ArtReview September 2022 by ArtReview

Let loose from the noose since 1949

Anne Imhof Life Among Ruins Free Money Sacred Bulls

Wolfgang Laib City of Silence

Photo of the artist’s studio. ©Wolfgang Laib.

London September—October 2022

ROSA BARBA RADIANT EXPOSURES SEPTEMBER 9 – OCTOBER 15, 2022

Rosa Barba, Solar Flux Recording, 2017/2022 (film still)

ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

MARK MANDERS September 3 - October 15, 2022

PÉLAGIE GBAGUIDI March 12 - April 30, 2022

ZENO X GALLERY ZENO X GALLERY ANTWERP Antwerp, Borgerhout

www.zeno-x.com

ArtReview vol 74 no 6 September 2022

Together Forever Hmmmm… for most of you, welcome to the end of an unnaturally long, hot summer. Although it’s nature that’s doing the heating. And us fuelling nature. Or something. In any case, we’re all in it together. Although ArtReview decides what goes in ArtReview, so in some cases we are not. btw, for those of you who are lagging behind the times, when it comes to ‘current’ ‘discourse’, ArtReview is using ‘we’ in the fashionable sense there. The one that doesn’t distinguish between humans and nonhumans. We’re all in it together! Like this year’s collectivepractice-focused Documenta. Oh… Maybe some of these things don’t work out in the ‘real’ world. That’s the problem with what happens in ‘discourse’: sometimes it has nothing whatsoever to do with what happens in ‘practice’. Perhaps when it started this editorial ArtReview had been paying too much attention to Zheng Bo’s artworks. The ones about our relations with plants. Right. Forget what ArtReview said earlier. Let’s rewind. The thing is that we’re clearly not in anything together. As widening gaps between rich and poor, ongoing wars, genocides, nationalisms and general disregard for nature and its processes when the going gets tough or expensive testify. Obviously that list could be longer. But ArtReview hasn’t got time to do everything. Besides, we’re not in it… and ArtReview decides… You get the point. Right?

Not in it together

In case you don’t, the point is that art and ArtReview exist precisely on the cusp of discourse and practice. One foot in each grave, if you like. With the possibility of bridging both. Of course, there are those who say that art only exists to protect its exceptionalism, to protect itself as a space where the normal rules don’t apply. A space in which the money should be spent regardless of any thought about the outcomes. And their relative worth. A space for job-shy layabouts with perverse and incomprehensible ideas of beauty who can’t be bothered to contribute to society, let alone fit into it. As ArtReview’s aunt likes to say. And the person who runs the newsagent. And the people behind the bar at its local pub. And the painters who are renovating its building. And the people at the swimming pool… Sorry… ArtReview’s drifting off. You already know all about ‘we all’ and ‘not’. And you’ll probably be wondering what ArtReview’s getting at here. Right? Yeah! ArtReview’s a fucking mindreader! This issue then is partly about why art’s important, partly about what art can do in terms of giving agency, often to people who either have none or are made to think they have none, and about how art might be a space in which we can gently explore some forms of solidarity and some forms of resistance to attempts to keep us in our places. And how our screwed-up society really needs some kind of reset. And unless you’re running society or invested in running society or want to run society or are quite happy with how our society is developing, we’re surely all into that! ArtReview’s done it to itself again, hasn’t it? Shit. ArtReview

All together now

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Adrian Ghenie

Adrian Ghenie, 2022 (detail), charcoal on paper, 65 × 50 cm © Adrian Ghenie

아드리안 게니

서울

새롭게 확장한 페이스갤러리

서울의 복합예술공간을 소개합니다

Seoul Explore our newly expanded art complex

Le Beige Building 267 Itaewon-ro Yongsan-gu pacegallery.com

Art Observed The Interview Rita Ackermann by Ross Simonini 22

Notes on Art and Abortion by Lauren Elkin 34 Positions by Emmanuel Iduma 36

Show Rooms by Phoebe Blatton 31 Pride of Place by Benoît Loiseau 32

page 32 Sol Marinozzi, About That Time, 2022 (installation view, White Cubicle Toilet Gallery at The Queen Adelaide, London). Photo: David Grandorge

Art Featured

Anne Imhof by Cat Kron 40

Nikita Gale by Salena Barry 56

Abdias Nascimento by Oliver Basciano 48

Universal Basic Artist by Pierre d’Alancaisez 62

page 48 Abdias Nascimento, Quilombismo (Exu e Ogum), 1980, oil on canvas, 71 × 56 cm. © ipeafro Collection, Rio de Janeiro

Sarah Sze 22 Anapiron Polemou Street Athens

GAGOSIAN

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 68 Danny McDonald, by Evan Moffitt Choreographing Politics, by Emily May Anna Esposito, by Ben Eastham Lucie Stahl, by Christian Egger The past and futures of Afrofuturism, by John-Baptiste Oduor Kim Hiørthoy, by Paige K. Bradley Margrét H. Blöndal, by Owen Duffy Hew Locke, by Melissa Baksh Jeannette Ehlers, by Rodney LaTourelle Rich-kid art, by Martin Herbert Marinella Senatore, by Skye Sherwin Peggy Franck, by Pádraic E. Moore The Condition of Being Addressable, by Claudia Ross The Future Behind Us, by Francesco Tenaglia Giselle Beiguelman, by Oliver Basciano Looking at art outside ‘the artworld’, by Martin Herbert Mounira Al Solh, by Mark Rappolt Steffi Klenz, by J.J. Charlesworth Graphic Turn, by Juan José Santos

India: A History in Objects, by T. Richard Blurton, reviewed by Mark Rappolt The Tribe, by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, reviewed by Oliver Basciano If These Apples Should Fall, by T.J. Clark, reviewed by J.A. Koster Cursed Bunny, by Bora Chung, reviewed by Fi Churchman Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, by Olúfé̇mi Táíwò, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth After Institutions, by Karen Archey, reviewed by Alexander Leissle

from the archive 102

page 85 Tiona Nekkia McClodden, The Backlight 5.10.2016, 2016, digital c-print, 61 × 46 cm. Courtesy the artist (as seen in The Condition of Being Addressable, ica Philadelphia)

Upcoming exhibitions: Ella Littwitz: If everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place

Upcoming art fairs: Frieze London: Oscar Santillán, Jamilah Sabur Artissima: Ada M. Patterson

6 Copperfield Street, London SE1 0EP Copperfieldlondon.com

Art Observed

A world once 21

Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Rita Ackermann

“Every artwork has to eat itself through the self of the artist until it is something more than just the presentation of the self”

Rita Bakos was born in 1968 in Budapest, where she studied with the painter Károly Klimó, an artist whose influence on her work has become increasingly felt over the years. In the early 1990s, at age twenty-two, she moved to America for further schooling and immediately changed her surname to the more pronounceable Ackermann. Within a few years, Ackermann wove herself into the New York art community. Her early paintings were filled with spritelike characters whose leonine features resembled her own. Over time her work has evolved in distinct series, most of them characterised by sending her figures through radical transformations: setting them aflame, erasing them, collaging

them with photographs. Most recently her paintings have taken the form of Abstract Expressionism, melting her figural draughtsmanship into colourful, corporeal smears. As long as she has been exhibiting, Ackermann has also collaborated with fellow New Yorkers. In 2000 she cofounded the band Angelblood with members of the local experimental music community, including Lizzi Bougatsos and Brian DeGraw of Gang Gang Dance. She’s also painted with Harmony Korine, produced a theatrical show with Kim Gordon and worked with the French fashion house Chloé. Despite Ackermann’s long-term presence in New York, she continues to speak with

September 2022

a rich Hungarian accent and the unexpected phrasal turns of a second language. I, however, interviewed her via email, which was at her request. For several weeks, over many exchanges, she responded to my questions with pronounced brevity. She has remarked that her work is born from the psychoanalytic emphasis of her Hungarian art schooling, but her answers did not seem to serve the purpose of verbal catharsis. Instead, many of the questions I asked her were left unanswered or were answered simply with “no comment”, as if, with every response, she was attempting to erase herself from the conversation.

I ross simonini Are you attracted to ugliness? rita ackermann I’m not sure what you mean by ugliness. Can you be more specific? rs Are you attracted to things that also repulse you? ra No, I don’t like to be repulsed, but I like funny things… Paul McCarthy’s work might be aesthetically repulsive but it’s also funny as hell. Also he’s a classical master in artistic skills so he can make repulsive things look masterfully beautiful without looking kitschy… His work also has the original innocence of a child even when it is at its nastiest behaviour. A perfect paradox, therefore. He is impossible to copy. rs What does a “classical master” mean to you? ra Someone who can shoot from the wrist, masterful drawings. rs Do you aspire to this? ra I’m not sure if it is something you can aspire to. rs Do you consider drawing as the true indication of skill? ra Through drawings you can see the intimacy between the artist and their works. You can see

the authenticity and passion, like when the child draws.

rs In what way do you experience your art as gratitude?

rs Do you want your work to have the innocence of a child?

ra That I’m able to live for and from art.

ra Probably. rs How would you do that? ra With radical amazement, without trying.

ra Of course. Van Gogh’s works radiate gratitude.

rs Were you an artistic child?

ra I always liked to draw and paint. rs Did people around you consider you a good artist as a child? ra They didn’t pay too much attention to what I was making but provided me with pencil, paint and paper that made me content. rs Did you ever leave art behind for a period of time? ra Not really, art was always my main passion. rs If not ugliness, was beauty your goal? ra Quality is more interesting… You can make a masterpiece out of trash with a sense of sophisticated lightness that shows the noble intellect of the original mind. My friend shared with me today a quote from Nietzsche that answers, for me, your question – ‘The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude’.

If I Was a Maid, Can I Clean Your Flat?, 1994, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 137 × 270 cm

rs Do any works of art by others express gratitude for you?

ArtReview

rs Are you a private person? ra Yes. rs What, specifically, are you private about? ra About everything. rs You answer many of my questions with short responses. Are you a talkative person? ra Sometimes… but I prefer to be quiet. rs Your earlier representational work referenced your own image. Do you also see your newer abstract paintings as self-portraits? ra My early figurative paintings were many things but most of all they were vessels for me to communicate because I lost my primal language but gained the ultimate freedom of expression

that wasn’t available in the setting of the Hungarian art scene. Those girl figures were embarrassing, trashy and classy at once. Pop and expressionist, loaded but innocent, and most importantly they didn’t need anybody at the end, they were content with themselves. They were portraits of the invincible youth and their guardian angels. Every artwork has to eat itself through the self of the artist until it is something more than just the presentation of the self. rs Do you ever purposely erase the presentation of yourself from your work? ra What exactly do you mean? I’m afraid I don’t understand the question. rs Do you ever notice something in the work that feels too much like ‘you’, something that is too revealing, and try to get rid of it, perhaps because of embarrassment or vulnerability? ra Vulnerability is a good thing if it comes in harmony with the confidence of acceptance. There are things that can be fixed and there are things that are stronger left alone.

ra I’m sure there is.

rs Attitude or altitude?

rs So you don’t really see your early work as self-portraits?

ra Altitude. Cruising altitude, like the airplane cruises above the clouds.

ra No, I don’t see those figures as myself. I don’t think of the self much because it is in the way of making art.

rs Does painting ever make you feel ‘high’?

rs Do you dress, in any way, like your work? ra I dress for work and I enjoy dressing up nice when I don’t work. Artists should have a good sense of style, though – a peculiar style that is independent from fashion trends and the capsule of times. rs How would you describe the sound of your voice? ra I have a quiet voice. rs Do you still make music? ra Very rarely… behind closed doors. rs Did you lose interest? ra Not in music, not at all… I just enjoy listening to it more.

rs Do you think there is any relationship between your own appearance and your paintings?

rs What kind of relationship do you have to music now?

ra Do you mean physical appearance?

ra Loving… Music is my great friend. A vessel to get lifted. It sets the altitude.

rs Yes.

ra Not intoxicated but elevated. Feeling elevated comes with clarity. It feels sharp and crystal clear and it hits with immense joy when a painting arrives to finish. rs Do your paintings relate to your body? ra I’m not aware of my body when I paint and hope it’ll stay like that for many more years. My body works like a tool to make paintings, and when you use a hammer to put a nail in the wall probably the last thing you think of while hammering is the hammer. rs What would happen if you paid attention to the body? ra Oh, I was unclear above. This hammer metaphor does not work at all. Simply put, when I paint I can only pay attention to the painting and which Dylan song should be playing and where is my glass of martini. The entire surface must be worked at once. Speed matters. Accidents must meet with control. Chaos has to precede order because without chaos there is nothing to clean up.

If anyone hurts my brother, I’ll kill that…, 1994, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 122 × 234 cm

September 2022

Mama, the Correspondence, 2021, acrylic, oil and china marker on canvas, 193 × 188 cm. Photo: Thomas Barratt

Mama, Yves’s Mask, 2021, acrylic, oil, pigments and china marker on canvas, 188 × 173 cm. Photo: François Fernandez

above Mama, Good Samaritan, 2021, oil, acrylic and china marker on canvas, 196 × 168 cm. Photo: Thomas Barratt facing page Mama, Let me in, 2020, oil, acrylic and china marker on canvas, 191 × 166 × 4 cm. Photo: Jon Etter all images but one © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cleanup gets done while the body precisely executes the untraceable movements. rs Do you often drink while painting? ra Sometimes, if I’m in the mood and have the right stuff. rs What’s the right stuff? ra Martini could be good, I make really good and light ones. rs How often do you finish paintings in a single session? ra Not often, I can’t remember.

ra The effects of time on anything or anybody can be only seen later, when there is far enough perspective to see the nature of changes. rs Would you compare this era to any other historical era? ra Each era is a completely new one, like each human has a new face that they are born with. rs How do you feel about the way your work looks online? ra It is not the same as it looks when you see it in person because then it’s texture. But since

rs Would you like to finish a painting in the least possible number of gestures?

ra There is no total control. In a way I just keep cleaning up the painting until it looks orderly. That gives me a sense of control. rs Do you keep your studio orderly? ra In my way, yes, but it might look different from the outside. rs Do you keep your house orderly? ra Yes. rs Are you ever obsessive about neatness? ra Probably around the kitchen more than anywhere else. rs Do you like to cook? ra Yes, sometimes. rs What are some of your most eaten foods?

ra Interesting idea. It really doesn’t matter to me how many gestures it takes to finish a painting. What matters is that I recognise that the painting is finished.

ra Dandelion and potato chips. rs Do you keep your mind orderly? ra Yes, the mind must be kept orderly.

rs What is the longest period of time you have spent working and reworking a single painting?

rs Do you have techniques for doing this?

ra Years, I didn’t touch a painting for years… I didn’t know what to do with it and then suddenly it was right in front of me.

ra Keep out the garbage. Clean the mind from bad or unnecessary thoughts. The actual cleaning itself can be a very good technique.

rs Did it look different than other paintings?

rs Are you embarrassed by any of your work?

ra It really did not.

ra Yes, sometimes, but please don’t ask me which ones and why.

III

rs Are you enjoying this interview?

rs How does your current age differ from the other ages? ra It is the best time of my life. rs How would you describe the era we live in now? ra Transitional times, even more than other transitional times of earlier decades. But who knows, maybe all times are transitional since the nature of our lives is transitional and we must make the best of each day that takes us closer to the time without a body. rs Do these transitions affect your work in any way that you can describe?

ra It is like an exquisite corpse… It is almost as if it’s writing itself. I like it… Do you? I look at my work on the screen while working on its different stages, I’m fine with how the paintings look online. rs Why do you prefer doing email interviews over spoken interviews? ra Because I can control my thoughts better in writing. rs Would you say you are also interested in controlling thoughts in your paintings?

September 2022

rs Very much. How would you ideally like an interview like this to affect the way someone experiences your work? ra That the person who reads our conversation can see that the paintings are more exciting than I am. Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

Fe rr in i nd ra sa es Al

Silvia Rosi

Illuminating paths in contemporary art

Namsal Siedlecki 24.06 — 20.11.2022

During the pandemic, the more ostensibly radical divisions of the artworld were awash with online discourse on ‘care’, ‘horizontality’ or equivalent propositions that tempered an obvious solution – ‘the redistribution of wealth’ – into something more expansive. With cultural arbiters hailing our global awakening to social and environmental breakdown, many sighed with relief when international art fairs – with their carbon footprints, exploited workers, soulless booths and dirty money – had to cancel. After all, fairs – and polite ambivalence to their problematic aspects – would return when we got ‘back to normal’; always a surreal concept, now particularly felt in the West as war rages in Europe, inflation soars alongside temperatures, Roe v Wade is repealed and governments subject refugees (who aren’t white) to unimaginable suffering. And, indeed, some fairs have positively come back swinging! “Like watching big insects fight,” an artist friend said of this year’s bombshell that Art Basel had ousted fiac from the Grand Palais exhibition hall in Paris after 47 years: all grist to the mill for said artist’s practice about the entropic collapse of meaning under late-stage capitalism. So, how will a new fair that has been announced in Warsaw, Poland – that border country of the eu, now hosting millions of refugees from neighbouring Ukraine – respond to the current mood? The Hotel Warszawa Art Fair takes place this September, organised by the forward-thinking gallerists behind Polana Institute, Leto Gallery and Gunia Nowik Gallery, who all happen to be women. When asked if this is significant (in a country where reproductive rights barely exist), they collectively reply that “it helps get stuff done”. Having gauged the satisfaction of their artists and collectors, who interestingly become more female – and queer – the younger the gallery, it is apparent that these gallerists indeed get stuff done. They acknowledge that they still have to negotiate the implications of their ‘Eastern European’ context – inherited wealth is a pretty new concept, for instance, while it has swelled the coffers of many Western galleries for decades – but ‘disadvantages’ can bring wisdom and mettle; essential when the goal is to “create an impactful and cyclical event that will inscribe itself in the fabric of international art fairs”. Entrance to the fair is commendably free, and there’s a canny understanding of how the beautifully renovated art deco Hotel Warszawa building is itself a draw. One of Warsaw’s first skyscrapers, it became an icon of resistance during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 as it withstood

Show Rooms

The Polish government’s grip on culture is tightening daily, says Phoebe Blatton, but are a group of women about to give it space to breathe?

Hotel Warszawa, site of a new fair in Poland’s capital. Courtesy Hotel Warszawa Art Fair

September 2022

German bombardment. Its Jewish architect, Marcin Weinfeld, was incarcerated in Dachau. The particularities of choosing the Hotel Warszawa accordingly resound beyond the ambience and intimacy that the hotel art-fair model – pioneered in 1994 by the Gramercy International Art Fair in New York, now the much larger Armory Show – brings to trading art. Driving the first iteration of the fair is the boom in Polish-art collecting by Polish collectors, with the 20 participating galleries all hailing from Poland. Concordantly, over 50 percent of the five-star Hotel Warszawa’s guests are Polish, demonstrating the wealth that was made during the transformacja period of the 1990s; an era increasingly referenced in the work of younger artists such as choreographer and performer Isa Szostak, whose skaj is the limit (2019) – ‘skaj’ is the Polish word for artificial leather, an aesthetic touchstone of transformacja – wowed audiences with its attentive elevation of an often ridiculed vernacular. With plenty of free attractions offered during the fair – important contemporary Polish artworks (not for sale!) from the Starak Family Foundation will be exhibited at the hotel, while the Friends of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art (largely comprising collectors) showcase the museum’s Filmoteka archive in rolling screenings – would it then also be astute to programme performance, for which Poland is so respected? Amanda Likus, who manages the hotel with her sister, is refreshingly candid about the hotel’s mixed history, revealing how the lobby was frequented by sex workers in the nineties, and how the occasional elderly person still comes in search of the money exchange that used to be housed there. She is adamant that despite its international, luxury status, it is “open for all Varsovians”, and it has housed families of its staff escaping the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But is there room within the rooms, and the confines of commerce, for a genuinely porous relationship between the artists, the architecture and the public, one that could trouble what the artworld really wants from a fair? The gallerists hope the fair will “make Warsaw sexy”, but what constitutes ‘sexy’ is perhaps the major issue for culture in this moment. What remains to be seen is how boldly the galleries seize this opportunity. With the rightwing government’s commandeering of Polish culture showing little reprieve, is it sobering or exciting that a luxury hotel could now accommodate some of the most interesting art being made in Poland today? Phoebe Blatton is a writer based in Berlin

Attending Pride London always seems like a nice idea, until the reality kicks in: the once radical march has largely been reduced to a theatre of rainbow-branded goods and storefronts that hardly inspire any pride at all (m&s lgbt sandwich, anyone?). This year, however, was going to be different. After two years of cancellations due to the covid pandemic, and to mark the event’s 50th anniversary, the capital welcomed two new queer art spaces. So, after claiming my complimentary canned rosé at a Scandinavian concept store in Soho, I began my cultural expedition and, polyester rainbow flag in hand, marched down to Queer Britain, ‘the uk’s first national lgbtq+ museum’, in King’s Cross. Inside the Art Fund-owned 1850s brickbuilding, on Granary Square, an introductory exhibition titled Welcome to Queer Britain spans two rooms of photography and archival

Pride of Place

What do we lose, asks Benoît Loiseau, when gay bars become queer museums?

