ArtReview November 2020 by ArtReview

Escaping definitions, including this one, since 1949

Nicole Eisenman

A little surreal, a little subversive, very funny, often obscene

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LONDON

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John Akomfrah The Unintended Beauty of Disaster

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ArtReview vol 72 no 7 November 2020

Hitting homers Hey – are things getting back to normal, or are they not? And who’s setting the rules? ArtReview has no idea, but it knows it’s been to see some art irl and has managed to cut down on Zoom time while also trying to keep a grasp on what is and is not allowed to do as a result of the varying degrees of lockdown enforced around its London hq. All of which got ArtReview thinking about the conventions and rules that govern its own sphere of interest. (Art, in case the name is not the dead giveaway, which ArtReview thinks it is.) What better time than now to take a look at the rule breakers, the definition stretchers and a variety of challenges to what we perceive normal to be? Challenges that are not necessarily pandemic related, that is. Rahel Aima looks at the ways in which American painter and sculptor Nicole Eisenman is reimagining the world through her art and exploring new codes for the representation of gender in the public realm. Rosanna Mclaughlin investigates the mythology surrounding Casa Mollino in Turin as ‘a means to examine the way in which history is written by those who own the keys to the museum and shaped to serve their interests’, perpetuating the ‘phantasm’ of male genius. Talking of which… …as a reconstruction of art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, an unfinished (at the time of his death, in 1929) collage of cross-cultural imagery that proved foundational to much Western art-history

Taste

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goes on show in Berlin, Chris Fite-Wassilak examines how the work of German artist Ines Schaber offers suggestions about how we might address and view (or not view) sacred historic imagery in the context of our fetish for archives and conscious and unconscious colonial impulses. Conversely and in parallel, Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré trace the history of Somankidi Coura, a selforganised agricultural cooperative in Mali, founded during the late 1970s by former migrant workers and activists then based in France, as a way of thinking about a politics of decolonisation for agriculture and migration, and of rethinking archives. (Their contribution is the result of an encounter at this past February’s Dhaka Art Summit and, to ArtReview at least, a proof of the value of chance meetings in real life.) In a newly commissioned collage, Brooklyn-based Kameelah Janan Rasheed unpicks and restitches language, mathematics and logic in a reflection on past, present and future times. And just in case you were worried that ArtReview thinks that everything old is bad, and in honour of our newfound embrace of pandemic-enforced ‘slow time’, Carmen Gray takes a look at eighty-two-year-old cult Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian’s first new work in 27 years. He’s 11 years older than ArtReview, you know, and still knocking it out of the park, as ArtReview’s American friends like to say. There’s hope yet… ArtReview

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Oceans, 2020, oil and acrylic on linen, 88 9⁄16 × 64 9⁄16", 224.9 × 164 cm © Nigel Cooke 421_AR.indd 421

Nigel Cooke Oceans November 11, 2020 – January 9, 2021 Geneva @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

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Mend e s Wood DM

Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66 th Street, 2 nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info @ mendeswooddm.com

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Toba Khedoori, Untitled, 2020 (detail)

20/20

David Zwirner

October 29–December 19

537 West 20th Street, New York

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2 OCT 2020 - 3 JAN 2021

Mariana Castillo Deball: Between making and knowing something

FREE EXHIBITION

MODERN ART OXFORD

FIND OUT MORE ONLINE MODERNARTOXFORD.ORG.UK Image courtesy of Mariana Castillo Deball

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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, AVENUE (NIGHT SHADE) (DETAIL), 1991 TARNISH AND SILKSCREEN INK ON BRUSHED ALUMINIUM, 211,5 x 121,5 CM © ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION / ARS, NEW YORK / ADAGP, PARIS, 2020 PHOTO: GLENN STEIGELMAN

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

NIGHT SHADES AND PHANTOMS

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PARIS MARAIS NOVEMBER 2020

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Art Previewed

The Interview Johanna Hedva by Ross Simonini 24

Sounding Off by Patrick Langley 38 Fair Warning by Martin Herbert 40

The New Orthodoxy by J.J. Charlesworth 34

page 24 Johanna Hedva, Los Angeles, 2020. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber. Courtesy the artist

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Art Featured

Nicole Eisenman by Rahel Aima 44

Untitled, 2020 by Kameelah Janan Rasheed 66

Sowing Somankidi Coura by Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré 52

Carlo Mollino by Rosanna Mclaughlin 76

Knowing When to Look Away by Chris Fite-Wassilak 60

Artavazd Pelechian by Carmen Gray 82

page 44 Nicole Eisenman, Night Studio, 2009, oil on canvas, 165 × 208 cm. Courtesy the artist and New Museum, New York

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Art Reviewed

comment, exhibitions & books 88 Matthew Wong, by Ben Eastham Trenton Doyle Hancock, by Megan N. Liberty Grace Before Jones, by Aaron Juneau Curated by, by Max L. Feldman Dana Schutz, by Tom Denman Sung Tieu, by Alex Quicho Ross Bleckner, by Martin Herbert Sammy Baloji, by Digby Warde-Aldam Once more to the barricades, by Louise Darblay Julia Phillips, by Rachel Remick Harlesden Safari Shop Vol 1, by J.J. Charlesworth Junque, by J.J. Charlesworth Simon Munnery, by Oliver Basciano

What is the artworld? by Ben Eastham Toyin Ojih Odutola, by Rahel Aima Elisabeth Wild, by Francesco Tenaglia The Hidden Mod in Modern Art, by Thomas Crow, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud, by Kuniko Tsurita, reviewed by Fi Churchman Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss, reviewed by Neha Kale Hold Up the Sky, by Cixin Liu, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes, by Jill Richards, reviewed by Deepa Bhasthi Beau Geste Press, edited by Alice Motard, reviewed by Oliver Basciano back page 114

page 91 Richard Bernstein, Grace Jones, Inside Gatefold Art for Fame, 1977. Courtesy the estate of the artist

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YOU AND I DON’T LIVE ON THE SAME PLANET

Taipei Biennial 2020 台北雙年展

Planet Escape

Planet Security

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o c n

Al te Gr rnat av ive ity

Planet Terrestrial

贊助单位

Sponsor

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主力贊助

Lead Sponsor

www.tfam.museum 10461臺北市中山區中山北路三段181號 No.181, Sec. 3, Zhongshan N. Rd., Zhongshan Dist., Taipei City 10461, Taiwan.

策展人：布魯諾·拉圖、馬汀·圭納 ; 公眾計畫策展人：林怡華

Critical Zone

Curators: Bruno Latour & Martin Guinard with Eva Lin (public programs)

Z Gaia

2020.11.21–2021.3.14 www.taipeibiennial.org

e Planet Globalization

你我不住在同一星球上

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31:

Women Abb.: Zanele Muholi, Gamalakhe I, 2018

Exhibition Concept after Marcel Duchamp, 1943

Daimler Contemporary Potsdamer Platz Berlin

until June 27, 2021

art.collection@daimler.com www.art.daimler.com

Accompanying publications can be ordered online

Marcel Duchamp. The Curatorial Work art.daimler.com/en/publication/marcel-duchamp-the-curatorial-work/

Duchamp and the Women art.daimler.com/en/publication/duchamp-and-the-women/

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Art Previewed

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Johanna Hedva, 2020. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber

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The Interview by Ross Simonini

Johanna Hedva

“There’s always an overabundance with the gothic – it’s too much, and I love that’

In 2019, after a decade-long break from making music, Johanna Hedva released the album The Sun and the Moon, a black slurry of rich, harsh noise, industrial beats and grainy samples. They describe this music as ‘Hag Blues’ made ‘for those who feel best in caves’. One song repeats the phrase “Man, beauty is so fucking dumb, the fuck” for minutes. Like much of Hedva’s work, the album is a celebration of darkness, an evocation of the swampy zone where the sacred and profane meet. Hedva’s upcoming album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, is radically different in technique though similarly thick in its mood, a lugubrious fuzz of doom guitars and vocal

aching in the form of a eulogy for their mother. “In one song”, Hedva says, “I feel like I am death itself, in others I am my mother, encountering it.” To convey this, Hedva has studied operatic and Korean pansori singing styles as a way of expressing the binary quality of their KoreanEuropean identity through a single throat. Hedva is also a writer who wades into prickly subjects: they court murderous rage, embodies internet conspiracy and waxes with blowjob poetry. Many of these forms are documented in their new collection, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (2020), which includes drawings and documentation from performances. In 2016 they published a manifesto, ‘Sick Woman Theory’, in

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response to a chronic illness that prevented them from engaging in street protests, but offered a new kind of bedridden revolution. Other works include On Hell (2018), a paranoid, profane rant of a novel, and They’re Really Close to My Body (2020), a thoughtful ‘hagiography’ of Nine Inch Nails that treats the band as a kind of mystic saint. Over the last few months, Hedva and I spoke multiple times over video chat for the ArtReview podcast Subject Object Verb. They were demonstrative and warm in these exchanges, laughing more often than their work would suggest. Soon after, we began a parallel exchange online, to capture the satisfyingly direct sting of their writing.

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Sloppy Wiccans ross simonini Is there a philosophical perspective on death that feels most true to you? johanna hedva Well, I’m a goth, so I’m partial to the ones who speak of death as the totalising divine. Georges Bataille, for whom God was death, comes to mind. I like [Eugene] Thacker’s book Cosmic Pessimism, it’s so emo. I spend probably an unhealthy amount of time thinking about the void. I’m pretty obsessed with black holes: black holes as a metaphor for death, and also as an un-metaphor, something so beyond language that it can’t be leveraged as a metaphor, feels very close. When I learned that black holes make noise, that when they collide it causes spacetime to ring, and that this is how we’ve been able to detect and articulate them – that nothingness sings – it made sense to me as a way to speak about death. I was raised by witches, which means that the dead were very much alive in our house. They spoke constantly, and their language was tricky and multilingual, but they rarely spoke directly to you in a language you could understand. Sometimes they spoke in dreams, sometimes they turned the living room lamp on and off. I think any philosophy of death has to account for this, how the dead speak.

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rs Were there any rituals, growing up with witches, that had an influence on you? jh In a way, all of them did, but at the time, being a witch wasn’t popular or trendy like it is now. My mother and my aunt didn’t go around saying they were witches, and I didn’t tell anyone. It was a kind of kooky thing to have to go outside every full moon with your aunt to do a ceremony of pulling energy up from the earth and thanking the goddess. Or that my mother spoke to animals and named all her plants. At the time, it felt like growing up in any belief system: my mother’s family was Catholic, and my father’s family, who are Korean, were Buddhist, and the witchcraft and magic practices of my aunt and mother didn’t feel much different than these other religious practices. As an adult, I’ve come to my own spirituality and practice of mysticism, and I practice witchcraft. To me, being a witch means being in a respectful relationship with energies and forces and cycles of the natural and supernatural worlds, in particular the ones that can’t be seen or measured or explained by normative systems of meaning. rs Do you have a preferred death ritual? Hedva performing at acud for Amplify Berlin, 2019. Photo: Oscar Rohleder

jh Living. rs Did your family practice a specific tradition of witchcraft? jh On my father’s side was the tradition of Korean fortune-telling. And my mother and aunt were working-class white women born and raised in la, so I sometimes like to call them ‘sloppy Wiccans’, in that they weren’t formally initiated into any order, per se, but came to it through what was available to them at that time. This was the 1960s and 70s, so, for example, the books at their local witchy store would have been heavily influenced by Wicca, which was developed around the mid-twentieth century in England. I think it’s important to point out here that most traditions of witchcraft have had to exist fugitively, through oral traditions passed down through generations, and the traditions can diverge greatly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, family to family. For many, many, many years, one did not announce that one was a witch, for fear of actual persecution, so it had to be practised and kept alive in secret. It’s also true, for instance, that I’ve not had nearly as much access to my Korean heritage as I’ve had to the Eurocentric traditions, because, like most first- or second-generation Asian-American immigrants, that history has been lost to colonial migration and trauma.

ArtReview

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Posters for God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce, Berlin, 2020 (with quotes from Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, 2020). Photo: Juan Saez

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above Hedva performing at Performance Space New York as part of I wanna be with you everywhere, 2019. Photo: Mengwen Cao facing page A poster for God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce, Berlin, 2020

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Staying Negative rs When you say that you’re a goth, what do you, personally, mean by that? Is it an identity? jh I will refer to Leila Taylor’s Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul here. It’s one of my favourite books ever, I cannot recommend it enough. When I first read it, I just felt electrocuted with recognition. I agree with Taylor’s definition of goth as a sensibility and perspective on the world: she says it’s ‘the melodramatic élan to the dull hegemonic culture of positivity’, that it’s a dissent against a mainstream insistence on optimism, but specifically it’s very romantic and over-the-top about it. There’s always an overabundance with the gothic, in terms of emotion – it’s too much, too dramatic, too extreme, and I love that. It’s a refusal to just chill out and get over it. The gothic is devoted to the spectres and secrets of society that we’ve tried to repress – ghosts, haunted houses, the weird, the horrifying – and for Taylor, this is political. Darkly is about the social and cultural meanings of the gothic and goth, which is entangled for her personally as a Black goth. For Taylor, Blackness, especially in America, is core to the gothic, and Blackness is inherently gothic, and I think she’s absolutely right. Obviously I cannot relate because I’m not Black, but there was always something for me in being a goth that had to do with my being an outsider to whiteness and normativity, as a KoreanAmerican queer person, as a disabled person. rs Do you feel a part of a larger goth community? jh Not really, but maybe that’s what makes me feel like a goth? Like, I’ve been wearing all black and probably too many capes since I was a kid – at age nine, I used to wander around my neighbourhood in a black cape, I obviously had no friends. I got made fun of and bullied endlessly at school, including by teachers, for what I wore (lots of burgundy velvet). I’ve never been part of any community of goths, but as an adult I would say that most of my friends were goths as kids, or still are. We clock each other in rooms, this ripple of recognition, like, hey, I saw you over there in your Rick Owens, wanna be friends? I think it’s a healthy subset of the queer community too – those of us who were goth loners and queer. Now that I’m older, I feel quite

warm and loving toward younger goths, like when I see piles of goth kids sitting on the sidewalk smoking cloves, I’m like, awwwww yes you, keep writing that poetry! rs What current goth artists are compelling to you? jh Oh my god, so many. Obviously, the deity Diamanda Galás. Just. Everything. About. Her. Although she has explicitly said she’s not goth, but Greek, making a distinction in terms of the Germanic goths. M Lamar is an artist who detonates what’s possible. I am lucky that we’ve been able to play a couple shows together. His work constantly inspires me. Lingua Ignota is someone who I respect and admire immensely, and I love how she makes rage feel almost like wealth, that abundance of what is taboo in her work hits a gothic note for me. My dear friend Isabelle Albuquerque (who drew the

illustrations for my book) just had her first solo show of sculpture open in la, and there’s something a little goth in it for me, the sensuality that slips between the sexual and mystical. I’m a huge fan of Arthur Jafa, and I find his films to have some of this goth perspective that Taylor talks about, their dissent, their teemingness, in terms of Blackness.

Evils of Ableism rs I recently read Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which is a kind of history of pessimism, and I always find that philosophy of meaninglessness to be surprisingly uplifting. jh I haven’t read Ligotti, but yes, I find meaninglessness totally liberating. That’s not to say I don’t believe in meaning, I just take great solace

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in how slippery it is. Meaning is always political, because when it gets bound up with institutions of power it is often used as a weapon, as a way to police. I guess, as someone who suffers because of such weapons, I tend toward the places where meaning is fugitive, exiled, banished, and the fact that it can shapeshift – that meaning is ultimately an invention, a costume that can be worn or taken off – is not just a consolation, but a strategy for how to think and live that helps me get by. rs Another identity you’ve spoken about is that of the Sick Woman, which isn’t limited to gender or even illness. Since you wrote ‘Sick Woman Theory’, has your thinking around this identity evolved? jh I proposed the Sick Woman as an identity that gets ascribed to anyone who is defined by care, by which I mean either that you work in care, or that you need it, and who doesn’t need it? (I don’t like the give/take binary in regards to care, because care doesn’t work like that, but anyway.) No matter your gender, if you are defined by care, you are feminised, rendered ‘weak’ and ‘vulnerable’, and devalued. The ‘sick’ part of the Sick Woman speaks to an identity that gets defined by ableism: if you are defined by the care you give and take, you are a person who is sick, or crazy, or unproductive, or a drain on resources, or dysfunctional, or disordered, or incurable, or worthless, etc, ad infinitum – in other words, your embodied existence deviates from ableist standards. Ableism is, to me, perhaps the most pernicious ideology, because it’s the very bedrock of how we decide whether a person is valued or not. White supremacy, racism, misogyny, transphobia, heteronormativity – all of these things need ableism in order to work because they are means of oppressing people based on an invented hierarchy of superiority and normativity. I wrote ‘Sick Woman Theory’ five, six years ago, and at that time I was still new to disability justice work and its discourse, and to crip theory and politics. I’ve since been very blessed in finding my crip fam (they read ‘Sick Woman Theory’ and came and got me) and being educated by folks in the disability community who’ve been doing this work for years and years. They have given me a much deeper historical background than I had then, which is why elders are so fucking important in any kind of activism, and

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shown me how this work is not over. I hope that the essays I’ve written since then about illness and disability can document my passage through this learning and politic, and help others as they move through it. As any abolition work, any activism work, is, it’s a lifelong process. rs In your essay on Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck, you write about your feelings toward him less like fandom and more like worship, or hagiography. What is the distinction for you? jh In the process of writing that essay I came to understand that the difference between fandom and hagiography primarily has to do with the question of a devotion that is communal versus one that is solitary. Hagiography is the latter. And it is specifically about the writing of one’s devotion, which is an inherently isolated endeavour, and since it’s the writing of the life of someone divine (meaning they are probably dead), it’s doubly cloistered, because it’s an encounter with that which cannot be known. Fandom, for me, is earthly: you find out your favourite rock star’s favourite food, you learn the behind-the-scenes trivia of how your favourite movie was made and you commune with others to share the enthusiasm of this knowledge. Hagiography is otherworldly, unearthly. It’s that someone is unknowable, and hagiography is the writing into this mystery with the knowledge that it can never be known. rs Are you interested in transforming yourself into someone worthy of hagiography?

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jh I think that the transforming of myself into someone worthy of hagiography is the task of my would-be hagiographer.

Hella Mystical rs You’ve often mentioned mysticism as a part of your work and life. Do you see the act of creating art as a kind of mysticism? jh I think it can be if you allow yourself to be annihilated in the process, which is what I try to do when I’m making things. All I’ve ever wanted to be is a humble servant to a craft. I think of mysticism as an attenuation of the self with nothingness, or with the divine (to me, those are often the same), and when things are really cooking creatively, that attenuation happens with the craft itself. It varies depending on the thing, of course: writing a sentence is like giving my entire purpose over to etymology, rhythm, grammar. Like, if I write a perfect sentence, it does not bring me glory. It brings glory to the sentence. Playing music is hella fucking mystical because it’s this annihilation of the self that happens within your body, and you can hear it vibrating through you. And then of course, when you perform live, that all just expands to include everyone in the room, all of their bodies and bones and souls and breath and the walls and ceiling of the room, all yoked together in this sound. Ugh, I really miss playing live, can you tell?

rs What about the experience of taking in art? Is that the same kind of experience for you? jh Oh my god, yes. I am very hungry for that always, and maybe my threshold is low, or maybe I’m actually just dissociating, but I find it in many things. I’ve written about these mystical experiences of seeing live music in the Finck piece, and the Sunn O))) piece [‘A Vacuum Is Also a Plenum and Both Make Music Make Life’, artpractical.com, 2019] and the Lightning Bolt piece [‘The Mysticism of Mosh Pits, Or, The Mess of Sociality, Or, Have You Ever Seen Lightning Bolt Live?’, Third Rail Quarterly, March 2019], and I plan to one day turn that into a book. It happens for me in reading, in looking at paintings, in seeing performances. It happens maybe most frequently in movies, I am deep into movies, I watch a movie a day. Before covid I went to the cinema all the time. Whenever I’m back in la (I split my time between la and Berlin), I stay with my aunt, who is walking distance from a Laemmle’s movie theatre, so I walk down there sometimes several days in a row to see everything they have. One of my favourite things is to go to movies alone. And one of my favourite experiences, just like in life, is that moment right after the trailers end, but the movie hasn’t started yet. Being in that huge dark room, in that moment of total blackness, and there’s this little breath of silence before the screen starts to glow. Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast, Subject Object Verb

ArtReview

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above Hedva performing at Silent Green, Berlin, for the Future Soundscapes Festival, 2019. Photo: Philipp Baumgarten facing page Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, published by Sming Sming and Wolfman Books, 2020. Illustrations by Isabelle Albuquerque. Courtesy Sming Sming Books

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LONDON

ROME–MILAN

SPACE AND COLOUR, RHYTHM AND MATTER 1 OCTOBER – 28 NOVEMBER 2020

TORINO

FONTANA BAJ MANZONI 15 OCTOBER – 19 DECEMBER 2020

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September 24th - January 29th

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Santiago Ydáñez, Untitled, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 260 x 200 cm. / 102 x 78 in.

