ArtReview Summer 2016 by ArtReview

Rick Lowe The secrets of art as social engagement

SOUS LE SIGNE DU LION BROOCH IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

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HA U S E R & W IR T H

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HA U S E R & W IR T H

GUILLERMO KUITCA 27 MAY – 30 JULY 2016 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

UNTITLED, 2015 (DETAIL) OIL ON WOODEN PANEL 70 × 50 CM / 27 1/2 × 19 5/8 IN PHOTO: ALEX DELFANNE

KARIN SANDER JUNE 3 – JULY 8, 2016 — MARIENSTRASSE 10 D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM ART BASEL JUNE 16 – 19, 2016 STAND S1 ART UNLIMITED AA BRONSON & PRABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL JUNE 16 – 19, 2016

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Ryan Gander, Portrait of a colour blind artist obscured by flowers, 2016, Film still (detail)

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Artur Lescher Atelier van Lieshout Candida Höfer Jose Dávila Jorge Méndez Blake Julieta Aranda Matti Braun Theo Michael Troika

*Pia Camil Bust Mask Earth, 2016 Ceramics 42 x 37 x 6 cm

Brian Maguire Over Our Heads the Hollow Seas Closed Up Kerlin Gallery 1 July–27 August 2016

Art Basel Hall 2.1, Booth M11 16–19 June 2016 www.kerlingallery.com

YAN PEI-MING, FUNÉRAILLES DU PAPE, 2015, OIL ON CANVAS, 280 X 415 CM

ROB PRUITT, MELTING POT FOUNTAIN, 2009, 152 BOTTLES OF WATER, PLASTIC, PUMP, 115 X 115 CM

YOUTUBE IS FOUNDED IN EUREKA, CALIFORNIA WITH THE SLOGAN ‘BROADCAST YOURSELF’. THE FIRST VIDEO POSTED ONLINE IS ‘ME AT THE ZOO’, LASTING 18 SECONDS.

AFTER RATIFICATION BY RUSSIA THE KYOTO PROTOCOL COMES INTO FORCE, BRINGING TOGETHER 191 COUNTRIES IN THE BATTLE TO REDUCE GREENHOUSE GASES EMISSIONS.

POPE JOHN PAUL II DIES AFTER A 26-YEAR PONTIFICATE, THE THIRD-LONGEST IN HISTORY. OVER 4 MILLION PEOPLE TRAVEL TO THE VATICAN TO MOURN HIM.

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Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille Elizabeth Taylor in a landscape, painting nature’s beauty and the caress of the smirking sun over the mountains. June 2 – July 30, 2016

ALMINE RECH GALLERY PARIS

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GOODMAN GALLERY CAPE TOWN / 2 JUNE – 6 JULY 2016 GOODMAN GALLERY JOHANNESBURG / 4 JUNE – 6 JULY 2016 ART BASEL / 16 – 19 JUNE 2016

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LUC TUYMANS / ZENO X GALLERY 25 years of collaboration September 4 - October 22, 2016

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ArtReview vol 68 no 5 Summer 2016

Remain Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Norbert Hofer, Rodrigo ‘the Punisher’ Duerte… What a month! A constant and bombastic blurting of endlessly divisive cartoon rhetoric that would be truly comic were it not for the fact that people are voting for these idiots (hey – it’s contagious! Ha ha ha…). One of the reasons ArtReview decided to review art in the first place was because it found in it a certain generosity. The generosity that creates a space in which multiple perspectives might be listened to (or watched) with some sort of degree of patience, tolerance and civility. After all, anyone who goes to a museum, biennial or an art fair knows that in all likelihood they will be confronted with a mixture of the beautiful, the bad and the genuinely very, very ugly. But more and more of us go to these venues nonetheless. That may, of course be down to the fact that we’re all hopeless optimists, but ArtReview prefers to think it’s not entirely the product of deluded minds. That generosity is something that ArtReview hopes is often reflected in its pages, some of which are occupied by columnists with whom ArtReview might have substantial differences of opinion about both politics and what constitutes good or bad art. Yes, ArtReview has learned to be a benevolent dictator! Perhaps it’s not unconnected to current world events that this month ArtReview has been particularly interested in the way that ideas and ways of approaching problems (albeit not necessarily with solutions) can flow from artworks and into more general discourses in the world. It’s a thread that runs through everything from an analysis of cover-artist Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses (a localised solution to a national problem), to a study of the ways in which issues of privacy and personal

The grim mix

identity in our digitally surveilled world are tackled in the work of Jill Magid, to artworks that influence fashion houses, and the relationship between visual and verbal expression and their approaches to the increasing velocity of lived experience in the output of celebrated French novelist Michel Houllebecq. Not forgetting the unique approach to public art and its purposes of Roger Hiorns. It’s all about sharing opinions, expertise and knowledge. And to some degree it’s about expressing the need to take a position or a stand. Oh, and at this point, ArtReview would like to remind its British readers that voting to remain in the EU, to be a part of a dialogue about the future of the different countries and different opinions or cultures that weave their way through the continent is the only sane thing to do. Regular readers will know that we’re interconnected, not a series of isolated or isolationist parts. Crumbs! ArtReview seems to have forgotten all about the bits where it puts the jokes in! Bah – it will leave that to the politicians. Those of you who are visually minded might notice that there’s a second magazine strapped to your regular issue of ArtReview. That’s because ArtReview and its friends at Phillips thought that the imminent unveiling of the latest expansion at Tate Modern might provide a good opportunity to look at the ways in which that institution’s programming has connected (or sometimes not) with the rapidly changing world of which it is a part. Not that ArtReview wants to be continually banging on about this. After all, some of its contributors do insist that art’s real significance lies within a frame of references that are entirely of its own making. Heh, heh, heh… ArtReview

No digging this

Blackness in aBstraction curated by adrienne edwards

510 West 25 th Street, New York June 24 – August 19, 2016

FAISONS DE L’INCONNU UN ALLIÉ OCTOBER 2016 Camille Blatrix, Tyler Coburn, Mimosa Échard, Simon Fujiwara, Yngve Holen, Oliver Laric, Lucy McKenzie, Perks And Mini (P.A.M.), Mary Ping, Brynjar Sigurðarson & Veronika Sedlmair, Valerie Snobeck, Cally Spooner, Rayyane Tabet, Anicka Yi. October 2016, Paris lafayetteanticipation.com @lafayetteanticipation #LafayetteAnticipation #FondationGaleriesLafayette

Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 37

William Morris on deskilling Interview by Matthew Collings 56

Points of View by Jonathan T. D. Neil, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Maria Lind, Sam Jacob, Dan Udy, J. J. Charlesworth 45

Charles Esche Interview by Tom Eccles 60 Nicolas Bos Interview by Mark Rappolt 66

page 37 Federico Herrero, Pan De Azúcar, 2014, acrylic and oil on canvas, 165 × 150 cm (in Under the Same Sun, South London Gallery)

Summer 2016

Art Featured

Rick Lowe Interview by Joshua Mack Essay by Erik Morse 80

Michel Houellebecq Interview by Tom Emerson 98 Francis Alÿs by Kim Córdova 104

Jill Magid by Aoife Rosenmeyer 92

Roger Hiorns Interview by J.J. Charlesworth 110

page 110 Roger Hiorns, Falling sculpture, 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

ADRIAN GHENIE STIGMATA 3, 2011

ANIMAL FARM

BEASTLY MUSES AND METAPHORS CURATED BY SUSANNE VAN HAGEN

A SELLING EXHIBITION 9 JUNE – 22 JULY 2016 ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 6700 | 31 ST. GEORGE STREET, LONDON W1S 2FJ NEW YORK | LONDON | HONG KONG | SOTHEBYS.COM

Art Reviewed

Lutz Bacher, by Wendy Vogel Ben Vida, by Orit Gat Stephen Kaltenbach, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Asger Jorn, by Jonathan T.D. Neil The Natural Order of Things, by Kim Córdova Eduardo Ventura, by Claire Rigby Joshua Petherick, by Sherman Sam 20th Biennale of Sydney, by Adeline Chia

Exhibitions 124 Warhol Avedon, by Mark Prince Mungo Thompson, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Maria Eichhorn, by Mark Prince Rachel Harrison, by Louisa Elderton EVA International, by Oliver Basciano Gabriella Ciancimino, by Barbara Casavecchia Michael Raedecker, by Dominic van den Boogerd Lou Cantor, by Phoebe Blatton Patricia Esquivias, by George Stolz Paul Fägerskiöld, by Stephanie Hessler Keiji Uematsu, by Gabriel Coxhead Thomson & Craighead, by Patrick Langley Barthes/Burgin, by John Quin François Morellet, by Mark Rappolt Glasgow International, by Laura Smith Ruben Ochoa, by Larry Wilcox Joan Snyder, by Jonathan Griffin Diane Simpson, by Stephanie Cristello Cornelia Parker, by David Everitt Howe

Books 154 A Burglar’s Guide to the City, by Geoff Manaugh Ringier Annual Report 2015, by Helen Marten Rave and its Influences on Art and Culture, edited by Nav Haq Out of Body, edited by John Beeson and Britta Peters THE STRIP 162 A CURATOR WRITES 166

page 139 Sheila Hicks, Mighty Mathilde and her Consort, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Ruth Clark. Courtesy the artist and Glasgow International

ArtReview

New York

parIs

HoNg koNg

seoul

909 Madison avenue

76 rue de turenne

50 connaught road central

5 palpan-gil, jongno-gu

BerNard FrIZe “dawn coMes up so young” 3 May - 18 june

HeINZ MaCk “spectruM” curated by Matthieu poirier 23 april - 4 june

CHeN ke “dreaM • dew” 11 May - 25 june

kaws 2 june - 27 august

pIerre paulIN 22 june - 19 august

¿CóMo te voY a olvIdar? gwladys alonzo, edgardo aragón, ana bidart, pia caMil, josé león cerrillo, jose dávila, yann gerstberger, Fritzia irízar, dr lakra, gonzalo lebrija, jorge Méndez blake, ariel orozco, tania pérez córdova, gabriel rico, Martin soto cliMent, tercerunquinto

curated by anissa touati & peggy leboeuF 10 june - 30 july

klara krIstalova “hello stranger” 11 May - 25 june

IMage: ¿CóMo te voY a olvIdar? Tercerunquinto “Desmantelamiento y reinstalación del escudo nacional” (detail), 2008. Installation: 2 B&W photographs made with 6 laminated panels each, one wooden frame polyptych containing 50 B&W and color photographs, color video with sound 11’18’’ Overall dimensions (each of the 2 laminated photographs): 256 x 244 x 1.3 cm / 100 13/16 x 96 1/16 x 1/2 inches. Courtesy Tercerunquinto, Proyectos Monclova, Galerie Perrotin. Photo: Agustín Estrada

Art Previewed

The next thing Marty saw after the shiny car bumper was a soft white lacy pattern 35

Valérie Donzelli’s new film with Jonas Kaufmann

Suivez donc la mesure

The 3e scène app: the Paris Opera’s digital third stage immersive experience. With Bret Easton Ellis, Xavier Veilhan, UVA, Glen Keane, Mathieu Amalric, Bertrand Bonello...

WITH THE SUPPORT OF

The 3e scène Founders’ Circle

Previewed Mirror Cells Whitney Museum of American Art, New York through 21 August Yngve Holen Kunsthalle Basel through 14 August Cindy Sherman The Broad, Los Angeles 11 June – 2 October

John Baldessari Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich 11 June – 8 August

Katharina Grosse Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden 11 June – 9 October

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today South London Gallery through 4 September

Uwe Henneken Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels through 16 July

Kemang Wa Lehulere Stevenson, Johannesburg through 15 July

Carl Andre Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin through 18 September

The Equilibrists Benaki Museum, Athens 17 June – 9 October Roberto Cuoghi Slaughterhouse, Hydra 21 June – 30 September

7 Stelios Kallinikou, Bricks, from the series Local Studies, 2015, pigment print, 87 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2016

Mirror neurons activate when an animal – eg you or me – performs an activity or sees another animal doing something. Apart from that, said brain cells are the focus of murky speculation concerning their relationship to empathy, and some unresolved research on monkeys. The Whitney, though, is running with the touchy-feely idea as a parallel to how 1 art works, and Mirror Cells gathers five youngto-midcareer American sculptors who deal with hermetic narratives and analogue materiality, positing their activity as a form of shared inwardness. Rochelle Goldberg has previously used ceramic and steel, crude oil and chia seeds to fashion ominously fishy, human-scaled sculptural creatures; Elizabeth Jaeger is known for sculpted packs of querulous dogs; and Win McCarthy’s work includes illuminated cagefuls of painted rocks. Expect their work, plus that

of Maggie Lee and elder zany materialist Liz Craft, to espouse narratives including ‘the loss of a loved one, preoccupations of a particular community, or changes that impact the world more broadly’, and don’t say you don’t care. Concerns for human empathy arise natu2 rally in an age of abundant mediation. Yngve Holen’s art, too, tracks how the self is being reshaped and augmented nowadays, his locus being the (absent) body in a context of consumerism and technological advancement. Following, for example, wall-mounted monochrome cross-sections of full-body scanners – bright and uneasy circular sentinels, revisited here – and a magazine filled with interviews with pornstars concerning bodily modification, the Norwegian-German artist’s largest institutional show thus far, Verticalseat, will include handblown glass replicas of Boeing Dreamliner

windows, owllike anthropomorphic bus headlights and, we’re told, at least part of a Porsche Panamera. Slicing things up, dismantling, Holen acts out an inquiry into postorganic selfhood, and that the result is highly aesthetic – coldly desirable sculpture-cum-painting – inarguably fits nicely. 3 Some latter-day photographs by Cindy Sherman have revolved around surgeried-up Hollywood matriarchs (played, need it be stated, by the chameleonic artist herself): the theme of modified selfhood, and those forces that compel the changes, had long been established in her work by the time Holen was born, in 1982. That was also the year that Eli and Edythe Broad discovered Sherman, and they’ve since purchased 125 of her photographs, their most substantial investment in a single artist. Expect The Broad’s first solo retrospective,

2 Yngve Holen, VERTICALSEAT, 2016 (installation view, Kunsthalle Basel). Photo: Philipp Hänger. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Modern Art, London; Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt

1 Liz Craft, Spider Woman Purple Dress (detail), 2015, papier-mâché, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: © Michael Underwood. Courtesy the artist and Jenny’s, Los Angeles

3 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #70, 1980, chromogenic colour print, 51 × 61 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

ArtReview

4 John Baldessari, Chopin, 2015, varnished inkjet print on canvas with acrylic paint, 238 × 137 × 4 cm, signed and dated verso. Courtesy Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

5 Alfredo Jaar, Logo For America, 1987, digital colour video, sound, 10 min 25 sec. Courtesy the artist

Imitation of Life, to draw deeply on that bounty, ticking off the many phases of a 40-year career – from the Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) to the lesser-known Rear Screen Projection series of 1980–81, the history portraits, the disturbing clowns – while skewing to the LA context and associations with film culture and celebrity, from its Douglas Sirk-quoting title onwards. Appropriately, Sherman’s 1997 feature, Office Killer, will also be screened; even more so, the most recent photographs in this exhibition have found the artist assuming the roles of Hollywood icons like Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo in their later years. A few years ago, John Baldessari told an 4 interviewer about a time when Sherman and Barbara Kruger came up to him at a party, and Sherman told him, ‘You know, we couldn’t have done it without you.’ Which was nice, except

that they were more successful than he was. 5 Jumex in Mexico City, Under the Same Sun: The world has caught up with Baldessari’s Art from Latin America Today arrives at South influential, wit-lubricated conceptualism, London Gallery, just in time for the opening however, and particularly his knack of wringing of the institution’s new space in a converted ambiguous poetry from the vernacular – film fire station and, one would think, at the right stills, for example. About to turn eighty-five, time of year to deflect cracks about the English he evidently remains a workaholic, maintaining weather. Curated by the Guggenheim’s Pablo León de la Barra along with the SLG (so perhaps a steady exhibition schedule and ticking off expect some variation from previous iterations), a show at Mai 36 every two or three years, alongthe show features works by 20 or so artists side other gallery shows and, lately, forays into recently acquired for the American venue’s fashion. Here, it might be reasonable to expect something similar to his last show, a few months UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Among them, ago, in which paintings based on banal found with most being born post-1968 and with photographs are crowbarred open by text a general emphasis on art that tracks political and social shifts in Latin America in the captions that have, outwardly, absolutely past half-century, are Runo Lagomarsino, nothing to do with the imagery, muddling Alfredo Jaar, Carlos Amorales, Tania Bruguera, genders and subjects with mellow abandon. Rivane Neuenschwander and Erika Verzutti. Having originated at the Guggenheim If, in other words, you haven’t been keeping Museum, New York, and toured to Museo

Summer 2016

up with matters artistic in the (global) South, of years, won Deutsche Bank’s 2017 Artist of the head to the south (of London). Year award; amid the melee, he’s found time to In a 2015 show at Gasworks (also South make some new work, showcased at Stevenson. Meanwhile, definitely under some kind 6 London), Kemang Wa Lehulere (who’s from of sun, Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation turns South Africa) combined, via text-and-image thirty-three this year: no longer younger than chalkboard drawings, sculpture and video, Jesus, then, though they’re still working with narratives including that of South African the institution that mounted an exhibition intellectual Sol Plaatje’s travels to the UK of that title, New York’s New Museum, a century before to petition against a govern7 on The Equilibrists. The show, hosted by the mental act that later led to apartheid; research Benaki Museum in Athens, spotlights ‘a new into forgotten American plays; and stamps generation of young Greek and Cypriot artists’ from countries that no longer exist. Chalk in working in the city and abroad: there’s 33 of particular is an apt medium for a meditation them, appropriately, and they’re being characon the shifting sands of memory; Wa Lehulere terised as part of the international precariat. has used it to make, among other things, collaborative works with his aunt based on her This is counterpointed, in turn, by the latest imperfect memories of mural paintings in a show at Deste’s Slaughterhouse space, Cape Town artist’s house. Recently Wa Lehulere, on Hydra, the incumbent this time being a mainstay of biennales over the past couple Roberto Cuoghi, the project entitled Putiferio.

We’ve read the introductory poem, looked up that the Italian word means ‘rumpus’ or ‘chaos’, and, while that’s often an appropriate word and particularly nowadays, we’re ready – as ever with Cuoghi, whose most famous project remains his efforts to turn himself into his own father, in what may or may not have been an artwork – to be surprised. Katharina Grosse has, for decades now, 8 been best known as a postcanvas abstract painter, applying chromatic clouds of sprayed paint to gallery walls, felled trees, beds, carved polystyrene architectures, rubble (at the last Venice Biennale), whatever: her practice falling improbably, if saliently, between romanticist landscape and graffiti bombing. But the Freiburg-born artist has also made numerous panel paintings, often in outsize scales, while preserving her acidly modern, post-Gerhard

6 Kemang Wa Lehulere, Does this mirror have a memory 8, 2015, drawing in collaboration with Sophia Lehulere, chalk on blackboard, 70 × 100 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg

8 Katharina Grosse, Ohne Titel, 2008, acrylic and soil on canvas, 390 × 796 cm. © the artist/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016

ArtReview

landscape like a vintage Mr Chad graffiti. Richter colour schemes. This retrospective, Weird staring eyes, often disembodied, have winding back to the 1990s, focuses on such been a staple of Henneken’s art, where they works, preserving the sanctity of the venue’s mingle with folkloric elements, sunsets, forests Richard Meier architecture. Though, as was and crescent moons. If the paintings’ seriousness demonstrated by last year’s show – huge has sometimes appeared uncertain, though, neon-bright canvases filled with tilting planes, weird suggestions of apertures and spaces Henneken is now fessing up: in the press release within spaces – at König Galerie in her home for his new show, he talks about his interest in city of Berlin, Grosse can still jolt and beguile the shaman as progenitor of the artist, and how, with traditional means, creating situations accepting this lineage, he began to ‘experience of collapsed distinctions where she can, a transformation, along with a deep knowledge as she’s said, ‘indulge in exuberance and and trust: all is good and these paintings are aggressive energy without killing anybody’. only a beginning’. The image we’ve seen from One way of measuring distance from the his Brussels show is a fairly nuts and heavily heyday of German Romanticism is to make your lysergic painting of an embracing couple 9 palette toxic and artificial. Uwe Henneken sprouting faces on their buttocks. clearly thinks likewise: see an early painting like OK, let’s straighten up. In his mid-to-lateanguard #431 (2007), in which a giant, colourful, 10 twenties Carl Andre worked as a freight googly-eyed head looms over a classical coastal railway brakeman and conductor, a fact surely

indivisible – though so is the dual influence of Brancusi and Frank Stella – from his art’s emphasis on workaday materials: from metal (itself a conductor) to, notoriously in the UK, bricks, often laid out in orderly what-yousee-is-what-you-get lines. As an artist, the Massachusetts-born Andre adopted a uniform of overalls, too. And so what better place for a retrospective for this eightysomething minimalist and poet of the vernacular (poet on typewritten paper, also) than in a former train station? Ranging from objects to photographs to poetry, Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 wears its scope on its title, sprawling over some 700sqm of the former station concourse and the long suite of basement spaces too, and will doubtless offer, on Andre’s pioneering reduction of sculpture to materiality and placement, an overall perspective. Martin Herbert

9 Uwe Henneken, Untitled, 2016, oil on canvas, 160 × 125 cm. Photo: Hugard & Vanoverschelde. Courtesy the artist and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels

10 Carl Andre, Margit Endormie, 1989. Photo: Ronald Amstutz. © Carl Andre/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York

ArtReview

Points of View

After 19 years, I am leaving New York and moving to Los Angeles. As I sense most New Yorkers do, I have long viewed LA as some sort of humorous threat, like a scruffy standup comic whose bit involves insulting the crowd. If you sit too close to the stage, if you lock eyes too long, all of your loosely worn but hard-won self-fashioning and bullshit pretence is going to be the butt of some pretty funny jokes. Best to sit way at the back, smile knowingly and make self-satisfied sotto voce asides to your tablemates – such as this one from Scott Hamrah writing in the New York-based magazine N+1 on The Martian (2015): Ridley Scott’s backlot Mars offers a parable for New Yorkers considering the move to LA. Once you relocate, you’re stranded, and the chances of getting home are remote. Yes, you’ll have a vegetable garden you can sit near and watch the beautiful sunsets, but you’ll be alone, 50 million miles from your loved ones. You’ll conduct your social life via text and Skype, make trips to the desert in your electric car. You’ll continue to shave every day on the off-chance you get a meeting.I’m sure Brooklynites guffaw at this as they ride the L train to a Straub and Huillet screening in the basement of an old Polish butcher, where they will eat organic edamame grown on a tenement rooftop in Queens, drink craft beer and scratch their beards. Sorry, that’s not fair. It’s probably not craft beer. I should admit that I’m not a true New Yorker. Though I have lived here longer than any other place, I was not born and raised here, and New York has always remained something of an object to me, removed and apart, something I’ve never been fully inside of. I belonged to no scene or stratum. I was never on the coveted invite lists. (I didn’t marry rich; though I certainly married up.) I have never patronised a Chinatown massage parlour at 2am nor played hold’em at an underground poker club in Midtown until 7:30am – or at least I don’t recall ever having done these things. New York

monkey see, monkey do Last month he said that New York was sliding into art’s history; this month Jonathan T.D. Neil practises what he preaches by sliding off to LA. Farewell to an idea… was always out there somewhere; it was happening somewhere else, even when I was in the middle of it. For the past three years I have been the director of a graduate programme in Claremont, California, which is on the eastern edge of LA County. My wife’s career kept us and our daughter based in New York, and so I resigned myself to becoming familiar with the inside of an American Airlines A321T jetliner, making cross-country trips, at first every week and then every other week. Very quickly I became familiar with LA freeways. After a year I could tell that the directions on Saturday Night Live’s sketch The Californians were legit. After two years I only used Waze to check traffic and navigate the upper reaches of the hills. Now I drive like every other Angeleno, doing things that should never be done behind the wheel of a car, like writing this column, or posting Instagram shots of all the foolish things other drivers are getting up to at 83mph.

Summer 2016

I’m not really inside LA either, and I don’t expect to be. Not because LA has no inside (insert here some toss-away line about its relentless horizontality or whatever other cliché of SoCal metaphysics one can conjure). LA has a big inside – it’s called ‘the industry’; they make movies – and a number of smaller inside scenes and strata, many more than New York, in fact. People in LA are just more aware of where the borders are. They’re also, in my experience, more interested to cross them. That experience has been limited to the world of art and culture, but that world’s LA inhabitants are mobile and curious. They seem optimistic and open. Either that, or they’re just rubbernecking at all of the arrivistes like me who are moving into town and threatening to spoil it with self-seriousness and snobbish talk of ‘the discourse’. They’ve seen this car wreck before, yet they can’t help being mesmerised by it. They don’t realise it’s just a defence mechanism born of the close quarters in New York, where it’s elbows out and space is shrinking. People get serious not when they can’t move, but when they’re forced to, and today New York is all force. This is where the logistics of LA do pose an advantage. As one hears often, it’s an intentional city, built out of intentional communities. Not to be confused with the real-estate developer’s planned community (so 1950s and 60s, this; today it’s the ‘mixed-use development’), LA’s intentional communities are the product of impromptu cultural-consumption curves holding historically at zero, and with a traffic multiplier. There is no just dropping in on this show, or checking out that talk. Every act of selection is a commitment, or rather, every selection is an act of commitment, of choosing this (this neighbourhood, this way of getting there, this chance of parking) versus that. No one can be forced to do anything, won’t be forced to do anything. It’s always an option to tend one’s vegetable garden and watch the sunset. People in LA have to choose culture; they don’t feel entitled to it the way New Yorkers do. Circumstance may be bringing me to Los Angeles, but here I choose it.

I was just trying to get an installation shot of Cum Slut #3 (In Blue) hanging in the Norskilderland prime minister’s home. That’s all I was trying to do! You see, the (now-former) prime minister, Detleif Thoraresensonn, had been a collector of mine for some time. He owned several paintings, but Cum Slut #3 (In Blue) was definitely the best, and all I wanted was a photo of it installed in the prime minister’s official residence. It’s a nice home (by Norskilderland standards) and hardly smells of fish at all. I figured a photo of the large and incredibly explicit painting hanging next to a bust of Eiríkur rauði or Bjorn Bigglufurhøven would really help calm the nerves of some of my more uptight clients, letting them know that being a national leader doesn’t preclude letting your freak-flag fly. Unless of course you’re Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Then… well, don’t even start. So, anyway, I called up Detleif’s personal secretary, the suspicious Astrid Kukklemänkuānturp to see if I could fly in and maybe get some pictures – you know… no biggie! I certainly wasn’t doing it to set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to the largest leak of secret information in the history of the world and destroy everyone in it’s wake. That, my friends, was not my intention at all! But when I mentioned the painting to Astrid, she expressed, in her halting, breathy English, that she had no idea what I was talking about! I thought perhaps something was being lost in translation until, after phonetically spelling out Cum Slut #3 (In Blue), she found it in the computer. “He sold it,” she whispered like a sexy pixie. “Sold it!? But he only just bought it!” Humiliated, a morbid curiosity overcame me and I asked a question I did not want to know the answer to. “How much did he sell it for? “$1” “$1!!!? To whom?” If it was to my old gallerist Maximillian Bingeweary, I was going to kill myself. I was going to fucking kill myself. “Wintris, Inc,” she answered like a mysterious garden gnome. “A company? A company bought it?” “Yes,” she said, “but if you want any more, how do you call it… information… you will have to deal with Panamanian lawyers. They handled the sale.”

the important thing is not to do anything foolish The Norskilderlanders, the leader, the Svaltálfar, the Panamanian advisers and an armageddon of genitalia – Jonathan Grossmalerman finds out how the artworld works

ArtReview

“I just find it a little odd that a company bought a huge blue painting of a vagina with penises and bucketloads of cum everywhere. It’s not exactly front-lobby material, you know?” “What? Oh! Wait, that painting is still here,” she said, giggling with relief, as a child would. “What? Are you sure?” I asked confused. “Does it have a blue woman with green eyes and blonde pubic hair being, like, fucked ballz deep and covered in cum from several purple penises?” She yawned for several seconds, forcing me to wait. “Yes, that’s exactly the one!” “I’m sitting under it as we speak. And you say this is the one called Cum Slut #3 (In Blue)?” She says this growling like a diminutive tiger. “That’s right” “Funny… there’s a tour group taking pictures of it now. Prime minister Thoraresensonn’s collection is one of our great national prides, you know, and you people think we’re straitlaced and provincial.” She paused for a moment. “Odd that he would sell it so cheaply and yet it would still be hanging here rather than in the offices of Wintris, Inc… wherever that is…” She trailed off wistfully, a note of concern colouring her words. I knew immediately what had happened. Thoraresensonn had transferred ownership to a shell company in order to… in order to do what? “It’s a bit of a red flag,” she added. “Unless, of course, it was the fault of the Svaltálfar … but I can’t imagine how.” She began a hushed monotone, “The Svaltálfar don’t concern themselves with the human realm.” “Well, I wouldn’t go jumping to any conclusions… I’m sure it’s all on the level,” I said. “We’ll see about that,” she whispered even more quietly. “The important thing is to not do anything foolish, like try and get to the bottom of this,” I implored. “I have to make a call… goodbye.” The line went dead and I sat in silence thinking about how I had just unwittingly upset the apple cart. All I wanted was a picture. A picture to impress my other potential patrons. Instead, I had rocked the boat. I had broken the artist’s Cardinal Rule. On the bright side, now that the international consortium of investigative journalists has published all these names, I’ve really fattened up my mailing list.

On any drive through Tehran, you will inevitably be confronted by an urban feature that is particular to this metropolis: numerous large-scale murals on the sides of buildings. Whether you travel on one of the many flyovers or take a smaller street, there they are. And given the city’s heavy-duty traffic jams, you’ll end up spending a significant amount of time looking at them; that is, when you are not distracted by the striking landscape or trying to catch a glimpse of the postcard-pretty snow-covered mountains to the north. More particularly, the murals are much more intriguing than any commercial billboard – of which there are plenty here too. The first murals I spot are enormous realistic portraits: either martyrs from the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, surrounded by exploding tanks, helicopters or occasionally cute fluffy clouds, or religious leaders with solemn faces. The second type of mural is a bit more peculiar: trompel’oeil paintings of big holes cut into the facades to reveal scenes of life inside, of flying cars, children holding bundles of balloons and floating through the air, and people biking up the sides of buildings. Most common are imaginary idealised landscapes filled with sunshine and beautiful green vistas. Architectural fantasies are also prevalent, referencing historical buildings built in traditional Persian styles. During one of my studio visits in the Iranian capital I encounter a version of this kind of mural: the one that adds a building to already existing buildings. Nazgol Ansarinia’s series of small sculptures Fabrications (2013; in collaboration with Roozbeh EliasAza) explores the architectural-fantasy murals in space, turning them into monuments in miniature, with an architecturally accurate side and an imaginary side. Depending on how you approach the 3D-printed plaster-and-resin sculptures, you come into contact with one of the two types of buildings, one of which is a vision of what the buildings in the wall paintings would look like if they were indeed realised. If traditional monuments typically represent supposedly enduring values and phenomena, Ansarinia’s maquettes memorialise ordinary houses with temporary applied visual effects, embodying the schizophrenic situation of the current era for many people in the country. Whereas on the surface there is the illusion of openness, of airy vistas and clear skies, everyday life is one of restriction,

NAZGOL ANSARINIA Riffing off a vernacular mural tradition, one artist captures the contrasts and contradictions of life in contemporary Tehran, by

Maria Lind

Nazgol Ansarinia, Residential building / Shah‑neshin and veranda on Satarkhan highway, Fabrications, 2013, in collaboration with Roozbeh Elias-Azar, plaster, resin and paint, 14 × 21 × 16 cm. Courtesy Green Art Gallery, Dubai

Summer 2016

constraint, rapid commercial expansion and heavily polluted air – this last to the point of frequent respiratory problems among its citizens and some days when those snowcovered mountains are completely obscured from view. As the artist has noted, the shift to imaginary landscapes in the city’s murals began in the early 2000s, as urban redevelopment accelerated and intense construction began to significantly shrink public space. Even today the number of construction cranes is impressive (shopping malls appear to be especially popular among planners and builders). In other words, the illusion of access to open landscapes and clean air in Tehran emerged at a moment when the opportunities to experience precisely those things were decreasing rapidly. This was also the time when daily existence in general became harsher and more restricted due to the international sanctions imposed on Iran for its refusal to suspend a uranium-enrichment programme. Since 2004 more than 800 murals have been commissioned by Tehran’s Bureau of Beautification, a scale of production that can be compared with Russia’s immediately after the revolution. But Tehran’s wall paintings have been around much longer than that, with the iconography of different regimes colonising blank facades over the last 50 years, at the beginning the lower parts of houses, and subsequently, after the Islamic revolution, climbing upwards. This attempt to beautify a city whose metropolitan population numbers 16 million has been rather successful among the inhabitants – according to a recent survey, only 5 percent now approve of the still-prevalent propaganda murals, instead favouring the increasing amount of imaginary landscapes. Ansarinia might well comment that the beautiful imaginary landscapes and nostalgic buildings are as ideological, if not more so, than the blatant propaganda of military and religious figures. Michel Foucault reminded us that real power always disguises itself, making the seemingly neutral and ‘normal’ rule. Fabrications insist on actualising the encounter between the existing and the virtual, looking like eerie colourless toys, breaking the slick surface of normality and embodying the stark contrasts and abundant contradictions so palpable in Tehran today.

