ArtReview Summer 2023 by ArtReview

Consistently meaning business since 1949

Cemile Sahin

Sigmar Polke, Untitled (detail), c.2000 Mixed media on paper. 199.5 x 150.3 cm © The estate of Sigmar Polke/DACS, 2023. Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi

Alchemy

Joseph Beuys · Anselm Kiefer · Sigmar Polke Robert Rauschenberg · Sturtevant Emilio Vedova · Andy Warhol London June—July 2023

BRILLIANT CUT 12 JULY - 12 AUGUST 2023 HEESEUNG CHUNG LIAM GILLICK KOEN VAN DEN BROEK TONY SWAIN ANDREW SIM MITSUKO MIWA CHARLOTTE POSENENSKE

Katharina Grosse Touching How and Why and Where 7/F Pedder Building 12 Pedder Street Central, Hong Kong

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ArtReview vol 75 no 5 Summer 2023

Work to Rule Did you know that back in 1949, when ‘King’ Charles the Watercolourist was barely one year old, ArtReview was crowned regent of the contemporary artworld? Clad in the hairshirt of honesty and the eyepatch of impartiality, and armed with the fauchard of fury and the crossbow of contempt, it was shoved out into a world of childish CoBrA artists, cowboy Abstract Expressionists and emerging Pop artists and told to get on with it. ArtReview’s symbols of power were of course something of a hangover from the age of Gustave Moreau, when Symbolism was briefly cool. But, you know, that was all part of the balancing act of doing what you want and giving the people what they want, which is all part of the delicate balancing act that comes with being ArtReview. ArtReview’s symbols of power were, as was the custom at the time, items that it had taken into protective custody (a bit like the Koh-i-Noor diamond: back then such objects were more properly called ‘gifts’ and ‘marks of respect’) from a few of the colonies its school chums had spent a lifetime (not including the time they had spent in school, which was in England – obvs) bettering. And that was also about giving people what they wanted too, apparently. ArtReview could probably have a long and interesting convo with the Watercolourist about that nightmare, btw! Anyhow, it’s got nothing else in common with him: there were no ointments or oils, no oaths of loyalty, no contributors marching around sweating profusely in bearskin hats. (The nearest any of ArtReview’s contributors came to an interest in any kind of fashion was when one of the contributors – G.M. Butcher, you know exactly who ArtReview is talking about – started listing the dos and don’ts of buying a madras shirt instead of reviewing some of the late, great Reg Butler’s sculptures. They must have done this in memory of the rather long time during which they – British people – owned Madras itself. A critic, ArtReview used to have to tell G.M. on a regular basis, has no time for sentiment!) Yes! ArtReview had to work for its imaginary crown!

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‘Rubbish!’ it would shriek till it was practically hoarse while wandering around the galleries of London. ‘Genius!’ it would whisper a little less often, when dealer and advertiser René Gimple was in the room. ‘Capitalists!’ it would sneer, after one of its ‘discussion sessions’ with early contributors like John Berger. ‘Old!’ it would sigh after a bicycle ride and pint of Courage Best at a mock-Tudor pub with design critic and hi-tech guru Reyner Banham. ‘Racists!’ it would accuse, after one of its not infrequent nights out with F.N. Souza (the artworld was happy to sleep with him but not to show his art, he always complained in his monthly interview with ArtReview). ‘Foreigners!’ it would spit, after one of its infrequent trips to the Venice Biennale. (Did you know that ArtReview used to make many of its foreign writers adopt pseudonyms so as not to put the good English public off its judgements? ArtReview learned that one from Joseph Conrad.) But ArtReview digresses. It’s not about the past. It’s about the present! And don’t worry, youngsters, ArtReview’s marketing department is transforming all its old slogans/critical opinions into a range of T-shirts that will be available online and at all good art fairs shortly. You can wear them ironically, or even honestly, but one thing you can be sure of is that unlike other trends that were knocking around at the time of its enthronement – CoBrA, Ab-Ex, Pop – ArtReview’s opinions never go out of fashion. Except in the eyes of its bastard sibling ArtReview Asia, where most of them were never in fashion in the first place. That’s why ArtReview always says, ‘Fuck family’. (They’ll make a T-shirt out of that too!) Anyhow, what ArtReview is really getting at is that maybe it’s all those years of hard slog that have made ArtReview so immune to art that strives to attain status and the ceremony that goes with it, and so intrigued by art that is deployed as a critical tool. At least that’s how it’s going to explain what’s was going on its mind when it put together this issue. ArtReview

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Art Observed

The Interview WangShui by Emily McDermott 24 Revival Survival by Martin Herbert 35

Lies, Damn Lies, Art History by Louise Benson 36 Dramatic Entrances by Daniel Elsea 38 Wedding Crashers by Skye Arundhati Thomas 39

page 38 Four possible Trafalgar Square entrance permutations for the National Gallery, London. Courtesy Allies and Morrison

Art Featured

Cemile Sahin by Alexander Leissle 46

Jessie Homer French by Martin Herbert 60

Sung Tieu by Cassie Packard 54

Manchester’s New Factory by Greg Thomas 72

page 60 Jessie Homer French, Twin Lakes, Bridgeport (detail), 2022, oil on canvas, 76 × 102 cm. Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo, Milan

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 79 Josh Kline, by Owen Duffy (la)horde, by Emily May Thomas Hirschhorn, by Pádraic E. Moore Jonas Lund, by J.J. Charlesworth Che Lovelace, by Oliver Basciano mahku, by Mateus Nunes Magali Reus, by Orit Gat Ndayé Kouagou, by Alexander Leissle Cathy Pilkington, by Tom Morton Paulina Olowska, by Gaby Cepeda In Defense of Symbolic Value, by Martin Herbert Ann Veronica Janssens, by Ana Vukadin Karms Thammatat, by Salena Barry Alberta Whittle, by Paul Pieroni Na Mira, by Matthew Erikson Édgar Calel, by Jenny Wu Basma al-Sharif, by Digby Warde-Aldam Nicole Eisenman, by Christian Egger Maiden Voyage, by Alexandra Drexelius

Contemporary Art, by Natalie Rudd, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Weeb Theory, edited by Jamie Sutcliffe and Petra Szemán, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak Up Against the Real, by Nadja Millner-Larsen, reviewed by Sinclair Spratley Armed with Madness, by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Crooked Plow, by Itamar Vieira Júnior, reviewed by Oliver Basciano Art is Magic, by Jeremy Deller, reviewed by Louise Benson

page 104 Nicole Eisenman, From Success to Obscurity, 2004, oil on canvas, 130 × 102 cm. Courtesy Hall Collection

from the archives 114

Kunst im Metaversum

COLLECTIVE Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer Ian Cheng Simon Denny Lea Ermuth Sarah Friend Dorota Gawęda & Eglé Kulbokaité Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst Katharina Haverich Ayoung Kim LaTurbo Avedon Loopntale Jonas Lund Omsk Social Club

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Image Copyright Miriam Cahn, Courtesy David and Indré Roberts Collection / Galerie Jocelyn Wolff. Photo: François Doury.

