ArtReview March 2021 by ArtReview

Riding roughshod since 1949

Mohamed Bourouissa

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March 10 - April 24, 2021

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Sonia Gomes Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool Sonia Gomes Gwangiu Biennale, Gwangiu Anna Bella Geiger Mori Art Museum, Japan SMAK, Ghent

Mend e s Wood DM

Maaike Schoorel Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague Lucas Arruda The Intermission, Athens Mariana Castillo Deball Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Siegen Luiz Roque VAC University of Texas, Austin Runo Lagomarsino Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen Neïl Beloufa Hangar Bicocca, Milan Fondazione Henraux, Milan Michael Dean Barakat Contemporary Art, Seoul

Image: Sonia Gomes detail, 2021

ArtReview vol 73 no 1 March 2021

Keeping it real Happy year of the Ox. ArtReview’s geomancer just texted its horoscope for 2021: ‘There will be incidents that suddenly occur that will cause you to spend away your wealth. You need to take care of your digestive systems.’ Then, just as it was about to eat its ‘wealth’ before it spent it, and book itself in with a gastroenterologist, ArtReview got the follow up: ‘Position yourself north. Or southeast. Buy the following: TaiChi Amulet (for wealth); Tai Sui Propitious Pendant or Luck Pendant (for wealth and luck) – preferably both.’ The incident had suddenly occurred! But, under the circumstances, is the horoscope still a prediction or merely the reporting of a fact to come? Talking of eating things, free will and reportage, ArtReview has been closely following the trials and tribulations of Hollywood heartthrob Armie Hammer. For those of you whose reading eyes rarely stray to the salacious end of the newsstand (and if you’re reading this, ArtReview presumes you have some sort of relationship with a newsstand), the ‘meat’ of the story is this: the star of 2017 sun-dappled gay romance Call Me By Your Name is reported to have cannibal leanings, allegedly sending messages to female fans, asking them for dinner in which they are the menu (Hammer denies the veracity of the leaked messages, and the reported screengrabs have not been verified). No illegality has been claimed, and it’s all pretty tabloid stuff, but it did get ArtReview, now back at its command centre, thinking about cannibalism as an analogy of artmaking (incidentally, the private collection of Hammer’s great-grandfather, oil tycoon Armand Hammer, is the foundation of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles). There’s a creeping sense that today’s artists, like many before them, have a voracious appetite to consume the world around them (while conversely, as Martin Herbert points out in his column, showing that same work in neverchanging white cubes, spaces hermetically sealed from the ‘real’ world they’re consuming). We pressure them to connect with the world, process it and then spit it out as something ‘new’. (A bit like what ArtReview is doing now – it’s always been a fan of form mirroring content: it makes things easier to understand.) Because, more than ever, we want our art to be ‘relevant’, of ‘our’ time. But

When form meets content

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what happens when that ‘world’ shrinks as lockdowns continue globally and international travel is pretty much impossible? What happens to the kind of art that feeds on ‘life’ when the restaurant is closed? Or is basically living off a survivalist’s storecupboard and a collection of more-or-less reliable Twitter feeds (there’s a reason we call them ‘feeds’, btw)? When what we (the global ‘we’, that is) share is a virus and an attempt to curb it? In Chris Fite-Wassilak’s profile of artist Gelare Khoshgozaran, our critic makes a reference to filmmaker Fatimah Tobing Rony’s notion of ‘fascinating cannibalism’, in which Western audiences become ‘consumers’ of the bodies of exotic others. Our writer is suggesting that Khoshgozaran is resisting this temptation in her work. Tobing Rony was expressing all this within the realm of postcolonial discourse, but the more general danger of art (and its audiences) hungrily consuming the world around it, in a bid to maintain some sense of relevancy, is that, with little else at hand, art’s diet might be in danger of getting a little monotropic (even if artists have the intention of addressing other issues, their work will be read, by their audiences right now, through the all-consuming topic of the virus). The pandemic has, and remains, awful, however ArtReview is not sure it’s ready for this global event – medical, political, psychological – to be clumsily fed on by artists, filmmakers and writers in years to come, starved of any other subject matter. There is a danger that far from ‘reflecting’ on the events of the past 12 or more months, art serves endlessly to package them up and courier them to our brains like Uber Eats in lockdown, as other conversations slip slowly out of bounds. In this issue, then, it’s to some of these other conversations that it turns. Right, ArtReview’s off to buy a compass! Till next month… ArtReview

When Mozart meets Goethe, who meets Bach and Omar

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The Impressionists, 2020, oil on canvas, 86 5⁄8 × 118 1⁄8" 220 × 300 cm © Adrian Ghenie

Adrian Ghenie The Hooligans November 20, 2020 – April 24, 2021 New York @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

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Beatriz Milhazes, Avenida Paulista (detail), 2020, collection Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, gift of the artist, 2020

MASP MUSEU DE ARTE DE SÃO PAULO ASSIS CHATEAUBRIAND Av. Paulista, 1578 São Paulo Brazil masp.org.br @masp ITAÚ CULTURAL Av. Paulista, 149 São Paulo Brazil itaucultural.org.br @itaucultural

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Art Observed

The Interview Tala Madani by Ross Simonini 24

Feral Atlas and the Anthropocene by Louise Darblay 32 Letter from Madras by Charu Nivedita 34

page 24 Tala Madani, Ghost Sitter (blue chair), 2020, oil on linen, 51 × 43 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

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Art Featured

Mohamed Bourouissa by Mark Rappolt 40

In Their Own Words by Chen Zhen and Maurizio Cattelan 62

Izumi Suzuki by Daniel Joseph 50

Su Hui-Yu by Ren Scateni 68

Gelare Khoshgozaran by Chris Fite-Wassilak 54

page 54 Gelare Khoshgozaran, Medina Wasl: Connecting Town (still), 2018, 16mm film transferred to video, 2018, colour, sound, 31 min. Courtesy the artist and Cell Project Space, London

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Art Reviewed

comment, exhibitions & books 78 Retail therapy in Paris, by Louise Darblay Merlin James, by Ana Vukadin John Edmonds, by Megan N. Liberty Linda Nochlin, #MeToo and blm, by Fi Churchman Bangkok Art Biennale, by Max Crosbie-Jones Jim Shaw, by Tom Denman Genesis Tramaine, by Pádraic E. Moore Klára Hosnedlóva, by Martin Herbert Haegue Yang, by Andy St. Louis Chen Zhe, by Paul Han Tyranny of the white cube, by Martin Herbert Teachings of John Berger and Arundhati Roy, by Mark Rappolt Quadriennale d’Arte 2020, by Mariacarla Molè Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas, by Mark Rappolt Resistance in São Paulo, by Oliver Basciano

rein gold, by Elfriede Jelinek, reviewed by Martin Herbert Open Water, by Caleb Azumah Nelson, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Yoo Youngkuk: Quintessence, edited by Rosa Maria Falvo, reviewed by Andy St. Louis Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, by Deepa Anappara, reviewed by Fi Churchman Thai Cinema Uncensored, by Matthew Hunt, reviewed by Max Crosbie-Jones Canceling Comedians While the World Burns, by Ben Burgis, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Things We’ve Seen, by Agustín Fernández Mallo, reviewed by David Terrien Islands of Abandonment, by Cal Flyn, reviewed by En Liang Khong back page 114

page 103 Jaider Esbell, Feitiço para salvar a Raposa Serra do Sol, 2019

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Art Observed

You don’t 23

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Tala Madani. Photo: Jersey Walz

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ArtReview

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The Interview by Ross Simonini

Tala Madani

“I’m mostly interested in art that excavates from the psyche – not the frontal lobe, not the intellectual, not the speakable, but the unspeakable”

Tala Madani’s paintings depict a universe of splendid transgressions. A brood of babies feasts on a mother made of crap. A toddler wields a penis the size of a go-kart. A man is levitated by the power of his own glowing ejaculate. It’s a funny, horrifying and often hypermasculine place, animated by the mythic logic of the subconscious. To suit her subject, Madani depicts many of these activities in the dark, lit dramatically by flashlights and projectors, as if they were scenes in some sordid farce. Light is a primary force here, just as it

is for all painters, but these lights are artificial, invasive beams of unwanted exposure. Since 2006, Madani has created these paintings (and also animations) with the quick brushstrokes and informal attitude of cartoons. But behind these easy lines is a conflict with the whole programme of our socialised selves. Her buffoonish characters seem to be couriers of a bitter message about human nature. I spoke to Madani on a videocall about these ideas and others. The feeling of the talk was comfortable enough that I questioned

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if the two of us had met before, but we had not. As she spoke, her voice rested at a deep, relaxed pitch, with a clear confidence that underlined everything she said, even her contradictions. Sometimes she switched midsentence into a mode of high-intellectual intensity, and began teasing out the sociophilosophical implications of her work. On a few occasions, she paused the conversation to criticise her choice of words, and after we finished, she made a few edits to her initial responses that she felt had been “un-succinct”.

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Transgress Yourself ross simonini Your work has a nice, transgressive bite to it. Is this a form of resistance? Would you say that you feel repressed by society? tala madani If I was feeling quite repressed, I’d probably make works that reflect repression. So, in a way, the transgressive work allows me to feel quite free. But of course everyone feels repressed. I mean, right now I’m feeling repressed because of covid, but it’s necessary. I think you are who you are based on the first five years of your life and how you were treated and how you were allowed to be. And you live within that for the rest of your life. Trump’s behaviour might be totally indicative of how his psychology was formed from a very long time ago, but not necessarily reflective of his current position. But when you say my work is transgressive, I think my work needs to become so much more transgressive.

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rs In what way? tm To make anything, you have to really believe in it. You have to have total faith in it, at least in the moment of making it. And sometimes I wish I believed in other things than I do because I want those things to become magical to me. That’s where my own limitations are in my transgressing, the limitations of the faith that takes art from an object to a magical object. rs So you want to transgress your own ideology. tm Yeah, that’s the constant project basically. rs Where do you get stuck? tm Anything that you don’t see in my work is where I’ve gotten stuck. So whatever you see is where the faith is. rs Do you think the limitations evolve from your childhood? The Gift, 2015, oil on linen, 51 × 43 cm. Photo: Lee Thompson. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

tm I think they’re based on experiences which create your connection to everything. You can’t really believe in something that you don’t know. The limitation is one’s exposure. It’s the lived life. rs When you were a teenager, you moved from Tehran to Oregon in America. How did that affect you? tm Well, in Tehran America is perceived in a very particular way through its own cultural outputs. At that time it was Hollywood, mtv, Tom Cruise, Schwarzenegger. And then Oregon was very different to that idea of America: beautiful, but also secluded. I lived in a small town of 6,000 people, and it was a dry [no alcohol] town, which was actually like Iran… But the big shift was the surprise of how little Americans understood Iranians. Iranians were so involved with American pop culture, and I thought, for no reason at all, that America would be somehow aware of Iran. So the big shock was that gap. I became much more Iranian in Oregon.

ArtReview

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rs What did that mean? tm In Iran, I thought I was Madonna. I wore a blonde wig and identified with things that I was watching on tv. But then when I got here, I missed home. I think Iranians are actually some of the happiest people, despite all the economic and societal problems. But they just don’t know it, because they’re not allowed to travel and see the rest of the world. rs Why are they so happy? tm Interpersonal relationships. I live in Los Angeles and homelessness is a huge problem here. And I think of so many people in Iran that would be homeless if they didn’t have a family net. So I just think about that dependable net that you have as an Iranian, which has disappeared in many Western cultures: family, extended family, friends.

happy, unless things are really terrible. I also keep the shit to myself. I don’t feel like I need to project onto you right now. This is not an appropriate venue for me to release it. rs Well, if you need to… tm Ah, you’re sweet. But actually, this is a new cultural norm and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Like, how do you use your own shit? How do you use your depression? How do you use those feelings? If I’m constantly releasing them, I’m not using them, and as an artist you need to use everything. rs You don’t want to give me your fuel. tm If I were to air these feelings and they were to go to an interesting target, that in itself would be interesting. But just to air them does nothing. rs Is your art a way of airing feelings?

rs Are you happy? tm I’m happy. I mean, I’ve had coffee and I think caffeine makes you happy. So I’m

Shitty Disco, 2016 (installation view, Pilar Corrias, London) Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

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tm Possibly, for me. But it’s really hard for me to know how people read the work, because it’s purely subjective. I think generally whenever you’re faced with an artwork, film, music, you use it for your own needs and what it can do for you. But I’m not a consumer of my own work, right? So I don’t really know how that registers. I’m only interested in my own experience as I’m making it. rs The paintings often depict a literal expulsion of fluids, which certainly suggests a release. tm Definitely. There’s a few paintings I’ve painted where a guy has cum on a chair and then he’s shooting it with a gun. rs Cum Shots [#1, #2 and #3, 2019]. tm That’s right. Terrible titles. But I was thinking about the sperm being half the child, and the guy’s relationship to ‘the new’ is that he just wants to shoot it down. His own relationship with the future is a bit fearful, and the minute the cum is out of him it’s no longer himself.

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Shit Mom (Remodel), 2019, oil on linen, 183 × 183 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

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ArtReview

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rs Are you thinking about this before you paint? Or is this in retrospect? tm I was painting the Shit Mom series [2019] at the same time, with lots of children around this figure of a shit mom. And I was thinking, what is the paternal experience of that? What is the mirroring male experience of that? But these paintings are not totally pre-understood. They’re a curiosity that I followed.

New Expectations rs Has the Trump/covid era changed people’s interpretation of your work? tm I think the pandemic has created so much limbo and confusion right now that it’s difficult to actually make work that is directly about something. And of course, thank God Trump didn’t get reelected. I mean, who could have ever made anything had he gotten reelected?

want to hold on to something. I think it’s really important for us, for all our sakes, to weed out strains of conservatism, because they’re rooted in insecurity and they’re rooted in fear and they get propagated because a lot of structures are comfortable with it. And if artists are invested in ideas of nostalgia, where they actually are interested in harkening – oh, that comes from that! It looks like that! Yay! It looks like this! – and celebrating, then they are not any different from Trump or Boris Johnson. Any kind of investment in nostalgia is really fighting for the same conservative positions of these politicians. And these ideas are put out there and it doesn’t get checked in the artworld. But we should expect more from cultural makers.

from the way, say, David Lynch uses nostalgia. Because he’s outputting something purely fresh, challenging and compelling. But our expectations are not ubiquitous. There could be someone who sees art for the first time. And so their experience would obviously be very different from someone who knows the history of art. But as creators, if one’s mental work is involved with nostalgia on a personal level, then you are involved with something that’s not quite different than a political ideology – which that same person might be critical of. And I think the recognition of this is important. Otherwise we’re becoming sloppy and we’re not creating a stepping-stone towards something greater.

rs How does this conservatism manifest in art? tm When you can’t have a direct experience with the artefact in front of you as an object, and instead you’re having an experience of it in relation to the past. But that’s very different

rs Are those internal transgressions you mentioned harder to perform during the pandemic? tm I think whenever something is in limbo, you become conservative. You’re on a tightrope. You

The Artist Is Irrelevant rs Do you perform transgressions in your life? tm Forget me! Who cares about me! It’s irrelevant! The days of ‘She paints in her underpants and that’s why the paintings are so interesting!’ need to be behind us.

Love Doctor, 2015, oil on linen, 41 × 36 cm. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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Cum Shot #3, 2019, oil on linen, 51 × 43 cm. Photo: Lee Thompson. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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ArtReview

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rs So you probably dislike the now-popular mode of looking at someone’s art through their identity markers. tm I think it’s a disservice to all parties involved: the maker, the work, the viewer. I’ve always fought the read of my work in relation to me being from Iran. But here’s the issue: right now, this is hot, the gender-race thing. It might not be hot in ten years. But the work is the work. The paintings become entities. They become personas. They become objects with souls. They become something outside of anybody who made them. That’s the idea of transcending for a viewer. Now, if I’m going to pull you down with my personal stuff, you’re not transcending anything. I think everyone’s work should be as personal to them as possible, but that’s going to be in the work. The artist is irrelevant. rs What do you mean by ‘soul’ in respect to the artworks? tm The works that work have power. You make a hundred things and maybe three of them work on that level. Some things have intelligence, like electricity. It knows where to go. You can ground it. I think artworks can have that kind of intelligence because there are moments where someone’s energy has gone through something into another object. If you’re following a painting, you’re following the artist’s thinking with that. So the ones that work have that presence of the artist’s brain. rs Considering this rejection of identity, do you think this interview is a problem, since it’s exposing people to your personality? tm Well, we’re trying not to inform them. We’re trying to actually talk about ideas. rs But your personality is revealed in your words… tm No, you’re quite right. We have to choose to talk about things around the work, right? Because we’re never going to give someone an experience of the artwork through an interview. But this is my position and I’m putting that forward. You are putting a philosophy into the work. Artwork is philosophy.

Making My Own Porn rs Taken all together, your body of work feels like a unified world, almost a mythology. Is that how you see it?

tm I’m happy that that’s how you see it. I guess I’ve painted now for about 15 years, and when I started painting I became really aware that I couldn’t express my full position within one or two or three paintings. And so I trusted that, if I continue working, a perspective would become clarified. If I’m fighting for something, I don’t have to show all that fight in one painting. But I don’t go into a world in my head. My internal transgressions would always fight against any kind of a programmatic process like that. In terms of mythology, they seem more like fables, right? I’m reading this book called Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, from the 1700s. It is by Pu Songling, who wanted to be a literary master, but he was rejected. So he had to just teach Mandarin in local schools. And then he wrote these amazing ghost stories. rs You just described an artist as a way to describe their work… tm Did I? [laughs] rs You have a pretty distinct style, but if you fight against a programmatic process, do you also try to push against it? tm I mean, one’s style can depict their attitude obviously towards the thing. So style is attitude. My problem with style is that style can become familiar. If you can recognise someone’s style, then you might not look at the thing anymore. I’m very interested in communication through the paintings. So I do fight against my style sometimes because I want to surprise the viewer into looking again and not recognising my work in some kind of a shorthand. Or even recognising myself. Forget the viewer! I mean, I guess I’m retracting what I said before. I am the viewer of my work, in moments. And I’m not interested in having a shorthand experience. rs Are you saying that all your paintings are based on a communication of ideas? tm Yes. I think all painting is conceptual. Painting is thinking and painting is a language. In a way, the more you paint, the harder it becomes to paint. You can say painters are like very, very addicted heroin addicts. You want to have an experience every time you’re making something. Every time, I’m looking for a high. But that is antithetical to having an idea. And it might lead to unsuccessful paintings.

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But at the moment that’s what I’m looking for: pure experiences. rs When you started making art as a child, were you looking for experiences like this? tm I think as a child it was purely about communication, I drew a screaming child and gave it to my mother when I was angry once. I had taken art classes in grade school, but the work all seemed not to be mine. Then, one day in eighth grade, I drew Mario from Super Mario Bros. And I made it look like Mario. And that was a revelation: you can make something look like something! And that was my first turn-on. And then I was in love with someone and I just started drawing naked Roman statues from books. I couldn’t buy porn so I just made my own. So then there was that turn-on: they’re naked, and I’m going to put them next to each other. And I think that was it, basically. That just got me hooked: sublimating sexual desires was how I started drawing. rs Transgression. tm Yeah, and lack of porn accessibility before the internet. rs A lot of boys draw violent things, which is probably a similar impulse. If you can’t act something out in life, do it in art. tm Exactly. Guns or tanks or something. That’s what they were doing in Iran, too. That’s what’s so brilliant about it. For children and adults. I’m mostly interested in works that have that component. Art that excavates from the psyche, not the frontal lobe, not the intellectual, not the speakable, but the unspeakable. rs Some people would say abstraction is the most obvious example of that. tm No form has primacy over another form, abstraction, figuration, comic strips, doodles. It’s only as good as how true it is to the maker. I do think that some forms were transgressive at one time, but not anymore. Right now abstraction is very conservative. You have to work really hard to make a transgressive abstract work. I think it should involve real poo. Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object Verb

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If you are locked down and want to see art, 2020 was probably marked by time spent in online viewing rooms of various types or scrolling through the glorified pdfs that constitute online art exhibitions. None of which come close to the physical experience of the real thing. On the one hand, that’s good, a validation of irl experiences. On the other hand, it leaves something of a hole that would normally have been filled by the intelligence and ambition of a good exhibition. But that’s a hole that Feral Atlas, which launched in online form last October, can fill. Since my first visit I have found myself continually wandering back into it, unsure of what I am looking for, but nevertheless drawn to this unusual exploratory tool. Poetic, playful and political, it reveals itself to the curious reader as a singular new roadmap through what we now call the Anthropocene: the disputed term used to describe our current geological era, in which human activity has become the most significant force for change (generally not of the good type) in our planet’s climate and ecosystems. On the homepage, watercolour drawings of various natural entities float across the white background (like specimens waiting for a microscope), identifying themselves each time my cursor hovers over them: toxic fogs, radioactive blueberries, salmon pests, underwater noise… These are examples of the ‘feral entities’ the atlas was constructed to bring to light: participants in ecologies that have been influenced or engendered by human-built infrastructures, but which have subsequently developed and spread beyond human control. These are the intertwined human–nonhuman

Disaster Tourism

Louise Darblay tours the Anthropocene with Feral Atlas as her guide

Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, 2020, digital atlas published by Stanford University Press