Home is a place about which people sing songs laced with wistful longing and rousing sentimentality. And though we might know nothing about the singers’ actual home, we all know what they are on about. This kind of home is a place that’s more the product of myth than geography; it’s somewhere built of gene pools, bloodlines and imagination rather than bricks and mortar. No one actually lives here. In reality, homes are a precipitate of economics, law and social convention. Accordingly, perhaps we should see them not as the place into which we escape from the world but as the place in which we become fully socialised. Not as castles of individualism, but factories of social discipline. Think of the drive – at least in AngloSaxon culture – towards home ownership; of the proclaimed ‘property-owning democracy’ that Margaret Thatcher placed as a central plank of Conservative policy during the 1980s. Thatcher summoned and sold this dream to gift-wrap a policy of privatisation aimed at ensuring that we all became intimately involved in ‘the market’. The house, in Thatcher’s formulation at least, became a financial rather than collective instrument. And through this participation in the market, the logic ran, we would become particular kinds of citizens in a particular kind of democracy. The unstated consequence being that if we didn’t or couldn’t own, then we were tenants or squatters and would ultimately be disenfranchised. In America, even before the financial crisis, whole communities of houses in cities like Detroit and St Louis had already been devastated. Entire blocks were abandoned, set on fire or pulled down to leave ghostly urban forms rendered now as grassy plots, their bucolic image belying the brutality of the forces that

Home is where… Screw slippers, sentiment and fireplaces says

Sam Jacob – what the home should really be is a generator of social change

from top Terraced housing and haunted housing. Haunted housing courtesy FairieGoodMother

ArtReview

created them. Their eeriness is reminiscent of haunted houses – a topic that is said to have become particularly popular during the Great Depression. Perhaps both the sentimental and the economic notions of home are valid. The home is both a place of deep psychological development of personal identity and the place that defines our relationship to society; the pivot between the private and the public; and the site where ideological clashes between individualism and collectivity rage over a battlefield of soft furnishings. Is the home a place of ‘me’, of ‘us’, or even perhaps of ‘them’? And if, in this narrative, homes are the things that make us citizens, then perhaps they are also the sites on which we could invent new ideas of citizenship. When, suddenly, the forces that support ‘home’ disappear, as they did during the 1930s and in 2008, it is not the buildings’ failure, but that of wider structural issues of politics and economy. Indeed, could we argue that the crisis of housing is not one of housing (shelter) itself but rather the crisis of citizenship and democracy? Any solution to the crisis isn’t only in the bricks and mortar, but in the way we construct the idea of home. Might that mean giving up the idea of the home as a purely private enclosure of domesticity? Could its boundary walls and picket fences become more porous, allowing a freer flow between public and private? An idea of home that merges with the outside world, where it becomes a place of productivity, of culture or of other wider social relationships? Rather than being a refuge from the world, could the home become the place where we confront and transform the world?

per kirkeby / untitled / 1968 / 122 x 122 cm

Per KIrKebY

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13/05/16 16.31

TRUDY BE N SO N 04/06/2016 - 30/07/2016

GALERIE BERNARD CEYSSON LUXEMBOURG www.bernardceysson.com

This past March, when Hillary Clinton claimed that the Reagans started a ‘national conversation’ about HIV/AIDS, the backlash was swift. As anyone remotely familiar with American history knows, the opposite is true: Ronald didn’t say the word ‘AIDS’ in public until 1985, after over 10,000 Americans had died. Within hours Clinton said she ‘mispoke’, before issuing a more extensive apology the next day, but for a brief moment her attempt to rewrite history catapulted HIV/AIDS into mainstream political discourse. In doing so, she prompted vital questions of how we remember the recent past. In the artworld such questions have preoccupied curators for a number of years, and since 2009 a wave of exhibitions has revisited the cultural practices that emerged in direct response to HIV/AIDS. Some, like ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 (2009) at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, in Cambridge, MA, or Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism (2013), at the New York Public Library, have focused specifically on the cultural output of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Others, from Helen Molesworth’s This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago/Institute for Contemporary Art Boston, 2012–13) to the New Museum’s NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (2013), have addressed HIV/AIDS as part of a broader historical survey. Invariably, though, these exhibitions have limited their scope to a specific alignment of people and place: New York City, the mid-1980s to early 1990s, and the downtown queer art scene. That many high-profile artists met premature deaths has rooted the notion of ‘AIDS art’ in this particular historic moment, and a set of usual suspects – Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres – often dominate such shows. The epidemic continues to this day, though, and infection rates among at-risk groups are on the rise. So what impact does the cultural history of ‘AIDS art’ have upon artists today? And what do we mean by ‘AIDS art’ anyway? In Art AIDS America, opening in July at the Bronx Museum, New York, curators Jonathan David Katz and Rock Hushka continue this work. Most significantly, they feature a number of younger artists including Kia Labeija and Derek Jackson, who show the myriad ways that art can reflect upon the conditions of HIV/AIDS today. After first opening at the Tacoma Art Museum, however, protests erupted over

What do we mean by ‘AIDS art’? As a number of exhibitions explore the history and legacy of art created in response to the hiv/ aids crisis at its peak in America, Dan Udy looks at the questions they raise about how we remember the recent past and what that means for an artist working in the present

Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me!, 2013, poster by Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin

Summer 2016

the glaring whiteness of the display: only four out of 92 artists were African American, despite the latter group accounting for 44 percent of new HIV infections each year. In response, curators at the following stop on its national tour – the Zuckerman Museum of Art, in Kennesaw, GA – added eight new artists into the show, produced additional wall texts and curated a subexhibition, Art AIDS Atlanta, that chronicled the work of local activist groups. Museum exhibitions have long been a flashpoint for activist interventions, given their power to shape the broader cultural meanings of HIV/AIDS. This tension reflects the semantic instability of AIDS itself: as a term for a broad (and contentious) list of opportunistic infections, it defers signification. Instead, AIDS provides an empty signifier in which affected parties can stake – and visualise – their own individual claims to meaning. Since HIV is symptomless and one can be diagnosed with AIDS by only a low T-cell count, visual art is the ideal site for thrashing out meanings of an otherwise invisible disease. In short, AIDS means nothing, so to pinpoint the meaning of ‘AIDS art’ is a virtually impossible task. Instead, its contingent meanings produce a diverse array of practices that articulate responses to it. Although the body and bodily fluids certainly recur – in Ron Athey’s performances, for example, or Andres Serrano’s early prints – their prevalence is hardly enough to form a definitive aesthetic trope. In fact, ‘AIDS art’ is best defined by a critical rather than aesthetic sensibility. In Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me! (2013), for example, Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin critique the use of activist aesthetics as a vector for cultural capital online; although their poster may mimic early ‘AIDS art’, their caustic irony makes the critical gesture of Your Nostalgia resolutely clear. To work through the meanings of AIDS, then, required and requires intensive critical labour. This is perhaps best captured by Douglas Crimp’s special edited issue of October, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism” (1987), in which both artists and critics theorised what forms activism might take in the cultural sphere. Today, this same work requires young artists to extend their scope beyond the sociopolitical effects of the epidemic: now, to critically engage with HIV/AIDS means also grappling with its histories. To do so requires a degree of self-reflexivity, and an interrogation of the ‘AIDS art’ canon that bears so heavily on cultural production today.

THe ArT oF THe breXIT

On 23 June the British electorate get to vote ignore about the eU – that it’s a political on whether or not Britain should leave the institution, not an idealised utopia, one that European Union. As I write (in late May), the is far less democratic in its processes than campaign has already become a little hysterical, its apologists would like to admit; that it has with both sides rapidly working through no problem deposing elected governments increasingly apocalyptic predictions of what for the sake of economic expediency; that will happen if we leave/remain. The British artafter thousands of billions of euros in eU world has remained largely mute on the subject, spending, the poorer economies of Europe are but the exception has been artist Wolfgang still poor; that when the peoples of European Tillmans, who in April brought his voice to the states are asked whether they want the eU, debate by mounting his own poster campaign: and vote ‘no’, the eU happily ignores them; in the form of 26 posters whose texts variously that national sovereignty, for the eU, is put the case for the eU in terms of its progressive heavily negotiable. But in a sense, the view of the eU that credentials – democracy, Europe-wide peace Tillmans presents is the view from the perspecand human rights – while damning the ‘Leave’ tive of the cosmopolitan, internationalist world campaign on the basis of the company it keeps. of artists and other ‘cultural workers’; those After all, if types such as Russian president Vladimir Putin, media oligarch Rupert Murdoch, who have benefited most from the freedom UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, to travel, work and settle in Europe’s cultural cranky British leftist George Galloway, Marine hub cities, cities whose bohemianism and Le Pen of France’s Front National, the British gentrification have tracked the rise of cultural National Party’s Nick and financial economies. Griffin and even Islamic It’s the version of Europe A POLISH FRIEND TOLD Vladimir Putin State’s Abu Bakr althat has little contact Rupert Murdoch ME THE OTHER DAY: Baghdadi think ‘Brexit’ with those who have Nigel Farage is a good idea, then done less well out of George Galloway I NOW HAVE AN E.U. FLAG surely it must be a bad the eU experiment Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (IS) AT HOME. WHEN WE DEMone, implies one poster. – the unemployed and 1LFN *ULIÀQ %13

Tillmans should be underemployed in the ONSTRATE AGAINST OUR and Marine LePen given credit for his provincial rustbelts of NEW AUTHORITARIAN want Britain to leave willingness to step up Europe’s old industries, GOVERNMENT, WE DO SO the EU. to political activism those displaced by the UNDER THIS FLAG. while others in the artrising costs of metro'RQ·W OHW WKHP KDYH WKHLU world have sat on their politan living, those I SUDDENLY REALISED, THE E.U. IS THE LAST way. Have your say. hands. But Tillman’s squeezed by an increasDEFENCE AGAINST ANTI-WOMEN’S RIGHTS, ANTI-GAY RIGHTS, RACIST ‘STRONGMEN’ rhetoric is interesting ingly uneven prosperity. POPULISTS IN EASTERN EUROPE. more for how he sees Yet this is only, in a The E.U. Referendum is on DO YOU WANT TO LEAVE the eU, an institution certain way, the problem the 23rd of June. THEM ALONE? NOW? he believes is a project of contemporary art But you have to register to to assert enlightened today, projected onto vote before the 7th of June. The E.U. Referendum is on the 23rd of June. But in order to vote you have to register until June 07 at www.gov.uk/register-to-vote values of moderation, European politics; tolerance and human the problem of who, rights across the continent. Tillmans’s narrative exactly, contemporary art addresses, in a system is, in essence, a cultural one, about how Europe increasingly distanced from national situations, has transcended nationalistic divisions to evolving into a closed circuit of likeminded produce a political union in which we are all cosmopolitans replicated across metropolitan ‘citizens of Europe’, a narrative turn on a liberal, centres, which themselves have little to do with centre-left version of what the eU stands for their more parochial hinterlands. Just as in – as Tillmans told The Guardian, ‘To stand up the US, political divisions have become increasor celebrate the middle ground is to be someingly culturalised – between the traditionalist, how uncool, but I really feel we need to do this conservative middle ‘red’ states and the cosmoright now. I think standing up for the centre politan, liberal ‘blue’ coasts – so in sentiments ground should be the new cool, because it is about the eU, there’s a similar attachment so dangerous not to. The democracy that the to cultural values of liberalism and tolerance eU represents – workers’ rights, women’s rights, in those places where people are comfortable gay rights – is a shining beacon to protesters enough not to have to deal with the more unin Poland and Russia.’ comfortable results of the eU’s antidemocratic Inevitably, like all good propaganda, and technocratic governance. But perhaps Tillmans’s version of the eU is just a little bit it is not so surprising that artists should vote Two of 26 posters from artist Wolfgang Tillmans’s one-sided. Why should it not be? It would be to remain wedded to an ideal, and be puzzled ‘Between Bridges’ campaign in favour of a ‘Remain’ vote keeping Britain an EU member state easy to trade points on what ‘Remain’ advocates when others look to leave a reality.

As Britain’s big vote approaches, those who’ve profited from Europe’s cultural economy have more reason to celebrate the eU than the average European, says a sceptical J.J. Charlesworth

Wolfgang Tillmans Between Bridges

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Great Critics and Their Ideas No 48

William Morris on Deskilling Interview by

Matthew Collings

William Morris, born in Walthamstow, London, in 1834, was an artist, author and socialist. His ideas about the use of materials, observation of nature and revival of medieval artistic skills profoundly influenced the Arts and Crafts movement. He demanded better conditions for workers and provided them for the employees in his own textile company, Morris & Co. He died in 1896.

ArtReview

ArtReview It’s funny to think about skill in art. Deskilling is the buzzword today.

AR What do you think of Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism in the Labour Party?

William Morris That’s true. Art started to become deskilled in the last part of the nineteenth century. Artists were outside academic institutions for the first time. There was a new attitude to materials and how you worked them, and to appearances and how they could be distorted – or even must be. And to yourself: what are you if you’re an artist? This was all a positive new freedom. Now, though, misunderstandings about the role in art of making cause deskilling to be understood almost as an option that an art student can choose, or a method connected to conceptual art.

WM It was a faked-up row. The Labour right wanted him to look bad. They are at war with anyone with moral principles. These make Corbyn attractive, and everyone knows the Blairites don’t have any (they only want to get into power; they don’t have any ideas otherwise). The Labour right is always looking for ways to agitate for a coup. In this case they thought they could say if Corbyn can’t rein in his anti-Semitism and that of his fellow socialists then what does it matter if he achieved a crushing leadership victory over the Labour right due to his vision of a society based on justice and personal agency rather than despair and a sense of futility? Absurdities like a fictional plague of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party are just a continuation of malicious calumny about him not possessing a suit and only wearing vests his mother knits.

AR Where did British socialism come from? WM Its roots go back to the English Civil War. But the real rise was during the nineteenth century. Many organisations were formed. The Socialist League, which I helped create, came out of a split with the Social Democratic Federation, the first nominally Marxist organisation in Britain. I wrote up the manifesto for the league with a man named Belfort Bax. It called for revolutionary international socialism. Bax published a commentary on Marx that Marx himself publicly admired, and he was a regular attendee at the weekly eveninglecture meetings put on by Engels. I once read some Norse myths to Engels but unfortunately he saw me as little more than an unpractical poet who probably wouldn’t get much done for the cause. In the first years of the league I learned Marxism bit by bit from Bax and we wrote articles on it for the league newspaper, which I edited and funded. AR Did the organisation really change things? WM There wasn’t much to it in real terms: only 230 members. AR Did it lead to the modern Labour Party? WM All the old small socialist organisations had a hand in that. But the league turned to anarchism in the early 1890s and I got out of it at that point. And then in 1901, with barely 6,000 members, it disbanded. In the meantime the Labour movement really had got going. The first-ever Labour council was brought in for the London Borough of West Ham in 1898. AR Do you think art is always better off under Labour? WM No, I don’t know what it would mean for it to be better off. Art is such an indefinable thing, or definable in such an infinity of ways.

“The tangible, factual, material element must always come into anyone’s appreciation of art. It causes art to be specific, not up in the air. Today art is mostly a matter of faith. It really is up in the air. It’s true for creators and audience. Even if there’s occasionally a kind of art where making is, in fact, important, there isn’t an audience that’s informed about the issues involved” AR What do you believe in? WM I believe in emancipation, feminism, environmentalism, social reform, educational reform and dignity through work. AR What about art? WM Well, I don’t think art is a matter of belief. As an artist it’s something you do. And this practical element, the tangible, factual, material element of art, its nature as a made thing, must always come into anyone’s appreciation of art. It forces attention onto times, places and contexts; it causes art to be specific, not up in the air. In my case, like the Byzantines long ago, I was interested in a type of artistic form involving

AR What’s the best thing you made? WM Morris & Co stained-glass windows. They’re a version of paintings.

facing page Photograph of artist Edward Burne-Jones (left) and William Morris (right) at Burne-Jones residence the Grange, London, 1874, by Frederick Hollyer

Summer 2016

woven, lacy, interconnected linear elements, which are essentially derived from observation of nature, and from which a proposal about a very solid and convincing yet at the same time clearly flat space can be constructed. Today art is mostly a matter of faith. It really is up in the air. It’s true for creators and audience. Even if there’s occasionally a kind of art where making is, in fact, important, there isn’t an audience that’s informed about the issues involved. AR Ideas are always good, though, aren’t they? I mean, it’s a dumbed-down society, and art is a place you can go where there are ideas. WM Dumbing-down comes from economic competition. Mass-communication media cut down more and more on resources. Inevitably news stories become based on PR statements issued by businesses and political parties. It becomes accepted that news stories are not objectively true. That’s how you get the antiSemitism fiasco. No one can say anything in that story that reflects a genuine examination of Israeli brutality in Gaza. Indubitably important ideas featuring in the story, like genuine anti-Semitism historically, present-day oppression of Palestinians, US and UK financial support of Israel, and odd historical anomalies where what might be thought to be straightforward turns out to have possibly unexpected twists, all appear as so many unrelated fragments in a fiction that hardly alters even though evermore narrative fragments come and go. A curious similarity occurs in contemporary art, where there are exotic ideas and lip service is paid to the marvellous complexity of them, whereas few of us really have any sense of what their status is or why we should value them. AR People love old art, though, don’t they? And contemporary art is always reprocessing the past in witty ways. Like the arse door in the Turner Prize: doesn’t it come from the 1970s? WM I’d like to compare that work to a historical work I saw in a German palace, a vast ceiling-fresco illustrating the theme of the Four Continents. Part of it is an arch composition (an arch of course is a kind of door). Here is art – with all the powers at its disposal, staging the reigning principles of the mid-1700s: exploration, commerce, power, European dominance, heaven’s approval and divine precedence. Perhaps one could say art always extracts an aesthetic meaning because of the redundancy of the other stuff: the way principles and beliefs of a certain period go out of date. So Modernism sees in Tiepolo orchestrated pale colours and marvellously fluid lazy lines; amazing aerial perspectives and looming enormous spaces; deliciously rich and complicated interactions of people and objects; and

beautiful expressions and poses. And it’s possible to think of a further extraction from that extraction – a lot of abstract values from those pleasures. These extractions become codified resources for artistic making, and also for seeing clearly what it is that has actually been done when we’re admiring something artistic. AR And the Turner Prize…? WM Well, it’s just like that German palace, someone might say. It, too, provides a forum for art to stage the new reigning principles of life, whatever they might be each year. AR You should work with Alex Farquharson, the chair of the Turner Prize and new director of Tate Britain. He’d love you – he’d hire you. WM And yet, does the art in the Turner Prize really work like that Tiepolo arch picture? Extraction from substance seems meaningful. Extraction from reflections reflecting reflections is always going to be a bit dubious. The arse door by Anthea Hamilton, which manifests, in 2016, an architectural whim of 1972 that was never realised by the Italian architect Gaetano Pesce, is about archival fascination with design history. There is a world of difference between that and actual design, but no one is ever invited to consider it. It’s glossed over.

to be all a middle ground by comparison. Nevertheless, it confronts you with infinite tangible visual subtleties. AR It’s wrong to be a fogey, though: surely art can have jokes? WM The arse-door is jokey, but so much of the farce is inadvertent. Archival fetishism is a farcical obedience strategy that young artists are brainwashed into believing is free-roaming thinking: they believe they are ‘researching’ as an attempt to resist having a reality forced on them that’s made up of media lies serving capitalist profit. It’s true there are more complex ideas in this research than are conveyed each evening on BBC’s Newsnight. But it’s not true that the artist is actually having ideas or communicating something original in an original way. People aren’t used to thinking about whether Tiepolo had ideas, because they’ve no idea what an idea is in Tiepolo. Most of us don’t even know the colours are pale (we don’t think enough

about colour to be able easily to notice that). So we can’t even wonder if paleness itself might be an idea, or who had it. (Rococo style as a whole, as an idea-generating machine, or Tiepolo the individual Rococo artist?) AR What do you really wholeheartedly say yes to today? WM What I would say yes to, today, is that everybody should have access to art in the sense of the practice of making. AR Do you agree with Bob and Roberta Smith’s signs saying ‘all schools should be art schools’? WM I’m all for those signs if you interpret them not at face value – after all, it’s an irrational demand for all schools to be art schools. But, instead, if you think of it as signalling the meaning that children being educated should not just be cogs in a profit machine, well, then I support him – if his meaning is that creativity should be prioritised in schools rather than profit. AR What else? WM The things I would say a definite loud yes to and support with all my might today would be a decent education for all, attention to inequality in the developing world and environmentalism. AR Deskilling in art is right because ideas are important, aren’t they?

AR Oh, people don’t want to know about formal analysis with old art, they want to hear about the colourful lives of geniuses and bohemians.

WM It’s not skill I’d like to bring back but making and awareness of traditions of making that built up over hundreds of years. It’s hard to know what’s meant by ideas. A dumbed-down picture of reality, one that serves the aims of the few in society that ultimately control the media, on the one hand, and the swimming giddiness of the annual Turner Prize, on the other, appear as two sides of the same coin. Not that I wish to attack the Turner Prize, I think it has its place as a public showcase.

WM And yet in the Tiepolo there is design amazement that answers desire. The doorway in the Turner Prize restages desire of course in its bum-ness, but it’s helpless to explore desire in the luxurious, rich way of those frescoes. The historic status of the arse-door is clear if you pay attention. But the same attention will lead very quickly to unclarity, to clouds of confusion about artistic aims. Desire operates in both works as it operates in everything at some level. The Hamilton relies on infinite levels of discursive meaning plus one inescapable obscene joke, while the Tiepolo seems

Next issue Osiris, Egyptian deity of death and rebirth, on the return of painting

top Anthea Hamilton, Project for Door (After Gaetano Pesce), 2015 (installation view, Sculpture Center, New York). Photo: Kyle Knodell. Courtesy the artist bottom Giambattista Tiepolo, The Investiture of Herold as Duke of Franconia, 1751, Würzburg Residenz, all frescoes completed 1753

ArtReview

Other People and Their Ideas No 29

Charles Esche A frequent guest on these pages, the Van Abbemuseum director is this time probed about how art and artists might respond to the current crisis in Europe, and whether or not they can have any real social effect. No spoilers here… Interview by

Tom Eccles

A curator, writer and educator, Charles Esche has been director of the Van Abbemuseum, in Eindhoven, since 2004. Last year he curated the Jakarta Biennale, while in 2014 he was one of the curators of the 31st São Paulo Bienal. That same year he was also awarded the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence. Prior to that, in addition to curating a number of other international biennales, Esche cofounded the Afterall Journal and Afterall Books

ArtReview

ArtReview In your introduction to the compendium of artist writings Art and Social Change [2007], you stated that ‘at moments of revolutionary success, there is a subtle elision between inside and outside positions that has produced some of the most powerful work effecting social change’. Given the current conditions of Europe, do you see any possibilities for revolutionary success or even for artists to effect social change? Charles Esche To answer the question, I’d have to describe what I think is happening in Europe. It seems to me that we have a fullblown paradigmatic transition going on of the kind that takes at least a generation. I’d say it started with the collapse of socialism in the eastern part of the continent and will end with the collapse of neoliberal capital in the western half. The extent to which this will affect the rest of the world is not clear because part of the transition is that Europe is ceasing to be the dominant continent that determines the rest. The twentieth century, for all of the USA’s economic and cultural success, was still defined in Europe. The two World Wars, the Revolution, the Holocaust and the Cold War were all essentially European disputes that spilled over far and wide. US and Asian decisions were significant, but the key determinants were played out in Europe. That world has come to an end. The outlines of what is emerging is less clear. This is normal, as a paradigm shift is always barely visible until it has already happened. But the economic decline of Europe, the decay of the European Union’s modernist vision and

the breakup of the old, powerful nation-states are part of the coming conditions. In this situation, revolution cannot mean what it once did; left and right become empty signifiers; and life reconfigures. It’s not easy, and the role of art is also changing as part of it. We see part of what it might become in the growing demand to be transdisciplinary and to break out of known protocols; to embrace the margins and deviance as forms of thinking. The early-twenty-first-century centre is no longer attractive. Its continued privileging of white supremacy, the old modern avant-garde (think blockbuster art exhibitions), its tired transgressions and its cult of personality/celebrity look yucky and tired. In response, there is a kind of quiet and casual ‘demodernisation’ in some art that I find inspiring. For me, it’s closely connected to decolonial thinking and how the European legacy across the world can be come to terms with. This is close to a muchextended form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (poorly translated as coming to terms with the past) that some Germans went through after 1945. I suspect it’s also connected to some forms of what might loosely be called ‘indigenous’ thinking and new relations to ecology too. We need to learn how to construct plural truths and yet manage consistent ethics. We need to move away from monotheism. The different communities engaged with art have a potentially revolutionary role to play in this, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, Avant-Garde Citizens, 2008. Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Summer 2016

especially if they again elide its old claim to autonomous action within the artistic field, with a real stake in a change in thinking about and acting in society. One thing is for sure: any future revolutionary art will look and sound different. It will be focused neither on aesthetics nor politics in the modern understanding of these words. It may not be made by self-identified artists. That would already be a social change, I guess. AR In 2008, you organised an exhibition that seems particularly prescient now. Be(com)ing Dutch focused the museum on questions of what have become sensitive issues of identity, nationality, citizenship and social cohesion in the context of the Netherlands. You invited not only artists but also politicians, intellectuals and the people of Eindhoven, where the Van Abbemuseum is based, to ask some tricky questions: ‘What does “Being Dutch” or “Becoming Dutch” mean in the twenty-first century? Who are “the Dutch” anyway, and how do we want to be seen by ourselves and others?’ What came out of this project? It couldn’t have been easy, being a foreigner yourself. CE It’s always hard to know precisely what emerges out of an art project. I think that Be(com)ing Dutch set a new tone in the Dutch artworld. Before I came to the Van Abbemuseum, in 2004, Dutch museums were dominated by populism in the sense that they were largely delivering what the mainstream bourgeois public wanted. Such adventure as they retained was still confined to the Euro-American canon and to what was then called a postmodernist aesthetics. It felt regressive to me, and I had a fair share of conflict

with my colleagues (most of whom have since moved on or retired) in other museums then. That postmodern, strongly whitesupremacist rhetoric has more or less retired too. I wouldn’t say that Be(com)ing Dutch was responsible, but it made politics in Dutch museums and art circles more possible in a way that had been absent since the 1980s. It established the idea that something cultural was at stake in Dutch contemporary identity. Of course, general cultural and political discourse is harsher now than then, but that’s part of the transition process I talked about before. Be(com)ing Dutch was certainly a moment to take account of in the history of the Van Abbemuseum and Dutch art more generally. In specific terms, I think it’s hard to see the development of other projects – [long-running transnational research project] Former West or the [project space] Stedelijk Museum Bureau, for instance – without it. For some artists, too, I think it gave an institutional baseline for certain ways of working or thinking. Would Jonas Staal, Nicoline van Harskamp, Renzo Martens, Yael Bartana and Ahmet Öğüt be making the same work without it? Probably, but it helped to give their practice some space, I think, and they continued to work with the museum. Directly, it affected subsequent projects in the museum, from Strange and Close [2011] at CAPC Bordeaux, which took its title from a talk by Homi Bhabha during the Be(com)ing Dutch caucus, to the current contemporary displays in the collection. We are also planning to repeat the formula of the caucus in 2017 – four weeks of mayhem and meeting in the museum. More generally, it opened up space for a dialogue with politicians. That discussion was very hard at times, especially when the financial crisis hit, but it gave them a new sense of what the museum is for. Recently, one political critic said to me that ‘you should do more blockbuster exhibitions like Be(com)ing Dutch if you want our money’. I’m happy to take him at his word. AR More recently, you worked with the Cuban artist/ activist Tania Bruguera on the Museum of Arte Útil (or ‘useful art’), ‘a place where art’s use value and social function would be analysed and questioned’. Bruguera suggests that art is both a tool and a device, and this is certainly true of her actions in the face of the authorities in Cuba, where she has been arrested and her work suppressed. Did you find this project ‘transformative’, as the project initially claimed it would be? Or do you find these projects episodic, fleeting moments before museums return to business? Are artists like Bruguera the exception rather than the rule? How might you respond to a critic who charges you with championing one kind of artist and artistic practice rather than offering the public a broader reflection of artistic production today?

CE There are a few issues mixed up in this question that I’ll try to tease apart, though I understand why you put them together. Museum of Arte Útil was indeed an exhibition project, but I always hoped it would be able to develop into a longer-term trajectory for the museum. I’m happy to say I’ve not been disappointed, but you are right to question it. If it had only been a singular event without consequence, then I would not do it again. On an institutional level such experiments have to contribute to a change in the internal politics and power divisions if they have any value. Fortunately, that has in part occurred, and though it needs to go further, I’d like to take a moment to outline some of the consequences of taking Tania’s Arte Útil gambit to heart. Firstly, the idea of a nomadic Office of Arte Útil grew out of the exhibition and is taking on a rounded life of its own with appearances

‘It is much easier to grasp the system by practising it at the same time as you are being asked to analyse it critically. This in-between status is something I enjoy about curating. It also feels to me an appropriate position at a time when modernist disciplinary divisions and the frequent snobbism of expert culture and intellectual labour have less and less authority’ in London, Middlesbrough in England, the Canary Islands, Warsaw and San Francisco so far. There are plans to situate a semipermanent office in the Granby Street area of Liverpool, where [restoration work by architecture collective] Assemble won last year’s Turner Prize. These offices are based on the Arte Útil open web archive that the museum maintains together with two curators, Gemma Medina Estupiñán and Alessandra Saviotti, based in Eindhoven and San Francisco respectively. They work independently but closely with Tania and the museum. The Office gathers information about Arte Útil projects and puts selected ones into effect locally. As a museum, we initially thought to bring the archive into the museum, but it made no sense, because it is not something anyone should own. Tania proposed that we use acquisition money to support one Arte Útil initiative per year, and we are still looking at how to do that

ArtReview

legally, but the basis is now so broad that we can do that in combination with others. The exhibition [in 2013] was also always seen as part of a longer research trajectory together with our international partners that included the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge in Reina Sofía [Madrid, 2014] and Confessions of the Imperfect [2014] at the Van Abbemuseum. All this culminated in a recently produced reader called What’s the Use? that we launched on 16 April this year. I hope and trust this will have some further implications as the book circulates, but what I can say for the future is that the new presentations of the museum collection will be inspired by Arte Útil and hopefully include many aspects of what we have learnt since 2013. So it was, I feel, as transformative as I had initially hoped, and it’s still working its way into our thinking at many levels, especially how we work together with people in our immediate Eindhoven neighbourhood. Finally, in answer to your question about the Van Abbemuseum’s partisanship, I don’t think there’s a neutral or unbiased option for curating a museum programme. The question is what you choose to show and where you draw the line. I’m mostly concerned that we make a break with the narrow modernist ideology of enclosed white-cube autonomy and isolated visuality. I believe it no longer serves to give art a meaningful role in the world but has become a pastiche of what it once was. Given that position, I feel there are a sufficient variety of approaches in our activities, from modes of interpretation to temporary exhibitions and different ways of narrating the collection. Arguably, the density of art institutions in the Netherlands and Belgium offers us a better opportunity to specialise, but even in an area with less cultural provision, I think an institution should stand behind the artists and positions it believes in. I can’t imagine doing anything else just to serve the demand for an imagined breadth of artistic practice. There’s an awful lot of decorative modernism and worse being made as art, and as a museum, none of us want to put ourselves at its service. AR You have been active in the area of curatorial education over the past 20 years and have put an emphasis on the study of exhibition histories. Once somewhat scorned by art historians and the art press, curatorial programmes have continued to expand and are now part of ‘the system’, so to speak. What do you think are the benefits of a curatorial education rather than, say, traditional art history? CE I have some doubts about the discipline of art history. It always runs the risk of isolating forms of artistic expression from what is happening around them. Most of my work has been about connecting aesthetics to social, political

and emotional change in society. How we see does not have to carry around the baggage of talk about art’s impact on people and role in modern art history and its bogus claim to artistic and what is seen influences how the world turns. society. Another risk will be the emergence of autonomy. Instead, by looking at the history an exhibitionary canon like the artistic canon I appreciate that many art historians also feel of curating, you have to become engaged we already have. This is probably unavoidable, this and work hard to develop other strategies, with the compromises and the contingencies. but it’s important that we constantly stretch but there is still something isolationist about the definition of what ‘making art public’ means What is certainly important is to avoid simply art history as a whole, particularly how that in terms of exhibitions. The value of the study replacing the figure of the artist with the figure art history is then presented in museums. of exhibition histories will be much greater if of the curator. Rather we need to ensure that Look at the Tate Modern art timeline, for we can leave these definitions open to actual both are discussed within their context and instance, which is a way many English people practice and to regular expansion or contraction, in terms of what an individual or group could and London tourists first encounter art history. depending on the urgencies of the moment. make possible in any given circumstance. It is partially a prolongation of Alfred Barr’s And I see that happening abstract art family tree of in many courses. Like 1936, but the Tate chose to exhibition studies, studying do away with all links to the curating does focus on an world beyond art, something inclusive and contextual that Barr did include tanview of making art public, gentially. Art becomes but it adds a strong practical a simple succession of styles aspect that I appreciate. and names with no connecIt is much easier to grasp tion to what is going on in the system by practising the world. That’s simply not it at the same time as you how we should be presenting are being asked to analyse art to people in general. it critically. This in-between It gets them off on the wrong status of doing and thinkfoot. As for the art press, I am ing is still something still amazed at the resistance I enormously enjoy about of many art journalists to curating, and I hope that curatorial gestures. At least pleasure is what we can pass in the Dutch press, they seem on to our students. It also to interpret any deviation feels to me an appropriate from the white-cube position at a time when presentation or the solo modernist disciplinary exhibition as a restriction divisions and the frequent on their sovereign right to snobbism of expert culture commune with the artwork, and intellectual labour without seeing how much have less and less authority. the white cube and solo Curatorial education can protocols are themselves find a good balance between curatorial devices. It becomes theory and practice without a little bit absurd when they denigrating either. I am accuse museums like the also enthusiastic about Van Abbemuseum of having how artists are increasingly too many opinions, as interfering with the curatothough an opinionless rial as a trope for them to museum would be possible. So, I am happy if deconstruct. One of the most exhibition histories challenge important artists of our time that classical form of art is the janitor at the Museum history. I like the fact that of American Art, among from top Li Mu, Qiuzhuang Project – Andy Warhol, 2014, watercolour, ink on paper, ‘exhibition histories’ is in the other things, and that feels 39 × 54 cm, courtesy Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; plural and also that it focuses entirely of a piece with documentation of Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang Project, 2010–15, courtesy the artist on the moment when an artthe moment. I am also I have to say that I am enjoying being in at the work becomes public, defining that as the key thinking of a recent project we did at the Van beginning of this area of study and helping to step in an artwork’s significance. With that Abbemuseum with the artist Li Mu, where he simple gesture, you immediately have to include shape its boundaries. It is also good to see how ‘curated’ his home village in China with copies it is being picked up around the globe, and all the manoeuvring, negotiations, personal of work from the Van Abbemuseum collection. I hope in the near future we can come together relations and institutional politics behind an The project resulted in numerous outcomes, to compare notes and to learn from each other. exhibition. Art becomes entangled in its social including fascinating film of the whole yearIf we turn to the more established emerand power system instantly, and this seems to me long public ‘exhibition’. Putting such projects gence of curatorial studies, I see one great a more pertinent and interesting way of writing as these into curatorial education will become advantage over art history already in that it about art and artists – especially if we want to more and more crucial in the future.

