ArtReview April 2017 by ArtReview

Nil Yalter Athens + Documenta = ?

Spencer Finch MILAN

Susan Hiller Paraconceptual

NEW YORK

oPenInG London

GILBeRt & GeoRGe dRInkInG PIeceS 1972-73 MAy – JUne 2017 37 doveR StReet, W1

London PARIS SALZBURG

oPenInG London

oLIveR BeeR neW PeRfoRMAnce And ScULPtURe MAy – JUne 2017 37 doveR StReet, W1

London PARIS SALZBURG

ANRI SALA TAKE OVER APRIL 28 – JUNE 17, 2017 — ANGELA BULLOCH HEAVY METAL BODY APRIL 28 – JUNE 17, 2017 — NEW ADDRESS POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN APRIL 28 – 30, 2017 FRIEZE NEW YORK MAY 5 – 7, 2017

The Centrifugal Soul 7 April — 27 May 2017

London | 4 Hanover Square

The Centrifugal Soul (detail), 2016, Photo: Rémi Chauvin

MAT COLLISHAW

Dachte Sie (detail), 2016, 240 x 180 cm, Photo: Lepkowski Studios

JONAS BURGERT ZEITLAICH 29 April — 29 July 2017

Berlin | Potsdamer Straße 77–87

HA U S E R & W IR T H

RONI HORN 27 APRIL – 29 JULY 2017 548 WEST 22ND STREET NEW YORK NY 10011 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

THE DOG’S CHORUS – LET SLIP TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH (DETAIL), 2016 WATERCOLOUR, PEN AND INK, GUM ARABIC ON WATERCOLOUR PAPER, TAPE; 3 PARTS 74.9 × 50.8 CM / 29 1/2 × 20 IN

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GORGONA, POSTGORGONA GORGONA, POSTGORGONA Curated by Danka Sosic and Zarko Vijatovic

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PIOTR UKLANSKI, MASSIMO DE CARLO GALLERY, MILAN, 2002, (INSTALLATION VIEW)

YAN PEI-MING, DESTINY ONE - THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND AND THE EMPEROR OF CHINA, 2009 OIL ON CANVAS, 150 X 300 CM, (DETAIL)

DAN COLEN, TBT, 2014, OIL ON CANVAS, 63.5 X 49.5 CM

IN 2012 100 YEARS AGO: THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC. (1912)

60 YEARS AGO: THE CORONATION OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II. (1952)

10 YEARS AGO: THE FIRST SOLO SHOW AT MASSIMO DE CARLO BY PIOTR UKLANSKI. (2002)

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM

Dirk Braeckman Belgian Pavilion 57th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia Represented by Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

Curator Eva Wittocx 13.05—26.11.2017 www.dirkbraeckman.be

Ha Chong-Hyun April 22nd — June 3rd, 2017

Ha Chong-Hyun,

Conjunction 03-8, 2003 Oil on hemp cloth 180 x 120 cm 70 7/8 x 47 1/4 inches

ALMINE RECH GALLERY PARIS

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Ryoji Ikeda

test pattern [film 14], 2014 © Ryoji Ikeda, photo by Jeff Elstone

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April 6 – May 20, 2017 Organised with Olivier Renaud-Clément Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House W1K 3JH London UK T +44 20 72 87 36 44 contact.london@alminerech.com www.alminerech.com

ALMINE RECH GALLERY LONDON

ArtReview vol 69 no 3 April 2017

Back to Life In a month in which the 14th edition of Europe’s Kassel-based quinquennial survey of the state of art, Documenta, docks at Athens, an arrangement that seems designed to highlight two poles of the continent’s economic, social and political destiny, ArtReview has been wondering how art, so often – in the context of attention-grabbing art fairs and auctions – sublimated to a condition of obsequiousness towards a financial aristocracy, contributes to our understanding of and engagement with these kinds of ‘real’ issues. After all, the representation of a problem is always one step removed from the problem itself. So how does art become more than simply an intellectual narcotic that does nothing other than ease consciences in the face of global suffering? Yes! ArtReview has been reading too much writing by people like Albert Camus and Lu Xun of late, and is consequently suffering a degree of existential anxiety. Still, the purpose of this magazine is to make its problems your problems, so deal with it. Not that ArtReview wants to come across as some sort of malevolent dictator (God knows there are enough people fighting to impose standardised or ‘correct’ readings of art already). Rather, its task is to persuade rather than impose. And any dictatorial tendencies it displays are at heart benevolent. Yeah – that’s what they always say, but ArtReview really means it. So let the persuasion start here! (Although do bear in mind that, to borrow a conceit from Donald Trump’s foundational ideology, ArtReview is right and everyone else is wrong.)

Self-love

This issue is in part dedicated to investigations into how art interacts with real rather than imagined life. Although, because of the cultish secrecy surrounding Documenta 14, some of the articles included here – an analysis of what Documenta might mean to Athens and a look forward to artist Peter Friedl’s contribution – are of necessity as much speculative as they are analytic. And artist Tyler Coburn’s Ergonomic Futures project texts look towards speculative future definitions of the human body in order to investigate the normative status of the human body today. But you’ve probably already heard that the path to enlightenment is neither straight nor straightforward. Now that you know that, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that ArtReview can play it straight too. Elsewhere in this issue it looks at how Turkish-French artist Nil Yalter has used formal experimentation in a lifetime’s work to highlight a range of issues surrounding immigration, feminism and social inequality in general. And at how Bulgarian artist Pravdoliub Ivanov remains haunted by his country’s transition from communism to ‘free’ market capitalism and the many contradictions that lie within. In the case of both artists, it’s an ability to mix the personal and the universal through the formal language of art that lies at the heart of things. That, and an inherent empathy and sympathy for other people. For without that, art becomes at best an onanistic performance, a form of porn for the ego. And there’s only so much you can really gain by watching someone else jacking off. As far as ArtReview is concerned, its job isn’t about witnessing a series of disappointingly less-than-mythical Pygmalions bringing their personal fantasies to life; rather it’s about exploring the ways in which the tools of art can engage with life-already-existing. ArtReview

Self-loathing

Pace Gallery is honored to announce the exclusive representation of the Estate of

Tony Smith

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Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 37

Socrates on spatial ideas in painting and Nick Serota’s magnetism Interview by Matthew Collings 52

Points of View by Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind, J. J. Charlesworth and Heather Phillipson 45

page 40 Seth Price, Untitled (detail), 2016, UV-cured print, acrylic paint and synthetic polymer on board, 152 × 152 × 1 cm. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Courtesy the artist

April 2017

Art Featured

Nil Yalter by Mark Rappolt 60

Peter Friedl by Raimar Stange 84

Athenian Panopticon by Iason Athanasiadis 72

Ergonomic Futures by Tyler Coburn 91

Pravdoliub Ivanov by Oliver Basciano 78

page 78 Pravdoliub Ivanov, Territories, 1995–2003 (installation view, Fridericianum Museum, Kassel). Block Collection, Berlin

ArtReview

KANG JUNGSUCK

2017. 4. 13–5. 11

DOOSAN Gallery New York

Art Reviewed

Lynn Hershman Leeson, by Jeppe Ugelvig Jordan Kasey, by Owen Duffy Gladys Nilsson, by Ashton Cooper Sadie Barnette, by Sam Korman Cynthia Daignault, by Scott Indrisek Hellen Ascoli & Jay Sullivan, by Laura A.L. Wellen Yoshua Okón, by Laura A.L. Wellen

Exhibitions 102 Wolfgang Tillmans, by Matthew McLean Babette Mangolte, by Stefanie Hessler Moshe Ninio Lapse, by Ory Dessau Sean Snyder, by Mark Prince Spencer Sweeney, by John Quin Laure Prouvost, by Dominic van den Boogerd Philippe Parreno, by Justin Jaeckle Michael Krebber, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Klara Kristalova, by Jacquelyn Davis Roger Ballen, by Sarah Jilani Sarah Pichlkostner, by Robert Barry COUM Transmissions, by John Quin Simon Dybbroe Møller, by Laura Smith The Place is Here, by Ben Eastham Field Work, by Gabriel Coxhead Maria Hupfield, by Bill Clarke Thomson & Craighead, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Judith Bernstein, by Jonathan Griffin Holton Rower, by Lindsay Zappas

Books 132 South and West: From a Notebook, by Joan Didion Ren Hang, edited by Dian Hanson Imagine Wanting Only This, by Kristen Radtke Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D, by David Kushner THE STRIP 138 A CURATOR WRITES 142

page 102 Wolfgang Tillmans, Juan Pablo & Karl, Chingaza, 2012. © the artist

ArtReview

no guts no glory ben turnbull saatchi gallery 11 april 8 may

Gung-ho, 164 x 206 cm (comic collage on wood, vintage flag), 2017 www.benturnbull.com

SAATCHI GALLERY

prints and originals gallery

Art Previewed

Monogamous crickets 35

Previewed Documenta 14 various venues, Athens 8 April – 16 July various venues, Kassel 10 June – 19 September Sadie Benning Kunsthalle Basel through 30 April Linder Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm through 22 April

Vija Celmins Matthew Marks Gallery, New York through 15 April

Seth Price Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 15 April – 3 September

Dee Ferris Corvi-Mora, London through 19 April

Dirk Stewen Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin through 20 April

Michel François Xavier Hufkens, Brussels through May 6

Steven Claydon The Common Guild, Glasgow 22 April – 9 July Giulio Paolini Galleria Christian Stein, Milan through 29 April

3 Linder, Fancy Man, 2011, Duratrans on lightbox, 161 × 126 cm. Courtesy Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

April 2017

1 Sixty-two years ago, Documenta was initiated as a subsection of a horticultural show in Kassel, with the aim of ‘documenting’ the so-called degenerate art banned during the Nazi era. The quinquennial event, now a coronation ceremony in any curatorial career, has come a long way since; indeed, this time, directed by Adam Szymczyk, it has come 2,489km. That’s the distance from Kassel to the Greek capital, where the first portion of the two-part 14th edition, which is subtitled ‘Learning from Athens’, will open, thoughtfully timetabled ahead not only of Documenta’s Germany-based remainder but also of Skulptur Projekte Münster and the Venice Biennale. The Kassel/Athens twinning, Szymczyk has suggested, reflects the urgency of looking at extremes within the precarious European Union: surplus-running and dominant Germany, destitute and dominated Greece, and creating some kind of symbolic exchange and interface between them.

One example of that will be the presentaIn Szymczyk’s previous workplace, tion, at Kassel’s Fridericianum, of works from the Kunsthalle Basel, there’s currently more the collection of Greece’s National Museum evidence of the exigencies of politics, this time of Contemporary Art. Otherwise, though, workfrom an American perspective. In the artworld, 2 Sadie Benning is best known for videos, ing in Athens has clearly not been easy, despite a vigorous runup involving piggybacking made since her teens during the late 1980s on Greece-based art magazine South as a State and including early PixelVision experiments, of Mind and ‘emergency cinema’ posted weekly which explored sexuality and the travails of on Documenta’s website by anonymous Syrian youth and were laced with pop-cultural tropes, filmmaking group Abounaddara. A month while in the music world she’s known for out, only the aforementioned two institutions cofounding feminist band Le Tigre. But her were confirmed as exhibition venues, and orgaexhibition here, Shared Eye, whose title evokes nisers’ lips were sealed concerning the list of the collaborative nature of seeing and creating artists. It does appear permission has been given meaning, represents a swerve of sorts, applying for the use of Athens’s public squares, and for a montage aesthetic to 55 so-called paintings a horseback parade at the opening, relating to – actually photographic reliefs accoutred with the equine procession on the Parthenon frieze shelves containing little toy figures, grandfather clocks, etc, and including painterly Aqua-Resin and launching a pointedly border-crossing 100-day horseback journey up through the elements and found photographs, the imagery western Balkans to Kassel. If Documenta 14 traversing the last half-century. Among the ends up unpredictable, unbalanced and elements are protesters, Ku Klux Klan marchers, disruptive, it’ll at least mirror these times. Benjamin Franklin (on a banknote), Benning’s

1 Marta Minujín, El Partenón de libros (The Parthenon of Books, 1983), installation, Avenida 9 de Julio, Buenos Aires. Photo: Marta Minujín Archive

2 Sadie Benning, Garden, 2016 (detail). Photo: Philipp Hänger. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

ArtReview

4 Vija Celmins, A Painting in Six Parts (detail), 1986–7/2012–16, oil on canvas, six parts, overall dimensions, 38 × 645 cm. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

5 Dee Ferris, Curtain Call, 2017, acrylic on paper, 152 × 102 cm. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

vinyl collection at home – in sum, ‘a highly perthrough the Latvian-born outlier’s quasi-mystic (Linder, in graphic-designer mode, created sonal response to the state of the world at a mophotorealism, her endlessly magical conversion the nipple-mouth-iron combo for the sleeve ment of deep political uncertainty’, says the of photographs depicting a single frozen of the band’s 1977 single Orgasm Addict; as the institution, ‘imbued with the charge of what moment into drawings with cosmic weight frontwoman of Ludus from 1978 to 84, she was has come before and what is yet to come’. Its very and transporting precision – star fields, oceans a doyenne of UK postpunk in her own right.) in-between-ness, you might recognise, is apropos. – and uncanny excursions into sculpture. If, as the gallery says, ‘institutionalised misogCollage is a format that invites renewal (Eg real stones accompanied by painted bronze yny’ is her bête noire, her art can never be ill because it’s a century old, originating in Cubism timed. Given the current unravelling of progress replicas.) All of this, Celmins has said, is rooted and finessed by German practitioners such as in her own life, or her own practice: getting the towards gender parity – the threatened rollback John Heartfield and Hannah Höch. One of their deepest black from a pencil for her night skies, of women’s reproductive rights in America 3 ablest spiritual descendants is Linder, who’s wandering around on piers or in deserts. She and legal protection against domestic violence made disruptive feminist collages for four decsaid as much to an interviewer once, and then in Russia – it looks doubly relevant now. ades, typically emphasising the female body added, ‘that’s enough, for goodness sake’. It is. If such shifts are another sign of reality and often repurposing porn and interior design. Over a decade or so in which she’s flown currently being off the rails – or, as a recent In her first solo with Andréhn-Schiptjenko New Yorker article half-jokingly had it, that 5 somewhat under the radar, Dee Ferris’s paint(and first exhibition in Scandinavia), nude we’re living in a computer simulation gone ings have progressed from stenographic traces wrong – what might offer some balm? Maybe women appear half-covered with swarms of landscape to blotchy, shadowy pastel abstracof butterflies and shells, and smeared with 4 a Vija Celmins exhibition. Now in its final tions, to something like Water Lilies-era Monet couple of weeks, the artist’s first New York cosmetics; or oiled and given toothy, lipsticked with the lilies left out. Yet quite consistently exhibition in seven years and first solo show mouths for nipples, clothes-irons for heads they’ve presented themselves as gauzy painterly with Matthew Marks is a 19-work excursion and artwork titles referring to the Buzzcocks. arenas less concerned with physical space than

April 2017

7 Seth Price, Different Kinds of Art (detail), 2004, vacuum-formed high-impact polystyrene, dimensions variable. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Courtesy the artist

6 Michel François, Untitled, 2015, asphalt, steel, 239 × 26 × 29 cm. Photo: HV-Studio, Brussels. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

inner space. Sometimes, as drink- and drugslangy titles like Candy Flipping on a String and Half Cut (both 2009) might suggest, it’s an altered state; generally it’s sybaritic, as witness Love Hotel (2007) or Lounge Lover (2013); and occasionally Ferris’s greys and greens imply morning-after nausea. In her fourth exhibition at Corvi-Mora, Pictures of Trickery (whose title quotes lyrics from a song by Goth trailblazers The Cure), the Somerset-born painter continues to drift away from figuration into abstraction, as if enacting a long dissolution. In the selection of new work we’ve seen, the forms in her compositions resemble crystals or precious stones but increasingly collapse into brushstrokes. It doesn’t seem by chance that some of these, as they bond together, also look like cigarettes. In his 2002 video Self-Portrait Against Nature, 6 Michel François strolls, smoking, across a concrete floor while wine bottles fall around him, creating an aleatory smashed-glass

composition. Chance, in the Belgian artist’s work, is a regular protagonist: he’s based loopy metal sculptures on scribbles by stationers’ customers testing pens, made blown-glass sculptures advertising his lung capacity at that moment, filmed an inchworm traversing a world map. There’s something roguish in these proposals; their meaning feels contingent, and they often delegate physical effort. Fitting, then, that François has repeatedly linked art and criminality: a block of polystyrene taped to the wall was inspired by a convicted smuggler’s attempt to conceal drugs; a later series of photographs depicted trial evidence, the objects’ value – as ‘Exhibit A’, etc, and then later as exhibits – impishly unfixed. Since art, under these auspices, is a game whose rules are for breaking, we’re guessing what François will show in Brussels by looking at the things he’s already made and excluding them as possibilities.

ArtReview

The idea of Seth Price having a retrospective, and a full-dress one like Social Synthetic at that, is slightly weird, since the Palestineborn American artist isn’t naturally associated with looking back. His mutating essay Dispersion, first published in 2002, influenced his peer group by positioning art in the digital era as a continually metamorphosing, frontward process; his artworks, meanwhile, reflect plasticity and, relatedly, the pressures of modernity on the body and the self. (See Price’s vacuumformed plastic shells of bomber jackets from 2005–8, once-utilitarian items later co-opted by the fashion industry, and his conversion of the negative space on a jpeg between ‘two people engaged in intimate action’ into a wall-based sculpture.) One might wonder how the Stedelijk will accommodate his overflow of extramural works, from mixtapes onward, but since the 140 works on display include ‘sculpture, installation, 16mm film,

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photography, drawing, painting, video, clothing 9 The past in Steven Claydon’s work is less and textiles, web design, music and sound, and another country, more another dimension. The party line on his artworks is that experipoetry’, evidently they’ve found a way. Dirk Stewen’s way, over the past decade encing them is like being an alien visitor trying 8 or so, has consistently involved gazing towards to understand the earth from an archaeological the past, and doing it via works on paper. dig; more generally, though, they’re meditations Within that circumscription the Dortmund-born on the diversely fluctuant status of objects. artist has found freedom aplenty, accessorising ‘Jeopardy and pressure’ are stated watchwords 10 his inventively elegiac works with thread, pins, for his Common Guild exhibition, which ‘plays confetti, streamers, tickertape and old photoout the processes whereby objects come into graphs. For his current exhibition, Stewen has being, accrue meaning, and endure and transform through environmental and cultural shifts’. decided to ‘spice up’ – his words – the show with someone else’s paperwork: expect, interspersed For what that means in practical terms we might with his art, sanctioned pages from Gay Goth Scene, look to Claydon’s last exhibition at Kimmerich a queer zine put together by singer/songwriter in Berlin, where sculptures fused circuit boards Joel Gibb (of the Hidden Cameras) and artist and fragments of sculpted bodies, thermal images, terracotta, mesh, cuneiforms and cables Paul P. (Goths, alert readers will note, are a subin atmospheric assemblies that seemed to span theme of this month’s column.) And, generally, centuries and civilisations. in his seventh show with Gerhardsen Gerner, Fifty-one years ago, under the pseudonym once again we’re being rewound through Stewen’s Christian Stein, Margherita von Stein opened autobiography: the zine, he says, reminds a gallery in Turin that would become a driver him of his own gothy upbringing in ‘a small of the Arte Povera movement and of advanced industrial town in Germany, feeling doomed’.

Italian art more generally. At the end of 2016, some 250 exhibitions later, the gallery – now based in Milan – made an appropriate gesture to its half-century birthday with a 19-work, two-venue show, spanning 1972 to 2016, by one of Italian conceptual art’s leading lights (and one of the gallery’s longstanding collaborators), the Turinese Giulio Paolini, always an outrider in Arte Povera due to his fascination with art history. Mimesis (1976–88), for example, involves two plaster copies of a classical sculpture facing each other; the intention, he’s said, being ‘to capture the distance that separates them and the void that the work creates around itself, taking away from us the right to possess its impenetrable gaze’, while the new work Fine (2016) is a sort of raft, referencing a Watteau painting and containing myriad tools, parts of artwork and other extracts from the artist’s studio. After its half-year run, the exhibition closes at the end of this month. Now in his mid-seventies, Paolini – tools restored, out of excuses – will have to get back to work. Martin Herbert

10 Giulio Paolini, Fine (installation view), 2016. Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Christian Stein, Milano

8 Dirk Stewen, Untitled (Schwarzes Brett 6), 2013, mixed media, 102 × 122 cm. Courtesy Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin & Oslo

9 Steven Claydon, Re-de-extinction Table; Transmission Assembly, 2016 (installation view, Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, 2016, Hepworth Wakefield). © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London

ArtReview

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April 6 – June 18, 2017

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15/03/2017 18:37

Points of View

The Trump administration has released its budget proposals for 2018, and as expected, on the chopping block are the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – the big three pillars of what conservatives and Republicans have long denounced as the federal embodiments of liberal elitism, political correctness and media bias. For those of us engaged with the arts in the US, the National Endowment for the Arts is the banner that cannot be allowed to fall. There is little doubt that we will muster every argument that we believe might thaw what we believe to be the cold hearts of our new legislative masters – eg that the arts contribute billions of dollars to the US economy (US Bureau of Economic Analysis; americansforthearts.org); that the arts are leaders in rural economic development (ruralgeneration.org); that the arts provide proven, cost-effective health treatments (National Intrepid Center of Excellence); that the arts are essential to educating creative thinkers and raising overall academic performance (artsedresearch.org). All of this is true, and so we will write letters and tweet about it to our congressmen. We will organise sit-ins and marches. We will mount messaging campaigns, and they will be beautiful and entertaining and piercing, because we’ve got the artists and designers and dancers and musicians on our side. We will believe that we are doing the right thing, that we are on the right side of history, that our righteousness is authentic and true and so deserving of the fight. And we won’t be wrong, but we will be making a dire tactical and strategic mistake. Trump’s budget is the beginning of divide and conquer. It is the start of a protracted negotiation not just with Congress but with the American people, and it has all the markings of Trump’s standard operating procedure, which is to go ‘big’, to ‘maximise options’ and to ‘get the word out’. Every big proposal to come out of the Trump campaign or White House has been designed this way, from the border wall

Civilisation on the chopping block This cannot stand, says Jonathan T.D. Neil of Trump’s plans to defund all that is good in life with Mexico to the projected growth of the US economy. In every instance, the starting salvo is regarded as extreme or outlandish. It’s designed to be so, because this is the anchor, the point of reference that sets the boundaries for the rest of the negotiation. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than in Trump’s first joint address to Congress, during which he was lauded for not coming off as crass, vulgar or unhinged. That he was applauded for finally appearing remotely presidential was a function of his prior behaviour anchoring everyone’s expectations to the crass, vulgar and unhinged character that he is. Furthermore, Trump isn’t proposing to end funding for just the NEA, the NEH and the CBP, he’s calling for the elimination of 16 other independent agencies – such as the African Development Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars – and for gutting the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency (31 percent), the State Department’s international development programmes (29 percent), as well as the Agriculture (21 percent) and Labor (21 percent) departments. Such a wide array of targets does a number of things. It gives the Trump administration

April 2017

all of the options it needs to give and take in its negotiations. It sets all of the variously vested interest groups scrambling after whatever dollars and attention they can get. (We in the arts will be just one of many constituencies vying for our small piece of the paltry discretionary pie.) And it ensures maximum media exposure through maximum outrage and anxiety, which guarantees that the anchors are being set far and wide. We know the arts are instrumental. Even the US Congress understands this. Title 20 of the US Code, which established the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities (of which the NEA and NEH are parts), ‘finds and declares’ that ‘an advanced civilization... must give full value and support to [all] branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future’, and that ‘the world leadership which has come to the United States cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be solidly founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the Nation’s high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit.’ In this, the ‘encouragement and support’ of the arts and humanities are ‘appropriate matters of concern to the Federal Government’. We need to remind Congress of this. And then we need to do and demand more. We in the arts need to form coalitions with reporters, with scientists, with scholars of international affairs and professional political operatives, with NGOs that provide crucial assistance to impoverished peoples and regions around the globe, with lawyers, with labourers and with advocates for the most vulnerable among us. (This used to be called the left, but perhaps it needs a new name.) Their causes and issues need to be ours. We need to protect funding for their agencies and programmes and staffs and beneficiaries as if it was funding for ourselves. And then we need to demand more of it, much more of it. It’s time to pitch the anchors in the other direction.