Work by Alia Romagnoli included in ‘Chosen Families’ (2022) at Queer Britain, London. Courtesy the artist, Queer Britain and Levi’s

ArtReview

material from the museum’s collection. One display, taken from a 2019 exhibition of the same name, is titled ‘Chosen Families’, referring to queer kinship networks (formerly indicted as ‘pretended family relationships’ under the Thatcher government’s Section 28). It features editoriallike portraits by ukbased photographers Alia Romagnoli, Kuba Ryniewicz, Bex Day and Queer Britain trustee Robert Taylor, which, all together, appear as an uncritically choreographed parade of bodies. A blurb on the wall explains that they were co-commissioned by the institution’s partner, denim brand Levi’s, to celebrate ‘the diverse, imaginative and deep relationships which sustain, challenge and nourish us’. While the nature of said commissioning isn’t detailed, the implied curatorial involvement of the fashion giant troubles the display’s ambition. Put simply: whose ‘deep relationships’ are we truly looking at? In the next room, another display, titled ‘Capturing the Rainbow’, consists of a puzzling selection of archival photography from the 1870s to the present day. It includes images of male impersonators in Victorian England, crossdressing First World War British soldiers and Princess Diana visiting the aids ward of a Brazilian hospital in 1991. According to the wall text, they were donated by Getty Images and Queer Britain’s partner, the advertising empire m&c Saatchi, which, need I remind you, was built on the back of Tory campaigns: starting with the 1978 ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ billboards credited with bringing Margaret Thatcher to power and, a decade later – the year before Section 28 was enacted – the ‘Is This Labour’s Idea of a Comprehensive Education?’ poster displaying three ‘disgraceful’ books, one of which is titled Young, Gay & Proud (1980). As I exit the museum, I’m left with the impression that I know more about its portfolio of corporate sponsors than its curatorial vision; but also that the former dangerously informs the latter. A few days later I travel south of the river, where Queercircle graces the former industrial area of Greenwich Peninsula, now home to the hip Design District – brainchild of Hong Kong megadeveloper Knight Dragon. This space, however, is not a museum – it doesn’t currently have a collection. Instead, Queercircle is ‘a new home for lgbtq+ arts, culture and social change’ – at least that is what a large poster announces on the facade of its freshly opened gallery, housed in a David Kohndesigned building. (The organisation, which has been active since 2016, has secured a five-year lease with the support of the Greater London Authority, the Outset Contemporary Art Fund’s Studiomakers Initiative and private

wigged and costumed glf members performing outside Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in solidarity with the incriminated feminists who had stormed the Miss World contest a few months prior. The material insightfully – and entertainingly – documents the introduction of drag street theatre into queer politics in the uk, nodding to the radical potential of performance in the public realm. In the pink-pound era, however, I question whether queer liberation is best served by institutional models. Or rather I question whether the ‘museumification’ of queerness is at all cause for celebration. (Call me nostalgic, but I would trade any museum for one of the many stale-smelling bars that have been priced out of London in recent years, particularly if they come with a cubicle-turned-gallery, as did the East End pub George & Dragon, and now the Queen of Adelaide.) Instead, ‘the will to institutionality’ – as queer and criticalrace-theory scholar Roderick Ferguson aptly puts it – should be scrutinised, for its promise of legitimacy often comes at the cost of normalisation. If London’s new queer institutions are meaningfully to serve their communities, they should not only welcome institutional critique, but actively encourage it. donations.) Yet as I look around the surrounding swanky office blocks, I wonder what kind of social change can be achieved here, aside perhaps from boosting the locale’s ‘Gay Index’ – the magic ingredient to any successful regeneration scheme, according to place-making guru Richard Florida. (Read: ‘bring the queers and your otherwise dull development will prosper’.) As at Queer Britain, entry is free. Good. Inside, two inaugural exhibitions prove delightfully compelling. Alongside a new installation by Londonbased artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan in the main space, the fabulously titled display The Queens’ Jubilee! is exhibited in the venue’s modestly furnished library. Cocurated with artist and gay campaigner Stuart Feather, it features a selection of archival material – spanning photography, articles and poetry dating from the 1970s – drawn from editions of the Gay Liberation Front’s newspaper, Come Together. One photograph shows half a dozen

Benoît Loiseau is a writer, editor and academic usually based in London

from top The Queens’ Jubilee, 2022 (installation view, Queercircle, London), photo: Deniz Guzel; Sol Marinozzi, About That Time, 2022 (installation view, White Cubicle Toilet Gallery at The Queen Adelaide, London), photo: David Grandorge

September 2022

‘Supreme Court Votes 5-4 To Throw Beer Bottle at Slut’ – The Onion, 24 June 2022

My Body

In the wake of the us Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Lauren Elkin shares six notes on art and abortion

In the weeks since the us Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I’ve been watching Tracey Emin’s 1996 film How It Feels, in which she recounts, to camera, the harrowing experience of a botched abortion. When the film opens, we’re on London’s Euston Road, outside the church where her doctor was located. Emin, natty-disheveled in tinted glasses, blue-andwhite- striped shirt, and pin-striped suit jacket, perches on the front steps, and the camera draws slowly closer to her, head in hand. She smokes a cigarette. And then suddenly she’s talking, talking about how “mixed up” her thoughts and feelings are. I don’t know where to start, she says, but this is where it started, she tells us, in 1990. I do the maths – that would have been six years earlier. My own abortion was just over six years ago. It doesn’t feel like much time has passed. Emin tells the story of how she went to see her doctor, who told her she was pregnant – a bit of a surprise, as he’d previously said he was “99.9 percent” sure she couldn’t conceive. Now that she was pregnant, he tried to sell her on it, telling her what a good mother she would make. She needed him to sign papers allowing her to terminate the pregnancy, it being a criminal offence to have an abortion in the uk – except under specific circumstances – without the written recommendation of two doctors. He refused. “Did you think that was unfair?” asks an off-camera interlocutor. “It wasn’t that it was an unfair thing I suppose,” Emin answers, “he was doing what he believed in, but he shouldn’t have beliefs for me.” “Was the doctor a man or a woman?” “Man.” “Does that make a difference?” “I think it made a lot of difference,” Emin says. “He’s probably very well off, very happily married, just had a young child himself, I don’t think he could ever understand what it would be like to have a life of poverty and a life like

Activists protest the leaked Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Los Angeles, May 2022. Photo: Matt Gush / Alamy Stock

ArtReview

a destiny you’ve never chosen and everything you’d always fought against all your life.” The doctor who initially refused to grant Emin’s abortion looked at her and saw only a potential mother – not a potential artist. He looked at her in rhetorical terms, or if you like in Christian terms, not in terms of what she herself wanted for her life. He could not apprehend her as a full human being, only as a womb-haver. 2 Emin is getting at what this whole debate is really about: it’s not fair that men who know nothing of our lives are deciding things on our behalf. Men, and handmaidens to the patriarchy like Amy Coney Barrett, making choices about what happens in the bodies of women and people who give birth. And the people who have supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade have done so in language that is fraught with the sentimentality of moral superiority, saying words like protecting the innocent and saving babies, when they weren’t talking about personal responsibility and how people should raise their daughters not to be sluts who need abortions, or how “some women” use abortions like birth control. Meanwhile, in his concurring opinion, the conservative justice Clarence Thomas took aim at birth control (along with gay marriage and sodomy). Looking back to when she got pregnant in 1990, Emin describes herself as a “total failure in life”, having to bear not only the feelings of guilt at aborting a baby she, on some level, wanted, because she couldn’t care for it. But also, she says, having “to suffer this other blow, of being totally inadequate, never ever being good enough, that’s how I felt”. She’d had a measure of artistic success – she’d managed to get a first-class degree and an ma from the Royal College of Art but was a few years off from starting to show with the ybas, nine years off from her Turner Prize nomination, 17 years off from representing Britain at the Venice Biennale. It was not at all clear in 1990 that she would achieve the wild levels of success that followed. It seemed much more likely that she wouldn’t.

3 What’s interesting about this piece is its form. It seems, on its face, fairly conventional: another abortion story, the contours of which are increasingly familiar, as women feel emboldened to share their experiences in public of what was once a stigmatised act. Usually it is told by someone who – as Maggie Doherty writes in a recent essay for The Yale Review – can depict themselves as ‘virtuous and relatable’, with ‘very important reasons for undergoing an abortion’. In this sense the stories are rhetorically motivated, with a particular underlying agenda: to normalise abortion, of course, but also to justify it. Where Emin departs from script is in her insistence on the affective component of the abortion – not just how it felt to have it, but how it feels to have had it. Not only what she felt at the time, but how it still feels, in an ongoing way. 6

4 The sentimental ‘pro-life’ framework seems like it is bound up in feelings, but it leaves no room for nuance, for ambivalence, for wanting it both ways. Emin says the abortion was a mistake, and also the best thing she did in her whole life: “a contradiction”, she admits, “but it’s the truth as well”. Without the abortion, no Tracey Emin. Without contradiction, without two equally pressing truths, no art. 5 The theme of maternity and pregnancy loss continues right through Emin’s oeuvre – from 1998’s Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children to the late 2000s collaboration with Louise Bourgeois Do Not Abandon Me to her recently installed monumental piece for Museum Island in Oslo, The Mother (2022), which depicts a nine-metre-high naked woman kneeling, holding something we can’t quite make out. It seems telling that Emin has chosen to make this mother figure so overwhelming, and all-encompassing, but the small thing in her hands unseeable. Is she holding a baby, or nothing at all?

Tracey Emin, The Mother, 2022. Photo: Jørgen Rist Holmen. Courtesy Agency of Culture Affairs, City of Oslo

September 2022

Towards the very end of the video Emin describes the abject despair she fell into after the abortion, giving up her work, turning away from friends, losing interest in just about everything. But then she came to understand that “there was a greater idea of creativity, greater than anything I could make with just my mind or my hands”; something that was “the essence of creativity, that moment of conception, the whole being of everything”: “… and I realised if I was gonna make art it couldn’t be about a fucking picture, it couldn’t be about something visual, it had to be about where it was really coming from, and because of the abortion and because of conceiving I had a greater understanding of where things really came from and where they actually ended up”. How It Feels asks us to tolerate conflicting feelings, and teaches us to stay with the trouble, in Donna Haraway’s phrase, because there is no way out, even with the right to terminate a pregnancy. In this way Emin’s abortion piece (and, by extension, Emin’s abortion) enables her (and by extension us) to become a more ethical artist and human.

On good days he writes an average of 100 words per hour. His staying power is just shy of three hours. Three hundred words on the most promising day: he works little by little. When the going is good, he feels like he’s descending. No… that’s the wrong image. While the hours accumulate, he does not feel like he is holed up, and so it isn’t descent but immersion. His desk takes on the character of a baptismal font. He is writing his second book. Things aren’t going well. There are several false starts. Each sentence he writes appears inexact. He knows what meaning to convey but can’t quite discern the rhythm of the prose. If great prose could be measured in mileage, he’s done several days’ worth of journeying but all he can manage are inch-long strides. He has to relearn the process of writing a novel, to master the twists of narrative, the right balance between fable and moral, truth and irony, character and event. He’s learning to tell the story of his people without cheap obfuscation or sliding into didacticism. He wishes, most of all, to work like storytellers of the past, in the oral tradition. His first novel had been unexpectedly successful. Within two decades he’ll come to be known, because of the novel, as the father of modern African literature. But the afterlife of one book has no bearing on the ease with which the next is written – you write as if training yourself again to run the distance you once covered. Yet sometime during this days-long stretch in which writing is strenuous and his purpose hazy he is offered a moment of distraction: a photographer visits his small flat, with the idea to picture him as a writer in modernised Africa. Eight photographs outlive the 1959 encounter. Four show him bent over his desk; four with his back straightened, facing the viewer. The desk is small, even cloistered, and three books are visible: two editions

Positions

A famous author, a photographer on assignment… Emmanuel Iduma on an encounter’s chasm of perspectives

Chinua Achebe, Enugu, Nigeria, 1959. © Eliot Elisofon / The Life Picture Collection / Shutterstock. Courtesy Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, dc

ArtReview

of his famous novel, and a worn, bulkier book, likely the Oxford English Dictionary. In one of the photographs – one of those where he sits on a chair – you can make out a foolscap sheet and, zooming closer, the slender squiggles of his handwriting. Many decades later, in 2013, Raoul J. Granqvist, a Swedish scholar who befriended the writer, reflects on the encounter between the writer and photographer. The writer has just died (the photographer long predeceased him). Granqvist clarifies that, despite how famous the photographs have become, they are framed by the racist assumptions of the series in which they are included. The photographer visited the writer as the second part of a commissioned trip for Life magazine. First he’d gone to Congo, where he took photographs meant to illustrate passages from books by white writers about the African continent, filled with clichés and stereotypes – including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad’s book would be the subject of a reasoned rebuttal by the Nigerian writer in 1975, 16 years after this visit. And thus, Granqvist concludes, the distance between the photographer and writer ‘is measured in murky, racial moon years’. But the writer appears to welcome the photographer with no such disillusionment. His eyes, when they turn to us, are kind and curious. Compliant and welcoming. His fight is neither with the camera, nor is it with tools such as English, the language of his colonial oppressors. Regarding English, he’ll later say he hopes to do ‘unheard-of things’ with it. Regarding the camera, what lie can it tell? We see him in one of the photographs as he might seem like alone, in the fight over exact words, straining to fill an empty page. Emmanuel Iduma is a writer and photographer based in Lagos

Uncommon Observations: The Ground that Moves Us

A multi-site artwork by Rhea Storr on view until July 2023. art.tfl.gov.uk

19—23 OCTOBER 2022 PREVIEW: 18 OCTOBER

After 8 Books, Paris Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan Amanda Wilkinson, London APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia Artbeat, Tbilisi BQ, Berlin Bureau, New York Ciaccia Levi, Paris/Milan Champ Lacombe, Biarritz Chapter NY, New York Crèvecoeur, Paris Croy Nielsen, Vienna Deborah Schamoni, Munich Delgosha, Teheran Derosia, New York Entrée, Bergen Ermes Ermes, Rome Fanta-MLN, Milan FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna Femtensesse, Oslo

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First Floor Gallery, Harare Foxy Production, New York Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna Ginsberg Galeria, Lima Good Weather, Little Rock/Chicago greengrassi, London The Green Gallery, Milwaukee Gregor Staiger, Zurich/Milan Grey Noise, Dubai Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo Higher Pictures Generation, New York Hot Wheels, Athens Iragui, Moscow Jacqueline Martins, São Paulo/Brussels Kayokoyuki, Tokyo Kendall Koppe, Glasgow KOW, Berlin Lars Friedrich, Berlin Lefebvre & Fils, Paris Lodos, Mexico City

Lomex, New York Lucas Hirsch, Dusseldorf Lyles & King, New York Max Mayer, Dusseldorf Misako & Rosen, Tokyo Galeri Nev, Ankara/Istanbul P420, Bologna Project Native Informant, London Rhizome, Algiers ROH Projects, Jakarta Schiefe Zähne, Berlin Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna Sperling, Munich Stereo, Warsaw Sweetwater, Berlin Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn Theta, New York Three Star Books, Paris von ammon co, Washington DC What Pipeline, Detroit

Art Featured

You punk 39

Anne Imhof by Cat Kron

Eliza Douglas in Anne Imhof, Work Not Yet Titled (stills), 2022, video, colour, sound. Directed by Jean-René Étienne and Lola Raban-Oliva. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam

ArtReview

Jesters and Gestures

Eliza Douglas in Anne Imhof, 13th Februar, 2022 (stills), 2022, video, colour, sound. Directed by Jean-René Étienne and Lola Raban-Oliva. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam

September 2022

Eliza Douglas, Carl Hjelm, Ruben Noel, Tilman O’Donnell and Sihana Shalaj in Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes, 2021 (performance view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2021). Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris

ArtReview

‘There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight,’ remarked Lon The works’ apocalyptic pallor is girded by an undercurrent of restChaney, horror’s silent-film star. And indeed the trope of the sinister lessness, which Imhof likened in a Zoom conversation with me this clown, dulled by a century of increasingly maudlin cameos in popular past July to the unrest present in experimental dance (notably that of culture, has in the hands of Anne Imhof acquired new potency befit- 1980s choreographic works that wed experimental dramaturgy with ting the suffusive pall of the present moment. The hands in question rigorous balletic technique). The German artist’s interest in dance dates belong more precisely to artist Eliza Douglas, Imhof’s collaborator back to early exposure to the choreographer William Forsythe, whose and partner: in a culminating passage from last year’s performance Frankfurt-based company was active during her own formative years in Natures Mortes at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, a young man in a ‘killer clown’ the city while a student at the Städelschule arts academy, and extends T-shirt of the sort favoured by nu-metalheads leans against a bank of to such choreographers as Michael Clark and Charles Atlas. Imhof lockers flanking a wall as a shirtless Douglas approaches from behind. would go on to form her own company of sorts – which in recent years With the steely gaze of a hallway bully (another cinema trope that has has, in addition to Douglas, included the dance/electronica composer taken on new and sickening implications in recent years), she grabs Billy Bultheel, photographer Nadine Fraczkowski, Forsythe dancer/ him by the collar and drags him to the centre of the gallery; kneeling, choreographer Josh Johnson and performers Frances Chiaverini facing front, before him, she pulls his shirt out from his chest and over and Mickey Mahar. She described the studio watching taped performance recordings for reference (and here her own head. The performer, her face now Imhof’s performers drift amid I imagined them huddled around a vcr, masked by the grimacing clown, pauses to observing how previous works maintained unfurl her fingers in a slow wave. a smouldering trash-heap their frenetic urgency without exhausting The Berlin-based Imhof, who this of cultural citations, either dancers or audience). “Pieces like autumn receives a midcareer display at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in addimany drawn from industrial metal 1988’s Impressing the Czar [Forsythe’s postmodern ballet masterwork, shot through tion to a solo show across Sprüth Magers’s and electronica subcultures with political and cultural references, and three-storey London gallery, orchestrates a crepuscular artistic vision that contrasts sharply with the crisp, pointedly indifferent to conventional notions of plot],” Imhof cites by exquisitely wrought provocations of her mediagenic performers, way of example: “We looked at its group scenes over and over.” which spread virally over audience-members’ social-media channels in Already curdling in Angst is the deviant figure of the jester or fool, real time as the works play out. The pieces appear set, as Serpentine here invoked via the subtle inversion of a performer’s hands, in what Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist noted in 2016 in a conver- is, in ballet terminology, referred to as port de bras. In classical ballet, sation with the artist, in “neither day nor night, a kind of twilight”. port de bras describes a set of fixed positions by which gracefully arced This conversation was occasioned by the debut of Imhof’s trilogy Angst limbs frame the torso at various aesthetically pleasing angles; in each i, ii and iii (2016), a suite that would introduce a string of dramatically position the dancer’s two middle fingers droop slightly below the scored multidisciplinary endurance works made over the next six years. other eight; instead, the performer raised them in an international In arresting, sometimes violently suggestive pieces, Imhof’s performers, gesture of provocation. In her performances and the wider sphere culled from modelling, dance and acting spheres, and who skew young of her practice, which extends to landscape painting and notably to and gaunt, drift amid a smouldering trash-heap of cultural citations, figure drawing, Imhof examines the gesture, exploring its capacity to signal and, conversely, its propensity to manipulate – to stir its many drawn from industrial metal and electronica subcultures.