Summer 2016

Museum Art Architecture Technology

Opens in Lisbon, October 5, 2016 Set within a ground-breaking kunsthall designed by London-based Amanda Lavete Architects and an early 20th-century power plant, MAAT will offer an innovative program focusing on contemporary culture, through a combination of visual arts, new media, architecture, technology and science. Opening Program 5 October 2016 Utopia/Dystopia, Part 1: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Also on view in October at MAAT:

Av. Brasília, Central Tejo

The World of Charles and Ray Eames

1300-598 Lisbon, Portugal

The Form of Form - Lisbon Architecture Triennale

www.maat.pt

Second Nature / Artists’ Film International / Edgar Martins

www.facebook.com/maatmuseum

Other People and Their Ideas No 30

Nicolas Bos Interview by

Mark Rappolt

ArtReview has always had an interest in the ways in which the concepts and forms of visual art become inspirations or resources for other disciplines and media. So this month it talked to Nicolas Bos, president and CEO of jeweller, watchmaker and perfumier Van Cleef & Arpels about the ways in which art can have an impact on the design of high-end jewellery. Founded in 1896 by Alfred Van Cleef and his uncle Salomon Arpels, the historic house’s extremely collectable pieces, which often feature flowers, animals and fairies, have been worn by style icons from the worlds of royalty and Hollywood, and are notable for their emphasis on the jeweller’s skill and craft.

ArtReview

ArtReview Your collections are often inspired by stories that come from literature and sometimes art as well. How does that come about? Is it a personal thing? Nicolas Bos I think that kind of artistic inspiration has been present in the house for a very long time. So that’s not something I brought to the job. When we started to revive that a few years ago, it was more my own personal inspirations or references that I felt were relevant to what we could do. A lot of people that have joined the company were also I think attracted by that philosophy and way of working, so now we share a lot of references and inspirations with the team. Talking about artistic references, with the first collection that we did that I wanted to be a narrative, I really brought in the whole idea of working with the fairy, and I did the research myself, trying to understand where the representation of fairies as we knew it within the company was coming from. And pretty much everything was really driving towards Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the pinnacle of this representation of fairies that would then influence not only writers and poets, but also painters and then movies, including Walt Disney’s. AR Do you look for those inspirations, or are they things that strike you by chance? NB There is always real scholarly research that takes place before we start to define the more precise inspiration. It takes around three years to build a collection. There’s a lot of iteration. So for instance, to come back to the idea of a story, when we did that collection on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was quite interesting to work that way, to work on this kind of half-imaginary, half-real world that we felt we could translate into our collections and jewels. That collection was very much about green and the enchanted forest, but another myth that came to mind quite instantly was the myth of Atlantis, which was the kind of underwater version of the same spirit – different story – that would bring you to a world of more blue and different interpretations, different stones. Then when we worked on Atlantis and we explored all the inspirations, one component that appeared very quickly was Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but I decided to keep that separate, thinking it would be more interesting to do something bigger on Jules Verne. What I’ve noticed, and it’s also my understanding and my relationship with culture, is that inspirations that really work internally and then in the long term for the collection and for the public are the ones that are deeply rooted culturally, but that are also quite accessible. So when you go into Shakespeare or Jules Verne or the myth of Atlantis or the story of the

gardens, you can go very deep and you have a lot of levels of interpretation, so it can be extremely sophisticated but it can also be very easy to access, because everybody has a vision of what a garden is, even a French garden, a Japanese garden. Almost everybody has a kind of idea of Jules Verne, and they bring their own imagination to it, the same for Shakespeare’s fairies. Every time we tried, we’ve gone into references that were a bit more complicated, which is sometimes very useful for the creative process, but it’s much more difficult to translate and to keep in the final collection. For instance, I was very proud of a whole collection that we did a few years ago revisiting butterflies, which is a very historical thing for the house. I took the work of Vladimir Nabokov as a starting point because I love it, and I think it was interesting, because he was of course a writer, and he was also a lepidopterist. It was very interesting as a creative process, because instead of saying, ‘OK, we’re going to do many butterflies,’ it was bringing the story behind that. But once you have all the series

I’m not so much into the purely conceptual approach that will not make you feel anything if you don’t have the key. It can sometimes be interesting as a way to create art, but it’s not necessarily what I love the most

NB Yes, of course, and I think that goes pretty much in the same direction. You need to have references that are completely universal, or as universal as possible, or really easy to relate to. But that’s kind of interesting. We did a whole collection on luck, for instance: of course the concept of luck exists in all cultures, but the representation changes. That’s interesting, even funny sometimes, because you will take for instance the bat, which is a very happy and positive sign in Asia, but is scary in France and the UK. So that’s also a way to start a conversation: what is luck and how these symbols have formed and evolved. AR With something like the luck collection, does it include trying to invent new symbols for luck, or do you tend to work with historical? NB It was mostly evaluation of historical symbols. We don’t really invent anything from scratch. Every piece had an origin rooted in tradition, sometimes very tiny – a Swiss symbol of luck that hasn’t really touched the rest of the world. So in some collections it’s going to be more text and literature, some collections are going to be more visual. When we did a collection on California, for instance, it was much more rooted in the 1940s to 70s, it was much more about American literature like Jack Kerouac, but also the period of American colour photography, like William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, and how they capture a particular vision of the light, the desert and the landscape and the endless horizon. Of course Ed Ruscha.

of butterflies, it’s very difficult to explain. If you knew Nabokov very well, you would understand, but I don’t want to go into an attitude where you need to explain too much. You put the viewer or the client in the position of inferiority, which is not the purpose. So it always has to remain very easy to approach at the first level, and I think it’s also something I like in general in culture and in art. I like a few very obscure things, but in general the things that move me the most are artists and artworks and experiences that you can really enjoy even if you don’t know the background. There is an element of emotion, of feeling, and then if you know the background you have the keys to understand even more, but I’m not so much into the purely conceptual approach that will not make you feel anything if you don’t have the key. It can sometimes be interesting as a way to create art, but it’s not necessarily what I love the most.

NB It’s a real inspiration, so it’s never something that you would try to interpret literally or to copy, there is no point trying to copy an Eggleston photograph with jewellery. I think that whole thing works because we are working with a medium that is in a way quite far away from all this inspiration. You always try to extract a combination of colour or a feeling of movement, an element of lightness, and what you find in the final piece will be a combination of stones, maybe a motif. It’s also the reason why I tend to prefer to work with text sometimes rather than visual elements: because it’s abstract. There is always room for interpretation. The design studio for instance are 15 people, so although they will all read the same page, the same description, they will all have a slightly different vision, which helps to bring richness to the collection.

AR You’re in a global market. Do you have to be aware of cultural differences within that?

AR Do you wear all the pieces so that you have experience as well?

facing page Nicolas Bos. Photo: Patrick Swirc. © Van Cleef & Arpels

Summer 2016

AR How easy is it to translate that into jewellery?

NB I don’t wear them all myself. But I probably try on more high-jewellery necklaces and tiaras and bracelets than most men.

POOYA ARYANPOUR UNDER THE SHELL 10 June – 21 July 2016

SOPHIA CONTEMPORARY GALLERY 11 Grosvenor Street, London, W1K 4QB, UK www.sophiacontemporary.com

20th EDITION

10.13 NOV 2016 GRAND PALAIS

when. during Art Basel week June 15 to 19, 2016

what.

Subject to change without notice. Errors and omissions excepted.

photo basel is an independend artfair and the trademark of photo basel GmbH.

where. new location 2016 Volkshaus, Rebgasse 12-14, 4058 Basel photo-basel.com

Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future

: A new lexicon for the biennial Jean-Luc Moulène, The Novacore suit, from the serie Thirty-nine Strike Objects, 1999-2000 © The artist & ADAGP

TAIPEI BIENNIAL 2016 SEPTEMBER 10, 2016 FEBRUARY 5, 2017

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What People do for Money SOme joint ventures

Manifesta 11.6. – 18.9.2016 zurich, switzerland www.manifesta11.org Initiators

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29 Jun – 1 Sep 2016

Artangel at Westminster Hall The Houses of Parliament artangel.org.uk/ethics-of-dust FREE, booking required #EthicsofDust

Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier

Summer Night: Umber and Black, 1976, 65 x 72in /165 x183cm (o/c 822) Jon Schueler Estate ©

2016 Celebrating the Centenary of

JON SCHUELER 1916–1992 Solo Exhibitions in Scotland An Talla Solais, Ullapool, May 7– June 19 The Iona Gallery, Kingussie, October 1 – 29 Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, June 25 – July 31

Kasper Akhøj Heba Amin Monica Bonvicini Mark Boyle Andreas Bunte Tom Burr Thomas Demand Werner Feiersinger Karsten Födinger Cyprien Gaillard Isa Genzken Liam Gillick Annette Kelm Jakob Kolding Miki Kratsman Susanne Kriemann David Maljkovic Jumana Manna Ingrid Martens Isa Melsheimer Olaf Metzel Maximilian Pramatarov Heidi Specker Ron Terada Terceronquinto Sofie Thorsen Klaus Weber Tobias Zielony u.a.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow one painting focus through December, 2016 Mallaig Heritage Centre, April 1 – October 31

Resipole Studios & Fine Art Gallery, Acharacle Aug 6 – September 18 Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Skye, May 27– June 24 The Thurso Gallery, August 6 – September 17 University of Stirling, April 2 – July 15 Paisley Museum and Art Galleries Gesture (group show), July 16 – September 11

Solo Exhibitions in the United States Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR Aug 5 – October 23 Berry Campbell, New York, NY November 17– December 23 For additional information visit jonschueler.com

25/6 – 16/10 2016 Ausstellung

Rhue Art, Ullapool, May 7– June 16

www.kunsthallewien.at

Roger Hiorns with Witherford Watson Mann, The retrospective view of the pathway (detail), 2016. Photo © Max McClure, courtesy of Bristol City Council.

Roger Hiorns with Witherford Watson Mann

The retrospective view of the pathway

Glass Wharf, Bristol BS2 0ZX A major new permanent artwork for Bristol commissioned by Castlemore and produced by Bristol City Council. With the additional support of Corvi-Mora, London.

Art and the Public Realm Bristol www.aprb.co.uk

Art and the Public Realm Bristol is a dedicated website for Bristol City Council’s public art programme, managed and owned by Bristol City Council. © Bristol City Council 2016

JACKSON POLLOCK'S ENERGY MADE VISIBLE. EXHIBITION CURATED BY DAVID ANFAM AND ORGANIZED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA MUSEUM OF ART IN COLLABORATION WITH MUSEO PICASSO MÁLAGA. SPONSORED BY CAIXABANK AND IN COLLABORATION WITH DELTA AIRLINES.

Art Featured

Yeah. No wonder he won’t ask my mom out, or any girl for that matter. All that he ever hears from my grandfather is that he’s going to fail. No one ever tells him he can succeed at anything… 79

ArtReview

The Social Sculptor Rick Lowe’s lifework, Project Row Houses, makes a claim for understanding social engagement as art. Consisting of 22 semiderelict ‘shotgun’ houses in a rundown area of Houston when it was cofounded by Lowe and several other artists in 1993, the project has grown into a laboratory and model for affordable housing and community-building – not to mention an actual thriving community. So what makes this complex of residences, commercial buildings, spaces for artist residencies and an exhibition programme so influential? Here ArtReview speaks with the artist in Houston and then looks at the project in terms of its significance as art

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I Combining practical requirements with poetic expression Interview by Joshua Mack

ArtReview How did Project Row Houses come about? Rick Lowe It started with me as a painter, trying to make paintings that dealt with critical social issues, brutality, poverty, war, the environment, an array of issues in the 1980s. I would make these large-scale-painting-slash-cutoutsculptural-things, and organise press conferences and rallies within the installations. It was working for me, for a while, until I got challenged by a teenager who told me that, while that was interesting, it wasn’t helping anybody. Probably one of the harshest critiques I’ve ever had. That caused me to slow down, close my studio and just engage within this community, the Third Ward. I started doing volunteer work here, and trying to figure out how I [could] do something that is both symbolic and poetic – the artistic part – but also have a direct practical impact. AR What was it about the Third Ward that brought you here? RL When I came to Houston in the mid-80s I quickly found a group of artists, and I was a part of their community. It was not connected with the African American community at all. So in my desire to get some proximity to the African-American community, I started doing volunteer work at one of [the city’s] best known and organised community centres for African Americans. It’s called S.H.A.P.E. Community Center (Self-Help for African People through Education). It was [also] a hub for all kinds of political activism, for services for youth and adults, and that kind of stuff. I also started reading a lot of art history, trying to figure out where I could find myself in a historical context. Where someone had done something that set a precedent for doing work that was not just symbolic and poetic, but was trying to have a practical application. That’s when I found Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture. I didn’t necessarily connect with his approach to it, but the concept of the world

as a sculpture, and [the idea] that we’re all sculpting it, was really valuable to me. It gave a framework for thinking about something outside of traditional painting and sculpture that had a legitimate artistic context, and that I could perhaps tap into. That was the art side. Then there was a side of being here in the community, and being a part of this activist group through the community centre. One day they organised a tour, with city officials, county officials and activists. They were asking for things to be torn down because there was so much derelict property here, and people were using it for prostitution, drug activities and that kind of stuff. We went all over the neighbourhood, and on the way back to the centre, which is just a few blocks from here, they stopped the bus and said that this was the absolute worst place in the entire neighbourhood. There were only three buildings occupied in the area. So they decided it should be torn down. At first I agreed. But I was also taking classes at Texas Southern University, which is a historically black college. The art programme there was founded by John Biggers, who did a lot of paintings about shotgun houses. I had a conversation with him about it. He just started talking about the historical context of the shotgun house, and it was mesmerising to me, because I grew up in the South, around shotgun houses, but I had never heard anyone talk about them in a way that had such poetic resonance and historic importance. Then I started thinking, ‘Maybe these houses would be a good spot to try to do something.’ So there’s the art side of me studying and trying to figure stuff out, there was the volunteering at the community centre, there was the reconnecting the shotgun houses with John Biggers. Then there was a fourth component of me meeting with a group of AfricanAmerican artists, trying to figure out how we could leverage the kind of cultural capital we were gaining by being in shows in order

ArtReview

to do something within the community. So, pulling all those things together, I said, ‘Well, let’s see if we can do something on this site that would be alleviating a real issue of blight that folks were having a problem with.’ AR How did the project specifically fuse the aesthetic and the social, and respond to the specific cultural or social needs of the community? RL The practical need of this community was to have someone that was invested in showing care for this place that had been written off. The poetic side was connecting the houses to John Biggers, to bring all that meaning and value that he projected in his paintings, and to try to do it in a living context. The purely aesthetic part of it, for me, was a real desire that what I was doing was manifesting itself as a part of my creative being as an artist. That’s where the Joseph Beuys thing became very, very important to me: the desire to see aesthetics in the social acts, the democratic acts that we use to build a more just and meaningful society. AR Over the period that the project has been in existence, how has it developed and changed, and how has your relationship to it evolved? RL On all these levels it’s been a challenge: on the practical level, on the poetic aspect, on the conceptual level for me as an artist doing this work. On a practical level, the scale has increased. It was a huge challenge for a group of artists, and folks with no resources, to take 22 abandoned houses and make them into something that actually has value. Over the past 20 years, we’ve gone from the 22 little houses to having about 72 rental houses that we’ve developed. That’s not including the houses that we do for programming and that kind of stuff. There are three small commercial buildings, and lots of other real-estate holdings. That’s a different scale. Then, the challenge to the practical, which I’m extremely excited about, is watching the place move from where real estate had almost no

above Rick Lowe, Victim #4, 1990 (installation view, S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, Houston). Photo: Ben de Soto. © Houston Chronicle preceding pages Rick Lowe, May 2016. Photo: Bill McCullough

Summer 2016

above John Biggers, Shotguns, 1987, oil and acrylic on canvas. © John T. Biggers Estate / VAGA, NY / DACS, London. Estate represented by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York. Courtesy Swann Galleries, New York facing page Charisse Pearline Weston, Travelin Man, 2014 (installation view, Summer Studios Residency programme, Houston). Photo: Alex Barber. Courtesy the artist and Project Row Houses, Houston

ArtReview

value, and if it was any value, it was, maybe, $1 per square foot; to 2005, maybe $5 or $6 a square foot; 2010, $13 or so. Now, in 2016, it could be upwards to $50 a square foot. It’s gone from being a neighbourhood that was dying because of disinvestment, to a neighbourhood that is being strangled from an influx of outside investment that has no relationship to the existing neighbourhood. How do we respond to that? The reason I say I’m so excited is that one of the most significant philanthropic families in Houston heard about what we’re doing, contacted me and said, ‘I think that what you guys are doing is really interesting and great, and we want to partner with you.’ Now I go to the poetic side. Dealing with the 22 little shotgun houses was so much connected to the aesthetic language of John Biggers’s paintings. As we’ve continued to grow and expand, how do we keep that poetic energy, within the broader context of things that we’re doing? AR When you say ‘poetic energy’, do you mean a cultural identity that’s vested in the history and the experience of the people who live in the neighbourhood? RL Yes, but the question, from a formal standpoint, is: how do you do it? I’m always thinking about what becomes the guidepost that I use to assure that the poetics – the gestures – are layered. It becomes important to figure out how you layer the meaning of housing in a way that distinguishes it from what housing means to someone who’s doing it just for financial [reasons]. For us, it’s carefully talking about the architecture and trying to really layer it as much as possible, to find as much meaning and

value in the type of structures that we put up. Also, it’s about trying to play with the idea of how you create a mixture of residents in a way that you wouldn’t normally be doing if you were just a real-estate developer. In our units we have people on as low as 30 percent of the median income. Hardly anybody [else] is doing that. How do we engage those residents within the context of neighbourhood? AR What are the ethical challenges that face art or face you as an artist responding to a particular community?

‘The Joseph Beuys thing became very, very important to me: the desire to see aesthetics in the social acts, the democratic acts that we use to build a more just and meaningful society’ RL Well, the most specific challenge is to see those things that have an inherent power within them that for some reason nobody else can see, and bring them into an empowering relationship with the rest of the things that you pull together. There are resources here – whether it’s within this neighbourhood or within this city – that have the capacity to actually empower this community to respond to the new challenge of development. How do you see them? How do you find them? How do you go about it? It’s very interesting, and it’s strange, because sometimes [it’s] the very simple gestures that, for someone like me, almost become second nature. It’s like

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most people in any kind of work: the more you do it, the more simple it seems. There are things that are right at us. It’s just being in a moment in time and looking for the power source that can empower this community to move forward and continue on. AR What does power mean, in the context of Project Row Houses? RL It’s more like empowerment, not power. That’s a very key element to the work, because if I had the power to do it all, then that would actually be disempowering to the community. My approach is more to not try to have the power, but to try to use whatever I have to generate empowerment from within the community. AR How do you measure success, then? RL From the aesthetic side, I always think it’s successful if there’s a richness of conversation and thought in the process. If it challenges people to think of new ways of doing things, and of being. Then there’s the bottom line. That’s a harder one, but I could say over time we’ve had a huge impact in terms of adding value to this community from a real-estate standpoint, but that’s also a negative. I think also, on the practical side, there is the amount of empowerment, the amount of people who are growing out of the work that’s happening, and seeing people that we’ve worked with that are now in very powerful positions within the city, which is fantastic. I think, though, going forward on this major effort that we’re doing, the success is going to be determined much more by specific things, the scale of housing, the quality, the commercial

development that will happen, and how that will fit. AR How much housing do you expect to develop through this new programme? RL We’re entering a planning phase that will determine that. This neighbourhood is very low density, and my guess is that, in the next 10 or 15 years, there are probably going to be around 10,000 new units. Then the question is, what percentage should be affordable? However we work that out in our planning process will give us some framework to understand whether it’s successful or not. AR Those battles of course are fought in other cities. Is your model something that can be applied in other contexts? RL I think what I have, more from an artist’s standpoint, is a process of how to approach the work. I think that process is one that is valuable and relevant in looking through issues in almost any context. AR How do you feel about some of the projects that have been linked to yours? The Watts House Project in LA, or Dorchester, in Chicago? RL I started the Watts House Project. It was the first time I had explored my process outside of the Project Row Houses context. Someone posed a question to me not too long ago: ‘What was the most essential thing that was necessary to start Project Row Houses?’ I realised that the most essential thing was time. It was the fact that I was in this community. That was a way for me to really get to the core of what was happening here. Then I needed other resources to come.

So, the big question, addressing new projects, is to find people, within a local context, [who] have time but don’t have connection to other resources. If I can bring other resources, then maybe we can get a similar thing. [With] the Watts House Project I didn’t have time. I connected with someone who did have time, and where I failed on that project was to continue to bring the other resources I had to help them move the project along in a meaningful way. When you talk about other projects, I think it’s the same as talking about a couple of painters who may paint in a similar vein, but still have their own approaches to what they do. I have to also understand that sometimes the things that we’re critical of are the most enlightening things, ultimately. They’re different than what we do, and they bring new value. I’m always excited to see other folks doing their work. I have a good relationship with Theaster [Gates], and watch and study his work with great interest. The same with Mark Bradford. I’m always trying to understand. AR Going back to the beginning, but also looking to the future: when you started Project Row Houses you offered housing to single mothers committed to continuing their education. Why single mothers? You were in Athens recently ahead of Documenta’s programme there next year. What did you find? RL Key to my process is to really do my best to listen, and to generate the concepts based on what I hear the values and needs of people within that context are. Oftentimes I will show up with things that are my preconceived idea, but I try to put it out in a way that allows people

ArtReview

to pick it apart until we can find what’s really valuable to them. With the young mothers’ housing here, it was pretty straightforward. As we were renovating these houses, and doing arts programming, and education programming, someone said, ‘This neighbourhood needs housing for people to live in.’ So then we had to figure out: how do we do housing in a way that’s interesting, that’s layered, that has meaning on multiple levels? We could have done artists’ housing, or we could have just had rental housing, but finding the high level of single mothers as being an interesting topic to approach, that’s how we got here. Now, in Athens, it’s really interesting, because I think I was invited based on a project that I worked on in Dallas called Trans.lation [2013–14], which deals with immigrant refugee issues. Spending just a little time [in Athens] listening to the situation of the refugees helped me understand that the project I do may have less to do with refugees and more to do with immigrants. The circumstances in Athens are such that the refugees there are just on a conveyor: they’re there for three to five days, 10 to 15 days, 30 days max. I need more time than that in order to find a way to connect with the refugee population in a manner that is about empowering people. I’ve come to understand, OK, I can shade that out a little bit, and focus a bit more on immigrant populations, and maybe refugees that are getting their status to be there on a longer scale. I don’t know, I have to go back and really dig deeper. The first trip was getting to know the Documenta team, and that kind of stuff, and a little glimpse into the community.

above Project Row Houses during the Artist Round 41 exhibition, March 2015. Photo: Peter Molick facing page ‘Writing in the Margins’ workshop by Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud during the Artist Round 42 exhibition, June 2015. Photo: Michael McFadden

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II From social experiment to artworld paradigm by Erik Morse

At the nexus of the contemporary artworld’s concepts of both ‘placemaking’ and ‘social practice’, Houston’s Project Row Houses continues to serve as spatial paradigm 20 years after its founding. The primary experiment of MacArthur-grant fellow Rick Lowe, the multiblock Third Ward project – or what he refers to, per Joseph Beuys, as ‘social sculpture’ – centres on nearly two dozen reconditioned shotgun houses and encompasses a growing network of lowincome residences, artist spaces, community outreach programmes and sustainable building initiatives. It has also come to represent a civic movement waging a continual battle for funding and recognition from within the very heart of the neoliberal New South – wherein the desire for living space turns on the demands of a deregulated market and ‘race blind’ political order. Likewise, in America’s postrecession era of corporatised universities and privatised funding models, critiques of the aesthetic legitimacy of ‘public installation’ – a catchall phrase that includes everything from urban cloud-gardens to fashionable, Banksy-inspired interventions – have often viewed Lowe’s Project Row Houses through a social-activist lens, rarely affording it the cartographic or phenomenological assessment it deserves. In a rare, and important, counternarrative, which illustrates Project Row’s syncretism of subaltern phenomenologies and domestic architectures, University of Houston professor Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez recently wrote that the 22 shotgun houses of the Third Ward community act ‘not only as a historical retrieval of African-American material culture but also as a mirror of a distinctive African-American way of being in the world’. Vazquez claims that Lowe’s conceptual practice originates in the architecture of the shotgun itself, a narrow, typically one-storey house originating in New Orleans and prevalent in predominantly black enclaves throughout the American South since the Civil War. For Vazquez, Project Row represents a ‘spatial unfolding’ between house and people in this African-American landscape. Despite the conceptual indebtedness within the art of placemaking to the languages of Continental ontology (cf Martin Heidegger’s Building, Dwelling, Thinking, 1951; Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, 1958; and Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphären. Plurale Sphärologie: Band III: Schäume, 2004), such references to theories of dwelling and intersubjective topologies are not, as a rule, applied evenly to art practices viewed as racialised or minoritarian, particularly those whose content foregrounds social or economic disparities. The aesthetic genealogy and material causes of Project Row, however, are precisely linked to the black domestic imaginaries that inhabited the shotgun house over the course of the Jim Crow century,

the period of time roughly following Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era, in which African Americans endured brutal, de jure segregation by the Southern white majority. Characterised by black cultural theorist bell hooks as a ‘symbol of architecture created to express life in transition… [of] a fugitive existence’, the house’s historical significance is inextricably coupled with a visual politics of segregation. She writes in the essay ‘Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice’ (1995): [B]lack folks equated freedom with the passage into a life where they would have the right to exercise control over space on their own behalf, where they would imagine, design, and create spaces that would respond to the needs of their lives, their communities, their families. Growing up in a world where black working class and ‘po’ folk,’ as well as the black well-to-do, were deeply concerned with the aesthetics of space, I learned to see freedom as always and intimately linked to the issue of transforming space. Few artists have elaborated more on the iconography and ‘place-ness’ of the shotgun house in African-American history than the late painter and muralist John Biggers, whose development of the fine-arts department at Houston’s Texas Southern University beginning during the 1960s galvanised multiple generations of black visual-artists and social practitioners throughout the South. Biggers’s Shotguns (1987), perhaps the cornerstone entry in his oeuvre, is a pictorial study of the shotgun house represented within the matrilineal heritage of AfricanAmerican domestic culture. His choice of women as Shotguns’s primary subject invokes these unique domestic and porch cultures initiated by the house’s functional topology, which serves, in the painting, as both a narrative and structural pattern upon which various totems of black folklore (among them quilts, train tracks, washboards and pots) are assembled to create a highly formalised landscape. Wrought in figurative tessellations reminiscent of Section d’Or’s cubist style, Shotguns’s importance as a visual artefact of the black imaginary is underscored by Southern cultural historian Robert Farris Thompson, who writes that it ‘…becomes a model of belief and practice… where black Creole vision takes the poetic measure of three worlds – Europe, Africa and America…’ It is in visualising this hybridisation of African diasporic and Western influences that, according to Thompson, Biggers’s work elevates the shotgun from commonplace shelter to cultural iconography. Thompson also, perhaps cheekily, draws a connection between Shotguns and Grant Wood’s omnipresent visual cliché American Gothic (1930) for their comparative depictions of vernacular architectures as

ArtReview

Monica Villareal, Migration Is, 2014 (installation view, during Artist Round 41 exhibition, March 2015). Photo: Alex Barber. Courtesy the artist and Project Row Houses, Houston

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New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward and the Seventh Ward. According to hooks’s reading, the shotgun was never an endpoint but rather a means for those at the sociopolitical bottom to climb towards greater structural independence. However, these aspirations were stunted in the increasingly confrontational climate of the Civil Rights era through a combination of redlining (the selective practice of denying finances or loans to those living in certain areas) and ghettoising and direct governmental violence within predominantly segregated neighbourhoods. The shotgun’s reframing from domestic space to criminal nonspace (from the 1970s through the 90s, it was most often cast by media as I frame Project Row Houses and other projects that I work on a drug or squatter den) ensured its genealogical and physical erasure via within a context of social sculpture. Joseph Beuys coined that subsequent urban revitalisation and gentrification initiatives. term and defined it as the ways in which we shape and mold the As part of Project Row’s vision, a majority of its domestic strucworld around us… But at its core, it’s really just about thinking tures, including both repurposed shotgun homes and, beginning in the social environment as a sculptural form so that we understand 2003, an affiliated programme of new multifloor duplexes designed some of the everyday, mundane things that happen – from transiby architecture students at Rice Building Workshop, have been deditional housing for single mothers or education programs or realcated to single mothers, low-income families and artists-in-residence, estate development – not only from the standpoint of the practical the last of these often serving on projects conceived and executed in outcomes from these services but also the poetic elements that can the Third Ward community. “After establishing the arts program be layered into them. and the education program, people hanging around began to point Unlike Biggers’s painterly depiction of the shotgun as a sort of out that housing was a real problem in the neighborhood,” Lowe totalising Gesamtdarstellung – symbolising a spiritual, maternal and explained in the same 2015 podcast. “So that gave us the opportunity cultural ‘homeland’ – Lowe’s renovation of the city’s Third Ward to think about housing in a poetic way: how do we talk about housing housing block necessitated reworking and reimagining the object and ask questions about housing and provide it to someone in a way itself from the ‘ground up’, engaging with the derelict structures and that could be inspirational?” the fragmented social surroundings that epitomised the ruinology of Additional public areas, including an organic garden, community urban blight since the 1950s. and entertainment venues, and a green corridor, open the row of exhiWith its predominantly Afro-Caribbean origin and efficient, clima- bition/studio houses onto a more mutable geometry of living/working tological design, the shotgun house’s rapid proliferation throughout spatial regimes. Such intimate cartographies suggest the midSouthern cities from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s was nineteenth-century phalansteries, experimental cooperatives based viewed as providing new, but temporary, communitarian formations around organised, and often retrofitted, housing blocks. But they for Freedmen and the postcolonial diaspora. The house’s configu- also accurately reflect how the serialised and proximal construction of ration was rooted in West African and Haitian shotgun houses, with their emphasis on indoor/ Archival photograph of shotgun houses building practices and adapted to the small plats outdoor liminality, often collapsed strict stratifiin the northern Third Ward, Houston, 1993. Photo: Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez and community geographies of Creole areas like cations between public and private imaginaries

symbolic of regional migrations – the latter for the white Midwestern farmer and the former for the Southern black Freedman. In situating Project Row Houses’ (and Lowe’s) ‘sculptural’ iteration of Biggers’s folk pictorialism – or, rather, transforming the utopian idyll of Biggers’s subject from the canvas to the (re)construction of the house itself, per Beuys – there remains the temporal/ quotidian variables of ‘lived experience’ – another concept endemic to the phenomenological subject. As Lowe explained in a 2015 podcast by arts website Bad at Sports:

ArtReview

of place among residents. Project initiatives like 2016’s ‘Project/Site’ into what Thompson calls ‘spiritualized architecture’, employand ‘Performing the Neighborhood’ commission performance-based ing what he refers to as ‘sub-Saharan [dress]’. In so doing, they also conworks that purposely expand beyond the studio spaces into neigh- tested the shotgun’s contemporary appraisal as a domestic nonspace. bourhood sites and streets. Careful not to fall victim to tokenism, Project Row’s innovations for affordable home design and sustainProject Row’s establishment of artist ‘incubation’ programmes able social services within a lower-income neighbourhood further and summer studio projects, beginning in 2012, sought exclusively encouraged an ecological reassessment of the shotgun in other cities local or regional artists in hopes of encouraging an aesthetic middle in need of minority housing. Following Hurricane Katrina’s devasground between trends in ‘white cube’ exhibition and dubious forms tation of much of New Orleans, which boasted the highest urban of anthropological tourism. concentration of shotguns, architects/firms like Morphosis, Miletus This deliberate hybridising of curatorial function and domestic Group, Frank Gehry and MIT professor/digital designer Larry Sass, setting extends to the numerous exhibiting artists who have directly among others, elected shotgun-inspired prototypes for rebuilding invoked the ‘house’ motif in their works, often utilising the shotgun’s efforts. Subsequent additions of ‘floating’ chassis, modular fabrication and solar energy conduits modernlayout as a template for site-specific The shotgun’s reframing from ised the house’s minimalist template installation (Vicki Meek’s 2517 Memory House, 1994; Paul Kittelson and Carter domestic space to criminal nonspace with a focus on sustainable technologies. Ernst’s The Full House, 1995; Robert BarPerhaps most important was the unaniensured its genealogical and physical samian’s Our House, 1996; Bob Powell’s mous incorporation of digital templates erasure via urban revitalisation and software modelling to standardise In This House, 1997; and Natalie Lovejoy’s Lost Innocence, 1997). It is indicative, an architectural design that had been in and gentrification initiatives Lowe’s hands a manual and piecemeal however, of a wider black domestic imaginary present in the surrounding Third Ward neighbourhood, which, social experiment based on a century of vernacular craft. As a result, per hooks, ‘view[s] the world right outside [its] housing structure as the shotgun finally achieved a place within the architect’s lexicon of liminal space where [it] can stretch the limits of desire and imagina- modern housing. tion’. Thompson points to the history of local yard artists like Cortor That Lowe’s architectural instantiation of Biggers’s vision has Black, Cleveland Turner and Robert Harper, all of whom inspired Lowe endured and expanded on a national and international level (Lowe with their vernacular approaches to architectural design and public has worked on similar social projects from Los Angeles to Athens) works. Using their own lawns and house exteriors as the predominant merits deeper readings of the contemporary desire for dwelling – medium for their craft, they assembled everyday objects like mirrors, not only by means of architecture but also across disciplines of social fan blades and hubcaps – material often viewed as waste or scrap – and domestic practice. This despite limited municipal resources and to transform these spaces into intricate decorative sculpture with a indifferent local ideologies, which continue to favour Houston as a phenomenological conceit, allowing the frame of the house to unfold zone-free city and encourage suburbanised models of housing for its as a conduit between private interior(ity) and public landscape, archi- ruling classes. For its numerous achievements, Project Row Houses tectural object and social practice. Dismissed by institutional forms exemplifies the aspirations of the black domestic imaginary for transof critique and exhibition as ‘outsider’ artists, forming an elusive and often belligerent landOpening of Artist Round 32 exhibition, March 2010 they nonetheless refashioned their dwellings scape into a home. ar

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Jill Magid In works created over the past 15 years, the artist has immersed herself in systems that police, restrict and enforce society’s public and private realms, ‘dancing’, ‘flirting’ and carving out space for herself while defining individual identity in the age of mass surveillance by Aoife Rosenmeyer

I can burn your face, 2008, neon light, 31 × 97 cm

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The use of CCTV in British public spaces exploded during the 1990s; media illustrate different facets of the boundaries she finds and tests between 1992 and 2002 it accounted for more than £250 million of within the organisational frameworks. public funds. By the time American artist Jill Magid’s videos in the The Dutch secret service (the AIVD) made an ideal counterpart for series Evidence Locker and the installation Retrieval Room (all 2004) Magid when it commissioned her to create a work for its headquarwere shown at the Liverpool Biennial that year, there were 242 CCTV ters in 2005. Her proposal was to create a human ‘face’ for this anonycameras operating in the city. To make her works (which comprise five mous body; it would be generated by conversations (operating within different narratives constructed from edited CCTV footage), Magid a series of limitations set by the agency) with AIVD staff. Over three spent 31 days walking through Liverpool dressed in a bright-red coat; years Magid talked to 18 employees about their personal lives. As the she alerted the staff operating the surveillance cameras to her where- work from these conversations developed (Magid gave the agency abouts so that they could follow her several pieces, including sculpture and Why does it constitute a breach of remotely. For the 18-minute Trust, for neon works), the AIVD accepted that example, she closed her eyes and asked Magid would stage a related exhibition decorum to engage emotionally and at Stroom Den Haag (Article 12, in 2008). the camera operators to guide her sensually with state organisations? remotely with their voices through the No one was directly identified in the streets. At the end of the 31 days, Magid applied to access the record- artworks, which included phrases in neon such as I can burn your face ings of her, using the ‘subject access request’ forms that are available (2008, meaning ‘I can reveal your identity’). Nevertheless, the agency to anybody whose data is recorded or gathered by the UK authori- felt it necessary to censor the exhibition. When she queried its action, ties; these she completed in the intimate manner of a love letter to a compromise with the AIVD was reached in which an uncut version the ‘Operator’. of her novelistic account of the commission was displayed – in a glass The films and installation were shown across the venues of FACT case – in an exhibition (Authority to Remove, 2009, at Tate Modern) and Tate Liverpool, and constituted Magid’s first major European before being removed and confiscated by members of the AIVD. show. If there ever was a honeymoon period for surveillance as a form A heavily redacted version of the same report was published as of control, a time when it was embraced by all the citizens it observed, Becoming Tarden in 2010; book and exhibition manifest the existence it was shortlived. Yet in 2004 few of us were aware of how deeply of secrets that may not be told. surveillance would penetrate our lives. Magid found a concrete In Magid’s Dutch project, transparency on the part of the agency instance of this growing, observing behemoth and approached it would have been highly unlikely; an attempt to render the workdirectly. She forged a relationship with the system on her own terms, ings of the AIVD simple in response to the commission would have challenging its sole purpose as a crime-prevention/detection tool for generated an inadequate, inaccurate portrayal of the sophistication enforcement agencies and making herself an active, conscious author of their operation. “I am trying to find or make meaning with strucand subject using it. A network of which we generally only think of in tures that seem intangible or closed,” Magid tells me in an email. terms of a broad outline was fleshed out when the artist placed herself “Transparency alone does not always accommodate that or reveal the within it in order to generate her own stories. Back then, surveillance complexities within the system.” Obfuscation and complication may was not as charged a topic as it is today, but the works resonate still; indeed be more correct. When tasked by Laura Poitras to generate a a book and a video from the project will be included in this summer’s glossary from the cache of information Edward Snowden gave Poitras Manifesta 11, in Zürich. about NSA surveillance in 2013 for the catalogue of the filmmaker’s Magid’s artistic method generally starts with something like 2016 Whitney Museum exhibition, Astro Noise, Magid instead wrote fieldwork, albeit with no claim to objectivity, when she seeks ways an account that entangled emotion with the linguistic register of to immerse herself as an observer in foreign systems. The systems or officialdom and intelligence. In response to the opacity of the termienvironments she chooses tend to be faceless, shadowy institutions nology in the cache, she constructed an alternative narrative (also – in Liverpool it was City Watch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool opaque) of an ultimately aborted search for an individual within the City Council) – that represent power information. ‘The archive, which I had Inserting a different, unexpected in various forms. With her intimate all too briefly entered, was vast and pregnant with secrets (S). I had wanted approach to form-filling in the Evidence quality of information in dialogue to penetrate it. Collecting NSA vocabuLocker project, Magid countered offiwith faceless organisations finds wiggle lary was a job, not a mission, resulting cial bureaucracy with soft words of room within cool, administrative sentiment and emotion. Contrasts in a glossary of terms that were defined between her poetic, amorous language but meaningless. I needed a target. He frameworks such as legal strictures and actions – ensuring she was seen by was my decryption key to the archive, the surveillance cameras and then appropriating the filmed material, and to all of the languages within it. Without him, I was left with an for example – and the reserved, impersonal tone expected when an architecture without tenants, terms without actors, SIGINT without individual and an institution interact, occur repeatedly in the artist’s HUMINT (Human Intelligence),’ writes Magid. work. Her strategies have been likened to flirtation: “I am dancing Magid’s major projects to date have engaged with public bodies with the rules, finding different ways to interpret them. I am looking that display varying degrees of openness, organisations all, nomifor a way to enter and understand the system, to have a dialogue with nally, working on citizens’ behalf. Since 2013, however, she has been it,” she tells me, when we talk via Skype. Magid’s interactions with developing a body of work called The Barragán Archives, which investhose powers provide the raw material or the stimuli for works in tigates the legacy of Luis Barragán. Since the Mexican architect’s film, sculpture, installation, performance and book formats. Different death, his professional and personal archives – as they fell on either

Summer 2016

Trust, 2004 (video still), DVD, edited CCTV footage and audio, 18 min

ArtReview

Evidence Locker. Control Room, 2004 (video still), two-channel digital video, edited CCTV footage, 10 min, loop (no sound)

Summer 2016

side of the door that partitioned the two activities that took place in the building in which he lived and worked – have been separated, to be owned and administered by different organisations. Today the house (Casa Luis Barragán) is a museum co-owned by the Fundación de Arquitectura Tapatía Luis Barragán (FATLB, who have the private archive) and the Government of the State of Jalisco; the work archive, meanwhile, has been transported to the headquarters of the Vitra furniture company in Birsfelden, Switzerland, where it is operated by the not-for-profit Barragan Foundation, itself in turn supported by Vitra. The architect’s posthumous identity has been split and incorporated by several different players, each constructing different versions of a common history. These organisations all have a remit to safeguard an individual’s legacy but are creating different versions of it. The Barragan Foundation is said to have been acquired by Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of Vitra, as a wedding gift for his wife, Federica Zanco, the architect who now directs the foundation; one man became an object of exchange in other people’s lives. The first iteration of Magid’s Barragán project was shown as part of Art Basel’s Parcours section in 2013; the latest takes the form of a solo exhibition at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen this summer. The Basel work, situated in the centre of Basel, about 20km from the Birsfelden location, consisted of a model of a proposal by Magid that a version of a Barragán water trough for horses be realised on the Vitra campus, itself an extraordinary site dotted with constructions by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and the like. This initial approach was rebuffed by Vitra and the Barragan Foundation; since then Magid has traced a delicate choreography around the subject of the architect and his archivists, Zanco in particular. Legal constraints relating to copyright and reproduction have become formative tools in the project. After Magid was warned that reproduction of anything in Barragán’s professional archive would result in prosecution, she investigated what reproduction specifically means. For an exhibition at Art in General in New York she could exhibit a chair inspired by his design under the ‘fair use’ doctrine, but the US legal loophole does not apply in France, so the same work was displayed under a blanket at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris. Barragán’s ownership of several cheap reproductions of Josef Albers paintings triggered a separate exploration of how she might recreate Albers’s works without infringing the laws governing intellectual property rights. Equally relating to themes of originality and

the legacy of a deceased artist, communication between Zanca and Magid inspired a performance that borrows from Samuel Beckett’s television play Quad (1981), in which four figures, dressed in white, red, blue and yellow respectively, each with their own percussive leitmotif, silently pace a square set, never touching each other. Magid’s performance, presented at the South London Gallery in 2014, replaced Beckett’s actors with the absent figures of Artist, Architect, Archivist and Author, described by a voiceover. Magid’s approaches, her (mis)uses of channels of communication, for example, often seem absurd, even if she equally demonstrates absurdities within the organisations or regulations she encounters. Which begs questions of why certain behaviour is appropriate in certain circumstances: why, for example, does it constitute a breach of decorum for her to engage emotionally and sensually with state organisations? Her actions are passionate, yet highly controlled, both in the doing and their reporting in various forms as artworks. When required by her strategy, Magid is committed, prepared to enter into a quid pro quo of personal revelation. Inserting a different, unexpected quality of information in dialogue with faceless organisations finds wiggle room within cool, administrative frameworks such as legal strictures. She contrasts the illusory notions that organisations should be transparent to serve us, or secretive to protect us, with more nuanced, embodied perspectives. She scrutinises a subject, not to achieve overview but to know it up close. As theorist Karen Barad has said, ‘Knowing is a direct material engagement.’ With her Barragán project, Magid has turned her attention from public bodies to the private sphere and organisations that float somewhere between private and public, perhaps in an acknowledgement (even if subconscious) that corporations are ever more powerful in a global context. More than anything, she appears to be sounding out the definition and meaning of an individual identity – the personal – if legally owned by a clutch of organisations that blur institutional and corporate boundaries. And ultimately, work like Magid’s, thanks to her insistence on her individuality, throws fresh light on private and public bodies, asserting control and promoting a kind of public space in the midst of their anonymity. ar

ArtReview

Jill Magid: The Proposal is at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen through 21 August. Work by the artist can also be seen at Manifesta 11, in various venues around Zürich, from 11 June to 11 September

facing page and above Der Trog (installation views, Art Basel Parcours, 2013) all images Courtesy the artist and RaebervonStenglin, Zürich

Summer 2016

Michel Houellebecq Interview by Tom Emerson

This summer, French poet and novelist Michel Houellebecq has his first major art exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Here he talks to architect Tom Emerson about the transition from word to image and from the page to space 98

ArtReview

Tom Emerson Maybe you could start by describing the exhibition you’re preparing at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris this summer and the motivations behind it? Michel Houellebecq In fact, this exhibition came from another exhibition in the 20th arrondissement that was more limited in scope. Jean de Loisy [director of the Palais de Tokyo] liked it and he asked me if I would be interested in doing another. I would say that it is a way to create a form of storytelling that for me is more akin to a collection of poems than a novel. So it is storytelling that is a little bit less narrative and that has potential for bifurcations. We spent a lot of time creating a plan for an exhibition that is segmented into small, autonomous rooms with relatively few elements. Quite often I put chairs in the centre or in the corner, to indicate a point of observation, a calm space where one can look at the images. There aren’t that many places where one can stop in a city. Well, there are churches, but apart from that, there aren’t many.

TE What can you do in a gallery or, more generally, in real physical space that you are unable to do in writing?

MH I don’t observe things frontally but quite often by being a little bit above.

MH To start with, to introduce bifurcations. All books are necessarily sequential. So having three dimensions allows us to envisage obligatory paths and optional paths.

TE But what struck me with regard to what I have read in your texts about the exhibition and seen in your photographs is the view towards a built environment.

TE You mentioned dividing the exhibition into small rooms. Is this also about the possibility of chance? To ensure that everything is not linear as it is in a text? MH Well, it’s choices. I don’t overdo it. It’s not a labyrinth. Not quite. There is a temptation in our writing to have narrative bifurcations, possible choices that may eventually come together later on. TE The neverending consumption of choices. MH Which is tiring. We live in a tiring world. And there is the interest of the image in itself, which is separate from the text. For example,

TE You mention this frequently in your text on contemporary architecture…

TE Do you think that by doing this exhibition you are returning towards an interest in the object, space, the chairs?

TE Maybe you could speak about stopping, the position of the observer… MH I think that the first artistic step I took was to stop along the way. When I go from one place to another, from my home to college, to take a moment to stop, to pass an indefinite amount of time to look at what is going on. To step out of time. Take my time and freedom against the schedule. A museum can serve this purpose.

TE I think this is a European condition. MH Yes, I’m sure. It happens that I grew up in a péri-urbain environment. The word didn’t exist, but the reality did. More recently I became interested in pure countryside. Especially since The Map and the Territory. I realised that, actually, I didn’t know France very well: I went to holiday destinations, but I didn’t know the French countryside. TE Is it fair to say that you are more interested in environments than specific spaces? Space and places are always precisely described, but the meaning builds in the conditions of broader environments, whether they be urban, peri-urban, rural, industrial, touristic, wild landscape or infrastructure for example.

MH Absolutely. Let’s just say that in general I am quite ill at ease in contemporary places because often I want to stop and it’s not possible. I am of a certain age, and there is an acceleration of movement and flows that is painful for me. Physically painful.

MH Space, yes, but not in manufactured objects, there aren’t that many objects in my exhibition. In the Palais de Tokyo, the chairs are important as a means of being able to stop. I think that in life in general there aren’t enough places where one can stop, and to stop with something interesting to look at. That is really something that is missing in society. Everything is too geared towards mobility and the reality of mobility.

MH Well, there are several periods to this. There was a period when I was interested, almost exclusively, in what we call the ‘péri-urbain’ [outer urban] zones, because the word ‘banlieue’ [suburb] no longer suits. These are shapeless zones, deconstructed, which in France spread between the centre of Paris and the countryside. There is a whole region that is confused.

I have never written real descriptions of landscapes because I find that photography is better suited to it. Similarly I don’t really take photos of human beings because I find that literature is better suited to that. TE This is one of the points that interests me: I find your evocation of place and of the observer’s position in your writing very precise. And the attention you bring to scale – for example in [your 2010 novel] The Map and the Territory, where [ fictional French artist] Jed Martin’s story and artistic project starts with a photograph of a nut and bolt and ends with a natural or partly natural territory. During each phase, the observer’s position is very much framed in comparison to an object, a person, a map. above France #002 facing page Michel Houellebecq. Photo: Barbara d’Alessandri. © Flammarion, Paris

Summer 2016

MH Yes, I think that it is tourism – rural reality – that is the future of France. I don’t say this as a provocation, because I do think that the nouveau riche will want to come and holiday in France – probably not in England, or in the Netherlands. It was a serious economic projection in my mind, which was taken as a provocation because the French like to think that they have a hi-tech future – with start-ups, etc – but I don’t think so at all. TE It is a very shocking projection. I think there is a passage in The Map and the Territory in which native French are dressed in folk-style clothing, in order to serve the Russian and Brazilian nouveau riche. MH Some people find it shocking, but it doesn’t shock me at all. TE I think that all Europeans want to think that they have a more productive future, but in fact you are probably right. MH Let’s say that tourism is an honourable profession. There is nothing dishonourable

about working in hotels and restaurants. I think that we tire ourselves out too much by hanging onto a technological future that doesn’t really want us back. TE That’s another theme that has always interested me, especially in The Map and the Territory, and also in your collaboration with a doctor for Manifesta 11 in Zürich this summer: it’s the presence of labour. The dialogue in The Map and the Territory between the fictional Michel Houellebecq and William Morris is very radical today. There is a new attitude towards craftsmanship and the value of work that we are trying to find today. Is this also a theme when you work with the ideas of the environment, the built landscape? Are the two themes linked? MH I think that my thoughts are about work in reality. Apart from having described all the works of Jed Martin in The Map and the Territory, where it really is his theme throughout his whole life – well, apart from at the end – but after having described all of that, I don’t really want to do it. Having described all this work, thinking about the theme of work has taken away the desire for me to do it. So I became more interested in the territory. TE There is a certain insistent gaze in the description of a place. The places are framed, maybe it comes from your photography – to stop and find a horizon… MH I like to frame things, but that’s independent of any aesthetic interest. I take pictures to write novels, not for the photos themselves, but because I like to see where the characters are. For the last one I took pictures of all the places: Rocamadour, the mosque, everything. I need to visualise the scenery. But to take pictures is enough, generally it isn’t really worth writing in situ. I take pictures when I’m there, I bring them home with me and I find myself there again. TE Do you think there is a relationship between photographs and memory? Does it serve to recall a memory that maybe contains more details than the picture itself? MH No, it isn’t quite that. I know that I very much like some places. But that’s because I have the impression that I remember it, when in fact it corresponds to nothing. It’s a very violent feeling in me, what we call déjà vu. We recognise a place; we are sure that it’s somewhere we know; and yet nothing from our past demonstrates that. Yet it’s a very violent feeling, and I don’t think that it’s completely irrational, I don’t think it’s something mysterious, I think it might be something we’ve seen in a dream. Maybe there are places that give us a strong sensation of recognition even though we don’t know them. And that often incites me to take a photograph.

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TE You said earlier that the exhibition has a link with your writing, but that it is more related to your poetry than to your novels… MH I started by writing poems. I did this for a long time, and in the end there is a rather direct link between poetry and images. Well, in my mind anyway. The move to writing novels was less obvious for me than the move to do this exhibition. With my first novel I found it very strange that I could write a novel. The feeling of writing a book is very curious. TE In what way? MH Because actually I had no stories to tell. I didn’t have any stories to tell, and I was never any good at telling stories. Poetry doesn’t tell a story, ever. So it was a funny process to write a novel. Only with Whatever [1994]; after that I got a taste for it. But in Whatever we get a real sense of reserve in relation to a novel. I warn that the story of my character is the story of anyone.

‘There are quite a few pictures taken from the perspective of what will be left of humanity when it disappears. It is a question that interests me a great deal. There are some people who never think about it, but I think about it an abnormal amount’ That there is nothing particularly interesting to his story. That his life is bleak, that there are no tremors. I took a lot of precautions. But I still call this a novel at the end of the day. It was a very, very strange process for me. The fact is that honestly my novels don’t have good stories, don’t have any especially remarkable stories. There is a third thing that literary critics never invoke and it’s the characters, I am good at doing characters. But not really stories, my stories are existential ones, where practically nothing happens… TE In the exhibition, are you looking for a story or idea that brings everything together in a particular way? MH There is not really a story; there is a structure. There is a brutal entry into the world, a kind of zone where something happens, where different theories are tested, and then a type of disappearance, a waning at the end, and that I think is the structure that exists in all my novels as well. That doesn’t tell a story as such.

ArtReview

TE Talking of waning, are you interested in the idea of ruin, of growth and of deterioration? MH There are quite a few pictures taken from the perspective of what will be left of humanity when it disappears. It is a question that interests me a great deal. There are some people who never think about it, but I think about it an abnormal amount. TE I think that you address it directly and indirectly, always. In fact maybe one of the things I have always loved is the way that you can speak about one topic through the description of another. In the texts you sent to me, there is a little description about the events of May 1968, which are evoked by a description of the unusual calmness of your school playground in rural France as it happened. The intense disruptions in Paris were seen through the quietness a long way away. It is both metaphorical and real, as the emptiness was the direct result of strikes, closures and protests. Your fixed point of view on emptiness in fact evokes all that is happening elsewhere. MH The fact is that I was ten years old and that is the only thing that I remember. That is to say that people had the feeling that something was happening elsewhere and that nothing worked any more and they were there waiting for potential news about this. So they hang around in the playground, usual activities were just interrupted. Also there was the news on the radio – my grandparents listened to the radio – it said that we could no longer find any petrol, the modes of transport no longer worked, there weren’t any trains either, so it was just a feeling of immobilisation without… TE So the events were revealed through an absence. MH Yes, and the issues – what was happening in Paris, the information – actually nobody understood a thing. It was just that things had stopped working. And already at the time I thought that it was a good time. TE And if we come back to the exhibition a bit, because this interests me, the exhibition here, more or less at the same time you will be doing the intervention in Zürich with a doctor. A health checkup, I think. MH Zürich is a more recent preoccupation, which has come about solely from the fact that I am getting older. Furthermore, although I’ve had medical examinations all my life, they have been more frequent in the last couple of years, with strange pictures of inside of me, some MRIs, well, some very curious things. TE But it is also a preoccupation that comes back to images. MH Yes. But whereas buildings in ruin have been an obsession of mine for a long time, the images of my insides are a recent thing. It goes back two years I think.

top France #029 above Espagne #003

Summer 2016

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top Inscriptions #012 above Inscriptions #013

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TE Well, it’s also a kind of living landscape. MH Yes, I discovered this recently, it’s interesting. TE How did you work with the other media in the exhibition? I know there will be sound, there will be a certain architecture… MH Well, sound is one of the hardest things to talk about. There is nothing in the catalogue. I worked with a sound engineer I know… And I will create an atmosphere that seems to go with the general atmospheres of the rooms, but talking about sound is not easy.

MH The format is essential. Because it is essential to frame things. TE And the object? MH The paper? I’m less at ease with that. I do things on computer screens and I hesitate a great deal: which size? I don’t know, I have difficulty with printing. I do things on screens and it’s true that I’m not used to thinking about the photo as an object. TE Even when you described it very carefully in The Map and the Territory?

MH There is a room in which there are photos of my life. Which are partially autobiographical. And a completely autobiographical room dedicated to my dog.

MH No, on that no. Well, there are some clips of films, some extracts from previous films, which merit being shown independently as sequences. But it’s very short. I have two sequences which are 30 seconds long, and another that is two minutes long and another short film that I did previously which is closer to a stereotype. But I didn’t create anything new for this exhibition.

MH I am going to use a comparison, otherwise I’ll never get there. When I create a poem, the first thing is to divide it into sections, then try to create a whole that is somewhat homogeneous. In fact I started with that – creating rooms that seemed to make sense to me featuring photos that it made sense to put together. The journey comes later. There are some rooms that have moved several times in accordance to the journey, and it’s for this reason that the narration is secondary in some ways. In a sense it is very different from a novel, because while I can write sections, I can’t interchange them at a given time.

TE Because the cinema is nevertheless important to you. MH Yes, but in the end, less so than photography. TE It often goes back to the image then, to photography.

TE You wrote recently that writing is the only true conceptual art, because the word is a pure concept.

MH I took pictures from a very young age, I started when I was sixteen. The cinema came much later in my life, and I am less at ease with it.

MH Yes, it’s true. TE Does your way of thinking and conceiving things differ between media, or is it a continuous idea?

TE Is the photograph important as an object, as a format?

TE Will there also be a more intimate side to the exhibition, more involved, where we will feel inside the image, with you?

TE Ah, yes! What you call the Machine for Loving. Do you also work with film or scripts?

MH Yes!

TE Does it relate to the exhibition structure you talked about earlier?

MH I don’t know. What is quite mysterious and interesting is that from time to time I wake up and I have the impression that a sentence is naturally juxtaposed on a photo: that it is the same thing. I don’t know how to explain it. But from quite separate elements, to my mind, it becomes an inseparable whole. And there I think it is linked to what I call poetry generally. Sometimes two successive lines that don’t have much in common nonetheless make a poem. It’s the same when I decide to juxtapose a sentence on a photo. And that is quite pleasant: it tends to prove that what I have is coherent. It’s true that at the beginning it is written and spelled out independently.

And there will be nervous shocks in this exhibition. As much as I like the rooms to be homogeneous, I also like brutal changes going from one room to another.

TE Do you think that maybe it’s because taking a picture is like holding a pen, it’s very direct, you are alone, without any intervention? TE But it stayed on the page nonetheless. MH No, printing the images is the most innovative part for me. TE In a way this doesn’t surprise me as I’ve always felt that you manage to jump from one extreme in scale, from the very small to the very big, extremely quickly, almost in the same sentence. Scale is never completely fixed. MH That is also to avoid people falling asleep in the book. We must create nervous shocks. above Cliffs of Moher all images but opener Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris

Summer 2016

MH Yes, it’s less complicated… I have quite a vague memory of my films, apart from those where I framed the shots myself. For me it is important to frame. To have a zone, people who capture the sense of the moment. TE So it’s very close to photography in that sense. MH Yes, let’s just say that there is something in cinema that evades me a bit… The audience and all that. ar This interview was conducted in French Michel Houellebecq: Rester Vivant is on view at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, from 23 June to 11 September

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Francis Alÿs by Kim Córdova

Turista, 1994, photographic documentation of an action

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ArtReview

In recent years the Mexico City-based artist’s subtle interventions in the social and urban fabrics of cities have moved away from his hometown and onto a more international context: does that change the nature of his art?

Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997, photographic documentation of an action, Mexico City

Summer 2016

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The Green Line (Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic), 2004 , video, 17 min 41 sec, colour, sound

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ArtReview

Known alternately as a poet of politics, a mawkish master of the head-and-shoulders taller than the average citizen, Alÿs, in his early absurd and a wonderful nut, Belgian-born Francis de Smedt arrived work, leveraged his outsiderness (as embodied by his physical otherin Mexico in 1986 as an architect to work for nongovernmental organi- ness) as an instrument to explore the effects of neoliberalism’s notions sations just after the earthquake of 1985, a disaster that left angry scars of efficiency on labour by eliciting something to his doing ‘nothing’. of political ruin and urban rubble in Mexico City for decades. Since Pieces like Turista (1994), in which he stands as a ‘tourist for hire’ making the transition from architect to artist at the end of the 1980s among day labourers waiting for work, or Looking up (2001), in which and adopting the nom de plume Alÿs along the way, he has developed he stares intently at the sky until he has attracted a group of curious an action-based practice in which featherweight provocation, docu- bystanders to do the same (at which point he retires from the scene), mentation and political gesture intermingle through the emulsifying exploit Alÿs’s physical conspicuousness and the malleability of group magic of humour, beauty and a reverence for the preposterous. behaviour to highlight the distinction between the ceaselessness of His early work is characterised by a scratching at what friend and cognitive labour versus work as activity of production. curator Cuauhtémoc Medina has called ‘those alternative moments Alÿs has stated that his work should circulate with the ease that oppose the rationale of city planning and understanding of of rumour. When I asked how he came to use myth as medium, he modernization as social engineering’. Working, or more specifically explained that when he was confronted with the enormity of Mexico walking, in the historic centre around the Zócalo (Mexico City’s main City, creating objects didn’t make sense. There was already so much square), Alÿs, in his practice from this period, deployed something stuff, how could more things have an impact? “It seemed to be better of the methodology of the Situationist dérive, as a call and response to create a story that would travel easily,” he says, and let the circuexchange with the psychogeographical rhythms of Mexico’s urban lation of the tale be the foundation of the work. In these fables Alÿs life (for Situationist International leader Guy Debord, a dérive aimed activates the information networks that bind communities by highto be ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geograph- lighting the economy of information that defines and reinforces ical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and group identities. In the Mexican art community, he is the man to let behavior of individuals’). Works like Placing Pillows (1990), The Collector a mouse loose in the Jumex Collection (The Mouse, 2001) and push a (1990–92), Seven Lives of Garbage (1995) and Doppelganger (1999–) are block of ice through the city (Paradox of Praxis I, 1997); to his neighbours meant to play with the strings of the in the historic centre, he’s the gringo social fabric rather than disrupt or in the street arrested with a gun (from Mexico City isn’t what it was during Re-enactments, 2001); and to the world, document them. the 1990s, and neither is Alÿs. No matter In 1994 Mexico experienced a culhe’s the artist who hurls himself how conspicuous a person may be, into ‘tornadoes’ (Tornado, 2000–10) tural and economic earthquake on par and moves a mountain (When faith with the upheaval of 1985: the North 30 years in a place makes one a local: moves mountains (Cuando la fe mueve American Free Trade Agreement was ‘People still know me as “the gringo”, montañas) Lima, 2002, in collaborapassed, flooding the Mexican market but I’ve been living in that vecindad with cheap foreign goods; the peso tion with Cuauhtémoc Medina and was devalued by approximately 50 Rafael Ortega). longer than anyone there’ percent (the resulting economic crisis These days Mexico City seems to was dubbed the ‘Tequila Effect’ and spread throughout Latin America); be running dry as font of inspiration for Alÿs. The city isn’t what it and presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated at was during the 1990s, and neither is he. No matter how conspicuous a campaign rally. Alÿs’s response to the social and economic after- a person may be, 30 years in a place makes one a local. “People still effects was to introduce a decidedly political element in his approach to know me as ‘the gringo’, but I’ve been living in that vecindad longer walking as his artistic materia prima. This time he treated the rhythms than anyone there,” he says. The price of familiarity is that it starts to of daily life as series of fleeting phenomena that are responsive to and become a blinder of routine; you stop being so open, you stop seeing. representative of the political and economic context of the moment In recent projects, which tend to follow a formula of conceptual rather than cultural fixtures. In The Swap (1995), for example, Alÿs simplicity in a geopolitically charged context, he has turned his attenspent a day moving through the metro, first bartering his sunglasses tion beyond Latin America to search out psychogeographies in places and then continuing to trade through a succession of objects, before where he can rely on the disorientation and openness that arise from ultimately leaving the last object as something of a sacrifice to the a state of otherness to sharpen his observational acumen and arrange city. Through this gesture of exchange, the artist invokes the tensions an interaction without slipping into activism. in the process of modernising Mexico’s economy as a result of the In The Green Line (2004), for which the axiom was ‘sometimes aggressive adoption of neoliberal policies by the Salinas govern- the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks ment (1988–94). In Vivienda para Todos (1994), Alÿs illustrates the cruel holding a punctured can of dribbling green paint along the contested bluster of campaign promises that transform real need into manipu- width of the so-called Green Line established between Israel and its lations of political rhetoric by making a tentlike shelter of campaign neighbours following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In formal terms, The posters lifted by the hot air rising from the subway grates in front of Green Line is a reenactment of an earlier work, The Leak (1996), in which the National Palace. the artist took a can dribbling blue paint for a walk and installed Among the legacies of colonialism in Mexico is the fact that fair the empty container in the gallery. By recontextualising The Leak in skin is charged with the history of conquest and by extension class, geopolitical terms, Alÿs relocates the tensions in the work from those so that European features all but oblige passersby to mutter, hiss or formal ideas of action and painting to questions of maps and territojauntily announce, “Güero” – blondie. As a güero who stands a full ries and who has the right to live where.

