ArtReview Summer 2017 by ArtReview

Zanele Muholi

DANIEL RICHTER LE FREAK

PARIS MARAIS JUNE – JULY 2017 ROPAC.NET

LONDON PARIS SALZBURG

IMI KNOEBEL SALZBURG AUGUST 2017 ROPAC.NET

LONDON PARIS SALZBURG

São Paulo Leticia Ramos Julie Beaufils Felipe Meres 27/05 – 29/07 2017

Michael Dean Skulptur Projekte Münster 09/06 – 01/10 2017

Brussels Neither. Curated by Fernanda Brenner 18/04 – 17/06 2017

Paloma Bosquê O Oco e a Emenda Pavilhão Branco, Lisbon 15/05 – 08/10 2017

Paulo Nimer Pjota Giulio Delvè 29/06 – 05/08 2017

Mariana Castillo Deball Sharjah Biennial 13, Sharjah 10/03 – 12/06 2017

New York HIC SVNT DRACONES Sonia Gomes and A.R. Penck 02/05 – 29/06 2017

Mend e s Wood DM Image: Michael Dean

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Lisa Yuskavage

7 June - 28 July 2017

Déjà Vu, 2017 Oil on linen 80 × 80 inches 203.5 × 203.2 cm

David Zwirner London

www.yanceyrichardson.com

www.stevenson.info

ZANELE MUHOLI STEDELIJK MUSEUM AMSTERDAM 08.07.17 – 15.10.17 AUTOGRAPH ABP LONDON 14.07.17 – 28.10.17

LONDON Santiago Sierra 67 Lisson Street NEW YORK Peter Joseph 504 West 24th Street

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PHILIPPE VANDENBERG CURATED BY ANTHONY HUBERMAN 27 JUNE — 29 JULY 2017 32 EAST 69TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10021 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

NO TITLE, 2009 WATERCOLOUR, BALLPOINT PEN AND COLOURED PENCIL ON PAPER 42 X 29.7 CM / 16 1/2 X 11 3/4 IN PHOTO: JOKE FLOREAL

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ART BASEL 2017 Booth R12 CAPE TOWN

SAMSON KAMBALU Ghost Dance 15 July – 12 August 2017 JOHANNESBURG

HASAN & HUSAIN ESSOP Refuge 15 July – 19 August 2017

LIAM GILLICK WERE PEOPLE THIS DUMB BEFORE TV? GRAFISCHE ARBEIT 1990 – 2016 JULY 2 – AUGUST 5, 2017 — ARI BENJAMIN MEYERS SOLO FOR AYUMI JULY 2 – AUGUST 5, 2017 POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM ART BASEL JUNE 15 – 18, 2017

Genieve Figgis, Pink stage, 2017 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 100 x 4 cm 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 x 1 5/8 inches © Genieve Figgis - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech Gallery

GENIEVE FIGGIS

What we do in the shadows June 3 - July 29, 2017

ALMINE RECH GALLERY BRUSSELS

Bernar Venet in his studio, rue Pairolière, Nice, 1963, Courtesy Archives Bernar Venet, New York

BERNAR VENET Looking Forward: 1961-1984 8 June — 22 July 2017

London | 4 Hanover Square

IN 2014

BUCO, MASSIMO DE CARLO, MILAN, 2014

GÜNTHER FÖRG/LUCIO FONTANA BRONZE/TERRACOTTA,MASSIMO DE CARLO, LONDON, 2014

MASSIMO BARTOLINI, ALIGHIERO BOETTI, ANDREAS CHRISTEN, PIERO MANZONI, STEVEN PARRINO, LYGIA CLARK, TAUBA AUERBACH, JOHN CHAMBERLAIN, DONALD JUDD, LUCIANO FABRO NEW WRINKLES (AFTER JUDD) 1959-2010, MASSIMO DE CARLO, LONDON SEPTEMBER 04 — OCTOBER 10, 2014

GÜNTHER FÖRG, LUCIO FONTANA GÜNTHER FÖRG/LUCIO FONTANA BRONZE/TERRACOTTA, MASSIMO DE CARLO, LONDON OCTOBER 13 — NOVEMBER 22, 2014

GELITIN BUCO, MASSIMO DE CARLO, MILAN JANUARY 28 — MARCH 15, 2014

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NEW WRINKLES (AFTER JUDD) 1959-2010, MASSIMO DE CARLO, LONDON, 2014

Three exhibitions that challenged the concept of sculpture.

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MICHAËL BORREMANS Sixteen Dances

September 3 - October 14, 2017

ZENO X GALLERY

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ArtReview vol 69 no 5 Summer 2017

Birds of a feather… People are always asking ArtReview who it thinks it is. Not because of a perceived impertinence on ArtReview’s part (at least that’s what ArtReview’s friends tell it), but something more about whether it is the sum of its parts or an independent whole. Quite rude really! As if, after nearly 70 years, ArtReview didn’t know who it was. It is an interesting question nonetheless. And not entirely uncalled for. It’s true that ArtReview is in part a collective consciousness, made up of all the individuals, each with a distinct voice, who contribute to it. It’s true also that those individual parts don’t always agree with each other and don’t always wish to be part of a coherent whole. But that’s something that’s true as well of communities and societies in general. In broad terms, such issues are also present in the art of Zanele Muholi, who features on this issue’s cover. The participants (as the artist refers to them as) in Muholi’s photographic series are all in some way marginalised or the subject of discrimination. Her portraits reflect them as a series of individuals and as a collective whole. In amplifying their exposure, the artist (she sees no clear distinction between art making and activism) makes these individualities public and their collectivity (socially) normative, and invites us as viewers to acknowledge and affirm the same. The question of what is ‘normal’ concerns B. Wurtz too, whose elegant sculptures transform the ordinary, quotidian materials from which they are made into something extraordinary, but in such a way that the essential nature of their individual ordinariness is never really disturbed. In a manner that

Normalcy

is radically different to both Muholi’s and Wurtz’s approach, Christina Forrer’s work also looks at the social dynamics of individuals who are part of a social whole. As, in an altogether different way again, does the work of Ashley Bickerton, which often tackles the still grander question of what art itself is doing in the world. You can see why issues of the individual and the collective are weighing down on ArtReview’s mind at the moment. When ArtReview wants to find out about itself it goes out and looks at the work of others. Some people say it should seek the help of a psychologist, but it prefers to seek the help of art. Mainly because it’s more stimulating and a lot more fun. But this art business isn’t simply a form of empty narcissism for ArtReview. It’s not just projecting itself into everything that passes in front of its eyes (well maybe a little). Ultimately it’s looking into the types of work featured in this issue to try and understand its relation to the world around it, as an individual that’s inevitably part of a social whole (art, ultimately is a social affair, even if that society is simply constituted of the artist, their work and you). If the world right now feels like a confusing and dangerous place, at times one in which ArtReview feels radically displaced, then the potential of art (to imagine difference and rethink normalcy and its tolerable parameters) can be one way of negotiating with it. Which, to come full circle is one way of looking at ArtReview’s own parts and whole: as a body that is in a permanent state of discussion, negotiation and evolution. Permanently in flux, but not anxious about that affecting its whole. (OK – maybe that’s also because there are these people called ‘binders’ whose job it is, literally, to make sure the whole magazine sticks together and never falls apart. But who doesn’t need a binder at some point in their lives?) ArtReview

Individuality

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Among Friends Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Art Previewed

Antonio Gramsci on the Venice Biennale Interview by Matthew Collings 54

Previews by Martin Herbert 37 Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Heather Phillipson, Maria Lind and Jonathan T. D. Neil 47

page 38 Maurizio Cattelan, Spermini, 1997. Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy the artist’s archive and Perrotin, Paris. (Exhibited at the Yokohama Triennale)

Summer 2017

Art Featured

Zanele Muholi by Brian Dillon 70

Christina Forrer by Aoife Rosenmeyer 90

Maureen Gallace by Sam Korman 78

Ashley Bickerton by Mark Rappolt 96

B. Wurtz by Ross Simonini 84

page 84 B. Wurtz, Four Collections, 2015 (installation view). Photo: John McKenzie. Courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

ArtReview

Art Reviewed

bow bow, by Ashton Cooper Hannah Perry, by Jeppe Ugelvig Sara Cwynar, by Wendy Vogel Wilhelm Sasnal, by Rachel Wetzler Mark Flood, by David Everitt Howe Letícia Parente, by Silas Martí

Exhibitions 108 Documenta 14 Athens, by Raimar Stange Hannah Black, by Kimberly Bradley The Absent Museum, by Sam Steverlynck Splice: Re-examining Nature, by Mike Watson Ulla von Brandenburg, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Adrian Paci, by Barbara Casavecchia Rodrigo Hernández, by Oliver Basciano Navid Nuur, by Dominic van den Boogerd Greg Parma Smith, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Ayşe Erkmen, by Sarah Jilani Ryoji Ikeda, by Robert Barry Oliver Beer, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Paul Johnson, by Sean Ashton Lawrence Abu Hamdan, by Paul Pieroni Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, by Laura Smith Annette Messager, by Brian Dillon Ewig Weibliche, by Susannah Thompson Rebecca Warren, by Ciara Moloney Peter Shire, by Andrew Berardini Matthew Ronay, by Lindsay Preston Zappas

Books 136 Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh Contemporary Art and Digital Culture, by Melissa Gronlund Ghachar Ghochar, by Vivek Shanbhag The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology, edited by William A. Ewing THE STRIP 142 A CURATOR WRITES 146

page 108 Vivian Suter, Nisyros, 2016, volcanic material, earth, botanical matter and microorganisms on canvas, dimensions variable. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis. Courtesy Documenta 14, Athens

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Property from the Tommy Hilfiger Collection JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT AND ANDY WARHOL New Flame, 1985 Estimate £1,700,000–2,200,000

Contemporary Art Evening Auction London 28 June 2017

Viewing 23 – 28 June 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5744 ALEX.BRANCZIK@ SOTHEBYS.COM SOTHEBYS.COM/LONDONCONTEMPORARYEVENING © THE ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT / ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2017 © 2017 THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC. / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK AND DACS, LONDON.

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JOSÉ PEDRO CROFT ArtBasel June 15 - 18 Hall 2.1 - Booth P7

57th Venice Biennale · Villa Hériot Official Portuguese Representation

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Art Previewed

Watchfulness is the path of immortality 35

Previewed Skulptur Projekte Münster Various venues, Münster through 1 October

Ida Applebroog Hauser & Wirth, London through 29 July

Kasia Fudakowski Chert Lüdde, Berlin through 17 June

Yokohama Triennale Various venues, Yokohama 4 August – 5 November

Ed Ruscha Peder Lund, Oslo through 10 September

Analia Saban Praz-Delavallade, Paris through 17 June

Mondialité Boghossian Foundation, Brussels through 27 August

After the Fact Lenbachhaus, Munich through 17 September

The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. Fondazione Prada, Venice through 26 November

Charlotte Prodger Sculpture Center, New York through 31 July

6 Coco Fusco, A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, 2008, performance. Photo: Eduardo Aparicio. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Summer 2017

1 Though only four editions old, Skulptur Projekte Münster is a big deal. That’s because it manifests just slightly more regularly than Halley’s Comet and My Bloody Valentine albums – every ten years – and is always curated by the renowned Kasper König, who founded the German decennial in 1977. Set in the eponymous Westphalian city, SPM’s USP is straightforward: siting sculpture exclusively in public space. This year, though, it also expands to the neighbouring city of Marl, the annexe purportedly featuring five artists’ work. (Big German art shows that are tales of two cities being, of course, a very 2017 thing.) The 35 artists taking part include Jeremy Deller, Pierre Huyghe, Gregor Schneider and Cerith Wyn Evans, alongside others ranging from Indian/Japanese pairing CAMP, the Nigerian Emeka Ogboh and, working with the Peruvianborn Monika Gintersdorfer, Münster local boy Knut Klassen. And in terms of clarifying

what ‘sculpture’ – or, excuse us, skulptur – means then, to privilege some increasingly familiar today, the organisers promise people walking terminology. And who’s big in Japan? Biennale on water, tattoos for pensioners and ‘human stalwarts like Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson and search engines’. (You know – the usual.) Ragnar Kjartansson, yes; but also choices such Looking positively frequent in comparison, as Irish cross-media artist Kathy Prendergast, Tsuyoshi Ozawa (maker some years ago of 2 this year’s Yokohama Triennale – three of these for every one of König’s, for those a fictional museum of ‘soy sauce paintings’) who failed maths – adopts the titular theme and sort-of-Young British Artist Alex Hartley. Islands in the stream, that is what we are. Édouard of Islands, Constellations and Galapagos, intending thereby to refer to the contradictory nature Glissant didn’t say that, though maybe he hummed it once. But islands and archipelagos, of our current reality: strongly interconnected as concepts rather than 1980s country-pop lyrics, on the digital level but also ever more defined geopolitically by protectionism and isolawere the late Martinican philosopher’s key tionism, these driven in turn by populism subjects, and Hans Ulrich Obrist commented and xenophobia. Aiming to think that through a while ago that he begins every day by reading Glissant, whose ideas have visibly shaped in a city famously defined by a node of connection the curator’s own. Now, with Asad Raza, – its port – the triennale this time convenes some the Swiss supercurator has dedicated a group 40 artists or groups from Japan and the rest of the world, fewer than usual in order to give 3 show, Mondialité, to Glissant’s ‘inspiring call for a global dialogue that does not erase local each one something like a solo presentation. cultures’. In the Villa Empain, the Brussels An archipelago or constellation of practices,

1 Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator (Yiwu) (still), 2017, mixed-media installation. © the artist. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

2 Paola Pivi, I and I (must stand for the art), 2014. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy the artist and Perrotin, Paris

3 Steve McQueen, Weight, 2016, 24-carat gold-plated mosquito net, iron bed, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist; Artangel, London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

ArtReview

4 Ida Applebroog, Mercy Hospital, 1969, ink and watercolour on paper, 36 × 28 cm. © the artist. Photo: Emily Poole. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

5 Ed Ruscha, Spied Upon Scene – One Liner, 2017. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Gagosian, New York; and Peder Lund, Oslo

mansion home to the Boghossian Foundation that has formerly been a Soviet embassy, a TV-station HQ and a squat that hosted a Mike Kelley show, the organisers are presenting ‘artworks, environments, documentary film and songs, dramaturgical structures and archival material’ by artists including Etel Adnan, Steve McQueen, Alighiero Boetti, Raqs Media Collective, Simone Fattal and almost 20 others. Expect, too, a rolling live programme of ‘choreographic and discursive events’, which recently kicked off with a day of interviews – as one might expect from the ever-inquisitive Obrist – and performances. Ida Applebroog, now eighty-seven, worked 4 as an illustrator and jewellery-maker before turning to art, beginning in the late 1960s with drawings of her own genitals made with the help of a bathroom mirror before arriving, in her forties, at an almost cartoonish, thick-lined,

quotation-heavy aesthetic (she’s called herself an ‘image scavenger’) that couches a focus on human bodies and gendered power relations. Regularly, it’s the hard, affectless stances of her figures that underline the violence she’s pointing towards; the current show, Mercy Hospital, though, assumes we know all that, and digs into the archives. We’re whisked back towards the start, to 1969–70 and a disturbing suite of drawings, lesser known than her vaginal imagery (which Applebroog nevertheless didn’t show until 2009), of amputated breasts and psychedelic clusters of figures and bodily organs. Some of the latter spout lines of anxious, beseeching text (eg ‘hey, wait for me!’); the tension of the later work is all there, but literally embodied in the gut. In 1970 the artist was hospitalised for depression and you might almost guess it; these works, though, glow persistently, even in darkness.

Summer 2017

When Applebroog made these drawings she was living in Southern California and her work involved language, but otherwise her art couldn’t have less in common with fellow SoCal 5 resident Ed Ruscha’s analytic approach to word and image. Ruscha, eight years her junior and apparently tireless thanks to his laconism, still works on paper sometimes: see Peder Lund’s show of new works in the format. We might expect him to remain in the end-of-empire mode he’s assumed over the past decade or so, wherein (as in Ruscha’s show at this gallery five years ago) he’s been comparing Los Angeles now to how it was 50 years ago: a typically economical, compressive gambit that speaks eloquently about change and, implicitly, American decline. But, as usual, Ruscha – whose recent-ish London show was a frosty, text-driven meditation on scale, from the giant to the infinitesimal – appears to be dodging anticipations.

7 Charlotte Prodger, Risograph for BRIDGIT, 2016. Photo: Kyle Knodell. Courtesy the artist; Hollybush Gardens, London; and Koppe Astner, Glasgow 8 Kasia Fudakowski, Cock Bait (II), 2017, stained and waxed oak, painted steel, leather, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Chert Lüdde, Berlin

An advance image from this show, Spied Upon the Fact is a less doctrinaire, seemingly more mainstream format. It serves as a streamlining, a focusing: BRIDGIT (2016), a black-box Scene – One Liner (2017), suggests he’s revisiting hopeful look at how, in the face of ‘fake news’ projected-video installation, features discrete the mountain imagery he patented in the 90s, and ‘alternative facts’ – and, generally, the way segments that each used up the memory on this time vignetted as if through a telescope that news disseminated online blurs truth and fiction – propaganda might be reconsidered her iPhone: static shots of her trainer-clad feet and overlaid not by text but a ‘one-liner’ that is indeed a single slim horizontal line, conveying as a different kind of force, ‘an analytical in a tranquil domestic scene, hilly Scottish views that reference the Neolithic goddess called both abstraction and redaction. If, as seems likely, framework that is as potentially problematic by many names including Bridget, disquisitions Ruscha is thinking about surveillance and secrecy as it might be helpful’. If the art here doesn’t right now – who isn’t? – then his characteristic on the artist being mistaken for a man. As ever, look like propaganda, maybe it’s just extremely fruitful obliqueness hasn’t deserted him. fluidity of identity is at the work’s core, yet insidious propaganda. 7 Charlotte Prodger has been a figure Along with those dark arts of control, its own equivocation offsets any didacticism. of course, there’s propaganda, the subject of to watch for some years: now seems to be her At Sculpture Center, where the work is framed moment. After an extended period of working in terms of a Situationist dérive, BRIDGIT – note 6 After the Fact at Munich’s Lenbachhaus museum. This show and ‘events project’, though, isn’t primarily with old monitors and using loaded, the title’s implicit pun – receives its US premiere. a rollout of dusty old posters and re-screenings found video and audio material – often redeTalking of divisions, visitors to Kasia 8 of Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self (2002). Fudakowski’s show at Chert Lüdde are greeted ploying, with disconnected but associative (Though that influential TV series’ key figure, with a choice and a restriction: enter the gallery voiceovers, special-interest and subcultural activity on YouTube, eg sportswear-fetish PR-man Edward Bernays, is mentioned pretty via the left or right door, and don’t go in the other videos or footage of dogs being put into trances sharpish in the press text.) Featuring artists side. Once in one space, the show cleaves again. – the Bournemouth-born, Glasgow-based artist A series of wooden, wall-mounted sculptures including Harun Farocki, Coco Fusco, Sean recently took a stylistic leap towards a more are gendered either male or female, while a book Snyder, Nancy Spero and Hannah Black, After

ArtReview

comprises an example of fan fiction – authored by the artist, who a few years ago did a performance in the same gallery involving her telling unfunny jokes – that fantasises about bringing together two late rogue figures: avant-garde comedian Andy Kaufman and artist Lee Lozano. (The artworks in turn appear to reference both Lozano’s work and Kaufman’s switch from comedy to intergender wrestling.) In the spirit of those recalcitrant artists, something of the show is invariably withheld – though, of course, you can take someone else with you, the someone else can own a phone with a camera and the gallerist might gently point out that you can meet your companion to compare notes in the gallery’s bijou little bookshop. 9 Analia Saban is Broken was the title of a previous show by the Argentinian artist – a painter, if hardly a traditional one – but it feels like a misnomer, so confidently does Saban find new wrinkles in materialism. She sometimes uses laser-cutting to sculpt 10 her paint, leaving shapely and intermittently

figurative shreds attached to the canvas; early works, meanwhile, involved swollen ‘bags’ of paint resting on the floor. Recently she’s gone more minimal, gorgeously so, threading acrylic paint through the weave of linen to create a labour-intensive white monochrome or a dun-coloured square of cloth through which, in a ripped area, black paint bulges. So, yes, clearly Saban owes plenty to modernist pioneers. But the sheer inventiveness with which she moves through the evolution of materialist thinking in painting – a rapid-fire replay and compaction of a century’s innovation – is bracing in itself, and there’s constantly a sense of incremental new developments being located, making her appear, oddly, as at once a classicist and a forward-thinker. If that constitutes broken, we can wait for it to be fixed. And finally: the Venice Biennale is on again, of course, but we’re not talking about it; that was last month. Running parallel with the show, though, is the Prada Foundation’s The Boat is Leaking. The Captain

Lied., a ‘transmedia exhibition project’ unfolding across three floors of the restored fifteenthcentury palazzo Ca’ Corner Della Regina, and a collaboration between writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, artist Thomas Demand, costume designer Anna Viebrock and Berlin Nationalgalerie director Udo Kittelmann. The starting point, it appears, is misprision – fruitful misunderstanding – as each protagonist comes to his or her own conclusions about a painting, Angelo Morbelli’s nineteenthcentury Giorni… Ultimi, which in the past has been considered (wrongly) to depict some retired sailors in a Milanese hostel. The subjective ‘responses’ by the participants, assumedly avoiding that reading, are expected to intersect and overlap, mixing art, film and stage settings. And, of course, this being the sinking ship that is 2017, the title is culled from a Leonard Cohen song. Strangely, nobody seems to have yet made a show called Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On, but it’s only a matter of time. Martin Herbert

10 The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied., 2017 (installation view). Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

9 Analia Saban, Weaving Composition #1, 2017, acrylic paint woven through linen, 20 × 20 × 2 cm. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy the artist and Praz-Delavallade, Paris & Los Angeles

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Tal R, The Bend, 2016 (udsnit), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Donation: Ny Carlsberg Fondet

Points of View

As you read this, British voters will be electing a new government (election day is 8 June). The election was called in April, on short notice, after incumbent prime minister Theresa May claimed she needed a new mandate in order to govern with strength and authority. And with the snap election, another slightly less important appointment also had to be made in a bit of a hurry. Starting with the 2001 election, the UK parliament has commissioned an ‘official election artist’ to cover each general election campaign and make a work in response to it. On 1 May, sculptor Cornelia Parker was appointed to this unusual position; Parker, if you’ve been following her on Instagram lately, has been travelling the country, attending various election events (the leaders’ TV debates, manifesto launches and suchlike) and snapping bits of newsprint and online media, alongside moments of everyday life, in order, presumably, to tap into the mood of the country. Contemporary artists in Britain like to get involved in domestic elections. During the 2015 election, artist Bob and Roberta Smith ran against Michael Gove, the Conservative education minister at that time, to protest the Tory-Liberal coalition’s sidelining of the arts in education; last year, in the EU referendum campaign, Wolfgang Tillmans led the most visible artworld opposition to Brexit, issuing pro-Europe posters that gained widespread media attention while spawning a whole culture of anti-Brexit poster memes. And in the current election campaign, Jeremy Deller has confirmed that he’s the author of a campaign of street posters with the snappy slogan ‘Strong and stable my arse’ – satirising May’s questionable ‘strong and stable’ campaign theme. By contrast Grayson Perry, an artist never shy of the public eye, has more recently taken to mocking an artworld synonymous with the muchmaligned ‘metropolitan elite’. Discussing Brexit in a Guardian interview, Perry declared, ‘As an artist I find it exciting. No doubt it will be a disaster, but also any chance to stick it to my fellow Islington liberals is great.’

