveros-Fauné is a New York-based writer and curator. He has written extensively about art and culture for numerous publications, among them Frieze, Art in America, The New Yorker, Departures and Newsweek – The Daily Beast. He currently writes art criticism for The Village Voice and artnet.com, and is also working on a monograph about the Guatemalan photographer and artist Lissie Habie. Viveros-Fauné has curated exhibitions at, among other venues, the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey; the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; the Museo Amparo, Puebla; the Centro Atlántico de Arte Contemporaneo, Las Palmas; the Royal Hibernian Society, Dublin; and the National Gallery of Art, Dublin.

Paul Gravett is a writer, lecturer, curator, festival director and publisher based in London and specialising in international comics. His writings on the subject appear in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement and Comic Heroes, among others, and on his website, paulgravett.com. His latest books are Comics Art and Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK (both 2014), cowritten with John Harris Dunning. Gravett and Dunning are also cocurators of the related exhibition Comics Unmasked at the British Library (to 19 August), the largest ever about British comics. Since 2003 Gravett has been co-director of Comica, the London International Comics Festival (comicafestival.com), which returns to the British Library over the exhibition’s final weekend, 15–17 August.

Paul Pieroni is a curator born and based in London. Since 2009 he has been exhibitions curator of Space, London, recent exhibitions at which include Human Wave: The Videotapes of Raymond Pettibon, Screens: Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Monory and Jo Spence: Work (Part I).

Jeremy Liebman is a photographer. He grew up in Berkeley and Dallas, and now lives in Brooklyn. French publisher JSBJ published his zine À Rebours, which was acquired by the library collection of MoMA in New York. His work has also been published in the books Background Noise and Holy Ghost Zine Vol. 1 (both 2010), and has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, London and Berlin. His clients include Apartamento, Nowness, W, The New York Times Magazine, i-D and Pin-Up.

Contributing Writers Sara Arrhenius, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Gesine Borcherdt, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Barbara Casavecchia, Matthew Collings, Jacquelyn Davis, Brian Dillon, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Charlie Fox, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Sarah Jilani, Maria Lind, Daniel McClean, Richard Parry, Paul Pieroni, Barbara Piwowarska, Mark Prince, Jim Quilty, Claire Rigby, Ed Schad, Mark Sladen, Olga Stefan, Susannah Thompson, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Iona Whittaker Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp

Sarah Jilani Contributing Artists / Photographers is a Berlin-based writed and curator. She teaches a course at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and is currently curating an exhibition for Autocenter, Berlin, that combines the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson and Eli Cortiñas, as well as a group show at Salon Dahlmann in Berlin on ‘poetic minimalism’, which takes the the work of Bernd Lohaus as a catalyst and features Rosa Barba, Katinka Bock, Gabriel Kuri, Sofia Hultén, Anri Sala, Ceal Floyer and others.

Jeremy Liebman, Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Anne Opotowsky & Aya Morton, Yasuyuki Takagi

Anne Opotowsky & Aya Morton (preceding pages)

Buried today beneath basketball courts in Hong Kong sleeps Kowloon Walled City, once home to the poor, the criminal, the innocent and the secretive, no bigger than a few city blocks and flourishing outside all conventions and laws. For the Emmy Award-winning American writer of books, films and documentaries Anne Opotowsky, the vanished Walled City struck deep emotional chords.

“It created incredible echoes in all I knew about human history. I see the Walled City in imperialism, Orientalism, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Africa, the American South and American West. The city, with its story, its people, their need to find a place, which though utterly anarchic, was home, became a powerful muse.”

Hong Kong itself was another inspiration that seduced the widely travelled Opotowsky. “This was where British imperialism acted as the catalyst for two wholly different worlds to meet, and the West could unravel their proper exteriors, while the East could be the temptress.” Opotowsky jumped at the chance to explore the medium of comics to develop

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her fascinations into three audacious historical reveries. The Walled City trilogy follows three best friends, all Chinese-bred in Hong Kong, whose fates are intertwined with that of the city, as they become, respectively, a revolutionary, a formidable member of the establishment and a powerful member of the Hong Kong Triads.