Santiago Ydáñez

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The backlash over the postponement of the touring exhibition Philip Guston Now is the latest, starkest example of how museums are becoming little more than sites of social and political contestation. The show’s first incarnation, at London’s Tate Modern, had been due to open early next year. Now the show, rethought, reimagined and redone is not projected to go on view until 2024 – ‘until a time’, according to the directors of the four institutions involved (Washington’s National Gallery of Art (nga), the Tate, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), ‘at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted’. In the strange debate that has played out following this panicked decision, commentators have rushed to reassert Guston’s political credentials, both as someone who had experienced ethnic persecution himself and fought against racism in his work, arguing that his paintings of the cartoonish, white-hooded figures of Ku Klux Klansmen that the artist made at the end of the 1960s should be seen, not hidden, precisely because of their relevance to the politics of antiracism in 2020. What has transpired, however, is a disingenuous debate over who gets to determine what political need takes priority in determining whether art gets shown at all.

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The New Orthodoxy

Philip Guston’s kkk paintings must be shown – but not as pawns in the culture wars, argues J.J. Charlesworth

Philip Guston, Riding Around, 1969, oil on canvas, 137 × 200 cm

Citing comments made by an nga spokesperson, ArtNews reported that ‘organizers raised concerns over “painful” imagery including the recurring Ku Klux Klan characters that appear in Guston’s late-period works’. Darren Walker, president of the hugely wealthy philanthropic Ford Foundation (and influential board member of the nga) was even more blunt about the motives for the decision. In a statement to The New York Times, Walker retorted that ‘what those who criticize this decision do not understand is that in the past few months the context in the us has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racial imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it.’ However wrongheaded it is to argue that the intention of an artist, or the historical context in which their work was created, counts for nothing over whether it might offend the assumed sensitivities of contemporary audiences, Walker’s anxious reasoning is understandable: for anyone who has been paying any attention since the controversy that engulfed the 2017 Whitney Biennial’s showing of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016), the idea that images of racial violence might be offensive or even hurtful has become an integral part of the culture wars being fought over what artworks can and cannot be shown in museums, and how they should be ‘interpreted’.

ArtReview

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In this, Walker is only following this fastforming cultural orthodoxy, in which museums have become ultrasensitised to detecting and removing any potential cause for outrage. Yet what has been striking about the general response to this is the derision with which this argument has been met. Rather than applaud the museums for their sensitivity to audiences, commentators have advanced an exaggerated defence of Guston’s politically ‘woke’ credentials. ‘If the National Gallery of Art,’ curator Robert Storr fumed, ‘cannot explain to those who protect the work on view that the artist who made it was on the side of racial equality, no wonder they caved to misunderstanding in Trump times.’ Similarly, Mark Godfrey, the Tate curator responsible for the show’s London iteration, has gone public with his misgivings about the decision, highlighting that Guston (who changed his name from Goldstein in the 1930s) was ‘a teenage leftist from a poor Jewish migrant family that had fled anti-Semitic oppression in Russia’. In other words, Guston knew about social injustice, and whose side he was on, and his work has a political message relevant to today. Meanwhile, others have pointed to the further validation of Guston’s work by contemporary black artists, rebuking the directors’ plea for a pause on the grounds that ‘we feel it is necessary to […] bring in additional perspectives and voices to shape how we present Guston’s work to our public’. Ben Luke, writing in The Art Newspaper, notes the contributions to the exhibition’s catalogue essays by artists Trenton Doyle Hancock and Glenn Ligon – the latter concludes that ‘Guston’s “hood” paintings, with their ambiguous narratives and incendiary subject matter, are not asleep – they’re woke’. What is disingenuous, however, is how critics have sidelined the museums’ concern for audiences in favour of banging the drum for Guston, the enduringly-relevant critic of white supremacy. In a hyperbole-filled open letter, published by The Brooklyn Rail, hundreds of artists, curators and critics allege that the museums’ decision is motored by ‘white guilt’: ‘Rarely has there been a better illustration of “white” culpability than in these powerful men and women’s apparent feeling of powerlessness to explain to their public the true power of an artist’s work – its capacity to prompt its viewers, and the artist too, to troubling reflection and self-examination. But the people who run our great institutions do not want trouble. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience. And they realize that to remind museum-goers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else.’

The signatories are right that ‘great institutions do not want trouble’; but it is sheer hypocrisy – one could say even moral gaslighting – to pretend one has no responsibility for this current state of affairs. After all, what these commentators seem reluctant to acknowledge is that this capitulation is not a one-off, nor is it simply an act of extreme but understandable oversensitivity to the immediate present. This has been years in the making, as contemporary critics have increasingly defined as ‘problematic’ the continued presentation of artworks made in another place and time, or the presentation of contemporary work that offends the narrowing criteria determined by an increasingly mainstream form of identity politics. In this battle over what museums show, even rich and powerful institutions have largely beaten a retreat in the face of unceasing criticism of their failure to live up to the political and ethical demands of their critics; first over sponsorship, then over governance, and lastly over under-representation and the lack of diversity in museum programmes and staffing.

Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969, oil on canvas, 122 × 107 cm

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At every turn, museums have shown themselves guilt-ridden and apologetic for their institutional shortcomings – promising always to do better, yet never succeeding. With each apology and retreat, museums have further emboldened their critics to dictate even more how institutions should behave, what they should show, and how they should show it. With the open letter, those critical of the museums’ decision are confident enough to tell them what to do, and why. ‘We demand that Philip Guston Now be restored to the museums’ schedules,’ the letter declares, ‘and that their staffs prepare themselves to engage with a public that might well be curious about why a painter – ever self-critical and a standard-bearer for freedom – was compelled to use such imagery.’ But in draping themselves in Guston’s reputation as a ‘standard-bearer for freedom’, these signatories, and others who choose to hype Guston’s supposedly fearless political radicalism, are being opportunistic. In truth, the case for Guston as a strongly political artist is complicated. As an example of the vulnerabilities and compromises of an artist’s encounter with their political reality, Guston is an ambiguous and all-too-human figure: a young Jewish artist who, cleaving to the communist left of the 1930s, tracked the socialist realist figuration of artists such as Diego Rivera, Guston turned, like many of his generation, to abstraction as the political climate in the us turned violently against the left, as McCarthyism hunted down communists and socialists and the last thing an artist wanted to be seen as was ‘un-American’. Meanwhile, the man who Anglo-Saxonised his name from ‘Goldstein’ to ‘Guston’ to allay the anxieties of his future in-laws at a time of rising antisemitism in the us, does not sit easily as the emblem of a self-critical ‘white’ artist fighting white supremacy. Guston’s America was, after all, the one in which Ivy League colleges enforced quota limits for Jews and where, in 1944, President Roosevelt could still chide his (Jewish) treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau with the observation, ‘You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.’ So when Godfrey asks, ‘can we locate [Guston’s] allyship also in his act of selfscrutiny when he considered how he was implicated in White supremacy?’, he risks erasing the reality of Guston’s own Jewish experience of wasp antisemitism, while reading the current critical preoccupations of a monolithic ‘whiteness’ backwards onto a time when the concept of undifferentiated whiteness had barely taken shape. Guston’s late return to politicised figuration, in the midst of the tumult of the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, seems more

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above Philip Guston, Open Window II, 1969, oil on panel, 81 × 101 cm all images © the estate of the artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

like an artist encouraged to change by the general tide of political events, rather than an unstinting assertion of his own political freedom. But failing to oppose the tide of events is also what these museums are doing in postponing the show. The strange ‘woke’ cultural orthodoxy that has emerged in the last few years is not McCarthyism, but it is still one in which any person or any institution asserting a different perspective on current conflicts over race, or gender – or for that matter any issue of serious disagreement in the new culture wars – will likely find themselves facing sustained outrage and censure. Punch-drunk from their failure to justify themselves institutionally and culturally, museums now fight shy of anything that (they imagine) will bring them more negative publicity. Rather than face that possibility, the institutions have chosen to absent themselves while they ‘reframe’. And yet, museums are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. As many have noted, the three years to 2024 seem like an implausibly long time in which to reframe a show. But it is not the Guston show that will likely be reframed. It is the art institutions themselves: there are now potentially three years for new boards of trustees to be appointed; for directors and curators to be replaced; for mission statements to be rewritten; and for programmes to be torn up to make way for art whose ‘interpretation’ will not fall foul of the new orthodoxy.

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In September I visited Goldsmiths cca in South London. It was my first visit to an art venue since spring. A drumbeat was emanating from the building’s upper floors, thump after muffled thump. The sound grew louder as I stepped inside, pinging sharply around the galleries. After months of encountering sound through headphones or laptop speakers, that unruly reverb confirmed that, really, there’s no substitute for the physical impact of encountering art in the flesh. I remembered a line from Pascal Quignard’s epigrammatic and ironically titled The Hatred of Music (1996), in which the French writer observes that ‘to hear is to be touched from afar’. I followed the sound of drumming to its source: a luminous, high-ceilinged room on the museum’s second floor. The pristine white walls were decorated with rectangular sound-dampening panels, also white, that brought to mind minimalist sculpture. In the far corner, the artist Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom was seated behind a drumkit. As he played the hi-hat, the cymbals’ harsh, high frequencies shivered in the upper reaches of the room. When he hit the kick, by contrast, the floorboards vibrated under the soles of my feet, Sounding Off making my shin bones hum like tuning forks. The artist tapped the snare with his drumstick: one, two, three, four. For Quignard, the physical vibrations of which rhythms are composed create an ‘involuntary intimacy between juxtaposed bodies’. One reason we listen to music in public is to feel part of something larger than ourselves, united with other bodies by our subordination to communal tempo. That process felt differently charged in the context of social distancing. I pulled up the qr-coded exhibition guide on my phone. The premise of the piece, titled Before, During & After, read like an anxiety dream. Over the course of this autumn exhibition, Boakye-Yiadom was learning to play drums in public, every fluffed beat and dropped stick gazed at by strangers. The potential for embarrassment was heightened by the assumption that the works of art we encounter in galleries, whether we like or dislike them, will at least be finished. But open-endedness is key to this artist’s approach. In his sculptures, videos and sound installations, drums are remixed and repurposed. Recordings of live performances soundtrack later videos. Packed-away kits become table stands. Drums point to an interest in hybridity and cultural cross-pollination, an element central to tribal rituals, nightclubs, jazz breaks and historical battlefields. But this was the first time he’d played them himself. Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Before, During & After, 2020 Headphones on, a clear ppe visor over his face, (installation view, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London).Photo: Mark Blower Boakye-Yiadom’s gaze was fixed on a Hantarex

Patrick Langley asks, Can we keep going at this rhythm?

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monitor playing a prerecorded lesson by one of five invited drummers. He watched, waited, played. Paused. He shifted from snare to hi-hat and started again. As musical performances go, it wasn’t exactly Elvin Jones. Nor was it trying to be. By foregrounding the repetitions, failures and improvements essential to the unglamorous business of honing one’s musical chops, Boakye-Yiadom was really drawing attention to time and to the patterns we impose on it. The only other artistdrummer I could think of was Walter De Maria. Active on the 1960s New York music scene, he was for a short time a member of an early incarnation of The Velvet Underground. During this time he recorded two plashy, improvised ‘drum compositions’ in which he overdubbed repetitive, jazz-inflected rhythms with field recordings: the chirping insects of Cricket Music (1964) and the thrashing waves of Ocean Music (1968). Incorporated into the soundtrack for his 1969 film Hardcore (and rereleased by Gagosian on a 2016 cd), these compositions coincided with De Maria’s pivot from objects to environments. Music was crucial to the evolution of what the artist called his ‘very clean, quiet, static, non-relational sculptures’ – such as his less-than-flattering Portrait of John Cage (1961), a punning work depicting the composer as a tall, narrow cage – to the Land art for which he is best known. In an accidental echo of De Maria’s interest in elemental sounds, heavy rain was falling – drumming – on the centre’s roof in a roaring accompaniment to BoakyeYiadom’s stop-start beats. A few days later I returned to the gallery. The drum kit had been packed away and stacked against the wall, except for the kick, which, like a sign in an absent shopkeeper’s window, read: ‘Here soon’. But the artist was not entirely absent. On the Hantarex monitor was a video. Collaged from audio recordings of BoakyeYiadom’s drum lessons and closeup footage of snares, hi-hats and kick drums, the piece was evolving over the course of the exhibition as the artist added to and reedited the footage. Where De Maria was torn between commitments to the stage and the gallery, and after Ocean Music abandoned drumming, Boakye-Yiadom identifies in such tensions raw material for art. In his 1991 essay ‘Sounds Authentic’, Paul Gilroy attributes to Quincy Jones the aperçu that ‘the times are always contained in the rhythm’. Drumbeats reflect the cultures from which they emerge just as potently as images do. And with lockdown uncertainty looming, baby-step rhythms felt apt.

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‘Some scientists,’ Frank Zappa used to say in interviews, ‘claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen.’ In a similar spirit, we might say that the foundational material of the contemporary artworld is average art. Toss a brick in a gallery district and you’ll hit some – work by young practitioners that, however long you linger and poke at it, scans as competent but says nothing new, work by big names on autopilot, etc – and, in terms of response, it delivers the worst the artworld has to offer: a sort of null, why-did-I-bother flatlining. Some days, after touring a bunch of such exhibits, you might long for not even a good show but a fucking atrocious one, just to feel something. Emerging from such a debacle not long ago, I facetiously asked my wife if she’d enjoyed it. Do I have tomatoes on my eyes, she said. (Derision is idiomatic.) Anyway, at this point I’d like to thank the Frieze Art Fair, which I saw this week via my laptop screen, for multiple complexly structured parcels of affect. Admittedly, as I nosed through online viewing rooms, there were numerous or perhaps innumerable works that in themselves didn’t quicken the pulse a jot, just like the real thing: galleries sallying forth their big names, or works on paper by their big names, the whole experience enlivened mainly by the visibility of the prices and the absence of any sense of rush on the viewer’s part. There was a ‘like’ button to smash below each artwork; I preferred not to. What the fair and the paraphernalia around it managed to achieve remotely, though – and this admittedly is the perspective of someone who missed the irl satellite and piggybacking events in London – was an ambient melancholy intermingled, on occasion, with bathos. At one point I received an email invite to an ‘online book signing’, at which it was promised I’d have a brief window of time to interact with the artist. Skipped that. On the fair site, meanwhile, viewers were encouraged to type their name into digital guestbooks to let the galleries know they’d clicked on the pages. (Probably, given the inestimable leakiness of the internet, the exhibitors have other if more laborious ways of finding out.) I appreciate the inventiveness of these substitutes for intimacy – necessity being the mother of invention – without quite being used, yet, to feeling somewhat sorry for galleries or fair directors. The work on show, meanwhile, tended towards sublime detachment from current events, either because their effects aren’t showing up in artistic practice

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Fair Warning

Martin Herbert has a heartfelt moment in the virtual viewing rooms

Dan Mitchell in Frieze Viewing Room, 2020, screenshot. Fair use

yet or because it would spook and depress those famously skittish beasts, collectors. (At least one exhibition I saw recently in Berlin was, according to the artist, scrubbed clean of aspects that might recall the pandemic.) Onscreen, flat room after flat room of a parallel dimension, often with the same expensive chair in the righthand corner and lots of Average Art alongside it, began to evince a strange, dissociative feeling. I zoned out, and found myself mindlessly toggling between two images of a Tobias Rehberger neon that reads ‘Without Love’ (£20–50k), one in a lighted space and the other in darkness. Maestro of the light switch, that was me. I clicked my way towards the Focus section, where as expected there were some younger names to take note of, but then made the mistake of opening an online interview – also on the site – with Kim Jones, artistic director for Dior Menswear and Fendi womenswear and couture, who had been invited to pick his favourite works from the fair and say a few words about them. Thanks to Kim, I now know that Howard Hodgkin’s work is ‘all about colour’, that Bill Viola is ‘very inspiring’, that a particular John Chamberlain sculpture is ‘unusual, exciting’ and that the interviewee is on first-name terms with the artists he likes. Reading this felt not unlike watching a car slide sideways down a distant hillside, or perhaps like eavesdropping on conversations in the Frieze vip bar, back in the day. As for the talks, I’m glad the discourse is being furthered but haven’t gotten around to them yet, having a backlog of podcasts to listen to. What was absent from the digital fair experience was, of course, the tiring aspect of tromping round booths; when your feet don’t hurt and your irritability level is relatedly lower, you’re more open to the spectacle accumulating, click by click: technology-enabled survival on the part of galleries and fair franchises with added art-fashion crossovers alchemising stupidity. What was especially good was that I could see it from Berlin without a mask on, and absorb plenty of information pertaining to the infrastructure of contemporary art: if not quite fair-as-gesamtkunstwerk, this was an artefact of a moment in deep flux, in which even middling art was tangibly wreathed in a larger mood, if hardly saved by it. At Frieze London in bygone days that mood might have been perky, nervy, champagne-fuelled excitement – now it’s ominousness, diminishment and even nostalgia, both short- and long-term. But at least, even through the screen, you could feel it.