UNRULY BODIES SHADI AL-ATALLAH, GIULIA CENCI, MIRIAM CAHN, CAMILLE HENROT, GALLI, EBECHO MUSLIMOVA, FRIDA ORUPABO, ANNA PERACH, PALOMA PROUDFOOT, & CLÉMENTINE BEDOS, VERITY COWARD, ASSIA GHENDIR, HOLLY HUNTER. 30 JUN–27 AUG 2023 GOLDSMITHS CCA, LONDON

Art Observed

Is the psychological mechanism 23

Photo: Maryam Hoseini

ArtReview

The Interview by Emily McDermott

WangShui

“The paintings are, in a way, physical gestural expressions of the algorithms that I embody”

When the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired a painting by WangShui in 2021, the museum uploaded it to their collection website and labelled it as a sculpture. “There are certain things that I’m expected to create,” the artist told me, adding that “the current climate in the artworld prevents people from seeing things as they are”. Indeed, up until 2020, the Californiaborn, New York-based artist’s work took the forms of video and moving-image-based installation and sculpture. But for the last three years they have been developing a unique painting practice, spreading oils as thinly as possible to illuminate abrasions made on aluminium panels, and sometimes collaborating with artificial intelligence to develop the compositions. No matter the medium, though, WangShui roots much of their practice in exploring concepts of perception and (in)visibility: not just how humans see things, but how we understand and interact with different aspects of the world – be they natural or synthetic, physical or immaterial, alive or inanimate – and how, in turn, these

aspects interact with or become part of us. WangShui understands such relationships as inherently intertwined and ever-evolving, as expressed in works like Gardens of Perfect Exposure (2018). The live installation consists of detritus (ranging from chrome bath fixtures and laminated hair to glass globs), silkworms, selfie ring-lights and camcorders, which capture the silkworms’ movements and growth; the recording is upscaled and projected in real time onto the walls of the room in which the work is installed. Historical and philosophical references aside, the work is, on an essential level, “about immersing the viewer within a mediated loop of consumption”, the artist says. In WangShui’s paintings, these same concepts are explored, albeit perhaps less obviously at first glance. As part of their first solo museum show, currently on view at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, eight paintings are installed on the floor of the main gallery, with an additional series depicting abstracted, mythical organisms hung on fabric-covered walls on the upper level.

Summer 2023

And come September, they will exhibit a new suite of paintings at Haus der Kunst in Munich, alongside a multichannel artificial intelligence simulation. With both shows, however, invisible forces are also at play: in Shanghai, a custom algorithm measures ultrasonic frequencies in the space and uses the data to generate a new layout for the floor paintings, which are then manually rearranged accordingly every Friday. In Munich, the live evolution of the ai simulation will similarly dictate new configurations for the paintings in the next room. “The movements of the paintings are real-time visualisations of the backend programming,” the artist explains. In this way, the paintings are not fixed objects in space, but data points in a recursive machine-learning loop. When I called WangShui shortly after the opening of the Rockbund exhibition, we decided to focus our conversation on the act of, and their intentions with, painting – a topic that led us from Claude Monet and Francis Bacon to artificial intelligence to their obsession with reality tv.

Relaxing, Smearing artreview You have a background in video and moving image, so what led you to painting? wangshui I have always wanted to paint, but it was probably galvanised by screen fatigue in the early days of the pandemic. Before the pandemic, I had never had an actual studio; I was always doing residencies. But then, during the early pandemic, I was staying at a friend’s place in Upstate New York and all of a sudden I was working in one place, so I started testing every single type of paint medium and different surfaces. It was the first time I had the time and space to experiment with painting and find out what made sense to me in terms of the process. Also, when I go see art, I mostly see paintings by dead masters. I have a deep interest in the history of representation. For years, my moving image work has been an attempt to deconstruct the material, optical and psychological dimensions of screens. Painting has, for me, presented a new access point to a more haptic and somatic dimension of the screen I wasn’t fully aware of before. ar How did you land on aluminium as a surface? ws The first thing I liked painting on was vellum, and I liked putting it against windows, because it was backlit like a screen. I then arrived at aluminium when I realised it has a built-in backlight. I was also doing a lot of research about

the refractive indexes of different materials and how you can shift them by transforming the materials. Depending on how I scratched the aluminium, I realised I could modulate the refraction of the ‘backlight’ to varying degrees. Then by adding paint to the scratches I realised I could also reveal the latent space of the pigment itself. ar You said even your videowork was inspired by paintings. What painters or paintings do you consider influential to your practice? ws Many have come and gone but my longeststanding influence has been Claude Monet – every time I’m in Paris, I visit his Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie. I really relate to how he spent 30 years studying the reflective surface of the pond and its capacity to collapse so many temporalities. It’s an objective I share with both my paintings and moving-image work. I’m always looking for techniques and materials that can bind and hold the most information all at once; that can create mediated loops that collapse different simultaneous realities and temporalities. Another early inspiration was Francis Bacon. His retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2020 changed my life. I’ve always been so inspired by his gestural smears, how he used the materiality of paint to express not only movement but also an expanded temporality. I paint primarily with rags, so I spend a lot of time smearing. So much gets integrated

Fig re vi, 2023, oil on aluminium, 152 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and High Art, Paris

ArtReview

in that process for me. It’s also really relaxing and makes me feel like I’m just polishing someone’s silverware.

The Dataset of Me ar Generally speaking, what interests you about collapsing different temporalities, or as you say, creating mediated loops? ws Coming from a video-art background, the loop was one of the early forms that really fascinated me. I didn’t fully understand why at the time, but as I kept going, the loop kept emerging. It has expressed itself in so many different ways, and now, with the paintings, it’s there again. The loop is at the centre of everything – quantum physics, ai and even trauma. More broadly, I think it’s now related to how I understand being alive – how as people we are just ever-expanding loops of information and experiences. ar That reminds me of how the algorithm is used in the Rockbund show. It’s an open-ended loop that is updated and morphs the appearance of the show every week. ws Exactly. And this is what led me to ai as well: ai works with datasets that you can constantly update. The program then interpolates the information and expresses where the dataset is at.

Double Lift (Fig re vii & viii), 2023, oil on aluminium, 152 × 152 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City & New York

Summer 2023

Sfregiare, 2021, oil on aluminium honeycomb panel, 229 × 109 cm. Courtesy the artist

El Decorum, 2021, oil on aluminium honeycomb panel, 229 × 109 cm. Courtesy the artist

poiesis, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Yan Tao. Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

ArtReview

ar For the paintings that you make based off ai-generated imagery, do you always build your own datasets? ws Yes, because I’m interested in thinking about the self as a unique dataset. I like to think about the entanglement that we have with ai, how we’re influenced by ai and how we’ve absorbed algorithms into our physical bodies. The initial source data for the ai paintings were my first five paintings, made without ai. From there it’s become an ever-expanding dataset: the more paintings I make, the more I photograph and put back into the dataset. It’s a mirroring process of the ai interpreting my marks and gestures, and then me referencing the ai’s interpretation by creating new paintings based on the images it generates. The paintings are, in a way, physical gestural expressions of the algorithms that I embody. ar Have you learned anything about your own painting from ai? ws In a way, ai has taught me how to paint. Traditionally, painting is a mastering of your own style, and the ai had the ability to efficiently perceive what I was doing before I even understood it. For example, my first series of paintings was based off interior sets of The Bachelor. There was one painting that featured cut and butchered birch trees, which were props in the hotel foyer. Somehow, the ai picked up on those trees and ended up propagating this landscape

that was not very present in the series. This was really interesting to me because I’ve always been deeply interested in landscape painting but didn’t have my own access point to it. Somehow the ai picked up on this and presented a landscape that I felt so deeply connected to that doesn’t actually exist. It has this otherworldly quality and is, in many ways, a landscape that only exists somewhere between me and the ai.

coming across these amorphous entities. They are lifeforms that seem to exist between worlds, between species, between scales. The more I began studying and painting them, the more I became interested in what auras, energies or dynamics they could have between each other, and I started staging narratives with these figures in encounters. They’re experiments in trying to understand how different life entities relate to each other.