Levi Strasser in Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes, 2021 (performance view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2021). Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris

September 2022

Franziska Aigner, Mickey Mahar and Enad Marouf in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017 (performance view, German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2017). Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; and German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2017

ArtReview

Billy Bultheel and Franziska Aigner in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017 (performance view, German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2017). Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; and German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2017

September 2022

Billy Bultheel in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017 (performance view, German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2017). Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; and German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2017

ArtReview

recipient’s indignation without ever quite voicing its intentions to do so (see the imperious snap, pointedly averted eyes, a wagging tongue between two fingers). The words ‘gesture’ and ‘jester’ share an etymological root in the Latin gesta, referring both to doings and, alternately – in a precursor to the ‘speech acts’ evoked in philosopher J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) – to do by telling, notably, for example, in the recounting of past exploits, particularly in a sardonic or mocking fashion. In our conversation Imhof cited the postures and physical affects of pop stars such as Dua Lipa and Kurt Cobain, idols whose personae can be traced in no small part to their distinct and recognisable carriage. Imhof followed Angst with Faust, a critically lauded and polarising tour de force inundated with charged signifiers (such as the caged Doberman pinschers guarding the threshold of the Nazibuilt German Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where it received the Golden Lion award for outstanding national contribution). In a section of the score titled ‘Last Song’, Douglas assumes the jester role. From a plexiglass shelf mounted at a precarious slant to the wall, she accompanies Chiaverini with vocals that give way to an extended guttural, wordless scream that effectively undermines the grave piety of the choral singing that preceded it. Like the silent-film master Chaney, who learned as the child of deaf-mute parents to convey expression and meaning through his body, Imhof is a master of the maximum-impact pose, and Douglas is in many respects her principal soloist. (Captured by Fraczkowski in recent years: Douglas posing topless and hips jutted forward with a falcon in Angst ii; with one hand pressed against glass and the other thrust under her pants in Faust; as a reclining odalisque with basketball in 2019’s Sex.) The multihyphenate painter-musician-model has assumed the mantle of jester numerous times over the past several years in Imhof’s work, and while other performers have inhabited its spirit of chaotic menace, it is her body and her gestures that now largely define the role. Douglas is seen throughout performance footage of Natures Mortes with tongue jeeringly extended or licking the skin of her fellow performers as if to infect them, in an act both

suggestive of medieval grotesques and singularly unnerving when taken in the greater context of the pandemic that was raging outside gallery walls. She will reprise the role in a suite (as yet untitled) of four videoworks, where she appears once again bare-chested in jeans, in front of a row of lockers set against a black background. As artificial snowflakes drift past the camera, she claws at her face and arms, leaving streaks of blood recalling the face paint (scars) of the Joker and other mutilated figures from popular literature. These four films, shot onsite in Russia, were initially intended to be exhibited at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow – before the institution closed its doors in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine – with the joint exhibitions at the Stedelijk and Sprüth Magers serving as a second stop. Instead, with the Garage show shelved and the methodology of her previous shows, which evolved around visual spectacle, becoming less and less applicable to these revised circumstances, Imhof overhauled her exhibition concept, with the Stedelijk to serve as the originating venue for the resulting show, titled youth. The exhibition resembles the labyrinthine floorplan of a hollowed-out warehouse in which alleys of shelving have been replaced by rows of lockers, with no works on view save the films shot days before evacuating from the country. That these dimly lit works are near impossible to capture on the viewer’s camera-phone befits both the bleak cultural climate and the artist’s own contrarian reputation. We find ourselves instead alone with Douglas the fool, whose muted demonstration of self-mutilation takes the place of live performance. A presentation format perhaps better suited to a moment of ever-mounting trauma, to which we’re becoming steadily inured. ar Avatar ii, a solo exhibition of work by Anne Imhof, is on view at Sprüth Magers, London, 23 September – 22 December; Anne Imhof – youth will be shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1 October – 29 January Cat Kron is a writer based in Los Angeles

Eliza Douglas in Anne Imhof, Work Not Yet Titled (still), 2022, video, colour, sound. Directed by Jean-René Étienne and Lola Raban-Oliva. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam

September 2022

Abdias Nascimento The continuing struggle for racial equality in Brazil by Oliver Basciano

Okê Oxóssi, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 92 × 61 cm. Courtesy masp, São Paulo

ArtReview

‘You have my permission to produce The Emperor Jones without ‘whitening’ the population through selective immigration in which payment to me and I want to wish you all the success you hope for white workers from abroad were given financial incentives to come with your Teatro Experimental do Negro. I know very well the condi- and make a new life. Or as Law Decree 7967 declared, ‘the necessity tions you describe in Brazilian theatre. We had exactly the same… to preserve and develop in the ethnic composition of the population the more desirable characteristics of its European ancestry’. parts of any consequence were played by blacked-up white actors.’ So goes a letter, dated 6 December 1944, from the American play- In prison Nascimento pondered further the staging of The Emperor wright Eugene O’Neill to Abdias Nascimento, shown in a recent exhibi- Jones he had seen. From his cell he set about organising a convict’s tion at Instituto Inhotim of work by the Brazilian artist, theatre maker, theatre group, which on his release became the nucleus of the Teatro poet and activist. Nascimento had asked O’Neill if his tale of murder Experimental do Negro. Performed at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de and power, written in 1920, might be the first work performed by his Janeiro on 8 May 1945, O’Neill’s work was the group’s first production newly formed Teatro Experimental do Negro – the Black Experimental in a programme that opened with a recital by the Black Cuban poet Theatre. Nascimento, then in his late twenties, had been part of a group Regino Pedroso, and with Nascimento himself taking the stage to read of six Brazilian and Argentinian poets who had burned all their previous Langston Hughes’s ‘Always the Same’ (1932). The choices were telling. writing and embarked on a lengthy journey across South America in Nascimento was not interested in merely fighting prejudice at home, search of what they termed original but in tapping into the Pan-Africanist American poetry. That is, writing that movement gaining traction in both North and South America, and across ignored the European tradition. In Lima they had come across a staging the Atlantic. of The Emperor Jones, and while blown The group went on to stage many away by the pioneering spirit of the more performances across Brazil story, Nascimento, the only Black (including further works by O’Neill and Hughes, Nascimento’s own plays member of the group, bemoaned the and Afro-Brazilian interpretations of fact the play’s Black lead was played by classics such as Hamlet and Macbeth). a white actor. The sets were invariably sparse, After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the widespread intermarwith questions of race, power and riage between races in Brazil, with no economic hardship delivered in what were praised as sharp, visceral perforus-style segregation laws intact, the mances. Yet theatre was just one part country was held up as a beacon of of the group’s activities: they pubracial progress. In his 1933 book Casagrande & Senzala (commonly translished a newspaper, Quilombo; organised protests against racial discrimilated as ‘The Masters and the Slaves’) nation both at home and in solidarthe Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto ity with Black liberation abroad Freyre describes an além-raça (a meta(notably apartheid South Africa); and race) more resilient than the sum of staged talks and conferences. In 1950 its parts. This was not however the day-to-day lived experience of darkNascimento and his colleagues opened skinned Brazilians. Nascimento had the 1º Congresso do Negro Brasileiro started to strike out against racism, (the First Congress of Brazilian Blacks), and the myth of Brazil’s ‘racial democat which the group resolved to broaden racy’, from the age of sixteen. In its activities even further by opening 1930 the teenager moved from his the Museu de Arte Negra (the Black Art home city of Franca to São Paulo to Museum), an institution that operated serve as a corporal in the army. In without a permanent home. the state capital he got involved in As well as delving deep into the the Brazilian Black Front, a radical activist group. One night during theatre group’s archive of production photographs, scripts, posters and the Carnival of 1935 Nascimento and a friend were abused as they correspondence, the exhibition at Inhotim, an arts centre and sculptried to enter a nightclub. A scuffle broke out. The police inevitably ture park in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, displays rotating hightook the doorman’s side and the pair were arrested. Nascimento was lights of the Museu de Arte Negra’s collection in a pavilion that, with discharged from the military and further convicted by a civilian court. the blessing of Nascimento’s widow, takes its name. Despite never His poetry pilgrimage took place while he was out on bail, and on his possessing a physical space, the museum collected art by Black artists return he was arrested again. It was then that he began to formulate who were, at the time, underrepresented in the country’s museums and his thinking of what he called quilombismo: a mode of militant, collec- art galleries (a problem that has persisted until very recently, the institive Black autonomy, the name referencing the tutional reappreciation of Nascimento being part Abdias Nascimento and Léa Garcia quilombos, remote communities historically set of this correction). In 1955 the museum organised in Nascimento’s Sortilégio, 1957, at Teatro Municipal, up by escaped slaves. Multiethnic Brazil was a Black Christ Contest, in which artists competed Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Carlos Moskovics. a front, after all, for a deeply racist policy of for the best depiction of Jesus with dark skin. At © ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

September 2022

Inhotim Cleo Navarro’s semi-Cubist oil on canvas, painted the same Brazil until 1974, the end of the so-called Years of Lead), and then to year, depicts the Son of God doleful and square jawed; likewise in Ecce Nigeria. Painting was also conducive to his circumstances. ‘Inhibited Homo (1955), a reimagined Jesus by Quirino Campofiorito has his eyes by my poor grasp of English, I developed a new form of communiclosed in prayer and beard braided into two points. The new exhibition cation,’ he said. Nascimento never liked speaking English, having includes later works added to Museu de Arte Negra’s collection along already been colonised, he said, by Portuguese. ‘I could paint, and by the same theme: American LeRoi Callwell Johnson’s The Crucifixion (1996) painting I would be able to say what no words could say.’ His 1969 is a fantastic Afrofuturist vision of Jesus on the cross against a strange exhibition at New York’s Harlem Art House was titled Teogonia afrosupernatural vista. A semiabstract nude Black woman kneeling in brasileira, a perhaps contradictorily European-centred reference to prayer and an African Bakota mask (a motif used by Picasso) also figure. ‘Theogony’ (c. 730–700 bc), a poem by Hesiod describing the origins The competition inspired Nascimento’s first forays into painting and genealogies of the Greek gods. For Nascimento it was the orishas too. The medium provided him with a means to escape the oppres- deities of Candomblé that were his subject matter. Another recent exhibition, this time at masp in São Paulo sion of Brazil’s burgeoning dictatorship: As Nascimento started to paint, though still subject to censorship, the and dedicated to the artist’s paintings, visual arts enjoyed far more freedom than opened with one such work: in flat blocks of the national congress was other creative mediums. He made his first uniform tones an orange peacock is shown, disbanded, newspaper offices major body of work in 1968 – symbolismsharing the canvas with a large butterfly in were raided, musicians and heavy canvases, largely in acrylic, that similarly warm tones. A woman with the intoxicatingly mix modernist abstraction lower body of a fish lies to the bottom of the filmmakers went into exile and African figuration – just as new laws of frame, while to the right of her a bull-like Brazil’s four-year-old dictatorship imposed widespread repression. head (but odder, more alien) stares straight ahead. The title of the 1972 As Nascimento started to paint, the national congress was disbanded, painting names several Afro-Brazilian gods: Iansã, Obatala, Oxum, newspaper offices were raided, musicians and filmmakers went into Oxossi, Yemanjá, Ogum, Ossaim, Xangô and Exu. Iansã, mother of exile. All scripts were censored, with cuts and bans meted out on the storms, also appears in another work of the same year, conjuring basis of politics or morality. A production of African-American writer up a great wind and holding a decapitated head aloft. Meditation LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman (1964) was banned, along with four scripts no 1 and Meditation no 2 (both 1973) feature Apis, the sacred bull, his by Brazilian playwrights that year. The industry went on a two-day eyes dilating respectively pink and green, each rendition featuring a strike after key lines of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire burning sun emanating from the animal-god’s temple. In the second (1947) were cut by the censor. work the bull’s features are more angular; both are strange and Within the year Nascimento too had gone into exile, first to the unsettling compositions. Other works might be mistakenly labelled us, where he staged his first painting exhibitions (he didn’t exhibit in abstractions, but are in fact amalgams of religious symbols. In Eshu

Bay of Blood (Luanda), 1996, acrylic on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. © ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

ArtReview

Cover of Quilombo, Ano I, no 4, July 1949. Courtesy Instituto Inhotim

Ancient Mask, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. © ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

O barco solitário, 1970, acrylic on canvas. © Museu de Arte Negra – ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

Xangô on, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 91 × 61 cm. © ipeafro, Rio de Janeiro

and Three Tempos of Purple (1980) two tridents curve inwards encasing which features the symbols of the two gods painted in black over the three floating purple orbs – an ode, the title suggests, to the trickster red and green of Garvey’s earlier liberatory banner. god inherited from the Yoruba people. The use of such symbols is part Nascimento was not a marginal figure: he rose up through the of a strategy, Nascimento wrote in 1980, to address ‘the urgent need of ranks of academia in the us before, on his return to Brazil in 1983, the Brazilian Black people to win back their memory’. becoming first a federal deputy and then senator for Rio de Janeiro. For Nascimento spiritual liberation and social freedom were inex- He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1978, and a year tricably linked. The works were political gestures despite their cosmo- before his death in 2011. The Brazilian artworld is increasingly and logical subject matter: they asserted Black culture as foundational belatedly investing time and resources into Black-made contempodespite, as he explained in a 1976 speech in Senegal, the fact that ‘we are rary art (though the internationalism that Nascimento strove for dealing with the more or less violent imposition or superimposition remains scarce) and his work provides part of the foundations from of white Western cultural norms and values in a systematic attempt to which to build that lineage. Blackface is no longer acceptable in the theatre. Yet his institutional reappraisal undermine the African spiritual and philoNascimento’s painting can be comes as so much of what he strived for in sophical modes. Such a process can only be described as forced syncretization.’ A series wider society remains unfinished business. read as establishing a Black Recently, fly-posters featuring cheap reproof paintings from the 1990s incorporate the homeland that operates Adinkra symbols, ideograms originating in ductions of Okê Oxóssi and Quilombismo beyond the nation-state borders Ghana that communicated various philo(Exu e Ogum) started appearing beneath flysophical ideas (and were also used as code overs and on the cluttered concrete walls defined by colonialism language by Black African slaves to commuof downtown São Paulo. They aren’t advernicate clandestinely). Living abroad, Nascimento considered himself tising any exhibition, however. Above the work is printed the ralto be in double exile: both from Brazil and ancestrally from Africa. lying cry, made as the country goes to the polls for the presidential Much of his painting, in exploring African cultures that migrated elections in October: ‘vote na preta’ and ‘voto antirracista’ and mutated, can be read therefore as establishing a Black homeland (‘Vote for Black’ and ‘Antiracist Vote’). No specific political group that operates beyond the nation-state borders defined by colonialism. or candidate is referenced; it is a call to action that transcends party In a pair of paintings Nascimento plays on flag insignias, refiguring politics. They do suggest however that, far from disappearing into them using Candomblé symbols. In Okê Oxóssi (1970) an arrow shoots art history, Nascimento’s message continues to empower the fight through the central blue orb of the Brazilian flag; while in Xangô against oppression. ar Sobre (Shango take over, 1970) an axe divides the us Stars and Stripes. These works are made in conscious allusion to Marcus Garvey’s 1920 Instituto Inhotim is hosting a changing programme of exhibitions Pan-African flag: most obviously in Quilombismo (Exu e Ogum) (1980), relating to Abdias Nascimento’s work through December 2023

Political posters featuring works by Nascimento, plastered in the streets of São Paulo. Photo: Oliver Basciano

September 2022

Rack and Ruin From the climate emergency to systems of authority, Nikita Gale’s work is focused on foregrounding troubling backgrounds by Salena Barry

The weather is a good place to start. Nikita Gale and I begin our artist has created to date. At one end of the room is a large velvet stageconversation by speaking about the uk’s record-breaking July heat- curtain covered in concrete, which is half drawn across the truss that wave, which caused death and fires alongside other forms of destruc- suspends it, as if frozen in the process of opening or closing a show. Also tion. Gale mentions how an increase of a couple degrees in the average attached to the truss is a spotlight that rotates and pauses as if searching global temperature can take humankind from precarity to extinction. for something. In the centre and other end of the room are two almost The scorching weather, which peaked over the course of two days, identical works that also feature spotlights affixed to the ceiling in will become much more frequent as a result of climate change, a more the same manner. Alongside them on the same trusses are static copies insidious process many of us quietly accept as it edges us towards an of the lights, again cast in concrete, from which concrete cylinders irreversible, cataclysmic end. Yet this heatwave was a moment when extend, occupying the space where a real light’s beams would be shed. our collective awareness of the larger, looming damage bubbled up The sculptural curtain and lights are performance devices used to over the back burner and into our immediate consciousness. reveal, conceal and direct attention. They suggest systems of surveilGale has previously created work referencing climate change. The lance and visibility, the latter of which often masquerades as equitable Los Angeles-based artist’s 2019 installation drrrummerrrrrr is a representation. By fixing them in concrete and forcing the audience prime example. It features a drum kit with each component standing, to navigate around them, Gale shifts the audience’s focus away from separated, in plastic tubs into which water from a black hose splashes the performance they would typically frame or highlight, and instead over the cymbals and pours in and out of drums. The torrent, rather holds the audience’s focus on these apparatuses of visibility. “They than the human body, plays these instruments. The work is an abstract are permanently objectified or rendered in these positions where they investigation into what happens to human technologies in the absence have to be analysed in a different way… they get closer to their roles,” of humankind. Like much of Gale’s recent work, drrrummerrrrrr Gale says. Through this process, the artist transforms them into ruins is analogous to a transitional space in which something new can be of a previously functional system. They are recognisable objects, but imagined amid the ruins of previous systems. It also offers a sobering their original abilities seem diminished and their scope limited. reminder of the impending consequences of the rising sea levels Moreover, by casting these objects in concrete, the artist further produced as the atmosphere progressively warms and thaws ice. interrogates the power dynamics embedded in these tools of visibility. Climate change is one of many entry points into the two primary Concrete has links to permanence and authority, most notably in how themes that run throughout the artist’s practice: ruin and attention. it functions in our built environment – roads, buildings, walls – to These form the foundations for in a dream you climb the stairs, guide and restrict patterns of movement. Gale describes concrete as the artist’s current show at Chisenhale Gallery, London (which is also having an ambient quality, particularly as it relates to infrastructure, Gale’s first European solo exhibition). Here the artist creates an atmos- in that it quietly enforces systems of power, hierarchy and behaviour. phere in which attention slides between seductive anticipation and “Ruin can be elegant,” says Gale, who studied archaeology before anxious dread. This feeling is amplified by a looping choreography completing an mfa. “I don’t think it always has to be read as something of lights and sound with no discernible beginning or end. Coloured that has been destroyed through active violence.” The artist describes lights, both in the corners of the room and attached to sculptures in the slow and almost imperceptible process of imposing power that is the space, go off and on, flicker, stay still and swivel, casting beams embedded into structures and systems in which we live – in effect Gale around the space. Simultaneously, sounds – is saying that we need to look more closely at what end of subject, 2022, six aluminium whistles, clicks and halting silences – punctuate we habitually overlook. This subtle approach is bleachers, automated lighting systems, four-channel sound, dimensions variable. clear in the Chisenhale commission. It differs the light sequence. Photo: Kerry McFate. Courtesy the artist from previous works like end of subject (2022) The installation features four sculptures, and 52 Walker, New York; 56 Henry, New York; three of them monumentally sized works that or the ruiner series (2020–21), where objects like Commonwealth & Council, stretch from floor to ceiling: the largest objects the benches or rail guards are bent out of shape in Los Angeles; Reyes Finn, Detroit

