ArtReview Summer 2021 by ArtReview

Coming out of its shell since 1949

Summer 2021

The Emperor’s new clothes

The man stayed at home

Ines Doujak

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ROSE DES VENTS AND MIMIROSE COLLECTIONS

Yellow gold, pink gold, white gold, diamonds and mother-of-pearl.

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Mend e s Wood DM

Lucas Arruda Sonia Gomes Otobong Nkanga Hariel Revignet August – September 2021 Mendes Wood DM São Paulo

Mimi Lauter Michael Dean June – August 2021 Mendes Wood DM Brussels Mendes Wood DM at Retranchement July – August 2021

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy ‘Rebel Archives’ group show curated by Sofia Gotti June – August 2021 Mendes Wood DM at Villa Era Vigliano Biellese, Italy

São Paulo | New York | Brussels + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com @mendeswooddm

Image: Lucas Arruda, 2021

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DAMIEN HIRST Forgiving and Forgetting

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ArtReview vol 73 no 4 Summer 2021

Parrotheads Ah, summer… when everyone slowly slips into vacation mode. “Nibblin’ on sponge cake/ Watchin’ the sun bake/All of you Parrotheads covered with oil.” But not this year. For some of us this summer is the first time in a while we’ll be seeing art in three dimensions for the best part of a year. It’s the first time in a while we’ll be seeing friends and family, and being part of a physical community once more (although for more on that delusion, skip over to Gesine Borcherdt’s deconstruction of Byung-Chul Han’s latest musings on all that we’ve lost in the pursuit of immaterial gain, p. 106). In short, it’s a time to wind up rather than wind down, with the best holidays being an escape from oneself rather than others. For others of us, though, the full force of the pandemic is still in play. Charu Nivedita takes stock of the situation in India, exploring some of the reasons, both social and political, as to why the pandemic has slipped so disastrously out of control within the subcontinent’s borders. Musician and filmmaker Flying Lotus, meanwhile, talks to Ross Simonini about using horror and nightmares productively (for more of their conversation, be sure to also check out the ArtReview podcast Subject, Object, Verb, available on artreview.com). While art critic Martin Herbert discusses how he’s going to deal with a summer return to art in real life. Talking of which…, Christian Egger takes stock of the work of Ines Doujak, which will be on show at multiple venues in the uk and Austria over the coming months. Many of the injustices of the present stem from the historical injustices of the past. For a number of years, the artist has used her work to take deep dives into the idea of homeland, sexuality, enforced normativity, the abuse of power and, as importantly, its conscious and unconscious concealment in both the past

Not-Margaritaville

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and present. Vaccine (2021), for example, explores the exploitation of poor people, slaves, prisoners and soldiers for the purposes of medical study. On a more redemptive note, ArtReview also reflects on the up-and-down career of nonagenarian Mexican sculptor Ángela Gurriá, and the ways in which she found communion in nature, when society let her (and so many other female artists) down. New Orleansbased photographers Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun share a selection of work documenting their hometown and Louisiana culture over the past four decades, from changes in its social and industrial cultures, to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and the gradual rebuilding of the city in the years since 2005. Berlin-based Californian Rindon Johnson explores a similarly wide range of topics to those that are the focus of Doujak, and in an equally wide range of media (spanning both the physical and the virtual), by analysing many of the things we take for granted. ‘We are going to be victims of the systemic generational hubris of those crap industrial, colonial ancestors, fellow humans and selves,’ the artist says, but crucially we don’t need to be willing victims. The world is in flux and the way we adapt to it can be too, we can achieve paradigm shifts, engender new understandings, new conversations and new beginnings. And art can be one of the primary ways through which we achieve that. But it’s a process in which both artist and audience have to take part. ‘Paintings just don’t have any meaning. They are what they are, unless you allow them to have that for you. And then they can be extraordinarily profound,’ says painter Michael Armitage to Martin Herbert. Great art, you see, sets up conversations in which all of us can take part. At least that’s what ArtReview, and this issue in particular, is all about. ArtReview

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Torkwase Dyson, Scale a Dance, Place a Continuum (Bird and Lava), 2020 (detail), acrylic and ink on canvas, 96 × 80 × 2" 243.8 × 203.2 × 5.1 cm © Torkwase Dyson

F E AT U R I N G Etel Adnan

Suki Seokyeong Kang

Walid Raad

Yto Barrada

Kapwani Kiwanga

Hito Steyerl

Aria Dean

Alicja Kwade

Rayyane Tabet

Simon Denny

Tony Lewis

Jessica Vaughn

Torkwase Dyson

Rodney McMillian

Adrián Villar Rojas

Sam Gilliam

Trevor Paglen

Fred Wilson

Hiding in Plain Sight July 14 – August 21, 2021 New York

@ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

Donald Judd Untitled, 1990 Cadmium red light acrylic on Douglas fir plywood and aluminum 49,5 × 114,3 × 77,5 cm (19 ½ × 45 × 30 ½ inches) Donald Judd Art © 2021 Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Donald Judd Salzburg July—August 2021

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Thaddaeus Ropac

London Paris Salzburg Seoul

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robertsprojectsla.com

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Art Observed

The Interview Flying Lotus by Ross Simonini 24

Art Market [zzz] by Martin Herbert 36

India Is Choking by Charu Nivedita 34

page 24 Flying Lotus. Photo: Tim Saccenti. Courtesy Flying Lotus and Warp Records

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Art Featured

Ines Doujak by Christian Egger 40 Michael Armitage by Martin Herbert 48

‘Then and Now’ Artist project by Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun 55 Rindon Johnson by Emily McDermott 64 Ángela Gurría by Gaby Cepeda 70

page 64 Rindon Johnson, Diana Said: /If you stop me/ from cutting/ your hair,/ there is a sense/ in which/ you are interfering./ */ But, since/ you are entitled/ to determine/ whether I cut your hair/ or not, you do not / wrong me./ */ I make your trip to the store a waste./ */ I buy the last quart of milk/ before you/ get there., 2019, vr experience, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles & New York

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Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 80 Kader Attia, by Ben Eastham Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, by Eliza Levinson Reprise, by Max L. Feldman Lindsey Mendick, by Hettie Judah Bigger than Myself: Heroic Voices from Ex-Yugoslavia, by Ana Vukadin Technologies of the Self, by Cat Kron Jim Lambie, by John Quin Joachim Koester, by Pádraic E. Moore Charles Gaines, by Kevin Brazil Lucy Raven, by Evan Moffitt Die Balkone 2, by Martin Herbert Sanya Kantarovsky & Camille Blatrix and Anderson Borba & Alexandre Canonico, by Tomas Weber Ivan Serpa and Yuli Yamagata, by Oliver Basciano Something New Must Turn Up: Six Singaporean Artists After 1965, by Adeline Chia

Undinge, by Byung-Chul Han, reviewed by Gesine Borcherdt Ethical Portraits, by Hatty Nestor, reviewed by Philomena Epps The Dancing Plague, by Gareth Brookes, reviewed by Louise Darblay The Committed, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, reviewed by Ben Eastham Karya, by Aravind Malagatti, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi China in One Village, by Liang Hong, and The Art of Contemporary China, by Jiang Jiehong, reviewed by Mark Rappolt back page 114

page 96 Lucas Samaras, Photo-Transformation 12/19/73, 1973, Polaroid sx-70, manipulated, 8 × 8 cm (image). Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles

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THE R AT E S OF CHANGE

더 갠 언 이

율 화 SPACE K Seoul 32, Magokjungang8-ro, Gangseo-gu, Seoul, 07802, Republic of Korea +82 2-3665-8918 www.spacek.co.kr spacek_korea

라

변

2021. 6. 2 4. – 9.1 7.

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RYA N GANDER

SPACE K was established in 2011 to foster art and culture by Kolon Group in Korea. Setting forth an initiative to support art and aiming to share with local community, Kolon Group introduces SPACE K.

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Art Observed

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Flying Lotus. Photo: Tim Saccenti. Courtesy Flying Lotus and Warp Records

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The Interview by Ross Simonini

Flying Lotus

“I just feel reality is pretty crazy and dark and fucked up”

In 2017 the musician Flying Lotus directed and cowrote his first feature film, Kuso. Until then, Lotus had built a decade-long career as a producer, beat-maker, culler of spicy jazz samples, record-label owner and occasional rapper – a man of refined musical taste; but his work as a director (done under his given forename, ‘Steve’) is a gleeful binge of tastelessness. Kuso is an unabashedly schlocky horror-comedy in four vignettes: a man fornicates with a sentient neck wound, phalluses endure torture, an anus feeds on faeces. But what I found most surprising about the film is its stark contrast to Lotus’s music, which always has a sprinkling of wonk but is usually polished

clean of jarring irregularities. Few artists play across such a radical aesthetic range. Lotus has always had an interest in the visual: he went to film school and he often projects psychedelic videos at shows to deepen the unstable dream of his music. In 2014 he commissioned a horrific anime short for his album You’re Dead, a buzzing tapestry of explosive saxophone, relentless, chugging drum and sundry cameos, including one for Snoop Dogg. As with film, Lotus’s musical work is often a collaborative affair. In 2021 he won a Grammy for producing Thundercat – one of his closest friends and most consistent collaborators –

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and has worked with David Lynch, Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, Herbie Hancock and Erykah Badu, a group of names that, taken together, seem to suggest his sound at the centre. In the last few years, FlyLo has scored three anime series, most recently Yasuke (2021), a historically based Samurai epic he produced from the ground up. On a few occasions he’s said that, in today’s music industry, soundtrack work may be his best path forward as an artist. I spoke with Lotus over a video call, in which he did not elect to turn on his video. It began uncertainly, as if he were feeling me out, but by the end of the conversation, we found a nice shared pulse.

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In the Sleepy Space ross simonini You seem like a bit of an autodidact. What are you learning about these days? flying lotus I’m always studying music and composition theory and trying to understand why I like certain things musically. I watch YouTube all the time. That’s kinda my thing. I don’t watch as much streaming stuff on hbo. I’ll watch the occasional show or whatever, but like I watch YouTube all day. That’s always on, some tutorial on something, or some music documentary. You have people opening up synthesisers and drum machines and stuff. I’m learning a lot about synthesisers. And I got this really nice vintage synthesiser coming that I need to learn how to tune, because it’s so rare and old that I don’t want to have to take it to a shop to get work done to it. I’m going to have to learn how to do it myself, which I’m really excited about. rs That seems like the next level of making music, when you start rewiring the boards and electronics to change the instruments themselves. fl To be honest, I hate having to open up my stuff to tweak it. But like I said, in this case, it’s such a rare machine. I want to know how to keep these things alive for the next, whatever, 20, 30 years I’m going to have it.

been listening to audiobooks. That helps me to go to sleep. I’ve been trying to find a good one. I mean, just to get into the last stuff I was listening to, it was like some old Chuck Palahniuk books that I used to like from forever ago. When I first read it, I was like, man, this shit is ridiculous!

but I mostly love the absurdity of it. You know, whenever I think of gross things and scary stuff, it’s never really in a malicious way. It’s always kind of like silly and cartoony. I just feel reality is pretty crazy and dark and fucked up, so I can’t deny a good fart joke.

rs I’ve heard about people passing out at his readings, from the visceral horrific quality of it.

rs I remember Ren & Stimpy’s soundtrack was pretty important to me, that kind of beat jazz sound.

fl Yeah, I think he was really inspirational for a lot of writers, post-Fight Club, in that way. But now I want to get into some nonfiction stuff.

fl That was a huge part of it. The music was so cool. It put me on to Raymond Scott and all that shit.

rs Less exciting for nighttime.

rs All of this disgust we’re talking about, it’s really about the body, right?

fl I just have trouble sleeping in general. So I’ve been trying to figure out anything I can do to kind of just stay in the sleepy space. I wake up at like five in the morning for no reason. rs You have trouble going to sleep or you have trouble staying asleep, like secondary insomnia? fl After a few hours, my brain is like, ‘Oh, I can get back to it. Now I can get to work.’ It’s like I always feel like I got a deadline or something that keeps my mind busy.

Film-quality Nightmares

rs Do you read much? I saw you asking for graphic novel recommendations on Twitter.

rs Palahniuk is an artist of disgust. You have a little of that going on in your films. Do you generally like a little disgust in art?

fl I do spend a little time with it. I haven’t as much, just because I’ve been really busy, but I’ve

fl Well, I love Ren & Stimpy. That is some of my favourite stuff. And I love horror and all that,

fl Yeah. Body horror. rs Would you say you’re a person who is particularly aware of their body? fl I’m definitely aware of my body. I try to be healthy and stretch. So I’m aware of my body in that sense. But I also just feel like I have a knack for knowing what makes people go, ‘ew’ about the body [laughs]. I always make the gross joke. rs And were you always like that? fl Always. I found all this footage recently of me as a little kid and it’s always just me making stupid faces. Every picture. And you know, my music gets kind of serious, but there’s always that silly thing in there somewhere. rs I think Garbage Pail Kids were seminal in my education of the gross.

Army of Darkness (still), dir Sam Raimi, 1998 (Universal Pictures)

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Kuso (still), dir Flying Lotus, 2017 (Brainfeeder Films)

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Army of Darkness (still), dir Sam Raimi, 1998 (Universal Pictures)

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fl That was great. Maybe they had something to do with it, because I remember enjoying that stuff too – having the cards and seeing the movie. Plus, you know what? My mom was pretty dark. I think she was like the catalyst, you know, she was always like making like super loud, inappropriate farts and laughing about it. And going up to random strangers to be like, ‘Hey, do I have a booger in my nose?’ Like just freaking people out. She was a really crass woman. I love that about her. I think I got a lot of that from her, now I think about it. That’s a rare thing. rs A good crass woman is a rare thing. fl Yeah. She was. She had to be my mom and my dad. So I think that just kind of just changed her. She just gave no fucks. rs When you say she was dark, what does that mean to you?

Evil Dead. I think I saw Army of Darkness way too young and I didn’t know anyone else who had seen it, really. She was a really special lady. She even put me on Nightmare on Elm Street when I was way too young. rs When you say too young, did it bother you? fl Being perfectly honest, I still have a Freddy Krueger nightmare here and there. I just got a replica Freddy glove, um, as a gift, actually, and I do remember being a little traumatised when I was younger. But I have this love for it now, in a way, that’s so different. I appreciate the artistry of how these things are made with the puppets and the animatronics and the special effects. I also have an appreciation for what that can do to a kid’s imagination in a good and crazy way. I think kids should have boogeymen, you know, that aren’t real, they should have that kind of stuff. A book of spooky stories. I miss that.

fl Well, the last movie I watched with my mom before she died was Irreversible.

rs I mean, every culture has got some kind of boogeyman.

rs Whoa.

fl The boogeyman stories are cool. They’re like the true cop stories that we don’t want to lay on the kids too early, you know?

fl And when I think back on it, yeah, that was a weird last minute. We couldn’t watch no family films. It was she and I watching Irreversible. That’s what I remember! But she put me on to a lot of movies back in the day. You know, she was the one who brought over The Lawnmower Man. She was like, you gotta see this shit! And I was like, what? She was like, you are going to love this! And The Lawnmower Man was crazy! And she put me up on like Army of Darkness and

rs Right, we’re teaching them the hard parts of life through the back door. It’s also the growing pains of the imagination too, right? Like, kids have these nightmares and overactive dark imaginations that are just necessary as a way of developing. For people who are artists, probably even more so, right? fl After a nightmare, I have a moment where I’m like, ‘Oh my God, ok. Wow.’ My imagination

is pretty lit. You know, it was like, I dreamt that up! Look at the story structure of this narrative that just happened, you know? So I’m like analysing that and I’m, like, yeah, man, you’re not bad at this. This is like some film-quality nightmare happening. You know, admire that shit. rs It’s fuel. fl I think the fuel is good and it’s going to happen no matter what – I’m going to have nightmares – but it’s what you do with it… rs Do you ever pull directly from nightmares in your work? fl Absolutely. I’m a fan of using voice memos and I have a bajillion voice memos that I probably need to organise and turn into things. But yeah, I have plenty of dreams recorded and lots of ideas for movies. I’ll just be somewhere and be like, movie idea about blah, blah, blah, and then forget about it. I’m sure everybody does that though. rs Do you have plans for doing more features? fl I’m actually in the running for a movie right now. I was going to do a movie with Paramount, like a couple of years ago, and I had to walk away from that. I’m actually really glad that I did. I hope to do so soon, but you know, making a film is so crazy, so difficult. So much time. Whatever film I do next is going to be something that I really love because there’s been a lot of projects that have been thrown at me that I’ve just kind of not been interested in. They’re not bad

Yasuke (still), dirs LeSean Thomas and Takeru Sato, story by LeSean Thomas and Flying Lotus, music by Flying Lotus, 2021 (Netflix)

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Yasuke (stills), dirs LeSean Thomas and Takeru Sato, story by LeSean Thomas and Flying Lotus, music by Flying Lotus, 2021 (Netflix)

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projects, but I’m not like, ‘Oh my God’. I have to love the story, you know? rs A film seems like it can drop you down the stress wormhole if it’s not the right project. fl And it’s two years of your life!