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APS-235x300mm-1019.pdf 1 2020/10/19 20:07

CMY

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New launch date New agendas New list Everything you need to know about a year that taught us how powerless we really are The 2020 Power 100 Online and in print this December

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Art Featured

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Nicole Eisenman by Rahel Aima

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Offering new codes for representing race, gender and sexuality, the artist is a key cultural barometer for our time

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preceding pages Fountain, 2017 (installation view, Where I Was, It Shall Be, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2020). Photo: Ken Adlard

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above Where I Was, It Shall Be, 2020, oil on canvas, 165 × 208 cm. Photo: Thomas Barratt

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People love to play a round of art-historical I Spy when they encounter spectator. The more recent versions of her fountain include chlorina Nicole Eisenman painting. Her multidecade career synthesises ated water for kids to play in and benches for tired parents or nannies. everything from German expressionism and social realism to comic For her 2019 Whitney Biennial participation, she installed a monubooks and tv culture, sometimes incorporating multiple styles mental procession of figures on a rooftop terrace. She wanted to recreate within the same canvas. It resists categorisation, yet like porn, you the visceral, bodied “scale change” felt at a protest, at once buoyed by the know it when you see it. A little surreal, a little subversive, very funny, energy and dwarfed by the mass of people, describing it as “this feeling often obscene. Her paintings blend social chronicle with commen- of power you can get when you’re in a crowd and walking amongst tary and feature a recurring cast of friends and lovers, but strangers, these figures that are bigger than you. It changes your sense of scale in when they appear, are depicted with the rare warmth of intimacy. the universe: you feel humbled by it, you feel small in a good way, and I imagine she must be a tremendous people-watcher and wonder how you feel powerful in that connection to the group.” But she couldn’t resist a little fart humour either: one sculpture features a fog machine the current season of isolation has impacted her practice. Speaking over the phone from Brooklyn, Eisenman says that that periodically blows smoke out of one of the protagonists’ asses. not much has changed: she makes the short bike ride to her studio Eisenman’s breakout came at the 1995 Whitney Biennial, where and carries on uninterrupted, making work, quietly, by herself, she showed a monumental wpa mural-esque apocalyptic scene of a every day. Mentally, however, it’s bombed-out Whitney Museum: at a different story. “You go through its centre, the artist, still painting Rather than distilling the body down to a waves of disbelief and dysphoria amidst the bodies and rubble and few features, her paintings abstract race and and depression. Everyone has their rent canvases. The work eerily gender while remaining solidly figurative own techniques for keeping yourprefigures the much later controself from going into the weeds,” versies that would lead to board she explains. This general mood has seeped into one painting she chairman Warren Kanders resigning after Eisenman and seven other has made this year – dogs frolic in the foreground of a rather English participants withdrew from the 2019 biennial (after the resignation, pastoral – which will be on view in her first show for her new gallery, the artists reinstated their works). Hauser & Wirth, in Somerset (making it her third gallery, with Anton She is a rare painter who seems to get better with time, no matter Kern and Vielmetter Los Angeles). The same dynamic suffuses her how impossible it might seem that she could surpass her past achievepractice as a whole: part escape valve, part reimagining the world as ments; she received a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ in 2015 for quite literally ‘[restoring] cultural significance to the representation of the it could or should be. In recent years, Eisenman has also become known for her sculp- human form’. But we can understand her as a master abstractionist tures, following a star turn at the 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster. too. Rather than distilling the body down to a few features – some Sketch for a Fountain, a collection of bathers lounging around a small eyes, a mouth, some genitals – her paintings abstract race and gender pool, gained notoriety when it was repeatedly vandalised with swas- while remaining solidly figurative. tikas and cartoon penises and was even decapitated; permanent iterAs such, her paintings serve as a kind of barometer for cultural attiations have since been installed in Dallas and Boston. Sculpture, for tudes towards gender and sexuality. Early bawdy paintings like Betty Eisenman, necessitates additional considerations of both usage and Gets It (1994), which features prehistoric tradwife Betty Rubble getting

Self-Portrait with Exploded Whitney, 1995 (installation view, Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1995)

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preceding pages Untitled, 2020, paper, collage and paint, 102 × 152 cm. Photo: Thomas Barratt

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above Betty Gets It, 1993, ink on paper, 129 × 101 cm

facing page Untitled, 2020, paper and collage, 77 × 58 cm. Photo: Thomas Barratt

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it from her next door neighbour Wilma Flintstone, and the 1990s iden- orgiastically crowded in the same painting, as with the seductively titarian impulse led to Eisenman’s inclusion in not one but two shows louche houseparty of Another Green World (2015). She sees portraying titled Bad Girls. Then, her characters were identified as lesbians; today, skin tones as an unavoidable imperative when painting, one from the same audience might understand them as genderqueer. which sculpture allows some release. “There are times in my painting Past bodies of work have leaned heavily on allegory and meta- where I don’t pay attention to localised colour and skin could be any phor, but Eisenman generally feels pinned down by the limitations of colour. There are other times where I’m much more specific and it’s language, and the way it reduces bodies – including her body of work like Caucasian skin or brown skin or Black skin.” – to a series of references. But this lexical change is one that Eisenman, As for her astonishing command and subsequent bricolaging of who identifies as genderfluid, welcomes. “I was so resistant to being Western art history? “I get bored,” she explains, citing her admiration called a lesbian painter because it felt just too narrow and confining,” for the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald and her ability to switch she explains, adding that in recent years she has come around to liking between styles and genres as the subject requires. “It’s a combination the identification of lesbian again. “It does begin to feel more radical of being indecisive, being bored and just liking the way things look when you have straight, married people being like, ‘we are queer!’ when they’re next to each other, things that don’t match each other.” We all know people like that.” The past two years, following I think of a missive in Artforum a papermaking residency, she has “I’m so aware of the problems of earlier this year from Ridykeulous, been experimenting with paper representing female bodies, genderqueer the curatorial collective Eisenman pulp, creating posters with an albodies, trans bodies, and putting them cofounded with Al Steiner to demost sculptural quality. “It’s a really marginalise queer and feminist art, strange process,” she explains. “You in the public realm,” Eisenman says which contained the excellent line take liquid pulp, you squeeze it out and it comes out and flops in sloppy lines, so there’s a real limit to – and frankly, clarion call – ‘separatism is more than a mere 6’. Questions of representation and responsibility dogged her early the mark-making you can do, and what kind of texture you can get.” years, and have more recently returned to the fore, especially when Instead of trying to fight it and make painterly work, she let the mateconsidering figures installed in the public realm. “I’m so aware of rial dictate the end product, which she alternately describes as crude the problems of putting female bodies, genderqueer bodies, trans and charming. The resulting posters are beautifully blobby and blurry, bodies, representing different kinds of bodies and putting them and feature slogans like incelesbian, and nicole sarah sarah in the public realm and exposing them to potential violence,” nicole, in reference to her girlfriend, the writer and critic Sarah she says. And while attacking statues is not the same thing as the Nicole Prickett. Along with the fountain and a scaled-down Whitney current epidemic of violence against (particularly Black) trans people, processional, they will also be on view in Somerset. Unlike her usual it still holds symbolic charge. Even if, sombre palette, these works are awash in Münster, these were random local in bright oranges and the baby pinks teenagers and not transphobic neoand blues of a wildfire-starting gender Nazis (Eisenman’s grandparents fled reveal – except here the punchline is, Germany in 1937), “what you end up there is no gender. ar with is a representation of a trans body being defiled. It’s frightening Where I Was, It Shall Be, an exhibition of new works by Nicole Eisenman, and ugly.” is on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset The same concerns extend to how she depicts race and ethnicity. Musthrough 10 January tardy yellows are particularly common, joined by blues and greens as Rahel Aima is a writer based in New York well as the usual flesh tones – often all

all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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In the Footsteps of Somankidi Coura by Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré

How a Malian farming collective offers lessons in the importance of solidarity and the value of art

whose work focused on migrant-worker The farming cooperative Somankidi struggles. For this generation, it was Coura was established in Mali in 1977 by about claiming a position within the 14 people, all of whom had activist and worker movement and activist cinema, migrant-worker backgrounds. They had but with a specific agenda and specific first met in Paris at the Cultural Assoclaims, in a dreadfully racist and neociation of African Workers in France (actaf), a collective established to supcolonial context (this was only a few years port ongoing liberation struggles in forafter the Algerian War), and to connect to the ongoing anti-imperial and anticolomer Portuguese colonies in Africa and the nial liberation struggles on the African migrant-workers’ movement in France, continent and elsewhere. actaf may which was seeking better living and have been a cover for militant activities working conditions. Following repeatin support to the liberation struggle in ed droughts in the Sahel during 1973 and Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde and 74, the group began to think of alternative Guinea Bissau, but we should not forget economic and farming practices for the the role of culture in those fights. For region’s villages. After taking up agriculMaoists from the French petite bourtural training internships in the French geoisie aiming to follow the precepts of countryside, the workers then travelled to the Cultural Revolution or from Front the Senegal River near the Malian city of Culturel (a cultural and political moveKayes, a crossroads of migration, in order ment denouncing Senegal president to set up the cooperative. Local authoriLéopold Sédar Senghor’s neocolonialties, in agreement with the villagers of ism), even for political leaders such as Somankidi, gave the group 60 hectares Amílcar Cabral, culture and agriculture of land. The land was situated opposite were understood as political tools for an agronomic research centre housed in liberation. As these struggles intersected a former colonial plantation for sisal and Billboard for the Somankidi Coura agricultural cooperative, a state collectivised granary built during with a learning process centred on image1980s. Photo: Bouba Touré the socialist regime of Modibo Keïta, making and cultural activism, Somankidi Mali’s first president. Of this land, 25 riverside hectares were turned Coura’s members grew to reflect on the circumstances of their own into polyculture gardens fed by a common irrigation system, while exploitation and the means for imagining new futures. Inspiration the rest was used alternatively for pasture (during the dry season) came in forms set out in cofounder Siré Soumaré’s book Après and farming (during the three months of hivernage, the rainy season). l’émigration, le retour à la terre (After emigration, a return to the land; Somankidi Coura (meaning ‘the new Somankidi’ in Bambara), by now 2001); from another Sokhona film, Safrana (1976), a speculative fiction a village of 300 inhabitants, rapidly became a regional model for other that envisioned the group’s settlement in Africa; and from the play migrant-return projects or local farming groups. The cooperative Immigration: Which Solution? (1976), performed in migrant-workers’ also cofounded the free Rural Radio of Kayes and a regional farmer dormitories by members of actaf and contextualising the proposed network, two institutions ‘led by and for peasants’, with educa- return to Africa. tional programmes held in different languages, including Bambara, The story of Somankidi Coura comes down to stories of displaceSoninke and Fula. ment, and their subsequent unfolding into a movement of thoughts: Documenting migrant workers and other sans-papiers struggles forced migration from countryside to city, from south to north, were early items on the agenda of collective cofounder Bouba Touré, the colonial capitalist production regime following in the wake of who during the 1970s had begun photographing his foyer (migrant- slavery; followed by a repositioning through self-education and housing block) in St Denis in France. Later, working as a projectionist, political activities in France, in relation to liberation struggles and he met filmmaker Sidney Sokhona and participated in the making of Pan-Africanism; to a militant and pedagogical return to the south and Nationalité: Immigré (1975), which dealt with struggles in the director’s the rural, facing climate disruption and neocolonial conditions. own foyer, rue Riquet, in Paris. Both Sokhona and Touré were influThe desire to produce traces, a memory of the migrant’s journey, enced by the films of the French-Mauritian director Med Hondo, and was part of a decolonisation process, just as necessary as the deconstruction of the neocolonial form of agriculture their work sits in dialogue with members of preceding pages Kaba Tounkara (left) and Bouba and governance in rural areas, and the quesCinelutte, the filmmaking group born of May Touré in the bed of the Senegal River, 68, and other similarly militant filmmakers Somankidi Coura, Mali, 1977. Photo: Bouba Touré tioning of the role and practice of the peasant

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Preparation of the land, Somankidi Coura, 1978. Photo: Bouba Touré

Threshing the millet, Tafacirga, 1976. Photo: Bouba Touré

Seed nursery, Somankidi Coura, 1978. Photo: Bouba Touré

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Gardens, Somankidi Coura, 2015. Photo: Bouba Touré

and herder within the liberation movement and society at large. of peasants’ history in Europe and witnessed forms of highly mechaThese stories were mostly missing from national narratives, which nised intensive farming and the pollution caused by the use of fertioften assimilated the ossified social classes and categories inherited lisers and pesticides, as well as a system of entangled debts in which from colonisation, or instrumentalised them, instead of attending peasants were doomed to become workers for the agrobusiness. There to their transformation and moving forward. After independence, was not much that could be applied back on the banks of the Senegal migrant workers were often considered traitors to the national River, but the training enabled a longstanding network of solidary project; peasants were given the role of protosocialist communities and partnership, and furnished a realistic assessment of the work and within the African socialist nation-state building, but were almost resilience that would be required to settle back in Mali. never consulted to define new agricultural programmes. The return wasn’t a return to an origin, to the home village of During the Sahel droughts, which brought famine and acceler- anyone in the group, but was chosen as a crossroads of migration, ated the rural exodus, actaf members, who were all from rural back- near a sort of ‘archaeological’ site of agricultural infrastructure that grounds in the West Indies or West Africa, recognised the necessity contained the historical layers that had first forced the exodus, the to reflect on the system that brought them to where they were and to legacy of slavery and colonisation, and the incompleteness of indetake the problem at its roots. The colonial extraction of the soil, the pendence in the countryside. The return enabled different systems monoculture cash-crop politics in many countries after independ- of knowledge to emerge, other speculative fictions to be imagined – especially around modes of cultivaence and the exploitation of labour forces were understood to be at the tion and the building of infrastrucThe return enabled different systems origin of the Sahel famine, but also tures to decolonise the technoscience of knowledge to emerge, other fiction of development politics and of their own journey as migrants. speculative fictions to be imagined There was an urge on Touré’s farming. The experience of the cooperpart to tell the history of the people ative to this day is a story of the creation of the Senegal River, peasants, fishermen or herders, Soninke, Fula and creolisation of farming technologies and practices within the or Bambara. To speak about the traditional family gardens near the requirements of permaculture to enable a region to sustain its ecosysriver, and the millet and sorghum fields that did not produce enough tems and provide people with food sovereignty, and to integrate the to pay the colonial taxes. To speak about generations of kids who were migration economy into the making of new futures. sent to do seasonal labour (Nametan), to work on the peanut cashConsequently, the image-making around the farming cooperative crop fields sometimes a thousand kilometres from home to sustain was all about escaping the persistent, paternalist, racist, colonial gaze their families; about the subcontracting of the herder population to present in the fabric of the working class, in the media coverage of the harvest gum arabic for colonial trade companies, and the displace- Sahel droughts or even within the ‘third world’ movement in France. ment of entire populations for forced labour in colonial plantations, It was about experimenting with forms of liberation and transmisproduct of the intense slave trade along the river. What could be done sion through the making of militant photographic and movingin the village to give people the opportunity to sustain themselves, to image works and their circulation, the production of theatre plays fight the drought when it comes and to think of futures other than and communiqués, parties, screenings in the foyers, even blood drives. forced migration to support their relatives? These contexts allowed new speculative futures to emerge. The aim During the six-month agricultural training organised by mem- of the archive project, Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive, was bers of actaf in the Marne, south of Paris, participants learned bits first to acknowledge and recompose a ‘ciné-geography’1, an assemblage

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Madjiguène Cissé (centre), spokesperson of the sans-papiers of St Ambroise and St Bernard, at a demonstration, Paris, 30 March 1996. Photo: Bouba Touré

Demonstration, Paris, 30 March 1996. Photo: Bouba Touré

Demonstration with sans-papiers from Foyer Charonne, Paris, 1992. Photo: Bouba Touré

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Ibrahima Camara (left) and Fodé Moussa Diaby stand by a billboard documenting the installation and performance of the play Immigration: quelle solution? on the first anniversary of Somankidi Coura, January 1978. Photo: Bouba Touré

Exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of Somankidi Coura, January 2018

Xeex Bi Du Jeex – A Luta Continua (still), 2018, a film by Raphaël Grisey, Bouba Touré and Kàddu Yaraax

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of films, documents and cultural and militant productions that had at Porte de la Chapelle in Paris, in Calais, or in the administrative detenvanished or became invisible due to the precarious conditions of tion centres is worse than ever, and the refugee crisis of summer 2015 their existence. This happened to be part of a broader tendency for never received the same support it had in Germany, for instance. the digitisation of amateur and militant archives by activist groups Rural exodus and emigration to Europe hasn’t disappeared from and researchers that emerged during the 2000s in France2 and else- the Senegal River, but it is now less than in regions such as Sikasso, where building up what might be termed a ‘migrant radical tradi- at the border with Guinea and Ivory Coast – perhaps the result of tion’3 through the constitution of a radical archive. Sowing Somankidi the multiplication and consolidation of local projects that may have Coura, a Generative Archive, via a practice of collaborative filmmak- received support from the diaspora, such as school, farming and ing, performance, research and publishing, aims to keep the collec- health-centre networks. Nonetheless the situation has been deteritive’s spirit alive and to engage with the stories of translation, muta- orating in the region. After eight years of civil war, a military coup tions and becoming of the archives in space and time. One example and the yet unclear outcome of the transition period, state governis our collaboration with Kàddu Yaraax, the famous theatre com- ance in Mali has almost vanished. This, in addition to the absence pany from Dakar: in 2018 we organof peace negotiations in the north ised a two-week workshop that and the complete failure of a French The Somankidi Coura archive, via a used elements of the archives as a military intervention and occupation, practice of collaborative filmmaking, may well cause further expansion of point of departure, alternating with performance, research and publishing, the civil war to other regions. The Theatre of The Oppressed exercises and other improvisations set up by effect of covid-19 politics got the nickaims to keep the collective’s spirit alive Kàddu Yaraax. This resulted in Xeex name of ‘Coronafamine’ in Dakar. Bi Du Jeex – A Luta Continua, a theatre performance and a film: both The informal economy, especially in cities, turned extremely precara newly generated archive in itself and a possible container for the ious from one day to the next due to lockdown restrictions. Those who archives, like a calabash gourd or Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag’. have had time to worry about the virus as such are the privileged ones. The situation in France and in Europe for refugees today is signifi- The covid-19 situation, and the expansion of zoonotic diseases globcantly worse than when Somankidi Coura was established. During the ally due to forms of farming and extraction capitalism on the African 1970s in France, it was nearing the end of the Trentes Glorieuses – the continent, reinforce the need for solidarity-farming networks and a 30 years of postwar promise and expansion – and the very beginning variety of artistic forms such as Somankidi Coura to bring up narratives of the repressive migration politics, but one could still fly to France or and practices that enable the dismantling of colonial structures. ar take a ferry without being arrested. During the 1990s the sans-papiers movement exposed the racial capitalism at play, and public opinion Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré’s Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive (2019) is published by Archive Books was supportive. Nowadays the precarity of refugees in France, whether

Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive, 2017 (installation view, Archive Kabinett, Berlin, 2017) all images Courtesy the authors

1 Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray, ‘The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography’, Third Text, vol 25, issue 1, January 2011

2 Historical examples of such are the work done by the association Génériques (odysseo.generiques.org), and by the Agence IM’média (agence-immedia.org)

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3 Thinking of Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983)

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Knowing When to Look Away by Chris Fite-Wassilak

Stefan Pente, Ines Schaber, An approach to address something that one would have never dared to say anything about; except through symbolic practices (still), from Unnamed Series, 2008

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A contemporary project addressing the use of sacred historical imagery renegotiates archival and colonial impulses

Ines Schaber: Notes on Archives, 2018 (installation view, Camera Austria, Graz). Photo: Markus Krottendorfer

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This is a story with many beginnings, and many possible endings. One corner of Schaber’s exhibition featured Unnamed Series (2008– One starting point might be the Hopi people and their culture, 09), a set of actions responding indirectly to the publishing of the who have for thousands of years been part of the arid southwest of 1895 images of the Hopi, produced in collaboration with fellow artist what became known as the North American continent: a culture of Stefan Pente. On one wall was a set of fairly nondescript photographs oral histories and traditions based around stewardship of the land. of doors and backlots in Santa Fe, taken by the American photograAnother starting point might be the European and Anglo settlers pher Karen Peters. Next to that was a slide projector with no slides and homesteaders moving West across the continent during the in it, facing towards a whited-out rectangle on the wall. It wasn’t nineteenth century to claim land, and the accompanying treaties running, but putting on a pair of headphones that accompanied the and betrayals that saw Native Americans pushed into reservation work, Unnamed Series, Part 2 (2009), you could hear dictated a letter that silos and forced into assimilating with these newcomers, and their Pente and Schaber had written to the person who had taken those sense of property and propriety. Or it might begin more specifi- images back in 1895: art-historian Aby Warburg. cally in December 1895, when a young German man was brought to “Dear Aby,” they read, “If we are to show you these images and Hopiland by a Mennonite missionary. The German brought with accompany them with our words and thoughts, we do so to share with him a handheld camera, taking a few dozen hurried and out-of-focus you our concerns about the taking of pictures and their growing life. shots of what he saw in the villages, including several of the Hopi’s We know that we will not be able to make them disappear, but we dances and seasonal rituals. By the 1930s, in response to the commer- hope that we can help them become something else. What were they cial exploitation and wide publication of sacred imagery, the Hopi supposed to represent? What are they representing today?” Warburg’s had banned visitors from taking photographs entirely; and though visit to the Native Americans of the southwest has gained a mythical the German man never publicised his photos from that trip – and status among the art historian’s fans and scholars. He had spoken only asked that they never be published – after his death, in 1926, they intermittently of his trip in the years after, but most notably, after were printed in books, in 1939, 1988 and 1995; and even after requests suffering from depression and spending several years in a mental asyfrom the Hopi to cease their publication, they were published again lum, gave a lecture with accompanying slides about his understanding of their symbology to a small audience at the asylum, in order in 1998, and yet again in 2018. My own knowledge of this story begins in 2018, while visiting to prove his mental health. In the lecture he compared the rituals of the American southwest’s ‘enclave of Camera Austria’s exhibition space Like any pictures that appear on our primitive humanity’, as he called it, in Graz, where German artist Ines to similar imagery in Ancient Greece Schaber was showing a sparse selectimelines at the moment, legally, and medieval Christianity. The trip, tion from her Notes on Archives series, of course, we can look at these images; and the resulting cross-cultural a sprawling project that, since 2004, and by ingrained Insta-habit, we want has examined the realities and contraapproach it inspired, is seen as a key to dictions of photographic archives. his conception of the Mnemosyne Atlas, to see them. The question becomes Schaber’s exhibition was restrained, his unfinished idiosyncratic crosswhether we decide to look but full of tensions and hidden histocultural collage of art and imagery ries; mapping, for example, in Culture Is Our Business (2004), how an that has been reconstructed and is currently on show at the Haus der image of street fighting during the 1919 German revolution came Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Warburg’s photos of the Hopi rituals are to be part of both a commercial stock-photo agency’s catalogue and conspicuously absent from the Atlas itself; it was a colleague’s posthua historical archive. The historical archive narrated the photo as mous publication of the asylum lecture that released them into the depicting a cross-class group of revolutionaries defending a paper public realm. The images have since spread, as part of art installations factory; the commercial agency describing the same photo as the by Goshka Macuga and Emo Verkerk, for example, and reprinted in inverse, of the Imperialist army defending against insurgents. Her Warburg studies by art historians Philippe-Alain Michaud and Uwe Picture Mining (2006) asks us to reflect on what images can achieve Fleckner. They have spread even further digitally: a quick image when it traces photographs of American child miners from the 1910s search online brings several of them up immediately, while PDFs of – intended at the time as social commentary – to the same online the lecture and studies are easily found. stock-photo agency, returning the underage workers to another The issue isn’t so much that Warburg himself didn’t want the images published, but how the ongoing use of the images displays a version of commercial exploitation. For me, one of the side effects of recent months of protest and lock- complete disregard for what and who the images depict, and how the down has been an involuntary retrospection, looking to things experi- act of looking itself perpetuates these problems. These aren’t visibly enced several years ago as they find resonance with our uneasy present. traumatic or outwardly violent images; they are, as I understand from Among the images of violence that pop up unbidden yet again on descriptions, mostly mundane shots from the pueblos, with a few social media timelines, among the blinkered decrying of pulling down ceremonies in action. The images could even be seen as celebratory, certain statues as the ‘destruction of history’ and among art institu- with historical value. As photographs of private rituals, though, the tions treating these issues like live mines that should be avoided rather images are seen by the Hopi as a misconstrual of tribe-specific esoteric than publicly dismantled, one of the things I found myself thinking knowledge. Art historians Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi devote of was the layered, hard-eyed archaeologies in Schaber’s project and a chapter to this issue in their book Art Is Not What You Think It Is (2011), the implicit questions it poses: how do these images actually come to noting how for the Hopi the issue is not so much one of ownership but appear on our screens and in our lives? And what histories are they of time, understanding ‘sacred presentness as trans-temporal. Privacy really telling? What are we seeing, and when do we look away? is consequently violated every time someone looks at the photographs.’