An artist goes for a hike in the hills on the outskirts of Beijing. She is looking for a stone that bears no visible trace of human manipulation. In the lush forest, she stumbles across a sizeable rock, the shape of which intrigues her. It appears untouched by Homo sapiens. She decides to bring the rock back to her studio in Shanghai, a journey of 1,400km. As the stone is neither small nor smooth, the journey develops into a complicated and cumbersome project. Once in the studio, the rock becomes the model, or motif, for a 1:1-scaled black-and-white picture. It sits at the centre of a naturalistic depiction and covers most of the picture plane. As the picture of the rock is made as a lithograph, it becomes a visual echo of sorts. Refined Still Life #1 (2015): the afterimage of a seemingly absurd endeavour. Why am I so fascinated by it? This work, by Yu Ji, is not exactly my cup of artistic tea. In fact, as a figurative representation of something from nature, and a singular, discrete art object on top of that, it speaks against many of my known and expressed interests. And yet my fascination is definitely connected to this simple surprise effect: that of my being attracted to something that I did not expect to find appealing. The work has become an unexpected and unassuming stumbling stone for other reasons too. This includes the artist’s openness to allowing not only the unexpected and mundane to become part of the work, but also the counterintuitive. To schlep a perfectly ordinary rock – after all, most of earth’s stones are untouched by human beings – means getting involved in a presumably boring and unnecessarily laborious process, albeit one that testifies to an interest in the land and its properties and faculties. Then there is the creation of the material artwork: it is complex without involving high production values (lithography being an old technique for reproducing images by drawing on the flat surface of limestone). The peculiar repetition of the object depicted and the picture itself is also captivating – an image of a stone without traces of human hands made precisely by human hands and a stone. Such tautologies can be gimmicky and nostalgic, but here the return to the old-fashioned technique comes from the work demanding it, not from a melancholy attachment (such as in the frequent fetishisation of celluloid film by artists during the 1990s). The demand in turn has something to do with going ‘back to basics’, to a form of reproduction of images that is obviously not only predigital but even pre-electrical. Every time I hear the argument – and I hear it frequently – in the more politically engaged art circles that artmaking as we know it has to stop under conditions being imposed by the governments of Trump, Putin, Duterte,

Pointless Acts Now is the time to cultivate the counterintuitive, says Maria Lind, wondering why she can’t shake the image of a common stone from her mind

Erdogan, Xi Jinping, etc, I am reminded of Refined Still Life #1. Because I disagree: rather than quitting art as it has been practised, now is the time to intensify our focus upon it. With distinction. But not distinction based on the good taste of the connoisseur. Rather distinctions by which we argue for our choices based on complexity, relevance and urgency. We need to distinguish inquiry from gesture, pertinence from entertainment, uniqueness from routine. We need to ask what the artwork does, to test it with changing ‘wheres’, ‘whens’ Yu Ji, Refined Still life 1#, 2015, lithograph, 58 × 45 cm. Courtesy the artist and Beijing Commune

ArtReview

and ‘hows’. This means subjecting it to various definitions of ‘quality’, which need to be continuously debated. And simultaneously – and importantly – we need to make time for civic engagement, whether through art or not. Only we can make the crucial decisions about how we prioritise time. In this context, the self-determination of the artist is not to be disregarded. To follow through with counterintuitive thoughts is indispensable here, to believe in a spark of an idea, or even a shard of a vision, which at least at the stage of the making of the work is unintelligible by others, and yet can be trusted by both the maker and by others. The challenge today is to avoid becoming ensnared in the political panic and dropping everything. Artist Naeem Mohaiemen speaks about the security panic in post-9/11 America, and how that triggered his interest in the 1970s as another period of security panic, another time when novel models in life and society were at stake. Now that we again find ourselves in a political panic, we must resist the logic of rising authoritarian, nationalist and fascist forces. We need new beginnings, and they abound in spaces where many of us are now, namely places of uncertainty and fear. This is also where relevant art, such as Yu Ji’s lithograph, tends to lie. Awkward and incomprehensible, and yet insistent, it is about the possibility of seeing and doing things otherwise. Art won’t save us. At its best, art cultivates the counterintuitive, manifesting the notion that ‘everything can be different’. It does this in ways we did not expect, which we did not yet imagine, or maybe had forgotten. Perhaps it even starts to conceive an entirely different intuition.

What effect can paintings have on politics? It’s a recurring, never-really-resolved question, since as an artform, the history of painting is one in which the question of its power as an agent of social or political comment, comes up against its awkward cultural status – its ambiguous history of exclusivity, luxury and leisure. And while painters continue, more or less self-consciously, to want to assert the medium’s capacity for addressing the political realities of the world, when it comes to picturing human suffering, particularly suffering produced by political violence, their attempts to acknowledge political solidarity often appear to be tokenistic gestures. That, at least, was the predicament of Dana Schutz’s oil painting Open Casket (2016), on show as part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which opened in March. Schutz is well known for her fragmented, psychedelically weird, often deeply neurotic take on figurative painting. Overt references to the world of history and politics don’t get much of a look-in. By contrast Schutz’s Open Casket takes its reference from photographs of the disfigured body of Emmett Till, the black fourteen-year-old who, in 1955, was murdered for the alleged slight of flirting with a white woman in a shop in Mississippi. Till was abducted by the woman’s husband and an accomplice, beaten, shot and dumped in a river. Images of his horrifically mutilated and bloated face, on view in the open casket his mother had insisted on for his funeral, would become an icon of the nascent American Civil Rights Movement. Schutz’s painting flattens and schematises the key elements from the various documentary images of Till in his casket – his black jacket, the white shirt buttoned up to the neck, and next to it a head made up of a gnarled and bruised contortion of facetted browns, blacks and streaked reds. In a biennial that declares itself to be arriving ‘at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing politics’, and in which half of the artists are women or people of colour, you could see how Schutz’s painting might seem relevant. Critics were quick to seize on the painting’s topicality. ‘If you think her work isn’t “political enough”’, gushed Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, ‘see her thick, sluicing Open Casket… and see if the idea of Black Lives Mattering doesn’t crash in on you.’ The New York Times’s Roberta Smith opined that Schutz ‘doesn’t picture [Till’s] wounds as much as the pain of looking at them.’

On the representation of the people As activists criticise Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, J.J. Charlesworth questions the extent to which an artist’s identity necessarily dictates the effect of their work However in the era of Black Lives Matter, and the bitterly divisive identity politics of intersectionality, it wasn’t long before Schutz’s painting was being called out for exploiting the suffering of black people, rather than expressing solidarity. So as social media quickly got hold of the image, at stake was Schutz’s identity as a white artist, or as one Twitter post succinctly put it, a ‘White woman profiting off of black murder caused by a white woman’. Another Instagram poster demanded ‘What stakes does this white woman have in this art? She’s not reliving generations of racist violence and trauma’. Soon, images were circulating of artist Parker Bright staging a one-person protest standing in front of the painting with

Parker Bright standing in front of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) at the Whitney Biennial

April 2017

the words ‘BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE’ scrawled across the back of his grey T-Shirt. Social media isn’t the most temperate of arenas for debate, and extreme opinions get full voice (‘this artist should just die’ didn’t get much take-up however). But the responses to Schutz’s painting are typical of the bitter and bleak temper of today’s identity politics, in which different identity groups understand representation to be a matter of disenfranchisement and exclusion of one group by another, so that representation itself – visual representation, of people, events and history – ends up claimed as the exclusive property of one or other disenfranchised groups. It wasn’t so much the image of Schutz’s painting that was deemed offensive, but that a white artist might claim it and deploy it. And the idea that working with and presenting such an image is itself a kind of abuse, or at least an act of grave insensitivity, turns on the idea that the artist making the image had no claim to a shared identity of suffering – that the art should ‘relive’ the collective experience of violence and trauma. But determining the right of an image to speak to people according to the identity of the maker is to put the intention of the maker before the effect of the work – to deny the possibility of an artwork having a capacity to affect, move or change those who experience it. This isn’t to argue that Schutz’s clumsy attempt to say something relevant about American race-politics via painting, or to try to use painting to speak of suffering (there are many better paintings that do this) must be applauded, but rather, it is to insist that it should be considered for what it does, not what we assume its author intends, or their social license to do so. Otherwise, to use the logic of identity politics on other (far greater) paintings of political suffering produces tragic absurdities: Picasso’s Guernica (1937) for example, would be dismissed not for what it looked like, but because the artist could not have had any real experience of the suffering of those of the Basque town that had been bombed by the Nazis – not to mention the small matter of him being a ‘privileged male’. But if artworks become no more than tokens of their makers’ identity, there’s little chance of them communicating anything to anyone else. At a time where progressive politics needs to think hard about how to form new solidarities, new common identifications, the politics of identity can only continue to turn artworks into totems of division.

Francis Bacon Nervous System

21 January 1 May 2017 FREE ENTRY Five of Francis Bacon masterpieces join the Ferens Art Gallery's permanent collection redisplay. This includes one of Bacon's most revered and highly recognised works, Head VI (1949), from the Arts Council Collection. A master of modern British art, Bacon's series was inspired by Diego Velazquez's 17th-century Portrait of Pope Innocent X

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Francis Bacon, Head VI 1949, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2017 This exhibition has been supported with loans from the Arts Council Collection. Founded in 1946, the Arts Council Collection is the UK’s most widely circulated loan collection of modern and contemporary British art and includes important examples by all of the UK’s prominent artists. For more information please see www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk

HULL

Apparently, an urban brain is rigged differently to a rural brain. Those little synaptic shockers heat and cool and leap at different rates, to toughen or temper the mind. The urban environment requires a certain level of drop-out, give-up, de-zoning to get through a single day. It’s just not possible to be that in it at all times. We need out from the gunk around us. And if you can’t switch it off on your own, you’re going to need help to do it. When I rehomed Marj, a border collie, her body specifically hers, she didn’t come wired for my corner of East London. The 38 bus within millimetres, infinite pedestrians, a loud sneeze, a helium balloon, a surprise bin-bag, a rogue squirrel – all causes for sudden alarm, and when she exerted her alarm on the lead, I felt it too. I felt it. Marj is a real, high-alert jumper, and she started rewiring me the same. A rehomed dog and a lover have the same way of uploading their consciousness to yours. It’s like someone’s let themselves in, after dark, and laid their everything on your everything. One of the best things about being companion to a dog is exposure to a title like Dr Overall’s ‘Protocol for Relaxation’. Marj has led me into a new realm of deep canine reading. Dr Overall’s thesis goes that, through trained relaxation, as embodied by you, you counter-condition your hepped-up dog-friend, encouraging less OTT behaviour. It’s like compensation for all the crap dogs have to withstand, trying to muddle in with humans. (Though, frankly, the human world is alarming, and we oughtn’t to forget it.) Too attached to my renewed hypervigilance to be a model of chilled comportment, I submitted my body to a ‘double gong bath’ – 24 people prone in a dark room, candles, blankets, an incense waft and, at either end, a gong, made resonant by a person. (No dogs admitted??) Between them, the ripples were splashing up all over us. The full 90-minute job. It’s hard to place sensuality, but I know I got doped up on the scents and soundwaves, and quickly forgot the sharp facts of my life for the slackened fantasy it could become. The air didn’t feel entirely dry, as though it could be liquid, an unplumbed sonic fluid,

metropolitan by

Heather Phillipson

April 2017

but it wasn’t wet enough to swim in. More like floating. And then I was in deep. It was like breaking the seal on a jar of what you most crave, and then downing it. Drowning in it. And the whole thing ended with a crescendo of convincing rain sticks. Rain sticks! Then, back out on the 38 bus-route – BLAM! Sirens, neons, Friday-night howlers. Sometimes, at my most tranquilised, I let my mind dip into that comfy spread, peanut butter (no palm oil, no added sugar), and wonder: is there anything it wouldn’t go with? Methodically, I’ve conjured it all – vegetables, rices and pastas, sweet spreads, savoury snacks, hot puddings, fresh berries… and got nothing. It took a while to reach this conclusion – meeting a peanut in my muesli, I used to feel duped: they’re not real nuts. (And wasn’t it peanut butter, in fact, that fried Elvis?) But once I ignored their cultural and symbolic status, and really tasted the peanuts, I had to admit a special affection. The peanut’s interloper status, between nut and legume, is its singular, claggy transgression. And with every scoop, I remain astonished – how many lives sacrificed in a single teaspoon? As it goes, one of the first poems that got to me, and that still, I mean it, gets me, is by Anon: ‘A peanut sat on a railroad track, / His heart was all a-flutter. / Along came a train, the 2.56 – / Toot toot! Peanut butter!’ Maybe deep down what I’m really considering isn’t peanuts and calm at all but the worthless consequences of my brief-lit body in toto and the passing connections it makes before: kaput. Now that persons come in byte-size portions, distributed ever quicker, worldwide, isn’t there all the more to be said for savouring each other’s specific tastiness? Staking a wager on the heat of love-aboutto-happen? Getting morphed? (I just thought of a baby’s chubby arms – so new and smooth and full – is it wrong to want to taste a baby’s skin, in deference to aliveness?) Are a lot of the best feelings like bathing? When I think of these mutual submersions, I can’t locate the feeling anywhere, exactly, but I’d like the rewiring to be extensive. Thank god there are still some things one can search for that remain unlocatable.

NIL YALTER

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SARIEV Contemporary at ART COLOGNE 26 - 29 April, 2017

And then...

NEUMARKT section Hall 11.3, A 34 Pravdoliub Ivanov Vikenti Komitski Kamen Stoyanov

Oliver Sutherland 13/04/17 - 14/05/17

Artists represented: RADA BOUKOVA // PRAVDOLIUB IVANOV // VIKENTI KOMITSKI LUBRI // STEFAN NIKOLAEV // NEDKO SOLAKOV KAMEN STOYANOV // VALIO TCHENKOV // VOIN DE VOIN

SARIEV Contemporary, Bulgaria, Plovdiv www.sariev-gallery.com

Pravdoliub Ivanov, Trouble is Always Double, 1997-2015

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14/03/2017 11:36

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 54

Socrates on spatial ideas in painting and Nick Serota’s magnetism Interview by

Matthew Collings

Socrates lived in Athens, 470–399 BC. The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato’s Republic, which, as with much of the philosophy of Plato, is supposedly a verbatim report of Socrates’s teachings.

ArtReview

ArtReview What’s the Socratic method? Socrates It’s a pedagogic approach in which students ask a series of questions and a guru or sage answers them, quite ironically sometimes. Truth is elicited bit by bit, mostly by the questioner gradually getting the message that the assumptions in their questions are unsustainable, and thereby the questioner attains enlightenment on a question that wasn’t asked but probably should have been. AR No one knows anything you really said. But the interesting thing about what Plato said you said is that Plato’s entire philosophical output as it exists now is thought to be pretty much what he said.

dependent instead on hundreds of years of visual traditions. AR Biblical mythological ideas are not necessarily recognised by the majority today. S That’s right. The same majority also doesn’t know what abstract values in paintings are. A dwindling minority is aware of the notion. Such values make up the formal meaning of a painting. This is its pictorial meaning independent of depiction. But the depiction is powerful because of it. AR You mean a painting of a scene from a story is vivid because of the formal treatment of the thematic idea?

S That is interesting, I agree.

S That’s right. If the painting isn’t a depiction but abstract, it’s directly about that formal treatment. That’s the only content. There isn’t any story.

AR Anything you want to add to the record? S I’ve become quite interested in how paintings are done. AR What conclusions have you come to? S To notice how a painting done right now is constructed is to notice what it’s fundamentally doing and to a great extent what it’s about. If it was done long ago it might be thought to be about Judith holding the head of Holofernes, which she’s just chopped off. But it’s more fundamentally about painterly construction and ideas. It was only because these were visually engaging – they had an engaging visual complexity and depth – that the communication of biblical mythology, or moral ideas that such mythology encapsulates, could be refreshed. Otherwise they were just known things. But now this known thing was suddenly urgent because of the urgency of the visual impact of the painting with its completely visual abstract supporting construction, a construction independent of theology and

AR Today paintings might be about different ideas than biblical mythological ones, or indeed religious ones generally. S No doubt religion still informs all ideas, as it continues after its demise to pervade all thought and behaviour, all ritual, all social structure, to some tiny degree; even, in places, a great degree. AR Has religion come back? S The idea that religion has come back, that its disappearance was just a myth, is a complicated one. Religious fundamentalism isn’t really religion coming back. It’s a social movement or quasi-military movement with slogans taken

from religion, and behaviours justified in the name of religion. ISIS however isn’t the Spanish Inquisition. And even the Spanish Inquisition isn’t really religion. Crazy fundamentalist Christians in America aren’t ‘religion’. Religion attends all these phenomena, but it doesn’t define them. Religion persists as religion, but societies are no longer ruled solely by its precepts. The extent to which its precepts really were sovereign in any era is another question. AR What is it that mainly replaces religion as a subject in art today? S We might suggest consumerism or freedom or artistic exaltation, or free experiment – but religion was never really the main subject even in religious art, in the sense of religion itself really being the focus. This is because religion imbued everything that went on in society. And so anything could be a subject in art and have a religious character, or be given one. The power of one town over another or one social group over another might be pictured in religious terms. So it wasn’t really religion that was the subject in this case, but power. Or some of the picturing might be directly religious in the sense that the Crucifixion is a religious idea and there are many paintings that picture it. But what the Crucifixion looked like is not part of any idea in the New Testament, and yet all these paintings of it are full of ideas about precisely that. So therefore even a painting of the Crucifixion is full of ideas that aren’t religious. AR A painting done now might be about well-fed confidence that neoliberalism gives to painters that have a good market for their wares. S That’s right. But you wouldn’t necessarily see these factors directly in a painting by Christopher Wool

above Francesco Clemente, Perseverance, 1981, oil on canvas, 198 × 236 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern, Berlin & London facing page Portrait of Socrates, first century, marble. © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Daniel Lebée / Carine Déambrosis

April 2017

or Charline von Heyl. Just as a painting by Jan van Eyck of the Last Judgement shows an infinite number of elements and factors that aren’t biblical, even though every single factor down to the beautifully rendered individual blades of grass in the painting could be interpreted as biblical. AR Hmm... S Van Eyck wouldn’t have put those visual ideas in the painting otherwise. If he thought for one moment that they could be considered alien to religion, he would have rejected them. And yet of course they are not really religious. It’s just that they could be interpreted as religious at that time. Society was set up in such a way that there was a strong likelihood that van Eyck’s visual ideas would be accepted as somehow religious. AR I get it, by Zeus! And you’re saying that’s a matter of interpretation at the time and what we know or confidently speculate about it now? S Right. A blade of grass might be mentioned as part of a biblical parable but not what it looks like, and yet there’s a blade of grass in a painting by van Eyck with a very particular visual character, and that visual character is extrabiblical. AR So you’re still talking about structure and construction? S They’re always interesting. Some swirls and swishes in a Christopher Wool in a sale at Sotheby’s – where the Wool is flanked by a few Richters and Oehlens and Kippenbergers, and a Baselitz, and the Wool is immensely tall – say something about structure and construction. They also communicate ideas about mythologies of art’s value in society. As well as ideas about freedom, and about certain types of painterly structure that have been agreed to be important, and then that agreement

was undermined. And so they tell us too about limits on freedom. And they tell us about space, extreme tonal contrast, translucency, emptiness, bodily movement, relative scale – the human body: after all it’s a giant painting – and wealth: how did he do it, what assistance did he have, does he have dozens of well-appointed studios all over the world, is he often on holiday, does he have the best speakers in the world on which to listen to the Flying Burrito Brothers, or whatever nostalgic rock his age group and gender would go for, while working? AR Do you believe in the gods? S Well, Nick Serota’s a near-deity. AR For real! But is it for good or ill? What do you think about him going to the Arts Council? S When I read the announcement online I remembered the early 1980s when he was the boss at the Whitechapel, and the gallery staged lurid enormous shows of neo-expressionist paintings, and had to weather (teacup) storms of protest that they’d been bought cheap by Saatchi, with Whitechapel official exposure ramping up the value. But to me they were a genuinely fascinating staging of various new careers, always a bit similar. From bohemian, ugly, quirky, outsider-provincial, with a streak of nastiness that distinguished the work from mere provincial-as-such, to awesome factory production of giant similar-looking tremblyoutline paintings, with Nescafé Instant content of bourgeois entertainment/challenge. AR Before that particular moment of Serota’s reign at the Whitechapel there’d be the odd show of Richter…

A glimpse of art on the BBC ineptly presented by an oblivious reporter was extended on Channel 4 to long programmes with dutiful interviews and careful explanation. The old, tatty and largely overlooked Turner Prize was replaced by a truly spotlighted and streamlined version that was consumed as a new kind of glamour, as Turner-Prize-typicalartists transitioned from the motley crew of eccentrics and fishwives to a new regime of young cokeheads who had trouble reading a book

ArtReview

S Haha, yes: who was this weirdo? Then this other circus set in, full strength all the time, apparently involving, as well as Serota, further Euro ringmasters all working together in an international pirate cartel: academics, curators, historians and private dealers. AR Later, as I remember, we’d learn it was all highly empty and wrong, courtesy of Benjamin Buchloh… S At the time, although Buchloh was a known thorn in the side, it wasn’t easy to know exactly what his gripe was or take seriously his idea that to paint at all was an ethical misstep. AR It’s a great narrative. S It wasn’t easy to know exactly what was good about Francesco Clemente or whoever’s paintings, either, showcased at the Whitechapel: what the painterly element in those done-inten-minutes, ten-feet-wide-oil-paintings was for. And what the conceptual element had to do with anything: a divided Germany, supposedly, with some of them. Or why we should care when an Arte Povera-mocking monkey realised his true self through aping brushstrokes by Cy Twombly. AR Then what? S Then there was global mumbling-religiousincantation-reverence, with Serota as one of the priests, where unlikely but market-friendly trios of art gods were globally worshipped, from China to Beverly Hills: LichtensteinWarhol-Twombly, or Beuys-Warhol-Twombly, with endless catalogues. The Tate Gallery, a boring, provincial dump, started having clumsily obvious survey shows of dubious phenomena dubbed the New Art, with A.R. Penck and Sandro Chia. There’d be groups formed of sad, confused, unhip, mediumwealthy donors, dubbed Friends of the New Art. This turned into what was initially rather a pathetic, would-be mass-media spectacle

called the Turner Prize, which Serota in the early days – 1984 onwards – seemed ashamed of. Once a year it got two-and-a-half minutes late at night on the BBC. AR And then? S Young British artists in the 1990s saved the Turner Prize, and Waldemar Januszczak, commissioning editor for the arts at Channel 4, made Channel 4 the Turner Prize’s mass-media sponsor and encourager, in a fit of inspiration equal to any of Serota’s great moves. A glimpse of art on the BBC ineptly presented by an oblivious reporter was extended on Channel 4 to long programmes with dutiful interviews and careful explanation. A different kind of embarrassment (that is, the old tatty and largely overlooked Turner Prize was replaced by a truly spotlighted and streamlined version) was consumed as a new kind of glamour, as Turner-Prize-typical-artists transitioned from the motley crew of eccentrics and fishwives they’d been before to a new regime of young cokeheads who had trouble reading a book.

and Alcoholics Anonymous buddy to Tracey Emin, ringing her up the day after she melted down on live TV to offer phone cuddles from on high. Then came Tate Modern, and the old dump at Millbank was refashioned as Tate Britain. Both kicked off under Serota with the hilarious gag of hanging all the works in higgledy-piggledy order so they weren’t male- or Western-centric, a stunt quickly copied by the rest of the world’s contemporary art museums. AR What resulted? S The result was a blessed neoliberal/Society of the Spectacle/hushed-tones-reverence-forbaffling-any-old-junk-lying-in-the-cornercalling-itself-art mishmash of forces too powerful and great ever to be challenged – but also, it turned out, the crystallisation of what had probably always been there anyway, since the hokey old shabby-art-centre days of the Whitechapel during the 1970s. The ugly donors became superdieted, Tibet-aware hedge-funders growing their own tomatoes in Martha’s Vineyard.

AR You’re funny!

AR And Serota?

S Producers of baffling gimmicks, the tearaway thirtysomething Brits had a hot glamour that benefited Serota, who annually chaired the Turner Prize. A typical lineup of judges would include a confused nonentity from the Friends, a curator twerp chirping nonsense, a drunken, red-faced mass-media representative and finally, to raise the tone, or at least cause it to be a bit sinister, a Mafia art-hustler from the Euro or USA official artworlds. In this context Serota’s aura (a repressed British diplomat in a Graham Greene story, ridiculously updated with designer suits) somehow seemed positive.

S Throughout all this, Serota was a socially alarming, pinched figure, embracing the new superwealthy, superbland, superfake spiritualart-love-plus-social-climbing ethos of the Blairite 1990s, which seemed to just come out

of nowhere, but at the same time he benefited from a reputation of having somehow personally invented it, perhaps receiving occasional guidance on the phone from Italy from Cy Twombly, who he now seemed to have invented as well. AR Saatchi and Hirst slipped from their thrones, though, in a way…? S They drifted off quietly of their own accord to do their own things – and Tony Blair was pulled off his perch. But Serota maintained a radiant glow, a missionary irradiated by money. His yin-yang archetype structure is that on the one hand he is the Victorian vicar from across the seas teaching colonised infants to sing hymns and on the other he is sexy for the lady artists. A great moment occurred when, in a Turner Prize speech, he compared people feeling dubious about whether the Momart warehouse fire destroying YBA artworks was really all that sad to Nazis. AR Plato said you were a great rhetorician. What do you think of Serota’s speechifying? S His Turner Prize speeches were always magnificently vacuous and banal. He’d say something innocuous and give it a great serious intensity, pausing to look out at the audience from under a powerfully raised eyebrow, through a massively concentrated glinting eye, to give emphasis to a pointless point, then return to the main flow, ready in a moment to pause and look out once again, blowing our minds with an insight like, ‘In recent years the arts have become part of our reputation and even our DNA as a nation’. AR You’re making me laugh again. S On the other hand, I think he’s great.

AR What next?