Reality Medicine rs You’ve said that film school kind of ruined your mind. Music school did the same for me. How’d you fix that? fl I spent enough time outside of it. I think I honestly had to just abandon film and the idea of doing film for so long, because film school made me second-guess myself all the time. It made me kind of say like, ‘Oh well, there’s no point in doing this because it doesn’t have all these proper things that a film needs to have’. You know? Like, this is a bad idea. I think it just added unnecessary voices to an otherwise super-innocent brain. I felt like I had way more ideas flowing all the time and I’m sure they weren’t always great, but I became inhibited once I went to film school, I think, and I just didn’t trust my instincts as much. rs I felt there should be a warning about art schools. It seems like you’re back on it though, making notes all the time. That’s where you want to be. fl And I think the reality with films is that you really just have to have experience being on set. I think that’s really the only film school you need:

in the field. Obviously going to school you can meet people and build connections there, which is a great thing to do, so I don’t want to knock it completely, but I think the best filmmakers were already good on day one. You already knew who was dope on day one and the same people were dope when it ended. It’s just, do you have ideas or not? You’re like built for it or you’re not. And it’s easy to see.

of weed smoke. I don’t even think about it anymore. Sativa… indica… it’s all the same to me! Or, well, that’s not true. Some sativa will get me to clean the house. But I have friends who are like, ‘Oh man, whenever I smoke it, I get all paranoid and all that stuff’. Man, I smoked through that phase, like 20 years ago [laughs]. At this point, shit has been forever. So my relationship is: weed, it’s here to stay.

rs I saw that you were doing the nft thing recently. As someone who has a label, have you had any thoughts on new models for releasing music outside of streaming?

rs Would you say it functions as a spiritual thing or a medicinal thing or –

fl That environment we’ve been kind of living in the past ten, 15 years with streaming and stuff – I don’t think that’s been the most inspiring platform or environment to be creating in. I don’t sit around and be like, ‘Ooh, I can’t wait to just drop this thing for Spotify’. Like that shit sucks. You know? So just having any other possibilities is great to me. I’m so tired of getting bullied by Spotify. And now they’re kind of like doing shit, back-end deals with labels, for promo and stuff. And that shit is trash. It’s like now no one will have a chance and no one’s gonna make any money. So yeah, I’m down with nfts a hundred percent. You know, just like trying to think of new ways to get ideas and music and art across. I think that’s amazing. rs You recently played a 4/20 festival online, during covid. What’s your relationship to weed these days? fl I’m at that point where I don’t have a relationship with it because it’s just like part of what I do. Like some breaths are just exhales

fl I think weed is just like something to do to cope with reality. A coping medicine. Yeah. I think that’s fair. Reality medicine. rs Creative medicine? fl If it is, I don’t know it. I smoke so much that I feel like I’m always stoned. It’s not like I smoke before I’m going to do something. It’s more like, when am I not stoned? People just have always seen me stoned and they don’t know what I’m like when I’m sober. rs You’ve merged with weed. fl Yeah, I mean, me and Snoop Dogg can smoke weed together now, probably. I’m at that point. We did once before and he got me really, really baked and I was surprised. I was like, man, Snoop does have the rapper weed that is a legend. I need some of that. Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

Yasuke (still), dirs LeSean Thomas and Takeru Sato, story by LeSean Thomas and Flying Lotus, music by Flying Lotus, 2021 (Netflix)

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Emmet Place, Cork, Ireland, T12 TNE6

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193 Gallery (Paris) • 313 Art Project (Paris, Seoul) • Galería 451 (Oviedo)* • Galerie 8+4 – Paris (Paris) • A&R Fleury (Paris)* • A2Z Art Gallery (Paris, Hong Kong) • Galerie AB (Paris)* • Martine Aboucaya (Paris)* • AD Galerie (Montpellier) • Afikaris (Paris) • Galería Albarrán Bourdais (Madrid) • Galerie Almine Rech (Paris, Brussels, London, New York, Shanghai)* • Alzueta Gallery (Barcelona) • Galerie Andres Thalmann (Zurich)* • Galerie Art : Concept (Paris)* • Art to Be Gallery (Lille) • Galerie Ariane C-Y (Paris) • Galerie Arts d’Australie – Stéphane Jacob (Paris) • Galerie Cédric Bacqueville (Lille) • Helene Bailly Gallery (Paris)* • Galerie Ange Basso (Paris) • La Balsa Arte (Bogota)* • Galerie Laurence Bernard (Geneva)* • Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou (Paris)* • Galerie Berès (Paris)* • Galerie Claude Bernard (Paris) • Galerie Bert (Paris) • Galerie Berthéas (Saint-Étienne, Vichy, Paris)* • Galerie Bessières Art Contemporain (Chatou) • Galerie Françoise Besson (Lyon)* • Galerie Binome (Paris) • Bogéna Galerie (Saint-Paul-de-Vence) • Galerie Bernard Bouche (Paris)* • Galerie Boulakia (Paris/London)* • Galerie Capazza (Nançay) • Galerie Jean-François Cazeau (Paris) • Galerie Chauvy (Paris) • Galerie Chevalier (Paris)* • Galleria Continua (San Gimignano, Beijing, Boissy les Chatel, La Havane, Rome, São Paulo, Paris)* • Galeria Cortina (Barcelona)* • Christopher Cutts Gallery (Toronto) • Danysz (Paris, Shanghai, London)* • Galerie Derouillon (Paris)* • Dilecta (Paris) • Ditesheim & Maffei Fine Art (Neuchâtel)* • Galería Marc Domènech (Barcelona) • Galerie Eric Dupont (Paris) • Galerie Dutko (Paris) • galerie frank elbaz (Paris)* • Espace Meyer Zafra (Paris)* • Galerie Valérie Eymeric (Lyon) • Galerie Les Filles Du Calvaire (Paris)* • Galerie Claire Gastaud (Clermont-Ferrand, Paris) • Galerie Louis Gendre (Paris, Chamalières) • Galerie Alain Gutharc (Paris) • H Gallery (Paris) • Galerie Ernst Hilger (Vienna) • Huberty & Breyne Gallery (Brussels, Paris) • Galerie Intervalle (Paris) • Galerie Italienne (Paris) • Galerie Jean Fournier (Paris)* • Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger (Paris) • Gallery Joeun (Seoul)* • Kamel Mennour (Paris, London)* • Ketabi Projects (Paris)* • Galerie kreo (Paris)* • Galerie La Forest Divonne (Paris, Brussels) • Galerie Lahumière (Paris) • Galerie La Ligne (Zurich)* • Galeria de las misiones (Montevideo)* • Galerie Le Feuvre & Roze (Paris)* • Galeria Le Guern (Warsaw)* • Galerie Lara Vincy (Paris) • Alexis Lartigue Fine Art (Paris) • Galerie Jean-Marc Lelouch (Paris) • Galerie Lelong & Co (Paris, New York)* • Galerie Françoise Livinec (Paris, Huelgoat)* • Galerie Loft (Paris) • Loevenbruck (Paris)* • Magnin-A (Paris)* • Maruani Mercier Gallery (Brussels)* • Galerie Martel (Paris)* • Massimo De Carlo (Milano, London, Hong Kong, Paris)* • Galeria Mayoral (Barcelona, Paris)* • Galerie Marguerite Millin (Paris) • Galerie Minsky (Paris)* • Galerie Mitterrand (Paris)* • Galerie Modulab (Metz) • Galerie Frédéric Moisan (Paris) • Galerie Lélia Mordoch (Paris, Miami) • Galerie Najuma – Fabrice Miliani (Marseille) • Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris, Brussels) • Opera Gallery (Paris) • Galerie Pact (Paris)* • Galerie Paris-Beijing (Paris) • Perrotin (Hong Kong, New York, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo) • Pigment Gallery (Barcelona) • Galerie ProvostHacker (Lille) • Galerie Rabouan Moussion (Paris) • Raibaudi Wang Gallery (Paris) • Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery (London)* • Red Zone Arts (Frankfurt am Main) • Galerie Richard (Paris, New York) • Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (London, Paris, Salzbourg)* • J.-P. Ritsch-Fisch Galerie (Strasbourg) • Galerie Sator (Paris, Romainville)* • Galerie Scene Ouverte (Paris) • Galerie Alex Schlesinger (Zurich)* • School Gallery/Olivier Castaing (Paris) • Galerie Lara Sebdon (Paris) • Sit Down Galerie (Paris)* • Galerie Slotine (Paris) • Galerie Véronique Smagghe (Paris) • Michel Soskine Inc. (Madrid, New York)* • Stems Gallery (Brussels)* • Galerie Taménaga (Paris, Tokyo, Osaka) • Galerie Tanit (Munich, Beirut)* • Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve (Paris)* • Templon (Paris, Brussels) • Galerie Traits Noirs (Paris) • Galerie Patrice Trigano (Paris) • Un-Spaced (Paris) • Galerie Univer/Colette Colla (Paris) • Galerie Vazieux (Paris) • Galerie Anne de Villepoix (Paris)* • Galerie Wagner (Le Touquet Paris-Plage, Paris) • Galerie Olivier Waltman (Paris, Miami) • Galerie Esther Woerdehoff (Paris)* • Galerie XII (Paris, Los Angeles, Shanghai) • Galerie Younique (Lima, Paris) • Yvon Lambert (Paris) • Galerie Géraldine Zberro (Paris). Promises: 31 Project (Paris) • Double V Gallery (Marseille) • Hors-Cadre (Paris)* • La Galería Rebelde (Guatemala, Los Angeles)* • Le Cabinet d’Ulysse (Marseille)* • Galerie Marguo (Paris)* • Galerie Pauline Pavec (Paris) • Galerie Véronique Rieffel (Paris, Abidjan) • Septieme Gallery (Paris)

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List of the 2021 exhibitors / *first time participants or returning galleries at Art Paris 2021

Free Entry Open 7 days a week

09—12 Sept. 2021

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Last year, when covid-19 cases were first reported in India, the government immediately declared a complete lockdown throughout the country. People in need of commuting from one place to another had to obtain e-passes, or permission to move around, as the administration put in place stringent travel rules. Many could not even bid final farewells to their loved ones due to curtailed mobility. Restrictions were in place to allow only 20 guests at marriages. Educational institutions, places of worship, cinema halls, malls and bars were closed. The country was reporting only a few thousand new cases per day then. Today (5 May 2021) India reported a record surge in new cases, to over 400,000, by far the largest single-day count in any country so far. Experts say this will peak during mid-May, with 800,000–1,000,000 new cases per day. India’s healthcare system is already on the brink of collapse due to a shortage of medicines, oxygen supply, ventilators, hospital beds and intensive care units. Yet Prime Minister Narendra Modi has declined an offer from the United Nations for help in procuring medical supplies, manufacturing a blanket lie that India has a robust system to deal with the situation. Ashok Amrohi, former Indian ambassador to many countries, passed away early in the morning of 27 April after waiting for a bed in the parking lot of Gurgaon’s Medanta Hospital for nearly five hours. If this is the state of a former Indian Foreign Service diplomat, imagine the

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Carnage Diaries

Choking on the smoke of its burning pyres, India continues, at all levels of society, to march blindly towards apocalypse, writes Charu Nivedita

A worker helps cremate the bodies of covid-19 victims on the banks of the Ganges river in Prayagraj on Saturday 8 May 2021. Photo: Prabhat Kumar Verma/Pacific Press/Sipa usa

plight of the poor. And it’s not just Gurgaon; the tragic situation is the order of the day all across India. With hospitals buckling under this record surge, you can forget about admitting patients, they are not even allowed to enter the hospitals and are treating themselves at home. But how to procure oxygen for those enduring at home, especially when there is a critical shortage across the country? The black-market price of an oxygen cylinder is climbing past Rs.40,000, and a single vial of Remdisivir, an antiviral medicine, is going for up to Rs.30,000. And even then: you may be willing to pay the price, but someone could still outbid you. Yet, addressing a virtual summit of the World Economic Forum on 28 January, the prime minister boasted to global leaders that his country had saved humanity from a big disaster by effectively containing the virus. The predicament of vaccination is a heartbreaking story by itself. Although several world-class Indian pharmaceutical companies were capable of producing covid-19 vaccinations, the government approved only two companies to manufacture them. Now, this blinkered decision has hampered the vaccination programme due to acute production shortfall. As only government hospitals administer the vaccine, people are cutting the vaccine lines to get it by hook or crook. Recently, I was appalled to see an unruly crowd in front of a government healthcare centre for covid vaccination and left the place immediately fearing I might catch the virus there. Of the 1.37 billion people in India, only 13 million have received one dose and only 2.14 million two; now the government stands emptyhanded because of vaccine shortage. With not enough stock to vaccinate even the population aged forty-five years and above, the government has irresponsibly announced that everyone above the age of eighteen will be eligible to get the vaccine from 1 May! This is what Muthu Krishnan, a Maduraibased activist and writer, wrote on his Facebook page: ‘When the whole country is reeling under perilously low oxygen supply during the pandemic, Modi is sitting in his air-conditioned vvip aircraft, flaunting his new colourful turban for a selfie opportunity. When desperate relatives of Delhi Covid patients are pleading for a bed and oxygen outside the hospitals, the Emperor is busy trying to match his turban with the shades on his walls. When crematoriums are overwhelmed giving way to makeshift funeral pyres burning through the night, when there is not enough wood to burn the deceased, and

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when rows of dead bodies are laying on the ground unwrapped due to scarcity of white cloth, the Emperor seems to be in conversation with an Italian designer to choose the turban to wear for the first session of Parliament.’ Why did the prime minister or his sycophants not prepare for a repeat of last year’s situation? Why did they not proactively study how other nations have readied themselves for another surge during the pandemic? Today, as covid deaths surge and crematoriums run out of space, the dead are being buried on roads in northern India. With more than a year at their disposal since the pandemic began, the government’s preparedness for maintaining oxygen supplies has come under scathing criticism. Precious lives are lost because of lack of planning on the part of the government. Schools and colleges have remained closed for more than a year now. In the last 200 years of Indian history, educational institutions have never remained closed for such a prolonged period. Of course, it was the right decision considering the situation at that time. But why did the central and state governments open malls and movie theatres when the educational institutions are still closed? Thiruvalluvar classifies human life into three categories: Aram – dharma/virtue; Porul – wealth/goods; and Inbam – pleasure/love. But Tamil society today has given a completely new, postmodern and material definition to them: Aram – temples; Porul – shopping malls, elections (materialistic gain); and Inbam – cinema. When covid was rampaging through India and turning it into one big burial ground at the beginning of April, the central government gave the go-ahead for the Kumbh Mela ‘show’ in Haridwar. On 12 April alone, more than two

million pilgrims took a holy dip in the Ganges in Haridwar. It was a ‘superspreader’ event, and it looked utterly absurd to the rest of the world. If, on the one hand, the government’s handling of the situation is atrocious, people’s behaviour has to be condemned equally, if not more. Hindu scriptures call for worshipping gods at home and do not even mandate visiting temples. That is why every Indian home has an altar or a pooja room designated for worship. Despite restrictions, even with a limited number of guests, weddings are the next big reason for the virus spread. My close friends and fellow writers, with no exceptions, attended weddings and are now unable to find hospital beds, reeling from infections at home. I have lost a few of my dear friends to covid. One of them was just forty years old. I advised him against attending the marriage. He insisted on attending, saying that it was his close friend. I was also close friends with the host. I urged him to postpone the marriage. He feared, “It is my close friend’s daughter’s wedding. The groom’s family will not accept that the wedding be deferred to a later date. If the wedding is cancelled, he will never be able to find another groom for his daughter.” The irony is all of them were educated and belonged to the upper class. As far as I know, three people who attended the wedding have died of covid (including my friend). At least 70 have contracted the virus. Does it not make the wedding host a criminal? If people were foolish enough to ignore the virus, the government went one step further by conducting elections as the nation edged ever closer to doom. Elections in India are nothing but a political Kumbh Mela. Thousands gathered for election rallies and public rallies – another superspreader. An entire nation is oblivious to the apocalypse they are marching towards. I am not sure how many more tens of thousands will have submitted themselves in death to the virus by the time you read this article. The official current death count stands at 226,000. But the real count, I am afraid, is at least 20 times more. It is nothing but carnage. Yet the prime minister is busy matching his sherwani, turban and sandals and posting selfies. His clown subjects may not care about anything and go about their lives in his footsteps, as if nothing has happened. If you don’t believe my words, let me tell you about a call I received in the middle of all this and as I was typing this article. It was from a celebrated movie director. He wanted to know if I would be interested in acting in his latest movie! India – there really is no place like it. New Delhi Television report on the discovery of dozens of bodies, thought to be covid-19 victims, that have washed up along the banks of the Ganges, 10 May 2021

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Statistical data from Madurai-based activist and writer Muthu Krishnan Translated from the Tamil by Srividhya Subash

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A friend of mine has followed the same creative technique for a couple of decades: in the evenings, he puts a Hollywood movie – usually action or sci-fi – on tv, then settles down on his sofa and makes drawings, occasionally glancing up at the screen. The plots, alien invasion or whatever, are generally easy enough to follow that way, he says, and the rest makes for a gaudily colourful ambience while he’s getting something done that matters to him. He likes these flicks, but he doesn’t have any respect for them: they’re just big, dumb things going on in the background, phenomena of no real importance best kept at arm’s length. Anyway, in totally unrelated news, art fairs are back and art auctions are going great. Perhaps, like me, you’ve read some articles informing you of these facts – detailing the spending, wryly characterising those who’ve gone through the labyrinthine checks (if they truly had to) to get into Frieze New York as ‘art addicts’, tabulating the sellout booths in the Shed, etc; or noting, in texts that conflate the art market with the resale market, that auction prices are miraculously above prepandemic levels and nft sales are off a cliff. And then maybe, just maybe, you thought: why did I read that? These facts make no real difference to my life. I could have spent those ten minutes drawing, or taking a nap. For many of us without real stakes in the financial side of the artworld, it’s a reflex, this keeping-up: vaguely assumed to be part of that amorphous thing, The Discourse. And on one level maybe it’s good to know that the fair system is getting back on its feet, though personally I wish it would drop dead permanently and allow the gallery system to breathe. Overall, such kneejerk fidelity to the timeline has a depressant if not angering effect – it’s all too easy to correlate big spending on art with the big profits that the superrich have raked in during the pandemic, and seethe and sigh – and paying close attention is perhaps a sign of not knowing how to manage your attention. Is it worth ploughing through the updates in order to make a sardonic tweet about how fucked things are? Your mileage, as they say, may vary. A strange thing about the artworld, an artefact perhaps of its former smallness or a marker of hustling’s primacy, is the expectation among its denizens that one be clued-in on every

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Background Noise

When it comes to the art market, Martin Herbert has taken to wearing ignorance on his sleeve. He likes the look

Attendees of Frieze, New York, May 2021. Photo: Casey Kelbaugh. Courtesy Frieze, New York

echelon of it. Call me paranoid, or dutiful, but it seems like you have to know who the hot emerging artists are and you should also have opinions on Jeff Koons’s recent decision to [yawns] sorry, I drifted off there. You should be able to parse old sculpture, new media and all points between. (Most people can’t – I have no idea why I was being sent to review Rubens shows when I was twenty-three and hadn’t studied art history – but there you are.) Art people can have proclivities but mostly not bounded specialisms; and when the noise of commerce in the artworld becomes loud, or at least this is what current artworld reporting suggests, then one is meant to be attentive to that too, even if you don’t subscribe to The Art Newspaper. But when you’re a peon, whether you have or haven’t memorised sales stats makes no difference to much other than the quality of your dinner party chat – actually, it likely makes it worse – and anyway, currently there are no dinner parties. Not-knowing is acceptable, even admirable, in theoretical circles (when it pertains to instrumentalised doubt); maybe it could be so in practice, too. If you haven’t got it, flaunt it. Plus, if you bother to keep up to speed, or don’t bother to refuse to, a distortion effect comes into play whereby your conception of contemporary art gets muddled up with infrastructure, and, regardless of the fact that much art isn’t very good, the view is muddied. Somewhere on the edge of the mental picture of what art and its staging environment could be is people at an art fair whispering, ‘Hey, I think that’s Beeple’. It might be worth asking yourself what you don’t need to know about, what degree of ignorance is liveable, even beneficial. In Bill Porter’s book Road to Heaven (1993), clarifyingly subtitled ‘Encounters with Chinese Hermits’, the author describes meeting one such recluse in a mountainside hut in 1989. The monk, says Porter, asked him who this Chairman Mao was that the author kept talking about; such people, Porter adds, ‘had a way of smiling that made us feel we had met the happiest and wisest people in China’. Each to their own, of course, and being checked-out comes with all kinds of caveats depending on the context. But certain kinds of ignorance aren’t exclusive to Zen monks and, right now, really do sound like bliss.