Election special! J.J. Charlesworth’s brief history of artists trying to work out which way the wind is blowing Perry’s mockery of the liberal elite is ironic, since he himself has become part of the ‘official’ scenery of contemporary art in the UK – from giving the BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures to presenting a string of TV programmes. Perry’s comments, of course, go ahead of his solo show at London’s Serpentine Gallery, titled knowingly (at a moment when the shadow of ‘populism’ hangs over the confused state of democratic politics) The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!, and set to open on election day. But both Perry’s cheerful anti-elitist posing and Parker’s more stuffy and solemn engagement as the ‘official’ artist of the election beg a more basic question: why should we be looking to artists to offer a ‘special’ take on a country’s political life at all? Maybe it’s a measure of how much contemporary art has come to be seen as part of ‘official’ culture in Britain that one artist who cross-dresses and another known for blowing up sheds should find themselves in such demand. But Britain’s political establishment has a long history of absorbing artists into its discreet system of patronage, from handing out ‘honours’ for services rendered to appointing ‘official artists’. And this cosiness is often cultivated by artists who desire public recognition and are keen to enter the intricate but opaque influence networks of government, funding bodies and the media. While artists relish the attention, it’s the political establishment’s love affair with

Summer 2017

contemporary art that produces such odd gigs as the ‘official election artist’: it’s no surprise that the commission was dreamed up in 2001, the first election after the rise to power of Tony Blair’s New Labour, with its neophile obsession with contemporary culture and the creative industries. The 2001 election artist was the society portrait painter Jonathan Yeo (son of former Conservative cabinet minister Tim Yeo). Yeo produced three terrible portraits of the main political leaders, with an equally dreadful conceptual twist: the three canvases were sized according to the three main parties’ share of the vote. They were titled, in an act of entirely toothless criticism, Proportional Representation – echoing the recurring gripe of British electoral politics that the composition of parliament doesn’t reflect the proportion of votes cast for smaller parties. Yeo’s idea now has a sort of crazy prophetic irony – after decades of squabbling over proportional representation, the British political class is reeling from the shock of a straightforward, majoritarian democratic decision, with huge political consequences. Contemporary artists in the UK have, by and large, tended towards the pro-Remain position of the political establishment; those few like Perry, who like to bait their ‘fellow Islington liberals’ in favour of Brexit, do so because they sense that there’s a problem with being too close to the ‘official’ position, too remote from public opinion. It’s hard to see how appointing an artist to ‘represent’ an election can produce anything but nonpartisan platitudes. At the same time, artists in the UK seem too often to opt for the political platitudes of a particular cultural and social outlook – the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. So while it would be regressive to argue that art and artists shouldn’t comment on what’s going on in society, it would be good to argue for more discord, more contradiction and division of opinion – more creativity. Perhaps the ‘official election artist’ will surprise everyone, and truly ‘represent’ the diversity of the will of the people, not just the partial opinions of artists…

It’s a big release to assert your deficiencies and press on, so why not own up that I’m not too hot at narrative descriptions of anything that feels beyond narrative descriptions, which, for me, is most of the world. And it’s especially so for art-performance-producer-collaborators Fevered Sleep’s Sheep Pig Goat (I keep wanting to call it sheepigoat, because FS surely anticipated that – no full stops, lumping then separating between neurons), which featured precisely what its title suggests, brought together, quietly, with string players and dancers, for unfixed interactions, in a Peckham warehouse, and which was less an event than an attendance. As a human-animal, and a pinkskinned one to boot, I find myself in a privileged party, but I’ve always felt on the side of the other-than-human – also a slab of ageing meatloaf, close to microbes, often damp. So I acted kind of like a seven-year-old in advance of the sheepigoat, toting it around to my friends with a twinkle. No matter what, I rarely decline mammals – I don’t mean eating them, I don’t do that, I mean the chance to get close to ‘other worlds’, in a sci-fi sense. Really, I’d like to renounce my selves to the snouts and whiskers and smasheroo hooves. Hooves are the real-deal footwear. The sheep’s pigs’ goats’ first major strike was their ecology of smell – a farmyard vacuumed up my nose. They made an ungulate flavouring – something like earwax stock-cubes – and it soaked everything. Afternoon sky was breaching Peckham skylights and the air was a communal stew. Incubatory. Captivity really bothers me, as does leering, but this was a lighter, conscious foregrounding, as if all the characters were familiar but everyone had new roles from a million freshly improvised plays. A sheep got close to a viola player, another sheep leaned against the wall, the third ate hay, claiming it and making it vital. (They were intensified, like our brain cells.) Watching creatures take snacks and craps has that piquing quality of snubbing you while sucking you in, and something welled inside the warehouse and me. SEE, it commanded – it’s that or go under. Did I suppress a laugh? If I did, it was from an intense simplification of feeling and an intense complication of thought. It was from zipping my mouth, as if caught in a sty, in flagrante. I felt like it was very bright in there, but realised I was focusing hard, which made me glad and thankful. I felt how I felt when I read Lydia Davis’s The Cows, in which little happens, except cows. Observed, day on day, re/arranging themselves in a field, the cows

sheepigoats by

Heather Phillipson

are pure presence. I felt worried, through and through, about my anthropogenic ancestry, still discharging. I felt how I felt when I first saw Eraserhead, aged eight-ish, with that chicken scene. You know, when the meat-corpse poked by a carving knife creaks back up to creatureliness, leaking into the family tableau – alive, alive on the dining table – aide-memoire of horrors. (‘Have you heard the appalling moan of the dead in slaughter? It’s the terrible disillusionment of the newly born dead, who’d hoped for and deserved eternal sleep but found themselves tricked, caught up in an endless machinery of pain and sorrow’ – Leonora Carrington.) I felt how I felt yesterday at the swimming pool, discovered in semi-undress in the school changing rooms by a gaggle of under-tens, who froze and stared and stared. It takes some mettle to be unselfconscious. I felt like a reminder of our fuller, hairier selves. The goats skipped and nipped, while the pig took a shit, blasé. I felt that sense of the inarticulate that’s released when exceptional musicians hit their concrete/transcendent highs. Image courtesy the artist

ArtReview

My mood? A pumped-up tyre! Inflated with tenderness and tension, feeling taut. A swelling of time, sweating. There was agriculture here, yes, and confinement and weather and habitat and versions of human dominion, but there was more of what escapes. I felt our biological buffooneries, our bestiary of relations, getting skewed. I felt, beside more and less furry bodies, unstaged, uncomposed, totally unreal-real, and that felt like the point. A mosquito landed on the rope in front of me, bloodsucking compère to the ecosystem. Appearances differ only, really, in audibleness. I felt like my walls had been licked and chewed until silky/sticky. Like I might smell of proximity. Like when I get a surge of love and want to feel another body’s weight because there’s a precise kind of tactility needed to feel where we are right now. I felt bloody relieved. I felt nervy with grip-the-handrest moments, though there weren’t any handrests, as if other parts of me had sprouted into existence before the tingling circuitry of legs and glances. A sheep lay down. I felt like I’d arrived late for the overture and would leave before the applause. (I love to dwell in a clichéd metaphor until it feels almost ickily literal.) As if generally I only inhabit pathetic worn tidbits of myself, and if I stayed around longer, maybe even the rest of my life, I’d still miss the most important nubs. It was Marj, my dog, who introduced me to Fevered Sleep’s co-artistic director, David, by mutually befriending his dog on our morning runs – scattered, extemporised meetings also something like the act of rediscovery – the unearthing of a different opening scene, or newly inserted 4th, 15th or 98th scene. We started to have conversations, about creatures and lovers and birdsong and boxsets and smut and the politics of pets and dog food and fruit massage oils and about feminisms and 80s pop-culture and poems, while the mutts tumbled each other, and you don’t get that strolling around a supermarket. If several mammals are brought together, in biological space, I think, we must establish, and reestablish, our curious, relative poses. And when what happens is contingent and unformulated and reformulated, one can’t ascribe meaning to it, thank heavens, only inhabit the common nanoseconds. I didn’t start out with something sensible to say and, I suspect, neither did the sheep and pigs and goats, but, between us, something sensible was surging. It was a very quiet way to have the enlivened shit whomped into you for an hour.

During the 1950s an artist by the name of Valery Lamakh took the train from Kiev, his hometown, to Moscow to study what at the time was most likely the only book on Piet Mondrian in the Soviet Union. He spent several weeks in the Lenin State Library, meticulously copying each picture on tracing paper and noting where the different colours went. This might seem extreme, but to travel long distances to see a film, visit an exhibition or buy food was not unusual in the vast Soviet Union. Back home, Lamakh then made his own copy of the Mondrian book, expanding his clandestine interest in geometric abstraction and spirituality. Lamakh’s activities are only one example of dissidence cited in Anna Daučíková’s contributions – the videos On Allomorphing (2017) and Along the Axis of Affinity (2017) – to Documenta 14 in Athens. Lamakh features in both, as does late-modern architecture, with its emphasis on verticality and horizontality, and the playful tension between them. “My body is a building,” says the hoarse voiceover in the three-channel On Allomorphing, which tells the story of how, as a child, s/he thought that the body would remain frozen in the shape in which s/he fell asleep in the evening. On one screen, which like its partners is suspended from the gallery ceiling, we see a person, gender indeterminate, clad in a rectilinearly patterned shirt, press their arm and chest against the glass through which this action is filmed. On Allomorphing is being shown in the Odeion, a never completed music conservatory that appears in the video itself, shining white and with facilities for teaching, rehearsing, performing and exhibiting. Like André Malraux’s later Maisons de la Culture in France, this planned multipurpose venue, designed at the beginning of the 1950s by architect Ioannis Despotopoulos, was meant to be a place in which visitors would encounter and shape art, as well as each other.

gender indeterminate Maria Lind goes in search of where things are really happening The Lenin State Library also appears, together with three further libraries. These are indeed different from the Moscow library in that two of them feature Slavic books alongside Englishlanguage publications, one with a focus on postwar philosophy, the other leaning towards gender theory. The third library is mixed, although many of the publications are in Italian. All three libraries are apparently private. There are various strange editions to the collections however: a shelf of philosophy books is also adorned with women’s shoes, mostly large in size and high-heeled. A group of Italian-language tomes are adorned with pictures of political and cultural heroes like Jonathan Swift, Nikolai Gogol, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell and Philip K. Dick, all of whom are introduced in Italian by another voice, this time male-sounding. Both On Allomorphing and Along the Axis of Affinity carry stories about the emergence of a subject and about psychological and physical malleability. They concern the subject’s ability to learn and adapt, and therefore the way in which subjectivity is shaped, whether by a transvestite, a transsexual or someone whose profession does not allow them to ‘show face’ (politically speaking) in public,

Anna Daučíková, Along the Axis of Affinity (film still), 2015, Athens, Documenta 14. Photo: Mathias Völzke

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but whose private position leaves no doubt about their political stance. As far as I am concerned, this is the one venue of Documenta in Athens that works as an exhibition, where something interesting happens between the works: Daučíková’s videos in relation to Edi Hila’s atmospheric paintings devoid of people or with people at a distance; Elizabeth Wild’s small, brightly coloured abstract paper collages that shine, almost like stained glass; and Nevin Aladaq’s furniture-turned-instruments. The venue swings, and the rhythm continues upstairs with Joar Nango’s social sculpture in which people can gather around a Sami tent. Maybe Hila’s dissidence, Wild’s choice to move from Switzerland to a Guatemalan jungle and Nango’s reactivation of traditional craft and indigenous rights give a taste of ‘transsexuality as a state of mind’, as Daučíková has phrased it: a constant mental condition where normality, borders and definitions are not only questioned but literally transgressed. The meandering structure of Daučíková’s second work, the two-channel installation Along the Axis of Affinity, takes us to postwar glazed-tile facades in Bratislava, Kiev and Cologne. These are places that Daučíková – whose biography also includes glass blower, undercover lesbian and self-described ‘non-woman’, onetime member of the Soviet Artists’ Union, founder of queer feminist journal Aspekt and professor of art at the Prague academy – is familiar with. Filmed horizontally and vertically respectively, the geometric patterns formed by the tiles, sometimes in different colours, emphasise Lamakh’s history: as a forced labourer in Cologne during the war, he found some books by Arthur Schopenhauer in the ruins of a house and brought them back to Kiev, where they inspired his ‘schemata’of simple diagrams exploring relationships. They profoundly shaped him. Apparently, he eventually smuggled some of them into the monumental figurative mosaics that he was commissioned to produce by the Soviet authorities. One scene that stands out features Lamakh’s widow deciphering a manuscript in which the artist describes a discussion among friends concerning there being a time before people used gendered pronouns. A time when there was neither he nor she; when ‘it’ stood for everything and everybody; a period of suppleness, beyond strict definitions. A bit like glass, which strictly speaking never solidifies completely. Simultaneously, the voiceover claims that surfaces are not necessarily superficial. As is the case in the work of Mondrian, this can be where things really happen.

Primary/Bristol is one of the most extensive programmes of contemporary art commissioning for school environments in the UK. Designed to include artists in the design of educational spaces in the city the programme has been developed in collaboration with lead curators Arnolfini and Foreground. Primary/Bristol is funded by Bristol City Council as part of the Primary Capital Education Programme in line with Bristol City Councils Public Art Policy, with the support of Skanska and the Education & Skills Funding Agency.

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Image: Stuart Whipps, Workshop at Barton Hill Primary (2016), Photo: Stuart Whipps, Courtesy of the artist and Spike Island.

Assemble Johann Arens Conway & Young Cornelia Baltes Simon & Tom Bloor Melanie Counsell Tom Dale Eudaimon Exyzt Roger Hiorns Matthew Houlding Marcus Jefferies Luke Jerram Peter Liversidge Sophie Mason Heather & Ivan Morison Morag Myerscough Nils Norman TOBY PATERSON Olivia Plender Marjetica PotrC & Ooze Kit Poulson Jennifer Tee Studio Weave Stuart Whipps John Wood & Paul Harrison Richard Woods Post Works (Melissa Appleton & Matthew Butcher) Daphne Wright

There is something a tad incredible, or unbelievable, about the recent record-setting $110.5 million sale of an untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat painting at Sotheby’s New York on 18 May. First there is the fact the work was bought by a young Japanese billionaire. With its echoes of the late-1980s, who cannot but think that this is a marker of hyper art-market inflation, now updated for the Instagram age (Instagram is where the buyer, Yusaku Maezawa, chose to first display his new trophy; does he even need to take possession now?). Then there is the fact that it is a Basquiat painting that broke the record (previously held by an Andy Warhol) for the highest price paid for a single work by an American artist at auction. The artist’s expressionist style and his tragic – and so capital-R Romantic – biography have long conspired on a sales-pitch (and racial) mythology of transcendent value to which the wealthy appear uniquely susceptible. In the wake of the controversy over Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) painting of the tortured and murdered Emmett Till at the Whitney Biennial, it’s notable that so far this Basquiat sale has sparked relatively little commentary about the spectacularisation of black-American culture and history (is it out of the realm of possibility that the ‘skull’ so many claim to see in this picture is instead a black man’s angst-ridden and cringing visage?). Finally there is the context: this melodrama of high-commercial theatre is taking place against the backdrop of the train wreck of the Trump presidency, for which incredulousness has become something like our nation’s mental steady-state, regardless of your politics: if you’re on the right, you’re witnessing a ‘slow motion coup d’etat’ – so wrote an anonymous commentator in The Federalist – if you’re on the left, you can’t quite believe that your hopes and dreams of the big-‘I’ (Impeachment) might actually be coming true. There is a barely-believable vulgarity to it, and here I’m not talking about the political hand-wringing on the right and palm-rubbing on the left. The optics of the Basquiat sale are of the ‘and the band played on’ variety, optics not unfamiliar to, say, the pictures of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, when the media and celebrity elite got together in effete black-tie to toast themselves and to roast an absent Donald Trump, who one-upped this proclaimed ‘opposition party’ by heading to Pennsylvania and holding a political rally that could only have offered

The Banal and the Extreme It all makes sense when nothing makes sense, says Jonathan T.D. Neil (ever the realist)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982, acrylic, spraypaint and oilstick on canvas, 183 × 173 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s, New York

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more ‘red meat’ to his voting base had he air-gunned Trump-brand T-bone steaks into the bleachers. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who broke Watergate and so Nixon’s presidency, were onstage in Washington while babyBenito whipped up the animal spirits in Harrisburg. Was it a scene straight out of Philip Roth’s 2004 The Plot Against America? Who could tell? When faced with such unbelievability, the brand-aware hunt for labels. I’ve heard many people resort to calling all of this ‘surreal’, but I don’t think André Breton would agree; Georges Bataille might – he had a greater affection for the proximities of shit and saintly Shinola – but neither would have paid a cent for a Basquiat. To my mind, it’s all closer to science fiction, or rather to the ‘speculative fiction’ that writers such as Margaret Atwood and Kim Stanley Robinson practice, fictions that could very well take place (or have taken place) in our current or near-future reality, as opposed to those (such as ones that feature dragons and boy wizards) that could not. At this point it is perhaps old hat to mention the timeliness of Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale’s release as an original streaming series on Hulu (writing that feels like a piece of speculative fiction all to itself); or that George Orwell’s 1984 rocketed to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list shortly after Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway introduced the world to ‘alternative facts’ to explain the record crowds and rays of sunshine that had (in fact not) graced her ‘dear leader’ on inauguration day; or – perhaps less old hat – that Atwood began her book in 1984 while travelling the duelling utopias of West and East Berlin. Personally, I’m more taken with Tom Perrotta and Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers on HBO (based on Perrotta’s 2011 novel by the same name). Briefly, the conceit of The Leftovers is to answer this question: what would happen to our social fabric if two percent of the population one day simply disappeared? The mystery of this perhaps-rapturous-perhaps-not ‘sudden departure’ is of little import; how characters build various different mental apparatuses and social technologies to deal with it is. When faced with the truly inexplicable, the novel and show suggest, our belief and value systems succumb to some fatal exception error, and upon reboot, some mixture of extremism and banality ensues. What is a sale of a $110.5m painting but a mixture of extremism and banality in an age of the unbelievable?

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Great Critics and Their Ideas No 56

Antonio Gramsci on the Venice Biennale Interview by

Matthew Collings

Antonio Gramsci, born in 1891, was a onetime leader of the Italian Communist Party. Imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926, he spent the remaining 11 years of his life in confinement. He is responsible for many theories and analyses of power, including the notion of cultural hegemony, the hidden means by which the capitalist state maintains legitimacy.

ArtReview

ArtReview Could you tell us what you stand for? Antonio Gramsci I’m a development from Marx, bringing him more up-to-date, and the work of Louis Althusser is largely based on mine. AR Oh, great. Have you seen any good exhibitions? AG I don’t know if it was good exactly, but at the Venice Biennale I saw the installation in the Swiss Pavilion, which was more or less about Giacometti, and although it was a mixed bag, I was glad I’d just seen the Giacometti retrospective at Tate Modern – which was impressive. AR Why? AG Why was it impressive? AR Yes. AG He can be funny. The work has great surfaces. He’s interested in striking shapes and abstract effects allied to depiction. Depiction itself is made quite funny. At art school years ago, during the 1970s – when you were there yourself, Matthew, I believe – students were conditioned to think about the relationship between objects when they drew or painted in the life room. You don’t just concentrate on the nude model, you find or discover the true shape of the model by relating it to all the other shapes, and particularly the whole space – and that means you’ve got to make decisions about the whole space. You need to answer questions such as ‘What

are you calling the whole space?’ ‘What are its edges?’ This thinking about space and objects is quite a revelation to students. It’s what used to be called objective looking. Anyway, it’s a way of capturing something visually that’s actually out there. You can see it, but it’s a mass of information; within this way of thinking and making, you can make sense of it, limit it, make something visual on the paper or canvas that seems coherent. AR And that’s connected to Giacometti? AG It’s really more connected to Cézanne: at least that was the idea when that approach was taught in art schools. But the point about bringing it up is that with Giacometti the system is, in certain ways, made extreme and, in other ways, undermined. There’s always a system bigger than the artist: looking, for the viewer, is about seeing how it’s been reorganised. All those scribbles in his drawings and paintings in Tate Modern presently, are marks recording the eye darting from one thing to another, traces of the eye’s movement. The scribbles become the only thing; the figure is made entirely out of them. Nothing’s ever carefully drawn in itself – a nose, a head – instead it emerges as an image out of scribbles, a lot of which remain ‘left above Philip Guston, East Coker – T.S.E., 1979, oil on canvas, 107 × 122 cm. © the estate of the artist and MoMA, New York facing page Antonio Gramsci. Photo: Victory Giannuzzi

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over’: just whipping around nearby, not really describing anything. I say they’re traces but we can’t know if they’re really that. What they certainly are is part of the visual design. The distortions he usually does – exaggerations, features looming or becoming very small, tiny head all concentrated and scribbled-at, going blacker and blacker; big body all generalised and light – these distortions are phenomenological, you might think. On the one hand they’re his enquiry, they stand for it. On the other hand they’re just his visual style and they don’t stand for anything. In fact they stand for a lot of things, like the cult followers of Philip Guston’s cartoon painting-style project all their sentimental fantasies onto Guston, so he becomes more and more meaningless. AR And Giacometti? AG The same with him – he’s the irradiated, atom-bomb-fallout-disaster, posthuman icon, whatever, the miserable alienated man, the tortured self-questioner; the existential decisionmaker every second of the day defining his own lonely moral self: all these clichés, which are laughable when that particular cultural moment has passed. But again, as with Guston, the work has such sterling qualities that you want to go on looking at it, if you’ve got any visual appreciation and sense of drama, in fact – even sense of narrative.

AR Is narrative so important? AG It’s a changeable narrative: the visual impact is so high-level so often, that the art is capable of reinterpretation in different periods, and with that work of reseeing, so also the drama and narrative are remade. There’s no fixed subject there at all. They’re just pictures of things: his brother, wife, girlfriend, and sometimes a more surreal sight: an arm in the air detached from a body, or a head with a nose that’s two feet long and is really a line, a sort of rod that tells the viewer about a horizontal line. If your mind is open, then you’re reseeing all this, not just registering style icons frozen in time. AR Ideological summing-up during the 1950s is still there, but the work doesn’t go all mouldy and entropic in 2017 just because… what? AG Just because we don’t endorse male-dominated art any more, or men treating women badly, or women being forced to be playthings for art, and we are careful how we endorse an abstract value like ‘freedom’, and we don’t think we go around making extreme moral decisions all the time trying to define our individual selves as free beings. You say ‘ideology’ – and that’s right. Cultural hegemony is the ruling class imposing its values on a culturally diverse society. But art always both carries those values and challenges them. The continuous work of looking, if you’re really looking critically and with imagination, is to track that dynamic between submission to power and unpredictable artistic undermining of it, the latter always beyond the artist’s conscious intentions. AR Phew, I’m taking all that in, but wondering as well why you thought the Swiss Pavilion show about Giacometti was a mixed bag? AG It was fascinating and also problematic. It was a mixture of Swiss and American nationalities. An artist couple – Teresa Hubbard (US) and Alexander Birchler (Swiss), made a film; and a Swiss-born American, Carol Bove, made some sculptures. The film looks at Giacometti rather negatively. Its authors are famous apparently for reordering cultural myths while implicating the conventions of photography and film. AR What does that mean? AG In effect it means they made a bad film focused on eliciting kitschy emotions by exploiting a defenceless old man. AR Can you say something more about the approach? AG It was based on interviews with the now elderly son of an obscure artist, Flora Mayo. She was Giacometti’s first mistress, but he forgot about her and she never got anywhere.

Whenever the son is interviewed in the film he bursts into tears, which is not right. Everything is framed and lit well. But the editing is sluggish and pointless; it just puts all the sequences together (man opens door, or goes down stairs, or walks along) without any sense of pace. Schmaltzy sad music is heard at a tasteful distance whenever the son weeps. AR Sounds bad, I agree. AG The film is frankly like the films that trainees at the BBC make, before they’ve had much experience – but it has been given much more resources. If it were remade at four minutes long or so by someone with a sense of filmic pizzazz, who could edit the words so that the essence of what’s been said is captured,

“I couldn’t see how the German Pavilion show, by Anne Imhof, was different to a fashion shoot or catwalk. It was great for that kind of thing, in fact. It’s great to make that be art, since a lot of art now is just thinking about making nonart things art. Well, not great exactly. But there’s an ordinary logic plus fun. All the Nazi medical stuff or morguelike stuff in that show was youthful chic, like with briefly fashionable Japanese bands during the 1990s playing onstage with a filmic backdrop of major surgery going on” it might work. The son’s story is genuinely moving. But the filmmakers should be told off for dwelling on his crying, an all too common filmic crime and an ethical misstep which is particularly problematic since Giacometti’s own exploitation of others – the women in his life – is the subject. AR And the sculptures? AG They were very superior – nothing like Giacometti, but very good nonetheless. Standing forms, deconstructed forms, centred forms, all in unexpected materials. They were striking individually, and they told you about the whole space of the pavilion’s forecourt – the pavilion, of course, was designed by Giacometti’s brother Bruno. The film

ArtReview

made me pity the old man it featured, but the sculptures made me alert to modernity. AR Can you think of anything important to say again about hegemony in relation to the Biennale, because it’s got lots of countries? You just mentioned a national pavilion deliberately mixing up nations, for example. AG Haha, I guess: they’re all losing their power and trying to find ways of getting new power. I couldn’t see how the German Pavilion show, by Anne Imhof, was different to a fashion shoot or catwalk. It was great for that kind of thing, in fact. It’s great to make that be art, since a lot of art now is just thinking about making nonart things art. Well, not great exactly. But there’s an ordinary logic plus fun. All the Nazi medical stuff or morguelike stuff in that show was youthful chic, like with briefly fashionable Japanese bands during the 1990s playing onstage with a filmic backdrop of major surgery going on. I was more interested in my feelings about the John Latham exhibit in the Central Pavilion. AR Did you like it? AG I neither liked nor disliked it, because I’ve seen that stuff so many times. I always thought it was good, so perhaps I liked it. But the thing that interested me was the realisation that I never had any idea why he did sculptures and paintings using burned and cut books as a material, and it never occurred to me to find out. I assumed he had some idea, but it was bound not to be of much interest. I would have been inclined to find out if I hadn’t thought the paintings looked very good regardless – but I did, and I still do. As far as I can tell today, there’s no clear answer why he did it. The obscurity doesn’t detract from anything. I also liked Phyllida Barlow’s interview on Radio 4 today, where she seemed to be not at all interested in meaning. If I were English I’d almost be having a sense of patriotic pride right now. AR Oh, you mentioned Guston earlier – did you see Guston and the Poets at the Accademia? AG Guston the enigma: what weird St Paul created the religious cult of him? Whence came all that idealised baloney – the impossibility of any discussion that isn’t entirely up in the air? The amazing hostility to visually observing anything he actually did with materials, so – as he says himself – there’s a subject but also the painting is its own thing and it surprises even him? The conviction that any subjectively blurted discussion will always be unassailably authoritative, and that he grants permission for those who are inadequate at art to take themselves for geniuses? What a disservice to someone who put such labours into painting. What was the point of altering anything in the process of painting, if everything is automatically

the highest of the high already? What’s the point of being loved only for reasons that are pure mystification? This cult of Guston is exactly the opposite of serious painting types being myopic about painting issues. It’s precisely about ignoring the fact that the paintings are paintings. They can only be discussed as visions, and what’s far worse is that they tend to be the cultists’ own visions projected onto Guston and not anything that could actually be ascribed to Guston himself – they express the cultists’ escapism. AR You mean that without critical judgement, value drains away? AG That makes it sound like art critics are a bit fazed, and that that’s the only problem. The problem is the meaninglessness that the cult causes the work to sink into when it can no longer be discussed by anyone – not just art critics – except as religion.

project, where he stages refugee-chic to big up his factory art production? AG Hmm, no actually, I was surprised how good the look was, all these geometric shapes, and the mood and atmosphere were great, too. Refugees from Afghanistan and Syria, temporarily under the protection of an enlightened refuge in Vienna, took the whole thing in a good spirit. They didn’t allow themselves to be objectified particularly. Or at least they were as relaxed with the inevitable condition of objectivisation as anyone else milling around. My abiding impression when I was in there was of everyone’s normalcy, plus the genuinely striking and unusual visual efficiency of the whole thing. I usually can’t bear this guy with his boring factory of art that only seems like gadgets, but here he was being good for once. If I try and put my finger on the visual delight,

I think it was to do with multiplied iterations and registers: from technologically sophisticated to crude, small to large, casual to careful. I like the Steve Jobs-style title, the way it slyly combines the phrase for getting the go-ahead for an initiative of some kind, with nature – with growth, fertility, potential – in other words, hope. Silicon Valley’s sinister power is derailed where it ought to be, but where there’s something to it, it’s put to good effect. AR Read any good new books? AG Yes. China Miéville’s October: The Story of the Russian Revolution is a rocking account in modern lingo but not at all bland, in fact a very intensely focused, informed and informative picture. Thoughtful ambivalence on the first page – ‘Ultimately tragic and ultimately inspiring…’ is absolutely right. AR Thanks, Antonio. AG You’re welcome – ‘Avanti o popolo!’