In the first volume, His Dream of the Skyland, set during the 1920s, an eager lad named Song Lu strives towards adulthood, tasting freedom, sex and opportunity. While his post office job delivering dead letters sends him on his bike into the Walled City’s labyrinth of mysteries and intrigues, life for his family and friends only gets more complicated.

“I wanted to tell a story that was free of Western Orientalism, of accepted views on how things happened, and who did what and why. In flipping history on its ear, I also wanted to have the freedom to write about people whose lives were just as beautiful and yet were not often told. So it was a blank canvas: I could write tales that were unknown to the characters, the storyteller and to the listener.”

As demonstrated in the new tangential Strip overleaf, Song’s Dreams, illustrator Aya Morton’s sinuous, calligraphic brushlines and luminescent washes of colour sweep up the reader in the heady fervour of the place and period. Her frameless, soft-edged panels melt their boundaries, and her idiosyncratic and sometimes vertiginous shifts in perspective mean that no building or wall can contain or confine our vision. Ravishing and remarkable, Opotowsky and Morton’s 300-page volume has recently been released in Europe by Australian publishers Gestalt, and the second in the trilogy, Nocturne, follows this summer, even longer at 450 pages, drawn by Angie Hoffmeister, with a third under way with yet another illustrator. Opotowsky remains a writer fascinated by the effects and meanings of walls. “They are so prismatic and say so much about who we are as people, about when, why and who we wall off and how this affects those within walls and outside them. For some they isolate, for others they protect and create the freedom to be someone or something wholly new.” Paul Gravett

ArtReview

23/05/2014 17:51

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Art and photo credits

Reprographics by PHMEDIA. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers.

ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (ISSN No: 1745-9303, USPS No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months July, August and February by ArtReview Ltd and is distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe Nj 08831 and additional mailing offices. Periodicals postage paid at New Brunswick Nj. POSTMASTER: send address changes to ArtReview, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe Nj 08831

on the cover Mark Leckey, Circa ’87, 2013, pigmentbased colour print, 33 × 48 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York on pages 86 Mark Leckey, photographed

by Jeremy Liebman on pages 96–7 and 177 Bosco Sodi and work in his studio, photographed by Yasuyuki Takagi on pages 174 and 182 Photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

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Text credits Quotations on the spine and on pages 33, 85 and 143 are from personal ads placed with shanghaiist.com. The ad quoted on the spine was placed by Cannellelee, 45kg, Shanghai

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Off the Record Summer 2014 The following takes place between 10am and 11am.

“Get up! Get the fuck up!”

I stumble to consciousness and blearily make out a middle-aged gentleman wearing a Panama hat and screaming in my face.

“That stunt you pulled back in the car – if you ever pull your weapon on me again, you better intend to use it,” he yells.

Fair enough, I think. I look around. We are in a small hotel room where the walls are painted orange. I have a colossal hangover and realise I am only wearing an Agent Provocateur Tigre fringed tulle playsuit. The middle-aged man is putting together what looks like a sniper rifle at the window.

“Hold on a minute, are you trying to shoot someone from the window of a room at the easyHotel in Basel?” I ask. I throw on a Dolce & Gabbana rose-print stretch-silk gazar coat to cover my modesty.

“Who are we trying to gun down?”

“Don’t you remember anything about our chat at the Kunsthalle Bar last night, Gallery Girl? About how the Chinese have replaced Spiegler with an impostor? How the real Spiegler is the only man who can help us find the missing warhead and stop it from being detonated, killing thousands of collectors at Art Basel? And put your wig on, you need to look like Kim Bauer!”

I pick up a lank blonde wig that is draped on the back of some easyHotel furniture and put it on. The man takes aim at a group across the street.