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Art Featured

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Ines Doujak An artist with her finger on the pulse of historical and present injustice, and the ways in which these forces impact on the lives of individuals and societies, foresees fresh catastrophes by Christian Egger

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Following the completion of a carpenter’s apprenticeship and a rela- posed by the exhibition – ‘Is sovereignty possible beyond power? tively late start in art, Austrian Ines Doujak first came to wider atten- Can sovereignty occur by questioning relations of dominance?’ tion for Siegesgärten (Victory Garden), a 2007 work shown that year at – were put to a real public test. Documenta 12 in Kassel. A raised flowerbed installation, it featured Her research project Loomshuttles, Warpaths (2010–18), developed conventionally designed seed packets on which, in the place of with longtime collaborator John Barker, examined the troubled relainstructions for the germination and care of seedlings, were printed tionship of fabrics, clothing and the conditions of their manufacture, texts addressing the far-reaching consequences of land grabbing, starting with early forms of global capitalism. This led to the creabio-piracy and monopoly in the seed industry: an efficient presentation of an haute couture collection that, among other things, visution of an urgent situation to a large and diverse audience. This kind alised cost calculations made at the expense of textile-worker safety of thematic scrolling through and clarification of complex global through the garment itself. The artist went on to show these works in, economic processes and practices that have large, not always meas- among other places, the setting of an eight-part popup display, where urable, but often catastrophic consequences for the individual is a the collection could be admired, touched and even tried on in specially feature one encounters in the artist’s work again and again. The fact built changing rooms (sale, 2018, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz). that her long-term, research-based artistic works and projects so often Invited to take part in the Liverpool Biennial, originally scheduled for 2020, the artist proposed turn out to be topical may have less to Doujak’s papier-mâché sculpture a large sculpture for the opening do with an obvious striving for releparade, which, when cancelled (for vance than with the fact that many attracted such attention regarding its well-known reasons; the biennial of the problems and imbalances of inclusion in the show that it forced the itself was postponed to this year), the present stem from economic and resignation of the museum’s director and was reconceived, again with Barker, historical injustices that are the focus of the artist’s meticulous attention. the dismissal of the exhibition’s curators as Transmission: A series of five podcasts on Disease and Pandemics in a Distorted This focus has been evident since she first started showing her work, in the noughties, across topics ranging World (2021). Divided into approximately 30-minute programmes from concepts of homeland (for example through the history of structured around the terms Vaccine, Meat, Forked Tongue, Class and Carinthian Slovenes, an indigenous minority living within Austria’s Blame, the podcasts trace the origins and effects of pandemics borders), anti-Semitic image politics, heteronormativity and repre- throughout history. In these informative and entertaining sound collages, musical genres (medieval, folk, lounge, electronic...), sentations of age and femininity. Doujak’s papier-mâché sculpture for Not Dressed for Conquering audio samples, historical data and facts on the history and spread (Transport) (2010), shown in the group-exhibition The Beast and the of pandemics are presented by different speakers and musicians Sovereign (2015) at macba in Barcelona and depicting King Juan Carlos reading from texts by the artists. What becomes apparent, in these I of Spain, the Bolivian labour leader and activist Domitila Chúngara long-term portraits of Homo sapiens and viruses, are the recurring and a German shepherd engaged in a sexual act, attracted such atten- patterns in the causes and effects of pandemics. tion regarding its inclusion in the show that it forced the resignation Vaccine details the history of poor people, slaves, prisoners and of macba director Bartomeu Marí and the dismissal of cocurators soldiers who have been intentionally, but without their knowledge, Valentín Roma and Paul B. Preciado. In the process, the very questions infected over centuries for the purposes of medical study in the fight

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opening spread The Devil and the Uncle, 2020, three figures, printed cloth, wood, steel, leather, teeth, jewellery, with an accompanying audio piece (30 min), 180 × 250 × 300 cm

facing page Not Dressed for Conquering (Transport), 2010, papier-mâché, metal, polypropylene, cardboard, steel helmets, hand truck, dimensions variable

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above Loomshuttles, Warpaths, An Eccentric Archive (detail), 2010–2018, 48 textiles, 48 posters, two index posters, two exhibition books, dimensions variable

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Loadcarriers (detail), 2014, print on paper, gilded and painted eggs, textile design, bags, jewellery, sculpture, dimensions variable

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The Devil and the Uncle (detail), 2020, three figures, printed cloth, wood, steel, leather, teeth, jewellery, with an accompanying audio piece (30 min), 180 × 250 × 300 cm

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above Economies of Desperation, 2019, carpet, self-adhesive vinyl sticker, dimensions variable

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facing page Ghostpopulations (detail), 2016–ongoing, collages of historical prints from early-twentieth-century botanical wall charts and medical books, dimensions variable

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against various pandemics: syphilis, malaria, hiv. As shown in the case York cook Mary Mallon, an asymptomatic carrier of disease who, after of two French doctors who lobbied last year to use Africa as a testing infecting 53 others, was forcibly quarantined for the final two decades ground for covid-19 vaccinations, it is often a fundamentally racist of her life and has forever after been known as Typhoid Mary. It shows way of thinking, and one that sadly persists. For its accounts of how how culprits for pandemics have always been sought, and how they are the privatisation of healthcare systems in the West made it easier for almost always ‘found’ among the usual suspects (the poor, the dirty, the virus to spread, of the speed with which the virus circulated and migrants, strangers…). In addition to providing a summary of events, of inaccuracies in media coverage of the race to develop the Biontech, a global context and an analysis of the rhetoric used by the various Moderna, Astra Zeneca and Sputnik vaccines, the horror and drama actors and interest groups during covid-19, Transmission places the of the first part of the series is hard to beat. Meat investigates how current pandemic in a historical context in which such crises and industrial meat production has helped create ideal conditions for the states of emergency are the rule rather than the exception. spread of disease: as forests are cleared to create space to grow feed Doujak’s work has always aimed at uncovering knowledge and for cattle, environmental pressure is transferred to animals, which presenting complex forces in a manner that brings them back to a in turn transfer viruses to humans. level on which they can be consciously Blame makes reference to past outbreaks perceived. Further opportunities to In Forked Tongue, Doujak and Barker describe the pandemic from their experience the results of her longof disease and shows how culprits for point of view, sometimes in a laconic running, research-based projects can pandemics have always been sought, way. You find out here, for example, be found in this year’s Vienna Biennale, and are almost always ‘found’: among that the pair’s polystyrene sculpture, where her exhibition Landscape Painting, elaborately produced for the parade, at the Kunsthaus Wien, is dedicated to the poor, the dirty, migrants, strangers caused a serious studio fire. You hear investigating and exposing the practice of their daily battles with lockdown fatigue, and the political power- of land grabbing; and in a large retrospective of her work of the past lessness engendered by state-mandated passivity. Class opens on the three decades, to be shown at the Kunsthalle Wien in the autumn. ar role played by the Austrian ski resort Ischgl in the spread of the virus across Europe, and recalls a timely pandemic-preparedness exercise Ines Doujak: Landscape Painting is on view at the Kunsthaus organised in New York in October 2019. Also discussed: the spike in Wien through 3 October; a retrospective of her work will be on show us gun sales between March and July 2020; the sudden popularity at Kunsthalle Wien, 1 October – 16 January; and her project, with John Barker, for Liverpool Biennial 2021, Transmission: A series in England of previously unloved castles; studies of historic pandemics of five podcasts on Disease and Pandemics in a Distorted in Ecuador, Italy and Mexico that consistently show higher death World, is currently available through the biennial website rates in poorer sections of the population; the way astonishment that a wealthy district of Paris could suffer such high mortality during the Christian Egger is an artist and author based in Vienna. His book Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 quickly faded as it became apparent the Shows, Signals, Unvernehmen: Collected Re- & Interviews dead were servants of the residents. The fifth and final part, Blame, 2005–2020 was published last year also makes reference to past pandemic outbreaks, such as to the New

all images Courtesy the artist

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Michael Armitage by Martin Herbert

The Chicken Thief, 2019, oil on lubugo bark cloth, 200 × 150 cm. Photo: Theo Christelis. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London

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It’s been a productive and eventful seven years for the painter, who presents highlights from that period in London this summer (plus another substantial show in Copenhagen)

Mkokoteni, 2019, oil on lubugo bark cloth, 220 × 170 cm. Photo: Theo Christelis. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London

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Mydas, 2019, oil on lubugo bark cloth, 220 × 170 cm. Photo: Theo Christelis. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and White Cube, London

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Eleven years ago, Michael Armitage was a student in London’s Royal drought-stricken land, and wanted to turn things to gold so he could Academy Schools; now he has a solo show in the Royal Academy itself. feed his people. Armitage’s composition, driven by El Greco-ish The last time he exhibited in this building, it was at the end of what wristy bravura, locates the moment in the story where the king, he calls a “difficult but fundamental” postgraduate course during after being told he’ll get what he wants if he bathes in wine, is showwhich he broke down and rebuilt his approach to painting, mov- ering his thin black body in ruby booze against a star-dappled sky. ing from abstraction back to figuration and beginning to work The backdrop is a convergence of ghostly figures, fragmentary on the rough Ugandan bark cloth, lubugo, that’s now an integral aquamarine landscape based on Armitage’s in situ drawings of an part of his art. Returning to the fabled institution on Piccadilly, arid, drought-plagued region of contemporary northern Kenya, Armitage is presenting a minisurvey – Paradise Edict, which originated a wine-lapping cheetah and murky abstract elements open to interat Munich’s Haus der Kunst – extracting 15 paintings from his last pretation. The painting asks you to traverse it while pinning itself, seven years’ work, during which time he joined White Cube’s roster, in symbolic fashion, to a story that many only know as a distortion. had solo exhibitions from the Norval Foundation in Cape Town to Armitage’s paintings arise, he says, “whenever there’s something moma in New York and alternated his base between Nairobi, where he that presents itself which, to my mind, I feel like I’m unresolved in”. was born, in 1984, and London. It’s a In 2017, relatedly, he inveigled himMydas (2019) asks you to traverse it while lot for one person to process; which self into a tv crew filming an oppois perhaps why, when Armitage pinning itself, in symbolic fashion, to a story sition party rally in a Nairobi park pops up on my laptop screen, he during the 2017 general elections in that many only know as a distortion appears to be sitting peaceably in a Kenya. This led to paintings such as secluded cave. The Fourth Estate (2017), with a cluster of figures sitting in an empurok, it’s just his Zoom backdrop, and Armitage is actually settled in pled tree unfurling a picture of a frog, while the branches quiver a leather wingchair in his London studio; but the cave, Armitage clari- lyrically in the wind. If it’s likely many of Armitage’s viewers won’t fies, is an African one, underscoring the centrality of the artist’s home- grasp the details here, it’s also not important to him, since he’s operland to him. Kenya is the grounding locale of his luminous yet opaque ating in a space where issues of unmitigated truth – for instance, paintings, which merge imagery and influence from a range of sources in journalistic coverage of elections – are already open to question. – the East African artists he encountered in his youth; European greats For him paintings aren’t legible hubs of connotation so much as such as Gauguin, Goya and Titian; mythology, rumour and contempo- spaces of charged, freeform encounter in which much of what tranrary political events. In his canvases, time and place become fluid, and spires is nonverbal and subjective. This is an artist, after all, who all kinds of ostensible givens are undone in real time. cites as one of his most important exhibition experiences an El One of the paintings in the ra show, for instance, Mydas (2019), Greco show in which he ignored all the wall labels and so had little originated in Armitage’s reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. King idea of the religious content of the works. “Paintings just don’t have Midas has become a shorthand for greed, “but any meaning,” he says. “They are what they are, The Fourth Estate, 2017, oil on lubugo bark cloth, unless you allow them to have that for you. And he’s probably one of the most hopeful figures in 200 × 330 cm. Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. Photo: George Darrell. © the artist then they can be extraordinarily profound. But the whole book”, says Armitage; Midas ruled a

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in many ways it’s like trying to talk about, let’s say, Formula One but a similar influence-revealing way, a simultaneous exhibition for the Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Account of an Illiterate Man, places his paintonly having the language of fishing…” Of course, one can make something of the fact that lubugo, whose ings in the context of a collection-riffling array of works, from a study rough texture redirects the artist’s hand and which in Armitage’s for Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867) – a painting that paintings is often pitted with holes, is also used for funeral shrouds; Armitage says he’s looked at and thought about ‘thousands of times’ one can notice and thematise the animist equivalencing of humans, – to Egyptian mummies, paintings by Berthe Morisot, Goya and animals and landscape in his paintings. But the places where he Gauguin, and myth-themed marble sculptures and painted shrouds. wants to make definite assertions are, thus far, mostly outside of his In one section of the show, near etchings from Goya’s Los Caprichos painting practice. The son of a Kenyan mother and an English father, (1799), is Armitage’s Hope (2017), depicting a serene-looking woman, Armitage grew up in Nairobi – relocating to the uk when he was gazing past the viewer, who has just given birth to a donkey, the sixteen, later doing his undergraduate degree at the Slade. (Asked if umbilical cord still attached. This would be quixotic enough, but in he paints differently when he goes back, he deadpans, “Yes, with my the upper-right corner there appears, floating in a v-shaped prism of feet”.) Last year he set up the Nairobi colours, a generic washing machine, “Paintings just don’t have any meaning. Contemporary Art Institute in the while at bottom right a small black They are what they are, unless you allow city, a nonprofit ‘dedicated to the figure is either tumbling through growth and preservation of contemspace or just an illustration on a them to have that for you. And then cushion. The painting is done, as porary art in East Africa’. The ncai they can be extraordinarily profound” cocurated a vital auxiliary section in usual, on bark cloth, small sections Paradise Edict that functions as a minisurvey of a half-century of figu- of it stitched together in a parallel to how the compositional elements rative painting practice in the region via 35 works by six artists: Asaph collide different realities within structural surety. Ask Armitage how Ng’ethe Macua, Elimo Njau, Jak Katarikawe, Theresa Musoke, Sane he begins to structure such ensnaring, wrong-but-right things, to Wadu and Meek Gichugu. (This segment of the show will, at an as-yet- move between cultural hierarchies of images and stories, and his unspecified date, also be shown in Nairobi.) answer suggests a sagacity that connects his art back to a grand tradi“I had always been a bit frustrated with how a lot of the painters tion and, simultaneously, proffers an insight that eludes many artists I grew up with and have been influenced by have been represented who equate artmaking with encoding, rather than the refulgent and – in terms of colonialism and naive primitivism – and I knew how free act of looking. “Everything”, Armitage says simply, “is in the frustrated they were with these descriptions,” Armitage explains. service of the painting.” ar “They were also part of a history, and saw themselves that way, whether it was political and cultural movements like Pan-Africanism Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict can be seen at the Royal Academy of Art, London, through 19 September. Michael Armitage – Account or thinking about indigenous language.” As such, Armitage is using of an Illiterate Man is on view at the Glyptotek, Copenhagen, the cultural leverage he has to demonstrate that he’s not sui generis from 6 June to 17 October but part of a creative continuum, and also widening the spotlight. In

The Paradise Edict, 2019, oil on lubugo bark cloth, 220 × 420 cm. Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. Photo: Theo Christelis. © the artist

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Account of an Illiterate Man, 2020, oil on lubugo bark cloth, 150 × 100 cm. Private collection. Photo: Theo Christelis. © the artist

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Restoration The weathered works of New Orleans photographers Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun

“A lot of our work was inundated by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. In the beginning we were literally throwing [work] away because all we saw was big bins of this nasty water. The ones that we kept, we put in a freezer; we thought that that would stop the deterioration. And so when we started working with them again, I can’t even explain what happened, but the transformation of the slides and the negatives was just… beautiful.”

of floodwater. Before fleeing, the photographers had attempted to store their life’s work – rolls of exposed but undeveloped film, prints, negatives – in plastic bins, only to return to find their negatives waterlogged and, it was feared, ruined. Damaged became the first title they gave this series, five years later, when upon pulling the negatives from their frozen storage and discovering (through scanning) that the partial deterioration had abstracted the images with leaked colours and cracks to the Kodachrome film, McCormick and Calhoun decided New Orleans photographers Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun to experiment with printing the photos. ‘The original images were have spent more than four decades, both individually and as partners, full of joyful people, rhythms, movement, sound and celebrations, documenting their city – their focus the preservation of Louisiana which is still ever present,’ the photographers write. ‘You can hear the culture and traditions, as well as the memories of people, friends and music and see these images bursting with as much energy, spirit and neighbours who make up their local community in the Ninth Ward. vibrations as the vibrant colors and symbols they hold.’ The series is They have pictured the traditions of Black church services and reli- now known as Right to Return. gious rituals, jazz funerals, community rites and parades; and docuFifteen years later, and still undergoing the slow project of mented the diminishing work of manual labourers in sugarcane fields, rebuilding its community, the Ninth Ward faces another crisis; sweet-potato harvesters and dockworkers and longshoremen of New this time, the globally shared covid-19 pandemic. McCormick and Orleans’s waterfront. In 2004 McCormick and Calhoun extended this Calhoun’s documentation of the last year reflects – in a similar sense series on work and workers to document the conditions of inmates at to the survival and transformation of the negatives that make up Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (an hour’s drive north of state Right to Return – the ways in which their community has dealt with the traumas of the pandemic, social unrest and capital Baton Rouge, and as the photographers page 56 Calhoun and McCormick, Treme 1996, 2010 the everpresent threat of the region’s hurricane have previously written about it, a former ‘slavepage 57 Calhoun, Lower 9th Ward Kids Bike Ride, 2020 breeding plantation named for the African season: to find the resilience that allows them to page 58 Keith Calhoun, 1988, 2010 nation from which “the most profitable” slaves, look beyond the damage. Fi Churchman page 59 Calhoun, George Floyd Protests, New Orleans, 2020 according to slave owners, were kidnapped’). Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun In 2005 Hurricane Katrina reached New page 60 McCormick, Dancing in the Streets, 1996, 2010 founded the L9 Center for the Arts in 2007 Orleans. By the time the levees failed at the page 61 McCormick, Mother Combing Hair 4, 2020 and continue to run arts programmes and Ninth Ward, McCormick and Calhoun, along page 62 Calhoun, Abstract Tuba Fats, photography workshops for young people in with most of their neighbourhood, had already New Orleans, 1984, 2010 the Lower Ninth Ward. They were awarded been forced to evacuate. The ward was destroyed, page 63 Calhoun, New Orleans Funeral During the 2021 Southern Prize and State Fellowship with some parts of the district under six metres Covid19 Pandemic 4, 2021

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Rindon Johnson In worlds virtual and actual, from speculative ecological fictions to sculpture on the scale of a skyscraper, the artist’s diverse works all graze in the same fertile pasture: language by Emily McDermott

