ArtReview Summer 2015 by ArtReview

Geta Brătescu

Photography: Michel Gibert. With thanks to Alain Cordier for Hortus Gallery.com.

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From top to bottom: Steven Claydon, The Geophysical U, 2013, Oil and gesso on canvas, laminated wood, 81 x 71 x 10 cm / 32 x 28 x 4 inches | Kaari Upson, Xerox Cushion I, 2014, Silicone, spandex, fiberglass, 71 x 61 x 20.3 cm 26 x 24 x 8 inches | Elad Lassry, Harry Potter, 2010, C-print, framed, 36.8 x 29.2 cm / 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches | All images are Courtesy of Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London

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ArtReview vol 67 no 5 Summer 2015

Art: some people can’t get enough of it. But ArtReview can Ah, come on! Don’t look so shocked. Recently ArtReview was on the flight back from the opening of the Venice Biennale when a Frenchman with a ‘Free Tania!’ badge pinned wonkily to his lapel started asking whether or not ArtReview was going to the biennial. Given that it operates in the artworld, ArtReview is used to dealing with idiots and so patiently explained that it was on a flight from Venice precisely because it had just been to the biennial. “Bouf!” the Frenchman exhaled scoffingly, adding, “Not the old one! The new one!” before repeating his enquiry about any plans ArtReview might have to head off to Cuba “with everyone else” in a couple of weeks. Apparently there was going to be a biennial in Havana as well as some sort of ‘free’ trip available to press, and ArtReview should be on it. Or so the Frenchman exclaimed invitingly before reaching into an Azerbaijan Pavilion tote bag and slipping ArtReview a card printed on board so thick you could use it as a ninja throwing star. Because of the acquired patience already accounted for, ArtReview didn’t use the card to maim the cardgiver, despite the fact that the only information it provided about the Frenchman was the word ‘Consultant’, inscribed in some archaic Gothic font. Instead, ArtReview was figuring out a polite way of saying that it wasn’t that sure it had ‘finished’ with the old biennial, both in terms of trudging to and actually finding some of the further-flung pavilions and, more importantly, digesting what it had managed to see. “What did you think of the ‘old’ biennial?” ArtReview ventured. But by then the Frenchman had found someone who was going to the new biennial and was no longer bothered. Perhaps it’s in response to this that ArtReview’s Summer issue reflects on art and artists who operate at or are interested in the operations of a slower pace: whether that’s the long, dedicated and remarkably consistent career of Geta Brătescu or the stop–start and sometimes obfuscating process of Lutz Bacher, or the unfolding and unpacking of the operations of history and time in relation to visual imagery in the work of Akram Zaatari. It’s not that ArtReview wants to become the artworld equivalent of a ‘slow food’ preacher, just that ArtReview isn’t sure that the best way to experience art is to insist on getting immediate satisfaction. Of course what ArtReview didn’t confess to the Frenchman is that in reality it is no stranger to a bit of double-biennialing itself. Prior to Venice it visited Budapest and the inaugural off-Biennale, on the face of it a nongovernmental celebration of independently funded art spaces (look out for more on this in the next issue), organised by people who, for various moreor-less-direct reasons, had been driven out of state-controlled art spaces by the current Hungarian government, which isn’t famous for its openmindedness. If for those reasons the off-Biennale didn’t exactly offer up multiple perspectives on what was going on with art in Hungary, it was an event that knowingly operated on the edge of art and life, whether that was in the form of exhibitions

Venice Biennale preview, day 1

that took place in people’s apartments or in the form of work that cumulatively reflected on forced migration and the way that art and artists can creatively, if not always successfully, respond to regulation, formal and informal censorship, and various other restrictions and controls. Some of that art-and-life stuff had been on its mind when ArtReview took part in Hans Haacke’s free World Poll (2015), an interactive visitors’ survey at the Venice Biennale which in return told it that, at that point (data accumulated by the middle of the second preview day of the Biennale), the stereotypical Venice visitor might be a voting forty-five-to-sixty-year-old heterosexual female Roman Catholic curator from a country in Western Europe or North America that has done hardly anything to prevent climate change, who supports a correction of economic inequalities and the payment of fair wages to migrant workers from South Asia who are constructing branches of various cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi, earns up to $50,000 per year herself and has spent $1,000 to $10,000 on buying works of art during her lifetime, concedes that the kind of exhibitions museums present might be somewhat affected by sponsorship, while generally disagreeing with the pursuit of United States policies in the world at large, but not as much as she disagrees with equivalent Russian policies, while thinking that Israel should end its occupation of the West Bank, that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay should be released, but only after a civilian court has found them not guilty, and that publicly financed infrastructure and social safety nets are the best way to strengthen the economy of the European Union, and thinks that her own ethnic background has had a positive effect on her safety and advancement in life. While this ‘average’ Biennale visitor did seem to correspond to ArtReview’s experience of the crowds around it, the survey and its highlighting of subjective opinion and the difference (in Abu Dhabi, for instance) between ideals and reality did force ArtReview to think about how its life, in all its particular details, does colour its experience of art. Consequently, that connection between art and life is something of a subtext that runs through this issue. It’s also the reason that ArtReview doesn’t habitually plunge into a biennial every second week. Because it has a life that, while inseparable from the way it views art, isn’t just art. You try wandering through a biennial with an eye for that alone after the results of the recent British general election. ArtReview

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Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 37

Mehmet II, the Great Conqueror, on the Venice Biennale Interview by Matthew Collings 66

Points of View by Maria Lind, J. J. Charlesworth, Laura McLean-Ferris, Lucas Ospina, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Laura Oldﬁeld Ford, Jonathan Grossmalerman & Daniel Elsea 51

page 56 Charles Ray, Tractor, 2005. © the artist. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Summer 2015

Art Featured

Geta Brătescu by Helen Sumpter 84

Doug Aitken by Andrew Berardini 102

Now Wash Your Hands by Chris Fite-Wassilak 92

Lutz Bacher by Martin Herbert 108

Akram Zaatari by Oliver Basciano 98

Fashion / Feminism by Clara Young 114

page 92 Ettore Sottsass, Bacterio Pattern, 1978

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

Luis Roldán, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Elizabeth Orr, by David Everitt Howe Hank Willis Thomas, by Brienne Walsh Brian Maguire, by Christian Viveros-Fauné Josephine Pryde, by Jonathan Griffin Francis Alÿs, by Gabriela Jauregui Cao Guimarães, by Claire Rigby Kyle Morland, by Matthew Blackman

exhibitions 124 pulp Festival, by Paul Gravett Artists and Poets, by Sherman Sam Pierre Bismuth, by Sam Steverlynck For Real, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, by Martin Herbert Yngve Holen, by Mark Prince Sequences vii, by Oliver Basciano Intelligent Machinery, by Luke Clancy Sergei Tcherepnin, by Barbara Piwowarska Ali Emir Tapan, by Sarah Jilani Rupert Ackroyd, by John Quin The Symptom of Art, by Robert Barry Five Issues of Studio International, by Gabriel Coxhead David Douard, by Sean Ashton Adam Pendleton, by Dan Udy Kapwani Kiwanga, by J.J. Charlesworth Maud Sulter, by Susannah Thompson Doris Salcedo, by Stephanie Cristello Mark Ruwedel, by Ed Schad

books 154 Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory, by Nick Jones Art Workers, edited by Erik Krikortz, Airi Triisberg and Minna Henriksson Headless: A Novel, by K.D. Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art, by John Sharp the strip 158 off the record 162

page 151 Francis Alÿs, Tornado, 2000–10, video documentation of action, 55 min. Photo: the artist and Jorge Golem. Courtesy Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City

ArtReview

Art Previewed

My life as a love-slave of the Amazons 35

Previewed Charles Ray Art Institute of Chicago through 4 October Momentum 8 various venues, Moss 13 June – 27 September Olaf Breuning Metro Pictures, New York through 1 August

Paul Chan Deste Project Space Slaughterhouse, Hydra 15 June – 30 September Terrapolis Neon, Athens (at the French School) through 26 July Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Corin Sworn Whitechapel Gallery, London through 19 July

Will Benedict Bortolami, New York 12 June – 1 August Carlos Bevilacqua Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo through 20 June Mona Hatoum Centre Pompidou, Paris 24 June – 28 September

Alex Israel Almine Rech, Paris 13 June – 25 July

7 Alex Israel, Desperado, 2014, acrylic on bronze. Photo: Joshua White. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery, Paris & London

Summer 2015

contributor Stefanie Hessler and Toke Lykkeberg noting that the eight sexually interlinked 1 Charles Ray’s career is spangled with outré anecdotes. There’s the time the la-based point out, a locale appropriate to their theme figures in Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992) Chicagoan – famed for exacting sculptural of narrowed attention in a networked world, all bore the artist’s own features, as if that were paeans to, inter alia, bodies, trees, fire engines either through disconnection from the external irrelevant. Or the fact that his artworks can and crashed cars – dismantled a defective tractor, frequently take a decade to produce. The results, world via immersion in digital life, ‘a renewed had its thousands of internal and external parts interest in psychotropic substances in society at combining strict mimesis and attentive poetics, hand-sculpted and cast in aluminium, fitted large’ or the ways in which collated user data the technically boggling and the psychologically covertly pilots our online experience. Aficionados them together and then sealed the structure, ardent, constitute a small but near-faultless may not be amazed to see the brightly addled making much of the painstaking work inaccesand ultrageeky corpus. Its most recent portion, visuals of Ryan Trecartin, Daniel Steegmann sible (Untitled (Tractor), 2003–5). Or the time he 19 works dating from 1997 to 2014, graces Mangrané and Agnieszka Kurant on display, spent a year looking for the ideal fallen tree, not the leading art institution of Ray’s birthplace along with works by 21 others; that shouldn’t, knowing what he’d do with it, and made Hinoki from mid-May onwards. though, blind viewers to the savvy syncretism (2007), which entailed moulds of the rotted and From Ray it’s a quick skip to tunnel vision, insect-chewed trunk, a fibreglass reconstruction 2 the phrase subtitling the eighth Momentum, of the curatorial conceit. the Nordic Biennial. Moss, the Norwegian coastal and master wood carvers in Osaka. (The work, If he weren’t a little outside the apparent age whose own future decay is a conceptual factor, town to which, between 1913 and 1916, Edvard 3 demographic, Olaf Breuning could conceivably has a lifetime pegged at 400 years.) Or the time Munch withdrew, is, as curators Jonatan Habib fit among those numbers, given that his works he reacted with surprise to an interviewer’s Engqvist, Birta Gudjonsdottir, ArtReview have frequently dealt with characters who can’t

1 Charles Ray, Unpainted Sculpture, 1997. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. © the artist. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

2 Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment (video still), 2004, 40 min 10 sec. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

4 Paul Chan, Hydra Slaughterhouse, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Badlands Unlimited, New York

5 Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin, 2014, bronze, 187 × 182 × 182 cm. Photo: Stephen White. © the artist. Courtesy Kusama Enterprise; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo & Singapore; and Victoria Miro, London 3 Olaf Breuning, Not yet titled, 2015, collage on wood panel. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

the emphasis will be on the issue of whether see past their own noses. The Swiss-born New For the past six years, Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation has mounted an annual show by Plato wasn’t trolling so much as arguing Yorker’s series of videos Home (2005–12) in some for the act of voluntary lying that constitutes marquee names in a converted slaughterhouse ways anticipates Trecartin’s work while being the creative act. on the Greek island of Hydra. This time, followa withering critique of American mores: specifically, living life as if starring in one’s own personal ing turns from Matthew Barney and Elizabeth A short distance away in Athens, the nonprofit Neon Foundation of another big Greek movie, the world merely your changing backPeyton, Doug Aitken and Urs Fischer, among drop. The simpleton main character, a gap-year 4 others, it’s Paul Chan’s opportunity to do businessman collector, Dimitri Daskalopoulos, is holding its second collaboration with London’s global-traveller type, babbles stories about with it as he likes. Fond of historical parallelism his adventures abroad and in America, or, in the (and, of course, silhouetted animations), he’s 5 Whitechapel Gallery, Terrapolis. More outdoor a logical choice, here engaging with Plato’s second and third films, welcomes us into them. sculptures are on view (as if Athens didn’t already What carries over from the Home series to the provocative early dialogue Hippias Minor have plenty of those); here, under the curatorial new, nonfilmic works at Metro Pictures, we might (or On Lying), in which Socrates argues for parity auspices of Iwona Blazwick, artists including expect, is the idea of a figure riding an excess of between truth-tellers and liars and says it is better Allora & Calzadilla, Huma Bhabha, Enrico David, to do wrong voluntarily than otherwise. Chan stimulus, with varying degrees of grace. Expect Sarah Lucas, Richard Long and Yayoi Kusama, addresses this with three outdoor sculptures circular collages where ‘anonymous characters’ and five Greek artists making new commissions, and a new translation of the text, introduced are apparently looking at ways to reconnect the sit amid chocolate coins, brain models, rubber by the artist and copublished by his Badlands human to the animal under the sign of ‘bioethics’. breasts and more, and mirrored sculptures onto The image we’ve seen is of one of Kusama’s Unlimited imprint, in which, apparently, which these frenetic images are reflected.

Summer 2015

giant pumpkins (or bobbed Kusama hairstyles), influence on Shakespeare, a tidy English link – effectively 2d props made by Hollywood artisans, meets another prop of sorts: a sculpture of a which, in this context, tilt genetically modified and, of course, masks. Chevy Corvette by a cactus tree. ‘Alex Israel would as well as psychedelic. Alex Israel is a thoroughly modern cultural 7 Meanwhile the Whitechapel itself, seemproducer. His work, often revolving around probably not be displeased to be considered artworks – particularly pastel panel paintings – as a sort of cool Michael Asher, totally adjusted ingly unable to resist collaborating with institutions in sunny Southern Europe, is, as is its that suggest props and backdrops, is closely tied to the reality of an artistic field violently recontwo-yearly wont, hosting a show by the winner to his experience of Los Angeles and the starfigured by the Internet and its acceptance of the making machinery of Hollywood in particular. rules of the Spectacular Society,’ curator Eric of the latest Max Mara Art Prize for Women, 6 Corin Sworn. The prize is based on proposals Troncy writes in the press release. Nicely phrased. Seductively glossy and easy on the eye, it might for work that the artist would make on residency seem analytical, acquiescent, or to situate Israel’s fellow Angeleno Will Benedict takes 8 in Italy. In the London-born, Glasgow-based acquiescence as a conscious position. Israel has a more explicitly aggressive, or even defeatist, artist’s case, the props, lighting and costumes referenced the doyenne of Angeleno disaffection, attitude towards banality: his 2008 Post Card Joan Didion (As It Lays, 2012, a collection of in her installation hew to her longstanding series of paintings, for instance, found him inserting small, semiabstract canvases into sheets deadpan, borderline-banal interviews with interest in the construction of narrative out SoCal glitterati, echoes her novel Play It as It Lays, of mottled foamcore, as if the painting were a of fragments but are also apparently inspired by the sixteenth-century theatre troupes of the stamp, enabling circulation; he’s since embedded 1970); he also has an eyewear line. At Almine other images in the same surface, and likes commedia dell’arte: expect thematics of deception Rech, amid conscious trackbacks to his last show to photograph collectors and artists in front and mistaken identity – reflecting the style’s at the gallery, one of Israel’s Backdrop Paintings,

8 Will Benedict, Madame President, we’re breaking up, 2011, foamcore, aluminium, glass, archival inkjet print, gouache, canvas, 108 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York

6 Corin Sworn, Max Mara Art Prize for Women, 2015, production still.Photo: Margaret Salmon. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery, London

ArtReview

9 Carlos Bevilacqua, Ek Peixe Azul, 2014, wood, lead, steel, stone, bone and cotton line, 74 × 80 × 18 cm. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

Mona Hatoum, Cellules (detail), 2012–13, soft steel and blown glass in eight parts, dimensions variable. Photo: Sébastien Normand. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

of these signature-style works, the ‘painting’ balance, how they might move. The Brazilian thereby receding into the realms of production artist’s physics-laden, elegantly machined, and reproduction, and finally behind a pane lyrical work can resemble an orrery, a mobile, a children’s toy. Here, he presents three new of glass. Here, more foamcore panel paintings – featuring charcoal drawings of a gorilla sculptures that promise a philosophic aspect and bedrooms – are accompanied by a music as well as, or instead of, a science demonstration: The Inexorable Path of Knowledge (all works 2015), video Benedict made using Detroit band Stare Case’s queasy song Bed That Eats, based on the a trio of vehicular designs appearing as if post1977 B-movie horror Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, collision, a clocklike wall piece, Mute Geometry, which Benedict’s gallerist informs us is ‘a major and Isolation Bridge, a stilelike sculpture that cultural touchstone’ for him. connects, complexly, only to itself. Maker of famously ferocious sculptures And that’s quite enough West Coast and and installations reflective of instability and visually appealing exposure of the structures violence – whether in war zones or in domestic that underpin cultural production. Let’s move on to, well, literally exposed structures, namely 10 spaces – Mona Hatoum is also, when you dig 9 those of Carlos Bevilacqua’s sculptures, into her oeuvre, adept at more delicate proposals precise and delicate assemblies of lead weights, that nevertheless reflect the exigencies of exile. These are related themes for the Lebanesewood and strings predicated on showing their born Palestinian artist, who emerged from workings: how they’re held in tension and

ArtReview

performative body art and from being stranded in London during the mid-1970s when the Lebanese war broke out, but whose works at once enfold and exceed such biographical speciﬁcs. The Pompidou’s lavish retrospective is set to do precisely such digging, revealing, via approximately 100 works from the 1970s to the present, that Hatoum’s 40-year career has accumulated any number of kinaesthetic highlights: the glowing heating elements, like lethal metal prison bars, of Light at the End (1989), the disorienting roomful of empty wire lockers creating seasick shadows thanks to a motional lightbulb in Light Sentence (1992), the giant kitchen graters resembling tortuous room dividers in Paravent (2008). The present writer may remember her as the testiest interviewee he’s ever encountered. Her best work, though, is for the ages. Martin Herbert

CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION LONDON 1 JULY 2015

Viewing 27 June – 1 July GERHARD RICHTER Stadtbild M 6, 1968 Estimate £2,000,000–4,000,000. Enquiries +44 (0)20 7293 5744 34–35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA. Register now at sothebys.com © 2015 GERHARD RICHTER

JOHN MEYER Lost in the Dust A powerful series of narrative paintings set during the Anglo-Boer War

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

Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com

selected by Mark Rappolt Sherman Ong

monsoon – the mechanics of rain, mobility and intervention #3, 2005, digital print on archival photo paper, 66 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Art Plural Gallery, Singapore

It would be easy to categorise Malaysia-born, Singapore-based stilland moving-image maker Sherman Ong as an artist who probes and investigates the postmodern reality of Southeast Asia. He does – analysing patterns of history, tradition and change everywhere from Hanoi to his homeland. But his work as a whole also foregrounds the relationships between people and their environment – the former sometimes social, the latter often urban – in a way that is less easily tied to speciﬁc geographies and contexts. In terms of his photography,

one of his primary skills lies in his ability to communicate the sense that behind every one of his still images there lies a complex and often dramatic narrative arc, a blend of fact and ﬁction that lends his work a dreamlike quality. His work is no stranger to notions of beauty, either, on the one hand giving it a direct appeal; on the other bringing it into play with all the complex notions and emotions surrounding the seduction of the exotic that come with that. Go check it out.

Summer 2015

Orangery

Howard Hodgkin: Arriving Gallery and Park

Conrad Shawcross: Manifold Artists House

Conrad Shawcross, ‘Manifold 2 (9:8)’, 2013, bronze, ed. 2 of 3 + 2 APs, 320 x 120 x 120 cm

Barbara Hepworth: Form and Theatre

Roche Court East Winterslow Salisbury, Wilts SP5 1BG

T +44 (0) 1980 862244 F +44 (0) 1980 862447 nac@sculpture.uk.com www.sculpture.uk.com

23 May - 26 July 2015

NewArtCentre.

Points of View

A lot of patina and a strong presence of machines and physical labour carried out by men were the strongest impressions after having worked my way through the Arsenale during my first day in Venice. What I saw felt earnest and fair, and the solid exhibition manages to normalise what was considered extraordinary in Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta in Kassel in 2002: the participation of artists from literally all over the world. However, the mazelike architecture obscured not only my view but also the potential connections between the many multi-original art pieces. I even managed to miss Georg Baselitz’s grand installation. After learning that a number of likeminded friends and peers had done the same, we agreed that it is probably a feminist blindspot, blocking out macho German painters. Nevertheless, three full days of hard work from morning to evening, looking at and in other ways engaging with art in Venice, were not enough to even make it to the pavilions in town. It is simply too much. One week later I had a diametrically opposed experience, at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. Embedded in this nonprofit’s dense library on the 11th floor of a highrise is a jewel of an exhibition, Excessive Enthusiasm, devoted to the late printmaker and sculptor Ha Bik Chuen’s peculiar scrapbooks and practice of documenting Hong Kong’s art scene. Among the material is his faithful documentation of exhibitions in Hong Kong from the 1960s until the 2000s. A selection of negatives, contact sheets and photo albums covering about 1,500 exhibitions is on display on bulletin boards and in small wooden vitrines next to the bookshelves. One series of photos shows artists – the majority male, among them Ha himself – beside their work; another set depicts people mingling among artworks at openings and hanging out in what seem to be studios. A table vitrine is devoted to his ephemera from around the 1967 leftist protests in Hong Kong and the Cultural Revolution in China: ripe for rereading in light of the recent Umbrella Movement. Thanks to Ha’s low-key but insistent practice of documentation, the exhibition team has even been able to reconstruct an entire exhibition – now translated in model form, complete with artworks and a miniature version of the artist sitting where he posed for many portraits.

male melancholia or

The Venice Biennale or

How I missed Georg Baselitz’s grand installation at the Arsenale but found solace in an intriguing exhibition in Hong Kong instead or

Ambition two ways by

Maria Lind

Collage book from Excessive Enthusiasm: Ha Bik Chuen and the Archive as Practice, 2015. Courtesy Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong

Summer 2015

But the most intriguing part of this mini-exhibition is the scrapbooks. Here Ha collected cutouts from colourful magazines, exhibition catalogues and reference books. One page has an image of a man dressed up as a chicken; a Chinese newspaper clipping on the International Kite Festival in Jakarta, where over 150 local and international kiteﬂying teams participated; and an image of a sculpture by Rachel Harrison. He also photographed art books and recombined images across time and space, creating a personal, virtual world of images, a miniature Asian version of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–9), or of André Malraux’s ‘Le Musée Imaginaire’ (1947). As in the two older cases, wild connections are made, exploring the beauty of anachronisms. In order to make as much as possible of the material available, in addition to the digital version on iPads, the team regularly changes pages in the vitrines. This way of activating Ha’s archive is very attractive: a relatively modest volume of material is carefully and intensively explored, playing out the curare part of curating. It is an example of how to maximise the minimal. How to make the most of what is at hand is a principle for aaa beyond the Ha show: it has an ambitious programme of public events, research grants, publishing and residencies, aiming at increasing research, writing and understanding of the recent history of contemporary art in Asia. It was through this that I was invited to go to Hong Kong in the ﬁrst place. All the World’s Futures in Venice, on the contrary, is maximised in size, and because of that it reduces, if not minimises, what each work can offer. Geopolitics still play out in terms of who can bring in their own funding, which affects the nature and scale of the work. Even excellent contributions, like those of Elena Damiani, Naeem Mohaiemen, Ala Younis and Massinissa Selmani, feel as though they were treated like poor cousins. Too little of the works’ potential is teased out, it seems. Upon leaving Venice I was exhausted. No wonder, if the exhibition can be said to sum up more than 20 years of Enwezor’s work. Despite the title, the exhibition is retrospective, almost an endpoint, rather than forward-looking. And I’m left wondering: what role does the weight of male melancholia play in this?

Once art gave up on a self-contained aesthetics as a method of giving itself meaning, it entered into the business of importing meaning-giving theories from elsewhere; Marxism, psychoanalysis or poststructuralism, to name just a few, have all marked contemporary art over the last century. If art picks up on the intellectual preoccupations of its time, it’s no surprise that one of contemporary art’s latest critical trade-ins should be in the emerging fusion of the ‘objectcentred’ philosophical thinking of speculative realism, alongside the ecological rhetoric gathered under the catchall concept of the Anthropocene – a perspective that treats human activity as a planetary process so impactful that it now leaves a lasting trace in the geological record. What this seems to mean for contemporary artists is a peculiar approach to seeing humanity: either as just one more ‘thing’ among others – resulting in a fascination with other types of nonhuman entity out there – or as something already long dead and vanished, seen from some (virtual) future perspective in the form of its archaeological record. And you don’t have to look too far at the moment to see how artists and the artworld are lapping up this new zeitgeist. So for example, this year’s Venice Biennale has its fair share of the new, on-trend misanthropism: take the Finnish Pavilion, by artists IC-98, whose presentation Abendland (Hours, Years, Aeons) (2015, part of their Abendland series of works), which, in their own words, seeks to ‘show a world without human beings, the new mutated landscape built on the remains of human civilization. This is not a paradise, not a regained pastoral existence. This is what it means to deal with the end results of the Anthropocene.’ Meanwhile, Susanne Pfeffer, curator of the Swiss Pavilion’s presentation by Pamela Rosenkranz, could be copy–pasting from the posthuman hymnsheet when she declares that ‘the anthropocentric construction of humanity turns out to be obsolete’, and that ‘thinking a universe beyond humanity and conceptualizing matter as inherently intelligible are among the urgent tasks of our present’. (Pfeffer is something of a curatorial repeatoffender in this regard – check out her show at Kassel’s Fridericianum, bluntly titled Inhuman, whose promotional image is a dribbled turd of grey goo.) Some are curious about the rise of pro-object, posthuman thinking among artists and curators. In the introduction to their anthology Speculative Aesthetics (2014), editors Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell and James Trafford shrewdly observe that the rise of speculative realism ‘was boosted by the convergence of [its] anti-correlationist theme with ruminations on climate change and the anthropocene (‘a world without us’)’. ‘Such an alliance is puzzling’, they continue,

the end of human experience or

Art’s new zeitgeist ‘Object-centred’ philosophy, speculative realism, accelerationism & the anthropocene: What does all this mean? Why are artists lapping it up? And how does it inﬂuence the kind of art they’re now producing? by

J.J. Charlesworth

Pamela Rosenkranz, Our Product, 2015 (installation view, Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale). Photo: Marc Asekhame. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

‘when one considers what sr[speculative realism] might bring to this negotiation, insofar as its primary selling point… is its dismissal of the mediating role of human experience.’ Mackay and company rightly mock the familiar speculative realist conceit that ‘an artwork is simply a thing, in meek and equal existence with other things (fridge; wombat; pen-lid; asteroid; crime-report; proton, etc.)’. An artwork is, of course, not ‘simply’ a thing, since unlike a mountain range or solar radiation, it is part of reality that is of human cognition’s own making – its own production, its own reshaping of the material world. Artworks are the traces of people reshaping the world in the process of questioning it, and themselves. But if the popularity of a way of thinking that dismisses the role of human experience appears puzzling, it is only if one overlooks how human experience, and ‘human mediation’, are seen negatively in both contemporary culture and philosophy. The trouble for critics such as those assembled in Speculative Aesthetics (they’re broadly speaking associated with the more optimistic, anthropocentric politics tagged as ‘accelerationism’) is that speculative realism derives its authority from the culture of misanthropy that rejects the idea humanity should reshape anything in its own image. The puzzle isn’t so puzzling: the Anthropocene has gained currency as a pseudo-scientiﬁc version of the environmental dogma that insists humans are fucking the planet up because they reshape matter already too much. Meanwhile, speculative realism gains popularity by giving philosophical credence to that cultural distaste for ‘human mediation’. What speculative realism thinks of as its novel philosophical insights – that humans are no exception to things, that there should be no distinction between human and nonhuman ‘actants’, and that the subject–object hierarchy in philosophy should be abolished – become the philosophical cheerleaders for a contemporary culture that denounces the idea that human beings can – even should – actively reshape the world in their own interests. What has that to do with art? Only that art, in its refracted, partial form, is one manifestation of a broader human capacity not only to reshape matter (stars and tectonic plates and locusts also do that, after all), but to do it consciously, to do it in order to explore its own capacity to do so, and to do it because it wants to. Art, design, architecture, urbanism, society, economy, ecosphere – all aspects of what human beings can choose to reshape, through conscious action. And yet this is what many today most fear. Instead, paciﬁed, inert humans look gormlessly on, fascinated by a world of objects they pretend they have never made, gawping from a pretend future at a society they pretend is already over.

“I do comedy in the artworld. What a fucking relief for you people!” So Dynasty Handbag addressed her audience during her travesty of television talkshows, Good Morning Evening Feelings with Dynasty Handbag, performed at the Kitchen, New York, this past April. In the live show, which moves through dark emotions that can plague the day, from morning fear to evening shame, Handbag (aka Jibz Cameron) plays host to a series of ‘guests’, all played by herself. Among them are Christine Smoofs, ‘lesbian breakfast chef’, who suggests that we make a fear smoothie in the morning by staring into the problem and grinding it with our mind, and ‘Womanhood’, an animated female pelvis with eyes and a mouth, who bemoans the lack of important female roles for her kind. Dynasty has makeup smeared draggily all over her face, and delivers a form of zany camp: waggling tongues, wide eyes, exaggerated gestures. There are certain elements to her show that don’t particularly require an art context. She has recently moved to la from New York, and her intro sends up the banal conversations that one repetitively has about the two cities after such a switch: “Everyone’s all: ‘New York is like this [presses hands against face as though smothered in a subway carriage] and la is like this [mimes driving, relaxed].’ You should all move to la. Except if you’re a dancer. Don’t move to la if you’re a dancer. In fact, if you’re a dancer: get a job. Quit.” Though the subject of her show, on some level, is a form of depression and mania that pertains to contemporary life (though the narrative arcs she chooses to parody are common to artists and performers – the burned-out old actress who used to be queen of the stage, for example), she’s right that comedy is providing relief for the artworld, and not just in the traditional sense. Within the last month in New York I’ve seen three routines of what you could call ‘artist standup’, all performed by women. Each was funny and each functioned in the same way that some of the best standup does: wellconstructed jokes aside, good standup says the unsayable, and ensures awkward, buried feelings can be aired rather than suppressed. And there’s a sense in which the artworld desperately needs this other language. Art’s most visible institutions, from academia to not-for-proﬁt spaces and museums, from corporate behemoth galleries to ﬂedgling project spaces in basements, share a deadening, legitimising formal language, sometimes so perversely voiceless that it masks the banality or the plainness of what it is actually being said. At the beginning of a recent short routine by the painter Heather Guertin, performed at the launch of a new book about curating, she staged her blouse falling open (“Oops, I really didn’t mean to do that!”). She buttoned herself

comic relief or

Get a (real) life! or

Art’s other new zeitgeist in which the author asks

If comedy is one of the ways in which we speak of things that cannot otherwise be spoken, can comedy be a form of art or is art too serious a matter to permit any part of itself to be funny? by

Laura McLean Ferris

Dynasty Handbag performing Soggy Glasses: A Homo’s Odyssey, 2014, performance at bam Fisher, New York. Photo: Rebecca Smeyne. Courtesy bam, New York

Summer 2015

up before stating, with much gravitas, that “a mechanical engineer once said to me: ‘Heather: ceramics are the future.’” Guertin’s delivery is oddly open and sincere. “Actually, it wasn’t a mechanical engineer who said ceramics are the future. It was my ex-boyfriend from high school. But he wanted to be an engineer at the time and was often testing out being one on me. Saying things an engineer would say, like, ‘I need to polish these rims in time for the solar-poweredcar contest’ and ‘Pass me some more blue cheese.’” After mourning that our oceans are full of oil and plastic, due to some of humanity’s turns away from natural elements like clay and earth, Guertin describes the moment when she found out, via Twitter, that the ex had just become a father again: “And I realised he’s wrong: ceramics aren’t the future… that baby is. And I wish that baby clean oceans full of nontoxic ceramic knives!” There’s actually a double-loading of sincerity here: think of Tina Fey’s Netflix series The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015), which follows the adventures of a young woman who has been locked in an underground bunker for many years and emerges with the kind of wideeyed optimism that serves mainly to reveal the cynicism of those around her. It’s difficult, when obeying the codes expected of artists at readings and performances, to speak of things like a future for the children. (What children – right?) Similar was the feeling during the Frieze New York talks programme this past May, when artist and comedian Casey Jane Ellison asked her female guests when they first knew they were an object. The black-lipsticked Ellison, whose painfully awkward all-female interview show, Touching the Art (2014–), was included in this year’s New Museum Triennial, offered in her signature, disaffected vocal fry that for her the moment came when, as a child, she chose a protein bar instead of a chocolate bar because it seemed more likely to keep her thin. Writer and activist Grace Dunham answered that, as a woman, she was born an object. “That hurts,” Ellison deadpans. Her truth-telling tactic is different – Ellison plays a dead-eyed, self-obsessed artist consumed with her own appearance and by being cool. She’s very funny, but she’s often just flaunting behaviours that others perform more subtly – alternating heavy attitude and gothy nihilism with the need to be found attractive and to be liked. Rather than focus on the way the artworld drags in other genres (music, dance, fashion, marketing, now comedy) and makes them ‘art’, perhaps it’s better to think of it this way: what is, being embraced, let’s say, is a form of sideshow speech that allows artists to change the language used to talk about their work in terms that are messy, funny, absurd and uncertain. Those terms certainly describe a side of the artworld that I, for one, am happy to recognise, and embrace.