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relationships that form the Anthropocene. Each is an entry point into the meandering experience of the atlas. Feral Atlas is a collaborative endeavour curated by anthropologists Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger and Alder Keleman Saxena, and architect and artist Feifei Zhou. It describes itself as ‘an online/interactive platform for scientific research into and research dissemination about feral species and feral dynamics in the Anthropocene’ and gathers contributions from over 100 scientists, humanists, writers and artists. The whole could have felt overwhelmingly disorientating were it not pulled together by the concerted effort to tell stories, to keep narratives at its core. More than 70 ‘field reports’ are collaged together, taking full advantage of the possibilities of online navigation, with thematic essays, videos and poems. The whole experience favours intuitive exploration, with airs of a choose-your-own adventure novel (‘revert at your own risk’ a page warns when you’ve spiralled far enough down one path) combined with the classification and indexing systems one might expect to find in a traditional atlas. As you click on them, each of the drifting feral entities is relocated as a little dot in one of four painted ‘landscapes’ illustrating four key historical (rather than geographical) catalysts in the formation of the Anthropocene: Acceleration, Capital, Empire, Invasion. Part architectural drawings, part treasure maps, the semi-elevated view of these imagined landscapes is strikingly seductive, despite the dark realities they, on closer inspection, reveal. A Genjer plant (Limnocharis flava) leads me to the Empire map: in portrait format, it pictures an estuary with cargo ships approaching the coast on gradients of blue sea, a huge dam further down the river; on the coast, a naturalhistory museum, water-recycling plants and human settlements; further inland, layer after layer of intensively farmed agriculture (teak, opium, palm trees, etc) and breeding pens; and a pond, in which the waterlilylike Genjer plants float. A click through leads to a fascinating essay or ‘field report’ that retraces the importation of this undeniably beautiful specimen from Latin America to Indonesia for display in botanical gardens. From where it

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spread like wildfire throughout the country. The plant then came to be seen ‘as a weedy invader by ecologists, a foe by rice farmers, and a food for others’, before becoming a political vessel following the release of a 1940s folk song (a 2011 version by Filastine & Nova plays as you read the article). Originally recuperated by Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, as a symbol of independence from the West, the song became associated with the horrific violence of President Suharto’s subsequent New Order regime through its use as the soundtrack of Pengkhianatan g30s/pki (1984), a four-hour propaganda ‘documentary’ that sought to justify the mass murders and communist witch-hunt led by future-president Suharto following the failed coup of 1965. Ultimately it caused some people to stay away from both the song and the plant, for fear of being associated with communism. Genjer also belongs to the subcategory take (collectively called ‘tippers’, these are verbs like dump or crowd that can fundamentally ‘shift ecologies past tipping points, changing the relationship between parts and wholes’), illustrated by short, impressionistic videos capturing the processes that enable this class of feral dynamics: cargo ships in Jakarta’s harbour; a train transporting iron-ore in Minas Gerais, Brazil; a wholesale market in Switzerland. A third, more horizontal reading axis, ‘Feral Qualities’, is delivered in the margins of the field reports, creating parallels between feral entities – Genjer is associated with lantanas and water hyacinths, species that thrived through human-guided distribution during the era of colonial expansion. Such transversal layering of information is what makes Feral Atlas a unique proposal:

top Carp and eels, Hangzhou, China and Murcia, Spain, 2019, video by Feifei Zhou, Isabelle Carbonell, Duane Peterson above Empire, by Feifei Zhou with Larry Botchway all images Courtesy Feral Atlas

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not as a repository of scholarly articles on the Anthropocene (of which there are already plenty, as the curators acknowledge in their introduction), but as an organic experience that mirrors in its form and navigation the complex interconnection of dynamics and stories that underpin our current environmental crisis and increasingly impact our living conditions. To put it bluntly, it reflects how the world works. In effect, the atlas’s release last autumn (with preceding exhibition iterations shown at the 16th Istanbul Biennial and the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, both in 2019) couldn’t be more timely. For the Coronavirus also floats among the feral entities. Clicking on it takes you to a cluster of ‘stories’ about the current pandemic seen from various angles: an article that argues against the closure of wet markets in China while deconstructing the racist rhetoric common in Western journalism; another demonstrating how human disturbance of ecological systems (through agriculture, domestication of livestock, but also resource extraction and pollution and its effect on climate change) is responsible for promoting the emergence of zoonotic diseases, responsible for 60 to 80 percent of newly emerging infections. Those tangled storylines speak to the cascading effects and ramifications of our actions on the environment, which have dramatically altered, in the space of just half a millennium, evolutionary processes occurring over millions of years. There are no tangible ‘solutions’ proposed here, in contrast to the action pages you might find on more militant platforms. Perhaps because Feral Atlas is a critical preamble to any form of action, existing on an ontological plane. Before being able to act, it suggests, we must fully comprehend the tangled mess that got us where we are in the first place. And what happens next, in real life, really is up to you and me.

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There is a common thread of loathing for and criticism of India among Indian writers. Deep-rooted corruption, poverty, the great disparity between the rich and the ordinary, a filthy environment, sexual harassment of women, casteism, untouchability, the pathetic situation in villages where men and women from a particular community work as scavengers cleaning the faecal waste of fellow humans, religious fundamentalism, especially Hindutva – a fascist state of mind that denies diversity and propagates hegemonic unity – the list is neverending. And while these are all real issues that India needs to address, a byproduct of this is that it shapes the lens through which the West perceives Indian society in the current day and age. In that respect, In Light of India (1995), a book written by a Westerner, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, is an exception to the rule.

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Notes from Madras

Charu Nivedita advances along the path to knowledge with help from unexpected quarters

Based on his experiences of living in Delhi during the early 1950s and for a longer stretch during the 60s, as a diplomat and ultimately ambassador, it gives incisive insights into facets of India other than its darker sides. So, what does the book highlight? That it is hard or rather impossible to appreciate the country with only a Westerner’s knowledge. India’s unique aspect, Paz writes, is that it is based on a science that stands in total contradistinction to Western thought processes. It may even be incorrect to term it a ‘science’, in the Western sense, at all. For instance, for any siddhi (attainment), one needs mantra (the energy), yantra (the vehicle) and tantra (the road map). Put another way, siddhi emerges when the raw material (mantra) is fed into the milling machine (yantra) according to a fixed process (tantra). Mantra gives energy to yantra. We call the one who attains siddhi through this process a siddhar.

ArtReview

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A siddhar can even become disembodied and enter another, lifeless body, reanimating it. Several siddhars, like Thirumoolar, Adi Shankara (the founder of Advaita philosophy and a yogi who absorbed the teachings of the Buddha into Hinduism) and Arunagirinathar, have experienced this siddhi, called parakaya pravesam (para – other, kaya – body, pravesam – entry). Other siddhis include the power to turn iron into gold (alchemy), to fly, to walk on water and to live eternally. A Westerner might dismiss all this as mere myth and legend. But it remains the very foundation of India’s philosophical-scientificspiritual tradition. There are no books, laboratory-based research or experiments, as there would have to be in the modern West, to substantiate this theory. The gurus taught and handed down such techniques to their students orally, mainly to protect their sanctity, and out of fear that ordinary men would misuse them. The first step on the Indian path of knowledge (jnana) is to undo everything one has learned so far and keep the mind as open as an empty sheet of paper. A book that has brought tremendous transformation to me in this respect is the Aghora trilogy (1986–97), by Robert Svoboda, an American. This trilogy details the life of Svoboda’s mentor the Aghori Vimalananda, a practitioner of the tantric technique called Aghora, which Svoboda learned from Vimalananda; and several of their discussions and experiences over a tenyear period. Before Vimalananda’s death, in 1983, he was known as an unassuming family man and the owner of Thoroughbred racehorses. Only a handful of people close to him knew that he was an Aghori. Vimalananda never cared to reveal this fact, wary of being associated with those fake gurus under whose spell Westerners are prone to fall – gurus offering Kundalini yoga as if it were pizza (and in the process turning themselves into billionaires). A modern reader of the trilogy might think it a fantasy novel filled with old wives’ tales. Not the reader’s fault, but that is what science has taught them to believe. Svoboda wasn’t one to trust an Indian guru blindly. A licensed Ayurveda practitioner, Svoboda was not an Aghori himself, but during the decade he spent with Vimalananda, he watched and learned from the yogi up close. So I cannot totally dismiss his work as a fairytale. Every Indian comes across many such yogis in their lives, and this presents them with only two choices: either to reject everything, on the basis that it does not conform to the British-imposed Macaulay system of education, or to embrace traditional Indian modes of thought. Robert Svoboda’s trilogy mentions other fascinating yogis, one of them being Trailanga

Swami. Born on 27 November 1607, he went on to live 280 years, dying on 26 December 1887. Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa called him ‘the walking Shiva of Varanasi’. He weighed over 135kg, and no one ever saw him eat or wear clothes. The British police once charged Trailanga under a nuisance order and put him in jail. A few minutes later they saw him sitting atop the roof of the police station. When the police climbed onto the rooftop to take him back into custody, he sped away and was next seen sitting on the Ganges; when they dived into the river to catch him, he submerged himself in deep waters. Even after ten days of searching the river, the police could not find his body. Right when everyone thought that he had attained jala samadhi (a yogi’s sacred self-drowning), Trailanga suddenly reappeared, roaming naked on the streets as usual. As you can see, the Eastern yogis were capable of acting beyond physical laws. Could someone be present in two different places in the same form at the same time? Svoboda writes that while talking to his friends in Mumbai in

above Trailanga Swami. Photo: Wikimedia Commons facing page Govardhan, Akbar with Lion and Calf (detail) c. 1630, ink, opaque watercolour, gold on paper, folio from the Shah Jahan Album. Photo: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

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his physical form, Vimalananda could sit and talk to another set of friends in Europe simultaneously, in the same physical state. The second book in the Aghora trilogy, Kundalini, addresses the tantric practice of Khanda Manda. It is one of the most challenging yoga forms, in which a yogi cuts off his own limbs and throws them into a roaring fire. After a few hours, these limbs emerge from the fire and rejoin the yogi’s body. It starts with a single limb, then two, and goes on until the head is finally severed. “You will faint at the mere sight of oozing blood,” Vimalananda warns his student. There was a yogi named Sai Baba of Shirdi, in Maharashtra, who is well known among the public now. Devotees who observed him up close during his lifetime (he died in 1918) have written that he had performed Khanda Manda yoga. Some called him a fake during his time. One day a devotee came to see him and was shocked to find Baba’s body cut into pieces. He ran into the village to convey that Baba had been murdered by one of his enemies. When everyone rushed to the site, they found Baba sitting as usual, his right leg over his left. Another siddhi concerns the power to host a dead person’s spirit in a yogi’s body. Vimalananda is known to have hosted the spirit of Akbar, the third Mughal emperor, several times. When this occurred, his disciples would behave as one would behave in front of an emperor: they would converse in chaste Urdu; they would fill the room with rose perfume and the scent of incense sticks. The trilogy’s third book, The Law of Karma, describes these scenes as though they were from a modern play. There is a part where Akbar jokingly says, ‘During our times, our vehicles (camels, horses) emptied their liquids, but these days, you fill the vehicles with the fluids. It is ridiculous.’ Everyone laughs softly, covering their mouths to avoid laughing out loud in front of the emperor. Once Svoboda recorded a televised interview, his first ever, during which he mentioned his Ayurveda mentor but said nothing of Vimalananda. At the time Vimalananda was recovering from a severe injury suffered in an accident, and Svoboda had not wanted anyone to disturb him as a result of this interview.

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Later, the two watched the telecast together. When Vimalananda realised that his student had not mentioned his name, he became angry and began yelling, saying that the interview must not continue airing. Right at that moment, there was a power cut. The headlines the next day were all about the total blackout across the city of Mumbai, including all television and radio stations. Svoboda called the producer and said, ‘This is the work of my guru. Please rerecord the entire interview or he might burn down your studio.’ Hearing this, Vimalananda laughed. The producer rerecorded the interview, and this time Svoboda made sure he mentioned Vimalananda’s name. When asked recently if he liked India, a land with innumerable yogis, Svoboda said that he admired the country except for two reasons: the heat and losing his suitcase during train rides. The fact that a woman cannot walk without fear of sexual assault was apparently by-the-by. Translated from the Tamil by Vidhya Subash

Sai Baba of Shirdi, c. 1915. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Debashish Genaamd

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17–20.06.2021

10 edition th

artgeneve.ch

Public Programmes & Research In collaboration with artists and thinkers, Nottingham Contemporary’s Public Programmes & Research practices the institution as a site of knowledge production where long-term research and public study foster practices for imagining otherwise.

Five Bodies Collaboratively developed with the Critical Poetics research group at Nottingham Trent University, Five Bodies welcomes criticalcreative practices that meld perceiving, sensing, feeling and knowing as knowledge-making practices. Thu 11 Feb Jesse Darling, Johanna Hedva, Kameelah Janan Rasheed Thu 11 Mar Ariana Reines, Himali Singh Soin, and Simone White Thu 15 Apr Rowan Evans, J. R. Carpenter, and Vicky Sparrow Thu 13 May Mirene Arsanios, Maureen N. McLane, and Lila Matsumoto

Digital Events Our digital events explore the poetic tactics and relational politics of sound, as well as the performative dimensions of blackness, community and expression. Join Aimar Arriola, Malik Gaines and Laura Guy as they explore global, queer visual cultures and counter-narratives of HIV/AIDS; Fumi Okiji and Dhanveer Singh Brar listen out for Black musical sociality; writer and scholar Alexander G. Weheliye discusses the interplay between the conceptual and the material in Black life; new Study Sessions exploring voice and political agency in the works of Dionne Brand, Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, and Audre Lorde; and a performance by artists Ashkan Sepahvand and Virgil B/G Taylor offering asynchronous modes of being together and apart.

Explore our Exhibitions in VR Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio Jimmy Robert: Akimbo

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The Contemporary Journal is an online publishing platform that brings together interdisciplinary modes of enquiry in the fields of critical theory, artistic research, the curatorial, and visual cultures, publishing new commissions across multiple formats: essays, poetry, artists’ writing, moving image and sonic works.

Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio. Install shot at Nottingham Contemporary, 2020. Photo Lewis Ronald.

Art Featured

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Mohamed Bourouissa We’re here, right now by Mark Rappolt

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A late-middle-aged man reads to camera from a sheet of paper. It’s not reminder that all the world’s a stage now that the seemingly unconeasy. He stutters and hesitates as he processes words into sounds. It’s scious, casual footage of the smartphone variety (of which this seems as awkward to watch. The process doesn’t feel traumatic; just diffi- to be an example) has merged with the more traditional experience cult. But, however haltingly, he ploughs on. It becomes clear that of everyday life. After a cut in the footage our performer carries on, the text is a French legal document outlining a court judgment and stuttering still, but reading out the name of the victim and the crime. the resulting prison sentence. Enumerating the various articles and Violent robbery. His victim, his crime. decrees that have led to the verdict. Our reader seems determined to Despite its ordinary aesthetic, this is an artwork, a video by Frenchcomplete his recitation. Even as his hesitations and stops seem slowly Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa, that was shot in 2015 and titled to be draining the words and sentences Nasser after its star, the artist’s uncle. of their meaning. Both for him and for Like much of the artist’s work, which Ultimately, this is what it means us. In any case, any true understanding spans a range of media, it documents an to exist on the margins – to find of them would require access to a (seemindividual confronting a system: a code ourselves rendered utterly incapable ingly endless) list of the Republic’s laws. (which, in parts during the reading, seems closer to algebra than the system He’s standing in a small room: perof locating a truth even when of rules that structure a society) and a haps a hotel, perhaps another type of it appears to have been placed person (for whom French is evidently institution. There’s what looks like a directly in front of us a second language) who stands both fire-escape notice on the back of the inside and outside of it. And yet in the door to one side, a wall-mounted tv on the other. Around halfway through the four-and-a-half-minute clip, middle of it all is a crime and a victim, leading the viewer to an uncomhe’s interrupted by a younger woman who enters through the door, fortable position with respect to where their sympathies lie. With the announcing herself playfully, in Arabic, as ‘the doctor’ bringing his seemingly fragile man who is attempting to communicate something ‘medicine’. A tin of chewing tobacco is handed over. She leaves. Our to us (as much as to himself) in a language he may or may not underreader appears mildly annoyed at the interruption to his mono- stand, or with the victim under law? This is what it means to exist on logue. For him, it seems, there has been an invasion of his stage. Such the margins. To find ourselves rendered incapable of locating a truth as it is. In any case, he is conscious of the fact that he’s performing, a even when it is apparently placed in front of us.

preceding pages Horse Day (stills), 2014–15, two-channel video, colour, sound, 13 min 32 sec. Produced by Mobiles, Corinne Castel with pmu support. © adagp, Paris 2018. Courtesy the artist, Kamel Mennour, Paris & London, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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A confrontation between the codes of art and the codes of a product of the images themselves as it is of the prejudices and everyday life is present too in the artist’s early photographic series preconceptions we bring to them. Périphérique (2005–08), which blends the aesthetics of contempo“For me there is a poetry inside the streets,” the artist explains as rary reportage and street photography with the grand posturing we talk over Zoom. “I try to reuse this whole culture and try to explore drawn from the codes of traditional history painting (think of or to expose this idea that there is a distinction between ‘high culture’ the painters who imagined and immortalised the founding of the and ‘local culture’. For me, this does not exist. In Périphérique, I was Republic, such as Jacques-Louis David or Eugène Delacroix). Shot in trying to integrate and reuse the code [of art history] with the cultural Paris’s banlieues (suburbs), the images depict people who might plau- aspect I have. It’s more interesting to think about poetry and not think sibly be their residents – which, in the about high culture and low culture.” main, means immigrants and people Instead, many of Bourouissa’s works Many of Bourouissa’s works concern with ethnic minority backgrounds – concern those who want to integrate those who want to integrate within captured in poses that suggest conflict, within a society but are kept out, whether a society but are kept out, whether illicit activities and social tension. by the codes of art or the codes that A reading further encouraged by the govern societal and cultural prejudice. by the codes of art or the codes that fact that the series began contempogovern societal and cultural prejudice. Inasmuch as there is any distinction. Or, raneously with the 2005 riots that more simply, they maintain that inteInasmuch as there is any distinction took place in the suburbs of a number gration, as opposed to assimilation, is of France’s major cities. And yet, for by nature a two-way street, even if that the most part, this kind of dramatic reading is caused by histori- is not how society or the politicians and media groups who shape the cally rooted cultural conventions concerning race, identity and issue tend to present it. body language rather than any discernible acts of actual aggression Bourouissa himself was born in Algeria (in Blida, around 50km or criminality in the images themselves. Moreover, the scenes are from the capital, Algiers) and moved to France with his family at the as staged as the ‘history’ paintings they reference; the actors made age of five. He spoke Arabic at home, with his mother, who didn’t up of Bourouissa’s friends and acquaintances from the banlieues. A speak French very well and didn’t read it at all. “For me, the integraculture in which he grew up. How we interpret them is not so much tion with the language was so hard,” he recalls. “I grew up with this

above and facing page Unknown #17 and 12.11.12, 2014, from the series Shoplifters, c-prints, 39 × 30 cm each. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris & London

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this and facing page Temps mort (stills), 2009, video projection, colour, sound, 18 min. © adagp / the artist. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris & London

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idea of the importance of language, to have more language, but in the breath of the street, to make things a little more interesting they also country of colonisation it was not good to speak Arabic, for example. resonate with the Arabic word for bullshit. All this time, the society has this aspect of racism inside it: it pushes As much as Bourouissa’s art is about shifting attention from you to think that if you speak two languages, you are not integrated. the centre to the periphery (a kind of reverse colonisation), it is also But that depends on what language it is. They don’t say to someone a challenge to conventional notions of what is deemed of sufficient who speaks German or English that it’s the worst to speak German, ‘importance’ to be the subject of art. That they aren’t the product or speak English. They say, ‘Oh, he speaks English and he speaks of tradition or convention (although these languages are evidently French – that’s great.’ The reason we don’t say someone who speaks there to be exploited), but rather a matter of context and perspecArabic and French is good is because of tive. Contingent, rather than necesthe baggage of history. But I don’t have sary truths; the particular rather than Bourouissa’s art is also a challenge to accept that. I do have to end this. To the universal. No more so than in Temps to conventional notions of what is transform this point of view.” Mort (Dead Time, 2008–09), a series of sms deemed of sufficient ‘importance’ to In Hara (2020), a work created for exchanges and videos made in collabolast year’s Manifesta in Marseilles, the ration with Al, a friend of Bourouissa’s be the subject of art. Not the product artist transforms the cries used as an who was in jail at the time, which juxtaof tradition or convention, but rather poses scenes of Al’s cell with scenes alert by lookouts at the city’s druga matter of context and perspective dealing corners into an abstracted form of Bourouissa’s freedom (a train shot of urban birdsong. Although the artist through the bars of prison window and admits that, in part, the work stems from his interest in concrete a train being ridden; the routine of prison life and the artist’s trip to poetry, he is at pains to point out that it is not about elevating some- Helsinki). Interspersed, in the early moments of the exchange, with thing found in the everyday of the streets to the status of art. “There text-messaged directorial instructions from the artist to his collabis the relation [to concrete poetry], but I’m not thinking about it. I just orator concerning what and how to shoot, which over the course of try to create a moment of poetry, try to understand this world and to the resulting video slowly morph into a more freeflowing exchange. push it into another form of feeling, a signal of this situation we are As much as the work is about the connections and disconnections living right now.” And while cries of ‘hara’ are in some ways the vital between freedom and a lack of it, in another way the film is about

Le téléphone, 2006, from the series Périphérique, c-print, 90 × 120 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris & London

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Le miroir, 2006, from the series Périphérique, c-print, 120 × 90 cm. © adagp / the artist. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris & London

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above and faacing page Horse Day (stills), 2014–15, two-channel video, colour, sound, 13 min 32 sec. Produced by Mobiles, Corinne Castel with pmu support. © adagp, Paris 2018. Courtesy the artist, Kamel Mennour, Paris & London, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