Monogamy Loops

ar This reminds me of a quote from you that’s been used time and time again about your practice being ‘born out of a desire to dematerialise corporeal identity’. As a final question, how do you see and use painting as a way to manifest this desire?

ar You seem so invested in everything from art history to artificial intelligence to reality tv. ws There are common threads throughout a lot of the subjects, even though they aren’t always apparent at first. I’ve come to understand reality tv, for example, as another mediated loop with a pretty controlled dataset. If you watch all 27 seasons of The Bachelor, they are virtually the same but with slight adjustments to the dataset. The adjustments feed on buzzwords and current pop-cultural issues to keep both new and old audiences engaged – the tried-and-true loop of heteronormative monogamy! ar Can you tell me about what you’re working on now? ws I’ve been working on a new series about figures and encounters between them. They’re very far from any sort of human figuration, but as I was exploring the ai landscape, I kept

ws I remember saying that in grad school and my teachers were like, ‘what are you talking about, you’re crazy’. But it came from my frustration with how inadequate it is to read someone’s body or how they present themselves as a way to understand other dimensions of the being or person. You’ll rarely see human figures in my work, because, to me, they are pretty obsolete forms in terms of their ability to communicate anything interesting. Currently, with the paintings, I’m interested in entities that can be evasive and shift. That, to me, opens another space that activates more productive strategies or techniques of perception. Emily McDermott is a writer and editor based in Berlin

poiesis, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Yan Tao. Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

Summer 2023

June

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Photo: Armin Rasokat. Performance of ‘OUTREMONDE - Dream Hunters’ by artist Théo Mercier at Luma Westbau, Zurich, June 2022. Courtesy of Zurich Art Weekend.

June 15–18, 2023 Latifa Echakhch, Night Time (As Seen by Sim Ouch) (detail), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

The commonsense definition of contemporary art is that it’s always looking forward; in reality, however, it’s most likely looking back. Since the 1990s, the retro cycle in art has been broadly predictable: artists would look at what their predecessors of approximately 30 years ago were doing and put some kind of contemporary spin on it. Relational aesthetics, which owed much to the communally minded experiments of 1960s art, was followed in the early 2000s by a fair bit of droopy neo-postminimalist sculpture redolent of the early 1970s. In 2007 the Argentinian-British artist Pablo Bronstein told me he was racing to finish a guide to London’s then-unloved postmodernist architecture before the inevitable Po-Mo revival hit; he could see it in students’ work already, he said. The three-decades-or-so rule we’ve had for three decades or so, though, scans in retrospect as a quickening of the last century’s intermittent revivalist trends: the Neo-Dadaists in the late 1950s were looking back four decades; the neo-geo and neo-expressionist artists of the 1980s were looking back six or seven. Like everything else, artistic recycling is broadly speeding up. Right now, then, you’d expect young artists attempting to get ahead of the game to be sizing up late-1990s / early-2000s aesthetics. But there’s a problem, a circular one: to do so would be to revive various types of revival. Maybe some people are trying to thread that needle, or maybe art’s bleeding edge has shifted to meme production or whatever. Revivalism, meanwhile, hasn’t so much dissolved as weirded, gone unpredictable. Recently, looking back not three decades but nine, we’ve had a lot of neo-Surrealism, underwritten by art institutions progressively and influentially widening the canon of modernist art beyond the output of European and American males (see the touring show Surrealism Beyond Borders, 2022, and the last Venice Biennale). There also seems, of late, to be quite a bit of Abstract Expressionism 2.0 about. Meanwhile, a different manner of returning may be glimmering, led not by artists but by galleries. Things are coming back that haven’t even fully left the present. For a long time it’s been a truism that nothing looks worse than the art of 10 or 15 years ago; typically, it feels old, but not old enough to be pleasantly haloed by nostalgia, or for people to misremember the time it came from – if they were even there in the first place. Many artists experience a midcareer slump precisely due to this yesterday’s-papers rationale. But currently,

Diminishing Returns

Martin Herbert wonders what comes next in the accelerating cycle of art revivals

top Josh Kline, Sleep Is for the Weak, 2011, French press with Red Bull infused with Vivarin; French press with DayQuil infused with Dentyne Ice; French press with Coke Zero infused with ibuprofen, and lightbox pedestal: plexiglass, leds and wood, dimensions variable above Yngve Holen, 5g Oslo Base Station Bordeaux, 2023, metal, antennae, resin, flock, 298 × 277 × 277 cm

Summer 2023

it appears, the superabundance of ahistorical painting in galleries is making anyone not profiting from it go a little crazy, and there’s only one novel-looking thing left to bring back. This, at least, might explain why in Berlin, where we just had a Gallery Weekend – traditionally a moment for galleries to roll out significantlooking shows – it’s like the heyday of Postinternet art all over again, like the day before yesterday (ie 2011) once more. To wit: Timur Si-Qin is showing at Société, Yngve Holen at Neu, Cao Fei at Sprüth Magers, Hito Steyerl at Esther Schipper. Some of these artists have never gone away, obviously, but others feel newly exhumed, and the synergy is notable. In the German capital, an incubator of the scene the first time around, this feels to have been building awhile; the Schinkel Pavillon in particular has been rehabbing postinternet artists of late, showcasing Jon Rafman and Anna Uddenberg last winter and, earlier this year, the New York collective dis, whose generation-specific curating of the 2016 Berlin Biennale did much to halt the movement’s momentum. Meanwhile, in New York, another green light: scene lodestar Josh Kline is being coronated with a Whitney Museum retrospective and the cover of Artforum. Hitting fast-forward – although also, obviously, rewind – on the fashion cycle in this manner, if it’s happening and not a blip, would unquestionably constitute a move, seemingly one of few available right now. But it also kind of works, in theory. It feels appropriate that a cohort bound up with accelerationist theories would be treated to an accelerated return. And in Kline’s case, perhaps partly because he came up in a generation highly aware of the nostalgia process, a proportion of his art seemingly predicts its own future disinterment by hewing to an aesthetics of storage. Liquids stored in refrigerators; sculptures involving packing materials; lifelike human figures – ostensibly displaced by near-future automation – wrapped in transparent plastic. In March The New York Times called Kline ‘an artist for the end of the world’. That might be hyperbolic, but he might be an artist for the end of art’s present-day atavistic relation to the past, one who factored it in as a kind of endgame. Once the snake has fully consumed its own tail, though, what next? Well, we could all take a tip from the fashion world, which the artworld increasingly mirrors anyway: you don’t have to bring something back just once. And waiting 30 years? Try a couple of seasons.