NEXT MONTH Mary Mother of God on LD50

S He became a combined art pope

Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2007, enamel on linen, 320 × 244 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s, London

April 2017

TONY McGEE

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A drum skin 59

Nil Yalter Exile is a hard job By Mark Rappolt

above Temporary Dwellings 2, Paris – New York – Istanbul (detail), 1974–76, photographs, objects and drawings preceding pages Turkish Immigrants (detail), 1976, b&w video, 20 photographs and drawings

ArtReview

The relationship between people and places, and the assumptions autodidact, she says; her earliest works, from the late 1960s, took the made about both, underpins the dominant discourses of contem- form of abstract paintings inspired by the Paris-based Russian painter porary politics worldwide. Examples are myriad, from the seem- Serge Poliakoff, as well as some performance and costume design. ingly endless refugee crises in Europe and elsewhere, to the more Although she exhibited regularly in Istanbul at the beginning of her loudmouthed mythological articulations of Trumpists, Brexiteers, career, in a 2013 interview with curator Adriano Pedrosa she reflects followers of Hindutva and various other forms of nationalism, on how, at that time, it was a city that had not engaged in contempoall of which seek to articulate who does and doesn’t belong within rary culture, let alone contemporary art: ‘in 1958 there was nothing, the defining lines of various accidents of cartography on our planet. not a single gallery, no museums, no books, nothing… we didn’t We live in an age – as have so many others in earlier times – in which do anything contemporary in Turkey in those days’. As a result, Yalter decided to move from European the primary function of much political art’s periphery to its centre, making rhetoric is to justify degrees of exclusion The work is a portrait of people Paris her home in 1965. This was a tranand repression. whose presence is at once evident sition revisited in Orient Express (1976), The relationship between people and and absent: the very essence of comprising Polaroids, drawings, text and places is also the dominant discourse in the work produced by Paris-based a film shot during the artist’s ride on one an indeterminate existence Turkish artist Nil Yalter over the course of the storied train’s last journeys from of her more-than-50-year career. It’s no secret that interest in Yalter’s Istanbul to Paris. The work quietly highlights, via observations of work, often not particularly evident at the time in which she made it, fellow passengers and passing landscape, the route’s glamorous aura, has been increasing over the past seven years. During that time, while the mundane realities of travel, the human emotions associated with Yalter’s production of new work has slowed (it’s harder to maintain leaving one place for another. the energy, she complains, when we meet in what she calls her Paris In Paris, Yalter came into contact with Pop and conceptual art, ‘computer studio’), her existing output has been included in bien- encountering artists such as Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman, and nials in Istanbul and Gwangju, and a part of her Temporary Dwellings by the early 1970s she was pioneering the use of installation and series (1974–77), for example, now hangs front and centre in Tate video, before later continuing her experiments with media outside Modern’s new extension. In a manner typical of the delayed fashion of the established art-historical canon by engaging with computer in which much art and cultural intellectualism operates – and by no programming during the early 1990s. But it is the work made in means am I excluding this magazine from that – this septuagenarian between these two periods for which she is now best known. Temporary artist’s past has come to symbolise our present. But that’s not to say Dwellings found its definitive form – 12 panels, seven of them now in that looking at Yalter’s work is merely another opportunity for a critic Tate’s collection, comprising photographs, objects, drawings and to analyse today from the relatively safe vantage point of yesterday. text, alongside video interviews with Turkish immigrants conducted Migration has, in many ways, defined her life as much as it has in 1978 – at an exhibition in Vienna’s Hubert Winter Gallery in 2011. her art. Born in Cairo to Turkish parents, Yalter moved to Istanbul at Taken together, its aspects document the interlinked lives and living the age of four. With no formal art training, she is “in everything” an conditions of largely immigrant communities in Paris, New York

Nil Yalter and Judy Blum, Paris Ville Lumière, 1974, 20 panels, drawing with colour pencil on cloth, photography printed on cloth sewed to the cloth, 1400 × 200 cm following pages Immigrants (detail), 1976–2016, painted polaroids

April 2017

El Exilio Es Un Duro Trabajo (detail), 2012, posters in the streets of Valencia, Spain, from the series Exile is a Hard Job, 1976–2016

ArtReview

El Exilio Es Un Duro Trabajo, 2012, posters in the streets of Valencia, Spain, from the series Exile is a Hard Job, 1976–2016

Exile is a Hard Job, 2013, posters in the streets of Mubai, from the series Exile is a Hard Job, 1976–2016

Su Gurbetlik Zor Zanaat Zor, 2016, posters in the streets of Istanbul, from the series Exile is a Hard Job, 1976–2016

April 2017

above Temporary Dwellings, Paris – New York – Istanbul (detail), 1974–76, photographs, objects, drawings and video preceding pages Installation of the posters from the series Exile is a Hard Job in the streets of Istanbul, 2016

ArtReview

and Istanbul; they’re dated and located as studies of, among others, change. In 1975 Yalter cofounded the group Femmes en Lutte (Fighting Portuguese and French workers in Noisy-le-Grand in Paris’s eastern Women); 32 years later, in 2007, her work was included in Connie suburbs, and Puerto Ricans chased out of and now reoccupying build- Butler’s landmark exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at ings on New York’s Amsterdam Avenue. Each panel contains two rows MOCA Los Angeles. So maybe some things do change, if slowly. of Polaroid photographs – some annotated with baldly factual descripYet Yalter’s work is not only relevant because it highlights a nexus tions, others not – documenting aspects of the location, interspersed of political, economic, feminist and migrant issues that remain by two rows of drawings and objects found onsite: fragments of wall current today, but for how it exemplifies the unique capacity that art and floor materials, notes from an English lesson and other detritus. has to address such issues. Not just the easy way – by bearing witness The end result is a portrait of people whose presence is at once evi- to suffering – but by interrogating and exposing the fears entrenched dent and absent: the very essence of an indeon both sides of such debates. Yalter has most recently deployed such tactics in a terminate existence. Yalter’s work highlights As much as the panels of Temporary the nexus of political, economic, series of illegal flyposters featuring images of immigrants that appear in previous Dwellings utilise a documentary or ethnografeminist and migrant issues works, painted over with the slogan ‘Exile phic form to highlight a certain poverty of life – as do several of Yalter’s other works – is a Hard Job’ (the title of a work originally that is current today they also mimic the ‘they’re here, but made by the artist in 1976). To date these shouldn’t be here’ formula that defines much anti-immigration rhet- have appeared alongside exhibitions of her work in Valencia, Metz, oric, revealing something of its logical absurdities. A similar tech- Mumbai, Vienna and Istanbul; Brussels is next. In formal terms, the nique is at play in a 1974 collaboration with fellow artist Judy Blum, posters introduce the faces of people a city wants to ignore or exclude Paris Ville Lumière, in which the artists documented key sites in the into its very urban fabric. Yet they do so in the most fragile of ways; city’s 20 districts, producing for each a collection of text, drawings and in most cases the paper posters are quickly and violently torn down photographs drawn, written and printed onto cloth. The 2nd arron- by residents and passersby. As much as this work bears witness to the dissement, for example, features the stock market: ‘women were not suffering of immigrants, then, it exposes the rage and intolerance allowed into the stock market at the time. They didn’t even notice that of the society in which those immigrants find themselves. we were women when we went in,’ Yalter recalls. Back in her studio in Paris, Yalter, still as tuned-in and passionate And of course, Yalter’s is not exactly a Romantic tale of one as she ever was, is considering her own precarity in the face of both woman’s voyage from backwaters to the cutting edge of contemporary old age and the rise of the political right in France and Turkey. “Maybe art. Gender plays a role in this too. In the same interview with Pedrosa, I’ll have to go back to Istanbul and wear a veil,” she says wryly. Exile she recalls the celebrated French gallerist Yvon Lambert telling her is always a hard job. ar ‘that he would never show a woman artist, because you never know what she would do, she could fall in love, go to Australia with a man, Work by Nil Yalter is included in The Absent Museum at Wiels, make a child’. An art market that works like the stock market: plus ça Brussels, from 20 April through 13 August

Temporary Dwellings, Paris – New York – Istanbul (detail), 1974–76, photographs, objects, drawings and video all images Courtesy the artist

April 2017

Athenian Panopticon By Iason Athanasiadis

Can the traumatised streets of Athens inspire Documenta to challenge our understanding of the global moment? 72

ArtReview

Somewhere in the narrow-laned former gangland district of Psirri – in the vitrines of garishly-lit hypermarkets and cement apartment its seediness long since raked over into a vibrant, still-scruffy enter- blocks blooming out of traditional, low-rise neighbourhoods. tainment district – a piece of graffiti proclaims Athens to be the new “The moment we knew we had to leave Kypseli was the day when Berlin. It is a leering aside at the hope-turned-cliché heralding the our toddler came in from the veranda covered in soot from the car city’s recovery that has reverberated through the Greek capital’s pollution,” one refined owner of a city-centre penthouse recalled as depressed downtown for years. The upturn is just around the corner, we stood on his terrace overlooking the Ministry of Development’s politicians tell the media who pass on the message to the hopeful brutalist lines, an occasional drug addict staggering by below. masses. Any moment now, it’ll be here, optimists inform each As that class of Athenian urbanites left (compulsively rubbing other, in a self-reinforcing patter reminiscent of bestselling author soot – real or imagined – off their offspring’s skin), foreign migrants Petros Markaris’s latest detective novel, Offshore (2016), set in a finan- from recently collapsed Albania and countries in Africa and the cially buoyant post-crisis future characterised by a peculiar forget- Middle East arrived to fill the ensuing vacuum. Their coming turned fulness and the repetition of all the same mistakes. As Athenians once-exclusive neighbourhoods wrought from luxury materials and continue waiting for Godot, hundreds of city-blocks in the centre dismissive worldviews into ‘Third World slums’, as they were referred of a European capital keep on subsiding into a prolonged decline to by the departing bourgeoisie, not without a trace of schadenfreude at ducking the deluge. whose causes far predate the crisis. Athens’s mixture of a collapsed downtown and a cognitively The new residents had worked hard to get to Greece but were unaware – or apathetic – populace is the context chosen by the German neither wealthy, privileged, nor well-connected enough to make it government-funded quinquennial Documenta for its 14th edition. beyond Greece’s borders. The hardscrabble ghettoes they created Conceptualised ten years after the Second World War in reaction to within Athens’s old centre rarely intercepted with mainstream Greek Nazi bans on modern art and as an attempt to reengage with the world, society, aside from informal, often exploitative employment arrangements or episodes of racial the show is hosted by Kassel, a tension. The spaces vacated by German town heavily bombed for being the manufacturing those economic migrants who centre of Panzer and Tiger departed as Greece’s economy tanks. But as the war receded, tanked were replaced by the Documenta took it upon itself more desperate refugees fleeing to become a vehicle for the conflict in Iraq and Syria. As Northern Europe shifted from promotion of the avant-garde to opening its borders to refugees repoliticise inert audiences and in 2015 to paying peripheral make culture relevant again; by the 1990s the quinquennial countries to keep the newcomers began to instrumentalise semiat a safe distance, the cracks nars, political interventions in Greece’s strained society and critical analysis expanding widened: now the country was not just Europe’s problem child beyond the exhibition format. Having already flirted with the but its dumping ground too. Muslim world when Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev located part of the Much like famous, extrovert parents inhibit their children’s 2012 edition in Bamiyan, Kabul, Cairo and Alexandria (with mixed development, the city’s celebrated past distorts its present form: success) in addition to the usual base of Kassel, the artistic director from the creation of the modern Greek nation-state in 1832 by an of this year’s Documenta, Adam Szymczyk, decided to investigate influential group of Western European officials schooled in romantic Athens, a rundown Mediterranean port city located at an intersection philhellenism (whose decisive intervention in the Greek War of of issues: the EU’s economic predicament, the refugee deluge and a Independence had something of Libya’s 2011 NATO-backed revolution series of other emergencies and crises of democracy in nearby Egypt, about it); to the choosing of Athens – for purely symbolic reasons, and Libya, Syria and Turkey. Athens, for all its distractingly, defiantly despite being radically reduced in size and importance from its late vibrant bars and pavement cafes, is a no-brainer match – outstripping antique stature – as the new nation state’s capital during the ninecomparable cities such as Cairo, Damascus and Benghazi that lack the teenth century; to the transplanting of Neoclassicism (an architecfreedoms to organise such an event – as perhaps the greatest case- tural style nurtured far from the Hellenistic world in Munich) and study of what it’s like to inhabit, at an advanced stage of its malaise, a Bavarian aristocracy to run the country. More recently, Greece’s the capital of a zombie nation-state. acceptance into the EU on cultural rather than statistical grounds was For three decades, the Greek equivalent of white flight saw middle- another deviation from the more humdrum fate a country lacking a class Greeks flee the smoggy centre. They took advantage of the rolling glorious past might expect. Just as distorting is the collective delucementification of much of the Attica Plain to provide a more spread- sion imparted to Greek children that their genes derive – in an out, consumerist lifestyle to their families. unbroken genetic line – from the imagined above Refugees have set up camp on the Piraeus port, Athens, Greece was post-dictatorship, a member racial purity of the ancient Greeks. May 2016. Photo: Velar Grant/Alamy Stock Photo of NATO, democratic (or at least regularly Add to all this dysfunction narratives of elective) and now a member of the EU too: ethnicities and minorities purged to make facing page View of the Acropolis from Lykavittos Hill, 2006. its future glittered before its citizens’ eyes way for a state overwhelmingly composed Licensed under Creative Commons: Rob & Lisa Meehan

April 2017

of Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and you have fertile ground of left-wing politics since the role it played in the overthrow of the for an art exhibition that ought to challenge hegemonic, national- Colonels’ dictatorship. Documenta was not mentioned once during istic narratives, upend ethnographic representations of Greece, and the talk, and a group of attendants I spoke with after were upset at ridicule sundry other stereotypes about how we view our encom- what they perceived as the organisation using Athens as a backdrop passing reality at a time of urgent global change. for a preformed agenda. (Amid heavy bandying of the word “neo-coloAt least that’s the intention behind this Documenta, which coincides nialism”, I asked Documenta for an interview but a spokeswoman this year with a Syriza government initially thought to be of the radical replied that no one from the curatorial team had the time.) left, but which challenged that impression when it formed a coalition With nearly half a million of the country’s youngest and brightest with the far right and performed a back flip in negotiations with its having left the country in search of fresh job markets, many of those creditors. This resulted in the pro-Syriza media welcoming Documenta who stayed behind dismiss Documenta’s events as Crisis 101 entryas effusively as you’d expect from a party with a rogue image to keep, level basic and unlikely to offer new insights. “Aestheticising the while the opposition press responded with knee-jerk hostile coverage. crisis and using Athens and Greece as vehicles for promoting an agenda are almost always presented Former Greek economy minister Yanis “Documenta will define Athens as well-intentioned,” said Mistriotis, Varoufakis predicted that the event the artist. “Athenians carry a heavy will devolve into ‘crisis tourism… like through involuntary selection, and rich Americans taking a tour in a poor history which makes them cautious in in doing so subject it to an action where African country, doing a safari, going general; this is probably one of the first on a humanitarian tourism crusade’. things they have to teach.” it’s not a willing participant” And Iliana Fokianaki, an art critic and One way in which Documenta’s gallery owner, argued in Frieze that the focus of the advance public events seek to avoid a stereotypical reading of the Greek crisis however programme on ‘marginalised communities and activism in Greece is by examining how the country’s imperfect democracy (little more and elsewhere’ resulted in a failure to address ‘the greater reality that than three political dynasties batting authority across the net in a franglooms over Europe currently, one that affects all but the 1%: austerity, tically spendthrift, three decade-long ping-pong contest) is the flawed result of the neoliberal processes that emerged from the 1967–74 milineoliberalism and capitalism’. “Athens is a fluid subject and did not ask or expect to be taught tary dictatorship. Roping in post-Marxist thinkers such as Antonio by anyone,” notes the Athenian artist Alexandros Mistriotis. Negri, Judith Revel, Franco Berardi and Sandro Mezzadra for semi“So Documenta will define Athens through this involuntary selec- nars open to the public introduces attendees to biopolitical, subjective tion, and in doing so subject it to an action where it’s not a willing and transnational readings of the reality afflicting Greece, and allows participant and which will obstruct the slow organic processes of the them to make connections to broader political themes that remarkably city’s informal development.” So, faced with discontent over a call few Greeks (Varoufakis and a few leftist notable exceptions aside) have out for members of the ‘chorus’ – essentially ‘local and international broached. But this is hard to pull off convincingly in what Greek critics artists, students, activists’ and others of Documenta describe as a claustroacting as visitor guides – in which phobic atmosphere of opaque applioriginally no fee was mentioned and cation processes and a group of organ‘travel and accommodation costs… isers perceived as failing to live up to must be covered by the applicant’ their motto of learning from Athens. (in later adverts Documenta clarified Three weeks before the event launches, that the positions would be remuthe exhibition programme remains secret and artists and their entourages nerated), together with other lurid appear to inhabit an Athens largely rumours imparted to me by the more disconnected from the city’s vibrant conspiratorial of the local art commuart and theatre circles. One Greek nity, can the event avoid the charges photographer recounted visiting the of selling out? Can it attract – along Documenta offices to follow up on her the way – those ordinary Greeks who project application after not receiving were never detached enough to view the crisis as an opportunity for introspection and whom actually a reply. She described being told by a staff member that artists cannot never want to hear the word ‘crisis’ again? just turn up to solicit and must apply online. “Only projects of interest They seem to be struggling. One Documenta event held in an will be replied to,” she was informed, after confirming that she had experimental theatre space in the centre of Athens mid-March was applied online but not heard back. attended by about 120 people, some of whom departed after the Immersion is also a challenge Documenta faces. How does it content was revealed to be a two-part lecture by Dutch and Greek cura- plunge its non-Greek-speaking foreign artists into a local reality tors Hendrik Folkerts and Eirini Papakonstantinou. The Dutch cura- sufficiently inspirational to unlock compelling visual interpretator’s unattractive, jargon-heavy talk was offset by Papakonstantinou’s tions and tools that Greek and foreign audiences alike can relate to? more engaging rundown of the history of Greek Athens’s dysfunctional downtown is certainly an performance art. Conversely, the previous night, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras (right) and appropriate playground for such an endeavour. finance minister Yanis Varoufakis at the Greek I attended a passionate two-hour debate on the Twenty years of carefree spending, followed by parliament in Athens on 18 February 2015. identity of Athens at the Polytechnic, long a base six years of economic collapse, pulped parts of it Photo: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters

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Graffiti in the Exarcheia district of Athens, February 2013. Photo: Nikolas Georgiou/Alamy Stock Photo

April 2017

into a stew of decrepit, desiccated and suppurating blocks of concrete Often, though, the most perceptive outsiders intuit a place better shaped by a heterodox collection of groups into neighbourhoods with than its average local. Szymczyk, Documenta’s rembetiko-listening an intensely communal identity. Daring art galleries, self-organising chief curator, has already innovated by rehabilitating Athenian public spaces (reclaimed from semi-privatised public land and run as landmarks of suppressed history as debate venues, such as the site of autonomous parks), vibrant cafes and empty buildings administered the 1967–74 junta’s torture chambers. The Polish curator’s subtle by anarchist collectives and occupied by refugees, thrive among these understanding of Greek history and psychology comes through darkened 1970s cement behemoths, alongside deserted commercial when he speaks about the cultural splits in Greek society that most arcades, winking brothel lights and shuffling herds of addicts. The locals resist discussing with outsiders. He speaks eloquently about graffiti-smeared district of Exarcheia, known for its alternative politics, this introverted country’s obsession with ‘Greek topicality’, refersquatted buildings and anarchist groupings, first became the banner encing important Greek architects, painters, composers and other of this movement and then a parody of itself as eager foreign visitors culture-shapers like Dimitris Pikionis, Jani Christou and Kostas booked AirBnB apartments in order to Tsarouhis that many Greeks would vicariously taste living in a so-called ‘no-go struggle to identify. How can a city, still shuddering zone’, sniff the smoke from burning barriSzymczyk’s mission is to stage a cosmofrom the delayed trauma of six years politan event in an introverted country cades, and post selfies of their escapades to of deepening austerity, go about friends and family back home. that shunned diversity for a century, while As with the humanitarians who close answering puzzling questions such as how transcending the slightly themselves up in cement-ringed milione city, still shuddering from the delayed unimaginative buzzwords coined trauma of six years of deepening austerity, tarised compounds and mediate reality by its public intellectuals? through bulletproof vehicles and local can go about transcending the slightly translators, I do catch myself wondering unimaginative buzzwords coined by its whether the journalists and artists who descend upon Athens’s shab- public intellectuals and the intense squabbling that has displaced bier neighbourhoods with the genuine intention of learning from public debate. Asking what a recovery might look like at a time of their destination aren’t perhaps too tightly sealed into their respective global economic, environmental and psychological freefall is the kind professional, linguistic and cultural narratives. Tall, blonde northern of question that is too often obscured by the heat of identity politics Europeans sporting a resolutely non-tourist sartorial aesthetic are now and what fresh disaster next week will bring. a fixture in the lanes of Exarcheia, often accompanied by local companThe Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid recently wrote that, ‘the ions with liberal sensitivities. It’s all a little reminiscent of Tahrir future is too important to be left to professional politicians… too Square during the Egyptian Revolution, when Egyptian graduates of important to be left to technologists either. Other imaginations from the American University of Cairo with perfect English and impeccable other human perspectives must stake competing claims. Radical, human-rights sensitivities latched onto non-Arabic-speaking foreign politically engaged fiction is required.’ Perhaps Athens’s Documenta journalists and presented a rousing version of their struggle that was can become a brick in this alternative reimagining of our present. seductive, one-sided and dominant enough to skew the Western media But only if its participants, Greeks and foreigners alike, let go of the coverage to the point that a whole series of how-did-we-not-see-it- firmly-held worldviews, comfort zones and certainties contained in coming articles appeared once first the Islamists were elected at the their smart phone screens and café circles, and embrace the uncerpolls, and then overthrown by the counter-revolution and coup. tainty of engagement. ar

Kypseli neighbourhood, Athens

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A poster in Copenhagen warns tourists against travelling to Greece under the authoritarian Papadopoulos regime, 1967. Photo: Myrhoj/Getty Images

April 2017

Pravdoliub Ivanov Rooted in his early experiences of life behind the Iron Curtain, the Bulgarian artist suffuses the stuff of everyday life with unresolved geopolitical tensions and anxieties by Oliver Basciano

above Up or Down, 2015 (installation view, Old Turkish Bathhouse – Centre for Contemporary Art, Plovdiv). Courtesy Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv preceding pages Childhood, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv

ArtReview

“It was like an American robot had landed.” It is dusk in Plovdiv, In the same exhibition, Ivanov showed the two-and-a-halfBulgaria, and Pravdoliub Ivanov is pointing out the site of the city’s minute video Natural Fear (2014–16). He installed it under the gallery’s first Coke machine, installed in 1989 as the country transitioned from entrance desk, requiring viewers to crouch and to stretch the headcommunism to capitalism. We pass through the city centre, filling with phone cable awkwardly. (Ivanov is an old hand at utilising discomfort Saturday night revellers, and the artist – in his early fifties, shaggy- in his work: the 3.4m-high 2015 installation Up or Down invited gallery haired, cagoule now slung over the back of a restaurant chair – tells me visitors to climb a narrow set of wooden steps to the daunting pinnacle, about growing up under communism. Tales of his politicised education then carefully step down the other side. This a strategy that has a long are intermingled with nostalgic stories of playing guitar and drinking history in contemporary eastern European art practice, from the body with friends among the ruins of Plovdiv’s first-century open-air theatre. sculptures of Eva Kot’átková to the extreme performances of Oleg I wonder to what extent these memories are politicised too. Kulik.) The uncomfortable viewing position in Natural Fear mirrors This mixture of the political and the personal, or how the the squatting and ducking evidenced in the video’s shaky point-ofpolitical becomes personal, has run through the sculptures and view footage filmed during some sort of battle. Ivanov ripped the installations Ivanov has made since the early 1990s, when he left video from a website that collates conflict material posted on social Bulgaria’s second city to study in Sofia, where he is now based (Ivanov media. Strikingly, however, at no point do we see the fighting taking place – we only hear thundering shells had travelled back to his home city to show me around). Case in point is one of “I realise that when I think of social, and zipping bullets – and instead the screen is filled with the long grass and his more recent works, Childhood (2013), political and global problems, I am undergrowth that whoever made this in which the artist has combined a drill actually thinking of my own fears” video is hiding in. Wildflowers grow on and a clunky old turquoise-painted the battlefield; explosions can be heard metal slide projector, the drill bit forced into the hole where the lens would ordinarily be. For a 2016 solo exhi- raining down. While Ivanov tells me he believes the video originates bition at Sariev Contemporary in Plovdiv, the sculpture was installed from the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, he has taken pains to excise with the bit bored into the gallery wall at such a height and angle anything that identifies the scene too specifically (Russian voices can that the power cord dangled impotently a foot or so off the ground. apparently be heard, for example, in the original unedited file). All There’s something violent about this work, and for me (from the the viewer gets, as we hunker down, is the noise of conflict and the West, and nine when the Soviet Union was dissolved and Bulgaria palpable fear of the protagonist, evidenced in their heavy breathing. held its first free elections in decades) the design of the projector All wars are personal, the work demonstrates; all conflict comes down element is alien. For Ivanov, to individuals. though, the hand-winding slide Looking at Ivanov’s older projector is an immensely evocworks makes it clear that geopolitics, filtered through subjecative object. “This thing is parativity’s lens, has been his preocdoxical. I remember the design cupation for some time. “Some from childhood, anyone my age of the works are triggered by would. It was used for my childhood slides, but also I rememcertain political events,” he notes, ber they used to use it to show adding emphatically, “but it’s not journalism.” The red fabric propaganda imagery.” in Trouble is Always Double (1997– Knowing this, one interpretation of Childhood is blatant, of 2015) – a single length of material how the communist narratives hung from two wall-mounted presented by the Bulgarian govflagpoles, the middle of this ‘flag’ ernment were drilled into the resting on the ground – evokes population to such an extent the Hammer and Sickle and can that the idea of the individual citizen – with a private life, a family therefore be placed in a Soviet history. But despite the reference to life, separate from state control – evaporated. As in so many coun- Bulgaria’s past, we can also read this as a more general comment on the tries in this era, the state and the person became one. Yet there is tensions arising from political alliances and notions of statehood. There more to it than this: the work’s purpose is not primarily to remi- is some confusion about the political stance of this work, admittedly: nisce on the past but to think about how external political narra- is this push-me-pull-you flag a testament to collaboration or control? tives, things that we have no control over, shape one’s subjecthood. The title might suggest the latter, yet the artist clearly invites a degree To what extent are we political subjects today? On which side of the of ambiguity. These are not clear-cut political statements, manifesIron Curtain we stood (if we are old enough) demarcates one’s under- tations of an unflinching point of view, but works born of political standing of Childhood, for example, separating those familiar with and social confusion. They are attempts to process an ebb and flow of this Soviet-produced object, sold only in the USSR and the Eastern history from which the individual is alienated. Ultimately they are Bloc, and those for whom it is strange – a demonstration, perhaps, about not being in control of one’s own political destiny. of long political shadows. “I realise”, Ivanov tells “I grew up in a swamp of ideology, but I think of Natural Fear, 2014–16, HD video, colour, these as social works – works about society – as opme, “that when I think of social, political and global sound, 2 min 30 sec. Courtesy Sariev posed to ‘political’ works,” Ivanov says. Truths (2015) problems, I am actually thinking of my own fears.” Contemporary, Plovdiv

