ArtReview September 2021 by ArtReview

Evading the spotlight since 1949

Curtain Call

Liu Ye

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Martha Jungwirth, Antiphon, 2020 Oil on paper on canvas, 248 × 215,5 cm (97.64 × 84.84 in) © Martha Jungwirth/Adagp, Paris, 2021

Martha Jungwirth Recent Paintings Paris Marais September— October 2021

Hurvin Anderson 12 October - 18 December 2021 3 & 11 Duke Street, St. James’s London, SW1

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Featuring Cha Jaemin, Cha Jiryang, Farming Architecture, Cao Fei, Tada Hengsupkul, Kim Heecheon, Koo Donghee, Cocoy Lumbao, Anson Mak, Oh Min, Mark Salvatus, Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, Chai Siris, Shireen Seno, Saroot Supasuthivech, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Wang Gongxin, Cici Wu, Yuan Goang-ming, Jiang Zhi

August 24 – October 24, 2021 MMCA, Seoul October 29 – December 5, 2021 MCAD, Manila December 10 – December 31, 2021 MAIIAM, Chiang Mai January 1 – February 28, 2022 M+, Hong Kong

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ArtReview vol 73 no 5 September 2021

All words and no play… While lockdowns may be lifting and vaccination programmes proceeding in some parts of the world, in other parts reality is rather different. The world that we once thought of as globalised continues to feel like it is being steadily split into someone’s idea of its constituent parts. How does whatever it is that we call an ‘artworld’ function in that context? For many of us, words – reading, writing, messaging, emailing, posting – have become an essential means of communication over the past 12 months, when it comes to continuing to share ideas and experiences. Great news for a magazine like ArtReview. But ArtReview never likes to focus on itself, and in this issue it takes a look at how words are deployed in various artists’ practices. South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape tells Ross Simonini about the dangers and benefits of becoming lost in a narrative, getting spoon-fed information that has been edited by someone else (btw and to be clear, when ArtReview does that, it’s only ever a benefit to you – got it?) and how information, thoughts and narratives manifest and filter into her own work. Yinka Elujoba navigates the text-based paintings of Glenn Ligon and the ways in which they separate the visual and literal meaning of words in a process of occasional dismemberment and ‘meta-disfiguration’, concluding that this process might be the American artist’s greatest contribution to the history of the medium. It’s a process informed, in part, by Ligon’s habit of letter-writing: ‘Letters by nature are intimate moving objects intended to cover ground – from the author’s to their recipient’s hands’, Elujoba writes, and how that ground gets covered – what happens along the way from writer to reader – is something Ligon’s work both highlights and plays with.

Beer can

Martin Herbert, by contrast, takes a look at the work of the British artist Sue Tompkins, attempting to find a continuity, through her exploration of the ‘endless affective possibilities of verbalisation’, between her work as the vocalist for the cult-but-short-lived indie-band Life Without Buildings, her spoken performance work and further output as a painter, through to the rediscovery of her work as a musician, by a much younger audience, through the medium of TikTok. The secret to her success? ‘Tompkins understands that words have a situational gravity,’ writes Herbert, and she knows how to deploy that. That’s something Chinese painter, and cover artist for this issue, Liu Ye also understands, although that knowledge may not instantly be visible in his work. In a text that explores how Liu has managed to evade the Chinesification of his art, in favour of a universal language many of his contemporaries eschewed, Fei Lai concludes that his growing up in a literary family (with literature being a career that his writer father warned Liu was too dangerous to pursue in the wake of the Cultural Revolution) led to the artist gaining an insight into the ways in which the development of rhythms and accents can transcend the specifics of language. Specifics that tie writers to specific cultures, places or times, and describe a connection to beauty in all forms. “Beauty? Writing? What about social justice?” ArtReview hears you cry. “That’s what all art has to be about these days!” Well, it’s there if you choose to look. But more obviously in the work of Italian artist Gian Maria Tosatti, whose latest installation in Istanbul is explored by Ana Vukadin, who looks at work presented in the reality it describes – an area of the city undergoing a process of rapid gentrification and massive displacement of migrant populations. One for those of you who favour experiencing over reading. And perhaps, as the curtains begin to be drawn back on the artworld’s global merry-go-round, there will be increasing opportunities to do some more of the first. ArtReview will always be there for the second. Particularly if you subscribe ;). ArtReview

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Untitled (The Cauldron), 2021, charcoal on mounted paper, 65 × 120" 165.1 × 304.8 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures © Robert Longo

Robert Longo

I do fly After summer merrily

September 10 – October 23, 2021

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Art Observed

The Interview Dineo Seshee Bopape by Ross Simonini 26

The Art of Thai Comics by Max Crosbie-Jones 40

Syros International Film Festival by Ben Eastham 36

page 40 © Banlue Publications – Art Jeeno

Art Featured

Gian Maria Tosatti by Ana Vukadin 48

Sue Tompkins by Martin Herbert 60

Glenn Ligon by Yinka Elujoba 54

Liu Ye by Lai Fei 68

page 60 Sue Tompkins, Pass The Drones, 2017, live performance at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. Photo: Patrick Jameson. Courtesy the artist

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 82 Simon Fujiwara, by Mark Rappolt Agnieszka Polska, by Phoebe Blatton Ja’Tovia Gary, by Rebecca O’Dwyer Spencer Finch, by Kevin Brazil Takako Yamaguchi, by Cat Kron Jade Montserrat, by Tom Denman Athanasios Argianas, by Despina Zefkili Glasgow International 2021, by John Quin On Hannah Arendt: bracha, by Marv Recinto Vojtěch Kovařík, by Oliver Basciano Robert Smithson, by Evan Moffitt Averklub Collective, by Max Feldman Rafael França, by Oliver Basciano Elisabeth Neudörfl, by Martin Herbert Bruce Nauman, by Ana Vukadin British Art Show 9, by Tom Jeffreys The Holding Environment, by Moritz Scheper Maurizio Cattelan, by Mariacarla Molè

The Prisoner, by Hwang Sok-Yong, reviewed by Mark Rappolt The Revenge of the Real, by Benjamin Bratton, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Melancholy, by Nick Cave, reviewed by Louise Darblay On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, by Maggie Nelson, reviewed by Martin Hebert Sub-Saharan Africa: Architectural Guide, edited by Philipp Meuser and Adil Dalbai, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Sandfuture, by Justin Beal, reviewed by David Terrien Speak The Wind, by Hoda Afshar, reviewed by Neha Kale back page 118

page 104 Zach Blas, im here to learn so :)))))) (still), 2017. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery in Brisbane, Australia (as seen in British Art Show 9, Aberdeen)

timesartcenter timesartcenterberlin

Más Allá, el Mar Canta

Beyond, the Sea Sings

www.timesartcenter.org/exhibitions/mas-alla-el-mar-canta

Artists Esvin Alarcón Lam, Sybil Atteck, Nicole Awai, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Andrea Chung, Christopher Cozier, Richard Fung, Colectivo Hapa, Mimian Hsu, Peng Zuqiang, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Humberto Vélez, David Zink Yi Curated by Pablo José Ramírez

Address: Brunnenstrasse 9 10119 Berlin, Germany T. +49 (0) 30 2478 1038 timesartcenter.org

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Art Observed

Is like the cinema 25

Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Dineo Seshee Bopape

“We have to bear the shadow that travels with us so that we travel through or with it”

At the Sharjah Biennial in 2017, Dineo Seshee Bopape exhibited away from the main exhibition galleries, in a dusty, sun-beaten courtyard. When I came upon her presentation, it didn’t immediately register as art; more like the ruins of a local shrine, with modest ritual offerings: a stack of burnt bricks, chunks of coal on torn strips of crumpled foil and plastic water bottles half-full of pale liquid. The space felt used. Later on, when I wandered past the site at night, its eerie power was amplified by moonlight. The piece’s title, +/- 1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791) (2017), pointed specifically to its feeling of blighted history. This work was my introduction to Bopape, and her earthy vocabulary of materials: herbs,

crystals, ash, soil, feathers, light. Video, too, has been one of her most consistent mediums, often including music, both by Bopape and by great musicians of the past, such as Nina Simone. Her gallery shows have a way of standing in stark contrast to their whitewalled containers. At Art in General, New York, in 2016, she installed a thick bed of carved soil; at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the same year, a hill of rubble; for the Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff this year, murals of painted mud. Since Sharjah, Bopape and I have attempted multiple methods of conducting a formal dialogue. First we tried email, which faltered, then we tried exchanging voice messages, which had its own awkward limits. All our correspondence was made particularly

September 2021

tricky because, in the past years, Bopape has been nomadic, moving through residencies across the world (as have I). Born in Polokwane, South Africa, in 1981, she attended Columbia in New York for graduate school, and when we found time to record a video conversation recently she was on a residency in Paris, where she was studying “the energy and resonance of minerals to translate them into song”. Bopape responded to most of my questions with long pauses, and often used “yeah” in the punctuative way that others use “um”. We spoke for two hours during an overlap in our very different time zones, just after I woke and just before she fell asleep. Later, she made a few text edits through email, using various forms of punctuation.

A Current of Somebody Else ross simonini You told me that when you think of someone, they often write to you soon after. dineo seshee bopape Yeah. More and more. rs What do you think about that as a phenomenon? dsb I think I might just be more and more conscious of it. (Forgetfulness.) It’s not quite terrifying, but it almost is. Things are so quick and I wonder about the thoughts that pass through my mind, what they mean physically. And I wonder if thinking about somebody when they call does something to the other thoughts that one is not conscious of sending out (and the denial of it is a wonder). rs Are you saying these thoughts can be disruptive? dsb Sometimes when I feel unhappy about something I feel as though that person/thing/ being knows that I’m unhappy about them/it. I’m not sure whether it’s the thoughts transferring, or whether I am being paranoid that ‘they’ have read my thoughts, or whether the universe is that open, we don’t quite have the borders that we imagined, things are more permeable… rs Do you try to control your thoughts? dsb That reminds me of a meditation practice I often do, where I’m asked to observe rather than control the thoughts coming through. That creates a different experience than I shouldn’t be thinking about that right now. rs Is it ever necessary to control, though? dsb When you say that, that reminds me: I keep imagining political prisoners in the ‘history’

of South Africa, the thoughts that might’ve gone through their minds, let’s say Winnie Mandela’s mind when she was incarcerated, in solitary confinement. At those moments, you – she/ the person/I/one – have to have and exercise some kind of control, because otherwise it’s possible to let fears just take over your mind. rs I remember in Sharjah, you and I were talking about Bessie Head’s 1973 novel A Question of Power, which is a portrait of a woman losing her mind. Maybe we try to control thoughts to avoid insanity? dsb Yeah. ‘Thoughts’ are already being controlled. We’re taught to do so as young kids – to ignore certain parts of reality, particular ways of hearing or trusting the information that one is receiving from the surrounding environment. rs What thoughts from your childhood are you trying to change? dsb There are a lot. Where to start? I grew up in post/transitional-apartheid South Africa in a township, in a village, in a city, in a town… so I’m working through those kinds of peripheral, and integral, structural ideas/weeds… and my place in the world in relation to, not in any order, colonialism, patriarchy, ethnocentrism, racism, classism, capitalism, feminism, mtv, media, plants, soil, space, beauty, water, ethics. rs How do you change these? dsb Through research. I’m trying to ‘understand’ what happened on the African continent, between Bantu, between Africans and Europeans, and between Africans and Arabs etc. I spend a lot of time thinking about what information is and was taught in school,

ArtReview

and socially, and what information is and was not. It takes a lot of effort to go digging for what actually happened in the 1600s, the 1800s, etc. rs I find that reading is helpful for turning off assumptions. You can replace your own thoughts with someone else’s. dsb That reminds me of something that Kara Walker once said in an interview, about the struggle of being caught up in the narrative of the protagonist of a story. I think she was speaking about Gone with the Wind. It could apply to ideologies in general, and to being swept by a current of somebody else’s thoughts. This could be pleasant, or not.

An Inverted Commerce rs You are often moving through different residencies. Do you enjoy being nomadic? dsb Yeah…? This answer changes depending on the day. I have a preference generally for longer residencies rather than ones for one month or two weeks. Yeah. That would feel too short. rs How long are you in Paris? dsb Six months. Perhaps. rs Have you been focusing on one project while there? dsb I’m doing a residency, which is supposed to be focused on a research project, but you know how it goes: the other project starts calling and ‘all of a sudden’ you have projects and conversations in the us and Italy. It’s also so hard to be in one place anymore. One mentally goes everywhere.

this and facing page +/-1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791) (detail), 2017 (installation view, Sharjah Biennial 13). Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

September 2021

this and facing page Untitled (of occult instability) [feelings], 2016 (installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

rs You’re not really in Paris. dsb Even though I’m in Paris, I feel as though I’m everywhere else. I’m not sure what it feels like then to be fully here, or whether it’s possible to really be here as well. rs Is our world moving towards placelessness? dsb Maybe, but what would be the point of the body then? This weight that we are. We have to bear the shadow that travels with us so that we travel through or with it. We somehow can’t deny it. rs Are your installations a way for you to reclaim placeness? dsb Yeah, definitely. (It depends.) And the research and the search for particular elements for the work, for soil or for clay or certain herbs or objects. That inserts me into the place. And also involving the people who are from the place helps me to be in communication with that place. Perhaps there are also various energies that are passing through a place or through people at a particular spot at a particular time. That then makes the place apt for an event where one is able to receive all the information needed, parallel to it or not. rs Do you plan your installations or just respond to a place when you get there? dsb One thing leads to another. I have a general plan but if I get too specific, if I know exactly what I’m going to do, it doesn’t work out well. It gets a bit boring for me in the process of making, realising. To discover new things, there has to be some room for things to come. Sometimes I have a list of ingredients going in, but I’m not sure how they would come together. I have a feeling, like knowing I want to use clay here but not

being sure exactly what the clay would be doing or how it would be arranged in the space. rs Do you try to develop that feeling? dsb Sometimes it’s more about resting. Things flow easier when there’s less pressure. When I can think of something without directly looking at it, almost ignoring it, or half-ignoring it, then it comes alive. rs Working on multiple projects at once seems like a good way to achieve that. dsb Yeah, it is. That’s been happening consciously and unconsciously. Even with videos, I like playing with something over and over again, on multiple timelines, and seeing where it leads and having multiple possibilities of where the story might go. rs Did you enjoy grad school, with all its different projects? dsb I found it amazing. And moving from Amsterdam to New York, I had to shift the way I was working, because it would have been too expensive to move all the objects I was working with, so I had to imagine a different relationship to those objects. The conversations with people, from other contexts, were not the same as the conversations that had been happening in Europe. Europe had felt conservative in some regard, and New York just felt more open, more vibrant. There were people from everywhere, it felt, bits and pieces of the whole world seemed to intersect. It was vibrant.

who’d been shot by a radical (Dutch?) Muslim, after some Islamophobic statements etc, and that had a particular effect on the society. But even before that, or rather amidst that, I found the Dutch had somehow collective amnesia about slavery and the history of the world and their role in where things are. So that was shocking, because I hadn’t expected it. And that affected how my presence was read and how my presence in particular videowork would be read (and also how I had made sense of the park benches.) All of that just felt too tight and not expansive enough. New York was much more open, more spacious, I could just be myself. rs Were you making similar work in grad school to your work now? dsb Yes and no. I think the themes were similar. I actually did an interview recently, and the writer was shocked that I was using a lot of plastic in the work in grad school. But for me, for example, glitter feels like water. rs You still use plastic water bottles. dsb Yeah. It brings up a conversation about what is purely natural (or not). It’s an inverted commerce. And there’s certain implications with every material. If the framing of that object happens too soon, then one can easily miss another thread.

A Bridge to Jump over the Water rs Plants play a big part in your work. Are they also a big part of your life?

rs How so? dsb I was in Amsterdam for two years during a moment that seemed to highlight the ‘conservatism’. There had been a (Dutch) rightwinger

September 2021

dsb [laughs] Yeah. rs Why are you laughing?

dsb Because I’m looking around and plants are everywhere in my studio: pots of tea, incense, dead plants, a living one (or five). A eucalyptus branch. So plants are: every day. We are: friends. This morning, I actually went back to an older work from 2011 and it had pictures of plants in it, and for me there was this longing in the photographs to connect to the real plants. I asked myself, why did I have photographs of the things rather than the actual plants in the space? rs Last time we saw each other was actually at a lecture on plant intelligence. dsb When you say plant intelligence, I become aware that I have a certain anxiety about the word ‘intelligence’ being applied to plants, or the necessity of applying it to plants or to animals, and our relationship collectively with ‘intelligence’ and being ‘smart’, and what is framed as their opposites. The idea that because plants are smart, it’s possible to then have empathy towards them, because they are deemed intelligent. But is it possible to have a relationship of respect for other beings without attributing something that’s ‘valuable’ in our current society? Can that thing be itself? Not stupid, not smart, just itself. Funnily enough, the other day I had a conversation with another artist about ‘Mother Nature’, and they had a similar itch: can nature just be itself without being gendered? rs ‘Intelligent’ is one of our holy words. We are scared of artificial intelligence and obsessed with intelligent life from other planets. dsb The ‘intelligence’ thing, the intelligence of a thing, orders the world in a particular,

possibly epistemologically Euro-imperialisticDarwinistic, way. It’s a sociopolitical prejudice for a particular type of logic, I find. And it sends me back to childhood and being able to perform, or not, in particular situations, like playing a game and being able to follow the rules – colouring within the lines of a colouring book, for example. Similarly with iq tests, which were culturally prejudiced. And that hovers in the same WhatsApp group as European colonial practices, for example the practice of taking indigenous children to colonial boarding schools, where the aim was to raise a child into a particular type of ‘intelligence’, to ‘de-nativise’ / ‘de-savage’ them. Wow, that erupts so many things in me, hmm. James Baldwin wrote, ‘We do not know enough about the mind, / or how the conundrum of the imagination / dictates, discovers, / or can dismember what we feel, / or what we find’. rs Do you favor intuition over intelligence? dsb When you say that, I also realise that I have a tense relationship with the word ‘intuition’. For some time, that word was a bit ‘scary’, because of how it had been assigned politically, historically. I had a fear that intuitive knowing would be perceived as being lesser than book knowledge. For instance, when asked if I’d planned out my installations. With a particular type of education (politic), planning was overvalued above ‘intuition’. But words are a bit tricky, because one gets caught up in definition and its matrix. And how does one express something without