Out of what is England’s identity constructed? A nation is forged not just from the cartographic borders that define it but from cultural traditions and shared customs that are rooted in stories passed down through generations. And it is forged from the rituals that imbue their continued usage in the present day with a sense of eternal continuity. But what happens when these stories are not developed over the years and centuries, and are instead confected today, to create a manufactured sense of indigeneity? Britain is a nation constantly looking to a rosy vision of its past, whether in the Gothic revivalism of nineteenth-century churches or the Pre-Raphaelites’ rejection of contemporary British art in favour of the early Renaissance. In 1851 John Ruskin wrote encouragingly of the group: ‘If they adhere to their principles, and paint… with the earnestness of men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will… found a new and noble school in England’. This sentimental turn can be seen in the Romantic pastoral visions of William Blake or in recent developments such as the new Dorset town of Poundbury, under construction since the early 1990s. A Frankensteinian mishmash of architectural styles, from Georgian to classical to country cottage, with a misty-eyed nostalgia for a bygone time that never truly existed, Poundbury is based upon the principles laid out by the former Prince of Wales in his 1989 urban planning treatise A Vision of Britain. Meanwhile, the crowning of the prince as King Charles III this May at Westminster Abbey was a ceremony filled with all the ancient (and ancient-looking) pomp to be expected of a ritual that has taken place within the same four walls since 1066 – although numerous elements, from the oil anointing of the king’s body to the wielding of two swords, were introduced less than 400 years ago. An official invitation issued to the public a month before the coronation featured the face of the Green Man emerging from a wreath of wildflowers. Described in the accompanying announcement as ‘an ancient figure from British folklore, symbolic of spring and rebirth, to celebrate the new reign’, the character quickly drew the ire of historians and specialists in folklore and popular religion, who pointed out that the figure was created in the early twentieth century by writer and folklorist Lady Raglan, who linked the decorative trope of ‘foliate heads’ on churches with the historic naming of pubs around the country as the ‘Green Man’. The newfangled figure quickly caught on as a supposed longstanding symbol of English mythology.

Fevered Imaginings

With all the recent talk in England of tradition, kingdoms and crowns Louise Benson looks at art’s role in the invention of history

Jamie Fitzpatrick, Home Counties Psycho Infinity 2, 2023, oil bar on screenprint and giclée print, 40 × 29 cm.Photo: Alan Dimmick. Courtesy the artist and Vitrine, London & Basel

ArtReview

‘English culture has been shaped by a recurrent harking back to a golden age, a time of perceived comfort, stability, safety or community spirit,’ art historian Susan Owens writes in Imagining England’s Past, published this past April, which examines the country’s invented histories from the eighth century to the present day. ‘It is perhaps a little sobering…’, she argues, ‘to reflect on how much of a sense of national history has been shaped by fiction’. This is truer than ever post-Brexit, which, in itself, demonstrated how folklore and popular culture can be manipulated to tell populist stories that narrow the view of what the country could and should be through a vision of an idealised past that never truly existed. It seems inevitable that when a nation falls on hard times, whether economic, political or social, the slippery tales of the ‘good old days’ emerge easily from between the cracks, like water from a burst pipe. These uneasy contradictions offer rich ground for artists to explore. Mythical figures of English folk history stalked Vitrine gallery in London in Jamie Fitzpatrick’s exhibition Psycho HomeCounties this spring, which featured animatronic sculptures standing over slain dragons amid the rolling hills of Albion while being torn apart by packs of vicious dogs. They offer a surreal and crumbling vision of a nation constructed from a patchwork version of itself that cannot be materialised, where rampant inequality is masked by the assertion that we are all united by one shared cultural heritage. This is echoed by Jeremy Deller in his solo exhibition Welcome to the Shitshow!, on display at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen until 6 August, in which he interrogates England’s troubled, constantly shifting relationship with its own history. ‘For our national identity to be a bit of a mystery is no bad thing,’ he writes in Art is Magic, a monograph published in May, ‘as it gives the public space to make up their own versions of who they are.’ That reinvention can result in an all-too-hazy view, a synthetic amalgamation created in the service of nationalism and authoritarianism, where new myths and so-called traditions are presented as native customs in a gesture towards something called Englishness. Yet a revisionist attitude also has the potential to disrupt the notion of a singular, sacred history, one that is frequently exclusionary and rooted in colonial and racial biases. These fabrications show just how mutable history really is, given shape by the decisions made in the present. Perhaps now is the time for new stories to be told.

BRIDGET RILEY DRAWINGS FROM THE ARTIST’S STUDIO JUNE 23 THROUGH OCTOBER 8, 2023 Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio is co-organized by the Morgan Library & Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hammer Museum. Bridget Riley (b. 1931), Final Study for “Halcyon” [Repaint], 1971. Pencil and gouache on paper, 37 3/8 × 36 in. (94.9 × 91.4 cm). Collection of the artist ©️ Bridget Riley 2023. All rights reserved.

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A museum is a necessarily public building. A Tate or a Pompidou may have a global profile thanks to what it contains (and its ability to advertise that), but what responsibility does its architecture have to what it does not contain: its immediate locality? One place to start is at the building’s most liminal point: the front door, which needs, for all the reasons you can imagine, to be obvious. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is one of those grand edifices that thinks of itself as an essential part of some grand canon of Western architecture: lots of dormers, columns, stone, and quite a bit of straight pomposity. Galleries, libraries, faculties, parliaments, from Manchester to Memphis to Mumbai, wear these clothes – architectural vestments of a Graeco-Roman variety. A vast staircase lifts you into a Grand Central Station of (mostly old) objets, full of people, airy halls leading off to the ancients, to Abstract Expressionism, to fashion, to shops, to toilets, all from one monumental internal piazza. But don’t let the late-nineteenthcentury Beaux-Arts wrapping fool you; even the technicolour razzmatazz of the Pompidou follows this prescription. It is a rectilinear block with a front door right down its middle that opens out to the centre line of a Parisian square, guiding visitors into a large lobby not dissimilar in formality and spirit to the Met’s. Even museums that inhabit buildings for which they were not purpose-built follow this user-friendly dna. The Museo Reina Sofía is in the refurbished Madrid General Hospital with broadly the same spatial conditions as the Pompidou. The discontents of late-twentieth-century architecture, however, led to some wild deviations in situating the urban museum. Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, one of those rare la buildings right on the sidewalk, has a sunken entrance hidden from the street as if the street wasn’t even there. Thirty years later, across the street, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro placed the entrance of The Broad off-kilter on a corner, facing away from its natural cousin, the great Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall beyond. Aptly named, Grand Avenue is that anywherestreet of loud icons not talking to each other. Thirteen miles west is Richard Meier’s Getty Center, so removed from the fabric of urban life that the fact that it might in any way serve it is almost laughable, a white acropolis that requires a car park and a people-mover to get up to. These are standalone objects in a car-dominated city of standalone objects.