All curators are prs, but are all prs curators? As the social dynamics of the artworld evolve, and the set theory of public relations engulfs all kind of trades – from infomercialist to auctioneer – a very narrow space, such as this column, can be dedicated to thinking about differences between curating and public relations before a happy ending signals the end of all distinction.

curating and public relations (in 33 theses) by

Lucas Ospina

The curator writes essays, not introductions. / prs practise all types of advertising, across whatever format is required, and measure its results in column inches.

12 The curator doesn’t confuse the art exhibition with the catalogue. / prs makes catalogues from the exhibition and from the catalogues make coffee-table books.

The art exhibition is only incidentally pedagogical. / There are pedagogical exhibitions.

The curator does not explain that which is already evident in the work but mentions what is obvious when nobody dares to signal it. / prs trust neither the work nor the observer. In their eagerness to persuade, they ﬁll the void with explanations that people don’t need or ask for.

13 The art exhibition is a means of putting ideas into play. / There are exhibitions that are the end of an idea.

4 The curator is questioning and reckless; she puts her life – and her job – at risk and into play. / prs are art’s diplomatic corps. 5

The curator learns her trade in staging the art exhibition; she has the same tactile instinct as the collector. / prs are trained in balance sheets, equations and indicators.

6 The curator doesn’t distinguish what she says from how she says it. / prs place ‘contents’ and ‘budget’ under different headings on the spreadsheet. 7

In the art exhibition, as in a candy store, form is the essential question, the initial impulse that leads to the glucose of content. / There are exhibitions that confuse form with subject: in a large space, more substance, in a small space… more substance (full). The curator is a parasite who lives off citing others: reordering and creating new constellations of subjectivities. / prs, despite their name, don’t have relations so much as transactions.

9 The curator philosophises with a hammer and works her texts with the meticulousness of a watchmaker. / prs write with the same diligence as traffic police ﬁlling in the boxes of a penalty notice. 10 The curator doesn’t read; she rereads. / prs collect press headlines. 11 In art exhibitions the curator doesn’t recreate history, she creates it. / prs make anecdotal use of history: a child of limited resources was touched by art! This piece was restored! Etc.

14 The curator is as transgressive as the art: she transforms types of work after initially classifying them. / prs feverishly seek categories and boundaries of classiﬁcation. 15 The curator puts art before life: she prefers the work to its author. / prs disguise the work with the face of its maker: they cross-dress the work before presenting it to society. 16 The curator is a child of her time but lives days, months, years and even decades ahead. / prs never stop talking on mobiles with unlimited data plans, minutes and international roaming in their fugitive operations for the cultural squatting of new art scenes. 17 The beginning and end of the art exhibition is language. / The beginning and end of some art exhibitions is the cocktail reception. 18 The curator answers to language. / prs answer to their superiors. 19 The curator accompanies the art exhibition in sickness and in health. / prs marry and divorce the art depending on the success or failure of exhibitions. 20 The curator knows that no work of art is without defects. / prs make perfection a religion: they conceal, disguise and ignore the potential for dissonance. 21 The curator does not stage political exhibitions but makes them politically. / prs, elite courtesans on the serving staff, are submissive newcomers to the political sphere. 22 The curator is aware of market value but is not swayed by it. / For prs, the price of an artwork speaks for itself. 23 The curator addresses the meaning of a work and forecasts art’s atmospheric states. / prs control the temperature of an exhibition: they ensure that the meaning of works does not heat up, thaw, melt, spill, pollute or evaporate.

ArtReview

24 For the curator there is no public, only individuals. / prs are passionate about the public and despise individuals. 25 Paradoxical soliloquy: the curator hears the art exhibition’s voices on her solitary, thoughtful rounds. / prs tour the exhibition via the cctv monitors of the private security system. 26 The curator is art’s circulatory system. / prs work in Customs: they verify documents (biographies, insurance policies, credits and sponsors’ logos…). 27 The curator isolates official discourse about the contents of exhibitions: she locks up the protocol of courtesy in the vault of etiquette and throws away the key. / prs can’t get out of this vault, and in this isolation all official discourse takes place, the spell that turns exhibitions into propaganda, the performance of rhetoric and its pearls of wisdom. 28 The curator knows how to improvise, work with what she has and make the best of the means at her disposal. / prs are incapable of responding to setbacks and never leave home without a legal umbrella. 29 Curatorial texts do not inform, support or communicate: they understand. / prs insist on explaining the art and offer the first hit of pedagogy for nothing: addiction to explanations does the rest. 30 The curator uses winter gloves when greeting the politician and boxing gloves to talk with the critic. / prs lavish themselves on the politician and protect themselves from the critic. 31 The curator only incorporates works that generate political friction when she is prepared for the political debate. / prs theorise about politics with the same self-satisfied naivety of an adolescent who wears underwear printed with the image of Che Guevara. 32 For the curator, all art is current: new art criticises old art as much as old art criticises new. By the time culture arrives, art has already made a roundtrip. / For prs there is no continuity in the dialogue of art: they segregate, fragment, mark. They isolate and silence the unceasing conversation of art; they are the fluffers of a tired cultural orgy. 33 Once the art exhibition has been curated, the curator does the right thing – she disappears. / For prs, no one can disappear, the focus is on the figures, credits and logos, the only aim is to sacrifice names before the altar of fame. Translated from the Spanish by David Terrien

ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION 20 YEARS

Ed Atkins Laura Buckley, Haroon Mirza & Dave Maclean Martin Creed Alexandre da Cunha Dexter Dalwood Tracey Emin Isa Genzken Samara Golden Guyton\Walker Rachel Harrison Damien Hirst Andy Holden Jim Lambie Michael Landy

Maria Maria Lassnig Lassnig Mark Leckey Mark Leckey Sarah Sarah Lucas Lucas Josephine Josephine Meckseper Meckseper Albert Oehlen Albert Oehlen Heather Heather Phillipson Phillipson Sigmar Polke Sigmar Polke Elizabeth Elizabeth Price Price Pamela Pamela Rosenkranz Rosenkranz Wolfgang Wolfgang Tillmans Tillmans Keith Keith Tyson Tyson Julia Julia Wachtel Wachtel Gillian Gillian Wearing Wearing Rachel Rachel Whiteread Whiteread Christopher Christopher Wool Wool

30 APR–16 AUG FREE ENTRY zabludowiczcollection.com 176 Prince of Wales Road, London NW5 3PT Jim Lambie, Zobop (Fluorescent), 2006 and Sonic Reducer 7, 2008 Photo: Stuart Whipps

Much has been said and written about concepts of entangled histories in the last decades. Ranging from Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985), to Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann’s concept of ‘l’histoire croisée’, to Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria’s notion of ‘entangled modernities’, these concepts have found their space both in academia and other cultural manifestations. The latest adept and dexterous manifestation is Personne et les autres, Belgium’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, curated by Katerina Gregos and featuring mainly the work of Belgian artist Vincent Meessen in dialogue with international guest artists Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sammy Baloji, James Beckett, Elisabetta Benassi, Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin, Tamar Guimarães & Kasper Akhøj, Maryam Jafri and Adam Pendleton. It takes humility, but also tactical ﬁnesse for an artist, granted the possibility of a solo show on such an occasion, to open the door for a conversation with his peers and to challenge the concept and myth of national representation. Five-hundred-plus years of slavery and colonialism are the greatest open wounds of history, and characterise one of the most brutal and inhumane phases of human existence: these infamous systems heavily and lastingly impacted both the oppressor and oppressed, and still reverberate within their societies – politically, economically, culturally and psycho-physically. It is against this backdrop that Meessen and his companions set out to explore the entanglements between Europe and Africa during and post so-called ‘colonial modernity’. Belgium’s legacy in this context is not one of glory. The mesh woven by Gregos and Meessen is one of multiple threads of different cottons, colours, sizes and narratives. The central piece – Meessen’s three-channel videowork One. Two. Three. (2015) – literally sets the tone. Based on a 1968 protest lyric by Congolese Situationist Joseph M’Belolo Ya M’Piku, discovered in the archives of the Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, the song is reconstructed by Meessen together with M’Belolo and musicians in Kinshasa. Filmed on the site of Congolese musical and artistic modernity, the Un Deux Trois club of Franco Luabo’s ok Jazz orchestra, the work ﬂeshes out important but little-known common denominators between the ‘former’ coloniser and colonised. These relations, their obviousness, ambiguities and asymmetries, are essential to this exhibition. From a more surreptitious perspective, Abonnenc’s Forever Weak and Ungrateful (2015) and Forever, without You (2015) explore the bronze statue in Cayenne, French Guiana, of the

entangled modernities featuring

european and african artists in an exploration of postcolonial legacies, liaisons of dependence and desire, Situationists, Congolese musical modernity and the President of Niger by

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

Vincent Meessen, One.Two.Three. (video stills), 2015. Courtesy the artist and Normal, Brussels

ArtReview

nineteenth-century abolitionist Victor Schœlcher. The depictions of Schœlcher with one arm around the shoulders of a sparsely clothed slave and the other proudly showing the way to freedom reveal a paternalistic power relationship, but also a titillating and unclear liaison of dependence and desire. The relation in Baloji’s Essay on Urban Planning (2013) is one characterised by the 500m empty zone that separated black and white neighbourhoods during the colonial era – the maximum flight range of malarial mosquitoes – called the cordon sanitaire. In Sociétés secrètes (2015), Baloji connects Belgian Colonial Secret Service surveillance and repression practices, the scarification practices of indigenous groups and the copper trade’s subjugation of workers to enslavementlike conditions. Getty vs. Musée Royal D’Afrique Centrale vs. dr Congo (2015) is Jafri’s presentation of iconic independence images from Congo that portray the becoming of a new state, and examine the contested area of image ownership between the nation state and image banks. Entangled histories sometimes exist in a state of checkmate, a concept that derives etymologically from the Persian shāh māt, which literally means ‘the King is helpless’. Such helplessness might derive from the fact that his pawns, knights, cortège and even the king himself have hybridised with the ‘opponent’ (or the ‘other’), a situation common in entanglement. Inspired by a 1961 photograph of a ceremony in Niger from Bernier’s family archive, depicting his grandfather of French Caribbean origin in grey, the president of Niger in black and a French military leader in white, in L’Echiqueté (2012), Bernier and Martin propose a chess game with a twist: the colour dichotomy is flipped as mixed coloured structures are formed upon a piece’s capture. There is no exhibition without weak links, but Personne et les autres excels on many levels, as one sees how the idea of l’histoire croisée, of entangled modernities and histories, materialises into form.

Summer 2015 until June 28 Checkpoint California 20 Years Villa Aurora in Los Angeles July 10 to August 30 Photo-Poetics An Anthology September 16 to November 8 STADT/BILD. Xenopolis STADT/BILD (Image of a city) is a cooperation of Berlinische Galerie, Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Nationalgalerie—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Deutsche Bank KunstHalle Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin 10 am—8 pm, Mondays admission free Details on the exhibition and supporting programms deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.de

north circular, London fading out – Skepta, Mumdance, losing signal. This is where you’re meeting them: a Wetherspoons called Millers Well. Tawdry cavern blistered with cigarette burns; upholstery ripped to shreds. Window tables guarded – prized crow’s nests of the icf. Weave through groups of suited councillors, women hastily made-up at office desks; cast around in the murk, feel elated when you see them at the back – Asim, Mehvish, Alex, Atif, Hasnan, Ali, Ish – rum-and-cokes with lime and ice. As if you’ve never been apart. Those parties on the marshes, speaker-cab walls, imprints of derelict tanning factories – must have been 2002 – thickets of buddleia and the skeletal frame of the old dye works. 6am. Pylons dissipating in lilac haze; Red Stripe and spray cans scattered on concrete ﬂoors; faces grey with exhaustion, survivors of a disaster. Clinging together, shaved heads, puffa jackets, bonds forming in dead chemical plants. And now – after a chance meeting in that 1960s shopping precinct in Stratford – reunited. They’re living in some empty houses off the a13 near Dagenham. Still have a crew stretching across Newham out to Essex. West Essex Inquilab. Bottles of beer, another round of rum and cokes. Barking Road is conducive to wreckage, the desire for excess irresistible. You melt into it, see through a lens of bloodshot iridescence. Sweep your face with bronzing powder, vermilion lips, mascara like false lashes. Immerse yourself in the theatricality of Friday night, the cusp of working-week order and total sensory derangement. Barking Road is like the mouth of the river, codes of the city scrambled like

fading out and moving in A chance meeting in a Stratford shopping precinct triggers memories of London’s past and reveals the city and its inhabitants as sites of memory in themselves Precarious allegiances, the breakdown of place, the signiﬁcance of dress, migratory ﬂows, the nature of community by

Laura Oldﬁeld Ford

ArtReview

shoals in a tilting sea. The point is to gauge it, to feel the ebbs and flows. A couple of drinks in, boundaries dissolve. The shift east started during the 1970s: a tide of evictions, Notting Hill, Camden, Islington, Hackney, Poplar. A tide of displacement going in the same direction as discounted sale items, West End stores to East End warehouses, East End market stalls, kilo bales, recycling, landfill, the estuarial vistas of Essex. The evictions from Hackney Road went in three phases. Place was breaking down. You remember the green netting in the windows, builders going into flats, throwing stuff in skips, ripping out the forsythia, yellow roses. Some drifted around the North Circular, short-life tenancies in Dagenham, condemned estates in Poplar. Others went to ground – cells of domesticity/ psychiatric wards/jihad. To be reunited after more than a decade came with a sense of dislocation, a loss of bearings. Leave pub, early evening. Block of brutalist flats, faded panels of coral and lemon seeping across the walls. Refugees from Eritrea, Mali, Syria. Speakers on balconies facing the street. Low-end bass, quaking envelopes of sound. Waves of sweet perfume, citrus scent of girls dressed up for the pub; snowy clusters, done up in white and gold, bleached hair, white satin bomber jackets. Empire venue, still known locally as the Duke. Tablighi Jamaat, exuberant planning for the ill-fated megamosque. You remember the meetings there, screens depicting the proposed site. Wahhabism, Saudi petro-dollars turboboosting Abbey Mills mosque from a cluster of containers to Emirates Stadium in the Lea Valley. Elevated section of the motorway where red bricks radiate in 1980s-town-centre patterns. Concrete stanchions steeped in a film of translucent blemishes, Paynes Grey leeching into raw umber like muted Colour Field paintings. Footsteps, shouts, subsumed by the rhythmic thumps of the traffic above. This is the threshold, London fading into an exurban landscape – the wastes of Essex. cctv poles, peeling black stickers. Neural Mass – airport Muzak filtered through a black crystal, a flowering of apocalyptic language. You imagine them, wasted on psilocybin, drifting through allotments at five in the morning. Monoxyde World/Final Warning/Viral Zoonosis. Vernacular Tesco – Costa Coffee, pharmacy, world foods, edging across six lanes of traffic with bottles of beer, cans of Boost. Cable-tied to lampposts – the wages of sin is death/Jesus coming soon. Push through tangles of sycamore and lilac, generic hotels, a jaundiced archipelago: Ibis, Premier Inn, Ibis Budget, Hotel Formule 1. Built like a pfi prison-complex – that cluster of hutches round Belmarsh; ochre bricks, corrugated roofs and cameras on poles. led sign

at the gate – £35 rooms available. Snarls of cotoneaster in wood-chip borders, fences collapsing in coils of blackthorn. Names rising in cartoon graphics: Socitransa, Eurolines, Autoosta. Transit vans parked in circles spilling holdalls onto the tarmac. Men out the front smoking, workers from the Barratt developments in Bow, from Crossrail, the new towers around Aldgate, sleeping fourto-a-room in narrow bunks. Reception: harsh like a hospital, vending machine and lime-green walls. Latvian lads supping cans of lager; blokes slumped in stairwells. You see them in Wickes car park at daybreak waiting for work. Arranged

to meet more crew here, young blokes from Afghanistan working for Asim’s dad in Ilford. Walk through corridors that remind you of the Terry’s factory in York, the Orange room and shifts on Twilights. A dusty warm smell, sweet scents of cinnamon and chocolate cut with cigarette smoke and the heavy stink of weed. Push through a fire exit and find them under a canopy of elderflower. Plastic chairs arranged in a semicircle, little drifts of cigarette ends, a scorched patch of ground. Khalil and Shaki. You think they look early 80s how they dress, remind you of Bradford, slip-on shoes, thin shirts and brown trousers. They’re

Summer 2015

kind of goofy, the way they laugh, glassy-eyed with the drink. Vans in the car park, Arabic graffiti, dinted side, like the old days, all piling in. Asim driving, you and Mehvish in front, them lot rolling about in the back with bottles of rosé. Climate of euphoria, ﬁlmic in that moment, faces glowing amber in the dusk. Pirate radio, sounds breaking down, fading out then coming back in waves – that track you used to hear all the time, Kyla’s Do You Mind, must have been 2009, Latin America ﬁltered through Tottenham, Leytonstone, Ilford, blistering heatwave, scents of vanilla and sweet damask. 1995/2003/2006/2011/2015.

ArtReview

Window down, staring across the creek, tides of detritus. Hot-dog vans and elevated containers, corrugated shacks and bonfires. Parched reed beds, failed apartment blocks, blokes pushing through metal barriers with flasks of vodka. The eye of a heatwave, sprawling Gascoigne estate, kwaito, uk funky, smoke rising from yards, balconies, industrial estates, barbecued meat, beer from Bulgarian shop. Narrow bridge, walls lit up with Polish graffiti, looming glyphs – anarcho-syndicalist, neo-Nazi obsessions pulsing in the landscape. A tangle of arterial roads, footbridges, North Circular. Feel the transience emerging. Militant energy – the sense that this is a point of departure. Millennial newbuilds sinking into the Roding. Force of London is magnetic. Feel its charge, crackling beyond the North Circular. From here London is a mirage, shimmering pink in a haze of pollution. Canary Wharf is pearlescent, the City and Barbican golden in the heat; you grasp London in its totality, think of all the interwoven lives and sequences embedded there – etched in bricks, under flagstones – memories, scars, traces. Asim puts a tape on: Olive’s You’re Not Alone. Speakers in the van so loud, a surge of emotion, chances proliferating. Song conjuring the intensity of your feelings – cutting through the lies you told yourself. Arcs of roses… heady scent… Flowers opening in front of your eyes. Remember how you would fantasise about a hideout, found that room – memories folded into corners, mirrored velvet and purple satin, sheets of sequins thrown across walls. Those letters, knowing he was thinking of you, hoping

to catch sight of you. Distilled rose water, delicate citrus scent. Cedrat, peach, violet, rose petals, cedarwood, patchouli, amber. Barking town centre. Market packing up, a village dismantling, clangs and crashes, steel frames flung to the ground. African blokes outside the b&b, shouting outside the bookies, Halal butchers. Hear the tannoy. Koranic verses, tension palpable in the alleyways, the luminous mazes of T-shirts and England flags. Black flag, Shahada, white Arabic lettering. Feel it rising. Broken computer terminals, discarded toys, hairbrushes and nail varnish, the tunnel between Iceland, Wilko and market. Cross of St George. You see the cross and it becomes black, a malign patriotism. Wrecked, beleaguered, the aftermath of a terrible war written in faces. nop, edl, Britain First. Sunwheels and Viking runes. Place becomes jagged. Kaleidoscopic, utopian worlds splintering and reconfiguring. Allusions to mythical states black with congealed blood. Aluminium chairs, a shuffling discontent, malicious sideways glances, polystyrene cups and bacon rolls… The black standard. The black flag of jihad. Veer onto pavement, slam to a halt outside pub. Always liked that moment, falling out of the van, top knots, mirror shades, scruffy mohawks. Balmy June night, London charged, crackling for the first time since 2011. Place is packed, big crew outside, blokes washed up from the docks. Feel the agitation transmitted like heat from wrecked faces. Six pints in, all-day session becoming restless, arguments firing in random formations. Pub hasn’t changed since 1976, burgundy labyrinth; dance floors, snugs and booths. Beer garden with dead yucca plants, garlands of lights smashed in the dust. George cross everywhere. Home turf, a messed-up family vibe like a wedding party unravelling. Alex’s dad in there with a load of lads from the Gascoigne. Jukebox wired up to pa, smell of spilled lager. Big-screen tv; London Tonight, roundup of mawkish stories, kids in hospital, obsequious royal drivel. Watch for sparks and portents, stubborn incidences of police brutality, neglected grievances. You know when there’s a mood, when it’s about to go up. Disturbances reported right across London, Metropolitan police chief fears could be a repeat of scenes in 2011. Find a corner, a dim alcove of worn velvet banquettes. Alex’s dad gets a round in. Early fifties, Hammers tattoos. Name’s Kev, used to be a convenor at Ford, knows the whole pub. Met him a few times, cropped dark hair, gold earring, mild sexual interest flitting across his face. The 70s is the gravitational point, the locus

Summer 2015

of conversation; leaving school, working at Ford – elation folded into the first wage packet, bars in Ladbroke Grove, clubs in the West End. The decade was an illuminated network of moments, winter of discontent, picket lines, fires in barrels, noise and camaraderie conjured like a cinematic event. Recreational gardens under the elevated sections of the a13, trees frothy with blossom, the lakes and hedgerows. Plant shifting production to Europe in 2002, a suspension, a slow counting backwards. Barking, Rainham, Becontree, Dagenham, Ilford, a destructive malaise. Walking frames, mobility scooters, the muteness of men drinking at three in the afternoon. nf, bnp, edl, ukip. And then, yeah, five years ago or whatever, there was all that shit about Griffin and that lot getting 15 seats round here – that didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a precarious thing, that allegiance; spectrum of skin tones, same estuarial accent – a seething hive, sediments shifting, you could feel the scrambling, scrapping for position. Jerusalem blaring, megaphone distortion. It wasn’t easy to give up on people you’d grown up with, you had to fight them, win them round – he knew if it wasn’t for the fierce republican background, he could have drifted the same way. The house in Becontree, the yellowing wallpaper, peeling roses, it came to him in dreams, the salmon-pink tiles around the fire in the front room. He thought of it in December, the shadows of the pine tree, shimmering amber lights. Always that haunting, the spectral life in Manchester, cigarette smoke, yellow lamplight. Something almost transcendental in the descriptions of those Stretford streets, his dad when he talked about it, the pubs, the music, fervent meetings in backrooms; the last walk away from the Trafford plant, creaking snow, temperature dropping and sounds turning brittle, expanse of waste ground, heaps of cinders, a strange topaz light. Unspoken sequences, Irish Republican Brotherhood firebombed farms around Manchester and made plans to blow up the canal locks at Salford Quays. ira men – working at the Ford motor factory in Trafford Park. 1916–1922. Circle of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood. It’s like the old days, about 30 of you now, circles melding, tables pushed together. Jukebox cranks up for the leering debauchery of Friday night. Rihanna, Labrinth, Kendrick Lamar. Another round of rum-and-cokes – powders dissolving in glasses. It’s starting. You think of his face, let the image crystallise, think how you’ve always known it.

Things have really started to look up since I joined my new gallery, Nozzlebaum & Gack. Sure, maybe they’re no Gristle & Windsor, or even a Frankly, Fergus & Pishaw, but they’re no Hauser & Wirth, either, so… well… there’s that. Anyhow, since my return to the fold I’ve been really startled by how much the artworld has changed. I mean, I was only away 11 long, horrible months and I barely recognise the place! It’s like it’s gone into some sort of crackedout overdrive! Do you have any idea how much work I have to crank out now just to keep up with the art fairs and all of the new markets that have opened up? The Chinese buy art now? Who knew? And there are a lot of them! They’ve more than made up for my dwindling collector base of despots and strongmen. And there’s this guy in la who’s developed a sureﬁre artist ranking system! In la! They have art in la now!! But here it’s still just little old me and my 11 assistants trying to keep them all happy! And, after all, there’s only so much fucking time in the day! Most of it spent wandering around in a fevered panic! Am I supposed to be painting this vagina or that one? What colour green was I planning on using for that background? Do I send it to Chen Shui or Chen Chin? Is this cocaine, or is it methamphetamine I’ve mistaken for cocaine in my haste? Plus how do I stop the bleeding? I really need some sort of an organisational system to help me be more productive and less stressed out! Once again, my dim-witted studio assistant Neal (that idiot!) really came through for me. He left a copy of Extreme Productivity: The Rod Verplanck Method Made Less Alienating, by Rod Verplanck, cps, in the bathroom where he sits down to pee so he can weep. I picked it up and it has completely transformed my life. Basically, and it’s a little complicated, so bear with me, you have to write down what you need to do as some sort of list… But that’s not all… you have to make a few lists so that you don’t get overwhelmed or mix things up. That’s right! Even your lists have lists!

getting things done or

There’s a Projects list that’s for your projects and there’s a Next Actions list for actions you should probably do next. And that’s within the Projects list. And you even have to separate those. And the cool thing is, once you’ve written those down, they no longer clutter your brain and stress you out. You just have to check the list every now and then so that obviously bad types of things don’t happen because something’s not in your brain any more. Like forgetting to pick up your eleven-year-old daughter after surgery, you know – for instance – or picking up your studio assistant Neal from surgery, or another studio assistant from getting their stomach pumped, or the one who got the abortion. I don’t know why I’m always expected to pick everyone else up, like I’ve got nothing better to do. I should probably talk to them about that. Communication is really key, although the book doesn’t mention it.… yet… I’ve really only read the list part. I really dig the lists. I’ve got a list for my upcoming museum show in Essen, the script I keep meaning to write and also having to write this column. That’s why I’m writing it! So I can cross it off my Next Actions list!! Write ArtReview column… right under… wait a second… it’s not on this list… Well fuck this! I shouldn’t be wasting my time, then… oh, wait! Here it is, under my Home Improvement list… Well that’s not where it should be! Also, I just noticed I never crossed off pick daughter up from Mount Sinai Hospital… Did… I… not do that? But I remember doing it… or do I? Is it possible that I’ve become so superproductive that I don’t even clutter my brain with accomplished tasks? Have I already, three hours into my list project, reached some sort of higher plane in stress-free productivity? And is my newfound success why my phone has been ringing nonstop for the last two hours? Isn’t it obvious I’m too busy to pick it up? And why is no one else picking up the phone? It’s oddly quiet and I have work to do! But what kind of work? Hmmm… let me consult my handy Vagina Painting project list.

The Art of Not Cluttering One’s Brain with the Inessential whereby

Our once-more-gallery-represented portraitist of the feminine form (Below the Waistline Dept) discovers how popular task-management techniques may assist in maintaining a productive work–life balance

Jonathan Grossmalerman

ArtReview

Imponderable The Archives of Tony Oursler

Featuring a new ﬁlm, installation and publication, this exhibition explores the boundaries of human belief and disbelief, the paranormal, mystical exploration and more.

‘Ectoplasm’ under an ultraviolet light, early 20th century. Photo by Aaron Fedor

6 July – 20 September 2015 Les Forges, Parc des Ateliers Arles France www.luma-arles.org

Commissioned and produced by the LUMA Foundation for the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, France. Curated by Tom Eccles and Beatrix Ruf. The exhibition is part of the international photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles 2015.

Walking through Mirrored Gardens on the periurban fringe of Guangzhou is an exercise in peeling away the layers between oneself and nature. An initiative of Vitamin Creative Space, the gallery and cultural operation (which fuses commercial gallery operations with those of an independent/alternative art space) of husband-and-wife Hu Fang and Zhang Wei, and Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, Mirrored Gardens quietly opened in late 2014. Together, they have created something that is more than a new gallery; it’s a meditation that weaves together literary and artistic pursuits with an ecological mission. Zhang and Hu, who represent some of the most interesting names in art to emerge from within Asia (among them Cao Fei, Heman Chong, Ming Wong, Lee Kit, Koki Tanaka, Xu Tan and Jun Yang), as well as Danh Vō and Olafur Eliasson, have had a career that has largely been an urban (and urbane) venture. Mirrored Gardens, its name inspired by a novel written by Hu, writes a new chapter in their practice, which Hu says has been characterised by a longing for something more primitive. Set within Hualong Agriculture Grand View Garden, a half-baked agricultural ‘theme park’ – the kind of destination that only seems to exist in transition economies – Mirrored Gardens comprises a parade of relatively small buildings set around an emerging, productive landscape. At the entrance is an outhouse that casually blurs typological boundaries: is it a shop? The reception? It’s hard to tell. There is a mysteriousness here that immediately invites you in and yet slows you down. Fujimoto is known for the gentleness of his buildings, best exemplified by his 2013 Serpentine Pavilion, which resembled a floating cloud. Unlike a cloud, however, it had more steel struts than the Eiffel Tower. This is the beauty of Fujimoto’s buildings: on the one hand, seemingly transient; on the other, firmly grounded. This quality is on display too in Mirrored Gardens. The showpiece here is a long series of galleries, arcaded and blocky in form and built around an existing warehouse found on the site, the whole unobtrusively threaded together by a promenade overlooking an agricultural garden. Lofty, airy and muted, the main gallery opened in mid-January with an exhibition by Hong Kong artist Lee Kit. Titled We’ll Never Go Back Again, Kit’s quiet fabrics, gentle canvases and wistful imagery take advantage of the ample natural light. His work was an apt premiere for this kind of place: relax, take off your shoes, Fujimoto and Kit seemed to tell us. The architecture is simple: rustic but refined. The melody of the buildings takes its cue from the vernacular village architecture of angular roofed houses found in the area. In Mirrored Gardens, each ‘house’ has a different

off-space: mirrored gardens The 28th instalment of our guide to alternative spaces in which to see art ﬁnds a harmonious contrast of architecture, nature and sustainability in the rural landscape outside of Guangzhou featuring galleries, a generous allotment, and a space which will not become a restaurant by

Daniel Elsea

Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou. Photo: Zeng Han. Courtesy Vitamin Archive, Beijing & Guangzhou

ArtReview

finish, one painted bright red, for example, another, inspired by a house in a nearby village, clad in oyster shells sourced from local fishermen and restaurants. When you describe these buildings it seems as if they should irredeemably clash; in reality, they don’t. Furthermore, the buildings sit on a stilted platform, evoking the architecture of Southern Chinese boat people while also having a light footprint on the land. The result is a contemporary architecture that does not look that contemporary. Zhang and Hu were introduced to Fujimoto by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2008, and they had been looking for a project on which to collaborate since then. So when they hatched the idea for Mirrored Gardens, they invited Fujimoto to come down and have a look. During its three-year creation, beginning in 2011, he visited nearby villages and drew inspiration from the local settlement typologies of continuous and interlocking houses. He modelled up a series of options until he and his client settled on what we have today – a long house set within three pavilions that are scattered around a garden. “As we developed the design, it became more and more rich,” says Fujimoto, “but then it also became more and more simple.” Adjacent to the gallery is perhaps the most inviting place of all, what Zhang and Hu cheerfully call the kitchen. A roomy, open hearth that looks out onto a generous allotment, it is a place dedicated to cooking and culinary exploration. Teas and herbs are meticulously catalogued, large countertops and tables invite conversation and experimentation, and a videowork by Tanaka ruminates on the meaning of it all. Staff and friends linger, preparing food, drinking tea, chatting and laughing. This is food as media, where we are encouraged to bring our body into the thinking. “It will not become a restaurant,” Zhang promises, “because it should always be a bit ambiguous.” It is the centrepiece of a nascent but growing farm where rainwater is naturally treated by the land and a fairly sophisticated compost system nourishes the soil. Zhang and Hu have invited local farmers to work here and grow crops. It is self-made and there is no perfection to it, which seems to be the point; to do otherwise would be to create a relationship between art and nature that could only hope to be superficial. What we have instead is a sustainability project as much an artistic one, which in our age of environmental crisis is something we should all be more engaged with. Perhaps Zhang and Hu are telling us to calm down a bit. It’s a slowfood kind of polemic that elevates enjoyment of the simple things in life. “We’ve prepared the ground first,” says Hu, “and now will come the programme.”