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Alÿs has been filming children’s games for decades; however, as he gravitates to more charged contexts, he seems increasingly to rely on the innocence of childhood as something of a political pressure valve. In Reel-Unreel (2011), which he produced for Documenta 13, he deploys children in a riff on hoop-rolling that manifests as a game of chase through Kabul in which the running boys simultaneously unspool and respool a filmstrip connected to two reels. In practical terms, the documentation of their youthful play foils the complexities of filming in a location weighted by generations of armed conflict. Metaphorically, child protagonists seem to be a way for him to navigate the difficulty of reconciling his real/unreal privilege and responsibility as an artist invited to produce a work in a conflict zone. Inspired by the Taliban’s burning of the Afghan Film Archive’s film collection, their game of winding and unwinding film while running through the city streets addresses the politics of representation and the inherently problematic issue of subjectivity of war reporting in international media. Similarly, Silence of Ani (2015) uses a stratagem of innocence by filming children playing with bird whistles to invoke a chimera of a harmonic civilisation coming back to the ruins of a city on the Turkish-Armenian border that suffered repeated sackings over the centuries, was closed off after the First World War and the Armenian genocide, and is now ‘an empty, militarised no-man’s land’. Alÿs’s current exhibition, The Story of a Negotiation, at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Havana, focuses on three major works, Bridge/Puente (2006), Don’t cross the bridge before you get to the river (2008) and Tornado, as well as Alÿs’s paintings, and seems to have Forrest Gumped its way into one of the most important diplomatic turning points in contemporary Western history. Alÿs assures that “the political context of the show was a complete accident. The exhibition had been planned

long before Obama and the Americans announced they wanted to normalise diplomatic relations.” While in Mexico the show was largely celebrated, in Cuba it has been interpreted by some as a frustrating reminder of yesteryear’s migration issues at a moment when the country would rather be looking forward. The main focus of this criticism is Bridge/Puente, in which Alÿs simultaneously produced two chains of boats, one in Havana and the other in Key West, Florida, to symbolically meet on the horizon, creating the illusion of a bridge. The horizon, as the point of imaginary meeting, gives the ‘military operation’ notion of bridges (as key infrastructural supports to tactical endeavours) a dreamy optimism through Alÿs’s instance on the bridge’s incompleteness. Maybe the caustic reaction to the piece in Cuba is a nationalistic reaction to the unfortunate coincidence of exhibiting an older work in a changing context. Or perhaps it points to the pitfalls of taking a practice committed as much to poetics as to politics on the road. As much as brushing politically weighty topics without offering the artist’s personal risk in the work and leaving the viewer to put flesh on bare bones allows Alÿs’s work an openness to an interpretation that emphasises the value and agency of humankind, it also leaves the work subject to the question of what we expect an artwork to do rather than to be. The question we are left with is, if a work is reliant on the politics of distant marginalised communities to generate meaning, is poésie enough? ar Francis Alÿs: The Story of a Negotiation is on view at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, until 12 September ; Ciudad Juárez Projects is on show at David Zwirner London, from 11 June to 5 August

Francis Alÿs (in collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi), Reel-Unreel, 2011, single channel video projection, 19 min 28 sec, colour, sound

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above Francis Alÿs (in collaboration with Taiyana Pimentel and Cuauhtémoc Medina), Bridge/Puente, 2006, photographic documentation of an event, Key West, Florida, and Santa Fe, Havana all images Courtesy David Zwirner, New York & London

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Roger Hiorns Interview by J.J. Charlesworth

The British artist on creating a number of large-scale public artworks that challenge any cosy notions of what the genre can and should do 110

ArtReview

ArtReview Your new public sculpture, The retrospective view of the pathway, commissioned by Art and the Public Realm Bristol, is quite a challenging work for a city to commission. Roger Hiorns That’s true. This hasn’t happened straightforwardly. It’s a provocative, monumental work in a very conservative area. The factors of the work are very much based on the circumstances of the time of its making, within the timeframe of a very precarious social and economic reality – one that continues. So, how to behave? What is the identity of an artwork that seeks not to offer a platitude to an indifferent public? To not again be the ‘Marie Antoinette’ commission? Essentially, it was an open brief, a budget based on a legal stipulation that an artwork must be made [as part of the planning permission for a mixed-use architectural development on Bristol’s floating harbour]. A developer in receivership after the crash, and the ‘will and testament’ of the whole project under the guidance of PricewaterhouseCoopers – a sort of demi-government – and an insurance company. The architect Stephen Witherford is the last key to this work. And all these ingredients, these incomplete and complete conversations, led to the making of this type of work and what it looks like. It’s a social document and hectoring neighbour… AR It’s not so much a piece of sculpture as a public edifice with a potential function… RH It’s a piece of municipal architecture that was once called the ‘free tank’ – the free tank was a space, a ‘nook’ in the built-up bank of the river that allowed ordinary people access to its water. As it turns out, it’s one of the only spaces that Bristol City Council retains as a piece of public land. The surrounding area is identikit, postmodernist shiny surfaces of indistinct and instant architecture. I wanted to go against the lightness and the shallowness of those surroundings by introducing heavy concretes and black granites. It became about wanting to overincrease the density and overdo the balance of the area somehow. I wanted to introduce two forms that we can loosely call ‘furnaces’. But further to the inevitable object-making of sculpture, I wanted to change the laws that operate and maintain the space. I wanted to change the permissible activities within a space that seems so self-defined. So I thought it was interesting to talk to a nearby law firm about whether or not we could revise certain laws about permissible activities within this small area that aren’t usually allowed within this historically public space surrounded by privately owned space. AR What was the outcome?

RH An absolute blank. Thoughts about how to present the body, put the human at the centre of the work for once, sadly were given little time. Ideas about public sexual identity, nudity… We didn’t get so far. AR These furnaces, they’re functional? RH There are two phallic chimneys made out of solid black granite, and then mounted into them as furnace mouths are two vulva openings. The forms are very simple and organic, but unusually monumental. They are about seven metres tall, transcendent in scale. They’re rare in their sophistication, and I wanted to encourage a scale that hadn’t been allowed or required from sculpture for a long time. And I wanted to offer an aesthetic timelessness, as if these were primary forms made by an earlier civilisation that wanted to celebrate a new god.

‘There’s a well-meaning idea about how art might be used to bridge a gap between, for example, civil society and a minority group, or an extra-defined cohort in the north that feel underrepresented, so that a large sculpture of an angel defines that deficit in material terms. Is an artwork necessary or is a transition into another mode of public representation now necessary?’ Of course, I’m hypercritical about public art. It’s never a satisfying outcome, but sometimes one catches a work that transcends, an unexpected taste appears, usually by some accident, or by the intervention of an artist who was sophisticated enough to sidestep the usual expectation, to bridge that loose authority that maybe the museum or the gallery might still just enviously guard and maintain, to place something of human value into the area of the real and the everyday. AR But they work as furnaces? RH They somehow propose that the law firm could burn their paperwork inside them. Of course this is a mild irritation to the law firm. AR And that other people could use the furnaces?

facing page The retrospective view of the pathway, 2016, rendering of public installation, Bristol

Summer 2016

RH I can’t see why not, perhaps anyone can bring whatever they want to burn into this arena of stone and grey concrete. Of course, there will be prohibitions eventually put in place to stop this new idea, and I’m not even sure I disagree with that. The work proposes a loss of some public order that can’t really be sustainable for very long. AR Are you expecting this work to be unloved? RH I’m not expecting it to be entirely loved, no, but I do try to allow the work to be beautiful and transcendent, and this may be a challenge enough to the streamlined business and networking environment within which it rests. AR There are a lot of high-minded idealisms about what public art can achieve. This work doesn’t seem to want to entertain any of those… RH There’s a well-meaning idea about how art might be used to bridge a gap between, for example, civil society and a minority group, or an extra-defined cohort in the north that feel underrepresented, so that a large sculpture of an angel defines that deficit in material terms. Is an artwork necessary or is a transition into another mode of public representation now necessary? The monumentality of the Bristol work was about achieving something that supports and elevates the human. A taking a stand on your being is in play; if you increase the proportions, if you increase the densities of things, other things will tear, the surrounding framework will break. That was always the case with my work, that at some point there will be a resistance to individual freedom, and a breakage is then necessary. AR I’m curious about how you bring ritual into your work and how it has something to say about secular life, which is also part of this ambiguity we have about everyday modern, rationalistic life. It exists under the sign of secular society; there’s no more deity, there’s no more afterlife, there is only the business of getting on with living in a modern and technological world, in a material, human body. So when you’ve brought in ritual, it’s under the sign not of religion but of something that at its bare essential was the antithesis of secular life. You’re currently working on a performance for Birmingham Cathedral in June… RH Well this is fascinating, because this then becomes about authority. The reason why I’m interested in this is that I’m not using the obvious materials of plastic and performance. AR You’re using the choristers of Birmingham Cathedral – as a ‘material’? RH Yes, I’m using religion and sermon and Evensong. Two Evensongs, Wednesday and Friday. The full choir – these children and the adult choir – will be essentially scattered, lying

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flat on their back, dispersed, atomised through the cathedral. They will be unarranged. They will be singing in the same fashion that they would be if they were as a choir but occupying the cathedral in a way that has not happened before. It’s a simple work that uses the medieval Evensong as a starting point. Again, a longestablished foundation stone of ritual in our society is revisited, grown upon, perverted. AR What’s troubling and interesting about a lot of what you have done is that the idea of activity and energy is somehow at stake. The idea of inertia becomes a big deal. Seizure (2008), for example, took a living space – a derelict council flat – and coated it with blue crystals, grown by filling the flat with copper sulphate solution. An inorganic process. The project you’re working on for Ikon in Birmingham for the next year is to bury a Boeing 737 and install a passage from the surface down directly into the passenger cabin of the plane… RH A global network of buried planes is an ambitious plan. It’s interesting with the aeroplane, because I think that it is almost like the layering of clichés: it’s an incredibly literal work. There is something that I found really fascinating in pushing that literalness and continuing to push it to see what would happen. So we take the idea of a burial, and we take the idea of a piece of global technology, an aeroplane, and we put it under the ground. Then we allow the individual to become a part of this equation too. It’s already an overwhelming proposition. As an artwork, it’s allowing a generosity that is perhaps unusual; it allows for the displacement of the artist, and in my place comes the viewer. This work is not about me. I don’t paint, I’m not somebody who is following a tradition of technique. I’m following a tradition of manipulation. I’m also thinking about the self, the person who wants to be involved, to be in the work of art, because they are the conclusive part of the work. It was a very similar situation with Seizure: the human was the conclusive part of the work – the reaction of the human within the work was a factor in the completion of the work.

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There was often a personal significance for the visitor to the environment that I couldn’t access. There were people who wanted to have sex in Seizure, or you would have a prayer group who would join hands and start praying – there was a level of human activity not usually encouraged to emerge in a work of art, and so this all seemed new and essential and real. Back to the plane: I thought about the ramping up of anxieties, the ramping up of tensions, the claustrophobia of the aircraft, the symbolism of the craft,

the rather flat present day into another dimensional vision. So if we anticipate the next future, if we anticipate the next language, it comes with the idea of the neurological more than anything. It’s about the understanding in the brain. If we understand the brain and its working. AR The attention to ritual in many of your works that include and require participation in some ways suggests the control and regulation of experience by certain forms of administration and power. How does that intimate a future, if at all? RH Well, the language of the future is a disestablishment language, a language actively disentangling the established codes of the present. We need a new language that focuses on our natural ability to deconstruct and neutralise threats. Together we can grind off the edges of our hardened experience of the world. Over the last 15 years we have invited ourselves into a situation that is not a fair representation of real freedom. Our current version of liberalism, neoliberalism if you like, is not a project for the elevation of all humans, and for humans to feel the eventual possibility of emancipation, to become a valued being in the world. So we have established authorities offering us a ‘capped’ freedom, a governing class who think a society where every human is sufficiently free and with an endless possibility of self-determination would represent a society that’s difficult to manage, difficult to trust to behave. It’s important not to be a manageable human, a good contemporary definition of an artist. AR So again, ritual comes up as a spectre of… RH …control

the fact that it’s buried, the fact that you’ll be funnelled into this thing under the ground… When I think about the work and when I make the work in the studio, I’m thinking about a time in the future rather than a time in the present, where a more successful or more interesting or more dynamic language would occur that actually might be able to retranslate A Retrospective View of the Pathway (pathways), 2016, buried aircraft

ArtReview

AR Or a caricature of a problem that’s not properly acknowledged in our current culture, which is the proposed notion of individual liberty, but the anxiety that liberty needs some… RH …conditions. So these conditions have to be inherent within the work, because in a way they have to offer the container. As an artist, you don’t want to just make the objects, you want to make the context. An artwork can’t survive on its own. So you have to do some work to alleviate the

pressures that will add to the demise of the new work, so it survives into the future… You have to contain the world, distil its primary contents, to allow the work to survive in its own novel language. An artist isn’t only designing or making artworks. An artist is more importantly allowing or establishing new versions of behaviour, new worlds. These works are an amalgamation that allows a greater work to occur. It’s important to say that these works propose moods and feelings rather than ideas. So when we talk about mood, it’s a focusing on a level of contemporary dread and anxiety, which are not entirely wonderful things to bring into the palette of what we’re trying to do with contemporary art at the moment, but useful motivations towards an absence…

RH The presentation of documentation and a timeline of archive material was the most important aspect, and yes, it was blunt, and tough to experience. In making the variant CJD show, I think it was really the pathology of variant CJD that fascinated me most: this story of the prion (a misshaped protein), the way that it can readapt brain matter in a human body to replicate itself and thus to disassemble the brain, turn it into a spongelike material – an agent of fundamental physical and mental destruction.

AR An absence of…? RH Well, an absence of the human. I think the human hasn’t been put at the centre of art for a long time. I think that to some degree the callous shininess that is the contemporary artworld is almost designed as an exclusion of the human. I think that maybe it’s interesting to be contrarian to the established root that seems to occupy people’s minds. This economic preoccupation within the artworld, where things are shiny and callous, is probably a reflection of the new type of collector, and the texture of their limited attention span. AR I wanted to discuss your contribution to the artist-curated show History Is Now, at the Hayward Gallery last year, a decade-by-decade picture of Britain in the postwar period. Unlike the other sections, which treated their decade through the history of artworks, you took a different approach: an informational presentation on an issue that had very little to do with contemporary art – the history of the ‘Mad Cow Disease’ epidemic, which took hold in the late 1980s and became a big political issue in the mid-90s, because of the fear that it might spread from cattle to humans (as variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease, or ‘variant CJD’). It was a quite a bold gesture within the usual habits of museum and art-gallery presentation.

Again, actually to talk about mood, in terms of the allowance of dread as a translator within an art frame. We’re in this constant state of self-denial and delusion. The artworld seems to be a road map of delusion right now, and I think it seems to be worth considering the above Untitled, 2012, adapted freezer, youth, dimensions variable (installation view, Roger Hiorns, De Hallen Haarlem, 2012). Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij all images Courtesy the artist

Summer 2016

breakup of this delusional unreality by dropping in an increased amount of reality. The fact that the variant CJD material presents itself as an artwork allows it a certain type of status, and that status allows it a unique and enduring position in the world. The artworld context allows the subject matter to become active again. It’s as viable an artwork as a Richard Long stone circle, and somehow it operates on the terms of an established art-history, but what is radical about the work is that it collects and represents and then displays power and the operation of power against the human. The CJD section of History Is Now displayed a tapestry of aggressive will against the human on an unprecedented scale, and the repercussions are only now being understood. The work provoked a reaction, a pushback, bringing the story back to the public realm, delivered to our future selves. Most of the time this never happens, we are awash with artworks that are passive, studio-made, salon-hung, clerks to a regime of material wealth and cynical boredom. This approach seems to me the future in my approach to making artworks: we can learn to use and reutilise the value that people still think is somehow present within art as a force to reinvigorate human potential. Over the last ten years the fascination with the art market, with spectacle, with short-term thinking has effectively closed down this long-constructed, uniquely liberal and international space for progressive thinking to occur and be enacted upon. AR Seems to be that you’re pointing to the idea that art does have some use, but it’s just not what we think it is any more. RH Perhaps we’re seeing the last market artworks being made, or performed. I think the journey towards the last artwork is a fascinating problem for me, or anyone, to consider. ar The retrospective view of the pathway will be inaugurated at Glass Wharf on Bristol’s floating harbour in July. Untitled (a retrospective view of the pathway) is at Birmingham Cathedral 15 and 17 June

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THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART

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Art Reviewed

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Avedon Warhol Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London 9 February – 23 April Commenting on the opportunism of writerly fame, Jorge Luis Borges said, ‘The important thing is the image you create of yourself in other people’s minds.’ This conjunction of the work of Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol looks initially like an opportunistic bit of celebrity spectacle (with the celebrities as both artists and subjects); but it doubles as a prescient study of how identity creation, in our exponential image culture, is a collaborative process between image-maker, medium and subject. In a culture ever more conscious of its own self-presentation, these photographs are one of the primary sources of where we are now at – on YouTube, Instagram and reality TV, at fairs that transform art into signifiers of its creator’s brand identity. Both artists spent much time picturing famous people, beginning in the 1950s as commercial artists: Warhol as a successful illustrator; Avedon as a fashion and society photographer for high-end magazines. The exhibition covers the chronologies of their careers from the 1950s to the 1990s (both figures are early examples of what we now call ‘career artists’: artists intent on honing their development into a consumably coherent narrative and making sure they are in the right places to ensure its consumption). From the beginning, Avedon is a facilitator of the celebrity image, Warhol its deconstructor. A 1961 Avedon portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, the young First Lady, adopts a conceit – later his trademark – of placing the subject against

a monochrome background to convert her into a shape, a cutout signifying the camera’s generalisation of her particularities by isolating them against an undifferentiated foil. To this extent, and in those equally branded negative frames left around his later images, Avedon’s photography is self-reflexive. Sleek as a bat in her trained silk sheath, Jackie is an emblem of America’s self-satisfaction in its global primacy. By contrast, Warhol’s Marilyn (1962) dismantles the image it creates. Broad areas of turquoise, lemon, mauve and orange acrylic block in the main areas of the black, silkscreened head that is applied to them. But the two registers – the gestural and the photographic – are slightly out of sync. The extended time of the brushedon paint qualifies the image as merely instantaneous. The effect is convulsive: the image a brittle skin, a shrill pitch that the multicoloured underpainting cannot quite justify. Contraries as artists, Avedon and Warhol shared a curiosity about how power – political, social, economic, sexual – resolves itself as image. Avedon’s The Family (1976) is a wall-wide grid of head-to-waist portraits manifesting all facets of political power: presidents, senators, union leaders. The series has an August Sanderesque taxonomical intent. Do the members of this elite share outward traits? And if these are the parts, what can we infer about its whole? Against white foils, they are (social) butterflies pinned into frames. There is a characteristic

duplicity in Avedon’s rhetoric of revealing a sitter’s authentic presence, his or her ‘true’ self, while cultivating an idiom based on veneers and postures. He was always working the prestige of his sitters to rub off on his own reputation. It is not coincidental that when he had the clout to photograph the big hitters of the arts establishment, he gravitated towards the existentialists – photographs of Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett are included – as though, by association, to make their soundings of body and psyche synonymous with his own artistic purpose, and imply its corresponding depth. He liked to strip his subjects, another sign for the baring of an essence. The equivalent opportunism in Warhol’s later portraiture is his willingness to accept commissions from the rich and famous to produce ‘Warhols’ of them; but, as always, his cynicism, freely acknowledged, preempts itself. Three portraits of the Iranian royal family centred on the Shah (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 1977) flatter their image as much as they pity them, with the pity not exempting Warhol’s own weakness in having been tantalised by their glamour. That the painted zones underlying the Shah’s image are unusually almost congruent with its contours is as much a political as a formal recognition. Warhol pictures the Shah becoming the power he projects and as nothing more than a projection. Mark Prince

Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn, actress, New York, January 20, 1967, 1967, gelatin silver print, 35 × 28 cm. © The Richard Avedon Foundation

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Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, 1979, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 102 × 102 cm. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Mungo Thomson Why Does the World Exist? Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris 2 April – 28 May Fifty-two-card pickup! That’s one prank brought to mind by Mungo Thomson’s second solo show at Frank Elbaz, which gathers eight new works: Compositions, seven digital embroideries on linen hanging on the walls, and Composition for Marimba, a limited-edition ios app (all 2016). Whether or not all of them originate from what one might hypothesise to be a frustrating inability on Thomson’s part to execute a perfect riffle shuffle like the true sleight-of-hand artist he wishes he were, one thing at least seems certain: the entire exhibition manifestly deals (with) playing cards, its single allover motif continuing from one work to another. That said, and although the artworld itself is no stranger to gaming and a dealer will always be dealing, the gallery hasn’t actually turned into a casino for this occasion. Rather, in what is presented as a quest for perfect images of randomness, it appears that the Los Angeles-based Thomson has let the cards fall where they may so that he could introduce chance into his art. This, of course, is the moment when you should rightfully expect me to say something expert about Thomson’s artistic filiation to John Cage, whose heritage he is quick to claim anyway. But employing probability in the face of the audience’s likely knowledge, I’d rather

take a chance and beat the odds here too by introducing you to Persi Diaconis, a ‘mathemagician’ (you couldn’t make it up). After all, even Cage is known to have composed with magic squares. A former professional magician and an eminent professor of statistics at Stanford University, Diaconis dedicated his career to the mathematics of shuffling and notably coauthored the 1992 paper ‘Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair’, concluding that a pack of playing cards was only truly random after seven vigorous riffle shuffles. Seven? Without explicitly crediting Diaconis, that is precisely the number of times Thomson shuffled a deck for each Composition in order to knowingly achieve pure mathematical randomisation before throwing the cards onto his studio’s floor and taking a picture of the ‘unique’ pattern thus obtained (statistically speaking, the chances of getting the same one twice are infinitesimally small). Each photograph was then thoroughly translated into an image on linen through digital embroidery, while the length of the area covered by the cards scattered on the floor strictly determined the dimensions of the final work (ie up to three metres long). What seems even more random than Diaconis’s mathemagics is how Thomson ended

Composition #27 (detail), 2016, embroidery on linen, 116 × 115 cm. Photo: Diane Arques. Courtesy the artist

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up turning to needlework: ‘a simple, gravityrelated observation guided the choice of embroidery: the cards could not be made to hang on a vertical surface without sliding off; therefore they had to be stitched on’, he wrote to the gallery. Ignoring the existence of glue may have been the trickiest trick here. Whereas cardistry requires quick dexterity, digital embroidery is painstaking for sure; to make each Composition took up to a week and one million stitches, depending on their complexity. Finally, based on Thomson’s notion to write a score for a 52-key marimba by shuffling a pack – one playing card paired with one note – Composition for Marimba completes the show with piped music, chance-controlled by an iOS app. Created with an engineer at MIT, it ensures the continuous random permutation of 52 cards screened on an iPhone whose installation atop a music stand openly refers to Robert Filliou’s Musique télépathique n° 5 (1976–8). Thanks to the warm, bright timbre of the marimba, the ever-changing and staccato result sounds as merry as a pharmaceutical commercial for antidepressants and spreads an enigmatic vibe throughout the exhibition space, the kind that would puzzle the most beautiful mind. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Maria Eichhorn Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices (1999 / 2005 / 2008 / 2014 / 2015) Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin 29 April – 25 June The least interesting thing about Maria Eichhorn’s art is the point it is trying to make. We probably agree that its exposure of its context, its media – its occasion, in the broadest sense – is no bad thing, although we might feel hectored for being told so. Isn’t there always something sanctimonious, even hypocritical, in claiming the role of exposer of media that one nevertheless adopts? The most interesting thing about Eichhorn’s art is how she attempts to deal with this problem. Marshall McLuhan famously said, ‘The medium is the message.’ Filmic structuralism sees the medium as seeking to conceal its message, and aims to out it. Film involves the consumption of images, typically in a darkened space, and is predicated on the pleasure of submitting to filmic illusion and a willingness to suspend our disbelief in it. Eichhorn’s Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices aggressively inverts the triad of subject, film medium and viewer, in line with structuralistic practice, transferring the spotlight (and film is all about where the spotlight lies) from subject to viewer. That the medium is 16mm film, with its whirring projector in tow, is now a sign, even a cliché, for a structuralism-based take on the medium, at least within an art context. This inversion tends to place Eichhorn in the role of killjoy, naysayer, finger-wagger; and she preempts this charge by offering us clips

of sexual acts or their fetish objects. How can she be hypocritically proscribing pleasure if she is offering us a peepshow? But this is no porn, and despite the sexually explicit images, the structuralist bugbear of filmic pleasure is being avidly policed. The clips are not presented as triggers of stimulation but as elements in a taxonomy of postures. Eichhorn is out to make viewers feel self-questioningly exposed by their response. Problematically, her effort to exempt herself from claiming the moral high-ground in this transaction tends to shift emphasis from the viewing occasion, which is her subject, to its stager, which is herself. A neon-lit gallery contains a bespoke, grey-painted shelf/projector stand, in which 20 film canisters are laid, corresponding to the list of 20 ‘sexual practices’ printed on the wall – each the title of the clip that features it – followed by the direction, ‘The films will be screened on request’. Opposite is another wall text of credits for Eichhorn’s periodic production of the films since 1999. An attendant hovers, waiting for the viewer to betray a preference. Some are embarrassed, some forthright, as if to refute any appearance of embarrassment, some silent, which causes a new pressure to exert itself, because without the viewer’s cue, nothing happens. The projections – approximately 1.5m wide – are milky because of the 16mm grain and the

gallery lights. Some involve an action (‘Breast Licking’, ‘Fellatio’, ‘Needle Play’), others focus on a body part (‘Ear’, ‘Eyes’, ‘Feet’). They are clinical, impersonal: we are never shown enough to identify the model. That each clip is the length of a film reel and shot in real time recalls Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964–6), with his exposure of the sitter transferred to that of the viewer. Eichhorn restages Warhol’s withering scrutiny of a sitter’s vanity, conforming to the standard structuralist trope of making the viewer’s gaze self-reflexive. In ‘Eyes’, a woman’s eye stares back at us, blinking as occasionally as it must, scrutinising us as much as seducing us. The artist’s owning of complicity is the moral crux. Whereas Warhol made his own curiosity congruent with that of his viewer, Eichhorn produces the film she shows being consumed. The difference is that her films are merely decoys in that circuit, pointing us to the viewer. In themselves they are boring. Her art is no more interested in the human particular than the porn movies her clips remotely recall. The only particulars in the transaction are the viewer and the viewer’s response; and we are left with the sense that this art knows what it expects of us (Warhol was open to his sitters’ contingencies), preempting our response as keenly as it preempts our judgement of Eichhorn as merely judgmental. If there is vanity being exposed, it is not the viewer’s but Eichhorn’s. Mark Prince

Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices, 1999 / 2005 / 2008 / 2014 / 2015 (installation view). Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

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Rachel Harrison Depth Jump to Second Box Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin 29 April – 25 June Up at 6am, read the newspaper, Panama Papers exposed; 7:30am, rush to the gym, pump some cast-iron kettlebells (twenty reps), sit-ups on pink plastic gym ball; 9am, arrive at office for board meeting, sit at head of table, talk business. Rachel Harrison’s exhibition takes on the mood of this daily routine. Occupying the fourth-floor conference room of an office block in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz (a space that the American artist did not alter), her handmade sculptures sit upon the large MDF meeting table, seemingly huddled ready to discuss the day’s agenda. Beneath the table, an altogether separate scene presents itself: multicoloured fitness balls nestle quietly, a gaggle of plastic spheres closely bunched, trying desperately not to be discovered (who’s taking minutes?). While anthropomorphic in their allusions to human activities within the corporate sphere, Harrison’s amorphous forms are ostensibly abstract. They are even reminiscent of the aggressively bold, textured modernist sculptures of Jacob Epstein or the weighted curves of Eric Gill. An amalgam of rectangles, cubes and tubes with both sharp and rounded edges, these shapes could have been fused together in a nuclear explosion, then coated with layers of cement and brightly coloured, metallic psychedelic hues.