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September 2022

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September 2022

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order to demonstrate alternate possibilities and the potential mallea- as both domesticated companions and tools for policing activities, bility of authoritative devices and systems. In in a dream you climb demonstrate how animals can act as technologies through which the stairs, the dual sense of destruction and possibility are maintained humans can extend themselves for different purposes, including through feelings of abandonment and the impending arrival of some upholding and possibly challenging systems of authority. This change – what exactly that is remains unclear and unanswered. human–animal relationship is further suggested by the titles of the There is a moment in the exhibition’s light-and-sound sequence installation and its three monumental sculptures, which are all named when a whistle melts into a missilelike screech, which gradually gets after Circe, a character from Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon, quieter and quieter. I expected to hear a boom or some other loud an excerpt from which provides the title to Gale’s show. Circe is a sound signalling that an invisible projectile had landed, but instead maid and midwife, who shares a name with the mythological witch nothing. This is part of the anxiety and expectation that the instal- in Homer’s Odyssey. She is introduced towards the book’s conclusion, lation provokes – the audience waits for something to happen, a where she inhabits her former employer’s mansion along with a pack performer to enter or some other release from the unease that perme- of wild dogs, who destroy the space and with it the symbols of serviates the space. Beyond that, what we really seem to be waiting for is a tude and disrespect that have coloured Circe’s time with the family. moment of legibility within our framework of perception and underConsidering what is beyond ourselves also informs Gale’s choice to standing. Gale denies us a resolution to this tension, so that we look leave the external windows of Chisenhale’s exhibition space visible in more closely, and in doing so, become more attuned to the space and the exhibition space, something that has not happened in the gallery for our own abilities and failures to perceive. some decades. The gallery’s six large windows are fitted with neutralIn a public conversation at Chisenhale between Gale and art histo- density filters that create a hazy, dusklike glow in the space during rian Rhea Anastas, the artist explained that many of the silences are daylight hours. Letting the outside in also breaks down the sense of actually occupied by sounds beyond our perception. What I under- isolation from the world beyond the show, while questioning the sense stood as silence is actually a high-frequency sound perceptible to of neutrality suggested in many art spaces. Because there is no clear dogs. The lights, which continue to flash and oscillate during these beginning and ending to the sequence of light and sound, visitors will moments, signal that something is still happening, even though I am spend varying lengths of time in the space, waiting for a conclusion not able to perceive it in its entirety. Dogs play an important role here, that never arrives. in a dream you climb the stairs has a collaborative by suggesting a breadth of perceptual possibilities that underscore the social element where the audience not only looks to the architecture limitations of human sight and other senses in comprehending the that creates the experience, but also to each other for clues about what spectacles we consume. Dog bowls are dotted around the exhibition is transpiring, beginning and ending. Something that excites Gale is space, and blue and yellow – the colours in which dogs see – are the pre- the prospect of two people discussing their differing encounters with dominant colours used in the light sequence. Further, the fourth sculp- the work. Through these interactions within and beyond the exhibiture in the installation, a pile of knotted dog leads covered in concrete, is tion, a variety of ideas and strategies for creating something new in akin to a canine shrine. From it, individual, knotted leads levitate in an the wake of existing systems and structures of surveillance and representation can be found. Ruins can be a beginning arrangement reminiscent of ascending a curved facing page drrrummerrrrrr, 2019– as much as they are an end. ar staircase. Each lead holds a sprig of lavender – (installation view, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, 2021). Photo: Tony Walsh. activating the sense of smell, something new to Courtesy the artist; 56 Henry, New York; Gale’s practice – like an offering. Nikita Gale’s in a dream you climb Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; the stairs is on view at Chisenhale Gallery, The activation of multiple senses in Gale’s Reyes Finn, Detroit London, through 16 October current work – in this case, hearing, sight and above and preceding pages in a dream you smell – highlights the possibility of forming climb the stairs, 2022 (installation view, Salena Barry is a writer based in London interspecies connections. Dogs, which have served Chisenhale Gallery, London). Photo: Andy Keate

September 2022

Universal Basic Artist by Pierre d’Alancaisez

The concept of state-provided incomes for artists may be hiding a whole bunch of consequences – unintended and otherwise 62

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The pandemic has had many detrimental effects on the arts, but forever. A trial run by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (ybca), recently the Western artworld has developed a peculiar form of in San Francisco, makes a virtue of its ideological bias and boasts of ‘long covid’, whose key symptom is the demand for a special form ‘randomly’ allocating 95 percent of payments to individuals from of income for artists, with a plethora of initiatives cropping up that marginalised groups. single out artists as uniquely deserving of support in the postpanIn many ways these schemes are no different to traditional grants, demic reconstruction. In 2021, for example, the New York City Artists fellowships or residency programmes, which continue to abound. Corps promised to employ artists in droves to restore the creative and And like the earlier formats, these guaranteed-income projects have tourist economies. Ireland is poised to launch a €25 million guaran- their political motivations. Ireland’s artist gi pilot ostensibly aims to teed income (gi) pilot for artists. And numerous programmes, such as resurrect the country’s minuscule visual art scene while dispensing Creatives Rebuild New York(crny), are currently trialling versions of with the Irish government’s manifesto commitment to trial ubi. universal basic income (ubi) targeted at artists. For the 2,400 creatives ybca pays race reparations despite such positive discrimination likely selected by crny, who are now a cool $1,000 a month closer to making being illegal when public funds are involved. Others are straightforrent, such initiatives may be a blessing. But are states and philanthro- ward, if modest, investments in socially ameliorative art practices pists truly interested in paying artists for ‘doing what they love’? Or accompanied by stricter-than-ever evaluation criteria. What’s new is does this proliferation of quasi-ubi programmes point to a future of the all-encompassing nature of these schemes. Whereas previously even lower artist incomes and increased control over who gets to be anyone could have been an artist in Ireland so long as they were happy an artist? to declare themselves as such on the census, the Irish state has now Blueprints for Universal Basic Income date as far back as Thomas decided that it ‘needs’ no more than 10,000 artists. crny turned away More’s Utopia (1516). The aims of the spate of recent trials of ubi in some 19,000 applicants. countries ranging from Namibia to South Korea have included What will the excess artists do? Here lies the artworld’s biggest reducing child malnutrition and promoting local businesses, while taboo: how many artists are ‘enough’ and who gets to decide? Past a programme launched this spring in Wales is directed at young decades have seen a meteoric rise in the supply of arts graduates, only people leaving social care. Figures as far apart on the political spec- a fraction of whom have been able to find employment in the creative trum as Britain’s former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Tesla’s industries. Despite also rapidly growing, the artworld has become Elon Musk have advocated much wider applications of ubi that accustomed to an overabundance of available labour, and this has would see living-wage-level payments contributed to the suppression of pay for art workers. Campaigns by the likes of the distributed to entire populations. Here lies the artworld’s biggest For all its appeal, ubi is a neoliberal con us’s w.a.g.e. highlight that unpaid labour taboo: how many artists are designed to disenfranchise vast parts of remains commonplace in the artworld. ‘enough’ and who gets to decide? However, hardly anyone entertains the society and undermine the earning power of idea that a mural artist would attract a all but the capital-owning elites. In a world where human labour is rendered obsolete to the extent that a signifi- higher honorarium if they didn’t compete with ten others for the cant portion of the workforce would be paid to stay idle, the human same commission, despite the inverse situation currently driving up itself will become surplus to requirement. This is not because work wages elsewhere, such as in the hospitality sector. Artworld dogma is intrinsically necessary to human dignity but because when the is that there must always be more art and more artists, at whatever worker has been stripped of their ability to produce, it won’t be long consequence and whoever’s cost. before they are also deprived of the means of democratic participaIf, as reports consistently show, the artworld is plagued by in-work tion. We are already seeing the beginnings of this process: American poverty, is welfare the answer? Artists’ gi makes a mockery of the ‘art commentator Joel Kotkin observes the millennial generation’s lack of work is work’ slogan, whose double-edge confusion was illustrated interest in the world of work or political participation. Add to this by art-writer duo The White Pube’s 2021 poster campaign demanding the so-called ‘great resignation’ (the phenomenon of rising rates the introduction of ubi ‘so that everyone, including artists, can make of workers quitting their jobs in recent years) and a future where, a living’. How does anyone make a living on a state handout? Shouldn’t in Kotkin’s words, a ‘managerial elite delivers food, housing, and we be rewarding artists for the work they do within the labour market, pleasure to unemployed and demotivated plebs’ is on the horizon. in which artists are subject to the same supply and demand mechaDespite this, polling in Britain suggests that more than half of the uk nisms as nurses or lawyers? We already have state and private funders public support the introduction of ubi, a figure only set to rise as the to correct for market failures, but when is enough enough? population is battered by yet another cost-of-living crisis. Cue arguments for art’s exceptionalism: ybca reminds us that artists But a guaranteed income for artists is neither universal nor basic. ‘shoulder the difficult work of making meaning from life in our world Some of the over 30 trials currently underway in the us – whose today’, while crny proposes a ‘too big to fail’ catch-22, claiming that collective price tag is, according to the Financial Times, $150m – are ‘improving the lives of artists is paramount to the vitality of New York committed to selecting recipients at random in the vein of earlier State’s collective social and economic wellbeing’. Add to this the selfexperiments. Others, however, expect artists to contribute to commu- satisfied praise for the creativity and critical thinking ostensibly unique nities in return for payments. A scheme in Minnesota perversely asks to artists and one could almost forget that the very same artists serve artists to make work that ‘demonstrates the need for guaranteed the capitalist structures of the university, the museum and the auction income’, as though to prove that a person forced house they were a moment ago protesting. facing page Comedian Harry Enfield to labour for the $500 a month this scheme That guaranteed income won’t solve the in the music video for Loadsamoney, 1988. provides will remain dependent on handouts underlying problem is made evident by the art © itv / Shutterstock

September 2022

market’s present detachment from the material realities of the resulting exhibition’s impotence in the face of political challenges majority of artists. The megagallery, paradoxically one of the few indicate where all this may be going. spaces in the artworld where high earnings are commonplace, already What is the case for prioritising art-school graduates for gi when thrives on the oversupply of talent by simply turning most of it away. uk hospitals are opening food banks to support their struggling With gi, the blue-chip gallery would have the state’s collaboration in nursing staff? Is it the thinly veiled cartel protectionism that saw the branding of its roster as even more elevated from the grey mass Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist register the of ‘Universal Basic Artists’, whose work is deemed worthy of only arts’ claim on the public purse just four days into the uk’s first coronathe minimum wage. And it is unlikely that any income guarantee virus lockdown in March 2020? Is it the erroneous conviction that the would be significantly higher, because the state suspects that artists arts are the key economic driver of the creative industries that was at perversely enjoy their work and that the occasional declarations of the heart of the #artisessential campaign that proposed fast-tracking public gratitude, in the form of those poster campaigns that artists the arts for investment? Or the ridiculous claim that the art school contributes vitally to the medical industry, are already happy to design for themselves, as put forward by the vice-chancellor of should be enough. Artworld dogma is that there Not only will the gi artist be limited London’s Royal College of Art? must always be more art and by the generosity of the public and philBetween such demagoguery, false conmore artists, at whatever anthropic funding institutions, they are sciousness and genuine economic hardalso unlikely to see the creative freedoms ship, the arts became the unlikely site for consequence and whoever’s cost promised by ubi. As is the case today, the this latest round of basic-income experiartist will have to choose between trying to climb the art-market ments. The inconclusive results of the recent Finnish ubi trial and ladder or complying with the politics of the institution. Failure to the failure of us presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s platform in break through the closely watched gates of either will render the 2020 should have given pause to ubi’s staunchest advocates. When artist an outsider, except that there will be little glamour in this, even the socialist journal Jacobin has understood that the short-term since a multitude of other outsiders will be making the same bid for effectiveness of pandemic support schemes is no promise of ubi’s relevance. This has happened before: the official artworld’s desire glorious future outcomes, we might wonder what makes artists into for control over independent artistic activity saw the uk’s politi- such compliant guinea pigs. The answer lies, as ever, in art’s excepcally vibrant community-arts movement of the 1980s neutered and tionalism: income guarantees will work for me, or for us, but they co-opted into the trend for publicly funded ‘participatory art’ since mustn’t become universal any more than the practice of art itself. ar the 90s. Documenta’s recent unironic inclusion of a Dutch ngo in its list of artists, the per-head allocation of production budgets and the Pierre d’Alancaisez is a curator, critic and researcher based in London

Tech entrepreneur and universal basic income advocate Elon Musk. Photo: David Branson / Alamy Stock Photo

ArtReview

The White Pube, ideas for a new art world, 2021, part of the Your Space Or Mine billboard and poster project in the uk. Courtesy Buildhollywood

September 2022

Subject Object Verb Series 2 Episode 14 Listen Now Ross Simonini with Deniz Gul and Nour Mobarak artreview.com/podcasts

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I can prove it 67

Danny McDonald 80wse, New York 8 June – 13 August Recently, at the scene of an apartment viewing in New York, I witnessed dozens of prospective tenants queuing around the block, listless in the midsummer heat. Their desperation reminded me of Danny McDonald’s Available Space (Various Figures) (2008): a miniature tableau of creepy dolls – the Wicked Witch of the West, Elvira, Frankenstein’s Bride – crowding a locked ‘For Rent’ flat while displaying visible agitation. The real horror story is not the witches or the undead but Manhattan real-estate prices, up 25 percent over just the past year. McDonald, who got his start in the 1990s collective art club2000, known for its satire of youth culture and commerce at the turn of the millennium, has long been a critic of inequality. His survey exhibition at 80wse, bringing together 27 sculptures assembled from toys over nearly two decades, suggests that if things seem bad, it’s probably because we’re getting played. In America there’s no question who is losing. McDonald’s Restricted Access to Medical Care (The Mummies) (2007), one of the show’s earliest sculptures, comprises a group of bandaged corpses clawing pathetically at a pill trapped beneath a bell jar – a fairly accurate depiction of what it’s like to be poor in the us healthcare system. In another work, from 2020, a demonic Uncle Sam doll mounts a golden plague-doctor mask as though it were a carnival ride (The Mask That Fits). The us government’s covid-19 response

showered the bloated pharmaceutical industry with subsidies while offering insufficient support to communities in need. McDonald takes on his fastfood namesake, too: in The Last Mexican Coke (2017), a figurine of Ronald McDonald, that sinister, burgershucking clown, has thinned to a skeletal frame. (This guy wouldn’t be caught dead in a Happy Meal.) Ronald’s right hand holds a skull while his left clutches a straw – a kind of drill pipe that plunges into a giant Coca-Cola bottle. The ‘last’ of the title could refer to the corn lobby’s successful implementation of highfructose syrup as a substitute for the sugar more popular below the southern us border, or to the soft drink company’s illegal draining of groundwater in Northern Mexico. Either way, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are extractive twin reapers, ready to suck the world dry. Many of McDonald’s earliest works plumb the latent queerness and alienation of muchmaligned fairytale monsters. Frankenstein’s golem is a favourite subject: he contorts inside a tiny box in 2007’s Inadequate Studio Space (the bogeyman of New York real estate again). Goodbye (The Wolfman and Frankenstein) (2008) imagines the titular werewolf as a lover-tothe-rescue, bouquet of roses in hand, kicking down the door of his boyfriend’s apartment to stop Frankenstein from jumping off the window ledge. It’s one of several works that stage an elaborate narrative only to land a pat one-liner. For instance, Forced to Sell Artwork

from Personal Collection in Order to Offset Living Expenses, Questionable Provenance Limits and Resale Opportunities (The Scream) (2016) finds the title character of the Wes Craven horror film series heading into a ‘Resale Gallery’ clutching an ostensible self-portrait, Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). Artists’ dim financial prospects are no joke, but McDonald’s sculpture fails to muster more than a laugh here. Much stronger are sculptures that indulge a playful formalism. McDonald constructed An Aggressive Character (2014) from Incredible Hulk action figures; on its backside, the tower of green beefcakes reveals a wrinkled, toothless broccoli face staring unblinkingly through a pair of holographic sunglasses. Nearby, a black plague-doctor mask, belted to a Darth Vader helmet and worn by a cheerful foam pumpkin, makes for an absurdly cartoonish villain (Pumpkin in a Mask in a Mask, 2017). A similar economy of means makes Bottled Bill (2022) deeply disconcerting: a tea towel printed with the face of Benjamin Franklin from the $100 banknote bulges inside a wall-mounted jar. As the price of the dollar fluctuates, McDonald offers up a leering spectre of literal inflation. For better but mostly for worse, our toys are us, fetishised commodities that mollify and indoctrinate our children. Icons for an era of globalised corporate branding. As McDonald reminds us, the big kids – Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Capital – write the rules to this game. Evan Moffitt

The Viewing, 2022, Frankenstein action figures (plastic, cloth, paint), pedestal, dimensions variable. Photo: Carter Seddon. Courtesy the artist and 80wse, New York

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The Last Mexican Coke (detail), 2017, jumbo glass Coke bottle, plexiglass, resin and vinyl action figure, pedestal, dimensions variable. Photo: Carter Seddon. Courtesy the artist and 80wse, New York

September 2022

Jérôme Bel and Kat Válastur Choreographing Politics Bode Museum, Berlin 16–17 July Choreographing Politics, a new performance series inviting contemporary dancemakers to respond to the history and collections of Berlin’s Bode Museum – mainly composed of Italian and German sculpture and Byzantine art – opened with performances by choreographers Jérôme Bel and Kat Válastur. Known for provocative yet entertaining pieces traversing dance and visual art, Bel may have seemed like the perfect opening act. Yet he operated more like a curator, reading out nonchalant introductions to a collection of extracts from dance history, and shepherding the large audience to the locations where they took place. Most of Bel’s curating bore no direct links to the Bode’s collection, aside from the opening recreation of Isadora Duncan’s Water Study

(1900–05), selected to reference the belief that Duncan visited the museum to see Antonio Canova’s sculpture Tanzerin (1809–12). It’s understandable why people think the work inspired her: Water Study is like Tanzerin come to life. To accompaniment by Schubert, a solo female dancer embodied the sculpture’s nymphlike quality as she tiptoed and skipped through the Bode’s Basilica, undulating her torso like rippling water, twirling, spinning and running bent-kneed, her loose hair flowing behind her. Bel later pulled the audience to 1929 for an interpretation of German expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman’s Pastoral. Featuring a classical score and light, fluid movement quality, the work, to a modern eye, is seemingly less experimental than others by Wigman. However,

while the performer wasn’t stomping her feet, legs akimbo, to a harsh percussive score, as in Witch Dance (1926), her simple white dress, floor-based contractions and reaches were still a significant departure from the upright conventions of early-twentieth-century ballet. While Bel’s audience may view both Pastoral and Water Study as passé today, many of its movements would have been considered boundarybreaking when they premiered. Yet this meant only those with prior knowledge of that history could fully enjoy the event. That said, Bel’s retrospective focus did cleverly highlight the responsibility of museums in preserving dance history. It showed that while performance requires different conservation methods than visual art – in his spoken

Jérôme Bel, project for Choreographing Politics, 2022 (performance view, Bode Museum, Berlin). Photo: Dorothea Tuch. Courtesy the artist