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 39

Mehmet II, The Great Conqueror, on the Venice Biennale Interview by

Matthew Collings Reminiscing upon his extensive experience of the slaughtering of venetians the Great Turk offers his insights into the ﬁner presentations at this year’s Venice Biennale, the close relationship between oligarchic wealth and the flourishing of the arts and

the comparative merits of Bellini and Baselitz

The Ottoman emperor Mehmet II, born in Edirne, Anatolia (now part of Turkey), in 1432, initially reigned from 1444 to 1446, and then from 1451 to 1481. In 1453 his armies defeated the city of Constantinople, thereby ending the Christian Eastern Roman Empire, which had lasted for over a thousand years.

ArtReview

artreview I saw you recently at Art Dubai and now we’re talking in the bar in Hotel Danieli while the Venice Biennale’s going on. What’s all this interest in art? mehmet ii After I conquered Constantinople I built a lot of mosques and palaces and established a great cultural scene. Conquering went on all over the East at the hands of my successors, and Ottoman art and architecture became a big thing as a result – with conquest comes wealth and with wealth comes opulence and luxury; the arts flourish. The distinctive Ottoman style, hemispherical domes and slender minarets, a synthesis of Iranian-influenced Seljuk style and Byzantine style, was everywhere within a few decades. Today as ruler of an empire I expect to see art in a lot of different global contexts. I’m the same as any modern kleptocrat: I’m city-hopping; buying from art fairs; setting up private museums. I liked the Greek Pavilion in the Venice Biennale this year. An artist bought the entire contents of a fur business in Athens that had gone belly-up. It was a little shop; the whole thing, even photos of the family of the proprietor stuck on the wall over the workbench. You see the little kids’ smiling faces – plus their crayon drawings. She shipped it over to the Biennale as an installation. The pavilion was tatty, a mess, with peeling walls. You could have thought it wasn’t in use. Maybe the Greek Arts Council or whatever they have over there refused to pay for cleaning. But this artist knew what she was doing, in my opinion. You went in, the space was large, shadowy, bits of junk lying around. There was this shop facade, then a few little scruffy rooms with old tools, fur hides on the walls, a stuffed hog’s head, I think, on a surface – I don’t know what it was. But you were in a room that had clearly been a workplace. And there was a film projected on a wall, showing the old shopkeeper telling the story of the failed enterprise and the artist offering

money to buy it all. There was something authentic about what you were seeing that was quite different to set-dressing: something painful about the family photos, for instance. Without it being spelled out, you knew it was about the parlous economic situation in Greece, and that economy in relation to Europe, and so it meant that whatever nation you might be part of, it connected to you – if you’re British, for example, it connected to the economy under the Tories. I would have bought it myself but I think it’s already sold. ar Do you own a lot of current art? m ii Of course, tens of thousands of works, we all do now if we’re rulers; it’s for ﬁnancial speculation, social climbing and money laundering. We’ve all got private museums planned or already existing. They’re pretty awful, actually, in terms of aesthetic signiﬁcance. There might be a show in one that’s accidentally good. But mostly it’s the kind of thing you see at the moment in the Pinault venue, in Venice, the Punta della Dogana. You get pleasingly designed modern spaces adorned here and there with objects whose purpose – in this context at least – is to mildly stimulate the foolish with some kind of shallow meaning, either whimsicalfake-intellectual or shock-sexual, in between admiring the views out the window or buying a souvenir from the gift shop or an asparagusand-boiled-egg sandwich from the coffee shop. Increasingly, genuinely important historical art objects are being included – a Rodin, in the Pinault Collection show, say. But every effort is made to ensure that these are received by above Maria Papadimitriou, agrimiká, 2015 (installation view, Greek Pavilion, Venice Biennale). Courtesy the artist and Temporary Autonomous Museum for All facing page Gentile Bellini, The Sultan Mehmet II, 1480, oil on canvas, perhaps transferred from wood, 70 × 52 cm. Licensed under Creative Commons

Summer 2015

the viewer in as dumbed-down a way as possible, so they fit seamlessly with easy junk by Danh Vō, for example – who was in fact the curator of the current show at the Punta della Dogana. ar You don’t reject the new, though. Did you like the Biennale experience on the whole? m ii I responded to content that wasn’t whimsical. One expects current art to be a bit like geography lessons. You will be informed about what’s going on globally, and the atmosphere of the art will be moralistic. And there was that. But it was thoughtful, substantial, various, energetic and engaging. Even work deliberately in the mode of the ridiculous, like the seven-channel film by the Russian collective known as aes+f, Inverso Mundus, at an offsite venue, was nevertheless – I mean, it was camp as hell – overwhelmingly effective in its funny allegorising of what current hot authors such as Maurizio Lazzarato call ‘subjectivation’. It was great that you encountered in the sections of the Biennale that were directly under the main curator’s control demonstrations of his main themes, with so little mere pretentiousness and so much actual dramatising of contemporary reality. ar You can’t say Baselitz isn’t pretentious! m ii Really? I thought he was great. Enormous paintings of gnarly, ugly nude men in beautiful light colour, rococo pinks and oranges against black, five metres high, staged in a sort of circle. They had real visual punch with their fluent handling and skilled transparency. They were depictions, but their content was certainly not confined to depiction. It was interesting to see them near Chris Ofili, who was disappointing. Ofili seemed like a lightweight version of Vienna Secession decoration. Previously with his joyous patterning and ornamenting and his imagery of gangsters and bitches, Ofili really was on a level

visually with the best paintings by Klimt you could possibly imagine. But he had modern relevant meaning as well. He was exploring femininity, and also race, but both in a way that was uncomfortable, funny and beautiful. All that has diminished now in favour of easy pleasantness. Baselitz was much more powerful, with colours like Byzantine mosaics, light and fleshlike but with that artificial heightened quality one associates with Byzantine decorative colour – and he was telling you too about twentieth-century painting, especially abstract art, that great period of high visual achievement. ar What do you think of isis destroying priceless artworks? m ii They don’t have the monopoly on that. For a thousand years Christians destroyed art from pagan cultures that preceded Christianity. It’s why there are now so few Greek sculptures in existence from the fifth century bc, the high classical period. They didn’t crumble away from natural ageing. They were systematically destroyed by Christians certain they were demons: Greek bronzes, marbles – the most amazing representational art the world has ever known.

m ii Nice. He was Venetian. I slaughtered many of them. Then I hired them. That’s business. I brought him over to work for me for a while in Constantinople, now renamed Istanbul: a splendid place for a visual artist. We were all fascinated by his perspective space and realistic picturing of the human body. I was twenty-one when I defeated Constantinople, but by now I was forty-seven. I was grotesquely fat with yellow skin and a growth on my leg that expanded horribly in warm weather. I was an interesting subject to portray, I expect. I am the son of a former Christian slave and an emperor. There was no system for inheriting the throne. All the royal bastards were born in the harem. If they survived to adulthood at all, they were lucky. The strongest just seized power if he was able when the time came. I planned the attack on Constantinople for eight years, thousands were slaughtered, I became known as the Conqueror, Great Turk, Caesar of Rome. I sent 400 children of Greek noble families each to the rulers of Egypt, Tunis and Grenada, as a gift. It was part of my move to become protector of the entirety of the Muslim world. I demanded the two sons of the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras, to fuck,

ar Greeks are on your mind today! m ii Well in the modern period the Byzantine people I conquered are referred to as Greeks. They thought of themselves as Romans, however. They were the continuation of the Roman Empire in the east a thousand years after Rome fell.

ar As you’re in art shows globally all the time, did you think the display in the Greek Pavilion, which was made up, as you say, of a series of real spaces displaced from their original context, was like Mike Nelson? m ii Well, I like him of course, but this was ‘him’ minus extraneous elements. I remember the setup he created in Venice four years ago or whenever it was, and there you had these very familiar but overlooked interior spaces, which are his trademark, like the spaces you peer into behind the guys you order minicabs from in the poorer parts of London – not that I ever have to do that, but I know about it. (All rulers have to know how the wealth-creation system functions at every level.) But he also wanted you to think about exotic information to do with Venice’s nautical history: a ship that went down centuries ago. This was a narrative that was somewhat removed and grandiose. And that element of a pretentious overlay is perhaps something I’m glad to do without. I was only really aware of it as a burden when it was stripped away.

next month Friedrich Engels on this year’s Turner Prize

ar What was it like having your portrait done by Bellini?

Maria Papadimitriou, agrimiká, 2015 (installation view, Greek Pavilion, Venice Biennale). Courtesy the artist and Temporary Autonomous Museum for All

after his entire family was brought to me in chains, when the smoke of battle was still in the air. And when he paused to think about it, I got impatient and had them all killed. It was handy, actually. It wasn’t good politics to let the leading Byzantine nobility survive. Bellini pleased us with his careful attention to realistic anatomy. Once, he wasn’t sure about the detail of bloody wounds in a battle scene, so I had a slave beheaded to provide him with visual information. Maybe it disturbed him.

ArtReview

HELGA DE ALVEAR

GALERIA

DR. FOURQUET 12, 28012 MADRID. TEL:(34) 91 468 05 06 FAX:(34) 91 467 51 34 e-mail:galeria@helgadealvear.com www.helgadealvear.com

21 de mayo – 30 de junio de 2015

AXEL HÜTTE Shadows of Light

18 – 21 de junio de 2015

Art Basel 2015 | Booth P8 HELENA ALMEIDA

CENTRO DE ARTES VISUALES FUNDACIÓN HELGA DE ALVEAR 25 de abril de 2015 – 31 de enero de 2016 Cáceres, España

www.fundacionhelgadealvear.es/apps

GRIEDER CONTEMPORARY

Dieter Meier «Acrobatics 1977–2015»

June 14–July 25, 2015 Private view: Saturday, June 13, 2015

Grieder Contemporary Limmatstrasse 256 8005 Zürich Switzerland T +41 43 818 56 07 info@grieder-contemporary.com www.grieder-contemporary.com

22-25 octobER 2015 grand palais et hors les murs, paris 2IÀ FLDO VSRQVRU

JAC K S O N P O L LO C K

G E TA B R ĂT E S C U

GLENN LIGON

Until 18 October 2015 Supported by The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Tate Liverpool Members

Jackson Pollock Yellow Islands 1952 © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2015./ Geta Brătescu Hypostasis of Medea IX X 1980 © Adam and Mariana Clayton Collection Photo: Stefan Sava/Glenn Ligon Untitled 2006 © Glenn Ligon; courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London;Luhring Augustine, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots has been developed in collaboration with The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and organised in partnership with the Dallas Museum of Art. Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions is a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary and Tate Liverpool, curated by Glenn Ligon.

Lucy Beech

Me and Mine Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, 2 May – 4 July 2015 The Tetley, Leeds, 17 July – 27 September 2015

FVU.CO.UK

THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART

17–20 SEPTEMBER 2015 CHICAGO NAVY PIER expochicago.com

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23 May - 09 September

Beatrice Gibson Crippled Symmetries

Emma Bennett

30.07.15 – 04.10.15

Michael Boffey Anya Gallaccio Ori Gersht Owen Griffiths An exploration of the significance of flowers in contemporary art through exhibition, commissions, residencies, publication and discussion taking place at Oriel Davies and beyond.

Image credit: Beatrice Gibson, still from Crippled Symmetries, 2015, 16 mm and DV transferred to HD, sound (surround). Courtesy of the Laura Bartlett Gallery and LUX, London.

Funded by:

Anne-Mie Melis Jacques Nimki Yoshihiro Suda Clare Twomey

flora.orieldavies.org Oriel Davies Gallery, The Park, Newtown, Powys, SY16 2NZ T: +44(0)1686 625041 E: desk@orieldavies.org Mon- Sat 10am - 5pm Jacques Nimki, The Little Florilegium, 2014 ﬂora is a National Touring Exhibition curated by Oriel Davies and supported by Arts Council of Wales. The ﬂora Outreach on Tour schools programme is supported by the Ernest Cook Trust.

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Peter von Kant

Daiwa Foundation Art Prize 2015

Private view 26 June 2015 6–9pm

Tobias Buckel

Introducing British artists to Japan 12 June – 17 July Mon – Fri 9.30am – 5.00pm Daiwa Foundation Japan House London NW1

26 June Oliver Beer Julie Brook Mikhail Karikis Selected by: Hideki Aoyama Richard Deacon Mami Kataoka Chris Orr RA Jonathan Watkins www.parkerharris.co.uk

31 July 2015 VIII

Palexpo Geneva / 28-31.01.2016 / artgeneve.ch Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 30.04-02.05.2016 / artmontecarlo.ch

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, Leonard rri, Elliott Erwitt with: René Bu Imbert, René Groebli, a Freed, Claudi er, Xavier Lambours, Tobias el pp Ka Simone aw and more. Madörin, Sam Sh Woerdehoff, alerie Esther Curated by G d Bildhalle, Zurich. Paris an

international art fair for young photography.

tion special exhibi «DRIVE IN».

Art Featured

Aphrodisiac scandal of the sex-mad interns and the 63 passionate student nurses 83

Geta Brătescu by Helen Sumpter

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For over six decades the Romanian artist has produced work, often under testing conditions, that is by turns humble, playful and heroic, but always human

Summer 2015

above Self-Portrait in the Mirror, 1985, photography, wood, tempera on mirror, textiles, pins, 41 × 32 × 12 cm opening pages Self-Portrait, Toward White, 1975, b/w photomontage, dimensions variable. Photo: Mihai Brătescu

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It’s nearing the end of April, two weeks before Geta Brătescu’s eighty- whether it’s two- or three-dimensional space,” she says, via translaninth birthday, and the artist is sitting at a desk in her studio, a large tion by her Bucharest gallerist and friend, Marian Ivan. room full of her books and artworks in her family house in Bucharest. Brătescu has often placed herself in her work. In the absence of It’s where she comes to work each day, surrounded by pots of pens life models, she drew her own hands. In the 1977 film Hands (For the and pencils, scissors, paper and glue. She’s showing me her latest small Eye, the Hand of My Body Draws My Portrait), filmed by fellow artist Ion collages, each comprising two or three almost-abutting shapes, cut Grigorescu, Brătescu’s hands act as expressive characters in their own out freehand with scissors from thin pink or black card and placed on narratives. Her hands are just as expressive as she talks now. Although a white background. As she carefully lays six or seven of them down she collaborated on films with other artists, the family and the studio on the desk, as if dealing a hand of cards, the visual dialogue created rather than her peers have been her support. Her husband Mihai was by the elegant and precisely placed compositions of shapes and the behind the camera in works such as Self-Portrait, Toward White (1975), high-contrast colours comes alive. They’re part of the artist’s ongoing in which the artist’s face is shown in a series of seven black-and-white series Jeu des Formes (Game of Forms), a body of works begun in 2009, in photographs, in each image her features becoming increasingly faint which the colours and shapes vary but and obscured by clear plastic, until they disappear completely. A transithe playful relationship between the tion from presence to absence, from elements is a continuous one. The collages are to be part of an black to white, is a repeated motif. exhibition of Brătescu’s work that When Brătescu retires to another opens at the end of this month at part of the house to rest – she’s been Tate Liverpool: a selected showcase suffering from a cold and hasn’t yet of drawings, collage, film, textiles and fully recovered – I take the opportunity prints dating from 1960 to the presfor a more focused look around her studio. The artist has worked here ent, and the Romanian artist’s first since the 1990s; before that, it was her institutional uk solo show. Brătescu mother’s bedroom. For her the studio has exhibited throughout her career, including at Venice in 1960 and the is not only a place for current work and São Paulo Bienal twice during the a repository for past works – sketch1980s. It’s only relatively recently, books are piled high, drawers are filled however, that she has begun fully to with works on paper and artist books, drawings and sculptural assemblages be acknowledged internationally, not only as one of Romania’s foremost cover the walls – it’s also a space that is highly significant to her work, as subexperimental postwar artists, but as a singular conceptual thinker, weaving ject, as private stage and often as an mythical and literary references into interchangeable stand-in for the artist creative expressive narrative and abherself. ‘The studio is myself’ is an oftquoted statement of hers. stract works that also reflect aspects of everyday life. She had a solo show In 1978 (the 1970s being Brătescu’s at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific most experimental decade), she made Film Archive last summer and an the short film Atelierul (The Studio), exhibition at Inhotim in Brazil last again with fellow artist Grigorescu behind the camera, which encomSeptember. Alongside Ivan Gallery in Bucharest she also shows at Barbara passes many of her interests – theatriWeiss in Berlin. Concurrent with the cality, narrative, performance as drawshow at Tate she will have work in ing and a certain slapstick sensibility. this year’s Vienna Biennale and a maStoryboarded by Brătescu into three jor show at the Hamburger Kunsthalle next spring. She created much sequences, the film shows the artist becoming an actor; emerging of this work under Romania’s communist regime, when, especial- from sleep, drawing a rectangle within the space, measured and scaled ly during the 1980s and the latter more repressive half of Nicolae by the limits of her own body and interacting with various domestic Ceaușescu’s dictatorship (1965–89), documenting daily life and paint- objects and props, not only foregrounding the relationship between ing portraits of the leader were the only acceptable activities for artists. her physical space and her studio space but also creating a narrative Collage may be Brătescu’s current medium, but as the Tate show within a domestic, imaginary interior world. seeks to demonstrate, she has expressed her ideas just as effectively Brătescu was born in 1926 in the city of Ploieşti, 60km north of through performing in her own short films and photographs, through Bucharest, to self-made middle-class parents (her father was a pharsculpture, etchings, textiles, tapestries, illustration, travel journals macist) who encouraged their daughter’s talent for writing and and writing about her thoughts and ideas. And underpinning all of drawing. She enrolled in both subjects, but her studies were cut short her work is the very physical activity of drawing. in 1949 when her drawings came under scrutiny The Studio, 1978, “Drawing is about any movement, or a series of from the authorities: she was expelled from art 8mm film transferred to dvd, b/w. movements within a space. And it doesn’t matter school under legislation that set out to ‘cleanse’ Camera: Ion Grigorescu

Summer 2015

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Summer 2015

institutions of teachers and students whose background was deemed denied a feminist agenda. When asked about her use of textile scraps, unsuitably bourgeois. Although she later completed her education many of which came from her mother’s fabric collection, she reminds (between 1969 and 71), one of the many things that makes Brătescu me that most tailors are men, but in her interest in strong but coninteresting is that she chose neither to be a political artist in resist- flicted female figures such as Medea, and the use of herself as the cenance to the state or to submit to being a state artist painting homages tral character and performer in her work, a desire to reflect something to Ceaușescu, but found ways both to placate the state and to make of the female experience isn’t totally absent either. her own work. Despite having travelled when she had the opportunity – among When she returns from her rest we pick up at this early point in her published writings are the travel journal De la Veneţia la Veneţia her career during the 1950s when, after her studies were curtailed, (From Venice to Venice) (1970), the result of a trip to Italy in the midshe was combining her drawing skills and literary interests to work as 1960s, during which she soaked up and recorded her impressions of an illustrator and a graphic designer, eventually becoming art director the country’s culture – Brătescu has lived only in Bucharest, drawing of cultural magazine Secolul 20 (Twentieth Century, now Secolul 21), an from and processing her own internal experiences within her immeassociation that she maintains, as designer, to this day. Although the diate surroundings, as she continues to do to this day. As she has magazine was financed by the Ministry of Culture, the state’s more said in other writings (an activity that has also remained constant liberal desire at that time to showcase its culture to the world allowed throughout her life, although only some of the results are currently for a certain amount of creative freedom, of which Brătescu took available in translation): ‘But what does being an artist mean? Being full advantage, producing exan artist means being a receptacle in which the chemistry pressive illustrations, including a series to accompany a that transforms experience into translation of Goethe’s Faust expression takes place.’ (1808) – another important refHaving been given a retroerence in her work. In 1957 she spective at Bucharest’s National Museum of Art in 1999 and the also became a member of the National Award for Visual Arts Union of Visual Artists (uap), in 2008, Brătescu has been valiwho oversaw the only officially sanctioned exhibition spaces, dated by the Romanian art estabtaking similar advantage of oplishment; still, I’m curious as to her standing among younger portunities to study and learn artists. My visit coincides with when she was duly sent to document construction sites, facBucharest’s annual White Night tories and peasant workers. She of the Galleries, when the city’s exhibition and project spaces shows me a book of these early stay open into the small hours. drawings, skilful and expresPage from the artist’s travelling journal to Italy, 1966–7, When I ask various twenty- and sive depictions of peasants at a postcards and text, 13 × 24 cm thirty-something artists about wedding and workers feeding fuel into the round openings of furnaces. “It was a great experience, Brătescu, the responses are the same, that she’s a great and imporvery interesting to be able to draw from life in these places,” she tant artist. And I have to agree, not only for her ability to continually says. In later decades, that experience resurfaced in more conceptual invent and adapt across different media but also in making work that work. During the 1980s the circular opening of the furnaces became a can appear humble, playful or heroic but always expresses humanity. containing motif for several series of beautifully composed abstracts Now that Brătescu seldom leaves the house, the central role of her that combine textile, fabric and drawing, among them Vestigii (Vestiges, studio is even more important. But with her cutout collages, just as in 1982), the second of two series with that title, and Regula cercului, regula her earlier years, she has found a way to work with rather than against restrictions. I’m reminded, inevitably, of Matisse – someone Brătescu jocului (The Rule of the Circle, the Rule of the Game, 1985). Another subject that Brătescu has revisited many times is the admires (there’s a postcard of a Matisse Blue Nude among the many Greek mythological character Medea, creating semiabstracted pro- images in her studio) – who also chose cutout collages as a medium file portraits in textile and lithographic print. Aesop, too, has been when he was no longer able to paint, as much as I’m reminded of other a focus in Brătescu’s work. I ask her why she’s attracted to mytho- singular female artists like Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama, who logical literary figures: “They interest me because they are very achieved their greatest recognition later in life. complex, and don’t fit into the romantic notion of what a good charWhen I ask Brătescu what the difference between being a young acter should be.” She won’t be drawn on whether she sees anything artist and an older one feels like for her, she considers the question of herself in that role, but when reminded that Aesop has a tragic carefully, but the answer, when it comes, is an emphatic one. “It’s much end, she’s quick to reply, not without wry humour, that “all of us have easier now. I have more freedom to simply enjoy the movement of the a tragic destiny”. hand”, she says with a flourish, “and to be playful, like a dance.” ar Brătescu has always denied any political agenda, but it can be read in her work nevertheless, albeit in coded form: in the constraints of An exhibition of Geta Brătescu’s work is on view from 30 June to 18 October at Tate Liverpool; her work can also be seen in Vienna the circles, the containment of the studio and the erasure and maskBiennale 2015: Ideas for Change, from 11 June to 4 October ing of identity in the photographic and film works. She has similarly

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above Hypostasis of Medea viii, 1980, coloured sewing on textile, 85 × 60 cm. Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland. Photo: Stefan Altenburger preceding pages Geta Brătescu in her Bucharest studio, April 2015. Photo: Ștefan Sava all images Courtesy the artist and Ivan Gallery, Romania, plus, on pages 84–85, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

Summer 2015

Now Wash Your Hands When does cleanliness become sterility, and hygiene inhumanity? A short history of dirt and germs in contemporary art by Chris Fite-Wassilak

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During August 1903 at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square, engineer, spending most of his life making pastry and doughnut the star of the packed-out shows was a bunch of parasites. As part mixtures that could last indefinitely. In how many science-fiction of a series of short films called ‘The Unseen World’, which included futures are humans depicted as hairless, wearing white, padding among other things a fly on its back juggling a small ball, the most through gleaming, antiseptic hallways? How far off is that from our popular feature was The Cheese Mites (1903). A man sits down to an minimal homes and slick galleries? Our projective desires of welloutdoor picnic and happens to use the magnifying glass he’s been being and progress continue to be intimately linked with ideologies reading with to examine his piece of Stilton. Audiences, gasping and that we like to think we’ve moved beyond. Or as Paul Virilio put it laughing, were then treated to almost two full minutes close-up in The Administration of Fear (2012), ‘The new humanity desired by the with dozens of small crablike mites crawling around. The film is totalitarians has become a techno-scientific reality in its own right!’ considered one of the first nature documentaries, but it also had a Picking at this scab has a history in contemporary art. We can few unintended results: the sales of home microscopes (which often feel the attempt to confront and confound this unsoiled facade in included a sachet of mites for ‘starter kits’) soared, and cheese sales the burbling paint and bodily fluids of the Vienna Actionists, Carolee were also affected enough for the Schneeman’s dearly fondled raw cheese industry to lobby to have chicken orgy Meat Joy (1964) or Paul the film banned. It also spurred McCarthy’s cracking into giant on the founding of the Institute of paint tubes of ‘Shit’. Dieter Roth’s Hygiene in London, which helpclassic gesture of a bad guest Staple Cheese (A Race) (1970) involved ed shape later food-safety regufilling the Eugenia Butler Gallery lations that specified cheese as a in Los Angeles with 37 suitcases, potential threat. each holding a different type of The ripples of The Cheese Mites, cheese. Over the month that they both its popularity and its regulawere left out in spring temperatory consequences, show us how visibility became one of the key tures, various stenches of rot filled factors of an emerging twentieththe room and juices began to seep century modernity. The smooth onto the floor, along with a considerable fly infestation. Public structures of glass and light to health officials tried to shut the come would, after all, be clean and safe places, free from such germs. gallery, but Butler bravely argued that it ‘represented the life-cycle’, (The sheer front of sealed windows in Lever House featured New and it was allowed to stay open. Roth allegedly collected some of York City’s first window-cleaning scaffolds, purpose-built into the the dead flies, referring to them as architecture.) While the insights the exhibition’s ‘true audience’. of nineteenth-century figures like But there’s also a quieter lineage. One of the first patterns creJohn Snow and Louis Pasteur increased public health and life ated by Ettore Sottsass in 1978 for the plastic laminates that expectancy, the demands and exwould cover the forthcoming pectations of a hygienist ideology have steadily grown: we’re cleaner, Memphis furniture designs was a safer, healthier than ever before. set of oblong, squiggly blobs. The Bacterio patterns came to be one And we’ve got an art that (literof the group’s most recognisable: ally) reflects that: prim, sanitised metal sculptures à la Kapoor or family dressers, bedside lamps and Koons, giant shiny shapes and surfaces that require no small amount chairs covered with a flimsy, industrial surface that was honest and of polishing, shining and cleaning in order to function. upfront about the fact that it was crawling with germs, bacteria In 1974, philosopher of history Ivan Illich wrote, ‘Medical civili- and countless microbes. The Critical Art Ensemble took this to the zation is planned and organized to kill pain, eliminate sickness, and to next level, turning their wayward-secondary-school-science-teacher struggle against death. These are new goals, which have never before approach towards a series of projects that were designed to echo been guidelines for social life.’ Or, as he put it, paraphrasing Goya, and imitate government-run germ warfare tests on civilians in San ‘New medicine tries to engineer the dreams of reason.’ It’s cleanliness, Francisco and the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. Turning loose a harmrather than dirt, that seems to haunt the twentieth century, spread- less strain of bacteria in central Leipzig, Target Deception (2007) used ing uncontrollably into the twenty-first human guinea pigs to see how far the supabove Lever House, New York, photographed in 2009. and beyond. It’s no coincidence that E.E. posed contagion could spread. Not far, as Photo: Samuel North. Licensed under Creative Commons ‘Doc’ Smith, the science-fiction author it turns out, though their main point had facing page Vadim Zakharov, Restaurant Philosophers’ Ship, 2014 who founded the ‘space opera’ genre durbeen to call attention to the inefficacy of (installation view, Progress and Hygiene, 2015, Zache˛ta, Warsaw). ˙ biological warfare. But they were close ing the 1920s, was by profession a food Photo: Marek Krzyzanek. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2015

Dieter Roth, Staple Cheese (A Race), 1970 (installation view, Eugenia Butler Gallery, Los Angeles, 1970). © estate of Eugenia P. Butler. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London & New York

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Benedict Drew, The Persuaders, 2014 (installation view, Adelaide International 2014). Photo: Sam Noonan. Courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London

Summer 2015

to another mark: the projects were carried out while an fbi charge of ‘bioterrorism’ against cae member Steve Kurtz was still ongoing, a case that was eventually dropped. The cae and Sottsass gestures call attention to the patent fact that we are incessantly surrounded by, host and home to countless beings that we might consciously think of as ‘unhygienic’, whether we want to be or not. Perhaps pushed by the delve into the digital, and the accompanying reactive return to the body, the spectre of the hygienic nemesis, as Illich called it, has been more readily apparent recently, as a way of thinking about the actual politics of the body without idealising it. Progress and Hygiene, a large group show staged last year in Warsaw’s National Gallery of Art, attempted to take on eugenics and the dark underbelly of modern medicine. For several younger artists currently working in the uk, it’s part of an eerily unsettled atmosphere, an attempt to draw attention to the sterile vacuum we’re hemming ourselves in to; you can sense it in the oozing heads and gloopy surfaces that run though Benedict Drew’s installations, or the imitation plant veneer and manipulated, artiﬁcial surfaces that abound in the work

of Rachel Pimm. In Heather Phillipson’s short video immediately and for a short time balloons weapons too-tight clothing worries of all kinds (2014), the innocuous Muzak keeps getting interrupted by an alarmed notice: “Now wash your hands”. A pair of hands places itself in front of a picture of the sea, rubbing vigorously. Another set of hands appears on top, pinching the surface like a touch screen before white liquid trickles down, covering the screen. “You must apply soap liberally,” the narrator admonishes. “More. More. Still not enough. Do you want the germs to win?!” Slipping on the double-entendres and mixed metaphors, through the ﬂuids and oriﬁces foisted upon us, a sense of ridiculousness of this state of humanity riots throughout Phillipson’s poetry, videos and installations, looking at self-denial about our animal essences, and our pernicious clinging to the illogical boundaries that enable us to walk around as clothed, sensible, rational members of society. Her work, by implication, stresses how we’ve merged our sense of a regulated environment with our very sense of being. What these artists ask is for us to look again, with a bit of dirt in our eye. ar