Objects originating from office stationery shops or gym accessory stores are scattered through the mise-en-scène, including mouse pads, pencils, headphones, air fresheners, white towels, vitamin supplements and deep-tissue self-massage tubes. In Green Kettlebell (all works 2016), a metallic green sphere with a thick handle sits atop an indigo-blue mouse pad: work(out) at the office. Pure Vanilla Joy combines a peach-gold form – reminiscent of pointed-finger squishy foam hands (think of the crowds in the 1990s TV series Gladiators) – with Glade air-freshener sprays and other mouse pads depicting large sandstone Buddhas. Panama Papers incorporates rainbowcoloured prescription drugs and endless files of paper, seemingly hidden away in a barely noticeable shelving unit at the base of the sculpture. Harrison’s work necessitates the decoding of brash pop references, combined with punning layers of politics, culture and an allusion to sculpture’s figurative past. Indeed, she almost always includes an investigation into the conventions of figurative art: upright on a human scale and with some indication of a face located upon a vertical mass. Travis Gregory includes a mouse pad emblazoned with the face of Antonin Scalia, a US Supreme Court justice who recently passed away and

was celebrated for being the intellectual anchor for the court’s conservative wing. In the main gallery (more akin to a typical clean-edged white cube), a large-scale form reminiscent of an all-purpose workout station sits in an otherwise bare space. Amidst a chunky wooden structure, green rings dangle from fluorescent orange straps wanting to be grabbed; metal bars await chin-ups; and a jump rope begs to be skipped. Resting just a metre away, a giant orange kettlebell sits with seeming anticipation. Titled FCHEM, this DIY gym, just moments away from the ‘office’, calls to mind our search for the infamous work–life balance. Writer Kirsty Bell’s exhibition text, ‘Express your Fitness in Everyday Life’, describes how ‘we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work’. In the age of neoliberalism, where you’re lucky to get a zero-hour contract at best, the spheres of work and leisure have become conflated, blurring the line between our office personas and our everyday selves (Snapchat with your work friends: hungover, Starbucks, on my way in). Harrison playfully blends references to pop, culture, work and fitness to indicate this present-day condition, all coated in appealing candy colours to draw us into scenes and scenarios that are ultimately defined by uncertainty. Louisa Elderton

Depth Jump to Second Box, 2016 (installation view, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin). Courtesy the artist; Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; and Greene Naftali, New York

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EVA International: Still (the) Barbarians Various venues, Limerick 16 April – 17 July To an extent, Koyo Kouoh’s curating of the biennial EVA International is about winners and losers, and the truism that history is written by the former. A pair of artworks installed in the abandoned milk factory that serves as one of the main venues brings this into focus. Part of Uriel Orlow’s Grey, Green, Gold (2015–16), accompanied by a ‘Mandela Gold’ crane flower seed under a magnifying glass and a photograph of the flower in bloom, is a slideshow of intertitles that relate the story of the prison garden developed by the ANC inmates of Robben Island. The political prisoners relied on seeds smuggled in and ostrich droppings for fertilizer; Mandela buried the manuscripts of his auto-biography Long Walk to Freedom (1995) among the plants. Orlow’s work is neighboured by the films of Jonathan Cummins. Here, across three sizeable ceiling-hung screens and a single monitor, we witness interviews with recently released IRA prisoners and their family members about the anguish of incarceration, every emotional wince and pained face projected large. The juxtaposition is telling: the ‘terrorists’, as they were once branded, of the antiapartheid struggle, are lauded as inspirational figures because they triumphed. The IRA soldiers, who were jailed fighting

for a united Ireland, and who failed, remain personae non grata. Kouoh’s exhibition, which involves the work of 50 artists, continues in this vein, highlighting how the effects of colonialism – particularly British colonialism, both in its rule of Ireland prior to the 1916 rebellion, the centenary of which provides a fitting peg on which to hang the show, and in Africa and beyond – endures. John Waid’s 909125 Minutes Later (2016) at the Limerick City Gallery, for example, consists of a clock and a written proposal to RTÉ that the one-minute interlude of church bells, rung before the evening news since 1950, be delayed by 25 minutes and 21 seconds. This would reflect 6pm in the time zone Ireland operated under prior to 1916, when, six months after the Easter Rising, the British government implemented Greenwich Mean Time. The TV station refused the request. Yet this is an exhibition that also rises above specific political or historic episodes. On display is a wider sense of ruin, a portrait of our insatiable appetite for violence. Otobong Nkanga’ s The Weight of Scars (2015) is a wall-hanging fabric that invokes a cosmological diagram. Made up of patchworked blue-hued mohair, polyester, cotton and linen, it also includes black-and-white

photographs that depict a landscape wrecked by heavy mining. The work inspires a wellspring of sadness, a sense of destruction reiterated in Samuel Erenberg’s installation of four dozen or so black paintings, each with a place name and date painted neatly in white (recalling On Kawara perhaps). Each corresponds to a conflict – ‘South Dakota 1890’, ‘Hiroshima 1945’, ‘Albania 1997’, ‘Uganda 2008’ – and such is the frequency of these historic moments that it becomes apparent that war is not the exception but the norm. Indeed, David Blandy and Larry Achiampong’s live-action Finding Fanon 1 and animation Finding Fanon 2, in which the artists and their avatars discuss radical theorist Frantz Fanon as they negotiate a postapocalyptic dystopia, points perhaps to the endgame. Kostas Bassnos spells out the biennial title in Greek (which is paraphrased from C.P. Cavafy’s Greek language poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’) across the roof of the milk factory. In Cavafy’s 1898 work, a city is left adrift without an enemy – the barbarians – to fight and define itself against. So too in Kouoh’s biennial – for all our claims to civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the British Empire and beyond – violence is presented as an integral and perhaps vital part of the human character. Oliver Basciano

Otobong Nkanga, The Weight of Scars, 2015 (installation view, EVA International, Limerick, 2016). Photo: Miriam O’Connor. Courtesy the artist and EVA International, Limerick

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Gabriella Ciancimino La stanza dello Scirocco (The Room of Sirocco) Prometeo Gallery, Milan 17 March – 10 May The Sirocco is a hot summer wind that blows from the Sahara to the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. It can rage for days, bringing sand, humidity and scorching temperatures, along with an oppressive sense of claustrophobia. To escape the heat, Sicilian aristocrats had stanze dello Scirocco – covert spaces where the presence of water and constant ventilation cooled the burning airstreams, in accordance with the principles of Arab architecture – built under their suburban villas. These rooms were hidden gardens of delights, whose design was based on a clever understanding of the southern ecosystems: spaces made to be in harmony with nature. Gabriella Ciancimino, born and based in Palermo, has created the mirage of a ‘room of Sirocco’ at the entrance of Prometeo Gallery. She has projected a beam of artificial light onto a row of perforated bricks, shaped in the traditional Sicilian floral geometric pattern that fractures sunrays and lets air flow, to demarcate an imaginary free zone (Paesaggio di Scirocco (Sirocco Landscape), all works 2016). Freedom of circulation – of ideas, words, symbols and people – is at the core of her work, avowedly inspired by the ‘social ecology’ theorised by American philosopher and activist Murray Bookchin, who considered environmental and humanitarian crises to be closely intertwined and equally determined by the oppressive organisation

of society. Since 2010, Ciancimino has mapped the unrestricted worldwide travels of ‘vagabond’ and endemic plants: emblems, for her, of endurance and resistance. Unlike humans, the seeds of Caralluma europaea, Cystoseira spinosa, aloe and chickweed, all pictured here, are allowed to migrate along the Sirocco’s routes, across the sea, to find shelter. The artist’s favourite medium is drawing, practised with a labour-intensive technique: she works on different types of paper and canvas with pencils, watercolours, acrylics and inks, as well as old buttons, used like rubber stamps. She then cuts the drawings, using a scalpel, along fractured and irregular outlines, and collages them together in large compositions, akin to monumental embroideries or oversize tattoos. Signs overlap and proliferate, thus mirroring a habitat in which different species coexist and flourish, as in the ‘Creole garden’ so dear to Martinican writer Édouard Glissant. The largest and most impressive work on show is the 7.7m × 4m wall-drawing (also incorporating two canvases) Efendisiz Flow, reference material for which was gathered by the artist during a recent period of study in Istanbul and titled after an anarchist magazine published in the city in the late 1980s. The artist merges the outline of a famous map of the Mediterranean area, drawn in the sixteenth century by the

Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis, with the cover of the first naturist manifesto (published in Paris in 1901), as well as with the earth’s curved profile and images of plants growing on the conflicted border between Syria and Turkey. It’s a frenzied scheme, where the flow – to borrow from hip-hop, whose music Ciancimino has adopted in previous works – follows the rhythm of individual associations, without linear logic. Another clear reference for the artist’s botanical leanings are Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau, also known in Italy as Stile Liberty – literally, freedom or free style. On a wall, a silk banner proclaims The Liberty Flowers love to resist, the Resistant Flowers resist for love, while The Flow of Flowers series reinterprets Egyptian protest posters – from the 1960s to the withered Arab Spring – by turning the usual iconography of the closed fist into a gesture of offering a red flower – not a rose, but a Mediterranean ‘dissident weed’, the Adonis annua, commonly known as ‘Red Morocco’. The metaphor is obvious, but by picking her stories from the margins of official histories and classifications, Ciancimino avoids being too didactic. Her optimism concerning art’s potential to exercise an emancipating social function seems so resolute that it serves to refresh, like the thought of a cool room in a suffocating climate. Barbara Casavecchia

Liberty Flowers, 2016, installation, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Prometeo Gallery, Milan

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Michael Raedecker Camouflage Grimm, Amsterdam 18 March – 23 April For the first time since his debut in 1998, Michael Raedecker has a solo exhibition in Amsterdam, his hometown. The 14 paintings on display, mostly from 2016, demonstrate how Raedecker has augmented his characteristic blend of painting and embroidery with the application of fabric and artificial fur. This new development is both exciting and risky. It’s exciting because the virtually colourless images of dim interiors evoke the feeling that can steal over you when you enter your own living room in the middle of the night: a motionless world, lit only by moonlight, completely familiar yet totally alien, as if the objects in the room led a secret life. This alienation is the exhibition’s strength. It’s risky because the collage technique in some of the paintings comes across as somewhat archaic. Covering the canvas with strips of textile and pieces of printed fabric may lead to associations with handicraft, which, for that matter, is disarming in its own right. The stylisations of Raedecker’s motifs – a lampshade, a houseplant, a bottle, a curtain – are at times reminiscent of advertisements from the 1960s and 70s, the years of his youth. The association with hobbyism, combined with a touch of

nostalgia, could easily provoke the suggestion that Raedecker’s work is a kind of deliberate outsider art. Yet the opposite is true: it marks a strong-willed, self-referential and highly sophisticated position within current painting. Flat (2015), for example, is a frontal depiction of a curtain, a standard lamp and a pot plant. Long vertical lines have been meticulously stitched onto the canvas, like folds in a curtain. The material that was used to create the painting dovetails virtually seamlessly with what the painting represents. A similar correlation between painting and image can be seen in permissive (2016), where a spiderweb has been drawn in grey artificial fur, stretched on a frame. The lines are no more than traces between the hairs of the fur, made using fixative but looking extremely fragile nonetheless. It’s as if they will disappear at the slightest touch – just like the delicate threads of a web. In body guard (2016) and public relations (2016), furrows in deep-pile fur form the contours of several chairs, quivering and unstable, as if they are unable to capture these contours. A feeling of resignation and futility surrounds these works. They recall the pseudo-domesticity of anonymous waiting rooms.

The paintings using artificial fur beg to be touched: stroked, as it were. Along the edges, where the fur curls around the stretcher, the hairs puff up, like the fur of a cat arching its back. There is something intimate about this, but I wonder if the ephemeral character of the nocturnal scenes would be enhanced if the paintings were framed, hiding the sides from view, with less emphasis on their materiality. My favourite work is the painting with which the exhibition opens: front (2016). It shows a window in a facade and is one of the most frugal, restrained works in the exhibition. The canvas has not been painted on, but dyed; the irregular stains in charcoalgrey and matt black render the image hazy and unsettled. The windowsill and panes are made from strips of painted fabric. Glistening, silvery moonlight glows on the frame. The curly fibres underneath it might suggest remnants of vegetation. The window offers a view inside, to the interior, but nothing except a dismal silence can be seen. Using minimal means, front evokes the feeling of existential desolation that makes Raedecker’s best work so intangible. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Suzanne Jansen

front, 2016, acrylic, thread, collage on cotton, 135 × 104 cm. Photo: Lewis Ronald. Courtesy the artist and Grimm, Amsterdam

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Lou Cantor The Labour of Watching. Difficulty of Seeing Leto Gallery, Warsaw 20 February – 26 March In this show by the pseudonymous Polish/ German duo Lou Cantor, The Labour of Watching is explicitly visualised in photographs showing lone youngish people passed out in recognisably institutional art spaces. These images are printed onto durable material slightly too large for the Clear Channel advertising displays into which they’re squashed, reminding me of crushed bedsheets. The phrase ‘Seeing, and being seen to see’ is emblazoned across one work, in a rather on-the-nose suggestion that the imperative is exhausting. Blunt-fringed haircuts and the sighting of a hipsterish Icelandic sweater don’t exactly suggest the people here are at odds with their new bedrooms. Their somnolence could even be an expression of next-level ‘at home-ness’. “You’ll recognise that’s Sprüth Magers,” I’m enthusiastically told by the gallery assistant about the location of one photo, though I don’t. I’m aware, however, that if I were to lie down on the parquet floor of the former fin-de-siècle apartment that is Leto Gallery, my prostrate body, clothed in garments that could indicate a degree of tribalism to Cantor’s depicted realm, would transfer perfectly into one of their pictures. Concurring with the exhibition’s

accompanying text, I feel the vertigo of the mise en abyme. A colossal vertical banner, donated by the National Museum in Warsaw, spills out in crumpled folds from one corner of the room. It is difficult to make out what show it once announced, though clues are there. Pixilated astral swirls of colour and a blotch of something fleshy suggest figuration. I find out that it is from the Masters of the Pastel exhibition (2015), which showcased artists from the museum’s collection. Cantor, according to their aforementioned text, believes that ‘to see art is to watch the process of aesthetic discourse unfold, but it is also to watch a hypervisible but unmarked economic process’. On the day I visit, it is announced that the current rightwing government in Poland intends to cease funding to public gallery collections, redirecting money to the Catholic Church, which intends a ‘contribution to culture’ with a museum about the Pope. Although this is a turn Cantor couldn’t have consciously addressed, it fits the exhibition’s narrative with gloomy aptness. This banner, retired to a private gallery that needs the patronage of institutional collections to endorse its artists,

Labour of watching, 2016, frontal crash test barrier, 80 × 100 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artists

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speaks for a current aesthetic and economic process in which dependency and cultural worth are exhaustingly dragged apart and muddled, but also for some faith in imaginative responses. Further into the show, a series of brightblue aluminium crash-test barriers are wallmounted at head height in what seems like a conventional gallery hang, simultaneously aping the crash-test technicians’ ‘exhibitions’ (they apparently use the same word). These raw, appropriated ‘sculptures’ conjure a range of masculine associations, from the dudelike ‘woah’ you can’t help but utter on inspecting the tangible damage, to formal echoes of those defining ‘masters’ of twentieth-century sculpture, Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg. In choosing an androgynous fictional moniker, ‘Lou Cantor’ is in itself a kind of test barrier, built to receive all our subjective ways of seeing: ‘Not another guy making art about theory’, was my first thought on encountering their work, the truth being somewhat different. But for the art scene in Poland right now, the gospel of Lou Cantor rings in timely contrast to the sonorous sermons of ultraconservative politics. Phoebe Blatton

Patricia Esquivias At Times Embellished Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, Spain 19 February – 5 June Patricia Esquivias’s video installation Walking Still (2014) – included in her survey exhibition At Times Embellished – presents a five-minute video that follows the artist as she uses Google Earth to explore a village in Colombia, seeking the distinctively patterned sidewalks that she had seen and photographed on a prior visit, although those images were later lost when her computer malfunctioned. The video follows Esquivias as she clicks her way along the images of the rundown streets, advancing, rotating, zooming in and out of the images on her screen. As it proceeds, Esquivias provides commentary in a lilting singsong recitative, sharing her memories and conjectures while describing the imagery before her (and us). In addition, two large graphite rubbings that she made of the sidewalks lie on low plinths in the projection space. Walking Still is a delightful (and delightfully quirky) work, and it encapsulates, albeit in condensed form, the qualities that lend At Times Embellished moments of haunting and lasting beauty. As in most of Esquivias’s practice, Walking Still is framed as an exercise in historical/ urbanistic research, but research rooted in the personal rather than the academic. The narrative layering is deft – the reconstruction of the earlier visit and of the lost photos via the simulation

of Google Earth, the recollections recounted in the deceptively simple and at times lyrical voiceover (“Now they have been looked at / And walked on so much / That they are worn out.”) It is a poem; it is a song; it is a story. Above all the work is imbued with a sense of loss, not so much that of the absent photographs but rather the overarching loss that results from time’s passing, so that the research of the framing device becomes a kind of ‘re-search’ in a Proustian sense, a searching again, as poignant as it is destined a priori to failure – a quality powerfully emblematised by the sidewalk rubbings, laid flat like gravestones in a tomb. Other works in At Times Embellished, while larger in scale and more ambitious in scope, retain this successful combination of stories within stories, dryness and intimacy, popular craft and contemporary form, loss and longing. For example, the centrepiece of the show, a multipart installation (its various parts dating from 2013 to 2016) – consisting of, among other things, videos, photographs, postcards, an artist’s book, archival architectural material and a good-sized chunk of rubble – retains this successful combination of stories within stories, being based on Esquivias’s relentless and apparently ongoing investigative study

of the handmade ceramic tiles decorating a residential building that typified 1950s Madrid architecture. A similar methodology structures an untitled 2016 work focusing on Guadalupe González-Hontoria, a curious and idiosyncratic figure in Spanish ethnographic history. As a young woman during the late 1960s, González-Hontoria won a small car in a raffle, which she then used to traverse the Iberian Peninsula, collecting thousands of items of traditional Spanish artisanship; Esquivias’s installation incorporates objects (including a remarkable handmade carpet of feathers) from her collection and career, clearly paying homage to a model and referent for her own idiosyncratic, document-based practice. And another large-scale, untitled, multipart installation from 2016 uses a 1930s sculpture by the Spanish artist Alberto Sánchez entitled El pueblo español tiene un camino que conduce a una estrella (exhibited alongside Picasso’s Guernica at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris) as a starting point from which to concoct an eclectic but ordered installation of documents and objects, including a lovely large hand-decorated stucco wall created in situ by a team of masons, highlighting yet again Esquivias’s capacity to use surfaces as a way to dig far below the surface. George Stolz

An image from Archivo de fotografías de revocos madrileños, 2013–16. Courtesy the artist

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Paul Fägerskiöld Pale Blue Dot Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm 7 April – 14 May What is it with artists and flags? Art history of the last century is spiked with them: from Jasper Johns’s first Flag (1954–5) to Nam June Paik’s Video Flag series (1985–96) and Robert Longo’s Black Flags (1989–91), to list just a few. In Paul Fägerskiöld’s latest exhibition, flags figure prominently. Perhaps surprisingly at first, considering these ensigns’ earthly connotations, the title of the show is taken from a space photograph captured by Voyager 1 in 1990 at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan. The image, shot from a distance of six billion kilometres, shows earth as a tiny pixel amidst the vastness of space. From this perspective, any territorial quarrels and claims, of which the nation-state symbols are indicators, seem particularly bizarre. Fägerskiöld’s flag paintings are held in thick layers of white oil on virgin taupe canvas, and depict banners of countries that no longer exist. Among them is a picture of a hammer and sickle within a sunlike circle, pointing to the Soviet past of the former semiotic icon. All these flags, in fact, feature suns of the same diameter – which, in turn, determines the size of the paintings. They are hung so that the circles form an imagined horizon. The sun has been a central motif in cultural practices, from the archaic Mayan civilisation to the ancient Egyptian Ra cult and antique Greek philosophy. It has been the first reference for time measurement,

and a constant reminder of our relative tininess on a universal scale. Fägerskiöld asks whether flags that are symbolically charged with solar and other references can be emptied of their former meaning, and become free to be claimed again for different purposes. Well, can they? Aside from the flags, the exhibition includes paintings from the artist’s Landscapes series (all works 2016). Terra Incognita is a large-scale, mostly empty canvas with a curved rectangle in dark maroon filling the lower sixth of the picture plane, reminiscent of the earth’s curvature. As flags are intended to foster a sense of belonging for one group at the expense of excluding others, the empty negative of the canvas is as much a constituent part of the work as its positive painted equivalent, with which it shares a clear-cut borderline. The painting Final Frontier resembles a black version of the star-spangled blue rectangle of the US flag. The stars in Fägerskiöld’s version are smaller and not painted, but made from sections of raw canvas. The work connects the symbolladen White Flags and Landscapes series – nevertheless, it could just as well be interpreted as a night sky, or simply an abstract pattern. In its ambiguity, it points to the core query of Fägerskiöld’s exhibit: to show how meaning is always a construct and an interpretative choice. An untitled spray painting, then, highlights the viewer’s role in making sense of such

undecided meaning. From afar the work looks like a monochrome image, yet when moving in we discern the billions of tiny paint squirts of which it is composed. Hence, the viewer’s movement is pivotal to deciphering the spatiotemporal actions at play in its making. Fägerskiöld uses a spray can to slowly let paint drip onto the canvas from different angles, resulting in an oscillation between chaos and repetition. Compared to the artist’s earlier tiny pointillist drippings, this work is made up of longer, decompressed squirts. It appears more related to digits and letters, and accordingly semiotics, and less of a perception-oriented cloud as in the earlier works. Fägerskiöld condenses diverse ways of viewing different painterly genres, from formerly symbolic flags and historical references, to landscape compositions, to tools dissecting the idea of a whole – which Sagan said we can never fully perceive while we are inside it. The show is about shifting perspective, and how we constantly shuffle new combinations of things to create meaning. Yet, considering our insignificant size in relation to the universe – visualised by the photograph Pale Blue Dot – and our limitation by symbols whose allocated meaning we can hardly dispose of, yet which we rely on to make sense of the world – see Fägerskiöld’s solar flags – we may want to question the value of the meaning thus construed. Stefanie Hessler

Terra Incognita, 2016, oil on canvas with walnut frame, 238 × 331 cm. Photo: Carl Henrik Tillberg. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm & Berlin

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Keiji Uematsu Invisible Force Simon Lee Gallery, London 8 April – 5 May Mono-ha, the Japanese art movement with which Keiji Uematsu is most closely associated, is typically translated as ‘school of things’. And yet, as Uematsu’s first UK show reveals, the concept isn’t actually that great a fit for the sixtynine-year old: mainly because his practice just doesn’t seem particularly ‘thingy’. His 1970s work, especially, encompasses photography and performance to a much greater extent than most of his Mono-ha contemporaries, who principally or exclusively worked in sculpture, which is perhaps why he’s been slightly left out of the current revival of interest in the movement. And even his actual sculptural works – which in this exhibition date from only the past few years – don’t emphasise their own materiality and objecthood the way core Mono-ha works do. Instead, Uematsu’s primary focus has always been on forces – on the invisible interplay of tension and balance – rather than actual matter itself. Two sculptures encapsulate this. Floating form – invisible axis (2015) consists of a two-metrelong copper cylinder suspended just above the floor by a steel cable that loops up through a ceiling-tie and tethers at the other end to a craggy rock on the ground, the cable being so

thin that for a moment it seems like the sideways cylinder is hovering in space. Not that you’re meant permanently to be taken in. Rather, the point is to generate an atmosphere of artifice and contrivance – with the gently swaying weight resembling some strange, otherworldly prop, and even the anchoring rock looking somehow unreal – so that the physical facts of the work seem to pale before the greater, eternal truths of the forces being invoked: the downward pull of gravity, and the counteracting tension in the wire. And there’s a similar sense to Cutting – triangle (2016), where two unequal sections of wooden beam are hung horizontally by an inverted ‘V’ of rope that’s hooked to the wall, with the beams’ touching ends not quite sitting square – this misalignment being, of course, a measure of the imbalance between their respective lengths and thus their weights. The piece becomes like a mathematical illustration, its outward form a mere accident, its physical arrangement the result, indeed, of physics. This illustrative ethos extends to Uematsu’s photographs from 1973 – two years before he left Japan and moved to Düsseldorf, where he still resides. The works are all pairs of sequential

shots: a long plank of wood lying on the ground with a slack rope attached, in the first frame of Board/Man/Rope, followed by Uematsu leaning back on the tilting plank while supporting himself with the taut rope; or, in Vertical Position, an upright wooden block within an empty doorway that, once Uematsu lifts it aloft in the subsequent image, is precisely the right height to reach the lintel. The same basic, inherent forces and dimensions, these images seem to state, were present all along – it just took the artist dynamically to complete the composition and make you realise it. Sometimes, though, an idea doesn’t even have to be literally realised. That’s the message, presumably, behind his hugely tall charcoal drawings, all titled Situation – gravity axis (2016), which represent side-on views of oblong shapes – perhaps more long planks or cylinders – stacked and balanced in precarious positions. The accurate, two-dimensional modelling acts almost like a rebuttal of mainstream Mono-ha ideology: a statement that, as long as the fundamental rules of physics are honourably observed, the final form of a work can be as unreal or whimsical as you like. Gabriel Coxhead

Tree/Man I, 1973, two vintage gelatin silver prints, each 76 × 55 cm. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy the artist; Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong; and Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo

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Thomson & Craighead Party Booby Trap Carroll / Fletcher, London 14 April – 25 May Writing in 2003, Fredric Jameson remarked that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’. Since the financial meltdown of 2008, that phrase has become more apt than ever. The so-called ‘crisis of capitalism’ has not precipitated the destruction of an economic system. Rather, the global recession has led to the entrenchment of neoliberalism and austerity in the UK, much of Europe, America and elsewhere. The ostensible end was just another beginning, a destructive rebirth of the status quo. Jameson’s argument – that we can sooner imagine the eradication of the human race than the dissolution of an economic system invented by humans – provides an important frame of reference for Apocalypse (2016), a limitededition perfume shown as part of London-based artist duo Thomson & Craighead’s solo exhibition. Comprising a black, velvet-lined box with a rectangular glass bottle nestled inside, Apocalypse aims to capture the odour of the end-times as described in the Book of Revelation. When a gallery assistant handed me a sample on a strip of white cardboard, I lifted Apocalypse to my nose. It was dank, musky, yet disappointingly pleasant: not as pungently repulsive

as I’d expected, given the artists’ description of the perfume, in a note beside the bottle, as containing odours of ‘hail and fire’ and ‘a grievous sore’. Apocalypse makes a playful yet sophisticated point about how collective anxiety about the end of the world can be sublimated into the branding for a luxury commodity: perfume. Elsewhere in the show, mankind’s ability to imagine (and engineer) its own destruction is explored in work of a more didactic nature. The war on terror (2016), for example, is a short, typewritten list of anagrams of the titular phrase. In a post-Snowden world of mass surveillance and surgical drone strikes, this seems a distinctly anachronistic target for satire. A temporary index (2016) features an animated projection showing the lengths of time it will take for various sites storing radioactive waste to become habitable by humans. The work simply re-presents statistics – many of which are accessible on Wikipedia – as a cryptic display of shifting numbers. This visually tedious work seemed to be making a simplistic argument about the environmental impact of nuclear waste disposal. A riskier and more compelling approach might have been to reflect on the

Stutterer, 2014, two-channel moving images, generative software. Courtesy the artists and Carroll / Fletcher, London

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political efficacy of presenting such information in the context of a commercial gallery. Stutterer (2014), another projection-based work, was more successful. Described by the artists as a ‘poetry machine’, it comprises animated letters (representing the human genome) synced to snippets of archival TV footage. In a disturbing echo of the human annihilation alluded to by the title of Apocalypse, these clips include reports on terrorist attacks and war. Given our daily exposure to horrific images such as these, it is perhaps unsurprising that we find it easier – as Jameson suggests – to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the collapse of capitalism. In the poster series Common Era (2016), predictions about the Apocalypse, from Nostradamus to Bob Geldof, are printed in a crude, colourful font that makes each portentous prophecy read like a billboard slogan. The cumulative effect is to expose the absurdity of such hysterical claims, while revealing how persistent the fear of annihilation has been throughout human history. As these posters demonstrate, the most convincing works in Party Booby Trap err towards the playful end of the aesthetic spectrum, even if their subject matter is nothing less than the end of the world. Patrick Langley

Barthes / Burgin John Hansard Gallery, Southampton 13 February – 16 April Roland Barthes drew – who knew? Well, Victor Burgin, for one, and at the John Hansard Gallery we are presented with a dialogue between 15 of Barthes’s drawings (apparently he produced some 700) and three of Burgin’s recent projection works. The slash in the title of the show refers to Barthes’s regular use of that gloriously ambiguous punctuation mark in his writing and also to the physical arrangement of the works here, in which Burgin’s rooms are split by a space containing Barthes’s wall-mounted drawings. To call them drawings might be questionable, though – they are composed of markings, sometimes done with felt-tip pens, occasionally with paint. They resemble doodling but are performed with more elan than that lowly word suggests. One imagines that those New Musical Express writers inspired by Barthes during the 1980s (Paul Morley and Ian Penman) might have enjoyed calling them drawings/paintings. All three of Burgin’s films are silent and visually interrupted by screen blackouts: moments of stasis that scream out: now think! The first room features Prairie (2015). There are poetic hints of haiku in the intertitles that reference the Amerindian Inoka of Illinois. These are followed quickly by static shots of covered wagons, settlers. Prairie refers to a now destroyed building in Illinois that was replaced by a Mies van der Rohe construction. Art as

poetic pedagogy, then: we are prompted into dwelling on the nature of memory and destruction, the rotten palimpsest of history. The other side of the partition has the Barthes drawings, and these suggest several inspirations/interpretations (it’s catching). These are small – some are executed on A2 sheets – but display an impressive control of gesture. No. 408 (1972) might be a preparatory sketch for a late Pollock; others, like No. 218 (1971), resemble calligraphy, Japanese markings, say, or, in the case of No. 159 (1971), Islamic script, and it is entirely possible that Barthes took pleasure in creating artefacts that to him looked like some new form of writing, illegible but gravid with possible meaning. Two more Burgin projections are next – one, A Place to Read (2010), was made for Istanbul’s designation at the time as European Capital of Culture. Burgin’s use of CGI illustrates troubles with the ongoing (and controversial) redesign of the Turkish city. The argument Burgin proposes around architectural vandalism spookily predicts the discontent of the Taksim Square demonstrations. The other video, Belledonne (2016), features panoramic visions of the Alps, projected as if one were overflying on a paraglider (imagine a blown-up 3D Google Map of the area around Grenoble). More intertitles prod the memory and there’s more haiku in

one that ‘should be no longer than a breath’. Lastly, there is a small library that contains the canonical Barthes works and a collection of Burgin’s own writings. Burgin’s practice has long been informed by his reading of the Frenchman, but what are we to make of the conjunction of his highly accomplished films and these amateur sideprojects of Barthes’s? Amateurism was important to Barthes. As Ryan Bishop and Sunil Manghani, editors of the book accompanying the exhibition note, for Barthes, ‘the figure of the amateur is important as a means of countering power structures and keeping open to writerly pleasure’. But would we reach the same verdict on these drawings were it revealed to us that the author was an entirely different sort of amateur, say a rock star such as Ronnie Wood? Knowing these drawings are by Barthes immediately loads the frontal lobes of the viewer. We cannot un-know this fact, and thus it is difficult to avoid prejudgement in the penumbra of his writings. Barthes’s works on paper have something of de Kooning’s late paintings, with their skeins of marking and a plentiful blankness. In turn this provokes disturbing conclusions on the junction between Barthes’s hyperaware notions of neutrality, Burgin’s contemplative pauses and the mute voids of de Kooning’s dementia. John Quin

Victor Burgin, Belledonne, 2016, digital projection installation. Courtesy the artist

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François Morellet Les Règles du Jeu The Mayor Gallery, London 6 April – 27 May 90 Annely Juda Fine Art, London 5 April – 24 June The French artist François Morellet passed away aged ninety, shortly after the opening of these simultaneous exhibitions and a little before this reviewer went to visit them. His transition – from contemporary to historic – inevitably colours the way in which you view the work, more than the language I’ve just used might suggest. The galleries post notices communicating their sorrow and how much they enjoyed working with the artist, you’re thinking about mortality, and the whiff of sentiment has singed your lungs. Particularly when you’re reviewing the recently deceased’s efforts for a magazine, like this one, that defines contemporary art as the output of living artists. Even Wikipedia was instantly updated following the artist’s death to inform people that François Morellet ‘was’ a contemporary painter. All of which, on the evidence of his work, is a little unfair. Not least because Morellet’s paintings and installations are so deliberately empty of sentiment and emotion, referring, in general, only to the set of mathematical rules or constraints that generates them and then

engaging viewers’ intellects by manipulating – sometimes even painfully (definitely so in the case of one of the 16 paintings on show at The Mayor Gallery: 3 trames de carrés réguliers pivotées sur le côté, 1970, comprising blue squares dancing somewhat unpleasantly against a red background) – their eyeballs. And of course given that Morellet was someone not without a sense of humour, there is one work on show at Annely Juda (which contains a sampling of the artist’s more recent works), titled Lamentable (2005) – a necklace of white neon tubes, interlinked like sausages and suspended from the ceiling such that they pool on the floor – that suggests the opposite of everything I’ve just said: under the circumstances, you think of a puddle of tears – an example perhaps of how viewer manipulation is not always the result of a controlled plan. (Another neon work at Juda, Cercle à demi-libéré n°1, 2013, comprising two semicircumferences of blue argon, reassuringly shows the artist back to his more typical, factual self.) Morellet is best known as a pioneer of mid-twentieth-century geometric abstraction

Tous les 2-3-4-5 en diagonale, 1974, silkscreen on board, 80 × 80 cm. Courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London

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(manipulating mathematical laws and systems to produce a series of more-or-less curious optical results) in Europe, as well as an early exponent of installation art, mainly using neon. When this magazine last reviewed Morellet’s work, back in 2013, at Kayne Griffin Corcoran in LA, it was very much an exercise in placing the Frenchman in an art-historical context: his relationships to Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Richard Tuttle, and to the pared-down aesthetics of American Apparel stores. Sitting amidst the paintings, mainly executed during the 1970s, in The Mayor Gallery however, you can’t help thinking that works like Tous les 2-3-4-5 en diagonale (1974), a black-and-white silkscreen on wood based on a distorted series of distorted grid patterns, speak a lot more to the flat information structures of contemporary QR codes and the mathematical communication of our digital age, albeit humanised by the occasional trace of the artist’s hand. Testament to the fact that contemporaneity can be something that lingers rather than something that always passes away. Mark Rappolt

Glasgow International 2016 Various venues, Glasgow 8–25 April In Glasgow, once a global trading port for shipbuilding and textiles, the shift from heavy industry to the creative industries is a sensitive subject, but one that is sympathetically charted for this, the seventh edition of Glasgow International. Described as having ‘a loose theme considering the legacy of industry’, the programme, directed by Sarah McCrory, sees 15 artists, 11 of whom are women, make use of assorted sites across the city, including the dilapidated former festival hall, the steamy yet serene Botanic Gardens, the ornate Mitchell Library and the more traditional exhibition spaces of GoMA, Tramway and Kelvingrove Museum, all of which were constructed as a result of the city’s industrial might. Across eight venues, the programme’s mix of local and international artists employ an array of both handmade and industrial materials and processes, considering what it means to labour, to harvest and to yield, and exploring ideas around the production of value and the resurgence of craft. At Tramway, Amie Siegel’s film Provenance (2013) provides a pensive consideration of artmarket economies. Taking the famed modernist furniture designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for Chandigarh as a starting point, Siegel maps the increasing fetishisation of these once-utilitarian objects as they move from offices and rooftops in India, through upholstery workshops (where they are covered in linen, velvet, fur…), to auction rooms, superyachts and collectors’ homes. With tidy circularity, Siegel then doubles back on herself with a second film – documenting the auction of the first – as it becomes yet another marketable commodity. Nearby, in a surreal complication of labour and excess, Mika Rottenberg presents two visceral films in which pearls are force-cultivated,

lettuces are pulverised and rubber is leached from trees by a production line of anonymous women. Behind which, Sheila Hicks’s Mighty Mathilde and Her Consort (2016), an enormous web of coloured fibres, exudes from ceiling to floor, depositing pillowy boulders at its base and clogging the disused tramlines with bright wisps of wool. At Kelvin Hall – the neglected home of Glasgow’s 1951 Exhibition of Industrial Power, and subsequent annual circuses and carnivals – Claire Barclay’s vast, and pungent, Bright Bodies (2016) sits atop a climb of peeling staircases. Drawing on the building’s history, Barclay uses industrial materials (steel, rubber, sheet metal and coal tar) to create a bondage-esque appropriation that at times resembles twentieth-century abstract sculpture and, at others, circus paraphernalia. Red canvas sacks enclosed in steel cages, swathes of pink rubber surrounding a lake of coal tar and machine-drilled sheet metal all recall the celebration of steel and coal that occurred in this very building, as well as the annual circus festivities that Barclay remembers from here as a child. Any emphasis on the industrial is offset at the Botanic Gardens, where Aaron Angell’s rickety ceramic sculptures flourish among the begonias whose glasshouse they share. Inspired by a disparate range of influences, from medievalism to the eighteenth-century landscape architect Capability Brown, Angell’s semipastoral dioramas – composed of tiny clay bricks, wonky pipes, flowers, watermills, ladders and church organs – advocate the intimacy of the handmade over the mass-produced. Tamara Henderson’s Seasons End (2016) at the Mitchell Library accentuates this attitude. A pantheon of costumed figures, resembling scarecrows or totemic beings in hand-sewn kimonos, feel like

members of an overlooked pagan group. Led by two central figures – Body Fountain Fetch, a recumbent blue female(?) whose body constitutes a chaise longue and whose head is made of water-filled pipes; and Garden Photographer Scarecrow, a giant patchwork man(?) with an embroidered fruit face – this community of beings, who feel both pre- and postindustrial, seem to be celebrating harvest and nature, as much as craft itself. More anthropomorphic textiles inhabit GoMA’s lower galleries, where Cosima von Bonin’s Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea? (2006–2016) presents a fete of fish out of water. Boisterous, scaled-up sea creatures (a languorous lobster, mischievous clams, a bored shark) are accompanied by prerecorded footage of a drag dance-off in an installation that literally plays with ideas around costume, performance and popular culture. With a strikingly different energy to other works in the programme, von Bonin’s melancholy yet humorous creatures also seem to present a contrast to the prevailing theme of industry in the surrounding exhibitions. Upstairs at GoMA, however, recent Glasgow School of Art graduate Tessa Lynch maintains von Bonin’s playful approach to the everyday, presenting an abstracted description of her daily commute. Taking advantage of the snaking gallery, her elegant installation portrays the colours and patterns of Glasgow’s particular stonework and facades with a dexterity that combines both craft and industrial technique. Here the programme finds a climax, celebrating both Glasgow’s illustrious heritage as well as its cultural future in a way that is sensitive, forward-thinking and sassy. The pairing of Lynch and von Bonin is satisfyingly awkward and happily discordant. Laura Smith

Amie Siegel, Provenance, 2013 (installation view). Photo: Ruth Clark. Courtesy the artist and Glasgow International

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Ruben Ochoa Tripping the Light Fantastick Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 12 March – 16 April Faced with Ruben Ochoa’s sleights of hand – the artist’s ability to make large industrial-seeming objects flicker between reality and fiction – one is tempted by two compelling interpretations, both red herrings. First, it appears that Ochoa must be obsessed with the influence and impact of New York Minimalism and Land art. His sculptures and paintings remind one of so many artists: large displacements speak to Michael Heizer, metal and rust to Richard Serra, and, in the case of his 2009 Peter Blum show, dirt to Walter De Maria and his 141 Wooster St installation. After one understands that Ochoa’s structures are mostly feats of engineering rather than blunt assertions of materials, however, the second interpretation dawns: maybe it is a Hollywood thing, a stage set and illusion thing. But if Ochoa seems like a Tinseltown minimalist, he’s a rather thin one. His sculptures do not succeed in shaking off narrative in order to tap into some prelinguistic reality of basic matter. And as for Hollywood, the sculptures – though at times beckoning towards science-

fiction or disaster movies – are very coy in their relationship to film and the theatre of the imagination. They may be make-believe (for instance, in At First Blush, 2010, an earlier series, not on show here, in which building pallets get up and dance on spindly metal legs), but they seem to be much more about work and labour than they are about studio backlots. All of this is another way of saying that Ochoa’s work takes a long time to sink in. Perhaps it even takes years of living in Los Angeles to understand. The film industry gets most of the attention, but LA is more importantly a place where massive visible infrastructure directs the experience of its inhabitants. Its highways connect farflung areas, but one’s central experience is of those same highways dividing the city along ethnic and class lines. Phrases like ‘south of the 10’, ‘west of the 405’, or ‘east of Los Angeles Street’ denote far more than location. Ochoa’s sculptures speak to this world. His sculptures and paintings are not monuments to Serra, they are monuments to LA.