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compression and expansion: the compression of life into a cell versus by and constituted of African Americans) for eight months, eventuthe expansive life of a free man; the compression of language into the ally producing the video, which mixes the language of documenform of a text message and of images so that they can be exchanged, tary, cinema and a community event (the artist eventually persuaded and their expansion in the form of an artwork. the community to stage a competition, Horse Day, with artists creating In the years since Périphérique, the artist’s own relationship to his costumes for the horses, the buildup to and staging of which forms the subjects, collaborators or communities – a power dynamic of sorts – primary focus of the work). If Périphérique takes on the imagery that has increasingly become a part of the content of his work. In a video- represents the mythology surrounding the foundation of the Republic, work documenting the creation of the artist’s Resilience Garden, a Horse Day tackles the Western imagery that represents the mythology collaboration with local residents of the Toxteth district of Liverpool surrounding the foundation of the United States. “Who John Wayne?” for the 2018 edition of the city’s biennial, the artist explores the gener- begins one of the conversations between the horseriders early in the ation of the idea, inspired by an encounter with Bourlem Mohamed, video. “Was he white or was he Black?” “Gotta be Black,” one of the riders a patient of the psychoanalyst and political theorist Frantz Fanon at shoots back. “I never dress like a cowboy; I’m a horseman,” says another. the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville in Bourouissa’s birthtown, In one of the more comic moments a rider talks to one of the costume who had created a garden as part of his makers about being uncomfortable occupational therapy, before going on about decorating his white horse like a As a viewer, you’re never quite sure to document the process of its making skeleton by painting large sections of its if the discussion is circling around in Liverpool. Instead of the traditional coat black. People like the horse because race, representation or more simply celebratory discourse that surrounds it is beautiful and white, he protests. community art projects, the only local And as a viewer, you’re never quite sure a rider’s love for his horse, a stripif the discussion is circling around race, voice we hear talking to the artist is that ping away of all the contexts that representation, or more simply a rider’s of a person being rudely critical of the make a Black, urban cowboy exotic love for his horse, a stripping away of all whole endeavour. For Bourouissa such the contexts that make a Black, urban inclusions are a crucial part of recognising his own position as an artist: “I said to myself, ‘ok, I come here, cowboy exotic. Leaving just a strange Romantic poetry behind. I make a garden, I want to create this community’, but you also create “I think now we can get this power,” the artist continues. “We are this form of colonisation for sure, even as you try to involve the people here right now. You have to deal with that and you have to accept that. and to present your point of view.” It’s about his discomforts too, his I’m not going to accept your eyes on me. You have these eyes on me but I know I’m here. I am legitimate because I know what I give and own sense of friction. Many of the primary themes of Bourouissa’s work come together what I think. I push something more in the cultural aspect in France. in the two-channel video Horse Day (2014–15), which documents I hope so. That’s what I feel.” It’s a vision in which art is not simply his encounter with the urban stables of the Strawberry Mansion deployed to highlight what is broken, but one in which art can offer neighbourhood in Philadelphia (the artist was inspired by Martha fixes as well. ar Camarillo’s photographs documenting the communities whose makeshift stables line Fletcher Street in what otherwise appears to be an Mohamed Bourouissa: HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!! urban ghetto). Bourouissa lived within the community (which is run is on show at cca Goldsmiths, London, from 2 April to 13 June

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Izumi Suzuki The brief life and disturbing tales of a visionary Japanese sf pioneer by Daniel Joseph

Izumi Suzuki was born in 1949 under the Allied occupation and came came into her own with ‘The Witch’s Apprentice’, published in of age during the 1960s, an era of drugs, rock and roll, and nationwide a special ‘women’s issue’ of sf Magazine in November 1975 alongprotests in Japan as it was elsewhere. After high school she worked side translations of work by such luminaries as Ursula K. Le Guin briefly in a factory, but soon quit to pursue writing, acting and model- and Marion Zimmer Bradley. During the 1970s, the world of ling, working with the controversial photographer Nobuyoshi Araki Japanese sf, like the literary establishment in general, was a literal as well as maverick directors Shūji Terayama and Kōji Wakamatsu. boys club – in a 1977 interview featured in the magazine Kisō Tengai, In 1973 she married the free-jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe, with Suzuki half-jokingly asks sf doyen Taku Mayumura if she might whom she had a daughter. The couple’s notoriously tempestuous join the sf Writers Club, of which none of the 30 or so members are relationship, dramatised in Wakamatsu’s 1995 film, Endless Waltz, women. He laughs it off. ended in divorce in 1977, and Abe died The critic Nozomi Ōmori writes from an overdose of Bromisoval the that Suzuki and her few female conScience fiction liberated Suzuki’s following year. Suzuki produced the temporaries were ‘treated by the sf writing, providing a playground in majority of her work, and her best community as outsiders, or perhaps which she could deconstruct a malescience fiction, in the last ten years “tourists”’. People were confounded of her life, which ended with her suiby her work, and focused more on dominated Japanese society and her her eccentric biography than on the cide at age thirty-six, in 1986. Science relationship to it, laying the groundstories themselves (her brief stint as fiction (or sf, as it is routinely called in work for generations of authors to come a nude model and in softcore ‘pink Japan) liberated her writing, providing films’, as well as the time she cut off a playground in which she could deconstruct a male-dominated Japanese society and her relation- one of her toes in front of her husband, have tended to dominate the ship to it, laying the groundwork for generations of authors to come. conversation). But as Ōmori says, ‘Readers back then probably just The academic and critic Mari Kotani writes, ‘It is not an overstate- couldn’t keep up. No sf author at the time was writing anything like ment to say that the age of [Japanese] women’s sf – wherein women her.’ Suzuki’s defiance of both social and literary norms paved the discover and reconstruct femininity – began with Izumi Suzuki, who way for subsequent authors from Haruki and Ryū Murakami to Yōko Tawada, Gen’ichirō Takahashi and Amy Yamada, but (along with her lived through her science fiction.’ Suzuki started writing sf as early as 1972, publishing five strange, infamously acid tongue) also likely contributed to the fact that she unsettling stories in addition to her mundane fiction, but she truly was never accepted into the canon.

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all images © Nobuyoshi Araki

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Suzuki has drawn comparisons to Western authors like Marge the sf literary milieu, feminist separatism was translated into narraPiercy, James Tiptree Jr (another woman who began producing sf tives of “feminist utopias”. These narratives, however, did not merely later in her career) and especially Philip K. Dick, whose tales of social support feminist separatism; on the contrary, they revealed a certain alienation and drug use are similarly ensconced in a futuristic mode. ambivalence about it.’ Suzuki’s most famous story, ‘Women and I would add Anna Kavan to the list; like Kavan, Suzuki is unsparing Women’ (1977), depicts a postapocalyptic matriarchal society in which in her use of sf to expose and examine the self. Her work is highly males are confined to institutional ghettos, but a sense of unease personal, but the artificiality and distance afforded by sf invigor- permeates this supposed utopia, leading the teenage narrator to quesates her writing, opening the way for a more honest engagement tion the values with which she has been instilled. with the collective delusion we call the Suzuki’s relationship to gender and ‘real world’. For Suzuki, everyday life is feminism is complex and nuanced, rePeople were confounded by her science fiction, and her sense of alienaquiring the twenty-first-century reader work, and focused more on her to step outside of hard-line contempotion from and suspicion of contemporary eccentric biography (her brief stint rary rhetoric. But while a contemporary society was intimately linked to sf. In her words, ‘There is something wrong with as a nude model and in ‘pink films’, mode of feminism may not be overtly our present society, and I can’t stand sf apparent in her work, Suzuki often spoke as well as the time she cut off one written by people who don’t understand out against the unrealistic feminine of her toes in front of her husband) ideals imposed upon women by male sf that… Even when you’re talking about some future society, if you write with full authors in the form of beautiful, cookiefaith in our present world, then nothing changes, you just end up cutter female characters. She also dismissed essentialist stereotypes like the notion of ‘women’s intuition’, and demanded the with the same ideas we already have.’ It comes as no surprise, then, that Suzuki’s stories are deeply right to be a real, flawed human being. Kotani again: ‘Suzuki’s texts rooted in the counterculture, with all its antiestablishment and defamiliarize the real world in order to demolish and reconstruct antiauthoritarian implications. In the end, however, the focus of the “femininity” bound hand and foot by real-world power strucher work is largely domestic. Most of her stories return to troubled tures. Her works dismantle the power structures whereby women relationships between men and women, and in a world of ready are marginalized through phrases like “only a woman would…” interstellar travel, we seldom leave Tokyo. Suzuki is fascinated with or “because she is a woman.” It is only through this process that one how the fundamental struggles of everyday life persist regardless of can begin to think about what constitutes “femininity.”’ But even at what new technologies infiltrate our lives. For Emma, the protago- her most political, Suzuki is never polemical. She approaches such nist of ‘Forgotten’ (1977), advanced technology represents a means questions obliquely, attacking imperialism (‘Forgotten’) and casually to indulge both her drug addiction and suspicions of her lover’s dismissing gender as a social construct (‘Night Picnic’, 1981) in the infidelity. In ‘Terminal Boredom’ (1984), advances in neuroscience course of depicting troubled romance and the absurdities of family serve only to opiate a society driven to the brink by unemployment life. Meaning flows through her stories like music, and despite the and apathy. Suzuki’s uncompromising, obvious complexities of her work, Suzuki though often darkly humorous, stories described her writing in simple terms: Suzuki’s uncompromising, represent a kind of sf version of kitchen‘I turn my dreams into stories’. though often darkly humorous, sink realism, told from the perspective of Nobuyoshi Araki called her a ‘woman stories represent a kind of sf of the age’, but Suzuki is a timeless the one stuck doing the dishes. The realwriter, or perhaps a writer out of time. ities of everyday life are never far away. version of kitchen-sink realism, Ōmori points out that many sf authors The virtual world of ‘That Old Seaside told from the perspective of write about a fantastical ‘future’ that Club’ (1982), for example, uncannily the one stuck doing the dishes becomes old and out of date the instant prefigures the popular feel-good Black we approach it; Suzuki wrote about the Mirror episode ‘San Junipero’ (2016), but dispenses with the touching ending in favour of a grim return to the ‘present’, and her stories transcend a particular time, culture or place, drudgery of an unhappy marriage. remaining as disturbingly relevant as ever – as Ōmori says, ‘Izumi Gender is somehow both central to Suzuki’s work and beside the Suzuki is always an author of the “now”’. ar point. As such, the gender dynamics of her stories may feel strange to contemporary readers. She blazed her own trail in the sf world, and Terminal Boredom, a collection of stories by Izumi Suzuki, is published in April. Daniel Joseph is the translator of ‘Women and Women’ this extended to her politics as well. Kotani writes, ‘During the period and ‘Terminal Boredom’, which are published as part of the collection of the women’s liberation movement, when Izumi Suzuki dominated

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Gelare Khoshgozaran How a simple usb drive unlocked a brave new world of contemporary storytelling by Chris Fite-Wassilak

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above and preceding pages Men of My Dreams (stills), 2020, Super-8 film transferred to video, sound, colour, 9 min 30 sec. Commissioned and produced as part of Queer Correspondence, a mail-art initiative by Cell Project Space, London

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In late October last year, a neon-yellow envelope came through my of landscapes – these teeming facts and places become displaced and letterbox. Inside was a thick black card embossed with the sentence, misplaced. That the arid Southern California climate where she is ‘The gradients of fascism are diverse in their predictable dullness’. based is similar to that of Iran is a source of ambivalent nostalgia; a On the other side was a business-card-size usb drive, printed with wistfulness lined with hard irony in finding reminders of home in a a patchy green pattern of what might be an ivy-covered wall, punc- country that continues to punish Iranians with years of sanctions. In tuated by a figure covering their face with a black-and-white mask the 30-minute film Medina Wasl: Connecting Town (2018), a set of voices printed with the features of director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The sentence speak over a desert scene. They describe “a giant expanse of bright and the image both appear in the nine-minute film contained on the sand”: “It was flat and brown, and a dust storm came and it looked drive, Men of My Dreams (2020), by Los Angeles-based Iranian artist like something out of a movie”. It becomes apparent that these are and writer Gelare Khoshgozaran. It’s a patchwork of dream impres- soldiers, recounting their sensory experiences of excursions into sions and pointed observations, opening with a passenger’s view of a southwest Asia, where we assume, at first, that what we’re seeing drive down a street in la. Armoured vehicles and rubbish trucks line is located. Then buildings appear looking oddly blocky, becoming the road, while shopfronts are graffitied with ‘acab’, ‘blm’; a bank apparent as shipping containers that have been hastily painted on one street corner has ‘George Floyd’ written across its window. to look like they’re made of mud bricks. An abandoned street has Subtitles describe the artist’s move from Iran to the city years earlier. stalls stocked with plastic fruit and fake eggs. Khoshgozaran’s notes ‘I miss my home, but everywhere is so ruined on this planet I feel accompanying the piece explain the unsettling facade: this is a miliat home anywhere.’ What follows is a tary training facility in California, set of a vignettes, the artist sporting designed to prepare and acclimatise a range of masks depicting the titular troops to some projected version of men that appear in her dreams: poet what they might encounter in Iran or Federico García Lorca, singer Farhad Afghanistan. As we continue to tour its Mehrad. In one scene, she sits by the ersatz butchers and mock mosques, the sea holding a mask of theorist Edward image is overlaid with another screen that shows a Google Map scrolling Said in front of her face, her hand along the southern border between covering his mouth as if stifling a Iraq and Iran. We are directed to look giggle. In another, she mimes playing at, feel and smell the Persian Gulf, but a game of tennis, the mask she wears remain rooted, unsteadily, on the West remaining an unidentifiable blur. Coast of the us. At one point the artist The mailout was part of London appears dressed as an Iranian soldier, gallery Cell Project Space’s monthrunning towards the camera through ly postal series, Queer Correspondence, a grove of date trees, and then hesiwhich ran from June to December last year. Khoshgozaran had initially tantly dancing, turning the terrain of been scheduled to have an exhibition simulated battle into an absurd and there; it’s been postponed to this year. mournful cosplay. The histories of miliThe usb key’s delivery was intriguing, tary and economic actions and lives like a stylish invitation to some cryptic that drift in their wake, Khoshgozaran event; though it was also, at that point suggests, create a tangle of echoes and in the year, a relief to be able to watch correspondences that reverberate long an artist’s film without yet another after, bobbing somewhere between live-streamed event or time-limited fantasy and hard fact. screening (and the resulting guilt of having missed it entirely). In In Medina Wasl, the simplified topography of Google Maps repreKhoshgozaran’s fractured, unfinished dream diary, where the after- sents the date palms growing on the shore of the Shatt al-Arab river as math of protests is placed next to serene seaside moments, the evoca- a generic light green, the map layered by Khoshgozaran with imagery tion of these figures seems to point towards a desire for escape, from of date palms in California. Each is a different way of seeing landscape, the ruin, the virus, the violence – and to look to them for answers or each with its own limitations – it is the edges and ellipses of these comfort. But no resolution arrives, we just hear the persistent hiss and forms of knowing that Khoshgozaran seems intent on tracing. Likely click of a vinyl record reaching the end of its spiral. While tapping Mine, her exhibition at the Visitor Welcome Center in la at the start of into the isolation and malaise of the pandemic, Men of My Dreams’s last year, revolved around different types of looking and surveillance. tone and delivery carries many of the themes that run throughout The floor of the gallery was spread with neat rows of model-plane Khoshgozaran’s films, essays and installations: a lyrical sense of dislo- parts, while nearby were several lightboxes holding Compositions for cation and unease, where things remain unfinished, unresolved, and X-Ray Machine (2020), a set of inverse collaged images of overlapping where political events are mapped unevenly onto intimate thoughts keyboards, model planes, a customs declaration slip. Hanging above them, the video Likely Mine (2020) is mostly black, dotted with occaand daily life. sional lighter specs, until points where the screen While much of Khoshgozaran’s work begins Gelare Khoshgozaran’s with documents and documentation – state fills with a pixelated hash of pinks, greens, purples Queer Correspondence #5 upon arrival, memos, journalistic photographs, 16mm footage and blues: the visible effects of electromagnetic Los Angeles, October 2020

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Medina Wasl: Connecting Town (still), 2018, 16mm film transferred to video, sound, colour, 31 min

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Medina Wasl: Connecting Town, 2018 (installation view, Made in L.A., 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles). Photo: Brian Forrest

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Likely Mine, 2020 (installation view, Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles). Photo: Josh Schaedel

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radiation when the artist’s phone was put through airport security expectant gaps between the various works in the room, the confusion scans. Air travel might have become severely limited since then, but and the dream state seem a way to navigate such confines. at its core the show seemed more concerned with making visible and Through its levelling of fact and its attendant fictions, of dream and apparent the routine incursions and probes we have come to normalise, protest, Khoshgozaran’s work enacts a particular form of contemporary the multicoloured static its own map of the ways security checks, body storytelling: wary of the essay film’s tendency for narration, which enscanners and aerial photography touch each of us. acts a simplification or occlusion of sorts; but one that is equally wary of At the entrance to Likely Mine, a voice from a cassette tape player documentary’s voyeuristic and othering tendencies, what writer and enunciates a set of phrases towards a small centrifuge sitting adjacent filmmaker Fatimah Tobing Rony has called ‘fascinating cannibalism’. on the floor, each one apparently the headline from a news item that It is dispersed, subjective documentary that follows on from the work contained the word ‘centrifuge’. At that point last year, the word was of practitioners like Trinh T. Minh-ha and finds echoes in contempoin the news frequently in relation to raries like Ana Vaz and Rehana Zaman. The artist appears dressed as an Irani- Khoshgozaran attempts a destabilised, the Iranian government’s announced plans for its nuclear programme. But an soldier, running through a grove of critical and oneiric pulling away from the photographic document, mapping in Reading the News to Waco (2020), as this date trees and then hesitantly dancing, the effects on the mind of the globally work is titled, an algorithmic search for turning the terrain of simulated battle dispersed forever war, and asking where the word spits out all kinds of results: we might go from here. In Men of My “Five strategies for delivering compliinto an absurd and mournful cosplay cated technical training”; “Why extra Dreams, the video ends with a quote from virgin olive oil is the healthiest fat on earth”; “Trump faces foreign Pasolini’s The Decameron (1971): ‘Why complete a work when it’s so beaupolicy challenges”. The casual collision of the mundane, the political tiful just to dream it?’ It then cuts back to a shot of the sea, low, foamy and the digitally-delivered accidental is telling; or rather, it is an accu- waves pawing at the rocks that line the shore. The dreamer is, yet again, rate portrayal of the terrain that Khoshgozaran suggests we already the activist of our time. ‘Crisis time is not work time,’ as Khoshgozaran inhabit, a place where the three are connected and confused. There wrote in article from August last year, ‘but there is a job to be done: to is a thread through her work that suggests life is prescribed by the dream and make plans for their coming true.’ ar military-industrial complex, determined by its persistent machinations. But as with the title of Likely Mine – punning between admitting Chris Fite-Wassilak is a London-based critic and author of The Artist in Time (2020) ownership and the presence of a potential explosive device – and the

above Medina Wasl: Connecting Town (still), 2018, 16mm film transferred to video, sound, colour, 31 min all images Courtesy the artist and Cell Project Space, London

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Maurizio Catellan meets Chen Zhen The two artists discuss the power of change, migration, translation, reinvention and, ultimately, a life after death

maurizio cattelan You grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, moving from Shanghai to Paris in the 1980s. It must not have been an easy transition. How did your life change once in Paris? chen zhen I worked very hard, day and night. It might have been the period of my life during which I worked the most and my thoughts were most concentrated. Few people can understand this. At that time, my family had not yet come to Paris. I was alone, living an extremely simple life. I did not need much at that time. I rented a small servant’s room about seven square metres in size on the outskirts of Paris, ‘hiding in a small attic, oblivious of all four seasons’. I lived like that for four years! Sometimes, I did not make any phone calls to anybody for a whole month, and nobody had any correspondence with me. Do you know what kind of life that was? A life in which you really felt you were a heavenly steed soaring across the skies and doing whatever you truly wanted! I had the rarest type of quietness and deep thinking in life! mc How did you manage to make a living then?

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cz I supported myself by sketching portraits for people on the street in the summer. I am a very good portrait-drawer. Three months of hard work could enable me to live like a king for the rest of the year. I am not a griper. Being far from China was of course not easy, but that was a time in my 30 years of life when I was for the first time my own boss and father. mc This brings us to the idea of ‘Transexperiences’, a concept you defined in relation to the encounter with a different culture. What exactly does it mean? cz Transexperiences. In Chinese it can be said as ‘Rong Chao Jing Yan’. This is a kind of ‘fusiontranscendence of experiences’. There isn’t such a word in either English or French, but the prefix ‘trans-’ has the meanings of ‘crossing’, ‘through’, ‘above and beyond’, ‘transfer’, ‘over’, ‘to the other side of’, etc. If you juxtapose this prefix with the word ‘experience’ and use it in the plural form, you have coined a new word, which summarises vividly and profoundly the complex Chen Zhen, Portrait, 1989. © Chen Zhen by adagp, Paris

life experiences of leaving one’s native place and going from one place to another in one’s life. mc How do you think this concept resonates with Western people? cz In 1993, on a flight to South Korea, Pontus Hultén asked me to sit beside him. We talked extensively about Asia and China, and about East–West cultural exchanges. As the plane was about to make its landing, I said to him, “You’ve devoted many years to the opening-up of the concept of art and East–West cultural exchanges. What is your personal experience in dealing with the Asian people?” “Eternal misunderstanding,” he answered surprisingly but also forlornly. At that very moment, I thought to myself that someday I would create a project to extol eternal misunderstanding. So this time, as a first step to singing the praises of eternal misunderstanding, I carved his words as a ‘found text’ in this work. mc It seems that you choose words carefully. Is the use of language dictated by logic or is it rather something innate?