April 2017

top Transformation Always Takes Time and Energy, 1998, hot plates, pots, teapots, cables, water, electricity, time. Courtesy Kontakt: The Art Collection of ERSTE Group and ERSTE Foundation, Vienna bottom Truths, 2015, drawing, black ink, pencil, 21 × 30 cm. Courtesy Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv

ArtReview

features two squares drawn in black ink on a white A4 sheet (a reference to Malevich), one square significantly smaller, perspective lines connecting them. Hand-scribbled in the bottom right corner, in English, is the phrase ‘big truth and small truth’. Ivanov explains that in the Soviet Union this was a political philosophy, one adopted by the Bulgarian communists. “The big truth was the communistic truth, the truth about the idea we’re supposedly working towards. The small truth was the truth of daily life. So if you experience difficulties in your daily life, they would tell us, ‘You should not confuse the big truth with the small truth.’” Another largescale work involving the flag motif is as ambivalent as Trouble is Always Double. In Territories (1995–2003), first shown in 1995 at the 4th Istanbul Biennial, a row of flags is hiked on poles along the gallery wall. The flags, however, are rock-solid, uniformly caked with mud. The effect is that instead of offering differentiating symbols to denote individual territories, and all the baggage that entails, there’s a parade of uniform, anonymous brown. The ensigns come together as a paean to universalism and a desire for the collapse of nation-state borders – earth is earth, with no regard to the lines we have drawn in it – yet this is expressed in a motif symbolic of the exact opposite. Ivanov talks about his attitude towards the nationstate: his abhorrence of the nationalism and tribalism that wrought terror in the country’s Balkan neighbours during the 1990s, and the conflicting belief that a strong Bulgaria is necessary (given the country’s history of submitting itself to the directives of Moscow): Ivanov’s big truth and the artist’s

small truth, perhaps. When we discuss his fear of Russian aggression today, covert and otherwise, I’m also reminded of the artist’s 1998 installation Transformation Always Takes Time and Energy, which features dozens of kettles and pans filled with water, each placed on a network of hotplates installed on the gallery floor. The heaters aren’t powerful enough to bring the water to the boil; instead the water just evaporates over the course of each day (the receptacles are refilled each morning to start the process over). Likewise, Russia’s relationship with its Eastern Bloc neighbours, even 19 years after Ivanov’s work was originally conceived, seems to simmer with tension, never quite achieving resolution. The slide projector used in Childhood was popular when political narratives came ready-packaged (though the artist’s family was firmly against the regime) and there was a clear distinction of sides. Now, at a point in history when the world is such a mix of confused alliances and multisided conflicts, those certainties have all but evaporated. The Sariev exhibition was titled On the Wrong Side (spelled out backwards in neon mounted in the gallery window). In today’s climate of Wikileaks, fake news and fluctuating political identities – in which the poles of left and right have been supplanted by nationalism and globalism – it is hard to say who is on whose side, let alone whether it’s the ‘right’ one or not. The message in Ivanov’s work, with all its inbuilt uncertainties, is that we have more to fear than ever before. ar Work by Pravdoliub Ivanov can be seen in La Tierra Inquieta, Triennale di Milano, from 28 April through 20 August

Trouble is Always Double, 1997–2015, two rods of stainless steel, two metal holders, red fabric, 282 × 120 × 165 cm. Courtesy Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv

April 2017

Peter Friedl Reality begins to quietly unravel through the artist’s staging, re-staging and de-staging of histories. Can his pointedly frustrated narratives point to a way beyond posttruth? by Raimar Stange

ArtReview

The Children (still), 2009, video, colour, sound, 2 min 12 sec (loop). Courtesy the artist

April 2017

A man stands in a pedestrian underpass and throws money into a ciga- strategies aim towards deconstructing any demands on ‘truth’. This rette machine. When it doesn’t dispense the cigarettes he paid for, he deconstruction highlights exactly the qualities that generate contexkicks the machine furiously and leaves. A junkie approaches him and tual meaning – like the power exerted by (hi)stories, and above all the begs for money; when it’s refused, the junkie kicks the man. Peter relationships between language and body, construed interpretations Friedl’s video Dummy, produced in 1997 for Documenta 10 in Kassel, and localised presentation, and finally author and actor. presents what at first appears to be a realistic, everyday scene. But not A year after Dummy’s installation at Documenta 10, Friedl organeverything is as it seems. The man standing at the cigarette machine ised an exhibition, titled Peter Friedl, in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in is the artist himself, who isn’t a smoker, and nor is there in reality such Brussels. To make it, he first asked the museum’s employees what a machine in the underpass; it was specially installed for the video’s animal they would like to become. Costumes depicting these creaproduction. The occurrences are therefore not sociocritical docu- tures were then fabricated in both child and adult sizes, and presented mentation, but artistically staged. This became obvious, if it wasn’t in the exhibition space. Displayed on the wall were the names that the already, when the 32-second video was shown employees had bestowed upon their animals (their alter egos?). Visitors were permitted to in precisely the same underpass during that Friedl’s strategies put on the costumes and play(act) with them. selfsame Documenta, the now-missing cigaaim towards rette machine betraying the work’s fictional At the same time, the costumes riff on Friedl’s nature. But Friedl pointedly questions even own early drawings, as a child – fittingly, since deconstructing any this condition of being staged, for the fiction the exhibition’s very name designated the demands on ‘truth’ show as a retrospective. Here visitors were here is based on a platitudinous cartoon from presented with connections between identity an illustrated magazine. The artist executes the cartoon’s trope on film, tersely and without interpretation. and role, authenticity and interpretation, and genre and institution. So maybe Dummy is something like documentation after all. In his later videos The Children (2009) and Bilbao Song (2010), which The aesthetic explorations of the ‘realism problem’ – located rearrange and reconstruct paintings, Friedl focuses on firmer historsomewhere in the tension between interpretation, staging and the ical questions – in the sense of questioning the discipline’s modes. power of language to simulate truth – that run through the Berlin- How is history written, and with what political demands? In The based artist’s work go far beyond the current juxtaposition of ‘factual’ Children, he takes the little-known 1966 painting Femijet (Albanian and ‘postfactual’ that haunts our daily political lives. This was for ‘children’) by Albanian socialist-realist painter Spiro Kristo as a obvious even in the relatively early work described above; it contains, starting point. The picture shows a street scene with seven children already, crucial aspects of a confrontation that later only becomes playing; one of them has a wooden toy weapon hanging over her more complex – the clash of genres, the absence of a plot that would shoulder, while a boy draws the image of a weapon on the ground. generate meaning, the displacement of significant elements and Friedl takes this scene and depicts the children as if in a tableau vivant. above all the eschewing of an ‘artistic’ staging as it is usually defined, He transports the scene to the interior of a room – in a salon in the ie ‘bringing a dramatic work completely to fruition’. Instead Friedl’s former high-end Hotel Dajti in Tirana, to be exact. The hotel, which

Bilbao Song (still), 2010, video installation, HD video, colour, sound, 5 min 53 sec (loop). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Dummy, 1997 (installation view, Documenta 10, Kassel, 1997). Photo: Dieter Schwerdtle. Courtesy the artist

April 2017

Teatro Popular, 2016–17 (installation view). Photo: Daniel Malhão. Courtesy the artist and Lumiar Cité, Lisbon

ArtReview

was built during the early 1940s in a fascist architectural style and now stands empty, was long considered one of the best in the Balkans. At the beginning of the two-minute video, the children enter the room, then take their poses and remain in position. Nothing is audible on the soundtrack except street sounds; only at the beginning does an off-camera girl’s voice quote Michel Foucault’s well-known statement from The Order of Things (1966): “The picture must step out of the frame”. In Friedl’s video, this is exactly what happens. More important, however, is that ‘history’ is seen here not as a strictly defined temporal sequence that then generates meaning, but as parallel, temporally distanced moments: in this case the period of fascism in Europe in the first half of the past century and the communist regime in Albania in the 1960s. In addition, the characters in this historical picture are not characters apparently standing in the centre of what is occurring; instead this Geschichtsuniversum (‘universe of history’), as the philosophy academic Maria Muhle wrote of The Children, is ‘populated by “subaltern and infamous”’ – the ‘very tiny and small’ seven children. Friedl withdraws two things essential to (bourgeois) history writing: a linear temporal sequence and the subject. Telling other (hi)stories in another way, and thus unmasking the fictional character in the story in question, is exactly what he does in his work Teatro Popular (2016–17). In this sculptural piece, recently on view in the Lisbon exhibition space Lumiar Cité, the artist deals with Dom Roberto, a kind of antiquated Portuguese street theatre using puppets. The barraca, is a simple wooden construction, covered with fabric to hide the puppeteer; the puppet shows are simple plays marked by repetition and typecasting. For Teatro Popular, the artist made four prototypes of the barraca, which can be constructed and deconstructed without tools. The fabric coverings, the textiles, do not come from Portugal, but from Brazil – an intentional reference to colonial history. Friedl designed the hand puppets, assembling an

ensemble of characters from various centuries, continents and societal spheres. Among them are the fifteenth-century astronomer Abraham Zacuto, who revolutionised sea travel; the twentieth-century general António de Spinola, who was the first transitional president of the Third Portuguese Republic; and Bonga, a legendary contemporary Angolan pop musician. But the sleekly rendered puppets also represent fictional characters, like Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman in the classic film Casablanca (1942), as well as a devil and an elephant. The 22 puppets, which allow a multilayered network of seldomassembled historical references to emerge, lie dispersed among the barracas and are not used to perform – ‘staging’ is once again denied. In this work, Friedl practices a ‘minor art’, in the sense used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which is here characterised by three things: first, crucially, the street theatre of Dom Roberto was once collective folk culture but today takes only a minor role. Second, the temporally dispersed cast of the puppet ensemble and the denial of a performance nullify theatre’s conventional semantics. And third, every element of this theatre contains political references, pointing to sociopolitical connections in Portugal’s past and present. Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of ‘minor art’ in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975), which leads to Friedl’s work at this year’s Documenta. As per the ‘rules’ of the event, details on the work are tightly under wraps. What can be said is that here, in the National Theatre of Greece in Athens, he’s taken a good two-dozen ‘players’ from a Kafka text and staged them into a film. But, knowing him, one has to ask: will he really stage it? ar Translated from the German by Kimberly Bradley Peter Friedl’s work is being shown in the Athens portion of Documenta 14, 8 April – 16 July, and in Variable Dimensions: Artists and Architecture at MAAT, Lisbon, through 29 May

Teatro Popular (detail), 2016–17, wood, aluminium, fabric, 22 glove puppets, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Lumiar Cité, Lisbon

April 2017

Contemporary Art Fair

21 — 23 April 2017 Tour & Taxis

Main partner

Ergonomic Futures In this ongoing, multipart work, artist Tyler Coburn looks through the lens of speculative evolution to investigate alternative scenarios for imagining new types of bodies. How, he asks, might these affect the biological, philosophical and legal definitions of the ‘human’? Here, an excerpt from the project

Cover of the 1978 reprint of Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future, 1930 (above); images from On Monsters and Marvels, by Ambroise Paré, 1573 (pages 92–3); image from Surtsey, the new island in the North Atlantic, by Sigurdur Thorarinsson, 1966 (page 95); diagram from Humanscale 1/2/3, by Niels Diffrient and Alvin R. Tilley, 1974 (page 96); image from Designing for People, by Henry Dreyfuss, 1955 (page 97); The Great Chain of Being, from Rhetorica Christiana, by Didacus Valades, 1579 (page 98); Kunst und Liebe by Herman Schlittgen, from Fliegende Blätter, vol 83, no 2085, 1885 (page 99)

April 2017

Chimera What makes a human distinctively so? Even a child can sing you the answer. Diapers and crumbs, snips and snails, sugar and spice, leers and sighs. We know our fathers by their collars choke, and our mothers by their ribbons and laces. What makes a human distinctively so? The ingredient is so protected, the trade secret so valuable, that Francis Fukuyama can only call it ‘Factor X’. In his 2002 book, Our Posthuman Future, Fukuyama dismembers the human on the figurative operating table, seeking our essence amidst the bones and viscera, the humours and the myths. Ultimately, he finds that no single thing – not sentience, nor reason, nor moral choice, nor language, nor consciousness, nor emotionality – can account for humanity. But combine them just so, and we attain that ineffable factor. What makes a human distinctively so? If will, choice and purpose are our distinguishing traits, as theologian Joseph Fletcher argues, then laboratory conception is as human as it gets. Fletcher has some unlikely bedfellows. Shulamith Firestone, for one, famously wrote in The Dialectic of Sex that a woman can’t be free without freeing herself from incubation. Randy Wicker, a gay rights activist, expects cloning to make ‘heterosexuality’s historic monopoly on reproduction obsolete’. This is not to say that Firestone and Wicker would welcome the link; they might suspect – with good reason – that any such affiliation would turn their politics into the handmaiden of scientism… What makes a human distinctively so? There are more things on earth than were dreamt of in Greek mythology. The fire-breathing, interspecies chimera of lore barely compares to Lydia Fairchild: the herald of Wicker’s dream that, man or woman, gay or straight, we’ll someday gain the right to become our own twin.

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Not that Fairchild had much say in the matter. A chance fusion of eggs gave her forty-six chromosomes, or two DNA signatures, effectively making her multiple people. As this condition exhibited no outward signs, Fairchild might have lived unaware that she’s what the medical community calls a chimera. But then the law intervened. During the early 2000s, Fairchild’s application for public assistance required her children to take DNA tests, revealing a mismatch between their genetic makeup and her own. Fairchild asserted her biological maternity, though given the results, the state suspected welfare fraud. A subsequent test, given to a baby she had just birthed, produced the same mismatch and left little room for doubt: Fairchild had multiple DNA signatures. She was, in actuality, both mother and aunt of her children. This bizarre case illuminates a larger trend of personal testimony losing ground to genetic evidence. According to Aaron T. Norton and Ozzie Zehner, such evidence creates ‘technological confessions’ for people like Fairchild ‘through a privileged objectification of their biological attributes’. Fairchild’s assertion of maternity, in other words, means little against the findings of DNA tests, however varied their results. Yet the claim of biological objectivity gives lie to the biopolitical forces at play – to how bodies are constructed and contested by science and before the law. Transgender parents with a genetic relationship to their children, for example, occasionally find their parental rights nullified for failing to match their original sex. Genetics thus could not be called an objective force in jurisprudence. Rather, it’s deemed to be objective when aiding and abetting social norms – when affirming traditionalist thinking about identity and parenthood. Sometimes you judge a book by its content, though usually you just glance at the cover. What makes a human distinctively so? If will, choice and purpose are our distinguishing traits, then laboratory conception is as human as it gets. But if laboratory conception increases the chances of chimerism roughly 33-fold, then what we call a ‘human’ may already be a chimera in drag. The future belongs to chimeras.

April 2017

Smurf There was a time when you couldn’t find the Smurf village without being led by a Smurf, and even then the journey was considerable. Mountains, deserts, marshes and forests encircle ‘The Cursed Land’ they call home. Isolation, it seems, yields utopian results. Absent are the instruments of economy, the myths of individuality forever keeping us at arm’s length. Everyone has a strength performed to communal effect; none lacks a bed in a mushroom. The Smurfs should be happy, and yet they’re blue. A smile tells one story, and the skin another. Does the seclusion, the inbreeding make them so? The strain of maintaining a utopian life? Or the recognition that, socialists or not, they’re the essential ingredient for turning matter into gold? Nowadays, you can visit without needing a guide. Somewhere in Kentucky, near the towns of Hazard and Troublesome Creek Times, is the human equivalent of ‘The Cursed Land’. Its Smurfs – or ‘Blue Fugates’ – pale in comparison to their cartoon peers. They’ve been blue since 1820, but are fading every day: whenever a newcomer dilutes the dye, whenever an exit is paved. The Fugates are a textbook case of the ‘founder effect’, or the impact on a small, isolated community of its founders’ genetic stock. As genetic variation decreases over the course of generations, recessive traits come to the fore, like the syndrome that gives some Amish extra fingers and toes, or the one that causes many girls from a village in the Dominican Republic to sprout penises around puberty. Ernst Mayr, an evolutionary biologist, has boldly claimed that changes brought on by the founder effect can lead to speciation! The founders of the Fugates, Martin and Elizabeth, shared a genetic condition called methemoglobinemia, which makes the blood produce a surplus of hemoglobin that is unable to release oxygen into the body. Living in geographical and genetic seclusion (albeit with more than one Smurfette), their progeny had no choice but to be blue. This tree grows sideways and byways, not onwards and upwards. ‘You’ll notice’, said one descendent, that ‘I’m kin to myself’.

Surtsey What had always been a likelihood became, in 1963, a reality: the state of nature leapt off the page and into the sea. More swan dive than swan song, as the cook of a nearby fishing trawler reported, the old bird proved to have some life in her yet. Centuries of philosophical bluster had kept her aloft, and her descent was just as exaggerated: the sky darkened, the sea roiled, peacetimes became wartimes, and lovers fighters… Finally, as the waters began to settle, the diva emerged from the depths. She had fallen into a swoon on a smoking chunk of volcano. Over the next four years, the volcano grew island-size, an upside-down comma of unspoilt perfection that nearby Iceland designated as a nature reserve. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau must have rolled in their graves at the missed opportunity, for the Icelandic scientists did significantly less than design a social experiment. They sat on their hands and watched the wind blow, waiting for a seed, a something to happen. The state of nature, it turns out, is a better read. Gradually, plants made their way from the mainland, but the evolutionary magic of islands – the mammoth becoming the mouse, the dwarf the giant – has not enchanted Surtsey yet. Humans are beginning to force her hand: trace tomato seeds, in a scientist’s bowel movement, later sprouted a plant; some naughty boys were caught planting potatoes. For the right price, a crooked fisherman will ferry you, under the cover of darkness, to indulge in a clandestine shit. If this island is any indication, then the truth of the matter contradicts the philosophers’ claims: society is not a coping mechanism for the savagery of the wild, but a novelty, a distraction from the state of total boredom.

ArtReview

April 2017

Dreyfuss

What is the shape, the size of democracy? It’s bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a planet, too much for the individual and rarely enough to fit a nation, like a mismatched lid on a boiling pot that lets the steam escape. For the 1939 World’s Fair, Henry Dreyfuss scaled democracy as a city, purpose-built with good intentions. Each and every resident could enjoy a garden apartment, a bucolic view, the landscaped highway to his job downtown, the landscaped highway for a swift retreat. ‘Democracity’ claimed to depict the world in a hundred years’ time, though suburbia was just around the corner. What is the face, the figure of democracy – life lived on the 50th percentile? Over the following decades, Dreyfuss zoomed in from his greenfield city to the intimate lives of its users: from utopian theater to the science of ergonomics. His 1955 book, Designing for People, all but confirmed this shift, casting ‘Joe and Josephine’ as paragons of midcentury gender. Their machines, like their mores, dictated how they should fit (no matter the aches and injuries). Dreyfuss earned his reputation by improving the machines. Joe and Josephine pass their days, respectively, on a linotype and over the ironing table, then in a tank and at the switchboard. He loses a limb. She routes a call. When Joe returns from the war, he finds his blue collars bleached. Starched and pressed Oxfords hang in the closet, ready for office work. And his stump, to his surprise, is a distinguishing mark – a plaque in need of a medal. In the 1940s, Dreyfuss was contracted by the Veterans Administration to design just the thing. Joe wears his medal to work each day, the stainless steel hooks peeking out from his cuff. On occasion, he’ll roll up his shirtsleeve to his coworkers’ delight, revealing the single housing, the hidden joints, the subtleties of the prosthetic’s engineering. If only they had a war hero’s life; what an honorable disability!

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April 2017

Great Chain

The Great Chain of Being, that marvelous convenience linking lowest to highest, the dialogues of Plato to the satires of Pope, began as a divine provocation. Some way into The Iliad, as Greeks and Trojans stood on opposing margins of a blank page, Zeus decided to issue a warning. Any gods who lent their penmanship to the war would suffer no less a fate than exile. And any attempt to overthrow his authority – to latch a chain to the heavens and drag him down – would be tantamount to folly. He was too powerful to budge. Moreover, Zeus threatened that with a mere tug of the chain he could send the rebel gods flying, the carnal world pulled in their wake. Their instrument could easily become his plaything – a necklace to hang around the peak of Olympus. Zeus never acted on these words and grew forgetful of his gauntlet, ever less a challenge and ever more a chain. Nature, too, had forgotten: gradually its denizens found shelter in the links, growing accustomed to the altitude and the elliptical life. As moss grows on a rock, so the natural world took to its host, until the two were impossible to distinguish. Gods came and went, and still the chain kept hanging – no longer the bauble of a boastful god, but the instrument of a wise one. Elizabethans seeking evidence of the Almighty’s plan needed look no further than this object, in which everything had a place. The ugliest stone, the poisonous animal, the treacherous snake and the louse could not be errors of creation, because each got its designated link. So, too, did the beggar and deaf mute have their place in society, provided they stuck to it. Everything – even angels – filled the chain, though complex hierarchies abounded. Wild beasts were superior to domesticated ones for their resistance to human training. Avian creatures bested the aquatic, as surely as air’s domain sits above water’s. In the insect realm, the beautiful ladybug ranked nearly as high as the bee, whose kingdom provided a social allegory. The chain’s links usually ended well before Hell, lest the sinners attempt to climb. Man held a special position in this chain. On account of his wit and will, he stood one link above the beasts and yet, owing to his carnal form, one shy of the angels. By the eighteenth century, his position had become ever more suspect, for undoubtedly the lowliest angel was far superior to man! The scholars found themselves in a quandary: conceding the point would break the chain, while ignoring it bordered on hubris. And so, in a prescient act, links were added and planets imagined, home to beings that could bridge the gap. Unlike the extraterrestrials of our age, those of the Enlightenment weren’t foreign to humankind; they fit hand in glove with its logics.