ArtReview

having to rely on an ‘old’ system – or rather than old, let’s say a wonder-reducing narrative – to make something valid? It’s like the science that’s now describing the function of dreams. Are dreams to be understood only through science? Has it to be trusted only through a particular system of knowing? rs Are you often asked to explain your art? dsb Yeah, even the process of interviews is tricky, because it’s also important to draw a window into a space to allow for people to come in. Or a bridge to jump over the water, if the water seems too big. A thread that one can hold on to, to be able to enter the work. rs Do you find that you need that when you look at art? dsb Sometimes. All the time. Some works are easy to enter but others need ‘context’. For me, before going to (insert place), I hadn’t really understood the work that was coming out of (insert place), with the artists from there. After having been there, that opened up a new way of reading the work. It’s like visiting a friend that you’ve known awhile, and then you go visit their family or hometown and certain things just become clearer. They become particular to a place, everything becomes connected, and complexities emerge. Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

this and facing page sa ____ ke lerole, (sa lerole ke ___), 2016 (installation view, Art in General, New York). Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist

September 2021

September 24–26, 2021 Photograph taken at Messe Basel

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J.G. Ballard frequently imagined a future in which drained swimming pools survived as monuments to the decadent last days of the West. The image comes back to me during a film screening at one such empty concrete pit on the Greek island of Syros. In nearby Athens it is 41 degrees. Today I received a text message advising me to close the windows of my apartment against clouds of ash from the wildfires encroaching on the city’s suburbs. Big-bellied aeroplanes carry water across the sky. I imagine the pool’s patterned tiles being pored over by the perplexed archaeologists of whatever civilisation succeeds ours. The film I’m watching, The Years of the Big Heat, directed by Frida Liappa and released in 1991, describes a near future in which a population afflicted by a pandemic and heatwave loses its collective memory. You can see why the curators thought it timely. The screening is part of the ninth Syros International Film Festival, an annual exhibition of Greek and international independent filmmaking at outdoor venues across the Cycladic island. For a second consecutive year its programme of workshops and screenings

Bleak Projections

The ephemeral community of a well-programmed summertime film festival offers little solace amid the evidence of so much loss, finds Ben Eastham

ArtReview

follows the theme ‘off-season’, with the collapse of international travel putting a new slant on its exploration into the traffic of people and ideas. The discrepancy between the dream of free movement and the fortification of borders is nowhere more stark than in Greece, which offers tax incentives to ‘digital nomads’ from the north even as it repels migrant boats from the south. The context encourages local interpretations of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), which opens the festival at a screening set against the backdrop of Hermoupolis’s neoclassical architecture. The dreamlike account of a Black community’s migration from the us South to the North at the start of the twentieth century, interspersed with dialogue in Gullah creole, ruminates on the relationship between memory and place, and how identity is carried across borders. Ideas which are themselves taken into the later work of two of its crew: director of photography Arthur Jafa and production designer Kerry James Marshall. These correspondences across cultures animate an island-wide festival in open-air locations that also function as commentaries

facing page Marina Gioti, Launching Ceremony (still), 2021, site-specific audiovisual installation commissioned for the 2021 Syros International Film Festival this page, top Vikelas Municipal Swimming Pool, 2021 Syros International Film Festival venue this page, above Tarsanas Shipyard, 2021 Syros International Film Festival venue

September 2021

(even festival audiences struggle to keep their phones in their pockets), independent cinema is the ideal medium through which to express a generational sense of lost innocence and heightened awareness. Now that the indoor cinemas are closed and we’ve become accustomed to streaming series into our living rooms, siff’s outdoor screenings set an ageing medium amidst the ruins of the century that defined it. An intelligently curated programme plays on ideas of travel between cultures but also, as in the case of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), across the boundary separating life and art; shorts including Marcus Meicher’s Austria (2017) and Peixuan Ouyang’s The_____World (2021) ask us to look again (and harder) at the illusions on which society is constructed. The people who attend film festivals are often described as pilgrims, and the description might naturally seem to fit the groups who trip across the island of Syros in search of art’s quasi-religious escape. But the more apt analogy for a festival that uses film to reframe our relationship to a changed world might be with Ballard’s anthropologists, studying the last documents of a disappearing time, trying to work out what went wrong.

on the theme. One screening takes place in a shipyard, its spectral cranes looming over the gathering like the ghosts of old industry. The highlight is a new commission by Marina Gioti that montages archival newsreels of ceremonial ship launches, the smashed champagne bottles and waving dignitaries, accompanied by a performance by thereminist May Roosevelt. Watching footage of crowds cheering the baptism of new boats from amidst the rusting hulls is uncanny, an effect exaggerated by the eerie sounds that Roosevelt conjures from her touchless instrument. It feels like an elegy for the old utopias of progress and expansion built on the exploitation of resources and abstraction of value for which we are now paying the price. As an artform once heralded as ‘light’ (portable, immaterial) and ‘hot’ (in Marshall McLuhan’s sense of immersive and stupefying) but which in the age of TikTok feels ‘heavy’ (expensive, ecologically impactful) and ‘cool’

top Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (still), 1991, motion picture, 113 min middle Pallas Outdoor Cinema, Hermoupolis, 2021 Syros International Film Festival venue bottom Frida Liappa, The Years of the Big Heat (still), 1991, motion picture, 104 min

ArtReview

拉里·阿奇安蓬

劳瑞·普罗沃斯特

LARRY ACHIAMPONG

郑波

LAURE PROUVOST

ZHENG BO

17 JULY – 17 OCTOBER

阿德里亚诺·科斯塔

ADRIANO COSTA

艾萨·霍克森

EISA JOCSON

里彭·乔杜里与何子彦

RIPON CHOWDHURY WITH HO TZU NYEN

破浪

毛利悠子与大卫·霍维茨

YUKO MOHRI & DAVID HORVITZ

雅克·雷纳

JAC LEIRNER

史莱姆引擎

SLIME ENGINE

CHI K11 ART MUSEUM, SHANGHAI CHIM POM

PRESENTED BY

迈克尔·朱

MICHAEL JOO

CURATED BY

沃爾夫岡· 提爾曼斯

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

VENUE

Belgian comics scholar Nicolas Verstappen began sifting through Thai comics five years ago. Plenty of time, you would think, to discover if Thailand had a comics canon worthy of comparison to the totemic Anglo-American, French-Belgian and Japanese traditions. However, due to a lack of local knowledge and of archives predating the 1980s, the process proved slow going. Several years passed, during which he scoured markets, libraries, antiquarian bookstores and online groups without much luck, until, just before the scheduled completion of the book he was working on, published this month as The Art of Thai Comics, the breakthrough came. ‘My Tutankhamen’s tomb: more than a thousand comic strips, cut from 1930s newspapers and bound together, were found in boxes during the reordering of an attic,’ he writes with palpable relief. ‘There lay almost the complete comics production of Sawas Jutharop and Jamnong Rodari, with early works by Prayoon Chanyawongse and Tookkata.’ This anecdote bears repeating – without the rare examples of Thai comic strip misesen-scènes these freshly unearthed finds provided, The Art of Thai Comics wouldn’t be as expansive and richly drawn an achievement. Some of these names are barely remembered in the Kingdom, let alone celebrated outside it – an injustice this largeformat book, arranged chronologically into chapters on influential cartoonists, imprints and trends, and released in Thai and English editions, strives to correct. Drawing also upon interviews and national archives, Verstappen skilfully illuminates the chequered lives and turbulent social contexts of his subjects, both cartoonists and sketched characters alike. Take Sawas Jutharop, a Bangkok boy, born to a family of goldsmiths in 1911, who hit his creative stride just as Siam was transitioning from absolute to constitutional monarchy in 1932. His work is emblematic of how comic artists of the time, cowed by new press laws,

Lineages

One man’s persistence has brought Thailand’s rich comics tradition to light. Now we need to connect its spirit of critique and independence to current times, writes Max Crosbie-Jones

from top © Family of Juk Biewsakul; © Heirs of Jamnong Rodari

ArtReview

turned their backs on satirical strips lampooning nobility and officials, and turned instead to long-form adaptations of Thai epic poems, albeit ones that often chimed with current events. Verstappen illustrates these biographical tidbits with fine examples of Sawas’s strips, from the serialised adventures of an investigative journalist in 1932’s Nak Suep Khao through to the early appearances of alter-ego Khun Muen, the Popeyeinspired prankster who appeared in his adaptions of classic chakchak wongwong folktales about princely heroes. Also emerging during the 1930s was the enigmatic Jamnong Rodari, described here as ‘the first Siamese cartoonist to bring naturalistic representation to the artform’. He was also, Verstappen adds, ‘the most consummate’ of the era, on account of his loosely pen-drawn and playfully anachronistic narratives rendered with ‘a remarkable sense of rhythm, composition and design in outstanding sequences – sometimes silent, expressionist or oneiric’. Such effusive praise

September 2021

is entirely warranted judging by the accompanying strips, among them a Harold Lloydstyle slapstick scene set in a then modern-day Bangkok, and a fey dreamscene, circa 1934, from vaudeville folktale Phraya Noi Chom Talad. Over 30 cartoonists and their creations are profiled in this assiduous manner, from titans such as midcentury masterof-shade Hem Vejakorn to lesser-knowns such as chronicler-of-theunderdog Triam Chachumporn, from dashing folk princes with Elvis pompadours to phi krasue (nocturnal female ghosts) trailing blood and viscera. On the way, Verstappen parses changing reading tastes (mass circulation one-baht comics, graphic novels, horror and sci-fi, the manga wave), disruptive shifts (wars, imports, trauma) and even the occasional melee between cartoonists and the ruling powers. In 1972 the leading political cartoonist of the day, Prayoon Chanyawongse, responds to military censorship by drawing his most famous character with his mouth sewn shut. In 1973 a group of students sow popular discontent by producing a widely popular comic pamphlet about animal poaching. In 1976 another political cartoonist, Chai Rachawat, has his series banned by a dictatorial new regime on the grounds that it contains messages to communist insurgents. And in 2021 antijunta satirical strips drawn by anonymous artists gain thousands, if not millions, of likes on social networks. If I have a bone to pick with The Art of Thai Comics, it’s this: while it broaches the moments when the Kingdom’s artists explored personal and at times boldly political themes, it neglects to meaningfully connect the dots between them, to explore their relationship with Thailand’s current vexed and vitriol-filled moment. This is ostensibly because Verstappen has opted to focus solely on printed materials and the period 1907–2007: a century that begins with the first known Thai multipanel comic and ends with the peak of the Thai independent comics scene. In doing so, he conveniently avoids having to give a newer, bona fide phenomenon worthy of sustained attention – online comics – more than a cursory mention. Given the clear lineage that online comics such as Kai Maew and

from top © Prayoon Chanyawongse Foundation; © Family of Pimon ‘Tookkata’ Galassi all images Courtesy River Books

ArtReview

Jod 8riew – unfettered and cathartic expressions of political disenfranchisement and alienation – share with the pugnacious social commentary of Siam’s 1930s proto-comic strips, not to mention the angst-filled horror and gore titles of the late 1970s and early 1980s, this feels like a missed opportunity (or the makings of a followup, perhaps?). But to nitpick in this manner is to fling paper darts at a rippling giant: Verstappen has crafted a work of huge breadth, accessible scholarship and real sociohistorical importance. Blending erudite readings of drawing styles with careful dissections of narrative traditions, applying detective work and high-minded analysis to a popular medium often dismissed as coarse and lowbrow, he skilfully charts the myriad ways Thai cartoonists have, in that spirit of unconscious eclecticism often said to embody ‘Thainess’, artfully borrowed and synthesised local and foreign influences: Jataka tales, likay theatre, Javanese shadow puppets, Popeye’s bulging biceps, among untold others. With each new page, a different member of the Thai comic pantheon is boldly redrawn – many long lost due to the ravages of paper and memory – and another part of the unique social scaffolding on which they stand is uncovered. The Art of Thai Comics, by Nicolas Verstappen, is published by River Books

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New fair location Messe Basel, Hall 1.1 Maulbeerstrasse / corner Riehenring 113 4058 Basel

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Art Featured

Because its eyes are not either side of its nose 47

Gian Maria Tosatti by Ana Vukadin

The artist-storyteller’s ambiguous installations confront crises in democracy at street level

ArtReview

Gian Maria Tosatti has steadily made a name for himself as a metic- areas and historical city centres, along with former industrial estates ulous visual storyteller for the poor, the dispossessed, migrants and and disused harbours. third-class citizens. Taking over abandoned or closed-off historic As part of this, a 20,000sqm section of Tarlabaşi that includes buildings in the neglected neighbourhoods of mostly European cities, 210 historic Ottoman-era buildings has been earmarked for regenthe Rome-born artist creates poignant installations that are rarely eration by the local municipality and the Housing Development advertised openly as exhibitions; they are there for anyone to stumble Administration of Istanbul, known by the Turkish acronym toki. upon. “I have to make art in the city, where people live,” he says when When Tosatti first came to Istanbul, in 2015, following an invitation we talk in Istanbul. “I’m not doing it for the king or his court, I do it (eventually declined) to participate in the city’s biennale, he stumbled for people who need it. When I go to these neighbourhoods, it’s not across the neighbourhood and was struck by a massive construction because I have something to tell them. I’m just a translator, not an site, made up of what he calls ‘channels’ all around the neighbourhood. author.” Despite working in rough environs, the time and dedication “They were 20m deep. I was very shocked to see an entire neighbourhe invests in the people and spaces pays off – his shows often become hood surrounded by this abyss.” When I visited Tarlabaşi in early July, word-of-mouth success stories, attracting a variety of people. “I’ve the construction site had given way to Taksim 360: a soulless, sprawling worked in the hardest part of Naples and in refugee camps. Those are complex in a faux art-nouveau style that markets itself as ‘the exclusive not places where if you do some kind of bullshit thing they tolerate lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of’. The buildings stand largely empty, it, because they have real issues. They don’t have time to waste with a casualty of the country’s lingering currency and debt crisis. your… you know… vanitas.” For Tosatti, the neighbourhood was a prime example of democIn 2018 Tosatti returned to Europe after ten years in New York. racy failing those who needed it most. It was the all-too-common “I felt too alien there. I wanted to come back to my land, my history, story seen in big cities around the world: eviction dressed up as gentriwith all the problems Europe was facing,” he explains. In Italy, Matteo fication, entire communities uprooted and erased. Except here it was Salvini, the far-right Lega leader, turbocharged by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s had rapidly risen through the top-down, frenzied infrastrucranks, becoming deputy prime ture investment of over $150bn minister that same year and to modernise the country and infamously closing Italy’s ports, turn Istanbul, which genereffectively banning a number of migrant ships coming onto ates 30 percent of the counItaly’s shores. Europe’s postcotry’s gdp, into a global financial capital. Every time Tosatti lonial heritage and its inability returned to Tarlabaşi, he found to renegotiate relations with its old colonies was a trigger for more construction sites. Over six years, the artist, often operTosatti’s ongoing pilgrimage My ating a mechanical merry-goHeart is a Void, the Void is a Mirror, round to provide the younger an in-depth and long-term inmembers of the community vestigation into the crisis of with an opportunity for leisure democracy in the West articuactivity, gradually made friends lated as episodes across a numwith the locals and their chilber of cities. The latest takes place in Istanbul, in Tarlabaşi, a low-income, dren. One day he saw a young deaf girl walking with her friends. predominantly Kurdish neighbourhood established during the She became the inspiration for the performance at the heart of the nineteenth century on the northwest corner of Istanbul’s famous Istanbul episode. · Taksim Square, a stone’s throw from what’s now the glitzy Istiklal Located in a run-down art nouveau building on one of the main · Caddesi shopping hub. Tarlabaşi and Istiklal Caddesi are separated roads of Tarlabaşi, the immersive installation – produced in collabby a six-lane boulevard built during the 1980s, a physical barrier oration with Italian nonprofit The Blank Contemporary – takes that ultimately contributed to the neighbourhood’s ghettoisation. over the whole venue, which took a total of two months to prep Filled with dilapidated buildings and dirt-paved roads, Tarlabaşi and clean. “We had a volunteer assistant join us and she left after is treated like a slum by absentee landlords. Still, cheap rent and a couple of weeks because she said it was such boring work,” proximity to the city centre have made it a haven for migrant Tosatti says. Visitors are allowed one at a time; I await my turn, workers coming from impoverished southeast Turkey, as well as, knowing little, beyond that there is a performance element, about more recently, Syrian refugees, a burgeoning transgender commu- what to expect. nity and Roma/Gypsy groups. It is a thriving, culturally diverse Entering the tall, narrow building feels like passing through area filled with shops, markets and people – children especially. Its some Lynchian portal into another time, another dimension. The location also means it is composed of potentially prime revenue- marble stairs look as if they could crumble; the stucco is peeling; generating real estate, and consequently the neighin an alcove by the stairs there’s a dish of food for the above bourhood has found itself swept up in the governlocal cat, an informal character in the show. I climb to Construction around the ment’s ambitious urban regeneration strategy, which Tarlabaşi neighbourhood, Istanbul. the first floor, half expecting the performer to jump since 2006 has principally targeted informal housing out at me. © Ivor Prickett/Panos Pictures

September 2021

This level comprises several interconnected rooms, sunlight urban renewal. Finally, in a closed-off space with glass windows, what beaming through large windows. In the centre of one room, a looks like snow covers the floors of the rooms beyond. performer sits on a chair, head resting on an oval wooden dining table. “I wanted to speak about this heroic girl who was fighting with A crystal chandelier hangs above her. She is small, like a child, dressed music against the cranes, against all these aggressive sounds which in black and surrounded by disquieting signs of a past life frozen in speak of destruction,” Tosatti clarifies later. “She wants to calm this time. All the glass, including the windowpanes, is cracked. An ornate Moloch coming to destroy her world, her house. This snow was stuck pendulum clock swings rhythmically, its hands absent. I notice the in my head. It came from my memories of the last story in Dubliners, girl leaving from the corner of my eye and pursue her in a panicked where it’s the symbol of the dead. Then I started to think this place fashion – it feels like following her will clarify my route. She ascends is not a battlefield, this place is gone. It’s not a dying star, it’s a dead to the second floor and approaches a gramophone; a beautiful, crack- star, but we are here just watching the light that remains. Then I told ling recording of a melancholy opera my assistant, maybe the girl’s not a “I’m not doing it for the king or his court, floods the room. I later learn this is hero, maybe she’s a ghost, and a few the voice of tenor Richard Crooks, hours later, the wife of the café owner I do it for people who need it. from a 1930s recording, singing the arrived with these pictures of her When I go to these neighbourhoods, it’s aria Mi par d’udir ancora from Georges dead daughter who had died in that Bizet’s 1863 opera I pescatori de perle. not because I have something to tell them. building. I said, ‘Damn, it’s the ghost The girl turns the gramophone that we were talking about’. The I’m just a translator, not an author” towards an open window, drowning day after, at the very end of March, out the sounds outside and offering some respite from the pervasive it snowed so much in Istanbul – the snowflakes were so enormous. soundtrack of demolition. She stares out at the transforming locale It hadn’t happened in years.” Tosatti’s poetic homage to a dying before slowly leaving. I try to find her, to no avail. It feels eerie again, community is moving in ways that only the best kind of art is. We like the place is haunted and I’m looking for a spirit. Carefully laid cannot help but watch the fading light and think about all the means out details feel like clues to a puzzle: a snowglobe with no city in it, by which people, in Istanbul and beyond, can be erased or forcibly a blanket over a damask couch, books including a Turkish version disappeared, left without a place or a story of their own. In this of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s The Time context, Tosatti’s work, and his strategy of displaying it within and as Regulation Institute (1962) and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2002). On the a part of the reality that inspired it, will at least ensure that one such top floor, I step gingerly onto a balcony girdling the entire building. place and one such story is treasured. ar Outside is the vertical modern skyline of Istanbul, and just below, the neighbourhood being slowly but surely swallowed up in the name of Ana Vukadin is a writer based in Italy

ArtReview

all images but one My Heart is a Void, the Void is a Mirror (Istanbul), 2021, site-specific installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan & Naples

September 2021

3 Notes on Glenn Ligon by Yinka Elujoba

1 Someone once said to Glenn Ligon: “Surely the binaries of race in America are embodied by the black and white in your art.” “I thought it was really funny,” Ligon says, recalling that moment, during an August interview in his Brooklyn studio. “So, in order to make him see how silly his statement was,” he continues, “I asked him if, since newspapers are basically black text printed on white paper, all newspapers represent the binaries of race in the United States.” It’s an irritating thing to be constantly put in a box, but because of the very overt politics present in Ligon’s art, it is easy to see why viewers and critics of his art run the risk of reducing everything he makes to issues of race, sexuality, identity and other social issues. Despite the fact that, at sixty-one years old, he has worked as an abstract painter, produced sculptures with neon lights and made images that are manipulations of photographs, his tradition of working with text in his peculiar way has become his representative style, and like those of most great artists, it is easy to recognise. Indeed, there is probably no artist alive today employing text with such a simultaneous focus on both its formal and political value. In general terms, any relationship between image and text is tenuous, a matter that has been the subject of an enormous amount of

literature. But in Ligon’s work there is the fascinating possibility of a new conversation on transliteration – a corresponding representation of associating each letter inscribed on the canvas to an image: here, literally, it is the text itself that becomes the painting. Ligon’s work with text consists mostly of daubed words or sentences from Black authors (among them James Baldwin, from his 1953 essay ‘Stranger in the Village’, and Toni Morrison, in excerpts from her novels). When the letters that constitute that text get onto his canvas, they smear and roll and twirl, and as a result sometimes become illegible. It is as though the heart of the text itself was squeezed onto the canvas, leaving a distorted husk and the splatter of blood. There is no translation happening – the text changes in visual not literal meaning, and the success of his art lies in how he creates the corresponding association every letter is supposed to evoke when perceived as an image. Sometimes a dismembering is necessary for this association to be accurately expressed. This meta-disfiguration of words transported from the pages of a book to the site of an artwork is, it appears, Ligon’s greatest contribution to the tradition of painting.