It’s tempting to draw a line between physical and virtual realities, but the titular insurance and investment corporation in 1969. This work each one bleeds directly into the others. Lived reality is virtual reality is embodies what artist Matt Keegan has said: biography and identity augmented reality, as Rindon Johnson’s expansive practice evidences. are tools to stake a claim. ‘I believe this is my building,’ Johnson writes The California-born, Berlin-based artist’s work encompasses media in The Law of Large Numbers, ‘so it is my building.’ ranging from virtual and augmented reality to physical sculpture and The opposite approach to such a conceit is found in his virtualmaterials like leather, wood and stone; he addresses topics equally reality film Meat Growers: A Love Story (2019), which addresses gender wide-ranging, from his identity as a Black trans American to the and race in the form of absence. The characters remain androgyglobal climate crisis. Johnson, as he writes in his most recent book, nous and their races ambiguous as they navigate a post-Green New The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss (2021), refuses ‘to walk a line Deal Napa Valley. In the speculative fabulation, strip malls have been that is thin, straight, or secure’. But the roots of his works can all be replaced with food forests and meat-growing plants, there are no paved roads in sight and the viewer’s character carpools to work in traced back to one thing: language. Johnson has authored four books to date, including Meet in the a solar-powered Volkswagen Beetle. The narration provides poetic ruminations on love and longing, on Corner (2017), a book that can only be Each of Johnson’s artworks begins exploitation and sustainability, while read – or, rather, experienced – in virthe chosen media provides a space fit tual reality. The Law of Large Numbers with a set of questions, often along is an artist’s book that also acts as the for making the world anew. the lines of, ‘What is something called, catalogue for his two-part exhibition, Our ecological crisis – with an why do we call it that and what can be Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies, curunderlying, though visually absent, rently on view at SculptureCenter in done about it or what can be changed?’ reflection on race – is also seen in Coeval Proposition #2: Last Year’s Atlantic, New York, and Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves, set to open later this year at Chisenhale Gallery in London. In or You look really good, you look like you pretended nothing ever happened, Johnson’s practice, the format of the book provides context and adds or a Weakening (2021). For this installation, Johnson collected ocean a multitude of additional layers to his sculptural and digital works. weather-data for 24 hours a day from March 2020 through January Beyond books, each of his artworks also begins with a set of ques- 2021 to create a live video projection that figuratively visualises the tions, often along the lines of, ‘What is something called, why do we information. For the duration of the SculptureCenter and Chisenhale call it that and what can be done about it or what can be changed?’ shows, the ocean reflected back to visitors will be as it was in that Language is a fundamental part of his practice, because, as he says exact moment one year prior. From Johnson’s perspective as a Black during a Zoom studio-visit, it is “the most liberatory thing we’ve got”. American, the Atlantic Ocean is a space imbued with meaning, but the Take, for example, Coeval Proposition #1: Tear down so as to make flat work also functions on another level: the exact midpoint between the with the Ground or The *Trans America Building dismantle everything New York and London exhibition venues happens to be in the middle (2021). Without the lengthy appellation, it of the North Atlantic ‘cold blob’, or ‘warming Outside I have never been lonesome, Always a fence, would appear to be a large redwood sculpture hole’, an unusual manifestation of global a plank, an eyebrow in the ocean, A baby received in consisting of two simple concentric pyramids, warming that is critical to our understanding a house, anything tall is a tree, The sky rearranges itself one slightly smaller and inverted. Through the thereof. In brief, the blob is a cold-temperature in the desert, The sky rearrange itself in the water, title of the work, however, Johnson reclaims The sky rearrange itself while I am in the sky, How lucky anomaly of ocean water that contributes to the I thought I was to see the street lights turn on, Clouds one of San Francisco’s most iconic buildings for slowing of the Gulf Stream. The blob’s growth like rows of planting, mistakes we make and agree to could, in theory, prevent – and is likely, at the himself and any other trans person who wants it. continue, 2021, leather and whiskey, 173 × 153 cm. bare minimum, to redirect – the flow of warm The geometric formation becomes an ebonised Photo: Paul Salveson. Courtesy the artist and water that usually moves upwards past the François Ghebaly, Los Angeles & New York outline of the Transamerica Pyramid, built by

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British Isles and Norway. And, as Johnson asks in the catalogue, ‘What been suspended with white cotton rope outside, above the entrance happens without the Gulf Stream? Nothing Good.’ He then brings to SculptureCenter, since January. Soon some of the cows will leave the piece full circle: ‘We are going to be victims of the systemic gener- the field and travel to Los Angeles, where they’ll be presented – from ational hubris of those crap industrial, colonial ancestors, fellow mid-May – at François Ghebaly gallery. Yet the cows will continue to react to the elements and their surroundings. Johnson’s works are humans, and selves.’ In addition to technology and language, it must be said that cows intentionally never fixed, never sealed to a point where they’re unable also play a significant role in Johnson’s practice. This is to be considered to change. “I would hate to make a work that is static,” he says. an amazing place. (panel #1) (2020), an abstract drawing with coloured Just as the elements will continue to make their marks on these pencil on varnished leather, is an example of his ongoing experi- cows, the wood used to make Coeval Proposition #1 will eventually ments with cowskins, while in his virtual reality experience Diana Said: decompose. Similarly, a viewer will never have the same experience (2019), cows appear as the sole creatures. Johnson first used leather and twice when viewing works like Coeval Proposition #2, Meat Growers: A Love rawhide in 2018 in the same vein that artist Susan Rothenberg used the Story or Diana Said:. In this regard, the only fixed aspect of Johnson’s horse: he didn’t hate cows, but he also practice is the written word – the titles, didn’t particularly like them; he had no texts and books forever intertwined He didn’t hate cows, but he also didn’t with both his physical and digital real relationship to them. They were particularly like them; he had no real works. But even these should not be enough of a nothing that they could relationship to them. They were enough deemed a constant. While words can be a form. But soon he felt a kinship with the pieces of leather and rawhide, be used to name and describe, they can of a nothing that they could be a form or ‘cows’, as he endearingly calls them: also create chasms and suggest parathey are byproducts of a vicious process, as are Black Americans. Now, digm shifts, as is often the case with Johnson’s practice. They can instil three years later, he goes so far as to write in The Law of Large Numbers, new forms of thinking where other modes of perception fail. Such is ‘We are coeval, the cow and myself, and by making the work, creating the power of language. ar the work, and then selling the work away, we remain coeval.’ During our studio-visit, Johnson takes me to a sun-drenched field Rindon Johnson’s Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies can be seen at SculptureCenter, New York, through 2 August. His exhibition The Valley in Sonoma, California, where he’s currently working – a change of of the Moon is on view at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, through 19 scenery from his adopted home of Berlin. When he flips the camera June. Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves opens at Chisenhale Gallery, on his phone around, his face is replaced with a number of ‘cows’ on a London, in November. And a collaborative exhibition, This End the Sun, tarp. A piece of purple furniture leather is covered with rusted pipes, a with Maryam Hoseini and Jordan Strafer, is on view at the New Museum, blue one with broken cinderblocks and shellac. The leathers have been New York, 30 June – 3 October exposed to the elements for at least 18 months and are being made in the same way as For example, collect the water just to see it pool there above your Emily McDermott is a writer and editor based in Berlin head. Don’t be a Fucking Hero! (2021–) – a large piece of rawhide that has

above Coeval Proposition #2: Last Year’s Atlantic, or You look really good, you look like you pretended like nothing ever happened, or a Weakening, 2021, realtime Portrait Animating Program, projectors, platform, computer. Photo: Kyle Knodell. Courtesy SculptureCenter, New York; Chisenhale Gallery, London; and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles & New York

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preceding spread Meat Growers: A Love Story, 2019, virtual reality work, 13 min 42 sec, 4096 × 2160 pixels

above This is to be considered an amazing place. (panel #1), 2020, leather, varnish, coloured pencil, dimensions variable

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all but one image Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles & New York

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Ángela Gurría Rocks by Gaby Cepeda

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At the beginning of Ángela Gurría’s long, prolific career sits an episode that would work perfectly as the first act of a feel-good Netflix biopic. The year is 1965. The sculptor, who turned ninety-two this year, is determined to make her mark on Mexico’s sexist society. She wants a shot at public sculpture. She wants to grow her ideas to monumental scale and she knows that to do so she must enter the public competitions in which those commissions are awarded. Women are not welcome, however. It’s an unspoken yet obvious policy at the time, but she decides to go for it nevertheless. Under a male pseudonym, composed of a dear friend’s first name and a last name a letter or two off her own: Alberto Urrías. Urrías/Gurría wins the first prize. The jury is disgusted but acquiescent when she reveals her subterfuge. But she goes on to create La Familia Obrera (The Working Family, 1965), a four-metre-high bronze sculpture installed at the headquarters of a tobacco company in downtown Mexico City. Gurría discovered her obsession with transforming materials – especially rocks like limestone, volcanic rock and marble, but also iron, steel, bronze and obsidian – early. She often tells a story about walking around her neighbourhood in Mexico City as a kid and hearing stonemasons pounding rocks; it was the rhythm of the constant movement, the sound and its reverberations, that she believes seduced her into pursuing sculpture as a practice. As an occasional music composer, Gurría is very sensitive to sound and rhythm; it still lures her and continues to fuel a curiosity for new materials in all kinds of sizes. She also credits Geles Cabrera, often recognised as the first professional Mexican sculptor, with inspiring her to pursue an art career seriously, having witnessed what a woman could achieve by collaborating with rocks. Still, Gurría occupies an awkward historiographical space. She isn’t really included in the Generación de la Ruptura (Breakaway Generation), who departed from Mexican muralism during the 1950s, although she is considered to be one of the pioneers of abstract sculpture in Mexico; and even though she worked with Helen Escobedo and Sebastián occasionally, she wasn’t really counted in the notable movements of which they were a part, like Arte Otro or the Salón Independiente – though she did participate in the latter’s first show in 1968. Yet she is also one of very few women artists mentioned when the story of twentieth-century Mexican sculpture gets told, alongside Escobedo, Cabrera and María Lagunes. All of these last (and Gurría) make appearances – along with Rosa Castillo and Elizabeth Catlett – in Monumental (2020), an ambitious exhibition at Museo de Arte Moderno (mam), curated by artist Pedro Reyes, in which he delineates prevailing influences among modernist Mexican sculptors, most prominently: preHispanic art, Land art and geometry. Indeed, in recent years, Reyes has taken it upon himself to proselytise for the works of that particular generation – starting a movement to save the view around the Espacio Escultórico at unam’s campus, promoting Cabrera’s mostly forgotten

practice – with all of it culminating in the massive exhibition at mam in which a narrative, centred around the figure of painter and sculptor Mathias Goeritz, about the meeting point of abstract art and public sculpture, was fully materialised. Reyes, after all, spent several years earlier in his career organising exhibitions and creating works at La Torre de los Vientos (The Wind Tower, 1968), a massive Gonzalo Fonseca sculpture that was part of La Ruta de la Amistad (The Route of Friendship, 1968), an impressive project that lined 17km of Mexico City landscape with 19 monumental public sculptures designed by artists from every continent as a welcome to international visitors to the 1968 Olympic Games, and in which Escobedo and Gurría were the only two women artists to participate. Gurría’s Señales (Signs, 1968), standing at 18m tall, consists of twin concrete structures, one white and one black, that look as if the two halves of a parabola have been broken off and then placed next to each other. Their heavy rectangular bases ground the tall, slender arms that gracefully curve and point towards the sky. Since their creation, the group of sculptures in the project has often fallen into disrepair: fortunes have waxed and waned, and their upkeep is handled today by wealthy families and corporate structures like the History Channel and American Express. Gurría’s, however, was moved when it got in the way of stubborn urban planning. Some years later, a more cursed fate awaited gucadigose’s first largescale public project. The group’s name comprised two initial letters of each of the last names of its members – Gurría, Cabrera, (Juan Luis) Díaz, Goeritz and Sebastián. In 1976 they were commissioned by then president Luis Echeverría to build sculptures to adorn an urbanmodernisation project in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. Each artist would design a monument inspired by the simplicity and geometry of a nearby Mayan archaeological site, Comalcalco, taking into account the natural elements surrounding each of their chosen locations. Gurría created El Caracol (The Conch, 1976), a circular base with a spiral ramp that arrived at the top, covered in red bricks and located at a traffic circle close to what was then called the Museo de Tabasco. As the story goes, its location doomed it. The museum’s founder, famed poet and politician Carlos Pellicer, was said to have disliked the structure for blocking the facade of his beloved institution; he had it destroyed as soon as Echeverría’s term as president ended, in 1978. Gurría’s was the first of the five commissioned sculptures to be demolished; Goeritz’s was the last to be taken down, in 2008. Even as these visible – and perhaps a little thankless – collective experiences punctuate her career, Gurría states today that she never really felt part of an artistic community. If her work serves as any indication, one could argue that her true communion (in the sense of mental and spiritual exchange) occurred exclusively between her and

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opening spread, left Ángela Gurría, photographed by Kati Horna in 1969. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City

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opening spread, right Cáctus, 1993, laminated iron, 38 × 14 × 14 cm. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City

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facing page La Familia Obrera, 1965, bronze, 400 cm (height). Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City

above Paseo Tollocan (Popular Toys), Paseo Tollocan, Mexico City, 1972, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Kati Horna. Courtesy the artist

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Homenaje al trabajador del drenaje profundo, Tenayuca, Mexico City, 1974–75, reinforced cement and iron modules, five towers, dimensions variable. Photo: Kati Horna. Courtesy the artist

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the materials that surrounded her. As she put it: “Some rocks don’t subjectively imagined but practically experienced.’ It is in this praclike me and I can feel that, but others open themselves, they want tical experience, in this decades-long hands-on process with mateme, they help me… and something comes out of me, but it’s them rials, that Gurría seems to have forged the most informing and valuwho are giving it to me. How many forms do we hold inside of us? able relationship for her art. How many interior curves, coinciding with another curve already Her work is often described in terms of opposites, life versus existing within a rock?… It’s so precise.” This sense of a material death, natural versus industrial, light versus dark, but I would argue call is especially obvious in her marble pieces, such as Nube (Cloud, the contrary: her art is an attempt at creating a world that is unified, 1973), in which Gurría seems to follow commands from the rock, beyond the binaries of human versus nonhuman, natural versus articeding her own agency in recognition of what a pattern, a vein, a crack ficial, landscape versus edifice, alive versus inert. She doesn’t claim or a crevice is suggesting. The work is a huge rectangle of irregular to bring materials to life through some kind of artistic miracle; greyish-white marble, and the seams of the rock appear to be barely she is simply able to know and interpret the life already within altered by Gurría – a few wavy them to find them a form, a place lines following the rock’s veins and a character that is readable “Some rocks don’t like me and I can feel that, create the kind of cloudy horizon for the rest of us. but others open themselves, they want me, one can see out airplane windows, There’s another episode in they help me… and something comes out of Gurría’s history that’s made for the effect of softness and ethereal a biopic: the first artwork she movement eloquently acted out me, but it’s them who are giving it to me. How by the stone-cold slab. many forms do we hold inside of us? How many ever sold (when she was a teenSome rocks (of limestone, ager) was a song. Indeed, another interior curves, coinciding with another curve for example) seem more coopof her occasional compositions, erative, more willing to bend to already existing within a rock?… It’s so precise” El día que me dijiste (The Day You Gurría’s wishes. This is the case Told Me, 1963), was famously with Calavera (Skull, 1993), a sculpture in which the simplest lines and performed by ranchera music legend Chavela Vargas. Fittingly it is gestures describe a human skull, a symbol of death: a clean inverted a love song about stars confusing their night sky home for the darkvase silhouette, two eye-holes carved at the top, a line going through ness of one’s heartbreak. A song about humans being home to the the middle accentuating that a crack at the top has matter-of-factly beauty of the stars. ar interrupted the symmetry. Gurría’s ease at achieving synthesis of form, her skill at evoking natural elements in the most economic of Work by Ángela Gurría is on show at Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City, terms, is a testament to her deep understanding of the minerals she 19 June – 21 August, and is included in Monumental. Dimensión works with. This insight chimes with what British anthropologist pública de la escultura. 1927–1979 at Museo de Arte Moderno, Tim Ingold describes in a 2007 text, ‘Materials Against Materiality’: Mexico City, through 3 December ‘the properties of materials [are not fixed] but are rather procesGaby Cepeda is an independent curator and writer based in Mexico City sual and relational. They are neither objectively determined nor

Mexican postage stamp from 1976 featuring Gurría’s Señales sculpture, part of the Ruta de la Amistad for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Courtesy the artist

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The Observer

Igshaan Adams KICKING DUST 19 MAY – 25 JULY 2021 Installation view of Igshaan Adams Kicking Dust at Hayward Gallery, 2021 © Igshaan Adams, 2021. Photo © Mark Blower

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Art Reviewed

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Kader Attia The Museum of Repair State of Concept, Athens 14 April – 19 June The visitor to Kader Attia’s exhibition at State of Concept enters a small enclosure created out of temporary security fencing staked in concrete blocks. Alongside two flat-screen monitors, a smattering of a4 printed texts are attached to the wire mesh cage by cable ties: closer inspection reveals them to be articles from Western news outlets on the ‘migrant crisis’. Once I have read a few of these stories, the only thing left to do is sit on the plastic chair and watch the subtitled interviews playing onscreen. That this minimalist installation is one of the few concessions to the affective strategies that conventionally distinguish art from documentary gives you an idea of the show’s character; that I sat there for close to two-and-a-half hours on my first sitting speaks to how compelling the material is; that this accounted for less than half of the five-hour duration of this work alone hints at the demands it makes of the viewer. Reason’s Oxymorons (2015) is a compilation of 18 short films on the subject of Western and non-Western approaches to psychiatric health. Through interviews with mostly Francophone ethnographers, ethnopsychologists and ethnomusicologists – with interludes from musicians and philosophers – the selection introduces the dominant themes and forms of the exhibition: the continuing failure of the West to acknowledge the limits of its own empire and epistemology, explored through talkinghead conversations with academics and nonacademics on subjects from the West African animist tradition of Ndeup to the restitution of looted artefacts. Because it takes a while to

pick up the thread, my attention is drawn to the homes and offices in which the speakers are filmed. And what’s startling here is how many of these academics talking about the relation of psychological disorder to forced displacement speak from the comfort of offices decorated by African masks, sculptures and ritual objects. That this is slightly shocking – like spotting a stuffed head behind someone delivering an online lecture on species conservation – might be the highest compliment to the work in this minisurvey of Attia’s decade at the forefront of decolonial art practice. Projected onto a standing screen at the back of the gallery, The Object’s Interlacing (2020) directly addresses the restitution of displaced artefacts from Western museums and exposes how the principles upon which those institutions are founded continue to serve the purposes of colonial power. That it is not perfectly coherent is to the work’s credit: the jarring juxtaposition of a Parisian psychoanalyst with a West African blues musician is one means by which Attia unsettles conventional patterns of reasoning in order to challenge the academic tendency to categorise, compartmentalise, ring-fence and control. The Body’s Legacies: Part 2: The Post-Colonial Body (2018), in which four decolonial thinkers explore the institutionalised nature of police brutality against France’s Black population, makes explicit how abstract systems are enforced through the perpetration of violence against individual and collective bodies. Attia’s reluctance to privilege one form of thinking over another is a way of resisting the kind of cold calculation that continues to be used to justify real harm.

facing page, bottom The Museum of Repair, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Stathis Mamalakis. © State of Concept, Athens

facing page, top The Object’s Interlacing, 2020, single-channel video installation, colour, sound, 60 min. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis. © State of Concept, Athens

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Attia’s project is necessarily generalising, and the breadth of his brush can sometimes paint over the nuances of cultural exchange or oversimplify the analogy between physical and psychological exile. Yet one means by which these films are distinguished from the academic institutions they critique is by generating a productive dialectic with the local context in which they are shown, rather than affecting to stand above it. In the shadow of the Parthenon, issues around restitution, repair and the instrumentalisation of culture to serve a European mythos take on a specific hue; when the daily news is of an authoritarian government’s encampment of refugees in makeshift prisons, temporary security fencing carries a resonance. Perhaps because I experienced it as a coda to the longer moving-image works, the most affecting film in the show lasts only two minutes and features no words. La Tour Robespierre (2018) is a single shot of the modernist facade of one of the ‘grands ensembles’ that house the immigrant populations of Paris, shot by a drone ascending steadily from bottom to top. At a squint, the camera might be tracking over the canvas of a De Stijl painting. The work reveals how closely the principles underpinning high modernist art and architecture – the supposed apotheosis of reason and creative autonomy from the world – are related to those of state surveillance and control. At the conclusion of the drone’s ascent, it peers over the building into an open landscape. Then, on a loop, it returns to the bottom and starts again. Ben Eastham