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Karen Peters, Santa Fe, site of former Palace Hotel #14, 2007, from Stefan Pente and Ines Schaber’s Unnamed Series, 2008

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Pente and Schaber’s first response to Warburg’s photographs between Leigh Kuwanwisiwma of the Hopi’s Cultural Preservation was a performative gesture, making a video in which they projected Office (hcpo) with the Warburg Institute. ‘Only members initiated a slide sequence of the photographs onto a wall and attempted to into these societies hold its information and knowledge, which is block out parts of the images with their bodies; then they decided not written, but rather is passed on orally to society members who that this video shouldn’t be shown – the audio of Unnamed Series, Part participate in the ceremonies. Information about the significance 2, with the letter read aloud, is all we can experience. It’s a delib- and function of these ceremonies can only be given by those initierate distancing that feels appropriate – similarly, in writing this ated into these societies,’ Kuwanwisiwma wrote. Kuwanwisiwma’s piece, I have attempted to keep my distance from the images of the predecessor, Vernon Masayesva, helped set up the hcpo and, in 1994, Hopi, to try not to see them, an indihad contacted a range of museums vidual act of blurring my vision, Theorist Ariella Azoulay proposed view- and archives with holdings of Hopi cultural artefacts and documents, screwing up my eyes as I scroll. But ing any photograph as an implicit civil requesting a moratorium on the presthis seems a private stance that has contract between the person taking the limited bearing on the wider strucentation of anything that concerned religious or ceremonial practices, and tural issues. During his visit with image, those photographed and those the Hopi, Warburg might, as Pente asking that the materials be returned. later handling and looking at the image and Schaber imagine in their letter, Several institutions shifted their have “realised that the real limit of the rationalist, modern Western stance and limited access to such photos and drawings after that; mentality is its tendency to negate things that cannot be meas- but in 1998 the Warburg Institute defended its republication of the ured”, but any doubts Warburg might have expressed about such images by stating that they were already in the public domain. It was, rationalist approaches haven’t stopped the voracious completists of course, the Warburg Institute that published the original lecture who study his work. Reverence for a European art historian and a and images in its journal in 1939, against Warburg’s wishes, putting short tourist trip he took over 130 years ago takes precedence over them into the public domain in the first place. The gesture (or lack a differing cultural approach; and so the archivist impulse repeats of one) continued an ongoing vicious circle, in which photos already circulating only continue to circulate, a process only sped along by the colonial impulse. Unnamed Series seems to exist in its primary digital archives and quick image searches. Lewis Wickes Hine, Coal mines. Child labor form as a publication, in Notes on Archives 5 (2019), In Notes on Archives 5, Pente and Schaber at coal and zinc mines in the United States, 1911, from acknowledge the limitations of their cautious the book collecting together views such as Ines Schaber’s Picture Mining (2006). and academic project, noting how when it was Farago and Preziosi’s, as well as the exchanges Courtesy Library of Congress, Washington, dc

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exhibited in Europe it was interpreted as institutional critique of images; and by ingrained Insta-habit, we want to see them. The questhe Warburg Institute. When shown in the us, however, it was criti- tion becomes whether we decide to look. cised for sidelining the Hopi and maintaining Warburg at the centre As Warburg’s work is in the public light again in the coming months of the narrative, repeating the hierarchies created in publishing the with the exhibition of the remade version of the Mnemosyne Atlas, a images. ‘It is not enough’, they conclude, ‘to not speak on behalf of strategic reinhabitation might prove useful. The uncompleted Atlas others.’ The issue might not be theirs to resolve, but they suggest provides an arrangement of unlabelled, uncaptioned images over a set several ways to continue the conversation, one being a conceptual of themed black-felted panels. In a notebook, Warburg described the reframing. Theorist Ariella Azoulay, who was driven by the brutal project as an ‘iconography of the intervals’, a place to link and compare imagery emerging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, proposed recurring symbols from a range of eras and sources. But the interval is viewing any photograph as an implicit civil contract between the also literally the gaps between the images pinned to the felt. In light of person taking the image, those photographed, and those later the Hopi’s pointed absence from the Atlas, these spaces and intervals handling and looking at the image. It’s a powerful suggestion, which become apparent as something active, something political – a place to if taken seriously would heavily impact the imagery that assails us step back, a space that might be filled with other perspectives than your daily, as well as redressing the balance of whether and in what ways own, something deliberately withheld, that is not yours to see. victims might choose to be seen. It would seem, though, that any such What Unnamed Series seems to be, rather than just a conceptual responsibilities of such a relationship for Warburg’s Hopi images has gathering of images, text, and an occluded video, is more a model for long been shrugged off by those who align themselves with the art informed non-Hopi audienceship – whether European academics, historian. Another suggestion is return: repatriating the images to Americans rehashing frontier nostalgia, or just casual browsers – the Hopi, for them to decide how they might be used. Though this, proscribing a deliberate aversion that might then be spread beyond again, while not entirely impossible for physical holdings, seems an just a personal act. A first, practical step is a choice not to look at such idealistic suggestion in light of the digital dispersal of the images. images, and the project asks others to consider that choice. Not as an It is not enough to accept they are just in the public domain, as if act of self-censorship, but as an act of respect, of patience, an attempt innocuously placed there; whose public, what domain? What are at redeeming a civil agreement created through an image; you look the so-called rights of such an eternally present when that relationship is actually agreed, actuWilly Römer, Strassenkämpfe in Berlin photography, where traumatic transgressions ally civil – whenever in time that might be. ar (Street Battles in Berlin), 1919, from Ines Schaber’s might not be continually reenacted? Like any Culture Is Our Business (2004) pictures that appear on our timelines at the Chris Fite-Wassilak is a London-based critic all images (expect facing page) moment, legally, of course, we can look at these and author of The Artist in Time (2020) Courtesy the artist and Camera Austria, Graz

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Kameelah Janan Rasheed Untitled, 2020 as told to Mark Rappolt

In all my work I usually start from the capacity of an individual word that I would never have expected or thought would end the sentence, and the ability to think about that individual word and its relation- I end up in a different place. So a lot of my writing is allowing myself ship to other pieces of text and words that I find. There’s an interest to be surprised by that. for me in thinking about leakiness of language. I’m interested in the I’m really interested in the oulipo [Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, ways in which nothing’s ever closed, nothing’s ever finished, and so a group of writers and mathematicians, founded in 1960 by Raymond there’s a constant reformulation of past, present and future, which Queneau and François Le Lionnais, who seek to create works of literatranslates into a constant flow in the relationship between my past, ture formed by writing under constraints] and how they think about present and future works. As a result, I have enjoyed looking back at the hidden resources of a sentence. I really like that language: to think my old work and thinking about the ways in which things intention- about what’s possible. I have a project for a group show [Kissing Through ally and unintentionally find themselves there again. a Curtain] at Mass MoCA, called Each sentence is a sponge! [2020], and for This project provided an opportunity to think about working on me I’m really interested in the accumulation of meaning in a given the page again. I was thinking about my noninstallation work and sentence and how it absorbs and leaks in that way. how to map that onto a page in a way that allows me to think about The page with the hand is from another piece I made during design and formatting and building the ecosystems of text and image a short-term residency at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in New York this on a page. So, in the work that follows there is an excerpt from a page summer. I was thinking about spirit writing and processes of writing in my book No New Theories [2019]. that make use of Ouija boards and of other constraints. For this project The pages that have relationships to numbers are from a work I was really interested in what it meant to give myself another set of called A Casual Mathematics [2019], which was looking at the use of constraints: you have one minute to flip through a book, and whermathematical language, equations and calculations in order to think ever your finger lands is the word that’s left behind, and that’s the about storytelling through the lens of thinking about history as a mat- word that you have to use to create something else. I’m interested in ter of motives that will add up to the future that we had imagined. the poetics of revision, which is to say that I’m interested in constantly Other pieces come together through the use of writing constraints: returning to my old work and constantly revising, retouching and my practice of going through a text and looking for individual words recontextualising old work to think about the capacity for it to be and forcing myself to think about how I could use those words to reimagined and for new sentences and ideas to emerge. ar then put together a new sentence. I’m really interested in thinking about what happens when we allow ourselves to create sentences that Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an artist, writer and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores a variety of media, including force our neural pathways to do something other than what they are installations, books, public text-works, collages and audio familiar with doing. Which is to say that if I start a preceding pages recordings. Recent exhibitions include Leaky Sentences, sentence that reads, say, ‘I went to the store’, I’m going Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Untitled, at the cca Wattis Institute, San Francisco. Her work will to end up at ‘store’, because that’s what I know and am 2020. Courtesy the artist be included in next year’s Glasgow International familiar with, but if I know I only have a list of words with thanks to Nome Gallery, Berlin

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Subject Object Verb Episode 3 Listen now Ross Simonini with Mason Currey Natalie Labriola CAConrad Candice Lin With new music by Astral Oracles and Sam Gendel artreview.com/podcasts

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ArtReview Asia

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Man, Myth, Smoke and Mirrors Does Turin’s Casa Mollino reveal how all our museums really perform? by Rosanna Mclaughlin

Brigitte Schindler, La persistenza della memoria. S.D., 2019, colour print on cotton paper. © the artist

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Mirrored walls, custom erotica, tales of the supernatural: no wonder discussion at the survey show Carlo Mollino: Maniera moderna at Haus Museo Casa Mollino has gained a cult following. Since opening in der Kunst (2011–12), an absurd debate even ensued as to whether 2000, the former home of – and now museum to – the designer, archi- Mollino could be considered a demigod. Ferrari, who contributed tect and photographer Carlo Mollino, on Turin’s Via Napione, has to the curating, argued that he could. After all, how else to explain become the source of an implausible occult mythology. The owner and his ability to design buildings, furniture, skis, even a car to compete founder, Fulvio Ferrari, is convinced that Mollino designed the inte- in the 24 Hours of Le Mans? rior as a personal pharaoh’s tomb, each aspect of the decor arranged How else indeed. Born in Turin in 1905, the son of a wealthy engifor his transition to the spirit realm. neer, Mollino was a man of indeAn extraordinary leap of imagination While the theory has proved popular, pendent means and a lifelong bachit is almost entirely speculative. elor. Rather than a demigod, his is required to turn the apartment desire for privacy, and the cloying When Mollino died, in 1973, he left no of a rich man with a penchant for extravagance with which he decoexplanation as to his intentions for rated the Via Napione apartment, the apartment, apparently had never pornography into a mystical sanctum call to mind the protagonist of Jorislived there and had kept its existence a secret (even from friends such as the artist Carol Rama, who lived Karl Huysmans’s novel À Rebours (1884), Jean des Esseintes: an across the street). He purchased the property in 1960, one of several affluent, solipsistic aesthete who shuts himself off from the world in he owned. He kept another in the hills outside Turin for taking erotic order to realise his fantasies. (It would not be a surprise to discover Polaroids – another covert pastime – picking up sex workers and des Esseintes’s jewel-encrusted tortoise suffocating under the dancers, dressing them in costumes and staging them for his camera. weight of its carapace next to the giant clam shells in Mollino’s After his death, over a thousand images taken between 1962 and 1973 living room.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mollino was dismissed as a were discovered at the Via Napione apartment, where some of them dandy by members of the Arte Povera movement, but he was also, were also shot. To this day they without doubt, extremely talented. remain the only known evidence of His sui generis designs often have a powerful libidinal ambience that any use of the residence. spills over into his photographs. Casa Mollino exemplifies the At the Teatro Regio in Turin, comway in which history is written by those who own the keys to the pleted in the year of his death museum, and shaped to serve their and arguably his most significant interests. An eccentric seventy-fiveachievement (the architect had year-old who never met Mollino, won a competition to redesign and Ferrari has dedicated so much time rebuild the eighteenth-century and money to the project that it’s structure, which had been devasno longer clear where one man’s tated by fire in 1936), the plush red, ideas end and the other’s begin. white and pink interior is ribbed by Despite the extraordinary leap of the facade of the boxes like a larynx imagination required to turn the or vagina. Among the Polaroids on apartment of a rich man with a penshow at Mollino/Insides is an image of a woman dressed in a corset and chant for pornography into a myscollar straddling one of his own tical sanctum, the tomb theory designs: the Fenis chair, first manuhas come to dominate Mollino’s posthumous legacy. It has been factured in 1959. Made from two indulged by publications includcurved, slender pieces of wood, the chairback rises in front of her ing The New York Times and The like a forked tongue; her vagina is Guardian, and featured in the literexposed through a small opening ature at Christie’s auction house, where five items of Mollinoin the design. designed furniture have sold for After Mollino died, heirless, upwards of $500,000 since Casa the apartment was sold. When it Mollino opened. It has also inspired numerous exhibitions, the most returned to the market in 1999, stripped of the majority of the origrecent of which is Mollino/Insides, opened at Collezione Maramotti inal decor, it was bought by Ferrari and his son Napoleone. The pair this autumn, where a selection of Mollino’s Polaroids are on show set about buying back furniture according to an inventory made alongside works by Enoc Perez and Brigitte Schindler, two artists following Mollino’s death and treating the placement of objects apparently drafted in to enhance the mystique. They are not the only as a riddle. Ferrari believed that the key lay in a small drawing of ones. While visiting the apartment in 2019 I watched a screening of Tutankhamun’s grandmother Queen Tiye printed in the frontispiece Yuri Ancarani’s film Séance (2014), in which a of Message from the Darkroom, a book on photogpsychic medium sits at Mollino’s dining table raphy Mollino self-published in 1949. Ferrari Carlo Mollino, Untitled, 1962–73, Polaroid. and converses with his spirit. During a panel invited a curator from the Egyptian Museum Courtesy Museo Casa Mollino, Turin

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Enoc Perez, 2 via Giovanni Francesco Napione, Turin, Casa Mollino, 2018, oil on canvas, 254 × 203 cm. © the artist

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Brigitte Schindler, Perché tu sai che posso guardare dietro le tende degli specchi, 2019, colour print on cotton paper. © the artist

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Enoc Perez, 2 via Giovanni Francesco Napione, Turin, Casa Mollino, 2019, oil on canvas, 203 × 203 cm. © the artist

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in Turin to the apartment, who drew his attention to an embroi- into the successes of the QAnon prophecy cult, the Trumpian regime dery on a cushion in the bedroom based upon an ancient Egyptian of ‘alternative facts’ and the corporate paganism of the wellness painting of a boat. This was Ferrari’s ‘eureka’ moment: the boat was industry. As Theodor Adorno warned in Theses Against Occultism (1947), the vessel used to transport pharaohs from this world to the next, the rather than empowering the oppressed, the occulting of culture may elaborately carved wooden bed on which it was placed a sarcophagus. in fact do the opposite: mystify structural inequality and undermine Every detail of the apartment was subsumed into the mythology. precisely the kind of discourse required to hold power accountable. The white marble dining table? A lotus leaf, symbol of rebirth. As the cultural sector’s uncritical flirtation with the Mollino The zebra-skin rug? A map for navigating between dimensions. Even mythology shows, what is allowed to flourish when reason is put the custom pornography has been sanitised to fit the narrative. ‘He aside can be deeply unprogressive. The Ferraris have now owned the had little interest in sex,’ says Ferrari, apparently willing to overlook apartment on Via Napione for 21 years – eight more than Mollino. Mollino’s evident immersion in sexual fetish. The portraits were During this time, Mollino’s motivations and desires have been reinstead ‘inspired by the Egyptian constructed along with the interior, civilisation in which statuettes called his possessions transformed into As the cultural sector’s uncritical flirtaushabti were placed in the crypt’. tion with the Mollino mythology shows, props in a plot worthy of a Dan Brown More shrine than museum – and novel. In the process the real-world what is allowed to flourish when reason predicated on intoxicating narrative context of money, sex and power in rather than verifiable facts – Casa which he operated has been obfusis put aside can be deeply unprogressive Mollino is a cultural establishment cated by smoke and mirrors. While for the posttruth, anti-Enlightenment age. The embrace of the tomb he may have been a talented designer, a wealthy, modern European theory is particular to an era in which occult and nonrational thinking artist paying underprivileged women to pose naked is nothing has been normalised, politicised and monetised. Among artists and if not predictable. In the end, what haunts the ‘tomb’ is depressingly institutions identifying with witchcraft, magic has become a fash- familiar: the phantasm of male genius – mascot for Western male ionable way to signal female empowerment and alliance with the exceptionalism, obscurer of structural bias – disguised in a hokey marginalised, evident in the work of contemporary artists including pharaoh costume. ar Tai Shani and the revival of Dorothea Tanning and Hilma af Klint. Yet the vogue for the supernatural, and a tendency to conflate Mollino/Insides is on view at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, through 16 May it with emancipatory politics, ignores the reality that occult thinking often serves a conservative agenda, and goes hand-in-glove with the rise of anti-intellectual sentiment. Neospiritualisms are also baked Rosanna Mclaughlin is a writer and editor based in London

Carlo Mollino, Untitled, 1956–62, silver gelatin print. Courtesy Museo Casa Mollino, Turin

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Natural Revolution Fifteen years in the making, Artavazd Pelechian’s new film sees the director move from political unrest to environmental turmoil by Carmen Gray