Heather Phillipson, immediately and for a short time balloons weapons too-tight clothing worries of all kinds, 2014 (installation view, Bunker259, New York, 2014), hd video and sculpture. Courtesy the artist and Bunker259, New York

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Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy, Elizabeth Taylor and Hershey’s Syrup Can, 2006, photographic colour-print on gloss paper, 183 × 125 cm. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London & New York

Summer 2015

Akram Zaatari by Oliver Basciano

Can we make sense of our present through the documents of forgotten decades? For one Lebanese artist, while he may recognise people and places, the past will always be a different country 98

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In Robert Fisk’s glorious, sad 1990 history of Lebanon at war, Pity the the scene is bright without shadows. El-Attal stares straight down Nation, the veteran journalist traces the turmoil of the Middle East the camera lens, not at the viewer (in this instance me, standing in back to the trauma resulting from the Nazi occupation of Europe. In Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, looking at a wall of similar photo1986 Fisk went to the Warsaw home of an elderly Jewish Holocaust graphs of el-Attal’s neighbours in the market of Haret el Keshek) survivor: ‘On the facing wall were affixed some faded sepia photo- but at the man photographing him, Hashem el Madani. Perhaps graphs… Each showed a group of schoolteachers sitting on rows of both sitter and photographer have realised the impact the first Arabchairs, the first picture labelled 1926, the last 1938, so that by casting Israeli war, which had started in May the year prior and ended in our eyes along the row we could see the teachers growing older, the a fragile armistice in March 1949, was going to have on their own bright, sometimes humorous faces of the Bialystok Gymnasium staff country and their own lives, perhaps they have not. They must have seen the thousands of Palestinians escaping the Israeli airstrikes – moving inexorably towards the Holocaust.’ Let us consider another photograph, this time an image that has the government in Jerusalem fiercely guarding the land mandated been used by Akram Zaatari in various iterations of the Lebanese to the Jewish people, friends and relatives perhaps of the schoolartist’s 2007 work Hashem el Madani: Itinerary. Like those of the teacher Fisk was to meet years later, a territory that was supposed to Bialystok Gymnasium staff, the photograph is of an ordinary person, protect the Jews from more bloodshed. El-Attal and Madani would but perhaps in this case the subject has the faintest inkling of the have been aware of the desperate Palestinians filling the camps in fate history has in store for them. It is 1949. Abdel-Ghani el-Attal Bourj el-Barajneh and Ain al-Hilweh. Like those refugees, the two is outside his grocery shop in Haret el Keshek, in the Lebanese city Lebanese men may not have realised then that the Palestinians would of Saïda, 40km down the Mediterranean coast from Beirut. Bags of never be able to return to their homeland, nor would they have been grain lie just outside the shop doorway; a tray of ring-shaped ka’ak aware of the effect this new population would have on their own bread is balanced on a box. A dozen or so photographs, presumably country: Lebanon’s precarious democracy about to be destroyed as of family members – children, parents – the country gets sucked into conflict on all are pinned haphazardly to a noticeboard. above Twenty Eight Nights and a Poem (still), hd video, 105 min. sides. In that moment, on that sunny afterCourtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, El-Attal is barefoot, sitting on a chair, one noon, as the cogs of history grind on around Beirut & Hamburg leg crossed over the other, an arm resting them, the two men seem oblivious and facing page Hashem el Madani, Itinerary – Abdel-Ghani el-Attal on the back of the seat. It might be spring, happy, contentedly absorbed in the job at next to his grocery shop in Haret el Keshek, Saïda, 1949, 2008. perhaps mid-afternoon – the grocer is wearhand, one posing for the photograph, the © the artist. Courtesy Hashem el Madani ing a pale short-sleeved shirt over a vest and other taking it. and Arab Image Foundation, Beirut

Summer 2015

Typically for Zaatari the Stockholm exhibition involves found to write historical, political or biographic narratives. Instead it’s a photographic archives, multimedia installations, and film and video, study of the documents the past bequeaths to the future. So while both documentary and fictional (and works that sit somewhere on a few occasions, especially in those works that involve the Madani between the two). It complements solo exhibitions at Salt, Istanbul, archives, Zaatari’s viewer might witness an innate, presumably timethis year, and the Power Plant, Toronto, in 2014, as well as his partici- less facet of humanity – the goofing of three friends in an image pation in the Gwangju Biennale and the Yokohama Triennale, both Zaatari has titled Abu Jalal Dimassy (centre) and Two of His Friends Acting 2014; and representation of Lebanon at the 2013 Venice Biennale. out a Hold-up. Studio Shehrazade, Saïda, Lebanon, 1950s. Hashem el Madani Zaatari’s work speaks frequently of politics and Lebanon’s fraught (2007), for example, is so full of the mischievousness of youth that modern history, but it has long done so through the telling of indi- I would happily believe it to have been taken at any point in history vidual, personal stories. The people who figure in it – among whom – more typically the work highlights the way in which the cultural the studio photographer Madani is a mashifts in the world surrounding these subjects since they were photographed jor presence – always remain the primary In this flux, the artist mirrors focus, yet he allows the inevitable intruhave been too great for us to be able to read the shifting narratives that them in the manner they might have been sion of the history they lived through to archival documents and primary read at the time. Take, for example, a series seep into the narrative. The 10-minute of photographs by Madani in which samefilm Red Chewing Gum (2000), for instance, sources are subjected to sex couples are pictured in an embrace – tells the story of the narrator and his lover’s encounter with a chewing-gum seller, noting that gunshots and one devastatingly handsome boy giving another a kiss, in Tarho and military skirmishes can be heard in the distance while this small El Masri. Studio Shehrazade, Saïda, Lebanon, 1958. Hashem el Madani (2007), personal drama plays out. The 11-minute Nature Morte (2008), word- for instance. In Zaatari’s 2004 book Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices, less save for the call of the adhān some way off, again evokes the the photographer explains that the subjects aren’t gay couples, but mundanity of conflict in its portrayal of two men working side by are using the other as substitutes for a heterosexual partner, because side at their respective tasks: the older making a bomb, the younger it was not seemly for a man and woman to be photographed togemending a jacket. ther outside marriage. While it is not necessarily a revelation that artefacts are read differently as time goes Yet Zaatari’s work is not about researchIn This House (still), 2005, video, 30 min. by or cultural contexts change, Zaatari’s ing the past (though that might be part of Courtesy the artist work highlights a certain degree of uneasy his methodology in its creation) or looking and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

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ambiguity to this process, in which intentions can only be assumed installation element of Twenty Eight Nights and a Poem). The fact that and, with the years rolling by, misunderstanding becomes more the interviews are often relayed via various technological means (laplikely. In This House (2005) centres on footage filmed by the artist show- tops, smartphones) that Zaatari in turn films provides a clue to the ing the unearthing of a letter written and buried by Ali Hashisho, fact that the work is not just about Madani but is also about the media a Lebanese resistance fighter, in the garden of a house he and his we use to explore history and personal narratives in the present. The comrades were based in during the late 1980s, together with the film Twenty Eight Nights and a Poem opens with a shot of a laptop sitting conversation of those present at the dig and a new interview with on a metal trolley in an archive (the credits confirm the assumption Hashisho (who is now a press photographer of some renown). Addres- that it is the Arab Image Archive in Beirut, the research centre Zaatari sed to the owners of the house, who at the time the missive was founded with photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad in written had been displaced, the 30-minute video documents the 1997 and which continues its operations today). The laptop is playing letter’s delivery from the past into the present and the consternation an odd, very dated black-and-white children’s television show, the this causes the returned homeowner and local authorities who have kind of footage that resurfaces on the Internet, in which a father sings insisted on attending the exhumation. In a part of the world where a piano-accompanied song to his young daughter. Throughout the history weighs heavily and is frequently used as a pretext for yet more film, occasional intertitles offer definitions of words relating the conflict, the wider, wretched political implications of the misinterpre- mediums and source material through which history is relayed, from tation of historical sources is perhaps self-evident. ‘camera’ to ‘archives’. Likewise, in the final scene Zaatari himself apThe images of el-Attal and his fellow shopkeepers were original- pears (artists also being narrators of history, their work source material ly used by Zaatari as part of a walking tour, in which the old photo- for cultural historians), sitting alongside Madani, watching muchloved Egyptian singer Abdel graphs were placed in the shops where they were originally takHalim Hafez sing his epic, beauen. At Moderna Museet each was tiful lament Ayy Dam’et Huzn La mounted, framed and installed (1974) on Zaatari’s laptop. in a grid alongside a video of the This tension between the artist interviewing an older man personal stories of the individwho remembered many of those uals and the use that the modern featured in the images and remiviewer has for the images as primary source for a wider hisnisced at length about how each torical narrative is one that the shop in the market changed artist has long been interested hands over the years. Most of in exploring. In his 2003 film Madani’s work was done not in This Day, in which scenes of a the streets, however, but in the pair of hands rifling through small, cramped studio he, now old photographs of everyday in his late eighties, still keeps, on the first floor of a busy street scenes from the mid-twentieth in Saïda. Zaatari’s work Twenty century in the Middle East are Eight Nights and a Poem (2010–) is a shifting, intimate portrait of the intercut with an array of news reports and Arabic pop songs, there’s photographer’s work told through a changing multimedia installa- a particularly poignant moment. An intertitle, typed across the tion, including photographs of items from the cramped studio space; screen in Arabic, proclaims, in translation, ‘In war, songs change photographs developed from old, often damaged negatives found and images transform’. The point being that wars don’t just inflict in the studio; found 16mm film; Super 8 films; hd videos shown on violence on people in the discrete period they take place, but cast a an array of devices including iPads and Kindles; sculpture; and the long shadow, colonising the cultural legacy of a group of people, or longest film Zaatari has made to date (also titled Twenty Eight Nights…, the image of a society, way past the moment of armistice, whether dated 2015 and lasting 105 minutes; it is often screened separately). intentionally or not. Like much of Zaatari’s moving-image work, in this film Madani’s life Zaatari’s primary concern, then, is not war per se, or Lebanese is portrayed through an opaque, nonlinear montage of shots taken by history, or even the individuals that appear in the work, but historithe artist. Some of these have a direct link to the subject’s life; others ography and how we use media to make sense of our current circumstances. It’s telling that in the artist’s exhibitions, elements from one seem more tangential. Again, the viewer is offered an insight into the personality of work are often taken to form another; individual works are used in Madani and the changing mores of Lebanese society via direct inter- larger, more immersive installations; titles are repeated; projects take views in which, for example, the photographer notes that men only multiple forms; other people’s work is subsumed into his own. In this requested to be photographed with guns after 1958 (the year that constant flux, the artist mirrors the shifting narratives that archival tensions between Lebanon’s Maronite Christians and Muslims came documents and primary sources are subjected to and consumed by as to a head), or that he was forced to scratch out the negatives of his generational perspective passes from one to other. Zaatari’s is a body portraits of a woman, taken before her of work that is never didactic but instead Tarho and El Masri. Studio Shehrazade, Saïda, Lebanon, 1958. marriage, after her furious, conservative presents the things we believe, the stories we Hashem el Madani, 2007, gelatin silver print on paper, 19 × 30 cm. husband paid him a visit (Zaatari managed tell, as mutable: subject to constant, uncer© the artist. Courtesy Hashem el Madani and Arab Image to process the damaged images as part of the tain adjustment and readjustment. ar Foundation, Beirut

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Doug Aitken by Andrew Berardini

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From coast-to-coast rail journeys to desert drive-ins, the California artist is bringing icons of the American West to Europe this summer

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the Atlantic to the Pacific, stopping along the way for ephemeral exhibitions of visual art in yurts, performances from iconic gangs of musicians interspersed with screenings of greatest hits of video art, including a brief excerpt of Fischli/Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987). Titled Station to Station, these ‘happenings’, as Aitken dubs them, I stood in the Mojave Desert underneath the silvery screens of an inflect and infect every aspect of his work, beginning with the elabold drive-in, a landscape scraped naked along the sweep and fall of orate cinematic atmospheres of Diamond Sea (1997) and Electric Earth mountains silhouetted against a night sky. The desert wind whis- (1999) that initially brought him to fame, revealing an interest in pered softly in between the bursts of electronic noise and the chatter and ability with large-scale projections that led to his most famous of the crowd wandering through the old metal posts leaning out of commission, sleepwalkers (2007). Projected up to 39m high along three the crumbling asphalt. A half moon hung like a ghosting disco ball walls of moma in New York, sleepwalkers featured five characters, over this odd party gathered exactly halfway between Las Vegas and including celeb actors Tilda Swinton and Donald Sutherland, on Los Angeles, in Barstow, California, a dusty town better known as a nightscape meanderings across a flickering city. His crowd-pleasing whistle-stop and crossroads than any kind and technologically extravagant exhibiof destination. Amid the skeletal creosote tions along with his ability to find support Aitken produces his elaborate and low shrubs of that spooky drive-in, for his projects make Aitken a favourite events with deeply committed the train riders and city folk, dazed and among museum directors looking for tastes for underground culture dazzled by the audacity of the spectacle, something spectacular. Along with elabowandered between the screens, the stage rate projections, Aitken produces kinetic and the installations. sculptures, wallworks, lightboxes and books that either delve deep There was some kind of setup by the sponsor, Levi’s, along with into his spatial fantasies or bring together the talents of many. scattered works by Kenneth Anger, Urs Fischer and Ernesto Neto. Or both, like Station to Station. Cat Power, No Age, Cold Cave and Beck stepped across the stage, the Despite no longer having a train, Station to Station now rolls into last accompanied by Fred Martin and the Levite Camp choir. At some London for 30 days at the Barbican Centre, accompanied by the musical crescendo in Beck’s set, artist Peter Coffin launched a ufo. launch of the documentary of the project’s transcontinental voyage Like the 1950s science-fiction drive-in double features, this flying and an exhibition of new work by the artist at a commercial gallery, saucer with its flickering leds was both spectacular and obviously Victoria Miro in Mayfair. But the frenetic Aitken won’t stop there: fake, the limits of technological transcendence. This is a landscape in the middle of Station to Station’s monthlong residency, he opens a harnessed, a mythology tapped, a sponsored coterie gathered into major survey at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, featuring a slew an elaborate entertainment. of greatest hits, including his 2013 ‘sonic fountain’. In the early autumn of 2013, the artist Doug Aitken and a circus An atmospheric organiser and California dreamer, Aitken’s power troupe of artists, musicians, designers, filmmakers, organisers, spon- is to do exactly this: gather an enthusiast’s cohort of cultural lumisors and technicians rode a train designed as a naries and technicians around a set of elements above Sleepwalkers, 2007 (installation view), kinetic light-sculpture (six tracks of environ- six-channel video installation, dimensions variable that run through his work. Conceptually, he often employs dreams of the American West (including mentally responsive leds on both sides of the opening pages Station to Station, 2013. cars) across the wide American continent from his 2010 book, The Idea of the West, for which his Photo: Mara McKevitt I live pretty close to the ocean and I walk out to it every morning as the sun rises, to remind myself that I’m living on the edge of the West. When I look at the horizon’s infinite nothingness it reminds me that the future is expansive and open. Doug Aitken to Alex Israel, 2010

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Electric Earth, 1999, eight-channel video installation and architectural environment, 9 min and 50 sec loop, colour, four stereo signals

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above Black Mirror, 2011 (still) facing page Sunset (black and white), 2011, hand-carved foam, epoxy with led lights and hand-silkscreened acrylic, 161 × 199 × 20 cm all images Courtesy the artist; 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich; Victoria Miro, London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

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lavish thematically curated gala at la moca acted as a launch party) along with casts of gospel choirs, auctioneers, cowboys with bullwhips and famous actors, all theatrically congealing into events that are masterworks in coordination and technological know-how, from sleepwalkers to the opera Il Tempo del Postino (2007; Aitken provided one act) to Black Mirror (2011) to Station to Station. As much a curator as an artist, Aitken produces his elaborate events with deeply committed tastes for underground culture, mainstream celebrity and the commercial trade of both. This nexus of talented and accomplished ﬁgures framed with technical mastery, however, never quite synergises or breaks the surface of meaning. This can be seen most clearly in his work as an object-maker. Aitken’s numerous wallworks are signs for nothing in particular, advertising without a product (or perhaps advertising as product). He makes lightboxes in the shape of words with picturesque landscapes inside the letters or just behind them. Other times he fabricates the words out of broken mirrors, live plants or, in one case, what appeared to be bubbling mud. Without the naive cheer of a Warhol or the sly wit of Ruscha, the single-word declarations evoke largeness but hang empty: free; now; sunset; art; utopia. Aitken harnesses the dream of these words but none of their realities. Is this enough? What made California so dreamy for so many? How has it failed its seekers? How has it succeeded? The critical reality of such questions is lost in the glittering lights of an urban landscape, the sweep of an ocean or simply a mirror reﬂecting back at you. Perhaps there is a second or third level of hidden criticality here, but it looks far too well made and literal to achieve the selfironising complicity of someone like the Bernadette Corporation. Travis Diehl, reporting for Artforum on the Barstow–Los Angeles leg of Station to Station, captured the nature of this contradiction best: ‘More than the Happenings, and probably more than Aitken’s eventual video, Station to Station was about Train Time: where a hand-picked cast of makers and doers were a community, where a ticketed high-budget spectacle was a public art festival, where a meticulously routed thousand-ton train was nomadic, where corporate underwriting was benevolent and necessary and divorced from content. The train contained its own relativity.’ How Station to Station, a project posited precisely on a train traversing the North American continent, can exist across an ocean without its central element remains to be seen. As a curated festival, Station to Station in London will doubtlessly give an experience to those who attend it, with residencies from experimental music pioneer Terry Riley and Turner Prize winners Martin Creed and Jeremy Deller, but sapped of the political values of the counterculture, like the utopian possibilities of Woodstock or the rollicking self-selecting community of the dispossessed that was punk or the space of the Mojave Desert and Los Angeles. Divorced from the political conditions that made

these movements and their figures possible, they become meaningless citations, fantasies easily co-opted. In this, Aitken’s ‘happenings’ become less gatherings and more a shimmering mirage, another kind of entertainment that uses places and communities as its source materials. What makes artists and the work they do meaningful is not the empty fact that they are iconoclasts, but the actual icons (patriarchy, fascism, sexism, homophobia, theocracy) they smash and the hope they give others in the smashing. Iconoclasts are not fighting empty signifiers, but very real limitations on their freedoms. When Aitken uses cattle auctioneers in a performance (The handle comes up the hammer comes down, 2009), it doesn’t come across as a critique of commerce so much as a work that allows us to marvel at the strange sound of their speech. When he employs cowboys with bullwhips, does it have anything to do with cattle ranching? The Idea of the West is not the West – it’s a form cut from meaning. Aitken appears wholly sincere in his attempts to create community and atmosphere through his art, yet his videos share the aesthetic of music promos and his California mythopoetic ends up as a local model of a phenomenon spotted elsewhere, not far from ted’s attempt to encapsulate lifetimes of labour and struggle into uplifting, formulaic 15-minute anecdotes. The process pulls the person from their context and turns them into an instrument for the organiser’s own purposes, an advertorial for its own aesthetic. The power to decontextualise, collate and instrumentalise is perhaps the same kind of magic that can transform a transcontinental train journey in America into a stationary 30-day festival an ocean away. Even the unstuck and relative quality of Station to Station itself has become unstuck, a brand with an opening in an international market. That naked desert in Barstow has been most profitably employed not by the carefully plotted movements of artists, but by the town’s three biggest employers: two military bases and a private military supplier. The West is place of both fantasy and reality; the intermingling and tension between these things is what makes it special. The Western romances of the nineteenth century in a train and the twentieth century in an old drive-in employ the nostalgia of these images without engaging in any of the complicated stuff beneath the surface. Perhaps it is better to wake up every morning and walk to the ocean thinking that you live on the edge of the West, the featureless expanse of water a blank and infinite possibility of the future for someone just like you. ar Doug Aitken’s Station to Station: A 30 Day Happening is in residence at the Barbican Centre, London, from 27 June to 26 July; and solo exhibtions of his work are on view at Victoria Miro Mayfair, London, from 12 June through 31 July, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, from 9 July through 27 September

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Lutz Bacher by Martin Herbert

Probing the politics of gender through decades of shape-shifting and self-effacement, the American artist has always been hiding in plain view 108

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A few pages into Lutz Bacher’s 2008 artist book, smoke (gets in your she handwrote on a4 sheets in 2010, leaving in the crossings-out. It eyes), there’s a photocopy image of a square sheet, maybe a napkin, reads as puked up quick-from-the-heart and yet issued out of absence. two columns of words handwritten on it. ‘Lute Bateau’, it reads, then Here and not here has been Bacher’s modus operandi since the ‘Klutz Backer’. The mutations continue, the artist’s unknown real mid-1970s. Her approach has been constantly to shape-shift, deny name vanishing behind variations on her longstanding pseudonym. her authorial signature, disperse like smoke. Back in 1976–77 – years On the next page is a triplicate definition of ‘Lutz’: evidently this when her gender was unrevealed – she worked with photography could mean a few things, including the pet form of Ludwig, and both found and self-produced, artist’s books, interviews, video, derive from German or French. Soon after, in a reproduced email, performance. Her artworks already barely resembled each other. someone (name redacted) tries to define what is ‘Lutzian’: qualities Men at War (1975) comprised cropped photographs of groups of men ranging from ‘moments of particular social rupture or awkwardness’ ‘whose central figure wears both a us Navy cap & a swastika painted to ‘bizarre behaviour in general, particularon his chest’; in The Milk Video (1976), ‘a man had a dream where I was drinking ly around women’ to ‘moral horror’. Paging Do you love me? is a generous a glass of milk’. Standard Stoppage (1976) on, we find a curator writing to the artist self-exposure that isn’t an exposure offers blurry photographs of a tree; in after watching 12 hours of videotaped interat all, rather a cortege of chaos. Documents of Rape (1977), snapshots and views in which Bacher asks artists, framers diagrams anatomise a possible sexual asand gallerists to describe her: ‘…as if, after all Here and not here, c’est Lutz those hours, I still believed there was such sault. Several things are going on in this a thing as knowing you’. Many such conversations are transcribed in nexus of proposals. A pluralistic approach (au courant during the a 2012 book, titled (like the videowork) Do you love me?, replete with 1970s but peculiarly fitting and instrumentalised in Bacher’s case); attention-derailing ums and typos: a generous self-exposure that a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s chance-driven work 3 Standard Stoppages isn’t an exposure at all, rather a cortege of chaos. Here and not here, (1913–14) that might also salute Duchamp’s own gender fluidity (as Rrose Selavy) and postmedium elusiveness; a complex of thoughts c’est Lutz. I’m looking at the handful of online photographs of her, taken at around masculinity and male power, from soldiers to dreamt-of private views, where she’s always dressed in black. In some she’s ‘milk’-drinking to rape. In the midst of this, there’s an artist who, her covering her face, in others she doesn’t bother. I talk to one of her wilful aesthetic already signals, will not be possessed or processed. gallery directors about interviewing her. He says sometimes she will, After this sequence of works is reproduced in Bacher’s chronologsometimes she won’t. I don’t pursue it; he tells me some things – her ical 2013 catalogue, snow, she melts away for five years, appearing to age, a recent bereavement – that are enough, produce nothing at all. Whatever the actual above Bingo (Or the Year I Was Born), 2008, too much already. He hands me the galleys of reason, such structural absences scan as conmixed media, 74 × 203 × 17 cm Bacher’s next book, Shit for Brains (2015), a gruent with her practice; the ‘work’ itself as facing page Men at War (detail), 1975, wayward, confessional, fearless little ‘novel’ composed partly of art objects, partly of an nine framed b/w fiber prints, each 36 × 28 cm

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enigmatic performative aspect; and all of this, in turn, a meditation wayward hitchhikers, veer between voyeurism, parody, and the fauxon the self. ‘A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts scientific tone that lends vintage porn its campy tenor’; they fail to for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thou- anchor the images, Kotz continues, sending them spinning out of sand,’ writes Virginia Woolf in Orlando (1928). Bacher’s biography, if control. Bacher’s occupation of images by men, for women, meanshe plays this game to the hilt, may never be considered complete. while, creates a space of productive ambivalence – it suggests that This, after all, is the artist who, in 2008, made Bingo (Or the Year I Was the fixity of gender roles is the problem, and the best thing to do, via Born), a bingo sign with numbers programmed to light up in random a rewiring of the gaze, is to explode it. sequences). Even if you didn’t care when Bacher was born, or what her She would continue, for a while, to regularly inhabit roles typically real name is, she continues to point to the fact that she’s not telling. assigned to men, and to work with masculinity, domination, selfIf you want to be systemic about the artworks she has made, defence. See Playboys (1991–3), paintings and drawings based on illusthough, they’ll permit that to an extent. They often vouchsafe an trations from the men’s magazines; numerous works around the same aesthetics of betweenness, conscious undecidedness: consistencies time connected to rape and child abuse, like male adult anatomical arise only to implode later; where variation seems to rule, links will dolls; Shooter (1993), a video of Bacher firing handguns. In fuguelike eventually appear. Consider James Dean (1986), two crossfading slide fashion, though, maleness is deemphasised – it will flare up again, at images of the fabled actor. In one he’s looking right; in the other, later points – and replaced by other stresses. Child abuse segues into left. No one view is more definitive, plus the image itself is destabi- childhood (which had briefly reared its head in Mechanical Reproduction, lised: it stands for more than a pair of publicity shots, opening onto 1983, a progressive enlargement of a photograph of a baby) and the some uncharted, ambiguously metaphoric realm. Preexisting images, psychology of the parent–child relationship, in disturbing ways. (Talk Bacher has repeatedly averred, are not fixed. People aren’t either. to Me, 1994, is a pink sack ‘that contains a foetus’.) Then this, in turn, So the media image becomes the readymade, which comes to lose recedes – for several years, Bacher appears focused on observational its initial semiotic sense; which blows it open; which makes it, in turn, and documentary video that either makes her an invisible flaneur analogical. Specifically, this process engages gender concerns, then or deflects attention from her – but in 2005 she cycles back, making capsules them within the problem of typologies and their relation to works featuring trolls and boys in pilot uniforms and incubators and power. In the series Jokes (1985–8), unconnected obscene captions are pregnant mannequins. Even change, she suggests, can be reversed applied to media images. (Jane Fonda is seen to say, at a press confer- upon lest it be recognised as an aesthetic of change. ence, ‘I’m really weird. I’m really all fucked up.’) In Sex with Strangers Yet for all the interpretative potential that might be suggested (1986), blown-up black-and-white porn images pair with captions by the patterning above, one could track through Bacher’s oeuvre from ‘a sexually explicit paperback written in the mode of a socio- and find different, equally uneasy, indefinite, though insistently personal repeated foci. Her relationship to other logical study’. In a 1992 article for Artforum, Jokes (Johnny and Ed), 1987–8, Liz Kotz writes that the captions, ‘in their artists, say. Beginning again with Standard distressed b/w photo mounted on aluminium, lurid accounts of female nymphomania and Stoppages and Bacher’s gender-fucking, we can 97 × 152 cm

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Shit for Brains, 2015, 404 pages, 30 × 23 cm, edition of 800. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin & Cologne

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glimpse an ongoing conversation with other, mostly male artists, object-making – also convey themselves within another, open-ended, not dissimilar to (though less extreme and ventriloquised than) stream of her work that deals with the literally unearthly. that performed by Sturtevant: Duchamp regularly, from the use of In 1996, Bacher filmed Blue Moon through the window of her house readymades to the broken mirror, The Big Glass (2008) to the giant- in Berkeley, California (she’s more recently moved to New York): a chessboard-and-sculpture work Chess (2012), with its bicycle wheel, work that ‘ironically literalizes’, as Caomhín Mac Giolla Léith has to the rubber Toilet (2013); Dan Flavin and Jasper Johns in the pink written recently, ‘the precise meaning of a phrase most often deployed fluorescent light Pink Out of a Corner (To Jasper Johns) 1963 (1991); and metaphorically – a second full moon appearing in the same calendar Warhol repeatedly – from the a, A Novel-like recordings and tran- month – in that the refraction of the moon’s image through the winscripts of Do you love me?, to works relating to Jackie Kennedy, to dow pane and/or camera lens produced a second moon, which was Sleep (1996), a real-time performance and cctv video of Bacher sleep- smaller but clearer, on account of the optics involved’. In her 2013 ing in the Gramercy Park Hotel, to her 2015 multichannel video of exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt, Bacher embedded video monitors the Empire State Building, numerous showing this work in a lunar desert of black others in between. There are references, in coal slag. By the time it travelled to the ica Recognising the cult of personality in London, the black desert, Black Beauty Bacher’s titles, to Jorge Luis Borges, David that clings to artists, she’s made Foster Wallace, Blinky Palermo, Jackson (2012), supported Ash Tray (2013), a plangent Pollock, Spies Like Us, Van Gogh, The Beatles, herself a personality in absentia, and vaguely humanistic metallic object, like a handmade rover (albeit one containDr Seuss, Jimi Hendrix, The Way We Were, à la Warhol and Duchamp ing an ashtray), while around the space J.G. Ballard, Camper van Beethoven, George R.R. Martin… drifted an audiowork, Puck (2012), of a man ‘Constellation’, though an increasingly overworked term in art with Down’s syndrome repeatedly essaying lines from A Midsummer discourse, might be a catchall to employ here, and Bacher, appro- Night’s Dream (1596): “If we shadows have offended / think but this, and priately, has worked with constellations themselves. In 2011 she all is mended.” At the ica, soundtracking the aforementioned Chess produced The Celestial Handbook, 85 framed pages of found imagery – which includes a cutout of Elvis Presley of the sort one might find in of the heavens – spiral galaxies, Alpha Centauri, nebulae, comets, an old-fashioned movie theatre – Bacher set up a loop of Presley, Elvis star clusters – from amateur astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr’s 1966 (2009), singing the wordless falsetto outro of Blue Moon (1956). Here book of the same title. One might read such work, coming after he’s a man who sounds like a woman; his voice merges with echoes four decades of artworks that point, however obliquely, to the of Duchamp. Everything melts, alloys. depredations of life on earth, as a dream of escape. But the heavenUndergirding all the different trajectories and star maps of ly photographs – imperfect transmissions, Bacher’s work, and working in tandem with its Snow (still), 1999, while fitting into Bacher’s tendency towards prolixity, is one broad stylistic approach: lowdigital video authored to dvd, colour, silent, glitch-laden, raw photography and film and grade, secondhand transmissions, second6 min 28 sec