2 Ligon was born in 1960, in the Bronx, New York. He studied together with his brother at a now-defunct private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan via a scholarship and received an art degree from Wesleyan University in 1982. Three years later, after he had worked as a proofreader for a law firm and spent most of his free time painting in the fashion of abstract painters like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, he got into the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, where he read much critical theory and began to use words in his paintings. Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) (1990) is perhaps his most famous and oftendiscussed work: made from sticky oil, gesso and graphite on wood, the two-by-one-metre painting contains words from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’. In the painting, the titular sentence is stencilled repeatedly across the canvas. Sometimes the words break haphazardly, but the striking thing is how thick white oil smears the white background, sentence dripping over sentence until the image starts to attain the elements of an abstract painting. Ligon speaks of his period as an abstract painter with an air of the past, but the compositions in his work prove that this training continues to inform much of his work.

When he started to make paintings like Therapy #2 (2004) based on the acts of figures like the comedian Richard Pryor, Ligon knew that he would require a different formal approach. He had to think carefully about the physical manifestations of the character he was referencing, something he didn’t necessarily have to do with Baldwin or Neale Hurston. Aside from transliteration, there was the need for animation, and colour. It was necessary to include Live (2014, a video installation that was a transformation from Pryor’s 1982 concert film Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip), although in Ligon’s design sound was absent. He had to correctly depict colours that would appropriately match the energy of Pryor’s flamboyant, flaming dress sense. He used lots of grammatical punctuation, and for the first time his often properly arranged letters seemed to be falling out of line. Was this a precursor for work to come? The letters in his more recent painting series Debris Field (2018), thick, black swabs of disfigured texts on dark red or white canvas, scatter as though in Brownian motion, with an exponential increase in the kind of energy contained in the Pryor paintings. But to manage this energy properly in a composition that works, Ligon says he had to revisit his training as an abstract painter.

ArtReview

above Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), 1990, oil stick, gesso and graphite on wood, 203 × 76 cm. Courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York

September 2021

above Synecdoche (For Byron Kim), 2018, neon, 13 × 78 × 6 cm. Photo: Brian Forrest

preceding pages Stranger (Full Text) #1, 2020–21, oil stick, gesso and coal dust on canvas, two panels, 305 × 1372 cm (overall). Photo: Thomas Barratt. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York

ArtReview

3 This September, at Hauser & Wirth’s Zürich gallery, Ligon’s new work First Contact will be on view for the first time. It is the biggest painting he’s ever made – a diptych three by thirteen metres – that renders the entire text of Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’. The manner is similar to that which he has always deployed: stencilled characters on a white background that drip and pour, as though the words possess a certain viscosity. The major difference here, apart from size, is that Baldwin’s words have covered ground and returned to the geography that inspired them in the first place: Switzerland (where, in 1951, the writer spent a period of time recovering from a near breakdown). Ligon is known for his letters to famous people like Jean-Michel Basquiat or to his friends. Some of these letters have been published as part of exhibition catalogues Ligon has organised. It is illuminating

to think of his relationship with letter writing in parallel to his relationship with text in general. Is every work he produces a letter to someone? “I don’t want to be all mystical,” he says, “but I’ve sometimes imagined these could be letters to some ancestor.” Letters by nature are intimate moving objects intended to cover ground – from their author’s to their recipient’s hands. Much of the inimitable tenderness in Ligon’s work is explainable when viewed through this lens. But there are extra layers in his case: the fact that many of his pieces contain a great deal of deliberate obfuscation in the way the text is rendered adds an element of intrigue, like the way one feels just before an envelope is opened and the letter is read. Perhaps this intrigue is the point: what is apparent might also contain an inside joke. ar Glenn Ligon: First Contact is on view at Hauser & Wirth Zürich from 17 September to 23 December Yinka Elujoba is a writer based in New York

all images but one © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Hauser & Wirth, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Chantal Crousel, Paris

Niggers Ain’t Scared, 1996, oil stick, synthetic polymer and graphite on linen, 77 × 77 cm. Photo: Ronald Amstutz

September 2021

Sue Tompkins by Martin Herbert

Mores, 2018, acrylic on canvas, aluminium frame, 42 × 32 × 4 cm (framed)

Doing things with words

All the Time, 2018, acrylic on canvas, aluminium frame, 42 × 32 × 4 cm (framed)

preceding pages Sue Tompkins, 2011 (installation view, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2011). Photo: Ruth Clark

above Skype Wont Do, 2013, acrylic on canvas, three parts, 130 × 55 cm (overall)

ArtReview

In 2012, during that year’s Glasgow International, I watched Sue indebted to the repetitions in some modernist forms (eg Gertrude Tompkins give a spoken-word performance at an offsite event in a pub. Stein), but it is also transient sculpture, words hovering in the air like I don’t recall what she said – though in another recital from the same physical things, then swept aside. As the Glasgow performance ended, year that’s preserved online, she talks about broken noses, novels, ears I wanted to congratulate her, but too much chatting and inhaling of bursting, settling differences via telephone, throbbing, wanting to secondhand smoke in recent days had incapacitated me. I scrawled run out – but I do remember the tumbling way she said it. I remember ‘I’ve lost my voice’ on one palm and ‘You were great!’ on the other, Tompkins repeated and glitched words and phrases, trying them on crossed the small room and showed her my hands; in any case, the for size and mingling them with nonsense sounds, making language evening didn’t need any more talking. at once pliant and incantatory. I remember her casually tossing the Tompkins, who was born in Leighton Buzzard, England, but sheets of paper she was sort-of reading from onto the floor as she has lived in Glasgow ever since attending the city’s School of Art went, also bouncing on her heels during the early-to-mid 1990s, is – or comes across as – a naturally and pacing back and forth and up Tompkins is a palimpsest: she sounds at once and down in confined space. As magnetic performer, but her story giggly and nervy and self-assured and incredibly if her speech were a discomfiting both as an artist and as a musician current flowing through her, present and alive, as if the words were tumbling is an utterly unlikely one. In the late 90s, while launching her art making her move hither and yon. out of her unbidden in a half-directed flow career after studying painting, Most of all, Tompkins, smiley and sometimes just nodding her head as if counting beats until the she was the frontwoman for Life Without Buildings, a beloved and next breathy outburst, materialised a contagious excitement, a kind actually really good art-school band who released one great album, Any of exultancy, at the endless affective possibilities of verbalisation. Other City (2001), of math rock-inflected, jangling and jangled postThere are, her performances suggest, a dozen ways of saying some- punk topped with Tompkins’s ebulliently wired, speak-singing thing, anything, and a logic that exists beyond straightforward phrasemaking before splitting up. (Just to underscore this, most linguistic meaning. Her throat-clearing and rhythmic repetition of art-school bands are terrible, and there are vanishingly few examphonemes have a rightness and timing despite not signifying, like ples of good ones whose members transition to successful visual-arts the verbal version of a jazz musician’s extended technique on their careers. Elizabeth Price, once of shambling indie band Talulah Gosh, instrument. It’s poetry of a sort, Tompkins’s spoken-word, and partly is another rare exception.)

c, 2018, acrylic on canvas, aluminium frame, 30 × 40 × 3 cm (framed)

September 2021

Tompkins didn’t want to be in the music world and hasn’t been gory: the successful painter who’s also a performer, or vice versa.) back, aside from demonstrating how musical someone can be with- Take, for example, All the Time (2018): that phrase, its letters daubed out music. Life Without Buildings’s live album, Live at the Annandale in a modulating range of colours from acidic lime through kidHotel, recorded in Sydney, came out to fans’ near-disbelief in 2007, friendly cerulean blue and shit-brown on a bile-coloured ground and that was pretty much that, or almost – unlikely recent twist in a perky green frame, the ‘All’ doubly underlined. The nonrecounted later in this text. It speaks to the band members’ appar- language constituents, colour and gesture, serve as silent analogues ently shared serenity with lwb being a thing of the past that I taught, for phrasing, such that the painting is at once sighing and deterfor several years, alongside the band’s former bassist, the artist Chris mined. Here and elsewhere, Tompkins seems to pluck a phrase Evans, and beyond mentioning that he played bass he never talked from the babble of the everyday and invest it with existential about music or mentioned their name. (The guitarist, Robert Dallas contours that belie the outward casualness of her facture. Sometimes this coming-into-focus, or Gray – aka Robert Johnston – is a giving weight to words, happens graphic designer and extant musiThere are, her performances suggest, with delayed effect; the multician; the drummer, Will Bradley, a a dozen ways of saying something, panel Skype Wont Do (2013) has well-regarded writer and curator. anything, and a logic that exists beyond found its moment in the last year “We did everything we set out to do,” he clarified to The Guardian or so. Mores (2018), in which a letter straightforward linguistic meaning earlier this year.) On the posthuhovering indecisively between mous record, as the band expertly navigates all manner of twists a lower-case ‘i’ and a ‘j’ floats in an expanse of turbid orange before and turns and lopsided time signatures, Tompkins is a palimpsest: a mass of tangled blue brushwork that could be a forest, turns abshe sounds at once giggly and nervy and self-assured and incredibly straction into charged personal drama with the addition of a single present and alive, as if the words were tumbling out of her unbidden letter; at the same time, it’s kind of goofy. in a half-directed flow; but if you compare the live and recorded Other works involve no language at all; some years back she was versions, they’re extremely similar, a brilliant simulation of in-the- fond of pinning scraps of coloured chiffon, accoutred with variously opened and closed zips that Tompkins says relate to the process moment improv. Tompkins understands that words have a situational gravity, of making a decision, to the wall in a way that seems at once casual and you see that in her paintings too. (Another very small cate- and just-so (albeit accompanying them with typed text pieces,

above Life Without Buildings, undated photo. Photo: Alan Dimmick

ArtReview

such as Odyssey Pink, 2011). Some of her works present as sheer abTompkins, for her part, professed herself very happy with this straction. Always, though, there’s a sense of Tompkins’s relation- youth-friendly development – which also, incidentally, hugely boostship to how language can work: the seemingly small utterance that, ed the band’s Spotify streams, such that they’ll probably make at least correctly handled, assumes scale. The apparently weightless thing £11.43 out of it – for what she saw as the sense of freedom the girls that, it turns out, has heft. Appearing both casual and profound were feeling. ‘Everything is open and somehow seems incredibly requires work, needless to say. It’s quite possible that Tompkins is sensitive and sincere and transparent at the same time,’ she told the a covert grafter, but you’d have to step past her work’s deceptively music website Paste. Additionally, in a way it’s perfect that a band, and wrought strategies to see it. an artist, who’ve hymned the flux of meaning – how contextual it can At the end of last year, another piece of Tompkins’s past assumed be, how to redirect it – should be rediscovered in this way. And in a – like the Skype painting – new significance. At the same time as medium that requires work. You watch these kids and think that to get a generation of British bands – to that point, to master the singer’s among them Dry Cleaning, Squid, own effusive spring rhythms, must Here and elsewhere, Tompkins seems to Black Country, New Road – have pluck a phrase from the babble of the everyday have required a deceptive amount adopted the sprechgesang (speakof practice. Tompkins understands and invest it with existential contours that singing) that Tompkins so winthe theatrical and emotional value of hiding the effort, that it’s more ningly aerated two decades ago belie the outward casualness of her facture impressive to see the apparently (and, to be fair, that Mark E. Smith was no slouch at two decades before that), Life Without Buildings throwaway become something in real time than it is to encounter selfwent viral on TikTok. Pushed along by a share from 90s-music- serious, capital-A art and find it not having much to say. Yet the main worshipping musician Beabadoobee, (mostly) young women started thing I remember from that aforementioned Glasgow performance, using 15 seconds of Life Without Building’s signature song The honestly, is being in the presence of someone extremely alive, or who Leanover in their videos, miming to Tompkins’s tricksy, thoughts- at least knew how to give that impression. This is, I suspect, part being-born repetitions – “If I lose you, if I lose you, if I lose you / in of what the TikTokers are feeling, partaking of, while they borrow the huh, the huh, the huh, mmm / If I, if I, if I, if I / B-b-b-baby”, etc Tompkins’s speech rhythms, and what they might take with them. – while showing off their heels, or applying makeup, or sitting in the A line from The Leanover that the kids don’t mime, but might interback of a car, or cavorting with their girlfriends. nalise: “You can be me, swim”. ar

above Mob de Mob, 2018, live performance at dkuk, London, 2018. Photo: Alex Zimmer. Courtesy the artist, The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow, and dkuk, London

September 2021

all images but two Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Liu Ye by Fei Lai

Book Painting No. 22 (Karl Blossfeldt, Wunder in der Natur, H. Schmidt & C. Günther, Leipzig, 1942, Page 49), 2019, acrylic on canvas, 35 × 26 × 4 cm (framed)

In translation

Book Painting No. 29 (Karl Blossfeldt, Wunder in der Natur, H. Schmidt & C. Günther, Leipzig, 1942, Page 47), 2020, acrylic on canvas, 35 × 26 × 4 cm (framed)

preceding pages Mrs. Schroeder, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 40 × 62 × 5 cm (framed)

above Book Painting No. 30 (Internationale Architektur Bauhaus Bücher No. 1, Albert Langen Verlag, München, 1925), 2020, acrylic on canvas, 37 × 29 × 4 cm (framed)

ArtReview

Before my visit to Liu Ye’s studio in Beijing, he messaged me to ask It’s a way of reclaiming the universal qualities of visual language if I was afraid of dogs: “No one else is home so I have to take care of and an approach that has allowed Liu to be ever more confident about the little dog today”. I bet he has one of those teddy-bear-like poodles, being just an artist as opposed to a Chinese artist – even in the age of I thought to myself. The little dog, however, turns out to be a giant covid-19, when he cannot leave China to attend many of his exhiwhite Akita-inu, who in fact looks a bit too large for Liu’s studio. Unlike bitions in the West. Indeed, looking at his works of recent years, the majority of painters in Beijing, who take up factory warehouses for one could hardly find any explicit traces of the artist’s experience their vast floorspace and high ceilings, Liu opted for a modern resi- in China. In keeping with that, when talking about his admiration dential flat as his workplace. His studio is relatively small and kept for masters like van Eyck, Liu eschews any categorisation of East and astonishingly neat and true to its modernist decor. There are only a West: as he has said in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘That’s few paintings on the wall, all under tabloid size. One is of the facade of not another culture – that’s culture’. However, that’s not to say the Gropius-designed Bauhaus that the East/West divide – of There is something undeniably liberating in Dessau. I had seen a picture of cultures and politics – is somethe painting before, but only in thing he doesn’t know well. stating that red is just red; that the red associated that living room, standing next In 1989, on the recommenwith Mao’s politics is essentially no different than dation of a professor at the to the dog and Liu’s collection of the red associated with Mondrian’s paintings; Central Academy of Fine Arts Bauhaus chairs, did I realise how (cafa) in Beijing, where he had small the painting actually is. and that a little red book is just a little red book studied for three years (back The studio itself reveals the artist’s aesthetic inclinations: the minimal decor, midcentury then, students needed official recommendations to be able to leave modern furniture, vintage toys in trichromatic colours; fitting oddly the country, and only a limited number of recommendations were among them is a porcelain figurine of Chairman Mao by the kitchen. assigned), Liu Ye arrived in Berlin with a student visa. Because he Over at the dining table, Liu has been reading a catalogue of Jan van flew Aeroflot – the national airline of the Soviet Union back then – Eyck’s complete works. The Chinese artist has repeatedly returned to from Beijing, the plane arrived in East Berlin. Coming from a socialist the Early Northern Renaissance painter for inspiration over the last country, he didn’t need a visa to enter East Germany, but no one from three decades. He points out a painting in the catalogue that catalysed his school in West Berlin could travel there to pick him up. Instead, a perception shift for him, the experience of which he still remembers he walked a long, fenced road at the airport that connected and sepavividly. Liu saw his first van Eyck in person at the Gemäldegalerie in rated the two Berlins, little knowing that the path and the divisions Berlin during the early 1990s, prior to which he had only seen images in the city would soon become defunct. on poorly printed artbooks back in China, which neither delivered Still, during his first few months in Berlin, Liu’s Chinese passport a sense of scale nor triggered much interest on the part of the young allowed him to go to East Berlin freely, a benefit most of his classmates artist. Measuring only 29 × 20 cm, Portrait of a Man (Giovanni Arnolfini?) in West Berlin couldn’t enjoy. And switching between the two Berlins (c. 1440) nevertheless dominated the entire room at the Gemäldegalerie, gave him freedom of a liminal kind. He would exchange his Deutsche at least in the eyes of the young painter (then in his mid-twenties). marks for eastern marks to buy food and painting supplies in the East and take them back to the West. The buildings and streets in And van Eyck has been one of Liu’s favourite painters ever since. What is it that threads together van Eyck, the Bauhaus and Mao, East Berlin reminded him of Beijing, but though they were strangely not just within the space where the artist works and reads, but within familiar and comforting, it was the cafés and museums in West the context of his oeuvre? Liu’s early works, from the 1990s, took Germany that attracted the young art student more. He was surprised a more explicit approach to combining disparate cultural elements to find ‘Bauhaus’ everywhere – not the Bauhaus he had learned about – from his experimentation with postmodern compositions (Atelier, back in Beijing, but in other aspects of daily life, such as the pan1991) to the famous Baishi knew Mondrian (1996). But Liu is not so European German chain of diy shops by that name. interested in a cultural reading Before enrolling in the muAlthough in appearing to place an emphasis of the subjects he had distincral department at cafa, Liu Ye studied industrial design at the tively chosen to put in his painton form over content, and in a way School of Arts & Crafts in Beijing ings. Political Pop was all the insisting upon it, Liu leaves his paintings from the age of fifteen to ninerage in Chinese contemporary wide open for interpretation, confronting art when he returned to China teen. He described the school from Germany during the midas a secondhand Bauhaus. Teachexperience with a form of innocence 1990s. And critics have made ers at the School of Arts & Crafts direct links between Liu’s frequent deployment of the colour red had been sent abroad to study the Bauhaus theory before the Cultural and his Chinese background. But this is something the artist himself Revolution. They brought back theories and methodologies of vehemently denies, along with any projection of political meaning European modernism, and taught young design students graphic onto his work. As far as he is concerned, he consciously steers clear of composition, constructivism, Kandinsky, etc. Mondrian, who would overtly political symbols within his painting. And there is something become something of an icon for Liu, was taught as an example of undeniably liberating in the straightforward approach: in stating how to draw patterns, but not from the perspective of any broader that red is just red; that the red associated with Mao’s politics is essen- art history. Needless to say, Liu’s formal training in design left a tially no different than the red associated with Mondrian’s paintings; lasting impact on his later practice as a painter. Instead of Sovietand that a little red book is just a little red book. style painting techniques, the painstaking study of which would have