Armenian director Artavazd Pelechian is one of the most visionary newsreel footage. We (1967) marks the trauma of the 1915 Armenian artists to have emerged from the Soviet Union, but like several of his Genocide on the Armenian people – a modern cataclysm at that time, friends making cinema in the then-existing republics of the South still little acknowledged – with a sombre, mesmeric weave of daily Caucasus, he struggled to work uninterrupted or breach the margins life and ritualised mourning. Inhabitants (1970) evokes the existential of canonised world film history. When he embarked on his career threat posed by humans through frenzied swirls and stampedes of during the early 1960s, his near-wordless black-and-white films were panicked animals. way ahead of their time in blending the reality levels of documentary Most of Pelechian’s 13 films as director have been shorts (at just archive and poetic fiction. Their shortness of length and blurring of over an hour, Nature is an exception). Rhythmic, largely dialogue-free categories, though, reinforced their status as outliers, resistant to and classical music-driven, they operate at a subconscious level. Time being co-opted and stripped of their arcane mystery by crass market- can feel strangely stretched and looped in them, due to the ‘distance forces, and unlikely candidates for mainstream popularity. Pelechian montage’ method he developed. Rather than assembling and juxtahas a near-cult core of devotees, and few initiated into the singular, posing shots directly beside each other to create meaning, as montage intuitive strangeness of his montage experiments would argue with pioneer Sergei Eisenstein proposed, Pelechian separated linked or the evaluation of his contemporary, Georgian-Armenian maverick repeated images, inserting other frames between them so that they Sergei Parajanov, that he’s one of cinema’s rare ‘authentic geniuses’. would reach back and forward across the film towards each other For all that, his name is still rarely heard beyond cinephile circles. with reverberating energy, connecting the viewer with a grander-scale However, interest in him is growcosmic unity that absorbs all differing, helped by a new film – his first ence. ‘For me, distance montage opens Rhythmic, largely dialogue-free and in 27 years. Nature (2020) is having up the mysteries of the movement of classical music-driven, his films its world premiere at the Fondation the universe. I can feel how everything operate at a subconscious level; time Cartier in Paris (which cocommisis made and put together,’ he told the sioned it with Karlsruhe’s zkm) curfilm critic Scott MacDonald in 1991. can feel strangely stretched and looped rently. It is screening together with Pelechian’s work at first hardly Pelechian’s The Seasons (1975), considered by many the greatest docu- travelled, but he has enjoyed special appreciation in France since the mentary ever made in Armenia, and in its rhythmic channelling of the 1980s, after film critic Serge Daney saw some of his films on a visit to rolling and bursting motion of nature at its most cataclysmic, the new Armenia and, blown away, wrote a glowing article for French newspaper Libération, declaring the director ‘a missing link in the true film is as staggering as this earlier work. Pelechian, who is now eighty-two years old, grew up in Armenia’s history of cinema’. French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard then second-largest city, Leninakan (now called Gyumri). There was no became a vocal champion of Pelechian’s work and an eager conversacinema, let alone a film school. After working as a mechanical engineer tional partner on montage and the essence of cinema, as both sought for a while, he found his way, like many budding directors across the to push the medium’s possibilities. Soviet bloc, to Moscow to enrol at famed film institute vgik. (As well Artists with local Armenian loyalties and subversive visual flair as Pelechian, the school’s illustrious list of former students includes that departed from state-sanctioned socialist realism were distrusted Parajanov, Mikhail Vartanov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Elem Klimov, Larisa by Moscow’s authorities, who fully funded and controlled the film Shepitko and Kira Muratova.) The surging movement of crowds industry. Pelechian suffered less overt suppression than his, to some, and natural forces during states of upheaval and emergency recur in more abrasively confrontational friends making films in Soviet Pelechian’s work, established in his earliest shorts. The Beginning (1967) Armenia. Parajanov has since become the best known, the belated reach captures the revolutionary forces of history set in motion by 1917’s of his influence clear in September when Lady Gaga, one of the world’s October Revolution in a distilled, ten-minute blizzard of 50 years of best-selling pop divas, appeared in the video for her track 911 in sand

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Nature (stills), 2020, dir Artavazd Pelechian, 63 min

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The Seasons (stills), 1975, dir Artavazd Pelechian, 35mm b/w film, 29 min

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dunes, blood-red fruit arranged around her, in imitation of the surreal, dreamlike tableaux of The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), Parajanov’s esoteric masterpiece on the life of eighteenth-century poet Sayat-Nova and the resilience of Armenian culture to attempts at violent erasure. After Mikhail Vartanov was blacklisted and fired from directing at Armenia’s sole film studio for making The Color of Armenian Land (1969), a film about dissidents Parajanov and painter Minas Avetisyan, and for speaking out against Parajanov’s 1973 arrest and imprisonment on charges including homosexuality, Pelechian successfully lobbied to have Vartanov work with him as a cinematographer – a collaboration that resulted, during the mid-70s, in The Seasons. The Seasons is a mesmerically odd, lyrical and disquieting work of orbital echoes, in which the forces of life and death entwine closely. Farmers shift their sheep for feeding up and down mountainous terrain in step with seasonal changes, clutching them tight as they tumble over each other almost as one down snowy inclines, and through river rapids that buffet and draw them under. In summer comes harvest, and the motion is echoed, as workers roll clumps of hay down a hillside. Textural splendour resides in the glittering creases of men’s rain-lashed coats and other details worked over by the elements, even as we sense the relentless energy required to survive, and submit the self to its place in nature’s forcefield. It’s astounding that a film so chaotic and perilous can feel at once so organically harmonious. It’s all in the tumbling rhythm as humans and animals navigate a nature unleashed full-tilt, and gravity at its most unforgiving. ‘Do you think it’s better elsewhere?’ asks one of several sparse intertitles, reinforcing a sense of human universality to events in a film with few language-based signposts. It’s impossible to know what Parajanov, who died 30 years ago, would have made of the recontextualisation of his work into cheeky pop-culture images viewed on laptop and phone screens. Pelechian’s early work remains as inscrutable and outside the mainstream as ever, but he seems to have nimbly adapted to our digital, cut-and-paste era of repurposed borrowings, having culled the footage for Nature from the internet. For a filmmaker with an uncompromising perception of

the magnitude of time, it shouldn’t surprise us that he germinated the feature for just as long as it took – 15 years since its commission. Or that, as an editing innovator who has always blended archival material with self-shot footage, he’d be unfazed by the virtual realm as a raw material source equal to others; as just another part of a cosmos that transcends all division of forms. Rolling, swirling, crumbling: the natural environment refuses static permanence in The Seasons. Through a restless eye that soars and glides, Nature pushes this recognition of topographical instability further, into the realm of natural disaster. The fragile harmony of our ecological interdependencies are increasingly fraught in days of climate crisis. In this film of speed and force, crumbling glaciers and avalanches redefine the contours of a world in flux. Volcanic eruptions spew liquid heat, tornadoes rip out sturdy trees and tsunamis claim fleets of cars from washed-out bridges and roads, as melting and drowning fluids encroach, architectural structures collapse and explosions billow skyward, remaking terrain’s foundations. In this maximalist visual symphony, soundtracked by Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich, Avet Terterian and Tigran Hamasyan, nature’s cataclysmic forces upend human habitation, perched precariously on land that is still for just a relative second of the planet’s billions of years of history. The sheer destructive might on show defies comprehension, let alone control, amid its terrible beauty. But morning breaks again. And if anything can contend with the ineffable, it’s filmmaking, according to Pelechian. ‘I am convinced that cinema can convey certain things that no language in the world can translate,’ he said in 2000, comparing it to the Tower of Babel; to before the world was drawn apart by languages. A cinema that trusts in unity’s eternal renewals out of chaos and heaving disruption may be just the salve for our treacherous times. ar Carmen Gray is a film critic, arts journalist and curator based in Berlin Artavazd Pelechian, Nature, The Seasons, is on show at the Fondation Cartier, Paris, through 7 March

Nature (still), 2020, dir Artavazd Pelechian, 63 min all images Courtesy Artavazd Pelechian

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Art Reviewed

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Matthew Wong Postcards Arch, Athens 10 September – 11 December There is something like abandonment in the paintings of Matthew Wong. His watercolours and gouaches on paper, hung in an even ring around the elegant white cube of this nonprofit space on the fringes of Greece’s National Gardens, convey the feeling of dissolving into a landscape. Their stylised scenes are naïve – women looking out to sea, silhouettes against the sunset, deserted parasols on empty beaches – but the best of them stimulate the paradoxical experience of a fleeting moment of perfect stillness achieved through intense contemplation. Big Wave Bay (all works 2019) is divided into two roughly equal planes by a horizon line, over which a tangerine sun is partially obscured by the solitary pink cloud in a mint-green sky. The flatness of the powderblue and ink-black splodges representing the titular scene undermines the illusion of perspective that a horizon line naturally generates, and so the composition initially reads more like the vertical cross-section of a body of water than a window onto a receding landscape. The absence of pictorial depth – and its implication of time in the suggestion of real space – contributes to the near-ecstatic tranquillity of this breaking wave. Yet above it flutters a bird, its wings blurred as if moving too fast for the mechanics of painting to capture, and the spell is broken.

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Big Wave Bay introduces the viewer into a series of fantastic landscapes imbued with so self-contained a sense of their own reality that you sometimes wish that a breeze might blow through the gallery. Pink Dawn depicts a faceless figure encircled by tree trunks that support the heavy purplish lid of a forest canopy. The dense foliage is mirrored at the bottom edge of the painting by a grey block that serves no obvious representational function but traps the composition between the jaws of a vice. A conventional image of escape – the return to nature – is recast as one of entrapment. The nightmarish distortion evokes the oppressive atmospheres found in the work of Edvard Munch, and works such as Moon Rise are so heavily indebted to the Norwegian artist’s Moonlight (1895) and Young Woman on the Beach (1896) as to suggest homage. Indeed, it should be acknowledged that part of the initial attraction of Wong’s work is its comfortingly close resemblance to the work of artists ranging from Hokusai (Mount Fuji can be glimpsed, incongruously, behind a leafless tree) to Henri Rousseau or André Derain. Dreamlike scenes are conjured through counterintuitive fauvist colour selections and pointillist techniques. That this lack of aesthetic sophistication sometimes spills into cliché can be forgiven given that these works are introduced as preparatory works for a residency in Athens planned for this summer. That Wong died

by his own hand in October last year at the age of thirty-five, shortly after completing these pieces, inevitably colours any reading of them – and lonely figures in desolate landscapes do not discourage straightforward biographical interpretation – but shouldn’t obscure their impersonation of the sublime. In standouts such as The Gloaming, the separation of colours into bright swabs and patches generates a glitter that unsettles the orders of distance that the brain tries naturally to impose on a path winding through a wooded landscape. The eye is bounced around the surface of the paper, and the particulars of the scene dissolve into an allconsuming play of colour and shape. The sense of a solid form evanescing into the interplay of unstable elements is exaggerated by the soak of watercolour into paper. When the colour is mixed thin, bodies bleed into the landscapes around them. The effect is pantheistic, though less in the sense of the Romantic imaginary – of an electrifying life-force running like an invisible wire through all creation – than in that of the Buddhist concept of sunyata, a state of undifferentiation that underpins the purely illusory differentiation between things. The sailboat of A Voyage on the North Sea is not crushed by the waves but seems on the verge of melting into them. There is energy in these works, but it is so thoroughly diffused as to approximate perfect emptiness. Ben Eastham

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facing page Big Wave Bay, 2019, gouache on paper, 22 × 31 cm

above The Gloaming, 2019, gouache on paper, 31 × 22 cm

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Trenton Doyle Hancock Something American James Cohan, Walker Street and Grand Street, New York 17 September – 17 October Trenton Doyle Hancock’s paintings, comic strips, installations and objects are rooted in the mythology of the ‘Moundverse’ – a world populated by his alter-superhero-ego, Torpedo Boy; ‘Vegans’, writhing beings that have the ability to possess humans and take over their bodies; and ‘Bringbacks’, creatures of nostalgia that recall childhood memories, like the toys in Hancock’s installations. Something American, installed across both James Cohan galleries, expands this world with ink-on-paper drawings from his ongoing graphic novel, large paintings of the Vegans and Bringbacks, and paintings of Torpedo Boy and a Ku Klux Klan member. Rendered nearly lifesize, Hancock’s Klansman is ghostly and cartoonish, a reference to Philip Guston’s own Klansmen paintings (a major Guston retrospective was recently postponed over fears that those paintings would be misinterpreted). In Hancock’s SKUM: Just Beneath the Skin (2018),

Torpedo Boy stands opposite the white figure, who extends the disembodied head of a Black man. Similar heads float around them in a swirling psychedelic backdrop of thick acrylic paint, coloured paper and plastic bottlecaps. Rather than comicbook word bubbles, the characters’ conversation is shown in text cut into their bodies. ‘No no no know don’t touch that damn thing! Germs,’ Torpedo Boy says. The Klansman responds, ‘Just be just beneath the skin again!’ repeated several times on his white disguise. In another meeting in a less colourful space, the conversation continues as the Klansman offers ‘The star of code switching’ and tells Torpedo Boy, now also a ghostly white, ‘Take it. It will help you live longer,’ advocating for assimilation or code switching – the practice of changing one’s speech depending on the audience – as a survival technique. The hooded figure’s language is both seductive, like the language

of white supremacy that allows it to continue to spread, and infectious like germs. The humour of their exchanges is undeniable, heightened by the cartoonish visuals. But as the exhibition title suggests, they hint at something darker about America. Hancock refuses to present a traditionally heroic superhero. Instead, Torpedo Boy is an antihero, betraying his fallible humanity; wry and at times gullible, engaged in an ongoing exchange with a dangerous figure. In Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service (2017), the Klansman offers an apple evocative of the biblical Tree of Knowledge, tempting Torpedo Boy and through him the audience as well. The figures stand on an ‘alter’ that reads, ‘All of this is you’. The desire to be heroic exists alongside a fear of the contagion of white supremacy, suggesting we are all susceptible to its lure, or at least to the human failures of apathy and inaction against it. Megan N. Liberty

skum: Just Beneath the Skin, 2018, acrylic, graphite, plastic tops and paper collage on canvas, 152 × 152 × 10 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

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Grace Before Jones Camera, Disco, Studio Nottingham Contemporary 26 September – 3 January Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio offers a shimmering insight into the life and work of an icon whose shrewd manipulation of her own self-image enabled her to glide between the worlds of art, fashion and popular culture, taking aspects from each and leaving her enduring influence behind. Iconic images of Jones punctuate the exhibition: her face as pure iridescent surface cutting through a void of black in Anthony Barboza’s 1971 portrait; Grace with clenched gold teeth for Hans Feurer’s 1974 Vogue Hommes cover; a grey velvet-shawled, rosy-cheeked, illustrated Grace for Andy Warhol’s 1984 Interview magazine. These act like silk-strewn parentheses between works by artists, fashion designers and photographers who inspired, were inspired by, or otherwise share with Jones an ability to capture all the complexities of race, gender and identity while challenging their historical constraints and prejudices. Collaborations with the likes of Keith Haring and former partner Jean-Paul Goude

present Jones as a living artwork, her naked body painted with Haring’s signature thick white lines, or photographically hand-spliced and reconfigured to accentuate her extremities and impossibly long limbs. Her body here is a hyper-sexualised, ‘ultrablack’ canvas, always in direct and unapologetic confrontation with a Western obsession with racial difference and the exoticisation of the African figure; images that stare straight back at the colonial gaze. These are interspersed with ‘behind the scenes’ film clips – Jones getting her hair cut while discussing her own public image with her hairdresser, backstage at the New York Palladium with Deee-Lite in 1991, where Jones takes it upon herself to direct the photoshoot – demonstrating that, even in more intimate moments, whenever a camera is present Jones is always performing to uphold (and add layers to) her public persona. Throughout, artwork by Richard Bernstein for Jones’s late-1970s Sigma Sound Studios albums and fashion editorial

illustrations by Antonio Lopez show how she gave herself up for continual reinvention (without ever fully relinquishing control). Unfinished dividing walls reminiscent of 1970s loft parties are lit sporadically with electric-blue spotlights, interrupted by podiums displaying elegantly draping dresses by Azzedine Alaïa and set to a soundtrack of Jones’s complete discography looping one song per day, forming a cacophonous disco backdrop. With its two halves and eleven ‘chapters’, each covering an aspect of Grace – ‘Interviews’, ‘Pills’, ‘Podiums’, ‘Grace & The Machine’, among others – the exhibition is as much an experience of Grace Jones, analysing all she embodies and represents, as it is a biographical portrait. What might first feel like an assault to the senses is however a highly considered and complex investigation into this multidimensional character that mirrors the controlled, perfectly ordered excess of Jones’s own persona. Aaron Juneau

Richard Bernstein, Grace Jones Mask for Warm Leatherette, 1980. © the estate of the artist

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Curated by 2020 Various venues, Vienna 5–26 September Vienna’s annual Curated by festival went ahead this year, despite covid-19, with 23 participating galleries temporarily handing the reins to guest curators; the pandemic, though, couldn’t help but leave its mark on the 2020 edition. The pressure under which the virus has put gallerists and curators was tangible, almost visible. Some shows even felt like they were organised across borders by video call – not unimaginative, nor simply messy, but rushed and unsettled. We’d like to think curators were fastidious creatures, but, at times, it appeared as though this year’s theme, Hybrids, came second to the urge to put something – almost anything – together. Even if the theme wasn’t clearly explicated in most of the shows, it doesn’t lessen the theoretical importance of hybridity. On the one hand, we might argue that the latter is a kind of default position in globally connected multicultural societies, even if artists and curators don’t go out of their way to acknowledge it. The savvier curators know this full well, and this came across in the most coherent shows, considered below; but many others seemed to expect hybridity to pop up as if by magic when they threw together disparate things. On the other hand, artists, curators and critics can themselves produce hybrid forms by making diverse materials and approaches collide with each other in a conceptual space where each is given equal importance. Nearly every exhibition in Curated by is a group show, so there was plenty of opportunity for this, but it was easier to spot time/place/culture montages in individual works from different shows than whole exhibitions supposedly dedicated to this idea. To use three examples, works by Sarah Lucas at Meyer Kainer, Hale Tenger at Georg Kargl and Kayode Ojo at Sophie Tappeiner all hybridised different kinds of ancient symbolism. These objects don’t simply refer to hybridity but exemplify it in terms of the body (Lucas), styles of empire (Tenger) and the global antiques market (Ojo). At Meyer Kainer’s show, curated by Lucas and Kris Lemsalu, Lucas’s dick ’ead (2018) asked what it means to be prurient in an age when we can choose to hybridise our own bodies as never before. A spindly bronze body, faceless but with breasts like odd, staring, googly eyes, sat coiled into an old-timey

barber’s chair while a huge, wildly disproportionate red phallus bounded from its loins. A phallic theme continued at Georg Kargl, where curator Alistair Hicks placed Hale Tenger’s tiny Turkish Delight (2003), alone on a plinth in the huge space downstairs. The majolica terracotta figure, based on Anatolian fertility god Priapus (originally found in Ephesus, Turkey), has a tiny body but boasts an enormous penis. Hybridity here derived from overlapping eras and belief systems, since the work is decorated in a cobalt blue and turquoise Iznik palette with floral designs, like the kinds of tiles produced during the height of the Ottoman Empire five centuries ago. The connection between empire and hybridity should, one hopes, not need explaining. At Sophie Tappeiner, curator Jeppe Ugelvig positioned Kayode Ojo’s A Very Unusual but Very Elegant Gesture (2018) front and centre of a diverse show. This 56-second-long video shows a besuited white art dealer describing a woodcarved divination cup from nineteenth-century Nigeria, explaining how it is one of the finest examples of its kind that he knows of. The viewer heard the bristling hum of hundreds of other voices in the background, as if we were attending some hellishly refined antiques fair of similarly expensive trophies. Marina Fokidis imagined what alternative, hybrid forms of social and cultural cohesion could look like at Christine König by, as she states in her curatorial booklet, ‘dig[ging] into the future’, exploiting material from the gallery’s vaults, pairing new and old works from different times and places. The exhibition was bookended by two works by Gerhard Rühm which express an absolutely certain sense of identity. Both titled erweitertes ich-bild (2000/2020), each consists of the word ‘Wir’ (‘We’) with a hugely extended letter ‘i’. The newer one, a mural painted directly onto the gallery wall, was visible from the street and greeted the visitor on entry; the earlier work, in collage and pencil on thin cardboard, stood at the back of the show. Rühm’s apparent confidence in collectivism came under question in Christian Nyampeta’s 38-minute film Sometimes It Was Beautiful (2018), a complex study of Sweden’s role in colonialism as articulated

facing page, top Sarah Lucas, dick ’ead, 2018, bronze, concrete, cast iron and acrylic paint, 172 × 78 × 116 cm. Photo: Robert Glowacki. © the artist. Courtesy of Sadie Coles hq , London and Meyer Kainer, Vienna