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introductions Bel references the practice of transmission, whereby dancers become living archives of works, passing them onto new generations – it is doable. His inclusion of American postmodernist artist Simone Forti’s Huddle (1961), a cyclical, task-based piece in which individuals repeatedly climb over a clump of bodies before being absorbed into it themselves, is a perfect example of a performance that has been collected and cared for by an art institution (in this case moma). Aside from a reimagining of Xavier Le Roy’s The Lion’s Vocabulary, an extract from Low Pieces (2009–11) – originally featuring a male cast, in this version three female performers crawled naked, imitating big cats around the statue of Prussian monarch Frederick William I in the Bode’s entrance hall – all the works Bel selected were created by women. Considering that the artworks in the Basilica, this show’s primary performance space, are all by male Renaissance artists, perhaps Bel’s point was about the lack

of diverse female representation in museum spaces and the Bode in particular? Berlin-based Kat Válastur’s contribution had similarly feminist intentions. The FarNear (2022) used sound generated by five female performers to ‘symbolically and speculatively affect and transform the art works in the space… destabilising their patriarchal roots’. The work opened with the cast assuming positions on wooden pedestals. Dressed in grey tank tops and pants, with fragments of pottery akin to archaeological artefacts strapped to their limbs, hands and groins, the women kicked off proceedings by aggressively hammering the tips of their steel-capped boots against the stages they stood upon. After a pause to allow the sound to resonate, the group began to bend their joints and knock together their ceramic appendages. At first gentle, the sound was aptly akin to a sculptor diligently chipping away at a hunk of rock. This inquisitive tapping also made the dancers look like sculptures coming alive, waking up and

breaking free after having been frozen in time by their male creators. Progressively, the dancers introduced stomping motions and their own voices, producing louder sounds layering to create complex polyrhythms and disturb the silent museum context. Hands bashed provocatively against pelvises before iPhone ringtones – another gallery taboo – played to inform the dancers to swap podiums. In new positions they continued, looking intensely at each other in ways at times warm and communicative, at others confrontational. Overall, The FarNear was a hypnotic display of female strength and endurance: towards the end, the group’s T-shirts were soaked with sweat, yet they showed no other signs of tiredness. Whether the performance made its intended lasting impact on the museum remains to be seen, but it undeniably shook it up, presenting a very different view of femininity to that of the Renaissance sculptures that line its hallowed halls. Emily May

Kat Válastur, The FarNear, 2022 (performance view, Bode Museum, Berlin). Photo: Dorothea Tuch. Courtesy the artist

September 2022

Anna Esposito What I’ve Done Gramma Epsilon, Athens 9 June – 1 October When the exhibition board of the 1978 Venice Biennale realised that the paltry representation of women risked provoking protests from feminist activists, it hastily commissioned the artist and poet Mirella Bentivoglio to curate an all-woman show. The resulting exhibition should be counted among the most consequential in the Biennale’s history, bringing together over 80 artists, including Sonia Delaunay, Agnes Denes, Natalia Goncharova and Ketty La Rocca, alongside the relatively little-known Anna Esposito. At Gramma Epsilon, a small selection of works from a 50-year career spent connecting the dots between feminism, social injustice and ecological destruction suggests that she has been unfairly neglected. One of two collages to be shown at Venice, and remade by Esposito for this exhibition, Fan of gunshots (1972/2022) staples agitprop flyers featuring Robert Capa’s famous 1936 photograph of a falling Spanish Republican soldier into the form of a folding hand fan. By recycling an archetypal representation of heroic masculinity as a fashionable woman’s accoutrement, Esposito summons Virginia Woolf’s critique of patriarchal culture: ‘This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.’ Fan of gunshots collapses the distinction.

In common with other artists to emerge from the poesia visiva (visual poetry) movement in 1960s Italy, Esposito employs the techniques of modernist poetry – unexpected simile, intense condensation, jarring juxtaposition – to confuse these and other hierarchies of value: between high culture and mass media, poetry and propaganda, personal and political. While there is little text in the work on show here (the exception being the other work to feature at Venice, a collage on plexiglass showing an ‘army’ of protesters bearing placards), collages such as Fishermen’s village (2006) show how such poetic strategies can be applied to the field of images. Here, the addition of painted fish and metal ring-pulls transforms an aerial photograph of a Greek fishing village into a comment on the living conditions of its inhabitants, packed into their homes like the sardines on which they depend for a living. The visual resemblance of working-class housing to food packaging functions like an opportune rhyme, making a political point by witty association rather than extended harangue. The apparently offhand conflation of fishermen with fish also dissolves the most fundamental of those hierarchies that Esposito’s work challenges: the separation of humans from nature. Ecological view n.4 (Red view) (1974) tacks red plastic litter like blossom onto the image of a meadow; a later work in the same series, Ecological view

Tearing up my self-portrait, 1987, photograph. Courtesy Gramma Epsilon, Athens

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(2004), takes advantage of the likeness between billowing white plastic bags and the white water of a brook as it runs over stones. A photo collage of a dead tree riddled with chainsaw blades against a lilac sky is titled San Sebastian (1992/2022), riffing on the anthropocentrism of cultural history and inviting the viewer to reconsider who, or what, is being martyred in the service of extractive capitalism. That humans are inextricably bound into the world explains why we are capable of destroying it and, by implication, it us: a show titled What I’ve done might equally have been called I told you so. Bentivoglio titled her germinal 1978 exhibition Materialisation of Language, proposing that our forms of communication must be reacquainted with the physical world and suggesting – by playing on the derivation of ‘material’ from ‘mater’, or mother – that women are best placed to do it. If our ability to separate ourselves intellectually from nature is what makes it possible for us to sabotage it, and by extension ourselves, then one task of art might be to close the gap between what is real and what is represented. In Tearing up my self-portrait (1987), Esposito has ripped a printed photograph in such a way that her reproduced image seems physically to be pulling itself apart. By reconnecting the representation with its medium, Esposito gives it meaning: she makes it matter. Ben Eastham

Lucie Stahl Seven Sisters Bonner Kunstverein 12 March – 31 July Lucie Stahl’s installation Petrochemical Prayer Wheel (2022), six empty oil barrels in freestanding metal frames, looks like some kind of three-dimensional advertisement that has found its way across the street from the car repair shop to the Bonner Kunstverein. Here they function as an announcement for this overview show by the German artist, who originally became known for refined, enlarged and scanned poster-works covered with glossy polyurethane. The barrels can be turned and moved in the style of Tibetan prayer wheels. But they don’t do much more than that, and it’s not the only example here of productive disappointment or failed salvation, insofar as it proposes an invitation for redemption through image or sculpture to provoke haptic feeling. Once they are stripped of their original liquid content, the vessels remain either nostalgically pleasant, advertising-laden shells or small, faded, rusty ghost containers, like another set of prayer wheels shown inside the Kunstverein,

these made from battered beverage cans, the brands of which we can just about discern through the rust and disfiguration (Amstel, Dr Pepper, Pepsi). Stahl’s exhibition title, Seven Sisters, refers to the consortium of oil companies that dominated the global petrol industry in the years following the Second World War. The show brings together works from the more recent past – the last eight years – and dramaturgically arranges them so that most exist in relative isolation and free from chronology, but united by the political urgency of our ongoing immense, and incomprehensible, dependence on fossil fuels. A loose bracket to the show as a whole is formed by the opening series of steel-framed photographs of drilling rigs off the coast of Scotland, Giant (2019), and the seven sculptures at the end, Seven Sisters (2022), decorated with fine ribbons and textiles, and surrounded by Burrows (2022), close-detail photographs of oil spills puddled in abandoned Albanian oil fields. Ultimately this room appears

flooded with the forces of one’s own association and imagination, the almost anthropomorphic steel-fabric bodies themselves like oil rigs punctuating a vast sea. Mutual inflection and contingent meaning, then, are significant here. Seeing yourself in the reflective surfaces of Stahl’s seductive photographs, you’re always thrown back on your subjective, partial relationship to the image. A chapellike room lined with abstract, scanbased works using oil and paint gives further momentum to the exhibition; at the end of this space, through two vertical slits, one can see the sculpture fuel (2019). Resembling a giant, somewhat ridiculous milking robot, it’s one of the show’s many implicit metaphors for the pumping and flowing of liquids and raw materials that dominate the course of the world while remaining half-obscured. Seven Sisters reminds us of that fact, though via an approach to visuals and meaning-making that is no less fluid. Christian Egger

Seven Sisters, 2022 (installation view, Bonner Kunstverein). Photo: Mareike Tocha. Courtesy the artist, Cabinet Gallery, London; Dépendance, Brussels; Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris & Los Angeles; and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna

September 2022

The Past and Future of Afrofuturism On the promise and peril of breaking from modernity The body of work loosely contained under the label of Afrofuturism exists within two radically distinct but conceptually overlapping timelines. The first encompasses the history of the United States but focuses its attention on slavery and its aftermath, traced all the way into the current century – the longue durée. Consider the paintings assembled for the recently opened In the Black Fantastic exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery. Ellen Gallagher’s canvases, depictions of survivors of the Middle Passage – thrown overboard but living in technologically advanced cities beneath the surface – represent the more radical wing of this first approach. The second extends its focus further still. It exists in cosmic time, beginning in the mythical prehistoric past and reaching out into the farflung future. Between these two points – in place of the events that have created the world of the present day: capitalism, colonialism, the emergence of the nation-state – there is usually a void, and we are instead given a timeline that jumps back and forth between pyramids and spaceships. For instance, Chris Ofili fuses Homeric and religious myth with celestial fantasies about contact with alien lifeforms. In his sculpture Annunciation (2006) – featured in In the Black Fantastic – a golden Mary and a black pregnant Gabriel (more alien than angel) press their naked bodies up against one another. Both approaches respond to the problem of whether it is possible to imagine something like a black modernity. Standing in the way is the existence of actual modernity, whose defining features the genre usually understands to be racism and slavery (but also, as in the images of greed and consumption in Wangechi Mutu’s animation The End of eating Everything, 2013, the destruction of the environment). Coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay ‘Black to the Future’, Afrofuturism from the moment of its inception was concerned with understanding how it was possible to enact a break from modernity by imagining what Dery called ‘possible futures’, or paths not taken, as an alternative to our present world, which is so saturated with suffering that little within it seems salvageable. There are of course other visions of the future, but these are, Dery insisted, ‘owned by technocrats, futurologists, streamliners and set-designers’ – a grouping that is ‘white to a man’. The cultural critic’s immediate focus was on fiction – turning to sci-fi novelist Samuel R. Delany or the dc Comics superhero Icon – but the problems emerging from this medium were present across artforms.

An instructive intervention came from the critic Greg Tate, writing in 1992, who took issue with the erasure of what he called the ‘affirmative aspects of blackness’ in Delany’s novels. Pushing back against such criticism, Delany insisted that part of what it meant to imagine something beyond modernity was to abandon the idea that one had to fight ‘the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world… by constructing something so rigid as an identity’. At his best, Delany is able to present social identities and structures as subordinate to technology and chance, which he uses to explain how this fragmentation occurs in practice. In ‘The Star Pit’, a story from 1965, he describes

how the first manned intergalactic voyage became possible: ‘Through some freakish accident, two people had been discovered who didn’t crack up at twenty thousand light years off the galactic rim, who didn’t die at twentyfive thousand’. Inhabitants of Delany’s world entertain emptying the asylums in search of other psychological freaks capable of galactic travel, but to no avail; the chosen are not marked out by features that overlap with any socially recognisable categories. Rather, technology and chance create these classifications. Where this flight into fantasy leaves the identity of race is left deliberately unclear. In this mode, Lina Iris Viktor, Eleventh, 2018, pure 24 karat gold, acrylic, ink, copolymer resin, print on matte canvas, 165 × 127 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Afrofuturism seeks merely to leapfrog the present, making our own social categories appear alien in the process. Writing in 2003, the filmmaker and theorist Kodwo Eshun described Afrofuturism as a ‘program for recovering the histories of counterfutures’, a description that gets at both the power and limitations of the genre. What is lost? Through its often-totalising understanding of actual history as endless suffering, the genre, in attempting to break with European modernity, breaks instead with the radicalism of actually-existing Black modernism. In its worst instantiations, invocations of ideas about transcending all social, sexual and racial categories can often come across as cheap mysticism, reliant on supposed connections between Black people and a mythic regal past that is alarmingly similar to the ideology of European fascism. This is a tendency to which Afrofuturism in its more celebratory modes falls victim. Of course, to engage with this oeuvre in such an argumentative way might be to miss the point. All artists rely in some sense on fundamental delusions or misrepresentations as a springboard. The important question should therefore be, what formal innovations does this playful space open up? Here the symbols of royalty, of premodern notions of a harmony with nature, of an inherent Black spirituality, are so well worn that it is difficult to imagine how one could turn to these themes without relying on cliché. One reason for this might be the fact that Afrofuturism within the visual arts exists within the same representational world as mass-produced popular culture. (The artist Lina Iris Viktor, exhibited at the Hayward, once filed a lawsuit against Kendrick Lamar for allegedly appropriating her work in the music video for the rapper’s Black Panther soundtrack song, from 2018.) The further Afrofuturism has been able to move from this market-dominated vision of culture, the more autonomously it has been able to think about the future. Much of the more interesting work assembled within the Hayward’s exhibition, such as Hew Locke’s sculptures and Kara Walker’s film recreations of racist violence, avoids these cheap solutions. They preoccupy themselves with the work of facing the future with two feet planted firmly in the present, interpreting the complex forms of identity taking shape in the here and now. In doing so, they point forward towards a more possible future. John-Baptiste Oduor

Hew Locke, Ambassador 1, 2021, wood, resin, fabric, metal, plastic, 155 × 50 × 137 cm. Photo: Anna Arca. © and courtesy the artist

September 2022

Kim Hiorthøy Hole in the Wall Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo 3 June – 7 August There’s a charmingly disjunctive quality to the work of multidisciplinary Norwegian artist Kim Hiorthøy. For a 2016 exhibition at Standard (Oslo), he showed an array of humble paintings lackadaisically rendered in washes of sombre colour and reminiscent of the sometimes outright twee compositions of other regional painters and collagists such as Mamma Andersson or Jockum Nordström. That outing, though, rather than packaging itself with some correspondingly laidback attitude, notably came prefaced with a quote from Donald Judd’s 1993 longform essay with the evergreen title of ‘It’s Hard To Find A Good Lamp’: ‘The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness, and scale as a chair’. The text cranks and grouses along, but essentially declares art and furniture as separate, sovereign pursuits. Six years on, Hiorthøy has taken a room in the Kunstnernes Hus and filled it with slabs

of plywood – various lengths and widths are genially propped up against the long walls, while others riff on the chair form. Their resemblance implies that the artist started fashioning his own versions of Judd’s Open Side Plywood Chair, or Front Recessed Plywood Chair (both 1991), but then abandoned that task to make more time for his true passions: step stools to nowhere, and towers for ascending and peeking through bored holes out at… other plywood structures, a number of which also have his tiny abstract drawings or paintings pasted on them – like some postminimalist’s notion of an Easter egg hunt (I found the expressive gesture!). Hiorthøy has even encased the space’s existent entryway, presumably functional, with one of his own. One side of his version is deeply slanted, like a swipe at the eminently reasonable reputation of Scandinavian design. The natives, and a revered figure of the international contemporary art

Hole in the Wall, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Uli Holz. Courtesy Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo

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canon, affably blasphemed in one cut of the saw blade. Hilarious! It would be dull to quibble about whether this whole installation should be understood as furniture or as art – what matters is the approach that Hiorthøy’s generous setup ultimately inspires and invites, proof of which was furnished by local kindergarteners activating the space with aplomb. A far cry from simply letting one’s offspring wedge themselves into the strict gaps of Judd’s blue stacks at Tate Modern, both in artistic intent and audience accommodation. Even those holes, if not exactly functional per se, do in the end serve a serious purpose: one drilled at the height of one’s face through a plywood corner booth, as well as the gallery wall encased within it, invites a summer’s breeze, from outside the venue, directly into the mouth. The point is to take your breath away. Paige K. Bradley

Margrét H. Blöndal Liðamót / Ode to Join National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík 28 May – 2 October In Independent People (1934/35), Icelandic author Halldór Laxness weaves a sagalike novel about a subsistence sheep-farmer, Bjartur of Summerhouses. After years of humiliation serving a rich farmer, Bjartur finally owns a rustic heath on which to raise a choir of bleating yews. The agrarian saga follows him as he survives hardships and absurdities to achieve independence, damn the cost. An ode to the resilient attitude of rural Icelandic life, the book also parodies stubborn individualism, a roadblock to collectivity. Margrét H. Blöndal’s Liðamót / Ode to Join deftly balances this tension between self-reliance and dependence, which manifests in her humble drawings and sculptures. At first glance, the exhibition seems to model self-sufficiency. It was produced by the artist in the space, requiring little in the way of flash and bang. About a dozen framed works on paper – colourful photo-album-sized scrawls

and jottings made with oil and dry pigments – are shown alongside fragile, precarious sculptures made of torn fabric, dyed and frayed, and entangled with wood scraps and rods (all works Untitled, 2022). The drawings feel like literal embodiments of the fuzziness of thought itself. Take one example: five saturated blocks of colour hover in the bottom half of the paper. Pea-green, cerulean and sienna bleed into the paper, surrounded by the transparent weep of oil stains. They are lyrical gestures, spaced out on the page like concrete poetry. The drawings always appear in conversation with the sculptures. Nearby, Blöndal has affixed an attenuated scrap of wood, stained white, perpendicular to a column. From it dangles a teal tatter of fabric, which joins with another cane, equally thin and long, floating parallel to the supporting column. The exhibition’s Icelandic title refers to the movement that

arises from the intersection of three or more joints. This sculpture, in a dance between itself, the gallery’s architecture and the viewer, embodies such precarity. It feels so light it might be disturbed by the viewer’s movement, should one’s pace be too brisk. Blöndal’s exhibition advances a sense of can-do, but much more measured than the bucolic obstinance of Laxness’s farmer. Thoughtfully low-tech, her work turns away from the overproduced spawn of the contemporary artworld. The installation favours sparseness – there is plenty of empty floor and wall – inaugurating a situation in which Blöndal’s unpretentious works depend on the gallery’s architecture, and highlight it. Absent the smack of obscene capital, Blöndal’s refreshing approach to art suggests that even the most resilient, self-reliant works must depend on something. Owen Duffy

Liðamót / Ode to Join, 2022 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík

September 2022

Hew Locke Foreign Exchange Victoria Square, Birmingham 14 June – 15 August During the 2021 Policy Exchange’s History Matters Conference, organised in the wake of the toppling of Bristol’s statue of slave trader William Colston and the wider wave of reckoning with public statues, former Secretary of State for dcms Oliver Dowden equated the removal of statues with “a tendency to rewrite chunks of history”: a statement that entertains the nonsensical notion that monuments are neutral, and that history is fixed, and never rewritten. However, as GuyaneseBritish artist Hew Locke’s public sculpture Foreign Exchange demonstrates so deftly, history is not stagnant but an ever-evolving, dynamic process, and Britain’s colonial-era monuments could do with some redressing. Despite Locke’s long-standing interest in the power of historical statues, Foreign Exchange is his first public artwork, commissioned by Ikon Gallery to commemorate the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games (the majority of the Commonwealth’s member states are former territories of the British Empire). Rather than creating an entirely new work, Locke has boldly reimagined a largely overlooked seven-metrehigh monument to Queen Victoria that has stood in Birmingham’s Victoria Square since 1901 – the original marble statue replaced with a bronze replica in 1951. Locke not only offers a revived, contemporary dialogue between past and present, but provides an alternative to the debate around public statues, which typically consists of ‘keep’ vs ‘topple’. Victoria, who oversaw the expansion of the British Empire, stands within a crate added by the artist. Around it, and the rectangular plinth on which the whole sits, Locke has built a large boat, a recurring motif in his work. The boat here evokes foreign trade and exchange, the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent

indentured servitude, a system of bonded labour that saw over two million people transported from India to work in British colonies. On the boat’s deck, five smaller replica Victorias are positioned before and behind the original statue, 3d-printed in resin but appearing like patinated bronze. Together, they look as if they are about to be shipped off around the world, reminding us of how ubiquitous Victoria’s image was across the Empire. (Indeed, in some parts of the territories she governed she existed as no more than an image: she was, for example, granted the title of Empress of India in 1877, without ever having physically set foot on its soil.) Growing up in Guyana, Locke himself was no stranger to this ubiquity: at the work’s inauguration, the artist explained how he passed by a statue of Queen Victoria every day on his way to school; her head even adorned his exercise books. At a certain point such imagery is so ubiquitous one ceases to notice it. Foreign Exchange, by contrast, is so conspicuous that it cannot be ignored. Locke has dressed the original Victoria with a Roman gladiator-helmet, her face partially covered by a visor, hinting at how historical figures are obscured and choreographed for political purposes. That she is indeed almost always represented as an older woman in public space, for example, reflects that it was during the latter part of her reign that the British Empire was at its peak. Each of the replicas meanwhile are wearing a martial helmet or mask of sorts, made in cardboard, cast in resin and painted gold. Golden spikes protrude from two helmets, like the rays of light on a halo adorning an Early Northern Renaissance Madonna, reminding the viewer of how society elevates powerful people to a saintly – and even

facing page Foreign Exchange, 2022 (installation view, Victoria Square, Birmingham). Photo: Shaun Fellows. Courtesy Birmingham 2022 Festival and Ikon, Birmingham