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and third-generation reproductions that accrete glitches, mixing signal and noise. The noise speaks as well as the signal – ‘one big ruin’, as Bacher describes her work in one interview – and slows the viewer as, say, listening to an old, hissy bootleg does. You strain to hear what’s there, and the listening is active: you might, indeed, be ‘hearing things’ that say as much about you as they do about the artist, just as the questions Bacher’s interviewers put to her in Do you love me? are inadvertent confessionals. The noise conveys in another way too. It says Bacher is an artist who simultaneously needs to speak and not speak – needs to do so through others, to smokescreen what she says. Hobbled communication is still communication. It’s the largest double, or binary, in a configuration of doubles that ranges from reapplied media images to double moons to black deserts and white ones, and collapses presence and absence into each other. This arrangement must also be reactive, lest it calcify. Bacher’s art is given life by her life’s unpredictability – eg, Huge Uterus (1989), a video recording her operation for fibroid tumours – and appears, at the time of writing, to have responded to her ascendant profile in the artworld by tossing out bedlam by the handful; the very procedure of making – overproducing – now becomes important. By the end of snow, Bacher seems to be making work constantly, without interrelation. The works are dated by day. On 23 March 2013 alone she makes Ft. Lauderdale, ‘a diving board-like structure out of aquamarine plastic panels’, The Thinker, a Rodinesque ‘sitting female mannequin’ and Cannibal Love Song, a red circle of folded and unfolded vinyl. As the outpouring continues through sculpture, performance, photography, video, it feels like one holistic, gnarly

thing. Her sprawling website, lutzbacher.com, meanwhile, is as immersive as any actual net artist’s: not surprising for a figure who effectively predicts our collective disappearance behind avatars. These recent pursuits, though consistently raw and anxious, admittedly don’t necessarily always contain Bacher’s semi-signature technical degradations. Rather, they allow flooding itself to become distortion. They still point, though, to messy signalling, and how that messiness can be – to echo a title she uses regularly – a ‘gift’. Objects and images, when roughed up, get enlarged, made galactic; they gain something by becoming, in music’s parlance, ‘lossy’. An artist’s public image is like that too. Subtracting information, Bacher has enlarged herself, pragmatically. Recognising the cult of personality that clings to artists, she’s made herself a personality in absentia, à la Warhol and Duchamp, a personality not reified but accepting that people are larger than any image put on them. There is a philosophy, too, of reception at work here. Recognising upfront that viewers never get a full picture, always inject their biases into whatever they see, Bacher doesn’t even try to present one; she offers something explicitly speckled with holes and gaps to occupy. In all of this, she creates something that allows for public fascination – call it mystique – that serves as a shield, that telescopes her most overt concerns. There is violence everywhere, her work implies as it brutalises images and objects and reveals brutality’s operations in the world, and it is a small violation within the larger ones, a disarming, to become the object of knowledge. So do I love her? I don’t even know her. But yes, I do. ar Shit for Brains (2015) is published by Galerie Buchholz, Berlin & Cologne

Chess, 2012, colour lithograph on cardboard, ﬁbreglass, wood, rubber, metal, plastic, paint, canvas, linoleum and media player with mp3, 607 × 610 × 198 cm all images but page 113 Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

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Fashion / Feminism by Clara Young

The urge to make women look pleasing and the urge to break them out of the habit of pleasing – just two of the seemingly irreconcilable driving forces of, respectively, fashion and feminism. And yet feminism is fashionable. So is feminism still feminism when it is sexed up? 114

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above Chanel Spring/Summer 2015. Photo: Olivier Saillant facing page Riot grrrls taking part in Washington, dc, protests of Reagan/Bush-era Supreme Court rulings, held on 25 July 1992 by civil rights and equality movements. Photo: Pat Graham

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Feminism is all the rage for Spring/Summer 2015! And, as with many aside, placard signs like ‘Boys should get pregnant too’, ‘Be your own things in the fashion sphere, its appeal stems not so much from stylist’ and ‘Women’s rights are more than alright’ were too hampresent-day necessity as it does from cool retro allure. British design- fisted to be accidental, especially for someone like Lagerfeld, who ers Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kirchhoff took their collection is capable of the lightest, most erudite touch in the fashion busiback to feminism’s third wave in the 1990s, when punk was renas- ness. Many did not know what to make of Lagerfeld’s brand of femicent and women were impelled by righteous indignation. Meadham nism. Did he think it was a trend? Did he think it was a joke? After Kirchhoff accessorised riot grrrls of various shapes, sizes and colours the show, he said to Fashionista, ‘My mother was very much a femiwith bloody-tampon earrings, latex washing-up gloves and stockings nist and I thought it was something right for the moment. I couldn’t embroidered to look like they’d sprouted leg hair stubble. care less if people are for or against. It’s my idea. I like the idea of In the period Meadham Kirchhoff is channelling, punk feminist feminism being something light-hearted, not a truck driver for the heroines like Kathleen Hanna, of the band Bikini Kill, scribbled feminist movement.’ ‘Slut’ on their stomachs onstage and outed taboo topics like rape. Few feminists think of the fight for equality as a lighthearted one, Their rallying cry was ‘Revolution girl style now!’, a sartorially in- and yet they have been careful not to drive a truck over the Chanel show. Prominent activist Amy Richards, volved yet still urgent slogan for the sisterhood. Compare that to “What do we want?!! ‘I like the idea of feminism being who is a well-known author and cofounder Tweed!!”, which issued forth from quilted of the Third Wave Foundation, told me, “I lighthearted, not a truck driver loved the Lagerfeld moment – I didn’t take bullhorns at Chanel last September. For Karl it to be a turning point in feminism but a Lagerfeld, too, had his thing to say about for the feminist movement’ the woman’s condition, and the hullabaloo fun expression of women’s freedoms. Freehe kicked up at Chanel overshadowed all the rest. dom to choose fashion – and expensive fashion at that – is certainly The clothes at Chanel, paint-bombed and impasto-effect tweeds, low on a priority list, but certainly powerful people expressing a need and chiffons and knits embroidered with silvery thin ‘paving stone’ for feminism is a potential positive for us all.” appliqués, were beautiful, practical and filled with sincerity. But, God knows feminism and fashion have rarely shared the same ever the lightning rod for whatever zeitgeist is hovering in the ether, positives. Fashion has had its moments of emancipation – Paul Poiret’s Lagerfeld accessorised them with accoutrements of revolt. Directoire collection freed women from corsets during the early Like many of his fashion colleagues, Lagerfeld spun the collec- 1900s; Chanel’s jersey sportswear made clothes still more comforttion off the 1970s, an era crowded with protests of the feminist able; and Halston told The New York Times in 1971 that pants were persuasion. Disarmingly, he told style.com, ‘In France, in Paris, there ‘part of women’s liberation… They don’t have to worry about getting are demonstrations all the time because I don’t see why not every into low furniture or low sportscars.’ In more recent times there was single human being is on the same level. Especially in our business. I Rick Owens’s much applauded Spring/Summer 2014 runway show, am just like a gigolo. I live from women.’ And true enough, this falls featuring foot-stomping, teeth-gritting African-American dancers. in line with Lagerfeld’s declaration that he is Much sturdier of build than the standard Riot grrrls (including musician Corin Tucker) an ‘opportuniste au dernier degré’. Yet barbs about runway model, these step-dancing college onstage at a Fugazi/Bikini Kill Supreme Court singer Adele being ‘a bit too fat’ or that Coco students created a rare fashion moment of protest concert held 25 July 1992 in Washington, dc. Photo: Pat Graham Chanel ‘was not ugly enough to be a feminist’ warm and fuzzy political correctness.

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ArtReview

Still, for retail reasons, fashion’s preoccupation is to make women pleasing to the eye, while feminism’s preoccupation is its opposite, to break women of the habit of pleasing, in dress or otherwise. As Mary Wollstonecraft wrote disapprovingly in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), ‘…[Jean-Jacques] Rousseau, and most of the male writers who have followed in his steps, have warmly inculcated that the whole tendency of female education ought to be directed to one point – to render them pleasing’. But pleasing, nay downright seductive, is what feminism has become over the past 18 months as it has steadily accrued pop-cultural capital. Lena Dunham and Girls, Taylor Swift’s public conversion to the cause, twerking, Emma Watson’s speech for the HeForShe campaign at the United Nations, Beyoncé’s untouched photos and cameo appearances by feminist godmother Gloria Steinem on tv’s The Good Wife (2009–), itself a primetime meditation on the peaks and pitfalls of women in power, have fashioned feminism into a shimmering cause célèbre. Now this was something fashion could embrace! And so, moving in symbiotic lock-step, these two opposed forces, feminism and fashion slowly advanced, achieving brilliant apotheosis in the form of Beyoncé, encased in a glittering Tom Ford bodysuit, backlit by the word ‘Feminist’ in monumental letters on mtv’s 2014 Video Music Awards night. Is the Tom Ford bodysuit the suffragette bloomer of the twentyﬁrst century? A feminist update of the Working Girl pantsuit? Politically, the bodysuit is cousin to the Mary Quant miniskirt, which ushered in the ‘Because I deserve it’ era of women’s lib, and is a distant relative of the hotpants worn by 1970s women’s libbers brandishing ‘Screw sexists’ placards. The bodysuit echoes today’s scantily clad Slut Walkers as well, who continue to demonstrate against the blame game in rape. Like Lagerfeld, Tom Ford has never been a friend of feminism – a quick refresher on his recent ads will tell you that – but his bodysuit suggests a sea change in feminist strategy. One that draws in men in the style of the un’s HeForShe campaign and Benedict Cumberbatch wearing a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt. If this is what fourth-wave feminism looks like, then Beyoncé in the bodysuit is very much sailing into it. Wind machine at her back and the captain of her own ship, the singer is a new-model feminist who pleases and seeks pleasure.

Is fashion the traitor or sidekick in all this? In 1968, demonstrators outside the Miss America pageant trashed their bras and girdles, makeup and high heels. The Barbie-doll women Jeremy Scott gave us at Moschino last September were a satirical poke at all that. The industry has become harder to read of late, not in its practices, because Third World sweatshops are still manned by exploited women, but in the images it projects. Lagerfeld’s protest-styled runway show at Chanel was a diversion in a larger, yet slow-moving current in high fashion. It cannot be properly called feminist; rather, it leapfrogs maleness and femaleness and their ensuing conflicts. Its interest is neither masculinity nor femininity nor feminism but genderlessness, and it is designers like Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy, J.W. Anderson, Hood by Air and Alessandro Michele, newly at Gucci, who are its vanguard. The edgiest stuff has come out of menswear, where effeminate fashion like clingy tops and off-the-shoulder shirts are slowly becoming acceptable. And while it seems superficial to think that men in slit skirts and hot pink, or the occasional transgendered model on the cover of a magazine, can dynamite female–male power relations, the way we dress is the way we enact and construct our gender identity, or perform it, to use a Judith Butler term, day after day. Many believe that gender, biologically understood, has been and will always be a rigged game in the way it distributes power between the sexes. If so, then mixing and merging gender shuffles the deck, evens out the chances or, at the very least, confuses the players. While high fashion has never been at ease with traditional feminism, it is very happy pushing the topsy-turvy, and the matchups are weird. For every Julia Roberts in a man’s suit for Givenchy, there is a male Gucci model in a peach-coloured pussy-bow blouse. For every transgender model Andreja Pejić in a Gaultier wedding dress, there is a guy wearing a draped J.W. Anderson tee or a slit-up-to-the-hip Hood by Air skirt. Two years ago, Givenchy prescribed this new state of affairs with a small manifesto titled ‘Future Feminism’. It was written by transgender singer Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, and was left on every chair at the show: ‘Men must find the humility to retreat. Women must step forward and start to forge a new way forward for our species and for all of nature.’ ar

Beyoncé performs at the 2014 mtv Video Music Awards in Los Angeles. Courtesy mtv

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Art Reviewed

My beat is call-girl city 123

pulp Festival La Ferme du Buisson, Paris 10–26 April What position do comics occupy today as an art form? All too often, they seem to have been sidelined by galleries, museums and funding bodies. Perhaps it’s symptomatic that pulp Festival, which set out in 2014 to reposition comics from the margins to the crossroads with other arts, takes place on the eastern outskirts of Paris: not far by train but perceptibly distant from the capital’s epicentre. Here, in 1990, a former Menier chocolate factory and dairy farm (built in 1880) were converted into a complex of six theatres, two cinemas and galleries for contemporary art. Since his appointment as director in January 2011, Vincent Eches, a bédéphile himself, began introducing comics into the programming, and last year instigated pulp. ‘I wanted to create a comics event here, but not merely another festival with exhibits and book signings. Working with arts channel Arte, La Ferme du Buisson, with its huge facilities, technical possibilities and multiple artistic disciplines being expressed here, brought truly added value to this project.’ Eches ensured that his second pulp Festival brandished its interdisciplinarity with panache. Transfers from page to stage included Frédéric Sonntag and company’s inventive enactment of the eco-superhero Lichen-Man, created by Loo Hui Phang and Hugues Micol. Broad genre satire was leavened by sharp psychology, as a mediocre scientist experiments on himself, the injected parasite granting him plantlike powers but at the expense of his humanity and sanity. For its low-budget, high-impact climax, a handheld compact camera mounted behind an action ﬁgure of our hero ﬁlmed him leaping cardboard buildings in a single bound and preventing a model nuclear reactor’s meltdown. Swiss director Dorian Rossel’s ensemble stt

(Super Trop Top) concluded its theatrical production, touring since 2009, of Jiro Taniguchi’s time-travel manga Quartier lointain (1998–9). Far superior to the 2010 French-language movie, stt captures a forty-something salaryman’s confusion and conflicts at finding himself back inside his teenage body and mind with perhaps a chance of stopping his father abandoning his family. It cries out for a revival and a run in Japan. Contemporary dance also collided and colluded with comics at pulp. In J’ai horreur du printemps (2015), the travails of a travelling circus by the late cartoonist Fred (Le Petit Cirque, 1973) were reinterpreted as an acrobatic performance by aerial dancer Mélissa Von Vépy, who scaled, traversed and interacted with projected blowups to a jazz trio accompaniment, in a work evoking the symbolically loaded atmosphere of the original. A surreal scene in the original, where authorities roll the road up like a carpet, inspired Von Vépy’s entrance, who unwraps herself from coils of fabric. In Méduses, Belgian street artist Vincent Glowinski, alias Bonom, changes his body into a human brush by daubing white paint across his arms and shoulders, forming gestures that a time-delay camera in the ceiling freezes in ultraviolet light and then projects, so that they accumulate into eerie imagery of a skull, foetus, minotaur or jellyfish. pulp’s installations proved equally immersive. Artist Ludovic Debeurme conspired with writer Loo Hui Phang to present their embodiment of The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) in a former farmhouse. Like Poe’s narrator, the visitor pieces together the family’s history from room to room, seven mental spaces in all. Dubeurme’s unsettling models of Madeline

open and close this perambulation. Curls of hair grow in through the walls, hung with portraits and phrases from the text, none more chilling than a black backdrop with a door in the middle, dividing the words scrawled in white: ‘Us’, ‘Her’. Enfants terribles Florent Ruppert & Jérôme Mulot mounted their ﬁrst monographic exhibition in a contemporary art centre by making the public physically complicit, posing them in human-scale comics panels or as a punctured Saint Sebastian and other playful grotesqueries in La visite des lycéens (2015), a gallery ransacked after a chaotic school visit. In an adjacent gallery, Le petit théâtre de l’ébriété (2015) gathered their obsessional circular paper constructions, which, as in a praxinoscope, are rotated by visitors activating a turntable with their foot, spinning their cutout characters into endless drunken cycles. Another highlight was Bandes fantômes, assembling some 200 Francophone comics rejected by publishers, abandoned by their authors, censored or destroyed by accident or design. Unrealised, stillborn, ghostlike, these ranged from Caran d’Ache’s 1894 dream of making the ﬁrst wordless full-length graphic novel to Fabrice Neaud’s fearlessly honest gay autobiography, the subject of lawsuits. Alongside surviving drafts and video testimonies, projections of extracts were printed on the reverse of a 60m roll of paper spiralling up to the ceiling, and illuminated sporadically from behind, only to vanish like apparitions. pulp, however, left a lasting impression of a festival fully engaging with the interconnectedness of comics with other arts and more than lived up to Eches’s ambition ‘to explore new visual and narrative territories by offering the reader-spectator other modes and temporalities to get to grips with comics’. Paul Gravett

facing page, clockwise from top Bandes fantômes, 2015 (installation view); Ludovic Debeurme & Loo Hui Phang, La chute de la maison Usher, 2015 (installation view); Frédéric Sonntag / Cie AsaNIsiMAsa, Lichen-Man, 2015, theatre performance. All images Photos: Pascal Gély

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Summer 2015

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Artists and Poets Secession, Vienna 12 February – 12 April A large banner emblazoned with the text ‘Dial-A-Poem +43 1 58 50 433’ stands outside the Secession. The text refers, of course, to performance artist and poet John Giorno’s iconic 1968 work, wherein poems wait to be heard on Giorno’s answering machines. In 2015, a row of old-fashioned black telephones offers mostly German-language poems – and, yes, that phone number works! Poetry or the poetic is certainly what’s offered by the exhibition’s curator, Ugo Rondinone, in the eight spaces of the Secession. The Swiss artist has selected 14 artists to accompany Giorno’s 30 newly selected poems (in collaboration with the Vienna Poetry Society), pitting sculpture against painting or pairing floor work with wall work. Even Gustav Klimt, in the form of the Secession’s permanent mural Der Beethovenfries (The Beethoven Frieze, 1902), is to be viewed in relation to a grouping of Andrew Lord’s colourful, figurative and expressive ceramics spread over three low plinths and classified by colour. These exaggerated, almost humorous pots, based on imagery drawn from Gauguin’s paintings, draw out Klimt’s art nouveau elegance and elongated figuration. If The Beethoven Frieze is the oldest and bestknown work here,Younger Turks like Andra Ursuta, Tamuna Sirbiladze, Michael Williams

and Justin Matherly (all born during the 1970s) lend a fresher tone to older, now less discussed cult ﬁgures. For example the American Matherly’s large cast-concrete sculptures of animals and birds, seemingly more like building statuary though made absurd by being held up on Zimmer frames, are as impassive as the spare drawings of Bob Law (1934–2004). The British minimalist is known for his near-empty canvases featuring drawn-on rectangles, several of which accompany a grid of his drawings; together these provide a witty riposte to Matherly’s own humour. The joy in Artists and Poets is that, unlike the speciﬁcity that a trained curator might bring to a thematic show, Rondinone charms with an artist’s sensibility, one constituted of the playful and the lyrical. Of this he says in the press release: ‘Poets and artists express a view of the world as a collage of passing fragments. There is no bigger picture or a linear logic here, only transitory images and words, seen as if rushing past the windows of a train.’ The same could be said of his show: it is the viewer who brings the connections, ideas and assumptions to make it whole. Like the poetry on the phones, the intuitive nature of the work, selection and pairings come to the fore, offering a glimpse

of a playful mind (Rondinone’s) or minds (those of the artists) at work. For example, Williams’s funky paintings, which catch the fleeting, lateral concentration of our Internet age, surround Ursuta’s polystyrene stools, Waiting Area (2014) – where the seats are casts from the Romanian artist’s upturned, panty-clad buttocks. Idiosyncrasy and play are also qualities to be found in the truncated oeuvre of Donald Evans (1945–77), who painted postage stamps from imagined countries. These ‘objects’, made with watercolour on paper and cut to resemble real stamps, are framed with the type of stamp-holder sheets that any philatelist would recognise. And if Evans’s art provides a colourful flight of fantasy and technique, then Heimo Zobernig’s early black geometric sculptures, assembled from cardboard and painted with enamel paint, offer a stoic and lo-fi counterpoint. De Kooning famously once described content as a glimpse, and that too is what Artists and Poets offers. Although it’s not content but glimpsing, neither puzzle nor direction; rather Rondinone offers an exhibition that gently unfolds via variant sensibilities. A series of moments, just like life, but also one in which the artworks become like words in a visual poem fashioned by Rondinone himself. Sherman Sam

John Giorno, Dial a poem, 2015, phone-based service, including four programmed telephones containing poems of the Vienna Poetry School, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview

Pierre Bismuth Jan Mot, Brussels 23 April – 30 May How many visual artists can boast an Academy Award? To my knowledge, only two: Steve McQueen and Pierre Bismuth. In 2002 the Brussels-based Frenchman wrote the synopsis for Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), featuring Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. A year earlier, Bismuth’s work was included in the 49th Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, illustrating how he is one of few artists, like Robert Longo or Julian Schnabel before him, bridging the sizeable gap between Hollywood and Venice, or what some might still perceive as the difference between popular culture and high art. With this show’s two new videoworks – Where is Rocky II? (Trailer) (2014) and Where is Rocky II? (Teaser) (2015) – Bismuth continues to overlap these two universes. The starting point was a 1980 bbc documentary showing Ed Ruscha hiding a fake, resinand-plastic boulder among the real rocks of the Mojave Desert. As the work, entitled Rocky II (1976), is little known, has never been found and is shrouded in mystery, Bismuth set himself the challenge to try to ﬁnd it: the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. At Jan Mot, however, just as in the work’s previous presentation at Team Gallery in New York, the artist does not show the actual ﬁlm – a feature-length quasi-documentary officially slated for 2016 –

but a teaser and a trailer, the first almost an anticipation of the second, prolonging the mental foreplay of the trailer’s format and adding an extra layer to it. Shown on a small monitor, Where is Rocky II? (Teaser) is almost more audio piece than video, the visual being a monochrome that is the specific green used for preview ratings. Playing with the conventions of teasers, the typical deep voice announcing blockbusters, spoken here by Lawrence Weiner – further blurring the lines between conceptual art and the entertainment industry – lists several dates in which unlikely mysteries, abductions and deaths occurred between 1870 and 1976 in Joshua Tree, part of the region where Ruscha’s rock is supposedly hidden, embedding the work in an even more enigmatic setting. Underscored by a funky soundtrack, Weiner’s basso speech includes rote phrases like “from the Academy Award Winner Pierre Bismuth”, concluding with the promising “Out soon”, something that, given Bismuth’s prankster mien, one shouldn’t take too literally. The moment the teaser finishes, Where is Rocky II? (Trailer) starts on a bigger screen behind the viewer. Here, at the press conference of Ed Ruscha’s Fifty Years of Painting show at London’s Hayward Gallery (2009–10), the American artist is asked by Bismuth, pretending to be a journalist, about the whereabouts of Rocky II. Surprised, he affirms its existence, yet doesn’t

clarify its location. Next, we see Michael Scott, a pi contracted by Bismuth to find the rock. “So you want to find some artwork he has done?” Scott asks, unable to hide his astonishment. With hardly any clues, the pi wanders through the desert, trying to get information out of locals and art professionals (including former moca director Jeffrey Deitch, whom he asks: “Any particular deserts he [Ruscha] likes?”), the trailer ending with a black screen and the words Where is Rocky II? slowly fading in, underscored with nerve-racking strings. With its quick montage, clever suspense and catchy soundtrack, Bismuth’s mimicry of the cinematographic genre of the trailer aims to further increase the mystery already surrounding Ruscha’s piece while at the same time turning the trailer format into art in its own right. It’s not surprising that the subject of his quest is a work by Ruscha, who, just like Bismuth, transfers conventions of the entertainment industry to the artworld and hence highlights differences and similarities between both. The actual quest is more important than the result, the final outcome, peculiar to the genre of the teaser, remaining open. Given Bismuth’s history of playing with audience anticipation – see his series of paintings and neon works employing the phrase ‘Coming Soon’ (2005–) – what else would one expect? Sam Steverlynck

Where is Rocky II? (Trailer), 2014, digital video, sound, 3 min 40 sec. Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels

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For Real Kamel Mennour, Paris 27 March – 13 May The only aesthetic achievement of For Real, which gathers 19 works by 15 artists and is curated by Anne Pontégnie, is that it somehow manages to be both loose and contrived. In a vain attempt to highlight a contemporary resurgence of the seminal iconoclastic twentieth-century gesture that introduced real artefacts within twodimensional pictorial space (from early-century cubist and dadaist collages to midcentury assemblages), Pontégnie’s stated aim is simply to bring together recent mixed-media paintings or the like that incorporate everyday materials. Yet if the intent seems clear, the vision of creating a comprehensible ensemble out of works by Kamel Mennour’s gallery artists (which represent around one third of the total exhibition) has proved to be hazier than planned. With the exception of one assemblage by Daniel Buren, works by Valentin Carron, David Hominal, Mathieu Malouf and Camille Henrot do not easily bend to Pontégnie’s curatorial direction. Another third is more successfully brought out of contemporary artists from outside the gallery (Alex Hubbard, Jutta Koether, Sergej Jensen, Fredrik Vaerslev and Helen Marten), while the remaining artworks, which belong to history, merely serve here as archetypes (collages by Pablo Picasso and Kurt Schwitters, a Combine painting by Robert Rauschenberg and assemblages by New Realists Yves Klein and Daniel Spoerri). Before going any further, let me share a quote from Fluxus artist George Maciunas’s 1962

manifesto ‘Neo Dada in the usa’, which I will brandish like a torch from hereon in to help me discern what, in the show, is ‘for real’ and what is not: ‘a Concretist sees a rotten tomato for what it is and represents it as such, without transformation..., it is a rotten tomato and not a pictorial or symbolic representation which is contrived and illusionistic’. Here, the quintessence of Maciunas’s ‘rotten tomato’ can be savoured in Spoerri’s Variations on a Meal (1964), which forever crystallises in a glass frame the greasy remnants, coffee stains and dog-ends of a dirty table setting. Another species of leftovers in Hubbard’s Trash Painting (2011) ironically offers an ecological statement: the artist scattered a large canvas with tons of plastic debris (caps, combs, lighters, spoons, etc) that, according to Pontégnie, he collected on a beach after surfing. Although the filthy arabesque of S&M accessories in Koether’s Untitled (2006) makes me prudishly question the curator’s definition of ‘everyday materials’, Buren’s Vingt-cinq lattes (1988), a neat arrangement of 25 bed slats instead of his usual painted stripes, certainly tickles my fancy (as much, in fact, as did once comprehending Sol LeWitt modular cubes for what they really were: jungle gyms for his cats). Exhilarating. Jansen’s Sans titre (2003), a bichromatic minimalistic abstraction made out of canvas fabric, is also efficient in regard to the curatorial theme, but I cannot assert the same with the

Alex Hubbard, Trash Painting, 2011, oil on canvas, 196 × 226 cm. Photo: Fabrice Seixas. Courtesy the artist

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other artworks, for they do not present their ‘rotten tomatoes’ with an equal straightforwardness (ie, without transformation). For example, in Carron’s Teflon longways Wearily (2014), a wall ensemble of eight cast bronzes representing smashed brass instruments, the performative and poetic dimension of the artist crushing an entire fanfare prevails. As for the burnt planks of Hominal’s Crack ii and iv (2009) or the dry mushrooms encrusted on the shiny silver-plated panel of Malouf’s nyt1 (2013), they aren’t relevant as such, though the latter’s unrecognisable mould brilliantly disenchants contemporary art. While Henrot’s Untitled (2015), a monster-size notebook with a hasty drawing of a female figure, completely falls out of topic here, Marten’s ‘~’ (2010), a life-size picture of a car printed on silk blinds like a vulgar symbol of our polluted urbanscape, certainly pushes the irreverent spirit of Dada into new levels of ugliness. Installed next to Buren’s slats and Klein’s witty Relief éponge bleu sans titre (1959), in which sponges saturated with International Klein Blue and stuck on an immaculate canvas seem to have soaked up all the paint, Marten’s eyesore profanely clashes. And since I’ve been carrying around Maciunas’s tomato for a while, allow me now to relieve myself of it, figuratively of course. Joking aside, the contextual disharmony of ‘~’ is also a reminder that the artworks gathered in For Real really have little in common. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s Hamburger Kunsthalle 13 March – 31 May Since 2004, guided by curator Gabriele Schor, the Verbund energy company in Vienna has focused primarily on buying and showing photographic works by feminist artists from the 1970s. This is a laudable enterprise, though not necessarily free of subtext. One might circumspectly see budgeting for small black-and-white photographs by women as a way to acquire a large yet focused collection without too much expense, since such works come to market far more cheaply than, say, big bright abstract paintings by men. The symbolic gender redress, one would think, can meanwhile only be good for one’s corporate image: not least in Austria, a country recently estimated as having one of Europe’s largest pay gaps between men and women. That said, the artworld – the one in which moma still only devotes about four percent of its permanent display space to women artists – is full of such wiggles; very little art collecting or exhibiting has spotlessly clean hands, and mostly the Verbund collection is a circulating force of good in the world, as demonstrated by this juggernaut touring show. In Hamburg, some 150 works by approximately 30 artists trace the development during the 1970s, in Europe, the us and Latin America, of alternative images of women as opposed to those previously constructed by men – an occurrence aided by the fact that in the postwar period, increasing numbers of women had

the opportunity to go to art school, and of course by the rise of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Naturally Cindy Sherman’s immortal Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) and related, lesser-known works are present and correct, as are Ana Mendieta’s famous 1972 photographs of her face distortedly pressed against glass, an idea reprised four years later by Birgit Jürgenssen’s text-scrawled photograph Ich möchte hier raus! (‘I want to get out of here!’). Here too are valie export’s mid-70s photoperformative images of her ﬁtting compliantly into various urban spaces, Hannah Wilke’s gum-speckled nude self-portraits and videos of herself undressing behind Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–23), the violent acting-out of Martha Rosler’s upending 1975 cookingdemonstration video Semiotics of the Kitchen (memorable use of a nutcracker) and a substantial representation of Francesca Woodman’s spooked self-portrait photography – the focus on video, performance and photography reﬂecting the fact that these media were considered less tainted by male art history. The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, a version of which began touring in 2010, perhaps inevitably overlaps with moca’s 2007 museum survey wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, and it’s interesting to note what’s happened in the intervening years. Several of the artists in both shows, like Nil Yalter, Suzy Lake and Lynn

Hershman Leeson – the latter’s 1974–8 works exploring her alternative identity ‘Roberta Breitmore’, who to some extent existed in the real world (driver’s license, credit card, etc), constituting a caustic highlight here – are now increasingly feted by the archive-trawling artworld. Whether this constitutes a triumph of feminism or of a ravenous market, though, is an open question. In the current exhibition, the curatorial net feels cast a little wider, and some individual achievements are levelled by context while others are elevated: projects like Lake’s transformations into a pseudo-geisha, Miss Chatelaine (1973/98), Alexis Hunter’s 1974 Identity Crisis photographs of herself as various ‘types’ and Eleanor Antin’s gender-switching Portrait of the King (1972) in particular make Sherman’s innovations less sui generis and illuminate a rich ﬁeld of related operations. There are, elsewhere, instances of rhetorical bluntness that clearly responded to the urgency of the moment but haven’t aged well: Penny Slinger’s various photographs of herself dressed in a weddingcake costume, Karin Mack’s sequential images of herself ironing in which the ironing board becomes a funeral bier for her body. But the fact that a substantial amount of the remainder is intense, resonant, nuanced and important, yet still barely troubles the canons of art history, is – ironically – partly what sustains The Feminist Avant-Garde’s mutual heartbeat. Martin Herbert

Birgit Jürgenssen, Nest, 1979, b/w photograph. © estate of the artist. Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna; vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2014/2015; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna

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Yngve Holen World of Hope Galerie Neu, Berlin 20 March – 18 April When we hear the pseudo-apocalyptic chorus of recent cultural commentators bemoaning or celebrating the ‘posthuman’ – a term used to suggest a merging of the electronic and organic – we might do well to recall Frank Kermode’s caveat, quoting Wallace Stevens (in The Sense of an Ending, 1967), that it is ‘a peculiarity of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era’. He had modernist endgames in mind, but his words serve to temper the current pervasion of melodramatic cyborg narratives in contemporary art and the chatter that surrounds it. Perhaps such talk is just an excuse for importing the novelty of flatscreens, hd computer animation and 3d-printed plastics into the sculptural repertoire. So much for the virtualisation of the art commodity. This is the context into which the young Norwegian artist Yngve Holen’s series of six sculptures insert themselves, or emerge from. Each consists of the same round, greyish-beige, moulded-plastic mouth of a Siemens ct-scanner, approximately two metres in diameter, covered in custom-fitting fishnet-stockinglike material and wall-mounted half a metre off the ground. These are parts belonging to instruments that produce tomographic images of the inside of the human body. Three have black fishnet-style sheathes, two white, one neon-yellow. The juxtaposition of scanner shell and legging fabric so explicitly connotes cutting-edge technology’s

assimilation and invasion of our bodies that the exhibition demands a reversal of the usual order in which an artwork’s metaphors devolve from a contemplation of its particulars. Perhaps this is a symptom of Holen’s immaturity: an urgency to make matters as unambiguous as possible from the outset. But the initial conceit is so crudely tendentious it seems it must be intentionally so. We get the tawdry punchline first, like a false lead that may as well be got out of the way as soon as possible. Yet it cedes to an engagement with what these sculptures could be other than confirmations of the signs they proffer. The broad fishnet covers resemble the polymerised webs that coat the shells of modern synthetic running shoes, or the enlarged aggregate of a pixelated or dot-screened image; the former association implying lightness, the latter the way illusionism tends to dematerialise an object. Objects that connote technology’s ability to transcend the opacity of a body’s substance, by seeing through its skin to create an image, are rendered as insubstantial as an image by the fabric. This tautology is evoked sculpturally from the specifics of Holen’s presentation of his materials as art objects, rather than merely from the play between what their constituent elements signify. A primal, totemic sculptural presence qualifies the ephemeral signs the works appear to be predicated upon.