AR I suppose you were pretty cynical about Olafur Eliasson’s workshop in the Central Pavilion, the Green light

Next issue Frantz Fanon on Basquiat’s high prices

Olafur Eliasson, Green light – An artistic workshop, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Francesco Galli. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Summer 2017

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Art Featured

Unwatchfulness is the path of death 69

Lights, camera, activist…

Lerato Dumse, Syracuse, New York Upstate, 2015 (from Faces and Phases, 2006–), silver gelatin print, 77 × 51 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg

Zanele Muholi confronts politics, danger, self-invention and beauty in her portraits of lesbian and trans South Africans by Brian Dillon

Nunu Sigasa, Germiston, Johannesburg, 2010 (from Faces and Phases, 2006–), silver gelatin print, 77 × 51 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York, and Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg

Boitumelo Mimie Sepotokele, White City, Soweto, Johannesburg, 2013 (from Faces and Phases, 2006–), silver gelatin print, 77 × 51 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York, and Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg

Sweeto Mahlatse Makgai, Vosloorus, Johannesburg, 2014 (from Faces and Phases, 2006–), silver gelatin print, 77 × 51 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York, and Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg

Pam Dlungwana, Vredehoek, Cape Town, 2011 (from Faces and Phases, 2006–), silver gelatin print, 77 × 51 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York, and Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg

‘Zanele the fire-eater’ is how one of her most ardent sitters describes the pointed collar of her white jacket setting off her equally sharp her. For a decade and a half the South African photographer Zanele expression, as though she’s arrived at some ideal of purpose and preciMuholi has been an indomitable defender of LGBTQ rights in her sion. Or young Palesa Monakale, photographed in Cape Town in 2011, native country, where those rights (though extensively codified with her waistcoat and low-slung belt and chunky retro headphones under South African law) are under constant assault. Muholi was and digital watch – also an eyebrow dramatically raised as if to say born in Durban in 1972, and worked in factories and then as a hair she knows exactly what such style still costs (emotionally, physically, stylist before taking up photography, politically) in South Africa. In part, Faces and Phases is an archive initially as a purely documentary pracSome of these portraits have accomtice. In 2002 she cofounded the Forum panying texts: poems, autobiographof close to a decade’s worth of sharp, for the Empowerment of Women: an ical essays, in a few cases extracts from queer dandyism – an affront, via the newspaper articles about the person organisation that gives support and persistence and the collectivity of style, photographed. Many or most of these shelter to black lesbians. Muholi at this recount familiar stories of the participoint began documenting antigay hate to a culture that still disparages gay pants’ coming-out: confiding in teachcrimes and in particular the ‘corrective’ life and culture as mere fashion ers or family friends, being rejected or rapes perpetrated against lesbians. Around the same time, she studied photography at the Market Photo embraced by parents and siblings, finding a community among the Workshop in Johannesburg (she already knew the photographs of groups where Muholi has been a high-profile organiser and ‘visual its founder, David Goldblatt) and began making a body of work that activist’. (The distinction between artist and visual activist, which includes intimate studies of queer life in her country – such as the may seem moot, seems for Muholi to come down to the way she thinks photographs of naked and embracing couples that make up her series about her participants as part of a collective, of which she is archivist Being (2007) – and latterly some furiously playful self-portraits. and witness.) What sets these accounts apart, though, is the regularity Muholi’s largest undertaking to date has been Faces and Phases with which stories of corrective rape emerge. Here is Pam Dlungwana (2006–), an ongoing series – ‘a life(whom I quoted at the start) time project’, she says – of blackwith her bleached crop and her and-white photographs of lesangry stare: ‘The morning after I bian and trans South Africans. was raped I woke up to write my There are 258 such pictures in the matric biology exam… I took it like a man, wrote the rest of my eponymous book she published exams, did not press charges.’ in 2014, from the first eight years Predictably, many of the rape of the project. They are mostly survivors are HIV positive. (‘I three-quarter length or headhave two birthdays,’ says Nunu and-shoulders shots, and it seems that all of her ‘participants’ (as Sigasa: ‘I was born on 10 October Muholi prefers to call them) have and I was diagnosed HIV positive in February, so each and dressed up to address the camera. every 15 February my HIV status Striped shirts and popped collars abound, neckties and bowties and turns a year older and I get to live neat waistcoats; here and there another year.’) In Muholi’s photographs, they’ve put on a cerexamples of the globally popular tain armour against the corhip-hop-golfwear nexus. In part, roding anxieties of their lives, Faces and Phases is an archive of using hair, clothes and their close to a decade’s worth of sharp, address to the camera to invent queer dandyism – an affront, via the persistence and the collecpersonas that are variously tivity of style, to a culture that butch, hip, extravagant or prestill disparages gay life and culcariously conventional. The people in Faces and Phases ture as mere fashion. Consider Makho Ntuli, aged make frequent reference to the forty-three when Muholi photoreal and metaphorical shelter graphed her in 2010. She’s been they’ve found among activists married, had three children, left like Muholi. Portraiture itself is a sort of refuge or protection, as her cheating husband and purwell as a potentially lethal form sued relationships with women, of exposure. Time and again ‘because that was what I had been the participants comment on the importance of suppressing in our time together’. Muholi frames Thando I, Nuoro, Sardinia. Italy, 2015, silver her against a nondescript black background, being part of Muholi’s project – the photographs gelatin print, 60 × 42 cm. © the artist. head shaved and shirt buttoned up to her neck, Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg propose a community among women isolated by

Summer 2017

geography, class and the need for secrecy – and the very real danger African apartheid state’s notorious pass books, the identification that when these pictures are seen their neighbours will want to kill black South Africans were required to carry if venturing outside them. As Dlungwana puts it: ‘she’s shot enough wailing and keening their designated, segregated areas, and by the work of the photogto wake God from his slumber and made all phobes aware that we’re rapher Ernest Cole, the country’s first black freelancer, whose 1967 here like mice, rice and lice.’ Their faces seem to express pride and book House of Bondage includes pictures of black South Africans being reserve at the same time: almost everyone looks straight at the camera, arrested for infractions of the pass-book laws. with expressions varying from the sombre to the slightly quizzical. “In each photograph that I take, there is longing and looking And among these faces is the artist-activist herself, in big 1970s glasses for ‘me’”, Muholi said in a lecture at the International Center of Photography, New York, in 2016. She and leopard-print shorts against Portraiture itself is a sort of refuge is unabashed about the therapeutic leopard-print backdrop. Or cutting an function of her art. It’s most obviously aristocratic figure in her blazer and her or protection, as well as a potentially expressed in the self-portraits she’s floral shirt – there is something curilethal form of exposure begun to make in recent years, which ously antique, almost Victorian, about Muholi’s self-presentation, or self-invention, in the middle of her depict the artist tricked up in costumes and headgear that mimic alike the clichés of colonial travesty and the tropes of contemporary own series. The historical reference is not accidental; Muholi’s work is racism. In some of these photographs Muholi exaggerates the darkcomplexly oriented towards the long history of colonial photography ness of her skin, or adopts a kind of homemade exoticism: costume of black faces and bodies, as well as the efforts of black artists and and headdress made of clothes pegs, for example, in an image that at intellectuals to project counter-images. In particular, she links Faces first glance looks like a nineteenth-century ethnographic portrait. Or and Phases to the 363 images of African Americans that the scholar and again, photographed in Amsterdam with her hair elaborately full of civil-rights activist W.E.B. Dubois assembled in 1900 for the Paris chopsticks: a reference to the fact black people are presumed not to care Exposition. When Muholi first for Asian food. Her self-portraits saw those images, she recalled may look as if they’ve departed from her activist past in favour (in a 2011 interview with poet and critic Gabeba Baderoon), ‘I just of a familiar (if still political) act wanted to cry. What I’m doing of photographic self-fashioning; is what has already happened. but in truth Muholi’s artistThere is a line of black women activism has always been about in photographs taken back to images of herself and others. the nineteenth century.’ Faces Even if it is also a matter of the and Phases is ghosted too by the most arduous labour, care and portraits taken for the South unceasing advocacy. ar Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama is on view at Wentrup, Berlin, through 24 June; her first institutional solo exhibition in the Netherlands will be on show at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, from 8 July to 15 October; and a third can be seen at Autograph ABP, London, from 14 July to 20 October

Namhla at Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2016, silver gelatin print, 80 × 53 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Wentrup, Berlin; Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg; and Yancey Richardson, New York

ArtReview

Bester IV, Mayotte, 2015, silver gelatin print, 80 × 58 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg

Summer 2017

Maureen Gallace

Summer Shack (Door), 2016, oil on panel, 23 × 31 cm

ArtReview

In the New York-based artist’s work, place becomes perception the moment we turn away from the view by Sam Korman

June 24th, 2016, oil on panel, 23 × 31 cm

Summer 2017

top Cloud / Wave Beach, 2016, oil on panel, 28 × 36 cm above Beach Wave October, 2016, oil on panel, 28 × 36 cm

ArtReview

The name Maureen Gallace is all that appears on the cover of the slim If pressed on the issue, I’d call her works history painting, in the hardback. The letters are blocky, the ink so thick that you reckon the sense that they are a somewhat erudite personification of the austere book has been set in some sort of provincial, homemade typeface. The landscape. They are meticulous studies of the medium of painting volume accompanied the American painter’s exhibition at Dublin’s and shrewdly combine strains of American realism and abstraction – Douglas Hyde Gallery in 2004. The clunky design is meant to imitate think Ellsworth Kelly crossed with Edward Hopper. Or don’t, because a well-worn estate agent’s brochure. Gallace’s paintings are defiantly unspectacular, their pastoral subjects The book offers a brief catalogue of Gallace’s paintings of rural exhibiting a romantic distance and cool resolve. I am led to believe and coastal New England landscapes, which frequently depict stout, that the paintings are as self-possessed as the artist. windowless houses. The colour of the cover stock complements certain Going through Gallace’s back catalogue, one quickly realskies, seas and foliage reproduced on the pages – mixing all the colours ises that there are almost never any people in these paintings. of Gallace’s palette would yield this same faded seafoam, which also It’s a common trope of real-estate photography. In Gallace’s work, the gives the book the officious and unpretentious feeling of a technical houses, barns, bungalows and other architectural artefacts are the manual. Each prepossessing title reads like a two- or three-word closest human surrogates. Occasionally they are painted with doors poem, or notes on DIY home renovations: Surf Drive, Cape Cod October, and windows, which lends the buildings numinous interiority. The Stormy Farmhouse, Summer Porch. house in Rainbow Road, Martha’s Vineyard (2015) is all the more inviting The book is a supremely understated example of what can for its screen door, presenting a scene of possible homecoming; the happen when literary and artistic worlds nestle into each other’s garage door in Summer Shade (2013) and its line of windows encourframeworks. Novelist Rick Moody’s ‘Monroe Realty. Ronald Gant, ages a creepy wonderment at what might be stowed inside. Paintings Licensed Broker’ acts as its introduction, drawing on Gallace’s like Cape Cod (2011) bring us closer to Gallace’s more typical style: paintings for examples and delivering an immensely compelling, the house’s facade is formally parallel to the picture plane, and the honest and sympathetic tutorial about property sales that doubles as oceanic vista’s horizon line is visible all the way through the house a deeply humane polemic about place. The story possesses the tone of from its front door. She further eschews the melodrama of synthesising the house and landscape a schmaltzy so-you-think-you-haveThink Ellsworth Kelly crossed with Edward in Lake House with Forsythia (2006). what-it-takes sales pitch; it’s not long, however, before we realise Hopper. Or don’t, because Gallace’s paintings The blocky collection of shapes and shades affects little more than walls how seriously the narrator, ‘Ronald are defiantly unspectacular and roof, pervading the scene with Gant, licensed real estate broker, bonded in the state of Connecticut’, takes his job. He defiantly invites the omniscient detachment of formalist convention. Meanwhile the projections. ‘Think of domesticity as a tendency with a history,’ lush landscape dances and abounds. he advises, discussing the pair of beach bungalows in Cape Cod in New England might be the most manicured corner of the United October (2002); they are alive for Gant, almost humanly animated States. Since the Puritans fled religious persecution and colonised the by the same melancholic drive for the perfection of home. In the end, area, a puritanical ethic stubbornly shapes the landscape; it represents the salesman and the artist aren’t so different. She’s an old friend, both an alternative and denial. What that means for Gallace is that ‘probably wearing a Cheap Trick t-shirt, or a Def Leppard t-shirt, all of this is a landscape full of tense reserve, its virtues only visible in small these things because she’s just a woman who once lived here in this town, details and shifts in perspective. Many examples of such are on view and who learned something from looking at these houses’. He’s stuck in her current moma ps1 survey, Clear Day. The show clusters around here, divorced, and having never done well in school, but real estate obvious affinities between works in lieu of more obvious thematic offers him a sly reversal of fortune: his home is a retreat from the world, arrangements. Barns go with barns, waves go with waves, bungalows where he contemplates his townie metaphysics. Gallace embraces the go with bungalows, though the distinctions aren’t strict, and seeing same provincial ennui, and her ongoing investigation into landscape a room in which barns exist in a variety of settings and seasons and – and indeed into looking – concerns how place becomes perception colours traces something like a figure-eight path around the subject. the moment we turn away. It winds throughout Gallace’s embedded vision of the region. Gallace is a confounding figure. She has dedicated the last 25 Organised by curator Peter Eleey, the show begins with a wall years or so to painting New England landscapes, though the occa- text that locates the artist’s work in the context of the current rise in sional floral still life and portrait make appearances as well. While nationalism, and suggestively poses Gallace’s hardboiled approach as there are elements of craft and hobby present in her work, to be clear: an antidote to the nostalgia and sentimentality that fuels these regresGallace has lived in New York for most of that time, and her anach- sive politics – the title, Clear Day, evocative of her sober reckoning. ronistic dedication to landscape painting reflects both measured Walking into a room that contains White Flower July (2015), a widedisinterest in more popular conversations about painting (and most mouthed vase with what look like three peonies or roses, or Summer urbane art discourse) and a desire for the freedom and self-determi- Rainbow, Cape Cod (2006), a stormy double rainbow, can be challenging nation that can actually be achieved on the scene’s periphery. She if expectations skew more overtly radical. Nonetheless, Gallace’s eschews the steeplechase for a patient interiority and rigour. Her work is modest, and quickly attunes us to the respite offered by quiepaintings seldom vary from her preferred 9-by-12-inch size; they are tude and slowness. In the context of the show, her paintings make the all painted from snapshots; their palette is muted, never straying emotional intensity of current politics feel distant, but they are transfrom the windblown finishes of New England; every exhibition portive regardless of the situation, unyielding of their position apart. basically looks alike, with just a dozen or so paintings hung evenly For Gallace, to think about looking is to think about thinking, and her landscapes externalise and rethink models of being and seeing. throughout a gallery; she only uses oils.

Summer 2017

top Long Island (with Vance), 2014, oil on panel, 31 × 31 cm above Pink Flowers / Ocean, 2016, oil on panel, 25 × 25 cm all images © the artist. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York, and Maureen Paley, London

ArtReview

The black barns are an equally tense and demure castle amidst a swirl landscape as a dark escape, the off-season back channel in which the of clouds in October (2013); Storm (2014) presents a tumultuous shore- mechanics of power and history churn quietly out of sight. Solitude line painted from a safe distance; and Winter Storm Connecticut (2016) provokes the ghostwriter, who, writing another man’s biography, would be a sunny wintry scene, were it not for its frenetic shadows and is literally confronted with the text of self. The discomfiting truths claustrophobic snowdrift. There’s always a sense of escape in Gallace’s he discovers lead to his eventual and total erasure from the story. paintings – it’s a quality that inheres to these vacation leisurescapes Windswept sea grass blankets these low-lying dunes and present as much as to a contemplative gaze. Such patient acts of looking, a drama that could be described as the landscape of the mind. Certainly, however, hone our perspective, and continue to inform new ways it remains as palpably relevant to the New England in Gallace’s paintings, into which the human form disappears into coastal banks, snowto visualise powerfully contradictory sentiments, or appreciate old. There are surprises, too – the show is not without its joys. Rounding drifts and blank houses. It’s tempting to relegate the subtle beauty a corner, Roses, Beach (2008) earns a double take: a sunset seascape with to a matter of access, but whether it intimates us to the landscape, or an otherwise blasé composition. Our phones are filled with millions to memories thereof, Gallace’s paintings include a staunch interrogaof such images, reducing the pleasure we take from the scenery to tion of how we present the real. a matter of framing, though Gallace retrieves the accident at the It’s an easily overlooked part of these paintings that the regional heart of the original encounter. In the foreground she’s daubed landscape can just as easily embody a fearsomeness, isolation and a little rose; it seems it was captured by an inattentive eye, but redis- derangement associated with the more apparently provincial quarcovered through the painting’s composition, the rose lends the ters of the United States. Down the Road from my Brother’s House (2002) is picture the instantaneousness of first sight. She’s a master of cathartic an innocent enough composition: a house with an attached garage and levity, employing elements of the landscape to give the heaviest signi- another structure partially obscured by a slight hill. A tangled sense fiers some buoyancy and play. In Grassy Beach House (2007), sea grass of belonging and dispossession pervades the painting: this house is painted with Cézanne-like brushstrokes obscures the foundations a suspect hanger-on to the memories of home and family that frame it. In various wave paintings, of the eponymous edifice, making it appear to float like a houseboat In some sense, the idea of reality is contingent on Gallace is at her most severe. or tanker on the aquamarine sea. it not being authored, because it would suggest No houses ground our perspective in works such as Beach/Wave That a home represents an inessome contrivance, and therefore suspicion capable relationship, growing (2013), Clouds on a Beach (2012) and into a mundane responsibility over time, is an ever-present bother, Beach #2 (2013). Instead we are positioned alone on the beach, where and Gallace renders the house as an ascetic collection of nondescript sloshy white waves obscure the horizon line and threaten realism with blocks. Security, over time, grows dull, but Gallace adeptly retools the inscrutable drama of abstraction. The beach paintings most clearly represent Gallace’s dissection of picture-making. it to grant access to the pathos of familiarity. I’ve lived in many places over the course of the last ten years, What keeps Gallace returning to this landscape? And what makes since I left my hometown in Buffalo, New York, though it’s with her a pressing subject of a career survey amid the tumult of early Buffalonians that I continue to find the unspoken comfort of partic- 2017? Poet Louise Glück’s essay ‘American Originality’ (collected ular manners. In general, it’s in writing that these patterns of behav- in American Originality: Essays on Poetry, published earlier this year), iour become apparent, and while I spent many years claiming to be which offers quite practical insights into the expectations of an artist from the East Coast, Buffalo is located eight hours from the eastern in the United States, lends an excellent vantage point on Gallace’s seaboard; I commonly soften to the sincere tone of the Midwest, quizzical and enduring attraction to New England. Addressing rather than the harsh directness that characterises citizens of the US’s American literature generally, Glück writes: ‘Original work, in our northeastern corridor. Manners are a matter of tone and tempera- literature, must seem somehow to break trails, to found dynasties. ment, and my turn to criticism in recent years wags the orthodoxy That is, it has to be capable of replication. What we call original must of niceness this region better understands. serve as a model or template, binding the future into coherence and, An experience I had while living in Portland, Oregon, beguiles simultaneously, though less crucially, affirming the coherence of the my better reasoning, as much as it elucidates the value of this line of outstripped past.’ Originality, the spectacular establishment of a new work. In turn, it might also suggest Gallace’s work as a form of paint- order, seldom considers its fallout. In some sense, the idea of reality erly criticism that encircles its subject in myriad analyses, dissecting is contingent on it not being authored, because it would suggest it with many shades of argument. My ex-girlfriend and I saw Roman some contrivance, and therefore suspicion. Embedded in this idea of Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (2010), which is set primarily in Martha’s originality, however, is a sense of return, the overriding condition Vineyard. Waiting for me at the exit was an attack best described of Gallace’s subdued irreverence – she is not preoccupied with proof as yearning, longing, homesickness – well, lack, though of what, of belonging, but rather long-term critical investment in such periphI cannot claim to know even today. eral locations, especially one as historically loaded as New England. It was evoked by the landscape, and I soon left to recover it. What The paintings are plainly stated, and give up all their secrets to bring, about the movie instilled these feelings? It was about a writer, yes, relentlessly, new pictures into the world. ar who is contracted to ghostwrite the memoir of a controversial political figure accused of war crimes. In effect, it’s about the power he does Maureen Gallace: Clear Day is on view at MoMA PS1, New York, through 10 September and doesn’t have to shape history, and the movie frequently uses the

Summer 2017

B. Wurtz “I don’t want to get obsessive” Interview by

Ross Simonini

My introduction to B. Wurtz was a modest square of raw canvas, barely clinging to a wall with the help of two loops of thread. Stitched to its surface, hanging from it, were only a pair of blue socks, which flanked the embroidered Ancient Greek maxim ‘Know thyself’. As with most of Wurtz’s art, the object was untitled (albeit subtitled ‘Know Thyself’, and dating from 1992) and one of a series of variations. Its materials were unassuming and ephemeral, and yet its affect was provocative and lasting. Wurtz’s work can usually be described in a sentence or two (see above), and this fact has always given his objects the whiff of conceptual art, but when a viewer is confronted by the artworks themselves, theory feels utterly impotent. All of the humour, references, debris and whimsical adornment that the artist invests in the work seem to deflect any possibility of reduction, leaving the viewer standing before nothing more than a naked object. Wurtz began exhibiting his art during the early 1980s, immediately after graduating from Cal Arts at the age of thirty-two. Since then, he has worked with a consistent and somewhat narrow vocabulary of around-the-house items: the sock, the plastic bag, the coupon, the shoelace. As modest as these objects are, he cares about them, and as time has gone on, the artworld seems to care about them too, with significant shows and critical commentaries growing more frequent each year. A while back, I met Wurtz in Lower Manhattan at his home and studio. For several hours he toured me through a collection of his artworks, which had been spread over the house’s four storeys, tucked away among tools, closets, bookshelves and knickknacks.

ArtReview

Summer 2017

above Untitled, 2012, wood, wire, plastic bags, 145 × 43 × 79 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York preceding page Untitled (Know Thyself ), 2012, canvas, thread, string, socks, 45 × 46 × 1 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London

ArtReview

Ross Simonini Why is most of your work untitled? B. Wurtz I just rarely give titles. I like the pieces to be more open-ended for the viewer. But they usually end up with nicknames. So the nickname for this one is ‘The Monument Sculpture’. That’s a big theme in my work – monumental attitude. Not necessarily in size but in attitude. RS I see the monument, but I also see the details. The brand names, the product designs. Do these matter to you? Like the can of beans in this work, which, to describe it, is a sock atop a tin can atop a small wooden pedestal. In this case. Does it matter what kind of beans were once in there? BW It’s certainly something I’ve thought about. Like, ‘Is it important that the found objects be things I use?’ Because I’ve made works where I painted the backs of aluminium trays, those things that takeout food or delivery food came in. And I thought, ‘Well, is it important that they all be things that I ate out of?’ I decided, ‘No, it’s not important. It’s a mixture.’ And, so I think that’s where I tend to be. I kind of liked the idea that those cans were organic beans, which I ate – actually ate. But people give me stuff, too. Like I use a lot of plastic bags, and I thought, ‘Oh, should they all be bags I came across?’ And I decided, ‘Nope, I’m gonna mix it up.’ I didn’t want to get obsessive about that. RS Do the objects ever look like other things to you? A face or body or landscape? Or do you mostly want them to simply look like the thing that they are? BW I don’t like to obscure what a thing is. I like that it has a use value and that it keeps that little history with it. I don’t relate to the approach of some other artists who use found objects. I’m not interested in taking thousands of things so that the art becomes a spectacle where you don’t really think about the thing itself any more. I’m more interested in really keeping the found object’s integrity, and then adding my formal arrangement. That’s where I hope

that something else comes into it. But I love what people see. If people see animals, I love it. RS Do you purposely choose modest objects? BW Yeah, because an object’s ordinariness gives me more of an opportunity to add something formally. There are a lot of found things that you could just put on a shelf and that would then be an objet d’art in itself. I can’t really do much with that. It’s already got too much of its own personality. I would rather go for just a tin can, because it’s generic. I can move it around and juxtapose it. I’m also not so into sculpture made out of kind of trashy, junky stuff and it still kind of looks trashy-junky. I know that’s kind of an aesthetic now, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to put the junky stuff together more selectively. I want the outcome to be very serious and hopefully elegant. RS I see some drawing on a canvas here. Do you do much drawing and painting? BW I do. This is actually a painting on stretcher bars! But, uh, when I was moving my storeroom, a pole from a bookshelf fell and tore it. And I was really bummed, and I thought: ‘Well, do I really like that piece any more?’ I tried to rationalise. I’m a bit obsessive, and I don’t like things to get damaged. But someone said, ‘Well, that’s kind of an interesting rip.’ And with a situation like this, I always think of Marcel Duchamp and The Large Glass breaking. His patron/collector, Katherine Dreier, was moving it in her car and it broke. She informed him and he [later] said, ‘Well, what could I say? She was so distressed. I had to just pretend it was nothing. You know, to try to save her anxiety.’ But as we know, he ended up thinking those cracks were pretty great.