ArtReview

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Sula Bermúdez-Silverman Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl California African American Museum 28 February 2020 – 2 May 2021 Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles explores ephemera, identity and history. In both form and concept, the six central works in the show contemplate the artist’s Jewish and Afro-Puerto Rican heritage while gesturing more broadly to ideas of preservation, mutability and decay. The exhibit – housed in a single room at usc’s California African American Museum – has technically had a whopping 14-month run, a timeframe that has seen multiple lockdowns, a historic uprising for racial justice, two presidents, a weeks-long spell during which la was the global epicentre of the covid-19 pandemic and, tentatively, a city reopening. While the artist’s mixed-heritage identity may take centre stage, the artworks themselves also fall outside of established categorisation. For example, in one featured series of works, three large transparent plastic sheets hang from the ceiling (Red Hook, New York, 2015; Austin, Texas, 2018; Los Angeles, California, 2019–20). Rather than patchwork fabric, these quilts gain their colours from readymade and occasionally colour-coded detritus, like ticket stubs, lighters, empty Marlboro packs and someone’s torn nametag. Two of the three quilts use a grid design, each object filed into its perfect square. One, however, uses more elaborate quilting, with alternating diagonal lines to evoke the traditional patchwork blankets. Bermúdez-Silverman’s quilts are as much in conversation with Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules (1974–87) as they are with conceptual sculpture; equally, they nod to the 1970s feminist art movement, elevating traditionally

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feminine ‘crafts’ like quilting, weaving and embroidery to the realm of contemporary art. Whatever the genre, Bermúdez-Silverman is a rogue archivist, losing nothing. Many of the other works in Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl also pull from evocative found objects – a used Afro pick; pastel-coloured wads of chewed gum – and from the artist’s own head, as she uses her hair as material in both 3c / 4a (2017), a drop spindle wrapped in a hexagon of dark brown hair, and her found lace doilies (2014–17), carefully embroidered with hair instead of thread. There is a sense, throughout the show, of the dutiful preservation of ephemera. Strikingly, many of these objects do not purport to be important. In fact, they are overtly the opposite: our dirty discards; our trash. Provocatively, Bermúdez-Silverman encases or enshrines such objects respectfully, even lovingly. One of the show’s more surprising inclusions is a cameo from Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who incited ire in 2015 after it was discovered she had posed for years as a Black woman, even taking a leadership role in her local naacp. In two multichannel video installations, Duck Test and Removal of Faux Locs Installed by Nkechi Diallo (aka Rachel Dolezal) (both 2018), Bermúdez-Silverman enlisted Dolezal to braid her hair, a process that took more than seven hours. Screening on loop via small tablets as part of a larger installation, Removal of Faux Locs… preserves both a faded pop-culture punchline and a onetime performance piece ad infinitum. These videos play alongside a collection of religious ritual objects from both Judaism and Santeria. The juxtaposition – the ridiculous

paired, it seems, with the sublime – raises questions about that which makes us what we are. In a show largely comprising serial, found-object works, Bermúdez-Silverman depicts identity as a constellation: the lasting glow of disappearing things. The highlight of Bermúdez-Silverman’s exhibition is her title work, Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl (2019–20): a row of ten multicoloured, almost-transparent sugar dollhouses, positioned atop lightboxes. The dollhouses have been modelled after the artist’s childhood one, but are this time constructed using glass and sugar, a reference to the artist’s Puerto Rican ancestors, who worked on sugarcane plantations. I had seen photographs of these dollhouses prior to viewing the show in person, and even virtually they moved me: their murky walls of sugar and glass; a row – like a suburban block – of nearly-identical homes, poured from the same mould; the cracked windows where imperfections, inescapable, slipped in. In person, though, the dollhouses are outright breathtaking. They stand tall, meeting the viewer at eye level. Each house varies in its presentation, though most are open at the back, allowing viewers to peek in at multistorey saccharine homes affixed with miniature furniture, sugar staircases and glittery stickers, or packed full of a glowing green plastic forest. The sugar edifices, radiant and fragile, are inherently impermanent, a brave choice for an artist who otherwise makes tight stitches out of losable things. In a show that questions the pillars of identity and history, beauty glows from the cracks in between. Eliza Levinson

ArtReview

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facing page Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl, 2020 (installation view featuring Red Hook, New York, 2015, Austin, Texas, 2018, and Los Angeles, California, 2019–20). Photo: Elon Schoelhotz. Courtesy the artist and California African American Museum, Los Angeles

above Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl, 2020 (installation view with detail of the exhibition’s title-work sugar-and-glass dollhouses). Photo: Elon Schoelhotz. Courtesy the artist and California African American Museum, Los Angeles

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Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Margaret Honda, Silvia Kolbowski Reprise Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna 4 March – 8 May Reprise continues Felix Gaudlitz’s strategy of exhibiting the most bloody-minded kinds of minimalism – these 13 works all make a show of their own retreat from visual stimulation into discourse about what counts as a ‘work’. Each questions its own existence as art and the conditions for its display as such – hardly the most original move, since this forms part of the standard lore of minimalism and conceptual art – and offers the viewer plenty to talk about (if they can find the words) even if they are left with little to look at. This is crystallised in the a4 wall text from Silvia Kolbowski’s Enlarged from the Catalogue: February 1990 (1990), a collection of 16 catalogues (whose subjects include Jenny Holzer, Pierre Bonnard and moma’s 1989 exhibition Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism) mounted on three rows of Plexiglas shelving. The text explains

that they are all from special exhibitions held at New York institutions during February 1990 – dominated by mostly European male artists – but goes on to quote extensively from Jacques Derrida’s explanation of the meaning of deconstruction from Positions (1972), before asking if these words and this display constitute an appropriate art-object: ‘Does reading them on a gallery wall take the pleasure/satisfaction out of looking at pictures?’ it asks. That sums it up: Reprise almost gleefully refuses the viewer any libidinal investment, but that doesn’t mean its contents are entirely joyless. Margaret Honda’s Elements from “Perennial” (1997/2020) consists of part of the artist’s archive from the last two and a half decades contained in shiny, silvery Marvelseal barrier foil (an extremely resistant material

first used by the us military). This serves a vital function: it not only ‘protects’ Honda’s work, but allows it – here and now, in front of us – to question its own status as something that is visible, exchangeable and collectible, since the very condition of our seeing it today is the concealment of the original sculptural material from 23 years ago. Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter’s seven-part Pocket Liner series (2021), meanwhile, is a selection of single words taken from cut-up paper receipts glued onto graph paper, turning them into concrete poetry. Pocket Liner 1 says, ‘The Grand handling of information or Your truthfully printed letter may be needed’. Pocket Liner 3 is the shortest of the bunch, reading ‘how to read the time: Item thyme’, like a ransom note written by incompetent kidnappers filled with temporal dread. Max L. Feldman

Margaret Honda, Elements from “Perennial”, 1997–2020, Plexiglas, polyethylene, bubble wrap, cardboard, Marvelseal, 71 × 56 × 15 cm. Courtesy the artist and Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna

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Lindsey Mendick Hairy on the Inside Cooke Latham Gallery, London 15 April – 21 May Humans have told many stories to make sense of hormonal transformations, among them tales of werewolves: metaphors for the beast within, carnality and adolescence. The red-hooded heroine of Angela Carter’s story ‘The Company of Wolves’ (1979) has ‘just started her woman’s bleeding’ when she sets out to visit grandma, but already knows ‘the worst wolves are hairy on the inside’. In Lindsey Mendick’s immersive exhibition, the hormonal lycanthrope becomes a cypher for the artist herself. Lifesize bipedal figures in cotton hospital gowns are seated along the jolly walls of a fantastical gynaecology and paediatrics unit. In place of human faces they sport wolf masks; hairy claws burst through their clunky rubber clogs. Heavy in glazed ceramic, these have the horror-comic vigour

of Halloween props, though some feature acupuncture needles and, on the wolf faces, anxious expressions. Arranged around a plastic play-table, Mr Potato Head and Sylvanian Families toys undergo a grim transformation: their surfaces carbuncled and breached by lupine snouts. These imperilled infants are Mendick’s potential offspring, and those of other women suffering polycystic ovary syndrome, which lowers ovulation (and thus fertility) and raises ‘male’ hormones, leading to weight-gain and excess body hair. A film reduces Mendick to a mouth and chin, the offending body parts around which her wolf within – the alien hormones flooding her body – has pushed long dark hairs. Between clips from werewolf movies,

including Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984), Mendick sips red wine and invites us to notice it catching on her lip hair. She shares horror stories. There are cruel adolescent encounters. There are also conflicting pressures: an adult world in which a woman is expected both to be a good feminist in accepting her body, and to mourn her lost fertility. Mendick wishes to do neither, and worries she’ll be judged superficial. This is sticky, awkward, womanly stuff: prime territory for this artist, who has previously explored coercive control and the intersection of sexual fantasy and the domestic. Wit and sly referencing sweeten the pain, but Mendick’s use of myth and old stories reminds us, too, how cruel they are to women who can’t, or won’t, stick to the path. Hettie Judah

Lindsey Mendick and Guy Oliver, Hairy on the Inside (still), 2021, single-channel hd video. © the artists. Courtesy Cooke Latham Gallery, London

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Bigger than Myself: Heroic Voices from Ex-Yugoslavia maxxi, Rome 5 May – 12 September When my grandmother was seventeen, back in 1948, she travelled to join a voluntary youth work action to build the motorway from Zagreb to Belgrade, in the newly formed Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She would recount how they’d work themselves to the bone during the day and in the evenings would sit around campfires, eating, joking and singing together. These men and women, boys and girls really, were not only actively rebuilding a country ravaged by war; they were also collectively building something utopian: a country that would go on to afford them free education, free healthcare, a job, up to two years of maternity leave, a home, paid vacations. This story always struck a chord with me, acquiring an almost mythological patina. Why, I pressed my grandmother – having never done a day of hard labour in my life – were they willing to do it for free?

maxxi’s Bigger than Myself: Heroic Voices from Ex-Yugoslavia seeks to reclaim a formerYugoslavian narrative that is not of the simplistic ‘blood and honey’ variety, where the emphasis is on the hatred and love that tore the country apart. Instead, it focuses on the positive aspects of Yugoslavia’s socialist ideology and culture as lessons we can draw on to imagine a life greater than ourselves, where we all – in the words of curator Zdenka Badovinac – ‘contribute to the building of a society of solidarity and a healthy planet’. It is one of the most hopeful, rallying shows I have seen in a long time. The 60 artists in the exhibition – hailing from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia and Slovenia – frequently reference the emancipatory potential of their history, investing it with resistance to

the current reactionary forces, the unbridled neoliberalism, the zealous nationalist and autocratic tendencies, consolidating in the region. A row of potted birches line the stairs to the show, a watering can at their side; this is Nada Prlja’s What Would Happen If We Succeed? (2001), and it invites viewers to donate their labour to help grow the trees. Just as volunteers in Yugoslavia had once come together to reforest its countryside or build new roads and railways, Prlja urges us to undermine and disrupt the course of today’s rationalism, to unite and embrace civic responsibilities. Women are notably prominent here as artists and protagonists. Once equal to men, contributing in large numbers to the Nazi resistance and later building the country, they find themselves marginalised in ever more conservative countries following the breakup

above and facing page Bigger than Myself: Heroic Voices from Ex-Yugoslavia, 2021 (installation views). Courtesy maxxi, Rome

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of Yugoslavia. In the video installation bodyscapes #1: Woman in battle (2019), Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović explore feminist storytelling. We hear former partisan Sonja Vujanović, now elderly, recount her first armed battle, where she killed an ss officer in direct combat. Images of a blanket and the lush green landscapes of partisan lore alternate with her frail sleeping body, a stark contrast to the strength of her lucid and chilling storytelling. “I thought to myself,” she says, describing how she shivered feverishly postcombat, “it is not easy killing someone. Even if it’s an enemy, it’s still a person.” Accordingly, this work raises the question of militarism and the validity of violence in securing radical social and political changes today. The show returns frequently to what it means to be a hero – both by spotlighting those of socialist Yugoslavia, who have largely fallen into oblivion following the wars of 1991–2001, and by asking what might constitute a heroic act today, where there is no monolithic, identifiable enemy. Slovenian art

collective irwin’s Was ist Kunst Bosnia and Herzegovina – Heroes 1941–1945 (2018), for example, is a poignant ode to the men and women who sacrificed themselves in their fight against fascism during the Second World War. These 100 painted portraits were originally commissioned by the Federal Republic of Bosnia during the 1950s and forgotten soon after; irwin has framed them and presented each accompanied by a biography of the sitter, compiled by art historian and professor Asja Mandič and her students, and accessible via qr code. Where once risk meant a willingness to make sacrifices for the good of everyone, now, Badovinac writes, it is equated with ‘the power of neoliberalism to destroy industry, people and the natural environment, and then justify this devastation as a necessary risk that is a precondition for a better life’. In Nika Autor’s Newsreel 65 – We Have too Much Things in Heart… (2021), 14 videos portray harrowing tales of refugees in present-day Bosnia caught in a Sisyphean nightmare of repeatedly attempting and failing to cross into Croatia and the eu. A local

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man is hosting nine refugees on the Bosnian side of the border but worries what will happen when winter descends. The work both lays bare the underlying hypocrisy and inhumanity in the current capitalist system – where asylum is hailed as a fundamental right and international obligation, but claiming it has become near-impossible – and the small acts of human kindness that translate as new gestures of resistance. The message of the show is clear: capitalist individualism and fascism have always cosied up to each other. On his way to power, in 1919, Benito Mussolini proclaimed that ‘outside the individual, there is no human reality’, while Margaret Thatcher stated some six decades later that ‘there is no such thing as society’. Bigger than Myself is an impassioned cry from and to the region that it remember its heroes and harness their stories as tools for new forms of resistance in creating a society of solidarity once more. As Slovenian philosopher Tomaž Mastnak cautions, in a world where antifascist heroes cannot survive, ‘we cannot survive’. Ana Vukadin

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Technologies of the Self Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles 3 April – 15 May In an era marked by a seemingly endless quest for what is currently dubbed ‘selfoptimisation’ – ever more successful and, crucially, attractive versions of ourselves – this group exhibition presents four alternatives for personal transformation. Per the show’s accompanying release, Tetsumi Kudo, Lucas Samaras, Paul Thek and Max Hooper Schneider (the youngest artist in this grouping by almost five decades) employ containers – cages, boxes and vitrines – as placeholders for the earthbound, constrained corporal body, their contents thus representing their makers’ desired ascensions to a higher realm. Self-optimisation can be understood through the lens of humanism, a school of thought that attaches supreme importance to humanity rather than the natural or divine, as if by unlocking our ideal selves we can attain godliness. It’s a philosophy Tetsumi Kudo particularly abhorred, and the Japanese artist’s own work challenged its primary tenet by depicting the human form, his own included, diminished, dismembered and in stages of decay amid the flora that would ultimately subsume and incorporate it. Kudo was active in Japan’s Neo-Dada movement before relocating to Paris in 1962. Many of his sculptures from the 1960s and 70s utilise his signature enclosures stuffed with replicas of human heads (the artist’s included) and replicas of plants; the works evoke at once biospheres and funerary tombs. In this show, two painted birdcages, Portrait of the Artist,

Buddha in Paris (Meditation entre futur programmé et mémoire enregistrée) (Portrait of the Artist, Buddha in Paris [Meditation between the programmed future and recorded memory], 1976) and Meditation Between Memory and Future (1978) contain disembodied and seemingly rotting heads and hands crammed amid fake flowers and artificial soil. The work’s allegory of metamorphosis and rebirth via corrosion of the flesh seems clear. Kudo’s blurring of corporal and technological elements presages the work of Max Hooper Schneider, who applies experimental technological processes to organically suggestive elements (sometimes incorporating live animals, as in dialectrix: division apteronotus [jesus saves], 2020), a neon-lit aquarium featuring live black ghost knifefish exhibited at François Ghebaly gallery in la last summer). Adjacent to the lightbox-ensconced glazed ceramic Battle Vest (2018), from a series of the same name, is the sculpture Crisis Hotline (2020), a metal cage through which a found neon sign is visible, positioned in a fabricated habitat whose miniature flora evokes Kudo’s. Hooper Schneider was trained in landscape architecture, and his work methodically explores the technical properties of natural and synthetic elements to posit a hybrid bionic future. By contrast, Paul Thek’s vision of alternate realms is emphatically, if wryly, rooted in spiritual ascension. In 1967, the same year that his installation The Tomb (a lifesize entombed effigy of the artist) shocked the New York

facing page, top Tetsumi Kudo, Meditation Between Memory and Future, 1978, painted cage, artificial soil, wax flowers, cotton, plastic,polyester, resin, thread, sand, yarn, wood and fly-fishing feather, 42 × 49 × 24 cm. Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles

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artworld, Thek abruptly moved to Europe, where he would create staged environments and ceremonies referencing the ritual and pageantry of the Catholic processions he admired. Two intimate structures on view here, Untitled #73 (1964) and Fish Tank (1969), are exemplary of the artist’s prior ‘technological reliquaries’ series and a hint of his work to come. The meat and amputated-limb sculptures encased in Formica and Plexiglas containers for which he had first gained notoriety are reminiscent of holy tombs whose sides have been made transparent to reveal their rotting saintly inhabitants, in a gesture of both homage and irreverence. If Thek looks to a universal hereafter, Lucas Samaras’s practice turns inward. Along with four of Samaras’s manipulated Polaroid self-portraits from his Photo-Transformation series (1973–76), two of the artist’s celebrated assemblage boxes, whose interiors frequently incorporate mirrors, photographs and personal ephemera, and which function as self-portraits, are included here. The open-lid arrangement of these boxes aligns them with Hooper Schneider’s, Kudo’s and Thek’s enclosures – whose choices of siding material allow the viewer to peer inside. One is left with the sense that, rather than hindering the artists who created them, these allegorical vessels serve as framing devices. The works feel tethered to their makers’ respective mortal coils by the very visual seductiveness of their forms, suggesting that perhaps transcendence is more than just a box away. Cat Kron

facing page, bottom Max Hooper Schneider, Crisis Hotline, 2020, modelled habitat, vintage neon sign, metal cage, 53 × 64 × 94 cm. Courtesy Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles

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Jim Lambie Buttercup The Modern Institute, Glasgow 26 April – 22 May Plasma monitors mounted in a row along a brick wall each project a mute monochrome image so that we get a neat line of ochre, pink and Klein blue rectangles. Wait a second… one suddenly comes to life, displaying a man approaching with a can of spraypaint. He calmly presses the nozzle and covers the lens with pigment: this is Self Portrait (in Seven Parts) (2020; all other works 2021). The video pithily captures what Jim Lambie does, what he’s best known for. He’s a skilled colourist, literally, through his practice of colouring things in. His art is Neo-Pop writ large, his installations a retinal blitz; Lambie is no chromophobe. The main space here has flooring coated in thin coloured and chrome vinyl strips:

Zobop (Wildflower), the latest variation of Lambie’s signature Zobop floorworks (1999–). Using bright floral shades of yellow, alternating with black and white and silver, the effect is less beguilingly botanical to these eyes than frankly vespid, as if the artist is warning us that this spring ‘recovery’ might still have a sting in its tail. Lambie’s taste for appropriating the titles of pop songs is in evidence with the Nick Drake-referencing Pink Moon, a folded doorlike construction covered with automotive paint the colour of April skies at dusk or springtime blooms of moss phlox. Similarly Wood Beez, a reference to the Scritti Politti song of that name. This is a wall-mounted display cabinet made of dark wood bisected by an old railway sleeper,

an abstract sculpture that asks, in chime with the tune, ‘what wood would be’. Elsewhere, Butterfly (Belladonna Lily) and Butterfly (Green Rose), two sculptures made from polished steel and mdf, resemble graffiti tags painted with confectionary stripes. Clichés of optimism colour (!) critical comment on Lambie’s art, but there are darker moods at play here. Solarize is a construction of multicoloured sunglass lenses that, no matter how beautifully lit by the gallery windows, warns against rose-tinted thinking. Finally, Horizon (Goldfinch) uses found jigsaws applied with car paint to remind us that covid-19 lockdown ennui and dull hobbying could make a comeback this autumn. John Quin

Pink Moon, 2021, wooden door, acrylic mirror, automotive paint, 190 × 77 × 38 cm. Photo: Patrick Jameson. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

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ArtReview

27/05/2021 11:36

Joachim Koester The Invisible Index Jan Mot, Brussels 20 March – 29 May Joachim Koester’s essayistic investigations explore subjects that, although diverse, can be collectively assigned as occult, either because they pertain to supernatural realms or because they are unseen, frequently outside the limit of human perception. In his most recent works on show here, he focuses on artefacts of a shadow economy: images of cannabis and cocaine photographed using a scanning electron microscope. Koester’s interest in such substances stems not only from their psychoactive properties, but their status as products of modern-day alchemy, whereby the basest of industrial materials (such as concrete and petrol) are transmuted into valuable commodities. The most striking pieces in the show, titled Cocaine #3 and Cocaine #5 (both 2019), are of minuscule quantities of the eponymous drug enlarged so that they resemble forbidding polar landscapes.