World of Hope, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Galerie Neu, Berlin

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Rectangular segments, missing from the outer rims, leave fang-shaped peaks pointing upwards, so that each sculpture cartoonishly resembles a bat’s head with its ears raised, or the protruding peaks of an alien mask. From the idea of a head comes that of the hole in the middle – the body’s point of entry into the scanner – as the orifice of a mouth, with two smaller, symmetrical holes, to its left and right, as the eyes. Furthermore, the suggestion of fabric opening around an orifice, augmented by the sculptures’ scale and frontality, recalls Robert Morris’s hanging felt works of the 1970s: a series that subverted the minimalist idiom of its raw materials – and their minimalistic suppression of illusion – by evoking the folding flesh around a vagina. The invocation of Morris’s literal/labial conceit by Holen’s synthetic found-object sculptures is yet another manifestation of the erotic defying its reduction to a virtual, reproducible image. Indeed, the serialism of these works mimics capitalist production as overtly as the fusion of their elements suggests a dissolution of the distinction between human and synthetic form. Both of these narratives are contemporary art platitudes. That what at first appears to be a reiteration of such ‘critiques’ ultimately proves to challenge their viability is a consummate paradox. Mark Prince

Sequences vii Various venues, Reykjavík 10 – 19 April Running 26 kilometres from the Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Station to Reykjavík is an overground pipeline that carries naturally warmed water to the Icelandic capital. This exoskeletal infrastructure is not mentioned in artistic director Alfredo Cramerotti’s notes for Sequences VII, Iceland’s biennial dedicated to durational work (typically performance and video), but one can’t help imagining that ‘plumbing’, the sometimes useful, occasionally unhelpful schema through which he wishes to consider ‘organisations, buildings, networks and routes’, and under which the Italian curator invited 26 artists to take part, grew out of the host city’s unique utility arrangements. The plumbing motif crops up blatantly in places: most noticeably the odd and at times awkward performance by Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson. Lasting a riveting half hour (and performed regularly for small groups in various rooms of the majestically ageing Hotel Holt during the festival), The Death Show (2014) opened with the artist delivering a monologue about a dangerously old boiler in a house he had rented in Amsterdam, complete with descriptions of the curdling groans of this rogue ﬁxture. Eventually, via a rap about possible lead poisoning, the work improbably concludes with a group meditation session led by a blue-skinned female deity, who reassures the group on the inevitable solace of death. Pipes reappear in Finnbogi Pétursson’s Tesla Tune (2015) – a highlight of the festival – in which various lengths of cardboard tubing hang by slim cords from the top ﬂoor of a disused supermarket, one of the main show venues.

A regular beat, at a frequency of 50Hz, is emitted from an alternating-current transformer, passing through a programmer and from there through the tubes. The result is a cacophonous wall of sound, as the differing lengths of tube create a deep, vibrating noise that feels like it might be coming from the bowels of the earth. Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson’s The apparent impossibility of zero (2015) occupies a pair of subterranean former public conveniences. Visitors are able to enter one of these spaces, where they are caught on a surveillance camera, live footage of which is projected on the interior wall and, as far as I can decode, cut and mixed with footage of previous visitors to the work and of the inaccessible, empty second space. While technically impressive, the end result remains that one is left in a disused toilet looking at a video stream in which nothing much happens. Elsewhere Cramerotti swaps works that refer to plumbing for others that instead address directly what the subject analogises: infrastructure and the affect of the unseen. To some degree this is a shame, as with the subtext firmly explained, opportunities for viewers to do their own extrapolating evaporate. That said, many of the works that don’t fit so directly with the plumbing motif – Graham Gussin’s unnerving 16mm film Spill (1999), in which a building cinematically fills with smoke, or Margrét H. Blöndal’s solo presentation of her delicate poetic sculptural assemblages in a gallery housed in a former fish shop –are the best of the festival, so my criticism is only half felt. It was a joy too to see such a large part of his show given to

works by Carolee Schneemann (together with Hans Ulrich Obrist’s great, rarely seen digicam interview with the artist in a noisy restaurant). The centrepiece of this presentation at Kling & Bang is More Wrong Things (2001), 14 monitors suspended from the ceiling and connected via a tangle of cables. Grainy archive footage of scenes of disorder – riots, protests, environmental disasters – play out, looped. After more than a few minutes, one becomes numbed; the images ﬂick over interminably, and questions of impotent personal agency in the face of global carnage emerge. Is this violence a breakdown in social infrastructure? Or, given the mundane frequency of the scenes depicted (and Schneemann’s title plays into the everyday nature of the degradation we’re asked to witness in the work), is this a picture of society itself? If Schneemann dealt with our fractured political models, current and historic, then Kolbeinn Hugi’s Plato’s Parable of Light Astral Pavilion 3d (2015), a one-off performance in which the artist and cohort of musicians, most of whom were topless, played a zoned-out set in a large transparent dome tent, while other chums created live computer-aided animations projected onto the exterior, looked to a projected but perhaps lost, future. Messing with motifs of techno-futurism from the 1970s and beyond – a love of collectivism and collaboration – Kolbeinn Hugi’s performance hints tangentially through its various musical and architectural references at a more utopic system and suggests that the world as it is plumbed-in now isn’t necessary how it has to be. Oliver Basciano

Kolbeinn Hugi, Plato’s Parable of Light Astral Pavilion 3d, 2015, durational performance, GoogleSketchup projections, sound, organs, construction plastic, synthesisers, vapour and festive residues. Courtesy Sequences real time art festival, Reykjavík

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Martial Raysse Palazzo Grassi, Venice 12 April – 30 November This major retrospective of almost 350 paintings, sculptures, ﬁlms and installations by the seventy-nine-year-old French artist is arranged without regard for chronology, effectively loosening the ties that bind Martial Raysse to the parts of his biography for which he is best known, in particular a short-lived association with the early-1960s Nouveaux Réalistes. He quickly turned away from their focus on the found object, though not before being included in moma’s 1961 The Art of Assemblage exhibition. Concentrating now on consumer packaging, advertising images and a postwar obsession with hygiene, the artist created an installation for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, featuring sand and paintings of women in swimsuits, that became an icon of European Pop art (Raysse Beach, 1962; a version of which appears in the Palazzo Grassi); he began making extended visits to the us, particularly Los Angeles, where he stayed until the events of May 1968 drew him back to Paris. Disillusioned, Raysse then withdrew from urban life and the artworld, slowly and only partly reemerging in the following decades to present his allegorical and myth-laden paintings, and a vision of a better world. In its organisation and emphasis, this latter and lesser-known stretch of Raysse’s career seems to be the true interest of the Palazzo Grassi exhibition. The absence of chronological arrangement liberates us, too: the exhibition opens with dozens of discrete works in ten large vitrines in the palazzo’s atrium – immediately separating the act of looking from the compulsion of wall-text reading, and introducing a relaxed state of openness to the objects themselves that usefully sticks around for the remainder of the journey through French supercollector François Pinault’s ﬁrst and grandest Venice space. By opening on vitrines containing small, often humble, mischievous, witty and spirited primitive-surreal arrangements with psychedelic overtones, the exhibition focuses attention on a life set out in miniature, containing and presaging all that will follow: bird, animal-like

and part-human sculptures in bronze, terracotta and plaster; small figures of men with open arms and splayed fingers, beseeching or beholding or surrendering; coloured plastic figurines; a larger-than-lifesize bronze of a woman’s head; a smaller woman being mauled, or ravished, by a lionlike figure; and another, smaller still, less ambiguously ecstatic woman atop a pigbear-crocodile creature; a roughly head-shaped cardboard cutout decorated with beads for eyes, though it could as easily be a palm tree in outline, or an ancient symbol from a lost world, repeated in carved stone elsewhere, reappearing in various guises throughout the exhibition (sometimes referred to as Forme en Liberté). And everywhere, mushrooms: blue, yellow and purple caps, red stems, popping out of dioramas set on plates, their papier-mâché forms growing from brightly coloured rocks or sandy debris in what could be wooden sewing boxes, lids agape, sometimes alongside human figures, a metallic butterfly, hybrid animals. Evoking shamanic exploration, offerings, obscure worship, these arrangements give coherence to the other objects, as details from another world, one the artist seems cheerfully and persistently attempting to communicate. On the palazzo’s upper floors, the full range of Raysse’s expression opens up: paintings, many of them portraits of women, in acid colours; nudes; landscapes; still lifes; largeformat allegorical tableaux full of narrative and symbolism, with references to history, folklore and myths. By far the largest of these is Ici Plage, comme ici-bas (2012), a three-by-nine-metre work depicting a dystopian beach scene that demands to be compared to the large-scale installation Raysse Beach of 50 years earlier, on view in the adjoining gallery. In contrast to the bright, artificial atmosphere of the first work – sand, cocktail glasses, a jukebox and beach toys, along with paintings of smiling women in bathing suits arrayed along the back walls of the installation, Ici Plage… presents a far more complicated and ambivalent scene in a blend of sickly

colours, a crowd of isolated, alienated beachgoers, some fully dressed, others nude or only partially clothed, arrayed along a rubbishstrewn shoreline, where they enact solitary and solipsistic poses while looking out at us with expressions that are blank, wretched or pleading for attention. The painting includes, at its very centre, a woman dancing alone. Rather than see this in isolation, as a pessimistic work created late in the career of a prodigious artist, it pays to view it alongside Raysse’s other largeformat allegorical paintings of the past quarter century – Le Jours des roses sur le toit (2001–03), for example – as the latest addition to an ever-enriching view of humankind. Not all is lost on Ici Plage… Elsewhere objects are attached to and extend beyond paintings’ picture plane; the stretchers themselves are exposed, or the canvas on its stretcher is turned down in one corner as though dog-eared. In other works Raysse plays with framing devices by adding smaller frames to a painting’s surface. The use of neon as drawn line appended to paintings attests to Raysse’s very early deployment of the form as a medium for creating images. Film, on its own and, in one instance, playing on a screen set into a painting, is added to sculpture, projection, installation, assemblage, bricolage, collage. From this profusion of styles and mediums, an entire world emerges, its details and forms and themes repeating across the years, as the artist revisits and adds detail to a particularly rich, consistent visual language, if one that at times can be both foreign and demanding. Raysse came to painting after rejecting poetry as a means of conveying meaning – for him the written word could not survive translation into other languages, so instead he chose images. His communitarian, utopian outlook, expressed across a deep and varied body of work on lavish display in this exhibition, seeks to create a separate, parallel world whose relevance to art today seems to be in presenting a model for how to work, how to live. David Terrien

facing page, clockwise from top left Ici Plage, comme ici-bas, 2012, oil and acrylic on canvas, 300 × 900 cm. Photo: Arthus Boutin Martial Raysse, 2015 (installation view, Palazzo Grassi). Photo: Fulvio Orsenigo Salut les potes !, 2014, bronze, pins and staples, 76 × 50 × 30 cm. Photo: Fabrice Seixas all images Courtesy the artist

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Intelligent Machinery Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin 3 April – 31 May In an era when Stop Killer Robots refers not, as you might expect, to a Bushwick synth trio but an ngo lobbying for a ban on fully autonomous weaponry, it might seem painfully on-the-nose to title an exhibition Intelligent Machinery, given that this was the name of a 1948 report by Alan Turing into the possibility of thinking computers. Luckily, this three-person show is concerned with something broader than this implicit reference point might initially suggest. After all, here is a group of artists who have passed through Ireland’s National College of Art and Design (ncad), the institution home to Francis Halsall – whose work is cited in the exhibition’s collateral material – one of the organisers of the Whitechapel Gallery’s 2007 Systems Art symposium, an event that promised to rethink cybernetic and systems art, as well as mark its retooling, even, as a critical approach. In that world, systems theory offers various advantages. It creates common ground, for example, between such apparently different artists as Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol. Equally importantly, the approach’s concerns with the anxious status of the artwork, in particular, can corral all kinds of contemporary

practitioners, from Assemble to (Andrea) Zittel. The recourse to systems aesthetics also serves to reduce visual spectacle, and ideally messes with the market by driving artists ever further away from commodiﬁed art objects. The odd thing about Intelligent Machinery is that while the theory that underpins it has a feeling of chunky excitement, the works’ dispersed character is delicate, riskily so. The three artists here work through installations that engage, over time, multiple senses and spaces, folding in frail sculptural objects, washy painting, whispered audio, crumpled photos and hd video – suggesting an organisational mesh so expansive that everything risks escaping. Such permeability is, though, precisely at issue in Soﬁe Loscher’s installation A Degree of Darkness (2015): sets of geometric sculptural objects created roughly, in sheets of polarising plastic, often held in shape by Sellotape, using the physics of light to produce images of an invisible universe of frantic messages amplifying and interfering with spontaneous intelligence. Messages form and disperse, then form again in Jonathan Mayhew’s Between (2015), whose audio involves the quiet muttering of a text

(writing is a regular recourse for Mayhew) with an unﬁxed subject, skittering from love to death via lines such as, “The machine endangers all we have made. We allow it to rule instead of obey.” It is shown here in conjunction with Mayhew’s damaged photographs, For A.T. (2015), which invoke Turing once more. Together, the works call into being a network that conveys intimations of attempt and failure, erasure and reconstitution, of individuals and of species. Niamh O’Doherty’s work, like Loscher’s, is driven by the materiality of light. But this time, rather than working on the nano scale, aligning photons, the interest lies in the cosmically large. From her Untitled (From Dawn till Dusk) (2013), a bout of obsessional note-taking in watery, diagrammatic paintings, tracking solar movements from a spot on the west coast of Ireland, to First Light (2015), a video of a nostalgic twilit landscape, the artist traces the sun’s daily transit as it centrifuges all earthly attention, before disappearing, here, slowly into the Atlantic off Ireland’s western seaboard, only to rhythmically return seconds later, an unerasable, only partially legible, daily signal of things outside the human frame. Luke Clancy

Jonathan Mayhew, For A.T., 2015, torn photos pieced back together attempting to ﬁx a past action, photo print (unique). Courtesy ArtBox, London

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ArtReview

Sergei Tcherepnin Vice Versa Cave Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw 5 May – 26 June The Vice Versa Cave, the first exhibition in the newly renovated and rebuilt Foksal Gallery Foundation, is an emblematic space for Sergei Tcherepnin’s multilayered interdisciplinary practice, which combines sound, interactive installations, environment and performance. In his first show in Poland, the ‘vice versa’ refers to the audience invited to participate in the process of cocreating the space of the ‘cave’ by touching images of rocks, copperplates and big undulating ‘tongues’ (brass and copper objects) connected to electric transducers and synthesisers. Caressing these objects generates vibrations and activates a collection of electronic and recorded sounds, so that the viewer becomes part of the whole installation physically: simultaneously the subject and the object of the show. On the opening night, Tcherepnin performed together with the audience, presenting various ‘manipulative’ potentials of his objects – both the speakers and the musical instruments – and allowing us to experience what the artist calls ‘queer sound’. For Tcherepnin this music represents liberation from the culturally codified system of sounds (analogical to the system of signs), whose sources are beyond our reach, and listening is also a subject of social manipulation. He reveals the domestication and physicalisation of the music: its deaths and rebirths, destructive

and redeeming powers, and iconography (from Odysseus and the singing of sirens, through Pan, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to the present). Recording, for Tcherepnin, kills a live moment; playing sound through metal brings it back to life. His work might be also perceived as a natural consequence of strong family connections to music, and its constant reinterpretation. The artist’s Russian great-grandfather Nikolai Tcherepnin was a famous composer and conductor who collaborated with Diaghilev; other musicians and experimental composers in his family were grandfather Alexander, father Ivan (director of the Harvard University Electronic Music Studio for 20 years) and uncle Serge, who invented the Serge Modular synthesiser during the 1970s. The exhibition at the Foksal Gallery Foundation is designed as a composition, a consistent environment of dialoguing aspects: photographs of rocks from Pennsylvania and ‘ringing rocks’ from Rosendale Caves in New York State, printed on silk and copper (the photographs made by Laura Steele); recordings of the sound of ringing rocks hit by a hammer; and videos from a trip to Brazil that depict Tcherepnin as a kind of vagabond in a ‘queer’ costume (primarily a very short dress) with a musical pipe wandering the coastline and streets of Rio. This ﬁgure is the key to the show:

the piper as ancient representation of the seducer. Tcherepnin appears again in the same costume, with his pipe, among rocks on the photos printed on the interactive sound-playing copperplates that resemble etchings. The ambivalent ﬁgure of the piper recalls the ambivalence of the music as a tool of seduction and manipulation. Tcherepnin references the little-known ancient motif that would later appear – in, among other places, quasi-historical legends in Germany during the Middle Ages and in writings by Goethe and the Brothers Grimm – as the ‘RatCatcher’ or ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’. The piper is asked to help rid the city of Hamelin of its rats, for which the mayor of the city promises a handsome reward. The piper lures and seduces the rats with the sound of his pipe and drowns them in the river, but the mayor refuses to pay him, and in revenge, the piper turns the power of his music on the children of Hamelin – luring them away to a cave and away from the town forever. (In another version of the tale he keeps them imprisoned in the cave until he gets paid.) In that way, the image of the cave – as the earliest human habitation, and as the famous parable from Plato’s Republic, where people chained to a cave wall receive only a vague interpretation of reality by viewing its shadows – ﬁnds in Tcherepnin’s work a contemporary dialectical, sound-oriented interpretation. Barbara Piwowarska

Vice Versa Cave, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

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Ali Emir Tapan There Is Another World Galerist, Istanbul 27 March – 25 April ‘I really enjoy it when a viewer asks if they can touch my work. I usually let them,’ says Ali Emir Tapan in an interview published in (appropriately) the compulsively touchable, roughtextured little grey booklet accompanying his exhibition. The conceptually and physically dense layout of the Turkish artist’s third solo show – held in Galerist’s ﬁve-room space, a neoclassical eighteenth-century apartment in the historical Istanbul district of Pera – incites exactly the yearning for contact that Tapan admits he likes to hear. This compulsion is the start of a very engaging but at times tense relationship between the viewer and the artworks on display. A metronome in a darkened room greets you upon entry: a familiar trope that sets the coming works into precisely ‘another world’, one with its own unique temporal and spatial rhythm. More intriguing is the lighting, dimming and brightening to this same rhythm, intended to mimic the artist’s breathing. Bringing a dented, almost volcanic-looking replica of a nineteenth-century Russian circus ball enclosed in a glass cube (Untitled Object, all works 2015) in and out of view, the pulsating light lends a bodily organicism to what started

off quite harshly with the quantifiable, manmade orderliness of time. Such dualities tense and merge throughout the rest of the show, which at first feels comprised of two different exhibitions. There is a series of works that feature videos and photographs of dogs and horses: these are Tapan’s exploration of the notion of semidomestication, of those suspended between culture and nature. The animals are in ‘liberated’ or outdoor environments, but their furtive and rebellious body language implies the presence of the watching human. His dog photographs are darkly tense, especially to those who know that dangerous encounters with stray dogs in both rural and urban Turkey are an everyday occurrence. The animals look trapped by the harsh flash of the camera in these night shots, but the wild madness in their eyes suggests that perhaps man’s ego has overreached his capacity for domination. In another room, Tapan offers us a series of almost astral-looking sculptures, where process reigns supreme over final form. These aluminium plates and mirrors tempered with fire, blown-glass spheres and calcite powder works, with titles like First Contact and Aurora

Flowers and hair, 2015, ﬁre-tempered mirror, each 40 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerist, Istanbul

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Borealis, seem to reenact destruction and creation at a cosmic scale. The colours and textures of these surfaces remain their grey, ivory, rust, silver and transparent selves: indeed, Tapan noted in the aforementioned interview (with Francesca Gavin), ‘Layering paint over a material just seems very aggressive… a very invasive rather than a transformative process.’ These pieces seem to have known no process but that of the natural intervention of matter upon matter. The artist by extension performs an erasure upon both his own actions and his own cultural function, since these nebulous, timeless materials suggest that nature is still the most potently transformative force. Do the two strands of work reconcile? Certainly, but after some effort at immersion on the viewer’s part. A universal cycle of creation and destruction, of artiﬁcial order imposed upon naturally recurring rhythms, emerges as the exhibition’s ﬁttingly malleable yet strong connective thread. A deft and exciting use of material is this up-and-coming artist’s most attractive promise, and There Is Another World introduces us to a style both appreciative of these natural tools and of their application in a nonegoistic, open-ended practice. Sarah Jilani

Rupert Ackroyd Cathedral Blocks and Thistle Seeds Marsden Woo Gallery, London 25 March – 1 May Trying to work out what’s going on in Rupert Ackroyd’s new show is an immediate challenge. Confusingly, as you descend into the small gallery space, you pass, on your right, an impressive ceramic imitation of a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona daybed (1930) that is in fact the work of another artist and not part of the installation. A member of the gallery staff kindly sparks up a few tea lights that sit at the foot of a two-pane glass partition with a gap in between. Suddenly some trapped white thistle seeds begin to flit up and down the void, propelled by convection currents generated by the candle flames. The seeds look like skittering albino arachnids, their movements as loose and spooky as some frightened daddy longlegs. Watching these was akin to the not-unpleasant and calming autistic state and stare that aquariums induce when you find yourself trapped in the waiting rooms for the worried. And what’s that balanced on the apex of a wooden inverted V also wedged behind the glass? We read that this is a block of granite chipped from the fluting of a Gothic cathedral. Looking closer now at the glass we see some decals stuck in various places – these at first glance resemble slices of quartz, but they are in fact representations of more thistle seeds, granite lumps and what appear to be… Wotsits. Yes, those moreish, cheap and cheesy corn-puff

snacks. And now we see, scattered unappetisingly on the ﬂoor of the gallery, some spilled Wotsits. With their toxic tangerine colouring and horrid grainy coverings, the temptation to stomp on them, to grind them into orange dust, is strong. Where have they come from? Look up and we see an odd construction, one of three in various parts of the space, that features a wall-mounted wooden beam projecting an overhanging clock primed to release some thistle seeds or Wotsits at set moments. Dramatically timed release of material in sculpture calls to mind the more violent gesturings of Anish Kapoor’s Shooting into the Corner (2008–9), where we experience the macho blasting of pigmented wax from a cannon. Ackroyd may be cheekily parodying this heavy-handed performance with his cheese-puff drops while simultaneously referencing the scatter art of Barry Le Va. Elsewhere what looks like a Perspex tube mimicking the role of a supporting column contains a settled mass of thistle seeds. This is not the pressed mulch of vegetation and rot that we associate with the work of Anya Gallaccio; the intention here is not to imply their ultimate decay. At another moment, if an overhanging clock had released them, the room would have been lively and ﬁlled with the drifting spores, but today all is still apart from those trapped behind the large glass.

Why thistles? Difficult not to think of Scotland and Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) in these charged political times. References to high national aspiration linked to a mere weed is, I’m sure, unintended, but hard to avoid with what one may jokingly call the Scots Gaze. But the concept of ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’ is not so far off the mark in Ackroyd’s construction – the idea of duelling intentions in one entity, the joining together of opposites – is made real in his contrasting light and heavy materials. Hence his use of airy seeds and puffs and the weight and heft of the cathedral block. But I’d suggest that the idea of some kind of cosmic balance using different materials and densities reached a more spectacular apogee recently in the late Chris Burden’s work Porsche with Meteorite (2013), given its impressive counterpoise of a bright yellow luxury car with a much smaller and denser lump of interplanetary detritus. Renata Adler, commenting on the writing of Pauline Kael, warns against work becoming shrill or stale or, worse, both. Ackroyd’s quiet installation is certainly not shrill, but with its hints of hackneyed symbolism (that unbearable lightness of being again), it risks being seen to be as stale as the scattered snacks. John Quin

Cathedral Blocks and Thistle Seeds, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Philip Sayer. Courtesy Marsden Woo Gallery, London

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The Symptom of Art Cabinet, London 23 April – 23 May Pierre Klossowski preferred to define his vocation as neither writer nor artist but ‘monomaniac’. His novels, philosophical works, drawings and lifesize tableaux vivants circulate around a limited set of obsessions that operate in relation to real life much as a dream does to waking life. Each one is the simulacrum of some fantasy, the impossible fulfilment of a fleeting desire suspended in words or images. Of the six works by the author of Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969) on display in this group exhibition, three are modelled after photographs by the filmmaker Pierre Zucca included in Klossowski’s 1970 book, La Monnaie Vivante (Living Currency). They depict the author’s own wife, Denise Morin-Sinclaire, in a state of partial undress, nipples poking permanently just over the crest of her bustier, being molested by near-faceless homunculi enacting scenes taken from Klossowski’s own Laws of Hospitality (1954–65) trilogy of novels (later adapted for the screen by Zucca, starring Klossowski and Morin-Sinclaire themselves in the central roles). In both the coloured-pencil drawing Les Barres

Parallèles 4 (1976) and the resin-based sculpture Diane & Acteon (1990), the Morin-Sinclaire-like ‘Roberte’ casts detached sidelong glances as limacine tongues poke and ﬂick at her from all angles. Interspersed with Klossowski’s drawings and statues hang a series of ﬁve works by Scott Von, psychoanalyst and director of Brooklyn’s New Clinic for Integral Medicine. Each resembling hurried lecture notes in marker pen on large sheets of white paper, they are composed largely in the inscrutable algebraic mathemes of Jacques Lacan and purport to show the decisive break inaugurated by Klossowski in the history of art. This moment Von seems to locate at the junction of Beuys’s ‘socialist neurosis’, Warhol’s ‘capitalist psychosis’ and the ‘sovereignty’ of Duchamp. The implication of the dotted line leading up from Klossowski’s name in Von’s The Symptom of Art (2015) would seem to be that returning to Klossowski offers the potential of a third path, beyond the impasses of Beuys and Warhol alike, towards some new aesthetics of perversion capable of holding the possibility

The Symptom of Art, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy the artists and Cabinet, London

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of an exchange at once monetary and passional in permanent suspension. One glimpse of exactly what such an aesthetics might look like is presumably offered by Danny McDonald’s Joker (2015), one of the New York-based artist’s arrangements of commercially available plastic ﬁgurines, perched here atop a white ziggurat plinth. In this case, we have an arrangement of ten Joker toys from the Batman series, symmetrically assembled in the manner of circus acrobats or synchronised swimmers. McDonald’s work is playful, engaging, at once archly pop in its appropriation of commercial products and a kind of quasi-Beuysian social sculpture in its democratic elevation of everyday acts of play and arrangement to the status of ritual, evincing an obsessive-compulsive’s pleasure in things neatly slotting together. If the Joker always represented the unrestrained id to Batman’s hectoring superego, his geometric multiplication here suggests an unstoppable proliferation of desires captured in the process of an endless self-replication. Consumerism elevated to the status of a fetish. Robert Barry

Five Issues of Studio International Raven Row, London 26 February – 3 May At first glance, this exhibition looks pretty much like any straightforward history of the 1960s and 70s – albeit with perhaps a slightly heavier emphasis on sculpture than usual. Among works by mostly familiar names are the bright yellow steels of William Turnbull’s Angle (1967/68), a video documenting John Latham’s water-bellows machine, Big Breather (1972), and various obliquely wistful wall-texts by Lawrence Weiner – all part of the ‘expanded field’ of art production that characterised the period. In fact, the show isn’t a history of the era at all (or, at least, is only indirectly so); rather it’s a history of Studio International magazine from 1965 to 1975, during the editorship of Peter Townsend. Concentrating on five specific issues, one of the show’s implicit arguments is that the magazine itself formed part of the ‘expanded field’. The pages of the July/August 1970 issue, for instance, were set aside as a novel kind of exhibition space for commissioned works by the likes of Keith Arnatt and Daniel Buren. For the other four issues – April 1966, May 1968, September 1969 and July/August 1972 – the current exhibition functions as a sort of analogue or realisation of their contents.