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in films, social and religious attitudes, and museum acquisition practices. As Time Went On, A Rumour Started at Gianni Manhattan, curated by James Lewis, concerned itself with our subjective experiences of time, and contained just three works. Guillaume Maraud’s Untitled (23.10 — 5.12.2015, paris) (2015/2020) is a series of funeral urns connected to unused pieces of furniture (including chairs and a mini-refrigerator) belonging to the gallery. In the middle of the gallery space was an authorless, mysteriously compelling YouTube clip bringing together a ten-minute looped section of Stone in Focus by Aphex Twin with a single shot from Ron Fricke’s nonnarrative documentary Baraka (1992), showing Japanese macaques bathing in a hot spring. The most visually arresting piece, however, was Mire Lee’s Made of only hearts at gianni manhattan (2020), an infernal zombie fountain made from severed parts of her other sculptures, spurting out and recirculating a slimy pinkish material from a flailing pipe at the top, collected in a metal tray at the bottom. Despite the presence of works by Eliza Douglas and Iván Argote, the art of Jojo Gronostay dominated Chiara Vecchiarelli’s Ups and Downs of a Flipped Planet at Hubert Winter, a show about how human beings position themselves in relation to the surface of the planet as a whole and what this does to constructions like the ‘Global South’. Amid broken-off stiletto heels that Gronostay found in a Ghanaian market, scattered liberally on the floor throughout, were hangers showing black and white leather jackets from the artist’s clothing range Dead White Men’s Clothing – a phrase deriving from the Ghanaian Obroni Wawu, used in the 1970s to refer to the secondhand clothes worn by new arrivals from the other side of the world. The five-part photographic series Chateau Rouge Displays (2020), meanwhile, shows us the cardboard boxes used by African street sellers in Paris to sell fake designer gear, quickly abandoned once the police show up. One of the prints presents boxes with the words ‘Highness’, ‘New Dream’, ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Europe’ printed on their sides: reminders that hybrid styles come with an emotional as well as a monetary price-tag. Max L. Feldman

facing page, bottom Kayode Ojo, L’Amant Double (Vienna), 2020, mixed media, 115 × 183 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sweetwater, Berlin

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Dana Schutz Shadow of a Cloud Moving Slowly Thomas Dane Gallery, London 16 September – 19 December Walking into Dana Schutz’s exhibition (her first solo show in London), I felt as if I were interrupting something. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Schutz’s ghoulish subjects seem to exist beyond their creator’s – and the viewer’s – control. While much of her work to date has depicted the human body, as weird-looking as Schutz’s humans are, the characters in this exhibition of 12 paintings and six bronze sculptures are mainly creatures of her own devising, and their puppetlike appearance lends them an uncanny sense of automation. The figures stare at you, avert their gaze or shut their eyes as if ashamed to be seen, or are frozen mid-motion or in some absurdist posture or configuration. I had the sense that if I turned away they would carry on with whatever they were doing. In the sculpture Atlas (2019) and the painting

Everything and Nothing (2020) the same owl – a bird known for its acute eyesight and as a symbol of knowledge – is chained to an eyeball, emblematising the predicament of all the figures in Schutz’s mad world: their existence, dependent on being seen, is also their imprisonment. Completed in the last couple of years, the works on display date from after the major controversy that attended the inclusion of Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) in the 2017 Whitney Biennial (a painting based on the image of the black teenager Emmett Till, murdered by white racists in 1955, lying in his casket), and the heightened, frenzied self-awareness in these pictures is a quality that distinguishes much of Schutz’s work after this watershed. Schutz was already drawn to the subject of shame, spurred by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 (a man

‘without shame’, as she told The New Yorker), and her work has always shown a predilection for jarring colours and grotesque figures, often entangled in conflict. But while the political climate might explain the dystopia in her recent paintings, which have less of the brightness and humour of her earlier work, it is hard not to imagine that the public humiliation she experienced in 2017 also had an impact. It seems to surface in the ashamedness of her subjects, the evasion and disaffection manifest in the mutinous vitality of the materials and the feeling that the artist has relinquished her autonomy to the art. The work offers no reprieve; there are no points on which the eye can rest. It’s as if the paint and the bronze were rebelling – against the artist and against us. Tom Denman

Everything and Nothing, 2020, oil on canvas, 190 × 224 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples; and Petzel Gallery, New York

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ArtReview

16/10/2020 16:40

Sung Tieu What is your |x|? Emalin, London 19 September – 7 November Visitors to Sung Tieu’s What is your |x|? enter a false room nested inside the bare gallery, where the floor is plushly carpeted, fluorescent lights blinding white. At either side, eight prison doors, bolted immovably onto interior walls, lead the eye in towards the room’s gleaming centre. A great steel wheel mounted on the room’s far face and, according to the exhibition notes, weighing over half a tonne, encloses a mirror laser-engraved with Tieu’s astrological birth chart; a surrounding relief of interlocking gears mimics a vault’s locking mechanism. Already, there’s an overture of entrapment, but the experience is playful, not oppressive. Viewers glimpse themselves decussated by a map of Tieu’s planetary aspects, appearing suddenly among the circumstances of her birth. Tieu’s past exhibitions saw her pepper carceral installations with family memorabilia, subtly

asserting her authorship across tightly-focused geopolitical analysis. In What is your |x|? political allegory is dialled down so that the dual presence of artist and audience are free to intermingle. The title belies an interrogation of ‘the self’; in mathematical translation, what is your ‘absolute value’? The steel doors, facing one another, could be seen as a hall of clouded mirrors where infinity is yet foreclosed. Closer inspection reveals texts printed on the opaque glass of the doors’ useless peepholes; written with the help of an astrologer in the directive second person, the short paragraphs offer archetypes – the Depressive, the Narcissistic – that beg for personal identification. ‘Your motto is “only those who perform deserve love”,’ reads one. ‘You are constantly bedevilled by self-doubt’, reads another. The doors feel linked to Tieu’s past series Exposure to Havana Syndrome (2020), in which

prison mirrors were laser-engraved with mri scans of the artist’s brain under the influence of a sonic weapon, allegedly deployed against us diplomats in Cuba. Materially twinned, both works offer a tension between comprehension and opacity. The scans render Tieu’s brain in intricate detail, but are illegible to casual observers; the astrological forecasts are interpretable by all but their generality impedes deep understanding. What may seem like a departure from the affective qualities of state violence actually entrenches Tieu’s pet themes: the felicitous construction of subjecthood, the workings of top-down systems that shape our fates. By taking as her subject the fashionable vagaries of self-reflection and self-deception, Tieu presents our desire for complete recognition – for the formation of an ‘absolute self’ – as the trap that it is. Alex Quicho

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Ross Bleckner Quid Pro Quo Capitain Petzel, Berlin 10 September – 7 November In the 1980s and 90s, Ross Bleckner was the painter-laureate of the aids epidemic, and one mightn’t have been surprised to see his austere semiabstractions of the era, with their references to blood cells, revived to address another era of contagion. But, as the all-new canvases here demonstrate, Bleckner increasingly conflates human fragility with aesthetics, which means an emphasis on stylistic change. Here, among the first things one sees is Burn Painting (Rooms Combined to Cheer) (2020), set in a black-tiled space, maybe a shower room. A trio of flower stems heavy with blooms float unassisted like ghosts – one blackened, one multicoloured, one vanishing – and, to finish, Bleckner has assaulted the canvas with a blowtorch in a vicious, impatient update of the

floral memento mori. It’s one of a half-dozen stylistic modalities essayed here. Melancholy unifies the show, counterweighted with acceptance: in the centrepiece four-panel geometric abstraction After/All/ These/Years (2020), concentric grey diamonds are steadily invaded by a single red one, moving from edge to centre, bespeaking ominous transformation over – the title suggests – a lifetime. Divided by Zero (2020) floats colourful, smeared horizontal stripes, seemingly on their way to somewhere, over a greyish void with a glowing white centre that feels about as close as these paintings get to hope. Another canvas namechecks spiritual guru Ram Dass, suggesting that Bleckner, in the solitude of his East Hampton studio,

has found a Buddhist path in coming to terms with the inexorable nature of change, and has looked for ways to make static images – and, more largely, a body of work – convey impermanence.For this reason, Bleckner’s show is a downer that lightly exhilarates; it pivots repeatedly on sadness, using it as energy. In one of the most darkly lovely works, Love and Letting Go ii (2020), a cornucopia of flower-heads disperses freely across a brownish canvas, most glowing and some dead, in a conflation of Dutch flower painting and the ‘all-over’ approach of midcentury American abstraction. As is typical with these paintings, the longer you look, the more consolatory colour rises out of darkness. Martin Herbert

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ArtReview

16/10/2020 16:34

Sammy Baloji Kasala: The Slaughterhouse of Dreams or The First Human, Bende’s Error Galerie Imane Farès, Paris 10 September – 18 December Nothing in this exhibition is as it seems: everything has a double meaning, speaking for former colonised and former coloniser in separate visual languages. For two decades, Congolese artist/academic Sammy Baloji has investigated his country’s cultural and political history. This latest, gripping chapter focuses on the shaky ethics surrounding colonial collecting and exhibiting, addressing both the connoisseurs who brought dr Congo’s cultural heritage to Europe and the historically voiceless people who created it. On entering, you’re confronted by a vitrine containing a traditional hunting horn from Baloji’s home province of Katanga. It’s pockmarked with runic scarification, seemingly ornamental but based on a writing system devised to be unintelligible to colonisers. Furthermore, Baloji commissioned this elaborate, supposedly ‘African’ mark-making from metalworkers in Belgium – an allusion to

colonial bureaucracy, which required that hunting permits were applied for not in dr Congo but in Brussels. Photographs taken by German anthropologist Hans Himmelheber on a 1939 expedition to Katanga are enlarged and printed onto tall mirrored panels. This specialist on Congolese art was relatively enlightened for the time; nevertheless, we see him carried on a litter by local porters. x-ray scans of objects he collected – rare minerals, ritual sculptures – are printed over his photos, implying that these clinical transparencies can tell us about the original objects’ material composition but not their symbolic value. Your own reflection in the mirror might be an accusation of complicity or an invitation to participate in the discussion. As ever, though, there’s an added dimension: mirrors are significant in Katangese spirituality, being an integral feature of divinatory Nkisi figures.

Elsewhere, there’s a projected film that presents writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila reciting Kasalas – prose poems that serve as oral history in Katanga – about its tragic past; an archive of photos and text on a huge touchscreen; and an extract from Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet’s 1953 film Statues Also Die, in which footage of well-heeled gallery goers admiring African artefacts is juxtaposed with a voiceover analysing what it means to look at such sculptures and masks. Where a European might derive aesthetic pleasure, the film suggests, they would likely be blind to the objects’ layers of meaning. Here, Baloji essays a sense of what that meaning is: he knots these disparate threads of cultural misunderstanding into a taut visual shorthand, articulating the problems of displaying colonial-era collections and suggesting how we might eventually overcome them. Digby Warde-Aldam

Kasala, The Slaughterhouse of Dreams or the First Human, Bende’s Error (still), 2019, hd video, colour, sound. Courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris

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23/10/2020 15:28

Once more to the barricades

In 1995 Mathieu Kassovitz released La Haine in French cinemas, awakening audiences to life in the banlieues of Paris by portraying the violence and alienation fostered in what were once visions of utopian living but had become social-housing ghettos. “It’s about a society on its way down,” says one of the film’s characters, played by a young Vincent Cassel, “and as it falls, it keeps telling itself: ‘So far, so good... So far, so good... So far, so good.’ It’s not how you fall that matters. It’s how you land.” If the film landed pretty well, garnering international acclaim, the society it depicted did not: ten years later the banlieues exploded in some of the country’s biggest and most violent riots. A quarter-century since La Haine, the banlieues are still on their way down: Les Misérables, a 2019 film by Ladj Ly that won the Jury Prize at Cannes and then four Césars, including Best Picture, was a punch-in-the-face reminder that nothing has changed. A modern retelling of Victor Hugo’s greatest tragedy, the film opens with ‘republican’ scenes of crowds from all backgrounds waving the tricolour flag and singing La Marseillaise following France’s victory in the 2018 World Cup, and closes to blazing shots of an escalating confrontation between young banlieusards and police forces. What happens in between is like a slow-motion car crash, revealing the failures of a society to look after all its citizens and of a dead-end system in which both the Jean Valjeans and Javerts inevitably lose out. Yet at the heart of Ly’s film is a drone owned by one of the kids living in the estates that captures a police blunder on video, offering hope that the officers will be held accountable and signalling perhaps one thing that has changed (beyond the fact that, unlike Kassovitz, Ly is actually from the banlieues): the widespread access to image technology and representation, and its potential to check abuses of power. Testimony to that is the incursion of those realities into the confines of the artworld: at the end of August, endless queues formed outside the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to see the exhibition Jusqu’ici tout va bien, titled in reference to Cassel’s line in La Haine and featuring work by students

of the École Kourtrajmé, a free alternative art and moving-image school founded by Ly in 2018. As a training exercise, the students worked for two months with the institution to produce a full-blown exhibition – of works ranging from largescale installations to minute drawings, from photography and short films to paintings – that engages with the energy running through both La Haine and Les Misérables while offering a new, complex portrait of the banlieues. Newly minted signifiers populate the show, conjuring (and celebrating) the culture of the banlieues: a set of Monobloc chairs, possibly the most common type of urban furniture, have been covered in concrete by Ismail Alaoui Fdili to evoke time spent trapped in the brutalist environment, where waiting has become something of a sport notably for local ‘cop watchers’. The police car, another staple of the banlieue, hangs irreverently overhead as a colourful piñata. A lifesize balcony, part of an installation by Tiah Mbathio Beye, invites viewers to step up and become neighbours, observers and witnesses. Ismaël Bazri’s assemblages of motocross-bike parts, displaying photographs of local ‘rodeo riders’ mounted on these bikes and in action on the streets, stand like shrines to the thrilling and deadly sports of the suburbs. Other works, meanwhile, move beyond symbols to challenge expectations around the representation of this milieu. A series of 12 photographs by Tassiana Aït Tahar, each accompanied by recorded testimonials accessible via qr code, offer unusual scenes of suburban life – an improvised hair salon in the streets, a youth straddling a beautiful white horse in the middle of an estate, another one performing a head spin in the entrance of a building – in an aesthetic reminiscent of Mohamed Bourouissa’s portraits of banlieusards. Addressing the lack of female representation in the context of the suburbs and more specifically in La Haine, Emilie Pria imagines what the bedroom of one of the protagonists’ sisters would have looked like. The sensual photographs of Nouta Kiaie, staging ambiguous

facing page above Tassiana Aïttahar, Toujours la même (detail), 2020, 12 photographs, 90 × 60cm. Courtesy the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris

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bodies enveloped in a pink veil, suggest that questions of gender in a very codified culture might be evolving. More striking, perhaps, is Djibi Kebe’s series of fashion photographs, for which he asked Virgil Abloh to lend some of his creations for Louis Vuitton; Kebe then asked some fashion students to create replicas, and got friends from the banlieue to pose in them against the backdrop of rundown estates, the extremely attractive photographs attesting to (and reversing) the appropriation and commodification of ‘street culture’ by high-end fashion brands. That Kebe was able to have Abloh collaborate says much about the fame of the school, and its ethos: based in Montfermeil, the very suburb where Les Misérables (both the novel and the film) and the 2005 riots took place, its strength and competitiveness lies in its extensive network of guest lecturers, who teach, produce and propel its students into artistic and professional careers (these have included filmmakers such as Spike Lee, George Lucas and Kassovitz himself). Run by Ly together with the artist jr and the actress Ludivine Sagnier, who actively build and maintain the aforesaid network, the school also benefits from the artist collective Kourtrajmé that inspired it, consisting of 130 members from both the banlieues and the bourgeoisie who work across the fields of photography, video, music and film – essentially reproducing the alumni system of elite art schools but making it accessible to the many. The cult following of La Haine and the one promised for Les Misérables, along with the popularity of the Palais de Tokyo show, are reminders of the power of representation to change perceptions and feed a more complex understanding of reality. That it was 25 years before an ‘heir’ to La Haine appeared hints at the fact that the urgent task might not lie with representation itself, but rather with democratising the means to create it and offering alternative routes to visibility. With a new school just opened in Marseille and another promised in Dakar, Ly and his disciples might well be on the way to changing that. Louise Darblay

facing page bottom Nouta Kiaie, sans titre (detail), 2020, 8 photographs, 30 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist and Palais de Tokyo, Paris

ArtReview

23/10/2020 14:48

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Julia Phillips New Album Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 10 September – 17 October Deploying her characteristic fragmentary visual language, Julia Phillips’s most recent sculptural installations investigate the mechanics of human relationships. Mediator (all works 2020) consists of two ceramic moulds of the area of the chest around the collarbone, glazed in layered, flesh-coloured tones and mounted at either end of the crossbar on a T-shaped stainless-steel fixture. Atop the vertical support sits a microphone inside a metallic ring, its position between the two ceramic moulds implying a discourse. The title invokes the legal process of mediation as a negotiation between two parties in conflict. Yet in viewing Mediator, the viewer is left to guess who mediates between whom and what is in dispute. Maybe it’s divorce proceedings, or political debates, or arguments with family members that spin around the microphone like a centrifuge. This equivocal connection between the sculpture and the viewer, where the viewer extrapolates the sculpture’s

indeterminate meaning, is critical to Phillips’s work, allowing it to function as a machinic representation of a psychological relationship. At the same time, Phillips’s use of fragments of the human form signals the embodied experience of relationships, like the chest pieces in Mediator or the clenched knuckles in Negotiator #1. These corporeal traces are reminiscent of Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series (1973–80), in which the outlines or indentation of the body implies its presence. The largest work, Oppressor with Soul, In Treatment & Suppressor with Spirit, In Treatment, places such bodily fragments in a symmetrical arrangement; opposing groups of elements feature a mould of shoulders and the base of a skull mounted on a vertical pole, near a hollow mould of shoulders revealing a chest-cavity-like shape that rests on a nearby metal table. Here, Phillips pairs the oppressor and suppressor, where both are in positions of power but are depicted ‘in treatment’. One chest cavity, whether the ‘Soul’

or ‘Spirit’, is largely intact, but in its opposite, the ceramic flesh curls with sculpted flames. This tableau suggests treatments that are perhaps more torturous than therapeutic, recasting the stainless fixtures and white walls of the gallery as a more sinister or surgical environment. In her installations, Phillips dissects power dynamics, leaving only corporeal fragments or cross-sections of oppression, negotiation, mediation or observation. Yet these fleshy icons prevent any reading of the social identities of their implied bodies (racialised, gendered or classed). By avoiding such constructs, Phillips invites the viewer to imagine whose bodies might be enacting these psychological relationships – a symbolic elasticity that permits the works to act as mirrors for the viewer. In contemplating New Album, I questioned the ways in which I allow myself to be vulnerable, to conciliate or to exert power in my own interactions. Rachel Remick

Mediator, 2020, ceramic, stainless steel, granite, nylon hardware, 175 × 285 × 285 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York & Los Angeles