“I kind of liked the idea that those cans were organic beans, which I ate – actually ate. But people give me stuff, too. Like I use a lot of plastic bags, and I thought, ‘Oh, should they all be bags I came across?’ And I decided, ‘Nope, I’m gonna mix it up.’ I didn’t want to get obsessive about that”

Summer 2017

Here’s another canvas. This is from a series I call ‘The Bread Paintings’. It’s another nickname – they’re untitled – and I ate all this bread and I started saving the bags. RS Healthful bread. BW It is. I’m a health nut, definitely. I don’t eat sugar. I like to eat organic things. RS And once you decided on bread bags as a material, did you choose each individual bag and colour at random for the work? BW It’s randomly chosen. I think I did some sketches for some of these, about how I might compose them. But once I had this formal structure with the bread bags and the fasteners, anything else that happened here was my freedom. I could pick whatever colours I wanted. RS Is that how you usually work with materials? BW Yeah, so, another example is my pan paintings. Someone designed the bottoms of all those pans. Those patterns were already there. So I just got to choose whatever colours I wanted. That was where I got to play. I think, to me, play – the idea of play – is an interesting aspect of art. I feel this connection with making art to playing as a child. It’s not that it’s totally fun. There are decisions. There’s agonising over things that don’t go right. But if it’s not ultimately about having fun, then, to my mind, why do it? And I really like when something fails, because then I have an opportunity to play around with it. I have something to work off of. Which is in a way why I think some people prefer to be a designer. Design is great because you’re given a challenge to figure out. RS Does this approach make you fear failure less? BW Well, I wouldn’t put a work in a gallery and then decide it was a failure. I hope I wouldn’t get that far. But I like failures in the studio. Sometimes I have to stare at it for weeks, months. I even worked on a piece for at least a year. It was on the wall and I finally changed

Untitled (bread quilt), 2012, plastic bread bags, wood, string, thread, T-shirt, shoelace, caution tape, 203 × 114 cm. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

ArtReview

one small thing and it worked. My wife, Ann, is a really good critic for me. I always listen to what she says – but she hated these pieces. Hated them. She said: ‘If those things came in the Sunday paper I’d throw them out.’ So I really thought about that. I stared at it and I finally decided that I disagreed with her. And I thought, ‘It’s great that I got that reaction out of her.’ It made me think about what it must have been like for those people that freaked out at the Warhol soup cans. RS Has B. Wurtz always been the way that you’ve signed your work? BW It’s been that way for a long time. I liked it, because I felt like it was more important to see the work than to get caught up with a particular personality. The name makes it a bit confusing as to whether the artist was a male or female. Years ago some people came in to see my show, and the gallery assistant overheard them say, ‘All she did was go to the hardware store!’ which was a criticism. Well, it was interesting that I was considered female, of course, but also, to me, it’s not an insult [laughs]. It’s, like, ‘Yeah, I go to the hardware store. That’s where the good stuff is.’ Who doesn’t like hardware stores? RS Is it an ‘R. Mutt’ reference? BW I think that was another influence. RS You talked about being health-minded a second ago. And when someone sees this work, it’s organic, whole-grain bread, and there’s a lot of it, which means that you’re probably eating this food regularly. And that in itself tells the viewer something about the artist, even if the name is mysterious. BW It does. And that, to me, is an interesting way to find out about the personality behind the work. Because art is about someone making it. I always use Donald Judd as an example, because I totally see a personality in that work. It’s completely genuine. He needs to make that

work. It’s who he is. But I’m trying also to not mythologise myself, like Joseph Beuys.

of stuff, I don’t feel like I just repeated myself. That’s nice.

RS Why not?

RS How long have you been working professionally, showing and living somewhat off your art?

BW The work should speak for itself. RS You want to keep the whole enterprise as modest as possible. Everybody of all classes eats bread, wears socks, and these are your materials. But there’s no denying that there’s a lot of personality in that organic-hummus lid. It points to the food-conscious consumer lifestyle. BW I just pulled that out of my bag of lids and I thought, ‘That’s, like, really real.’ It’s very much of the present moment.

BW I never lived off my art. I’ve had various freelance day jobs all my life. I always thought it would be better to keep the day jobs clearly separate from my art. I think it was probably good that I had to go out and work, because I was around people. It’s kind of healthy, right, to be around people? RS Have you always shown your work?

BW Maybe there’s a better way to package stuff, but in the meantime, it exists and everybody has to eat, and there’s something kind of noble about that. It sustains us. I also just like plastic as a material. I remember when I was really young I was thinking plastic is just the most amazing invention. Like, who is to say that plastic isn’t more valuable than diamond? It’s certainly more useful.

BW I’ve shown pretty regularly over the years, but a lot of people never knew about it. I worked for many years kind of outside of what was really being done. And so, in a way, I wasn’t paid much attention. I think I was just a little out of step with a lot of what was being done, like, in the 80s and 90s. I mean, I don’t want to complain too much, because I did exhibit and I had people interested in my work who I really respected, really smart people. And so I knew I was doing something right, but I just couldn’t seem to get things going. It was frustrating, because I wasn’t one of those people that thought, ‘Well, I’m going to make my work and I won’t have anything to do with that corrupt gallery system and those museums.’ But even then, it was still fun to make art. I was always getting something out of it. I just learned to live modestly and got used to things being a certain way.

RS It doesn’t seem as if your approach has changed very much over the last 40 years.

RS But now there is interest. Do you think there’s some sort of new relevance for what you do?

BW I’ve been fairly consistent, right? [laughs] Luckily when I look back at the whole span

BW Yeah, a lot of young artists relate to my work, and in the last few years I seem to be getting more attention, which is actually really, really nice. Though it’s funny, when things change, even if for the better – it always throws us a little. Don’t you think? ar

RS Would that change it for you, in ten years, when someone is looking at it? BW It will be funny in the future. Especially when plastic bags are illegal, which they should be. I’m hoarding plastic bags now [laughs]. RS You’re celebrating the bag. BW I am recycling it, in a sense. RS But you’re also treating it with respect, even though it’s a conflicted object.

“I’m not interested in taking thousands of things so that the art becomes a spectacle where you don’t really think about the thing itself any more. I’m more interested in really keeping the found object’s integrity, and then adding my formal arrangement. That’s where I hope that something else comes into it. But I love what people see. If people see animals, I love it”

Summer 2017

Christina Forrer By Aoife Rosenmeyer

Joy and horror are intrinsically intertwined in the Swiss artist’s latest woven works 90

ArtReview

Three heads come together, forced into position by the figure on the of tapestry works alongside a single sculpture and sketchbooks – books right, whose arm stretches out seemingly to strangle the figure on the made from collages on photocopies of found images and the artist’s left. Stranger still, the three heads share only two mouths – frozen drawings – at the Swiss Institute in New York. Its title: Grappling Hold. As you would expect, the works in Grappling Hold (the title refers to rictuses, one a grin, the other a grimace. The central Janus-faced figure stares both ways, his eyes met by the eye of the companion to his left a wrestling grip) again featured dramatic scenes, though these charor his right, each of whom presses their face into his. This untitled acters are no longer from fable or legend but everyman and -woman. 2014 work by Christina Forrer, its subjects woven into cotton and The show’s focal point was the intensely coloured tapestry Gebunden linen fibres that are uncoloured but for the pink grasping arm, the (2017), more than two metres tall and one and a half wide. It could heads then filled in with dark purple, blue and brown gouache, is be a family portrait, with a happily embracing couple at its centre, relatively simple and unsophisticated in contrast to the Swiss artist’s but each of the two is grasping a smaller infant figure by the neck, larger, vividly coloured tapestries. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of starting a chain of similar cruel grips. A further adult pair look on her most recent figurative weaving are there: dramatic interpersonal from above with horror, though they are equally involved in grabbing exchanges, functional or dysfunctional, designed and worked into infant limbs or necks. It is a perverse family tree of interconnection; like the title, which could be translated as either bound or bonded, it the very support of the work. Forrer grew up in Zumikon, outside Zürich, went to study in intimates that familial life can mean joy or inescapable horror. We are California at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in the early products of our ancestors and have been most likely nurtured by that 2000s, and has remained in the US ever since. For a decade or so after same family. The diagrammatic structure of this piece underlines the her studies she assisted other artists, among them Robert Therrien, inevitability of our inheritance and at the same time illustrates the keeping her own practice under the radar. We first met in 2008, when historical fact of shared genes as a lived experience. This version of she was exhibiting design-inspired drawings of speculative objects events is extreme, yet let’s not forget that cats pick up kittens by the at an exhibition by a group of LA-based friends at Zürich’s Bolte neck when taking care of them. Lang gallery, but by her own account, her artistic breakthrough “I don’t think of the world in terms of large events,” says Forrer happened after this, when she began to include figures in her work; when we talk by Skype, LA morning and Zürich evening. Her interest then the oeuvre coalesced and “made sense” to her. Subsequently lies, rather, in “what happens on a small scale”; the minor, the family learning pattern weaving and tapestry weaving from Babajan Lazar, life most of us share, can clearly incorporate drama, whether physa Kurdish-American teacher, during the late 2000s, she found tapestry ical or mental, which appears major and overpowering when we’re to be a medium that enabled her to work both intuitively and just in the thick of it. Not all the woven tableaux in the exhibition were precisely enough. Critics embraced her fresh imagery when Grice domestic, and several scenes illustrated intergenerational tension. Bench gallery in Los Angeles mounted an exhibition of these works Eight (2017), nearly three-metres wide, shows a queue of people in 2014, a selection of what had, by then, become highly sophisticated heading stage-right. The elderly pair first in line have fixed grins, tapestries and drawings featuring characters from old and recent whereas there’s dismay and revulsion on the faces of those behind, folklore, such as Dorothy from The Wizard above Figure Group, Toy, Acrobats, white pine, wire, paint, metal, including a woman who tries to shield of Oz or a horseriding warrior with a lance. a scared child. The scene is horrible for its 36 × 13 × 8 cm. Courtesy Winterthur Museum, Delaware This past spring, following a further show facing page Gebunden, 2017, cotton, wool and silk, 155 × 220 cm. presentation of concurrent glee and fear; it is worrying, or even dreadful, to imagine at Grice Bench, Forrer had a solo presentation Courtesy artist and Grice Bench, Los Angeles

Summer 2017

above Untitled, 2014, gouache on linen and cotton, 30 × 38 cm. Courtesy collection of Peter Franciosa and Jennifer Pinto preceding pages Eight, 2017, cotton and wool, 290 × 114 cm. Courtesy the artist and Grice Bench, Los Angeles

ArtReview

what unseen stimulus would provoke such extreme responses. What ancient and modern. She cites Hannah Ryggen and Ernst Ludwig would be welcomed by an older generation but repulse or even terrify Kirchner’s tapestries, as well as Lise Gujer’s, as important influences, younger viewers? An antique toy – featuring two wooden acrobats along with many forms of folk, pagan and religious art, and craft and positioned in such a way that allows a child to swing the figures decorative techniques too; in some of her pieces these references are around and around – borrowed from the Winterthur Museum in explicit. And the works are fluent in contemporary image production Delaware, completed the show at the Swiss Institute. They are bound as well: the variations of scale and the abrupt shifts seem to borrow together in their gymnastics just as Forrer’s figures are ensnared from a filmic or comic-strip language, like the two topmost figures in in their relationships. For any social or collaborative being, other Gebunden that tower, oversize, above the rest of the family. people are inevitable, and yes, at times they can be hell. An untitled work from 2016 shows a woman kneeling on a bed Eight is woven in cotton and wool, Gebunden in cotton, wool and with a tiny infant before her. She is petrified: a black skeleton, represilk, all of them bright, saturated yarns. The clashes and contrasts of senting death, hangs over her back, grabbing her by the shoulder and colour recall quilting’s aesthetic the breast. The baby meanwhile Forrer presents us with everything at once, of reuse, though Forrer also uses laughs obliviously, and flowers an image we can take away and reflect on later, and leaves in a vase on the bedside heightened colour to weave florid or veiny faces, for instance. A few table appear in rude health. An like folk art illustrations that are not made final telling details were added to ambiguous and intolerably trouto be contemplated for long both in pen once the pieces had bling scenario is taking place, but come off the loom, like a snotty nose on the child in Eight and the eyes of is frozen, encapsulated in one image, this immobility underlined by the the smallest figure in Gebunden. Forrer weaves on a handloom, working blunt colour transitions. Forrer presents us with everything – mother, from a cartoon she has drawn either digitally or by hand, or using a child, spectre, surroundings – at once, an image we can register and combination of both, the cartoon then placed behind the developing reflect on later, like folk art illustrations that are not made to be contemfabric. While she weaves, the structure of the loom means that only plated for long. Folk artforms and traditional crafts frequently reflect a band of little more than 10cm wide of the work is visible at any contemporary events – ‘pussy hats’ are an obvious example – and these given time, so its producer has a blinkered, closeup and incomplete endeavours can positively refocus our view of particular events. Forrer, view until the revelation of the finished work. Whether the images are in contrast, refines how we look in general by borrowing the appearance generated horizontally or vertically also radically alters the structure of fixed narratives that is native to genres like religious iconography. and dynamic of the image for Forrer: Eight has vertical bands, Gebunden Her work presents life, local and intimate, real and fantastical, as an horizontal. The results are imperfect, for the weave is thick and the absurd fait accompli, arrested in its tracks. Nonetheless, and although design is translated into the fabric by eye. Forrer’s design generally she works in a stable and measured medium, her pictures are unruly distils countless ideas into something that the medium’s resolution and unsettled. For ultimately, she cannot allow a fatalistic view. Taking dictates be simple; in any case, were all her thinking to be visible in each domestic and interpersonal interactions as her subjects, she challenges image, it would be “unbearable” says Forrer. Untitled, 2016, wool, cotton, and linen, 132 cm × 145 cm. her viewers to reject the idea of historic inevitaShe is informed by a broad array of sources, Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy Grice Bench, Los Angeles bility and the passive regard it encourages. ar

Summer 2017

ArtReview

Ashley Bickerton Direct, enigmatic and in constant pursuit of profitable alienation by Mark Rappolt

Summer 2017

Boom! That’s how Ornamental Hysteria, Ashley Bickerton’s current figure, often associated with the Neo-Geo movement (although exhibition at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, opens – with in the artist’s opinion, misleadingly) during the art-market boom a box sporting an ominous red LED number-counter bolted to the of that decade. He showed alongside Jeff Koons in a four-person wall. It’s the kind of thing you can imagine the late Roger Moore exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in 1986. “Things moved so quickly briefly interrupting a moment of passion to rush and defuse during in that early period that some things dated really fast,” he recalls. his 1970s/early-80s James Bond heyday. Look closer at Composition That doesn’t seem to be the case with the older works at Newport After William Blake (1989) and you find that the LED records the current Street, however. Except when Bickerton (always a bit of a contrarian) estimated value of the work – $182736.52 when I was in front of it – makes it so. rather than the time until detonation. Although there might well Tormented Self-Portrait: Susie at Arles (25 Years) (2014) features a boxbe a correlation between value and destruction when it comes to the like steel and aluminium construction similar to the one used in intellectual perception of booms of the art-market type. The work Composition After William Blake. Bickerton describes the structure as is certainly dressed up as a commodity: ‘Bickerton’ is written across ‘part obsolete mechanism, part vessel and part missing part’. The self-portrait features a collection the front of the sculpture in the of logos (CNN, Google, Amazon, kind of font that might be used There’s a sense in which you want to read by a skateboard manufacturer or Oral B, Samsung, FedEx, Gillette, something meaningful into these works, hair-metal band from its time of etc) applied to its surface. And it’s but at the same time are made to feel foolish for creation; handling instructions an update of an earlier work from are affixed in English, Spanish the New York years, Tormented Selfdoing so. Even, perhaps, for desiring to do so and Japanese; and there’s also portrait: Susie at Arles (1987–8), in a round logo for ‘Culturelux: the best in sensory and intellectual which the logos include Body Glove, Renault, the old Samsung logo, experiences’. Even writing about Composition After William Blake TV Guide, Fruit of the Loom and Marlboro. The brand had replaced the makes you feel like you’re entering into some sort of dreadful brushstroke, a person was what they consumed and an artwork was complicity with the numbers on the screen. The work is weird (what the same as a product (Susie being Bickerton’s brand for this series has it got to do with Blake, for starters?), direct, knowing, funny, of works). At first glance both works (the earlier version is in MoMA’s brash and a little bit icky. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty accu- collection) feel facile, empty and a little repulsive: self-portraits without the self. Like a scene from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho rate summing-up of Bickerton’s work in general. Having had a seemingly footloose upbringing (born in Barbados, (1991). But, like the book, at the same time they have a brutal honesty. then growing up in Ghana, Guyana, England, Hawaii and the Balearic Somehow they’re compelling indicators of their times. Islands, and then going to art school in California), Bickerton, a surfer In 1993, Bickerton left New York and ended up on the island and an island-life junkie, moved to New York in 1982 (initially as an of Bali. And, if the later self-portrait is to be believed, developed assistant to Jack Goldstein), where he become a highly marketable an interest in male hygiene/grooming products and the Internet.

ArtReview

opening pages and above Ornamental Hysteria, 2017 (installation views). Photos: Prudence Cuming Associates. © Victor Mara Ltd facing page Tormented Self-Portrait – Susie at Arles (25 Years), 2014. Photo: Tom Powel. © the artist

Summer 2017

One might speculate about the effects of age and of a displaced (in artworld terms, ‘peripheral’) geography. But that might be putting too much faith in product (which, according to Bickerton’s early works, the artworld does). There’s a sense in which you want to read something meaningful into these works, but at the same time are made to feel foolish for doing so. Even, perhaps, for desiring to do so. In any case, the revisitations of his own past aside, when Bickerton relocated, his work changed form. Radically. Red Scooter (2009) is an overpainted photograph on canvas, featuring the artist, grinning stupidly, blue-skinned and bald (he’s neither) in a Picasso-esque red-striped, long-sleeved T-shirt, with two palm tree-like structures sitting like horns atop his head, riding the titular scooter, an indigenous drum and aluminium cooking pot strapped to its front. A young girl with multicoloured skin and a floral headdress sits to his front and another clasps his waist from behind, while a similarly articulated woman lounges to the scooter’s rear with rope-bags of coconuts and some exotic knick-knackery strapped to the back. They’re a happy family. They’re riding across a beach and look like they’ve just finished up at some rave or mela. The whole thing sits in a pockmarked frame evocative of driftwood, studded with stones and vaguely aboriginal dots, and cornerpieces that look like relief carvings from a Hindu temple. The whole thing is crazily colourful, excessively ornate, overly fecund and ridiculously exotic. A Western beachbum’s wet dream, or in Bickerton’s words, ‘a tropicalia of b-grade movies’. And it’s part of a series of works (among them the even more ornate Smiling Woman, 2009), often featuring exotic women or the ‘blue man’ persona, that Bickerton has made in recent years. True to Bickerton’s contradictory self, the works manage to be a celebration of island life, a critique of Western perspectives of island life (sex and drugs) and a recognition of the artist’s alien presence in the midst of that life. You get the feeling that if Bickerton fled product-driven

New York, it was only to find a different sense of alienation on Bali. And, self-confessedly haunted by the spirit of Gauguin’s Tahitian adventures (there’s a sense in these works of fear, almost, about what art can do to a place like Bali, in much the same way as earlier there was a sense of fear about what money and commerce could do to art in New York), he has rendered that literally on canvas. And in sculpture. Standing next to Red Scooter in the Newport Street show is a lifesize sculpture of a silver woman, dreadlocked and garlanded, but mainly naked, cradling a dead hammerhead shark while standing in a black outrigger canoe filled with coconuts. The title of the work – Canoe, Shark, Woman (2016) – is a succinct summary of what visitors might expect of a trip to somewhere like Bali. The sculpture offers a similar exotic thrill coupled with a tragic, plaintive air. Sculptures such as Orange Shark (2008) find the hammerhead suspended in midair, dressed in the fishy equivalent of a dogcoat, and dripping coconuts and other manmade detritus – the whole thing vaguely totemic, but also connected to the artists’ ongoing concerns about man’s impact on the environment, and particularly the seas. And yet these works are ultimately enigmatic, difficult to read. Perhaps that’s a reflection of a certain individual impotence when it comes to dealing with issues such as humankind’s impact on the environment. Or its exploitation of what it thinks of as exotic or marginal places. Maybe too, given Bickerton’s earlier works, there’s a fear that art and its markets end up trivialising or suppressing any attempt to make such a commentary in an effective way, by supplanting those values with a commercial value. Rending commentary product. Bickerton is an anomaly: the outsider artist with all the insider jokes. Unless he’s the insider artist with all the outsider jokes. Often it’s hard to tell. Probably because Bickerton has been both. And ultimately the truth is somewhere in between – his slipperiness certainly makes him one of a kind. ar Ashley Bickerton: Ornamental Hysteria is on show at Newport Street Gallery, London, through 20 August

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above Red Scooter, 2009. © the artist. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong facing page Ornamental Hysteria, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates. © Victor Mara Ltd

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Open Call 2017

Enter online today The search is on for the brightest UK & Irish artists, photographers & filmakers of 2017 to enter the 21st National Open Art Competition

£60,000 Prize Fund First Prize £8,000 Exhibit in Central London & launch your career

21st National Open Art Exhibition 17-26 November 2017

Deadline 9 July 2017

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MOMENTUM 9: ( alienation ) Abigail deVille (US), Atelier Cyberspace (DK), Búi Aðalsteinsson (IS), H.R. Giger (CH), Johannes Heldén (SE), John Duncan (US), Jone Kvie (NO), Jussi Kivi (FI), Jenna Sutela (FI) THE NORDIC BIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART Kapwani Kiwanga (CA), Kjersti Vetterstad (NO), Levi van Veluw (NL), Linda Persson (SE), Mediated Matter (US), Museum of Nonhumanity (FI), Olga Bergmann and Anna Hallin (IS) JUNE 17 – OCTOBER 11, 2017 Patricia Piccinini (AU), Patrick Jackson (US), Pinar Yoldas (TR), Public Dreaming (NZ), Ragnar Þórisson (IS), Rana Hamadeh (LB), Rolf Nowotny (DK), Serina Erfjord (aNO) Moss, Norway Sonja Bäumel (AT), Stathis Tsemberlidis (GR), Third Ear (DK/US), Trollkrem (NO), Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen (FI), Wael Shawky (EG), Ylva Westerlund (SE) www.momentum9.no

Every thing Flows 07 June 03 Sept 2017

museums-sheffield.org.uk

Paul Barlow Rose Butler Joseph Cutts Natalie Finnemore Ruth Levene Victoria Lucas Peter Martin Ryan Mosley Ian Nesbitt

Sunflower Head Ken Currie

Limited Edition Etching – £720

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synthetic landscapes

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Re-viewing the ‘ideal’ landscape

4 June to 3 September 2017 Weston Park Weston-under-Lizard, Nr Shifnal, Shropshire TF11 8LE Heather & Ivan Morison Pablo Bronstein / David Bethell Dafna Talmor / Edward Chell / Ged Quinn Helen Maurer / Hélène Muheim / Julian Opie Jasleen Kaur / Ryan Gander / Salvatore Arancio 24 June to 3 September 2017 Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery The Music Hall, Market Street Shrewsbury, SY1 1LG New work by David Bethell

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Ged Quinn, Events Arrive on Doves’ Feet. Courtesy the artist & Stephen Friedman Gallery.