Pages featuring articles and illustrations, displayed in vitrines, correspond to nearby works – sometimes to the exact piece described, as with Barry Flanagan’s limply sagging pile of sandﬁlled sacks, heap 3 ‘67/68 (1967), and at other times to a looser, thematic display, as in the various pieces by Naum Gabo. Indeed, it’s fascinating to see the connection between Constructivism and the new wave of British sculpture outlined so concretely, and the main success of the show is in conveying this sense of continuity and discovery across a whole range of works, from Kenneth Martin’s brass parabolas to Charles Biederman’s jutting steel paintings. Other trends explored by the magazine, however, become somewhat lost in the translation to physical exhibition. It’s only when you read through the excellent catalogue, which contains more extensive reprints of the issues, that the debates and discussions are revealed more fully. In a sense, that’s hardly surprising – yet it also points to a difficulty at the heart of the exhibition, which is that physical works and magazine pages aren’t equivalents to each other in any simple way. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s important to remember that art magazines don’t

contain actual art (pace the occasional conceptual ‘exhibition’), but typically contain representations of art in the form of written arguments and photographic illustrations. Yet too often in this exhibition it feels like the other way round, as if the physical works are included simply to illustrate the contents of Studio International. And while that’s certainly a curious reversal, there aren’t enough truly conceptual pieces – works that reﬂect upon their status as both objects and representations – to make any advantage of it. Only a piece by Adrian Piper, indexing photographs of groups of friends according to areas of colour, really explores such notions. In this context, one of the most strangely eloquent works, though hardly intended, is Nicolas Schöffer’s Chronos 10 (1962) – a rotating, whirring steel structure full of glancing lights and spinning mirrors. Except, during my visit, and for several weeks of the exhibition, it wasn’t actually working. Within a show about a print magazine, however, its mute immobility seems powerfully appropriate, and hints at the possibility of a more complex, more ironic and nuanced show somewhere beneath the surface. Gabriel Coxhead

Five Issues of Studio International, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy Raven Row, London

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David Douard S’ Union Paciﬁc, London 24 April – 23 May “Initially, he wanted to use saliva,” said the director of Union Paciﬁc. “Perhaps he should’ve done,” I replied. We were discussing David Douard’s work S’ (all works 2015), a fountain made from heat-folded plastic and steel rods. Water pumped into an upper basin drains through a plughole into a larger one below. Also included, tied with wire to the shelf supporting the upper basin, is a pamphlet of the artist’s hip-hop-style poetry: ‘got half the money/on the bag of sunny/…so bubble up the honey/joints gettin’ runny’. With its lyrical ‘uzerz’ manual, S’ resembles nothing so much as a garden feature from an imaginary Don DeLillo novel; and when I say that the rest of the show recalls a gallery scene from a 1980s movie, I am not necessarily dispraising it. Though gregarious with materials, Douard is not content to be merely sensual; he is just as interested in the cultural silhouette of a work as in its formal character. That said, some works seem more like moodboards than artworks, somewhat aimless juxtapositions of ephemera. In We have, a square painting measuring 150 cm on a side, amorphous chunks of aluminium hang over grey gingham fabric, a red rubber facemask, two hen’s eggs and three a4 posters (recycling text from the poetry pamphlet in S’)

also visible under the scratched Plexiglas with which it is glazed. Opposite this is Gotten, a doublesided painting in a similar style, hung vertically from the ceiling on an aluminium pole. Both works eschew compositional unity, relying on the containment of disparate elements that don’t really amount to more than the sum of their parts, lacking that mysterious emulsification of arbitrary ingredients that characterises good expanded painting, from Kurt Schwitters to Martin Kippenberger. When Douard is less expansive, the results are more atmospheric. In Untitled, shown downstairs, a flat-cast aluminium head seen in profile juts from a two-panel stretcher of grey fabric printed with large monochrome faces and blurred text. A third (metal) panel dangles beneath, bearing a scrap of canvas showing an appopriated image of a bird feeding its young. Here, more care is taken with the space between the components so that they don’t present as mere information, and no Plexiglas container is required to enforce false unity. It’s the same with Never, a sculptural tableau comprising two awnings, the first, of fabric, suspended over a pair of freestanding figures with flat-cast aluminium heads, their spindly legs terminating in box-fresh Atemi trainers; and the second,

trouble every day, 2015, epoxy resin, wood, 115 × 215 × 10 cm. Photo: Oskar Proctor. Courtesy Union Paciﬁc, London

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of black vinyl, attached to the wall over a stretcher of grey gingham bearing a wooden box containing two eggs and a circle of red rubber. There’s a more theatrical frisson between the components here, augmented by the aluminium shape hung from the second awning’s illuminated grill, at which the farthermost ﬁgure gazes in ritualistic vigil. Also shown are three abstract paintings in sickly rhubarb-and-custard resin, held within baroquely curved frames, the surface clotted and marbled like fairground confectionery (all titled trouble every day). Those in the lower space have large holes barred by metal grilles, with darker, charred-looking areas of paint giving them a vandalised appearance. They are more interesting as sculptures than as paintings. Like Steven Claydon or Thomas Zipp, Douard explores the area between picture and object, though there is greater fealty to the image in his work. Here, he is more effective when function or ritual provide a conceptual fetter to his arbitrariness (as with S’ and Never respectively). Arbitrariness is to contemporary art as abstraction is to contemporary poetry: it is seen as a professional hazard, something to be tolerated rather than eliminated. Douard could eliminate more of it. Sean Ashton

Adam Pendleton New Work Pace, London 16 April – 23 May As a slogan and a chant, the power of ‘Black Lives Matter’ lies in its potential; it describes an unreached state of things, an attempt to actualise itself and make its words ring true. Once black lives do matter, it will lose its potency. Until then, the familiar story repeats itself: people of colour are harassed, assaulted and killed by law enforcement, and this phrase forms a deﬁant, and desperate, response. When preparing his exhibition New Work at Pace, Adam Pendleton couldn’t have known what events were yet to unfold in Baltimore. His use of the three words throughout the show, though, might as well have predicted them. To deploy ‘Black Lives Matter’ acknowledges that its meaning hasn’t been achieved, and that there’s still more work to do. It points towards a continued need for political action, but what initially looks like timely context risks overshadowing the complexity of Pendleton’s work. Although this show has a serendipitous degree of political relevance, it’s more than a mirror to a zeitgeist. Among the repeated slogans

is a dense web of visual and textual references, drawing from the artist’s ongoing Black Dada project that turns a racially inﬂected lens to the canon of art history. Since 2008 Black Dada has functioned as a frame for Pendleton’s practice, manifest in individual letters – Bs, Ds, Ks, etc – that appear across his multimedia work. Always capitalised and sans serif, their recurrence grounds what’s otherwise quite ambiguous. It may be part movement, part critical apparatus, but the artist is reluctant to deﬁne what Black Dada really is. Helpfully, an assemblage of photocopies sits in a folder at the Pace front desk, apparently a provisional model of his forthcoming Black Dada Reader; duplicated from art history and critical race studies texts, its pages are fragmented, blown-up and reprinted in Black Dada Sculpture #1 and Black Lives Matter (wall work) #2 (both 2015). This mechanical repetition is central to Pendleton’s work, and logically follows for a self-proclaimed conceptualist (Sol LeWitt was an early collector, and images of Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974, have since

appeared in Black Dada paintings). The new works on display are made with a ‘painting machine’, the details of which are kept mysteriously vague. Clearly, Pendleton likes to keep us guessing. Despite the spraypaint lettering in some of these works, they are undeniably slick. Mixing cool conceptualism with such emotive subject matter is a tricky balancing act, and the blacks of Black Dada/Column (D) (2015) could feel slightly too smooth, its nods to Malevich caught up in an air of detachment. Elsewhere, the mirrored steel in Magicienne #2 (2015) and Protest (2014) aggressively implicates its viewers, but also imbues the works’ surfaces with a polished, industrial sheen. There’s a ﬁne line between aestheticising politics and politicising the aesthetic, and Pendleton’s role as an artworld darling is important to remember: as part of his prestigious moma residency he’ll soon be travelling to Ferguson, and the ethics of this gesture are certainly open to critique. For now, though, it appears he’s treading carefully, and we’re rewarded with an intelligent, intriguing result. Dan Udy

Black Dada Sculpture #1, 2015, silkscreen ink on mirror polished stainless steel, 119 × 100 × 2 cm (foreground) and Black Lives Matter (wall work) #2, 2015, wall work, site-speciﬁc dimensions variable (background). Both © the artist and courtesy Pace, London

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Kapwani Kiwanga Kinjiketile Suite South London Gallery 15 April – 7 June Canadian-born, and of Tanzanian heritage, Kapwani Kiwanga might be the exemplar of a new kind of ‘postinstitutional’ artist. Having studied anthropology at McGill in Vancouver during the early 2000s, she then got into documentary filmmaking while living in Scotland, receiving two bafta Scotland nominations for her films, before moving to Paris to take up a residency at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, later studying for a postgraduate diploma at the prestigious Le Fresnoy. Such a shifting career seems worth noting, not least because the exhibition guide enjoins us to consider Kiwanga’s ‘research-based’ practice, which mixes her earlier training in social sciences ‘with a more subjective and fictional observation of culture’. Kinjiketile Suite is indeed such a mix: Kiwanga has divided up the South London Gallery’s main gallery with large timber spaceframes arranged around a central table, which serve as display stations for a range of videos, archival photographs, magazines, books and ephemera, all relating to two moments in the colonial and postcolonial history of Tanzania. The historical core of the exhibition is the Maji Maji uprising of 1905–7, in which the indigenous population of what was then Tanganyika, German East Africa, fought against their German colonial rulers, led by the figure of Kinjiketile Ngwale, a spirit medium and cult leader who

emboldened the rebels with his distribution of a ‘war medicine’ – nothing more than water mixed with castor oil – a potion he claimed would protect them from the German oppressors’ bullets. This historical figure becomes the quasi-mythical reference point for the show, inasmuch as Kiwanga provides a tangle of material that suggests how Kinjiketile’s legend might have passed down through the decades – the ‘suite’ of the title, perhaps – becoming an icon of Tanzanian nationhood. Kiwanga’s recorded voice makes fragmentary references to the uprising, while the installation winds between Kinjiketile and Tanzania’s post-1964 independence: magazines such as the South African Drum and us Time magazine, profiling Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere; Nyerere’s book on African socialism Ujamaa (1977), and his translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; a video of two actors playing out a dialogue between Kinjiketile and an associate anticipating the uprising (perhaps from the play Kinjeketile [sic], 1969), by Ebrahim N. Hussein, also displayed); a table of growing castor oil plants. Since there’s no contextual information, Kiwanga’s organisation of these elements instead encourages a process of happenstance association – Nyerere as Caesar as Kinjiketile, for example; or, in the case of the long documentary

Kinjiketile Suite, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy South London Gallery

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sequence from the 1960s of Tanzanian villagers arguing hotly with a representative of the central government over the issue of money for building works and agricultural investment, a sardonic analogy between the new modernising black socialists and the old white colonialists. Yet, while such allusions might come to the viewer, they just as easily might not. One has to be very generous with one’s attention to what is otherwise a mute presentation of documents to have a hope of reconstituting something of what Kiwanga might be probing. It’s not that the historical subject is not interesting – archival material is often surprising and enlightening – only that the artist has done so little – aesthetically, affectively, formally – with the material assembled. As if, shifting from research methods to artistic ones, Kiwanga has forgotten that her audience is not that of a research symposium, but people in a gallery of visual art. For a new generation of culturally mobile, discipline-andinstitution-hopping cultural practitioners such as Kiwanga, ‘research-based practice’ often becomes the justification for a form of deskilled visual didacticism. Clearly, in her appeal to fiction and subjectivity, Kiwanga expects to operate beyond the constraints of the documentary mode, so it’s a pity that her ambitions for a fictionalising archival practice are realised in such prosaic form. J.J. Charlesworth

Maud Sulter Passion Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow 25 April – 21 June In her text for the 1985 ica exhibition The Thin Black Line, the late Scots-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter (1960–2008) wrote that ‘being visible can be dangerous. But being invisible eats away at your soul’. The motivating force behind Sulter’s practice, which spanned visual art, sound, writing, curating, education, publishing and activism, was visibility; specifically, the visibility of black women in art and culture. In this exhibition, made up of works drawn from major photographic series including Les Bijoux (1992), Paris Noir (1990) and Hysteria (1991), the unifying tenet is a desire to reclaim or make space for figures whose presence has been marginalised, overwritten or ignored. Works such as those drawn from the photographic series Zabat (1989) act as revisionist histories, challenging the history of art’s privileging of whiteness by placing black women centre stage in the role of muse, a role canonically reserved for white female ‘archetypes’. The contemporary artists, musicians and writers portrayed each carry the attributes – those symbolic props held by allegorical figures as a way to decode a character’s identity – of their mythological counterpart. The attributes chosen by Sulter embody Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of ‘minor literature’ in that they are thoroughly

political, harness a collective, enunciative value and speak in the coloniser’s language (in this case, European painting), but, crucially, from a minority position. The lump of fool’s gold held by Terpsichore, for example, speaks as much of the legacy of colonial trade, slavery and servitude as do the names of the streets directly outside the gallery in Glasgow’s Merchant City area. As a body of work, Zabat represents a deterritorialisation of the tropes and conventions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history painting using the visual rhetoric of the very genre it seeks to contest. The works look expensive and museum-quality in their production and display, held in heavy, ornate gold frames, each rendered in deep, saturated colour. It is no coincidence that Sulter’s chosen medium was photography, a medium that carries deep associations with colonial encounter and has acted as a key instrument and tool in the visual othering of its anthropological subjects. But it is also a medium that, when Sulter’s work was most visible, had became closely associated with challenging the canon along lines of gender, race and sexuality. Originating as small collage works using vintage postcards of Alpine landscapes, images of European painting and illustrations from

books on African art, the Syrcas series (1993) references the history of photography both directly and indirectly. Hannah Höch’s 1930s photomontages are clearly cited, while August Sander’s 1920s documentary photographs of German social ‘types’, including people of African descent, act as the (invisible) catalyst for the series. The enlarged, wall-hung prints reﬂect on the redaction and denial of black history in Europe but also on the possibility of reclaiming it through a reexamination of archives and historical sources. They are startling in the density and scope of their associations. In contrast to many examples of explicitly politicised work of the late 1980s and 90s, Sulter’s is visually arresting and sensuous. In strictly formal terms (if one could ever put narrative to one side here), the scale, ambition and polish of these works could itself be read as deliberately disruptive, setting it apart from the lo-ﬁ, diy aesthetic of much contemporaneous politically engaged work. These are glamorous, beautiful works in which visual pleasure is not at odds with serious political endeavour. The portraits celebrate their subjects and admonish the viewer in equal measure, acting as both homage and cautionary tale. Each series is lyrical, imaginative and full of integrity. Susannah Thompson

Terpsichore, 1989, Cibachrome print, 152 × 122 cm. Courtesy Edinburgh City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums & Galleries

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Doris Salcedo Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 21 February – 24 May Keats, despite himself, created a monument out of his epitaph: ‘Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water’ – a gesture towards the ephemeral turned accidental sculpture, with the text carved permanently into the poet’s nameless headstone. In attempting to preserve the forgotten, by calling attention to, and indeed expecting, a confrontation with loss, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s ﬁrst international retrospective does the precise opposite. Plegaria Muda (2008–10), which translates loosely to ‘silent prayer’, is installed as a labyrinthine structure in the entrance to the museum’s galleries. The installation requires the viewer to weave in and out of its row upon row of overturned wooden tables – an echo of the melancholic expectation of how one navigates a cemetery. Individual blades of grass grow through minute holes in the surfaces of the tables, the ﬁrst of only two instances of colour in this otherwise chromatically muted exhibition. The mandatory path through the piece opens into a collection of Untitled sculptures from 1989 and 1990. These works, made out of abandoned and repurposed hospital furniture and stacks of perfectly pressed white shirts, are minimal and precise if not for the tarnished patina

of the found objects. We read in the exhibition text that these assemblages were created in response to two massacres in northern Colombia, while Plegaria Muda was made in response to the socioeconomic circumstances leading to gang violence in Los Angeles. Indeed, the aesthetic of Salcedo’s work is marked by a steadfast solemnity; though these spaces do not venerate political violence so much as they allow for a more formal consideration of memorial. While Salcedo’s manufactured artefacts border on the fetishisation of loss, they also subvert the commemorative capacity of sculpture. After all, to monumentalise loss in a physical form is to undermine the necessary ephemerality of grief and mourning – though to restage monuments within a museum is not necessarily an act of remembrance. In a stunning installation of Salcedo’s most iconic works from 1989 to 2008, a narrow gallery of the mca is occupied by functionless armoires, bed frames, dressers and chairs, which are all substantial and weighted, as though exhumed from concrete. Like characters that repeat over time, the works only ever transform slightly. The consistency of Salcedo’s material sensibility creates a cyclical storyline, with each sculpture

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reappearing as an improvisation on the same character, like José Arcadio in (fellow Colombian) Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). The exhibition acts as a collection of spectres, bringing together not the ghosts of political atrocities, as Salcedo’s works are so often understood to do, but formally recurring histories, in which past, present and future intermingle as one. In the final work of the exhibition, A Flor de Piel (2014) – the second departure into colour – a flesh-red carpet of delicately sewn rose petals stretches out onto the gallery floor. The resulting fabric is somehow tender, as if the life of these flowers still courses through their detached stems. In what is described as a shroud, here more than in any other work Salcedo presents a caricature of emptiness, each petal carefully preserved as a dramatic suspension of life, which is gone – not with ferocity, but a kind of tender rebellion. The curatorial framing of Salcedo’s retrospective certainly expects of its viewers a specific kind of sadness, though to demand a reaction of loss is to misuse her work; it is much too fluid for one definition. Permanence is perhaps no different than writing on water. Stephanie Cristello

Mark Ruwedel Pictures of Hell Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica 3 April – 30 May The photographs of Mark Ruwedel bear an old-fashioned veneer. They are usually silver gelatin, exquisitely printed, and underneath each image one finds the title of the photo in graphite lettering. The photographs might as well come leather-bound and wrapped in a century of dust, such is their resemblance to projects by Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins and other nineteenth-century photographers of the western United States. Like those figures, Ruwedel is inspired by the West as an illusion of destiny created at once through belief in religious providence and as a vast promise of potential wealth. Ruwedel’s efforts, however, are far from anachronistic. The visual strategies that he finds in the rich history of landscape photography gain power and sophistication through his employment of the principles of conceptual art, the lessons of 1970s earth art and recent trends in environmentalism that coincide with our increased awareness of global warming. In other words, it has never been more relevant to take

unapologetic photographs featuring the oftendevastating impact of humans on the natural landscape. And Ruwedel, taking his cues from Joe Deal, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and other New Topographics photographers from the 1970s, is among the leading documenters of the contemporary landscape. Ruwedel tends to work on any given series of photographs for many years at a time, sometimes decades, and his most recent body of work, Pictures of Hell, began during the mid-1990s. The series starts from a simple premise: to explore the history of how places received their names, speciﬁcally names that have to do with the devil or hell. Ruwedel sets out to ﬁnd all of the Devil’s Gates, Hell’s Gates, Devil’s Punchbowls, Devil’s Throats, Devil’s Speedways and Devil’s Backbones that are to be found – and there are many. For all the promise held out by the western United States, the reality of the landscape, as speculators and homesteaders actually experienced it, was brutal, dangerous and often barren.

The deadpan approach of arranging photographic subjects into types, or grouping them by their names, naturally taps into a recent history of photographers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher and Ed Ruscha. Ruwedel learned the lessons of such projects well and, like earlier photographers, lets the nature of the scene and its subsequent classiﬁcation by humans present its mysteries with little intervention from the photographer. Some places, for instance Devil’s Punchbowl #1 (1999), are quite beautiful, leading one to think the name was more circumstantial than existential, while other photos, such as Hell (Chuckwalla Valley, California) (1996), seem to ﬁt their appellations quite well. Ultimately the lesson of the series is that when it comes to place names, ‘Hell’ or ‘Devil’ simply means inhospitable to humans. On this logic, openness to human habitation is good, while resistance to human advancement is bad. For Ruwedel, the irony is clear. As the seas rise and the planet warms, the devil turned out to be human all along. Ed Schad

Devils Gate, High Rock Canyon, Nevada, 1997, gelatin silver print on archival board with graphite lettering. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica

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Luis Roldán Eidola Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York 2 April – 16 May At ﬁrst glance Luis Roldán’s Eidola series of sculptures and paintings (all works 2015) appears familiar, even timely. Small, languid, painterly abstractions, neither wholly geometric nor completely biomorphic nor fully expressionist, have been green-shooting through the us mud of pictorial one-liners that have triumphed as status art of late. From Forrest Bess to Thomas Nozkowski to Andrew Masullo, what we might call the ‘deeply considered canvas’ has become a kind of minor form practised and admired mostly by artists’ artists. And Roldán’s paintings hold their own here, though it would be wrong to think of Roldán as a ‘painter’ like the others. His larger body of work is familiar in a different way, mostly because it is more ﬁrmly in line with the kind of Latin American Conceptualism that luxuriates in the subtle poetics of, say, photography and found materials. Its gestures are small but precise. Its mode is allegorical rather than symbolic or pedagogical (or pedantic and knowing). So when Roldán unveils a slate of colourful canvases and a series of incised and partly painted sculptures crafted from wooden hat blocks, one feels compelled to ask what he is after, because whatever it is

must be other than what one might get from painting alone. The title of Roldán’s show, and of all of the works in it, offers a clue. ‘Eidola’ is the Greek word for images. Artists of all sorts, but painters in particular, are in the business of producing images. And never more so than today, when one young artist after another appears to be making two-dimensional work tailored for sharing on Instagram. The deeply considered canvas would then be one of the primary modes of painting today that resists this easy translation into reduced dimensionality. Talk to any artist and one will quickly hear that colour and texture, that depth and ‘feel’, can’t be found in the digital image, and these are the things that the considered canvas is after. A slower pace. A more present perception. But again, is that what Roldán is after? On the evidence, it’s not. The best paintings in this show court the image world even as they self-consciously challenge that world’s legibility. These are the works where we see gestures of shade and highlight, passages of paint that suggest a surface shimmer. Because these effects are depicted, we can see how Roldán must have

been looking at something without wanting to give us that something itself. The weaker works go too far in the direction of content. For example, works that evoke a pink pin ﬂag on a golf course, or a slice of cake. Or they go too far in the direction of self-conscious abstraction, as when a ﬁeld of muddy black paint gets a fussy hash-stroke texturing. The hat-block sculptures, though lovely to look at, don’t carry the conceptual nuance that we can see Roldán trying to work out in the paintings. That the blocks are ‘images’ of the hats they once helped to shape is obvious, and the colourfully painted strips of canvas that have been glued onto their cut surfaces, as if to suggest that these moulds’ interiors are more interesting, more lively, than their plain wooden exteriors initially reveal, do little to overcome their character as aesthetic curiosities. There is enough earnest engagement with material and pictorial abstraction here to satisfy any hater of art that has nuzzled too close to the conceptual gesture or the digital abyss. But there are ideas here too, and it’s to Roldán’s credit that we are only given a shimmering image of them. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Eidola, 2015, oil on canvas applied to wood, dimensions variable. Photo: Arturo Sanchez. Courtesy the artist and Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York

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Elizabeth Orr Loss Lead Bodega, New York 4 April – 3 May Elizabeth Orr’s Loss Lead is named after a seemingly counterintuitive marketing strategy that reduces the price – and proﬁtability – of one item to spur sales of another. Bananas at a grocery store are one example; they’re usually priced below cost and placed far from an entrance, with the hope that customers will be lured deep into the store and enticed to buy other, surrounding things. Live shows at a casino are another. They’re usually unproﬁtable, though they offer patrons the opportunity to gamble before and after the show, which is when real money is made. Is there, then, a loss lead of Loss Lead? Perhaps it’s the strawberry yogurt, which coats a glass pane forming part of the installation Projected Return (all works 2015), a big, ridiculous, arrowshaped tabletop pointing to nowhere but the wall. (Apparently in Sweden they actually frost glass with yogurt.) In Projected Return, the yogurt

looks like it was factory-made, not applied directly by Orr. But really, this is beside the point. Loss lead is used here as a crutch to parody corporate marketing strategies and their administrative aesthetics. The arrow is one example. It’s inset with different-sized glass panes that look like the kind that separate sad, queuing masses from bank tellers, or the angled glass of presidential teleprompters. The arrow also makes an appearance as a misbehaving cartoon character in the video Gaussian Catharsis. It ﬂoats back and forth across the screen taunting the work’s frustrated human protagonist, who squares off with it on a sidewalk in Albany, New York. The pleasure of Loss Lead is the way Orr makes an abstract muck of her references. Ghost Posture is simply a tall piece of bronze glass, inset into a Formica base that could be a cross between a pig trough and a cheap upside-down desk.

In the video Loss Lead, the term is defined with jargon about ‘strategic meditation in the workplace’ and ‘predicted future returns’. The video is set in a high-floor conference room in the New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters. The camera lingers lovingly on a Poland Spring water bottle, pans over sleek if generically contemporary office furniture and keenly makes one aware that it’s high over the city, not down in its streets. This elitist separatism is reinforced choreographically in one of the video’s best sequences: the three actors in Loss Lead all turn at once to walk towards the room’s floor-toceiling glass windows, like modern-day flaneurs taking in the city from their privileged positions high, high above it. It’s these stylistic overtures to class that make Loss Lead interesting. I wish there were more of them. In Orr’s hands, they’re especially canny. David Everitt Howe

Projected Return, 2015, glass, Formica, ﬂavoured yogurt, foam, steel, 36 × 72 × 12 cm. Courtesy Bodega, New York

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Hank Willis Thomas Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915–2015 Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th and West 24th streets, New York 10 April – 23 May When on 12 January 1915 the us Congress voted to reject a constitutional right to vote for women, Representative Stanley Bowdle of Ohio made a speech. ‘[Women’s] beauty is disturbing to business; their feet are beautiful; their ankles are beautiful, but here I must pause – for they are not interested in the state.’ The vote was a minor setback for suffragettes – women eventually gained the franchise in 1920 – but it is an apt beginning for Hank Willis Thomas’s Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915–2015, an exhibition that explores the use of the white female form to sell products. Arranged chronologically in Jack Shainman’s two Chelsea galleries, each of the works in this exhibition represents a single year in the 100-year span designated in the show’s title. Each work begins with an advertisement, which Willis strips of its original branding and text, and then adds his own titles. His intended message is usually trite. There’s no hiding from it, 1982/2015 (all works 2015) depicts a beautiful woman’s face split in half: on one side she is youthful, and on the other covered in wrinkles. (Fear of ageing sells products! Who doesn’t know that?) You’ll never

guess our deep, dark, delicious secret, 1984/2015 reflects the subject position of the artist, who is a black American male. In the work, a white model holds the index finger of her right hand up to her lips; in her left, she clutches a melting chocolate popsicle. As individual pieces, Thomas’s works lack the grotesque punch of, say, Mark Bradford’s collages. His digital chromogenic prints read as grainy and flat, like reproductions one might easily find at a poster sale on a college campus. It is only when they are seen together that they have power. And what they reveal is terrifying. As much as we think that women have made advancements towards equality with men in the past century, the way we have been and continue to be depicted in advertisements reflects the opposite. In the images from the early twentieth century, women are generally depicted as having some sort of set role: they serve, they mother, they are kind to disabled soldiers, they dance, they even drive. The epoch of their empowerment arrives during the Second World War, when capable, fully clothed females transmit virtues

You’ll never guess our deep, dark, delicious secret, 1984/2015, 2015, digital c-print, 117 × 102 cm, edition 1 of 3 + 2ap. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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such as bravery, sacrifice and industriousness. But she has other important uses as well, 1944/2015 depicts a pretty woman wearing a bandana, and working in a metal factory, for example. Starting in 1952 with Only in America… 1952/2015, an image that depicts a Miss America type in a red skirt and bra, females are pictured partially disrobed and stay that way until, in the 1990s, they are naked. Stripped not only of their dignity but also of any profession, women become nothing but sex objects. Obsession for men, 1994/2015 shows Kate Moss lying facedown on a couch, her ass just waiting for someone to lay something on top of it. Women are redeemed somewhat in the 2000s: She keeps me warm, 2014/2015 shows two fully clothed women taking a selfie. But Thomas takes care to rip down any illusions of progress with Just as our Forefathers intended, 2015/2015, which depicts a parade of bikini-clad Sports Illustrated models floating on a barge with two pickup trucks in a bay full of melting icebergs. It’s a vision of the future of which women are well served to be reminded – in this case, by a black male, whose kind is also losing the battle for equality. Brienne Walsh

Brian Maguire The Absence of Justice Demands This Act Fergus McCaffrey, New York 5 March – 25 April An Irish painter with a nose for social engagement, Brian Maguire has worked on and off in Juárez, Mexico, since 2010. Here 14 largeand medium-scale canvases – just a portion of his labours, featuring open brushstrokes and rough paint handling – scour exploitation from the representations of victims of grisly narcoviolence while inevitably leaving guilt and rubbernecked voyeurism intact. Constituting a thoughtful yet shocking painter’s report from hell – once the murder capital of the world, Juárez has recently been demoted to 27th most violent city – these works don’t merely express outrage or solidarity; they also capture this excellent painter’s struggle to bring urgent stories of extreme inhumanity to life. An artist who is, at once, perfectly cognisant of the need to make convincing paintings, but also of the importance of avoiding manipulation with regard to his difficult subject matter, Maguire confects a painterly aesthetic that is equal parts age-old realist and contemporaryexpressionist. Echoes of Édouard Manet,

Max Beckmann and George Grosz abound, as do likenesses to certain stylistic contemporaries, such as Martin Kippenberger, Francesco Clemente and Marlene Dumas. Characterised by drips, figurative simplifications and studiedly messy paint application, the sixty-four-year-old artist’s canvases also feature flat areas of vibrant colour. Another of Maguire’s successful tropes is leaving swathes of his larger paintings seemingly unfinished. Where familiar shapes and contours leave off, the viewer imagines scenes, atmospheres and conversations cut short with abrupt finality. Maguire’s painterly elisions include a pile of brown and black submachine guns that accrue in the manner of impressionistic daubs, as well as the blurry likeness of an impressively large seizure of us greenbacks. Both pictures point to these canvases’ original source material: photographic images found on the web or in articles from Mexico’s yellow press. A third painting based on a found photograph, Police Graduation, Juárez (2014), features several rows of Mexican police cadets giving the institution’s

straight-armed ‘Roman salute’. Maguire paints all but one of the cadets’ heads and bodies white, shrouding the ﬁgures in the deadening anonymity engendered by epidemic violence. Important with respect to this last picture is its similarity to a speciﬁc example of French history painting: Manet’s serial versions of The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (painted between 1867 and 1869). A source with equally tragic Mexican lineage, Maguire’s reference to Manet’s canvases serves to point up just how different his representations are from the Frenchman’s memorialising effort. Manet’s compositions offer a coolly ambiguous depiction of a single gruesome act; Maguire’s multiple paintings, which include images of bodies and limbs stacked up like cordwood, are trying to represent mass murder. Created after the advent of photography, Manet’s works celebrated the new invention’s detachment. Maguire, on the other hand, uses painting’s slower pace to battle the desensitising that comes with our contemporary image glut. Christian Viveros-Fauné

The Absence of Justice Demands This Act, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey, New York

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Josephine Pryde lapses in Thinking By the person i Am cca Wattis Institute, San Francisco 5 May – 1 August We all know that Random International’s Rain Room (2012), drawing crowds most recently at moma, and Carsten Höller’s slides, two of which are currently installed at the Hayward Gallery, signal the end of days for art. Or at least that’s the established view among the cognoscenti. Hands-on experiences in art galleries, the argument goes, turn the brain off. Josephine Pryde’s exhibition at cca Wattis is both interactive and intellectual. In fact, it might be understood as a distinctly ironic send-up – there’s a little train! And you can ride on it as it choochoos around the gallery! – of those kinds of fun, participatory artworks that get families queuing at the museums. Pryde’s train, a realistic 1:10 scale model of a Union Paciﬁc freight locomotive pulling two graffitied boxcars, is not a happy engine. Titled The Hungry Messenger (2015), it can be operated to trundle at a sedate pace from one end of a U-shaped track to the other, before it reverses dolefully back again. A concealed speaker emits

engine noises and whistle blasts. For visitors who choose to sit on the pads atop the boxcars as it completes its Sisyphean journey, it is a confounding and bathetic experience. While riding, viewers roll by a row of 19 evenly spaced photographs, each showing a woman’s hands touching something. The pictures are cropped to remove heads, so they might show one woman or many, Pryde or a model. In about half of the images, the object being handled is an example of touch-sensitive technology: smartphones, tablets, or – in two pictures – a touch-sensitive, dimmable lamp. These are interspersed, as titles such as Gift für Mich, Galerie Neu Christmas 2014 (1) (2015) explain, with photographs of hands holding gifts to the artist from her dealers. To force connections between these discrete artworks would be crass and disrespectful. Pryde is a subtle and evasive meaning-maker. However, to the meditative passenger, certain rhythms make themselves felt. The notion that

touch, in our present technological moment, is itself a form of thinking – or seeing – is suggested in these (untouchable, glazed) photographs and then complicated by the touchable and old-fashioned train, one that itself has been touched by the spray cans of imaginary, miniature taggers. In this the train becomes a conveyor of language, a hulking, primitive message-board that sends words to their unseen destination. To ride The Hungry Messenger is to surrender control, just as receiving gifts, or slick photographic images, or information from a smartphone all require certain kinds of surrender. Pryde’s photographs seem to allude to those states of mind in which, through opening ourselves to one kind of data, we ﬁnd ourselves letting in another kind instead – moments such as gazing out a train window, looking at the landscape, scrolling through emails, while thinking about something else entirely. Jonathan Griffin

lapses in Thinking By the person i Am, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Johnna Arnold. Courtesy cca Wattis Institute, San Francisco

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Francis Alÿs Relato de Una Negociación Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City 26 March – 16 August Francis Alÿs is an artist who crosses borders both real and metaphoric: a Belgian in Mexico; an artist among soldiers; an adult among children; a skinny Quixote who battles dust tornadoes and crosses and redraws the lines that divide us – the borders between reality and representation, between violence and poetry and between dreaming and re-signification. In this show – and in a sister exhibition, Hotel Juárez, at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros – Alÿs’s first in his adopted hometown in years, the leitmotif of the horizon serves as a stand-in for the mirage, mirror and actual dividing line that is the border. Throughout the Museo Tamayo show, the walls are thoughtfully painted in pastels akin to the soft colours of Alÿs’s paintings – one colour for each project – with the bottom half in gloss and the top half in matt. This tenuous line becomes a reminder of the horizon, the unattainable border – a limit – but also echoes the institutional paint deployed on school walls throughout Mexico, serving as a symbol for the children present in many of his works. This show reveals that it is incorrect to speak of Alÿs’s pieces as ‘works’; they are all process-projects – ‘poetic-political-pictoric’, as Cuauhtémoc Medina, the exhibition’s curator, defines them. While his major touring retrospective A Story of Deception – which commenced in 2010 at Tate Modern, London – positioned the paintings and the poetic-performative works

as more distinct from one another, here the paintings are part of a larger process. Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (2008) is a project in two episodes, the first of which, Bridge (2005), consisted of building a bridge of boats between Cuba and Key West, and the second, the truly poetic-political Gibraltar (2008), saw two sets of children, one in Tarifa, Spain, another in Tangier, Morocco, march into the narrow Gibraltar Strait holding detailed and beautiful small boats made from flip-flops, sandals and babouches. The entire project was documented partly in paintings, many of which resemble medieval miracle paintings, maps, notes, and also in a two-channel video installation. The powerful commentary of this piece at a moment when thousands of migrants are drowning trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe, and the way the little embarcation sculptures are displayed in a line, with a mirror on one end symbolising the horizon, is worth a thousand op-eds. And yet Alÿs does not hide behind poetic licence. Rather his thought process takes an aesthetic turn when moving from a concrete political situation to the miragelike quality of dreams, or from the adult world into child’s play. His process is both diaphanous and researchheavy, suffering many alterations, as revealed by the studies (sketches, maps, drawings, maquettes, often as beautiful as the ‘final’ result) included here.