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ArtReview

23/10/2020 11:01

Harlesden Safari Shop Vol 1: Where Do We Go From Here? Harlesden High Street, London 25 July – 10 October Over the summer, following worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, itinerant gallerist Jonny Tanna (and his gallery Harlesden High Street) assembled a show in a vacant third-floor office space not far from where the Central London demonstrations had assembled. Tanna’s idea was to bring together artists of colour to dialogue and reflect, making, as the press notes suggest, an ‘exhibition of an ongoing discussion, exploring the engagement of art away from institutional values and frameworks’. Where do We Go From Here? is loose and informal, staged on office carpet under the glare of strip lighting. The attention to black experience and the social presence of blackness reverberates with a sense of crisis – of visibility most of all – and politics get mixed up with technology: Ibiye Camp’s mobile of painted head portraits (Polygons + Peels, all works 2020) – each a skin of paint dangling from a clip –

are sensitive studies; a smartphone ar app invokes the ghostly appearance of 3d-polygon ‘masks’ that ‘attach’ themselves to the paintings in virtual space. Camp’s nearby video, Behind Shirley Research, elaborates the former work’s sources in the controversy over how ai vision fails to recognise black faces. Technology imposes on the body differently in Clémentine Bedos’s mucosa #3, a floor-scattering of qr codes printed as removable skin ‘tattoos’. These link to an unpredictable archive of images of white cultural icons and an older colonial racism: Michelle Pfeiffer in pvc Catwoman outfit, a white colonial holding decapitated human heads. These are pessimistic and accusatory reflections on the enduring presence of white supremacy and the desire to be released from identification – the futility of ideals of ‘colour blindness’ in the face of surveillance

– searches for a way out: Emmanuel Awuni’s installation Exodus is a ramshackle platform of tarp and timber, a stage for a group of works that variously hint at mutability and disintegration: a bust of a man, dark paint dripping over it; a conchlike clay sculpture, all indefinable innards; and the tarps, painted like abstractions but perhaps only material for a nomadic shelter. Salvage is also what constitutes Randa Asma Osman’s wry, detritus-born sculptures, whose titles hint at displacements and cultural distances (Lost in Translation and The parallels between Brent and Eritrea got me…). Farrah Riley Gray’s Together, with its embroidered figures of people styling each other’s hair, from which actual hair extensions unravel, by contrast offers the only image of secure sociability and intimacy. Where do we go from here? It really depends on who we mean by ‘we’. J.J. Charlesworth

Emmanuel Awuni, Exodus, 2020, ceramic, screen print, spray paint, paper, ink druget, board, synthetic hair, acrylic on tarpaulin. Courtesy the artist

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Junque Massimo De Carlo, London 1–30 September “No one gives a shit about art during Coronavirus,” exclaims Jamian Juliano-Villani, artist and curator of Junque, in the show’s polished video promo. She herself seems to care a lot, and Junque (glamorous yet absurd respelling of ‘junk’) materialises the mixed message that art is irresponsible and serious, culturally ambitious yet largely impotent, but still just about worth having around – a weird fly in the ointment of contemporary life. That means artworks that both provoke and assert a more positive sense of value. In the window, Maurizio Cattelan’s polished brass rendering of the Union Jack (tears, 2020) is pocked with carefully drilled bullet-sized holes, goading wealthy Mayfair passersby with post-Brexit cosmopolitanism and luxury-goodsdoes-punk inanity. Inside, the gallery is dominated by the civilisation-in-ruins cynicism of Ashley Bickerton’s painting Red Scooter Nocturne (2010), its blue-skinned, cackling fat

guy speeding on a Vespa with two naked women riding behind. This hallucination of a decadent, globalised commodity culture beyond repair emblematises the show’s accusatory side; before it is Anthea Hamilton’s Wrestler Sedan Chair (2019), a red-and-white cuboid that might seat the blue dude, flunkies hefting the whole along on its scaffold poles. Hamilton’s conflation of ‘modern’ art, utility and baroque servility condenses the show’s passive-aggressive ambiguity towards art’s court-jester status, watched over by John Waters’s camply evil rendering of that emblem of American wholesomeness, Lassie (Reconstructed Lassie, 2012). But there are quirky assertions of what we might care about too. Downstairs, a glossy polychrome statuette of a stoic Amerindian – the late Mexican Luis Jiménez’s Study for Southwest Pieta (1983) – holds in his arms the body of a white-robed woman. Jiménez was no artworld outsider, but the fusion of Chicano,

indigenous and Catholic culture crisscrossed in his Pieta suggests that artworlds form where publics are invested in them. In odd symmetry, Bobo’s Angry Water: Judgement Day (2020), a crazy electronic display panel comprising illuminated philosophical flowcharts, a wheel of fortune and an audio recording of overeducated types arguing cryptically about Lacan, intuits something about knowledge and power between the rabbit holes of fake news and narrow intellectual conformism. Art’s politics here is quixotic escape, embodied by the spindly tetrahedral frame of General Idea’s Playing the Triangle (1979). The trio of artists, their photos mounted in triangular frames at the foot of each strut of the larger structure, are seen reaching up to strike a real musical triangle which dangles from the frame’s apex. Visible and invisible, collective and personal, frail and hopeful – its value is there and not there. It depends entirely on whether we ‘give a shit’. J.J. Charlesworth

Luis Jiménez, Study for Southwest Pieta, 1983, fibreglass, 58 × 38 × 28 cm. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan, London & Hong Kong

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ArtReview

21/10/2020 10:56

Simon Munnery What Am I? Stroud Valleys Artspace, Stroud 8 August – 26 September Simon Munnery’s first foray into the artexhibition business includes a video of the comedian (and now artist) exploring a Venn diagram. The diagram features two sets: comedy and art. It’s a response to a 2006 review that described Munnery’s standup act as ‘the closest that comedy gets to modern art’. The statement was intended as a compliment. In the video (of a later standup show) Munnery uses the critic’s assessment to imagine in which of the two categories his work actually sits: “A long way from the middle of the comedy circle – like funny comedy – in fact almost not comedy at all,” Munnery explains. “But not art. And even if it became art, it would be shit art, art perilously close to being comedy.” Alongside the video hang a series of paintings also playing with the Venn motif. In one, two sets touch without overlapping. A dot captioned ‘my show’ lies just inside the ‘comedy’ circle, where it meets the circle marked ‘art’. So here we are.

While never becoming a household name like the 1990s comedians he’s standing next to in one archive photo (Stewart Lee and Caroline Aherne among them), characters such as the dictatorial egoist The League Against Tedium and student anarchist Alan Parker: Urban Warrior won Munnery avid fans, not least artist Andy Holden, who cocurated this show (along with Munnery himself). His brand of absurd whimsy and wordplay translates well from comedy club to gallery. Some works admittedly come off as one-liners, even if undercut with dark humour: a painting, in which a child says ‘Please Daddy, everyone else is going’ as she drags her father towards a sign pointing to hell, has the artistic value of a New Yorker cartoon. More persuasive is Monkey Reverie (undated), a series of 11 photographs of (presumably) Munnery in a monkey costume, collaged onto a painted desert landscape so as to appear as if he is approaching the viewer. In the final picture the ape, according to a typewritten caption, ‘whips out a banana

and offers it to you’. It goes on to ask: ‘What would you do? Eat the banana? Run away screaming? Or gently insert the banana in the monkey’s back passage?’ There is something dreadful in the scenario that, trading on transgression and violence, mines the dark humour of surrealism, or the absurdism present in the work of conceptualist forebears such as Bas Jan Ader or Keith Arnatt. In another video, Munnery stands in front of a similar desertlike landscape while Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973) plays. Spoofing Dylan’s famous film clip for Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965), from inside his trench coat the almost-artist brings out a series of cue cards: ‘Knock’, ‘Knock Who?’, ‘Knock Knock’, ‘Who’s There?’, ‘Knock’, ‘Knock Who?’ ‘Knock Knock’. It is a work that confounds and annoys and is all the better for doing so. Leaving the joke hanging without a punchline, Munnery enters the territory of art where, at its best, ambiguity and a lack of resolution are rightly privileged. Oliver Basciano

Hell, 2020. Photo: Andy Holden

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What is ‘the artworld’

Here’s a question for you: how many people are in the artworld? Don’t ask how the parameters are defined. Just give me a number. Right. What is it? In the admittedly small survey I conducted via WhatsApp this morning among friends, most of whom were immediately infuriated by my refusal to define what I meant by ‘artworld’ (which type of quibbling, over definitions, is itself very artworld), the answers ranged from several hundred to several hundreds of thousands. Which is to say that no one knows. That there exists an artworld went largely unchallenged, albeit people were liable in the followups to argue that there are several intersecting artworlds, or to distinguish between ‘the market’ and every other aspect of artistic production, or to say that the artworld should be dismantled as a matter of urgency, or to refer me to Arthur Danto’s 1964 essay ‘The Artworld’ (which type of noncommittal deferral to an external authority is also very artworld), all of which points have obvious merits and warrant discussion at greater length than is possible here. But the question is deliberately crude because I wanted to work in the opposite direction, to find what the respondents’ answers revealed of their own unconscious attitudes towards a concept, industry and community that everyone can agree is in crisis but no one can adequately define. The artworld is, after all, historically speaking, a recent invention. It was only in the eighteenth century that the Romantic notion of art as an independent field of social activity not subordinate to the state or church gained traction. That the myth of artist as solitary genius practising a discipline only appraisable on its own terms endured in the West for so long might, ironically, be attributed to its convenience to the emerging powers of the academy and the market. Yet that myth has been so thoroughly eroded that progressive artists now resist attempts to differentiate their practice from the infrastructures that support it, which can be celebrated (social practice) or foregrounded (conceptualism) or denigrated (institutional critique) but never escaped. As contemporary art has colonised every part of the cultural and intellectual world, no one seems any longer sure where the artworld ends or what it stands for (so that a T-Rex is the star of a contemporary sale at Christie’s and moma ps1 publishes a book on mass incarceration funded, in part, by trustees invested in mass incarceration). I’m not taking a position on this, only suggesting that pandemic, economic crisis and the dematerialisation of the spaces in which art is exhibited are accelerating

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another paradigm shift. So I wanted to use this amorphous word as a Rorschach test, and to interpret what people saw. The simplest interpretation is that people for whom the artworld encompasses hundreds of thousands of people hold a heart-warmingly inclusive vision of a global community that incorporates everyone from the directors of Chelsea galleries right down (or across) to the Sunday ceramicist in Santiago who might not have read the latest Artforum and has yet to be told by a visiting curator that her work is ‘vibrant’. By the same measure, those who gave a much lower figure might seem to cling to a conservative model in which a few hundred tastemakers set the commercial and ideological agendas to which everyone else must adapt if they have ambitions beyond obscurity. But obscurity has no bearing on the quality of the work, and as I fielded responses I wondered whether or not this more limited idea of the artworld might be the more enlightened one. By resisting the neoliberal impulse to assimilate every human activity into what is equally nebulously called contemporary art, it might acknowledge that art can exist outside the dominant commercial and ideological frameworks, and does not need to be recuperated by them to hold value. Which is to say that art is not the artworld. The idea that I, as a critic, might also be able to exist outside the artworld brought great derision from the woman who first asked me the question that I posed at the top of this article. When pressed, I had to admit that I didn’t count myself as a member of that world according to my own (low) estimate of its size. This prompted her to accuse me of not being prepared to admit my own complicity in it. The graduate students at an expensive American university also interpreted this sense of myself as at least provisionally outside the artworld as presidential-scale cognitive dissonance in the discussions after I was invited to present a lecture, last week, on the state of art criticism. I can see the point. But my artworld, if I’m pressed into making an analogy, resembles a provincial market town. Artists venture in from the surrounds once a month to deliver their wares, where they can be appraised by the academy tasked with upholding the standards of imported goods and taken up for sale by the stallholders, and then they get the hell out. Writers might also move in and out of the citadel, bringing news to the wider community, coming to know the inhabitants but never living among them. My editor points out that I should probably mention here, if only to concede

the paucity of my imagination, that I grew up literally outside a provincial market town. Critics, the students seemed convinced, are not only living in the citadel but drinking schnapps with the stallholders and concocting new movements to shift their goods. When I said that this didn’t align with my own experience, each of them called me a liar (with their eyes: we were on Zoom, they were on mute). I resented this, until I reflected that I had just lectured them on the tyranny of the academy, and how the failure of art historians to look beyond the cities in which they lived and their narrow theoretical frameworks was responsible for the canon with which we’re now burdened. So maybe they were just getting their own back. They identified the artworld with the market and thought I was its representative and embodiment; I identified it with the academy and thought they were. Both positions are expressions of bad faith, of course. But the artworld is useful as a fictional construct that helps us (meaning anyone who looks at art) to consider the relationship of art to money and power in its pen and sword iterations. Does this work replicate a consensus or challenge it? Is it inside or outside? What do we mean by inside or outside? For a critic, thinking about the boundaries of the artworld might make it possible to at least try to move more nimbly back and forth across it, never getting trapped on one side or the other. Which is to say that it would enable the critic to make a living while retaining a degree of freedom. Whether you think this kind of mediation is feasible, desirable or even possible is likely to be revealing of your attitude towards the artworld. Before the lockdown condemned such things to the rose-tinted past, I had a four-pints kind of argument with a friend. She believed that artists and critics should be social, and that their work must be an expression of the communities in which they lived if it were not to fall prey to solipsism. I countered that this excludes any individual without access to those groups, generates a guild mentality that is antipathetic to independent thought and enforces a consensus that reflects the socioeconomic background of a privileged minority. This position is no doubt an expression of the chip on my own shoulder, illustrating my point about the artworld as verbal Rorschach test. If you’re inclined to agree with me, I should confess that the friend was an art critic and that we were sitting in an East London pub surrounded by artists, in the wake of a gallery opening, and acknowledge that I’m relating it to you, art-loving reader, in the pages of a specialist art magazine. Ben Eastham

ArtReview

21/10/2020 10:59

François Joseph Heim, Charles V Distributing Awards to the Artists at the Close of the Salon of 1824, 1827

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Toyin Ojih Odutola Tell Me A Story, I Don’t Care If It’s True Jack Shainman Gallery, West 24th Street, New York 10 September – October The thing I will remember most about this spring’s lockdown in Brooklyn is the constant interweaving of sirens. I wondered about their lives, all those people being carried away in ambulances to become statistics, and whether they would ever return. In Toyin Ojih Odutola’s new exhibition of drawings, skin ripples sinuously, like all those sirens curving through the air, but instead of a panicky cacophony, they suggest quiet, interested interiority. Layers of mark-making accumulate, creating remarkable depth. Titled Tell Me A Story, I Don’t Care If It’s True, it features works that were largely created this year during lockdown. It was initially on view on Jack Shainman’s website this summer before opening at one of the gallery’s Chelsea locations in the autumn. Yet viewing the show online doesn’t begin to convey the way the drawings shift with the light. In person, they make you want to move around in front of them, tilting your head to capture the movement, as you might with a lenticular print. As with previous bodies of work, the show features closely cropped portraits of Black people. The subjects have a nonchalant, even dreamy air that decentres the viewer’s gaze. They don’t refuse to perform so much as find the very idea a bit boring. Even when directly facing the viewer, they appear to look past you into the middle distance. Here, the portraits are framed together with little vignettes of text in the

artist’s neat hand, both mounted in apertures cut in a considerable expanse of white mat. Both writing and drawing suggest inset windows on a computer screen, or perhaps the faces and text areas that now describe a typical working day. Ojih Odutola’s works often revolve around a narrative, as in her breakout solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2017, which was based on a fictionalised tale of two aristocratic Nigerian families. Here the texts range from single lines to a couple of paragraphs and switch between first- and third-person reminiscences, but manage to world-build in just a few deft strokes. They unspool the stories – and lies – that we tell ourselves, and that are poignant and prosaic in turn: a seventy-year-old woman reflecting on her art collection (‘a biography of a blessed life’), a woman viewing the dead body of someone who terrorised her when alive, so many relationships lost. Spending time with this show feels like eavesdropping in a café or urban park-bench, so intimate is it in its anonymity. It offers a curious voyeuristic pleasure that is sonic instead of scopic: not looking but listening. Sometimes the texts relate conversations like an angry phone call in For Evidence (all works 2020). In Chosen, meanwhile, Ojih Odutola imagines an exchange between a pair looking into a shop window emblazoned with ‘sale’. One person touching up their lip gloss turns into

a conversation about getting chosen and self-love. ‘Don’t worry if we had the option, we wouldn’t choose ourselves,’ says the person on the right. ‘Well… I’d choose you,’ the other replies. Throughout, there’s an awareness of being for sale (a very American story), of being seen and not seen, and of honouring ancestors. In It’ll be over soon, a pair honed in rare colour against a cobalt background grumble about their lack of visibility, while in Homeroom a bespectacled woman tries to get through the day and ‘avoid any notice of her person by anyone’, the text explains. ‘There is a disheartening supposition that our elders were somehow uninvolved with mainstream channels of visibility and their own agency,’ Always Been offers alongside a pensive woman in a pearl necklace. In Nourishment a man considers an object accompanied by the memory of a trip to the ‘Artifacts of Africa’ wing of a museum, and his mother tells him that this stolen art is his inheritance and he should have pride in it. When he wants to escape the discomfiting lesson by getting food, she tells him she is amazed he still needs nourishment after time in the room. I imagine the same conversation happening in this gallery – except here the art isn’t looted colonial spoils. And I imagine the same conversation one day happening in museums around the world, filled with repatriated objects; a story I long to tell myself even if it doesn’t come true. Rahel Aima

A Delayed Understanding, 2020, coloured pencil and graphite on Dura-Lar, 48 × 60 cm (framed). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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ArtReview

23/10/2020 15:32

Elisabeth Wild Karma International, Zürich 12 September – 24 October Elisabeth Wild’s European solo debut is nothing if not quietly seductive. Quietness, nevertheless, was not typical of her lifestyle: born in postHabsburg Vienna between World Wars, Wild fled with her family to Argentina during Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. Under the shadow of Juan Perón’s policies, in 1962 she escaped again, to Basel, only to (eventually) return to South America during the mid-90s, joining her artist daughter Vivian Suter in Panajachel, Guatemala. A tropical shell, tossed about and occasionally endangered by severe weather, indigence, world events and local crime organisations, she died earlier this year, aged ninety-eight. In Guatemala she had adopted geometrically inclined papier collé, snipping from art, fashion and architecture magazines at a time

when the modernist diatribes the technique once ignited were long distant. Displacements, appropriations and recontextualisations had by now naturalised montage, as had the cutand-paste aspects of home computers and visual pop culture. If anything, Wild was inadvertently closer to the aesthetics of hauntology – popularised circa 15 years ago and deriving from a neologism by Jacques Derrida – which sees in collage a device for extracting unexpressed, ‘spectral’ potential in narratives of the past. As showcased here, Wild’s work also offers glimpses of possible presents and futures: her arrangements depict an angular and quasiabstract world in which social housing flirts with postmodernism; a carnivalesque brutalism has prevailed and landscapes are populated by totemlike structures.