September 2021

Bauhaus No. 8 (Triadisches Ballett), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 38 × 52 cm

Bauhaus No. 7 (Oskar Schlemmer as ‘The Turk’), 2021, acrylic on canvas mounted on wooden panel, 54 × 82 × 6 cm (framed)

above Book Painting No. 31 (Internationale Architektur Bauhaus Bücher No. 1, Albert Langen Verlag, München, 1925), 2020, acrylic on canvas, 35 × 26 × 4 cm (framed)

facing page Cuadra san Cristobal, 2020, acrylic on canvas mounted on wooden panel, 33 × 43 × 5 cm (framed)

ArtReview

been a basic requirement at a fine-art school in China, his training in and obsession with which he discusses the quality of van Eyck’s brushindustrial design allowed him an unknowing (at the time) ‘shortcut’ strokes. What this speaks to is an ultimate love for language, be it writto the ideas of modernism. And that ‘secondhand Bauhaus’ educa- erly or painterly, in its elementary phonemes and rhythms. tion, combined with his subsequent firsthand exposure in Germany, All this might bring to mind the nineteenth-century poet and art has manifested in a recent series of works devoted to the Bauhaus, of critic Charles Baudelaire’s favoured metaphor of the painter as transthe iconic buildings and book covers associated with the movement, lator, but in the case of Liu, the work transcends any binaries of imitaand of Oskar Schlemmer’s ballet dancers. A tribute to the universal tion and imagination. Liu only translates the things that he absoqualities of beauty and restraint that characterise the output of the lutely loves, taking them from one lexicon to another. In the process, he stays faithful only to the beauty and rhythm of language, not to movement and Liu’s own paintings. Though Liu showed a remarkable talent in drawing as a child, the original author’s intent, as Nabokov would have demanded (as painting wasn’t his first love. Liu’s father was a writer of children’s a translator himself, Nabokov wrote several essays on the subject of literature and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the young Liu Ye developed a translation in which he emphasised that the process should involve passion for books and once aspired to become a writer himself. Given total loyalty to the author’s full intentions). In this respect form that his childhood was marked by the Cultural Revolution in Beijing, trumps content. Although in appearing to place an emphasis on the Liu had, at the time, an incredibly rare and privileged access to books: former, and in a way insisting upon it, Liu leaves his paintings wide both children’s books and banned books that his parents had acquired open for interpretation, confronting experience with a form of innobefore the Cultural Revolution and hidden at home. On the flipside, cence (which has, in the past, led the artist to focus on representations his father knew well about the danger of language and what not to of children and children’s characters, such as the Little Mermaid and write, and subsequently discouraged his son from becoming a writer Dick Bruna’s cartoon rabbit, Miffy). It was the translator Mei Shaowu who first introduced Nabokov’s in light of the dangers involved. He allowed, however, that he could become a painter. novels to a Chinese readership. And his translation of Pnin (1957) is Still, Liu’s love for the literary form echoes through his painterly one that Liu read and loved. Son of the famous Peking opera artist work. Most obviously, books have, literally, played a part in his paint- Mei Lanfang, Mei Shaowu was the only one in his family of opera ings since the early days: from the self-portrait Brooklyn (1994) in which artists to delve into the world of written language. Perhaps because he holds a red book next to a Mondrian painting, to the more focused of his family background, Mei came to know early what any masterful series representing book covers and pages that started around 2013. translator learns, something Liu also learned from his literary family: Particularly striking among ‘The Book Paintings’ series are three rendi- that a certain rhythm transcends the specifics of language and has the tions of the first page of Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov. Liu copied potential to connect beauty in all forms. ar the exact image of the page – line by line, word by word – from three Work by Liu Ye is on show at Esther Schipper, Berlin, from editions of the book, printed in 1997, 1959 and 1955 respectively. When 4 September to 23 October we meet, Liu speaks of the rhythm in Nabokov’s words all images (which he had read in both English and Chinese, but © the artist. Courtesy the artist Fei Lai is a writer and editor based in Shanghai chose to represent in the former) with the same passion and Esther Schipper, Berlin

September 2021

A FEMINIST REVISION OF PORTUGUESE GRAPHIC DESIGN HISTORY 27 AUGUST—28 OCTOBER 2021, GABINETE GRÁFICO, PORTO

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21/05/2021 15:18

Art Reviewed

But wherever the story demands 81

Simon Fujiwara Who the Baer Fondazione Prada, Milan 29 April – 27 September Who the Baer is a cartoon character dreamed up by Simon Fujiwara during the pandemicinduced lockdown year of 2020. Although there’s obviously a fair degree of conscious appropriation involved in that dreaming-up. Appropriately, then, the majority of the works on show take the form of mixed-media collage (from conventional combinations of paper to structures incorporating moving image and kinetic sculptures) and explore a certain degree of what a trained psychologist might term ‘dream-reality confusion’ (the dream is contaminated by the real, unless it’s the other way around). The exhibition takes the form of a structured journey presenting Who’s invention and is shaped by a sequence of works, many of which are decorated by more-or-less-absurd surveystyle ticked boxes, org charts and detourned political and marketing slogans, that playfully suggest who Who, as someone born in 2020, might be or can become. It’s a warped take on a ‘choose your own identity’ adventure, if you like. The works on show are housed in a vaguely mazelike cardboard architecture whose outer limits trace the silhouette of the bear in question. Although only the truly architecturally minded would have any chance of recognising this while wandering through them, the forms nevertheless give viewers the feeling that, despite their individual titles, we are dealing with some sort of an indivisible gesamtkunstwerke (or are trapped in a larger-than-life, ursine model of the boardgame ‘Operation’). Which, depending on your outlook on such things, might be a common-sense or a naive notion of how we expect identity to function. The journey begins with A True Account of Who the Baer (all works 2021), a structure that looks at first glance like a giant Disney fairytale book (of the type that opens Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), whose open pages are cut through to reveal a collagist’s worktable (littered with pens, scissors, notebooks, glue and a cutting mat), as if to emphasise that all ‘truths’ here are constructed. ‘Out of what?’, then, is the question with which we begin. An image of Who themself appears in the collage, seated, dressed only in a pair of blue jeans, reading what we might take to be a self-help book, titled Becoming

Who?, and appearing at once Pooh-like and reminiscent of the bear costume deployed by Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss in videos from the early 1980s in which, channelling an artworld version of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, they too dreamed up schemes to categorise the world and its absurdities. And in case there was any doubt about the artificial nature of the world on display, the account proceeds with a series of collages purporting to detail Who’s invention through the diktats of a branding exercise (titled Branding Who and offering ‘three design traits your brand character must have’ – ‘instantly rings a bell’, ‘inspires trust’, ‘drives engagement’ – the play on ‘your character’ running throughout the show). And yet while all this might suggest that Fujiwara’s character is built on clear design principles, structure and planning, it is playfully undermined by Who’s subsequent unfolding as a symptom of our unstable present, the baer taking its place in a world that is as full of befuddlement as it is of potential. The various artworks that follow explore themes of gender, sexuality, race and historic and inherited identity, all of them presented, thanks to the conceit of creating a character, as choices to be made (by Who or their creator) rather than the product of necessary truths. Who’s in the Mirror? is a cartoonish Sleeping Beauty-type mirror decorated with a selection of pronouns. Adam Who? and Eve Who? feature art-historical representations of the biblical characters collaged over with gendered jean types from fashion magazines or catalogues and drawn sketches of Who in muscular or serpentine form. There’s the vague sense that both male and female forms trace the outline of a Google image search. A feeling that lingers as the exhibition proceeds. Later collages reference Elon Musk and Grimes’s decision to raise their child genderneutral, while Skolstreijk for Who?, a cartoonish sculpture of a ship lurching over what may be polar waves or an iceberg, with a flattened polar bear flopping over its prow and a placard displaying the slogan of the title raised midships, references… well, you know. Elsewhere stop-motion animations chronical Who travelling the world to find themself (with all the

facing page, top Who the Baer, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

hippyishness that might imply). Turning to ancient monuments, we trawl through Easter Island-style sculptures of heads (sporting cartoon-bear ears) and Ancient Egyptian-style mummies clutching toy bears to their bony chests (titled Who’s in Egypt?, the pun evoking debates about both restitution and cultural appropriation as well as the ethics of the display of human remains). A vanity table with a Chinese lantern looks like it was abandoned by whichever one of Fischli/Wiess was wearing the panda costume (a version of which hangs to the side of Fujiwara’s lifesize tableau), its surface littered with news stories about China’s pandas. Who is inserted into Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–08); Who’s Baerlines (New Rules for Liquids) is part of a series of works that examine travel and transportation (from the point of view, largely, of branding); Whope is a detourned version (bearlike) of Shepard Fairey’s iconic image of Barack Obama. Who is reflected or projected in everything. Like a desperate narcissist, or lost child searching for home. You can’t help but be reminded, of course, that it is by apparent reflection of a similar kind that many of the algorithms that govern our digital and analogue lives work. There’s a trace here of Guy Debord’s examinations of the dominance of mediated existence, of lives lived through marketing and images, and of a world in which, as he puts it in his 1967 tract The Society of the Spectacle, ‘All that was once directly lived has become mere representation’, tracing what he viewed as society’s steady descent from being, to having, to appearing. That last phase is where Who, and by proxy Fujiwara, starts. In this world the construction of new images from old ones (true to theme, and for what it’s worth, Prada notes that the entire physical installation is recyclable) is all there is. But whether that’s a good or a bad thing, a constraint or a liberation, is something about which both character and their creator evince a degree of ambivalence. Despite the fact that one of the implications of Who’s the Baer is that art shares dna with marketing, advertising and sloganeering to the point at which they become indistinguishable as separate species. We’re back to the drawing board at which we began. Or never really left. Mark Rappolt

facing page, bottom A True Account of Who the Baer, 2021, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

ArtReview

September 2021

Agnieszka Polska The Thousand-Year Plan Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (msn) 2 July – 19 September In 1962 the journalist Ryszard Kapuściński wrote that Poland’s ‘electrical communism began in the year ’58’ and that the peasant now had what he wanted, ‘heaven and hell in a single switch’. This observation, which succinctly registers a critical meeting point between technology and political and religious ideology, undergirds Agnieszka Polska’s immersive, archly ecstatic two-channel video installation The Thousand-Year Plan (2021). Within the quasi-basilica of msn, the audience sits on long benches between two massive projections. Thus our heads are constantly turning, interrupting full immersion. The films’ parallel narratives are anchored in the 1950s, when ‘The People’s Republic’ cultivated a workforce that reflected socialist principles of gender equality and universal education, and, meanwhile, ‘cursed soldiers’ – nationalist partisans now lauded by Poland’s right as anticommunist heroes – hid in forests, tuning makeshift radios, awaiting another war that would liberate their homeland.

Thus, a pair of engineers, one notably female and a graduate from the peasantry, traipse the countryside, drenched in evening sun, scouting routes for the electric grid. The sumptuous cinematography of this reedy, boggy land is redolent of classic Polish cinema (Krzysztof Zanussi, Andrzej Wajda). Yet here, subtly animated flames – animation being a characteristic of Polska’s work – haunt the protagonists. On the opposite screen, a couple of partisans hiding in the same forest wretchedly compete over past savage glories, and are similarly ‘alight’. A meeting of the pairs feels imminent, a confrontation of their investment in electrification to seemingly different ends. When this happens, the films also ‘meet’, fusing into an animated section that is at once a spectacle of electrical power, accompanied by a mournful folksong, and absurdly reminiscent of a screensaver. Acknowledging that the peasant masses considered electric light ‘unnatural’, Lenin declared, ‘but what we consider unnatural

The Thousand-Year Plan (still), 2021, two-channel hd video installation with sound, 30 min. Courtesy the artist and msn, Warsaw

ArtReview

is that the peasants and workers should have lived … in such backwardness, poverty and oppression under the yoke of the landowners and the capitalists’. No communism without electrification; but true communism has arguably never come to pass in Eastern Europe or, indeed, anywhere, beyond a corrupted, metaphysical version. What has, conversely, as Kapuściński speculated, is the proliferation and evolution of the electric ‘switch’, and the ‘heaven and hell’ contained within its mechanism. As I cross back from Poland into Germany, the sun is setting over the River Oder, and I’m struck by the unnatural appearance of the blazing orb in that moment, as though superimposed on the landscape like Polska’s flames. I’m reminded of how she interrogates the ‘nature’ of energies, and how electrification’s practical and spiritual implications speak as much to a local audience in Warsaw regarding the East and the West as they do to a broader climatic anxiety about the sun, now sunk beyond my westward gaze, and the earth. Phoebe Blatton

Ja’Tovia Gary The Giverny Suite mmk Frankfurt 3 June – 8 August An ornate antique settee stands in the middle of the darkened gallery space, its high back facing the three-screen projection of Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Suite (2019). There is nowhere else to sit, but we sense the settee is not for us. For one thing, a viewer wouldn’t be able to sit on it and watch the film at the same time. Like the film and two nearby Orisha altars, it seems its function is to make and hold space. It waits on someone else. Shown behind, on a loop, the 40-minute The Giverny Suite uses archival material, voxpop interviews and other filmed segments to consider the space and safety of Black womanhood. Enclosed within it is Giverny I (Négresse Impériale, 2017), a six-minute short that weaves, among other things, footage of the artist (the titular négresse) in Monet’s garden at Giverny, Nina Simone’s discomfiting, robotic performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival; newsreel footage from Haiti after the invasion

and occupation by us troops in 1915, drone strikes conducted under the Obama regime and Diamond Reynold’s Facebook Live video just after her boyfriend Philando Castile was murdered by Minnesota police in 2016. Complicating and expanding this earlier short, The Giverny Suite is a compelling, uneasy work – evidence of the strength of Black women, as well as the violence that undermines their simple right to exist. “Do you feel safe in your body?” Gary asks passing Black women on the streets of Harlem. In the eminently meme-able clip from Puerto Rican reality-tv star and rapper Joseline Hernandez, the question is much more direct: “Can I live? Can I fucking live?” Situating these questions alongside visual proof of state violence, The Giverny Suite implies the lethal incongruity of Blackness – described by writer and theorist Frank B. Wilderson III as ‘violence without sanctuary’ – in white social and cultural

life. Even in art, at Giverny, the Black woman is always idealised as an exotic mirage or whispered threat. Examined too closely, her image causes the lens to shudder. Her true likeness, let alone authorship, seems a problem for representation itself. One possible critique of The Giverny Suite is that, in its wide source material, it ends up talking about everything and nothing. Still, to talk about Blackness is to talk about everything. Gary’s inclusion of drone strikes from the Obama regime – instead of the innumerable cruelties before and after him – emphasises the scant power of Blackness within the current system. In its ambitious systemic view, The Giverny Suite aims at a form of representation adequate to the richness of Black experience. This is primarily a spatial task, I think, beginning with the discomfort of white audiences. Making space, we take our seats on the floor. Rebecca O’Dwyer

The Giverny Suite, 2019 (installation view, mmk, Frankurt). Photo: Leonore Schubert. © the artist. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Gallery Frank Elbaz, Paris