Alÿs’s body is often implicated; he is part of the work at all times. In his project chasing tornadoes outside Mexico City (Tornado, 2000–10) he seeks to inhabit that chimerical horizon at which total chaos meets total peace in a desolate yet bloodstained landscape. In reel-unreel (2011) – and related paintings made after being embedded as an artist with British troops in Afghanistan – Alÿs undertook a rigorous reflection on the status of the image in Afghanistan (in media, as hypermediated; and in religion, as iconoclastic), incarnated in the film work by another popular children’s game: that of pushing a hoop – replaced by a film reel – with a stick. At the very start of the show is a painting of greenery, a jungle perhaps, sawed through by Alÿs before the exhibition opened, days after Islamic State militants destroyed the ancient site of Hatra in Iraq – another timely reflection not just on art and iconoclasm but also on the lines dividing innocence and violence, nature and artifice, real and unreal. To tie this show to Hotel Juárez, there are lines in pink and blue paint the artist leaked from one museum to the other across the neighbourhood (a link, too, to his piece Green Line, made in Jerusalem in 2004), as though the sawed-through painting at the beginning of the Tamayo exhibition had bled out paint to lead us to the next point on the map of Alÿs’s horizons. Gabriela Jauregui

Don’t Cross the Bridge before you get to the River (detail), 2008, photographic documentation and video of an action, Strait of Gibraltar, in collaboration with Julien Devaux, Rafael Ortega, Felix Blume, Ivan Bocara, Jimena Blasquez, Roberto Rubalcava, Begoña Rey, Abbas Benhnin and children from Tarifa, Spain, and Tangier, Morocco. Photo: Roberto Rubalcava. Courtesy Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City

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Cao Guimarães Depois Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo 7 April – 6 June In preparation for a new book (Cao, published in Brazil this year by Cosac Naify), the Minas Gerais artist Cao Guimarães found himself sifting through year upon year’s worth of work both finished and unfinished, forgotten and vividly remembered. Works whose existence and reemergence spoke of memory and forgetfulness, the past as unfamiliar terrain and our reencounter with it as strangers, years down the line. For Depois (Afterwards), Guimarães, who has made his career mainly in video art, with some photography, has collected select archival works into four new series, in a process combining elements of cataloguing and editing as well as the rearticulation of works that have become, as a result of the distance imparted by the years, almost akin to found objects. Drawn from images captured over the last three decades but presented here as newly conceived works (hence the 2015 date throughout), the sets of photographs are shown alongside a similarly formulated videowork, Hotel Palace. The short film pairs footage of a decaying

grand hotel in Minas Gerais with the audio of an elderly man’s voice – the latter part of a study by Guimarães on old age – in which he reads out a list of all the nicknames he has ever heard, a litany accompanied by images of antique chandeliers, empty, expectant breakfast rooms and half-abandoned hotel hallways. He lists name after name, digressing occasionally to recall the people who bore them. “‘Canelones’ – sou eu!” he exclaims; “‘Canelones’: that’s me!” – while onscreen, a swathe of well-kept but worn red carpet zigzags neatly down a carved wooden stairway. In the photo series Plano de Vôo (Flight Plan), sharply delineated avian footprints track back, forth and around in the sand like tiny aeroplanes in single ﬁle, with apparently no destination other than the imperative to move, perhaps to survive. And in the 14 black-and-white photographs of the photo series Steps, closeup images of human footprints register the real comings and goings on a busy construction site, in which purposeful tracks made by sturdy-looking boots and shoes cross paths with the similarly

purposeful, cross-hatched soles of Brazil’s iconic Havaiana flip-flops, the footwear of necessity for millions of Brazilian workers. It’s in that closeup, eyes-to-the-ground sensibility that Guimarães’s most powerful poetics lie, epitomised in Steps and Plano de Vôo, but above all in the series Ilhas (Islands). Here, four colour photos capture fallen leaves lying delicately on a stone floor, each surrounded by a broad, dark patch of moisture. The haloes of humidity seem to radiate from the organic matter; but they are in fact the result of a dryness encroaching, as vestiges of a rain shower evaporate, eating away at the damp around the leaves and replacing it with minute tidal marks of washed-up sand and grit. Far from being pulsing, active entities exerting their presence on surroundings, as they seem at first sight, the tiny leaf islands, like scraps of memory, possess only the quiet, ephemeral persistence of that which has endured, as the rest evaporates – but emerge nonetheless as vivid, newly faceted and newly meaningful gems. Claire Rigby

Untitled, from the Steps series, 2015, colour digital photograph, 75 × 50 cm, edition 2 of 5 + 2ap. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro

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Kyle Morland Node Blank Projects, Cape Town 5 March – 4 April “They bounce,” Jonathan Garnham, founder of Blank Projects, says, grabbing one of Kyle Morland’s awkwardly crumpled, colourful mild steel sculptures and pulling it down with a really frightening force. And not only do Morland’s sculptures in the exhibition Node bounce, with a vigour that sets one’s nerves on edge, but there is a humour to them – while not bouncing – that breaks their masculine formal statement. There is something whimsical about Moreland’s work: there always has been. When he graduated six years ago I was told that I should go and see his installation because it was ‘funny’. Sadly, despite several attempts to see it, at Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, each time I went, the door to his room was locked. At one point I began to wonder if that was the joke, but it turned out to be just bad luck on my part. However, a year or so later I did see, at the Joburg Art Fair, his bronze sculpture of a pile of excrement, whose shape was informed by, as the title stated, the Fibonacci Spiral (2011).

Morland’s early works were playful in a manner that is quite different from his current way of working. In fact, at times it is hard to know if Morland is interested in humour at all. Or whether in these haphazard lines of steel he is taking formalist or modernist concerns simply at face value. He would not be alone in this if he did. Many young white male sculptors and painters seem eager to move away from politically and socially motivated art towards a less prescriptive formalism. From Zander Blom to Jan-Henri Booyens to Rodan Kane Hart, there is a steady trail of South African artists who seem to want, in Blom’s word, to ‘play’ with the great Postimpressionists. However, Morland’s art contains something different to the works of those artists mentioned above. His outcomes are objects that are distinct in their large scale and at times their failure. 130_16 5.2 9.3 (2015), for example, is supported on the ﬂoor by a jury-rigged wooden wedge.

What is more, these works are not created in the terms handed down by academia ‘to activate the space’, but rather they tend towards deactivating it by their size and the awkwardness of their construction and placement. Yet 130_16 5.2 9.3 and 225/8 5.0 7.2 (2015) are not the result of frivolous acts, either. The intense workmanship and study that Morland personally puts into their creation – there is a process room adjacent ﬁlled with calculations – goes someway to expressing the real interest he has in steel’s formal properties and its potential. It would be hard to argue that there is anything overtly political being stated here, but there is something helpless about Morland’s work that seems to ring an almost satirical chord. This perhaps explains how a gallerist can say about them, with a degree of real joy, ‘they bounce’ rather than ‘he is greatly inﬂuenced by the works of Matisse’. Matthew Blackman

130_16 5.2 9.3, 2015, mild steel, timber wedge, zinc metal spray and topcoat, 228 × 115 × 155 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blank Projects, Cape Town

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ArtReview

Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory by Nick Jones Routledge, £85/$140 (hardcover)

When action occurs, it occurs in a space. Just how important is that space to the action that it contains? Very, says a growing body of social-science theory gathered under the banner of ‘the spatial turn’. As the title subtly implies, Nick Jones’s Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory takes the spatial turn into the Odeon and applies it to the blockbusting, bone-crunching, explosionoutrunning realm of the Schwarzeneggers, Cruises and Damons. This is not an oblique, back-alley meander. As Jones convincingly argues, the action sequences that are the main attraction of these ﬁlms are characterised by their use of space. Furthermore, these sequences illuminate and explore the spaces round us in revealing ways: ‘Space becomes impossible to ignore in moments of cinematic action, as routine is interrupted and attention is drawn to the possibilities and threats of the surrounding environment.’ Action cinema ‘displays the intrinsic and undeniable importance of space’. The theoretical framework Jones uses draws on Fredric Jameson’s ‘postmodernity’ and Marc Augé’s ‘hypermodernity’, among others, but its chief touchstones are Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974) and Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). And while the book is steeped in theory – as you’d expect – Jones does an admirable job of keeping the writing pithy and open.

Indeed, the book is a memorable rampage of insight and unexpected connection. On to the excitement, beginning with an analysis of the way action sequences (mis)treat iconic architecture and landmarks. These set pieces – such as the gunfight at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York in The International (2009) – are ‘closely attuned to the particulars of space’, and ‘strongly tie themselves to the particular locations in which they take place’. The curving ramp of the Guggenheim rotunda is integral to Clive Owen’s game of cat-and-mouse with the gunmen out to kill him – it enables and defines the whole scene. The heavily armed duellists must become spatially aware and turn the environment to their advantage: in the end, Owen triumphs by ‘spatial alteration’, sending a chandelier crashing onto assassins cutting off his escape. Similarly, in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), Tom Cruise improvises with the raw material of Dubai’s 163-storey Burj Khalifa: ‘The glass windows become a mode of transportation, a fire hose becomes a rope and the folds of the architecture become springboards. He is not using the building as its designers and owners intended but in a way that serves his own goals.’ One effect is to ‘flesh out’ this icon, applying the human scale to a gigantic building that does not obviously conform to human proportions.

Jones presents all this improvisation as analogous to de Certeau’s description of the individual resisting the city and the impersonal forces that have shaped it by ﬁnding his or her own way through its streets: ‘The action protagonist takes the tactical actions of the pedestrian – usually hidden and slight – and brings them up to the level of the skyline, the space of strategies and control.’ The Bourne trilogy (2002–07), by contrast, unfolds across anonymised, globalised, abstract spaces, and Matt Damon gives their communications networks and surveillance grids the same treatment Cruise give the Burj – in the process, stripping off their mask of neutrality and functionality, revealing conduits of state terror. In the ﬁnal third of the book, Jones moves to look at the ‘paraspaces’ of dream and imagination in Inception (2010) and Sucker Punch (2011), and then – importantly – on to portrayals of cyberspace and the inner worlds of the computer and the network. Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory is part of Routledge’s ‘Advances in Film Studies’ series and has the price and availability only too common in academic publishing: an eye-watering £85 (£80.75 on Kindle), just shy of 50p per page. If that’s too much buck per bang, request it at the institutional library of your choice, and let’s hope for a future repackaging aimed more at the multiplex crowd. Will Wiles

Art Workers: Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice edited by Erik Krikortz, Airi Triisberg and Minna Henriksson Lugemik, €10 (softcover), or free download at art-workers.org

Despite its somewhat academic title, Art Workers… seeks to locate art and its institutions within the realities of everyday economic life in the Western world (although given that the book is the product of artist groups operating in Estonia, Finland and Sweden, one might argue that it is about the peripheries of that world). On the one hand it can be seen as symptomatic of art’s attempt to align itself with the wider working movement. On the other hand it’s an expression of discontent with the way many art institutions and art systems work. As such the book is divided into two parts: the ﬁrst dealing with the particular conditions of artists in the three case-study countries; the second locating that in a broader context of labour struggle and art’s engagement with it – from the Paris Commune of 1871, to the Call Against Zero Wage movement

in Prague during the early years of the current decade. While the initial texts are rooted in local context, this book manages to highlight many of the key existential issues facing art and artists wherever they live or operate today. At their core, the texts collected here argue that artists shouldn’t be made to pay in order to produce and show their work, and that they should be fairly rewarded by those who proﬁt (both materially and immaterially) from that work. Sounds like a no-brainer. And yet the collection also highlights many of the contradictions inherent in such demands. For example, if artists wish to protect their freedom and independence, then campaigning for state regulation of art’s labour markets, and, beyond that, for state support – with all that comes with it – seems counterproductive. And yet without this,

Summer 2015

the pressure to cater to the demands of the art market can become all-consuming and produce artwork that is standardised. The underlying argument here, of course, is that art has a valuable contribution to make to society and is therefore something society should invest in. And it’s in arguing for this that the collection is perhaps a little weak. Too often art’s value is articulated through the way it is exploited by others (using artist studios and galleries to gentrify rundown neighbourhoods, say) rather than the positive impact art can have in expressing alternative thinking, a diversity of ideas and opinions, and the beneﬁts that come with that. It’s precisely for these reasons that the alignment of art and workers’ movements can be a productive one. Mark Rappolt

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Headless: A Novel by K.D. Triple Canopy/Sternberg Press/Tensta Konsthall, $25 (softcover)

While few veriﬁable details are known of Georges Bataille’s notorious Acéphale (‘headless’) group, its urban myth continues to exert a historical legacy. A secretive outgrowth of his Collège de Sociologie dedicated to medieval rites and the potentials of human sacriﬁce, the Acéphale instantiated Bataille’s interwar theories of a ‘community without community’. In Headless, a Byzantine metatext and satire indebted to Bataille’s transgressive and occasionally conspiratorial theory, the spectre of the Acéphale inspires a murder mystery set in the postrecession art market of the 2010s. Behind the authorial persona of K.D., Headless also represents the most ambitious undertaking yet by literary magazine publisher Triple Canopy, a Brooklyn-based collective whose experimental e-books have challenged the contemporary novel’s relationship to web-time and the visual literacy with which literature must contend. At the nexus of Headless’s knotty diegesis is cipher-turned-protagonist John Barlow, a Cambridge graduate and writer manqué whose work as an author-for-hire leads him to an assignment for the nebulous Scandi art collective Goldin+Senneby. G+S, who are ostensibly modelled on performance ‘supergroups’ like Bernadette Corporation and Claire Fontaine, have instigated a long-term ‘project’ on the identity of Headless, Ltd, an offshore corporation managed by the cheekily named Sovereign Trust – though the extent of its efforts are unclear.

What begins as a basic freelance assignment turns dangerous when an Interpol agent approaches Barlow with a photograph of a decapitation linked to Sovereign. Thereafter, Barlow’s task of determining Headless’s provenance is complicated as his role of guardian of the ‘real’ and narrative worlds of the novel becomes the grist of G+S’s own performance and colloquia; a status compromised when a conspiracy of secondary characters, including a hit man, the beheading victim, an art historian and the Nabokovian/Borgesian interloper – K.D. herself – begin to challenge him for the position of author of the novel. ‘In general, mass-market fiction is not about the production of mass-market fiction,’ Barlow explains to Triple Canopy editor Alexander Provan in the introduction. ‘Perhaps Headless is commercial fiction for lovers of conceptual art who are also fans of gut-wrenching, keeps-youon-the-edge-of-your-seat thrillers.’ Such a conceit mines much the same territory as Bernadette’s Reena Spaulings (2004) or even Bret Easton Ellis’s outrageous Glamorama (1998), merging the metaphysical detective story with a sardonic jab at the self-referential preoccupation of art criticism and vanity exhibitions, as they become appendages of hyperspeculative forces, both financial and hermeneutic. What, then, is the responsibility of an artworld in which antiquated values such as ‘meaning’ and ‘representation’ are traded with the speed of transnational currency markets?

Neither Barlow nor G+S, nor the shifting cast of intellectuals and patrons of Headless’s parodic artworld seem interested or capable of turning away from the conspiratorial morass that ensures their professional survival. In a particularly Pynchonesque lampoon of the mfa excursus, a roundtable of insufferable critics and celebrity artists (some thinly veiled caricatures of real-life figures) are assembled like a cabal of supervillains to take part in a talk on ‘site and non-site’, an event that g+s have amusingly chosen to emcee in absentia. Underlying the discursive elitism and conceptual ‘liquidity’ of the artworld is, as the scene implies, a synergy between academia and finance, whose conspiracy is consistently obscured by the diversionary pleasures of ‘watered down’ theory. These suspicions are confirmed, when, in a recurring trope, all analyses of Acéphale require the characters’ use of Google as a primary source. Does the secret of the offshore Headless, Ltd, and its potential connection to Acéphale represent a transcendental signified, a semiotic key to unravelling and evaluating the ontological riddles presented by these artworld carneys, or is it the very conspiracy ensuring the artworld’s virtual displacement? By the novel’s end, Barlow’s quest to uncover Bataille’s credulous ‘community without community’ seems nothing but a fever dream under the influence of the hypercapitalist present. The crime the reader is left to solve is not the decapitation of the artist but the murder of the artworld itself. Erik Morse

Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art by John Sharp mit Press, £13.95/$19.95 (hardcover)

It is with characteristic candour that John Sharp dedicates portions of this book’s closing pages to laying out shortcomings in the fields it examines: ‘The interactions of games and art are littered with … missed opportunities’ he notes. Works of Game keeps its focus tight and largely within the sphere of videogames, examining phenomena Sharp identifies as ‘game art’, ‘artgames’ and ‘artists’ games’ – though within the period of the book’s writing, the first two of these have (according to the author), respectively, ground to a halt and become ‘even more a cul-de-sac inside the marginalized world of media art than it was before.’ The overlap between the world of art and games, then, is revealed as a fragile space – as a professor of games at Parsons with a background

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in art history Sharp has a foot in each camp, and ﬁnds himself somewhat in the position of a man with two beloved friends whom he wishes would ﬁnd common ground. Visiting the New Museum’s 2009 Younger Than Jesus generational he wrestles studiously with Mark Essen’s Flywrench (2007) video game, explaining that the artworld will not ‘get’ artist games without gaming literacy (and, implicitly, determination). Discussing the artgames (auteur-esque videogames that subvert the ludic qualities of the medium) of Jason Rohrer he acknowledges both the modesty of the gaming and a conservative social rhetoric not commonplace in the artworld. For all his frankness, there is one glaring issue from which Sharp shies away. To a gameliterate audience used to the lush graphics

ArtReview

and sophisticated interaction of Destiny, Grand Theft Auto V or BioShock Infinite, the videogamerelated works of artists such as Cory Arcangel function within the field of amusing nostalgia – of the games laboriously hacked for his Various Self Playing Bowling Games (2011) the most recent (as listed in Works of Game) was already a decade old – rather than gaming actual. For the artworld to address the videogame – as subject or as medium – on equal footing would require vast technical investment or a significant shift in available technology. It is notable that the most compelling artist game that Sharp examines – Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman’s Sixteen Tons (2010) – functions entirely in real (rather than video) space. Hettie Judah

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Geta Brătescu in her Bucharest studio, April 2015. Photo: Ștefan Sava

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For more on Woodrow Phoenix, see overleaf

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Contributors

Helen Sumpter

Sarah Jilani

Contributing Writers

studied ﬁne art and writing & publishing at Middlesex University and has been writing about contemporary art and artists for both the mainstream press and art publications for over 20 years. She was deputy visual arts editor at Time Out London for seven years and is currently senior and web editor at ArtReview. This month she travelled to Bucharest to meet eighty-nine-year-old Romanian artist Geta Brătescu. For further viewing and reading she suggests the Nicholas Brothers’ tap-dancing scene from the 1943 ﬁlm Stormy Weather and Patrick Harpur’s 2009 book The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination.

is a Turkish-British freelance writer and artist currently based in London. She is a recent graduate of the MSt in English from the University of Oxford. Her interdisciplinary ﬁlm/literature research has been published in peer-reviewed journals Senses of Cinema, Life Writing and Postgraduate English, and her arts writing in Aesthetica and Apollo magazines. Having found the Ali Emir Tapan show she reviewed for this issue to be quite disconnected from any one overarching debate or culture, but nevertheless fascinating in its atmosphere and preoccupation with making the familiar strange through natural materials, she suggests that Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) might be an appropriate accompaniment.

Sean Ashton, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Matthew Blackman, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Luke Clancy, Matthew Collings, Gabriel Coxhead, Stephanie Cristello, Daniel Elsea, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Gabriela Jauregui, Sarah Jilani, Maria Lind, Erik Morse, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Laura Oldﬁeld Ford, Lucas Ospina, Barbara Piwowarska, Mark Prince, John Quin, Claire Rigby, Sherman Sam, Ed Schad, Sam Steverlynck, Susannah Thompson, Dan Udy, Christian ViverosFauné, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Will Wiles, Clara Young

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

Contributing Editors is an independent curator and biotechnologist based in Berlin. He is the founder and artistic director of the art space savvy Contemporary, Berlin, and editorin-chief of savvy Journal for Critical Texts on Contemporary African Art. His recent curatorial projects include exhibitions with Satch Hoyt and Ilja Karilampi at Galerie Wedding, Berlin, in 2015; If You Are So Smart, Why Ain’t You Rich?, a parallel project of the 2014 Marrakech Biennale and The Ultimate Capital Is the Sun, nGbK, Berlin, in 2014. He is cocurator of the yearlong art project An Age of Our Own Making for ‘Images 2016’ in Holbæk, Roskilde and Copenhagen. Ndikung has lectured internationally on critical theory and curatorial practice. He is currently adjunct professor of postcolonial theory and art at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel. This month he writes an opinion piece on the Belgium Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. He recommends the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organisation retrospective, showing as part of Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures exhibition at the Biennale.

Paul Gravett is a London-based comics activist and curator, for whom Buenos Aires has long been a dream destination. In April he was invited to attend the city’s Encuentro de la Palabra, a free multi-arts lit-fest. As well as meeting some of the brightest sparks in Argentine comics, he explored their history in the Cartoon Museum, the Biblioteca Nacional’s archive of Historieta y Humor Gráfico and numerous secondhand stores. Best find: an original Patoruzú (1928–77) newspaper strip. This August, he visits São Paulo to give a conference keynote at the 3rd Jornadas Internacionais de Histórias em Quadrinhos. Among the mind-expanding graphic novels on his reading table are Barbara Yelin’s Irmina (2014), evoking the relationship between a black Oxford student and a German woman amid the rise of fascism, and Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening (2015) on ways of seeing, the first PhD awarded to a dissertation in comics form.

Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Woodrow Phoenix, Ștefan Sava

Woodrow Phoenix (preceding pages)

Few creators have been stretching the capacities of comics to fully involve the reader as persistently as London-based Woodrow Phoenix. From his New Wave roots in the Fast Fiction collective and the uk’s small-press scene of the early 1980s, through such genre mashups as Sinister Romance (1988) or Sugar Buzz (1998), Phoenix keeps setting himself challenges to reﬁne and redeﬁne the medium. This skill is illustrated in his standout graphic documentary Rumble Strip (2008), subtitled If you want to get away with murder, buy a car. Phoenix asks us to open the blind eye we seem to take to road deaths, which, reframed as ‘car accidents’, have become the almost acceptable price of our glamorised life behind the wheel. From his experience working on health education comics, Phoenix was aware of the problem of readers being unable to identify with a preset protagonist. “If you don’t like the main character, then it’s difficult to get into the story or feel like it relates to you. Removing any visual anchors

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makes a space for the reader to project themselves into that narrative,” he says. In Rumble Strip, Phoenix positions his verbal commentary centre stage inside the panels, so that they become an internal monologue apparently pouring from the reader’s own mind. Looking out through the windscreen and through the eyes of this unseen, unspeciﬁed Everydriver, this is comics at their most subjective. Emptied of other road users, Rumble Strip’s streetscape promises the ultimate solo ego-driven experience, the stuff of Top Gear fantasies and mounting fatalities. In She Lives (2014), Phoenix entrusts the reader with his original artwork, on heavy 220gsm Fabriano paper, sewn and bound by hand into a hardcover tome nearly 1sqm and in an edition of one. Typically, reading comics is a solitary act, but the scale and uniqueness of She Lives demands that it be read as a tactile, physical interaction shared live with others and with its creator. “It has been fascinating to observe

ArtReview

people responding to the narrative in real time, which is an experience like theatre.” For ‘Numbers’, his new Strip for ArtReview, Phoenix turns to the issue of how and how much we can identify with the victims of massacres by naming and showing the people killed at Garissa College, Kenya, by Islamic militants in April this year. “I thought it was vital precisely because you are unlikely to have seen their faces. It’s telling that the list of everyone who died there, plus the few photos gathered from friends or families, were much harder to ﬁnd online than for the Paris victims. They are staring right at you because, again, I want you to feel directly engaged by them. These are ordinary people who died for no reason. It could have been you.” Phoenix is seeking to make comics more effective as, to use his description, “empathy generators”. His goal is “to keep experimenting with narrative forms, with ﬁnding the best or most involving ways to present stories.” Paul Gravett

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Photo credits on the cover and pages 88–9, 157 photography by Ștefan Sava on page 154 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 162 photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

Summer 2015

Phrases on the spine (a headline from the January 1963 issue of Man’s Story) and on pages 35 (a headline from the February 1959 issue of Man’s Illustrated), 83 (a headline from the March 1963 issue of Man’s Exploits) and 123 (a headline from the March 1967 issue of For Men Only) are taken from It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps, by Adam Parfrey, published in 2003 by Feral House, Los Angeles

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Off the Record Summer 2015 I anxiously look at my Bvlgari Diagono stainless-steel and diamond watch. An interminable presentation is going on in the Art Basel Salon. I have no idea who the two old guys on stage are ‘in conversation’ with Sarah Thornton. They are warbling on about the role of auction houses and Jerry Saltz’s previous career as a long-distance truck driver. All I know is that dotted around the crowd are members of the team I’ve been working with for months. These are curators, art-fair directors and gallerists that I’ve gathered, all united in fury against the clusterfuck of success that Art Basel has become. Together we know we can bring it down through one well-placed guerrilla intervention in this so-called ‘informal’ talks series, the camera on my zte Grand X smartphone and the YouTube film I’m just about to make that will be as viral as smallpox. Just as I’m starting to fret, a former employee of the sadly defunct vip Art Fair lets out a prearranged signal and it’s all on. A key member of our splinter cell gets up and walks onto the stage. The once well-regarded Indian academic and curator grabs the microphone. “Thank you, gentlemen. Our next Salon is titled ‘Art Basel: It’s Not That Great, Really’ and I am delighted to be introducing it. But let’s think back into art history. I was there back in the day at Documenta 11, Platform2. That’s not a train station – no, comrades, that was one of Okwui’s amazing curatorial gambits with the catchy subtitle: ‘Experiments in Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation’. That was real art. Not that it had any art in it, of course, being an Okwui thing. But this so-called ‘Art Basel’, this is less of a platform and more of a bus terminus of art history!” The Indian gentleman waves at the audience dismissively and then sits down on the lap of the elderly bloke who was banging on about Jerry Saltz. Led by Sarah Thornton, the crowd applaud respectfully. This is going seamlessly. I pan my zte towards the next of our guerrilla speakers, an elderly German lady. “I was one of the first assistants of the legendary Galerie Rolf Ricke, and I want to remind everyone that Art Basel is a Johnny-comelately! Cologne was the first art fair, and we were there! Those were the days when David Zwirner’s dad was selling Otto Mueller!” This mysterious but effective intervention brings another round of applause that is interrupted by one of the ushers I’ve planted, who rips off his Art Basel vestments to reveal a T-shirt with Mera Rubell’s smiling face on it. “Don and Mera have been coming to Art Basel since 1979! That year Julian Opie was in the section for young artists! What a disgrace! Opie has never been and cannot be young! Age shall not wither him!” And with that, he sprints towards the stage and does a flying leap towards the two critics, the Indian gentleman and the German lady.

“Catch me!” he yells, before landing on top of them. The German lady rips the Mera Rubell T-shirt off his lithe torso and throws it into the crowd, who emit a mighty cheer. I’m sure that’s not in the script that we worked out over wurstsalat at the Restaurant Strassburgerhof, but it’s all good. A Chinese gallerist stands up. I don’t recognise him but I assume he is one of the angry brigade kicked out of Art hk when Basel rode into the Asian territory on a big Swiss Braunvieh cow. “There are other fairs! Other places! Other modernities!” He runs down onto the stage and beckons members of the audience to follow him. “We are the artworld!” They start singing. “We are the children. We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving!” This Michael Jackson song was never in the script. I feel a sense of panic. The group transition into Bill Medley and Jennifer Warne’s unforgettable (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life and point towards the back of the Salon. To my horror, there running down the steps, hands aloft, is my nemesis, Marc Spiegler, arm in arm with Jerry Saltz in a dress. He pauses for a moment next to me, winks, and then does a Patrick Swayze triple spin before picking up Saltz, twirling him round his head and launching him into the auditorium a couple of seats down from me. In turn Spiegler is lifted high by the German lady, the Indian curator and the Chinese gallerist. Fuck it. They’re all in on it. Spiegler must have inﬁltrated us weeks ago, turning these cowards back towards his loyal herd. To my horror I realise the crowd has as one turned to Spiegler just as the song crescendoes. “Just remember, you’re the one thing I can’t get enough of,” they sing. “So I’ll tell you something, this could be love!” Spiegler touches his silk pocket-handkerchief in gratitude and looks around the crowd. He catches my eye and shakes his head, the faint hint of a triumphant smile ﬂicking across his devilishly handsome features. I bury my face in Jerry’s décolletage, which for a former truck driver is surprisingly comfortable, and weep uncontrollably. Gallery Girl

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