The compositions, all untitled, render an otherworldly, intimate synthesis of the major avantgardes of the century she spent across the Atlantic, liberating the constitutive pieces of the collages from glossy context and temporal situatedness. The show’s curator, Adam Szymczyk, who first championed Wild in a duo exhibition featuring her and her daughter’s work at Kunsthalle Basel in 2014, has arranged this show as an orderly picture gallery spreading horizontally and vertically on an aquamarine, windowfacing wall – a nod to the artist’s taste for lively backdrops – in what seems an allusion to a calendar (Wild made one work per day, as if to mark the passage of time). Or it could resemble a surreal, intimately personal panorama to be glimpsed through metaphorical ‘openings’ in a boundary wall. Francesco Tenaglia

Untitled, undated, collage on paper, 32 × 24 cm. Courtesy Karma International, Zürich

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Books The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London 1957–69 by Thomas Crow Paul Mellon Centre, £25 (hardcover) That ‘Mods’ – the sharply dressed youth tribe of 1960s Britain – should have something to do with modern art (of the 1960s) seems at first incongruous. It’s not that the two weren’t adjacent culturally and socially, but that art history and cultural history tend to keep their objects in their separate tracks – the history of painting and sculpture in one, say, and the history of fashion cults and popular culture in another. What art historian Thomas Crow essays in The Hidden Mod in Modern Art is a sympathetic and elegantly counterintuitive account of the emergence of something more like an attitude towards life; a kind of subject who was ‘devoted on an almost full-time basis to fastidious discrimination in the styling of the self’. Crow refuses to compartmentalise fashion, design, music and art, preferring to weave these together like threads in a Mod’s knitted tie. His close-to cultural history is about individuals, not abstracted cultural or social movements, each chapter tracing fortuitous interconnections between creative minds in particular urban and institutional junctures. The tiny, hothouse world of artists, art schools, soho bohemia, fashion shops and art galleries of the 60s are here mapped in synchronicity, and the first chapter opens with Crow’s ironic recommendation that ‘it is often useful to launch an investigation into any

artistic episode from an apparently marginal or inauspicious point of entry.’ In this case it’s an ad for Vince’s, a proto-Mod menswear shop in Soho. This ad, however, appears in Ark, the magazine of the Royal College of Art at its most influential moment; Ark’s editor at that moment is Roger Coleman, who is steering the magazine towards American mass culture and a cuttingedge technophile attitude to graphic design; Coleman is then recruited to Lawrence Alloway’s exhibitions committee at the ica; Alloway puts together Coleman’s painting schoolmates Robyn Denny and Richard Smith with Guy Debord’s London acolyte Ralph Rumney, resulting in the 1959 show Place, which, with its immersive installation of paintings ostensibly responding to American largescale abstraction, suggests a quite different attitude to visual sensation plugged into the reality of mass media, and by implication, a new sensibility to the city and urban culture. This new sense of the mobile, self-making individual, alert to commodity culture and media, is the ‘Mod’ Crow seeks out in his parallel tales of artistic emergence, siting the familiar alongside the less well-known; David Hockney’s explosive early success framed in relation to his less-feted contemporary Billy Apple; the shortlived Pauline Boty’s Pop painting alongside the enduring Bridget Riley’s Op. In each, Crow points

out the fading exclusivity and hermeticism of high (and male and heterosexual) modernism giving way to the heterogenous and horizontal interdependencies of ‘Mod’. But the Mod sensibility is soon to dissolve in the endpoint of individual self-affirmation – hippydom and the counterculture, which Crow treats in the final two chapters. Underpinning Crow’s kaleidoscopic enthusiasm for British culture at a moment of extraordinary fertility is, it turns out, a long-range dispute with the disciplines of the New Art history and cultural studies. Crow’s Mod is, in essence, a cousin of the denizen of Paris in the nineteenth century (on which Crow cut his art-historical teeth) and he bookends his chapters with criticism of T.J. Clark (a key figure of the New Art History) and cultural studies, seeing in their theorising of the spectacle of Parisian modernity and of contemporary youth subcultures a parallel condescension of the ‘petitbourgeois’ subject – that is, not politically radical or ‘authentically’ working class, but an individualist hopelessly adrift in the capitalist spectacle. Crow is no revolutionary, but it’s the selfconscious ‘modernist’ awareness of that spectacle, and the claim of working-class and subaltern agency that stems from it, that The Hidden Mod is determined to defend. J.J. Charlesworth

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud by Kuniko Tsurita, translated by Ryan Holmberg Drawn & Quarterly, $29.85 (softcover) For women, navigating the publishing scene of the counterculture during the 1960s was notoriously difficult. Rife with sexism and macho attitudes – despite the liberal and progressive ideas male editors and publishers professed to have – the publications produced by the underground often only made space for women in administrative capacities. In Japan, underground manga publications ran much the same way – at least so it seems in the essay that accompanies The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud, a long-awaited celebration of popular alternative manga magazine Garo’s (1964–2002) lone regular female comic artist, Kuniko Tsurita. Kuniko’s contributions – she was the first woman (at the age of eighteen) to publish comics in the magazine, in 1965 –

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have been an underrecognised part of the canon of Japan’s comic artists more widely, something that comics historian Ryan Holmberg and editor and manga researcher Mitsuhiro Asakawa endeavour to rectify in their afterword on her life and work. Eighteen of Kuniko’s comics are collected here, published between 1966 and 1980, with themes largely reflecting on Japan’s youth in existential crisis via bleak but humorous stories in black-and-white drawings that shift in style (from simple straightforward lines to more detailed images), while retaining a visual language through severe use of high contrast. Read from right to left in the traditional Japanese style, the words spoken in the comics are translated here officially for the first time by Holmberg.

Despite the wide range of topics related to Japan’s youth culture, sexuality, society and politics that appear in this collection, it is the stories that tell of the societal challenges facing women that bind it together: in ‘Woman’ (1966) the prehistoric female protagonist is beaten and rejected by an ex-lover, becomes a single mother and is ostracised by her community; ‘The Tragedy of Princess Rokunomiya’ (1967) reflects on arbitrary beauty standards; a female figure in ‘My Wife Is an Acrobat’ (1974) literally performs nakedly – apart from high heels – in front of a man. Offering far more than a glimpse into Kuniko’s professional career, The Sky is Blue… reflects on her satirical subversion of social and cultural ideals of femininity in an industry dominated by men. Fi Churchman

ArtReview

27/10/2020 12:18

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Having and Being Had by Eula Biss Riverhead Books, $26 / £14.99 (hardcover) Eula Biss didn’t see the point of owning property until she bought a house herself. The American essayist, lauded for her genre-crossing nonfiction books Notes from No Man’s Land (2009) and On Immunity (2014), has long valued money in terms of the time it afforded her to write, she writes here. That is, until she secured a university job, along with a raise that brought her salary to $73,000. It pushed Biss and her husband, John, also an artist, into a new pay bracket – one that could accommodate a mortgage on a brick bungalow with a view of the lake in Evanston, Chicago, a historically AfricanAmerican neighbourhood. She describes the lure of becoming a landowner near the start of her searching, occasionally frustrating collection of short essays on how money shapes and winnows our trajectories. ‘I wanted to paint the kitchen Moir Gold and I wanted to plant a garden in the backyard,’ she writes. ‘I wanted to make something mine. What I wanted, more than anything was the illusion of permanence the house provided. The solid foundation, the bricks that wouldn’t blow away, the sense of security. That was a fantasy, I knew, but it felt real.’ This postpandemic moment has fast exposed permanence and security as latecapitalist delusions. Biss, who draws on the ideas of David Graeber, the late American

anthropologist who famously proposed that most white-collar jobs were meaningless, concedes that owning a house also means being owned by it. John strips wallpaper off their living room. Biss prunes roses she doesn’t like. ‘The house is just passing through my hands,’ she writes. ‘It’s not a purchase, it’s husbandry.’ Yet the house is also an asset that grows in value. It accustoms the couple and their young son to a new world of middle-class comforts. Biss, paraphrasing Marx, points out that the middle class, comprising business owners and professionals with the means to make investments, is dangerous because their loyalty is divided between the workers they depend on and the capitalist dreams to which they aspire. Having and Being Had is at its best when it reveals the anatomy of this split allegiance. In clear prose, free of rhetorical flourishes, she explores the thrall of middle-class desires. She’s drawn to a brand of white paint that costs $110 a gallon and magically appears more luminous than its cheaper counterparts. These desires become purchases, which become class signifiers that feel increasingly indispensable. Biss buys a piano, the domain of nineteenthcentury housewives who were expected to model ‘genteel idleness’. Biss also exposes the lie of middle-class morality, revealing its relationship to invisible labour and servitude. In Victorian England,

she writes, landowning women liked to go ‘slumming’, visiting the poor and making them scrub their linens. In the essay One’s Own, she reveals that Virginia Woolf underpaid her chef, Nellie Boxall, and fired her several years after publishing A Room of One’s Own (1929). Biss isn’t immune to this irony. After giving birth, she pays a young woman, who goes by the job title ‘mother’s helper’, only eight dollars an hour to do chores while she holds the baby. Biss is fearless when it comes to excavating the terms of her own complicity, laying bare its ethical and moral dimensions. When Biss and John move into their bungalow, the American big-box chain Walmart pays them $8,000 to create an imaginary interior for a commercial aimed at the African-American demographic that can no longer afford their neighbourhood. ‘John tells all this to his friend Dan, who says, I think that’s the definition of white privilege,’ Biss writes. Here, Biss’s stylish nonstyle works to obfuscate, not illuminate. To anyone who doesn’t share the writer’s class and race, this is a self-evident truth that borrows the force of a revelation. Having and Being Had thinks deeply about the systems we take for granted, but these teachable moments can dilute the strength of its project. After all, investigating our class delusions and renouncing them altogether are two different things. Neha Kale

Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu Head of Zeus, £18.99 (hardcover) The human story only really has two endings (if you ignore the one about living happily ever after). In one, everybody dies. In the other, the universe ends. Cixin Liu’s science fiction is stoic in that way, since these are the inexorable endpoints of his take on humanity’s relationship to science, technology and the cosmos. Hold Up the Sky collects the first English translations of 11 short stories mostly written during the 2000s, and it affirms Liu as the nerdish, physics-, cosmology- and engineeringobsessed writer who has won many fans among those fond of the ‘hard sf’ genre. Whether it’s the exact way a star collapses after having a black hole shot into it, or the detail of how to contain an underground coal-seam fire with liquid cement, or how much matter it takes

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to store every permutation of Classical Chinese poetry in atomic-scale computer memory, Liu is dazzlingly plausible. But that plausibility is only the armature for stories that aspire to the philosophical grandeur of writers like Isaac Asimov (one of Liu’s heroes). Here, human lives are tiny in the face of cosmic space and time. Liu’s stories often start out in present-day China – a dying provincial school teacher teaches his students Newton’s laws, not realising that his charges will be taken as proof of earthly civilisation, saving the planet from world-culling extraterrestrials; an anticorruption official discovers that a superstring computer can make all history (and all crimes) transparent – and in one sense, his science fiction is Chinese in its outlook, though not

because of its local particularities. Ironically, it’s because it’s now China that still espouses such an (old-fashioned) view of human progress that Liu’s work reads as contemporary and as classic (that’s to say ‘Western’) space opera. Compared to, say, the ecologism of Ursula K. Le Guin or the futurised cultural relativism of Iain M. Banks, Liu’s universe is very un-Western in its optimism about humanity’s identity and future among the stars. And in the face of final futility, it’s art that gives meaning to things – the three most whimsical stories here are of alien entities who come to Earth to play music, or sculpt, or write poetry – even if, occasionally, this results in disaster and the death of millions. This is only fiction, after all. J. J. Charlesworth

ArtReview

27/10/2020 12:18

The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards

‘The washerwoman Josephine Marchais seemed dirty and withered, though still angry looking, “like a fury.”’ Likening a pétroleuse – women who were put on trial for alleged incendiary activities during the Paris Commune in 1871 – to a fury, the author Léonce Dupont employs physiognomy to pass swift judgment on the five women he encounters at one of the trials in his book La Commune et Ses Auxiliaires Devant la Justice. That women who fight for their rights are stereotyped as manhating, ugly, hysterical, even unnatural is hardly of recent imagination, as Jill Richards’s study reveals. She uses a wide range of archives to chart the history of modernist women’s struggles for various rights – seeing each movement as both events in themselves and in contact with each other. During the course of this, her book steers away from the specific demands made by each of the selected movements to examine acts of resistance as an extended practice in the day-by-day experiences of the women who were part of these movements. At first Richards’s selection of archives seems unconventional: she mines bildungsroman literature, schedules and minutes of meetings, little magazines, public petitions, sex manuals, birth-control pamphlets, paintings, photographs, plays, tables of contents and suchlike, all produced by women to chart ‘the lived experiences of female citizenship as a practice

Columbia University Press, $105 / £88 (hardcover), $35 / £27 (softcover)

and process’. She consults arrest records and prison sentences to record names and stories of women who were part of various movements. In doing so, Richards brings to attention the quotidian nature of politics instead of seeing it as an occasional activity the women indulged in. The first of three parts in the book examines the afterlives of women incendiaries through the act of naming names employed in Ina Césaire’s intimate 1992 play, Fire’s Daughters. The chief character, Rosanie Soleil, is a historical figure, though the story of the play is not a historical drama. The prologue sees the character of the mother doing housework while an offstage voice delivers in monologue the names of the women who participated in Martinique’s Southern Insurrection. Their names, ages, professions, places of birth and domiciles are recited, acknowledging their acts, placing them in history. In chapter two of this first part, in what Richards calls the ‘long middle’ of the militant suffragette movement, she reads the everyday lives of the women and the process of the campaigns themselves. Part two looks at the history of reproductive rights across the Atlantic, via the role little magazines like The Women Rebel (1914) and The Birth Control Review (1917–40) played in the pro-choice movement. Hannah Höch’s art and Mathilda (Til) Brugman’s short story ‘Department Store of Love’ (1931–33) are used to thread the

connections between Dadaism and queer feminism movements from the 1920s onward. Man Ray’s 1922 portrait of Marquise Casati and the works of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore are among the archives that Richards examines for a history of surrealism’s preoccupation with the female form as a set of identity characteristics and the treatment of queer resistance. In the final part of the book, the form of committee meetings as faulty but foundational to the development of institutional human rights is analysed through the reports and editorials in Paulette Nardal’s journal Woman in the City (1945–51). The sense of this being a history of the present is hard to ignore. The rights pertaining to citizenship, reproduction, sexuality and suffrage might have been secured through long struggles, but several have become newly vulnerable in the present. Richards clarifies, towards the end, that the book is not meant to be an instruction manual, but admits that the layers she was investigating in The Fury Archives were motivated by the politics of the present. That strategies such as the occupation of public spaces as an act of protest, strikes to try to accelerate governmental action and the naming of names as an act of acknowledgement and remembrance remain familiar and continue to be employed make many of the decades-old archives seem eerily contemporary. Deepa Bhasthi

Beau Geste Press edited by Alice Motard Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, €39 (softcover) Writers, artists or anyone dependent on gatekeepers to get their work noticed will sympathise with the motives behind the Beau Geste Press, a diy publishing outfit founded by two Mexican émigrés, the married artists Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion, and art historian David Mayor in rural England in 1971. In a 1972 letter to Transgravity magazine, reproduced in this comprehensive history of the press, Ehrenberg explained, ‘The main reason we set up our press was to cut out the grievous bullshit about submitting work “for consideration”; and the ensuing stress’. It’s no surprise that a distrust of authority underpinned the enterprise: the couple had fled to Britain after escaping the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which as many as 300 demonstrating students were killed by Mexican authorities. After briefly staying in

London, they moved to Devon, renting a farmhouse that would become the headquarters of the small-run publishing house. This catalogue raisonné, stemming from a recent retrospective at the capc in Bordeaux, chronicles the press’s growth from publisher of the founding trio’s Fluxus-inspired projects to one inviting contributions from friends and peers internationally. Ehrenberg produced a bundle of games packaged in a disposable-tampon bag that first year; a year later, the press had published a book for Carolee Schneemann that included essays by the artist, a comic strip documenting her 1970 performance for the Fluxus Fluxorum Festival and a game ‘to be played by couples’. Lacking funding, they did eventually turn to existing structures and the ‘bullshit’ Ehrenberg

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feared. In one of the accompanying essays, Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, also in Britain, and on the run from cia-backed tyranny in her homeland, connects the British Council’s withdrawal of funding for her 1973 book with Beau Geste to Pinochet’s coup. Withdrawn because the council had decided she was ‘not doing “art” but “politics”’, the grant was only reinstated after younger members of the British Council’s staff threatened a hunger strike. The press disbanded in 1976 as the artists, each growing in recognition, concentrated on their own work. But its nonetheless prodigious output, assiduously collected and annotated here, serves as an inspiring reminder of the possibility of escaping the artworld establishment. Oliver Basciano

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We often recall that when we made ourselves Empress of India – after that shocking business of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and we were on their side, by the way – it was in the belief that the state ‘should breathe feelings of generosity, benevolence and religious toleration’ (we, Albert and ourself, came up with that one). As far as we can see on YouTube, you don’t even understand what any of those words mean; and before you start, we’re not making fun of your collective breathing difficulties. We guaranteed the poor people of that nation their religious freedom and rescued them from the brutalising, money-grabbing, capitalist hideousness of the East India Company. You know, up here in the clouds, as we enjoy our regular Friday tea with Jesus (such beautiful feet), Prince Albert (yes, that ‘we’) always brings up the fact that we (the other ‘we’) were the original Occupy movement. We laugh, of course. We were much more generous, hygienic, well liked and organised than that rabble. But Jesus always says that Albert’s got a point, and who’s going to argue with Him? Now we read on Twitter that Hindoos are killing Muslims, trishuls are flying and the place is a bloody mess. After all the effort we put into sorting it out! And you people say empires are a bad thing! Unless they are run by that Jeffrey Bezos fellow (wonderful eyebrows), in which case you’re a bit ‘on the fence’, as people say. Of course we pity you, at times we even shed a tear, but it’s very hard for us to fathom. We’ll tell you something else that’s hard to fathom: the whole business of the British Museum thinking about regifting that head we gave them. A horrid business, if you’ll pardon our French. We were always of the opinion, as we believe most people are, that the British Museum ‘thinking’ about doing anything was far, far removed from the idea that it might do anything about it. But then we hear, on Radio 4 no less, that it went and put the head of Sir Hans Sloane – its founder – in a ‘secure cabinet’ on nonprominent display, with a note of some sort explaining that he was ‘a collector and a slave owner’ and that his work should be seen in ‘the exploitative context of the British Empire’. As we’ve already established, our Empire was about bringing an end to exploitation. If atrocities had been committed by people of Sloane’s generation, everyone’s lives were improved by people in ours. Ask Jesus, for goodness’ sake! I heard the museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer (frightful beard), prancing around the ‘media circuit’ and proclaiming to all and sundry that “we have pushed him off the pedestal” (as if he has any right to call himself a we), and then announcing that “we must not hide anything”. As if pushing poor Sir Hans off the pedestal, locking him in a cupboard and surrounding

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Back Page

In an ongoing series by the great colonialists, Queen Victoria has some advice for museums

him with inaccurate footnotes was anything other than hiding him! It’s a small comfort to us to know that at nearly two-and-a-half metres in height, the head we gave the museum is rather too large for cupboards. It’s what we’re told the locals (from Rapa Nui, apparently the last place on Earth to be settled by humans) call a moai, and this one is supposedly named Hoa Hakananai’a. I remember the last director of the British Museum, Mr MacGregor (what a jaw), putting the great lump’s history like this: ‘He came to London in 1869 and he’s been one of the most admired inhabitants of the British Museum ever since’. He – the natives believe that it is

inhabited by a spirit – came to London because the Royal Navy brought him here. So that they could give it to ourselves. And we in turn gave it to the museum. It says so on a notice beside the head. A notice of gratitude in honour of our generosity. We were noted for our generosity, btw. We remember to this day the look on Duleep Singh’s handsome (for a native) little face (he had the most incredible dark eyes and shiny white teeth) when we allowed him to wear the Koh-i-Noor diamond again. He had given it to us when he was eleven, as part of the treaty of Lahore. He said he loved us and that he was glad that we had it now. He used to be a Maharaja and we made him the Black Prince of Perthshire – not officially, of course – which we think is a step up in the world. To think that people say we kidnapped him, when our people took the poor child to London in order to civilise him and save him from his Sikhish ways! We have to confess, though, the truth is that while the front of the head, the aforementioned big one, is rather charming-looking (majestic nose), the carvings on the back include an episode revealing a rather nasty fascination with female genitalia, which was obviously inappropriate for Buckingham Palace. Although we might have got away with it in Balmoral, since anything goes up north. The navy (the crew of hms Topaze, managed by the charming Commodore Richard Ashmore Powell – he had a pair of wonderful legs) found the head halfburied in a hut, which I guess is the Rapa Nui equivalent of Fischer’s cupboard. We gave it to the museum so that it could travel from obscurity to light. And there it has sat, alongside other items associated with us: the admissions ticket to Hamilton’s Museum (it was a brass object, like a coin, it had our head on it, like a coin), a nineteenth-century bookmark (our head, again), some Canadian, Straits Settlements, Cypriot, Hong Kong and Indian money (worthless, but our head, naturally) – it was all about money with these museums, even in my day – all of it bringing joy and wonder to the good people of Britain for more than a century. And now, despite the fact that it was us who brought Hoa Hakananai’a out of the closet, we hear that the Rapa Nui people consider our good sailors to have ‘stolen’ him and are asking that he be given back! And worse! That the British Museum is ‘talking’ to them, and considering a ‘loan’! As if it were one of those video stores that young people used to hang out in during the 1980s while libraries went to seed. What utter ingrates! Let them see it, we say, perhaps even let them fondle it, as we did with Duleep Singh. But never let them think it might be anything other than ours.

ArtReview

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