September 2021

Spencer Finch Only the hand that erases writes the true thing Lisson Gallery, London 22 June – 31 July The first work visible upon entering Spencer Finch’s latest exhibition appears as a line of narrow coloured rectangles running along the left and rear gallery walls. Upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves to be paint swatches, each accompanied by a description written in pencil below: ‘trail sign’, ‘trail’, ‘spruce’, ‘sky’. Following the line of swatches, you repeat Finch’s journey along the route named in the work’s title: Crawford Path up Mt. Pierce, New Hampshire (after a spring snowstorm) (all works 2021). The colours are those identified by Finch as corresponding to things seen on his hike; corresponding being the key word, since the colours are in fact those available in the Benjamin Moore paint catalogue. An individual’s perception of colour is mapped by readymade industrial categories; a continuous experience divided into a linear grid. Finch calls this work a ‘a peculiar kind of landscape painting’, one that came from ‘marvelling at the range of colours that arise out of this seemingly monochrome material’. Yet marvel isn’t exactly the mood this work conjures, captivating as it is. In foregrounding the way our encounters with nature are mediated by industrial technology, it evokes and shares the historical conditions that led to the emergence of landscape painting: the artist’s sense of alienation from the natural world that made the object appear as a discrete subject to be painted, rather than part of a more general environment in which

one belongs. The somewhat melancholy tone accompanying this work is heightened by those sections where the same word, ‘snow’ or ‘shadow’, appears multiple times beneath seven or eight different coloured swatches. It is a reminder of the poverty of the English language – of many languages – when faced with the variety of the natural world. Other works in the exhibition return again and again to the relationship between words and colour, language and nature. Cloud (cumulus fractus under stratus, Connecticut) consists of an image of a cloud, painstakingly composed out of layers of Scotch tape on grey board, accompanied by the label that forms the work’s title. The image aspires to depict a particular formation, language works to classify it into a group. A series entitled Fresh Snow (morning effect) consists of flecks of silver leaf on white paper; the painstaking effort of depicting a particular appearance contrasting with the generic similarity of the titles. Almost turning to the exoticising cliché of the Inuit having a hundred words for snow, a set of works occupying a single room are named after usuyuki, a Japanese word meaning ‘thin snow’ or ‘light snow’, suggesting that other cultures, by being closer to nature, have retained a linguistic diversity, or even a kind of projected primitivism, lost to those deadened by civilisation. These works consist of layers of white tulle suspended from rods on the gallery wall. Perhaps because – titles

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aside – they feature no words, or conceptual mediations on language, these works are the most successful in drawing attention to the visual complexity subsumed in colour words like ‘white’. Shade, density, luminosity and intensity shift as you spend time moving around the gallery, or as a weak sun comes and goes on a characteristically disappointing English summer’s morning. Evoking the techniques of Light and Space artists like Mary Corse, this room enables you to understand that our experience of colour is not predetermined, or readymade, but shaped by context and time, always in flux. A final room, housing Mistakes I, another series of coloured squares running along the gallery walls, suggests that our failures correctly to perceive the world have been Finch’s theme all along. Each coloured square of card contains a pastel smudge and pencil description: ‘a wave mistaken for a duck’, ‘wet leaf mistaken for dog poop’. The overall tone is one of humour, as if to encourage us to laugh at how we will always get it wrong. If this is a welcome deflation of a ponderous seriousness that can sink many works in the tradition of Conceptual art that explore the relationship between ‘Art and Language’ – to name but one artistic project that takes these questions very seriously indeed – the room does lower the stakes of the exhibition somewhat. Words don’t match the world, perception is always deception. What does it matter, if it is all just a joke? Kevin Brazil

facing page Mistakes, 2021, soft pastel on coloured paper, 25 panels, 28 × 25 cm (each). © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai

above Only the hand that erases writes the true thing, 2021 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai

September 2021

Takako Yamaguchi Stars, Los Angeles 15 May – 10 July For most of the nearly five decades during which she has been active, Japanese-born Takako Yamaguchi’s work has been associated with Pattern and Decoration, a United Statesbased movement born during the 1970s that challenged the hierarchy of art over craft within the American artworld. P&D’s celebration of traditional handwork that was perceived to be feminine, and particularly of non-Western traditional craft techniques, was intended as a riposte specifically to the clinical remove of American Minimalism. And yet Yamaguchi’s own relationship to both movements is complicated. Throughout her career, she has rejected the conventional distinctions between minimalist-style abstraction and figuration, sometimes oscillating between the two modes within the same painting. This artistic choice has made her challenging to categorise and may partially explain her historic underrepresentation outside her hometown of Los Angeles (itself

historically more receptive to craft traditions, most notably ceramics, and movements like Finish Fetish that revelled in the surface). Stars’s new presentation of six largescale paintings on paper executed between 1998 and 2008 has already made significant progress in amplifying her visibility within the larger artworld, as evidenced by coverage of the show in national and international publications. In contrast to the artist’s 2019 exhibition, which presented spare, trompe l’oeil abstract paintings based on photographs of geometric structures, and to her 2018 show of wry ‘portraits’, in fact depictions of the artist’s torso dressed in finely rendered fabric (both presented at as-is.la), this set of paintings hovers between abstraction and depictions of highly stylised landscape. The artist’s seemingly tongue-in-cheek references to what might once have been termed Orientalism are visible in her flat renderings of pattern-work that recall

Tropical Depression, 2001, oil, metal leaf on paper, 133 × 133 cm. Courtesy the artist and Stars, Los Angeles

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Japanese textiles, in a canny nod to the artist’s biography, which critics have frequently used to categorise her work. Two untitled paintings made in 1998 and 1999 feature lotuslike flowers, as if to underscore the joke. Intricate patterns of gold leaf are carefully applied over gradations of oil so delicately painted that they appear almost airbrushed but pointedly are not. The oil elements of these works are achieved with a single brush, often over the course of many years, lending the final paintings an obsessive quality in stark contrast to commercial airbrushing. On the surface of these stylised vistas, eddies of gold paint pool and seem to undulate. Yamaguchi suggests mountains on horizons, oceans and clouds intercut by patterns that allow these paintings to appear both flat and spatial. They sit in the interstice between the two, coyly evading our attempts to classify them while confidently holding our gaze. Cat Kron

Jade Montserrat In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens Bosse & Baum, London 5 June – 24 July Navigating the affective ambiguities of bodily consciousness, often through the prism of Afro-diasporic subjectivity, Jade Montserrat’s drawings resist clear-cut interpretation. In them, fragments of the body merge uncomfortably with dreamy landscapes, strewn with motifs that feel symbolic but whose meanings could be multiple and conflicting: a handshaped rock reaching out of the ocean (In Tune with the Infinite, 2015); a pair of feet with vultures perched on its toes and heels, while scattered over its pinkish skin are blue-and-yellow round bushy growths, possibly sea anemones, and diamantine shards (Feet, Spectator, 2016). The recurring motif of the groin, presented as a frontal, semicartographic outline from waist to thigh, may celebrate female sexuality as a

source of strength, and yet combined with such utopianism are more discomfiting references to sexual objectification and bodily dispossession. In Torso: Reef-knot (2020–21), the joyous palette (blue sky, pink blossoms), the balletic effect of the white zigzags and even the fantastic octopus-shaped ‘hair’ covering the figure’s genitalia are superficially uplifting. But less so are the potential allusions to the Middle Passage in the reef knots and the gold cagelike material cladding the Black skin. Text is often incorporated into the images, many of the phrases starting with the words ‘Her body…’, which act as the exhibition’s verbal refrain. But despite the possessive pronoun, self-possession is never stable. That the meaning of these phrases – and by

extension most of the works in the show – is unfixed is suggested by the precariousness in Montserrat’s rendering of the letters, as if they were in a state of frenzied motion or competing for visibility with their surrounds. In Her body moved through darkness to dawn (2017–21), the words of the title shiver amidst red-and-pink cellular forms floating in ultramarine; against the white letters, brown spawnlike cells also appear to be growing. The work elicits both hope and suffering, as we’re unsure of how to read ‘darkness’ or how her body came to understand its meaning. Perhaps Montserrat is telling us to hold off interpretation, just for a moment, and find a middle way between reading, looking and feeling. Tom Denman

Torso: Reef-knot, 2020–21, watercolour, gouache, pencil, pencil crayon, highlighter pen, ink, graphite on paper, 42 × 33 cm. Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy the artist and Bosse & Baum, London

September 2021

Athanasios Argianas Hollowed Water arch, Athens 3 June – 31 August Empty ceramic armours, resembling fragmentary parts of hybrid figures – somewhere between humans and sea creatures – punctuate the floorspace in Athanasios Argianas’s Hollowed Water, which premiered last year at London’s Camden Arts Centre and is now restaged at arch. As if washed up on a displaced shore, these unidentified sculptures, Tilebodies (sleepers) (2021), make you wonder too about the ‘missing’ bodies they once enveloped. Were they damaged or destroyed, were they healed? These ceramics deviate slightly from those in the initial exhibition: developed during the lockdowns, they seem even more unfinished, roughly made, more fragile. Over our heads, like a drawing in the air, a set of suspended steel and brass ribbons (Song Machine 20, 2020) is inscribed with text: it reads, among other phrases, ‘The width of your shoelace, of the length of your nail. The width of a coral snake, unfolded. Of the length of a coral snake, curled up.’ You might use the words to ground yourself if you lack a background in music, given the potentially puzzling references to its history and technologies constantly present in Argianas’s work. Texts, recycled from older works, slip and then return, like a loop. They may not give fixed meaning to the objects – luckily – but they amplify the counterpoint among different sensations, sounds and textures in this grouping, maybe the artist’s most textural work to date. Waiting on a manual turntable is Pivoting Music ( for strings and cat purr waveform in A) (2020): involving strings and a drone made

from a waveform of Argianas’s cat’s purr, written as slurring glissandos, it is heard through Principal (aberration) and Metalique (aberration) (both 2020), two sculpture-speakers, both aberrations of the historical design accompanying the ondes Martenot, a proto-synthesiser invented in 1928. Principal, playing the right channel, has a relatively clear sound, but in Metalique, a gong framed in plywood, the sound is distorted, the cello stands out, everything seems to be collapsing. This could be the sound of dust. Meanwhile, two Brancusi-like heads, cast in bronze from 1970s binaural microphones and each titled Binaural Head (2020), lie on the floor. Their ears, replaced by mollusc shells, touch the ground: gold diggers scanning the sound of the earth, perhaps, or dowsers looking for water. Historical modernism, an inexhaustible tank from which the artist regularly draws references, is present but not overwhelming. Again, sensations overcome reason; aural connections seem more important than the objects themselves. The water suggested but missing from this gallery is to be found upstairs, in Hollowed Water (a gesture, 24 times) (2020), a three-minute film installation with music for harpsichord, voice and drum. The dazzling effect of the continuous alternation between two images – a drum falling into the ancient Athenian river of Kifissos and a closeup of a woman’s hand wearing a bismuth crystal ring – is accelerated by continuous jumps between tonality. The near-stressful result reminds one of fractals, chaos visualised. The music’s crystalline form is pivotal to the

facing page, top Hollowed Water (a gesture, 24 times) (still), 2020, back-projected 4k video installation with sound, 3 min (looped), 230 × 230 cm. Photo: Luke Andrew Walker. Courtesy Camden Arts Centre, London

exhibition, as is the motif of the cast, the cell. Different fragile, organic forms, like a grouper jowl or a leaf, as well as moments and sensations, are cast throughout the space in an everchanging choreography, reflective and open to interpretation and intuition. How, it all suggests, can you turn affect into language? Octopus (2020), by the exit, is a black-andwhite image, printed on a record cover, of a cat nesting inside a seashell: it’s possibly the artist’s pet, the sound of its footsteps still haunting the space. This sheltering animal seems to hint at the tenuous encounters and connections around us – in the works, in life. The sensation created by this image and the exhibition as a whole is open to definition, like an alien conversation, yet one coming from the depths of the earth or the sea, the mind of an animal. Where is my voice in this, I wonder, walking around the old centre of Athens, where the gallery is situated. Can I communicate with this universe? Does it relate to any of the thoughts that trouble, say, a writer’s mind at an intense moment of their life, all the obligations delayed during lockdown pressing to be resolved? The previously ‘picturesque’, now highly activated sight of cats nesting on the ceramic roof tiles of the neighbourhood’s traditional neoclassical houses does not permit the obvious, negative answer, but rather keeps reopening the conversation, bringing back images, textures and scores from Hollowed Water. It’s like a song looping in your mind, asking you to sing it again and again, even though you might not want to. It’s stressful. It’s also cathartic. Despina Zefkili

facing page, bottom Tilebodies (sleepers) Set 3, 2021, various ceramic bodies, 35 × 110 × 70 cm. Photo: Paris Tavitian

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September 2021

Glasgow International Various venues, Glasgow 11–27 June At last, a biennale! This delayed Glasgow International features over 100 artists and 70 exhibitions, and loads and loads of unusual venues to explore: odd places you’ve long wished (even as a local) you could access, such as old buildings in the Barras market and locked railway station offices. Richard Parry, the director of this year’s gi, expands on its theme – ‘attention’ – over a pot of tea I’ve inattentively let him pay for. We talk about Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and its famous line ‘attention must be paid’. This is one of gi’s key messages as you wander around the city: stay awake! Pay heed to advertising hoardings and billboards, as some feature examples from Iconoclasm (2021), a collection of drawings by Sam Durant. We find Madrid, 1936 (2018) on Clyde Street (Spanish Republicans firing guns at a statue

of the Sacred Heart of Jesus), not far from Arthur Dooley’s 1974 fibreglass figure of the Spanish Republican fighter and prominent communist Dolores Ibárruri by the river. Durant’s works are based on images of public statuary being attacked throughout history, thus homing in on the live debate over who should stand and who might fall. Parry talks about the ‘attention economy’, how the commercial world grabs at us – the subject of one of the central works at gi: Gretchen Bender’s Total Recall (1987) at the Royal Concert Hall. A bank of tv sets like those mesmerising David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) flash a collage of fastcut commercials for General Electric and clips from Oliver Stone’s movie Salvador (1986) set to a blaring 1980s synth barrage of sound. The effect is deliberately nauseous, a bit like

Georgina Starr, Quarantaine (still), 2020, video, 43 min. Courtesy the artist and Glasgow International

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living during the 80s themselves. Your brain screams: get out of my mind! The overlooked, the forgotten, are the subject of susan pui san lok’s powerful exhibition seven x seven. A long list of surnames on wallpaper – Ascendants Descendant/Descendants Ascendant (2021) – testifies to brutal misogyny and the large number of women accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736. A video, 99 (2021), features embroidery hoops with the names and villages of those women persecuted in Essex around the same time. Paying attention to the individual at their most basic level – one’s name – is the subject of Graham Fagen’s Ping Pong Club at the wonderful Queens Park Railway Club. This is an archive of misspellings of the artist’s own name in various letters and publications, thus we get ‘Fagin’, ‘Fagan’, ‘Graeme’ and so on.

Many of the missives come from highly prestigious organisations that, one assumes, take pride in getting things right. Here they don’t – with amusing and disturbing regularity. No doubt many will identify with this banal institutional inattention. Darkness heightens our attentiveness, and at an empty Barrowland Ballroom Duncan Campbell shows o Joan, no… (2006), a Beckettian film where people moan and grunt and yell in a blackout interrupted by occasional flashes of light. Is this a soundtrack to sex or childbirth or madness? Maybe it’s a parable about our general lot – a life of obscurity punctuated by rare glimpses of lucidity. Perhaps we should pay more attention to those closest to us. Luke Fowler does, with Mum’s Cards (2018), a film about his mother, the sociologist Bridget Fowler. We see her index files, an organised

mind; she’s clearly a hard worker. Similarly we meet his father, John – a political philosopher – in his own letters, displayed in another film, For Dan (2021). These films are works of love that duck sentimentality. The late Carol Rhodes’s drawings and paintings get a deserved revival and, hopefully, a larger audience at the Kelvingrove gallery. Elsewhere here, France-Lise McGurn’s Aloud (2020–21) is an exuberant painting on glass gleefully feminising Duchamp’s original concept for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23) by depicting naked women. Accompanying canvases have one marked ‘Taps Aff’ on its side: appropriate, as it’s quite hot out for Glasgow and people are indeed stripping off. There’s more eyepopping bodily exposure over at Tramway with impressive videoworks by Georgina

Starr – Quarantaine (2020) – and Jenkin van Zyl – Machines of Love (2020–21). Both are fantastical and recall, respectively, Lewis Carroll’s dreamy Alice and the macabre world of H.R. Giger. Real horror is addressed at goma, where Nirbhai (Nep) Singh Sidhu has tapestries and sculpture referencing Sikhism and India’s military actions in 1984 – specifically the attack on the Golden Temple and torture of Sikhs in the Punjab. This is a cri de coeur that attention must be paid to events of the past that Narendra Modi’s government would gladly bury forever. Sidhu’s work has significant contemporary local charge given the recent events in Pollokshields, where Home Office officials were prevented by protesters from extraditing two Indian men from the Kenmure Street Sikh community. A success story – not unlike this year’s edition of gi. John Quin

Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, 1987, 8-channel video installation, 24 monitors, 3 projections, colour, sound, 18 min. Photo: Tate. Courtesy Glasgow International

September 2021

On Hannah Arendt: What is Freedom? – bracha Richard Saltoun, London 15 June – 31 July Upon entering this exhibition, featuring 39 artworks by artist and philosopher bracha (Bracha L. Ettinger), I am immediately drawn to three smallscale paintings on canvas titled n.4, n.5 and n.6, from the Kaddish series (2015–20) – named after Jewish prayer hymns, which can be recited for the dead. In them, shrouded figures levitate hazily between planes of perspective, while the deployment of heavier purple tones in these works lends them a sombre aura. This layering process is paramount to bracha’s painting, as she locates the site of historical trauma within the repetitive, retrospective process of revisiting and reengaging with the original events themselves. These three paintings, along with the Eros – Pietà (2015–19) works in the next room, imply a maternal gentleness in the way the larger anthropomorphic figures cradle the smaller. However, whereas most of these paintings verge on nebulous abstraction, bracha sometimes renders facial features with clarity,

so their piercing eye contact with the viewer endows a suspicious eeriness. Towards the back of the gallery are works on paper from the Eurydice – Pietà series (2013–21), after the Greek myth and Christian maternal motif; these are less visually compelling than the paintings, but certainly more conceptually cogent; whereas the deliberate nature of form within paintings impinges upon the spontaneous conjuring of memory, a photocopier used to manipulate images of historical events reintroduces the unpredictable and manufactured nature of recollection. Each mechanical distortion further muddles the clarity of the initial images, which depict charged historical events, yet retains their traces in an echo of inherited cross-generational trauma. Collectively, the works on show (14 small canvases and 25 works on paper) reference women in mythology, literature and the Bible, while the artist’s matrixial colour scheme of red (to symbolise love and blood), purple

Kaddish n.6, 2015–20, oil on canvas, 40 × 30 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun, London

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and black (bruises) adds a visual cohesion across the exhibition. The Israeli artist, feminist theorist, psychoanalyst and philosopher is known for developing matrixial theory – a synchronous, feminist and subjective approach to psychoanalysis. Her paintings, in turn, are an aesthetic engagement with her theories, and meditate upon the fate of all wartime women, particularly – as the gallery indicates – during the Holocaust This is the fourth iteration in Richard Saltoun’s yearlong programme centred on Hannah Arendt, and it takes its title from a chapter from the political theorist’s 1961 book Between Past and Future. To Arendt’s question ‘What is Freedom?’ the gallery seems to answer ‘painting’, which in its simplicity might appear to do both bracha and Arendt a disservice. Yet even that cannot take away from the fact that bracha’s artwork and philosophy offer glimpses of insight into an enduring enquiry. Marv Recinto