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Extended weekend opening this summer

C4RTI5TS Reimagining the Car 15 July – 29 October 2017 14 artists, 1 challenge… Transform a car into a work of art! transport-museum.com

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Documenta 14 Various venues, Athens 8 April – 16 July ‘Documenta is the Botox of capitalism’, read a slogan emblazoned on posters that popped up in Athens during the opening days of Documenta 14. But on the evidence of the first part of the exhibition (part two, in Documenta’s traditional home, Kassel, opens in June), that accusation – that this edition of the quinquennial event will affirmatively smooth capitalism’s ugly wrinkles – completely misses the target. A geographical split is not the only means by which artistic director Adam Szymczyk has worked against the grain of Documenta’s format. The exhibition, which over the past 60 or so years has focused on contemporary art, this time includes numerous historical works; it foregoes big names (a few exceptions notwithstanding); and it decentres the presentation by utilising an extraordinary number of venues – in Athens, more than 40 – to house the works. This Documenta also features an unusually high proportion of performances: a fact that both rejects art’s usual object-and-commodity character and brings into play, as Szymczyk said in an interview on German radio, the ‘individual, the thinking body, which contrasts with power structures’. Above all, this Documenta – subtitled Learning from Athens, though ‘Athens’ here feels to be a metaphor for a larger problem – pointedly rejects the idea of art as the product of an autonomous and merely, as it were, formalist aesthetic. Instead what we see are works characterised, in their own ways, by political qualities and content-driven statements, for example concerning neoliberalism, rightwing populisms, refugee crises. There’s no doubt that this political engagement is necessary in such difficult times as our own, and Athens, with its disastrous economic situation, and the huge influx of refugees coming to Greece, is a symbol of this, at least within Europe. Potentially a problem in this regard is that Szymczyk’s approach to political art – at least since 2008, when he cocurated the 5th Berlin Biennale with Elena Filipovic – is cautious: an approach that, despite all his implicit criticism of a market-conformist l’art pour l’art, doesn’t forego a determined desire for art per se. This is exactly what’s inscribed

on this Documenta, and it turns out to be a good thing. Szymczyk’s Documenta, while light on ‘activist’ art, successfully presents a comprehensive revision of recent art-history and current art-production, one that sounds out the selected artworks and showcases how political content is transported within them, how they take up critical positions with regard to neocolonialism and globalisation, disenchantment with democracy and, for example, climate change. No artistic genre, medium or style is left out: the spectrum ranges from painting and sculpture to sound and spatial installation, from video art and performance to conceptual and public art. So you can see, for example, Miriam Cahn’s expressive paintings dealing with the global refugee problem; Hiwa K’s minimalist domestic sculpture One Room Apartment (2017) about housing in Iraq; the disturbing sound installation The Ears Between Worlds are Always Speaking (2017), by the artist collective Postcommodity – which, using Long Range Acoustic Device speakers ‘against their intended purpose’ (that being as a weapon), broadcasts multilingual stories of displacement, etc. Other offerings include the conceptual video Report (2016), by Peter Friedl, in which immigrants in Athens perform Frank Kafka’s text ‘A Report for an Academy’ (1917), and the endurance performance-and-installation The Portrait (2016), by South African group iQhiya, dealing with gender and racism, specifically the treatment of black women. Elsewhere, as many abstract as figurative works hang, old next to new, with collaborations (numerously present here) beside works by individual, international artists (from Norway to Nigeria). How open-mindedly and dedicatedly this revision is carried through is obvious in terms of how aesthetics formerly discredited by the art scene slip into view: for example, allegedly folkloristic dilettantish paintings or the art of Socialist Realism – long treated with suspicion due to its being ‘unfree’, subject to censorship by communist states. Szymczyk’s curatorial strategy of searching for the political in art is concretely imagined in his selection of painting. At the four-storey

EMST (National Museum of Contemporary Art), for example – works from whose collection will, reciprocally, be exhibited in Kassel – a selection of realistic paintings from Albania is on view. Among them is The Action Worker (1966) by Albanian artist Hasan Nallbani. This ostensibly feminist portrait on canvas shows a young female farmworker looking resolutely out of the picture plane. These figurative, party-centric political images are contrasted – apparently to show a whole range of artistic possibilities – with abstract paintings hanging one floor higher in the museum; such as, for example, the ongoing series Sámi Flag Project (1977–) by Synnøve Persen of the Norwegian Sámi Artist Group. Here, a Colour Field aesthetic not only plays with Barnett Newman’s painting Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I (1966), but also frames, in a symbolic way, the task of an indigenous population forming a country out of its home. Also of an abstract nature are paintings, on view next to a church on an Athenian hill, by Swiss artist Vivian Suter, who currently lives in a Guatemalan jungle (as can be seen in Rosalind Nashashibi’s video portrait of her, Vivian’s Garden, 2017, on view elsewhere). The images in her series Nisyros (2016), placed, in Athens, outside and exposed to natural elements, are painted with microorganisms, oil, earth and botanical and volcanic materials rather than conventional pigments. Up for discussion is the relationship between art, nature and environment, an inbuilt reference to global climate change. In contrast, Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu, who disappeared in 1981, paints figuratively: his large series on view at the Benaki Museum, 101 Works (1973–4), deals, in a naive style (if you will), with the brutal history of his homeland, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Next up, we can look forward to seeing how Szymczyk continues his Documenta in Kassel: whether it repeats the statements made in Athens or perhaps questions them self-critically, and how the German city’s markedly different economic and political situation will change the exhibition. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Kimberly Bradley

facing page Synnøve Persen, works from the series Sámi Flag Project, 1977– (installation view, EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Documenta 14). Photo: Mathias Völzke

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Hannah Black Small Room Mumok, Vienna 17 March – 18 June What is life? In Small Room, a lean show on view in Mumok’s basement, Hannah Black asks the largest of questions. The British-born, Berlinbased artist and writer recently gained notoriety after writing an open letter on Facebook calling for the destruction of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), a painting on view in this year’s Whitney Biennial depicting Emmett Till, an AfricanAmerican teenager lynched in 1955. Black’s oeuvre nearly always addresses racial and genderidentity themes, alienation and how social stratifications and power imbalances inscribe themselves upon the body. Her take on the Schutz painting – that a white painter has no business rendering the physical image of a murdered young black man – created a raging social-media discussion that was ultimately parsed in The New York Times, and in many ways it encapsulates her hot-button topics. Small Room encapsulates them as well, but far less overtly. The show’s centrepiece is a looped, ten-minute, three-channel video, Beginning, End, None (all works 2017); in its collage of manipulated and mostly moving images, Black ponders the lines demarcating life and death by considering and presenting the cell as a biological unit, but also paralleling it with prison cells (presumably the titular ‘small room’) and factories, both symbols of exploitative

late-capitalist institutions. To this end, we’re presented with visual fragments: a schematic drawing, as if from a children’s book, of a human cell as, indeed, a factory; a recurring rendering of something that could be a prison; the abstracted profile of Black’s face gazing at a neon-laced landscape through a train window; and onscreen texts like, ‘There has never been a world’ and ‘It’s the beginning of the world’, sometimes read aloud, sometimes left for the viewer to read and ponder. The multitrack audio echoes the images, rapidly shifting between autobiographical snippets and grand statements addressing the macro structures that the tiny life-units must face. Opposite the three screens, four sculptures made of creamy-coloured latex hang from the ceiling like skins, crisscrossed in draped strands of black yarn. In the film, a voice claims that no form of life exists without a membrane: these sculptures appear to be abstracted manifestations of that universal biological imperative. But even here, there’s a moment of personalisation: at the base of one membrane is a floral body tattoo. Considering Black’s prior body-related work, too, one wonders whether the odoriferous latex alludes in some way to sexuality (skin? fetishwear? condoms?), and whether its light colour is significant.

Beginning, End, None, 2017, digital video, colour, sound, 10 min 22 sec. Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

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Perhaps the crux of the exhibition is its least conspicuous component – two copies of a slim little novel titled Life, chained to the wall near a video-viewing bench tucked into a corner (its subtitle, ‘The mechanism by which life began on Earth is unknown’, is attributed to Wikipedia). Black cowrote this science-fiction narrative with New York-based artist/musician Juliana Huxtable; in its pages each author plays the character of a risk analyst ‘returning from the dead’, somehow to accompany or prevent the apocalypse. ‘I have retired from risk, and now nothing can happen to me. I’m a singlecelled organism carved out of the white bone of the world. Mind is a miracle,’ writes Huxtable. ‘You don’t have to tell me what you were by virtue of still being,’ answers Black. In Small Room, Black simultaneously zooms far in and far out on what’s always been important to her – the constrictions and limitations of biology, of societies, of ideology, of the ‘accepted’ representations of reality. But she also tests our limits in mixing weighty dialectics of life/death, personal/universal and present/future into a visual and textual brew that’s as unsettling as it is sticky. We learn through Black’s video that defining ‘life’ is elusive; most definitions lean on description. What is life? Depends on who’s asking, and where, when and how. Kimberly Bradley

The Absent Museum Wiels, Brussels 20 April – 13 August In 1968 the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers set up the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles in his living room in Brussels, a fictitious museum with various ‘departments’ intended to mimic the functioning of museums while simultaneously denouncing the lack of a decent institution in his home city. Almost 40 years later, Brussels still has no museum for contemporary art. Hence, the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre has engaged in the hypothetical exercise of imagining what such a museum would contain, while subtly referring to the debate about the actual planned new museum in the city, a franchise of the Centre Pompidou – criticised by a substantial proportion of the Belgian art scene as French cultural imperialism. Via The Absent Museum, Wiels artistic director Dirk Snauwaert, who instigated the show, wonders why inhabitants of Brussels who immigrated there – the city has the world’s second-highest percentage of residents born abroad – are, according to him, surprisingly absent in its museums. At the same time, the show temporarily tries to fill this gap (and others), and to put forth a blueprint of the museum of the future. One of these absent voices was the GermanJewish painter Felix Nussbaum, whose work has been rediscovered of late. During the 1940s Nussbaum was a refugee trying to escape the Nazi terror by hiding in Brussels, but he ultimately ended up in Auschwitz after being denounced. In a series of striking paintings, both expressionistic and allegorical, that

occupy a central position here – the main building of this exhibition, and two smaller venues adjacent to the art centre – Nussbaum’s paintings seem to eerily anticipate his horrible destiny by depicting, among other things, a snitch on the lookout for Jews. The video Être et pas avoir (2014) by Younes Baba-Ali, meanwhile, sheds quite a different light on immigration. The artist filmed a Belgian resident with immigrant roots explaining offscreen how to obtain as many social benefits as possible via all kinds of schemes. This is a work that could easily be co-opted by the far right, and hence it represents a bold move: not only avoiding the normal, politically correct way of portraying immigrants as victims, but also trying to open up a genuine debate – as museums should do – by tackling uncomfortable issues and not only ‘critical’ topics about which the artworld agrees. Belgium’s own identity crisis and problematic attitude towards the concept of the nationstate – the country is often seen as an artificial construct – is, naturally, also addressed, with the self-deprecating humour the country is known for. Le Mur (1968) is a black-and-white 16mm film, attributed to Henri Storck, that starts like a news feature in which a Congolese journalist reports from Brussels divided by a wall to separate French and Dutch speakers. After a while it becomes clear that this is a fictitious account to warn voters participating in the then-upcoming national elections – characterised by growing tensions between both language communities –

about the dangers of a ‘Berlin scenario’. (This in turn is evoked in a nice cluster of works dealing with Germany’s loaded history by Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, Dirk Braeckman and Luc Tuymans.) Tuymans is also represented by a recent body of work, Doha I–III (2016), for which he made paintings of the empty rooms of the Qatar Museums Gallery Al Riwaq after his retrospective there, the only visual reminder of his show being the stainlike outlines that mark the spaces his paintings used to occupy: a rather literal reference to the absence in the exhibition’s title. Though that epithet could suggest otherwise, the amount of works referring to the museum as an institution is actually rather limited: besides the inescapable Broodthaers, there are prints from Guillaume Bijl’s 1977 art liquidation project and drawings from the ongoing Zoological Classification project by Wesley Meuris, who makes architectural designs for various animal species while drawing parallels with museums, illustrating the conditioned gaze in zoos and museums alike. Hence the exhibition rejects navel-gazing institutional critique, delivering instead a genuine reflection on museums’ role in civic society. The result is a clever show that is not only highly relevant to the current moment, both in Belgian and international contexts, but also leaves room for humour and a sense of relativism – as illustrated, for instance, by the aforementioned Le Mur – in a spirit that feels, appropriately, true to Broodthaers himself. Sam Steverlynck

Felix Nussbaum, St. Cyprien (Gefangene in Saint-Cyprien), 1942, oil on canvas, 68 × 138 cm. Collection Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, Osnabrück

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Splice: Re-examining Nature Oulu Museum of Art, Finland 20 May – 12 November A return to the issue of nature and our relationship to it is central to this exhibition, which opened in collaboration with the Bioart Society. The show includes 16 artists and four artist duos, all of whom are involved in ‘bioart’, a field dedicated to art that incorporates natural growth in its production. Such practice serves to bridge the gap between art and nature by making the artistic process itself a mediator between the manmade and the natural. Many of these works blend scientific processes with natural processes, hinting at scientific processes that serve to augment nature. In this light Antero Kare’s SWAN (2000) features a polyurethane swan, modelled on Scandinavian cave paintings, and upon which microbes are encouraged to grow, creating a vast mouldcovered, almost monstrous-looking creature housed in a vitrine to protect the public from its spores. The work not only symbolically points to prehistory via its reference to cave painting but also reminds us that humans are in a constant relationship with microbial lifeforms that live on our skin and in our guts. We are deeply connected to nature even as we perpetually try to analyse and separate ourselves from it.

Tuula Närhinen’s Saltwatercolours (2012) presents the residue left in 12 soup bowls after reducing ten litres of seawater once a month from the waters around Harakka Island, south of Helsinki, from May 2012 to April 2013. Next to each bowl a handmade stock-cube, derived from the condensed seawater, is placed as a record of the changing state of the Baltic Sea during the course of one year. The work serves as a reminder of humanity’s ongoing and impossible task of refining and containing nature, while all the time contained within it. On the opening night, visitors were invited to leave the museum and walk towards a nearby lake, where artist Kira O’Reilly, sporting a green sequinned dress, stood waist-deep in the near-freezing water. Holding the gaze of the assembled visitors, the artist slowly walked to the shore before putting on stiletto heels and picking up a dead wild salmon, which she carried as she slowly walked into the museum and around the three ground-floor exhibition rooms that host Splice. In tribute to Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), O’Reilly proceeded to show each artwork to the salmon, slowly, mournfully, with a tear

Kira O’Reilly, Be-wilderment (Nature Drag), 2017, performance. Photo: Antti Tenetz

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running down one cheek. In a seminar held at the museum the following day, O’Reilly said that she began to think of our relationship with nature “as a drag performance”, restoring “some forgotten, romantic, remote, perhaps never seen return to the pristine”. Ilkka Halso’s Kitka River, a digital c-print made in 2004, depicts an imaginary landscape inspired by a Finnish lake but appropriated with Photoshop to include an array of towers, canopies and viewing platforms. This work points to the absurdity of an overromanticisation or overdevelopment of nature. During her opening-night presentation, curator Nina Czegledy said her intention had been to “provoke the politics of nature”. The question raised by this exhibition is what role such a politics of nature leaves to the human being, and whether it is then possible to speak of ‘politics’ at all. After all, the notion of the political is a human one. In any case, Splice showcased a bold new area of enquiry that will hopefully diversify debate within the arts away from the purely ‘social’ or ‘political’ and towards other fields of inquiry. Mike Watson

Ulla von Brandenburg Two Times Seven Galerie Art: Concept, Paris 8 April – 13 May Depending on whether you take Ulla von Brandenburg’s fourth solo show at Art: Concept at face value or pursue its subtext, you may be bored or scared to death. With deliquescing colours and missing bodies, the German-born, Paris-based artist (and 2016 Prix Marcel Duchamp nominee) has here staged a spooky spectacle for whoever is clairvoyant enough to interpret it as such. Directly upon entering, Falten & Körper, Zweige (Plis & Corps, Branches), Falten & Körper, Kiste, Nägel (Plis & Corps, Boite, Clous) and Falten & Körper, Fisch (Plis & Corps, Poisson) (all works 2017) summon the spirit of Yves Klein. These three chlorine ‘anthropometries’, loosely hanging against the walls, were realised by spraying bleach on moving performers draped in ultramarine sheets. Once unfolded, these unpredictable theatrical abstractions, comparable in process to photograms, read somewhere in between the Turin Shroud – an alleged image of Jesus on what is believed to be his burial cloth – and the carbonfrozen Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Although nobody was harmed in the making, the only visible trace of the performers’ bodies is a series of clenched fists on the gloomily and unevenly discoloured resulting curtains. Wait for these phantoms to blow via the slightest draught inside the gallery and you’re in for a serious chill.

Proceedings continue with Norma, Jacqueline, Nacht and Lyda, four watercolours on gesso and wood, which portray performing artists, presumably actors or dancers. The protagonists’ ghostly, plain white faces and bodies are left unpainted, whereas the figures are each outlined with an ethereal, eerie rainbow of dripping colours. The final paintings not only look haunted, but also as if pigmented tears were seeping through them. Not a crime scene but a scene of, well, dyeing can be further witnessed under the sculpture Two Times Seven, made in situ. It consists of seven pieces of cloth tinted in the gallery before being hung up to dry on an assemblage of seven fishing rods. Whereas the buckets in which the artist sank her fabrics were removed from the final work, forensic investigators won’t need luminol here: the dyes dribbling from the wet textiles left stains all over the floor, which struck me at first as colourful evidence of a pictorial slaughter. Finally, the ten-minute film C, Ü, I, T, H, E, A, K, O, G, N, B, D, F, R, M, P, L completes the ensemble with an uncanny procession of floating unworn skirts, which languidly come at the viewers, each in turn filling the entire frame without ever revealing any sort of background besides another plain or patterned textile right behind it. This strange cortege is accompanied by an otherworldly chorus, the lyrics of which, like

the title, are supposedly reduced to the letters comprising the last verse, in German translation, of Wisława Szymborska’s 1962 poem ‘Rozmowa z kamieniem’: ‘Ich klopfe an die Tür des Steins. “Ich bin’s, mach auf.” “Ich hab keine Tür”, sagt der Stein’ (‘I knock at the stone’s front door. “It’s only me, let me come in.” “I don't have a door,” says the stone’). Yet, after careful verification, the ‘s’ is missing here, just like the entire exhibition is lacking bodies, and the stone a door. Hoping to solve this ultimate mystery – for it felt like a matter of life and death to figure out whether or not this was voluntary – I was informed (by the artist) that this was in fact a simple lapse. No matter what, my subsequent frustration, like von Brandenburg’s film and Szymborska’s poem, symbolises the forever-unquenched thirst for knowledge. It has been commonly stated that von Brandenburg uses fabrics, one of the most recurring materials in her work, to mark the threshold between reality and artifice, as theatrical curtains and costumes do. I believe she uses them to breathe life into her aesthetics all the more interestingly when performers are actually missing. After all, if the main point of this exhibition isn’t that it is totally haunted, what thrill are we left with? Do the skirts come with clothes hangers too? Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Two Times Seven, 2017, bamboo, tinted fabric, 193 × 121 × 118 cm. Photo: Claire Dorn. Courtesy the artist and Art: Concept, Paris

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Adrian Paci The people are missing Kaufmann Repetto, Milan 29 March – 29 April There are millions of people, but no individual bodies, in this exhibition. In his new video Interregnum (2017), Adrian Paci skilfully edits together found footage from the public funerals of communist leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Josip Broz Tito, Kim Il-sung and Enver Hoxha, obtained from state archives and national televisions. Hoxha, a cult figure in Paci’s homeland, founded the Albanian Communist Party in 1941, after the Italian fascist invasion, and ruled as secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania from 1944 to 1985, while forging alliances and conflicted relations with Yugoslavia, Russia and China. In the video, we see nondescript crowds assemble to pay homage to the adored deceased (who is never seen), in a public display of mourning where compulsory tears are impossible to distinguish from sincere grief. The death of the ‘father of the nation’ is celebrated with plenty of emotional intensity and epic pathos, but all manifestations of sorrow take place under the camera’s gaze, as much as under public scrutiny, in a permanent state of surveillance. In scene after scene, we follow the faces and postures of ‘the common people’, while the impressive final sequences zoom in and out of a long, winding procession, an interminable

line that zigzags across streets, along facades and pavements, choreographing the massive fluxes of anonymous individuals involved. Paci has lived in Milan since the 1990s, but has never cut ties with his country and culture of origin – in 2015, with his wife Melisa, he opened Art House, a gallery/residency programme in Shkodër, northwest Albania, to invite artists, friends and scholars to his family home. He has also never stopped looking at his own past as a tool for interpreting contemporary phenomena such as migration, globalisation and, now, populism. The word ‘interregnum’ refers to a state of exception, the gap occurring in a social order before a new form of power comes into place. In our current times of violent rhetoric directed at the masses, calling for direct action and the suppression of ‘the elites’, Paci recalls the effects of propaganda, ‘alternative facts’ and manipulation by situating them in the recent past and its bygone ideologies (Italy, by the way, had the biggest Communist party of Europe after the Second World War, thus the work also ends up having a very site-specific resonance). By contrast, The people are missing (2017), the installation from which the exhibition borrows

its title, is empty and silent. Paci built a double set of white bleachers, four steps high: quite literally a ‘public arena’, where only a few footprints on the ground testify to the passage of humans. The structure recalls a parliament, a theatre, maybe a stadium, a sanitised space where it’s easy to imagine debates and applause bound to remain virtual, unless embodied and directly enacted. In the adjoining tiny project room, an old-fashioned petrol-and-ethanolpowered water heater for showers, once in use in Albania, is at work (Untitled, 2017): the fire burns, the water drizzles from a small hose, the rusty tank radiates heat, dangerously close to its user’s absent body. A relic from a time of extreme paucity and nonconsumerism, it operates like a restrained monument to existenzminimum and basic physical needs. In the basement, Paci closes the exhibition with a single photograph from the series Malgrado Tutto (Despite Everything, 2017), shot in a former Communist prison in Albania. The image records a fragment of the graffiti and drawings, akin to prehistoric carvings, left on the stone walls by former inmates. We are left to ponder how consensus is built and orchestrated, and at what terribly dire price. Barbara Casavecchia

Interregnum, 2017, video, colour, sound, 17 min 28 sec. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy the artist and Kaufmann Repetto, Milan & New York

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Rodrigo Hernández The Shakiest of Things Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga 24 March – 7 May In what could be read as an ironic reference to the contemporary-art-averse cliché that ‘a child could do that’, Rodrigo Hernández actually got kids to make the work for The Shakiest of Things, which is otherwise billed as a solo show by the Mexican artist. A gang of seven- to nine-year-olds from a local primary school in Riga were given crayons to use as they wished on the walls of the first of the exhibition’s two rooms. The resulting chaos of colour, drawings and scribbles is undeniably cute. In the second room, Hernández led the same group in making papier-mâché sculptures. At the show’s opening these were laid out, not fully dry, on the gallery floor. On my viewing, towards the end of the show’s run, they were mounted on the walls: ten smaller works facing off a larger one across the room, approximately two metres in length. All were painted – splodgy, carefree marks of various colours – but most left visible some of the raw brown cardboard used in their construction. A few had craft and haberdashery materials attached or embedded: beads, thread, etc. One might hazard that one of the smaller works depicts a cat; another, a gun; a third, half a human

figure (the basic stick-figure form is a motif in Hernández’s work, which often employs simple or faux-naive imagery). But these resemblances are slight and most of the sculptures are abstract. The larger sculpture, nevertheless, sprawls across the wall like a landmass, its multicoloured painted surface cracked like parched earth. A large central fissure threatens to break the work in two. Yet there seems more to the artist’s gesture than just a joke. And nor, appearances aside, should we ‘dismiss’ the work as the product of a gallery education programme. Hernández was given the largest space at Kim? and invited to make a solo show, no strings attached. To return to the graffitied walls of the first room: various motifs appear, including a crude depiction of a family (with mum, dad and presumably the author of the drawing in the middle), flowers, mountains, fantastical creatures and names, such as the exuberantly scrawled LiNDA. There is in fact a riotous, anarchic freedom to this work. (I’ve seen something similar on such a scale once before: a vast tarpaulin by The Edge Group, a radical artist collective from the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, originally placed in a public space in April 1990 as the Soviet Union disintegrated

and Bulgaria embraced freedom. Residents were likewise invited to scrawl on the blank material, the result a similarly crazy, varied, joyful mass of self-expression.) In both the graffiti and the sculptures, all the basic subjects of art history are represented: the self, landscape, nature, the monstrous and the fantastical. The desire to depict such things is perhaps a primal one: that thought in turn recalls Matisse and the later CoBrA artists, who were likewise inspired by children’s creativity, and A.R. Penck’s early ‘standart’ works, in which the late German artist returned to early or ‘primitive’ motifs with the aim of creating a radical, universal language. Hernández is working in this tradition, an expression of free social construction, as opposed to self-expression: a representational language through which a Mexican artist, Latvian children and the viewer can communicate. His move here was a risky one – it could easily come off as gimmicky – but pays off in its timely reminder that for all our constructed differences, nonverbal, nonlinguistic, representation, uncorrupted and unconditioned by learned prejudice, exists in the mind of a child. Oliver Basciano

The Shakiest of Things, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Ansis Starks. Courtesy the artist and Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga

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Navid Nuur Sandman’s Sand Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam 15 April – 20 May According to Navid Nuur, the largest monochrome in the world is the one we see when we close our eyes. Ever since he was a child, the Dutch-Iranian artist has been trying to work out what he sees under such circumstances, and all his ‘paintings’ – made in an array of formats, colours, materials, not all involving paint – are attempts to represent it. His latest work in this longstanding series, collectively entitled The Eye-Codex of the Monochrome (1984–), is brought together in Sandman’s Sand, an exhibition as engaging as it is intriguing. When all visual stimuli are cut off, what are we left looking at? Personally, in this condition I don’t see much more than darkness, with some blurry spots that I assume are afterimages on my retina. But Nuur, an expert at staring into nothingness, sees endless patterns of innumerable irregular dots – a kind of boundless mesh that seems to slide past almost imperceptibly, flickering softly. Maybe you’ve seen it yourself at some point when you were on the verge of waking up. Nuur’s fascination with ‘seeing nothing’ is, naturally, the show’s red thread. In the middle of the gallery sits a shipping crate fitted with a flue connected to the ventilation system on the ceiling. Two metal tubes at the base serve as stoking channels. By setting off two emergency flares inside these tubes, a painting has

been ‘smoked’ inside the crate, like a mackerel. The sooty, sweaty canvas hangs next to its packaging – the result of a fascinating attempt to make a painting ‘blind’ (Aladin, 2010–17). City Silence ii (2011–17) draws on what you could call a ‘blinding’ technique, derived from the world of graphics. Posters tend to have what’s known as a ‘blue back’: a layer of blue ink that prevents whatever’s underneath showing through. Nuur has photographed this, printed it on poster paper and pasted the latter onto a chain-link fence that partitions the gallery space, so that something normally intended to conceal is itself revealed. A similar idea informs The Eye-Codex of the Monochrome (STUDY) (2011–17). Envelopes have been unfolded to expose the pattern printed on the inside to prevent the contents from showing through, and the different patterns of dots bear a remarkable resemblance to what Nuur sees with his eyes closed. Peering into darkness, sooner or later perception will morph into imagination. The Passage (2017), a photograph of a cave printed on a gold foil emergency blanket, may be a nod to the dark hole that Alice fell down to get to Wonderland. Another photograph shows the artist attempting to step into a black circle painted onto the wall of his studio (Another window in my studio, 2008–2017). The cave and black hole both recall the pupil of the eye that turns up in several

Sandman's Sand, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Jhoeko. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam

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photographic works – all openings onto the invisible boundary between the world inside and the world outside. That Nuur, with these clever conceptual sleights of hand, is setting himself apart from conventional painting practice is clearly apparent from the cabinet of materials that forms part of the exhibition. The metal shelves aren’t stacked with the usual tubes of oil paint or tins of acrylics but rather with tins of bitumen, gesso and antirust varnish – substances manufactured to fulfil a certain function, not to give a certain shade. Yet these supposedly neutral colours, too, inevitably evoke associations. Study 4–87 (The Eye-Codex of the Monochrome) (1984–2017), painted with swimming-pool paint, is suggestive of an endless surface of water; Study 93 (The Eye-Codex of the Monochrome) (1984–2017) is made of the reflector foil used in traffic signs, illuminated by two lamps so that it glints like the canopy of the night sky full of stars. Light, essential for seeing any painting, here seems to spring from the surface of the work itself. In such works, as elsewhere, Nuur crosses the alchemy of painting with the phenomenology of perception. He, then, is the sandman of the exhibition title: a sandman who, paradoxically, creates new images by taking away sight. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Emma Rault

Greg Parma Smith Music of the Spheres Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich 22 April – 27 May Greg Parma Smith’s painting skill puts one in mind of Parrhasius, the Ancient Greek artist who, according to the myth, tricked his colleague Zeuxis into believing that a curtain covered a painting when the curtain was the painting itself. Little wonder that sincerity is continually challenged in Smith’s art, given his works’ capacity to deceive; in his current series, through which he grapples with ideas of the spiritual infinite, they do so pointedly. Smith, who is New York-based, is busy; when this show opened he had a survey show of about ten years’ production ongoing at MAMCO in Geneva and another exhibition closing at his NY gallery. At Francesca Pia he reveals two tight groups of his work, all from 2017: four ‘Offering’ paintings and five featuring single flying birds, seen from below, which soar inside circles ‘drawn’ with small stickers of relief objects. The former works, such as Offering with Masks, are still lifes of fruit and drinks sourced from Smith’s urban environment, though referencing religious offerings. Pears, apples, a melon and bananas, including the stickers with which they are sold, are illustrated with boggling realism,

while the titular ‘masks’ are shaped like two crones’ faces painted gold that adhere to the canvas to hover over the background. Painting over objects adhered to his canvases has long been part of Smith’s repertoire, though this selection of works is restrained in comparison to others, in which he can paint on either side of canvases that peel back or, in other works, over larger objects in a kind of counter-trompe l’oeil, the image attempting to remain concordant even while flowing over the foreign objects. The works in the bird series, not painted from life, are still rendered in a lifelike manner, though with less attempt to appear real. Roseate Spoonbill with Nimbus describes the gradation of massive wings in roughly stepped intensities of pink, for example. And around it is a halo (or nimbus, gloriole, aureole or mandorla, as are used in other titles) outlined by cheap plastic decorative stickers, including clear jewel forms, hearts, cupcakes, dogs and all manner of other diminutive icky tat. Across the two series there is a coming together of a range of nonspecifically spiritual symbols culled from or relevant to Renaissance Christian imagery, Buddhist practice and any

number of belief systems both ancient or new age – a halo here might equally be a mandala, making one great, and hollow, world religion, as it were. And this cultural synthesis is painted with infinite care, then studded with signs of cultural bankruptcy: forms that used to mean something but were put through capitalism’s shredder, emerging as empty vessels with which to decorate a phone or other accessory. The press-text fustian, written by the artist, questions whether it’s possible ‘to hold both the spiritual infinite and a moralistic critique of ideology in mind at the same time’. I can understand why he would lean on highfalutin language when thinking about these things, particularly at a time when painters continually have to justify their endeavour, but it is unnecessary. Look up at those soaring birds, and before long the detritus that surrounds them escapes its base and earthly origin and takes on a rhythmic motion, drawing the viewer up beyond their own realm. Or does it trap you in an earthly limbo of clock faces or loading graphics? The infinite is present, of that there is no doubt, but its meaning is not to be found here. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Offering with Sunkist, 2017, oil on canvas, 76 × 117 cm. Photo: Annik Wetter. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich

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Ayşe Erkmen Kıpraşım Ripple Dirimart Dolapdere, Istanbul 5 April – 14 May It is impossible to avoid the digitally rendered posters of beautifully renovated apartments, featuring smiling families breakfasting on their balconies, draped over the seemingly endless scaffolding that props up Istanbul’s oldest districts. Unintentionally, they reflect the economic, political and social undercurrents that accompany urban regeneration in the city’s low-income areas. The posters are simultaneously a mirage (locals cannot afford the dwellings), a cover-up (‘improving the image of our city’ reads better than ‘rewarding party-loyal property developers’) and culturally tone-deaf to their environs – shabby urban neighbourhoods, perhaps once known for their merchants or artisans specialising in some now-defunct trade, like ship repairs. Gentrification is nothing new to cities. But in Istanbul – where heritage is aplenty, yet there are huge barriers to its protection, and building has boomed unchecked – its pace can create bewildering contrasts in architecture, lifestyle and income within one neighbourhood, and leave many of its equally bewildered communities behind. This context is crucial to Ayşe Erkmen’s current exhibition. That visitors travel through the dilapidated Dolapdere neighbourhood to reach the new, imposing glass building that houses Dirimart seems calculated: you pass construction sites for a second Arter gallery and the Koç Museum of Modern Art; showrooms for condos in progress; half-collapsed wooden houses seemingly uninhabitable yet crisscrossed with laundry. Erkmen designates the neighbourhood itself as the first of three ‘zones’ her show occupies, and it leaks inside as a sound

installation looping throughout the main room (zone two) and a second, smaller room (zone three). A recording made during a walk from Pangaltı to Dolapdere – the artist reading local signage aloud – has been transformed into abstract frequencies then played back, bookending Erkmen’s otherwise site-specific sculptures with a broader sense of place. The physical works within the second zone are in a flux that complements this nebulous sound installation. The gallery’s wood-andplaster panelling has been torn away and suspended from the ceiling at varying heights. Tears, fragments of concrete and plaster dust on the panels suggest violent removal, while the exposed walls still hold the now-useless nails. Though pursuing similar themes, Kıpraşım Ripple is subtler than bangbangbang (2013): Erkmen’s lifesize crane and buoy suspended over a warehouse-turned-Istanbul-Biennial space then marked for demolition. This subtlety mirrors the slight retreat in Istanbul’s appetite for overt protest – for reasons of increasingly violent state response since July 2016’s coup attempt – and allows Erkmen to reflect on the role of private interests, like the art market’s, in this transformation. The restless, rippling effect these torn wall panels lend the white-cube space – weakening, both physically and conceptually, its perceived perfection – emphasises its shifting cultural currency, the physical brutality of construction and Erkmen’s own catch-22: an artist both profiting from utilising a space born of gentrification, and lamenting her hometown’s transformation. The third zone contains twisted and bent aluminium frames. Resembling the

Kıpraşım Ripple (installation view), 2017. Photo: Hadiye Cangökçe. Courtesy the artist and Dirimart, Istanbul

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surplus building materials piled around the surrounding neighbourhood, these sculptures, recreated in shiny metal and then deformed, are attractive but flimsy: a parallel with those empty new-builds that hard-pressed locals are expected to applaud as progress for all. Erkmen wants her works’ ephemerality emphasised, that’s clear. The site-specific works, all untitled, will be dismantled after the show to allow the walls to be repanelled, and stored by the gallery, useless for repeat exhibition due to Kıpraşım Ripple’s site- and temporal-specificity. This lack of anything to sell on is perhaps the more thought-provoking takeaway here, the artist suggesting an answer to her own creation’s problematic, uncomfortable presence vis-à-vis her lamentation of urban transformation. Thus she asks whether this is the intervention that matters in such a context: to minimise your footprint, and leave. But where market forces will fill the gap anyway, whether with a gallery or another condo, is it any better to withhold art? True, Erkmen extracts the value of having put on an exhibition, but the show being free of charge and the works having no continued existence in the same form makes an accusation of hypocrisy too facile. To dismiss the installation’s social comment by fixating on whether its ephemerality absolves the artist is inconsistent with her past oeuvre, and blind to the works’ communication of Istanbul’s urban situation. Erkmen articulates the latter here with a contextual awareness, timeliness and impact that displays the city’s socioeconomic tensions, simmering beneath those garish banners promising prosperity. Sarah Jilani

Ryoji Ikeda π, e, ø Almine Rech Gallery, London 6 April – 20 May Comparing his 4’33” (1952) to Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1965), John Cage wrote in 1968, ‘in the music [of 4’33”], the sounds of the environment remain, so to speak, where they are… In the case of the Nam June Paik film, which has no images… [t]he nature of the environment is more on the film.’ Consisting simply of 6,552 frames of blank 16mm film with sound stripe, hung on a wall in 55 rows in an almost square frame, Ryoji Ikeda’s own 4’33” [gray] (2014) makes clear reference both to Cage’s ‘silent’ composition and Paik’s unexposed film, but its means and effect are entirely different. The ‘environment’ is irrelevant to Ikeda’s own silent composition. What we focus on instead is the nature of the medium itself, its physical properties as an immediately graspable image of time transformed into space (88 × 92 cm of space, to be exact). 4’33” [gray] is one of a series of works on this theme occupying the middle room of a show that is otherwise less concerned with silence than with the indistinguishability of signal and noise. Walking through Ikeda’s generous threeroom exhibition, it is tempting to accuse the electronic-musician-turned-artist of a kind of fetishism. What works on paper like the irrational (ø) [n°1-2b] (2017), a seemingly random

grey scree (reminiscent of the ‘snow’ of TV static), share with the more sculpturally presented data. scan [n°2] (2011) – one of nine LED screens laid flat and raised to thigh-height on a wooden box flickering with the rapid scroll of figures representing, in this case, the DNA sequencing of chromosome 11 (with others encoding the structure of the universe, of protein, or of a four-dimensional hypercube) – is an impression of information as something dizzying and unfathomable in the face of which we can only gaze admiringly. The works come off like a geek’s dream of the nineteenth-century sublime, with mountains of data replacing the rocky peaks once gazed upon by Friedrich’s famous Wanderer. But there is something more at stake here. Ikeda’s fascination is with the medium, not the message; his peers in this case are not so much Baudelaire as Marshall McLuhan, Jussi Parikka and Bruce Sterling. On the walls surrounding the nine screens of the data.scan series hangs a kind of archaeology of dead media, recalling Sterling’s Dead Media Project, begun in 1995. Across the six backlit panels of the systematics series (2011–12), we see piano rolls, the punched tape of midcentury IBM computers, the aperture cards once used by the US Department

of Defense. Together they present a history of increasing levels of abstraction, a progressive shift from the human-readable to the inscrutable high-speed streams of numbers on the screens in the middle of the room. Let’s return, then, to the six recent works that open this show – in particular, the moreor-less plain white the irrational (ø) [n°1-c] (2017). This work, expressing – so the exhibition text explains – the first 1,452,384 decimal digits of the irrational number ø (the so-called ‘golden ratio’), is most productively interpreted neither in terms of ‘airports for particles of dust and shadows’ (as Cage, in the same 1968 essay, said of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 White Painting triptych); nor as some sort of lame statement about the unique and ineffable beauty of mathematics (after all, there is nothing unique about a white piece of paper). Better to see here a statement about how humans have increasingly created systems of representation that make the parameters of their own world oblique and incomprehensible to anything but machine intelligence. Whether that should be regarded as cause for lament or celebration probably depends on whether you, dear reader, are a human or a machine. Robert Barry

π, e, ø, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Melissa Castro Duarte. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery, London

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Oliver Beer Ikon, Birmingham 15 March – 4 June Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London 28 April – 29 July An ominous swelling of voices draws you down the bright, formal corridor. Four men stand facing into the corners under and opposite a central stairway, as if they’re being punished for misbehaving. But they’re singing: steady tones, occasionally rising, echoing and merging to the point where it starts to make your head swell a bit. A shiny copper etching informs us this grandiose performance is Oliver Beer’s Composition for London (2017), part of his exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac’s swish new Mayfair gallery. It’s the latest iteration of Beer’s Resonance Project, which, since 2007, has used the human voice to find the resonance frequencies of rooms and buildings across the world. The voices are joined by other sounds – other notes, ringing in your ears, the building itself becoming an unusual additional choir member standing over you. This dramatic swell has an immediate sensual impact, though it struck me more as the soundtrack to a horror movie, hearing it while walking down such an ornate white corridor – I was having unwelcome flashbacks to when I accidentally saw Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979) as a seven-year-old (it includes scenes of a silver orb zooming down just such a hallway to gouge into victims’ heads). Then the performance ended: one member of the small audience clapped politely, the rest shuffled off silently as if in church. Further into the gallery is another odd choir, altogether inhuman: Devils (2017), consisting of a set of miked-up pots, urns, vases and teapots on plinths, amplifies and

resounds certain frequencies to create a more tense polyphony. You can, at times, make out the high note of a ceramic cockerel, or the more temperate hum of a cat teapot. Another of Beer’s resonance installation works is simultaneously on display in his show at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery. Making Tristan (2016) uses a chamber pot and a ceramic pig to reproduce the dissonant chord known from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde (1859), its uneasy whine permeating the entire exhibition and giving the grimacing, squatting pig the air of defiantly shitting in your ears. These resonance works, using buildings and ancient and hand-me-down vessels as singers, are Beer’s most directly engaging works; which must be why it is a gesture to which he has continually returned, including making them the most prominent components of both these shows. Unfortunately, however, these works are undermined by the clutter that he surrounds them with. Much of these are more token, superficial takes on Beer’s loose thematic exploration of sound. The Birmingham show includes two organ pipes emitting the highest and lowest notes possible on the instrument, along with a video in which Beer’s mother sings a single note while subtitles lecture on basic music-theory concerning complementary notes; as well as large glass orbs that contain small golden replicas of parts of the inner ear, titled – wait for it – Silence is Golden (2013). These blandly perform notions of sonic experience and limply enact musicality without exciting anything further in either the ear or the mind.

facing page, bottom Silence is Golden, 2013, 24K gold, lead crystal, paper. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris & Salzburg

facing page, top Composition for London, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Steve White. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris & Salzburg

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Worse, though, is the ongoing series permeating both the Birmingham and London shows in which the artist has cut cross-sections from objects and embedded them in the wall or in canvaslike rectangles of gesso. Starting with two violins in Recomposition (We Two Boys) (2017) and a double bass in Double Bass Drawing (2017), they might, if we’re feeling buzzed from the melodramatic choral sounds, be seen as similar singing bodies, the flat outlines letting us look at the cavities once filled with sound. But then he’s also done it with SLR cameras, pipes, lightbulbs, rifles, revolvers, pencils, tuning forks and walking sticks. These two-dimensional objects are cute, and utterly pointless. What they make clear is that Beer is more concerned with surface than content, with affect than effect. The works cumulatively set us awash in sounds and textures, seemingly oblivious to their own import and implications, flattening individual traumas and histories to prop up idealised, aesthetic ends. At Ikon, one of the walking sticks is embedded high in the ceiling: the first narrative I imagined to explain its placement was that its user had tripped, falling and throwing the cane into the air. In the video Training (2008), we see a set of young people listening intently to a recording of a woman confessing to having been abused by her uncle as a child; the story of rape, written by Beer, is remarkably just a pretext for him to record the reactions on the listeners’ faces. Beer’s bodies and vessels aren’t just neutral containers, as he treats them, but singular entities, with their own songs to sing. Chris Fite-Wassilak

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Paul Johnson Teardrop Centre Camden Arts Centre, London 7 April – 18 June Paul Johnson’s project at Camden Arts Centre began with ostensibly drastic measures: ‘For this ambitious installation,’ reads the press release, ‘Johnson will dismantle his entire studio and reconstruct fragments in Gallery 3.’ The process may constitute an archaeology of his practice, but the results are closer to an open-cast mine. Eighteen of the 40 works scattered across the gallery are grouped together under two ensembles, listed in the plan as ‘Table top’ and ‘Mine’ (all works 2017). The latter comprises a large, irregular patchwork of colour photocopies of Johnson’s studio floor, strewn with numerous glazed stoneware casts of disposable coffee-cup lids, interspersed with six separate works, the boundaries between some unclear. For instance, Human, a paperpulp cast of part of a car tyre enclosing a folded jumper looks like a fragment of the adjacent Tyre, a paper pulp and resin cast of a whole car tyre. The 13 works offered on ‘Table top’, a stack of white-painted MDF boards on a pinewood base, are similarly porous, the glazed stoneware casts of coins in Coins merging with those of In_, a chunk of cast stoneware bearing the plastic fascia of an iPhone and another stoneware coffee-cup lid.

Though architectural elements of the studio are included here – the door presented upright, affixed with a scrap of cardboard bearing the words ‘I AM: VERY HANGRY GOD BLES YOU’ (Studio Door) – the ‘dismantling’ functions less as a relocation of Johnson’s working environment than as a means of reexamining it. Several fixtures are mimetically reproduced. P. Copier replicates a photocopier, to scale, from recycled MDF, a pencil jammed between the lid and paper trays. Fridge follows the same method, one side papered with colour photocopies of parcel tape: a representational object that doubles as a plinth for the chunk of glazed stoneware on top, which bears, in turn, a grey Perspex motif derived from a coffee-cup lid. This ‘nested’ approach is characteristic of the show in general. Johnson moves nimbly from readymade to representation, from representation to presentational device, certain elements seeming to hover between actual and simulacral status, others appearing realer-thanreal against a simulated backdrop (as with the pencil in P. Copier). If, in ‘Mine’ and ‘Table top’, studio ephemera are raised to the level of souvenirs, his best pieces go further, possessing a more totemic aura. The standout work in this regard is Server-8 & Tower-188, a column of 24 black

Teardrop Centre, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy Camden Arts Centre, London

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plastic soakaway crates flanked by a smaller column of eight, housed in a heavy-duty coldform steel frame, with steel rods extending sideways and to the ceiling, terminating in flat circular motifs – enlarged variations on the symbols of the ubiquitous coffee-cup lids (the leitmotif acquiring somewhat mystical status here). Two crates made of silver-painted birchply, apparently fabricated by hand, complete the sculpture, a cross between a speaker stack and an antenna-cum-weather-vane. Arranged end-up, base-outwards, the crates’ injectionmoulded openwork patterns resemble Islamic arabesques, the decorative character of functional objects revealed through their multiple deployment as building bricks. Traditionally, material is brought into the studio, altered, sent out again; the idea of using the studio as material is not unlike that of a stomach consuming its own lining. Though the perversity of its conceit was not as visually apparent as I expected, Teardrop Centre sustains one’s attention, not just through the blurring of distinctions between raw material and finished works, or indeed by recouping existing works as raw material, but by revealing the spectrum of possibilities in between. Sean Ashton

Lawrence Abu Hamdan Maureen Paley, London 28 April – 28 May ‘What does your PTSD sound like?’ asks a thread on myPTSD, a popular Internet forum dedicated to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (I’m researchbrowsing). ‘It kind of just sounds like growling, grunting and anguished moans,’ answers Venator, an active forum member. Reddevil1111, a forum guest, adds: ‘It can be with my father yelling, the sound of his belt hitting my flesh.’ Here – in extremis – is the auditory component of sensual memory, what is known as echoic memory. The resounding of such memories, in particular those of trauma, is the keynote theme of Jordanian-British artist and ‘private ear’ Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s second solo exhibition at Maureen Paley. Downstairs is a new installation resulting from Abu Hamdan’s collaboration with human rights NGO Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture (a research project coming out of Eyal Weizman’s Research Architecture department at Goldsmiths, University of London). Billed as an ‘acoustic investigation’, Saydnaya (ray traces) (2017) focuses on the echoic memories of former captives of Saydnaya prison, a notoriously brutal Syrian regime compound 25km north of Damascus. (Picture cells so cramped inmates

die of suffocation, sadistic rape games, torture involving scalding water and nail pulling, and some 13,000 executions since 2011). Kept mostly in the dark or blindfolded, Saydnaya’s prisoners, the exhibition text informs us, developed an acute sensitivity to sound. Employing a digital visualisation process used in architecture to map acoustic leakage (the titular ‘ray tracing’), Abu Hamdan has diagrammed ‘ear witness’ accounts from freed inmates into a series of images that attempt to render the prison’s otherwise unknown architecture through memories of how sound propagated in the building. Printed on acetate and mounted onto six overhead projectors, these images (essentially scratchy lines inchoately mapping architectural geometries) beam out onto the gallery walls at oblique angles. Thus so, the abominable soundscape of Saydnaya – slamming cell doors; morbid screams; wall-shuddering torture machines – is neatly transposed into architectural data. Could this be one of those nuanced situations in which the sheer horror of an event or circumstance is ramped up by its relative absence or adjacency in representation (qua Hitchcock)? Perhaps. Though I feel that Abu Hamdan’s

compassion is unquestionable (he is dedicated and consistent in his politics), he has decided here, as elsewhere, to filter the contagion of poesy and viscerality from his work. This is undoubtedly in order that it might serve another cause, one quite strange to art: that of useful evidence, in the most formal, legal, forensic sense. Note: If one is alone or among quiet visitors, sound drifts down from a second work upstairs, This whole time there were no landmines (2017), an eight-channel video installation that reworks a 2013 project exploring ‘the shouting valley’: a stretch of land on the Syria/Israel border that, due to its unique topography, allows divided families to communicate directly with each other. (The work comprises low-res video footage of the transgressive moment when, on 15 May 2011, 150 Palestinian protesters from Syria broke into Israeli territory). There’s power in this accidental mingling. If it needs saying, there is something jarring about hearing actual screams and yells as opposed to viewing them represented as visual information, however instrumental such information might be in the establishment of vital, objective truths. Paul Pieroni

Saydnaya (ray traces), 2017, inkjet prints on acetate sheets on overhead projectors. © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

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Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg Who am I to Judge, or, It Must be Something Delicious Lisson Gallery, London 31 March – 6 May Cavorting acorns, misanthropic bananas, mischievous elephants, salacious poos and bashful ponies are just some of the objectsturned-characters making up the floor-based tableau that crowds the first of two rooms in Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s exhibition. At first resembling children’s toys, these silicone figures – which also include seedy carrots, angry anthropomorphised houses and vulgar golfball/moon-like beings – molest, grope, tease and taunt one another; pulling down pants and socks, peeling, licking, prodding and straddling. Three record players amidst the pandemonium emit – from their speakers – semisexy moans, sobs, sighs and groans, while scattered speech bubbles, scrawled on card, reveal worried or ashamed proclamations such as ‘what crap is buried here?’ or ‘this is not going as well as it did when I was thinking about it’. The whole scene is debauched yet humorous – Hieronymus Bosch meets Roald Dahl, maybe? – and is characteristic of Djurberg and Berg’s work to date, in which the would-be innocence of cutesy puppets mutates towards a series of grotesque or sardonic allegories for human taboo. In the adjacent room, three videos – almost cinematised fables – feature many of the same figures, animated via stop-motion, as they explore various primal emotions from lust

to envy, gluttony to humiliation. Dark Side of the Moon (2017) takes place in a shadowy wood populated by a talking house, a smoking wolf, a young girl (Little Red Riding Hood?), an overweight pig and a prancing golf ball/ moon. An atmosphere of curiosity, indulgence and vulnerability creeps into the story as the group discuss (via speech bubbles) ideas around greed, shame and loss of innocence, accompanied by an ominous, though fanciful, wind-instrument score. Delights of an Undirected Mind (2016) describes a sort of coming-of-age dreamscape in which a young girl falls asleep and imagines a depraved bedroom tea-party featuring an undressing elephant, a wolf in a nightgown, a sad rabbit, a tiger dressed as a baby who drinks milk straight from a cow’s udder, a leering octopus, some cheese guiltily canoodling with a mouse, the same mouse riding a hotdog like a motorbike, a seductive fox wearing furs, a fat crocodile opening gifts, a bull in a matador costume. These characters appear and reappear one by one, as a soundtrack of percussive beats and eerie chanting drives the chaos forward. Finally, Worship (2016), the most explicit of the three works, explores the stereotypes and imagery associated with porn and sexual fetishisation. The eight-minute video presents

a pageant of silicone women and men, dressed in sequins, velour or silk, who perform different erotic acts: grinding against a giant banana, squeezing a pink inflatable doughnut, twerking with a Siamese cat, writhing with a giant sequined fish or a giant sequined ice-lolly or a gold and black motorbike or an aubergine on wheels... These figures strip, touch themselves and attempt to seduce the viewer, as a dark electro-pop score provides them with a rhythm to which to move. Morality is missing, to varying degrees, across these works, which feel like an adventure within human nature’s most capricious and animalistic impulses. The creeping, climactic structure of the videos and the unapologetic transgressions of the exhibition’s opening tableau make us very aware of our own desires. But when coupled with the homemade style of the figures, the works manage to retain a sense of humanity. And while the characters might commit vulgar or sadistic acts, their violence is often presented alongside shame, and their cruelty coexists with the material tenderness of their making. Thereby asking us to provide a level of compassion, or even knowing complicity, to/with their actions – and thus reaffirming the very morality that is so lacking to begin with. Laura Smith

Worship (still), 2016, clay animation, digital video, stereo audio, 8 min 6 sec. © the artists. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Milan