ArtReview

Seat

At one time, for practical reasons, the heating systems of museums found lodging in their sofas. The ottoman of the Louvre’s Salon Carré – that infamous object from Henry James’s The American, where the art of seduction was ever on display – contained a coal grate to keep bodies and passions inflamed. In warmer seasons, when the libido can more or less heat itself, such seats became park benches: resting stops for ‘aesthetic headaches’ as much as for wearied amblers and would-be picnickers. Contemporary museums, in contrast, are decidedly less commodious. We still chance upon a sublime artwork from time to time, then stumble back in disbelief, yet rarely are our Stendhal swoons caught by plush upholstery. A wooden bench might break our fall, or a daybed on holiday from its analyst. More often than not, we hit the floor. The museum seat is one in a constellation of display structures that increasingly cater to the ‘disembodied’ spectator. This peculiar human, comprising merely two eyeballs and a brain, began haunting museums as early as the mid-nineteenth century – and prompted shifts in institutional design. Joel Sanders and Diana Fuss have traced the seating of London’s National Gallery, for example, which began in a private residence in the early century, where furniture could be moved at the viewer’s discretion. However, once the gallery relocated to the heart of the city, only a few chairs remained, implicitly fixed in their positions. An engraving of the era depicts viewers familiarising themselves with the new norm; they stand, they look and they contemplate. By the time MoMA opened its doors in 1939, the disembodied spectator had assumed modern airs, no longer soft-shoeing in search of moral education, but flowing through the galleries like a shopper through a department store. Amidst this marvelous circulation, the museum seat appeared increasingly lost: a relic of the time when a body could suffer the exhaustion, an eye the strain, that it uniquely relieved. The first MoMA benches came with backs, but those would disappear soon after, reducing the museum seat to a signpost for significant artwork – an entreaty to give a little more from our shrinking attentional wallets. Nowadays, a few museums in the world carry new types of seats, as uncomfortable as MoMA’s ascetic units, albeit for a very different reason. Ergonomically designed for future bodies, they prescribe corporeal norms that no living human can fit. And so they’ll wait, like the museums themselves, until these bodies come along to fill them…

April 2017

Dear Sir John Patrick Richardson, It’s time. forever at your service, Anohnah Musahi

May 6th and May 7th 12pm-9pm 210 Cook St. #212 Brooklyn, NY

Art Reviewed

Ink 101

Wolfgang Tillmans 2017 Tate Modern, London 15 February – 11 June As the show’s title reminds us, it is ‘2017’. Many things have changed since the last Tate survey of Wolfgang Tillmans’s work, in 2003. In the wake of last year’s ‘Brexit’ vote in particular, this celebration of the first foreignborn winner of the Turner Prize has a particular, timely resonance. What hasn’t changed, however – on the evidence of this exhibition – are Tillmans’s subjects. Friends, plants, casual views of exotic locations (Buenos Aires, Yazd, Addis Ababa), food, the way clothes hang, transport, the fall of light across a room – the things that interest him are the same things that always have; the same things, on the whole, that Instagram-users are interested in too. As on that app, the idea of a life that often emerges out of these captured moments is one of which I find myself jealous. It’s the great streak of pale sunshine slanting across an interior in Miracles of Life (2009) that arrests me, but I find myself lingering on the room’s good wooden furniture and piled Persian rugs. The problem may be mine. I’ve never fully separated Tillmans’s work from his life, or my idea of it; however brilliant his art, it’s only ever mattered to me as much as he has, his life a model of how to be in the world: tough but sensitive, cool but committed, serious but hedonistic. Tillmans’s own image rarely appears here (while the gallery permits photography,

the exhibition leaflet specifies ‘no selfie-sticks’), but the gregariousness of the curating – which features a rare videowork, a live programme, ephemera from the artist’s Berlin-based project space, juvenilia like a foray into garment design and an inexplicable gong sculpture – reveals the artist in a surprising number of dimensions; he even codesigned the catalogue. A parallel sense of generosity is felt in Tillmans’s photographs: this show demonstrates (pretty much as the 2003 one did) that he attends to water sprayed from a drainpipe with as much care he does a sky full of stars. The title subject of Weed (2014), displayed as a print several metres high, soars like a cathedral spire (is producing a print at this scale an awesome feat? I assume so, but with its minimal exposition, this exhibition is not the place to understand technique); a humble pear, backlit, glows like Uluru at dawn. These images’ primary – only? – register is wonder; the world seems too full of grandeur for it to be any other way. Adjust the crop of the waterfall in Iguazu (2010) and it could be a spread in National Geographic; for all its titular disdain, even the construction-site study Shit buildings going up left, right and centre (2014) makes a pretty enthralling vista: a warm-hued study of pattern and planes. Even when he eschews representation, working without cameras, the results – as with

Shit buildings going up left, right and centre, 2014. © the artist

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the Greifbar series, in which abstract marks spread sporelike across cloudy colour fields – are a numinous sublime. It’s not all signs and wonders: the simultaneously earnest and puckish Truth study center (2005–) assembles news clippings, documents, Tillmans’s photographs and found images to evoke a bewildering media landscape, inviting us to question the production of ‘factual’ narratives, and images’ role within it. In the final room, a similar installation, Time Mirrored 3 (2017), displays Tillmans’s photographs with observations of historical distance: ‘The end of the Cold War is now as long ago as the end of WWII was in 1970’, for example. A statement of how elusive progress can seem, it also suggested the expansive potential for change in any span of time. Accordingly, hung nearby are images of sites where change is due (Lampedusa, Gaza), or that suggest unpredictability (an abeyance of waves, a clear horizon). For a moment, the world feels upliftingly mutable. The exhibition’s takeaway, after 14 crowded rooms, is one pretty familiar to Tillmans fans – the world is strange, confusing, fragile, but fundamentally wonderful. Still, in 2017, hope is no negligible thing. Next to the exit door is a grid of four photographs of apples, growing on the branch in different seasons. Sometimes ripeness is all. Matthew McLean

Iguazu, 2010. © the artist

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Babette Mangolte I = EYE Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 18 December – 12 February Having dedicated much of her time to documenting dance, performance and theatre works by others, Babette Mangolte here asks visitors to spend some of their own time. Her exhibition is conceived from fragments that together form an integrated temporal-spatial score, almost seven hours long. The fragments consist of film and photography (some of the latter contained within films or wall-mounted and periodically lit) of performative works by Mangolte’s contemporaries, such as Trisha Brown, Richard Foreman, Robert Morris and Steve Paxton. Cumulatively, this goes beyond mere documentation and stands as independent artistic work, negotiating the tension between the camera’s influence on what happens in front of it and avoiding competition with the motif and particular style of the performer. The exhibition further includes a vitrine and a table with photographs as well as wall-mounted showcases with pictures, VHS tapes and books, and a hanging silk cloth imprinted with the 1959 Robert Bresson quote that gives the work its title, Un film doit être quelque chose en perpétuelle naissance (A film ought to be something in perpetual birth, 2002). The crux of documenting performative art is that any attempt fails to reproduce its liveness and is only a spur to memory, as Peggy Phelan famously pointed out in 1993. Trying to resolve this predicament since the 1970s, the Frenchborn, US-based Mangolte has sought to identify the single shot that would communicate the

presence of a performance without ‘standing in’ for the action itself. Rather than showing that final image only, the exhibition exposes multiple unedited shots that were necessary for the one to emerge. In the central space, 13 films by Mangolte are played one by one, including Water Motor (1978), wherein Trisha Brown’s solo dance performance is shown first in real time and then in slow motion, and Slide Show (2010), depicting photographs of choreographies by the Judson Dance Theater. The videos are successively projected onto one of three screens suspended from the ceiling and facing each other, while the rest of the room remains darkened. The small-scale photographs installed on the surrounding walls are almost indiscernible until illuminated during certain intervals between the videos, accompanied by sounds from Mangolte’s films and recorded reflections by the artist on her practice. A number of wall-mounted black-and-white printouts of Mangolte’s writings deliver further insights into the artist’s obsession with time. Her text ‘What does it mean to be contemporary?’ (2012) poses questions regarding the status of an artist’s work when it exists in a time after its own creation and is set against a successive generation of artists’ works and new technologies. A similar coexistence of different temporalities, she writes, guides moving images from the present of the shoot to the present of the narrative, to the present moment when the

film is seen. Touching IV (2016), a table laden with printed contact sheets of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater productions, invites visitors to rearrange the images and create different sequences, following the logic of an analogue film edit; the colour photographs Landscapes and History (1997) point to epic temporal dimensions in landscapes like the Mojave Desert. The exhibition successfully integrates these concerns by interlacing different temporal frames in itself. As the title I = EYE insinuates, besides time the exhibition is concerned with how we see and comprehend the act of looking. In Mangolte’s film The Camera: Je or La Camera: I (1977), models are told how to pose, their anxious expressions revealing the power relations between those in front of the camera and the person behind it. Mangolte consistently attempts to undo the male gaze, as in her five collaborations with Chantal Akerman, for instance as cinematographer for Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), none of which, unfortunately, are included in the show. Yet the exhibition inevitably raises questions regarding a female photographer’s operating in the background to record the works of her primarily male choreographer and theatre director friends, since we know that only what is documented enters into art-history books. This comprehensive standalone exhibition by Mangolte is long overdue, not least because the questions she poses continue to persist today. Stefanie Hessler

Roof Piece on the High Line (still), 2011/12, HD video, 35 min. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Broadway 1602 Uptown & Harlem, New York

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Moshe Ninio Lapse Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris 28 September – 29 January In the exhibition Lapse, as throughout Moshe Ninio’s whole body of work, the photographic mechanism of containment – via framing, marking and representation – is pushed into the realm of the uncontainable, the unframeable. This push generates an oscillation between the process of becoming and the state of being an image. The exhibition centres on two bodies of work by the Tel Aviv-born artist, Glass (2010–11) and Morgen (2015–16). Glass is a sequence of framed photographs that render successive versions of one image: as a pair of colour prints (Glass I), as a single colour print (Glass II) and as a single black-and-white print (Glass III). The image depicts an empty glass booth in front of a white wall. It is like a model of its own means of display: the frame of the booth’s opening optically corresponds to each photograph’s real frame, the represented glass pane of the booth to the real glass pane, and the represented wall to the real wall upon which the prints are hung. Yet in addition to its mute, anonymous visibility, Glass’s image of the empty booth,

as all photographic images, is an index of historical time and place. The booth is not just any booth, but the one Adolf Eichmann sat in during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Therefore the image of Glass is itself evidence of a historical legal procedure that triggered the question of witnessing and representing. In this sense, the movement of Glass’s sequence between colour and blackand-white prints reflects a movement of photographic images between the space of art and the archive, between subjective expression and objective information. Morgen is a video installation of two adjacent screens installed on the wall, leaning forward. Reedited from YouTube, the footage shows Israeli singer Esther Ofarim singing the German hit Morgen ist alles vorüber in her 1964 debut performance on German TV. Ninio’s reedit zooms in on the agitated movements of Ofarim’s facial features, dissociating them from her voice. His focus unhitches imagery from sound to the point where the video

becomes an act of rupture, undermining the original meaning of the footage. During Ofarim’s performance, the camera pulls back and the studio’s stage design, an abstract pattern, is slowly revealed behind her. Ninio extracted a segment of this and printed it on a constellation of metal sheets that lean against the gallery wall, further separating background and figure. The artist titled the grouping Décor: morgen_appendix. Magnifying the separateness of each of the video’s elements, the isolated patterning resists the containment of the frame (in this case, the framing of the camera, and that of the video screen). Here, working in pointedly symbolic terms, Ninio literally stages a scene during which something in the background abandons its decorative role, in order to reappear in real space as an uncontainable witness of something like a traumatic event, though precisely what is left open-ended. The pattern has ‘seen’ an act it could not contain – or be contained by – and therefore had to escape. Ory Dessau

Glass II, 2010-11, photograph, injekt print in MDF frame, 110 × 77 cm. Courtesy Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris

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Sean Snyder Aurora Borealis Galerie Neu, Berlin 19 January – 1 March For all the cutting-edge technology he deploys, Sean Snyder is the least ‘virtual’ of artists. He treats digital information like a minimalist sculptor treats metal or wood, exposing its grain and texture, its characteristic properties. He likes to box himself into a minimalist heritage he can then fight his way out of. Duty-Free Molotov Cocktail (2016–17) is a glass cube, like the ghost of Robert Morris’s Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1965), onto which a bottle of vodka and a silk scarf are placed. An information sheet, provided by the artist, describes it as ‘a configuration of luxury items with the potential to become a weapon’. The objects dress up an art-historical allusion – to minimalist literalism, incompatible with any kind of embellishment – as a political metaphor. Silence (Audition) (2016–17) is a flatscreen monitor graphically translating a recording of John Cage’s silent 1952 composition 4’33”, which we hear, on headphones, as an echoey auditorium. As with the glass cube, an established cultural value (there 1960s Minimalism; here the 1950s musical avant-garde) is a vacant ground Snyder uses to offset a narrative that eludes its grasp. If this is ‘silence’, the sounds we are hearing might conversely be those of the medium itself – the digital file, the provider (‘purchased from Apple iTunes’), the software (‘using the shareware computer program Audition’) – as much as the acoustic resonances of a concert hall.

Projected on a wall painted RAL 7043 (Traffic Grey) – another sign for minimalist specificity (the grey monochrome, the code) – the film Cloud Sediment (Gstaad) (2015–16) shows a drone buzzing over a data storage facility built into a Swiss mountain and dusted with debris as if still showing signs of excavation. The snowy aerial panoramas are very James Bondish. I kept expecting jet skis to emerge from the pines. Is that bottle of Absolut for mixing martinis as well as making bombs? The sinister drone and fortress are metaphors for the clandestine nature of information itself, which is of course what we are watching in the form of gigabytes of data in the seductive guise of beamed footage. That Snyder’s medium is also his subject can make his art seem hermetic and overdetermined. As a corrective, he cultivates the sidestep of analogy. ‘Cloud’ storage becomes a skyscape of clouds in 25 photographs taken from a plane window, each formatted according to the golden ratio. Here, the trappings of traditional pictorial artifice clash with the empirical documentary form of greyscaled images, gridded like a bank of surveillance monitors, and framed into conformity by another RAL tone: 7047, Telegrey. The exhibition is torn between conforming to such binaries (illusion/its occlusion) and overturning them with a Romantic narrative they cannot contain. Network (Les Animaux De La Ferme) (2016) is structuralist tautology

in ironic overdrive – a series of photographs of angling lures implying that the image is also a lure – while a smartphone on a plinth runs a film of rough seas over the soundtrack of 4’33”. The roiling waves are a generic sign of what digital technology, in the guise of the small screen, is unable to assimilate; as the crackles on the Cage soundtrack are, being an excess of contingent sound generated by the attempt to record ‘silence’ in a crowded hall. Each challenges the limited space offered by the wafer-thin mobile, its compression emphasised by the relative substantiality of the block on which it is laid. It seems like having his cake and eating it for Snyder to cast information as both minimalist matter and the stuff of transcendence, but affirming that paradox is his only window out of the airtight correctness of his critique. There is a nice audio overlap – from the drone’s hum to the rustles of the Cage recording to the mysterious, ambient ‘fragments of audio registrations of the aurora borealis’ on a memory stick attached to a pair of headphones (Magnetosphere, 2016–17). Each blends into the other across the gallery, as if, as immaterial as digital information is, it were also a space that could accommodate both the potential lethalness of a drone and the life-affirming marvel of the Northern Lights, and reconcile them. As if Snyder, the structuralist, were converted to a reluctant idealist by his material. Mark Prince

Mnemonic Equation (Level 5), 2017, 25 archival pigment prints on matt paper mounted on mixed media aluminium, wall paint, 240 × 333 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin

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Spencer Sweeney Viva Las Vegas Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin 28 January – 4 March Spencer Sweeney apparently worked simultaneously on the numerous oil paintings and crayon drawings on paper displayed here. This multitasking extends to the New York-based artist’s musical interests (and reputation as a party animal), and it’s possible each work is to be imagined as a visual accompaniment or scenic backdrop to tracks in some putative rock opera – not least since Sweeney tried resurrecting that unmissed genre back in 2010, working with members of A.R.E. Weapons and Andrew W.K. But any overarching theme is elusive, and why an old Elvis Presley song is referenced in the show’s title is unexplained. The works share two characteristics: they are constructed in a spontaneous, childlike fashion not dissimilar to that of Karel Appel and his CoBrA colleagues, and they are coloured in a naively intense fashion that would agitate a hallucinating Fauvist. Confronting this retinal barrage is like being a hyperactive infant salivating amongst a supermarket’s multifarious bags of Haribo confectionery, and the paint applied here contains similar brightly heightened colourings to those sweetly artificial jellies: consider the shrieking strawberry-reds and noxious gooseberry-greens in the many selfportraits here. An initial rush of euphoria, as if you’d been zapped by E-number additives,

stimulates an optical equivalent to moreish chewing and gulping; you press on quickly to the next image, only to find yourself feeling, by the end of the series, somewhat stuffed and vaguely unwell. Maybe that’s what Sweeney intends by his imagery of leering faces – a reminder that even the jolliest soirées can turn sour. Take The Aesthete (all works 2016/2017), a cartoon figure with a sunflower-yellow forehead and green courgette-shaped fingers clutching at a golden statue that may or may not be an Oscar. Sweeney appears to mock the person’s refined sensibilities and has the owner smile broadly in smug appreciation of this object. A raver is featured in Reveler, a faceless cipher composed of a Venetian carnival mask and an orange hand with pink and green nail varnish in front of what might be a bucket, or a giant scarlet drinking-cup. In this work, Sweeney demonstrates an attractive way of making his oils look chalky, with lemony tear streaks on the mask. Reveler suggests a flashback of delicious memory; good times from the night before. There are more hijinks in Jazz Party Celebration (Horny), where an avocado-coloured woman dances with a lime-green drum behind some solid trees done in Heinz-ketchup-red. Breakfast is a gentle image of the morning after: a minty-blue chair and cup, an ochre table,

some fruits on a white plate and watery violet streaks for curtains. Pleasingly, there’s a pelmet painted with purposeful gaucherie in red and some grey-blue squares at the top of the canvas. There are, additionally, some self-portraits here that could be a pastiche of earlier primitivisms, like those scary masklike constructions of Marcel Janco. Bruce is another portrait: at a guess, it might be an in-joke referencing fellow Gotham pranksters such as the anonymous members of the Bruce High Quality Foundation. Most of Bruce’s face is mud-brown, but his square chin is apple-green with scattered black stubble, the tip of his nose is cherry-red, the rest of it a smear of blue. There are purple and magenta shadings on his cheeks; Bruce looks like no one. These paintings and drawings are, as the title of Adam Thirlwell’s 2015 novel would have it, Lurid & Cute. Thirlwell has his central character say this about his upbringing: ‘the juggernaut of meaning, let’s say, was not parked heavily on our lawn’. Sweeney’s hedonistic capering here is likewise no pantechnicon loitering on a garden of great import. These works are late gatecrashers that possess lesser wit and good manners than those of earlier exuberant colourists. Glutted and tired out by the onslaught, you can’t help but wonder if Sweeney’s party is over. John Quin

Jazz Party Celebration (Horny), 2016 / 2017, oil on canvas, 224 × 297 cm. Photo: Matthias Kolb. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

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Laure Prouvost the wet wet wanderer Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam 27 January – 2 April From the street he is clearly visible: the man-size cleaner, a stick figure fashioned from wire with a monitor for a head, mopping the floor on the other side of the window. His screen shows text flashing past. ‘I need to clean the floor,’ it says, ‘cleaning the mess of Gregor and his octopus.’ He seems to want to entice passersby inside. ‘Come and join us / come to the bar / have a glass of vodka.’ Act upon the invitation and you enter a thoroughly drenched environment, as if it were somehow raining indoors. Water streams down the windows (and runs to a gutter, from where it’s pumped around the system again). The white carpet is wet. The walls have been sprayed with diluted ink. Sogginess abounds. Where have we ended up? Who is this Gregor? A video on a screen under a glass water tank gives a clue: Gregor Samsa turns out to be a tortured writer, frantically trying to write in octopus ink freshly obtained from the market. The black liquid splashes in all directions. Then we see the writhing arms of an octopus and hear pitter-pattering raindrops and a woman’s groans, lending the images a suggestion of sultry eroticism. Splayed out beside the tank is the flaccid body of an octopus, cast in bronze. Samsa is the protagonist of Prouvost’s six-part film The Wanderer (2012) – an excerpt from which is on show, and which the rest of the exhibition ‘translates’ into installation. The film is based on a curious translation

of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915): curious because the work was translated from German into English by someone with no knowledge of German whatsoever, resulting in all kinds of absurd misunderstandings. What can be confidently ascertained is that Kafka’s original tale has been completely lost. Prouvost, a French artist who has lived in the UK since she was nineteen, loves this kind of communication breakdown. This obviously does nothing for the story’s intelligibility. On several areas of the carpet, pools of synthetic resin – in which all manner of rubbish has coagulated: rusty beer cans, halved gherkins, shoes, mussels, many twigs and leaves – have been deposited. Like the large branch with a soaked scarf hanging from it, attached high onto the wall, and the two dripping suits suspended from the ceiling, the pools appear to mark a place where something dramatic has happened. The suggestion of death by drowning raises its head, but never takes concrete form. Two drawings on panels, smudged with wax, show ghostly figures breathing through a tube. The eye-catcher in the installation is the vodka bar, bathed in black light. Resting on two tables are fountains spraying diluted ink, surrounded by numerous vodka glasses in which the ink has already sunk to the bottom (and there’s no vodka in there). White neon letters on the wall read: ‘Citizens or

gods, men are truly stuck’. Samsa’s lamentation also resounds from speakers, alternated with shards of conversations and the instantly recognisable guitar intro from Prince’s Purple Rain. Words transform into images, images into sounds; it’s a multiple collision of signs and meanings. The staging is intriguing, rousing one’s curiosity but hard to get a handle on. ‘Slippery when wet’ would be an understatement here. The existential angst manifest in Kafka’s novella, the sense of alienation and exclusion, have made way for a steamy interplay of forces around drinking and drowning in which the problem of writing, of the imagination itself, comes floating to the surface. La Pluie (projet pour un texte), a short film by Marcel Broodthaers from 1969, springs to mind. The artist sits outside at a low table, writing in a notebook with a fountain pen while rain comes down in torrents, washing the words away; the man continues to write regardless. Both Broodthaers and Prouvost consider the translation of one language into another – literature into film, film into sculpture – and everything that can get lost in the process. Every translation is inadequate, gets out of hand, leads to absurd misunderstandings, but is carried out with tenacity nonetheless, imagination running riot. ‘One last shot of vodka?’ the cleaner asks. Sure, why not? Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Suzanne Jansen

the wet wet wanderer, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Aad Hoogendoorn. Courtesy Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

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Philippe Parreno A Time Coloured Space Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto 3 February – 7 May ‘We are in a big building, and an event is taking place,’ reads the opening of Philippe Parreno’s 1995 book Snow Dancing, a speculative narrative for a party yet to occur. In recent years, the French artist’s megaprojects have folded architecture and event into a singular form. He has long mentioned an unrealised project to adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) into a feature film; meanwhile he has birthed exhibitions as benevolent monsters, suturing artworks together to animate gigantic building-beings. At Serralves – as, for example, at the Palais de Tokyo in 2013 – Parreno has been given the entire museum as his vessel, but here the baroque grandeur of his recent exhibitions has taken a turn towards spectral minimalism, foregrounding timbre rather than intensity, absence over action. Repeating and rearranging serial works across the museum’s 15 main spaces, this retrospective of sorts is rendered a landscape of eternal recurrence, as an electrical storm of pulsating lights and synthetic noise rolls through the galleries. Like a mute chorus, over 200 of Parreno’s Fireflies (2012–16) align on many walls, black drawings defining an insect in scratchy ink amidst gloopy washes, upon what is often revealed to be hotel letterhead. With the aura of a nocturnal fever dream, the fireflies bear silent witness. Their bioluminescence seems stolen by the galleries’ flickering lights, their multitude the product of Parreno emulating the automaton of his 2007 film, The Writer.

Over 10,000 Speech Bubbles (1997–) nestle statically against the galleries’ ceilings. Different colours in each room, they form the sparse show’s main event, sometimes acting as lighting gels to tint whole spaces. From power outlets continually sprout the domestic apparatus of Parreno’s AC/DC Snakes (1995–2010) – small agglomerations of plugs and travel adaptors, often topped by nightlights – or his clear glass Happy Ending lamps (2014–16). Phosphorescent prints from Fade to Black (2004–13) punctuate walls, their images indiscernible in the daylight, while a smattering of his Christmas trees, Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas (2008–16), idle inside and outside the museum, awaiting seasonal transformation. An illuminated ceiling and moving wall, sculptural offspring of Parreno’s scenography for Dancing Around the Bride (2012), perform a pas de deux in another space. The more Parreno’s works are iteratively multiplied, the more they shed their visibility, and the architecture of the Álvaro Siza-designed museum asserts its own in their place. Freshly empowered to palpably breathe – its lighting and sound fluctuating like respiration – the museum assumes the foreground as an active landscape controlled by incorporeal forces; a building-scale ecosystem populated by a few flocks of different species of artwork, who engage in a silent conversation against an atmosphere of noise. The conductor of this living museum is an artificial intelligence attempting to master

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fugue no. 24 in D minor (1950–1). In the auditorium a Disklavier piano plays the results, erudite musical phrases collapsing into pointillistic staccato as it ‘learns’. Inverting the master/slave relationship between silent cinema and piano accompaniment, a generative visualisation of the AI’s learning process is projected as the 3D ‘film’, A Time Coloured Space (2017), from which the exhibition takes its title. Plugged into the building’s infrastructure, beyond the auditorium, the fractured fugue dictates the rhythms of light, noise and window blinds of galleries under the algorithm’s electroacoustic possession. Whereas the yeast controller for Parreno’s 2016 Turbine Hall commission seemed half-hidden in a janitorial cupboard, at Serralves, signposted by one of the artist’s marquees, the project’s ‘brain’ has here literally moved to centre stage. That the mechanics of the exhibition’s control both name it and are given such a platform seems a significant marker in Parreno’s work: a logical development of his increasing withdrawal as puppetmaster in favour of the delegation of exhibition choreography to designed systems. As the ‘brains’ of Parreno’s projects become increasingly sovereign, the artworks of the exhibition-monster appear less like its organs, more like an autonomous ensemble cast, awaiting direction. At Serralves it’s Parreno’s quasi-objects that now appear to be the participants in the event in a big building, the public eavesdroppers on their quiet communion. Justin Jaeckle

A Time Coloured Space, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Fundação de Serralves, Porto

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Michael Krebber The Living Wedge Kunsthalle Bern 18 February – 30 April This exhibition, comprising 55 works created between 1986 and 2016, is a reduced version of one shown at the end of last year at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto. Even without that major show, Michael Krebber’s reputation precedes him, though that reputation is fuzzy. Though he’s now in his sixties, his practice remains light-footed and difficult to define. Sometimes he is described as a conceptual painter; curators and galleries hesitate to pin down his visual practice in words. Survey exhibitions are thus welcome opportunities to consider the umpteen facets of the Cologne-born artist’s work, and the spaces in the Kunsthalle Bern discreet and compact enough for his unshouty paintings to stand their ground. Opening the exhibition is Contempt for One’s Own Work as Planning for Career (2001), a white canvas featuring a head and shoulder outlined in apple-green, one side of the face bathed in a blue shadow, an implicit statement of modesty. The scrubbed lines of the shadow recur elsewhere in other paintings, as do a toolbox of shorthand motifs, such as snails, keyholes and the outline of a rocket – or is it a spanner? This latter occurs in each of the untitled works in the three-part The average, edible fish says ADIEU series from 2001, twice like the pins through circular brooches over a deep purple spotted print, once

entering a topsy-turvy environment on a white canvas that may be an office or a toolbox, the faint pen lines left cryptic given the work’s hanging well above our heads. Elsewhere Krebber paints on a variety of grounds, such as synthetic blankets and patterned cotton, and there are also a handful of sculptural works. Paint is applied in spare, agile strokes or sprayed, sometimes through patterned templates. En masse, the works show a range of approaches to the construction of paintings: reference, manipulation, recontextualisation, interrelation or sampling, for starters. The same can be said of the installation, which purveys several different approaches: standard white-cube showcasing; chopped-up windsurfing boards laid out as if components of do-it-yourself sculpture; paintings creeping up the wall as if to break out of a single hang into salonlike density; and three smallish canvases propped in one corner testing visitors’ observation. By this point, other artists’ focus on a single strategy seems laboured and lacking in intellectual curiosity. Krebber, meanwhile, just keeps innovating, reworking his vocabulary and refusing to settle into a recognisable style. His zigzag scrub from the opening 2001 work pops up again in the recent five-part group MK/M (2014/15), with

their blocky green shapes applied in broad perpendicular paint strokes on white canvases; here the zigzag, a grace note to the rectangular shapes, tails off like a sunset reflected on water and thus an abbreviated cliché. These canvases are poorly stretched, their surfaces buckling slightly, and given the intelligence at work elsewhere, this too may be by design. He conjures a return key and space bar, the access keys to virtual spaces, with an L-shaped block and a solid band at the base of one painting; and yet, with the stretching, concurrently underlines the materiality of the painting itself. Krebber knows what a risky business painting is, how little room is left for manoeuvre; after all, he studied under Markus Lüpertz before working for Martin Kippenberger and Georg Baselitz. In answer to the challenge of what painting can mean today, it seems he doesn’t acknowledge the question, just keeps mining its referential and communicative potential, sometimes sincerely, sometimes ironically. It’s an approach that allows him to make the gloriously cheeky Miami City Ballet IV (2010), the aforementioned propped stack. Three primed canvases lean against the wall, unified and coloured by the patterned dust cover he has slipped over all three, a single dab of black acrylic lacquer on top showing that the painter was present. Aoife Rosenmeyer