Elsewhere in the gallery, a vitrine display contains a text by Koester surrounded by vintage copies of High Times. Titled From the Secret Garden of Sleep (2008), this text muses on Ronald Reagan’s backfiring efforts to eliminate domestic cannabis growth in the us during the early 1980s. Greater levels of state surveillance spurred growers to move operations into subterranean premises and utilise hormonelike chemicals and grow-lights, which in turn spawned a ‘genetic revolution’ and the emergence of phenomenally potent mutant strains. High Times, meanwhile, which was established in 1974, brought together investigative journalism on government crackdowns, interviews with pop-culture luminaries and instructional tips on cultivation. In a parody of Playboy, the periodical featured seductively shot centrefolds of cannabis plants – a nascent form of plant

porn. Yet while initially contributing to a groundswell of activism and policy change, High Times symbolises a trend seen throughout the late twentieth century whereby grassroots organisations expanded into profitable corporations as the countercultural ideals they espoused became mainstream. This compact but dense exhibition, then, exemplifies Koester’s penchant for homing in on minute details of objects or historical narratives in order to highlight broader constellations of issues. In examining some of the ways that mind-altering substances are written about and represented, Koester exposes infrastructures of control that regulate society; moral, legal and scientific codes that are so embedded and internalised that they have become invisible. Pádraic E. Moore

The Invisible Index, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Philippe De Gobert. Courtesy the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels

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27/05/2021 11:37

Charles Gaines Multiples of Nature, Trees and Faces Hauser & Wirth, London 29 January – 1 May This is Charles Gaines’s first solo exhibition in the uk, in spite of a career beginning in the 1970s and an abiding influence through his work at CalArts, where he has taught since 1989, on subsequent generations of artists such as Mark Bradford and Laura Owens. This sense that Gaines – along with many other older artists in the past decade – is being rediscovered, and his position as a link between the first generation of conceptual art and contemporary Black artists working with conceptual strategies like Glenn Ligon, tended to be emphasised in the early reception of this exhibition, which opened online in January. This risks somewhat distracting attention from his work itself, and why it has remained so thought-provoking for decades. Numbers and Trees: London Series 1 features nine works in a single gallery that continue the Numbers and Trees series Gaines has produced since 1986 and offers an introduction to his characteristic concerns. Largescale black-andwhite photographs of tree branches are overlaid with Plexiglas, the surface of which is divided into a numbered grid. A silhouette image of the entire tree is presented on this grid, picked out in hand-painted pixelated coloured squares, whose two poles, in terms of colour tone, are red and green. These works are constructed around a series of binaries: photography versus painting, the index versus the grid, machine versus handmade, monochrome versus multicolour, part versus whole, individual versus the series. In true structuralist fashion, Gaines demon-

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strates that meaning is always generated out of oppositions, and that sight takes place within relational systems that precede and exceed us. A second gallery contains the 15 works from Numbers and Faces: Multi-Racial/Ethnic Combinations Series I, continuing another long-running series, Numbers and Faces, which Gaines began in 1978. Black-and-white photographs of 15 faces of people who identify as multiracial or multiethnic are again overlaid with a Plexiglas surface, their names and specific identities included in the title of each individual photograph. As with the Trees series, the Plexiglas surface is covered in a numbered grid, whose squares are filled in with colour. Each face is assigned two colours, one for its contour and one for the space within that outline, and each portrait is laid on top of the portraits that preceded it in the sequence until the final image is covered by all the superimposed faces at once. These works explore colour as system of classification: the relationship between what we think of as ‘colour itself’, here arbitrarily assigned to each subject, and the skin colour of individual people. In the European racial imaginary, these were fused in the service of classification and control. In response, colour has become an object of global identification, solidarity and resistance: producing the ‘people of colour’ to which the subjects of these photographs belong. In an interview Gaines has said that one source of his theoretical interest in difference came from growing up between the Jim Crow

South and Newark, New Jersey, and his realisation that a whole set of ‘cultural values’ was erected on an essentially ‘arbitrary’ difference of skin colour. Numbers and Faces makes visible the arbitrary nature of colour classification as a basis for racial value. Just as there are no natural divisions between light on the colour spectrum, and just as the linguistic systems for naming colour vary across languages, the choice of using colour to categorise humanity is indeed an arbitrary one. These systems overlay the individual, and you have to look aslant, face pressed against the wall, to see their photograph under the Plexiglas sheet. What makes these people more ‘mixed’ than anyone else? And yet, like the layering of faces across the series, the consequences of these systems build up over time. Gaines’s deployment of the grid treats conceptual structures as frozen and static, not as systems in motion. In this, his works remain within, or at least reveal, what has always been the limit of structuralism as a theory of meaning: its ability to show how meaning changes over time, how the system is shaped by history. The categories of colour that implement racial domination may be arbitrary, but the motivations that guided those choices were not. Although the process of categorisation is here replicated as an aesthetic system, these are motivations that Gaines’s grids cannot show, and their consequences in history, and in our present, are still unfolding, accumulating and smothering. Kevin Brazil

ArtReview

27/05/2021 16:34

facing page Multiples of Nature, Trees and Faces, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Alex Delfanne. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

above Numbers and Trees: London Series 1, Tree #6, Fetter Lane, 2020, acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, photograph, 162 × 224 × 15 cm. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

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27/05/2021 16:35

Lucy Raven Dia Chelsea, New York 16 April – January 2022 When the Dia Art Foundation moved into a West Chelsea garage in 1987, it precipitated the neighbourhood’s shift from industrial hub to tony arts district, and the global craze for galleries with trussed ceilings and concrete floors. Minimalist art needs a lot of real estate, and so its principal steward became a pioneer in what developers have come to call ‘adaptive reuse’. By the time Dia Beacon opened in 2003, in a 28,000sqm former factory upstate, Chelsea had become virtually unrecognisable, and the foundation pulled back slightly from its programming there, ceding turf to dealers like Larry Gagosian. Now, with the conclusion of a twoyear expansion project by Architecture Research Office, Dia is tending its roots again. Two new commissions by Lucy Raven inaugurate the space, alluding both to a lost West Chelsea and to landscapes of the American West – where Dia safeguards canonical works of Land art – that are also in danger of disappearing. Ready Mix (all works 2021) is a mesmerising 45-minute film shot at a concrete plant in central Idaho. Black-and-white drone footage glides slowly over lorries as they dump slag in spreading heaps. Seen from above, pools of fly ash bleed like Rorschach blots. Raven dives in for long closeups: we watch as millions of pebbles bounce through sprays of water that wash away impurities and then travel down a conveyor belt that wobbles like an oesophagus. The stony aggregate passes through a set of

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rubber teeth and spins in the sopping maw of a cement mixer. Smooth camerawork and editing make these motions feel oddly natural, like geological peristalsis. Concrete has been called ‘the most destructive material on Earth’, responsible for approximately 8 percent of worldwide co2 emissions; despite the apparent metaphor of digestion in Ready Mix, it’s unclear how these toxic byproducts will be metabolised. Such sequences recall Robert Smithson’s description of a leaky pipe, in his 1967 essay ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’, as ‘secretly sodomizing some hidden technological orifice’. Imbuing industrial waste with human pathos, they also set up a scene of violation. The film’s title puns on the type of concrete most commonly used in construction with Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ – what could be considered the first instance of adaptive reuse in art – and points to Land artists’ treatment of the earth as an object free for their taking. Smithson and his cohort, especially Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria, regarded Western landscapes as blank canvases for works that eschewed the commercialism of the nascent contemporary art market while indulging a colonialist impulse to permanently alter biodiverse habitats and indigenous homelands. Although Raven appears to acknowledge this tension with her choice of subject matter, her formalism tends, like that of her minimalist forbears, to reduce it to a slick abstraction.

Notably, the only people in Ready Mix appear at the film’s end, hoisting cinderblocks onto a wall. The focus, again, is concrete, which ultimately occludes our view of the labourers and debris behind this final product. It’s a poignant refusal, almost a statement of artistic intent. Raven’s treatment contrasts markedly with a scene from Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) – another western, shot around the same time, in nearby Nebraska – in which one can almost smell the sweat of beet harvesters and the pizza they eat from soiled hands. The human textures of Zhao’s film are smoothed out entirely in Raven’s, enhancing its sense of alienation. In a large adjacent gallery, two mechanised, wall-mounted spotlights from Raven’s Casters series (Casters x-2 + Casters x-3) swivel in the dark. The works are an almost theatrical counterpoint to Carl Craig’s concurrent installation at Dia Beacon. But, whereas the strobes and heavy bass of Craig’s Party/After-Party (2020) make me nostalgic for all the dancefloors I’ve missed during lockdown, Raven’s Casters leaves me cold. Who are they looking for? Glancing over the concrete floor – formed by a continuous Chelsea-grade pour – they track smoothly over their subject and, like Raven’s camera in Ready Mix, never fully illuminate its fissures. Meanwhile, across the street, excavators dig and cement trucks churn the foundation for another luxury condominium. Evan Moffitt

ArtReview

27/05/2021 11:40

above Casters x-2 + x-3, 2021, installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York.Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. © the artist. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York

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27/05/2021 11:40

Die Balkone 2 Various venues, Berlin 30 April – 2 May In a public square in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, Sam Durant was shouting at a dead man. More specifically, the American artist was aiming a megaphone at a giant bronze bust of German communist party leader Ernst Thälmann – one of very few gdr monuments in the city, preserved at the request of locals and freshly scrubbed of graffiti – and issuing complaints, first telling a disrespectful pigeon to clear off (it complied), then needling Thälmann for his male-pattern balding. Then his collaborator Ana Prvački took over, and finally, at this lowkey launch event, loudhailers were offered to those who’d gathered: a quixotic opportunity to release whatever pent-up grievances came to mind. I was tempted to ask the fist-raising Ernst what he thought of an American telling Berliners how to use their public statuary, or how it feels to be a parkour site for ambitious

local skaters; but I moved on from Complaints to Ernst, Ongoing (all works 2021), because there was much else to see, or at least to hunt for. Durant, who moved to Berlin in 2018, was one of dozens of Prenzlauer Berg-based artists taking part in Die Balkone 2, the second edition of a project initiated by curators Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza in 2020, soon after the first lockdown began, in which, for a weekend, artists placed work on their apartment balconies, in windows or on the street below. (Durant was one of a handful of exceptions.) The neighbourhood, in former East Berlin, is gentrified to the point of being a citywide punchline: full of restaurants, modernist furniture emporia and well-heeled parents pushing prams, plus the occasional indolent art critic. But it’s also where many artists have lived and continue to live, and was, in gdr times, a hotbed

of squat culture, fomented resistance, poetry, ad hoc art events, etc; and then there’s the longer history, to which bullet-pocked facades attest. Die Balkone, in its loose-limbed, hopeful collectivist pragmatism, might have more in common with the P-Berg of the 1980s than the present, even if the astringent whiff of coal-fired heating is long gone and the buildings are no longer blackened with soot. The project is also scrappy in the sense that the work isn’t necessarily easy to find. The downloadable map notes that ‘getting lost is part of the game’ and, to protect artists’ privacy somewhat, does not give addresses, just vague locations on streets. Which is laudable until you’ve failed to find four works in a row; or spent time mistakenly translating a political poster that a militant nonartist had hung out before noticing Jan Peter Hammer’s Micro-nation?

Sam Durant & Ana Prvački, Complaints to Ernst, Ongoing, 2021. Courtesy Die Balkone, Berlin

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ArtReview

27/05/2021 11:42

– a flag, black circle on red ground – positing his balcony as potentially sovereign space. Other works, though, required no guesswork: Tommy Støckel’s comically ominous pa19 comprised a pair of hot-pink geometric tentacular forms sprouting antically from windows, reaching down towards a bit of graffiti – a large, frazzledlooking, Muppety red face – that has dotted local buildings this year. Similarly pronounced was Yael Bartana and Saskia Wendland’s In-carnations Circle, a pavement-based mandala of takeaway carnations memorialising the 400 members of the wartime resistance group ‘Red Orchestra’, including Marta and Walter Husemann, who were both imprisoned by the Nazis and for whom this particular street is named. Reactivating occluded histories, both major and minor, was on a number of artists’ minds: in a city where nearly 90 percent of streets are named after men, Pinar Öğrenci, discovering that part of her street used to be named after a female anti-Nazi politician, brought Ella Kay back as a ghostly, half-smiling face on a flag. In a more sentimental vein, Durmusoglu and

Jörn Schafaff displayed objects made by Rirkrit Tiravanija at the address where he lived for six years (and brought artworld people together). Nearby, on a turn-of-the-century building that has seen many styles of decor pass through it, Andrea Pichl hung out gaudy 1970s-style gdr curtains recalling those she grew up with; next door, Christina Dimitriadis partnered them with a long winding sheet festooned with embroideries made while caring for a sick parent in Greece, their iconography – lots of animals, notably bears – referencing both Greek mythology and the artist’s relationship to Berlin. In the entrance hall of what used to be Berlin’s biggest urban shelter, built during the 1920s and now flanked by costly apartment blocks, Antonia Low’s phantasmal Arriving Winter Nights with All Belongings comprised a semi-opaque printed fabric curtain depicting what appears to be a homeless person’s trolley laden with bags, a sight connecting a century ago with the far-from-egalitarian present. Perhaps the most resonant contribution, extended beyond the show’s run after media

attention and positive local response, was Nasan Tur’s –Locked up–, in which he collaborated with his neighbours to place large photographic portraits of detained political figures in the windows of his apartment building, among them Aung San Suu Kyi, Julian Assange, Alexei Navalny and Osman Kavala. Tur’s aim, it appears, was to restore perspective, to hierarchise containment: yes, lockdowns are annoying and contentious, but they also encourage dwelling on one’s own inconveniencing while others who, whatever the finer details, have put themselves on the line at the cost of their own freedom. For a while after seeing that, nothing seemed to be where it was supposed to be, which led to an extended period of neck-craning attentiveness to local architecture and the myriad things residents have on their own balconies – a built-in side effect of the concept – and time to ponder the fruitfully open-form, lo-fi imperatives of Die Balkone itself. And if that wasn’t compensation enough for the schlepping, you could always complain to Ernst. Martin Herbert

Nasan Tur, –Locked up–, 2021. Courtesy Die Balkone, Berlin

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Sanya Kantarovsky and Camille Blatrix Will-o’-the-wisp Modern Art Bury Street, London 23 April – 22 May Anderson Borba and Alexandre Canonico Kupfer, London 12 April – 8 May It is storytime at Modern Art in St James’s, where the New York-based Russian painter Sanya Kantarovsky’s Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, created with Tokyo’s Adachi Hanga Institute of Printmaking, depict Halloweeny scenes – moments in imagined folk sagas or gothic children’s tales. We are left to guess the narratives. In this collaborative show, the French sculptor Camille Blatrix has made caselike foldout frames from smooth white Corian, a synthetic polymer mainly used for countertops, to house each of Kantarovsky’s prints. The frames’ sliding doors unclip with a click and unfold to the right to reveal Kantarovsky’s images on the insides of the doors. Two rounded rectangles, cut vertically into the lefthand side of each frame, visible when the frames are open, contain pieces of marquetry, a seventeenth-century furnituremaking technique in which pieces of veneer are arranged, like a jigsaw, to form a pattern. Close the frames and they look like hypermodern storage lockers, bringing to mind the ease by which artworks, held inside freeports, can be bought and sold without ever moving or being seen. Their techie minimalism is the aesthetic of the international artworld. A bony finger beckons a faceless child. A man is bleeding beside the ocean while a seabird walks by. Kantarovsky has worked with writers before, and his images have an illustrative quality, as if they were meant to illuminate or explain something. Except they do not, which is the joke – Blatrix’s cartoonish marquetry eyes gaze out from

facing page, top Sanya Kantarovsky and Camille Blatrix, Will-o’-the-wisp, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Robert Glowacki. Courtesy the artists and Modern Art, London

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the frames, but the faces of the children in Kantarovsky’s prints are eyeless. And the works do, occasionally, appear so smooth that the eye can glide over them without hindrance; they place the viewer somewhere between frictionlessness, hi-tech seamlessness and indecipherability, enigma. And yet, the slickness of Kantarovsky’s prints risks undermining their impact. While mysterious, they seem at home in a familiar universe of surrealistic horror. In the basement there are four more exquisite marquetry works by Blatrix. The marquetry is MacBook smooth, creating an impression of evenness that the strangeness of the images does little to unsettle. A translucent hand touches a futuristic piece of tech, some sort of home speaker. To the left is a gold ring tied to a green string (11:11, all works 2021). In Infinite Water the top of a blue face is inlaid into the grey veneer, as if the surface had been scratched away to reveal it. Below it is a Möbius strip. It all fits together in infinite flatness, without fissures or slits. Far from dematerialisation, it is a direct effect of Blatrix’s technical expertise with wood. It goes down easy. Wood – this time with splinters – is also centre stage at an impressive show at Kupfer in Hackney. The building housing the gallery is under construction, which is appropriate for the work of Alexandre Canonico and of Anderson Borba, two Brazilian artists based in London. Canonico’s smallscale works are composed of offcuts from mdf and plywood boards, and employ a nascent sort of marquetry: the artist has cut shapes out of the

facing page, middle left Camille Blatrix, 11:11, 2021, marquetry, 53 × 42 cm. Photo: Robert Glowacki. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Modern Art, London, and Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris

boards and roughly slotted the shapes back into the holes. The pieces fit baggily in their spaces, and the surfaces of the works are covered in small holes and spraypaint. Nesting (2020) is two pieces of laminated plywood connected by an appendage descending from the top board that slots, imperfectly, into a hole in the bottom board, leaving voids of space. The top board is spraypainted in fluorescent orange, the lower in purple and dark blue. While – like Blatrix’s marquetry –these works are painterly, the wood is key: Canonico’s works think through slotting, nesting, fitting and assembling. Borba’s four totemic sculptures are assembled out of cheap fragments and scraps of discarded industrial wood, slotted together into complex arrangements that move from roughly hewn, splintery blocks to smooth rounded elements. Colour is introduced through varnish and acrylic dribbles. They are imposing and alien sculptures that recall the playfulness of their assembly. In the Modern Art exhibition, traditional materials and techniques like Ukiyo-e and marquetry are employed to engineer a sense of lavish fluidity. The degree of mastery and precision is overwhelming – almost too perfect – and the works feel distant and tightly controlled. Meanwhile, in Borba and Canonico’s works, wood is a cheap, democratic technology of diy combination, improvisation. Both shows – especially seen together – are an education in materials. Tomas Weber

facing page, middle right Alexandre Canonico, Nesting, 2020, spraypaint on laminated plywood, screws, steel washer, 62 × 36 × 2 cm. Courtesy the artist

facing page, bottom Anderson Borba, Bestmode (Jacaré), 2021, wood, sawdust, corner braces, plaster, acrylic, varnish, 35 × 136 × 24 cm. Courtesy the artist

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27/05/2021 11:43

Ivan Serpa A expressão do concreto ccbb, São Paulo 3 February – 12 April Yuli Yamagata Insônia Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo 24 April – 29 May That Ivan Serpa was mentor to the likes of Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape has determined which of the artist’s own works are best remembered. In 1954 the Brazilian founded Grupo Frente, the pioneering school of Latin American Concretism of which those more famous names were members. Some of Serpa’s paintings of geometric abstraction are included in this extensive survey of over 200 of his works, but the real service The Expression of Concrete provides is in, despite the title, showing how much more varied and restless an artist Serpa was.