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Annette Messager avec et sans raisons Marian Goodman Gallery, London 19 April – 27 May A certain pendulousness has long been essential in Annette Messager’s sculptural address to real bodies and their marionette-ish representations. That’s to say, in Messager’s work things hang around – including varieties of near-human, and their body parts. In the French artist’s first London show since her Hayward Gallery retrospective, The Messengers, in 2009, there are remnants of her most compelling forms of frail suspension, and a few instances where this modus has got way out of hand, becoming a block to late-career invention. On the one hand there is Pinocchio dans ses entrailles (Pinocchio in his Entrails, 2008): a battered little wooden body whose implausibly large red fabric guts are trussed up with him and hung from the ceiling. On the other hand, Daily (2016): an assembly of oversize everyday objects – key, scissors, comb, phone, jewellery – draped with stuffed-fabric figures and suspended amid smaller, sculpted black

rats hanging in nets. The earlier work has a visceral-whimsical ambiguity about it that harks back to some of her even earlier work: the line drawings of entrails, bones and foetus that she made on her own body for Annette Messager Trickster (1974). The new installation seems devised to invoke so sufficiently the early Messager – also, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois – that one won’t notice the vacuous expansionism going on too. It isn’t all grandiloquence or abjection. Somewhere between these extremes is Tututerus (2017): suspended above an electric fan so that it circles endlessly is a black tutu and under it a sculptured uterus, which is a frequent motif in the show. On the wall nearby is Utérus doigt d’honneur (Uterus Giving the Finger, 2017), a uterus in fabric, paint and papier-mâché, one of whose fallopian tubes has twisted and transmuted into a black hand giving the finger. There are more uteruses on the wallpaper, some containing skulls

and others the deadpan inscription: ‘Mon uterus’. These drawings are related to the images Messager has been making of the Femen activist group in action: bare-breasted figures bearing red-acrylic slogans – ‘My Own Prophet’, ‘Fuck Your Morals’ – and in a few cases mimicking Marianne, the French national symbol of liberty and reason. All of this work is energetic, polemic even, but thinner in form and concept and resonance than one wants from Messager. The best work at Marian Goodman is at first glance the most abstract or schematic. In a room containing otherwise one-note sculptures – ruined Barbies, big black snails with breasts for shells – Gants croix, Gants croix oblique and Gants triangle (all 2017) are svelte, acephalic geometric monsters made of string and gloves, with coloured pencils at the ends of their fingers. Unlike much of the show, they feel considered and scurrilous, filled with graphic potential. Brian Dillon

Uterus doigt d’honneur (Uterus Giving the Finger), 2017, fabric, papier-mâché, paint, rope, 80 × 80 × 13 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

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Ewig Weibliche Koppe Astner, Glasgow 21 April – 27 May Ewig Weibliche is a small exhibition of works by Darja Bajagić, Olga Balema, Charlotte Prodger and Benedicte Gyldenstierne Sehested. The title refers to the notion of the ‘eternal feminine’ and was important to Goethe. To varying degrees the exhibition attempts to contest this idea, examining gender essentialism, sexuality and archetypal feminine ‘virtues’. That said, Prodger’s video sculptures fit less easily into this schema than does the work of some of her fellow exhibitors, though there are elements of fetishisation here that appear at various points across the works of the four artists. In her Forest Hills/Oregon Dacite (2013–16), the fetish in question – a recurrent motif in Prodger’s work – is sneaker-slave subculture, aka trainer porn. On one of two monitors (the other showing extended, detailed flint-knapping to form an arrowlike tool), an anonymous YouTuber, shown lower-torso only, scrapes and scuffs a pair of pristine white Adidas trainers against rocks and stones, grating them into dried mud and rubble. This is abject art for millennials. The artist’s audio overlay – recounting remembered fragments of the formation of Prodger’s queer identity – offers more substance, rupturing any potential for a holistic narrative through disjunction between

what we see and hear, and posing subjectivity and lived experience as a political act. The disturbing, childlike figures in Sehested’s untitled pair of sculptures (2016–17) could be props from an Aphex Twin video. With disproportionately large hands and heads, blankly expressionless faces and awkwardly jointed limbs, they stand and sit on the gallery floor, lifesize bodies shrouded in semiopaque gauze and cotton over a galvanised metal armature. In one of the two works, a smaller figure sits on the lap of another, larger ‘child’ wearing a wig. Here, the ‘come to daddy’ sexual associations we project onto these creatures become the most unsettling aspect of the work. A cluster of latex breasts hangs from one of Balema’s two large, overpainted school wall-maps. In Motherfucker and Everybody and their mother (both 2016) the artist makes parodic allusion to the stereotypes of mother earth and the nurturing female body. Only glimpses and shadows of certain countries remain beneath. Territories and empires are obscured by a thin, almost transparent skein of latex and paint, and suffocated by multiple fleshy protuberances. Perhaps these breasts are intended as a matriarchal palimpsest, an aggressive

reclaiming of established (male) world history? These associations aside, the disembodied breasts are also grotesque, a kind of horrormovie skinsuit, or lumps of stretching, pulling flesh from John Holmes’s iconic cover for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). Bajagić’s work, sourced from social media, news and pornography, purports (according to the press release and in interviews with the artist) to juxtapose ‘happy, sexy and friendly’ imagery with ‘darker’, more nightmarish visual references to murderers and serial killers. For me, there’s nothing of the former and not much of the latter (the true-crime element isn’t apparent just from looking). Rather, these seem like the routine art/porn collages of a million degree shows, assumed by the artist to be shocking but too derivative for impact. In an exhibition that is framed as one which rejects gender essentialism, a concentration on the physicality of gender in some of these works seems a little dated in an era focused on gender fluidity and postbody politics. And while the show as a whole often asks important questions related to gendered identity, if there is sophisticated critical content underpinning Bajagić’s work, it’s buried with the bodies. Susannah Thompson

Olga Balema, Motherfucker, 2016, map, latex, pigment, acrylic paint, 73 × 110 × 12 cm. Courtesy the artist and Koppe Astner, Glasgow

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Rebecca Warren Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles 22 April – 17 June Seven of the sculptures from the series Los Hadeans (all works 2017) in Rebecca Warren’s exhibition take their names from a geologic era known as the Hadean period, which passed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. It may not be wise to take these names at face value. In interviews, Warren has claimed a preference for ‘misleading titles’, which can lead the viewer up the interpretive garden path. Yet, with their inchoate limbs and rough, textured surfaces, Warren’s ambiguous forms do look like protohumans recently emerged from the primordial soup (even though the Hadean period only saw the rise of singlecelled organisms). Made in clay, then cast in bronze, the twisted postures and gnarled forms of the sculptures bear a resemblance to ancient bog bodies, believed to be victims of pagan sacrifice and long since mummified in peat. It is in the sculptures’ intimations of gesture that their most recognisably human traces can be found. See the thick, splayed fingers issuing forth from the back of Los Hadeans (ii), and the hands-on-hips pose of Los Hadeans (vii), whose head, crowned by what looks like a bun, is turned away to face the wall. The proud stance of

Los Hadeans (iii) could be that of a Viking warrior, proffering his shield, or a matador waiting for his bullfighting cape to be run through. There is a violent intensity to the figures’ angles and amorphous, fleshlike lumps, which have been forcibly hand-wrought by Warren – her fingerprints remain visible on the surfaces of the works. The exhibition also includes a number of welded-metal sculptures featuring sharp, polished angles, which are at odds with Los Hadeans. These include Early Sculpture, a grey patinated steel pillar that rises to eye-level, and Let’s All Chant, a geometric composition of flat, intersecting metal planes painted in a gleaming candy-pink. If Warren’s figurative works recall Umberto Boccioni and Alberto Giacometti, then these steel works look back to artists such as Richard Serra and John McCracken, among others. While Warren cribs, liberally, from her artistic forebears, she is no slavish copyist. In her hands, the weighty arsenal of sculptural materials and strategies – bronze and steel, figuration and geometry – is lent a personal touch by hand-painted criss-cross patterns

and messy splotches in ice-cream tones of mint, vanilla and strawberry. Several works sport cheery pastel-pink and -blue pompoms, and the head of Three is topped by a fetching bow. Even the cool, minimalist form of Let’s All Chant acquires an animated quality, with its diagonal plane, poised between stillness and movement, resting on a pompom. That animation is underscored by the work’s title, which it shares with the 1977 disco classic by the Michael Zager Band that exhorts the listener to ‘move your body’. Set next to the exaggerated, overtly sexualised bodies of her early sculpture, the amorphous figures of Los Hadeans would be unrecognisable as work by the same artist. Her shift away from the grotesque, which began almost ten years ago, has been replaced by a more subtle anthropomorphising seated in allusions to clothing, to skin tone and to body language. By adding this relatable detail to otherwise antediluvian anatomies and abstract forms, Warren crafts a subtle intelligibility within otherness, a kind of training ground for recognition, which is very welcome today. Ciara Moloney

Los Hadeans (iii), 2017, hand-painted bronze and pompom on painted MDF pedestal, 226 × 100 × 68 cm. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles & New York

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Peter Shire Naked is the Best Disguise Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 22 April – 2 July A massive, heavy-bottomed ceramic coffee mug splattered with primary colours on a bananayellow field sits on my desk. It could probably hold a freighty, sloshy litre of coffee, though since I purchased it some years ago, it does primary duty as a mug for broken pencils, pens with just a sneeze of ink left and the odd screwdriver. I found it at ceramicist Peter Shire’s annual Christmas sale, among the glazed shards and impossible teapots of his studio’s steady output, alongside jungle-gym sculptures and squiggly, geometric furniture, ungainly pots with hot-rod colours and drawings of versions of all the above. Situated along Echo Park Ave under the purple blossoms of jacaranda trees, Shire’s studio building sports funky colours and quirky metalwork. It’s just one more bit of output in a career that found an engaged audience in design enthusiasts, though Shire clearly doesn’t care too much what kind of creator you might call him. With the cool glaze of this ungainly mug in hand, I prefer ‘artist’. Shire’s oeuvre crowns the very best of Los Angeles bad taste. Beginning in the art-punk

underground during the late-1970s, Shire got his start when he was spotted by Milanese designer Ettore Sottsass in 1977 in LA’s WET, the only magazine devoted to ‘gourmet bathing’ (along with punk and art). This bad-taste aesthetic (often identified as ‘postmodern’, though it doesn’t wear it well) informed Kenny Scharf’s sets for Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1986–91) and Matt Groening’s column ‘Life in Hell’ in LA Weekly. In the 1986 black comedy Ruthless People, Danny DeVito stalks an upscale LA house looking for his hated wife, her interior decor a cool mess of bright hues, hard shapes, shimmying lines and lots of turquoise. Brash and glitzy, the furniture is all knock-offs of the Memphis Group (founded by Sottsass in 1981) and most particularly its sole LA member: Peter Shire. Like the character of DeVito’s on-camera wife, Bette Midler (whom Danny’s planning to murder), the work is meant to be read as the worst kind of garish: magically looking both expensive and cheap. And it is, in the best way. In this current survey show (his first in an LA museum), Shire

shows us chairs with tomato-red shark fin backs, legs like beach balls filled with orange Fanta and lime green and salmon pink arms of wildly different shapes. Each of the dozens of teapots on display – stacks of spheres and pyramids and cubes, armed with handles that might serve as toys for space insects – altogether look like they might require special choreography just to pour. By taking on all of its downbeat beachy modernism and superficially flamboyant style, Shire’s work celebrates, embodies and amplifies a Los Angeles that has made more than a few sophisticated outsiders sniff at John Fante’s ‘sad flower in the sand’. In one corner, a rainbow polygon of a chair, Right Weld Chair (2017), bears a couple of tubular pool railings in brushed aluminium hanging off its back, both dangling baroque tassels from your grandmother’s curtains. It is a mix of colourful hypermodern excess and a previous generation’s overwrought extravagance. Like the rest of Shire’s oeuvre, it is either awfully beautiful or beautifully awful, but certainly and unselfconsciously fun. Andrew Berardini

Bel Air Chair, 1981, wood, steel, upholstery fabric, 123 × 109 × 123 cm. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy the artist

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Matthew Ronay SURDS Marc Foxx, Los Angeles 29 April – 3 June Sometimes Matthew Ronay whistles in the studio ‘with a lot of vibrato’, he once confessed in an interview with David John. ‘I’m normally ecstatic in the studio,’ he continued. Ecstasy has many variants: overwhelming joy or exuberance, sexual bliss, spiritual awakening. Think Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52), which exhibits a bit of each. Ronay’s Technicolor basswood sculptures also toe the line of transcendent spirituality and out-and-out sexuality. In Thermal Organ Apparatus (all works but one 2017), a yellowflocked phallus protrudes from a large rectangular base. In the more architectural 13 (2016), a baby-pink orifice is carved centrally into the sculpture’s backside. Some of these inclusions can feel like dude jokes, but Ronay’s formal agility produces complex formal relationships that well transcend the vulgar. Like Bernini, he creates rippling and undulating folds out

of an otherwise hard material. The tabletop sculptures are exquisite puzzles of delicately carved parts, each piece stained in a unique colour. Compositionally, they would be at home with work by Ron Nagle or Peter Shire – intricate details and unexpected hues surprise at every turn. The sculptures’ placement on low-slung pedestals encourages an intimate investigation of each work. Only when hunched over each carved microcosm can one make out brightly flocked holes or thin wood edging, which appears as malleable as Play-Doh. Scanner, more sci-fi invention than formal experimentation, consists of a large shell-like orifice resting atop a slanted pink base, which recalls both a computer keyboard and a topographic slice of land. A fistlike form juts out of this base, bending around to almost kiss the purple shell; there is a sensual tension in their

almost-meeting. Like a third wheel, a wiggly pink form surprises on the backside of the sculpture, edging into the action. Wrapped around each pedestal is a fitted cotton tablecloth, offering a bed of softness under each wooden composition. Where the sculptures are perfectly composed and solid in their forms, the fabric sits awkwardly; their hemlines fluctuate while large wrinkles make the wraps appear unconsidered and rushed. Like a rusty anchor to Ronay’s otherworldly constructions, the table dressings root the sculptures in the everyday rather than letting them expand outward into the transcendent. While individually the work in SURDS is utterly spellbinding, the installation as a whole seems to point directly to the future life of these alien objects: a quiet existence, sitting atop a swathe of linen somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. Lindsay Preston Zappas

Scanner, 2017, basswood, dye, flocking, plastic, 30 × 46 × 29 cm. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles

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Hannah Perry Viruses Worth Spreading Arsenal Contemporary, New York 3 May – 2 July During the performance at her new solo show, British artist Hannah Perry is seen sitting on the floor, hunched over her laptop and typing while smoking a cigarette. In the dark room around her, a group of performers bounce off contorted white blobs in plastic and foam scattered on the ground, momentarily enacting postures of affect such as longing, despair, anger and desire. The lonely girl behind the computer crystallises as the authorial voice of Viruses Worth Spreading, a postbreakup journey spanning painting, sculpture and video, and mapped through the many arbitrary traces of contemporary online life (including but not limited to updating, stalking, liking, blocking, streaming and chatting). Perry’s obsessiveness unfolds as a porous encounter with the world in both virtual and material terms, tracking the textual and material manifestations of human emotion onto familiar industrial materials. A series of prints on Plexiglas and aluminium (A Phone Full of Friendzones, Size Queen, Hey Papi, all works 2017) greet the viewer along the wall of the gallery. They consist of collaged snippets of personal text messages; fragmented, sized-up iPhone

images; and various other online vernaculars. Summer of Blocking textually archives on Plexiglas spiralling threats against an estranged lover, ultimately ending with the statement ‘block myself’. The deeply personal and even diaristic is here always already mediated digitally, and seemingly only registered once communicated and distributed as data, where, in the flow of Internet traffic, it is destined to become a little less generic than a meme. Feelings such as obsession, despair and distraction are typically categorised as irrelevant, self-indulgent and unproductive, particularly when given voice by women. In the spirit of Chris Kraus and many other female autotheorists, Perry seeks productivity in the purposely forceful performance of the ‘hysterical woman’, where emotion is accelerated and multiplied into incoherence. Two sculptural works, Pretty and Trauma Junky, aestheticise the rush of a car-crash by incorporating broken car parts into a sculptural entity, translating perhaps the longing for extremities of pleasure, danger and excitement when one is sick with a broken heart. The four-channel video Cry

Daggers extends this strategy to the moving image, loudly juxtaposing sexualised music videos with personal recordings of drunken taxi rides and West Coast roadtrips, while an animated text document, with stream-ofconsciousness-type musings addressed to Him, to the world and to no one in particular, endlessly expands on screen. These artefacts of affective labour are, if anything, the bridge between Viruses Worth Spreading and Perry’s longer-standing interest in so-called working class aesthetics, in which, as the press release of this exhibition also asserts, ‘abstract entities [are] synthesized under the umbrella of culture and ritual’ in her native Northwest England. These entities, united in a series of floor-based sculptural works in the darkened middle room of the gallery, seem to include synthetic hair-extensions, steel and the same plastic-wrapped duvets that served as props for Perry’s performance. A portrait of the poor? Outside the artist’s own biography, it ultimately feels difficult to connect Perry’s recent heartbreak with the socioeconomic realities of working-class England. Jeppe Ugelvig

Viruses Worth Spreading, 2017 (installation view). Photo: Greg Carideo. Courtesy the artist and Arsenal Contemporary, New York

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bow bow Canada, New York 5 May – 11 June In a standout I Love Lucy scene from 1953, Ricky and Lucy go head-to-head in a dance-off. Ricky does a few versions of a kind of sophisticated, slowed-down hand jive, while Lucy, true to form, goes big with pinwheel arms, onelegged hopping and a novice grapevine. Ricky is doing it the way things are supposed to be done – measured, elegant and self-contained. As such, he’s like a personification of the stereotype of modern painting: gestural, sure, but composed – an ambassador for good taste. Lucy is all ‘deliberately clumsy actions’, as the standard definition of slapstick would have it, and a frenzied, sweaty, gesticulating mess. She’s also undeniably charismatic in comparison to the restrained actions of her opponent. This two-person show of California-based artists Johanna Jackson and Sahar Khoury takes a similarly charming slapstick approach. A rumination on using materials the wrong way, bow bow is the frisky side of the gestural and expressionistic, the messily handmade and an antiprecious approach. There are a lot of types of objects and materials on display:

sculptures made of steel or ceramic or concrete, paintings, rugs and one mirror – and each is imbued with its own sense of humour. In addition to her tin book-sculptures and hand-hooked rugs, Jackson employs chunky blocks of ceramic to make sloppily glazed sculptures of a pendulum clock, a pair of shoes and an outsize penny. They are like 3D renditions of a kindergartener’s drawing, unkempt and expressive; mimetic but entirely messy. Khoury’s work, here shown in New York for the first time, is a wonderful surprise. The artist uses a host of materials and techniques – among them poured concrete, papier-mâché, old clothes, painting, bamboo and more – in creating her paintings and sculptures. In one of my favourite pieces, Untitled (triangle, rug pedestal) (2017), a patch of mint-green machine-made rug is sunk into the side of a concrete sculpture that resembles a line drawing of a right-angled triangle. Other patches of the concrete are tinted with light pink paint (perhaps the effect of painting into wet cement). There is something alchemical about the way Khoury uses materials

here. However industrial, she prods them into feeling gentle and supple. For example, there is a series of holes in the base of the sculpture that, in Khoury’s hands, appear torn away rather than, say, drilled, which makes the stony construction material feel soft and vulnerable. I’m also taken with the way Khoury builds modes of display into the works themselves: one painting has a hanging device made of four paper shopping-bag handles that stick out of its top edge, and another hangs from a 60cm-tall bamboo triangle. An improvisational mode of problem solving is embedded into the formal qualities of the works. At first glance one might be tempted to say this show is a little crowded. The artists and the great multitude of materials with which they make their work are pushed up against each other. Though a more measured mode of installation would allow for a greater amount of hallowed space around each object, maybe the disorderly presentation is fitting for these bodies of work in all their deliberately clumsy glory. Ashton Cooper

Sahar Khoury, Untitled (triangle, rug pedestal), 2017, rug, cement, steel, paint, 70 × 58 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist and Canada, New York

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Sara Cwynar Rose Gold Foxy Production, New York 7 April–14 May “Every political gesture associated with democracy is branded with a colour,” a voiceover states in Sara Cwynar’s eight-minute film Rose Gold (all works 2017), the centrepiece of this solo exhibition bearing the same title. So what are the politics of rose-gold? Named one of Pantone’s 2016 Colors of the Year (the colour giant identified it as ‘Rose Quartz’), the blush-tinted pink can be found on everything from iPhones and jewellery to men’s sneakers. It’s aspirational, but the soft aspiration associated with minimalism and Scandinavian fashion. (The all-gender Swedish clothing line Acne Studios hopped on the trend early, debuting a pink shopping bag in 2007.) A recent article on New York magazine’s fashion blog The Cut, ‘Why Millennial Pink Refuses to Go Away’, argues that the hue not only complements many skin tones but embodies the gender fluidity of fourth-wave feminism. Paler than the pink on the ‘pussy hats’ worn during January’s Women’s Marches, but more visceral than a neutral nude, this colour is associated with an appealing androgyny. Cwynar’s impressionistic film, peppered with quote fragments from thinkers like Lauren Berlant, Toni Morrison and Ludwig Wittgenstein, traces the rise of rose-gold alongside cultural phenomena such as 1970s melamine crockery and the development of swipe technology. It teases us with political

messages, spoken against a flow of pleasing, rainbow-coloured images. A male voice intones, “The gold iPhone was invented for China, where gold still means something”, as the view of a Trump hotel flashes by. Rose Gold also ventures into identity politics, troubling the colour’s reputation as “universally flattering” with a montage of ads for vintage makeup compacts. These include the shade Rachel (a creamy hue created during the late nineteenth century, primarily for stage makeup, and based on the skin tone of Jewish French actress Rachel Félix) and Dark Rachel (for a browner complexion). The Rachel colour was originally devised as an alternative for (white) women who would not be flattered by a pink or ivory powder. For all its wearability, rose-gold can be seen as a more politically correct version of the white-skewing ‘flesh tones’ that were prominent on catwalks several seasons ago. In addition to the video, a series of digitally manipulated photos titled Tracy gesture towards Cwynar’s past as a graphic designer. Six are based on studio portraits of ‘Tracy’, a chic woman of Asian descent. Tracy lounges against backdrops of green or blue (standard chroma-key colours) or a full colour chart. Tracy’s images recall the ‘China Girls’ – usually of white ancestry – whose likenesses appeared in mid-twentieth-century film leaders as a means to check colour calibrations. Cwynar

Avon Presidential Bust (Lincoln, Gold), 2017, c-print mounted on Dibond, 76 × 61 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Foxy Production, New York

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digitally layers four of Tracy’s portraits with fragments from grammar books, art postcards, perfume bottles and anonymous portraits. In two final series, both confronting myths of masculinity, Cwynar shifts her attention from rose-gold to heavier metals. On two blackand-white photos of medieval suits of armour, printed lifesize, Cwynar has added collage elements of handheld objects, from hairbrushes to obsolescent iPods. The message is a less caustic – more millennial? – version of one that Barbara Kruger put forward in her 1981 photomontage of a groom being manhandled by his best men, accompanied by the line: ‘You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men’. Cwynar’s Avon Presidential Bust series conveys a more potent critique. These photographs depict headless, gold-painted bases of Avon aftershave bottles, released on the occasion of the US Bicentennial, in 1976. Only Cwynar’s titles (eg Avon Presidential Bust [Lincoln, Gold]) reveal that the bottles were designed as portraits of the country’s best-known leaders. In lieu of their recognisable visages, the bottles sport only humble perfume nozzles sitting atop cheesy lopsided presidential ascots or bowties. In their mixture of fake opulence and crass commercialism, these yellow-gold objects signify a very contemporary shift in the cultural (and political) temperature. Wendy Vogel

Wilhelm Sasnal Anton Kern Gallery, New York 22 April – 20 May The day after the election of Donald Trump, protesters took to the streets of Oakland, California, wielding a massive white banner with angular, duct-taped lettering reading: ‘Choke on your silver spoon you fucking Nazi’. A photograph of this protest serves as the basis for Wilhelm Sasnal’s arresting painting Untitled (Choke) (2017). In the artist’s hands, the image takes on the graphic slickness of an album cover. Set against a ground of Pepto-Bismol pink, the banner occupies the bulk of the canvas. We see little of the protesters themselves, aside from four fists grasping its corners and the flat silhouettes of their legs below. As with much of Sasnal’s work, his detached, deadpan handling of the image gives the painting an insistent ambiguity, in spite of the caustic antifascist text it depicts. Though none of the other works in Sasnal’s exhibition at Anton Kern are as explicit as Untitled (Choke), the word ‘Nazi’ hangs in the air throughout. Spread across two floors of the gallery’s new Midtown townhouse – located mere blocks from Trump Tower – the exhibition is an elliptical meditation on Western

civilisation’s apparent compulsion to repeat the mistakes of the past. At the exhibition’s entrance, one painting depicts the United Nations logo at an oblique angle, with hovering white orbs suggesting the glare of a monitor (UN, 2015). Across the room are three small greyscale portraits of former UN general secretaries, among them the Austrian Kurt Waldheim, who was revealed, after his term ended, to have been complicit in Nazi warcrimes. On the opposite wall, we see two Angela Merkels – one young and smiling (Angela Merkel 1, 2016); the other more recent, furrowing her brow as she stares into the distance (Angela Merkel 2, 2016) – and Marine Le Pen, who Sasnal casts as something like a cinematic ingenue, with a dreamy gaze rendered in an icy blue-grey palette suggestive of a film still (Marine Le Pen, 2012). Upstairs are two paintings of Hillary Clinton, only identifiable because of the titles (Hillary Clinton 1 and 2, both 2016), in which she is viewed from the back as she delivers a speech at a podium. We see only the spotlighted contours of her figure in a darkened

auditorium. The source photographs date from Clinton’s tenure as first lady rather than her failed presidential campaign, but in the show’s context the pictures take on a funereal quality. Interspersed among these political symbols are paintings of unpopulated landscapes, alternately transcendent and banal, which are primarily based upon photographs taken by the artist rather than mass-media imagery. Whereas the portraits are relatively small and uniform, tethering them to their original photographic sources, the landscapes are larger and more eclectic in style; in one, a pile of discarded tyres is framed by streaks of spraypaint; on the next wall, a soaring view of the bright winter sky is punctuated by birds and fluffy clouds. These juxtapositions seem purposefully jarring, toggling between private and public, the world-historical and the everyday. But if the meaning behind Sasnal’s network of images remains elusive, its underlying grammar feels familiar, capturing as it does the disorienting psychical effects of watching catastrophe unfold via a social media feed. Rachel Wetzler