The Living Wedge, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Gunnar Meier. Courtesy Kunsthalle Bern

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Klara Kristalova Slottet (The Castle) Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm 14 January – 12 February In her fifth solo exhibition at this venue, Klara Kristalova creates a beguiling melange of ceramic works displayed upon a castlelike installation that reaches skyward, alongside miscellaneous drawings, paintings, textiles, jewellery and design objects shown on the gallery’s surrounding walls. Though the exhibition has no stated political agenda, the timing of the Prague-born Swedish artist’s show aligns with the inauguration of right-of-centre, traditionalist forces attempting to redefine what constitutes a functional government, as one can, for instance, observe in current American, UK and French policy-making decisions, which allow room for more divisive discourse. With these sociopolitical issues at stake, exhibitions such as this one are quickly contextualised as either/or: political or otherwise. What at first looks like a fantastical world of ceramic figures and visual delights now appears to highlight hierarchical power plays and shifting undercurrents, for the castle remains a potent representation of unchecked absolutism. It reads as a fortress, guarding desirable territory for those who belong to its regulated sovereignty or from those who are, in contrast, excluded. The exhibition

consists of the citadel and its surrounding fragile pieces, which serve as fragments of a larger assumed whole: one can make parallels between the layered nature of the display, where figurative sculptures are viewed on a pyramidal cakelike base, and the psyches of those manipulated by political dualities. The displayed objects can be interpreted in many ways; the artist creates ambiguous, phantasmagorical pieces that do not always reflect individuals or objects which exist in reality. Kristalova’s work frequently draws attention to the face, as in her glazed sculpture R (2016), which shows a woman’s visage ‘infected’ by what appears to be a blooming rash; the complementary sculpture of a girl’s head devoid of eyes (leaving gaping holes) in Girl on the Top (2016); and the watercolour Blue Eyed (2017). Other displayed objects exemplify the space between the human and inhuman; this animated alternative is present in specific works like the solar stoneware The Sun Devours All (2016) or the jewellery piece Leaf Man (2017). Animals and puppetlike formations also appear as presences, inviting one to communicate with creatures that range along an interactive spectrum granting entrance to the castle’s

connected imaginary world. Kristalova’s castle is the manifestation of curiosity and mythical diversion; one is free to cultivate pleasant reveries, imaginary forays, even alternative solutions for an off-kilter world. Other Swedish artists such as Joakim Ojanen, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, Lisa Wallert and Hanna Hansdotter help Kristalova pave an unconventional path for artists working with ceramics and glass to be perceived more so as uncompromising auteurs. Andreas Mangione contributes a supplemental text, presented online, titled ‘Keep on Digging for Clay in the High Hills’, which highlights the connection between Kristalova’s castle and writing as an invaluable craft. Mangione writes: ‘Of the oldest writings in existence, most have to do with lists and laws. Without law and order, no royal palace, without a registry for trade transactions and possessions, no castle.’ In this instance the castle becomes a doorway and possible muse, inviting entities to reconsider their rapport with the real and fictive spheres of law and society, as they both stand and could become. The castle and its diverse inhabitants remind one that another, perhaps even more civilised world awaits – perhaps impatiently. Jacquelyn Davis

Slottet (The Castle), 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm

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Roger Ballen Retrospective Istanbul Modern 28 December – 4 June ‘You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that,’ says Samuel Beckett’s character Hamm in Endgame (1957), shrugging at the absence of a plan or meaning to life. South African photographer Roger Ballen’s three decades of work has drawn strongly, he’s said himself, from this Beckettian mix of irreverence and darkness; it manifests in explorations of absurdity and the strangeness of the psyche in this major retrospective. Featuring seven photographic series and a new installation, the show extends from Ballen’s photojournalistic work in rural South Africa through to last year’s experiments with abstraction. Plunging the viewer into a world akin to that of the subconscious, two narrow rooms of photographs lead to the sole installation (a terrifyingly ‘Ballenesque’ room – his own term). His first exhibition in Turkey acquaints the visitor with much of Ballen’s work since the 1980s in one fell swoop. The result is an intense experience that both entrances and exhausts. The exhibition begins with the series that shot Ballen to prominence as a photographer, Dorps, published in 1986 and reprinted in 2011 as Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa, which captured rural shanty towns where impoverished whites lived. Early morning, Napier (1985) is one of its standout images: with its empty church, overcast sky and slightly off-kilter vanishing point, it encapsulates Ballen’s talent for disorienting spatial compositions and unheimlich atmospheres. Platteland (1994) followed Dorps in publication, as it does in Istanbul Modern’s

hanging. In it Ballen is a confident portrait photographer: here he shows us the pitiful yet characterful faces of an Afrikaner underclass riven by poverty. Straightforwardly composed portraits, like that of twin brothers Dresie and Casie, suggest a documentarian eye turned on a socially disadvantaged group. On the other hand, some photos – like Woman and dogs (1994), where a woman and her dogs sit to the sides of a largely empty frame – seem less about their human subject and more about evoking that Beckettian sense of absurdity. The slightly deranged air of Platteland’s inhabitants recalls that anxiety-inducing dualism common to the act of looking: interest plus revulsion. This soon proves a persistent theme. In the successive series Shadow Chamber (2005), Boarding House (2008) and Asylum of the Birds (2014), Ballen’s humans grow ever closer to actors or props in claustrophobic indoor environs. They play-act absurdities and interact strangely with animals. Less a temporary abode, Ballen’s boarding house is a periodic destination for the poor, disabled, homeless and criminal. Scribbles on scuffed walls in an image titled Squawk (2005) suggest both harmless boredom and chilling ritual; a hand reaches under a dirty bed to provoke a snake in Bite (2007). Meticulously staged yet voyeuristic in feel, these three overarching series are Ballen’s most ethically challenging: their (sometimes clearly mentally disabled) human subjects are borderline objects, and his setups can aestheticise

squalor. Ballen’s later photos then grow abstract, imbued with symbol and sign, in The Theatre of Apparitions (2016); here he experiments with scraping at spraypainted glass to let natural light through. These approach the realm of psychoanalysis in a purer sense; shadow, light, shape and texture suggest but ultimately conceal forms. Finally, Room of the Ballenesque (2016), a walk-in installation recalling the Boarding House world, invites us into a dingy room containing objects now familiar from that dark series. A rusty bed, grimy doll’s heads and stained concrete walls seem to mock our earlier respite in his abstracts. Ballen’s work may not speak to the mainstream Turkish or tourist visitor on a cultural day out at Istanbul Modern, especially as one enters and exits the retrospective via a room housing the flashy exhibit commissioned by the museum’s lighting sponsors. Demet Yıldız’s curatorial hand is almost nonexistent in its deference to the sequencing of the photos as they appear in the books. Minimal intervention there is no bad thing, but the museum has been similarly tentative when marketing this major retrospective, offering no parallel events, workshops or tours to stir public awareness. Ballen, represented by Gagosian, is hardly under the artworld radar; his showing in Turkey when creative freedoms feel particularly besieged is a gesture of belief in Istanbul’s contemporary art scene, and of faith in its audiences. The exhibition’s contents and affect exceed the space and ambition its host allows it. Sarah Jilani

Dresie and Casie, Twins, Western Transvaala, 1993, 1993, from the series Platteland. Courtesy the artist and Istanbul Modern

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Sarah Pichlkostner Kay calls me all the time in other words fly me to the moon Josh Lilley, London 13 January – 17 February At Sarah Pichlkostner’s first London show, everything is out of true. Across two floors of gallery space, occupied somewhat sparsely by a seemingly oblique assortment of objects – some 14 works, all with the unilluminating title Kay calls me all the time in other words fly me to the moon – we find a series of metallic poles, their sections all not-quite-aligned, hanging not-quite-straight from the ceiling; a bizarre, unfollowable story spoken by a not-quite-human-sounding voice, projected from two speakers in a corner of the gallery, that both beckons you to listen then forbids you from making any sense of it when you do; panes of glass leaning against the walls here and there, in various places about the gallery, that have been silvered into reflectivity, with this silvering then oxidised into obscurity. Even the windows onto the street bear the oily blemish of chemical treatment. Everything that is designed to invite the viewer in, simultaneously seeks to disturb and repel. These various objects and elements, displayed over the gallery’s two floors, are an extension of ideas and practices first developed during a two-year residency (ending last year) at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

Pichlkostner took the opportunity to immerse herself in antiquated production technique – most manifestly the ‘silvering’ method first used to make mirrors during the mid-nineteenth century – and we can consider this exhibition as a redeployment of the laboratorylike atmosphere she made for herself there. It was a German chemist, Justus von Liebig, who devised a method of creating mirrors by coating glass with a layer of silver nitrate. Today the method is rarely used, or the silver is replaced by metal less reactive, like aluminium, due to the tendency of the former to oxidise and draw in sulphur, growing dark and mottled. But for Pichlkostner this is precisely the source of the technique’s attraction, offering a dialectical play of revealing and obscuring. The leaning glass sheets promise to show us ourselves only to frustrate with a rough coppery stain. Silvered glass tubes, hanging crookedly from the ceiling, pass insensibly from transparency to obscurity. Though the different objects here seem superficially discrete, it’s difficult to talk about ‘individual works’, since everything in the

show is titled the same. The more time you spend in the gallery, the more these obscure works conspire to produce a sense of unease. Downstairs, all the usual gallery lighting has been removed, replaced by randomly placed strip lights slung in corners, trailing cables across the floor in their wake. Mottled panes of glass lean against the wall just a little too flush, always threatening to topple. Everything is on edge. The soundtrack in particular: it runs with barely a pause, emitted from two eyelike speakers embedded in a low platform, roughly the dimensions of a human body. This would make an odd sort of bed, though – its inviting layer of soft foam is covered with a more forbidding pane of glass. Spoken by the artist herself with an inflection recalling the affectlessness of computer speech synthesis, the narrative sounds perfectly mundane until you follow closely; then the sense slips away on a dreamlike flow of non sequiturs and fractured clauses. Kay calls me all the time in other words fly me to the moon renders cold and threatening every familiar form and surface; a psychosis of objects. Robert Barry

Kay calls me all the time in other words fly me to the moon (detail), 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Josh Lilley, London

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COUM Transmissions Humber Street Gallery, Hull 3 February – 22 March An admission: my initial encounter with the work of Cosey Fanni Tutti, a key member of the artists collective COUM Transmissions, was in East Kilbride in 1977, in my parent’s bedroom. So, entirely different circumstances to the current show at a classic white-cube gallery in this Humberside space, but more of that later. There are two floors here documenting the activities of the English group from 1969 to 1976. The number of items is extensive – 179 drawings, documents, posters, performance photographs and outfits displayed in 22 vitrines. The survey begins on the lower floor and seven newly filmed interviews with the key members. Two are recognisable from their subsequent fame in the experimental band Throbbing Gristle: the aforementioned Cosey and arch provocateur Genesis P-Orridge. Their oral histories outline how they met and what core values they held of collectivism majoring in subversive experimentation. There are some sketchy details of performances and how these evolved into the now betterknown musical activities. A notebook in a vitrine contains 1001 Ways to COUM (1972–), the copied 23 pages of which are wall-mounted. This list of typed phrases is a manifesto of sorts, beginning with the first, set in capitals

(‘COUM ARE FAB AND KINKY’), to the somewhat dubious seventh (‘Coum make a nice evening out for the family’), through to the amusingly archaic 996th (‘Coum make friends and enemies of Hawkwind in one night’). By their admission COUM were poor, starving and penniless; hippies without hot water, freezing themselves in the derelict town of Hull. We are told in the filmed interviews that they were a “democratic group” with “no boundaries” who insisted on their “seriousness in play”. Reference is made to the influence of the Merry Pranksters (LSD was taken) and, preeminently, the Dadaists. Tutti comes across her video interview and in the documentation as an Emmy Hennings figure, all dance and daring. An antic P-Orridge is seen in the performance shots resembling Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in his lobster outfit flailing around with similarly wacky costumes. One member, called Spydee, describes practice sessions that featured “incessant drumbeats”, recalling the spirit of Richard Huelsenbeck, the Dada drummer. Another member grew uncomfortable with the increasing influence of Viennese Actionists like Otto Muehl and scarpered. The police took more of an interest in the activities. Their show at London’s ICA in 1976, called Prostitution,

Sex Une Bonne Idée, 1975 (still), performance, Nuffield Gallery, Southampton. Courtesy the artists

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caused outrage, led by a Conservative MP called Nicholas Fairbairn, who labelled COUM “the wreckers of civilisation”. With that in mind, and not a little anticipation, you head upstairs, only to be disappointed by wall-mounted photographs of performances that time has rendered tame, a wooden block studded with nails, a black PVC strap costume, an old G-string (unclear if it belonged to Cosey or Genesis or both), posters for gigs and some banal examples of mail art. Old letters mildly amuse; one from the Arts Council accuses ‘Mr. Orridge’ of sending ‘a farrago of opinions and abuse’. The letter continues: ‘I know of no critic or other person who thought your exhibition… was worthwhile.’ The prurient will be disappointed: only two grainy old videos might offend the timid, one of which, called Coumdensation Mucus (1975), appears to be footage of a DIY sigmoidoscopy. This detritus now seems to be as dated as the magazine with pictures of Cosey wearing stockings I found in my father’s suitcase as a prying teenager all those years back. There is limited insight into the artistic value of COUM here, and a suspicion lingers that the historical documentation is primarily of interest to obsessive fans of (the admittedly fabbier and groovier) Throbbing Gristle. John Quin

Simon Dybbroe Møller & Laura Bartlett Gallery, London 5 February – 12 March In Simon Dybbroe Møller’s latest exhibition, a taxidermied cormorant, perched atop a pile of rolled-up white towels (Cormorous, 2015), welcomes or perhaps observes its visitors. Nearby, a ‘poster’ advertises Lettuce (the artist’s 2015 solo exhibition at the 21er Haus, Vienna) in swirling French script, screenprinted directly onto black marble. Around the corner a minimalist, polished-steel kitchen counter, complete with sink and tap, hosts a sprinkling of lifelike resin casts of lettuce leaves, seemingly just washed, as evidenced by the collection of silicone water droplets that splatter the work surface. These leaves, however, are grey, not green. Their colour is drained from them so that, because their every other detail resembles a crisp, fresh leaf, it is almost like looking at them through a greyscale filter – an early evocation of the artist’s interest in the mutability of contemporary image technologies. A small photograph of a bronze sculpture that depicts the torso of a man – his shirt clinging to him as though soaking wet – completes the room. The atmosphere suggests an exclusive but clinical homeware shop, or the inside of a magazine photo-spread advertising the latest kitchen designs. Dybbroe Møller’s peculiarly sterile collection of things – notably all of which have a particular relationship with water or wetness – seem to highlight the ubiquitous

use of fake, plastic or artificially preserved objects in our everyday lives. And in doing so, they stimulate an awareness of the messy, leaky and porous qualities of our own bodies. In the adjacent room, the nine-minute video Cormorous (2016), a work that made its debut appearance at Kunsthalle São Paulo last year, tightens this enquiry. Questioning how technology has transformed our relationship to (as Dybbroe Møller puts it) ‘what we used to call nature’, the video begins almost as a natural-history documentary. Roaming images of the taxidermied cormorant, interspersed with static shots of a research laboratory (computer, photographs, notes, books, drawings and smoke from an e-cigarette, which wafts in the breeze of a desktop fan), are accompanied by a male, Attenboroughesque voiceover describing the anatomy, ecology and habitat of the cormorant – said to be one of the most ancient bird species. The voiceover informs us that cormorants are the only seabird not to have developed waterproof feathers, hence the “Christlike pose” they adopt to dry their wings. Now images of Rio de Janeiro’s Cristo Redentor appear as we are told that the cormorant is also “older than technology, older than mediated sexuality”. At this point the video’s predictable structure of visual association descends, at the mention of sex, to images of women in wet-T-shirt contests

and the voiceover becomes female, French and breathy, almost mockingly sensual. This is accompanied by a steady banging that builds tension towards an uncertain climax. After which the banging stops, and the video ends with the same static shots of the empty laboratory accompanied by a soaring, orchestral piece of music, of the type that normally signals the end of a Hollywood romance. The video feels as though it is propelled by two opposing impulses: a need to classify the world – scientifically, formally and historically; and a droll urge to suggest that the world today is simultaneously unclassifiable and unknowable. The outcome is a work that balances on the brink of moments of great insight and solemnity, and random nonsense and wit. Dybbroe Møller is evidently fond of using logical and recognisable processes – taxidermy systems of classification, natural-history documentaries, lifelike casting – to achieve quietly puzzling results. His apparently casual assimilation of materials might at first feel glib, but deeper or more tangential lines of thought lead to a widening of social, technological and ecological narratives that seem to ask – through a sculptural exploration of objects, surfaces and materials – what remains of our corporeality in the increasingly mediated and preserved spaces of our everyday lives. Laura Smith

Simon Dybbroe Møller, Lettuce (detail), 2015, varnish, resin, gelatin, silicone, kitchen countertop, 225 × 100 × 90 cm. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

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The Place is Here Nottingham Contemporary 4 February – 30 April Visitors to this major exhibition of black British art from the 1980s are welcomed by Lubaina Himid’s lifesize cut-and-paste portrait Toussaint L’Ouverture (1987). What at first seems a straightforwardly heroic depiction of the Haitian revolutionary leader is, however, complicated by the collaged tabloid newsprint representing his Napoleonic breeches, cuffs and boots. At the painting’s bottom right, these crinkled headlines – documenting the ‘terrorism’, ‘racism’ and ‘abuse’ endemic to Thatcher’s Britain – are connected by arrows to a handwritten legend. ‘This news wouldn’t be news’, the caption states, ‘if you had heard of Toussaint L’Ouverture.’ Thirty years on, the implication is that today’s news – of far-right nationalism, institutionalised misogyny and state-sanctioned violence against nonwhite citizens – wouldn’t be news if you had paid greater heed to the art produced by artists such as Himid. In the second of four galleries stocked with videos, sculptures, paintings and abundant archival material, Zarina Bhimji’s She Loved to Breathe – Pure Silence (1987) is an eloquent indictment of institutionalised racism.

Here an intimate series of poetic fragments and hand-tinted photographs is enclosed in four Perspex panels suspended over a field of ground turmeric and chilli. The series’ callous conclusion in a pair of latex gloves is jarring until you learn that, during the late 1970s, scores of Asian women were subjected to ‘virginity tests’ when seeking entry to the United Kingdom. (This ‘news’ didn’t reach a wider audience until a Guardian exposé in 2011, fully 24 years after Bhimji’s work.) The revelation makes it harder to dismiss the current attempts to greatly restrict travel to the United States as exceptional, suggesting that our contemporary crisis is more deeply embedded and closer to home than those who identify it with a single billionaire fantasist like to believe. That point is upheld by this exhibition’s occasional failure as much as is it is by its many successes. Sutapa Biswas’s Pied Piper of Hamlyn Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is… (1987), which depicts a pinstriped capitalist travelling by rickshaw through a ghostly Indian city, is one of the few works to play back into stereotypes that entrench rather than extend

thought. Some of the more polemical work on show risks, for all its emotive power, distracting from the structural causes of inequality by focusing on its most repellent symptoms (another lesson worth learning). The show mixes work by Rasheed Araeen, Keith Piper and Himid (the subject of concurrent solo exhibitions at Spike Island, in Bristol, and Modern Art Oxford) with less familiar pieces by artists including Joy Gregory and Maybelle Peters. Peters’s Frantz Fanon-inspired animation Black Skin, White Masks (1991) is one of many examples of how hybrid forms such as collage, with their inherent ambiguities and resistance to material hierarchies, can serve to expose and undermine systemic injustices (not least in Black Audio Film Collective’s extraordinary Handsworth Songs, 1986). The highlights of this presentation are too many to mention, but one small caveat is that more explicit links might have been provided to organisations, artists and collectives engaged in the struggle today for the benefit of those inspired (perhaps the better word is radicalised) by the material. This is news, after all, that stays news. Ben Eastham

Maybelle Peters, Black Skin, White Masks, 1991, film, 16mm. Courtesy the artist and the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive

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Zarina Bhimji, She Loved to Breathe – Pure Silence, 1987 (installation view, Nottingham Contemporary). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and V&A, London

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Field Work Tiwani Contemporary, London 13 January – 25 February The word ‘history’ carries two distinct sorts of meaning. It’s what occurred in the past – whether that’s everything that ever happened, or else a particular series of events. And secondly it’s the study and narration of the past – that’s to say, history as discourse: something traditionally undertaken by historians, of course, using the written word, but which has also become a central concern in much recent art. Field Work presents work exploring different meanings of history by eight such artists – all of whom sit within the rubric of Tiwani Contemporary’s focus on Africa and its diaspora – and highlights some of the pleasures, but also the pitfalls, of this mode of practice. The main pleasure is simple: being introduced to overlooked, fascinating facets of history. Two works here offer such glimpses. Theo Eshetu’s The Mystery of History and My Story in His Story (2015) is a vast print of a photograph from the archive of the late Marshal Tito, president and dictator of Yugoslavia (to which Eshetu’s grandfather served as Ethiopian ambassador), depicting Soviet sailors poring over a map of Africa – hinting, perhaps, at a curious confluence of Cold War and African Independence narratives. And Abraham Oghobase’s Ken’s Smoking Pipe (2016) features recordings of speeches by executed Nigerian

activist Ken Saro-Wiwa along with images, including a scan of one of his trademark pipes – presumably meant as a sort of meditation on the object-as-relic. And yet, if Saro-Wiwa’s pipes are, according to the press release, all collected in his former offices, why is only one depicted here? Similarly, why only one image from Tito’s archive? Both works end up seeming slightly meagre, like preliminary investigations. Indeed, one of the dangers of historically minded work is a sense of superficiality. Too often, a piece’s effect is simply to make you want to turn to written history, to get to the real meat of the matter. Or sometimes it can be the other way round – that a work is tied too tightly to a corpus of history, like a compendium of known facts. That’s the case, unfortunately, with I was her and she was me and those we might become (2016), a video by Kitso Lynn Lelliott, whose imagery of overlapping female figures dressing and undressing against a background of navigational star charts, switching between African and New World garb, is a rather too obvious illustration of Middle Passage motifs. The opposite tack, then, is to leech away all specific references, to evoke the oblivion of time’s passage rather than any particular period. Youssef Limoud’s Ruins (2013–16)

are invented, ramshackle models of ruined buildings, themselves constructed from broken cuts of wood and junk. And Rita Alaoui’s cellular drawings of magnified objects found around Casablanca’s beaches – bones, wooden flotsam – may be titled Objets Trouvés (2014–16), but equally they’re about how items become lost and anonymised through history. The most effective works, though, explore how history, as a discourse or story, is recorded and represented. Robel Temesgen’s handwritten newspapers, Another Old News (2016), containing subjective, remembered accounts, are a nice comment on the conjectural nature of narrative. And writing, or rather its failure, is also central to Thierry Oussou’s large, untitled works (2016), where he borrows prehistorical, protolinguistic marks from various anthropological sources, painting and drawing in a mad, multicoloured, meaningless abandon. But the most astute piece here is a lightboxmounted image, L’Oeil se noie (The Eye is Drowning, 2016), by Katia Kameli, which initially resembles a fabricated montage of different Algerian themes and periods – but in fact is a single photograph of a postcard stall, the random juxtapositions of stock portraying history as a kind of chaotic, intricate medley. Gabriel Coxhead

Katia Kameli, L’Oeil se noie, 2016, backlit film print in PMMA lightbox, 60 × 90 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary, London