During the late 1950s he won a travel bursary, setting off to Europe to immerse himself in the prevailing art trends, a trip that had a profound effect on his work. On his return to Brazil he put aside paintings such as Faixas em ritmo resultante (Resulting rhythm tracks, 1956) – a red-and-blue geometric oil-on-wood composition, in which the two blocks of colour are divided by what appear to be elongated musical crotchets – and instead embraced a style of monstrous figuration. An untitled 1965 oil on canvas from the Women and Animals series depicts a woman, naked,

being consumed by the writhing bodies of two, perhaps three, otherworldly creatures. The composition is a delirium of messily composed black lines, the darkness picked out by splatterings of red. In another painting, made the same year, the head of one of these demonic animals seems to protrude from the torso of the same naked woman (her own head out of frame). One can make the assumption that among the artists Serpa studied on his European tour were Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Francis Bacon (though Serpa would have been aware of Picasso’s contortions of the female form – ‘machines

Ivan Serpa, Untitled, from the series Women and Animals, 1965, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. Photo: Jaime Acioli. Collection Leonel Kaz

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for suffering’, as the Spaniard horrifically called women – as early, at least, as the first Bienal de São Paulo, in 1951), the Brazilian artist taking the patriarchal violence of their Jungian dramas and transplanting them to a country entering its darkest moment. The violence and transgression of the Women and Animals paintings, and the related Animals series (1962), I’d argue, evoke the social and political nightmare of Brazil’s dictatorship years. In an untitled Animals work, multiple eyes of numerous blobby fiends painted in orange, red and blue likewise recall the swirling anarchy of Picasso’s antiwar Guernica (1937) as they gnash their teeth against each other. Another of Serpa’s untitled works, from a year later, shows two further monsters staring at each other, set against a swirling blue background, both savagelooking, both with pendulous breasts, which might conceivably also serve as wings. In a third oil on canvas, a green biped critter seems to eat the ass of a white four-legged opponent. While they owe something to European art’s

avant-garde, including the cobra artists, they are not derivative, incorporating a uniquely local sense of the monstrous – tropical, feverish – evident in Brazil since the work of painter Tarsila do Amaral and poet Oswald de Andrade three decades earlier. Of course, we take from art what we need for the moment, and it is perhaps inevitable that in a time stalked by the spectre of a virus and all the anxiety that produces, it is these horror scenes that I’m drawn to over the earlier cool experiments in colour and form (though Serpa would return to geometric abstraction in the 1970s). Monsters abound too in Yuli Yamagata’s Insônia (Insomnia), a solo show of 18 wall-, plinth- and floor-based sculptures. The artist, born in 1989, brings a similar level of underlying anxiety to these predominantly textile works as that found in Serpa’s art. In an exhibition statement Yamagata references both director David Lynch and how the line between dreams and reality is blurred in Japanese manga; indeed, a work such as Cyborg Nascendo (all works

2021), a fabric collage stretched over a frame in which a figure lies, the palms of their feet facing the viewer, under a tie-dye blue sky, raises all sorts of questions. Is the person dead? Are they a robot? Are they dreaming? Is this a nightmare? We don’t get any answers. Yamagata’s show is full of motifs that lead you to search for their significance yet that ultimately resist explanation – a giant, padded fabric octopus lunges out from behind a dark velvet background in the wall-work Polvo Nadando (Swimming Octopus); a plinth-based sculpture, Pudim (Pudding), features a cob of corn hanging from a rod mounted on a lump of green resin. What prevails is gnawing uncertainty reflective of the weird times in which the works by these two artists were made. Their strange visions, decades apart, chart how political repression or pandemics are psychological events as much as anything else: the trauma and neurosis of the external world invading the subconscious, crawling into the imagination of both artist and viewer alike. Oliver Basciano

Yuli Yamagata, Polvo Nadando, 2021, elastane, velvet, sewing thread, silicone fiber and stretcher, 290 × 210 × 4 cm. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro

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Something New Must Turn Up: Six Singaporean Artists After 1965 National Gallery Singapore 7 May – 22 August Boomers had it good, yeah? Well, not if you’re an artist in Singapore. Your career would have peaked somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s, also known as the awkward period straddling ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary art’. Such labels may be woolly, but you still suffer from a lack of easy branding, unlike, say, the cohort before you, the ‘modern masters’, the China-born artists who migrated to Singapore and developed a local idiom melding Western painting and Chinese ink. And of course, after you are the sexy contemporary artists, the artworld’s default tribe. This club of neglected middle children is finally getting some love in the National Gallery’s latest show. Perhaps acknowledging the difficulty of spinning a coherent overall narrative of this period, the gallery opted to have six individual retrospectives. The ‘after 1965’ timestamp refers to the year of Singapore’s independence, and the press release states hopefully that audiences would be able to ‘draw connections between the artworks and developments in Singapore’s history and cultural identity in the post-independence era’. Indeed, pinging through the showcases are certain recurrent ideas, such as the place of spirituality in modern life, cultural hybridity and technological change. Here, you glimpse the historical era through the artists. In most conscientious ngs megashows, it’s the other way round. In terms of art history, the exhibition also colours in some blanks. For me, it traces the precursors of certain tendencies in local contemporary art, such as the exploration of indigenous religious practices and arcana. Opening the show is a moving survey of artist, writer and lyricist Chng Seok Ting (1946–2019), a stalwart figure who, before this, stands somewhat in the background of local art-history, but who never stopped creating even through disability and illness. Depending on her circumstances, she worked in different media. During the 1970s and 1980s, when she studied overseas, she was primarily a printmaker. Her surroundings fed directly into her etchings – the spare, wintry fields of Iowa and the riverine landscapes of Hull. In 1988, a freak accident left her 90 percent blind. Out of necessity, she went into sculpture and installation, including pieces she made and remade over the years. The exhibition highlights some of these largescale installations, such as

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a chessboard with human figurines (Game of Chess, 1997–2001) and a mixed-media work interpreting the 64 hexagrams in the I-Ching (Variations on I-Ching, 1982–92). Delicate works that draw from the everyday better show off her strengths. One such series is inspired by kim-chiam, or dried daylily buds, a traditional Chinese ingredient. These spindly vegetables are individually knotted, and their fragile forms become transmuted into tiny human figures in her art. As you leave the exhibition, one of the last works you see is the joyous Kim Chiam Code (2008), featuring these tiny vegetable-people she fashioned by touch alone, dancing and embracing. Next up is a deep dive into Malay magic and esoterica: the showcase of artist, traditional healer, Sufi mystic and collector of Southeast Asian artefacts, Mohammad Din Mohammad. The exhibition is genre-bending, containing an almost equal mix of art and ethnographic displays. Art-wise, there are paintings and assemblages with intense mystical themes made from the 1990s to the 2000s. Then there is Mohammad Din’s collection of artefacts, including textiles, krises (traditional Malay daggers) and Islamic manuscripts. Art and religion are two sides of the same coin. A pair of mixed-media works studded with bone, wood and shells (Earth Energy and Earth Energy ii, 1994) are designed to be therapeutic, for the patients who looked at them in his house, and now, presumably, for anyone. A series of calligraphic works featuring the Arabic alphabet was painted with his bare hands using silat (a Malay term for indigenous martial arts) movements to channel his internal energy onto the canvas. Was Mohammad Din a mystic-as-artist, or an artist-as-mystic? The curator doesn’t come down on either side, portraying his religiosity and art as one continuous world. In the paintings, I would say the mystic comes first. Often jejune compositions executed in bright colours, and heavy with straightforward symbolism, they have more culturalanthropological significance than aesthetic charge. In the assemblages, the professional artist is more obvious. The works are combinations of found objects that juxtapose the traditional and contemporary, the spiritual and mundane. Take the Franken-creature he calls The Singa Kuda – Alternative Vehicle (1996–99).

A horse’s skull and tail are attached to a computer stand, with a row of coconuts replacing its ‘body’. The whole thing balances on a piece of driftwood covered in horseshoes. At the legs is a Sundanese puppet and on its back a smaller Balinese lion. Cheerfully blending mythologies and cultural practices from the region, this vehicle is like some fabulous chariot from a Southeast Asian steampunk universe. Following Mohammad Din are three relatively conventional presentations. The first is a trek through Goh Beng Kwan’s career, tracing his journey from the 1940s to 90s, from early experiments in abstraction in New York to his return to Singapore, where local influences fed into his collages. Next comes the light and airy world of Eng Tow and her nature-inspired work in textiles and paper. Finally, there is the show of Jaafar Latiff’s abstract batik works and acrylic paintings. Finally, we go into mad genius territory. Enter Lin Hsin Hsin, artist, it professional, poet, composer and uniquely wired person. She was big in the 1970s to 1980s for her abstract paintings, but moved into digital art and flew off the radar. Now she apparently works in cybersecurity and has scrubbed off most online references to her analogue work. The exhibition focuses on her work from the 1970s to 1994, the offline back catalogue she seems to have disavowed. It’s a shame, because it is a weird and wonderful world that brings together grand cosmic themes with technology. The gallery is dimly lit, like a planetarium, and the walls are painted black. Her luminous canvases appear to float. The works inspired by music, water and outer space are Miró-esque compositions that generate a soft, gravity-free environment, including ‘harder’ subjects like computers and software, which were a great source of inspiration for her during the 1970s and 80s. The last room brings us up to the present and concentrates on her recent digital artworks, whose processes I’m too stupid to understand. In here are prints of butterflies rendered by equation, patterns generated by algorithm and a section of a 1.8km landscape whose size she managed to crunch via some computer magic. There you go: here’s a boomer artist who is more postinternet than you. But that is probably a story for another time. Adeline Chia

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Chng Seok Tin, Variations on I-Ching, 1982–92, twine, stones, wire and paint fixed on card and mounted on canvas, 174 × 174 cm. Courtesy National Gallery Singapore

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Kenny Dunkan Keep Going! Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris 6 March – 22 May Born on Guadeloupe in 1988, Kenny Dunkan has said he grew up oblivious to questions of race. His homeland – a former plantation colony – is considered an integral part of France, and it was only on moving to Paris to study that he was made to feel aware of his own Black skin. The realisation steered the artist to recognise his body as both a platform for artistic expression and as a loaded political signifier: as Dunkan puts it, “a vector of history”. Keep Going!, his first solo show at Paris’s Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, puts this thinking into practice. Dunkan’s own likeness is an inescapable presence here. In The Forbidden Fruit (2020), photographs of his hands, fingers contorted into surreal configurations, are blown up to wall height and displayed repeatedly across the two floors of the space. Upstairs, video monitors present them suggestively

unravelling the flesh of a scrotal Antillean fruit known locally as couilles du pape (‘Pope’s balls’). Towels that Dunkan has dried himself off with, stained with his own, dark-pigmented skin flakes, are presented framed as Transfer (2018), shroudlike on the walls. Yet the questions of identity posed by this often chaotically multifarious show stretch beyond the personal. A wooden platform suspended from the ceiling offers a wunderkammer of absurdist sculptures the artist has fashioned from organic and industrial materials, mimicking the kind of display you might encounter in a nineteenth-century ethnographic museum, yet shorn of any discernible meaning. Meanwhile, the syncretic relationship between Catholicism and African-derived spiritual beliefs in the Caribbean is alluded to by Bwa Bwa (2020), a folding crucifix manipulated into the form

of a prone man – in Antillean creole, an effigy called a ‘bwa-bwa’. Dunkan can be irreverent, too, reeling off snappy visual punchlines: a photograph that initially appears to depict a set of male genitalia turns out to be a brown leather bicycle seat rubbed with Vaseline (bbc i, 2020), while a text featuring slogans lifted from shampoo advertisements adds a daftly absurd voice to the cacophony of imagery. Yet the most arresting moment is also the quietest and most reflective: in Gouffre (2017) a horizontal tv monitor concealed beneath a grate over the gallery floor broadcasts blurry footage of rattling metal beads accompanied by a soundtrack of distant waves and muted groans. The allusion to the slave transports that originally brought the ancestors of Guadeloupe’s present-day inhabitants to the Caribbean may not be explicitly stated, but it is impossible to miss. Digby Warde-Aldam

The Forbidden Fruit 2, 2020, print on archival Fuji Crystal paper, white maple frame, Plexiglas, 110 × 150 cm. Courtesy Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris

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Books Undinge: Umbrüche der Lebenswelt by Byung-Chul Han Ullstein Verlag, €22 (hardcover) The other day I accidentally dropped a silver art-deco teapot, which has been my constant companion for the past 20 years. The dent was huge, and so was the measure of my grief. I suffered sleepless nights until I found a silversmith who promised me she could fix it. Now I find myself waiting impatiently for its return, filled with dread that, when it arrives, it will no longer be the same. And yet the experience leaves me wondering: why have I unravelled in this way? ‘Things are points of stability in life,’ the South Korean-born, Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his new book, Undinge (Nonobjects), which is just out in German. (As is the way of things with philosophy books, English-language readers might need to wait some time for its appearance in translation). ‘Objects stabilise human life insofar as they give it a continuity,’ Han writes. Living matter and its history bestow on the object a presence, which activates its entire surroundings. Objects – especially well-designed, historically charged objects, and which are not necessarily artworks – can develop almost magical properties. Undinge is about the loss of this magic. ‘The digital order deobjectifies the world by rendering it information,’ he writes. ‘It’s not objects but information that rules the living world. We no longer inhabit heaven and earth, but the Cloud and Google Earth. The world is becoming progressively untouchable, foggy and ghostly.’ This type of critical stance towards the present, written in clear, zenlike sentences, is a feature of all Han’s books. From The Burnout Society (2010) to The Disappearance of Rituals (2019), he describes our current reality as one in which relations to the other – whether human or object – are being lost; as one in which the tap of finger on smartphone has replaced real contact and real relationships. The fleeting quality of virtual

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information and communication, which obliterates, through amplification, any deeper meaning or stillness, displaces the object – whether it be the jukebox in the author’s apartment, or the telephone receivers of Walter Benjamin’s childhood, famously ‘heavy as a dumbbells’ – in whose physical presence resides a humane component, or even an aura, that makes the object mysterious and alive. Information on the other hand does not illuminate the world, according to Han. It deforms it, levelling the boundary between true and false. ‘What counts is the short-term effect. Effectiveness replaces truth,’ he writes here. For Han, our postfactual stimulus culture is one that edges out time-consuming values such as loyalty, ritual and commitment. ‘Today we chase after information, without gaining knowledge. We take note of everything, without gaining insight. We communicate constantly, without participating in a community. We save masses of data, without keeping track of memories. We accumulate friends and followers, without encountering others. This is how information develops a lifeform: inexistant and impermanent.’ Han speaks of an infosphere, which has settled over the objects. The atmosphere that develops in real space through relations to others and to, as he puts it, ‘things close to the heart’ disappears in favour of fleeting swipes on screens, which suggest brief, disembodied experiences. It’s these types of positions that have earned Han the reputation of being a cultural pessimist – of being a moaning, reactionary romantic who loves to quote himself. Yes, naturally the ‘Like’ button, the ‘Hell of Sameness’ and Martin Heidegger as the earthbound antithesis to our affirmative, virtually defined world are topics he returns to here. These mantras – there is almost a meditative

quality to his writing, providing insight and understanding without forcing the reader into higher spheres – have to be understood as anchors, binding you to the basic concept, leaving the horizon to expand as you read. As a nonnative German speaker and writer, Han manages, in a fascinating way, to dissect the cumbersome semantics of Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher, in his analysis of the contemporary and to carve out words in such a way that they appear to have the kind of physical quality that almost allows them to become objects in themselves. Indeed, many artists are attracted to Han’s work precisely because of this elision of form and meaning: the pictorial, minimalexistential language he deploys so pointedly, in much the same way as art manages to do when it’s at its best. It’s worth noting too that Han didn’t need to wait for a pandemic to describe how we are voluntarily tied to our laptops, how we exploit ourselves in the neoliberal home-office mode, how this makes us feel creative, smart and connected while we cover up our feelings of precarity with swipes and likes; he did that more than a decade ago. Now he has reached the stage of addressing commitment and responsibility, quoting famous phrases from The Little Prince (1943): ‘You become responsible forever for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose,’ as the fox tells our royal hero. And, ‘One sees clearly only with the heart.’ Moreover, Han does so in such a disarming way that you can understand why other philosophers snub him. In a discipline that revels in overt complexity and a lack of contact with reality, someone like him cannot be allowed to score points. Yet we should note that while those who stoically grasp the nettle have always been stung, more often than not their actions have been ultimately proved to be right. Gesine Borcherdt Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

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Ethical Portraits: In Search of Representational Justice by Hatty Nestor Zero Books, £10.99/$16.95 (softcover)

Hatty Nestor’s salient and sensitive investigation into the representation of individuals incarcerated in the us opens with a quote from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2006): ‘Those who gain representation… have a better chance of being humanized… those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human’. Butler uses Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy about ‘the face’ and ‘the Other’ as a framework, writing that ‘to respond to the face… means to be awake to what is precarious in another life’. Nestor also takes a Levinasian approach to the ethics of looking, contending that when an artist documents an individual, they inherently enter ‘a position of accountability and responsibility… when a moral obligation to others, by default, should take priority over the so-called individual self’. Across six chapters, Nestor interrogates manifold depictions that include cctv footage, dna profiling and media images, in addition to conducting extensive interviews with artists who have made portraits of incarcerated, missing and wanted people in gestures of solidarity and resistance. Nestor’s essayistic, voice-driven narrative is an effective form of consciousnessraising, demonstrating an assertive, political urgency to the issues, rather than presenting an abstract debate. She is transparent about her anxieties surrounding the ‘ethical conundrum of portraying another person’, cognisant of ‘the fine line between “research” and voyeurism’, questioning rather than didactic in her approach.