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Chen Zhen, Portrait de Marc Stephann, 1988, soft pastel on paper, 45 × 30 cm. Roland Stephann and Marie-France Stephann/Rufin Collection. © Chen Zhen by adagp, Paris

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cz Using the mind is very different from using the heart. This is well worth looking into. Of course, behind the word ‘jie’ there lies something that is more of conceptual hybridisation and conceptual power impurity than of conceptual purity. In order to ‘jie’ (borrow) freely and methodically, you must have rich ‘trans experiences’. Life is a big bank. At the same time, the Chinese ‘jie’ (borrow), in my opinion, implies an extremely powerful and confident ‘digestive power’. No matter whether you borrow from the outsiders or the insiders, you always come out to be ‘yellow’. Therefore, today we are not afraid of ‘borrowing’ from either the Chinese past or the modern West. ‘Borrowing’ can ‘disrupt the law’ and achieve an ‘illogical concept’ or a ‘haphazard logic’. mc I had never considered the notion of borrowing through these lenses. How does this type of relationship model communities and societies, especially today, as we are living a more reclusive and solitary life in lockdown? cz In this game two elements are ubiquitous: me and others. The two elements coexist in harmony in the paired ‘me–others’ relationship. In order to invent and create rules for yourself, you have to give new definitions to these two elements and read just the relationship between the two. Of course, I am talking about playing

the game in your own sphere, or bringing things from outside or others to your own sphere for scrutiny. You play your own game at ease. Who was the first to define the concept of ‘Others’? Of course, it was done in the West. This definition proves paradoxically the deeprootedness of ‘Western-centralism’. ‘Others’ represents a concept of grouping beyond the scope of the relationships among ‘me (us), you, and him (them)’. mc I wonder what would happen if we start to identify more and more people as ‘others’. Would we be able to control it? cz As Foucault said, ‘Madness is not a natural phenomenon but a product of civilisation.’ The more civilised a place, the more madmen and diseased there are. Is this due to needs and desires? Schopenhauer said that the desires of humanity are the greatest pain for humanity: the grave of humanity itself. mc Can we apply the same paradigm within the artistic realm? cz Today I again thought of the saying that ‘people within art circles are more or less diseased or mad’. I wonder if this condition is normal or not. The field of contemporary art, like many other fields, is a machine and network

system where power and money are interwoven. Experience is the basis of creativity and yet it is ‘postwork’. It transcends any possession of the work, or the equivalent (reciprocal) thing of the work – the possession of money. mc Nevertheless you have chosen to stay with the ‘mad’! cz I have become the artist I am today due to the two times in my life where I ‘chose the wrong occupation’. The first was during the Cultural Revolution. In those years, there were no other choices. All the universities were closed then. I studied in an art high-school, and from then on ‘went on the path of art’. At the time I believed what I learned was real art. I once studied and practised diligently, focusing my spirits. The second time was after I went to Paris. I suddenly realised that art could be ‘something else’. Art is not so sacred, and artists do not have to be those specialists we think of. Thus, I again chose a fork in my path; again I changed occupation, rebelling against myself. I don’t know when and where I’ll have to change occupation again – that is truly the greatest excitement in life! mc You once told me that a friend of yours asked you what it was like to reach the most exciting moment in your creative process.

Chen Zhen, Crystal Landscape of Inner Body (Serpent), 2000, crystal, metal, glass. Photo: Attilio Maranzano. © Chen Zhen by adagp, Paris. Courtesy Galleria Continua

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Chen Zhen, Daily Incantations, 1996 (installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2020). Photo: Agostino Osio. Private collection, courtesy de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong. © Chen Zhen by adagp, Paris. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

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Chen Zhen, Jardin-Lavoir, 2000 (installation view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2020). Photo: Agostino Osio. © Chen Zhen by adagp, Paris. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, and Galleria Continua

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cz I said it was like the ‘short circuit’ phenomenon in electricity. Two opposite electrodes meet: irrelevant, yet from the same electrical circuit. What I am really interested in is the ‘shocking’ and ‘destructive’ power triggered by a ‘short circuit’. That is creation. That is the most stimulating moment. To give you a more direct answer, every time an artist runs across different contextual factors, he will feel – in varying degrees – conflicts, dialogues and a ‘call from time and space’ or a transformation of each other. In short, he will experience the ‘short circuit’ phenomenon. mc Recently, in your solo show at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, I had the opportunity to see your work Daily Incantations [1996], which is the result of your first visit home to Shanghai back in the 1990s. The piece is composed of 101 chamber pots arranged in rows on a large semicircular wooden structure that resembles an ancient Chinese musical instrument. I have a longtime fascination for this object, since, during my childhood, we didn’t have a bathroom in our house. cz What is interesting to me about it is that it is, first of all, not art. It is an ordinary object for daily use. The Chinese have a double concept about the chamber pot: the first is that most

people view it as an ugly thing. The second is that those who believe in superstition think that the chamber pot is the ‘son and grandson stool’. It helps to propagate and reproduce, and to carry the generations onward. The intrinsic duality of this object is very close to the inner quality of contemporary art. The white calcium sediment on the inside wall of the chamber pot is even a preciously rare Chinese medicine, called ‘philtrium white’, used to dispel heat and alleviate fever. These kind of things with a dual nature I like very much. Furthermore, in line with Western urban policies, chamber pots are a thing to be discarded, a thing that is becoming extinct. Therefore, it has a close relationship with such concepts as ‘the West’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘supplanting the old with the new’. mc It’s not a coincidence that you are talking about Chinese medicine. Coming from a family of doctors, you often expressed your desire to become a ‘doctor’, though you would rather heal through your art than with medicines… cz Individuals should become a type of ‘virus’. Virus, and ‘contagious’ and ‘latent’ viruses at that. Viruses are characterised by being active, infectious and rampant. This time it is a very appropriate metaphor. It is well known that viruses are very tiny, but extremely harmful

to human bodies. Wherever they go, nobody dares to ignore them. Some viruses are capable of not being easily defeated and cannot be killed by any medicine. Most of them ‘live and die by themselves’. Once viruses invade the human body, they will cause the active response of the human immune system: the viruses from outside will engage in battles against the antibodies from inside. The aggressive viruses will destroy the immune system. You see, all of this seems to be describing an artist’s posture towards so-called mainstream or central culture, and his contributions to ‘multicultural exchanges’. mc So are we viruses trying to lay bare the current system of values? cz That is the beauty of being a ‘migrating creature’ like me, who could examine my own country and Asia through a polygonal prism. mc That’s a long and timeless journey… cz Every mature artist labours under the threat of life and death. Time is my most severe ransom. Short-circuits, an exhibition of work by Chen Zhen (1955–2000), is on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, through 6 June

Maurizio Cattelan, Portrait

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Su Hui-Yu By exposing the forgotten and the forbidden in Taiwan’s cinematic history, the artist explores new futures via the changing ways in which we consume the past by Ren Scateni

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Su Hui-Yu’s work has the disorienting appeal of a hazy dream. time, when Taiwan was under martial law imposed by the Chinese Droning sound, lo-fi instrumental soundtracks and static composi- Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). As sexual violence was rife in tions lull us into a stupor. We’re awake but not, as if languidly sucked those titles, a subgenre of female-avenger films eventually emerged into a memory that’s impossible to recall. I spoke with Su via Skype providing inspiration for Su’s latest work. Taiwan’s fierce conservative on a mid-January morning, more than a week before sitting down past is gone, so “now the country is progressive and liberal enough to write this piece. Exposed, as most of us have been over the past for me to unearth such films and advance a negotiation between months, to an endless flux of social-media content and virtual events, opposing political beliefs and gender groups”, offers Su. our conversation itself now manifests to me like a distant memory: an As with most of Su Hui-Yu’s recent works, The Women’s Revenge owes experience that I have to recreate aided by our recorded voices playing a lot to his personal memories. Too young to enjoy those B-movies in again through my earphones. the theatre, Su first came into contact with them through their gory “I was always fascinated by the experience of watching cable tv posters affixed to the walls of the cheap eateries he frequented as a kid. at night,” Su Hui-Yu says, discussing his 2012 video installation The And yet his involvement with the project doesn’t stop at a passive reenUpcoming Show, “and when I tried to recall all the weird programmes actment of the original material. In a radical move that also investiI saw, my mind seemed to be covered with mist.” It wasn’t possible gates the politics of bodily appropriation and consumption via digital to recreate those bizarre programmes technologies, Su stars as one of the that populated the fringes of Taiwan’s women avengers. “Using deepfake techIn a radical move that also television programming during the nology, I adopted Lu Hsiao-Fen’s face investigates the politics of bodily 1990s, Su remembers, so he decided – the star of many 1980s exploitation appropriation and consumption, to rearrange his recollection into a films – and joined the female squad. As much more personal work. The process Su stars as one of the women avengers a man, I wanted to experience the world of reshaping the artist’s oneiric and of women and open up the dialogue mnemonic worlds while making use of archival materials, such as on gender differences.” There’s a moment in which Su’s inspiration television shows in this instance, anticipates Su’s later works, which transforms into a vivid and unapologetic manifesto. Carried supine explore the forgotten and the forbidden of Taiwan’s cultural history. by the other avengers, his character spreads her legs wide open to The Women’s Revenge (2020) is the second iteration of Su Hui-Yu’s expose a pair of unzipped panties. But this is no L’Origine du Monde. series reshooting the subversive classics of Taiwanese cinema, follow- Rather, where one might expect to see a vagina there is a diamonding the 2018 four-channel video installation The Glamorous Boys of shaped miniature screen showing one of the other women tied up by a Tang. Originally conceived as a five-channel installation, The Women’s group of uniformed men. While the camera draws closer and eventuRevenge screened in short-film format at the 2021 International Film ally penetrates Su’s body to lead us into a different setting, the artist’s Festival Rotterdam – a treatment that was previously applied to genitalia not only become a canvas on which to project the sole scene The Glamorous Boys of Tang too. This newest work draws inspiration of female abuse we witness in the film, they also function as a stark from the so-called Taiwan Black Movies, an exploitative genre that reminder that violence on women is ultimately perpetrated by men. proliferated in the country during the late 1970s and early 80s. Those For the most attentive film connoisseurs, The Women’s Revenge films reflected the tumultuous social and political atmosphere of the is a treasure trove of cinematic citations. The film’s mise-en-scène

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is in itself a reference to one of the most iconic settings of Taiwan audience will be invited by those images, even if they are unfamiliar Black Movies: the slaughterhouse. In The Lady Avenger (1981, directed with Taiwan.” by Yang Chia-Yun), the film’s heroine murders one of her rapists in Within Su Hui-Yu’s ‘reshooting’ series we encounter other items the meatpacking factory where he works, and similarly, it’s in the populating the artist’s mnemonic realm. The two-channel installachilling atmosphere of a slaughterhouse that Su Hui-Yu’s female tion Super Taboo (2015) materialises, in a bucolic setting, carnal tableaux squad slashes through a horde of dishevelled, seminaked men vivants of entangled naked bodies, evoked by a white-collar employrunning away in terror. Other tributes hide in the details, like the ee fervently reading from a pornographic publication – known as frozen gesture of holding a knife above a man’s naked body, which xiaoben, ‘small book’. In martial-law-era Taiwan, heterosexual pornorecalls the promotional poster for Zhuang Xiang Zeng’s The Woman of graphic content was as marginalised and suppressed as homoerotic Wrath (1984), or the sparkly eye-patch sported by one of the avengers, manifestations in film and theatre. Whereas The Glamorous Boys of Tang a reference to Tsai Yang-Ming’s Woman Revenger (1981). However, these exists as a piercing and opulent homage to a 1985 film of the same artistic citations don’t stop at Taiwanese films. “I cite Western paint- title directed by Chiu Kang-Chien, a homoerotic fantasy whose most ings a lot,” cues Su, “mostly because a lot of my personal memories subversive ideas were heavily censored, the beautifully fluid multiof violence come from Western art history.” References to Artemisia channel installation The White Waters (2020) celebrates playwright Gentileschi or Caravaggio are evident Tian Chi-Yuan’s visionary work White in a scene featuring a severed male Water (1993), a same-sex reinterpretaSu Hui-Yu’s female squad head spurting blood. tion of the ‘Flooding of Jinshan Temple’ slashes through a horde of The Women’s Revenge is also indebted episode from the Chinese classic The dishevelled, seminaked men Legend of the White Snake. “No matter the to East Asian spirituality. In a scene that original – be it a film, a play or a porn helps to transition from the punishing running away in terror magazine – my mission is to resurface space of the slaughterhouse to a world of surrealist images and settings, the men shoulder a humongous those ideas that couldn’t be expressed because of the censorship of frame and oscillate to a thudding music. Within the frame they the time and give them new life,” Su concludes. By situating his work carry, the same scene is replicated over and over again. “This con- in a liminal space, Su Hui-Yu negotiates the erasures of the past with centric composition represents a way to hell but, in a Buddhist logic, the renewed freedom of expression conceded by present-day Taiwan, it’s also a visual representation of karma,” explains Su Hui-Yu. “If hopefully paving the way for even more subversive reinterpretations life is a circle, then you die and go to a different world. You may of the country’s complex history. And when the curtain eventually come back to life again, but you’ll never escape.” Mirrors represent closes on the nightmarish apparitions of gender violence evoked in the ineluctable status of the human condition, but the way these The Women’s Revenge, the camera pans to embrace three young highmen are positioned and illuminated is, again, peculiarly baroque. school students, who are seemingly drawn from the artist’s own “Religion, myths or historical paintings, these are all parts of our memories. Enraptured by a faraway scene, they pant heavily. Their collective memory, and I draw from that. West and East are often gaze fixed towards the future. ar interconnected in my art, but when I use my personal experiences to create my psychedelic and bizarre dreamlike works, I just wish the Ren Scateni is a film critic, curator and programmer based in Edinburgh

all images The Women’s Revenge (stills), 2020, dcp, colour, sound, 16 min 35 sec

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Subject Object Verb Episode 4 Listen now Ross Simonini with Lawrence Abu Hamdan artreview.com/podcasts

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09/02/2021 10:41

MOMENTUM 11 HOUSE OF COMMONS

12.06–10.10.2021

Moss, Norway

www.momentum11.art

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17/02/2021 10:37

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10/02/2021 11:02

Retail therapy in Paris

In early February, as the French government announced that the reopening of cultural venues would be postponed once again due to the pandemic, more than a hundred museum directors penned a letter to Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin protesting the decision and drawing attention to art’s potential as ‘a sensitive aid to mental wellbeing to cope with this crisis’, while also pointing out their extensive experience in regulating traffic (where better to enforce social distancing, one-way circulation and limited numbers than a ticketed exhibition?). While the ministry has since responded with vague allusions to a possible earlier return; museums have been closed for four months. Yet those with a more optimistic bent may be inclined to see the city’s cultural offerings as a glass half full rather than a glass half empty; indeed many Parisians are discovering a plethora of commercial art galleries – which, classified as ‘essential businesses’, have been permitted to remain open – previously known only to the initiated. Paris’s retail sector has carried on largely unrestricted since November. Depending on your perspective, the status of galleries in this regard is either the result of a useful loophole or a moment of honesty in regard to their mercantile nature. Although for noncollectors like myself, gallery visits remain an important alternative to shopping. So it is perhaps with a hint of irony that, for the inauguration of its first Paris space, Galleria Continua presents itself as an ‘art supermarket’. The show is the result of a carte blanche given to French street artist and photographer jr, who has capitalised on the venue’s recent history as a wholesale leather-goods shop by filling the existing floor-to-ceiling shelving units with a mix of artworks and artist editions by the gallery’s international roster (from Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor to Daniel Buren and Kiki Smith), gallery publications and, in the ‘deli corner’, edibles. The gridded-format of the shelved space combined with the neon shopping baskets that greet you at the entrance (but no, you can’t touch the art – or the food), a takeaway coffee station and signature trompel’oeil interventions by the artist-curator, evoke something more akin to a concept store than a supermarket. What concept, you ask? Well, if we’re to believe the show’s title, Truc à Faire, it’s something to do – both for the gallery and its audience, one can assume. It’s light and playful,

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quite superficially so, but after a year of restrictions and forced isolation, it’s also restorative. Another artist-curated show, at Lévy Gorvy, offers an almost perfect counterpoint. Horizons, a group show of painting and sculpture assembled by Etel Adnan (whose paintings also hang at Continua), is a poetic exercise in contemplation around the titular line dear to the ninetyfive-year-old artist and poet. At once figurative and abstract, literal and metaphorical, the horizon serves as a simple yet potent motif to connect works across art history and regions. Up on a plinth, resting at eye level, Simone Fattal’s (Adnan’s partner) glazed stoneware clouds look like sugar-coated candy, both rough and delicate in finish. Their quietude and fragility are set in contrast to the repetitive straight lines of a small Agnes Martin drawing and a series of largescale semiabstract paintings by Christine Safa in flaming ochre and Mediterranean blue. Another dialogue takes place in the next room around a row of Adnan’s signature smallscale landscapes. Colourful, impressionistic in treatment, these semiabstract horizon scenes face a contrasting presentation of works by Ugo Rondinone: the monumental horizontal flatlines of vierterjulizweitausendundelf (2011) and the vertical Black, green, yellow, blue, pink mountain (2019), a rock formation rendered in flashy colours. Meditative and rich in aesthetic associations, Horizons feels like a personal show, in which the artist opens up conversations while inviting viewers, in lack of perspective, to look into the distance. From contemplation to obsession: Claude Viallat, a founder of the avant-garde movement Supports/Surfaces, which sought to deconstruct painting in the aftermath of the May 1968 student uprisings, has taken over one of Galerie Templon’s spaces with his pulsating patterned compositions. His deconstructive approach has remained consistent for nearly five decades: bed sheets, sunshade covers, aprons and other domestic fabrics patchworked together to form a canvas, on which the artist systematically paints the same semiorganic, semigeometric motif. Yet here, in his latest series, the compositions bear sutures: crisscrossing strips of fabric stitch and mend the ‘tears’ that reveal the wall behind it. Hung by their corners on the gallery walls, they look like joyful diy banners, while suggesting some healing ritual performed by the artist. Turning a corner or two takes me into the self-contained universe of French artist Laurent Le Deunff at Galerie Semiose. Curious

and ambitious, the show is full of mysterious narratives set somewhere between a hunting cabin, a natural history museum (or could it be an homage to the nearby but locked-down Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature?) and a public garden. Hanging on one of the walls in the first room is a giant necklace made with what looks like huge sharks’ teeth; propped up on small metal rods atop a plinth are sculptures of various slugs and less identifiable creatures; on another wall, wooden bas-reliefs depict moles and badgers making their way through underground passageways. Stepping into the next room we enter a clearing: the ground is covered in soil, moss and trees, populated by sculptures of animal heads on plinths that look like public memorials to dead species. Seemingly carved in wood, the sculptures are in fact moulded in cement, and it turns out the sharks’ teeth are made of wood – small deceptions that further confuse the viewer in search of hints. In drawings that line the wall of this garden, we see a cat in the artist’s studio, surrounded by some of the work presented here. There are no traces of the artist (barring the hand that made the works), or of humans in general. Is it an homage to the reign of other animal species and the artist’s feline companion (an exhibition text quotes William Burroughs’s view of cats as ‘as psychic companions, as familiars’), or are we projected into a future where all that remains of animals are representations? I’ll leave you with a theatrical send-off, on show at yet another established international gallery setting up shop in Paris. Taking a minimalist approach, Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique (one work or one room – both apply – reinstating a brand originally conceived by gallerist Lucio Amelio in 1989) showcases in its vitrinelike setup a new work by Los Angelesbased Kaari Upson. Clay Baby (m.l.) (2021) consists of three sculpted replicas of a kitsch figurine of a Bavarian woman in all her fantasised stereotypes (Alpine hat, plump demeanour, protuberant breasts and rosy cheeks), with a comical and irreverent twist: the three figurines are lifting their skirts to flash bare buttocks at passersby. Crouched, facing each other, atop a white-andblue-patterned table, they seem complicit, as if engaging in a ritual (perhaps the most basic and universal one), yet aware of the provocative nature of their gesture. I’m tempted to see the scene as a cheeky protest against a situation over which they have little control. Louise Darblay

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Truc à Faire, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Sara De Santis. Courtesy the artists and Galleria Continua, Paris

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Merlin James P420, Bologna 25 September – 23 December In a brief, wondrous interlude between one lockdown and another, Merlin James was able to travel from Glasgow to Bologna to install his show at P420, and I managed to catch it just before it was shut down. The exhibition is small, unassuming and engrossing, featuring eight works spanning 15 years, modestly sized and displaying a variety of styles – hints of James McNeill Abbott Whistler, Francis Bacon, Serge Charchoune, Giorgio Morandi. There is a familiarity you cannot quite grasp: that building you think you may recognise or the coastline you may have driven along. As the works draw you in, slightly off details emerge. In Audience (undated), heavily applied hues of black, brown and mauve acrylic outline an audience watching a stage, as two small dots of white

and red stand out against the darkness – lights, perhaps, or performers. Leaning in closer, you realise that James has covered large parts of the small canvas in human hairs, some sticking out from the canvas. In Coast (2000–02), a dark, elegiac coastal scene is almost jarred by what looks like a patch, as though the artist repaired an old canvas before painting on it. James’s subject matter – mostly landscapes, buildings or partial figures – is often subverted in these subtle, mischievous ways, diverting our attention from the subject to the matter itself, the physical act of painting, and back again. Even the diminutive size of the paintings evokes the easel they have been painted on. James’s love for his medium is allencompassing: he considers each part of the canvas as a fundamental element of the

language of painting. My favourite works are his ‘transparencies’ or ‘frame paintings’, which divest themselves of canvas altogether, exposing the wooden stretcher and covering it in a fine, transparent polyester. In House and Cloud (2010), he has carved and painted parts of the bars in green and white – it almost looks like some kind of insect resting on a flower – and covered it in fine mesh, onto which he has painted a just-about-discernible house and cloud. Buildings (2012) takes transparency one step further: James working on the stretcher frame itself, carving a fantastical little building onto it. His works are that rare thing: paintings that, in a time of perpetual distraction, avoid the heavy-handed or pretentious, and retain the ability to transfix. Ana Vukadin

House and Cloud, 2010, mixed media, 71 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna

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11/02/2021 11:32

John Edmonds A Sidelong Glance Brooklyn Museum, New York 23 October – 8 August John Edmonds’s photographs in his first institutional solo show are alluring and seductive. The artist’s previous subjects have included the street fashion of Black men and his own queer artistic milieu, reframing Eurocentric art-historical tropes to include Black queer desire. But here Edmonds turns his lens to a different form of desire. The photographs primarily show African masks and totems – culled from the Brooklyn Museum’s own vast collection, as well as from the homes of the artist’s friends and peers – centred alone or staged with said friends and peers. The subject here is the desire of the collector and the complicated colonialist legacy of collecting continental and diasporic African objects. These formally simple tableaux are deeply researched, as evidenced by Edmonds’s large folded free newsprint poster featuring a reproduction of his photograph Whose Hands? (2019) – showing several arms grabbing a statue

made by the Baule people – and 521 notes about the Baule culture, their religious beliefs, use of masks and treatment of sculpture, sourced from Susan Vogel’s Baule: African Art Western Eyes (1997) and Alain-Michel Boyer’s Baule: Visions of Africa (2008). On the back wall of the exhibition hangs a suite of eight photographs of African sculptures donated by the Ralph Ellison estate to the Brooklyn Museum, including Baule, Hemba and Senufo figures. In 2019 Edmonds was invited to photograph this collection, and the resulting images present the wooden statues glowing against an iridescent backdrop, spotlighted and regal. In the current rethinking of the colonialist collecting, cataloguing and exhibition practices of institutions, Edmonds’s work asks a more nuanced question, not just about the pitfalls of museum collecting, but also about collecting by private individuals. Ellison is celebrated as the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952), but was also later criticised for a perceived lack of

engagement with the civil rights movement. The images of his collection question these objects as signifiers in a complicated heritage: how did Ellison live with these objects? Did they glow in his home as totems of a long-lost lineage? In the black-and-white photograph Anatolli & Collection (2019), a buff shirtless Black man sits level with, according to the wall text, Edmonds’s own collection of African art. The angled spotlight casts the objects mostly in shadow but illuminates the man’s torso and shoulders. He looks at this collection – but we look at him. Here, as with the objects from the Ellison collection, the statues glisten, but much less so than the eroticised male figure. Anatolli’s body is treated much like an object as well, making visible a desire for bodies. This calls to mind the homoerotic desire present in Edmonds’s previous work, but also the long history of Western ownership over Black bodies. Megan N. Liberty

Whose Hands?, 2019, archival pigment photo, 36 × 28 cm. Private Collection. © the artist

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Fifty years after Linda Nochlin made her mark on the story of art, the struggle carries on

Three weeks after The New York Times published an investigation into sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the American art historian and pioneering feminist Linda Nochlin died. Author of the essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (ArtNews, 1971), in which her dissection of the notion of ‘great men’, the ‘male genius’ and the systemic privileging of white men launched a new era of feminist art history, Nochlin witnessed the trailer to the detonation of Weinstein’s career. But she didn’t get to see the avalanche of artistes of all kinds – film and theatre directors, actors, photographers, musicians, comedians, artists, chefs and more – mainly men, that landed in a heap at the foot of the #MeToo movement. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ and its 2001 sequel, subtitled ‘Thirty Years After’, are now republished in a 50thanniversary edition, accompanied by a foreword by academic Catherine Grant. That first essay was sparked by a question put to Nochlin in 1970 by New York gallerist and dealer of Old Masters Richard Feigen (who died at the end of January) when he sought her advice on collecting paintings by women artists. Nochlin’s 4,000-word response carried the (now rarely reproduced) subtitle: ‘Silly questions deserve long answers’. Nochlin swiftly dismantled ‘the myth of the Great Artist – subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike – bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass’s chicken soup, called Genius or Talent’: a fairytale perpetuated by the ‘romantic, elitist, self-individualizing substructure on which the profession of art history is based’. She shone a light on the institutional and structural barriers to women and minority groups. ‘If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is,’ Nochlin wrote. ‘But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have

facing page, top Artemisia Gentileschi, Esther Before Ahasuereus, c. 1628–30, oil on canvas, 208 × 272 cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male.’ To offer a bit of context, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ was published at the same time as the Equal Rights Amendment (era) was resurfacing, nearly five decades after it had first been proposed. The era passed the House and the Senate in 1971, but fell eight short of the 38 state ratifications needed to enter the us Constitution by a deadline of 1979. And despite numerous attempts since then, the era – ‘Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex’ – still has not been written into a document that is supposed to uphold the basic tenets of us society. Nochlin’s 2001 followup might not have the same punchy impact as the original, the reason being that after ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ was published, women in the arts started to gain greater visibility: feminist art was documented contemporaneously, and art historians began conducting an archaeology of women artists throughout history. But it does offer a valuable appraisal of the first essay, highlighting the development of intersectional feminism during the 1990s that takes into account the way in which different and overlapping lived experiences (including race, sexuality, class, disability, religion) combine to create different modes of discrimination. White women largely benefited from second-wave feminism, but it would take a couple of decades for queer, trans and women of colour to be included in these conversations. This remains an important axis from which to consider Nochlin’s 1971 essay today. ‘Those who have privileges invariably hold on to them, and hold tight,’ she wrote. ‘Thus the question of women’s equality – in art as in any other realm – devolves not upon

the relative benevolence or ill-will of individual men… but rather on the very nature of our institutional structures themselves and the view of reality which they impose on the human beings that are part of them.’ While Nochlin takes as points of reference European and American artists from the Italian Renaissance to the realists of the nineteenth century (her area of study), and on towards the mid-twentieth century, mentioning along the way the likes of Artemisia Gentileschi and Lavinia Fontana, Rosa Bonheur, Käthe Kollwitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, it is this crucial argument that continues to make Nochlin’s essay a relevant and formative text for students of art history – it’s where this writer first learned about how historic systemic inequality and exclusion (in the context of Europe and North America) has had a lasting impact on the lack of advancement of anyone who isn’t a white man. Nochlin continues: ‘Most men, despite lip-service to equality, are reluctant to give up this “natural” order of things in which their advantages are so great.’ The text was groundbreaking, written with wit and in a conversational style rarely seen in academic studies, but its confinement to the worlds of academia and art also reveal its limitations, both in terms of accessibility (knowing where to find it) and the fact that it doesn’t directly reach ‘any other realm’. These days, it would be difficult to find a museum curator who had not read Nochlin’s text. And yet it was only after the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements entered popular consciousness that gallery programmes offered any significant shift to reflect these social issues. Even after its explosiveness in the academy, and its position as a keystone text for feminism in the artworld, it has taken nearly half a century, the fall of a ‘great’ man, and then many men, as well as multiple police killings of people of colour, to reach a mainstream awareness that no longer accepts ‘greatness’ (or success, or seniority) as an excuse for abuse of power. Fi Churchman

facing page, bottom left Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1652, oil on canvas, 208 × 225 cm. Courtesy Polo Museale dell’Emilia Romagna, Collezioni della Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna. © Pinacoteca Nazionale Bologna

facing page, bottom right Artemisia Gentileschi, Susannah and the Elders, 1610, oil on canvas, 170 × 121 cm. © Kunstsammlungen Graf von Schönborn, Pommersfelden

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Bangkok Art Biennale: Escape Routes Various venues, Bangkok 29 October – 30 April The Thai Kingdom is, for once, a picture of civic health. Tucked away in one of the second Bangkok Art Biennale’s ten venues, Prateep Suthathongthai’s photorealistic painting Dusit Thani Province 1 (2020) depicts a pointy-roofed Thai temple hemmed in by neat lawns and white crenellated walls. Just beyond lie the pint-size, European-style buildings that made up King Rama VI’s Dusit Thani, a miniature model city that served as his proof-of-concept playground for the principles of democracy, complete with party elections, a constitution and even a daily newspaper, back in the 1910s. Suthathongthai’s carefully hand-rendered recreations of archive photos are joined by large-format uv prints of the project’s original blueprints, while projected on the floor is drone footage of a dusty northeastern Thai village built by the government for former Communist Party members – failed fighters for a very different utopia – during the 1970s. The work hangs in The Prelude, a marblehewn show-suite for One Bangkok: a 167,000

sqm, ‘game-changing district’ being built, just steps away, by a sister company of bab 2020’s key sponsor, Thai-Chinese drinks conglomerate ThaiBev. Upon completion, this us$3.9-billion development will be ‘a new global landmark on the world stage’, replete with ultraluxury condos, office towers, retail precincts and culture spaces, not to mention prices likely to keep nearby slum dwellers at arm’s length. Emerging from The Prelude, I am met by the clanging of its breakneck construction, and struck by the poles of inertia, subjugation and progress that Suthathongthai brings into question: true democracy still remains a Thai fantasy of sorts, yet profoundly inequitable urban gentrification schemes sprout as if by magic. After the inaugural edition in 2018, several academics concluded – in contrast with a heap of positive media coverage – that bab’s artists had been co-opted by an ungainly spectacle. This mega-event aimed at belatedly branding Bangkok as a city of art affirmed both the neo-

above Prateep Suthathongthai, Dusit Thani Province 1, 2020, oil on linen, 142 x 196 cm. Courtesy the artist

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liberal agenda of its backers and the charismatic careerism of the esteemed curator helming it, all while saying next to nothing about the political woes afflicting the country and seeming wildly out of step with the unruly, anti-institutional urges of many emerging Thai artists and events. For the most, I agreed with these counterhegemonic critiques – but Suthathongthai reminds me that things aren’t so cut and dry. Bringing the iniquitous character of the country to the fore, subverting the dominant hegemony, his work shows that critical artistic practices can, to paraphrase political theorist Chantal Mouffe, ‘disrupt the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to spread’. Scaled back but only slightly humbled, bab 2020 is at its best at moments like these: when the platitudinous ‘hope’ and ‘survival’ rhetoric of artistic director and bab mastermind Apinan Poshyananda’s ‘Escape Routes’ theme – spurred initially by the knottiness of the United Nations’ sustainable development

facing page Installation view of works by Prateep Suthathongthai at Bangkok Art Biennale, 2020

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goals but since amplified by the pandemic – finds little sanctuary; when works seem to misbehave by offering up something richer and more rooted than the event’s sweeping therapeutic narrative and hubristic attempts to remake the world would seem to allow. At the city’s ailing kunsthalle, for example, Thai auteur Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s short film Two Little Soldiers (2020) follows two squaddies as they fish and talk by a forest-fringed pond in a Thai army camp. In this sketch, lifted from a forthcoming feature inspired by Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘Deux Amis’ (1882), a crackling radio reports news of violence on the streets of a remote Bangkok as they idle, leading us to ponder the extent of their complicity. Another video at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (bacc), the bab’s main venue, I-na Phuyuthanon’s Harmonimiltary (2020) explores strife in Thailand’s deep south simply yet affectingly: dressed in a flowing turquoise burka, she ambles around a lush village where separatist violence has been met with public vilification and peacekeeping operations. On an upper floor at The Parq – a sparkling new office building also linked to ThaiBev – a painting by Yuree Kensaku, Bleu Blanc Rouge (2020), raises the spectre of republicanism with a cartoonish send-up of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), complete with a Tricolore-waving chicken. And nearby, relative newcomer Rungruang Sittirerk’s The Metamorphosis (2020) is an installation of 1,997 clay works – a reference to the year of the Tom Yum Kung financial crash – located beside a window overlooking the Klong Toey slum, source of much of the city’s cheap labour. If this selection implies a certain bias towards the local contingent, it merely reflects facts on the ground. bab 2020 has dual missions: introducing 31 Thai artists to a globalised international contemporary artworld on one hand; bringing works by 55 of that world’s artists to Bangkok for its citizenry’s betterment on the other. It excels at neither but proves far more accomplished at the former: while most Thais contribute new commissions, most of the international contingent – Ai Weiwei, Yoko Ono and John Akomfrah among them – deliver old works that serve to dilute rather than reinforce. Many, especially the glut of photography, seem

entirely decoupled from their counterparts, immediate context, even their place in time. Why are they here? Most appear to have been selected simply because they were at hand, or easily executable mid-pandemic, or help summon the star power to which Poshyananda is clearly so in thrall. He is bab 2020’s biggest enigma. In the runup, he revealed that the decision to go ahead largely rested on a calculated desire to capture some of the attention that would have been directed at the better-established, cancelled competition (this was later confirmed in a press kit underscoring the ‘big opportunities to gain much more share of voice in international media’.) In the opening days that raw opportunism was replaced by a careful defensiveness, as he fielded questions about the government’s heavy-handed suppression of the recent student protestmovement, and the 25 bab artists who had issued a letter railing against it. (An official written statement in support of the protesters never materialised, but Poshyananda tried to burnish the bab’s reputation – ThaiBev’s symbiotic ties to the palace, government and military be damned! – by claiming solidarity.) Ever since then, the impression of a one-man show, an auteurist affair, ‘smooth image’ personified, has been hard to shake. In every talk, video tour and media interview, he appears every inch the smart-casual showman: repeats his ‘Escape Routes’ lines and opines on the logistical challenges overcome. Littered with references to power-mongers, pollution, greed and plagues, his bab 2020 writings, meanwhile, continue a long Poshyananda tradition of emphasising art’s conciliatory and cathartic role, only to retool that schtick for the geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow that is now. All this posturing aside, there are rewarding moments. A strong vein of ecologically minded work runs throughout – fitting at a time when Bangkok’s pm2.5 levels are slowly killing us. There is also a peppy section at the bacc where fantastical visions from across the Middle East and Asia collide. This includes, among other works, Kubra Khademi’s gouache drawings of eviscerated female bodies (The Birth Giving, 2019);

facing page, bottom Ai Weiwei, Law of the Journey (Prototype B), 2016. Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio

facing page, top Yuree Kensaku, Bleu Blanc Rouge, 2020, acrylic, glitter and collage on canvas, 140 × 540 cm. Courtesy the artist

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the chimera-filled Mongol Zurag-style paintings of Nomin Bold and Baatarzorig Batjargal; and Chantana Tiprachart’s beguiling tone poem in Lai Torn (2020), a video in which a boat decked with candles for the Lao-Thai Naga festival slowly burns. And winning the prize for biggest showboat is Anish Kapoor’s Push/Pull (2009). Hearing someone compare this round monolith of soft, cinnamon-red wax to a giant Babybel quelled only some of its ferocity; it springs, like a blood-curdled sledge sent screaming from one of the 16 levels of Buddhist hell, out of the marble floors of the famous Wat Pho temple’s sermon hall. Speaking of hell, his assistants apparently endured two weeks of hotel quarantine, as did performance artists such as Melati Suryodarmo and Miles Greenberg, so the show could shuffle on. You have to admire such dedication. Still, such pulses of pleasure are always tempered by a nagging sense that audience and artists alike would be better served by an event that smacks less of spectacle-led short-termism. In a press conference last October, bab was blithely repositioned as a national saviour, as a ‘prototype event’ that will help recalibrate and revive the country’s decimated tourism industry (it failed dismally, through no fault of its own). But, from my vantage point, its own long-term fate looks even more questionable: it has revealed no collecting urge, no nurturing instinct, no memory beyond its duration, no clear sense of mission and no roadmap beyond its next edition. This lack of focus is doubly alarming when you consider the core sponsor’s fixation on the numbers (allegedly, 3 million Thais and foreigners visited, and over 4.5 billion baht was stimulated, in 2018) – and the fact that those numbers have now, surely, all but collapsed. The net result is all-too familiar: a biennale no greater than the sum of its parts, an expolike gathering that talks a good game but, in actuality, offers up only random ‘discoveries’ – a bit of art from here, there and just about everywhere – as its intellectual prize. As for the near future, the escape route to better global art pastures that Poshyananda has built for Thailand could well vanish as soon as 2023: the year his and ThaiBev’s commitment ends and, conveniently, its dream city launches. Max Crosbie-Jones

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16/02/2021 13:12

Jim Shaw Hope Against Hope Simon Lee Gallery, London 20 October – 16 January Donald Trump makes an appearance twice in this exhibition, timed to coincide with the us presidential election and its contentious aftermath. In The Master Mason (all works 2020), we see him among members of his Cabinet in a pastiche of eighteenth-century caricature: the president in tight blue britches, being served a head on a platter (probably Barack Obama’s, but it’s hard to tell); and Donald and Melania Trump descending the escalator into the 9th circle of hell reserved for traitors frozen in a sea of ice is a satirical rendition – this time parodying Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno – of the much-publicised scene preceding his announcement that he would run in the 2016 election. It is clear, however, that the whole show is about Trump, or Trumpism, a term we may be hearing more often now that the man himself has been

voted out of office and, despite the ensuing malarkey, Joe Biden has been sworn in. The rest of the exhibition, in a manner typical of the artist whose work has often incorporated midcentury American memorabilia, makes fun of the ‘Great America’ myth (notoriously propagated by the Trump campaign’s slogan), taking images from 1950s advertisements and tying them to contemporary or recent political circumstances. Because nothing is more absurd than the real thing, it is hard to exaggerate Trump’s outlandishness to humorous effect. When we try, we are in danger of overlooking the dark reality lurking beneath the hairdo – a reality that took a turn for the darker when he unfoundedly accused the Democrats of election fraud when things weren’t going his way, not to mention

when he incited his more fanatical supporters to storm the United States Capitol. This is why Alec Baldwin’s (worryingly) realistic imitation of Trump is acclaimed and Spitting Image’s grotesque caricature is not. It is also why Shaw’s esotericism is more confusing than funny, let alone subversive. The throwback to Eduardo Paolozzi-esque counter-consumerist visual tropes is meant to be seen in relation to Trump’s resurrection of outmoded ideologies. But there is also something regressive, even defeatist, about it, as if Shaw – unintentionally – were giving credence to Trump’s word. Put simply, by employing devices of the past, the artist too steps back in time, backhandedly condoning Trump’s reactionary rhetoric, when Trumpism, whatever has happened, whatever will happen, is very much a problem of today. Tom Denman

The Maze, 2020, acrylic on muslin, 89 × 114 cm. Courtesy Simon Lee Gallery, London & Hong Kong

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15/02/2021 13:14

Genesis Tramaine Evidence of Grace Almine Rech, Brussels 7 January – 27 February The past decade has seen visual art enthralled with spirituality in its many forms. The most prevalent manifestation is in practices that draw on the trappings of occultism or refer to early-twentieth-century abstraction, itself shaped by an engagement with esotericism. These signifiers are inherently potent and would imbue almost any artwork with a certain frisson, yet the manner in which they are handled is often intentionally ironic. Artists pussyfoot around religious symbolism with measured detachment, ensuring that there is no risk of being mistaken for a true believer. For such commitment would transform the status of an artwork into a doctrinaire, creedal statement and expose its maker to the vagaries of a system that demands novelty. In contrast to all this are the unapologetically zealous paintings of Genesis Tramaine;

the output of one who wears their faith on their sleeve. The Southern Baptist beliefs of this self-declared ‘Bible nerd’ are the impetus for her work. Christianity was undoubtedly vital to the evolution of Western art in terms of patronage and content, but in recent centuries this coupling has produced little more than a surfeit of maudlin tableaux-vivants. The Brooklyn-born Tramaine, by contrast, breathes new life into ancient, scriptural subjects, creating compelling images – Black figures built from vigorous tangles of brushwork, oil stick and spraypaint, with titles like Prodigal Son and Witnessing Grace (all works 2020) – that beguile even the most agnostic. Absent from any of the documentation of this show are the inscriptions that adorn the sides of almost all the paintings but which are visible only in profile. Some of these are

psalms; others, eg ‘God is not mad @ you today’, evoke textspeak. The inclusion of these is a testament to the extent to which the messianic mission of spreading the ‘Good News of Jesus Christ’ is integral to Tramaine’s process. The influence of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art brut is palpable here, while the dominant compositional formula – head/shoulders against radiant monochrome backdrop – evokes Francis Bacon’s 1970s portraits. But these allusions are tempered by a vocabulary that is entirely Tramaine’s own. Gestural flourishes in oil stick suggest catharsis and hint at visual glossolalia; the fruits of an ascended ecstatic state. Her use of colour is also striking; aside from a few flashes of ultramarine and azurite the palette is consistently organic and alluvial, underscoring the tenet that divinity is present in every earthbound being. Pádraic E. Moore

Saint Abigail, 2020, oil stick, oil pastel, holy spirit, 183 × 123 × 6 cm. Photo: Hugard & Vanoverschelde. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech, Paris

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Klára Hosnedlová Nest Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin 7 November – 20 February An initial spin around Klára Hosnedlová’s Nest suggests someone who learned about contemporary art via limited hearsay, never saw any and plunged into making it anyway, oblivious to its conventions – which, in reality, is to say that this young Czech artist understands the unwritten rules well enough to scramble them. The first things that pop out in her German solo debut, most of whose elements look as much like tricked-out interior design as art, are wallmounted multipart reliefs. These large, heavylooking swathes of terrazzo, stylishly punctuated by shallow grooves and speckled with hemispheric glass baubles, form the backdrop for what initially appear to be realist paintings in a washed-out palette. Depicting half-naked bodies draped with fragmentary moulds, or pseudoscientific rituals using smartphones, magnifying glasses and knives, or people holding perturbed cats, these are, it turns out, painstaking embroideries. Nearby, a biomorphic grey blob of a stone table with a recess in it contains bulbous reishi mushrooms, used in Chinese medicine; on the floor beside this assemblage are pools of melted glass, like giant tears. Clustered around a steel pole that runs from floor to ceiling are myriad javelins of smoked glass, black at the top and clear at the base. This thing looks, by turns, brand-new and burned out.