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Maria Hupfield The One Who Keeps On Giving The Power Plant, Toronto 28 January – 14 May Founded in the 1880s by Christian churches and the Federal government, Canada’s ‘residential school’ system was meant to assimilate the country’s Indigenous peoples into Euro-Canadian culture and encourage economic self-sufficiency. Instead, for over 100 years, Indigenous children were taken from their families and put into isolating and abusive environments where their culture was stripped from them. The last residential school closed in 1996, and while subsequent governments have issued apologies and negotiated reconciliation agreements, the sad fact remains that, as Canada marks its sesquicentennial and positions itself internationally as a country that values multiculturalism, thousands of Indigenous people live in underresourced communities where high rates of poverty, mental illness and substance abuse are the norm. Brooklyn-based Maria Hupfield is one of several Indigenous artists from Canada, including Kent Monkman, Rebecca Belmore and Krista Belle Stewart, whose work addresses this legacy of the residential schools and the current lived realities of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. But where these other artists confront, Hupfield lulls, and leaves her work more open to interpretation. A display of charming objects – a cassette tape, a full-size canoe, sunglasses and a camera,

all recreated by the artist out of felt – opens the exhibition. Hupfield employs these items during performances. The canoe appears in the video Jiimann (Canoe) (2015), filmed in a courtyard of Campo dei Gesuiti in Venice. Hupfield enters, dragging the cumbersome sculpture behind her. She removes her sneakers, rubs her bare feet and dons a pair of silky opera-length gloves before mooring the canoe to the courtyard’s fountain. She then has a drink before exiting, leaving her canoe, wine glass, gloves and shoes behind. The performance thus presents a kind of claim to this 860-year-old Catholic church by sailing into it (and leaving a mess), like the Europeans did the Americas. In It Is Never Just About Sustenance or Pleasure, produced for 2016’s Site Santa Fe, Hupfield hikes across a landscape of parched plants and small streams, carrying a backpack and wearing large felt boots and gloves. At the video’s end, Hupfield removes her protective gear and resumes her trek barefoot. Why she continues her journey with feet and hands unclad is left for viewers to ponder. Perhaps the artist is shedding the ‘civilising’ accoutrements that impede her from directly connecting with the natural world. A new performance, commissioned by the Power Plant, gives the exhibition its title, which is also an English translation of Hupfield’s

mother’s Anishinaabe name. The performance stems from a painting of the shores of Parry Sound in eastern Ontario, which was made by Hupfield’s mother in 1974. It is signed ‘Peggy Miller’, the anglicised version of Hupfield’s mother’s name. This raises the question: why didn’t she use her given name? The painting hangs alongside projections of two performances, the more affecting one occurring on a stage before an audience. Hupfield sits on the stage looking at the painting while her sister beats a handheld frame drum and sings a ‘women’s water song’ in her ‘mother tongue’. Her brother and a cousin, dressed in spanglecovered costumes, circle around them like birds. In Anishinaabe culture, birds – particularly the mythical Thunderbirds – were companions of Mother Earth, providing her with water when she was thirsty. The undulating cadence of this version of the song suggests the sound of rushing water. Though the performance could easily be taken as a call for the responsible management of natural resources, Hupfield, by surrounding herself with relatives, suggests that, while contemporary Indigenous art exhibitions in major institutions may raise awareness of traumatic histories, recovery from those traumas will remain a private, family affair. Bill Clarke

The One Who Keeps On Giving, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Power Plant, Toronto

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Thomson & Craighead Wake Me Up When It’s Over Young Projects, Los Angeles 27 January – 21 April To say that video or ‘moving-image’ art is at bottom ‘durational’ is to traffic in cliché, if not self-referential redundancy. Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) made this cliché into a magnum opus, mapping as it did an entire archive of the ‘talkies’ mentions and depictions of clock-time to the actual hours and minutes of a single day. It didn’t hurt that that archive belonged to Hollywood, which long held a monopoly on the commercialisation of dreams until the advent of the Internet and smartphones. The same year as Marclay presented The Clock, the artist duo of Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead debuted their own take on Hollywood’s time-sensitive entertainments. The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010) recuts George Pal’s 1960 production of H.G. Wells’s novella so that every word spoken in the film appears alphabetically. Understandably, the cut wreaks havoc on the story line – just imagine every ‘a’ and ‘and’ spoken by the film’s characters lined up and delivered like staccato gunfire. In this ‘retelling’, the most narrative sequences come with blessed silence. The result is less engrossing than Marclay’s work, but it’s more thoughtful, because what

Thomson & Craighead offer the viewer is a kind of object lesson in the dialects of structure and system on the one hand, and narrative and event on the other. By cataloguing all of the words uttered in Pal’s movie, Thomson & Craighead give us language – organised, ordered, disciplined – but not speech or, by extension, story (one could also describe this using semiotics’ distinction between langue and parole). In foregrounding the system by and through which time may be represented, say, in storytelling, Thomson & Craighead destroy the ‘time’ of the movie in favour of the more impersonal temporality of the film’s mere duration, which we as the audience are given to feel rather than follow. This interest in the affect associated with impersonal systems and temporalities pervades much of the work that Thomson & Craighead have made over the past decade. A Temporary Index (2016), for example, is a projection of what at first glance appears as a row of totems whose bases are undergoing steady changes of configuration. A second glance reveals these totems to be made up of large numbers, turned on their sides and paired with their mirror

image. A nearby booklet (part of the work’s installation) explains that the numbers are countdown timers for when various nuclear waste sites will expend their dangerous radioactivity – most of the countdowns stretch into the tens of thousands of years. Or take A Short Film About War (2009), which gives us images from publicly accessible Flickr accounts accompanied by voiceovers of excerpts from blogs written by both civilians and soldiers about their experiences of war. The montage of stories and pictures is immensely compelling, but it’s also important that, on a second adjacent screen, we are given a scroll of the images’ source URLs, user IDs and upload dates and locations. And when moving between one ‘account’ and another, Thomson & Craighead insert a Google Earth animation, which lifts us up from one site, moves us around the planet and then zooms us back down to a new location and a new account. Thus the war stories are delivered to us against the backdrop of Google’s inhuman eye and the Internet’s inhuman archive, analogues of the war system that will distinguish the time of the twenty-first century from what has come before. Jonathan T.D. Neil

A Short Film About War, 2009, two-channel video projection, 9 min 39 sec. Courtesy Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles

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Judith Bernstein Cock in the Box The Box, Los Angeles 11 February – 18 March In the Bible, Judith was a beautiful and fearless Israelite widow who saved her besieged people from the army of King Nebuchadnezzar, which was led by the general Holofernes. She prayed to God to make her a good liar, then inveigled her way into the enemy camp, where she hacked off Holofernes’s head after he tried to have sex with her. On the roll-up gate in front of the Box, someone has painted the name ‘Judith’ in giant looping script, repeated over itself with manic intensity. The signature is the calling card of the indomitable artist Judith Bernstein, a zerofucks-given riposte to the mannered, quasisubversive street art along Traction Avenue – where the Box is located – in Los Angeles’s dubiously designated Arts District. Bernstein gives her biblical namesake a run for her money in the insurrectionist stakes. The work with which her exhibition Cock in the Box shares its title, a vigorous charcoal and pastel drawing from 1966, greets visitors in the foyer: it shows an engorged penis springing out of a Stars and Stripes-patterned box. ‘AMERICA’S NUMBER 1 TOY’ reads her inscription, as if in

promotion of the device. Bernstein has told how she would make her male friends stand guard outside male toilets during the 1960s while she studied the graffiti inside. Her research was both aesthetic and sociological, and has informed her work ever since. In 1966 Bernstein was twenty-four, and filled with righteous ire at the intersection of the US’s violent foreign policy and the sexual violence embedded in the psyche of the American male. The newest work in the exhibition, a maximalist painting in fluorescent oils titled Birth of the Universe: The Voyeurs (2014), shows that the years have diminished none of her anger, even if her sense of humour may have sharpened. A screaming vagina dentata floats in deep space, while arrayed cocks and eyeballs point towards its centre as if caught in its force field. Numerical notations relate to integers of personal significance to the artist (18, for instance, is lucky in Judaism) alongside the recurrent 13.82, the age of the universe in billions. Bernstein’s calling out of ‘the voyeurs’ in this painting of deep time is ambiguous given the pleasure she herself clearly takes in looking,

especially at illicit subjects. Cock in the Box does a fine job of charting a course between 1966 and 2014 that reveals a side of the artist less inclined to furious expressionism, and more to slow, even meditative, analysis. A row of 18 square paintings of anthurium flowers, executed between 1981 and 1984, spans one wall. The common houseplant – whose waxy red spathe and luridly projecting spadix are impossible not to associate with both female and male genitalia – is painted by Bernstein from the same angle in each picture, abstracted almost to the point of modesty. Across the room, a group of charcoal and graphite drawings from 1968 and 1970 describe one of Bernstein’s enduring motifs, the roundhead screw – a visual but also linguistic euphemism. These drawings are cooler, almost technical, and given her commitment to the subject (Hardware #1, #5 and #6 are featured here, all 1970, along with Screws, 1968), they reflect not just her pleasure in looking, but in representing too. Bernstein is an artist known for her dogged tenacity; this survey reveals her also to be an artist of wider range than is often recognised. Jonathan Griffin

Anthurium in Color 4, 1984, oil on canvas, 61 × 61 cm. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy the artist and the Box, Los Angeles

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Holton Rower Cutaways Venus LA, Los Angeles 14 January – 24 February On election night in the US, after I watched one too many states go red, a friend dragged me to a karaoke bar, where I met with other confused liberals trying to delay the inevitable, at least for just one more Weezer song. What is the role of escapism in a time of political anxiety? Holton Rower’s exhibition Cutaways may just have an answer. Rower’s frenetic sculptures seem at first like nothing more than an excuse to play with a gratuitous, psychedelic palette, but soon open up to reveal wondrous moments and captivating details; the exhibition is an escapade into paint as surface, body as process and colour as medium. Gobstopperesque colour schemes cloak Rower’s wall panels and geometric sculptural forms. Unlike Ken Price, whose sculptural forms are undulating and sensuous, Rower’s sculptural works recall an old-school, hardedged formalism (shades of Brancusi). Yet, with irreverence to any kind of modernist purity, Rower buries his plywood geometries within layers and layers of acrylic paint, building their surfaces up with such intensity that they

become their own pliable, carvable medium. I overheard the gallerist proudly explain that Rower’s process is like skinning an animal – he knifes into his thickly layered surfaces to create mollusklike shapes. Using cured paint as a sculptural medium is nothing new. What sets Rower’s work apart is his sophisticated use of colour. By carving paint, he is able to unearth sunken layers of deeply toned magenta and rust, which then, a beat later, shift into airy baby-pinks and peaches. Often, as in Very Not Hallow (all works 2016), the darkest tones rest heavy on the bottom of the sculptural forms, with rosy whites flanking the tops, providing a lightness that almost elevates the thing off the ground. These variegated colour schemes are vital to the work’s sense of movement. When they are absent, as in Helpless Champion Reference, which is coloured with a consistent midtone blue, the form (overtly phallic in this case) sits dumbly static. The wall panels, which appear like scrolls or mandalas, are more overt and simple compo-

Cutaways, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Lazaros. Courtesy the artist and Venus LA, Los Angeles

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sitionally. In More Than It Is, a dark blue wave disrupts a serene white sky, recalling Hokusai’s iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa (1829–32). The wall-bound works are meant to be read, not felt, and they lack the dimensional gravitas implicit in the sculptural work. I felt both liberated and awkward embracing out-and-out escapism in that karaoke bar last November. Leaving the bar, anxiously listening to NPR, any hope I may have had for a different outcome was quickly shattered. How artists will respond to American politics in the next few years remains to be seen, and while there is certainly much work to be done politically, Rower unabashedly asks us to check our baggage at the door. In a time of collective anxiety and an uncertain future, this brand of escapism, so insular and far removed from politicisation, is a welcome reprieve. Hopefully by 2020 artists will not have forgotten abstraction’s potent power to elicit emotion, champion an array of viewpoints and harbour a momentary escape from the outside world. Lindsay Preston Zappas

Indisputable Authority Reference, 2016, paint on particle board, 191 × 71 × 121 cm. Photo: Lazaros. Courtesy the artist and Venus LA, Los Angeles

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Lynn Hershman Leeson Remote Controls Bridget Donahue, New York 27 January – 12 March When it comes to new media, few artists can claim a vision as prophetic as that of Lynn Hershman Leeson. Since the 1970s, the American artist has investigated issues of identity in relation to digital and virtual existence, often going unacknowledged for her trailblazing deployment of emerging technologies. Remote Controls surveys her interrogation of technologies of control and surveillance over almost four decades, both as subject matter and as a structural premise of artistic form. For example, in Deep Contact (1984), the sensuous voice of a female avatar addresses the viewer, drawing us towards the screen she inhabits, ‘waiting’ for the touch of a passerby to ‘activate’ her. The first artwork ever to use touch-activated-screen technology, Deep Contact leads users through a technicoloured garden of Eden, where interaction determines the outcome of the narrative. The work skilfully captures the psychosexual dimension of the encounter (using tactile technologies long before the age of smartphones) and accurately predicts the prevalent feminine gendering

of AI service assistants today, such as Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft) and Alexa (Amazon). The erasure of the boundary between feminine subject and digital object is indeed Hershman Leeson’s main concern, which is turned on its head throughout the show: technology as that ambivalent extension of humanity producing at once deeply troubling systems of control and new utopian horizons of female subjectivity. The six-minute Seduction of a Cyborg (1994) tells, in a surreal language reminiscent of that used on TV home-shopping programmes, the story of a white female computer-user whose body is invaded by the pictures that appear on her screen, effectively blinding her to anything but the virtually disseminated images of the Web (which in the video consist mostly of digitally rendered maps and newslike visuals from around the world). Hershman Leeson points to the seductive but hollowing effect of representation in cyberspace, in which ethnic/cultural Others are reduced to nothing but fetishised images despite the promises

of global networked communicability. This problematic techno-gaze is inverted in The Complete Electronic Diaries (1986–94), a 76-minute video ‘confessional’ in which then-emerging video-editing techniques become a kind of therapeutic tool enabling Hershman Leeson to act out histories of personal trauma. These anxious, ambiguous documents regarding technology’s effects on the human condition feel all the more poignant alongside Hershman Leeson’s newer works, which engage super-current discourses of technology without ever betraying the formalism that by now shines clearly from her oeuvre. Venus of the Anthropocene (2016) captures, via facial-recognition technology and without warning, the image of the viewer, and projects it above a vanity dresser (part of a small installation that includes a stool, mirror and dismembered mannequin), where it remains as evidence of the surveilled body even after one has left the gallery for the streets, where these technologies already pervade, albeit far less visibly. Jeppe Ugelvig

Venus of the Anthropocene, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Jason Mandella. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

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Jordan Kasey Exoplanet Nicelle Beauchene, New York 10 February – 12 March United in their cropped views, androgynous figures and eerie lighting, Jordan Kasey’s new paintings reach for a sense of unhomeliness, in the Heideggerian sense that we are strangers to our own being. They present a struggle between the removed and the experienced, the alienated and the certain, that plays out in the formal realm of competing textures and colours. In Practicing Piano (all works 2017), a sense of horror vacui reigns as a haunting human spectre hunches over ivory and charcoal keys. The piano’s glossy red lacquer reflects apparitions of serpentine fingers, which only serve to heighten the figure’s phantasmic presence. The composition is tight, purposefully leaving viewers without space and without context. Who is this yellow-eyed entity with mauve lips who crowds our own space with such empty presence? Greyscale skin, softly swirling with Kasey’s deft brushstrokes, lures us into what should be a familiar scene of leisure and song. But the gaze of a lone yellow eye, the way the

impasto jeans meet the rendered keys at an acute angle and the stark shadows all usher us into the uncanny. Kasey’s paintings often avoid fully fleshedout faces. Upside Down Face manages to demonstrate virtuosic paint handling while communicating only basic visual information. What little there is on this canvas – soft, sickle-cell lips; a scalene nose; Play-Doh eyebrows – accumulates into an inverted portrait of no one. Multiple lighting sources collide, leaving a deep shadow on the far side of the nose, cut with a feathered highlight. Shades of salmon, lemon and steel radiate on the face, which is sectioned into discrete thirds. Coupled with intense cropping that allows only centimetres of background colour to peek through at the corner, Upside Down Face is irresistible in its visual absorption. There are two scenes of summertime leisure in Kasey’s show, Backyard at Night and Poolside. In the former, a grisaille figure (stylised and stocky) lounges in bathing trunks while

fingering a blade of emerald grass. Tightly rendered, the figure’s left arm cuts down the centre of the canvas and is painted in a style corresponding to a chair in the composition’s bottom-right corner. Likewise, the figure’s more painterly right arm matches another chair in the back left. Kasey’s style of many styles produces an uncanny visual logic that encourages a sense of unease. No stability lurks within this painting that could placate uncertainties about Kasey’s environments. More upbeat than the brooding noir of Backyard at Night, Poolside shows a greater degree of stylistic uniformity, except for the thick, confettied bathing suit of one of Kasey’s four bathers, all of whose faces are either turned away from us or cropped out. We are left wondering: who are these people and what do they really look like? What world is this that is almost, but so clearly not, our own? Kasey updates unhomeliness for the present, when we are strangers to our own being as much as each other’s. Owen Duffy

Poolside, 2017, oil on canvas, 197 × 274 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York

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Gladys Nilsson The 1980s Garth Greenan Gallery, New York 12 January – 18 February In a standout painting here titled The Dicky (1986), five pantless female figures assist a beleaguered man in slipping a pumpkin-orange false shirt-front over his head. As is typical of Nilsson’s style, wiggling limbs weave between each other pell-mell as swathes of colour trifurcate the picture plane into three intertwined scenes. The effect is something like a classical frieze viewed through a kaleidoscope, not least because Nilsson’s aqueous pools of richly hued watercolour seem to hum and swish-swash around on the page. (Her virtuosity with watercolour is a subject worth writing about on its own.) What unites the 12 works on view – almost all large-scale watercolours, and all from the 1980s – is an abiding interest in monumentalising the humdrum of everyday life, whether it’s going to the beach, putting on a dicky or working construction. When talking about her subject matter in recent interviews, Nilsson often emphasises her fascination with human minutiae, such as watching everyday, small-scale occurrences and interactions unfold. For example,

‘watching people at the supermarket, bending over the frozen food section’. In these works, the trivial is front and centre. In her formal constructions, Nilsson transposes this observational imperative onto the viewer. It is nearly impossible to glance at one of these works and quickly grasp what it depicts. You have to really look: follow the twisty limbs back to the bodies that own them, decipher the looks exchanged in the background between minor characters and puzzle over what bearing one plane of colour might have on the next. I’d argue that The Dicky embodies many of the primary themes of this body of work. For one, it deftly illustrates Nilsson’s playful attitude towards the body. Take the women’s bodies. In the hands of any other artist, the depiction of a woman with a pokey boob jutting out akimbo from an Amazonian one-shouldered top and puffy little uncovered labia would be undignified or even grotesque, but Nilsson’s bodies are entirely matter-of-fact. They are deeply liberated in their unconfined-ness. I can’t stop picturing Nilsson staring gleefully at a big butt bent over a supermarket freezer. She paints the moments

when the body is ill-comported, un-tucked-in, up-in-the-air – but she does so affectionately. Secondly, Nilsson has a deep sense of the absurd, but without any cynicism. Rather than Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill, she has a guy trying on a dicky. (Is there a better illustration of the meaninglessness of the universe than a dicky?) Even the most boring daily routines are saturated with humour. As is the point of Camus’s interpretation of the Sisyphus myth, life is pointless, but isn’t it funny? And third, Nilsson is floodlighting the ridiculousness of life under late capitalism, two of the products of which are the mall and the supermarket. In this exhibition, certain pieces address work (two paintings depict construction sites) while others address leisure (going to the mall, the beach, exercise class). Nilsson, who comes from a blue-collar Chicago family, has said she deals with ‘the celebration of making it through the day’. By depicting her characters with both jocularity and affection, the artist doesn’t allow them to be cogs in a machine. She monumentalises these supposedly small lives. Ashton Cooper

The Dicky, 1986, watercolour on paper, 102 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

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Sadie Barnette Do Not Destroy Baxter St Camera Club of New York 18 January – 18 February Obtaining an FBI file is no simple task. Besides the arduous paperwork and patience required of government bureaucracy, the agency charges a dollar per page processing fee, which we might assume means we pay them a buck to redact and conceal information. Sadie Barnette applied for the FBI file of her father, Rodney Barnette, and the process imbues the document with emotional anticipation for what it might uncover. The elder Barnette drew the attention of the investigative agency for his brief membership in the Black Panther Party during the late 1960s, and excerpts from the file comprise My Father’s FBI File: Part II (2017) the centrepiece of this exhibition. Arranged in little clusters across an entire wall, the pages consolidate micronarratives throughout the document and, like the rest of the show, construct biographical vignettes that attempt to reconcile competing perspectives: an adoring daughter versus the paranoid eye of the FBI. Scanning the pages reveals just how fastidiously the FBI logged even the most banal information. It could appear like a pulp mystery novel: a radical past and intimate links to political unrest are just the thing to spruce up the daily struggles of a family man. In fact, elder Barnette founded the Compton branch

of the BPP, and was on the outer edges of Angela Davis’s circle before and during the infamous trial of the leading Communist Party USA member (and associate of the BPP.) But the file is extremely thorough and suggests that disillusionment led him from Vietnam serviceman, to black nationalism, to salesman, to postal worker. (Barnette picks up on this thread in Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968), 2016, a diptych of framed photographs depicting her father in military uniform versus a black beret and leather jacket respectively. Though they compare his adopted identities, the bright flash used in the taking of both images illuminates the environs of a family home.) In one scene, he lived out of wedlock with a woman, something that cost him a job; elsewhere, his neighbours and colleagues appear in a background check, vouching for his integrity. The FBI kept records on the man for five years, long after he left the BPP, and the file frequently includes extraneous information about former friends or even just contemporary events. What’s especially chilling is the way it seems that elder Barnette could be instrumentalised by the FBI, as if they kept records on him in order to build a case against even his most distant associates. Elder Barnette’s story is hardly dispensable to his daughter. Here and there Barnette

counterbalances the FBI’s dry perspective with twee formal interventions, lightly spraying the documents with black and pink ink, or bedazzling them with pearlescent crowns and glittery crystal appliques. The gesture merely breaks up the monotony of reading an entire wall of text, though when it disrupts the reading, it injects Barnette, the daughter, into the narrative with a childlike insouciance for the content. What did she feel when she read over the difficult (or even the boring) details of her father’s life? Barnette keeps her own response ambiguous, though she spares us few details from the original file. Her interventions also highlight the tension between the document’s red declassified stamps and rectangular redactions. Despite her search for answers, these details represent the limits of her inquiry; they hint at institutional power, lending the omissions a powerful aesthetic force. Barnette’s investigation is both distanced and tender, which allows it to recuperate some of her father’s story from the systematic racism that quite literally informed it. Her own reaction is embodied in the drawing Untitled (We All We Got) (2016). The phrase repeats in two arcs against the blank page, a motivational adage or empty tautology so plainly stated it tricks the eye. Sam Korman

Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968), 2016, c-print, 102 × 117 cm (each), edition of 3 + 1AP. Courtesy the artist and Baxter St Camera Club of New York

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Cynthia Daignault There Is Nothing I Could Say That I Haven’t Thought Before Flag Art Foundation, New York 19 January – 13 May Via the three complementary series on show here, Cynthia Daignault proposes a form of conceptual painting that doesn’t abandon craft, and even has room to reinvigorate fusty genre mainstays like the floral still life. The result is an exhibition that is cerebral without being obtuse – and one that offers a way forward for fellow artists who want to push the medium without murdering it outright. The sinew connecting these bodies of work is a sense of networked community. For the largest series, There Is Nothing I Could Say That I Haven’t Thought Before (2016–17), Daignault painted various artworks – by the likes of Charles Ray, Barbara Kruger and Julia Wachtel – that have moved her in some way, all executed with polite, methodical daubs. It’s a chance for Daignault to flaunt her painterly chops in small, delicate moments: the wavy peacock-feather strands in a reproduction of a Carol Bove assemblage; the tender, stroke-by-stroke composition of a man’s beard in a rendering of a Roe Ethridge photograph. Much like Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41), which allowed the artist to miniaturise and package his own work, There Is Nothing I Could Say… is a way for Daignault to construct

a portable museum of her own idiosyncratic, wandering taste. Another museum is the subject of a second, less celebratory series, MoMA (2017). For that, Daignault quasi-scientifically determined which of the New York institution’s canvases are the most popular. She then converted each disparate work into a text-based painting, with the monochromatic backgrounds alluding to the predominant tonal palette of their source. They resemble Richard Prince’s joke paintings at first glance, or the date paintings of On Kawara (a work of his from 1969 has a cameo here). Daignault’s summations of MoMA’s greatest hits reverse the ‘picture is worth a thousand words’ adage and instead relay the spirit of an image with spare phrases that one could, in most cases, stuff into a tweet. Some have the light touch of a William Carlos Williams verse – ‘The sound of regret, or of falling into a leather chair’ (Ed Ruscha’s 1962 Oof ) – while others have a beat edge, as with Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948): ‘Heritage farmland. We painted this country a flat color field of grass. You can’t go home again.’ If these first two groups of paintings are about Daignault exercising control – over the

works of others, and over the master-narrative of art history – a final series, The Certainty of Others (2017), finds her letting go of the wheel. She invited ten of her peers to reconstruct one of her own canvases – a small-scale rendering of colourful flowers in a jar – and then gathered the results (minus the original). Some people – TM Davy, Daniel Heidkamp, Todd Bienvenu – play it straight. But Dylan Vandenhoeck disappears his flowers in a cloudy haze; Gregory Edwards flips the composition sideways, and lops half of it off; Conor Backman disregards the figurative altogether, presenting instead a tangled smear of what might be pastel toothpaste. The sense of obsessive repetition, of slight variations on a common theme, mirrors a work that Daignault pays homage to in There Is Nothing I Could Say…: one of the countless water glasses painted, with near-religious devotion, by Peter Dreher. In fact, that German artist and his confoundingly beautiful cups float over this entire exhibition as a kindred spirit, a believer in the ways artists can achieve the unconventional through entirely conventional means. Scott Indrisek

There is nothing I could say that I haven’t thought before, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Object Studies. Courtesy Flag Art Foundation, New York