Paintings like The Season of Darkness (2016) are basically landscapes that find a long sweep of open territory and drifting clouds grinding in the rust of urban reality. Their footing is in Richard Diebenkorn and Sam Francis’s observation of natural phenomena coalescing into abstract structures, but they wear the dust and the grit of those structures openly, as though Ochoa is drawn to LA’s inner ocean of rebar as much as to its actual coastline. It must matter to Ochoa that his sculptures make one think of sidewalks breaking under the stress of tree roots, long bridges stretching over eight lanes of limitless lines of cars and high, breathtaking ramps turning one’s attention within seconds from one part of the city to another. These experiences can be magical and menacing at once, tough and slightly fantastic. They are much like the metal stones that Ochoa has placed among his paintings at Susanne Vielmetter: beautiful, gnarled and industrial, but, in the end, lighter than you think. Larry Wilcox

Tripping the Light Fantastick, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

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Joan Snyder Womansong Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles 30 April – 10 June The New York-based painter Joan Snyder came to attention quite suddenly, in 1971, at the age of thirty-one, when she exhibited a body of work that she referred to as her ‘stroke paintings’. These large canvases, both abstract and expressionist, though ambivalent towards the orthodoxies of the masculine Abstract Expressionist movement, arranged discontinuous strokes of different colours on horizontal grids. Snyder’s Spring 1971 (1971), which introduces her exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, is a classic work from this pivotal moment in her career. Compared to the contemporary works that follow it in the main gallery, Spring 1971 is a difficult, jarring painting, and bracingly so. It is difficult because it refuses to cohere, or synthesise; like most of Snyder’s paintings from this period, each painterly incident – trowelled daubs of oil paint, pooling stains of thin acrylic, faint mists of sprayed enamel – arises unexpectedly and independently. Snyder – who may be a synaesthete – has long been inspired in her art by sound and music. With its horizontal bars, Spring 1971 is reminiscent of 1960s experimental

graphic notations of composers such as Roman Haubenstock-Ramati or Cornelius Cardew. As a composition, it is discordant, arrhythmic and seemingly improvised. Snyder’s recent paintings in the exhibition retain some of those structural qualities, though their mood is quite different. In contrast to the rather cerebral painting from 1971, these seven works, dating from 2015 and 2016, are brimming with sensuous feeling, a consciousness of the body, of the artist’s heart, guts and womb, and are encrusted with material culled from the external world, including mud, dried flowers and glass beads. During the 1970s Snyder became increasingly involved with feminism. She has sustained an avowedly female aesthetic ever since. Heart of the Fugue (2016), a panoramic painting made from conjoined canvases, has at its centre a scratched heart symbol and poppy stalks tied with silk ribbon embedded in puddles of glossy white paint. As a man, I am perhaps not fully licensed to say that many of Snyder’s indices of femininity – pastel colours, flowers, hearts, ribbons, etc –

seem rather clichéd. If I were a woman I might resent having my gender so narrowly prescribed. Snyder does not use these signs lightly, however. For her, the dried flowers and seed heads that she cements to her canvases with thick paint or gloopy, transparent medium are profound symbols of germination, fruition and ultimate decay. Artists including Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer (both of whom are recalled here) have each used flowers to similar – though less overtly gendered – effect. Snyder’s fragmented paintings are never overbearing or hectoring, as Kiefer’s can often be. Instead she presents us with moments of formal experimentation or traces from her life experience, arranged with space between, allowing us to explore them on our own terms. To let one’s eye wander through the diaphanous Field of Berries (2016), for example, is to encounter all manner of unexpected gifts: veils of dripping, translucent acrylic; torn scraps of watercolour paper; crusty scabs of vivid, unmixed oil paint; twigs and clusters of tiny clay fruit. Jonathan Griffin

Field of Berries, 2016, oil, acrylic, clay, paper twigs on canvas, 137 × 227 cm. Courtesy the artist and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles

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Diane Simpson Chicago Works Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 16 February – 3 July In modern art and all that comes after it, the romance between flatness and volume remains unrequited, if not productively unresolved. The rise and fall of their courtship has nevertheless been engaging for Diane Simpson. Over the course of her career, Simpson has made a case for the doing and undoing of painting and sculpture’s relationship, confounding one’s expectations of encountering each medium, which results in a singular experience. Originally commissioned for the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin in 2007, Window Dressings appears here for the first time in a gallery setting. Each of the six pieces was originally installed at street level, and was viewable only from the street. Comprising large-scale, setlike backdrops, Simpson’s geometric tableaux are layered tightly in space, almost as if they were collapsed into a single plane. The works flip between subject and context, foregrounding a garmentlike structure against nearly symmetrical Art Deco-inspired architectural backdrops. Background 3, Pinafore (1987/2007), Background 6, Collar & Bib-deco (2007/08) and Background 4, Apron VI (2003/07) depart from their direct relationship to commercial window

displays through their approach to abstraction, undoing the consumerist expectation of clear product presentation and desire. Simpson’s compositions recall critic Leo Steinberg’s observations on Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), which Steinberg understood less as an extension of the viewers’ perceptual space and more as a ‘receptor surface’, a ground on which objects are put, and where data is gathered. Simpson’s works are similarly sensitive receiving devices; they fire on demand, evoking a system of associations triggered by viewers’ familiarity with her source material – the elegance of the traditional Japanese architecture she quotes unfolds symmetrically from the overall composition like origami; the floral patterns held within the rigid frame of the hard sculpture remain as visually soft as the garments from which the textile treatments borrow. The works perform like perfectly orchestrated synaesthetic misfires. While the approach of Window Dressings may appear formulaic, the relationship of form and surface born out of this series is not limited to medium. Rather, it breeds a system of dialectics.

Window Dressing: Background 4, Apron VI, 2003/07, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Nathan Keay. Courtesy MCA Chicago

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Each of the works becomes a stage on which oppositions unfold. The logical precision of the structures’ geometry is placed in contrast to their decorative treatment, just as their imagistic flatness wrestles with their material existence in space. This theatrical effect, which draws its narrative from these embedded formal concerns, makes the stage the lead actor. The method confounds decor with design. While style itself remains a subject in the work, as Simpson makes clear: ornamentation is necessity. Removing simplicity from the idea of sophisticated taste, Simpson’s works carry a rare and elastic quality that few other artists have achieved, a shapeshifting sensibility whose dimensions operate on two axes as well as they do on three. This flexibility, litheness and Gemini-approach to medium breathes form into being, registering image and object at once. In a sort of Hegelian spiral, where thesis and antithesis meet, each of the Window Dressings functions as a self-contained synthesis towards the progression of Simpson’s mission, the doing and undoing of painting and sculpture, the two faces of Modernism. Stephanie Cristello

Cornelia Parker Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 19 April – 31 October On a sunny Saturday afternoon in April, the chatter of drunk, preppy socialites mingling on the Met’s Fifth Avenue rooftop sucked nearly all the foreboding Hitchcock-iness out of Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) (2016), a 7.6m-high reconstruction of an Upstate New York Dutch-style farm building. I was expecting something grand and cinematic; what I got resembled more a shack to ignore in favour of social pursuits than anything scaled to compete with the Met’s privileged vantage of the Manhattan skyline – or even the surrounding Roof Garden Bar. These are tough games to beat. Nonetheless, what Parker has built seems swallowed up by its setting, or at the very least, the setting detracts from PsychoBarn’s Pandora’s box of conflicting associations. The classic, American-Dutch farmstead is, for Parker, ‘part of the iconography of America’, as she told The New York Times. It has rich cultural connotations reflective of both the history of painting and Hollywood lore. Not only did it

prove an enviable subject for many an Edward Hopper painting, such as House by the Railroad (1925), but that very painting’s imposing, lightbathed home became the basis for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which set it high on a hill and – in a Gothic change of style – overran it with weeds and shadow. In that iconic slasher movie, Norman Bates keeps his dead mother in the basement, as if she were still alive to compulsively control his every sinful desire. Apparently Bates never had a teddy bear, a ‘transitional object’ that could help him cope with separation anxiety, to ‘shift from the earliest oral relationship with the mother to genuine object-relationships’, as the term’s coiner, D.W. Winnicott, described in 1951. Titling her rooftop slice of Americana after this psychological concept, Parker stews together Freudian horror, myths of American domesticity, New York City’s cultural landscape and Hollywood backlot all at once. Made of remnants of an actual farm building from Schoharie, New York, the house, or at

least the two sides that actually constitute it, look a little off, with paint blistered and missing from pieces of wood, and decorative brackets and filigree broken off and otherwise incomplete. Move around back and there is simply scaffolding supporting the two facades, all held down by massive black water tanks so that no couples below perish should it blow away, Wizard of Oz-style. In the current political climate, though, the siting of Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) – set against its Manhattan backdrop – seems rather timely, even ominous in a way. American small-town values are being corrupted into a horror movie unfolding before our very eyes. It’s being directed by Donald Trump, who’s ironically a local New Yorker. What does it say about this city that it birthed such a monster? Is Manhattan to blame for the backlash against liberal values? Maybe this is why the bar has pride of place on the Met’s roof: in times of crisis, some of us turn to liquor, not art. David Everitt Howe

Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), 2016 (installation view, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Roof Garden Commission).Photo: Alex Fradkin. Courtesy the artist

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Lutz Bacher Accidental Tourist Greene Naftali Garage, New York From April 8 Virtuosity can be downright corny – take the voice of Journey frontman Steve Perry, for instance. His polished vocal technique catapults simple pop songs into the territory of hopeless melodrama. Pseudonymous artist Lutz Bacher understands the danger of the overwrought aesthetic, and instead has cultivated a practice with slacker appeal. Having worked in the hippie capital of Berkeley from the 1970s until recently, Bacher makes art consisting largely of found objects or images that seem casually assembled from garage sales. And yet Bacher brings a certain poignancy to her work. From her meandering interviews to her paparazzi shots and cheesecake Playboy illustrations appended with zingy one-liners, she probes identity, sexuality and belonging. Bacher is an apt choice to inaugurate Greene Naftali’s raw garage space, sited on a quiet block of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where one is as likely to find stoop-sitting octogenarian Italian Americans as thirtysomething hipsters. MEAT LOCKER (ORANGE) (2016), a curtain of clear and neon-orange strips of PVC, equally commercial and festive, cloaks the entrance. The material rhymes formally with Empire of the Sun (2013), a translucent plastic backdrop of a setting sun that is hung from the ceiling and bisects the space. There’s a nostalgic quality to this work

(which, like the exhibition itself, is titled after a novel that was made into a popular 1980s movie) and to the installation of standard Reebok basketballs and ‘novelty’ balls on the floor in front of it. There’s something seedy about the found backdrop, too, which is held together with tape, its black ties on the vertical edges lying slack like unused BDSM gear. The novelty toys on the floor, for their part, are infected with crass commercialism, from a black basketball imprinted with an Angry Bird to glossy plastic spheres bearing images of characters like Snow White and Superman. In her exhibition at Greene Naftali in 2015, Bacher paid a post-9/11 homage to Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), projecting a looped colour video of the Empire State Building onto Perspex panels, each anchored by sandbags. Here, on the far side of the sun backdrop, Bacher has installed several works that recall Warhol’s fascination with cheap reflective materials during the 1960s. A loose pile of silver Mylar rests atop a small lofted space, built out for storage or a bed. One low-ceilinged space under the loft, lit by a single bulb, resembles a sad office. Bacher adorns it with two pieces of cheap rock wall and three nicked metal chairs in tones of copper, bronze, and silver, with a silver Mylar cushion spread across them. GINGERMAN (2014),

EMPIRE OF THE SUN, 2013 (detail). Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

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a holiday cookie come to life as a six-and-a-halffoot painted foam costume whose mouth is inexplicably stuffed with plastic wrap, looms ominously in an adjacent space under the loft. These works elicit contemplation on the psychological mechanism of projection, not to mention the spaces of everyday trauma, both professional and domestic. BURPLE (2015–16) alludes to Bacher’s hippie roots. Four Buddha Machines, a music device with several meditative channels inspired by Brian Eno’s theories on generative music, sit on a dusty lavender table, flanked by six brightorange stools topped with leather ‘shag’. The gallery attendant had tuned them all to a drone channel, and they cycled in and out of harmony, filling the space with an eerie, ambient soundtrack. After leaving the show, I walked past the neighbourhood’s schizophrenic architecture for a Saturday morning bagel – my weekly ritual as a neighbourhood resident. Ugly stucco and vinyl siding from the 1960s and 70s clashed with encroaching new condos. The old bluecollar homes had an undeniable appeal, much like Bacher’s work, against the steel-and-glass constructions that have started to replace them. When I entered the bagel shop, the radio blared Don’t Stop Believin’, Journey’s greatest hit. Wendy Vogel

Ben Vida Lisa Cooley, New York 3 April – 15 May Soft Systems Music (Video #1) (all works 2016) is a series of closeups of eight actors. The camera homes in on a person’s face as they smile. It’s a long process of forging proximity, not always a comfortable one. There’s an intimacy and an anxiety to this nearness. Working with actors whose profession demands the ability to put on different airs, Ben Vida expands the limits of these expressions – a smile, a smirk, a hint of wonder and unease, a notknowing-what-to-do. All of which create different kinds of music. Vida, who has an active career as a composer, programmed a synthesizer to translate the changes in the actors’ facial expressions into different sounds. The ‘systems’ in the work’s title refer to the analogue/digital mix of programming a synth to respond to a physical change in someone’s face, as captured onscreen. Vida watched the videos and timed his commands on the instrument to match these moments. Each face creates different rhythmic events, which are articulated in what may seem like a cold electronic echo, but when the sound

is interposed with its catalyst, the pairing feels immediate and lively. The muteness of Soft Systems Music (Video #1) contrasts with a focus on language in the other elements of the show. Speech Acts consists of two ink-and-gesso-on-panel works and a series of eight ink-on-rag-paper drawings. Handwritten in a beautiful script, the Speech Acts read like a form of experimental fiction. Speech Act 6 begins, ‘[Soft ramble. All pudding. Effortless flow…’ Speech Act 8 ends, ‘[Alright. Evening out.] hmmmm.’ Other entries in the series transcribe counting activities – ‘10 (thinking) …. 9 (or at least) …. 8 (trying to)’ – or the sounds of mutterings, such as ‘mmm – oo – hmm’; others indicate physical markers: ‘[With eyes half-lidded]’, ‘[Barely breathing]’. Language has a rhythm. Grammar is a system of notations. Reading the drawings generates a sense of pace in the viewer’s mind. That pace is also present in a video titled Speech Act (Video), in which Vida and a woman perform the text from the drawings, replicating its speed, lingering on repetitions, sounding its

complexities and creating a piece so engrossing that when the language is abstracted, you find yourself completing their words the way you skip over a typo when reading. It’s an active form of viewing, and one that plays on meaning, and how we extract it from language, sound, images. Vida creates a score that includes all of these without ever delineating a single system to read it, only points of contact. It’s a viewing experience that rewards letting go: if you’re open to this work, it seems human and rare in its testing of the boundaries between affinity and understanding. The title of Vida’s show, his first with the gallery, is [Smile on.] … [Pause.] … [Smile off.]. While it reads as the description given to the actors in Soft Systems Music (Video #1), it stands as a good descriptor for the whole exhibition: notations as directions, language that doesn’t convey meaning as much as it binds words, expression, sound and an audio component that isn’t sound art as much as it’s the driving force behind every piece in the project. It’s all part of the composition. Orit Gat

Speech Act 6, 2016, ink and gesso on panel, 120 × 148 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York

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Stephen Kaltenbach A Short Exhibition on Art Expression: Actualization Marlborough Chelsea, New York 30 April – 18 June In the back viewing room of Marlborough Chelsea sits a tightly packaged retrospective of projects that Stephen Kaltenbach began between 1967 and 1970. On display are examples of small sculptural objects (eg OBJECT FOR INVESTIGATION, 1970–), blueprints and drawings for proposed architectural interventions (eg LOW CEILING, 1968–2010), magazine advertisements the artist placed in Artforum (YOU ARE ME, 1969), proposals for ‘bad ideas’ (eg BLASTED LUNA SEAS, 2007, which proposed using nuclear bombs to paint the moon) and other assorted ‘art expressions’ that took the claims and stakes of conceptual art far beyond where most practitioners were willing to go. For example, Kaltenbach’s ‘A Short Article on Expression’ (1969) easily stands next to similar statements, such as Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967), Lawrence Weiner’s Statement of Intent (1968) and various other ‘statements’ on the changing nature of artistic practice offered by artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Hanne Darboven, Daniel Buren and others, some of which today stand as ‘texts’ while others stand as ‘art’ (even the typographic stylings of this sentence point to such uneven treatments). Indeed, the final question of Kaltenbach’s text asks, ‘Has this article potential value as work of art?’ When letterpress-printed, hinged and mounted in a simple white frame, and titled A Short Article on Expression (1969–2016), the answer would seem to be self-evident. But for Kaltenbach and many of his peers in the 1960s, self-evidence is always in question. Some artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Kaltenbach’s classmate at UC Davis, pushed the self-evidentiary to its logical extremes. As Nauman reasoned, he was an artist, and he had a studio, so anything he did in that studio, such as Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–8; an early filmed performance), must be ‘art’. Carl Andre’s floor pieces distilled sculpture down to plates of elemental metals such as zinc and magnesium, presenting nothing so much as matter itself as a readymade ‘means for art expression’, to use Kaltenbach’s language. Richard Serra would take this one step further with his prop pieces, simple demonstrations of how material

configurations carry different capacities to affect and be affected by one another, while artists of a more conceptual persuasion, such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, would, following British philosopher of language J. L. Austin, explore ‘how to do things with words’. Kaltenbach seized quite quickly on this subtle shift from objects to situations, from beings to doings, as the direction in which advanced practice was heading. But whereas many artists approached these new conditions as a means to achieve greater ‘realism’, greater transparency between art and the realities of life and experience – reaching, that is, for more that could be taken as self-evident – Kaltenbach turned to strategies of greater opacity, falsity and illusion. Kaltenbach’s time capsules are signal examples of this. Nothing of Great Value and Bury with the Artist (both 1968–2010), small, 13cm-round aluminium containers with their, again, seemingly self-evident titles engraved on one face, possess unknown contents. As Kaltenbach describes it in an interview from 1970 with Cindy Nemser, ‘They possibly contain things and possibly they do not contain things. I don’t say anything about their content, or that there’s any content at all, because I found out the concealment of information is as primary a function of the capsule as its preservation.’ Kaltenbach also took the street, with a number of what he calls, in the same interview, ‘streetworks’, which included a stencil producing the words NOTHING IS REVEALED (1970–) and a stamp made from a cast of Kaltenbach’s own lips (GRAFFITI STAMP. LIPS OF ARTIST, 1968–2014), with which he used to mark subway posters and street signage. Then there are the streetworks that never existed in any material or authentically performative way at all. As Kaltenbach told Nemser, he had planned a series, such as selling brown paper bags to people on the street, or photographing configurations of litter downtown and then reproducing those same configurations uptown on Fifth Avenue, but he never went through with them. Instead, he lied about doing them to friends at a party to ‘see how much substance nothing could be given’.

facing page, bottom LOZANO’S MIND, 1968–2010, steel and unknown contents, 30 × 56 × 10 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Chelsea, New York

facing page, top GRAFFITI STAMP. LIPS OF ARTIST, 1968–2014, rubber stamp, reproduced for the 2014 restaging of When Attitudes Become Form, Fondazione Prada, Venice, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Marlborough Chelsea, New York

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It would be easy to dismiss Kaltenbach’s anecdotes, the streetworks, the time capsules, and much to which Kaltenbach claims authorship as so much conceptual pranksterism, but works such as Lozano’s Mind (1968–2010), which takes the form of a rectangular steel box with ‘LO, AN OZ’ engraved on its top, and BARBARA ROSE TIME CAPSULE (Self Appropriation) (1970–), point to Kaltenbach’s sincere concern for the minds and convictions of others. The Barbara Rose time capsule bears instructions for Rose, one of the most eminent critics and historians of that period, to open the capsule once Kaltenbach had attained, in her opinion, ‘national prominence as an artist’. That the capsule remains closed is something of a humorous comment on Kaltenbach’s own career, but in recorded commentary that Kaltenbach has included in this presentation of the piece, he is quite open about the work’s and by extension his own generation’s concern with fame and reputation. More intimately, Lee Lozano was one of Kaltenbach’s closest friends, and he regarded her as one of the best and smartest artists working at the time. Lozano famously made dropping out of the New York artworld part of her artistic legacy, and Kaltenbach’s capsules (there is more than one) give ‘substance’ to the vacuum generated by her intentional absence. Apart from the fact that much of what Kaltenbach was doing during the late 1960s has been repeated in one guise or another by one or two generations of more contemporary artists, what is compelling about his work today is how much it pressurises the ‘self’ side of the ‘self-evidence’ with which so many artists of his generation were occupied. Kaltenbach seems to have understood more than most the dialectic at work within Minimalism and conceptual art’s strategies of aesthetic withdrawal, how the acts and intentions of the artist more than ever secured a piece’s ‘substance’, if not its meaning, and that those acts and intentions would always remain inscrutable and unverifiable to others. If this is always going to be the case, Kaltenbach seems to ask, then why not make an entire practice out of holding things back. Wouldn’t that be self-evident? Jonathan T.D. Neil

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Asger Jorn The Open Hide Petzel, New York 5 May – 29 July Is it safe to say that Asger Jorn is rising from the dead, at least in New York? The artist passed in 1973, and the last show of his work was mounted here exactly two decades later. Jorn and CoBrA, the bright, brief movement with which, after the Situationist International, he is most closely associated, was just becoming fodder for PhD students during the 1990s (two of my colleagues in New York were ‘working on’ Jorn at the time). This likely had something to do with T.J. Clark, the eminent historian of artistic Modernism, naming Jorn ‘the greatest painter of the 1950s’, which he did at a conference in 1992. But things went quiet for another two decades, and then the journal October, in 2012, dedicated a special issue to the artist and his writings; in 2014 Karen Kurczynski published The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (Routledge); and the following year Blum & Poe mounted The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up, a two-part exhibition in New York and Los Angeles dedicated to all things CoBrA (both Kurczynski’s book and the Blum & Poe show are titled after a signal work by Jorn). Who says the market doesn’t follow history? Now, this year, Petzel gives us The Open Hide (also the title of a Jorn work), an episodic

retrospective of Jorn’s paintings from the early 1940s to the first years of the 70s. There isn’t enough work on offer from the 1950s to adjudicate Clark’s claim, but let’s just say this: Jorn could paint. What The Open Hide offers, among many things, is a brief glimpse of a transition that takes place in Jorn’s work, from an early fascination with ‘the animal’ as a symbolic and so representational category, to the ‘face’ as the same. This isn’t to suggest a consistent, linear move, but it is certainly the case that, in its time, CoBrA seized on animal figures and symbols as a means to challenge the status of ‘man’ in the wake of the European conflagration that was the Second World War. Yet Jorn’s interest in our animal nature (as challenge to our human ‘culture’) predates his involvement in CoBrA. The double-sided work Animaux animé(s) (1944/46), an almost cartoonish jungle scene, marries Matisse of the Bonheur de vivre (1905–6) to lessons learned from Fernand Léger, with whom Jorn studied in France. By the end of the 1940s, however, the model of Matisse’s idyll had been replaced by the dark, dense and confrontational Untitled (Phoenix) (1949/50). This is a CoBrA work, in which two sets of eyes

Acteur en Action, 1967, oil on canvas, 65 × 54 cm. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York

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glare at us from within a black shroud, and little effort is made to sublimate the viscosity of paint. Later in the 1950s, Jorn produces Portrait: Signora Albissola (1957), which channels Pollock, but also Wols, an immensely important painter and precedent for Jorn – witness the aggressive abstract materiality of works such as Oriental Fire/Sanoyara (1958). By the 1960s though it’s faces: Untitled (Faces in a Head) (c. 1960) recalls the confrontation of the Phoenix picture but now with a distinctly Frankensteinian visage rendered in greens, blues, browns and reds. Green takes over in Acteur en Action (1967), where Jorn’s juxtaposition of a type of smearing stroke with rough scratches and thicker daubs of paint creates alternating pockets of blur and focus. This is the human animal that mere symbolism could never quite touch. The latest works in the show suggest that Jorn thought all that heavy paint was too symbolic as well. The Open Hiding Place (1970), a lithograph, and an untitled gouache on paper from 1971, give up on figures of any sort. In their place are rapid marks in light, bright colours – not desperate, but urgent: marks meant to hold on to life. Jonathan T.D. Neil

The Natural Order of Things Museo Jumex, Mexico City 11 March – 8 May The Natural Order of Things positions itself as a fictional museum within a museum. The show boasts 103 works by 100 artists culled from the roughly 2,700-piece Jumex Collection and is the first exhibition at the museum to be curated by Museo Jumex’s new chief curator and interim director, Julieta González, alongside its now former associate curator (since April, MCA Chicago’s) José Esparza Chong Cuy. Occupying two floors of the museum, the exhibition divvies up the galleries with labyrinthine partitions to group the exhibits in taxonomical clusters. The familiar ping! of an iMessage greets visitors. These pings, which surely inspire Pavlovian pocket-reaches from most who enter, are emitted by a video of a speaking asterisk by Dexter Sinister. The booklet explains that the asterisk is an extension of Dexter Sinister’s piece Meta-the-difference-between-the-two-font (2011) and that as typography-video-booklet the asterisk is ‘an artwork IN the exhibition’ as well as ‘an interface TO the exhibition’. In a sense the booklet is the exhibition, since as the interface to the works, the text and footnotes are critical to understanding

this fictional reality nested in our own. The pieces in the galleries are labelled with a number that refers to a citation in the booklet that corresponds to an endnote with the piece’s identifying information. This interface text is a hodgepodge of 70 quotations (from approximately 68 texts and one movie) arranged by a nameless editor. As a work of literary-appropriation art masquerading as curatorial didacticism, its purpose seems to be to contextualise the groupings of the artworks, but ultimately it questions the value of authorship. What can we expect of a text whose every sentence is written by a different author in a different era for different ends? Is it suggesting that museums or collections as institutions are amalgamations of disparate voices that we only mistake for a self-contained whole? On the first floor the curatorial strategy works as an amusing reframing of the taxonomical approach to scientific and artist-as-historian practices. This humorous remastering of the idea of the encyclopaedic museum as seen through the lens of contemporary art is echoed in Eduardo Abaroa’s Ancient and Modern Foods (2012), a sculpture of a mammoth made of

Hostess cupcakes, and Coco Fusco’s Primate Visions of the Human Mind (2015), in which she delivers a TED Talk as Dr Zira from the movie Planet of the Apes (1968). On the second floor the exhibition groupings shift to address more complex modalities of human civilisation, considering for example flows of capital and construction of the social self. It is here that the show begins to break down. The gimmick of the museum within a museum wears off and in its place is an element of simply taking an inventory of the collection. Why, for example, is Tino Sehgal’s Kissing (2016) included in the ‘Order of Civilization’, or Christian Camacho’s The Wall Guest (2014) hidden near the ceiling in a passageway by the elevator? It seems like the curators aren’t sure themselves, since neither are referenced in the text. Like the text, in which the hand of the editor-as-appropriation-artist is valued over the authorship of the original works, The Natural Order of Things seems to give preference to the exhibition’s philosophical superstructure over the artworks presented, using them merely to window-dress a fanciful curatorial position. Kim Córdova

The Natural Order of Things, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Moritz Bernoully. Courtesy Museo Jumex, Mexico City

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Eduardo Ventura Rio de Janeiro – Paisagens Improváveis Sergio Gonçalves Galeria, Rio de Janeiro 19 March – 30 April If a city has a thousand troubles and a teeming foreign press corps, with more press arriving every day, how many troubles does it have? Lovely Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s self-proclaimed ‘Marvellous City’, is finding out the hard way in the run-up to August’s Olympic Games, as a new swarm of hacks hit the honeypot weekly, ready to serve up Rio’s freshest, stickiest problems for their readers’ breakfast horrors. Poverty, inequality, criminal violence and feral police: Rio has it all, as well as sewagetainted seawater and a spectacular oceanfront cycle path, inaugurated with pride in January then smashed into the sea a hundred days later by a furious wave, splintering, along with two passersby, on the rocks below. Eduardo Ventura has already painted Rio’s sunlit, tropically voluptuous curves in the series Quatro Estações (Four Seasons, 2012), in which the city’s black mountains are given ice-lolly colours in layers of acrylic, parts of which have been scraped away to reveal the contours of the city’s natural splendour. In the present series, Rio de Janeiro – Paisagens Improváveis (Improbable Landscapes, 2015–16), Ventura reveals Rio’s seamy flipside – not the violence and inequality that mar it, but its actual seams, in the flyovers, bridges, access ramps and sooty underpasses that stitch the city together.

With firm, fast gestures in tones of grey and pastel, thickly applied using palette knives, Ventura creates asphalt expanses brightened by diffuse light from ashen skies, and black, gloomy shadows under monumental concrete highways. Out the other side, bright asphalt again, and roads that reach into skilfully composed distances. Gone are the people of the 2010 series Realidade Revelada – A Linha do Tempo (Unveiled Reality – Timeline), in which figures cross Ventura’s canvases in a hurry, strokes of paint tracing their passage, each person turned inward, lost in melancholy, worried self-absorption. In Ventura’s Paisagens Improváveis, no people are visible at all – not even the street dwellers who populate Rio’s dark corners and underpasses; or if they are there, they are hidden in the shadows, like the occupants of the occasional vehicles Ventura includes in these paintings. In Rua Bulhões Maciel, Parada de Lucas (2015), a yellow bus is seen half in and half out of the darkness under a hulking flyover, the silhouettes of cars suggested on the road overhead. A pickup truck, in Rua Waldemar Dutra – Santo Cristo (2015), is captured about to enter the deep shadow of another elevated highway. Caught in the moment, it looks unsure, hesitant – or does it? Has it stopped and been abandoned?