Come On In

Every museum needs to know how to make an entrance, says Daniel Elsea

top Undercroft entrance proposal for the National Gallery, London. Courtesy Allies and Morrison above Barbican Centre detail, London. Photo: Karman Wan

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Which brings me to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. Selldorf Architects – architects to Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner – have been employed to refurbish Venturi Scott Brown’s 1991 (now Grade I-listed) Sainsbury Wing as part of the gallery’s bicentennial projects. The National Gallery has been in its Trafalgar Square setting since the 1830s, supplementing William Wilkins’s stone and masonry original through subsequent additions. For much of this history, the gallery maintained a presence alongside the public piazza in front of it, with an entrance along its centreline. It followed the formula. Commissioned as an extension, the Sainsbury Wing was originally a supporting character to the wider whole of a global museum, tucked slightly offside Trafalgar Square. Yet in the time since, the wing has taken on the role of the main entrance. There are millions more visitors now – and long queues of slightly befuddled tourists looking for the front door. It’s not obvious. There is a missed opportunity here for museum to better speak to city. Why not restore the gallery’s principal entrance to the portico on the Wilkins building along the centreline of the great square? It currently presents on Trafalgar Square as a long sort of impenetrable wall, as if it were a background. As a hinge between Trafalgar and Leicester squares, two of London’s most important public spaces, a central entrance could unlock a new route with wider positive benefits to the city. With that nagging preoccupation to expand audience and public engagement, might the architecture of a public gallery first be an exercise in urban design? A museum or public gallery’s architecture should nurture a bond with its city by urbanising its edges in both macro and micro ways, in apparent and visible ways; a type of porosity found in multipurpose arts complexes such as the Southbank and Barbican centres. Seemingly simple things – like a door, or small surgical interventions in the ‘right’ place – can yield significant wide-reaching benefits for agendas both urban and curatorial. Rather than coy glances away, on the one hand, or haughty distance from the hustle of urban life on the other, let there be more front doors, better welcomes, easier ways in, through and via. The first thing the architecture of today’s arts spaces should do is to not be afraid of the obvious. Look out, not in. Daniel Elsea is a partner at architectural and urbanism practice Allies and Morrison, London

Salim Shah, a doctor, the neighbourhood favourite, is the sharp-jawed love-interest in director Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society (2023). He’s what people around him call a ‘catch’. He’s also a mama’s boy. Raheela, the mama in question, strokes his face and whispers in his ear to soothe him at parties when he gets anxious; the two lie in a tangle on the sofa, arms interlocked, while watching tv. There’s no father – maybe he’s dead – and thus the story is ripe with Oedipal markers. Mother and son, codependent, a little sinister, live together in an enormous house, in what looks like the same set as the one in Downton Abbey. Polite Society is set within a London community of British Pakistanis; part thriller, part family drama, and a marriage plot-meetscoming-of-age (a classic combination). The film begins with a glitzy Eid party at the Shah family home. All the eligible girls in the neighbourhood have been invited; everyone’s in their best outfits. Later we find out that hidden devices in the flower arrangements have assessed the girls’ fertility as they walked in. The marriage plot can take on gruesome proportions in South Asian family structures, and while Manzoor begins the story with the stereotypical cues – controlling mothers, arranged marriages, girls-gone-rogue – the film moves quickly past them into its own exegesis and, importantly, humour. The plot is so self-aware that it sometimes even slackens into slapstick parody. While Salim is the love

Love’s Labours

From fly-kicking mothers-in-law to horror-hippodrome weddings, Nida Manzoor’s new film recasts the stereotypical South Asian family unit, writes Skye Arundhati Thomas

Priya Kansara as Ria Khan in Polite Society, 2023, dir Nida Manzoor

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interest, the movie’s protagonists are a pair of sisters – Ria and Lena Khan – who are angry and inseparable. They like to pick fights, beat each other up, listen to loud punk music and headbang with their hair untied. The first time we see Salim he is perched on a velvet sofa by a roaring fireplace, surrounded by the ladies at the Eid party, as they fawn over his silly jokes. Hothead wannabe-stuntwoman Ria, the younger sister, looks on with a scowl, ice clinking in her tumbler while Salim hits it off with Lena. Ria isn’t subscribing to the heteronormative fantasy peddled by the older women in the film – the mothers, mostly – not for one minute. For starters, she makes stunttrick videos in her free time, and she needs her sister around to film them. She is religious about her karate classes and bounces around the punching bag in her room for hours, jabbing. In lieu of a diary she writes to Eunice Huthart – Angelina Jolie’s stunt double – sending her special clips of fast-paced ju-jitsu sequences and backflips off the wall. Lena’s just dropped out of art school and Ria wants her to go back; she pulls out her broken, discarded canvases from the trash. “My sister is an artist,” she says over and over again. To her, the pair, artist and fighter, are embarked upon a heavenly mandate, joined in a typical us-against-the-world battle, and men only get in the way of that. Ria comes home one day to find the family in the sitting room, a ring shining on Lena’s

finger. Moments later she is scaling walls to plant dirty evidence in Salim’s bedroom and visiting – in a bushy stick-on handlebar moustache – his gym to hack his laptop in an elaborate interference plan involving her two best friends. Salim picks Lena up in his sports car; Ria fumes at her bedroom window. She is dead set on sabotaging this wedding. Enter Raheela. To her, the incoming wife is a womb, a vessel to carry lineage, and she will obliterate anything that comes in the way of this fantasy of the future. Raheela and Ria are mirror images in their ambition, straddling a generational divide, the first a South Asian woman of the past, Ria new-gen: to her, men are arbitrary and marriage is defunct. As Salim Weds Lena, things come to boil, and the wedding is a horror hippodrome: Ria glowers furiously during her Bollywood dance sequence (the hook of the song directly translating to ‘you have killed me’), gunshots ring in the air, an army of zombielike guests flood the scene and the jewellery and lighting are so garish that each sequence is made immediately shinier, more histrionic. The family unit in Polite Society is not driven by the patricidal impulse of Oedipus, as Salim and Raheela’s relationship might suggest, but rather by a slow unravelling of a very particular alchemy of malignant forces – patriarchal, religious, generational – that come together to produce a terrifying conglomerate of power and control: the South Asian Mother of a Son (let’s call them sams). Raheela is manipulative, calculating and cruel, and should it come to it,

she can leap off the ground in a swift flying kick. “You could never know what I gave up for that boy… what I did to shape and fashion him,” she thunders over Ria. “Behind every great man is a very tired mother, who has sacrificed everything for her beautiful boy.” But the real kick is that her beautiful boy grows more redundant as the

above Nimra Bucha as Raheela and Kansara as Ria in Polite Society

film progresses; the marriage isn’t even really about him. The big twist (spoiler alert) is that the object of Raheela’s desire is the perfect womb in which to incubate her own clone; Salim, it turns out, had a first wife who died in a previous attempt . With this, Manzoor reaches for the jugular: sams will style their sons into their own image, but this renders them so weak and dependent that, in the end, sams are thoroughly disappointed by their creations. All of the men in Manzoor’s film eventually become little more than props. Raheela’s self-replicating obsession is textbook Lacanian: in ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ (1949), the French psychoanalyst writes of how the child’s idealised version of itself is in fact an idealised version of its mother; but a mother carries her own injury, a narcissistic injury that is inflicted on her by the child’s entry into the symbolic order. Raheela’s desire is to be restored, to start again, to be perfect, to undo the compromises that her beautiful boy forced upon her. ‘It wouldn’t be worth it if I just went and wrote some honor-killing thing with some bro,’ Manzoor said to The New Yorker, sharply turning away from what is expected of her as a Muslim woman and filmmaker. Polite Society is about the patriarchy, but its lens is specific: it examines, above all, the complicity of women in the ill treatment of other women. ‘Like, who doesn’t want to fight somebody at a Desi wedding?’ Priya Kansara, who plays Ria, says to The Guardian. ‘Haven’t we all wanted to kick an aunty in the face at one point?’