ArtReview

godly – rank. They also recall the Statue of Liberty, a possible ode to New York’s Guyanese population – the fifth-largest foreign-born population in the city. Foreign Exchange also discerningly points to the darker realities of Britain’s colonial history. Each Victoria carries an oversized medallion commemorating battles fought by the Empire, including the Battle of Seringapatam (1799), the Second Afghan War (1878–80) and the Capture of Trinidad from Spain (1797). By reviving the memory of these brutal conflicts in public space, Locke challenges the favoured representations of Empire that still dominate in film and tv. During the History Matters conference, Dowden argued that “strong societies don’t try to airbrush their past, they don’t try to hide it away. They preserve and they cherish their heritage”. Locke – who does not advocate for the tearing down of statues – is holding Dowden to his word. With the utmost respect to the monument as a historical object, the artist’s embellishment richly enhances, and in doing so, presents multiple sides of Britain’s history, in all its messiness and complexity. Foreign Exchange is quiet radicalism at its best. It does not pander to a particular point of view, or draw upon polarising opinions – nor does it impose ideology. Instead, it prompts the viewer to dig deeper – exactly what public art should do – and empowers people to ask questions around not only history, but the power and purpose of monuments. Locke’s playful commission deals with dark and painful histories with wit and grace, by casting what has always been, but carefully concealed, into plain view. Melissa Baksh

September 2022

Jeannette Ehlers Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen 11 June – 7 August Interweaving evocations of revolt with pointers towards healing and communal exchange, Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers’s exhibition asserts a spiritual perspective on postcolonial discourse, examining Denmark’s repressed imperial history both poetically and politically through multivalent objects, film, installation and performances. The show opens with Moko is Future (2022), a video installation portraying the carnivalesque Moko Jumbie – a mythical ‘healing spirit’ said to have walked across the Atlantic on stilts following West African slaves to the Caribbean – dancing through Copenhagen’s old town to overlapping ocean sounds and shifting rhythms. Moko Jumbie’s transatlantic journeys recall the routes Danish slave ships travelled; a displacement also signalled by Gle (2022), a ritual mask with high spiritual value, made in the Ivory Coast, purchased in Puerto Rico, and now displayed in a country that pretty much ignores its violent colonial history. Nearby are the pink neon words ‘Until the Lion has their historian, the hunter will always

be a hero’ (Until the Lion, 2021): an African proverb that Ehlers saw graffitied on a ruined dungeon wall in a former Danish colony fort in Ghana. The statement could serve as a guiding principle not only for the exhibition but Ehlers’s overall practice, a much-needed examination of colonial justice in this national context. Yet, if her early videowork focused on oppression and visibility, her varied collaborations and multiple media here allow her to activate the debate between violent and non-violent resistance with a triple focus on care, rebellion and community; articulated in diverse regimes of knowledge, from spoken word to bodily participation. See, for example, Secret Pathways to Freedom (2021), a colourful curtain of braided hair extensions – an identity marker for people of African descent, often used against them in policing – made in an exhibition workshop she organised in Detroit. The title refers to covert messages and diagrams such as escape routes that subjugated slaves interlaced into cornrows. In We’re Magic. We’re Real #3 (Channeling Re-existence into Hallowed

Coil: The Sensuous Way of Knowing (detail), 2022, video installation. Photo: David Stjernholm. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

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Grounds of Healing) (2022), fantastically long braids of hair created in exhibition workshops with the help of local Afro-Danish hairdressers emerge from the walls and ceiling, filling the large space with crisscrossing thresholds of entwined hair before disappearing in bubbling buckets of dark liquid. Coil: The Sensuous Way of Knowing (2022) concludes the exhibition with an immersive installation based on the ancestor-honouring Maafa ceremony. Instead of the traditional ritual candles, though, here rows of suspended cellphones play footage of fiery riots and indignant uprisings from around the world. The violent imagery builds to a serene closeup of a woman’s hair being braided by her mother, while a commissioned spoken poem by Fiona Compton speaks to Afro hair in relation to both trauma and healing through coded, intergenerational communication and the legacy of postcolonial resistance. As it does so, Ehlers’s braided concerns – and the show as a whole – reach a powerful apex. Rodney LaTourelle

What’s Luck Got to Do with It? On the much-needed discussion of class in the artworld At a gallery dinner in Berlin a while back, the artist sitting next to me asked where I was from, originally. He was English and trying to place my accent, I think. “Oh, I’m from a shithole,” I said, fondly remembering that small, rough-edged town in Yorkshire. “Everyone’s from a shithole,” said the artist. But he was in his fifties and had no doubt benefitted from the same free higher education – a lifeline of sorts to relatively ambitious, misfit, nonmonied, art-minded people from regional towns – that I had, that my parents had, but that vanished during the late 1990s and has become progressively the preserve of nonshithole people ever since. I didn’t ask, but that artist probably doesn’t teach, or spend much time around emerging artists. When I meet the latter nowadays, if the conversation ever gets as far as family background, it often turns out that their parents are ‘in tech’ or doing something shadowy in finance: upper middle-class at least. These kids, in other words (and this applies not only to artists but other inhabitants of the art infrastructure, like curators and gallery owners), can count on the financial cushion necessary to allow them to develop their practice without getting a distracting job or five; or flapping about in an attempt to find the also-vanished social-security safety net. Even among the students of my graduating year at art school, in 1995, seemingly the only one who’s had a solid exhibiting career since – for tasteful, somewhat old-fashioned abstracts – was one of the poshest among us. I’d assumed he’d disappear like the rest of us; blame it on youthful naivety. Get exposed to this imbalance repeatedly and you can easily become chippy, especially when you ponder how little class is discussed within the artworld. I know people – artists, yes – who, once they know that another artist has some money behind them, instantly dismiss the art; I sometimes instinctively lean in that direction myself. But the problem

with directing one’s displeasure at such fortunate, accident-of-birth practitioners, rather than at a monolithic system of inequality, is that there are creative types who happen to both come from very comfortable backgrounds and be extravagantly talented, as I’m reminded – sticking with the uk for the moment – anytime I see one of Joanna Hogg’s films, read an Edward St Aubyn novel or see a Tacita Dean show. (After which, checking whether I’m going soft, I like to

balance the books by looking at a Marc Quinn sculpture or thinking for three seconds about Alain de Botton.) Plus, taking a longer view, time makes everything trickily blurry. In British art there have always been counterexamples of brilliant bootstrappers – Hogarth and Turner, for example – but, as you remember any time you watch interviews with British modernists, the truer history – and without even needing to mention the Bloomsbury Set – is more one of cut-glass accents and ‘bohemian’ salons in big houses in Belsize Park than it is of the brief interregnum of universal opportunity, Monopoly game board, us version

September 2022

offered by the postwar settlement, that lofted working-class Yorkshire lads like David Hockney. Outside the uk, consider what critic David Rimanelli says, laughing, while defending the late American artist Dash Snow in the documentary Moments Like This Never Last (2020): “Do you not like Manet? He was a rich kid too!” Later, if the art was good in the first place, the money that helped enable it tends to get conveniently forgotten, or it’s seemingly crass to think about it now that the work has proved its worth. Yet what’s not seen in this picture, in the present day, are all the talented young people who weigh up their burgeoning ability against the cost of art education and what comes after, recognise they can’t afford it and give up. What is seen, not infrequently – and placed in high relief by how different it is to the kind of hardscrabble practices currently on show at Documenta and the Berlin Biennale, full of artists from the Global South – is a lot of affable, well-composed, of-the-moment mediocrity by people who could afford it, whose parents could afford it. And what might be different from the long history of monied artists, in this great professionalisation of the Western artworld within which you can’t get anywhere – get any contacts, any leverage – without a master’s degree and a subsidised period of ‘emerging’ – is that many gifted outsiders increasingly don’t have a way in, for all that a handful will invent one. You might wonder about the potential result of this: an Anglo-American art scene composed of artists who’ve been insulated from any kind of concerns related to class or economics, any sense of a world larger than themselves. And increasingly you don’t need to wonder – you can look directly at it. Martin Herbert

Marinella Senatore Afterglow Mazzoleni Art and other venues, London 9 June – 26 August A gospel choir, gymnasts and tango dancers were among the odd bedfellows Marinella Senatore gathered for the opening event – and central illuminating force – of her multisite exhibition Afterglow. After a procession to the amphitheatrelike forecourt of Battersea Power Station – the site of a nearing-completion luxury property complex – singers, musicians and dancers did their thing, purposefully unrehearsed and to a timetable structured around overlaps: two wrestlers writhed on the ground before a choir of seniors; a steel band played David Bowie’s Life on Mars (1971); an operatic solo soared above it all. What underpinned the roster was each group’s progressive principles: the black ballet company Pointe Black for instance is a challenge to the dance-form’s elitist white history; Esprit Concrete’s parkour is therapeutic. Setting the scene, one of Senatore’s signature light sculptures provided a contemporary take on Southern Italy’s traditional ‘luminaries’, which recreate outlines of baroque cathedral facades with electric lights for religious festivities through piazzas and streets. At Battersea, the words of contemporary spiritualist Jeff Brown – ‘At the heart of our expansion is the capacity to be vulnerable’ – glowed in mercuryfree neon. In central London, another lightwork was installed above the entrance to the sial primary school, which shares a building with the British Ukrainian Association, and where, as an appendage to the opening event, schoolchildren performed an Italian Second World War-era song to show solidarity with Ukraine. Nearby, at the courtyard of swanky ethical restaurant Petersham Nurseries, diners could

contemplate a lightwork espousing the nineteenth-century American agnostic Robert Ingersoll’s belief that ‘we rise by lifting others’. Though the gallery materials highlight the dictionary definition of ‘afterglow’ – ‘a pleasant feeling remaining after a pleasurable experience’ – for Senatore both light sculptures and performances are imbued with a greater purpose: they generate energy to change ‘space’ and ‘individuals’. She’s notably pursued this idea of ‘social change’ through the ‘transformative power of collective experiences’ developed with her School of Narrative Dance, whose ten-year anniversary celebrations Afterglow kicked off. Taken at idealistic face-value, Afterglow’s concurrent performances enacted an egalitarian community that thrives on difference, with art buffs and passersby alike potentially drawn into this brief alternative society. Senatore has previously spoken of her desire to reach a wide public, yet in staging work in economically elite locales, she seems to actively court contradictions. It’s impossible not to wonder, at one of London’s most notoriously costly developments of apartments and shops, who can an epiphanic ‘free for all’ be for? And to what end – consciousness-raising or conscience-easing? Is amplifying the illusion that a site owned by a corporate consortium is a democratic public space taking the revolution where it counts, or art-washing the privatisation of the civic landscape? The accompanying Bond Street gallery exhibition underlines the hazy impact of live events, as well as the challenges of creating objects that might adequately convey their oomph. A low-lit room with a white sand floor

nods to Fabio Mauri’s 1968 arte povera installation, Luna. Instead of awesome journeys into the cosmos, Senatore evokes the nebulous territory of inner space. Opaque coloured light boxes that quote Walt Whitman on human potential, ‘I contain multitudes’, are an invitation to wonder what might lie within. The artist’s hands, replicated in frosty peach glass, stretch upward from a plinth, seeking connection. A second room includes a scaled-down festive lightwork with a famous misquote from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), glowing in disco violet: ‘Dance First Think Later’. In a play whose characters repeat themselves and wait, these words are often taken as a call for action. Yet a series of pencil drawings opposite suggest that Senatore is equally alive to Beckett’s imprisoning stasis. Based on photographs of global protests, they include a suffragette in 1908, a banner for Barnsley Miners’ Wives and her previous collaborators Pussy Riot. Countering Senatore’s can-do performances, this community of transhistorical activists implies an overarching futility, with people compelled to rise up again and again. One drawing, in which Margaret Thatcher is confronted by the fashion designer Katharine Hamnett sporting one of her famed political statement T-shirts, felt telling. In this constellation of eternal struggle, Hamnett’s project underlined the dilemma that vexed Afterglow’s defining event: her T-shirts brought pressing issues into everyday conversations in a way that felt sincere but easy to dismiss, without making the powerful pay serious attention. Skye Sherwin

Afterglow, 2022, inaugural performance at Battersea Power Station, London. Photo: Scott Finnegan. Courtesy the artist; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mazzoleni Art, Turin & London

ArtReview

We Rise By Lifting Others, 2022, glass tubes with mercury-free neon and castmethacrylate mounted on a painted aluminium panel, 103 × 120 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mazzoleni, Turin & London

September 2022

Peggy Franck Nap, Sit, Lap, Backlit Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam 12 May – 5 July Of the six artworks that make up this exhibition, four are large and lustrous photos. In these images, Peggy Franck continues pursuing what has become a signature strategy of hers: fusing the rhetorics of painting with those of photography. The Dutch artist executes particoloured compositions in acrylic on sheets of highly reflective material and hangs them in various locations throughout her studio before photographing them. In the resultant images (all works 2022) our focus is drawn to Franck’s loose, liberally applied brushstrokes. These gestural traces and spontaneous daubs in a predominantly warm palette have been substantially enlarged, and made more luminous and vivid, via the photographic processes. What were originally small paintings are transformed

in scale and complemented by tantalising environmental details; rays of sunlight falling across the surfaces, illegible forms reflected in the metallic sheen. In addition to ‘staging’ her own artworks, Franck has a penchant for conflating sites of production and display. This is demonstrated here in a street-facing anteroom off the main gallery via a small, florid mural painted in fuchsia and magenta gouache. Although diminutive in comparison to the nearby photos, this mural – which will be erased when the exhibition concludes – is the only instance here in which Franck’s brushstrokes are presented in an unmediated way; without the enhancement or amplification of a lens. The aptly titled Come Alive appears to be the index of one rapidly executed action,

Nap, Sit, Lap, Backlit, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Johannes Schwartz. Courtesy Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam

ArtReview

and is imbued with spontaneous vitality and panache. There is an alluring quality to this show that stems primarily from an ambiguity regarding the status of its constituents. It is essentially an amalgamation of self-reflexive photo documentation and auratic artefacts. The largest piece on display here, titled ?01013!030422(i), comprises a large plywood panel extracted from its original location: part of a partition wall in Franck’s studio. The surface is adorned with an elegant motif in black acrylic resembling a swag of curtain or theatrical drape. This is apposite, for Franck’s process is fundamentally performative and predicated upon offering us glimpses into interiors – her studio, perhaps even her mind – that would usually be concealed from view. Pádraic E. Moore

The Condition of Being Addressable Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 18 June – 4 September Is language an affliction? The exhibition’s title quotes theorist Judith Butler’s response to a question about why ‘language is hurtful’, excerpted in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). For Butler, language is one distressing result of sharing a world with other people. We are exposed to each other and create categories (race, sexuality, gender) that constrain unique subjectivities. These categories, for guest curators Marcelle Joseph and Legacy Russell, appear in the strange, violent collisions of language and visual life, uniting 25 international, intergenerational artists in this exploration of identity, visibility and power. Pain and discomfort are central in the exhibition. In Judy Chicago’s Immolation (1972), red smoke obscures the nude body of a female figure in green body paint. Evoking political events of the era, her pose recalls those of the Vietnamese monks who set fire to themselves

in protest against the Vietnam War. Elsewhere, Jessica Vaughn’s After Willis (rubbed, used and moved) #012 (2022) rearranges the worn, stained seats from Chicago public transit vehicles historically used to bus Black students into predominantly white schools, placing them vertically along a wall. Fifty years apart, Vaughn and Chicago recontextualise the material results of oppressive governmental policy, reckoning with the destructive ways state power affects marginalised groups. Photography and video contends with how omnipresent technologies both enable and negate the representation of the body: in Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s The Backlight 5.10.2016 (2016), a smartphone camera flashes at the artist’s lens. The bright light illuminates a white jacket, throwing the rest of the image into dark contrast and rendering the photograph’s Black subject inseparable from the background. Anaïs Duplan,

in The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch (2019), ‘datamoshes’ frames of found footage from popular music videos and documentaries, a technique that partially destroys digital images and text, forcing faces and scenes to melt into one another. Miatta Kawinzi’s sweat/tears/sea (2017) features a first-person speaker who is broken down over the video’s course, resulting in disjointed letters placed over images of beachy landscapes. Image-based technology allows us to capture ourselves, but only under its terms, fracturing the depiction of subjectivity. Joseph and Russell take a broad approach to Butler’s ideas: here, language produces a landscape of images, icons and symbols that is both inevitable and confining. These are works that contend with the complex, painful processes of identity and self-making, ruminating on the relationships between people and power, body and earth, language and living. Claudia Ross

Judy Chicago, Immolation, from the series Women and Smoke, 1972, archival pigment print, 102 × 102 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco

September 2022

Le Futur derrière nous (The Future Behind Us) Villa Arson, Nice 12 June – 28 August The wealthy banker Pierre-Joseph Arson established his family mansion in the hills of Nice in the early nineteenth century. Mid-century watercolours show the original Villa Arson in a fully bucolic panorama, its demure Italianate garden stretching towards the sea. By the 1960s the French state, now owner of the former mansion, entrusted the task of transforming the estate into an art school, artists’ residence and exhibition venue to architect Michel Marot, who devised a spectacular brutalist complex that echoes ancient Provençal villages. All of this is barely visible if seen from downstream, hidden as it is by parasol

pines, cedars, oaks and cypresses. Winding and concealing: qualities well suited for Le Futur derrière nous, a group exhibition curated by Mario Scotini, showcasing generations of Italian artists who have emerged from the 1990s to the present. The focus is on collectives and artists whose work relates to the shift in creative and political energies that occurred in the 1980s due to the exacerbation of social conflicts, state violence, the emergence of commercial television and the return to traditional values. The so-called riflusso was thematised in many cultural exports of the time (the films of Nanni Moretti, for example). Opening the exhibition is a blow-up shot of

Luca Vitone, Panorama (Pisa), 2006, telescope, wooden platform, installed at Villa Arson, Nice. Photo: Jean Christophe Lett. Courtesy Gianni Garrera Collection, Rome

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a sit-in at Piazzale Loreto in Milan, taken by photojournalist Uliano Lucas in 1970, juxtaposed with an extract from Luca Vitone’s Carta atopica (Atopic Map, 1988–92), a morphological map of an unspecified land whose names have been erased, rendering it useless to seek directions or to orient oneself. Nearby, Rossella Biscotti shows works from The Trial (2010–13), begun while the artist was undertaking photographic research on fascist architecture and resulting in a sculptural, performative, audiovisual elaboration on archival material from the so-called ‘April 7’ trials, which ran from 1979 to 1988. Thousands of militants and intellectuals were caught up in the Italian

state’s political witch-hunt, that saw the likes Antonio Negri – Marxist professor at the University of Padua – accused of being an ideologue and promoter of armed subversion. Protesting in Negri’s defence, Gilles Deleuze would liken him to Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist who died falling from a window at a Milan police station while illegally detained. The Pinelli case is directly addressed by Francesco Arena, in an installation of various works that allude to this infamous death: a metal ladder equivalent to the distance of the fall, disparate objects cut to the height of the police station’s balustrade, a modular floor that replicates the length of the anarchist’s last walk. These enumerations, reenactments and translations seem like forms to fathom hidden machinations, or a form of sedation for a shared posttraumatic stress. In La notte del Drive-In. Milano

Spara (2013) Francesco Jodice roguishly edits clips from low-budget crime films of the period, to unite the emotional registers of violence and fear with mainstream social unease. In other cases, the invocations of history are more factual, such as in the works of the Stalker collective, which organised participatory actions in Rome’s Corviale neighbourhood, a modernist housing utopia that quickly turned into suburban dystopia. Or they’re poetic, as in Adelita HusniBey’s sound piece Cronaca del Tempo Ripetuto (A chronicle of histories repeating, 2021), based on exercises in radical pedagogy. Or they are ironically surreal, as Carla Lonzi’s books transformed by Claire Fontaine into bricks to be hurled in a riot (Brickbat series, 2015) or the hypnosis session, on vinyl record, that is expected to save us from work addiction in Danilo Correale’s Reverie – On the Liberation from Work (2017).