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Barbara Kruger, 2016, oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Hellen Ascoli & Jay Sullivan My body is here, my body isn’t there Concepción 41, Antigua, Guatemala 14 January – 15 March With four interventions within the ruins of a seventeenth-century convent in Antigua, Hellen Ascoli and Jay Sullivan consider the architectural structures that frame spiritual, emotional and physical experiences. Embodiment is the central question, both for the extant architecture of the convent La Concepción – which houses the Concepción 41 exhibition space and residency programme – and for the artists’ proposal. “My body is here. I can’t feel you. I can see you. Can you feel me? I can see you. Where are you? Can you hear me? I see you. Where’s your body? I don’t know. My body’s not here, but I feel you,” they call back and forth to each other in a sound installation titled My Body is Here… (all works 2016). The sounds can be heard best from a supine position: the viewer is invited to climb onto the domed roof of La Concepción, lie on her back and insert her head into the small openings of a cupola to hear the piece. The body, then, becomes a willing, perhaps uncomfortable, participant in the work’s investigation of absence and presence. My Body is Here... was recorded in another convent, the nearby Las Capuchinas, in which the cellar has a rotundalike construction with a massive central supporting column. The dramatic acoustics of this beautiful white space are evident in the work, but its archi-

tecture also invites a circular walking, which became the subject of Ascoli and Sullivan’s corresponding video installation, located outside, in the ruin-strewn yard of Concepción 41. The video of the two artists walking during their call-and-response – the dialogue here removed and the work silent – is projected on an L-shaped screen, made of translucent fabric over a metal frame. In the video the artists walk around the column, appearing and disappearing, seeking each other, perhaps looking for someone else. The fabric screen hugs a brick structure, leaving just enough space for visitors to walk between structure and screen. Again, the exhibition creates a situation in which the viewer’s body becomes part of the work: her shadow is thrown on the projection or on the building, depending upon where she enters and how she walks through the space. ‘To move the body through such membranes is to discern their implicit edges and points of slippage,’ the artists write. The installation collapses references to local religious architecture – that is, to how the women who lived in this convent might have moved through it – while also placing the viewer’s body in movement in these spaces. Inside this brick construction, there is just enough space to step in and turn a corner. At the dead-end, a small plinth has a woven

red textile placed on it, low and near the ground. Ascoli works as an educator at the Museo Ixchel, Guatemala’s national museum of textile history, and her work has often considered corporeal histories through woven matter, thread and repurposed fabrics. As night falls, the interior space becomes too dark to see the weave; when I visited, I had to kneel to touch it, making out its edges with my fingers. People Disappear All the Time is the fourth installation here, and its inheritance of certain minimalist considerations might be most evident in a comparison to Robert Irwin’s new installation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Like Irwin, Ascoli and Sullivan use a translucent white fabric to make a structure that allows both light and visitors to enter. What happens, then, is a constant reconfiguration of visual experience, which relies upon a dialogue between the natural environment and the viewer. On a much smaller scale than Irwin’s installation, People Disappear is more intimate, invoking absence and grief in a manner that is topical in terms of the historical context of Guatemala and ongoing quotidian violence there. The piece, then, embraces disappearance and looks to the plays of light and shadow that allow for remembrance. It is a subtle, poignant immersion, in ways both physical and emotional. Laura A.L. Wellen

My body is here, my body isn’t there, 2017 (installation view, Concepción 41, Antigua, Guatemala). Photo: Karl Williamson. Courtesy the artists

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Yoshua Okón Miasma Parque Galería, Mexico City 7 February – 8 April Texas is on trial here. A synecdoche for the United States, the Lone Star State bears the brunt of Yoshua Okón’s sharp critique of US intervention and of the deep effects of neoliberal politics in Mexico. Texas is also the site of his research for Miasma, which includes a series of sculptures, video, drawings and a poster campaign. A miasma is bad air, an oppressive funk that emanates from something rotten and hangs around. Its noxiousness is matched only by the difficulty of pinning it down: it floats, stinks and indicates decay. The main space at Parque is filled with cutout forms, sculptures oscillating weirdly between two and three dimensions and propped up against the walls: two overweight white women ride Segway scooters, wearing helmets and smiles, one in a T-shirt printed with the American flag across her chest. Next to them, a bald eagle stands on its head and a cockroach, with hairy legs reaching out like tentacles, is the same scale as one of the women. The flat, freestanding sculptures cast dramatic shadows on the floor and wall, their grotesqueness heightened by the strangeness of their

scale, relative to each other. In the centre of the space, Okón takes another sculpture as referent: he reproduces an image of George H.W. Bush, as sculpted in bronze for the Sesquicentennial Park in Houston. In Okón’s version, the bronze Bush emerges from a fragmented rocky promontory. Two bald eagles surround him, their hawkish features threatening rather than regal: the national symbol is fractured here, it menaces rather than protects. In the back room, Okón’s video Miasma (all works 2016) opens with a nod to the clichés of horror films. It is a dark and stormy night, actually. A light pierces the fog and the camera moves through trees. The sculpture of Bush appears, a strong light marking the contrasts and curvature of the figure’s face. With a startling clap of thunder, the video cuts to a closeup of Bush’s face, seen from slightly below. Menacing bird sounds – perhaps the call of Texas’s imperious grackle – heighten the sense of doom in this overwrought portrait. A sculpture of an eagle perches nearby, and the light makes a frightening study of its glaring eye.

Okón’s indictment of the US comes in the form of a certain ambivalent decay: obesity, fractured symbols of patriotism, cockroaches and fallen flags all suggest the ugliness inherent in the body politic. While the didactic material surrounding the exhibition suggested its critique of US intervention in Mexico, the exhibition itself seems more to be an extended study of American ugliness. The exhibition opened during the week of art fairs in Mexico City, and one couldn’t help but notice the disconnect between the large numbers of wealthy American art tourists mingling at parties and the citywide protests over the hike in fuel prices, known as the gasolinazo: both effects of US-driven economic policy that has many of its roots in Bush-era trade agreements. There is nothing subtle about this terror show, where roaches and Segways indicate a certain laziness in the US, pointing to a docile public of obese white Americans. Indeed, with his signature heavy-handedness, Okón’s Miasma is a portrait of a contemporary American nightmare. Laura A.L. Wellen

Miasma, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Ramiro Cháves. Courtesy Parque Galería, Mexico City

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Books

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Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke Pantheon Books, $29.95/£24.38 (hardcover) ‘We forget that everything will become no longer ours.’ So writes Kristen Radtke towards the end of her thoughtful, funny and eclectic graphic memoir. Radtke is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared, for example, in The New Yorker, where she’s published a series devoted to modern loneliness: solitary faces in brownstone windows, stranded figures on their phones in empty parking lots. Her first book is a story of abandonment in at least three senses: a beloved uncle dies young from heart disease, the grieving late-adolescent Radtke finds unexpected solace amid the postindustrial ruins of urban and exurban America, and spends her early twenties working out ways not to be with her boyfriend (then long-distance fiancé), Andrew. Imagine Wanting Only This is an assured and at times moving debut, though it suffers from some schematism, preciousness and overfamiliarity of its reference points. Radtke’s ruinous excursions begin when a classmate at college tells her about Gary, Indiana: ‘It’s post-apocalyptic, dude.’ In an abandoned church near the city centre, she and Andrew find a cache of photographs, which they do not at first realise were taken by an urban explorer who died nearby – the

pictures are part of his memorial. For reasons unclear to herself, Radtke takes the photographs away with her, and stashes them in a succession of apartments in the US and in Europe, where they start sprouting mould and stinking up her closet. She is culturally and personally addicted to decay and destruction, spends her free time visiting ruined factories and military installations, reading Georg Simmel and Rose Macaulay on ruin aesthetics, watching Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). Several pages of Imagine Wanting Only This are devoted to a fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in 1871, and what it later taught the US Air Force about how to start firestorms. The book begins with a black page and a ragged hole in the middle, through which the author as a young girl looks out uncertainly. Radtke’s visual style is laconic, made of clean lines and flat greys – it’s a texture not exactly fretted by her ruinous subject matter. What graphical drama there is tends to come from vantage point: open-heart closeups when Radtke thinks about her uncle’s surgery, an under-the-chin perspective when she looks up at a rotting church ceiling, the melancholic vacancy of rearview mirrors

and airplane windows. Now and then a family snapshot or a photograph from the collection Radtke found in the church interrupts the sense of visual sameness – so that you’d have to add W.G. Sebald to the book’s range of ruin-loving citations. Which may well be one of the reasons that Imagine Wanting Only This feels a little flat and familiar – even, or perhaps especially, if you’re a longtime admirer of the Sebald-Marker axis. Radtke’s efforts to suborn such material to what is essentially a conventional postbereavement memoir – albeit one that’s primarily visual – comes off as a little awkward as well as dated. On the other hand, so relentlessly aged and male is this melancholy, mock-heroic seam (full disclosure: I’ve mined it many times) that it’s heartening to see it ghosting something resembling a graphic novel, and one in the end with a protagonist who for all her attachment to relics from the past is forever on the move and refusing to go back. If at times Imagine Wanting Only This is a touch too creative-writingclass coy, it is also very obviously a work of diligent and poetic emotional archaeology, at its best rendered with lightness and invention, not solemnity. Brian Dillon

Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D written by David Kushner and illustrated by Koren Shadmi Nation Books, $16.99 (softcover)

You are not a loner or a geek, but sometimes you write about them. You are David Kushner, and you have a keen interest in gaming. You interview Gary Gygax, ‘the father of Dungeons & Dragons’, in the final year of his life and publish a profile of him in Wired in 2008. In it, you pick out elements from his biography that foretell greatness in the field of tabletop role-playing-game development. You introduce his D&D cocreator, Dave Arneson, and the decisions that shaped the game. Key among these is the elevation of one player in the group above the others. This is the dungeon master, and he (at least very often a he) improvises in spoken form the broad outlines of a story, using a 20-sided dice and pencil on graph paper to assist the other players in giving it flesh. You are not alone in tracing the development of a multibillion-dollar gaming industry back

to the teenagers who brought these virtual worlds to life in basement rec rooms during the 1970s and 80s. You even quote someone as saying that without D&D we would all still be playing Pac-Man and Pong. Nonetheless you wait a number of years before publishing a graphic version of your original profile. It’s not clear what took you so long or why now, but it’s sweetly compelling. This is that book (with a brief update tacked onto the end). Like good dungeon masters everywhere, this graphic retelling of the D&D story speaks directly to its audience, creating an intimate environment of first-person address that allows the reader inside the head of a range of figures associated with the game. Surprisingly given the financial stakes and the fact that Gygax and Arneson eventually had to settle their differences in court, there is scarce a bad word to be said about

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anyone, not even when, during the 1980s, the media stirs rumours of Satanism amongst the creators and players of D&D, companies and marriages collapse, friendships wither: just an open, often bearded or spotted face telling you what happened next (Koren Shadmi’s illustrations move easily between imaginary worlds and those basement rec rooms, always with an eye for the telling period detail). In this warm, somewhat wistful account, one can certainly discern an uncontroversial claim to relevance on behalf of the original dungeon masters, and there is as well the affirmation of D&D as a cornerstone of geek and now popular culture, but what we are left with – and why, I eventually realise, it feels a little strange to read – is a story that could easily have sold itself a lot harder, and yet has declined to. How unusual. David Terrien

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South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion Alfred A. Knopf, $21 (hardcover) Bringing together essayistic musings and notes relating to two never-completed journalistic projects – a journey through New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama in 1970, and the Patty Hearst trial in California in 1976 – South and West suggests the kind of shelf-clearing affair typically published after an author dies. Joan Didion is 82 but still with us, and flinty: the nonpareil literary nonfiction writer and novelist survived the consecutive deaths of her husband and daughter by writing about them in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011). At a moment when the American political scene is in turmoil, this slim archival volume might not be what one expects from her – something more like a sequel to her collection Political Fictions (2001), still the go-to analysis of politics’ descent into image politics. But, as Nathaniel Rich explains (when not aping her mantric locutions) in his introduction, these old reports speak from the past to the vexed present, and may even explain it. The earlier piece takes up most of the book. In 1970, while fellow New Journalist Hunter S. Thompson was reporting on the ‘decadent and depraved’ Kentucky Derby, Didion headed south without knowing why, only that she was ruminating on her home state of California and thought going

where many West Coast settlers originated might be illuminating. What she found down there – while dinner guests asked how her husband could allow her to consort with ‘marijuana-smoking hippie trash’ and warned against ‘getting too mixed up with the negroes’ – was a place where the Enlightenment hadn’t taken root. In New Orleans, with its peculiar light, thickened air and residents who have ‘mastered the art of the motionless’ and indifferently watch each other fall dead of heat exhaustion, racial and class divisions were a ‘vertiginous preoccupation’. Such an antebellum social structure, Rich notes, is one many Americans elsewhere have become nostalgic for, with dismal consequences. She’d seen the future, and it was lacerating ‘demonstrators’ as ‘un-American’. Yet this isn’t a straightforward knifing. Didion is transported by the ‘euphoria of Interstate America’, its transcendental anonymity; and she lengthily interviews a white man who describes the complexities of creating racial harmony before announcing he’s ‘not going to have a coloured minister come home for dinner’. He leaves her ‘glazed’; ‘ All the reporting tricks I had ever known atrophied in the South,’ she writes later. Didion’s backstage style is, naturally, a bit

looser than her published one. Sometimes the pages peter out into notetaking. Elsewhere there’s less of her signature parallelism – writing to herself, she doesn’t need to hypnotise the reader – but even in a notebook she’s literary, polished, dramatic. On a downriver trip, all is ‘snakes, rotting undergrowth, sulphurous lighting… the nightmare world,’ and she can’t resist the biblical symbolism of finding a snake, even if it’s in a box rather than grass. Didion attended the trial of Patty Hearst, kidnapped heiress turned Symbionese Liberation Army gun-toter, for Rolling Stone, but didn’t publish anything because she couldn’t get purchase. ‘I thought the trial had some meaning for me – because I was from California. This didn’t turn out to be true,’ she writes in a retrospective preface. What had meaning for Didion here was Didion: watching the trial, she thinks back, comparing Hearst’s upbringing to her own – we get parallel pictures of them wearing Hawaiian leis – and ends up initiating her analytical California memoir, Where I Was From (2003). This might seem an odd addition to the Southland tales that precede it, but the two parts of South and West do fit together. Each anticipates something that will be spelled out, decades later and for better or worse, in black and white. Martin Herbert

Ren Hang edited by Dian Hanson Taschen, £34.99 (hardcover) Before he took his life this February, the Chinese photographer Ren Hang had published many monographs, but in limited print runs. The present collection corrects this with about 300 reproductions, but adds little in the way of context. Works appear, as they do on Ren’s website, without titles, medium or date, and further exposition is limited to a very brief and breezy introduction. An opportunity has thus been missed to deepen the level of discussion around Ren’s achievement: in the recent obituaries, the ‘Chinese Ryan McGinley’ tag has persisted. Yet the purism of Ren’s focus on the nude (all but one of this collection’s subjects appears undressed) sets him apart, as does his work’s pointed lack of the sense of personal freedom that animates a McGinley (or indeed the work of Juergen Teller and Nan Goldin). An eye

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peering from a face wrapped in an octopus carcass in one photograph here, speaks less of joyous liberty than a kind of bewildered anomie. Though Ren’s subjects are often his friends, and young, and lithe, they rarely smile: even the trio engaged in fellatio have dead-eyed expressions. Frequently shot in anonymous rooms, in secluded forests or on the perilous edges of city rooftops, they seem subjects in retreat from the world. Ren’s consistent use of flash adds to the sense of alienation, emphasising both the camera’s presence and the photographer’s distance, not caressing the models but exposing them. If there is tenderness in the work, it is in the carefulness of the arrangements in which Ren pictures his models: with limbs, genitals, faces, animate and inanimate props all elaborately interlaced to striking visual effect.

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But for all their sexual explicitness, these images are more disconcerting than sexy – buttocks clutch strawberries, a vagina cradles an ashtray, a cake fork is prodded at a penis. The work that appears last in the book is one of his most powerful: a curling telephone wire disappearing into an anus, a visceral image of disconnection that channels Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait with Whip (1978). One of Ren’s champions, Ai Weiwei, saw something typically Chinese in the way Ren conveyed that ‘sex is about something which is impossible’. Though perhaps overdetermined by the postscript of his suicide, to my eyes these images suggest someone who has lost his sense of what anything is for, of how things – bodies and objects, individuals and their worlds – fit together. Laying bare this chilling and impressive oeuvre is welcome: now is the time for more interpretation. Matthew McLean

Materials from Robert Rauschenberg’s home and studio. Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York. Photography: Nicholas Calcott.

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For more on Tobias Tak, see overleaf

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Contributors

Tyler Coburn

Iason Athanasiadis

Contributing Writers

is an artist and writer based in New York. He received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University and an MFA from the University of Southern California. He also served as a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2014–15. His work has been presented at South London Gallery; Kunstverein Munich; Kunsthalle Wien; Grazer Kunstverein; UCCA, Beijing; and Sculpture Center, New York; and he participated in the 11th Gwangju Biennale and the 10th Shanghai Biennale. In this issue he presents an excerpt from an ongoing project investigating speculative evolution and new types of human bodies.

is a writer and videographer whose work focuses on the Mediterranean. He lives between Athens, Istanbul and Tunis. He has contributed to the BBC, Al Jazeera English and Channel 4, and written for The Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, The Guardian and Newsweek, among others. For this issue he considers what good can come out of staging Documenta in Athens.

Iason Athanasiadis, Robert Barry, Dominic van den Boogerd, Bill Clarke, Matthew Collings, Ashton Cooper, Gabriel Coxhead, Jacquelyn Davis, Ory Dessau, Owen Duffy, Ben Eastham, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Stefanie Hessler, Scott Indrisek, Justin Jaeckle, Sarah Jilani, I. Kurator, Maria Lind, Matthew McLean, Ciara Moloney, Heather Phillipson, Lindsay Preston Zappas, Mark Prince, John Quin, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Laura Smith, Raimar Stange, Jeppe Ugelvig, Laura A.L. Wellen

Laura A.L. Wellen is a writer and curator who works between Guatemala City and Houston. She is currently a writing fellow at the Core Critical Studies Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She received the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her writing about contemporary art in Central America, and holds a PhD in art history. For this issue she reviews Yoshua Okón at Parque Galería, Mexico City, and Hellen Ascoli & Jay Sullivan at Concepción 41, Antigua, Guatemala.

Scott Indrisek is a writer based in Brooklyn. He formerly served as the editor-in-chief of Modern Painters, and his writing has appeared in Bookforum, The Believer, Out and other publications, as well as online on The Observer and Artsy. He is the creator of a series of satirical blogs dedicated to Marina Abramović, the Brant brothers and bookish cats, all of which can be accessed via stopandfrisky.com. He is the cofounder of Teen Party, a Brooklyn-based apartment gallery that has hosted exhibitions by Peter Halley, Marc Hundley and William Wegman, among others. For this issue, he reviews Cynthia Daignault at the Flag Art Foundation in New York.

Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Tyler Coburn, Mikael Gregorsky, Tobias Tak, Anna Vickery

Tobias Tak (preceding pages)

The doubly gifted Tobias Tak expresses himself through dance and art, the two combining in his comics as a perfect partnership of motion and rhythm. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Tak had his earliest strips published in the progressive Dutch underground magazine Talent (formerly Tante Leny). Then he moved to New York, determined to learn from the masters of tap, and embarked on a global career of more than 20 years as an acclaimed jazz tap-dancer, singer and choreographer. His return to comics came in 2003 with his first collection of short stories, Upside Down. These confirmed his inimitable imagination, as he conjured up fantastical characters in a dreamlike realm, inspired by Alice in Wonderland (1865), Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1988), Hollywood’s glamorous classics and the fifteenth-century paintings of fellow Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch. Tak’s eccentric cast includes Gaboon, a benign but clumsy wizard, the alluring blonde Slenzy and numerous other bizarre

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and bewitching creatures who appear in many anthologies, the compilation Gaboon’s Daymare (2011) and his first full-length graphic novel, The Land Behind the Mirror (2014). This year sees the release his distinctive graphic reworkings of 20 of Federico García Lorca’s 77 lyrical poems, written between 1921 and 1924 and published in May 1927 as Canciones. “An underlying theme is Lorca’s longing without object: longing for what was, what could have been or what will never be,” Tak explains. “The Canciones are mostly short poems, influenced by Japanese haiku poetry, ballads and lullabies, and the cante jondo – ‘deep song’ – folk songs in a traditional style of flamenco music and dance that Lorca knew by heart since his youth. Lorca liked the directness of their lyrics.” In his new Strip for ArtReview, Tak chose the “small jewel” of ‘De Otro Modo’, also from Canciones. “An important element in Lorca’s character was his love for the countryside: ‘I am tied to the land in all my emotions’, he once said. The way the landscape is described

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in such a lyrical and mysterious way in ‘De Otro Modo’ immediately promoted images to me. The poem evokes that landscape of Andalusia with its many streams and rivers, the vastness of the fields, the amazing colourful evening skies and its abundance of trees, flowers and patches of dry earth.” To this setting Tak introduces some of his recurring characters, such as the man in the tall hat and the inquisitive cat who “looks at the world through his telescope, just like Lorca, who always questioned the world around him”. Tak’s atmospheric drawings here are inspired by his research trip in February 2016 to Granada to see where Lorca lived and worked. “I stayed at an organic farm on the Sacromonte. Each morning, I walked down the mountain with an amazing view of El Alhambra in the distance, and back up in the evening, witnessing beautiful skies and sunsets. This landscape had not really changed and must have been a lot like what Lorca saw in his adolescent years.” Tak’s imagery enhances the wonder of Lorca’s contemplative poem. Paul Gravett

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

The words on the spine and on pages 35, 59 and 101 refer to the medicines that Zhou Boyi, father of the Chinese writer Lu Xun, was prescribed and endured before dying of an asthma attack in 1896. It is speculated that he may actually have been suffering from dropsy.

on page 132 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 142 illustration by Anna Vickery

April 2017

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A Curator Writes April 2017 “Howay, man, hinny, I said I was clamming!” I have been storing up this phrase all day to use on Edgar. He doesn’t laugh. “Ivan, we are in Manchester,” he flatly replies. “I know. That gadgie’s a propa doylem!” “Those funny phrases you’re using, Ivan, they are from Newcastle, which is around 150 miles away and has a distinctly different dialect to Manchester. I hope you’ve prepared properly for this interview.” Frankly, Edgar is getting far too big for his boots. “Edgar, don’t be stupid. If you recall, I curated Bit of a Mither: Barney vs Bjork at The Public.” “That was in the West Midlands. Also, the venue closed down three months later.” “Oh, shut up, Edgar. Look, did you bring my post with you like I asked when we were back in civilisation?” He silently hands me a small pile of envelopes. I look out the window of the small meeting room in the municipal museum where we’ve been told to wait. We have come here to pitch my idea for the lead exhibition of the Manchester International Festival. I am fully confident of success. Through the window I see Northerners scavenging the grim street. My eyes well up and I shudder as I remember Orwell’s words about the poor of Hull kneeling in bitter cold on the slimy stones of a slum backyard. I look down at the envelopes in my hand. One envelope is addressed in crazed handwriting. A fan of my ArtReview column, I should warrant. I decide it might be time to focus and find out what Edgar knows about this interview. He is busy looking at his phone. “Edgar, so who else is pitching for this so-called festival?” He answers without looking up: “Matthew Higgs. He’s got some Joy Division, New Order and Liam Gillick idea lined up….” “Bollocks! That music-art thing is my bag. I paired the Vengaboys with Eric Fischl well before Higgs learned how to press play on his CD player and claim to be a DJ. As for Ragnar Kjartansson and the National, does no one remember when I programmed the Cheeky Girls and Hans Ulrich for a Serpentine Marathon that went on for three days? Hans Ulrich was absolutely exhausted…” “Ivan!” Edgar interrupts me waving his phone at me. “Look at this!” I’m annoyed. I was just about to talk about how I had to spend hours helping Hans Ulrich recover from the Cheeky Girls by showing him the joys of a traditional English public house. “For God’s sake, Edgar, do they not teach manners at the Courtauld Institute any more? What would my dear friend Brian Sewell say…” “… Ivan, shut up! Look!” He is waving a photo from one of those ghastly art society and gossip columns that Artforum has sunk to. I think of the November 1966 edition of the once august magazine. Michael Fried on Stella. Kozloff on Tony Smith. Coplans on Ab-Ex. And now reduced to reporting the chitter-chatter of gallery dinners. Ghastly. “What are you trying to show me Edgar? I can’t possibly read that terrible nonsense.” I scrunch up the unopened bills and throw them onto the patterned municipal carpet. I try to open the fan’s letter. “These are photos from the opening of Art Basel Hong Kong. Look at these shots of Kenny Lee Gallery. Can you see Kenny?”

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I glance cursorily at Edgar’s phone. I’m struggling to open the piece of fan mail. Whoever has sent it has used some pretty strong tape rather than merely sealing the envelope with a gentle brush of their undoubtedly unctuous lips. “No, Kenny’s not there.” I reply. “What’s the big deal?” “Kenny’s dead, Ivan.” Edgar reads the brief, upbeat and informative party roundup beneath the photos: “‘Found killed by a blunt instrument, most likely a screwdriver, body dumped in a bin outside one of Hong Kong’s less salubrious night spots.’” “Crumbs, that’s a bit unfortunate,” I say distractedly before hastily adding in a suitably plaintive tone, “Why is it always the good ones?” Edgar doesn’t look impressed by my show of emotion. I finally tear the envelope open. “Look who is named as the gallery director instead.” I peer more closely at the idiotically small screen. And then I see her. The room suddenly seems smaller. The carpet goes in and out of focus. “But she’s dead!” I splutter. “Killed in a diner in New Jersey. I wrote her obituary myself. They say that it was that brute…” “It’s her, Edgar. Gallery Girl.” I don’t know what to do. I pull the fan’s letter from the envelope. I desperately need a moment of validation. I look at it. A crude sketch of a hand holding a screwdriver and some crazy message. I scream. The door to the waiting room opens. I see Matthew Higgs and Liam Gillick walking by in the corridor. They are high-fiving and singing Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart in a horrifying a capella. “When the routine bites hard!” sings Higgs. “And ambitions are low!” replies Gillick I start sobbing. I can’t hear the rest of the verse. I kneel and rock back and forth. Higgs and Gillick peer in the door and sing in unison as I weep on Liam’s loafers. “Then love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again.”

Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 29-30.04.2017 / artmontecarlo.ch

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