all images Photos: Parisa Taghizadeh. © Focus Features

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer based in Goa

top Kansara as Ria and Ritu Arya as Lena Khan in Polite Society

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That links individual action 45

Weapons of Choice Transforming information into aesthetics, Cemile Sahin challenges state power by Alexander Leissle

Save for a few wisps of cloud, it is a clear day. Viewed from a high vantage point, the sea shimmers and the curls of each wave can be seen in high definition. Where it meets the coastline, there is lush greenery, a town of uniform white buildings and roads slaloming between them. A grid of blue lines overlays the image, the squares modulating with the terrain. This largescale wallpaper work adorns one wall of Rifle in the Closet, Kurdish artist Cemile Sahin’s exhibition at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden. It’s a pretty picture, with a sugary taste for colour and lighting. But the high viewpoint suggests a more complicated relationship between the viewer and the landscape: we look at this 3d digital render of the city like a bird of prey, only the gridded blue lines and a digital reticle of green and red that hones our attention on one particular building suggests the eyesight of something altogether more mechanical. The exhibition booklet informs that this is the Palais de Rumine, at the heart of Lausanne. The Swiss city is significant to this show on two fronts: it is part of ‘drone valley’, an industry moniker for the region between Lausanne and Zürich as the world’s centre of civilian and military drone development, the product of which has been used in wars spanning decades across the Middle East; and it is host to the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, in which the uk, France, Italy, Japan and Turkey carved up the old Ottoman Empire and divided Kurdistan and its people between multiple countries, causing a chain reaction of ongoing political conflict and displacement of Kurds. The conflicted intersection – between power, technology and the lives they impact – is instructional for the ways in which Sahin is working today. Born in Wiesbaden to Kurdish parents who fled the region during the late 1980s, Sahin is now based in Berlin. An avid researcher, she spends months or even years leafing through books and trawling online archives, YouTube and TikTok, following her curiosity, then finessing her ideas and sources before she’ll even begin to distil these into artworks. The finished exhibitions have certain visual hallmarks: arrangements of found or digitally produced images – often colourful, largescale and wrapping around multiple surfaces – combine with posterlike text, a sense of layering created by installing images in the

middle of galleries, and interrogative videos at the centre of it all. Her works are often arranged so that you see almost everything at once, your central vision flooded, then set to work on each element. Topics also recur across exhibitions, as if to reject any idea of completeness a show might imply. For instance: Rifle in the Closet is her third exhibition to feature Lausanne as the epicentre from which contemporary conditions in the Middle East have been dictated. Her installation Drone Valley at last year’s Lyon Biennale focused on the wall enforcing the 900km Turkish– Syrian border (the boundaries of which were marked in the 1923 treaty): blown-up images of the wall sourced from Google Maps were wrapped around the space and overlaid with block-capital text (‘the future is in the sky / because nations that cannot / protect their skies / can never be sure of their future’, attributed to modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), a short dashcam video of a car driving up to and then crossing the border and an inflatable sculpture installed in the room that mockingly imitated a section of the wall. A later installation, It Would Have Taught Me Wisdom (2021), at Esther Schipper, Berlin, featured five uv portrait prints on glass depicting a digitally reconstructed sculpture of Minerva, the Roman patron goddess of craft and strategic warfare. Each iteration of the Minerva is clad in the military colours of the nations who were at that time undertaking military action in the Middle East. Behind the portraits, a black-and-white wallpaper image of political leaders signing the Treaty of Sèvres (Lausanne’s ‘failed’ 1920 precursor) is overlaid with orange and yellow text: ‘that i did not receive in time / this french minerva / it would have taught me wisdom’, a quote attributed to the Prussian king Wilhelm II. Sahin’s use of text feels constantly attuned to the qualities of poetry: introducing deliberate line breaks to quoted speech or prose in order to draw emphasis to each isolated phrase; and, in this case, employing iambic tetrameter in the first line. (Sahin also happens to be a prizewinning author of two novels in German.) While the linguistic aesthetics of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer will feel like obvious references for some onlookers, Sahin’s method is finetuned to her focus: she adopts words from literature and historical documentation to highlight an

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above car, road, mountain (stills), 2020, digital video, site-specific installation with photographs, advertisement banners and airplane slides, dimensions variable, 12 min 27 sec. © the artist preceding pages Rifle in the Closet, 2023 (installation view, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden). Photo: Christian Lauer

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ambivalent poetry within them, the artistic outcome always first in playwright Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell (1804; the titular Swiss folk service to the contexts from which it was taken. hero associated with marksmanship), a quote from which also adorns “Art shouldn’t be so far away from society,” says Sahin, in conversa- the floor of the gallery space (translated from German: ‘we trust in tion at her studio in Berlin. “I live in this world too, even if I’m sitting the highest god / and do not fear / the power of men’). The in my studio. I’m not some kind of genius who woke up one day and videogame aesthetic builds on ideas addressed in the late German had some sort of idea. People have different talents and mine is trans- artist Harun Farocki’s Parallel i–iv (2012–14), a series of films that forming information into an aesthetic.” She is animated about film, investigate videogames as a new medium for understanding a history books, nuggets of information. We talk giddily about new discoveries of imagemaking. Those films posited the self-contained, realityshe has recently made while working on her next project, changes mimicking worlds as a new imaginative tool for artists to create immersive environments and tell new stories. Sahin’s video explores to the YouTube algorithm and handwriting styles. She cites Chris Marker as an early influence. The French New Wave the ways in which videogame technology might instead become an director’s essayistic approach to documentary film – and, later, his imaginative tool for malign powers to inflict future destruction, their multimedia installations featuring arslick aesthetics a mask for the realSahin’s works invert the monorangements of documentary images, world consequences of warfare. video and text installed across woodIn the introductory statement to chrome radarlike aesthetic of military en frameworks – seem a clear guide Tomas van Houtryve’s Blue Sky Days drone-camera images to which to Sahin’s contemporary engagement (2013) – a series of photographs in we may be accustomed – because the with such media. Where Marker’s which the artist’s small drone camera installations were often black-androves high above quotidian American reality is in fact far more advanced white, gritty and melancholic, hers life – he quotes an interview given by are luridly colourful and vertiginous in scale, and by incorporating ai the grandson of a civilian killed by a us drone strike in Pakistan in and videogame technologies have uncanny tendencies. 2012: ‘I no longer love blue skies,’ Zubair Rehman said. ‘In fact, I now Sahin’s works also invert the monochrome radarlike aesthetic prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.’ It’s of military drone-camera images to which we may be accustomed – a chilling admission – and one that feels relevant in Sahin’s own use because the reality is in fact far more advanced. “The universities in of drone footage, much of which is decidedly colourful, sunny and, ‘drone valley’ contribute work for the Swiss army,” says Sahin. “They in isolation, presents idyllic views of their landscapes. Both van develop ai simulation training for the army. They’re literally played Houtryve and Sahin share a determination to point the threatening like a game to practise.” In the video at the centre of Rifle in the Closet camera back on the nations who usually control them. After all, the (a screen installed 2.75m up the wall), Sahin intercuts clips of this implicit power of the drone-eye view is alarming, both in its dizzying simulation training with drone and GoPro shots of real-world army scale and as it frequently bears the promise of violence. In Sahin’s exercises. The gamelike footage roams alongside virtual soldiers use and ventriloquism of its images, she nods to a more widespread, and flies over sunny hills (it could be bucolic Swiss countryside but and therefore disquieting, vision of the drone camera than merely its is also, in this context, reminiscent of Kurdistan’s mountainous implication of violence. If photography helped accelerate the era of regions). These ‘in-game’ scenes are intercut mass image-making, resulting in a shrinking Rifle in the Closet, 2023 (installation view, with a digitally rendered woman reading to perception of the world by making it subject Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden). us passages from German philosopher and to capture on camera, then it’s arguable that Photo: Christian Lauer