Particularly engaging is Outside the Theatres (2021), by Rä di Martino, a video that traces the history of the Centre for Theatre Research and Experimentation (founded in 1974 in Pontedera), projecting us into a universe that seems, seen from the present day, parallel to our own: a provincial town becoming part of a circuit of international artistic experimentation, whose purpose was the production of a collaborative sense rather than the aesthetic ‘measurability’ of its output. Scotini has succeeded in recounting a lineage stemming from a crucial, if brief, historical moment, circumnavigating the long nostalgic shadow of Italy’s Transavanguardia postmodernists, not only thanks to the strength of the positions expressed, but also to a staging that fully employs the narrative potential of the exhibition format. Francesco Tenaglia

The Future Behind Us, 2022 (installation view, featuring works by Francesco Arena). Photo: Jean Christophe Lett. Courtesy Villa Arson, Nice

September 2022

Giselle Beiguelman Botannica Tirannica Museu Judaico de São Paulo 28 May – 18 September Outside the deconsecrated 1930s synagogue in which the Museu Judaico de São Paulo opened last year, Giselle Beiguelman has planted a garden of weeds. ‘Weeds’ of course is an entirely subjective term, denoting any unwanted wild plant. Inside the building, in front of windows overlooking the exterior beds, the artist provides a ledger, identifying each species with its Latin name and its common name in Brazilian Portuguese (with an English translation). Among them: Wandering Jew (Tradescantia zebrina), Gypsy Braid (Senecio jacobsenii), Jew’s Thorn (Euphorbia tirucalli), Lady of the Night (Cestrum nocturnum). Inside the rotunda gallery, other shrubs and greenery, each with names similarly referencing specific groups of people, grow inside tanks installed on a central circle of metal shelving units. Those historically labelled with anti-Semitic references were invariably ‘invasive’ species – a trait that can be found also in the common names for plants in English and other languages – prone to take over a garden where the green-fingered were not careful to control

them. Botany as a site for anti-Semitic prejudice. Other plant names nod to physical caricatures. In Brazil the ornamental Thunbergia alata flower, with its big wide yellow petals that conjoin in a dark central hole, is known as the ‘Mulatto girl’s bottom’ (‘mulatto’ refers to people of mixed African and European ancestry); the tangled climbing vines of Muehlenbeckia complexa is referred to as the ‘Cabelo-de-negro’ (‘Hair of a Black Man’). This caricature of the Black body summons up histories of exoticisation and slavery. The offensive nomenclature of botany is merely symptomatic of prejudice passed through generations. To this Beiguelman adds questions of colonialism through a series of botanical drawings of similarly offensively named species, hung on the surrounding gallery walls, the medium recalling the adventures of colonialera botanists whose research was as much an expression of imperial power as it was scientific curiosity: to name and categorise is to give yourself the structure to govern and rule. The subsequent exploitation of the indigenous

Botannica Tirannica, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Daniel Cabrel. Courtesy Museu Judaico de São Paulo

ArtReview

plants is signalled in a collection of seeds and herbs derived from plants that proved to have economic value; the dehumanising names (a jar of Brazil nuts labelled with an old name employing the N-word; a pot of ‘kaffir’ lime leaves) a means of legitimising exploitation. Yet Beiguelman’s concerns go beyond the legacies of historical prejudice via a series of ai-generated videos, playing out looped on monitors that sit alongside the plants on the metal racking. The videos feature pictures of ‘Frankenstein’ plants created by algorithms that combine images automatically gathered from the internet (one video, showing a woody-looking fantasy species, takes images of plants that slur indigenous groups as its source material, another images of plants with sexist names and so on). Machine learning, built on datasets steeped in inherited prejudice, Beiguelman suggests, will only perpetuate that thinking. As ai is increasingly used in everything from job applications to crime prediction, there are risks of far more serious consequence than the language of the flower bed. Oliver Basciano

The Other Side On the joys of looking at art outside ‘the artworld’ I’m far from the only person who does this, even at this magazine, but mea culpa – when I say ‘the artworld’, that’s code. It means something narrowly specific: the infrastructure around ostensibly serious, forward-thinking, frequently expensive art, as shown in ‘serious’ commercial and noncommercial galleries in major cities, biennales and art fairs. The phrase, which might easily be replaced by ‘the industry’ – except that won’t happen until we start calling galleries shops – is a convenient shorthand for the kind of art that, circularly, gets covered in magazines like this one. But, of course, what’s described above is not the whole ‘artworld’; and nor is the latter anything like singular, more a grouping of big fuzzy spheres that occasionally overlap, usually don’t and often go strenuously ignored or are chanced upon only by happenstance, by breaking habits. A few months ago, for example, having taken up looking for new things in my district, I veered into a dog-walker-friendly strip of woodland next to a local park, through a gap in a chain-link fence, and onto a hitherto-unknown (by me) echtBerlin patch of funky wasteland dotted with makeshift bars and food stands. A poster advertised a weekly video-art screening that had evidently been going on awhile. I’d never heard of any of the artists, but that’s a seemingly authentic sector of a crusty, nonglitzy ‘artworld’ – far from the first one I’ve encountered here, the others usually and naturally in outlying neighbourhoods – and it’s giving someone enjoyment, pause for thought, etc. I wouldn’t have found it in a gallery listings website, which don’t list fledgling, under-the-radar spaces – including those where the significant art of tomorrow might be developing – not to mention work that happens online. So you’ve got to find them another way; if, that is, your limited time isn’t already pledged to visiting those blue-chip venues, where not infrequently the least newness and the most consolidation is going on, but it sure is pleasant to feel unchallenged. At the other end of the spectrum, while I might be in west Berlin trying to tick Galerie Buchholz off my list, I’ll pass galleries that

purvey tasteful, still relatively expensive, often neomodernist art: angsty bronze sculptures and washy abstracts made recently, also-rans of decades past; one step up from the watercolour landscape dealership. Someone is making aesthetic decisions about that art too, thinking

about it (to some degree), buying it, or these outlets – which seem to greatly outnumber the type I do frequent – wouldn’t exist. Sometimes these worlds do merge, due not least to contemporary art’s ravening need for new inventory, plus changing tastes. Witness what happened a couple of decades ago with ‘outsider’ art. Or, to take a more recent example seemingly inspired by the blurring of hierarchies pioneered by Frieze Masters, note that the now-paunchy John William Waterhouse, Thisbe, 1909, oil on canvas, 97 × 59 cm. Public Domain

September 2022

London galleries of the 1990s have started showing the sort of Cork Street painters they initially defined themselves against. (Everyone loves Prunella Clough now.) But mostly ‘the artworld’ is a piece of divisive, defining, this-not-that nomenclature, a portcullis that’s generally up unless there’s money in it and/or the exclusion is no longer tenable. What we call contemporary art at any given time certainly doesn’t contain all new art of worth. I know artists working outside ‘the artworld’ who are as intellectually ambitious, serious and committed as those you’d encounter inside, but either they can’t break in or choose not to try, reserving their energies for artmaking rather than networking. Circumscribing the field, meanwhile, is not only useful for gatekeeping but also because it’s a time-saver for all of ‘us’. Contemporary art as we understand it is already a bloated field in which it’s impossible to fully know what’s going on – trying to do that and regularly checking what’s outside it to see if you’ve missed something would require, it seems, living several simultaneous lifetimes. There are, nevertheless, upsides to sometimes engaging with art that’s outside your bubble, entertaining the idea that ‘the artworld’ is not always the final arbiter and certainly isn’t always ‘right’. First, you’re required to fall back on your critical faculties when nothing in the framing is telling you whether what you’re seeing is legit. Second – here comes the snob again – entertainment value. Some of this stuff is deservedly beyond the pale because it is, or at least appears to be, comically shit: derivative, histrionic, in thrall to notions of bougie tastefulness, all the above. Third, and relatedly, honing your eye. Many people have pointed out that it’s useful and salutary to look at bad cultural production to recognise, or be reminded of, what’s good about what’s good – try a student jazz band that can’t swing, say, or my guy in Prenzlauer Berg who’s long run a space called something like ‘Art of the Twenty-Fifth Century’ and happily places his fourth-rate Futurism in the ground-floor windows. If ‘the artworld’ gets you down, as it is wont to for many of us, veer off the beaten tracks if you can find a way, and the time. You may find you’re cheerier when you come back; and you just might discover something great. Martin Herbert

Mounira Al Solh A day is as long as a year Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 9 April – 2 October At the centre of Lebanese-born, Netherlandsbased Mounira Al Solh’s exhibition is a circular, embroidered red tent (a new work from which the exhibition as a whole takes its title). It is of the type that one can imagine speaks to a nomadic tradition. And while the exterior is ‘decorative’, featuring relatively elaborate floral patterns and depictions of birds, there are other types of memories of other types of nomadism preserved within. The tent’s form and decor is based on an Iranian Qajar-era tent (created for Muhammad Shah during the mid-nineteenth century) in the collection of the Cleveland Museum in Ohio. This one

is embroidered in collaboration with 31 women from Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, the Netherlands and South Africa. You might see it as an act of repossession. Or restitution. Or reanimation. Although it’s not. A clue comes in the form of the Arabic words articulating notions of the sadness and happiness of female contributors on the interior of those decorated panels. And since we’re on the subject of language (which is important in Al Solh’s work), one might begin to think too about the fact that the word chador, used to describe the cloak worn by many women in Iran and other Persianate countries, derives from the classical

A day is as long as a year, 2022 (installation view). Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

ArtReview

Persian word for ‘tent’. What’s pretty on the outside is more complex once you go inside. From the central tentpole itself hang printed stories (in Arabic and English, with keywords embroidered in red) of migrant lives. Like leaves on the branches of a tree. These highly personal narratives (also present in audio form) include stories of lost cats, the loss of mentally-challenged brothers, the perils of long-distance relationships, lives lived under patriarchal power systems, the problems of providing care across continents and of living with bombing and conflict, and cycles of violence that seem destined

to persist. And at its heart is an exploration of what is possible when you have agency and what is impossible when you do not. In some ways this work speaks to a solidarity of suffering as much as it does to a solidarity of women. (‘Maybe suffering is the key to growth’, concludes one of the texts on display.) And, at times, of how that suffering can be overcome. As you circle the tentpole, the stories appear to circulate with you. If that sense of solidarity comes in part because these women’s stories are literally woven together, then a series of painted portraits from the ongoing series I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2012–) returns us to individual experiences. While still suggesting what they have in common. The portraits relate to the artist’s conversations with women who have been

displaced by conflicts in the Middle East and Syria (Al Solh’s parents are Lebanese and Syrian) and are now facing the transition from refugee to citizen in their new homes. The images, the equivalent of painted snapshots (sometimes with the face and text obscured), are executed on yellow ruledpaper from a legal pad (which, assuming you get the reference, adds to the sense of these portraits being ‘snatched’, while also referencing the bureaucracy within which the subjects of the paintings are ensnared). As with A day is as long as a year, there’s an extent to which you need to follow the threads, or read between the lines, or, perhaps most accurately of all, translate what you see. Although on the other hand the whole project could be boiled down (as the artist has when discussing it previously) to the

following cliché: every face tells a story. Although it certainly helps if you know how to read them (and Arabic). The exhibition is completed by doublesided patchwork curtains (of the type used in Lebanon to shade houses from the sun) from another ongoing series, Sama’/Ma’as (2014–), which feature pairs of three-letter Arabic root words in which the letter order of one is shifted to generate a new word to form pairs such as ‘Desire/Dust’ or ‘Shovel/Dignity’. While they articulate a form of play with the slipperiness of language and meaning, they also suggest the enduring migrant conundrum of being a part of something and apart from something – the same but different. Collectively the works on show here articulate a powerful sense of what makes communities, and of the forces that break them apart. Mark Rappolt

A day is as long as a year (detail), 2022, mixed-media installation. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

September 2022

Steffi Klenz Concrete Thinking Sid Motion Gallery, London 25 June – 23 July Photographs live in mostly unnoticed matter – paper or acetates coated in chemicals, grids of flickering leds. The visible world of things is always contained in its frame, but its own materiality tends to go unnoticed. So Steffi Klenz’s densely layered, richly material combines of photographic, reprographic and drawn images, layered and bonded in and on frames and objects that reminisce about modernist architecture, are stunning, arresting things, in which images are decelerated and complicated by the stuff that makes them, dragging them back into the here-and-now of the gallery, and where images break down into graphic information or the trace of the hand – different kinds of index at odds with photography’s naturalism. Around the walls of one gallery are large brownish plywood panels from the series Tensed Muscles (2021): something like little billboards or noticeboards filled with a noisy accumulation of images that (according to the gallery notes) relate to time Klenz spent getting to know the residents of the modernist Maiden Lane housing estate in London. Vivid studio-shot photographs of upraised hands, some light-skinned, some dark-skinned, are interspersed among blackpainted frames with clips of newspaper stories

about the area, along with more cryptic graphic elements – stylised lettering, painted red spots, the lot overlaid on what might be anatomical cutaways of muscle fibres, and the whole riffing on a history of constructivist modernism, from Russian avant-gardist El Lissitzky onwards. The feminine hands point and make hand gestures, the fingers wearing what look like condoms. Buzzing with a social and sociable sensibility, these assemblages mime – but don’t represent – something of the conflicts and stresses of life in London. Eschewing didactics or documentary, however, Klenz’s tableaux are more profoundly meditations on the image’s stressed position somewhere between information and aesthetics: that the Tensed Muscles works are visually dynamic is obvious, but more importantly they pull us in and out of different registers of visual communication – news, typography, symbol, metaphor – bringing us back to the activity of looking and thinking about an object that contains images and ideas, in a culture that only really knows images as fluid and transient, existing inside glassy little digital slabs. Underlying this is Klenz’s attention to the ghosts of twentieth-century modernism, who are recalled here, perhaps, as witnesses of an

Tensed Muscles, 2021, hand-drawn coloured pencil drawing on plywood, with collaged c-type prints. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Sid Motion Gallery, London

ArtReview

older utopian hope that the social world could be completely remade, and that would produce a century of images of imaginary places, buildings and cities. Some were built, of course: contrasting Maiden Lane is the reference point of Klenz’s other series in this exhibition, A Scholar’s Rock (2022) – Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929. Mies’s pavilion, with its seminal combination of open-plan design and lavishly veined marbles and stones, is hinted at in Klenz’s peculiar shelflike wallmounted sculptures, which each host a framed collage consisting of a pencil drawing of a ‘scholar’s rock’ – those pitted rocks prized in classical Chinese culture for their complex and allusive organic shapes. Here, these sinuous bonelike formations are overlaid with irregular fragments of photos of Mies’s pavilion. The works in A Scholar’s Rock are, like their namesakes, also objects for contemplation – about the power of images and our disembodied thrall to them, but also the restorative and healing function of attending to a ‘thing’ sharing a space with us. And, by implication, the integration of our vision into a more actively social and material world, rather than the isolated and estranged seclusion of life lived in our little screens. J.J. Charlesworth

Untitled 07, from the series A Scholar’s Rock, 2022, hand-drawn coloured pencil drawing on matt paper, collaged folded c-type print, glass, vinyl, marble veneer and marble slab. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Sid Motion Gallery, London

September 2022

Graphic Turn: Like the Ivy on the Wall Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 18 May – 10 October Graphic Turn brings together milestones in the history of Latin American graphic art’s role in the fight against oppression, from the 1960s to the present, in works that variously memorialise the victims of dictatorships, the battle for indigenous rights, and queer and feminist activism. The exhibition avoids a linear chronology; instead, works have been clustered into thematics such as ‘Untimely graphics’, ‘Insubordinate territories’, ‘Border crossing’ and ‘Counter-cartographies’, displaying affinities between the work of activists and artists from countries as distant as Mexico and Chile, and connections between creations made decades apart.

The result of in-depth research by a network of curators and scholars that was founded in 2007, Red Conceptualismos del Sur (the Southern Conceptualisms Network), the exhibition explores – through both image and written word – decades of political and social upheaval, while charting the substantial improvements in the region’s access to education, the impact of globalisation and the appearance of the internet. The latter influenced the search for new graphic tools to illustrate social protest, such as the light projections of verses from poems by Raúl Zurita produced by the collective Delight Lab during the Chilean popular uprisings of 2019.

Jean-François Labouverie, Amsterdam march for the 100 ‘disappeared’ Argentinian artists, September 1981. © the Archive of Jean-François Labouverie

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The effect of the new media landscape of the twenty-first century is evident through social media and the phenomenon of virality, collected in an succinct, testimonial manner in the segment titled ‘Agora of the Present’, which condenses images and videos circulating on the internet ranging from memes and phrases to actions that escape the notion of ‘graphics’ altogether, such as the performance Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path, 2019) by the Chilean feminist collective lastesis. Graphic Turn succeeds in showing how art brings creativity to the service of street protests, and vice versa: how the breath

of revolt inspires and influences artists, from works as simple as posters – perhaps the most used medium in the period of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, marked by civil wars, dictatorships and the intervention of the usa – to the current explosion of possibilities offered by the internet, and now more focused on the struggles of racial minorities and sex- and gender-dissident groups. Another noteworthy aspect is the sheer range of formats and surfaces used, as in the works related to the 2014 Ayotzinapa scandal, with works made by family members and activists protesting the detention and disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, ranging from publications to embroidery, monumental graffiti and kites with the students’ faces printed on them. These two-dimensional artistic strategies, billboards, posters, banners and print are based on an economy of means that inherits

the aesthetic tradition of posters printed on small-scale platen presses, with the particular imprint that these leave on the paper, a style that even today is imitated with digital filters. Aesthetically there is not, in fact, that much difference between many of the contemporary works on view and those of the 1970s or 80s. Visual motifs recur – closed fists, balaclavas, women cultivating the land, men in guerrilla uniforms – speaking to a connection between designers and artists from different latitudes, but also to the power of nostalgia, when the activist image is reduced to that of a pop icon, as happens with, for example, La Falsificación de Las Tupamaru (2006) by Javier Vargas Sotomayor, who cross-dresses the sixteenthcentury Inca leader of the ‘Great Rebellion’ against the Spanish crown in brightly coloured wigs. What was initially generated to encourage civic power just as often decants

into products destined for hipster consumption and the aestheticisation of political struggle, as with Jesus Barraza’s Solidarity with Standing Rock (2016), a screen print starring a closeup of an attractive young woman wearing an equally protest-graphicfilled T-shirt. These are urgent responses to injustice. Examples of street banners and posters on the museum wall – as with the big space destined to a number of Argentine collectives – offer evidence of streetwise immediacy, while other works suggest greater deliberation and retrospection in dealing with past traumas, as in the embroideries made by Zapatista women. All the works, though, are united by their basic function: they constitute a call to action. This is art that serves a cause, one in which the message comes before the aesthetic. Juan José Santos

Coletivo Vão, ‘Canalha’ flag, 2016. Courtesy the artist

September 2022

Books India: A History in Objects by T. Richard Blurton Thames & Hudson, £30 (hardcover) ‘Colour is one of the most obvious, insistent and frankly delightful elements of South Asian culture.’ That’s just one of the banal and trivialising comments in this book, in which ‘India’ is actually South Asia – spanning Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This act of generosity is, on the face of it, laudable: it allows the author to insist on an idea of ‘India’ or South Asia as multilingual, multireligious and home to a variety of cultures, in contradistinction to, say, the recent Hindu-fundamentalist reconstruction of the Indian nation. But the India/South Asia business is not framed as a political statement; in fact, the book is introduced as not being about South Asians at all. ‘Without understanding cultures other than one’s own, we are reduced. With South Asians – both in Asia and today dispersed on every other continent – making up a fifth of the world’s population, it is essential to undertake this task,’ T. Richard Blurton concludes in his introduction, leaving the reader with the lingering thought that this book is for non-South Asians who need to understand South Asians, because sooner or later they’re going to be overrun by them. Unless that intro is simply

an advert for the importance and value of Western museums, and their continuing to hold objects that came from someplace else. The objects here ‘come’ from the British Museum. They span Palaeolithic tools (from about 1 million bce) through to contemporary works of art by the likes of Bharti Kher. Blurton gallops through that timeframe at breakneck pace, pausing, usefully, to explore the relationship between the urban empires of the plains and the more freewheeling upland areas, as well as evidence for South Asia’s historic cosmopolitanism thanks to its trade networks. And pausing too to explain the key figures who shaped the continent – among them the Buddha, Mahavira and the Buddhist emperor Ashoka (who ruled from c. 268–232 bce). But while Blurton points out that Ashoka’s iconography can now be found in the new Indian republic’s iconography (a contemporary banknote is displayed as evidence), he doesn’t really explore the extent to which, until the nineteenth century, it was buried beneath a Hindu ascendency. The focus on what was dug up or unearthed conceals the reasons some of these things remained hidden.