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You access the second room through a bespoke, parallelogram-shaped doorway suggesting sci-fi design by a drunken architect and are confronted with an ersatz tilted arc: a freestanding curve of (I think) stone cladding on a frame, tucked inside which is a bench upon which you can sit and look from afar at another small embroidery, which again feels off. There’s a retrofuturist air to proceedings, but it’s muddled, fogged. Hosnedlová’s aesthetics might not look so alien, though, if you’re familiar with the Ještěd Tower, a flashy hyperboloid – like an inverted long-stemmed funnel – that perches on a mountaintop near Liberec in the Czech Republic. Erected in 1973, combining the functions of television tower, weather station and upscale hotel, it still exists, but it’s a marooned fragment of a utopian modernist future that never came to pass. I haven’t been, but some of the photographs online of its interiors are in clear correspondence with Hosnedlová’s aesthetics; certainly, the handout says, the show is based on ‘extensive research’. Her embroideries, meanwhile, are based on photographs of her friends performing gnomic rites in the tower, as if probing the place, trying to make sense of it and connect with it from a position of alienated distance; and in the process setting

up a distorted, dragging model of time, counterbalancing the click of the shutter and the slow accretion of thread. The show’s title, then, is a concise marker of distance from the hopefulness of futuristic thinking – tomorrow as a safe, comfortable place – to today’s soft dystopia, with surveillance devices (like Google’s Nest) in our own homes. The irony of all this is that Hosnedlová is returning, if inadvertently, to more than one historical moment. Her engagement is surely sincere, her ability to affectively encode melancholy historical consciousness undeniable, but go beyond the details of her work and it feels like a flashback to the vanguard art of the early twenty-first century, circa 2004, when – tied to a growing interest in the archival – a large number of artists turned to researchdriven rumination on lost modernist utopias and raking the ashes of the century prior. This was a period style for a while, starting when Hosnedlová was in her early teens, and it’s odd – though appropriate for a moment when art seems to have lost the knack for forward development – to see it roll around again so quickly. But then, as her show demonstrates, the past never really goes away. It keeps coming back to needle us, to remind us how much better the present could be. Martin Herbert

ArtReview

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facing page Untitled ( from the series Nest), 2020, cotton thread, terrazzo frame, terrazzo panelling, mould melted glass, 200 × 260 × 24 cm

above Untitled ( from the series Nest), 2020, cotton thread, stainless steel, 29 × 22 × 4 cm

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both images Photo: def image. Courtesy the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin

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mmca Hyundai Motor Series 2020: Haegue Yang – O2 & H2O National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul 29 September – 28 February The intellectualised art practice of Haegue Yang has a tendency to confound viewers with its surfeit of latent references, fuelling a lofty discursive purview for framing her work in the context of continually shifting conceptual parameters. At its core, however, Yang’s oeuvre conveys nuanced sensibilities and provokes visceral encounters with viewers across cultures, repurposing everyday materials such as clothesdrying racks, venetian blinds, bells and artificial straw to invoke imaginative excursions into the realms of science, craft, folklore and philosophy. Yang’s first solo presentation at the mmca explores the conceptual space between the ontology of natural phenomena and human efforts to navigate competing beliefs, desires and conditions in an indeterminate world. The exhibition title makes reference to the molecular structures of oxygen and water; despite the specificity of these chemical symbols, they remain highly abstract as signifiers, giving little clue as to the actual physical properties of either substance. It’s precisely this sort of hybrid sensibility – familiar yet foreign, inscrutable yet obvious – that Yang is so deft

at conjuring in her works, luring viewers deeper into her visual milieu. Substantiating this sensibility are two groups of sculptures that exude a commanding and uncanny presence, activating divergent cognitive pathways by conflating the bizarre and banal. Yang’s Sonic Domesticus series (2020) enlarges scissors, tongs and hairdryers into imposing forms, while new works from the Sonic Clotheshorses series (2018–) are modelled after configurations of drying racks; aside from their unusual silhouettes, what makes these works so strangely evocative are the thousands of small bells that cover their surfaces. Throughout human history, bells have been used in religious rites as a means of connecting human beings to the cosmos, and in the case of Yang’s sculptures, they invest domestic forms with a sacred resonance. Other groups of works unfold similar dualities through the interplay of materiality and form. In works from The Intermediates series (2015–), Yang uses artificial straw to create shaggy surfaces that enshroud ambiguous sculptural forms drawn from folk

imagery – namely, serpents and shields – and forge links between artisanship and representation. Elsewhere, venetian blinds function both as a rigid structural element and permeable internal substance in two 2020 works from Yang’s Sol LeWitt Upside Down series (2015–) as well as the monumental Silo of Silence – Clicked Core (2017), this last rising 16m into the air and slowly rotating to assert an entropic presence that simultaneously arouses curiosity and apprehension. The exhibition is rounded out with several site-specific installations laden with multiple dimensions of meaning, some more obscure than others. And yet, the myriad references that have come to characterise Yang’s distinctive oeuvre are subdued in O2 & H2O, and the need to parse the meaning of every single work subsides in the broader context of the exhibition. As such, one’s appreciation for Yang’s diverse presentation is not predicated on any external framework that might otherwise overshadow the viewing experience; instead, her works are permitted to speak for themselves, facilitating a mode of interpretation that is more intuitive than cerebral. Andy St. Louis

Silo of Silence – Clicked Core, 2017. Photo: Cheolki Hong. Courtesy mmca, Seoul

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12/02/2021 14:50

Chen Zhe A Slow Remembering of a Long Forgetting Bank, Shanghai 13 November – 13 January As its title suggests, Chen Zhe’s new exhibition puts seemingly opposite concepts together to create ambiguity, duality and a ‘both and neither’ status. Over the years, Chen has gradually shifted her practice from a focus on personal emotions to an examination of broader metaphysical contexts. Previous works such as The Bearable (2007–10) and Bees (2010–12) examined the contradictory relationship between self-relief and self-harm, while Towards Evening: Six Chapters (2012–) sees her investigating languages and higher beings. Here, Chen addresses a hidden and fundamental connection between all beings and a vision of the universe as a single conscious subject – cosmopsychism. On the one hand you might view this transition as optimistic; on the other hand, it might represent a somewhat existentialist confusion about the unknown future. It may even be both. Above all, the move towards the occult, and cosmopsychism specifically, seems to seek relief in the idea that ‘we’ are not alone, that all is connected, and perhaps endowed with purpose. At the entrance to the exhibition, photographs of skinlike surfaces and installations of skulls and stones orchestrate a brutal and primal ambience, as if recalling a remote memory

of some prehistoric shelter. The intense theatricality and dim lighting serve to hush the viewer into silence: a prelude to Chen’s theatre of occult. In the medium in which her practice originated, photography, Chen uses closeups, cropping her compositions in unconventional ways in order to create a feeling of ambiguity. In Eternal Ephemera: Divination 3 (2020), an image of amber marbles on a grainy, uneven, cracked stone floor might equally be an aerial photo of an unknown village. Staring at the image is like taking part in a divination session: you get the feeling that the marbles (or village huts) have been waiting for you. And then, given the fact that the marbles seem to have fallen into the cracks and channels offered up by the floor, you start to wonder if the whole thing might be entirely random. The authenticity of this apparent randomness plays an important role throughout the project. In the photograph Eternal Ephemera: Body-Mind 2 (2020), a closeup of a resin skull illuminated from within, the enlightened body-mind organ – the brain – is viewed through the lines formed by the sutures in the skull, thus associating psyche, or identity, with a randomly generated pattern. Skulls appear again in the installation Reading Old

Dreams: Among You (2020), placed atop stone artefacts and assembled totems, a juxtaposition of agricultural tools and the enlightened power that invented them. In a statement that accompanies the exhibition, Chen suggests that there are two maps that grow with us through life: one is the celestial chart drawn up at the moment we are born, ‘determining’ one’s personality and fate; the other is the unique pattern of one’s skull, which can be used to identify a person via autopsy. Thus, the two maps connect one’s birth and death. They are the unrefined ‘cracks’ in the fabric of the cosmos, maps with the power of prophecy or divination, for people to interpret with refined theories and practices. By analysing and collecting examples of such ‘cracks’, Chen tries to picture a greater map of the cosmos (invoking too the occult, religions and dreams), which she suggests is a David Lynchean approach. A quotation from the American director’s tv series Twin Peaks (1990–91; 2017) is placed on the staircase that leads down into the gallery: ‘I believe that these mysteries are not separate entities, but are, in fact, complementary verses of the same song. Now I cannot hear it yet. But I can feel it. And that is enough for me to proceed.’ Paul Han

Me You Us 4, 2020, archival pigmented inkjet print, 106 × 160 cm. Courtesy the artist and Bank, Shanghai

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15/02/2021 11:20

The tyranny of the white cube – and what it will take to end it

In the spring of 2007, Tate Britain held a two-day conference titled ‘The Rise of the London Art Market’. I shy away from such events, which outlast my attention span, but I was trying to improve myself at the time and so I agreed to go and review this one for another art magazine, whose founding of an art fair four years earlier wasn’t entirely separable from the subject under discussion. The podium lectures spanned from 1870 to the then-present and were a collective reminder that the conditions under which art is exhibited are in flux; the preferable locations change, as does the decor, albeit slowly. John Kasmin’s hyperfashionable 1960s gallery in Mayfair, we were informed, had a ridged linoleum floor copied from Rome airport; nevertheless it was still a white cube, a modernist format that postmodernism couldn’t kill and that continues to show few signs of shuffling off. Yet the meaning of this sterile backdrop might also be said to modulate, as the world changes around it. Am I now going to quote from Inside the White Cube? But of course. In his influential three-part essay from 1976, later published as a book and subtitled The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Brian O’Doherty argued that in these locations, something of ‘the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics’. Time would appear to stop, and anything placed inside the magic box turns miraculously into art. Accordingly, the white cube recrudesces in more explicitly commercial viewing spaces: an art fair booth is a threesided, ceiling-less variant bathetically infected with noise and visual interference; even when an online viewing room is constituted of one ‘wall’, it is inevitably white. If the white cube has never been truly ‘neutral’ – as O’Doherty describes it, it is intentionally coercive – then it is also not, or is no longer, a space in which

the infrastructure and imbalances of the artworld conveniently fade out. Often, when I’m able to set foot in a gallery these days, clean white space feels like the ground to runaway commerce’s ritzy, phantasmic figure. Against a pristine void, just about any artwork will be more likely to look worth buying – and, ok, worth looking at – than against the paint-smeared backdrops of an artist’s studio. This is also a reminder of the artworld’s structural conservatism, its silent safeness. To borrow the argot of internet critics, the white cube is a ‘locked-in’ format that almost every gallerist adheres to and validates, and if they don’t like it, they can’t change anything without looking frivolous. Occasionally the artist calls for a different wall colour (and the press release apportions blame); sometimes the space is blacked-out for video, but then it’s time to make the shop look like a shop again. If the still-applicable lesson of Minimalism is that the art experience is the artwork plus where it’s presented, then white space is, thanks to shifting semiotics, now outwardly antiseptic, inwardly septic. You might call this reading hysterical and touchy; maybe so. People who don’t come from money and don’t earn a huge amount of it can end up having allergic reactions when considering what’s happened to the artworld lately, and while basic jealousy is likely involved, so is disappointment. Consciously or not, a bunch of people of my generation – edge-of-the-playground-dwellers who then discovered the shreds of a workable ‘indie’ or diy culture and thought this might still be a plausible space to inhabit – oriented ourselves towards contemporary art during the early 1990s because other options looked conservative, careerist or inaccessible to right-brained types. Later we discovered that the playground was still there and that the popular and/or rich kids wanted the edges too, coveting intellectual glamour and, well, edginess, plus recognising an inbuilt class system that was easy

facing page, top Courtesy Frieze Masters

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to leverage. When art merged with high-end lifestyle, they, or their parents, could buy said cultural credibility, mantle themselves with it: pay the art-school tuition fees, set up a space, land a gadabout gallery directorship, etc. Of course, money has always sloshed around the art scene – many canonical British modernists had cut-glass accents – but for a long time it wasn’t anything like the point. In 2003, the year of the first Frieze Art Fair, the Norwegian record label Rune Grammofon put out a compilation whose title sticks in my head: Money Will Ruin Everything. You couldn’t exactly call that phrase a prophecy – its sentiment is as old as the Bible – but the future-simple tense ghosts everything that follows. Relatedly, it’s hard to see a future in which white-walled gallery spaces, real or virtual, aren’t the norm, because they invest the art objects being made today with desirability, and the mercantile motive appears to control developments (or the lack of them) in the artworld. Not that this is entirely new: around a decade and a half before an Old Etonian named a London gallery after his book, O’Doherty wrote, ‘For many of us, the gallery space still gives off negative vibrations when we wander in. Esthetics are turned into a kind of social elitism – the gallery space is exclusive. Isolated in plots of space, what is on display looks a bit like valuable scarce goods, jewelry, or silver: esthetics are turned into commerce – the gallery space is expensive.’ He’d go on, however, to argue that the gallery space finally subsumed commerce (hence the necessity for a lengthy unpacking of its machinations). Nowadays, arguably, the opposite is true. The white cube will fade out when or if art itself changes enough to demand it, and meanwhile one may glimpse a silver lining in its persistence: in advertising complicity in today’s messed-up, herd-mentality market, every fresh coat of white paint is a subtle act of autocritique. Martin Herbert

facing page, bottom Kingsman: The Golden Circle (still), 2017, dir Matthew Vaughn. Courtesy 20th Century Fox

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What’s the point of art criticism? Some pointers from John Berger and Arundhati Roy

The award-winning art critic and novelist John Berger once said: ‘If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen. For me, a storyteller is like a passeur who gets contraband across a frontier.’ He’d present you with one thing in order to talk about something else entirely. In Berger’s celebrated tv series Ways of Seeing (1972) he opens up by talking about painting in order to talk about photography in order to then say that paintings in general are not what we think they are (having previously suggested that we shouldn’t necessarily trust him in the first place). The aim, he states, is to help us better understand the situation in which we are living. Which, in a way, is how magazines like this one write about art even now (although we insist that you trust us). We pose as an art magazine, as a vehicle for the learned study and criticism of artworks, in order to write about politics, or sociology, or economics, without the danger or burden of anyone thinking that we are posing as experts in those fields. And therefore, we hope, cutting us a bit of slack if we’re indirect or imprecise, or talking in similes and metaphors rather than directly addressing the subject at hand. And, generally, artworks oblige in facilitating this. That’s partly, of course, as a result of the artworks we choose to write about and partly because artists are doing exactly the same thing. Playing at being smugglers, passeurs. (Or at their best, of course, doing it for real.)

Particularly in times when everyone in the field of culture wants to pass themselves off as an ‘activist’ of some sort, however removed from the ‘action’ they may actually be. Here at ArtReview, we frame this way of writing as a ‘legacy’, because Berger was a contributor to Art News and Review (as ArtReview was originally titled) during the first decades of its existence. And occasionally we republish one of his reviews to remind readers of our fine tradition. But I’m not sure we practise it as consciously as that would suggest. I’m not always sure that we are so clear about what we are trying to do. It (the framing and reminding) is a less noble form of smuggling. A step back into safe embrace of tradition and stability when we’re confronted with the instability of an ostensibly contingent present. Back in 2016, when Berger agreed to republish an article written during the 1950s (for the New Statesman rather than ArtReview) about ‘the disastrous relations between art and property’ on the grounds that not a lot had changed since he first wrote it, ArtReview’s editors were split as to whether this was an act of solidarity or implicit critique of our complicity in the status quo. But Berger, who died in 2017, didn’t spring to mind because of a connection with legacies or stalemates. Rather because he is evoked, albeit in passing, in Arundhati Roy’s latest

collection of lectures and newspaper articles, Azadi (2020). The book’s title derives from the Urdu word for ‘freedom’, which is chanted by those opposing the Indian rule of Kashmir and the ever-widening range of atrocities that come with it. And yet, it is something of a misnomer: the collection itself is largely about a lack of freedom. Most notably that resulting from the ‘unforgivable’ repression of the population in Kashmir (in a text, included here, that was originally published in The New York Times in 2017, Roy lists 70,000 dead, thousands ‘disappeared’ and tens of thousands tortured) and the blind eye many Indians turn to it. It’s about those whose freedom is denied, if you like, and those who choose willingly to set it aside. (This last conforming to what the writer W.G. Sebald – a 2018 lecture included in Azadi was delivered as part of a series at London’s British Library established in the German’s memory – described as ‘people’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes’.) And more generally about the plight of a country that not so long ago (1947) won independence from colonial rule, only to end up being governed by what Roy describes as a self-imposed combination of ‘feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism’. In the face of all this, the essays included in this collection come out, broadly, against homogenisation and fixity, and for multiplicity and

Arundhati Roy. Courtesy Flickr; Creative Commons

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fluidity. And, in a way, Berger’s evocation of the passeur is in itself an appeal for a similar type of freedom: freedom from tradition, received wisdom, narrow visions and, one presumes, the tyranny of a single language. Berger pops up in the fourth of the nine works included in Azadi, titled ‘The Language of Literature’ (originally presented by Roy as a lecture, given in New York in May 2019). While it covers a range of topics, at its heart is a discussion about the limits of art. Or, more accurately, the limits to our perception and definition of art. Roy is discussing reactions to the fact that she spent the two decades between her first and second novels (the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, published in 1997, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, 2017) writing nonfiction and championing a variety of social issues. On the one hand people didn’t know quite where to place her, given her apparent abandonment of a field in which she had had such dazzling initial success and being suspicious about whether or not she might have leveraged that success to jumpstart another career entirely. (Such people, at least those who wanted to redeem her two writing practices into some sort of potentially seamless whole, Roy recounts, eventually settled on the term ‘writer-activist’ to describe her, a term that highlights only seams and limits to the scope

of both writing and activism.) On the other hand, her writing was subject to various learned opinions about the one form being superior to the other: fiction permanent, nonfiction ephemeral; nonfiction real, fiction fake; fiction nonpolitical, nonfiction political. For what it’s worth, I came to her fiction through her nonfiction. But for Roy that’s not worth much. ‘Fact and fiction are not converse,’ she states as a rebuttal to the superiorists. ‘One is not necessarily truer than the other, more factual than the other, or more real than the other.’ The important thing is to have a story worth telling. At this point Roy recalls ‘the first message I received from John Berger’ (yes, ‘the first’ – it’s reassuring to note that one of our greatest living writers is not above a little boosterism of the legacy variety too): a handwritten note stating, ‘Your fiction and non-fiction – they walk you round the world like your two legs.’ We live in an age, needless to say, in which politicians are the prime peddlers of fiction, and facts are the preserve of ordinary people struggling to live on the ground or people the more repressive types of government will prosecute and imprison (Roy herself has in the past been charged with sedition). The struggle, Roy suggests, is in figuring out ‘how to be a writer during these times’. For Roy, great literature is literature that’s needed (and the point here is that the same is

true of art), built, as Roy puts it, through a compact between ‘writers and readers’. An echo, perhaps, of Berger’s statement about a storyteller being someone who listens. Who smuggles out the stories of others who can’t be heard or whom no one wants to hear. Who creates great art to relate the story of ordinary life. That too is the lesson of Azadi: fiction has its uses – for smuggling messages that can’t be said directly (for Roy, ‘Particularly about Kashmir, where only fiction can be true because the truth cannot be told’); but, when we can say things straight up, we should have the courage to do that too. ‘If the function of the public critic is to relate works of art to ordinary life,’ Berger wrote in an article originally published in what would become ArtReview, ‘it follows that either the works themselves are remote from that life as it is normally understood, or that the public are so confused by art that they cannot see the connections which do exist.’ The article envisioned a future in which the public would have no need for specialist art critics at all, because the public wouldn’t need them to be intermediaries between audiences and works of art. Which, as a critic, once you get over the natural fears about redundancy, would represent a kind of freedom too. To embrace being a nimble jack of all trades without posing as or worrying about being the master of one. Mark Rappolt

John Berger in Ways of Seeing, 1972

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Quadriennale d’Arte 2020: fuori Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome 30 October – 5 April When I arrived in Rome to visit the Quadriennale, Termini train station welcomed me dressed up in green, white and red lights. The same colours, the colours of the Italian flag, were projected on the facades of all the main politically symbolic places in Rome. The concept of homeland and the spirit of national pride seem to be in a state of robust health, reborn with the pandemic crisis; which, given the most obvious effects of that crisis, engendered a feeling of mistrust that stayed with me for the entire trip. Maybe that’s why the Norma Jeane light installation Corpo di fabbrica (2020), pulsating within the triumphal arched entrance of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, was so impressive. At night the white light pulses to the rhythm of the artist’s breath: a life signal from somewhere else, generating a spatial and temporal disorientation. It articulates a clear desire on the part of fuori (which means out) to solve the distinction between inside and outside the institution, and to position itself beyond the representation of power and the normative narrative of tradition. And this makes me realise that this facade also sounds like a programmatic declaration, although with different results. One naturally has to wonder how an institution like the Quadriennale, which has its roots in the history of Italy’s fascist regime (it was conceived in 1927 to exalt Italian art as a symbol of Italian supremacy), can repair its past and reframe its primary purpose. With this in mind, curators Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Sarah Cosulich set out to curate the exhibition much as you would care for a baby born out of violence (borrowing the metaphor from the plot of the 1974 novel La Storia, by Elsa Morante, in