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above Four Ballads for my Father – Spring (stills), 2022, digital video, 43 min 40 sec. © the artist preceding pages It Would Have Taught Me Wisdom, 2021 (installation view, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2021). Photo: Andrea Rossetti

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drone technology used in remote-controlled warfare has done some- Kurdish television archives and from family records, layering Spring’s thing similar: the technology has expanded the size of a given battle- fiction with real-world sources – contrasts with the clinical, mechanfield to a space of almost no limitation. The complexities of this ical eye of the drone, reinserting human experience and presence extended vantage point are alluded to by Teju Cole, who writes in his where such kinds of military technology erase it. “Speaking about essay ‘The Unquiet Sky’ (2015) for The New York Times: ‘What was invis- home is protective, and a really deep, sad cause,” says Sahin. “People ible before becomes visible: how one part of the landscape relates to are forced to leave. Sometimes they cannot take anything. It’s really another, how nature and infrastructure unfold. But with the acquisi- hard for a lot of people because they clinch onto their memories: for a tion of this panoptic view comes the loss of much that could be seen at lot of political refugees, they went back 30 years later and everything close range. The face of the beloved is but one invisible detail among they had in their head – how it was, their school, their house – was many.’ There is an ongoing friction here and in Sahin’s aesthetic form, gone, and it became a question of whether you can ever go back at between a macro and micro view of history and of human life, both all.” It’s a concern shared by many writers, often of a similar generation, displaced and living with trauma in the wake of war – take forever intertwined. Tamil author Anuk Arudpragasam, So as if to counteract the dehuman“You have to build a whole new ising distance and aesthetic of drone who in his novel A Passage North footage, beloved faces are increasingly (2021) describes memory becoming cultural memory and you need to present in Sahin’s work. Four Ballads for ‘far harder to maintain when all the start in the past. You cannot build it clues to that memory that an envimy Father – Spring (2022), the first in a back entirely, but it’s important ronment contained were systematiforthcoming quartet of narrative films, tells the story of a Kurdish family split cally removed’. to do it. It gives people hope” between Paris and Istanbul: how their Sahin finds a parallel in other life was affected by the Southeastern Anatolia Project, a dam construc- forms of image production: “There’s almost no Kurdish cinema. For tion that ruptured communities in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. At the last century there was just war in Kurdistan, people didn’t have one point, in a French documentary that serves as a film-within-the- time to make films – they just had to survive. So you have to build film, a man recalls his former life in Kurdistan and the circumstances a whole new cultural memory and you need to start in the past. that led him to Paris. “I thought I wanted to be a hero, so that people You cannot build it back entirely, but it’s important to do it. It gives would later say: he fought for the freedom of his people… But the fact people hope – for life, that something can be rescued.” With this point, is also that I am alone here. I miss Kurdistan. I want to die in Kurdistan. the crux of her work crystallises: a drawing of attention to the operaNot here… To a certain degree I’m still pretending to be a person I am tions of both historical and contemporary state power; and to remind not.” He speaks to us, though, in a voiceover; in the interview chair, he viewers of who it impacts. Taking us from sweeping drone-eye views, sits silent. While we listen to his voice, the footage cuts between the down to the granular ache of loss, Sahin’s critically forensic, visually sitting man and a grainy handheld-camera montage of the Kurdish iridescent – and increasingly heartfelt – works rally in the face of an countryside. “Feeling a pain is one thing: irretrievable past. ar Drone Valley, 2022 (installation view, you suffer,” he says. “But to describe a pain is 16th Biennale de Lyon, 2022). another: you suffer and you understand why.” Cemile Sahin’s exhibition Rifle in the Closet Photo: Andrea Rossetti is on view at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden This mode of emotive directing – edited all images Courtesy the artist through 23 July from a collection of footage Sahin found in and Esther Schipper, Berlin, Paris & Seoul

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Not Fracking Around by Cassie Packard

On Sung Tieu’s subtle art of making things visible, and the even subtler art of allowing audiences to come to their own conclusions

Mural for America, 2023, 1,900 stainless steel plaques, engraved, screws (installation views, Infra-Specter). Photos: New Document. Courtesy Amant, New York