Similarly, many of the objects displayed are accompanied by credits to the Western collectors and archaeologists who either dug them up or donated them to the British Museum: Beatrice de Cardi (an early-twentiethcentury archaeologist) Collection; the Bridge family; Sir Harold Arthur Deane, etc. The colonial era, or ‘the British period’, as it is stated here, is downplayed – ‘by the 19th century, painters were demonstrating a mastery of European perspective’, Blurton states, without fully going into the reasons why; a sword looted following the eighteenth-century sack of Tipu Sultan’s capital, Seringapatam, is presented without much discussion of how it ended up in Britain. It comes to a head in the author’s discussion of ‘Company painting’ – works that captured the flora and fauna, peoples and customs of India, by local painters for British clients. But here introduced without a clear link to their relationships to the cataloguing, exploiting and pigeonholing that define the colonial impulse. Perhaps, then, objects alone can only tell us so much. Mark Rappolt

The Tribe by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne with Rahul Bery Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) The titular tribe of Álvarez’s first book are Cubans. With his guidance, the reader travels the Caribbean island over three years from 2014 (the book was first published in Spanish in 2017), taking in events including Fidel Castro’s death and the San Isidro democracy protests. More than history, however, this is a compendium of ordinary Cuban life delivered by a journalist in a sonorous crónica form, privileging absorbing, informative colour over hard facts. The interlacing tales are populated with a vast array of characters, from a butcher siphoning off state rations and a couple scouring Havana’s largest rubbish dump as a means of survival, to a mother fighting for the repatriation of her daughter’s body from Miami, the artist Tania Bruguera resisting state persecution and the

poet Rafael Alcides retreating into seclusion. Through these portraits, each incisive and sympathetic, we’re introduced to a paradise in the late stages of self-destruction. Corruption in all its forms – economic, political, psychological, spiritual – has become ‘the unheroic driving force of a cunning society’, Álvarez laments. While the stories Álvarez tells condemn the mismanagement and repression catalysed by the Communist government, he has no sympathy either for rightwing forces calling for counterrevolution from across the Straits of Florida: ‘the genuine pain of Cuban exiles in Miami is all too frequently disparaged and squandered on shrill rhetoric’, he writes (paging Marco Rubio). Despite the beguiling lyricism of Álvarez’s prose, which makes the pages joyously fly by (and, for

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this reader, evoked pangs, whatever the politics, to return to the country), it is a despairing critique of Cuba, with only the rare glimmer of hope. From the loneliness of his self-exile, Alcides (who died in 2018) offered one such moment of redemption. A hero of the revolution, the poet fell into a black hole of literary purges in 1970, and for the remainder of his life rarely strayed from his home. ‘He looks like a God but he is a heretic,’ Álvarez writes – his heresy is to write the truth, away from the rotten society that surrounds him. ‘Political lackeys, a population consumed with cynicism and cowardice, wasted, fruitless lives heading nowhere, shot through with bitterness or fear – and then Alcides. Thanks to Alcides our country will be forgiven.’ Oliver Basciano

September 2022

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present by T.J. Clark Thames & Hudson, £30 / $39.95 (hardcover) Ten years ago, art historian T. J. Clark, reviewing a show of Paul Cézanne’s Card Players series (from the early 1890s), announced that the French painter ‘cannot be written about any more’. It went on to be his most-cited (and most-criticised) remark. In his new book Clark explains what he meant. Cézanne, a painter known for his still lifes and landscapes, is generally regarded as among the most significant modernists. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse revered him. Clement Greenberg declared him ‘the most copious source of what we know as modern art’. But, Clark argues, such judgements were driven by assumptions – an ‘overweening faith in Art’, a belief in art’s ‘access to Truth’ – that are alien to us today. Clark wants us to recognise this historical discontinuity, to give us a sense that to understand Cézanne is to grasp this discontinuity. Cézanne can be written about provided that we do not assimilate him to the present. But (and this is the paradox that Clark wants to inhabit) Cézanne continues to speak to us all the same. He is historically remote, but also our contemporary. And the basis on which we might understand him – or fail to – hasn’t changed: the experience of modernity. Cézanne’s work embodies knowledge of what it is to be modern, the book argues. This knowledge is mostly negative. It is a peculiar kind of not-knowing characterised by ambiguity and contradiction.

These values are exemplified by the formal structure of Cézanne’s paintings. Take, for instance, the apples in the famous still lifes. They are peculiarly magnified. They seem to be rolling off their plate right into our hands. And yet their location in pictorial space is uncertain. They are available, ready for the taking, but we don’t know ‘where to have them’, Clark says. The resulting disorientation is a specifically modern feeling. Clark is not the first to highlight this aspect of Cézanne’s work. Greenberg put its ‘unfading modernity’ down to the ‘problematic quality of his art’; Roger Fry felt himself ‘reduced to negative terms’ when tasked to put words to his paintings. Some of these words (used by Fry and Clark alike) are ‘disquieting’, ‘unnerving’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘sinister’. However, Clark distinguishes himself from his predecessors through his sheer insistence on Cézanne’s – and modernity’s – negativity. Across the book’s five chapters – on Cézanne’s apprenticeship to Pissarro, his still lifes, his landscapes, the ‘card players’ paintings, and the legacy of his work in a canvas by Matisse – Clark errs on the side of modernity’s failure. In the first chapter, we find Clark meditating on the feeling of homelessness conveyed by Cézanne’s landscapes. Chapter two interprets Cézanne’s treatment of proximity and distance as an attempt to come to terms with ‘the new form of the object-world’ – that is, the commodity

form. In chapter three Clark mobilises the materiality of the brushstroke against the notion of ‘the aesthetic as a moment of adequacy of form to content’. Chapter four makes a case for the peculiarly modern (as opposed to reactionary or revolutionary) quality of Cézanne’s peasant card players. In the final chapter, Clark reflects on Matisse’s aestheticism, arguing that the autonomous artwork, while self-enclosed, registers social contradictions all the more acutely (here channelling Adorno). The analyses, while often scintillating, are also relentlessly formal. What’s lacking is the texture of a specific historical period. One gets a little apprehensive when references to cave painting, world history and metaphysics start piling up towards the end of the book. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Clark contravenes his own call to honour Cézanne’s historical specificity. He experiences Cézanne’s paintings as the very embodiment of modernity – understood as an irresolvable contradiction, an ‘interminable to-and-fro’. But it has to be asked whether this is Cézanne’s modernity or ours. Clark often has Cézanne ventriloquise the disappointed hopes of our own (post-)postmodern era. What ends up dropping out of the analysis is an appreciation of the utopian dimension, art’s promise of happiness, which should not be ignored for its period flavour. J. A. Koster

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur Honford Star, £10.99 (softcover) Cursed Bunny was originally published in 2017, two years after the phrase ‘Hell Joseon’ was popularised in South Korea, used by a younger generation as a satirical term to describe the nightmarish socioeconomic crisis they’re facing: a lack of stable, well-paid jobs, entrenched social expectations, an increasing wealth gap. A series of nightmares is one way to describe Bora Chung’s cursed tales, the English translation of which was nominated for this year’s Booker Prize. The fictional short-stories blend the genres of magical realism, horror, fantasy and folklore, with some of those reading like critiques of social standards upheld by contemporary society (that don’t just pertain to South Korea). In ‘The Head’,

for instance, a woman is confronted by a creature who lives inside her toilet, and who is made up of all the woman’s bodily effluence. Disgusted, she does her best to dispose of it, only to find it reemerging decades later, having grown into a beautiful young version of herself – and a vengeful one at that. It’s a story that speaks to the demands of ‘feminine perfection’ – a rejection of the abject parts of us and the weight of social taboos. In ‘The Embodiment’, a young woman finds herself pregnant – a side effect (in this bizarre world) of taking contraception pills for too long; she is pressured by an unsympathetic midwife into finding a father to help her raise ‘a normal child’, but upon failing, gives birth to a wriggling amorphous blob of blood.

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What a woman chooses to do with her body is of no consequence. Other stories read like a series of cautionary tales against capitalist greed: the title story tells of the slow, traumatic demise of a corporation’s ceo and his family after he is gifted a cursed object in revenge for his unsavoury business actions. And in ‘Snare’ the greed takes the form of the exploitation of natural resources: a downand-out man finds a trapped fox that happens to bleed golden blood; he keeps the fox alive to sell its blood and begins to enjoy a life of riches with his new young family. But what follows is an unfolding of further gruesome events that lead to murder, cannibalism and incest. What do you call a nightmare you can’t wake up from? A living hell? Fi Churchman

Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously by Olúfé̇mi Táíwò Hurst, £14.99 (softcover) ‘Decolonisation’ has become a go-to discourse, both in the academy and in wider politics, and in broader cultural debates about the content of the university curriculum, the art gallery or the museum. For advocates of decolonisation in Europe and North America, traces of imperial and colonial history should be expunged in order to resolve what is seen as the unfinished business of postcolonial liberation. At a more profound level decolonisation indicts the intellectual and philosophical traditions that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, as well as questioning the validity of ‘modernity’ as such – both seen as no more than avatars of, and alibis for, continued Western domination and white supremacy. Táíwò, a Nigerian academic now based at Cornell University, is less interested in the controversies that currently rip through Western cultural institutions, and Against Decolonisation is focused on how decolonisation discourse serves – or fails to serve – contemporary Africans in their continued struggle for liberty and social progress. It’s fair to say that Táíwò is fiercely sceptical of what he calls the ‘decolonisation trope’, arguing that ‘the ubiquity of the “decolonisation” in all areas of thought – from literature and linguistics to politics, economics and medicine – indicates that either the idea packs an explanatory and/or analytical punch like no other, or it has simply

become a catch-all trope, often used to perform “morality” or “authenticity”.’ The problem for Táíwò is that much decolonisation discourse is at once too fixated on the colonial period as a historically all-defining experience for African countries, while because of this it inadvertently belittles and downplays the autonomy and ‘agency’ of Africans in being able to decide for themselves both what to take from their past (colonial or otherwise) and how they might wish to determine their own future. The decolonisation trope, according to Táíwò, produces an ‘absolutisation of colonialism and its supposedly almost undefeatable capacity to bend the will of the colonised’, which forecloses ‘the possibility that the colonised could find anything of worth in the life and thought of the coloniser which they could repurpose for their own societies, both during and after colonialism’. Táíwò is emphatic that his is no apologia for the old racist justification that Western colonialism somehow brought progress and modernity to Africa, even as it pillaged, slaughtered and subjugated. Rather, he argues that colonialism ‘subverted some of the core tenets of modernity as regards the principal of subjectivity (ie selfdirection, self-ownership) and of governance by consent’. The experience of modernity in Africa, Táíwò argues, preceded the colonial period, if one understands African societies as having always

been more open to exchange with societies beyond the continent, and more dynamic in how they developed their forms of government and social organisation. One of Táíwò’s more forceful criticisms is that, while imperial administrators once encouraged and reinforced the more conservative aspects of the societies they oppressed as a form of proxy control, decolonisation, in its emphasis on restoring supposedly ‘authentic’ African cultural and social forms, celebrates static notions of African-ness. For Táíwò, this makes the mistake of abandoning the intellectual and philosophical resources of modernity, which, while they might have emerged in the West, do not belong to it, but are universally valid and applicable by all humanity. What decolonisation obscures is the possibility of ‘claiming the universal against the false universalism of colonialist ideologies’. Against Decolonisation is a lively, polemical and profoundly thoughtful retort to the unthinking rush to ‘decolonise’ everything; a book that – somewhat ironically, given how much decolonisation has been appropriated by progressive politics in the West to address what are often really Western social conflicts around race – actually centres the debate on the political and cultural demands of contemporary Africans, and their ongoing struggle for greater liberty and self-determination. J.J. Charlesworth

After Institutions by Karen Archey Floating Opera Press, €17 (softcover) In March 2020, Stedelijk Museum curator Karen Archey was six months away from opening After Institutions, a show ‘about the failure of institutions’ that ‘was itself canceled’. This book expands on her research to imagine the phantom exhibition and share her vision for a third wave of institutional critique in art. Archey’s more-writerly introduction soon settles into the meat-and-potatoes of academic prose, beginning with an almost glossarial overview of Western art-institutions as they exist in a postpandemic world, while addressing touchpoints such as artwashing, the blockbuster show and deaccessioning. Her overarching sentiment is somewhat revisionary, but mostly expansionist in nature: to untether the practice of institutional critique from the often-adjacent

canon of conceptual art and reposition it around care – as a sensibility and an institution. But what to make of the artworks? Institutional critique has historically evaded aesthetics in favour of works that are thinking rather than feeling in nature, something Archey seeks to rebalance in her selection. Casting artists like Zoe Leonard and Derek Jarman into this light, united by their responses to the aids crisis, proves successful: the former’s Strange Fruit (1992–97), consisting of fresh fruit ripped open, sewn back together and scattered across a gallery floor as metaphor for the ravaged body, challenges healthcare institutions’ failure of care and subtly mocks in its ephemeral form the museum’s instinct to collect and preserve. Aesthetics and critique, then – a point well made.

September 2022

Expanding institutional critique also means confronting the whiteness and Eurocentrism of its tradition, something brought about by Liu Ding’s The Orchid Room (2018), which intersperses orchids (a reference to Mao Zedong’s orchid room) with photographs of the artist’s private conversations with contemporaries about the challenges facing art in China today. It’s a shame that it takes us so long to get here, though, Archey’s prose so regularly and arthritically doubling back on itself as she builds her case. One also wonders why discussion of collective practices in art remains absent, which would develop her otherwise formulaic outlining of whether to read artist biography into institutional-critique art – and help elevate Archey’s sturdy work into a genuine intervention. Alexander Leissle

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ArtReview is printed by Sterling. Reprographics by The Logical Choice. Copyright of all editorial content in the uk and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, issn No: 1745-9303, (usps No: 21034) is published by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom. Subscription records are maintained at ArtReview Subscriptions, Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne pe10 9ph, United Kingdom.

Art credit

Text credits

on the cover Levi Strasser in Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes, 2021 (performance view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2021). Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York; Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Words on the spine and on pages 21, 39 and 67 were spoken by Edward G. Robinson in the role of Sol Roth in Soylent Green (1973), dir Richard Fleischer, written by Stanley R. Greenberg, based on Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966)

September 2022

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from the archives John Berger on what the West can learn from Indonesian art Apart from the 1945 Picasso show, this is the most important contemporary exhibition seen in London since the war: important not only because Affandi, who was born in Java in 1910, is a painter of genius, but also because it indicates the type of work and the attitude which lie behind the new emerging culture of Asia, and because we in Europe will finally have to learn from that attitude. But first a warning: about a dozen of Affandi’s fifty canvases are badly erratic and incoherent; also, all of them suffer the disadvantage of being unstretched and unframed. Personally, I believe both these facts to be constructively significant. They must, however, be allowed for when most of us in our present situation tend to be negatively critical and conservative. Nor do I wish to imply that I am above such faults. If I feel and write decisively about Affandi’s work, it is only because during the last two months I have had time to study it. Most of the pictures are fairly large and are painted on coarse canvas. The pigment itself is usually thick and often applied in line strokes which literally appear to have hit the canvas, and, having hit it, to have been drawn irresistibly into the orbit of the forms and spaces portrayed. Or more accurately, the magnetic process appears to work both ways:

the tension of the paintings is dependent on the lines and colours both attracting and being attracted by the development of the presented forms. Or again, to put it in an abstract way: the form and content of these works is indivisible. Their colour is bright, but violent and dignified rather than gay. Their subjects range from landscapes of rice fields, cities and mountains to portraits of the artist’s family; from paintings of animals – buffaloes, horses, boars, to paintings of the people to whom the artist has a complete, unselfconscious loyalty – rickshaw drivers, street musicians, republican soldiers, beggars, serious students. There are also on show a number of extraordinary drawings whose calligraphic quality is oriental, but whose grasp of particular form and expression is more reminiscent of Rembrandt or Goya. Yet what makes any description of these works inadequate (Expressionist is the only label that appears to fit, but doesn’t) is that they are different in kind from anything we are accustomed to seeing. Not because of their exotic content – far from it: looking down one of these street scenes, one has no feeling of being on an unfamiliar set of values. Broadly speaking, ‘Art’ in the West has become inflated at the expense of life. Aesthetics have triumphed over vitality. These paintings redress the balance. They are the result of participation rather than contemplation, action rather than introspection. They are not concerned with Taste, for Taste completes and isolates. (This, I think, is the significance of the canvases being unframed and of a few being badly organised and uncorrected.) Instead, they are concerned with the continuity of life, the necessary continuity of being able to risk achievements. One could argue that such an attitude means the destruction of art, that a work of art must always be complete in itself. This is true. But such completeness is only achieved by an artist who resolves his continuous, otherthan-aesthetic responsibilities, never by one who rejects them. Affandi, working during historic and heroic events (the resistance to the Jap occupation and the war against the Dutch for Indonesian independence) has a profound sense of active solidarity. The public, to whom he accepts responsibility, are not those who may happen to look at his paintings, but those who make, or are implied by his subjects. It is for this reason that his pictures do not present themselves to the spectator, but turning him into a witness, confront him. Looking at one of Affandi’s pictures, one feels that the canvas and pigment, neither cherished nor despised for their own sake, were simply the ground on which the particular situation was fought out: the lines and colours somehow miraculously expressive tracks of the fight. Yet the proof that Affandi has resolved his responsibilities is that his work never appears to be either moralistic (in the narrow sense) or sentimental. On the contrary, its predominant quality is one of tolerance and exhilaration. Finally, the obvious: Go to this exhibition. What I have said may be irrelevant to many readers. The only thing of which I am absolutely certain is that this exhibition is a supremely important challenge. Originally published 31 May 1952, Art News and Review, Vol iv No 9

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10-13 NOV 2022 GRAND PALAIS éPHéMèRE