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Mark Flood Google Murder-Suicide Maccarone, New York 2 May – 28 July There are groups of dumpy, paint-stained black couches scattered throughout Mark Flood’s latest exhibition. They look like they came from the furniture store Rooms To Go, or even more tragically, a Goodwill in New Haven, Connecticut. They’re actually from the artist’s North Carolina studio, and they’re a tad slutty, since they ‘get around’ to so many of the artist’s shows. Here, they’re placed over equally downtrodden carpets, and face Flood’s paintings. This is notable because they’re such analogue foils to Flood’s canvases, which depict ethereal streams of brand logos and Twitter feeds – the pleasures, and terrors, of the placeless, neoliberal digital age. Take a well-used seat, Flood seemingly intones, and contemplate the shiny, slick things that will never age, but remain the same for all time, like fossils made of zeros and ones. Movement is a big part of the work: all of Flood’s logos are printed blurry, as if they were animals triggering motion-detection cameras at night. Starting things off with a bang is the massive Deutsche Bank logo in Captured Serpent (2017), which simply floats – or rather, slowly drags – over a sea of white space. Logos

are weird. They could be anything. This one could conceivably be a road sign in another country, or a framed slash mark on your keyboard, or the ‘tribal’ tattoo on your butt cheek. Even though it’s an empty signifier, arbitrarily given meaning by one of the world’s largest financial conglomerates, when printed on a five-metre-wide canvas, it’s sublime. Then there are the Google logos performing ‘lines of escape’, Gilles Deleuze’s description of capital wiggling its way out of tricky situations. Google Murder Suicide (2017) appears like it was caught moving 15cm to the right; Google Transformer CGI (2017) looks like bits of it are being flayed away in chunks; and Google Blur (2017) is hightailing it every which way, as if it’s being both flattened and stretched out at high speed. You can barely make out the company’s letters, they’re so washy and spread thin. Much stranger are the paintings composed of acrylic paint, stencilled with the frilliest of lace. In Paddock (2015), the lace is painted Pepto-Bismol pink and edges a sea of primary green. In The Women’s Cult (2017), it’s similarly pink and also yellow, and even contains ancient Dionysian nymphs trotting around it, blithely

GOOGLE MURDER-SUICIDE, 2017 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Maccarone, New York & Los Angeles

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carefree. Don’t they realise they’re in for it? That the body is passé? The look of both paintings is a combination of tacky Grandma craft-time meets imperfect monochrome. They’re hideous, but in a so-hideous-it’s-chic kind of way. Rounding things out are paintings of Twitter feeds – Don’t Be Stupid (2017), for example, which layers conspiracy threads about Julian Assange’s death – and stencilled, graffitilike cardboard works that spell out Serve the Community Bitter and Death/Safe Space (both 2016). These are by far the least interesting works, if only because they seem so straightforward, even banal. But wait, there’s more – a Greta Garbo wall isn’t easily forgotten. Pages from a found scrapbook that some Garbo-obsessed teenager (or psychopath, it’s not clear which) made in 1939 are hung here in a grid, arranged roughly chronologically. The work seems out of place, but actually isn’t. Garbo was, in her own way, a kind of logo too, or at least a mega brand from a pre-Internet era, if one can even fathom that. It’s a nifty reminder that while technologies change, branding has always remained the same moving target. David Everitt Howe

Letícia Parente Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo 25 March – 25 May Her house was her entire world, littered with pages from women’s magazines that sometimes found their way into her work. The late Letícia Parente is remembered today only in fragments, mostly for the few forays she made into blatantly political moving-image work: silent videos such as Marca Registrada (Trademark, 1975), in which she recorded herself sewing the word ‘Brasil’ into the sole of her foot in black thread, branding her body as a product under the country’s military regime. Parente preferred reclusion and quiet: her realm of resistance during the 1970s was her middle-class Rio de Janeiro apartment, the setting for these powerful early VHS works. Collectively they document performances of strange, upended domestic chores, such as Tarefa I (Assignment I, 1982), in which a maid irons the artist’s clothes with Parente still in them, lying facedown on an ironing board; or In (1975), the artist’s contortionistlike attempt to hang a blouse in the closet while, again, wearing the item of clothing. The works succeed in portraying her home as being as violent and uncomfortable as the nation heaving at her doorstep. Taking this twisted domesticity to perhaps an even more profound level, her minimalist

collages, poems and drawings all shed light on what it meant to be a woman whose body (then, as now) was under siege by patriarchal propaganda and chauvinism. These bold, albeit minimalist, phases of her oeuvre now find a broader audience in this strong survey exhibition. In one of the strongest and least-known series in the show, Parente borrows a pattern of stitches – most commonly used by the cosmetic surgeons of the time to stretch and smooth out wrinkles and reshape and augment breasts – in order to sew lines on black pieces of paper, again in black thread, sometimes adding nails to the jagged, broken contours. These pieces are abstract, monochromatic jewels that vibrate with unsettling tension. Her collages, which feature wide-eyed blonde babes plucked from the pages of fashion magazines, make this violence more obvious, with safety pins driven through the paper, piercing puckering lips. This surgical motif continues in Preparação II (Preparation II, 1976), a video in which the artist is seen giving herself injections and then recording them on paper as ‘antiracism’ or ‘antimystification of art’, creating what resembles a medical record. This laboratorial aspect of her work summons her background as

a chemistry professor, a science she dedicated most of her life to before becoming more involved with her artistic practice. It is this search for a scientific methodology, aesthetics based on data collection, that shapes her most significant work here. Medidas (Measurements, 1976) is an installation first exhibited in Rio’s Museu de Arte Moderna in 1976. In nine steps, like a modern-day, ER-style Stations of the Cross, the exhibition visitor is asked to gauge their ability to read under a dim light, test resistance to pain by taking fingertips to burning candles and describe a favourite kind of silhouette given a few options. Though aimed at the general audience, it seems clear by the end of the process that Parente was targeting women, asking them to assess whether or not they meet the beauty and moral standards of their society. Her dry, clinical approach in works such as this contrast with the actual violence of cosmetic surgeons tugging at skin and flesh. Not surprisingly, this is the final work in the show, where the two sides of an oeuvre, vulnerable and detached, come together as a cracked mirror held up to a reality of women abused in a botched society. Silas Martí

Medidas (Measurements), 1976, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Everton Ballardin. Courtesy Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo

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Books

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Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh MIT Press, $39.95/£32.95 (softcover) How do we understand something if we’re still in the middle of it? The question is always there, no matter how discombobulating our particular times might seem. The need of theory and art-history practitioners to label and assign fixed terms to movements and time periods has always vexed me; it’s like pinning down and thereby killing a butterfly in order better to appreciate its beauty. But how even to start to untangle the impossibly complex layers held within the UKIPers cry to ‘take back control’, as if those world maps blotched with pink never existed? Or take what should be a pretty straightforward bit of reporting transformed in Artlyst’s recent headline, ‘Turner Prize 2017 Shortlist Reveals Obscure Multicultural Pick & Mix’ – as if the artworld were only populated by well-known white Joes and Janes. The legacies of colonialism, and its institutionalised inequalities, are still going strong, and are just one of the strands explored in the ‘Former West’ project and now book. Perhaps, this sizeable and robust collection suggests, theory’s angular postulating is a sort of linguistic distancing, a tool with which to pry ourselves from the present the better to see it. With over 50 short, dense essays by a range of academics, artists, theorists and writers, as well as visual documentation and inserts from 13 artists, this is no light read. But it does ask pressing questions: how might we unpick the assumptions still inherent from colonialism, the Cold War or even modern art? What the hell is the ‘contemporary’, anyway? Along the way come examinations of the commons, the Internet, precarity and late capitalism. Nancy Adajania’s

concluding statement sums up the overall trajectory and tone of the book well: ‘The West’s exclusivist and exceptionalist understanding of the contemporary as its self-conscious and historicized monopoly is no longer tenable’. There are texts from familiar names like Boris Groys, Brian Holmes and Hito Steyerl, but also welcome introductions (for those like me perpetually behind on their theory reading) to the work of, for example, Indian historian Vijay Prashad, Bengali historian Dipesh Chakrabarty and Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. The book is a hefty testament to the conceptual weight of the ‘Former West’ project, which ran from 2008 to 2016 as a series of lectures, seminars, group exhibitions, conferences and meetings (none of which, I have to admit, I attended), that began at the BAK, Utrecht, and popped up peripatetically in institutions in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the UK, all dedicated to figuring out ways in which the concept of an economically and ideologically superior ‘West’ might be dissolved into a more truly global perspective. Some texts come from talks given at these events, others are republished from sources like e-flux and various academic books and journals, while many also seem to have been written specifically for the book. So, now that the project has concluded, it isn’t documentation as such, but a handy guide to current debates on the shape, direction and power structures of the international artworld and beyond; a handbook to decolonising the mind.

You might not be able to read – or understand – everything in this tome, but you will find moments of inspiration, or at least countless pointers towards worthwhile thinkers and research, like Sven Lütticken’s nod to the story of radical pastoralist René Riesel, or philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli’s essay ‘Arcana Mathematica Impirii: The Evolution of Computational Norms’, tracing the ways humans have reduced themselves to numbers that can be tallied and manipulated, from slavery to Skynet. There are ironies of course, the most obvious being that a project of such international ambition was still run exclusively within the European terrain of the ‘former West’ that the editors are attempting to dissipate. Theory, it seems, can at least gesture to the open sky beyond its prison walls. As American art-historian Susan Buck-Morss notes in her essay, ‘the next phase of theory will be a displacement as opposed to an internal development’; this book, made up of a bunch of Cold War kids trying to make sense of the post-Cold War world, wants to be an anachronism, and self-consciously awaits such a displacement. That stance points towards the more inherently troubling feeling that, at least with the view from Brexit Britain, marked by rising education costs and dwindling researchfunding, this book is actually a lengthy eulogy: a tribute to the articulate, funded, hypertheorising arts professors who enjoyed what now seems the luxury of contract positions and research grants, who were themselves a product of the neoliberal ‘contemporary’ period and will soon be a remarkable oddity of the past. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture by Melissa Gronlund Routledge, £24.99 (softcover) This dense textbook – which one can better imagine on a college library shelf than as lovingly thumbed bedside reading – is an attempt to comprehensively chart the history of so-called post-Internet art, a label Gronlund uses throughout to cover art made from the mid-2000s onwards that displays a certain aesthetic: ‘work accomplished online, as well as facets borrowed from the internet’; art with ‘a keen interest in banality… and in the accumulation and curation of information as material’. (The author lists formal motifs too, not least ‘green-screen technology… stock photography and the imitation of corporate platforms.’)

Gronlund studiously stitches together myriad tangents: tracing the lineage back to the cybernetic philosophies of the 1970s and invoking figures such as Donna Haraway and the theorist’s ideas on the ‘posthuman’; looking to net.art as an antecedent to post-Internet art (though Gronlund points out that ‘net.art is primarily concerned with the internet as medium, post-internet art could be more accurately described as an exploration of digitality’). On contemporary practice she writes on the reproducible status of the image (invoking both Hito Steyerl and the influence of the Pictures Generation); the connection

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between post-Internet art and the move to object-oriented ontology; together with the effect the Internet has had on identity. Throughout she invokes artists who can be thought of as having genuinely changed the narrative of recent art-history (notably Steyerl, Ed Atkins, Mark Leckey and Paul Chan), but she has also unduly – given the relative lack of maturity in their work – elevated others from the footnotes. That said, this is a good, rigorous study of a particular mode in recent artmaking, though it will be more interesting to see if the book retains its relevance for long. Oliver Basciano

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Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag Faber & Faber, £10 (hardcover) While Vivek Shanbhag is an established writer in his native India and well known to readers of Kannada (the South Indian language from which the current volume is translated), this is the first of his works to be published in English outside of his home country. And based on the evidence here, we’ve got some catching up to do: the author has written eight works of fiction and two plays. Ghachar Ghochar (originally published in 2013) is a novella about a family in Bangalore whose circumstances are rapidly and dramatically changed when the narrator’s father loses his job, his uncle founds a successful spice business and the family transitions from working to middle class. The consequent separation of labour from value affects them not only in terms of the way they interact with the material world – their home and the objects around them – but also in terms of the internal and external social relations of the family group. ‘Our relationship with the things we accumulated became casual,’ the unnamed

narrator confesses. At the same time the family’s relationship with other people becomes anything but that. While he and four members of his extended family (mother, father, sister, uncle, later joined by the narrator’s wife) once shared the imposed intimacy of a four-room house, they now share an even more claustrophobic, self-imposed intimacy designed to protect the family’s newfound status and wealth. ‘What can I say of myself that is only about me and not tied up with the others?’ the narrator says plaintively midway through the narrative. Every day he escapes his token job at the spice company to a favourite coffee shop in order to be by himself, or listen to the mystic advice of his favourite waiter, while reflecting on a ‘gentler, more leisurely time’. While the novella is of value as an account of the impacts of a quarter century of economic liberalism on Indian society, it is even more stunning as a work of art and for the economy of words with which the author (and his

translator) tells his tale. Much of the action takes place between the lines, very much present, but ultimately unsaid. The title’s nonsense words, which supposedly describe a situation of irretrievable entanglement, are introduced to the plot by the narrator’s doomed wife, as an indicator of intimacy. But they end up standing for the family’s social and moral confusion as they move (literally, in the sense of from the most modest of homes to a larger one) from a space in which every object and every person has their place, assigned to them by the traditions and economics of daily life, into a realm of supposedly open possibility but actual constriction and emptiness. It’s a remarkable book: in only 118 riveting pages Shanbhag (son-in-law and sometime translator of the late, great Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy, of whose 1965 masterpiece, Samskara, this might be considered a displacement and updating) announces himself as one of the most astute and compelling voices on the world’s literary stage. Nirmala Devi

The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art and Technology Edited by William A. Ewing and Barbara Hitchcock Thames & Hudson, £34.95 (hardcover) Invented in 1948 by Edwin H. Land in an archetypical eureka moment, after his daughter asked why she couldn’t see the photograph he had just taken, the Polaroid is a camera and darkroom in one, producing images that, for the first time, could be viewed before the event they portrayed was over. The first commercially successful model, the SX-70, from 1972, promised in its advertising ‘the rebirth of a sense of wonder and an increased awareness of the beauty that surrounds you’. The Polaroid Project, published to accompany a touring exhibition, explores the somewhat utopian ideals of the camera brand and its influence on art and consumer photography. William A. Ewing argues that, in bypassing the need for commercial processing, the Polaroid heralded a new sense of immediacy and authenticity in everyday photography (as well as intimacy, resulting in a sideline in smut).

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‘Polaroid came to stand in the collective consciousness for quality, speed, ease, and even, one might say subliminally, democracy,’ Ewing says. It is ‘a microcosm of an ideal America’. The performance of image-making – of participating, of self-sufficiency – became as important as the image itself. The success of the camera owes much to Polaroid’s generous patronage of the arts. Landscape photographer Ansel Adams was hired as a consultant to the company during the late 1940s, and the long-running artistsupport programme ensured an extraordinary range of experimentation. John Rohrbach argues that Polaroid’s speed and rigid format quickly became a ‘major cultural and artistic force’, facilitating innovative approaches to photography and documentation in a climate of radical change. Abstract artist Ellen Carey explains how the photograph’s immediate

ArtReview

physical presence lets her escape ‘the tyranny of photography’s historical imperative to record and reveal “things”’. Although now undeniably a redundant format, a market for nostalgia means that the Polaroid remains, somehow, doggedly popular: when the company, after years of struggling, announced it would stop selling film in 2008, the Impossible Project revived it within the same year. But the camera itself is no longer the easy go-to for consumer photography, and in proving that the Polaroid is something more substantial than a novelty throwback, these essays succumb to that same nostalgia. The Polaroid Project seems to fight with the fact that the camera’s most obvious and enduring legacy is quotidian and everyday – in the sepia filters, white borders and stylised skeuomorphic icon of Instagram – and in the democratising of photography as cheap, easy and accessible. Lucy Watson

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For more on Rui Tenreiro, see overleaf

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Contributors

Ashton Cooper is a Brooklyn-based independent writer and curator. She has organised exhibitions at Maccarone in New York; the Knockdown Center in Queens; and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York. Recent writing projects include a catalogue essay for Mira Dancy’s exhibition at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai and an essay for a publication on artist Ellen Cantor to be released by Capricious Press later this year. Her writing has also appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Modern Painters, Hyperallergic, Artinfo.com, Cultured, Pelican Bomb and Jezebel. For this issue, she reviews the group exhibition bow bow at Canada, New York. Lindsay Preston Zappas is the editor-in-chief of Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, an LA-based quarterly arts magazine. In addition to ArtReview, she has written for various exhibition catalogues and publications, such as SFAQ, Art21 and Flash Art. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at OCHI Projects (Los Angeles) and City Limits (Oakland), and a two person show at Vacancy (Los Angeles). Zappas has taught art and critical theory at Cal State Northridge, Fullerton College and Oregon College of Art and Craft. Here she reviews Matthew Ronay at Marc Foxx, Los Angeles.

Ross Simonini is an artist, musician and writer living mostly in Northern California and occasionally in New York. At this year’s Sharjah Biennial he exhibited a wall of napkins that he stole from restaurants and used to soak up spills and stains of food and paint. His first novel, The Book of Formation, will be published by Melville House Books in November, though he has trouble with the word ‘novel’ and only uses it because he knows no other word for a long book of lies. He also edits The Believer, produces an experimental podcast called The Organist and is one half of the band NewVillager. This issue sees the first of his series of artist interviews, starting with American artist B. Wurtz. Brian Dillon is an Irish writer and critic based in Rochester, UK. His new book, Essayism, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Previous books include The Great Explosion, Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope and In the Dark Room, which will be published in a new edition next year. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, The New York Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, Frieze and Artforum. He is UK editor of Cabinet magazine, and teaches critical writing at the Royal College of Art, London. Here he profiles South African artist Zanele Muholi.

Contributing Writers Sean Ashton, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Dominic van den Boogerd, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Barbara Casavecchia, Matthew Collings, Ashton Cooper, Paul Gravett, Sarah Jilani, I Kurator, Maria Lind, Silas Martí, Ciara Moloney, Paul Pieroni, Lindsay Preston Zappas, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Ross Simonini, Laura Smith, Raimar Stange, Sam Steverlynck, Susannah Thompson, Jeppe Ugelvig, Wendy Vogel, Lucy Watson, Mike Watson, Rachel Wetzler Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Joshua Mack, Laura McLeanFerris, Christopher Mooney, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Zanele Muholi, Rui Tenreiro, Anna Vickery

Rui Tenreiro (preceding pages)

Rui Tenreiro, the third generation in a family of white Mozambicans, was born in 1979, only four years after the southeast African republic’s independence from Portugal. Tenreiro grew up in a Mozambique redefining itself as a Marxist-Leninist regime. As he recalls: “In the Pan-African spirit, we were all entitled to be Mozambican, with all our cultural differences. The government wanted to unite the country and all its nationalities by levelling everyone and making Portuguese the official language. At the time, the Portuguese had mostly left Mozambique, and white Mozambicans were a tiny minority, who didn’t consider themselves Portuguese any longer. So they assumed Mozambican nationality, like my parents did.” Memories of the Civil War, which wracked the country from 1977 to 1992, are still vivid to Tenreiro, although the family, living in the capital, Maputo,

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avoided the worst of the conflict. It was during this time that Tenreiro’s father inspired his son’s interest in comics. Employed by the state’s railways and then the fisheries ministry, his father was an avid comics reader and created his own in his spare time. Tenreiro remembers encountering Mozambican comics. “They were commissioned by the state, and served as a way of telling the stories through an ‘easy’ medium. Without exception, all the stories published by the government were political in nature; in one story, about smuggling weapons, the Portuguese troops were the bad guys and the dissidents (who were black, white and Indian) were the good guys.” In 1993, a job opportunity for his father meant the family moved to Cape Verde. Tenreiro’s peripatetic education took him to courses in advertising art-direction in Johannesburg and in Maidstone, Kent, where he discovered art cinema, another vital influence.

ArtReview

Tenreiro’s strip here draws on his experience of his current home, in Stockholm. “Living in Stockholm, there’s a less-visible side of Sweden – there are people living in extreme wealth, in luxurious old apartments and houses, while on the outskirts a bunch of demoralised souls crowd in desolate economy blocks of flats, which still cost a ton of cash. It took me a while to realise the total and absolute wealth that some people benefit from here. There’s really an admiration for the bourgeois.” His most recent book, Lanterns of Nedzu, has just been published and is accompanied by an original music score, a mix of media that reflects how his work often unfolds. “Stories are sometimes chaotic, nonlinear things,” he says, “which happen in the mind, involving a combination of images, dialogue, writing, even sound. It’s a kind of shuffle puzzle that slowly starts coming together.” Paul Gravett

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

The words on the spine and on pages 35, 69 and 107 are quoted from the opening verse of chapter 2 of The Dhammapada (Penguin, 1973), translated from the Pali by Juan Mascaró

on pages 136 and 140 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 146 illustration by Anna Vickery

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A Curator Writes Summer 2017 “But I still don’t understand why we landed in Salzburg given that we’re going to Art Basel… in Basel.” Edgar looks mournful. I decide that honesty is the best policy. “Look, Edgar, the truth is that we’re not going to Basel. The big empty spaces of Art Unlimited remind me of Voids, the horrifying Pompidou show in which I suffered almost a total nervous breakdown in the Maria Eichhorn room.” “But how are you going to write your market report for ArtReview?” Edgar asks nervously. I pause for effect. “Edgar, I am going to write it from the type of location where the finest art-market correspondents of our time, and here I speak of the likes of Kenneth Schachter himself, would most surely prefer. A spa in the mountains, dear boy! vivamayr! Think of Thomas Mann’s magisterial tome The Magic Mountain, in which our protagonist Hans Castorp pays a fleeting visit to a European mountain sanatorium, ends up staying seven years and finally leaves to meet what must surely be his demise on the bloody battlefields of Europe!” I continue to talk to a rapt Edgar about the complexities of Mann’s bildungsroman throughout our pleasant drive before we finally reach the renowned vivamayr health retreat on the shores of the magnificent Lake Altaussee. I feel immediately inspired. “Take the Dictaphone, Edgar, I am ready!” Before waiting for him to press record I grab a sheaf of Art Basel press releases and begin my report while striding towards the reception. “This year’s edition of Unlimited is a strong presentation of 76 large-scale projects, powerfully curated by Gianni Jetzer…” “Hold on, Ivan,” interjects Edgar, “aren’t you just reading the press release and adding in the words ‘powerfully’ and ‘strong’?” I ignore the little shit and try keep the thoughts flowing as I hand my bag to the receptionist and am shown to a doctor. I have no problem continuing to carve my art-market report from the granite of my mind while passing bodily fluids for the kind Austrian doctor. However, it is more of a challenge to keep going when he insists on dabbing my tongue with various powders and then checking my reflexes. I motion at Edgar to wrestle the doctor away from my mouth and continue. “Dealers reported strong sales with unconfirmed reports of three-, four-, five-, six-, seven- or eight-figure sums paid for the likes of Chris Burden, Barbara Kruger, Richard Smith, Cory Arcangel, Doug Aitken and…” The doctor gets the better of Edgar and resumes stuffing powders under my tongue. I simply must keep channelling the vivid brilliance of my thinking, so I just keep talking. I look down at the press releases. “Alex Logsdail said he was very pleased with the robust response from collectors who came from Portugal, Bulgaria, Moldova, Belgium, Spain… Hold on, this is the fucking list of results from the Eurovision Song Contest, you moron,” I shout at Edgar, but he’s being led up to our room by a kind yet muscular nurse. I follow, and when I get there I’m confronted by an array of pills and instructions. I undress

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and climb into my Ashley Bickerton ‘Bad’ set of pyjamas that the kind folk at Other Criteria provided me with to celebrate the great man’s London exhibition. I throw the ‘Good’ Bickerton pyjamas to Edgar, proceed to ignore the instructions about the pills and neck all of them with the help of the bottle of Clos de Epeneaux Premier Cru 2005 that I’ve smuggled in. Twelve hours later I stagger from the toilet, which has seen more dirty protests than a Paul McCarthy chocolate factory. Edgar is nowhere to be seen. I am taken for a series of abdominal massages, during which I try to imagine what Franco Noero might say about a robust response to Gabriel Kuri or how the girls from Karma International might talk about the serious interest in Sylvie Fleury. “There are plenty of conversations. Serious collectors are taking time to think things through this year. This is no place for mere speculators,” I mumble at the masseuse. A week later I realise that I have been on a personal odyssey. I have sat in silence and eaten delicate offerings of food. I have enjoyed massages of intimate and, for years, untouched parts of my body. I have experienced nasal reflexology. My bowels have found a new rhythm that is in tune with the almost silent but ever-present rhythm of the world. Most importantly I no longer have feverish dreams about being briefed on the unprecedented institutional interest in Jonathan Horowitz by a spokesperson for Gavin Brown while holed up in the ironic toilets of that ghastly young-people’s bar in Basel. I put on a gehrock as worn by Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and walk from vivamayr up into the mountains. I think of Hogarth’s instructions in his Analysis of Beauty: ‘The principles I mean are fitness, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy and quantity; all of which cooperate in the production of beauty.’ I realise what I must do. Shedding the coat, my trousers, shoes and underpants, I run down the grassy slope towards the lake and with a great shout of release leap into its chilly embrace. I feel that my leap has the trajectory of an ogee about it. I land in the water. I can’t swim. My parents could never afford the lessons. I feel alive. I. Kurator

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