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which a mother lovingly raises a child born from a rape committed by a German soldier). ‘Only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments,’ says Walter Benjamin, and I think that sums up the purpose of the exhibition. That’s the desire that poignantly emerges from architect Alessandro Bava’s critical reinterpretation of the Quadriennale’s interiors, which transforms the spaces into an ephemeral stage, made of unfinished plasterboard, emptying the violent magnificence of the space, punctuated by the regal yellow marble columns and half pilasters. The end result is that you feel that the space can breathe again, no more so than when you encounter Cloti Ricciardi’s Respiro (1968), a room covered in a white fabric that can be moved by visitors, creating the illusion that the room is alive while also suggesting a stinging critique of the conventional white cube. The criticism becomes disruptive in Berlin-based Tomaso De Luca’s site-specific Die Schlüssel des Schlosses (2020), an installation that destroys the walls and the ceiling of its space, but returns to subtlety in Lorenza Longhi’s intervention: a paper ceiling that effectively curls up the space and filters the natural light above it. More ironic is the effect of Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano’s giant flowers, 7 aprile 2020 (2020; the title reflects the date they were supposed to be married, an event postponed due to covid-19), which hang on a staircase originally intended as a stage for fascist propaganda, and play with the colossal formats that characterise fascist rhetoric and its representations of power. And truly elegant is the choice to show, in a gallery traditionally designated for sculpture,

a dialogue between Irma Blank’s Bleu Carnac (1992) – a series of 38 canvases that fuse something of the vertical sacrality of a megalith and the horizontal legibility of a book – and Micol Assaël’s Stone Broken Circuit (2016) – an open electrical circuit mapped out on the floor in Bakelite, a nonconductive plastic used in the fabrication of early electronic devices, with small white marble cubes dispersed throughout as if to symbolise a certain unpredictability. In a space that is, thanks to Bava’s intervention, bent, oblique and unstable, a space that criticises the authority of tradition, the bodies that inhabit it best are those that deform themselves to give life, such as Lisetta Carmi’s Il parto (1968), a series of eight images documenting a birth. Or those that so deeply interact with their environment that they become part of it, as in Simone Forti’s video Zuma News (2014), in which she visits a beach and interacts with water, sand and newspapers, demonstrating the paper’s capacity to absorb water and sand’s capacity to become part of the sea. Also present are Michele Rizzo’s sculptures, in a trance from having danced all night, and the bodies, filled with homoerotic desire, that invade Sylvano Bussotti’s drawings and collages. The curatorial narrative is precise and persistent from room to room, leading to an internal balcony where, in the full light that falls through a skylight, Salvo’s candied glimpses of hallucinated cities made of geometrical forms in incandescent colours and lights are the postcard I take away from the exhibition: an act of love for a mutant world in transition and containing many shades – an unexpected trip, much like visiting fuori itself. Mariacarla Molè

ArtReview

16/02/2021 16:12

facing page Simone Forti, Zuma News (still), 2014, video, 12 min 37 sec. Courtesy the artist; The Box, Los Angeles; and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan

top Quadriennale d’Arte 2020: fuori (installation view with works by Micol Assaël, foreground, and Irma Blank, on the wall). Photo: dsl Studio. Courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma

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above Quadriennale d’Arte 2020: fuori (installation view with works by Michele Rizzo). Photo: dsl Studio. Courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma

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Aby Warburg Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – The Original Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 4 September – 1 November Your first impression on encountering this reconstruction of German art-historian Aby Warburg’s most celebrated work is that it looks like a primitive, pinboard version of a Google image search. Or the evidence board in some 1970s crime movie. Yet to many, Warburg’s Bilderatlas (picture atlas), begun in the final years of his life and incomplete at his death, in 1929, represents the origins of modern (Western) art history, when disciplines such as iconography, sociology, ethnography and psychology were introduced into a history of Western art that had until then been dominated by aesthetics alone; to others it presages contemporary image-culture; while to others still it really is symptomatic of Warburg’s ‘crimes’. For Warburg himself it was part of ‘a laboratory of the study of civilization’. As long as you accept, according to a map that opens the presentation, that civilisation is the property of a geography that stretches from Bagdad to Coruña and from Hamburg to Aswan. Prepared according to Warburg’s instructions, it’s titled ‘The Road Map to Cultural Exchange Routes’. The Bilderatlas comprises a series of 63 panels with black-felt backgrounds that collectively feature 971 images comprising photographic reproductions of artworks stretching from Antiquity to the Renaissance, mixed in with newspaper cuttings and advertisements, stamps, images of coins and astrological charts. Warburg had begun the project of assembling his visual archive in 1924, tracking its references, evolutions and recombinations using a card index as he moved his vast undertaking towards a planned book form. A version of the project, of which this exhibition (also available for online study at https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/virtualtour-aby-warburg-bilderatlas-mnemosyneexhibition-haus-der-kulturen-der-welt) is a meticulous reconstruction, was exhibited in 1929, not long before Warburg, an independent scholar and scion of a wealthy banking family, died. The planned three-volume book unrealised. The panels are arranged so as to suggest connections and leaps across time and space, and to argue for the fundamental importance of the visual within more general studies of culture. Panel 72, for example, features representations of drawings and paintings (largely Christian or Classical) featuring dining, plotting and other more or less sinister forms of conviviality alongside photographs of contemporary religious ceremonies and student dinners. Panel 77 features history paintings by Eugène Delacroix, representations of various nineteenth-century monarchs surrounded by iconography of the

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sea (Queen Victoria in her shell carriage), a series of stamps from France featuring Liberty sowing the seeds of freedom at sunrise, a pre-Christian coin from Syracuse and a photograph of a German golf champion caught mid-swing. Through the course of this exhibition, as the panels flip between an at times seemingly rational and at other times purely empathetic logic, you’re not sure whether Warburg’s great project is saying that something changed as civilisations travelled through time and space or that nothing really changed – that culture is no more than the product of a fixed but mutating iconography: appropriation followed by reappropriation; a series of eternal returns (Warburg was influenced by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche). It’s the kind of exercise that was still in place if, like me, you studied art history (at an institution in London associated with the one that bears Warburg’s name) during the 1990s, and informs the work of artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Gerhard Richter (whose own Atlas collects together photographs, sketches and newspaper cuttings that the artist has collected since the 1960s), and is more currently linked by some critics to the work of Hito Steyerl and even the montage techniques of American artist Arthur Jafa. A series of panels (39 and 41) highlighting facial expressions and body gestures suggest that Warburg might have had more than a passing interest in emojis too. You can see more sinister parallels in Trevor Paglen’s recent explorations of how ai networks are taught to ‘see’, or in Liu Chuang’s exploration of the evolving iconography of power and resistance in the three-channel video Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018). But Warburg wasn’t interested in China, and looked to the past more than the future. He looked to visual imagery as holding the unconscious memory of civilisation’s uncivilised pagan past (hence the reference to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, in the Atlas’s full title), a world in which there were humans and nature, and the one interacted with the other. One of the three introductory panels setting out the methodology of the project features a fifteenth-century diagram of the body as it is affected by the animal signs of the zodiac, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1487) and a sixteenth-century division of the hand according to the planets, each suggesting intriguing, yet unexplored, relations with Tantric art and Ayurvedic medicinal illustrations. Warburg wasn’t interested in that either.

He was interested in the Native American Hopi people whom he visited following his marriage in 1895, documenting their serpent dances before going on in subsequent lectures to suggest that they had connections to religious thinking in ancient Athens. Because civilisation, as we know, is European, transmitted from the lands of the Bible. By contemporary standards his map looks small and selective, tracing a story that goes from Antiquity to JudeoChristian tradition with the Renaissance as the melting pot of the two. But back in the 1920s there were no satellites, no cheap air travels, no TikTok, and maps were full of willed and unwilled blank spots. Warburg’s photographs of the Hopi rituals are not part of the Bilderatlas (their posthumous publication, to illustrate Warburg’s lectures, has led to conflict with the Hopi, who are demanding the restitution of their cultural artefacts and whose traditions do not allow information about their rituals to be passed to the uninitiated), but, alongside what may today be seen as various instances of cultural appropriation, an interest in the serpentine runs through the atlas. The panels are arranged in curves as if to suggest some sort of ouroboros, and Warburg himself, like the eighteenth-century German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing before him, was, on the evidence of the panels here, fixated on the image of Laocoön, a mythical Trojan priest who, along with his two sons, was devoured by serpents sent to execute him by the gods. For Lessing, ancient sculptures of Laocoön provided an excuse to meditate on the limits of visual art and poetry, and Warburg is doing something of the same. The 59-page brochure of captions that accompanies this exhibition, simple descriptions that range from ‘boat with musician’ to ‘Gaudenzio Ferrari, Christ Before Pilate, 1953’, seems expressly designed to emphasise the fact that words are never enough. In a present in which everyone complains about the overwhelming saturation of image culture, and moans about having to navigate a world full of half-truths, alternative truths and plain untruths, the Bilderatlas, despite its idiosyncrasies, its evident flaws and blindspots, remains an intriguing example of one man’s attempt to create some sort of coherent worldview at a time when the world, interwar and on the point of economic collapse, seemed disparate and fractured. Which can be both a dangerous and a liberating thing. The true world, after all, is often rather less coherent and far less obedient than we would like it to be. Mark Rappolt

ArtReview

12/02/2021 10:33

Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, panel 77 (recovered). Photo: Wootton/fluid. Courtesy The Warburg Institute, London

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Oppressed by Brazil’s culture wars, São Paulo’s museums finally bite back

The leaders of Brazil’s state-funded arts institutions have found themselves in a bind ever since the start of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right presidency, in 2019. Until the pandemic and Amazon fires took over the political agenda, art provided an easy target for the president and his supporters as they whipped up politically expedient culture wars, either highlighting its cost to the public purse or presenting work involving nudity as offensive to Christian morality. In one respect it has been an unfair battle, with the directors and curators of the institutions under attack, individuals who might normally be among the first to defend the importance of art as a zone of free thinking and free speech, unable to mount a defence or make public comment for fear of losing their jobs. They have received criticism in the past for this perceived cowardice, and yet, while their own voices may be silenced, both of São Paulo’s leading museums have now responded robustly, through their programming, in defence of culture in general, and of the marginalised communities that have come under the cosh of Bolsonaro and his cronies in particular.

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (masp), under the directorship of Adriano Pedrosa, has introduced annual themes, from Histories of Sexuality in 2017 to Histories of Women and Feminism in 2019 (the Portuguese word histórias is more open-ended than its direct English translation: closer to the English ‘stories’, the titles suggesting alternative, nonmonolithic narratives of art history). In the runup to the next presidential election, in 2022, the museum’s survey and solo exhibitions will continue to address an expansive retelling of the country’s art history under the banner Histories of Brazil, which will be followed by Indigenous Histories and Histories of Ecology. masp might not say so in its official literature, but the long-term programme is a clear rebuke to the conservative forces currently wreaking havoc in Brasilia. Until recently, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, in the city’s poorer downtown neighbourhood, had not offered anything nearly as radical. Yet, with a rehang of the collection (Pinacoteca concentrates on Brazilian art, whereas masp has the largest holdings of European art in South America), director Jochen Volz has now also spoken. The

small percentage of the museum’s collection previously on show was hung traditionally and chronologically. With this revamp, the German curator has brought a lot more work out of storage and introduced thematised galleries that tackle social and political issues as much as art-historical narratives. The opening room (of 19) sets the uncompromising tone with a plethora of works made as Brazil headed into the darkest days of the country’s dictatorship (1964–85), an era of which the current president has spoken fondly. The screaming faces, captured mid-protest, in Claudio Tozzi’s Pop acrylic painting Revolta (1968) find emotional resonance in the wide-mouthed, gurning agony of the semiabstract figure, seated at a dinner table, that is the subject of Anna Maria Maiolino’s Glu…Glu…Glu..., painted in 1967 and hung close by. Under the table, where one might expect the woman’s legs, Maiolino has depicted a toilet; the digestive process on show analogous to the shitty politics flowing through society both at the time the work was realised and today. A neofigurative painted assemblage by Tomoshige Kusuno, A Porta (made in 1965, five

A gallery dedicated to self-portraiture in the Pinacoteca’s rehung collection.Photo: Levi Fanan. Courtesy Pinacoteca de São Paulo

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17/02/2021 11:54

top A gallery examining the body in the Pinacoteca’s rehung collection.Photo: Levi Fanan. Courtesy Pinacoteca de São Paulo

above Amelia Toledo, Mina, 2009, steel plates, screws and fuchsite stone, 83 × 40 cm. Courtesy Pinacoteca de São Paulo

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years after the artist joined the second-generation wave of emigration to Brazil from Japan), features the hellish scene of plaster hands clawing through a wooden door attached to a wood mount. It is complemented by another wall assemblage, Acontecimento (1965), by Nelson Leirner (who died last March), in which a taxidermied rat appears to be setting off across the first of a grid of traps, as yet unscathed. Two works from Antonio Manuel’s series Repressão outra vez – eis o saldo (1968), in which the viewer originally lifted a cover (no touching allowed now) to reveal the screen-printed frontpage of a newspaper reporting incidents of state violence, are more direct in their commentary. In the current climate, the curatorial arrangement can’t help but come across as a ‘ghost of Marley’ warning of where things might end up if the country continues along the path Bolsonaro seems set upon. Further rooms are dedicated to landscape and nature, or works concerning female identity, or indigenous life (as well as a few taking on straightforwardly formal issues). Landscape is introduced in a wall text not as a genre, but as a term for work that might ‘approach a place without dominating it’: Antonio Parreiras’s sublime Ventania (The Gale, 1888), painted in the European style of the nineteenth century, portrays in oils a crouched figure beneath big brooding clouds, the curvature of the figure’s back matching that of trees bowed in the evident wind. In contrast is A Matança da Vaca no Sítio (1959), an arte popular painting by José Antônio da Silva, in which man is the destructive force: using levers and pulleys, a pair of farmers haul a slaughtered cow, its throat gushing blood, up into a tree by its hindlegs. Nature is presented as no more than a resource; the violent act perhaps a reminder of the damage intensive farming has left on the Brazilian landscape. In the background, through a rather thin row of trees, a row of houses stands in place of the cleared forest. Both Tarsila do Amaral’s Palmeiras (1925) and Eleonore Koch’s neighbouring painting Deserto do Arizona ii (1995) also show signs of human habitation in a landscape, though this time without any actual figures being present. In the older work, a cluster of

houses sit under the titular tree, and in the more recent, just a single abode is depicted among the sand dunes, but both possess an eery emptiness, as if these places have been cleared and abandoned, by both humans and nature alike. There’s no doubt that these arrangements are polemical in intent, and there are those who will bemoan the use of works as mere plot devices in a political narrative predetermined by Volz and his curators rather than entirely by the artists themselves. Yet, to its credit, as much as the institution sits in judgment of the societal violence and discrimination that marks Brazil’s history, it doesn’t hide itself from the critical gaze. Indeed, it is where the Pinacoteca faces up to its own historic complicity that this rehang is at its most powerful. On the same wall, in a gallery titled Violence and Resistance, a late-nineteenth-century painting of a dark-skinned woman by Antonio Ferrigno is paired with a 1981 photograph of a Yanomami woman by Claudia Andujar. In both figures there is a sense of fatigue. In the earlier work, Mulata Quitandeira (1893; the title suggests that she is a grocer), the woman sits on the dirt floor before the entrance to a hut, the produce she is selling on a blanket merging into the shadows behind. Andujar’s photograph is part of a series titled A vulnerabilidade do ser (The Vulnerability of Being) and comes out of her ongoing fight for justice for the indigenous populations of the Amazon. Both subjects confront the imposing Dom Pedro ii (1825–91), the last monarch of the Empire of Brazil, in a stately portrait in oils by Frenchman Raymond Monvoisin that hangs directly opposite. Next to him is an eighteenth-century religious painting of the Virgin. Coloniser and church face off against those they oppressed. The juxtaposition is startling, not least on learning that Ferrigno, who moved to Brazil from Italy in 1893, specialised in depicting workers on coffee plantations, commissioned in the main by the plantation owners: people and property mixed. Similarly pointed recontextualisations abound: one of Pinacoteca’s most iconic works, Candido Portinari’s Mestiço (1934), is a portrait of a handsome shirtless man, the title suggesting that one of the subject’s parents was indigenous,

facing page, top Jonathas de Andrade, Museum of the Northeast Man (detail), 2013. Courtesy Pinacoteca de São Paulo

facing page, bottom Regina Vater, Mutant Woman, 1968, enamel on mdf, rails, castors, 127 × 230 × 29 cm. Courtesy Pinacoteca de São Paulo

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the other European. Agricultural land spreads out into the background. Portinari painted the work as a neorealist homage to the worker, but hanging in the same room are photographic projects by Jonathas de Andrade (Museum of the Northeast Man, 2013) and Paulo Nazareth (2010, from the series To Cover the Sun from Your Eyes), which highlight the fetishisation of the dark-skinned body inherent in the historic painting. It’s a complex curatorial commentary, not without a dash of irony, that questions myriad intersectional privileges. The neighbouring gallery is devoted to self-portraiture, and it is here that one of the most confrontational moments of the whole rehang occurs. In a salon arrangement of over two dozen paintings, mostly from the nineteenth century, the faces that stare out are all white and often rich-looking, bar, in the middle, Sidney Amaral’s 2016 self-portrait, Imolação (Immolation), in which the artist, who is black, holds a gun to his chin as if in the act of suicide. Amaral’s work dealt with the racism inherent in Brazilian society (with depressing relevance elsewhere). He died in 2017, aged forty-four, of pancreatic cancer, just as he was gaining acceptance in the Brazilian artworld, and the decision to place this painting, with its shocking subject, surrounded by white European faces is a formidable declaration of intent that acknowledges that art by Black artists represents a minority of the museum’s holdings, even as it suggests that this kind of work will no longer be ignored. In a country in which violence against certain sectors of society – Afro-Brazilians, indigenous people, women – and against the natural world is all too common, sanctioned by the highest office in the land, this rehang marks an attempt to give voice to those people, at a time when they are at risk of being silenced in society at large. Yet it also highlights the fact that art and its institutions (themselves now under attack) have long been used, both consciously and unconsciously, as a weapon against the groups it is now foregrounding, denying them visibility, creating stereotypes and confirming and reconfirming their lowly status in society at large. A problem acknowledged that remains a problem to resolve. Oliver Basciano

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Books The Things We’ve Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead ‘Reality is eminently disordered. We never perceive things in their correct order, which means that when we’re talking or writing, we don’t keep to the correct temporal sequence either.’ This uncontroversial statement, buried towards the back of a 484-page novel, lies at the heart of Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo’s project in The Things We’ve Seen. Fernández Mallo, the de facto leading light of an avant-garde literary movement known in Spain as the Nocilla Generation (so-called for the author’s own Nocilla Trilogy, 2015–19), writes here in a manner that variously recalls, references, evokes and invokes the writings, aesthetics and thinking of W.G. Sebald, Carl Hiaasen, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Georges Perec, Octavio Paz, Ben Lerner, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jorge Luis Borges, Edward Hopper, Giorgio De Chirico and many others, and yet that remains entirely his own in its final assembly and presentation. ‘Life’, the statement continues, ‘is an nth degree plane crash, life is a great catastrophe, the definitive accident, and our attempts to recount it are shot through with that very same disorderedness.’ Disorder asserts itself from the start, when the story’s unnamed narrator, a writer, decides not to return home following his participation in a conference on the topic of ‘Net-Thinking’, held on an otherwise unoccupied island off the coast

Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99 (softcover)

of northern Spain, in 2014. Alone, cut off from the world, he delves into the island’s history as the site of a prison camp during the Spanish Civil War via documents he discovers on a fleet of vintage pcs. Stories within the stories: a prisoner’s testimony of friendship with a guard; the privations suffered by older inmates; the solace of contraband poems by Federico García Lorca; a baker who makes pregnant-dog-shaped biscuits with breast milk; an unidentified droning noise that sounds like pure love; and a text message on the narrator’s out-of-coverage mobile phone that reads, ‘It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given’. (This last, we are told, is a line from the Galician poet Carlos Oroza.) Careering towards what looks like the narrator’s nervous breakdown, Part I ends with his admission that he has no memory of the year that follows. Then the story – the stories – really pick up, expand, circle: we’re in New York now, it’s 2015, and the narrator is at a loss as to how he got there. He attends a screening of art films in Red Hook and meets a woman named Skyler, who is in possession of images from the prison camp in Galicia, which leads in turn to a baker on the Lower East Side known for his pregnantdog-shaped cookies. While watching the eternal churn of rubbish in the East River,

he is approached by a man presenting himself as Salvador Dalí, who tells a story about leporine starvation – death by pure protein, rabbits in this case. We learn about an exchange of energy called the Compton Effect, the endlessly burning fires of Africa, New York’s falcon population, the way that aimless wandering eventually resolves into a figure eight, a friendship with a Uruguayan named Rodolfo, who dies suddenly, and who becomes the pretext for a trip to South America. Dreamlike narration and associations build in intensity, fed by echoes of earlier conversations and details, an increasingly manic and disordered delivery, another nervous breakdown. The universe will not expand forever. And yet we are less than halfway through The Things We’ve Seen, with Book II, narrated by the delusional – or is he? – Kurt Montana, the putative fourth astronaut on Apollo 11, and Book iii, which takes the point of view of the first narrator’s abandoned girlfriend, who is on a pilgrimage of sorts to Normandy, where the twin pressures of Syrian refugee migrations and the Brexit referendum are coming to a head… At the end of it all, I am left in an uncanny, dreamlike, sympathetic state where the membrane between art and life feels thin indeed. David Terrien

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara Chatto & Windus, £14.99 (hardcover) In an unnamed city in India, a child disappears. Local police are called, but they don’t care. The child is from a basti, a shantytown on the outskirts of the city towered over by marblefloored ‘Hi-fi’ condos where people who do matter live. Nine-year-old protagonist Jai takes inspiration from his favourite reality-tv programme, Police Patrol, and from fictional sleuth Byomkesh Bakshi, forming a ‘detectiving team’ and recruiting his friends Pari and Faiz to find their missing neighbour. While they hunt for clues, more children vanish. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is Deepa Anappara’s debut novel, informed by 11 years of reportage focused on the effects of poverty and religious violence on children’s education. Having spent much of that time interviewing

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children from marginalised communities, Anappara contextualises the story as a national issue, where children drop out of school because they have to earn money to eat, or because they are displaced by religious persecution, and where it’s estimated that a child goes missing every eight minutes, thought to be trafficked for slave labour, prostitution or the organ trade. Writing from Jai’s perspective, Anappara turns statistics churned out by the media into a voice, so that, as she says in her foreword, ‘we are reminded of the faces behind the numbers’. Jai, Pari and Faiz seek to uncover the truth about the disappearances, wandering the nearby bazaar, questioning ‘suspects’ and gathering information from the families of the vanished. But they are also just children: Jai watches tv

and plays cricket in dusty alleyways; Pari dreams of getting a scholarship so that she can become a doctor; Faiz works at a café to help his parents make ends meet. Reality collides with fiction: children whose more innocent fears focus on the spectres of the novel’s title are also confronted with the grinding hardship of India’s poorest societies, where girls are expected to grow up and become wives and mothers, and Muslims are ostracised. The language, playful and light in its child’s point of view, is held in constant tension: as the young detectives come to terms with grief and bereavement, darker political and social forces, like the ever-present smog that makes ‘shadows sprawl’ and looks ‘like the devil’s own breath’, threaten to engulf their lives. Fi Churchman

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17/02/2021 15:01

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rein gold by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Gitta Honegger Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) Elfriede Jelinek’s rein gold originated in 2012, first as an essay for the programme booklet accompanying a staging in Munich of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (1876), then as a book in 2013. The following year, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian author’s text was turned into an actual opera at the Berlin State Opera, and now, finally, it appears in English translation. The true starting point is more elusive, though. Jelinek redeploys two of Wagner’s characters and moral antonyms, the god Wotan and his Valkyrie daughter, Brünnhilde, who respectively steal and return the ring around which the cycle’s libretto revolves. While giving them new things to say, Jelinek sets her narrative broadly within the timeframe of the first opera of the quartet, Das Rheingold (her title puns sardonically on ‘gold’ being rein, or pure, rather than dredged from the Rhine), which was first performed in 1869. But the Ring Cycle itself, an enduring metaphor for the ruinations of greed, is somewhat unhitched from time, being based on Norse sagas and a thirteenth-century epic German poem and influencing J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954–55) and, in turn, Harry Potter – as we’re reminded when Jelinek’s Brünnhilde at one point mentions J.K. Rowling’s ‘house elf’ Dobby – and here it’s updated to the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, another highpoint for mankind’s disastrous taste for avarice.