Where is everybody? With that thought, a new city emerges from the paintings: the calamitous world portrayed in José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness, in which driver after driver goes suddenly blind and crashes, stops, stumbles away. The 2008 movie adaptation of the book, directed by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, was partly filmed in São Paulo, and Ventura’s sooty nooks and urban crevices could just as easily be depicting that preapocalyptic metropolis, which was also painted by Ventura in a 2014 series titled São Paulo – Prováveis Paisagens (Probable Landscapes). In that series and this one, the city is a subtly alienated place; but what might have been menacing shadows and silence are lifted by the painter’s bright, pale skies and the light on concrete and tarmac, in tones of palest grey. Ventura created these landscapes using tools like Google Street View, giving him a once, twice, three-times removed vantage point that turns his gaze, and ours, to that of a ghost, haunting Rio’s empty ramps and highways unseen, like everyone else who is missing in these images. Bereft of people, it’s the city that comes to life in these improbable, intensely memorable landscapes. Claire Rigby

Rua Bulhões Maciel, Parada de Lucas, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy Sergio Gonçalves Galeria, Rio de Janeiro

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Joshua Petherick Ditch Presences Minerva, Sydney 19 March – 23 April Enter Minerva and you find three videos, three objets trouvés and several constructed reliefs by Joshua Petherick. The videos – Glass Tables IV (Ditch Presences) (i), Glass Tables IV (Ditch Presences) (ii) and Glass Tables IV (Ditch Presences) (iii) (all 2015) – are mostly abstract and the first things to grab the eye. They have a fluid, kaleidoscopic quality, offering a shifting and dissolving sheen of metallic surfaces; the “sfff, sfff, sfff” giving sound to the swipes moving horizontally across the screen only accentuates their mechanised, sci-fi feel. In reality, the image is constructed by tinkering around with a cellphone and scanner. Such playful, lo-fi approaches are everywhere evident in the Melbourne-based artist’s recent work. One video monitor is slung low across the front of a white plinth, like a sculpture, while attached to the side of a similar support across the room is an assemblage involving fragmented seashell and resin. This palm-size construction, Ear with Tinnitus (iii) (2016), nestles several stemlike and spherical blobs of resin within the metallic-coloured, wing-shaped shell, the whole held in place with a magnet. Are these translucent pieces intended to suggest sound? Or perhaps the shape of the ear canal,

the blobs representing buzzing? The dense, rough nature of the shell brings out a pearlescent quality in the softer resin elements. As in the videos, it’s the various textures in juxtaposition that appeal, but more importantly, these small pieces create a sense of microcosm that draws one’s eye closer. Likewise in the found objects, where a bucket, a cement mixer and a pair of clay dinosaurs with goofy clay riders (the latter installed high up a wall as if strolling up a vertical landscape) each charm in their own particular textural ways. The baker’s bucket, Estate (2016), all worn and caked with cracked black matter, seems to have been party to many events; the metal arm of the mixer, Flower (2016), has been crumpled and flattened by being run over on numerous occasions. As its title implies, the latter’s accidentally modified form suggests a blossom. Unlike Duchamp’s readymades, which carried subversive conceptual purpose, Petherick’s instinct is more poetic. These particular works follow in the spirit of Arte Povera by offering a sense of materiality and lived time. However, unlike his Italian predecessors, the Australian’s constructions are not just limited to expressing the material but

also elements of the figurative or narrative, as is suggested in Flower. Petherick’s work does not immediately appear to be theoretically focused or narratively driven; exemplified by his strange videos, it’s ultimately ambiguous, not precise in intention or representation but, rather, rich in evocation, a quality often brought into focus through his titles. Titling a bucket Estate perhaps hints as much at how the work sits on the gallery floor as it does the terrain suggested in miniature by the caked surface. That is, together title and object conjure images of things or place. ‘Artwork for me is not explanation,’ Petherick has said. ‘What excites me about a work of art most of all is what you can do with the areas of silence in-between what is gathered. [The viewer gives it a] speculative bringing to life… beyond the meticulous play of material, process and gesture.’ Yet the constant among the works, through his sense of material and touch, is the feeling of a greater world figured through sparse elements of it. Dusty bucket for the earth, resin cradled by shell for ear and sound: there is always a hint of more to be found, and seen, in the microcosm of Petherick’s art, and therein lies its charm. Sherman Sam

Ear with Tinnitus (iii), 2016, polyurethane resin, seashell, rare earth magnet, 7 × 9 cm. Photo: Jessica Maurer. Courtesy the artist and Minerva, Sydney

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20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed Various venues, Sydney 18 March – 5 June I am following the swaying haunches of a digital tiger. It’s moving to a place where, the voiceover says, “all of the body’s failures, its successes, don’t mean anything”. Sounds good. I walk. It’s a really poorly rendered tiger – blocky, neon-orange, wrongly weighted, thus a bit floaty – but it’s hypnotic and touching in the way that awful 3D animations are: you can’t believe someone has put in so much effort to make something only for it to look so bad. “Please don’t say this is virtual,” says the voiceover. “You are not virtually here.” Where am I? In real life, in Dog Leg Tunnel, cut through a hill in one of Sydney Harbour’s largest islands, groping along clammy railings. I am wearing a virtual reality headset – something like a smartphone strapped inches away from my eyes – immersed in the stereoscopic video Preamble (2016) by the Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans. Her work dabbles in a funky digital occult, summoning new ghosts, computer-generated or otherwise. At the end of the tunnel, there’s a screen with a hi-res video copy of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman called Phil. Phil’s blinking a lot and jerking his head around. Each pore, freckle and strand of pale stubble is reproduced in uncanny hi-def.

“I will always love him,” says a voice-software, though Phil’s lips don’t move. “I will always be here, lurking on this drive till they drag me to another, more climatised drive.” Filled with ruined, jumpy intelligence, hyperreal yet disembodied, Phil could be the unofficial mascot of this year’s Biennale of Sydney, which, under the stewardship of curator Stephanie Rosenthal, is a sci-fi-inflected enquiry into the twenty-first-century conception of reality. The double-barrelled title, The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, a quote from sci-fi senior statesman William Gibson, lays out the cards. The first concern is about how technology may have already created a future that has superseded all our past projections. This impulse demonstrates itself in the biennale as a pleasantly buggy horology, where the old is made new and the new rendered somehow timeless, or at least imbued with a sense of déjà vu. A good poster boy for this would be Thailand’s techno-animist Korakrit Arunanondchai, who in his video, Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2015–16), is seen in spiritual communion with an emissary from another realm: a drone.

The second thrust of the biennale, less thoroughly realised and spread out in bits and bobs, is about the unequal distribution of resources. So there’s talk about dispossession and displacement, a nervy issue in Australia, where most public addresses begin with acknowledgements of the traditional owners and the custodians of the land. Associated with the homeless and the disenfranchised, refugee tents make multiple appearances. There’s a gigantic offsite one by Keg de Souza titled We Built This City (2016), a makeshift shelter made up of stitched-together tents, used to host a series of public discussions about social justice called ‘The Redfern School of Displacement’ (Redfern is a working-class suburb in Sydney in the inevitable throes of gentrification). In front of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), artist-activist Richard Bell repitches the historic Aboriginal Tent Embassy that has been on the lawn of Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra since the 1970s (Embassy, 2013–). Besides the huge sign saying ‘White invaders, you are living on stolen land’, there is a video showing various Sydney landmarks being blown to pieces.

Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen, 2014, HD video, 22 min 30 sec. Courtesy the artist and Barbara Seiler, Zürich

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As biennales go, this one is sanely proportioned. It is spread out across two main venues – former rail yard Carriageworks (now Australia’s largest multiarts centre), and Cockatoo Island, home to Phil – as well as several other satellite locations. These spaces are organised by subthemes into different ‘Embassies of Thought’, of which Cockatoo Island’s ‘Embassy of the Real’ is the strongest. There, the real, virtual and everything-inbetween slides together with magnificent uncertainty. Entering the exhibition, you first have to pick your way through Korean artist Lee Bul’s installation Willing To Be Vulnerable (2015–16), which projects a future that is simultaneously heroic and defeated. Striped canvases depicting headless figures on unicycles hang from the ceiling and collapse in heaps around the site, like the scene of an apocalyptic circus. In these end times, a silver airship and blinking hot-air balloon, however, are still defiantly afloat. Another work requiring navigation is a new iteration of choreographer William Forsythe’s Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, No. 2 (2013), a field of swinging pendulums suspended from the ceiling. Dancing through the installation and avoiding being hit, the viewer engages in a spontaneous choreography. The more sedate can rest at Camille Henrot’s video Grosse Fatigue (2013), the Venice Silver Lion-winning video that

unfolds in cascading windows on a computer screen while a voiceover raps out origin stories of the world. After this visual essay, she takes things offline with a smattering of voluptuous, biomorphic bronze sculptures. Not all the embassies have this level of dynamism and confidence. The ‘Embassy of Transition’, set in Mortuary Station, the terminus of a railway line that used to ferry the dead and their bereaved to a nearby cemetery, is stoically illustrative. There, Taiwan’s Charwei Tsai has hung smoking incense spirals inscribed with words from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, from which waft the sweet-sickish smell of Buddhist temples and cultural appropriation (Spiral Incense, 2014). There’s more oxygen in the ‘Embassy of Non-Participation’, where Karen Mirza and Brad Butler put up a not-obviouslyresistant resistance: they claim that withdrawal and nonparticipation can actually be an active political force. Is this semantic hair-splitting or a viable position? A bit of both, for me; in any case, it’s worth spending some time here. In Hold Your Ground (2012), inspired by an Egyptian pamphlet on ‘How to Protest Intelligently’, they use musical notation, choreography, text and images to issue instructions for effective rioting. (Pro tip for messing with armoured trucks: ‘You can also stick a wet towel in the vehicle’s exhaust to stop it’.) Carriageworks, the last major venue, is the ‘Embassy of Disappearance’, where archaeological

ruins, vanishing cultures and various ill-fitting offcuts are shoved together. There’s a lot to take in, and the curatorial muscle has also weakened considerably, oscillating between the patiently literal and patently random. You want disappearance? You get it to the letter in documentary films on dying indigenous cultures in Taiwan; an installation of old Japanese potsherds; a slideshow on the dilapidated, overgrown home of late elusive Colombian artist Norman Mejía… And so on. There are some intriguing delegates in this embassy, but they keep to themselves. Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Home Movie (2016), showing a cluster of burning rotating fans, is a churning inferno that spits the occasional flame like a dragon – but it’s in its own dark cave, divorced from the others. In the middle of the exhibition, South Korean artist Minouk Lim’s epic installation Strange Fruit (2016) stretches out, featuring a suspended shipping container shot through with bullet holes and paddling through the air with two gigantic oars. The journey is witnessed with patient malevolence by a circle of hybrid bystanders constructed from animal skins, antlers, cameras and lighting equipment. The entire business is so big and fearless that it seems churlish to fault its unbelonging – it creates its own diplomatic immunity. Adeline Chia

Lee Bul, Willing To Be Vulnerable, 2015–16, heavy-duty fabric, metallised film, transparent film, polyurethane ink, fog machine, LED lighting, electronic wiring, dimensions variable. Photo: Ben Symons. Courtesy the artist and the 20th Biennale of Sydney

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Books

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A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $16/£10.99 (softcover) Geoff Manaugh is best known as the creator of BLDGBLOG, for more than a decade one of the best architecture sites on the Internet, possibly the outright best. Blogging was (is) a fine vehicle for Manaugh’s talents: his manic energy, his magpie eye, his ability to put together the weirdest and wildest topics in terms of architecture and urbanism, and take them on journeys of imagination. ‘So what if…’ was a signature phrase, indicating the author was about to embark on a speculative dérive, which would often only be laying the groundwork for an even more fanciful scenario. Every BLDGBLOG post felt like it could be the germ of a longer essay, a book or a novel. But The BLDGBLOG Book (2009) stayed faithful to the experience of the blog: creativity sparking off in all directions, consistent only in its diversity of subjects and the glue of Manaugh’s charm. If only all that energy could be focused into a coherent beam and trained on one subject for a full 300 pages. What would that look like? A Burglar’s Guide to the City is that book, and it is a delight. None of the blog’s inventiveness or eye for twinkling minutiae has been lost, but at last a topic is given exhaustive attention. And it’s an excellent topic – burglary, the art of covertly entering buildings to take things that do not belong to you. It’s perfect territory for Manaugh, with his longstanding fascination with hidden doors and passages, and enthusiasm for transgressive uses of buildings and the city. Cracking open this vault, he finds the whole

universe. ‘Burglary is the original sin of the metropolis,’ Manaugh writes. ‘Indeed, you cannot tell the story of buildings without telling the story of the people who want to break into them: burglars are a necessary part of the tale, a deviant counternarrative as old as the built environment itself.’ Not strictly true – plenty have told that tale, of course. But Manaugh will make you wonder how they did without mentioning the masked rascal. The burglar is halfway between architecture critic and ghost, and spans a spectrum from lazy opportunism to patient technical genius. ‘Burglars explore,’ Manaugh says. ‘They might not live in a city full of secret passages and trapdoors, but they make it look as if they do.’ They tunnel up from beneath and descend through skylights. They are masters of materiality, taking professional interest in what walls, doors and ceilings are made of. They draft and build: George Leonidas Leslie, the greatest burglar of nineteenth-century New York, was a lapsed architect who turned his skills to crime, reconstructing bank vaults in detail in order to plan heists. A dumpster can be adapted to conceal someone cutting through a wall, and hide the debris. There are also plenty of idiots, the ones who get wedged in ducts and cat flaps. But all have something to say about buildings, on a fundamental level. ‘Burglary’, Manaugh writes, ‘requires architecture: without an inside and an outside, there is no such thing as burglary.’ This means the law

must define what constitutes a building, and therefore what architecture is. In a dizzying sequence, Manaugh looks at the foreverproliferating categories of objects regarded as buildings by different US state codes, and thus as venues for the crime of burglary: from railway cars to fishing boats, from telephone booths to tents, from potteries to cargo containers. A small excavation in a hillside, used for storage, is considered a building, ripe for the burglar. ‘Because of burglary law, architecture is suddenly everywhere,’ Manaugh writes. ‘We are surrounded by invisible buildings.’ Minton T. Wright III, an attorney who in 1951 laid out some of the problems entailed, put it differently: architecture is ‘magic’. Now the game is played in a large part online, making vastly more audacious heists possible. The entire source code for New Songdo, a ‘smart city’ in Korea, is kept in a safe-deposit box somewhere. You could steal a city – or at least the wherewithal to seize command of the entirety of its infrastructure. Another city, Bradbury in California, has tried to reduce its vulnerability to burglary by limiting its media profile, covering its tracks like, well, a burglar. A Burglar’s Guide to the City is a hugely entertaining and stimulating book, a treat on every level. With one caveat: it is not a relaxing holiday read, unless you want to spend your time on the beach imagining armies of depraved geniuses boring, rappelling, picking and hacking their way into your home. Will Wiles

Ringier Annual Report 2015 by Helen Marten JRP / Ringier, free (boxed) Who says accounting and art don’t go well together? Certainly not Switzerland’s largest media company, Ringier. For almost 20 years (under the directorship of art-collector Michael Ringier) it has given carte blanche to high-profile artists such as Fischli & Weiss, Richard Prince and, more recently, Laura Owens, to design its annual report, turning a traditionally dull exercise into collectable artist books. Better still, thanks to stock-market rules, it’s free to order online. This year’s report is designed by British artist Helen Marten and themed around sausages (the company data is included as a small booklet), which are treated with all the seriousness

accorded to Ringier’s statements of profit and loss. This begins with a visit to two Swiss butchers, documented in 15 photographic plates; an accompanying text compares sausage manufacture – from the grinding, mixing and filling to the display of the final product on the butcher’s counter – to the publishing industry – the collecting, processing and redistributing of information (there’s a nod here to Dieter Roth’s ironic Literature Sausage, or Literaturwurst, 1961–70). With her usual flair for changing the way we look at everyday objects, Marten playfully magnifies her meaty subjects as aesthetic objects. The cold, extreme lighting of the photographs

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turns a potentially repulsive industrial process into a series of overaestheticised clinical compositions, where soaking intestines, ground meat, buckets of blood and raw sausages hanging off racks in the antiseptic meat-processing plant take on a decorative, even sculptural aspect. The metaphor filters through to the packaging of the book, wrapped in glassine (a traditional book covering, but also suggestive of butcher paper) and accompanied by two large, empty sheaths. Are they sausage cases waiting to be filled by readers inspired by the photographs? Or maybe they’re simply there to distract investors from the data report. Louise Darblay

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Rave and its Influence on Art and Culture Edited by Nav Haq Black Dog Publishing, £24.95 (softcover) From Jim Lambie’s Poetry Club in Glasgow to the Van Abbemuseum’s ongoing investigation of 1980s countercultures, there is a definite atmosphere of rave-curiosity wafting about the European artworld at the moment, like teasing and tantalising zephyrs of Vicks VapoRub. The publication of Rave feels timely in this context. Rave is the companion publication to Energy Flash, an exhibition opening in June at M HKA in Antwerp (where Nav Haq is resident curator), and mixes documentation of artworks with essays, interviews, an entertainingly snitty glossary and facsimiles of antirave legislation in Europe and the US. The Antwerp connection dictates a certain degree of Belgocentricity, but that’s no bad thing. Firstly, as the birthplace of New Beat (a precursor to house music), Belgium has some justification for claiming rave as its own. Secondly, the combination of British editor and mainland European institution has produced a book of more international scope than might have been conceived in the UK alone. Rave as a cultural phenomenon of the late 1980s and early 90s was the product of multiple forces, among them technological advances that facilitated independent production of electronic music, the dying-back of industry in Northern Europe that made available large empty spaces on the urban peripheries, the widespread availability of certain categories of drug and the

proliferation of mobile communication devices. It was also a state of mind – communitarian, antiestablishment and in equal parts nihilistic and utopian. Artists’ engagement with rave has been multifarious. There are old favourites here of course – the dazed club kids of Rineke Dijkstra’s The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK / Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL (1996–7), the scores for Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass (1997) and Mark Leckey’s ubiquitous paean to dance culture, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). Martin Kersels’s Brown sound kit (1994) weaponises the sonic equipment associated with house music to apparently Y-front-spattering effect. Aleksandra Domanović draws thematic links between the free parties intoxicating Europe’s youth in the early 1990s and the momentous changes sweeping the east of the continent in the same era. Irene de Andrés captures the defunct superclubs of Ibiza as modern ruins – institutions that engineered their own downfall by catering to a movement propelled by pills rather than bar purchases. Rave as a subject for art and culture is one thing – it’s influence is another. Deeply bound up in the current interest in rave – or the club as a site for art – is a desire for cultural practice that functions outside of market influence. Here the ‘rave’ signifies a nonhierarchical space that is crowd-generated, accepting of niche concerns

and personal expression, and which presents a forceful alternative to mainstream culture. The highpoint of Rave is Mark Fisher’s searing essay ‘Baroque Sunbursts’, which analyses the sociopolitical backdrop to the movement and the violent legislative attempts to quash it. Placing rave on a trajectory of uproarious and somewhat disreputable popular gatherings dating back to the medieval fair, Fisher depicts it as a last gasp of carnival spirit, the will to assemble squashed not only by the 1994 Criminal Justice Act in the UK (and subsequent legislation around Europe and in the US), but by the rise of home entertainment: ‘As the home became more connected, the space outside started to be abandoned, pathologised and enclosed.’ In places Rave is marred by prose that matches the worst excesses of 1990s music journalism to the more indigestible tendencies of curator-speak. There is also a strong waft of hyperbolic old-fartery – Haq suggests that rave is ‘Europe’s last big youth movement’, and as Fisher later notes, ‘the lonely connectedness of smartphone addiction is a depressive hedonic reversal of MDMA festivity’: take that, youth of today! Props to Haq and co, though, for undertaking a broad and serious-minded investigation of a major cultural phenomenon that is yet to be afforded the attention it is due. Hettie Judah

Out of Body Edited by John Beeson and Britta Peters Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, free (PDF) Out of Body is the first instalment in a collection of three publications (to be followed by Out of Time and Out of Place) edited by John Beeson and Britta Peters and published in the buildup to the fifth edition of the decennial Skulptur Projekte Münster, which will open next year (Britta is one of its curators; Beeson an art critic and editor). A free-to-download PDF comprising three essays and a series of reflections on performance by performers themselves, Out of Body focuses its attention on the intersections between body, digital and spatial politics. Art historian Claire Bishop’s opening essay, ‘Black Box, White Cube, Public Space’, offers a point of departure from which one can begin to understand performance art as a reframing of the performing arts (the ones usually played out in a theatre/black box) within the context of an exhibition. And on the basis of this reduction,

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it raises shrewd questions about the ethics of labour, the quality of performance and the implications of an increasingly fine line between public and private spaces. The rest of the document elaborates on these ideas: artist Larisa Crunteanu tells of the effect an audience member has when they enter a performance artist’s space; professional dancer Justin F. Kennedy questions the ways audiences behave within the realm of art (as opposed to theatre). But it is the last two texts of the publication that are the most interesting, because they set the medium of ‘performance’ in a social and political context outside of the museum or gallery. Jodi Dean’s text on communicative capitalism addresses the way in which our online behaviour and performative acts have become a kind of currency: our opinions are expressed as ‘likes’, and our ‘likes’ are now a digital and quanti-

ArtReview

fiable value, rather than real critical expression. ‘Proxy Politics’, by Boaz Levin and Vera Tollman, looks at how protesters are now deploying the same methods of digital monitoring used by governments to organise mass demonstrations in public spaces, which are then broadcast via the web in a ‘reterritorialisation of the Internet’. Out of Body provides an important rationale of the concept behind Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 precisely because the citywide exhibition is a decennial. In helping to shape the discourse around this future show, the publication sets the next edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster firmly within its current context, marking it out as topically and globally relevant. And what better way to reflect on ‘the relationship between the public and private realms in times of increasing digitalisation’ than with a free online publication? Fi Churchman

PA RT N E R S

M E D I A PA RT N E R S

Artists working in any medium are invited to propose a design or concept for tapestry. Winner receives: • •

Your work hand-woven by Master Weavers. Opportunity of a three week residency.

Selectors: Simon Martin, Pallant House; Helen Turner, Cass Sculpture Foundation; Master Weavers at West Dean and Sarah Hughes, Artist.

www.westdeantapestry.org.uk Deadline for entry: 1 September 2016 #WDTAPESTRY

The Science of Imaginary Solutions Private View: Thursday 9 June, 6 – 9 pm 10 June – 17 September 2016 Anonymous Charles Avery Marcel Broodthaers Steven Claydon Alexandre da Cunha Matthew Darbyshire Ruth Ewan Ian Hamilton Finlay Barry Flanagan Lucio Fontana

BREESE|LITTLE Unit 1 249 - 253 Cambridge Heath Road London, E2 6JY info@breeselittle.com www.breeselittle.com

Andy Holden Yayoi Kusama George Henry Longly Ella McCartney Albert Renger-Patzsch Katie Schwab David Thorpe

David Thorpe, A R ipening (detail), 2012 oak, sand, clay, hair, dung, slake lime, pigment, rabbit skin glue 56.5 x 43 x 7 cm Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley

ﬂora Aberystwyth Arts Centre

12 July - 17 September 2016

Eleven artists reveal how flowers can elicit cultural, historic, geographic, social and scientific ideas. A National Touring Exhibition curated by Oriel Davies and supported by Arts Council of Wales.

Emma Bennett, Michael Boffey, Caroline Dear, Anya Gallaccio, Ori Gersht, Owen Griffiths, Anne-Mie Melis, Jacques Nimki, Magali Nougarède, Yoshihiro Suda, Clare Twomey flora.orieldavies.org The flora Outreach on Tour schools programme is supported by the Ernest Cook Trust

Method Maker — — A summer school on research methodologies and how they inform artistic production. 27 June – 1 July 2016 £100 full price, £75 concession Contributors include: Petra Bauer, Simon and Tom Bloor, James N Hutchinson and Tessa Lynch and other invited guests.

For full details and to book a place visit: www.collectivegallery.net

Chapter www.chapter.org

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by Zao Dao

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For more on Zao Dao, see overleaf

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Contributors

Phoebe Blatton is a writer based in Berlin and London. She is the editor of the Coelacanth Press, which reissued Brigid Brophy’s 1956 novel, The King of a Rainy Country, in 2012. She also publishes The Coelacanth Journal, currently on issue no 10, titled Stage Fright. In the Summer issue of ArtReview she reviews a solo show by artist duo Lou Cantor at Warsaw’s Leto gallery.

Joshua Mack is an art critic and independent curator based in New York. His writing has appeared in Art in America, Time Out New York, Aperture and Modern Painters, among other publications. For this issue he interviews artist Rick Lowe in Houston about the origins of Project Row Houses. Laura Smith

Tom Emerson is a partner, with Stephanie Macdonald, of Londonbased 6a architects. The practice has completed several gallery and arts projects in London, including Raven Row, the South London Gallery and a new studio for Juergen Teller. A new student housing court will be finished this summer for Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Alongside 6a, Tom is professor of architecture at ETH Zürich, where his students have designed and built the Pavilion of Reflections, a floating island in Lake Zürich with public bath and cinema, for Manifesta 11. During Glasgow International 2016, 6a and ETH students exhibited the Glasgow Atlas, a survey of a postindustrial landscape. For this issue, Tom interviews French author Michel Houellebecq about his upcoming exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

is a curator at Tate St Ives. She has curated solo exhibitions of artists including Nicolas Deshayes, Patrick Heron, Linder, Marlow Moss, R.H. Quaytman, Nick Relph and Jessica Warboys, as well as group exhibitions such as Images Moving Out Onto Space (2015) and The Modern Lens (2014). She is currently working with Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer on a reimagining of Paul Gauguin’s time in Tahiti, and is also curating a large group exhibition based on the work of Virginia Woolf – whose ‘lighthouse’ she can see from her window. In this issue she reviews the seventh edition of Glasgow International.

Contributing Writers Dominic van den Boogerd, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Barbara Casavecchia, Kim Córdova, Gabriel Coxhead, Stephanie Cristello, Tom Eccles, Louisa Elderton, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stephanie Hessler, Sam Jacob, Hettie Judah, I. Kurator, Patrick Langley, Maria Lind, Erik Morse, Mark Prince, John Quin, Claire Rigby, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Sherman Sam, George Stolz, Dan Udy, Wendy Vogel, Larry Wilcox, Will Wiles Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Zao Dao, Mikael Gregorsky, Bill McCullough, Anna Vickery

Zao Dao

(preceding pages)

Because her real name is so common in China, ‘Zao Dao’ adopted this pen name, which means ‘early rice’, as a reference to the month of her birth in 1990, July, when the first rice crop is harvested. It has proved appropriate for this precociously brilliant artist, who at the age of twenty-five has become an Internet phenomenon, while still living in the isolated village where she was born, on the outskirts of Kaiping. Drawing since she was a child, Zao Dao never took any formal classes but devoured books on classical Chinese painting that were given to her by her encouraging parents. Equally important were the comics she still recalls from growing up. “The first and only comics series I had as a child was called The Calabash Brothers, whose story and style resembled animated cartoons and shadow theatre. When I was small, you couldn’t find much to read in our little village, almost cut off from the outside world. There was, however, one very old library that nobody used, because people said it was haunted – there were certainly plenty of spiderwebs inside it. But I dared to go inside and so I read some lianhuanhua there.” These booklets, literally ‘images in chains’, are typically in black-and-white, palm-size, with

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one landscape-format image per page. Zao Dao regrets, “I couldn’t read enough of these old comics, because today they’re not easy to find. Artists in the past drew lots of characters and objects from reality, so they all possessed a very solid graphic foundation and their comics stories always had a close link to everyday life. I hope that young people of my generation will look at them again to discover the serious side of their work and distance themselves from superficial, fashionable things.” In her early twenties, Zao Dao enrolled in an art school in Guangzhou for three years but found the course boring. “I stayed at home and drew and drew, and never got my diploma.” Meanwhile, in 2010 she had started a blog on the Chinese website Weibo, posting her fierce and freewheeling artworks in ink and watercolour. It drew over 150,000 followers. Her appealing approach takes the mystical and mythical past, often rooted in the Buddhism she grew up with at home, and spices them up with a modern edge and spirited, predominantly adolescent protagonists. Her style also owes much to venerable Chinese ink-painter Dai Dunbang, whom she admires and has met, and to her discovery of other comics, notably manga. “In Japanese comics, there are many different ways to tell a story, and

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their layouts have a natural, fluid rhythm. You always learn something, like how to dig deeper into the subtlety of a character’s personality.” While China’s often conventional mainstream found her maverick mashup of styles bizarre, an independent publisher approached her in 2013 to commission her first book, a wordless narrative blend of illustrations and comics titled The Breath of the Wind in the Pines. “I finished it in April 2015,” Zao Dao says. “The publisher decided to launch its sale on the Internet on the morning of my 25th birthday in July. When I woke up that morning, all 4,000 copies of the first printing had sold.” Three reprints swiftly followed, and when Mosquito Editions released a French adaptation in September with some additional explanatory texts, Zao Dao was invited to comics festivals in Grenoble and Algiers, further cementing her increasingly international following. She remains discreet about her next book project, but enjoys sharing freeform graphic short stories with her fans online. In that vein, her playful new Strip for ArtReview echoes traditional folklore, the two Chinese words in it, 咕, pronounced ‘koo’, and 呱, pronounced ‘kwa’, being the onomatopoeia for a croaking frog. Paul Gravett

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover, on pages 80–81 and on page 161 photography by Bill McCullough

Phrases on the spine and pages 35, 79 and 123 are from Back to the Future, a novel by George Gipe based on a screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, published in 1985 by Corgi

on page 154 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 166 illustration by Anna Vickery

Summer 2016

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A Curator Writes Summer 2016 “Many years from now, as I prepare to face the firing squad, I will fondly remember this by-then-distant afternoon when you took me to discover ice.” “Sorry?” The Editor (International) of ArtReview looks up at me from his whole-baked onion accompanied by marinated beetroot. “The opening of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, my dear boy, although I’ve taken a few liberties, of course.” He pops some chard into his mouth. “That’s your fucking problem, Ivan. All the stuff you’ve read is decades out of date. We’ve tried to give you the right open-access links to look at in the past couple of weeks, but I think full immersion is the only option.” He sticks his fork in my spiced chickpeas, a dish that I have no intention of eating. “So,” he continues, “you’re not coming along to Goldsmiths to watch me on the panel of ‘Queering Gender: Now, Then, When?’” “Thank God,” I reply. My spirits lift. For a moment the traffic roaring outside on New Cross Road sounds like the opening of Philip Glass’s Einstein On the Beach. In fact, I’m so delighted, I’m just about to share a humorous anecdote about once mistaking Jean Baudrillard for the recently deceased Ronnie Corbett, but am stopped in my tracks. “Instead you’re going to take my place. Don’t worry, I’ve cleared it with the panel moderator. Now I’ve got to go. I’ve got an Appear.in group video chatroom powwow with the director of the new Pales-

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tinian Museum, representatives of the Gulf Labor Coalition and Dr Cornel West in ten minutes.” “You’re just so (International)!” I yell at him as he departs, hoping he’ll hear the mocking parenthesis in my voice. An hour later I find myself onstage in an underground lecturetheatre at Goldsmiths. I sit down behind a table as the other speakers join me. A printout on the table lists the presentation order. I notice that I will be the first to contribute, and that the title of my paper is ‘My Journey: From Pan’s People to the Pan-Gender’. The moderator thanks me for my images and says that we should wait for another five minutes or so for the hall to fill up. I suddenly feel a spasm of fear as I realise that I have no idea what images the Editor (International) has sent in for my presentation. I’ve been done up like a kipper. Excusing myself I make a dash towards the toilets. As I lurch down the corridor I ask a group of students where the Gents is. They laugh horribly and one of them replies, “I think ‘the Gents’ disappeared in 2010.” I have no idea what she can mean until I stumble across a door and am faced with a sign saying ‘Gender neutral’. As I hover I see the moderator heading towards me. She brushes past, pushes open the door and blithely heads into a cubicle. I follow her, desperately hoping that I am not going to be arrested. I am at a total loss. The noises emanating from her cubicle are indescribable. In my panic, I urinate in the sink. She emerges from her cubicle and quietly but firmly says, “You are violating this shared safe space.” “No, no,” I quickly insist, tucking away Dr Winky. “I was making a stand. I fully believe these gender-neutral toilets implicitly reinforce the fixed genders of male and female mixing together in a false utopia that discriminates against trans people!” See, I did read those bloody open-access links, I think to myself. We wash our hands next to each other as she thinks. And then she turns round, high-fives me and exits the toilet. A few minutes later and she’s introducing me. “Good afternoon, agendered, gendered, genderqueer and everybody else out there. Now there are some speakers who talk the talk, and then there are some speakers who enact what they believe. And it gives me a great deal of pleasure to tell you I’ve just seen our first speaker make a very IRL statement of his beliefs. Please welcome Ivan Kurator!” The audience applauds graciously and I smile and nod. “Thank you for that kind introduction. I want to start by taking a provisional yet hopefully provocative position: in order to queer the implicit gendering of the presentation format, which to my mind always insists on a male-gendered authorial voice, I have asked a colleague to provide me with an entirely random list of images that I have had no prior access to!” The audience cheer wildly as the first image of Pan’s People, the British television dance troupe from the 1970s associated with Top of the Pops, flashes up. “It was as a teenager, when I first found myself strongly identifying with the all-women dance group Pan’s People, that I started questioning the notion of fixed gender roles…,” I begin, improvising madly. I look at the audience, who are now gazing back in admiration, pity and awe in equal measure, and I realise that I have finally come home. I. Kurator

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