Vojtěch Kovařík In the Thickets of Unexplored Places Mendes Wood dm, São Paulo 27 June – 31 July This is a tricky show to stage at a moment when discussions about cultural appropriation, conducted with varying degrees of sense and stupidity, burn intensely. Nine figurative paintings by white Czech artist Vojtěch Kovařík, in which some of the dark-skinned subjects are posed naked or seminaked in a lush landscape while others have the bluish pallor of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s epitome of kitsch exoticism, Chinese Girl (1952), seems then an open goal for criticism. The figure in Persephone and the Beginning of Summer (all works 2021), for example, is reminiscent of some early colonial depictions of Brazilian indigenous groups or the problematic Tahiti paintings of Paul Gauguin. Squatting, the topless subject has dark straight hair and reddish-brown skin and is shown sat on a beach eating fruit. More positively, the scrubby landscape and flat paint handling also recall the work of Tarsila do Amaral (though Kovařík

mixes his acrylic paint with actual sand to enhance the grainy texture). Yet the title suggests Greek mythology as its reference point. Similarly discombobulated references occur in Aphrodite With a Swan (two metres high, as are the majority of these works), in which the Greek goddess of love is shown not with the pallid translucent white skin and delicateness of, say, Botticelli’s fifteenth-century rendition, but dark-skinned and well-built. Move through the show and a potpourri of classical and modernist references from European culture and beyond come into play. It is telling that Kovařík originally trained as a ceramicist and sculptor, because the nude boxers of Pankration (triptych) are composed with a seductive repetitiveness, in a celebration of strength that suggests Soviet social realist architectural reliefs. There’s a sculptural quality too in (composition of ) Fading Amazones. The smooth marbled skin of the two reclining figures resemble a Henry Moore but

have the faces of Easter Island statues, while the work’s title summons both the warrior females of the ancients and Brazil’s most famous natural asset (the androgenous subjects hold each other against the backdrop of lush vegetation). Kovařík seduces the viewer with bold lines and exuberant palette, before grabbing our attention with moments of unexpected detail (the ear-shaped mask in Tiresias’ Ear, for example). Moreover, there is a complexity here that marks this work as a cut above the faux-naive or surrealist-inflected figuration that has become fashionable of late: by painting the founding figures of European culture as Black, Kovařík is offering a provocation. Your opinion on the work will depend on whether or not you conclude that for painting to engage effectively in dialogue with its own history, the vast repository of global culture, good and bad, your own and others, must be fair game for reference. Oliver Basciano

Tension, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 220 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood dm, São Paulo, Brussels & New York

September 2021

Robert Smithson Abstract Cartography Marian Goodman Gallery, New York 24 June – 20 August The view from the tgi Friday’s in Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (dfw) looks out onto the tarmac, where in midsummer the Texas heat ripples across neat rows of pavement and browning grass. It’s a landscape the same colour as the sickly barbeque ribs I’m picking at while I sit here, imagining what could have been if Robert Smithson had had his way. In 1966 the artist was approached by the architecture and engineering firm Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthyStratton for help with a proposal for a new Texas regional airport. He had no architectural training and had spent most of his career as a painter, abandoning the canvas just two years prior to produce minimal steel and neon sculptures, such as Alogon #2 (1966), that he called ‘crystalline structures’. Yet Smithson

had a keen surveyor’s eye, and what is an airport if not a crystalline structure? Seen from the air, its runways lace together in an elaborate web, while terminal walkways and conveyor belts move people and luggage in many directions. Smithson’s designs for dfw, on display in Abstract Cartography, are as fantastically sculptural as any of his work in three dimensions. Exhibited alongside collages of maps, studies of geological formations in film and photography, and drawings of unrealised public sculptures, they reveal interests in monumentalism and ecology that prefigure the Land art he would pioneer in the following decade. There are so many sketches and maquettes for dfw here that it’s easy to see why they all fell through: Smithson had too many good

competing ideas and not enough political muscle to get them executed. The scale of his ambition was vast. A group of painted cardboard models seem to take their form from gemstones or honeycomb, with tessellating shapes that recall the sculptures of Smithson’s friend Sol Lewitt. Another plan had four monumental works by Carl Andre, Lewitt, Robert Morris and Smithson himself positioned at the four corners of a cruciform structure. Flattening into two dimensions when viewed from the sky, they would also be filmed individually, with a live feed channelled to a bank of monitors at the centre of the terminal, where travellers could sit and watch time go by. Most interesting are Smithson’s blueprints for the tarmac, which envision earthworks visible only from airborne planes. In one,

Drawing for Shift, 1967, pencil on paper, 36 × 46 cm (paper), 55 × 66 cm (framed). Courtesy the estate of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

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an enormous spiderweb of white gravel stretches out from water storage tanks. Another imagines the fields around the terminal marbleised by ‘wandering earth mounds and gravel paths’. A drawing from 1967 depicts a large asphalt spiral, like a runway coiled into a folly, sketched three years before Smithson completed his iconic Spiral Jetty (1970). Airports are interstitial spaces. Their form follows their function to funnel us someplace else. Smithson, however, understood them to be true architectural monuments of our modern age: products of our conquest of the sky that have hastened our destruction of the earth. (Aviation today is responsible for 2 percent of total global greenhouse emissions.) The earthworks he planned to build at dfw remind me of the Nazca lines in Southern

Peru, geoglyphs created more than 2000 years ago to appease heavenly deities. To see them now with God’s eyes carries an exalted responsibility; Smithson, a lifelong environmentalist, may have envisioned his as both a wonder and a warning. Shortly before his airport commission, Smithson proposed his very first earthwork, Tar Pool and Gravel Pit (1966), for a public sculpture project in Philadelphia. Had it been realised, it would have comprised a deep sink of molten tar surrounded by gravel. Smithson wanted to make ‘one conscious of the primal ooze’, he noted, but also a ‘tertiary world of petroleum, asphalts, ozokerite, and bituminous agglomerations’. Formed from carbon, we’re choking ourselves with the stuff. Had he lived to see the state of today’s climate, Smithson

would have ambition to match the age: one 1971 drawing on view at Marian Goodman shows his plan to tug a forested barge around Manhattan, as a reminder of what was and could be. I long for the lull of Smithson’s Land art channel instead of the Major League Baseball game that flickers over this bar; for the warmth of a sunny gravel path rather than the deepfreeze of air-conditioning. ‘This inscrutable terminal exceeds and rejects all termination,’ Smithson wrote in ‘Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site’, which appeared in the Summer 1967 issue of Artforum. He argued that his design heralded the end of distinctions between art and architecture, interior and exterior, and a rejection of ‘the old framework of rational language’. It will take nothing less for things to change. Evan Moffitt

Untitled, undated, painted mirrors, 11 × 23 × 19 cm. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

September 2021

Averklub Collective Manuš Means Human Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 2 June – 5 September In Europe at least, few groups are as marginalised as the Romani people. They are still the butt of jokes and stereotypes that exoticise or revile them, and the victims of widespread discrimination and material poverty. This is the world of Averklub Collective, a loosely organised group whose 13 main members were once residents of the Chanov housing estate in Most, Czech Republic, the country’s largest Romani settlement. Together, they question the boundaries between art and ethnography, the conditions under which each is made and distributed, and who gets to tell the story of the Romani people. Manuš Means Human, named after a book published by Czechoslovak-Romani politician Vincent Danihel in 1986, moves the collective’s practices into the museum in order to bring key moments from Romani history to light. The show also tells an unsettling story: that the Romani people enjoyed much better social status and material conditions under Czechoslovakia’s socialist regime than under the liberal capitalism that replaced it. The group does this by displaying a vast collection of works and objects – some produced by the collective itself, others by Romani artists, many originating in the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno – in six colour-coded ‘sections’ dealing with different aspects of Romani life, culture and suffering, including labour conditions, housing issues, the 1971 Romani Congress, the Stalin-era standardisation of the Romani language and, perhaps most importantly, the conditions for the representation of Roma people. Take, for example, the section amusingly titled ‘The History of Art, without History and without Art’. This line of sculptures, set on green platforms in the middle of the room, proceeds from three busts – Vincenc Makovský’s Student

(1945–49), Miloš Axman’s Portrait of the Sculptor’s Wife (1951–52) and Averklub Collective’s own pointedly squashed A Portrait of George Soros (2021) – through Daniel Kováč’s sculptures of a female saint, a lion, a king, a woman and a head, which look like early medieval relics but were all produced in 2005 (though King is undated), to a grey concrete brick, a yellowish unfired handmade brick (1990s) and a grey and white handmade mould for forming unfired bricks (1990s), all of which are uncredited because they are real bricks used for construction, first shown in the Museum of Romani Culture. This whole section resists the kind of ‘linear’ interpretation offered by traditional Marxist philosophies of history. There is no story of progress here. Nor can the display be read as a passage from socialist realism (the busts) to greater, freer forms of abstraction (the bricks). Not only are the latter not art objects, they do not become so once they’re brought into the museum space: they don’t represent the terminus for an emancipatory history, and cannot be used to build a paradise – socialist or otherwise – only the most basic forms of shelter. What we are left with is a frustrating story about the impossibility of making art or envisaging the future under conditions of total material and spiritual destitution. The contrast with Saban Hasy’s Onward (1969) from the section ‘He Who Does Not Work Shall Not Eat!’, about labour, could not be greater. This oil painting looks like classic socialist realism. A man and a woman, surrounded by farms and machinery in a mountain setting, are building the socialist future. The man holds out his hand, surveying the territory in front of him, mouth open – perhaps issuing a command to his fellow

facing page, top Rozana Kuburovič, The First World Romani Congress, 1971. Courtesy the artist

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workers, promising progress – while a woman to his right holds a blueprint. Together, they lay out the future for all mankind, with Romani people included. These hopes are confirmed in Rozana Kuburovič’s painting The First World Romani Congress (1971). Based on a photograph from the Museum of Romani Culture, it shows delegates dressed in period clothes (Afghan coats, loud shirts, big collars), apparently singing while waving the newly adopted flag of the Romani people – included nearby in both its official and Yugoslav variants – and holding a document demanding a camp be set up in response to the death of three Romani children on the streets of Walsall, England. Two videos made by the collective, however, show the grim reality of life after dreams of emancipation. The sevenminute Social Murder (2021) shows the Zabíjanec Romani settlement in Rudňany, Slovakia. We see grinding poverty – men sitting smoking in the doorways of dingy shacks, naked children playing in the trash, women hanging up washing – while a voice reads passages, in Czech, from Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) that chime with what we see, despite the long historical gap between words and images. A companion video, the hourlong My Home in the Chanov Housing Estate (2021), documents the shift from socialism to capitalism in one specific location. One interviewee describes a once-thriving community who lived in “beautiful apartments”. When socialism collapsed, however, people were left to fend for themselves in a brutal new reality; abandoned by social services, the mafia moved in. “It was wonderful here,” she says. “And then the kids destroyed it.” Max L. Feldman

facing page, bottom Yugoslavian Romani flag mockup, 1971

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Rafael França Requiem and Vertigo Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo 22 May – 31 July In this engrossing group exhibition dedicated to Rafael França, which shows the Brazilian filmmaker’s work alongside that of contemporaries active during the 1980s (such as Hudinilson Jr and David Wojnarowicz) and of younger artists (including Letícia Parente and Luiz Roque), a single work by França stands out from the rest. Set against the backdrop of America’s aids epidemic – the artist lived in Chicago for ten years – Without Fear of Vertigo (1987) starts with a wistful rumination on death. Friends and acquaintances of the artist, all fresh-faced and with easy familiarity, mull existential questions such as whether it is better to live intensely and die young than dully reach old age, or whether suicide is an act of power or helplessness. “I wonder what it would be like to just take a gun and blow your brains out,” says one, proffering what might be whiskey in a pint glass. This pontification is intercut with

lingering shots of a seascape, with J.S. Bach’s melancholic Prelude & Fugue no 22 in B-flat minor playing over the top. There is something comical in the earnestness of these scenes, a gross sentimentality. Yet França is playing with us, because halfway through this ten-minute film, a title card flashes up and the tone of the work abruptly changes. The music and bohemian student digs are abandoned for a harshly lit closeup of a man answering the questions of an unseen interrogator. As the interview unfolds, the man, who confirms his name as Peter Whitehall, denies the accusation that he went to the house of a man identified as Yann Bondy, whom we understand is a close friend and fellow artist, and filmed his suicide. During the increasingly tense exchange, it’s intimated that this suicide footage was intended as an artwork. This twist is grimly seductive: it’s unclear whether we are watching

documentary or fiction, as França also plays with the uncertainty of whether ‘Whitehall’ is lying (and the possibility that there is a piece of snuff video art stashed away somewhere). An intertitle claims Whitehall was later sentenced to five years in prison as an ‘accomplice in the suicide of Yann Bondy’. Internet searches produce little evidence of either man. Without Fear of Vertigo was made at a time when a mystery virus stalked França and his friends: this uncertainty prevailed in his life until he died from an aids-related illness four years later (the only certainty of all life being death, of course). Amidst ruminations on love and loss in other works included in this show, Without Fear of Vertigo, with its twists and turns and abrupt change of tempo, expertly captures the psychological tension of a time when fake news ran wild, friends disappeared and basic human interaction risked death. Oliver Basciano

Without Fear of Vertigo, 1987, transferred Portapak video (colour, sound), 11 minutes. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo & Brussels

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Elisabeth Neudörfl Out in the Streets Barbara Wien, Berlin 28 April – 22 August In February 2020 Elisabeth Neudörfl travelled to Hong Kong and began photographing the city’s streets; in around 100 photographs, of which 35 are extracted here, they appear as if in the aftermath of a disaster, eerily deserted in white-skied daylight. As they were: not only had swathes of the population deserted the thoroughfares as the pandemic began to grip, but sequential crackdowns on the pro-democracy movement meant that protest marches weren’t happening either. The artist, a significant figure in the very German format of artistic documentary photography, followed the 2019 march routes and visited geographical flashpoints, such as the Hong Kong Polytechnic, of conflict with the police; if the people aren’t around to make a political comment, Neudörfl suggests, the streets might do it on their own (with a little help from an artist). In Out in the Streets (No 35) (all photographs 2020) – an elevated view of an overpass running

above a couple of ground-level streets, with one solitary car heading towards us at far left – the eye fills in missing campaigners. Out in the Streets (No 68) offers a high tiled wall scrawled with palimpsests of (one must assume) pissed-off graffiti, a synecdoche for sustained frustration. (No 86) shows a similar scene, except the authorities have already painted out the sprayed marks, leaving abstract grey blocks. In (No 38) and (No 29), huddles of water-filled police barriers almost become malevolent characters in themselves; in (No 41) a long line of them hugs the base of a glossy tower block. Elsewhere Neudörfl points her lens at fenced-off and guarded university campuses, and a pair of banners by a subway entrance read, bathetically, ‘In Joy Enjoy’ above, yes, another compound burst of graffiti. For the six-minute video shown on a tilted monitor on the floor, Calligraphy Lesson (2021), Neudörfl attached an action camera

to a paintbrush, then proceeded to write both the Chinese characters for ‘Hong Kong’ and an example of the city’s graffiti (several of which she’d had translated for her) with deliberate slowness. The gesture is slightly ambiguous, but it imbues graffiti – usually speedily written – with the gravitas of tradition, ironically Chinese tradition, so that sprayingand-running is elevated as a mode of communication, perhaps given its rightful due. In the photographs it’s virtually all the protesters appear to have left. Interviewed recently, Neudörfl pointed to analogies between the Hong Kong protests and all manner of postcolonial conflicts in Europe, and certainly Out in the Streets speaks more widely to authoritarian moves against the right to protest. But it’s also a specific narrative, one that Neudörfl addresses with taut pictorial logic: even if something’s been made invisible, you can still point a camera at it. Martin Herbert

Out in the Streets (No. 35), 2020, digital c-print, mounted on Alu-Dibond, 51 × 76 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin

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Bruce Nauman Contrapposto Studies Punta della Dogana, Venice 23 May – 9 January When I told a friend I was writing about this exhibition, she exclaimed, “Gosh! What can you possibly say about Nauman’s work that hasn’t already been said?” What indeed. Nauman is, of course, a giant of contemporary art – he’s been breaking ground since the 1960s, creating an entirely new formal language. So I waxed lyrical about the feeling the show left me with: awe, disorientation and, mostly, a heightened awareness of my body, of its ageing and the many ways in which it betrays me. I was grateful when I stepped out into the sun and weary in anticipation of my future. The starting point for the 34 works here is Nauman’s pivotal video Walk with Contrapposto (1968), in which the lithe twenty-eight-year-old artist strikes that ubiquitous Renaissance pose: the moment when, midwalk, we shift our weight from one foot to another, body slanted at a seemingly seductive angle, a symbol of agility, youth, dynamism. Nauman repeats the pose for 60 minutes of black-and-white video, walking up and down a purpose-built narrow corridor, hands behind his head, the 16mm camera at one end; as he comes closer, we see a blur of white T-shirt. What starts out as a banal experiment soon becomes a rigorous exercise in endurance: the classical stance Nauman adopts between each shifting of weight becomes an absurd live sculpture, the space of the narrow corridor now defined by his body as it moves unharmoniously from side to side. You are equally fascinated and deterred: what is this hellhole he is trapped in, you wonder, not for the last time here.