“Hold on, aren’t you just angry because you’re a former Venice Biennale curator raging at the rise of art fairs who’s been locked in this room with boxsets of the popular American thriller series 24 for the last two years?”

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“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve done enough lying myself to know the signs,” I yell, and leap at him. Before I can complete my rugby-tackle, he’s pulled the trigger and with one shot grazed the knee of an attractive but visibly shocked VIP ambassador to Art Basel across the street. He leaps out the window.

“What if you’re wrong?” he shouts up at me as he picks himself up and runs down the Riehenring.

“I’m not! They all think you’re dead, but I know that you faked it and you’re back to hijack Art Basel, just like Tony Almeida when he goes bad in series seven!”

Instead of hijacking the fair, the curator hijacks a car, shoves the driver out of it and speeds off towards Messeplatz. I give 100 Swiss francs to the doorman of the easyHotel and gesture at a moped. “This isn’t a field-ops call, Gallery Girl, I need authorisation. But I like the wig,” he shouts in a Swiss-German accent as I manhandle him onto the 50cc Honda moped and hold a knife to his ear to encourage him to go faster.

By the time we get to Art Basel, the curator has already overpowered the elderly driver who mans the Art Basel–Liste shuttle and is driving it straight towards the doors of Art Basel Unlimited.

“He said his name was Bauer, Ute Meta Bauer, and he was here to give a talk in Art Basel Salon,” says the dazed geriatric.

“He’s not Ute Meta Bauer. He thinks he’s Jack Bauer. And that Spiegler is a Chinese stooge. Give me your radio!” I snap at him, straddling his face.

I yell into the radio, “Art Unlimited volunteers! Form a human chain around Marc Spiegler at Xu Zhen’s presentation courtesy of Long March Space. And kill on sight any curators you see!”

I get up and sprint into Unlimited as fast as my Bruno Magli embellished suede pumps will carry me. Twenty minutes later I’ve made it to the Xu Zhen work. Bodies of volunteers lie everywhere, and the bullet-riddled curator is slumped on a bench. I go over to him and cradle him. He fondles my wig.

I look up and see Marc Spiegler, safe and sound. I breathe a sigh of relief. A group of Chinese businessmen moves towards Spiegler, points in the direction of the dying curator in my arms and then starts high-fiving. Spiegler glances guiltily in my direction. I suddenly have a terrible realisation and start fumbling under the curator’s now-dead body for his Glock 19.

My name is Gallery Girl, and this is going to be the longest day of my life. Gallery Girl

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AUGUST 29TH - AUGUST 31ST 2014

A N D E R S E N ’ S C O N T E M P O R A RY ( D K ) G A L E R I E A N D E R S O N / S A N D ST R Ö M ( S E ) G A L E R I E A N H AVA ( F I) A N N A E L L EGA L L E RY ( S E) G A L L E R I B O B J E RG G A A R D ( D K ) C H R IST I A N A N D E R S E N ( D K) C H R IST I A N L A R SE N ( S E) DAV I D R IS L E Y G A L L E RY ( D K ) E L A ST I C G A L L E RY ( S E ) G A L E R I E F O R S B L O M ( F I ) J O H A N B E R G G R E N G A L L E RY ( S E ) G A L L E R I N I C O L A I WA L L N E R ( D K ) N I E L S B O R C H J E N S E N G A L L E RY A N D E D I T I O N ( D K ) N I L S STÆ R K ( D K ) G A L E R I E N O R D E N H A K E ( S E ) I 8 G A L L E RY ( I S ) G A L L E R I M A G N U S K A R L S S O N ( S E ) M A RT I N A S B Æ K G A L L E RY ( D K ) O S L C O N T E M P O R A RY ( N O ) P E D E R L U N D ( N O ) P E T E R L AV G A L L E RY ( D K ) G A L L E R I R I I S ( N O ) G A L L E R I S P EC TA ( D K ) G A L L E R I S U S A N N E OT T E S E N ( D K ) V 1 G A L L E RY ( D K ) MEDIA PARTNER

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