In her foreword, Jackie Wang suggests that the practice of ethical portraiture requires ‘circulating images that counter the state’s representational repertoire’, thereby creating ‘counter-images’. The ‘counter-image’ brought to my mind James E. Young’s theory of the ‘counter-monument’, defined in The Texture of Memory (1993) as a rebuttal to the traditional, passive memorial. The counter-monument is active, it can ‘provoke’ and ‘demand interaction’. Nestor similarly defines an ethical portrait as ‘integral and empathetic, [challenging] marginalisation’, allowing individuals who have been dehumanised by the prison-industrial complex to regain control and demand agency. It is the counter-portrait to the mugshot, which demands subjects to ‘act as if they are already corpses’, or the courtroom sketch, where ‘subjects are given no voice, no say in how they are portrayed’. Forensic technology, such as facial recognition software, is shown to be an oppressive surveillance tool with historical roots in the pseudoscientific nineteenth-century method of categorising criminals by their physiognomy. Two chapters are dedicated to artist portraits of the activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, by Alicia Neal and Heather DeweyHagborg respectively. Transgender inmates are subject to brutal mistreatment and violence within the carceral system. In 2014, Neal was commissioned by Manning’s Support Network to paint a portrait that aligned with her chosen gender presentation, as her only media represen-

tation was a misgendered military photograph. This new image was circulated, acknowledging her selfhood and functioning as a form of reparative justice. In Radical Love (2015), DeweyHagborg created 3d-print portraits with forensic methods of representation, using dna samples from swabs and hair clippings that Manning sent her. Nestor argues that this artwork liberates Manning’s image while also dismantling the hegemony of genetic data. People of colour, women and individuals from poorer backgrounds face lengthy sentences for minimal crimes, whereas large corporations avoid criminalisation. Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider’s 2016 activist project Captured: People in Prison Drawing People Who Should Be addressed these discrepancies, however ‘the inmate is only rendered through the portraits of those who are free’. Alyse Emdur’s Prison Landscape (2005–13) series fully engages with their visibility, photographing inmates in front of painted backdrops found in visiting rooms. These artificial scenes depict ‘imagined existences of nonconfinement’ (waterfalls, beaches, sunsets), enabling prisoners to assert ‘their individuality as a gesture towards freedom’. The power of their imagination can exceed the regulated space of the prison. Emdur’s work provokes Nestor to raise the importance of solidarity, ‘a position that demands to be revisited time and time again, until we find alternative avenues of representation for the marginalised’. Philomena Epps

The Dancing Plague by Gareth Brookes Self Made Hero, £15.99 (softcover)

If we’ve learned anything this past year, it’s that everyone loves a good plague story – if only to put our situation into perspective. Among the many such stories to reemerge during this pandemic was the famous case of mania that overtook the city of Strasbourg in 1518. Also described as ‘choreomania’ or ‘dancing plague’, it saw the town’s population engage in uncontrollable dancing, to the point of complete exhaustion – or death. This phenomenon engendered more or less wild interpretations: a rebellion against the church-enforced social order; mass hysteria caused by disease; food poisoning; or a case of diabolic possession or divine punishment. It’s these last readings that are explored

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in Gareth Brookes’s graphic novel, which imagines the events of Strasbourg from the perspective of Mary (whose story fuses the lives of two actual female medieval mystics), an illuminated woman plagued by visions of Christ’s passion. Mary’s uncertainties about the origins (divine or hellish) of her visions find expression in Brookes’s unique visual language: angels and satanic creatures, rendered in colourful embroidery, weave in and out of black-and-sepia vignettes, creating a stunning contrast and sense of depth – most notably in the dancing scenes in the town square, where the creatures act as malevolent puppet masters taking the villagers by their hands and feet. The medieval grotesque

is buttressed by the comical use of Middle Age vernacular: ‘By the grace of Christ’s foreskin!’ Brookes seems intent on revealing the hardship of women (especially mystics) in the Middle Ages; his book is rife with incidents of physical and mental oppression against them, inflicted by husbands, fathers (biological and clerical) and neighbours. Yet the systematic subjugation of women (and their endurance in the face of it) is hardly news. And ultimately, however entertaining its illustrations, one finds oneself wondering what new insights or meaningful interrogation this retelling actually has to offer this particular page of history – or the one we are writing today. Louise Darblay

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The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen Corsair, £18.99 (hardcover) The narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 debut novel, The Sympathizer, used his FrenchVietnamese heritage to his advantage as a double agent before and after the fall of Saigon. Or perhaps it is better to say he was born into the role: able to pass in two cultures, a trespasser in both. Nguyen’s widely anticipated sequel picks up where The Sympathizer left off, with the unnamed narrator on a boat headed for France after his release from a reeducation camp where he was tortured to cure him of the compassion that, while inherent to anyone brought up to identify not only with but as different people, is anathema to the monomaniacal revolutionary. If the conflicted hero of the first book was ‘the sympathizer’ because he could see everything from both sides, the title of the second begs a question: to what is he now ‘committed’? ‘Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom,’ said Chairman Ho Chi Minh in his 1966 appeal to the Vietnamese people, and it is to nothing that the narrator commits himself. The name he chooses for his French passport is Vô Danh, meaning ‘nameless’, and the life he pursues in France is nihilistic. Readers of The Sympathizer will be familiar with Nguyen’s trademark combination of high theory with low genre fiction, and Vô Danh’s transformation into drug dealer for ‘bobo’ Parisian society provides plenty

of opportunities to sneak postcolonial philosophy in under the cover provided by shootouts between Arab and East Asian gangs. We could say that this tension between high and low is only one of the many binaries reconciled through Nguyen’s dialectical method, or we could say that sandwiching a cocaine-fuelled orgy in which Catholic priests and corrupt politicians do unspeakable things to nubile girls from the global south in between discourses on Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969) and Hélène Cixous’s Le Rire de la Méduse (2010) is having your cake and eating it. Either way, it’s a lot of fun. That Nguyen can get away with these and other absurd plot devices – the French-African doorkeeper of a brothel called Heaven is liable to wax on about Frantz Fanon, just in case the reader wasn’t going to get the connection when the bad guy turns up wearing a white mask – is a near-miracle of style. The narrative form expresses an ideological position that ‘nothing’ is a precondition of free will, this ‘nothing’ being the space between fixed identities and determined actions. It is this Sartrean ‘nothing’ (I know it’s Sartrean because the French author’s 1943 L’Être et le Néant is, naturally, discussed on a tv playing in Heaven) that the narrator embodies, an individual operating in the gap between East and West, capitalist and communist, white and Black. That he is both self and other is dramatised – and that

this succeeds is the near-miraculous bit – in the narrator’s oscillation between first and second person and the division of this novel into two mirrored parts in which nothing happens, twice. Even these proliferating references to the Western canon – the narrator’s forbidden love is for ‘Lana. Two syllables, two taps of my tongue on my palate. L-l-lah-nah!’ – reinforce the central theme of how difficult it is to escape the ideological structures within which our education takes place. That the narrator can’t stop echoing Voltaire even as he rails against the mission civilisatrice captures the double bind from which a double consciousness must attempt to escape. Like his anonymous narrator, albeit that he was a child in the company of his family, Nguyen fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon. He shares with postcolonial writers from Césaire to Fanon the dilemma of how to reject the oppressor’s account of history from within the coloniser’s own philosophical and literary tradition. One solution is to graft a treatise on the relative values of violent and nonviolent protest onto an airport thriller about gangsters in early 1980s Paris; another is for the colonised subject to express their gratitude to the coloniser for the gift of Western literature in the words of Nguyen’s narrator: ‘Thank you! Fuck you! Thank you! Fuck you! Thank you! Fuck you! Thank you! Fuck you!’ Ben Eastham

Karya by Aravind Malagatti, translated by Susheela Punitha Penguin India, ₹399.00 (hardcover) Rare must be the times that death does not have an unspoken business function. The grieving apart, there are always those who use the dead to sort out pending issues, stoke or settle old rivalries and negotiate arrangements beneficial to themselves. For shrewd and heartless politicians, death can be good optics too. This usefulness of death is sharply critiqued in Aravind Malagatti’s Karya (the title means death rites), a novella that was first published in Kannada in 1988. It is the third day since Bangaravva died. She has had a funeral befitting her status in the village as a generous woman. Most of the villagers are part of the procession to conduct the third-day ritual of feeding the birds – the

dead are believed to return as crows to eat the food offered – when a rogue swirl of the wind makes Mallappa the wrestler drop the kullaggi ritual fire he is holding. Dropping the fire could bring untold bad luck to the community, and it is now up to the Panchas, the council of elders, to find a solution for this unprecedented calamity. As the large congregation awaits a verdict from beyond the boundary of the village, the elders scramble to follow rigid practices, often to comic ends. Country liquor flows freely, alongside accusations and gossip about Mallappa’s relationship with the landlord Shantagowda’s second wife. Mallappa’s uncle Chandappa meanwhile plots to be the Ghategara, the head of the

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community and the one responsible for carrying the kullaggi, trying to usurp the position from his older brother. Shantagowda arrives at the funeral party with a gun, and a solution is arrived at. But Malagatti does not allow the reader the comfort of closure. As the procession to the funeral ground begins again a day and half later, another chilling catastrophe awaits them. Grief is given its space, but it is in the way that myth, symbolism derived from nature, power politics and caste violence are used to comment on death’s potential as a spectacle and a tool that people use variously to further their agendas that Karya packs quite the mighty punch. Deepa Bhasthi

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The Art of Contemporary China by Jiang Jiehong Thames & Hudson, £14.99 (softcover)

China in One Village by Liang Hong, translated by Emily Goedde Verso, £19.99 (hardcover) The Art of Contemporary China is the latest addition to Thames & Hudson’s iconic ‘World of Art’ series. Although Jiang Jiehong politely kicks against the series’ encyclopaedic construction, explaining that his story will be rooted in the particular social and cultural context of postMao China as opposed to the world history of art. What this means in practice is that his narrative is structured by themes (art’s relationship to the masses and collectivism; to tradition; to urban transformation; and to a constrained society) drawn, as he puts it, from the ‘everyday reality’ of China, rather than a conventional chronology. Given Jiang’s conceit, perhaps it’s no accident that the only non-Chinese artist cited in the book – Robert Rauschenberg, who exhibited at Beijing’s National Museum in 1985 – used to claim that his work occupied a middle ground between art and life. Yet, beyond that aside, little attention is paid to outside influence: why many Chinese artists migrated to Europe and the us; the impact of the international artists who currently occupy so much of China’s gallery real-estate. Hong Kong, so much a part of China today, does not exist. Nevertheless, Jiang’s approach is welcome in that it goes some way to explaining why some of the preoccupations of contemporary art in China have developed and allows the author to connect one artistic practice to the next to create a convincing and at times illuminating narrative. And to make a break from the often asphyxiating tendency to divide contemporary Chinese art into strictly differentiated generations, rather than a continuous and messy flow. Where it falls a little flat is in the fact that not enough space is given to the intricacies of the realities from which the art derives. Indeed, not all of the realities of life in China (the impact – good and bad – of technology, for example) are present. In part this is a product of the state censorship regime in China, but it is equally a consequence of the paradox Jiang has created for himself: in which the real life from which the art is generated can only be identified when it enters the slightly less ‘real’ sphere of art. So, while the approach looks fashionably bottomup, it is necessarily top-down. The Tiananmen Square ‘incident’ of 1989 is mentioned and a few artworks relating to it, such as Song Dong’s Breathing (1996), glossed; its true impact (and the

restrictions governing discussion of it) is never discussed. Even a work as apparently ‘real’ as Hu Yunchang’s One Metre Democracy (2010), in which the artist had himself sliced open for a metre-long stretch from his clavicle to his knee, seems both privileged and indulgent without more contextual focus on what ‘democracy’ – a remarkably shifting value – meant in China at the time. Similarly, the economic context of both China and the development of the Chinese art market over the past decade or so is one about which Jiang, rather bizarrely, remains silent. Presumably because this avoids complicating his vision by having to deal with contemporary art’s interconnection with the country’s wealthy citizens/collectors, the increasing prevalence of art in government-led gentrification schemes or the influence of art-market forces. The effects of changes in China’s economic, social and political policies over the same timeframe dominate Liang Hong’s China in One Village, an at times harrowing, but stunningly insightful meditation on the status of the word ‘home’ and the redefinition of the family unit told from the perspective of ordinary citizens in rural China. Based on a series of interviews with Liang’s extended family and other residents of her hometown (Liang Village in Henan Province, Central China, from which the author, a professor of literature in Beijing, had been largely absent for a decade), it was originally published in Chinese in 2010. With little largescale industry (and the infrastructure that comes with it), the region’s economy, such as it is, is largely agrarian, its fabric torn apart following 30 years of sometimes contradictory ‘reform and opening up policies’ (which saw the decollectivisation of agriculture and an opening up to foreign investment) set in motion by Deng Xiaoping during the late 1970s and stuttering through to the early 2000s. Liang summarises the government assessment of the area as economically underdeveloped, socially conservative and generally backward; and the more general status of the rural population in China, which once constituted the majority of its population and the primary focus of Communist Party policy, as a ‘large burden’ on society, both politically and culturally. Broadly anthropological, yet coloured by emotion, the book focuses on the lives of three

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generations of villagers: grandparents dealing with the scars left by the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), their children (the author’s generation) who have left to find better-paid work in more-or-less distant cities (but continue to identify Liang Village as ‘home’ and to show off their wealth within it) and their children’s children, who consequently have little connection to either the town or the country. During the course of this history, the village has become part abandoned, part lavishly reconstructed, its arable soil drained of nutrients by brick factories and other extractive industries that have further damaged the irrigation systems and water quality. Children who moved to urban centres to seek employment rely on their parents to provide childcare services to grandchildren in a transactional relationship that extends the grandparents’ working lives and exploits traditional family structures. ‘In the future will these places [villages] really be their “hometowns”, these places characterised by loneliness, isolation, and contradiction? Lifeless and emotionless,’ Liang wonders in respect of younger generations. Yet part of the power of this book is the fact that Liang never allows it to become a straightforward sob story: ‘the problem of the underclasses isn’t a simple question of the oppressors and the oppressed; it’s a game of cultural power’, she writes, noting that villagers’ general apathy towards a sense of society outside of the family and village unit, their indifference to national politics and passive acceptance of their fate is partly responsible for their current situation. What makes Liang’s study so compelling is the way in which it offers a glimpse of a world in which personal problems – among them alcoholism, envy, domestic violence – exist on the same level as broader social and political problems – changes to collectivised structures, village and provincial finances, education and healthcare provision. Which, of course, aligns with Jiang’s conception of the history of China’s art. ‘Literary and artistic works explain life,’ the Rang County Committee Secretary informs Liang. But while China in One Village provides much of the additional contextualisation that Contemporary Art in China needs, how the former benefits from the context of the latter is rather less clear. Mark Rappolt

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Art credit

Text credits

on the cover

Words on the spine and on pages 23, 39 and 79 are from Nanditha Krishna, Sacred Animals of India, 2010

Ines Doujak, Ghostpopulations (detail), 2016–ongoing, collages of historical prints from earlytwentieth-century botanical wall charts and medical books, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Summer 2021

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First of all, let me just say that if you want proof of the benefits of colonialism, just look at what’s happened to Hong Kong now. A once proud, independent island reduced to a vassal state! It wasn’t like that when I was in charge. At thirty-five I was the youngest governor in Hong Kong’s history and I made it my business to empower the place. But I’m not here to provide you with empty boasts. Although I see you’re rather fond of that, if your elections of Donald, Boris and Narendra are anything to go by. Still, I know you doubt me. You’re somewhat to the left of those people we used to call Whigs, obsessed with the idea that everything to do with colonialism is a bad thing. Although, I venture to suggest, it’s ironic that the readers of a magazine about visual culture so often fail to open their eyes. What do you think about when you think about Hong Kong today? Money, that’s what. And, in all humility, it’s thanks to me. hsbc and Standard Chartered were both set up under my watch – and I think you’ll find that they are still printing banknotes today. It was me too who introduced labour reforms to the colony. To make money. In fact, I got a knighthood for that. For introducing coolie labourers to the territory. And I did that despite the fact that plantation owners in Ceylon were constantly whingeing that there weren’t enough coolies to go round. (That’s probably why I was sent to run Ceylon next – the tea must flow and all that.) It was me too who introduced the Hong Kong Cadet system to colonial bureaucracy. We trained Englishmen to speak Cantonese, so that we wouldn’t have to hire any natives, and a clear sense of order could stay in place. I would suggest to you, if I may be so bold, that one of the problems you living people seem to have is that none of you knows exactly where you belong, what station you occupy. When I was in charge no one wondered about that. With all modesty, I think you could say that I made Hong Kong great. Not ‘again’; great in the first place. I could never say that myself of course. I was happy directing things from the wings. A backstage kind of chap. Hiding my light under a bushel (the one and only instance in which I disobeyed Jesus, I might add). It tended to blind people, after all. But it was me that organised the annexation of Kowloon too.

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Back Page

In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists justify themselves, Hercules Robinson says ‘fair’s fair’

Hercules Robinson

To consolidate our needs for capital and freshwater, and to provide a buffer between the good people of the colony and the opium-addled Chinese. It’s because of things like that that I gained a reputation as a good administrator. I know you won’t believe my words, so I humbly submit for your perusal the reference I received in the Australian Town and Country Journal back in 1872, when it was announced that I was popping over to run New South Wales: ‘Sir Hercules is fond of power [not sure about that, I may have bought my commission in the army, but the rest just came naturally], a trained and admirable administrator of Crown colonies, an indefatigable worker, and one of the fairest distributors of patronage that ever held reins for Her Majesty anywhere. He is both sharp and clear in apprehension, a capital writer and speaker of formal set addresses, but not a ready man in public,—in fact, morbidly shy of public appearances in any shape,—fonder of the desk [I wasn’t quite so obsessed with furniture as this makes me out to be] and of real downright hard work in travelling, inspecting, and maturing schemes of improvement [I did sort out the Straits Colonies in my spare time while running Hong Kong]. He has effected wonders in Ceylon; and we should be fortunate, if he got another six years term of office here [and that’s before I’d even arrived, I’ll have you know]. Lady Robinson, daughter of Lord Valentia, is fond of gaiety and society, and is a majestic-looking woman [that’s why I married her – because of the latter part of the description, not the first – no one liked gaiety less than I did. Although it is true that having her there to be gay and sociable freed me up to get down to the serious business of running things].’ So, to conclude, ultimately my life was governed by a sense of duty and fairness. When I was helping to negotiate a rather unsavoury truce between the Empire and the Boers in the Transvaal, it was me, for instance, who suggested that, in the interests of equality, if the South African Republic had the right to exclude native races from its territory, it should extend that right of exclusion to Indian and Chinese coolie immigrants as well. And, I added, any other coloured immigrants who might be hanging around as well. Fair’s fair, after all.

ArtReview

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