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This video’s significance assumes a whole new dimension in the Contrapposto Studies series (2015–16), a rare example of Nauman revisiting an earlier work. Before you even step into the spacious darkened galleries housing the immersive installation, you are engulfed by an electronic orchestra of everyday noises: footsteps, tissues, microphone tics. Projected onto the walls are his monumental ‘studies’, composites of his body, variously spliced, shot from different angles, colours reversed. Nauman, here in his seventies, still wears the white T-shirt, blue jeans, boots. He is in his New Mexico studio. At times he rubs his nose or fixes his T-shirt, his colostomy bag occasionally visible. His gait is now more laboured and stiff, walking in a straight line evidently arduous, yet here he is – gloriously laying bare the indignities of old age, unabashedly assuming agency. In Contrapposto Split (2017), where Nauman assumes the pose in a bright 3d video, his body is spliced at the waist so that we see two irreconcilable images, one going forward and one backward. The 3d brings the studio to life, offering a mesmerising window onto an artist who famously professed that art is anything made in the studio. The exhibition features a number of conceptual video performances from the 1960s, where Nauman takes a simple concept like stamping or bouncing, disrupts it by turning the image upside down or sideways, and repeats the action until the tape runs out, a lone figure in his studio. Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 (1968), Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968) and Lip Sync (1969) share a gallery space. It is a testament to curators

ArtReview

Carlos Basualdo and Caroline Bourgeois that, while each work demands our attention, it takes on a new, more profound meaning in context: it becomes a choreography of some absurd minimalist theatre. Watching For Beginners (all the combinations of thumb and fingers) (2010) – a hypnotic two-channel projection showing two sets of hands (against a black background and a white one respectively) working through all the 31 possible combinations of thumb and fingers, as Nauman gives instructions asynchronously – one could hear the gripping violin from Soundtrack from First Violin Film (1969). The music fits For Beginners perfectly, bringing to mind Philip Glass’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. It took me a good ten minutes of searching the galleries to locate the source – my senses tested in ways I hadn’t experienced for ages. Tucked in a corner of the top floor, meanwhile, is Acoustic Wedge (Mirrored) (2020), made for the show. This wallboard installation is covered in acoustic material and resembles a giant section of an accordion. Step in, and all sound – including your own footsteps – disappears. It becomes a temporary refuge from the cacophony emanating across the halls, until you gradually realise that even silence has sound: that some sound always trickles through as your ears adapt, and, should the erasure be so total, that there is always the sound of your own heartbeat. Nearing eighty, Nauman refuses to be a victim of ageing as he perseveres in his quest for something sublime, pushing himself and his spectators into realms of discomfort, absurdity and, at times, countermanding beauty. Ana Vukadin

facing page Walk with Contrapposto (still), 1968, video, b/w, sound, 60 min. © Bruce Nauman by siae 2021. Courtesy the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (eai), New York

above For Beginners (all the combinations of thumb and fingers) (still), 2010, two-channel hd video installation (colour, stereo sound), 26 min 19 sec, and 25 min 59 sec (loop). © Bruce Nauman by siae 2021. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

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British Art Show 9 Aberdeen Art Gallery 10 July – 10 October The pandemic-postponed ninth edition of the British Art Show (bas9) presents a scene at once thriving and struggling to survive. The exhibition, which normally takes place every five years, was conceived to survey the state of contemporary art across the uk. The art shown in this edition is by turns powerful and intriguing; the context unavoidably depressing. Selected by Hayward Gallery Touring and participating cities (Aberdeen, Wolverhampton, Manchester and Plymouth), the exhibition’s curators, Irene Aristizábal from baltic, Gateshead, and Hammad Nasar at Decolonising Arts Institute, University of the Arts London, met with 230 artists and selected 47. Many of them are familiar, some perhaps overfamiliar, but there is also the odd surprise. While previous editions of bas have often eschewed overarching themes, Aristizábal and Nasar have three: tactics for togetherness; imagining new futures; and healing, care and reparative history. Loose and overlapping, these inform the curators’ thoughtful accompanying essay but fade into the background across the exhibition. Instead, the visitor proceeds artist by artist from the grandly pillared groundfloor sculpture court, through multiple galleries over three floors and up to a film programme in a dedicated screening room. The two most emotionally affecting works are sound installations. Hrair Sarkissian’s Deathscape (2021) is a dark room filled with the scraping sounds of archaeologists unearthing mass graves in Spain dating from the Civil War. With nothing for the eye to settle upon (a bold move for an artist known for photographic work), one is forced to imagine the horrors.

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Nearby is Elaine Mitchener’s [names ii] an evocation (2019–21), which memorialises some of the 2,000 enslaved people owned by a sugar-planter with family in Aberdeenshire. Through overlapping readings, each life is reduced to no more than an imposed English name, a gender and a monetary value. Aristizábal and Nasar intend for bas9 to respond to the specific contexts of each host city as it tours the uk. So each iteration will include a different combination of artists and a different thematic lens: alternatives to extractivism in Aberdeen; intersectionality in Wolverhampton; labour conditions and the social contract in Manchester; migration in Plymouth. This works in some ways – notably through Kathrin Böhm’s When Decisions Become Art (2019–ongoing), which is only showing in Aberdeen. A series of tape drawings and collages, it points to the issues of exhibiting in a gallery funded by oil money while acknowledging the complexities of speaking from afar to a specific context. The work includes an A4 printout, pinned to the wall, which reads: ‘I’m not a local and I don’t know enough about art and oil in Aberdeen, but I know that we all rely on the economies around us, and that we as a human kind can change them if we want to.’ Aberdeen Art Gallery has recently been renovated at a cost of £34.6 million, and its supporters include oil and gas companies bp, cnooc International and Suncor Energy uk Ltd, as well as The Petroleum Women’s Club of Scotland. This is the hypocrisy Böhm identifies: ‘Artists are tired,’ reads another statement in the work. ‘Tired of organisations who want to show radical ideas without practising them.’

ArtReview

Abigail Reynolds’s Elliptical Reading (2021) is also a highlight – not least for taking visitors outside of the pristine gallery and into the noticeably less lavish Aberdeen Central Library. In some cities (such as Plymouth, 2011) bas has catalysed collaboration between organisations, but that is less evident here: while millions can be raised for Aberdeen Art Gallery, libraries and vital nonprofits like Peacock Visual Arts remain precarious. The pandemic has limited possibilities for community-driven projects, but Reynolds has engaged library staff and readers across the four host cities. Each has selected a favourite book, which Reynolds has lovingly rebound with marbled paper and graphic depictions of a reader’s hands. They have then been recategorised within the library with a certain flair for mischief. For example, thanks to Aberdeen’s library-events manager, Dallas King, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) may now be found in the Business section. A survey show like bas has conflicting priorities: first, selecting the artists, then planning how to exhibit them. The lineup of bas9 is outstanding, but the exhibition is occasionally unsatisfying. Many artists are presented in isolation; when they are shown together, connections remain unclear or even counterproductive. Intrusively repetitive bouncing and clattering sounds from a looped film by Joanna Piotrowska, for example, make it hard to focus on Anne Hardy’s quietly gorgeous photograms. The works on show are all significant in their own way, but in Aberdeen at least, interesting conversations are not yet developing between them. Tom Jeffreys

this page, top Marianna Simnett, The Needle and the Larynx (still), 2016, video, 15 min 17 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Serpentine Galleries, London

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this page, above Kathrin Böhm and collaborators, There are as many cultures as there are people, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Fiona Allen. © the artist. Courtesy Mansions of the Future, Lincoln

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The Holding Environment Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn 9 April – 20 June (Chapter i), 3 July – 8 August (Chapter ii) ‘Care’ is a much-used word in the art scene at the moment, even though the field is teeming with people who first and foremost care for themselves. As a reaction to this lukewarm buzzword-creation stands Bonner Kunstverein’s two-part, 24-artist exhibition The Holding Environment, curated in-house by Fatima Hellberg. The title phrase refers to a conception by the psychoanalyst and paediatrician D.W. Winnicott concerning the threshold between care, dependence and stability, and that which does not provide appropriate support. The framework is thus set right from the beginning: care is no picnic, and at the same time its intimate, structural and institutional form is forever open to insincere zeal and abuse. As if to illustrate the multipronged nature of care, the first of the Kunstverein’s

two rather boxy rooms is broken up by an architectural intervention: a long wall almost splits it in two, leaving visitors to decide if they want to go around it or take the stairs that go over it. It’s almost as if the organisers are saying that this topic can’t be broached without also changing the perspective of the institution itself, and our perspective on it. This first room, in any case, is soaked in a noisescape of cracking and breaking. The source is Pope.L’s Small Cup (2008), a video as simple as it is fascinating (and prescient), in which chickens and goats dismantle a scale model of the us Capitol made of cardboard, grains and peanut butter. The setup is reminiscent of tests put to zoo animals to animate them, whereas here it’s the heart of American democracy that is getting ground

up. Co Westerik’s paintings in the same room set up a different accent. Foot (1990) shows an example of the titular body part, its transparent skin and fine system of veins painted in technically overwhelming anatomical precision. Instep and Achilles’ heel, strength and vulnerability culminating in an extremity? These two very different works might already suggest that The Holding Environment does not seek to illustrate a thesis or proffer simple answers. Every successive work pulls the overarching topic in a fresh direction and tears open new questions. As if to accommodate this fact, the exhibition has been split into two chapters across its run, not to alter the thematic direction halfway but simply to do justice to the amount of observation within.

Marianna Simnett, The Udder, 2014, video with colour and sound, 15 min 30 sec. Photo: Mareike Tocha. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin

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(The same core group of artists appear in both, though some show different works in each, and a few more artists are added in the second part.) Curatorial care, this decision suggests, sometimes also means hearing someone out. A standout from the whole is Marianna Simnett’s video The Udder (2014). Here, the British artist collapses together the (understandable) obsession of dairy farmers with the cleanliness of their cows’ udders and teats with the sexualisation of a farmer’s prepubescent daughter. Simnett stages, in a wholly disturbing manner, a social community whose borders are so close to each other that something is constantly sliding, without the viewer – as dairy consumer and/or sexual being – being able to escape their own sense of responsibility. Less radical but no less touching are

photographs by Niklas Taleb, the tender, amateurish way they are placed behind glass using tape strongly mirroring the hermetic, intimate images themselves. The most accessible work probably is overthinking the hand (2021), a photo of Taleb’s father under a lampshade that resembles a halo. The picture is hung upside down. Jason Dodge approaches the already rather miscellaneous object of care in a slightly looser way still. Untitled (2020), an installation made up of coins, buttons, fluff and glass jars, squeezes into the cracks of the room, expanding and unravelling without losing its inner cohesion or its making sense in the space: a parallel, in microcosm, to the approach of the exhibition itself. Dodge’s objects are mostly carelessly discarded things

that receive renewed meaning through the artist’s attentiveness, his collecting them and transferring them into an art context. The work uses its own materials to develop questions of pollution and cleansing, collecting and solidarity; but it also involves, on another level, the question of trust, since Dodge sent the materials without a manual or written instructions to the Kunstverein, trusting that they would be installed in a meaningful way. And this points, in turn, to an uncommon truth about The Holding Environment as a whole. In contrast to many group shows built on lengthy artist lists, there are practically no works here that feel superfluous or misplaced. Such attentiveness, too, is a form of care. Moritz Scheper Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

Jason Dodge, Untitled, 2020, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Mareike Tocha. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

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Maurizio Cattelan Breath Ghosts Blind Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan 15 July – 20 February Cattelan’s first show in Milan for over a decade consists of three new works – three capital letters and no comma; three acts in three spaces. Before I can set foot inside the show, however, one of the works, Blind (2021), a massive black tower (a little like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey) stabbed through by a plane, so that nose, tail and wings emerge from each of its four sides, pops up on Instagram. A sort of mutant crucifix, the work’s reference to September 11, at its impending 20th anniversary, is as inevitable as it is inescapable, and tinges any expectations I had of Cattelan’s triumphant homecoming with a sense of sorrow and mourning. And yet it seems like the right time to shake off the jester’s mask that has so definitively represented the spirit of Cattelan for much of his career. Here, all expectations of hilarity, irreverence and provocation are betrayed from the get-go, and replaced by a greater sense of scenic intimacy and suspended mystery. The king seems to be naked; or maybe, once again, he is bullshitting us. In the blackness of the first space a single spotlight focuses on Breath (2021), a pair of white Carrara marble statues – a human figure in a foetal position and a dog lying on its side in front of him, resembling a pair of clochards. Viewers don’t know who they are and whether they represent the dead or the living; we can only make varied hypotheses. It’s part of the game: the less Cattelan says about his elusive work, the more anecdotes, lies and tales proliferate. Which of course continues to increase the striking power of his artworks. On closer inspection, viewers might recognise Cattelan’s own iconic face adorning what

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had previously seemed to be just another invisible member of society curled up like a stray; and in it, the artist’s signature move of showing himself and immediately withdrawing. To the viewer standing before the spotlit scene as if in prayer, absorbing an aura of instability and vulnerability that seems such a contrast to the stability and endurance of the white luminescent marble, Breath comes across as both a confession and a secret, breathing dialogue between permanence and its opposite. The construction of a dramaturgy through the use of light is a longstanding trope of artists confronted by HangarBicocca’s cavernous spaces – in this Breath Ghosts Blind follows in the footsteps of Carsten Höller’s Doubt (2016), Philippe Parreno’s Hypothesis (2016) and Cerith Wyn Evans’s …the Illuminating Gas (2020). Similarly, Cattelan’s show produces images through dramatic staging in a manner that allows the exhibition to function not as a collection of discrete art objects but rather as a single space–time narrative. Soon the dim light reveals Ghosts (2021), thousands of taxidermied pigeons perched on the beams between the pillars and walls of the huge 30m-high ‘Navate’ space. The new work is a reiteration of Turisti, an installation at the Venice Biennale in 1997 that appeared to mock the idiotic and relentless tourist flow through the city. There is no evident sarcastic reference this time; instead the atmosphere is gloomy, as one might find upon sneaking into a cemetery, experiencing a feeling of mourning mixed with fear – a childish fear that brings to mind the escape through the forest of spooky eyes in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

ArtReview

(1937). As you walk through HangarBicocca, however, it’s as if the space’s own past – as a factory – comes back to haunt it: Cattelan’s pigeons stare at us like ghosts, highlighting the structure of its industrial architecture. This great sense of emptiness and absence, raised by the phantasmic presence of the pigeons, finds its symmetrical inversion, more explicit – almost to the point of being didactic – in the final work in the show, Blind. The tower takes loss to another level, combining the pathos of the artist’s Novecento (1997), a suspended taxidermied horse, and the monumentality of l.o.v.e. (2010), a ten-metre-high marble representation of the fascist hand salute in which all the fingers, bar the middle one, have been chopped off. Staring at Blind, I cannot help but think about Anselm Kiefer’s The Seven Heavenly Palaces (2004–15), a monumental work that is permanently installed on the other side of the gallery wall and that now houses a covid-19 vaccine hub, a further reminder of how precarious our monumental gestures can be. Blind is rather smooth and compact, in the manner of a giant toy. The plane is fully integrated into the monolithic block, with no signs of leaks or sutures; the tower shows no evidence of the effects of the impact, indeed there is no sense of impact at all. The only shock of this collision is in our history and our memory, which have made tower and aeroplane one. Yet despite all that, there is a sense in which Breath Ghosts Blind is an exhibition that makes the real world appear surreal, that escapes from words and takes refuge in images, like a fairytale designed to allow us to face fear. Mariacarla Molè

facing page Breath, 2021, Carrara marble, dimensions variable. Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

above Blind, 2021, resin, wood, steel, aluminium, polystyrene, paint, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

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Books

The Prisoner by Hwang Sok-Yong, translated by Anton Hur and Sora Kim Russell Verso, £30 (hardcover) ‘My mistake was to assume that people would understand the truth from facts alone. But it turns out that facts are treacherous things that can be twisted to distort the truth.’ That’s Hwang Sok-Yong reflecting on the events – an (officially) unsanctioned trip to North Korea in 1989 – that would eventually lead, following a four-year voluntary exile, to his spending five years in a South Korean prison during the mid1990s. For a celebrated novelist and prominent activist, who spent the 1970s launching cultural activist groups and penning declarations and manifestos for various democracy movements, it’s a statement that seems both oddly naive and hard to swallow. Hwang is now seventy-eight; The Prisoner, originally published in two volumes in Korean in 2017, is a memoir chronicling his life and work. His truth. Although it is his life experiences that fuel the majority of his fiction too. It lends them another kind of truth, or authenticity. Hwang is best known for Jang Gilsan, an epic bandit saga (concealing a critique of South Korea’s dictatorship) that was serialised in a national newspaper between 1974 and 1984; Mr Han’s Chronicle (1970) is about a family separated by the Korean War (Hwang’s parents migrated from Pyongyang – which Hwang refers to as ‘home’ from the start of his memoir – to Seoul, under the pretence of travelling for a picnic, shortly before its onset, leaving their extended family behind), The Shadow of Arms (1985) is based on his experiences of the Vietnam War, while The Guest (2002), about a massacre in North Korea wrongly attributed to the Americans, is partly drawn from the same (Hwang credits his experiences as a conscripted soldier in Vietnam with revealing to him the ‘true meaning’ of the Korean War). Hwang’s life is remarkably rich, governed by the legacies and actualities of Japanese colonialism (he was born under Japanese rule in Manchuria and moved to Pyongyang when he was two), civil war, national division, the Vietnam War, cultural and social activism, Korea’s popular

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uprisings of the 1960s and 1980s, the effect of the Gwangju Uprising and its lethal repression in catalysing his activism, his campaigning for a united Korea, exile, prostitutes, marriages, divorces, estranged children, sometimes brutal prison-time, alongside literary celebrity in his homeland and, to a lesser degree, abroad. It is something of a soap opera in and of itself. As well as offering a lens through which to experience the complexity of modern Korean history. Indeed, of his own work, Hwang writes that he felt ‘compelled to craft a deliberately Korean narrative that would depict reality from our point of view’. That in the context of living through a time when the Korean narrative was dictated by colonial powers (principally Japan and the us), military dictators and stubborn ideologies. But while the title of this work clearly references the various prisons of the mind and body within which Hwang (and by implication Korea – there’s not a little ego on display here) was incarcerated, what really drives this narrative is Hwang’s struggle to grasp the slippery essence of truth. Assuming there is such a thing. Recalling his deployment with the Republic of Korea Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, where, working alongside us forces, his tasks included cleaning up the remains of various massacres, Hwang confesses that he did not think, at the time, that young Viet Cong ‘were Asian like me’. ‘I did not feel pity for them. All they [the corpses of dead guerrillas] were to me were strangely shaped objects’. Only later did he come to realise that the derogatory term ‘gook’ derived from Korean (Hanguk for Korea or miguk for America). And that an undercurrent of the Vietnam War involved a fellow Asian nation’s resistance to the imposition of foreign ideologies and neocolonial rule. While there are periods of his life when his campaigning and organising cultural movements led to a pause in Hwang’s career as a writer, the end goal of The Prisoner is,

ArtReview

to a degree, to articulate Hwang’s fundamental belief that art and life should be one. A break, he claims, from the traditional notion of the ascetic classical scholar who removes themselves from society in order to achieve a clarity of vision. Yet even by his own account, his engagement with everyday reality throughout his life was somewhat patchy. As a youth, he did decide ‘to leave the secular world’ and become a Buddhist monk. He achieves a certain clarity of vision during the course of his 18 hunger strikes while imprisoned (the memoir as a whole is structured in alternating chapters recalling his often-brutal life in prison and his personal biography). And there are wives and children from whom he was estranged or absent – at one point he describes telling his third wife that he wanted her to earn money so he could do the, by implication, important work of joining the labour movement. He left and returned to his patiently supportive mother’s home with little explanation or notice when he felt like it, stole from her and missed the chance to see her in the runup to her death. On the one hand it’s notable that women are the principal collateral damage of his campaigns for democracy and social justice; on the other hand, it’s instructive to hear him describe the way in which a full commitment to art or activism and to life is a struggle in itself. Although there’s a suspicion throughout that Hwang’s admission of his ‘bad’ qualities functions strategically to push the idea that what he writes is the truth, rather than functioning as a genuine expression of guilt or regret. Nevertheless, all of this (and a very good translation of the original Korean) contributes towards a fascinating account of a life lived for art and campaigns for freedom and justice. Of an individual artist’s attempt to be a useful part of society, and the conflicts and contradictions present therein. And while Hwang is at the stage of looking at that in a narrative of the past, his concerns remain just as active and urgent in the world today. Mark Rappolt