At the start of Das Rheingold, you may recall, Wotan has hired two giants to build him a vast house and then ducked out of paying them. The consequences of this drive the action, and, in Jelinek’s recast, result in Brünnhilde spending the first fifth of the book berating her patriarch – via a massive, unparagraphed tirade – as a victim and exemplar of runaway capitalism, tempted to purchase what he can’t really afford. Naturally for a character voiced by Jelinek, whose work has routinely critiqued power relations, Austrian fascism and racism, and capitalism, Brünnhilde has evidently read Marx and Engels. Consequently this Brünnhilde is versed in exchange value, ‘the woman as commodity form’, class consciousness and property-as-theft (like, say, an unpaid-for mansion). How do you make economics operatic? Via fractious arias like this one, part of what stands as a larger unpacking of the contemporary uses of nineteenth-century culture and theory. Wotan, when it’s his turn, launches into an extended, depressive ‘that’s how it is’. Because the capitalist creates the labour, he ‘takes everything that comes out at the bottom. He takes the whole shitload’. (Such phrasing being typical of a book that makes room for ‘the pussy fart, the cum guzzler, the clit mouse, the thundercunt’, etc.) Then it’s Brünnhilde’s turn again, and so on. The liveliness of Jelinek’s language (in Gitta Honegger’s translation, which deftly

renders all manner of wordplay) is undeniable; the cumulative effect, even though this is a short book, is exhausting. Outsized tracts of unadulterated viewpoint are a specialty in Austrian literature – see the novels of Thomas Bernhard – and here we get a back-and-forth of thundering streams of consciousness detached from much other structure. Aside, that is, from the narrative backdrop of the Ring itself – without some working knowledge of which, needless to say, this book would be even harder to parse. Wagner’s epic ends with Wotan and Valhalla burning. Here, sometime prior to that, Wotan signs off with a long, uneasy discourse on the future or otherwise of German manufacturing and the country as a whole, maybe nodding to Nietzsche’s reading, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), of the Ring as foretelling a national reawakening; and predicts an ambiguous revolution in which, after the ring is returned, the father figure – a haunting spectre of capital, ‘a has-been once and for all’ – will nevertheless continue to be worshipped. Somehow, also, the Pink Panther is involved. After a certain point, for all the spectacle of seeing Wagner – notoriously beloved by Hitler and long associated with German nationalism – reclaimed for the left, you may find yourself impatiently waiting for it to end. In that sense, whether intentionally or no, rein gold is highly evocative of the endless onward stagger of late capitalism. Martin Herbert

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson Viking, £12.99 (hardcover) Caleb Azumah Nelson is a writer and photographer. Open Water, his first novel, is a tale about seeing and being seen. It takes the form of a love story, set in South London, involving a young male photographer (the narrator) and a young female dancer. Two people; two Black bodies. The one accustomed to observing other bodies; the other to expressing themselves through their body. The perfect union. Or so you’d think. ‘I know I’m a photographer, but if someone else says I’m that, it changes things, because what they think of me isn’t what I think about me,’ says the main protagonist when the couple first meet. From the beginning, then, he admits to an antagonism between how he sees himself and how other people see him. What follows is a (mostly) gentle unravelling of the conditions

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(generally the product of power structures) that have combined to create this fugitive identity. You are not your body, but your body is you to most other people. Particularly if your body is Black. Love, of course, presents an opportunity to, if not quite reconcile, then feel more comfortable with the gap between the two. While this short novel, which nevertheless covers everything from takeaway choices to contemporary art and inspirational academic screeds, is told from a first-person perspective, the narrator is most often the object, rather than the subject of the tale, referring to himself as both ‘you’ and ‘I’. ‘I’ in direct speech, or in intimate moments (when the narrator dances: ‘I make a little world for myself, and I live’); but most often ‘you’, when experiencing

everything from simply walking down a street to the randomness and brutality of police stop-and-search tactics. On the one hand, the ambiguity between the singular and collective ‘you’ reflects the way in which cities like London view Black identity. On the other, it encourages a peculiar solidarity between narrator and reader. It’s a kind of schizophrenia boiled down to a possessive pronoun – a fusion of form and content that Nelson deploys with a great deal of skill. And there’s no little irony in the fact that what lies at the heart of the problem for the narrator, this fugitive, unseen self, is precisely what provides space for the reader to jump in, to experience a little of what it might be like to be young, creative, male, British and Black. Mark Rappolt

ArtReview

15/02/2021 13:10

Yoo Youngkuk: Quintessence edited by Rosa Maria Falvo

In ancient times, the world was thought to be made up of four elements – earth, air, water and fire – that constituted all matter. Aristotle, however, posited the existence of a fifth element: a sublime and perfect substance considered as the embodiment of pure form. The notion of a quinta essentia (fifth element) persisted through the centuries, giving rise to the modern term ‘quintessence’ as a shorthand for the indelible and intrinsic spirit within all things. A new monograph on Korean abstract painter Yoo Youngkuk (1916–2002) asserts this keyword as a framework for contemplating the artist’s keen aesthetic sensibility, granting long-awaited international recognition to an early adopter of modernism and influential figure in postwar Korean art. Boasting 213 colour plates that span the entirety of Yoo’s career as well as three new critical essays and a detailed chronology documenting his life and work, this hefty volume foregrounds Yoo’s pioneering vision of abstraction, his knack for distilling the spirit of the Korean landscape into fluid visual meditations and his visceral connection to the rugged terrain of his country. ‘The mountain is not in front of me but inside of me,’ reads a quote on the book’s back cover, a fitting aphorism for the oneness of subject and self manifested in Yoo’s extraordinary oeuvre. Born in the hinterlands of Uljin, South Korea, Yoo departed his homeland at the age

Rizzoli, $135 (hardcover)

of nineteen to attend art university in Tokyo, where he explored geometric abstraction in his painting practice and played an active role in Japan’s burgeoning avant-garde scene. Yoo returned to Korea in 1943, ceased his artistic activities and began operating a fishing boat owned by his father. After Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial occupation, in 1945, he briefly took up a teaching post at Seoul National University; however, with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Yoo again made his way back to Uljin and took over his family’s soju distillery as a way of making ends meet during the lean wartime years. It wasn’t until after the war that Yoo resumed painting in earnest, at which point the flat angular planes of colour that had characterised his early works gave way to organic forms and atmospheric spatial compositions, bespeaking a newfound engagement with the Korean landscape as his primary subject matter. In time, he settled on a restrained visual vocabulary of triangles and circles– motifs representing mountains and the sun – rendered in vibrant hues, which he arranged into harmonious amalgamations of colour and form. It was an aesthetic that would define Yoo’s practice for the rest of his career, never straying from the elemental abstraction that imbued his landscapes with a transcendental purity rarely matched in the realm of modern Korean art.

Quintessence furnishes readers with ample biographical context for Yoo’s oeuvre, thanks to the three interpretive essays. Gabriel Ritter (Head of Contemporary Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art) situates Yoo in the historical milieu of interwar Japan and the influence of his mentor Murai Masanari, before focusing on Yoo’s turn towards nature and the development of his signature style in the latter part of his career. While Ritter’s writing largely hews to the facts, Inhye Kim (curator, mmca Korea) offers a psychological analysis of the underlying motivations that informed Yoo’s personal evolution from childhood until old age, asserting his lifelong pursuit of ‘absolute freedom’ as a defining characteristic of his distinctive painting practice. A lengthy text by Bartomeu Marí (director, Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; former director, mmca Korea) postulates that Yoo’s unwavering artistic conviction arose in response to shifting cultural paradigms that he encountered in his lifetime – the chaos of forced modernity during the Japanese colonial period, dire poverty and destruction wreaked by the Korean War and ideological repression of authoritarian rule in Korea during the height of Yoo’s career – and awakened his belief in building a better world, with the constancy and resilience of his country’s vast mountain ranges as a beacon of stability amid the caprices of modern existence. Andy St. Louis

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn William Collins, £16.99 (hardcover) What happens when the wild reclaims the future? The early lockdowns of covid-19 were filled with strange dreams that ‘nature is healing’. Dolphins were sighted in the canals of Venice; a herd of elephants raided a stash of corn wine in Yunnan (these stories turned out to be false). But such surreality populates Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment: an atlas of the spaces over which we once ruled, now deserted. The ghost town of Plymouth, on the Caribbean island of Montserrat – totalled by volcanic eruptions during the 1990s – makes a spooky stage-set. Flyn encounters a former hotel packed with ash slurry, ‘set like concrete, before its outer walls gave way to reveal this solid record of its negative space’: an uninten-

tional recreation of Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), she observes. Flyn has a keen eye for how the pastoral and the political intersect. Threading her way along the razor-wire-lined demilitarised zone on Cyprus, she describes the new life – rare bee-orchids and wild dwarf-sheep – that has swept across no-man’s-land: each species ‘a marker of time passed in bloody stalemate’. There is great violence in these landscapes: the human mark in the ecological record is Flyn’s leitmotif. Wading into the toxic intertidal waters off Staten Island, rusting ships up ahead, she finds a teeming seabed: ‘all the crabs you can eat… But a single Newark blue-clawed crab carries enough dioxin in its body to give a person cancer’. And then to Place à Gaz, Verdun, where the chemical weapons of the First World War

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were burnt into the ground, and where today the soil is laced with arsenic. Yet in Flyn’s telling, we need not submit to dystopia. Even here, vegetation has found a way to survive: metallophyte moss has adapted, stashing poisonous salts away in its tendrils, in turn cleansing the earth. What’s the message? Flyn’s diagnosis is that we are too busy ‘playing at being stewards of the Earth’ and offers a corrective to the fantasy that we can geo-engineer our way out of extreme, compounding planetary crisis. But ruins can also be havens for new life, ‘all the stranger and more valuable for its resilience’. I love these sublime, liberating portraits: glimpses of hidden histories and alternate futures that might outlive us all. En Liang Khong

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ArtReview

16/02/2021 16:24

Thai Cinema Uncensored by Matthew Hunt

Long before the uk’s culture minister hinted that Netflix’s The Crown (2016–) should come with a ‘health warning’ highlighting its blurring of fact and fiction, Thailand got into an almighty tizz over the hit Rodgers and Hammerstein musical film The King and I (1956). Its liberties with the stage-managed official narrative – its portrayal of Siam’s King Mongkut prancing, using chopsticks and fighting back atavistic urges towards Anna Leonowens, tutor of his 82 children, all as Western mores and modernity encroach on a barbarous society – were deemed an intolerable slight to an entire nation. Indeed, this relic remains banned in Thailand today, rendering the prospect of any mature national debate about the film’s wanton cocktail of ethnocentrism, imperialism, catchy tunes and gilded opulence impossible. A quotation in Thai Cinema Uncensored, from the country’s uk-educated former prime minister Anand Panyarachun, perfectly crystalises why: ‘You have to remember that I spent some time abroad… But most Thais could not separate the musical parody from the history of their own country.’ That dangerous, paternalistic fiction – that the Thai citizenry consists of idiots who must be sheltered from anything that might contaminate their world view – echoes through Matthew Hunt’s ‘overview of the history of film regulation in Thailand and the ideology underpinning it’. Thai film censorship is as old as Thailand’s first feature film. Real-life footage of a prisoner being executed was cut from Suvarna of Siam (1923), a romantic melodrama. Back then, outright bans

Silkworm Books/University of Washington Press, £20.99 (softcover)

were rare but a mere scintilla of disapproval by the king was enough to give movie distributors jitters. A 1930 film act introduced a censorship committee comprising government bureaucrats and senior police officers, but its ‘prohibitions were sufficiently broad that they could be used as a pretext to cut almost any potentially objectionable material’, writes Hunt. Despite periodic tweaks (most of them retrograde ones that cemented a fusty royalist-nationalist ideology, suppressed social change or added more layers of officialdom), it remained in place for threequarters of a century. With chapters on three core taboos for the censors – sex, politics and religion – Hunt’s account is delivered without rhetorical flourishes or value-judgements. But the narration is spiced up by interjections and conjecture from ten Thai directors – all male, barring transgender directorturned-politician Tanwarin Sukkhapisit – who have been left sour by what, in 2008, replaced the Film Act: the country’s first cinema ratings system. Known as the Film and Video Act, this was introduced in the wake of the Free Thai Cinema Movement, a public campaign prompted by the arbitrary cutting of six innocuous scenes from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (2016). It appears to have changed nothing: an all-encompassing category in the ratings system is reserved for ‘films which are prohibited to be disseminated in the Kingdom’, and nine censorship controversies have followed. For film critic Kong Rithdee, this combination

of ratings and bans, the latter applicable to films that are deemed contrary to public order or good morals, or affecting the security or dignity of Thailand, is ‘the worst cocktail imaginable’. In an extended interview section in the back, Weerasethakul is on superbly venomous form, savaging the Thais’ inclination to self-censor and save face, and speculating in regard to the censor’s cuts to Syndromes… that ‘maybe they wanted some money under the table’; Pen-Ek Ratanaruang opines on why depictions of corrupt policeman have long been a no-no in Thai cinema, and argues that, in the case of his documentary Paradoxocracy (2013), the cuts imposed actually strengthened his message; and Chulayarnnon Siriphol (Birth of Golden Snail, 2019) outlines tartly how the state funded his film, only later to backpedal. The takeaway is a dishearteningly familiar one. Thais and Thailand watchers will recognise the bigger story, an all-too-common narrative arc streaked with moments of fear, absurdity and humour, in Hunt’s lingering closeups on the mangled, hidden wreckage of film censorship. Filmmakers, particularly those who subvert rather than soothe, are revealed as yet one more casualty of what is proving to be an interminable wait for a truly representative, just and transparent political system, replete with checks and balances that stretch into every prissy nook of power – and yet one more threat to a dusty hierarchy that ranks nation, religion and monarchy at the irreproachable top, and transgressive talent of all stripes somewhere near the bottom. Max Crosbie-Jones

Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left by Ben Burgis Zer0 Books, £10.99 / $16.95 (softcover) Depending on where you stand, ‘cancel culture’ is either deserved payback for those who have enjoyed their privilege for too long, or a serious threat to free speech and public life. In his lively and thoughtful book, Ben Burgis, philosopher, socialist and regular contributor the us leftwing website Jacobin, analyses why cancel culture is, in fact, a political problem for the left, even if it appears to originate in progressive sentiments that take reactionary attitudes and rightwing politics as their target. Burgis opens with a defence of comedians such as David Chappelle, arguing that comedy, when it becomes ‘art’, functions ‘to make our inner lives more interesting by making us

extremely uncomfortable’. Some will object that what comedians say is offensive and even hurtful, but this says less about the nature of what is said than it does about how it is received. Burgis’s broad point is that the narrow focus on policing offensive speech hides a wider loss of belief in the possibility of really changing anything. Canceling Comedians tries to understand the psychological investments that make cancel culture so histrionic and intolerant as a failure of the left to rally people to a politics that’s more material than it is moralising. Burgis draws heavily on the late British theorist Mark Fisher’s prophetic 2013 essay ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, and his bleak analysis of the increasingly divisive

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and disciplinarian tone of leftwing politics, which anticipated the paranoid and censorious atmosphere that has come to dominate public life in the years since. Quoting Fisher, Burgis points out that the inhabitants of the ‘Vampire Castle’ (those obsessed with cancelling others) pretend ‘to care about structural issues but “in practice it never focuses on anything but individual behavior.”’ ‘If you don’t really believe in changing the world,’ Burgis argues, ‘and deep down you see your politics as a symbolic performance, a way of “taking a stand”’, then it’s only natural that you’ll end up ‘trying to prove your personal virtue and examining the virtue of others’. J.J.Charlesworth

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on the cover Mohamed Bourouissa, Horse Day (still), 2014–15, video diptych, colour, sound, 13 min 32 sec. © adagp, Paris 2018. Courtesy the artist, Kamel Mennour, Paris & London, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

Words on the spine and on pages 23, 39 and 77 are from To Love Somebody, 1967, lyrics by Barry Gibb and Robin Gibb

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Hi there. You probably know us as the stars of the Slavery show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. That’s right, we’re slaves… What’s that, Maerten? Oh… right. You should have said something earlier. Why are you always so late to the game? Sometimes I think you’re more interested in looking good than in paying attention to what’s actually going on around you. You’re a slave to fashion. Maybe that’s why there’s nothing going on around you in that portrait that Rembrandt painted of you. All people remember are your ridiculously big shoe-buckles and flouncy lace decorations. If you’d have painted your lips you’d look like a clown. I just read an article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian where he explains the emptiness around you by suggesting that ‘Rembrandt may have wanted us to register that there was something amiss’. And what’s amiss? Half the time it seems to be your brain. But stop interrupting! Where was I? Well… it seems that you probably don’t know us because of the Slavery show after all, because you can’t travel and the Rijksmuseum is currently closed because of the plague. But you probably know us from our portraits, which I like to think launched Rembrandt’s career in the field. He painted Maerten and me in a pair of full-length portraits to mark our wedding back in 1634. They’re enormous. Because we were. Not physically of course; we were modestly thin – serious, religious people (despite Maerten’s thing for shoe buckles). But we were successful and enormous in terms of our social stature (and bank balance, let’s not pretend that the two are unrelated); we were successful traders, the Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott (before they got divorced, obviously) of our day. And Rembrandt obviously appreciated that. Such an empathetic man, as the Jones person observes. And you people obviously appreciate our enormity too. The paintings were sold in 2016 for €160 million and set a record for works by him. To the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum, because no single entity could cope with our enormity. We’re symbols of intergovernmental cooperation: une affaire d’état. Of course, now the debate (well, it’s not really a debate) is about owning slaves. Specifically our slaves, the ones who made sugar (and our fortune) for us in Brazil. Everyone who could was at it at that time. People go on about how our factory was called ’t Vagevuur, or The Fires of Purgatory, but that’s just because it was hot! It is when you make sugar! And as far as I’m concerned, it was really called that because it was one step away from

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In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists explain themselves, Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit ask: who are the real slaves here?

heaven. It may have been us who were in heaven because of our riches, but the point is that the people making us rich were only one step away. Even if they were in Brazil. Oh yes, and did you know that after we were immortalised by Rembrandt we were immortalised by Playmobil? Everyone knows that they are for children and against slavery! Your children play with us! How could we possibly be bad! Oh… what’s that, Maerten? A dark-skinned chap wearing a slave collar who came as part of a Playmobil pirate set? Oh tush! Playmobil cleared all that up. They said the figure was meant to ‘represent a pirate who was a former slave in a historical context’; his collar was a reminder of the atrocities he’d suffered. A mark of his liberation, not his subjugation. Every child can understand that, even from the age of four, like Playmobil says on its boxes. For someone who’s such an important figure in art history, you are truly terrible at iconographic readings. Worse than a child, for goodness’ sake! Oh? Now you want to speak… oh! About that? Will you never let it lie! Maerten wants to deliver his daily grumble about the fact that his name was lost to history for centuries (even though we’d paid Rembrandt handsomely to put it into history by painting us) because people forgot it was us in the portraits once I’d died and they passed on to my second husband’s family. It’s not my fault that people can’t tell one Maerten from the next (after husband no. 1, Maerten, died, I married husband no. 2, also called Maerten – it made things easier for me, but apparently not for my descendants, who assumed that it was Maerten 2 in the portrait). Still, my point, if you will ever finally let me make it, Maerten 1, is that these days we’re the real slaves. Our likenesses are pimped out on diminutive limited-edition Heineken bottles or turned over to German Geppettos; the empty spaces in our portraits exploited as deposits for all the guilt you Europeans have about how you got to where you are now. Or for those, like the Joneses, who will do anything to suggest that Rembrandt was in no way complicit in bigging up the slave trade. We paid the painter to make us famous, and now you remember him and forget our names! It’s us who got the bum deal here. We gave our slaves job security; what do we get for all the joy we give to your children and you, their beer-swigging parents? nothing! Where’s the morality in that? We’re a charity now. Practically saints.

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17/02/2021 14:36

Dia Chelsea Reopening Friday, April 16, 2021

537 West 22nd Street New York, New York diaart.org