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The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World by Benjamin Bratton Verso, £10.99 / $19.95 (hardcover)

The ‘real’ here is the covid-19 pandemic. ‘Revenge’ is a provocative term, and while theorist Benjamin Bratton doesn’t assign consciousness and agency to a dumb virus, the appearance of this one, in its unthinking indifference towards human life, is seen as a kick in the teeth for a Western political and philosophical culture obsessed, as he sees it, with a narcissistic, hyperindividuated view of the ‘sovereign subject’, which wilfully refuses to acknowledge the complex entanglement of human and nonhuman systems. The Revenge of the Real sees the pandemic as a catalyst towards Bratton’s technocratic vision of ‘a model of governance based on planetary-scale technological rationalism’. Bratton’s targets are all those who reject this ‘realism’ – the deluded libertarian individualism of rightwing populists, but also the supposedly more radical philosophicalpolitical tradition of ‘negative biopolitics’. ‘The pandemic has made it easier to see oneself more as a node in a biopolitical network… than as an autonomous individual’, Bratton argues, and so the virus becomes the vindication of a project of reinterpreting the self, in which – in common with much contemporary posthumanist theorising – ‘the conception of oneself becomes less an interiority… and more a medium through which the physical world signifies itself’. This new ‘disenchanted’, ‘materialist realism’ is a view

of humanity’s place in the world that demands we see ourselves as things among other things; objects more than subjects, though however still capable – through the technological capture of an objective view of planetary systems – of becoming a planetary society ‘able to deliberately compose itself with compassion and reason’. ‘Collective human intelligence as the collaboration of such creatures working in concert’ can only be realised through what Bratton terms the ‘sensing layer’, a vast, real-time aggregate of data-collecting about reality, coupled to a deeply technocratic taste for ‘competent governance’. The result, though, is a strangely matter-of-fact and supercilious authoritarianism. On the issue of governance and power, Bratton will have no more silly talk from old poststructuralists, with their negative biopolitics that equates ‘control’ with ‘oppression’. ‘Waves of Boomers, myself included, grew up in a world in which the bad establishment was (supposedly) hierarchical and rationalist and, therefore, individualism and autonomy and spontaneous irrationality were (supposedly) a position of resistance’, he writes. He concludes, like a chastened fan who got carried away by his idols, that our ‘morgues are full because of the… individualist irrationality of the status quo’. For Bratton, in the negative biopolitics of commentators such as Agamben,

‘resistance against the state and its power… takes precedence, perhaps even over preventable deaths’. But for all his mouthing of the platitudes of ‘care’ and compassion, what underpins his fondness for a top-down, rationalist recasting of society as a planetary control system is an oddly disembodied indifference to what human beings and society are for, and a disdain for the meaning that humans give to their lives. The dislocated antihumanism of Bratton’s outlook is profound, since it only sees human society as a system to be managed, rather than as the interplay of human subjectivity with its social and material reality, and, more fundamentally, humanity’s deliberation of the purpose and meaning of its own existence; that is, everything more than just existing. So while Bratton expends energy in trashing Agamben, he has nothing to offer in response to Agamben’s fundamental observation, early in the pandemic, that ‘our society no longer believes in anything but bare life’. While Bratton insists that the pandemic is a ‘matter of life and death’, the preservation of life has, for many ‘progressive’ thinkers like him, become the fetishistic substitute for a twentyfirst-century culture in which any sense of the meaning of living, and the purpose of human society, has completely drained away. J.J. Charlesworth

Melancholy: The Little Book of Lost Gloves by Nick Cave Cave Things, £45 (hardcover)

What was Nick Cave (the musician) doing during the successive lockdowns? Photographing lost gloves. The series of images, Cave explains in a short introductory text, began in 2018 when the brooding rockstar was struck by the melancholic vision of a lost glove hanging on a street sign in his hometown of Brighton, before taking on a newfound resonance during the pandemic as solitary walks became one of the few leisure activities left. Taken with the Polaroid app on his phone, the 100 pictures capture, in closeup, solitary gloves the artist chanced upon in the city streets and parks. Each is captioned, on the facing page, with the location and date at which it was taken, which serves the additional benefit

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of offering a trace on Cave’s whereabouts to his fans: if up to 2019 the various mitt-pics were taken across Europe and the us; from 2020 onwards they remain mostly bound to Brighton and London. They also track a new reality, as knitted mitts and leather gloves are increasingly superseded by the now-ubiquitous rubber glove, turned inside out and discarded. Some of the images are interesting in their own right – veering towards abstraction or reminiscent of cyanotypes – while others register as rather banal, documentary pics; yet as a typology of sorts, and in the context of this past year, they collectively read as a melancholic meditation on loss and solitude, as well as

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a celebration of chance and randomness when opportunities to encounter either were limited by lockdowns. The book was published by Cave Things, the artist’s own brand, which sells merchandising with varying degrees of authorship, but could just as well have been an Instagram series (more affordable too) of the archive-of-the-everyday type that has emerged on so many artists’ accounts of late. But melancholia doesn’t lend itself well to social media. ‘I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy,’ Robert Burton wrote in his satirical preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621); a poetic and therapeutic enterprise that might better qualify this project. Louise Darblay

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson Graywolf Press, $27 (hardcover) Freedom, Maggie Nelson admits while introducing this quartet of extended essays, is a problematic word. In part that’s because it’s been co-opted by rightwingers – as fuck-you, neo-Confederate freedom in the author’s embattled United States – and in part because the left can’t agree on what it means. Personal freedom and collective freedom can seem antonymic (Hannah Arendt thought so; James Baldwin didn’t), and in 2021 freedom as a notion might feel spent after such lengthy struggles for it – freedom from racism, or sexism – haven’t achieved the desired results. Against all this, in four tracts that examine prismatic spaces where freedom might, if complicatedly, be possible – art, sex, drugs and, no, not rock ’n’ roll but climate anxiety – Nelson skews to nuanced, nonbinary thinking, and the conviction that freedom is a process: that there is no liberatory moment but an ongoing, near-ambient movement towards. She seeks to demonstrate that, per Foucault, people are freer, or potentially freer, than they know; and that, per David Graeber, revolution lies in acting like you’re already free. Her characteristic rhetorical move is to lay out a seemingly unbridgeable divide, two spaces of unfreedom, and find a midpoint at which some measure of liberation might flourish or, at least, be defended. ‘The Ballad of Sexual Optimism’ sets sex positivity – the contemporary injunction, underwritten by pop culture, to go out and ‘do the work of fucking’ – against

post-#MeToo attitudes, which don’t easily square with the former outlook, and in which sexual encounters are framed only in terms of either ‘sin, abuse, violation, or trauma’. Nelson, while typically affirming the good in both sides’ arguments, finds that each stifles ‘female waywardness, transgression, desire, and agency… expressions of female complexity’, and sexual experimentation per se, in which freedom might be pursued. Nelson, as detailed in her muchloved 2015 book of ‘autotheory’, The Argonauts, is the partner of gender-fluid artist Harry Dodge (the current book is dedicated to their son). Nelson is also a recovered alcoholic and a devotee of the drug memoir, and ‘Drug Fugue’ explores the paradoxes of drug writing – how the authors can seem to be writing about liberation while describing imprisonment – and the difference between addiction memoirs by men and those by women (the former skew to notions of liberation, the latter to self-abasement). From here, via a lengthy discussion of Paul B. Preciado’s melange of theory and drug diary, Testo Junkie (2008), Nelson arrives at freedom residing in the abyssal indefinable, plus the idea – returning to abasement – that ‘this feeling of the “I” gone missing… can also arrive in the state colloquially known as “bottoming out”’. In ‘Riding the Blinds’, her essay on climate change, Nelson doesn’t bottom out; instead, while raising a small child in a California ravaged by wildfires, she locates a modicum of mental

space in the fact that there are wildly different predictions for how environmentally screwed we are, and thus ‘something’ is still up to us. (She also notes that much thoughtful writing on the subject comes from women of colour, who are used to the patient work of emancipation, rather than ‘doomer dudes’.) In ‘Art Song’ Nelson, who teaches at CalArts, defends artistic indeterminacy and the right to say what you want, even if you upset some people, against those who want to instrumentalise art and fix its meaning, and those who – increasingly so over the past half-decade – want it to be reparative, therapeutic, uncomplicated. Parsing the debates around flashpoint works by Dana Schutz and Sam Durant, and considering, circumspectly, the long tail of the ‘orthopaedic aesthetic’ by which art seeks to help the damaged or (in early-modernist art) numbed viewer, Nelson arrives at a different definition of ‘care’ vis-à-vis art: that protecting artistic freedom is also a form of care, and that being against ‘the homogenising logic of paranoia’ is quite opposed to art-as-caring. There would seem to be something a little dusty about art’s power lying in transgression – though I say that as a cis white male – but, here as elsewhere, Nelson makes her case persuasively, marshalling a chorus of thinkers alongside her own experience. One model of freedom, On Freedom suggests, lies in choosing – and arguing for – one’s definition of freedom itself. Martin Herbert

Sub-Saharan Africa: Architectural Guide Edited by Philipp Meuser and Adil Dalbai dom Publishers, €148 (7 volumes, softcover)

‘It is my belief that there is not a singular theory that has the capacity to tell the truth about the African continent or its architecture. It is my hope that we can embrace specificity, patience, and people in any theoretical understanding of architecture in Africa.’ So says the Berlin-based Burkinabé architect Diébédo Francis Kéré. To some degree, this seven-volume compendium is an attempt to make that dream a reality. The first volume is devoted to the history and theory of Sub-Saharan architecture and the remaining six volumes offer a 49-country-by-country gazette of traditional, heritage, vernacular, colonial, modern and contemporary architecture (featuring 850 buildings and 200-plus articles);

the project is epic in its proportions. Although thankfully, for those of us who are now feeling faint of heart, each volume is designed in the format of a hand-sized guidebook. It’s to its credit that while covering such wide-ranging ground the study refuses to shy away from the problematics – such as a consciousness of the various acts of translation required for architecture in this context to participate in a discipline dominated, in its international scope, by European and us practitioners and discourse, and the tendency towards sweeping generalisation involved– of its subject matter. Volume one begins with a theory proposed by the South African artist Doung Anwar

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Jahangeer, who, when asked about what distinguished African culture from Western culture, suggested that in the West people earn money to invest in art or creative culture, while in Africa people have to be creative to earn money. It would be trite to say that Sub-Saharan Africa shows just how creative the continent’s architects can be. Although to some extent it is a showcase for that. More importantly, the collection tells a fundamental story of what happens when the specific conditions of site, social needs and cultures meet the requirements of politics, economics and national identity. And how that balance levels out differently from place to place. Nirmala Devi

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Sandfuture by Justin Beal mit, £19.99 / $24.95 (softcover) This is a personable, erudite memoir that ambles through a series of theoretical and historical musings linked to the author’s emotional, intellectual and practical engagement with New York City from 9/11 to sometime shortly before the pandemic. Towards its end, Beal, an artist who had previously studied architecture, quotes from a 1993 interview with Ada Louise Huxtable, the powerful American architecture critic, then approaching the late phase of her career, in which she rues the gradual collapse of optimism in what the built environment can achieve. ‘We truly believed that the horizons of technology, the horizons of art were going to lead us to a better place and make us a better people,’ she says. ‘We found this wasn’t true.’ It’s an assessment with obviously broader resonances that Beal examines afresh here, albeit from a different generational standpoint, but nevertheless anchored in contexts that were at the heart of Huxtable’s criticisms. Among the latter is the World Trade Center, the destruction of which occurred 20 years ago this month, and the story of its architect, Minoru Yamasaki, whom Huxtable championed early in his career and essentially renounced late in hers, and around whom much of the book revolves. Beal writes in short passages that bounce around, stretching the reader’s ability to make

connections: a memory of standing in the wtc plaza and looking up at the buildings; an account of Hurricane Sandy’s arrival and inundation of New York’s low-lying areas; a new romantic relationship with a gallerist; a first sighting of a residential tower rising at 432 Park Avenue; a brief history of migraines and their literatures (Joan Didion, Oliver Sacks). Gradually, through repetition and expansion, the main storylines emerge, though the links remain ambiguous, our attention repeatedly pulled away by the distraction of learned asides and well-researched nuggets. We meet ‘Yama’ the architecture student, also nicknamed Sockeye by fellow students for his gruelling summers spent canning salmon in Alaska, and learn of his rapid professional rise through the war years, his resistance to late modernism, a suspect daintiness in his work, the initial triumph of his design for the PruittIgoe housing complex in St Louis (the later demolition of which was famously – and slapdashedly, in Beal’s estimation – labelled by architect Charles Jencks as the day modern architecture died), his poor health, the paucity of information about his inner life and, later, the steep decline in his reputation. Nevertheless, it remains a fact that Yamasaki was commissioned to design not one but two of the tallest buildings the planet had ever seen.

Set up in opposition or as a contemporary parallel to the wtc is the story of the Rafael Viñoly-designed 432 Park Avenue (completed in 2015), the tallest example of Manhattan’s new ‘pencil towers’ – ultra-thin, ultra-high residential buildings made possible by aggressive workarounds of zoning restrictions, design innovations and the highly stratified nature of late-capitalist society – which Beal likens to a gnomon telling time across the sundial of Manhattan. Beal is not unaware of how his opposition to this tower, as pithy as it is damning, could be read as a contemporary equivalent to the bitter objections that greeted the construction of the wtc. This informative and empathetic text, dense with lightly worn histories (modernist architecture, hospitals, disease, pharmaceuticals, the Port Authority, the economics of the midsize art-gallery), operates in multiple personal registers as well, from Beal’s accounts of falling in love to becoming a father. It suggests a lively daily writing practice occurring alongside his teaching and artmaking, as well as the embodied belief that, for better or worse, we are powerfully affected by the built environment. Rather than directly answering Huxtable’s pessimistic assessment, Beal seems to want to acknowledge it and move on. David Terrien

Speak The Wind by Hoda Afshar Mack Books, £35 (softcover) Is there anything quite like the wind for portending disaster? European sailors arrived in Australia via the Roaring Forties, a westblowing precursor to the colonial havoc they later wrought. In Egypt, there’s the Khamsin, an intense southerly synonymous with sandstorms, while Iran’s south coast is in thrall to zār: a malevolent breeze that possesses and sickens those in its path, calling for a shaman to appease it through a ritual ceremony. In 2015 the Tehran-born, Melbourne-based photographer Hoda Afshar started documenting this last practice in the Strait of Hormuz. The passage, home to the islands Qeshm, Hormuz and Hengām, provides the setting for Afshar’s new photobook, Speak The Wind. Zār is said to remake people and places; Speak The Wind provides a chronology of these

airborne currents via three sections of blackand-white photographs set between colour images of landscapes and portraiture. In two of the sections, strange peaks jut out of the desert, whipped into humanlike forms through centuries of erosion. Alongside these images, statements and drawings voice the wind’s strange power: ‘Something was moving under my skin’, says an unknown victim. In another poignant sequence, a figure, cloaked in a white cloth, undergoes an exorcism; they crouch, shift to the left and press their head to the ground. Historically, photography has been used as a tool for imperial extraction. But Afshar – who’s long positioned her work against Western modes of seeing – isn’t interested in using her medium to explain an obscure custom or to create an objective record. Her images are moody

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and mysterious, and lovingly composed into strata that fuse together peoples, their culture and the landscapes that surround them. In the book’s accompanying essay, the Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig addresses the layered history of the region’s inhabitants, referring to the African slaves brought to the Strait of Hormuz by Muslim traders. The soil of Hormuz Island (the strait’s largest) is known for its high levels of iron oxide, and in an arresting image near the end of the book, where the sea appears to wash up blood, human and geological histories merge in the reader’s mind. The wind may foreshadow disaster. But for Afshar, it can also sweep away our surface perceptions. When it blows, it can help us see buried stories, envision forces that may be hidden from sight. Neha Kale

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on the cover Liu Ye, Prelude, 2018, acrylic on canvas,

Words on the spine and on pages 25, 47 and 81 are from John Berger, To the Wedding, 1995

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Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節 jung-chau jit) falls on the 15th day of the 8th month in the lunisolar calendar, to coincide with the Harvest Moon. This year the festival arrives on 21 September, which we celebrate by eating Mooncakes (月餅 yuht beng). The Harvest Moon is a particularly bright full moon that rises shortly after sunset which, before electricity, would allow farmers to gather their crops for a little while longer under the moonlit sky. Mooncakes are traditionally filled with lotus seed paste, red bean paste or mung bean paste, and contain a whole salted duck egg yolk which symbolises the moon (though there are various types of the cake that are made without these). Here are some with black sesame filling. The Mid-Autumn festival finds its roots in the custom of giving thanks and praying to the old cosmic gods of Chinese folklore, dating back to the Shang

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Tasting Notes: Mid-Autumn Mooncakes

Dynasty (1600–1046bce), and in particular to Taijam Noengnoeng (the Lunar Empress, or, the Great Yin Mother) who was thought to grant wishes and heal sick children. But the folktale of the moon goddess Seuhng Ngo (Chang’e in Mandarin), which was popularised during the Tang Dynasty, has become the primary story connected to moon worship during the Mid-Autumn Festival. There are variations of the tale, including versions that tell of Seuhng Ngo’s curiosity and greed, or of her selflessness in the face of her tyrannical husband. The kinder story goes like this: the Earth was once blighted by ten suns. Seuhng Ngo’s husband Hou Yi was a skilled archer in the Imperial Guard and shot down nine of the suns to save the scorched land. As a reward, he was given an elixir of immortality, which he hid away. One day, Seuhng Ngo discovered that his apprentice planned to find and steal Hou Yi’s elixir for himself. To stop him, Seuhng Ngo consumed the immortality potion, which caused her to float up into the sky. Rather than ascend fully, Seuhng Ngo managed to stop herself at the moon so she could remain as close as possible to Hou Yi, and keep watch over him. Upon finding out that his wife could no longer return, Hou Yi would place Seuhng Ngo’s favourite fruits and pastries outside as a tribute to her. Another story relating to mooncakes is that these pastries allowed secret messages to be smuggled between Ming revolutionaries during the Yuan dynasty which resulted in the overthrow of Mongolian rulers. These messages were hidden either inside or on the surface patterns of the mooncakes. In 2019 Hong Kong family run bakery Wah Yee Tang (華爾登麵包餅店) and the larger chain Taipan kicked up a storm when they began to sell mooncakes stamped with protest messages. These included phrases like ‘Hongkonger’ (香港人), ‘add oil’ (加油) and ‘be water’ (如水) – the last inspired by Bruce Lee and which came to describe the fluid, flexible and unpredictable methods employed by hk protestors. ingredients Sugar syrup Lye water Peanut oil Plain flour Black sesame Caster sugar Butter Glutinous rice flour Salted egg yolks Egg yolk

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