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Walking around an industrial area in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg, a 2013 article titled ‘Poisoned Ground’. Oil – of which fracked gas is part – Sung Tieu couldn’t help but notice all the construction that was taking is one such slippery hyperobject. Oil scrambles timescales; derived place. The Vietnamese-born, Berlin-based artist (who was, at that from ancient organic matter, it may well outlast humanity in the form time, developing a project for Amant, located in East Williamsburg) of slow-to-decompose plastic. Oil is subterranean yet ubiquitous; as it soon learned about the Metropolitan Natural Gas Reliability Project, is sought out beneath the Earth’s surface, it is also omnipresent in our colloquially known as the North Brooklyn Pipeline. Since 2017, multi- day-to-day lives, heating our homes, fuelling our cars (while paving national utility company National Grid the roads we drive on) and manifesting Tieu investigates a banal genre has been developing an 11km pipeline in common consumer goods such as in Brooklyn to transport fracked gas cosmetics, electronics, medications and of psychological discipline: from Pennsylvania to New York, where clothing. This complex material poses the hostility, violence and paranoia a challenge to a conventional underfracking – a practice linked to a launembedded in supposedly neutral standing of objects, wherein they are dry list of deleterious environmental more bounded or static. By displaying and health effects – has been banned bureaucratic spaces and architectures disparate elements, occurrences and since 2014. The pipeline, which passes through several predominantly Black and Latino neighbourhoods effects of fracking, Tieu aids viewers in acknowledging its multidiand has been funded by hikes in local utility rates, has been met mensional vastness. Staring down the barrel of one of her Reverberations with protests by community organisers and environmental groups. (2023), a set of three large Hyundai Steel pipes internally embedded Local officials working with protesters were able to halt the pipeline with speakers, gallerygoers may experience time and space as existing, at ‘stage five’ in its construction and impede the company’s plans to as Morton put it, ‘radically inside objects, rippling through them’. construct two liquid natural gas vaporisers at the line’s apex. (The Guided by FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit that maps data related to caveat is for now: National Grid intends to resubmit its application.) oil and gas development, Tieu visited fracking sites located in Marshall Tieu, who lives in a country where fracking has been almost entirely County in West Virginia, and Greene County and Ryerson Station State banned since 2017, was inspired to do a deep-dive into the contentious Park in Pennsylvania. Her sound sculptures feature scrawled alphanufracking practices that have exploded in the United States during meric pipeline codes that allude to their former lives and the administhe past two decades and established the nation as a global leader in trative systems through which they have travelled. Each pipe emanates shale-gas production. Her multipart installation on the topic, Liability sonic vibrations, ranging from a steady deep hum to intermittent Infrastructure (2023), is currently on view at Amant as part of her solo jittering buzzes, recorded at the location specified in the work’s title exhibition Infra-Specter. The show pairs Tieu’s exploration of fracking – for example, Reverberations (Ryerson Station State Park, pa). As sites that – in which physical infrastructures are viscous with meaning – with feel distant or abstract breach the gallery space, the viewer may recall recent works that probe infrastructures of informational or psycho- that Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York and Ohio are materially logical control. A solo show concurrently on view at mit, Civic Floor, connected via a massive shale formation – and that the decision to builds on Tieu’s investigations into a banal genre of psychological frack that formation is tied up with geopolitical concerns about energy discipline: the hostility, violence and paranoia embedded in suppos- dependence that implicate locales even further afield. edly neutral bureaucratic spaces and architectures. Characterised by The pressurised liquid used in fracking involves chemical addian austere metallic aesthetic, Civic Floor features minimalist sculp- tives that vary between companies and sites. While some states tures that reference prison design alongside abstracted versions of us require disclosure of the chemicals used, which can be hazardous to human health, exemptions are made for ingredients deemed to be asylum applications. Infra-Specter, a research-driven exhibition, encompasses sculpture, ‘confidential business information’. Tieu worked with data scieninstallation, video, works on paper, sound pieces and text-based tist Gary Allison and Physicians for Social Responsibility consultant works. The show overtakes two of Amant’s galleries and even spills Dusty Horwitt to analyse millions of entries on FracFocus, a nationwide registry of the chemicals that into its interstitial spaces: mounted Chilling in its scale, the mural appear in fracking fluid. “All of this on external walls, four stainless-steel information is available online, but it plaques (Proximity Relation, Body vs. consists of 1,900 gleaming plaques, takes so many steps to sift through it,” Infrastructure, 2023) denote the exact each engraved with an ingredient Tieu tells me over the phone. The title distance of the viewer’s body – somefound in fracking fluid, such as of Tieu’s visual distillation of chemitimes zero feet – to the North Brooklyn cals, Mural for America (2023), suggests Pipeline. As it triggers the doubt that methanol (used in pesticides), that she is working with material that can accompany encounters with starbenzene (a component of gasoline) is – or should be – public, and that her tling information in an age of alternaand rapeseed oil (a cooking staple project is a kind of public art. Chilling tive facts (and parafiction), the signage in its scale, the mural consists of 1,900 also makes the viewer’s propinquity to and industrial lubricant) the pipeline keenly felt. gleaming plaques, each engraved with Philosopher Timothy Morton has described a ‘hyperobject’ as an ingredient found in fracking fluid, such as methanol (used in pestisomething – like global warming or capitalism – whose dispersion cides), benzene (a component of gasoline) and rapeseed oil (a cooking across time and space, and seepage into the fabric of our lives, is so staple and industrial lubricant). Some plaques are marked with great that it is difficult to comprehend. ‘We find ourselves inside an identifying Chemical Abstracts Service (cas) Registry Number, [hyperobjects], part of them yet not part of them,’ Morton wrote in while others are labelled as ‘proprietary’ or ‘trade secret’. Exuding a

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Civic Floor, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy mit List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (ma)

Proximity Relation, Body vs. Infrastructure, 0002, 2023, engraving on stainless steel metal. Photo: New Document. Courtesy Amant, New York

Infra-Specter, 2023 (installation view). Photo: New Document. Courtesy Amant, New York

ArtReview

bureaucratic severity, the standardised steel rectangles are arranged – or, as some climate activists advocate for it to be called, methane gas – in orderly rows to form a massive grid, conjuring up post office boxes, as ‘green energy’, enabling Ohio gas companies to meet environsafety deposit boxes and columbarium niches. mental, social and governance (esg) investing standards more easily. Across the gallery, Living, Drinking, Eating (2023) consists of a small Next to the rocker on which the paper rests is a childsized chair, wooden display case containing clear jars of water taken near fracking alluding to prevailing narratives around climate change that often wells. In addition to requiring large amounts of water, fracking can seem to boil down to, as the American writer Maggie Nelson put it contaminate – and has contaminated – surrounding groundwater in On Freedom (2021), ‘the pabulum of reproductive futurism’; in this through fluid leaks and spills, poorly constructed wells and waste- publication, Nelson notes that this has little to do with the arguably water mismanagement, as the us Environmental Protection Agency more demanding task of (quoting Documenta 14’s experimental (epa) reported in 2016. Superficially, Tieu’s water samples appear unre- public programme the Parliament of Bodies), ‘[taking] responsibility markable. How viewers ultimately ‘read’ the water is inevitably influ- for those who are no longer, or not yet, here’. As Tieu highlights the enced by the political leanings of the media that they typically consume media narratives and semiotic battles that swirl around fracking, and and use to scaffold or reinforce their relays the results of her meticulous research on the topic, she also gives us worldviews. The same epa writeup, for Each pipe emanates sonic vibrations, other ways to think about or engage example, can easily be cherrypicked from a steady deep hum to jittering with the extractive practice: through to tell a different story: fracking advobuzzes. Sites that feel distant cates reporting for conservative outlets feeling vibrations, or locating ourselves chose to highlight that the agency did in space, or peering at water, or attemptor abstract breach the gallery space not unearth ‘systematic’ contaminaing to metabolise a display enumerating nearly 2,000 chemicals. Tieu’s approach to telling stories about tion or enact new regulations in light of its findings. Tieu says that Liability Infrastructure “is about fracking as a content, fracking is not explicitly oriented towards the future, but rather but it is also about language, and the crucial role that language plays towards making this far-reaching phenomenon – and its strategic in how we perceive information”. The open-ended series Newspapers obfuscation and lack of meaningful regulation – more clearly percep1969–ongoing (2017–) consists of faux news articles that the artist has tible to viewers, which is perhaps a first step towards taking action written based on her research, sometimes adopting different view- so there can be a liveable future. “I reveal information”, says Tieu, points or tones in texts on the same topic. Part of this growing body “and let the audience decide how to take it from there.” ar of work, There Is Green Gas in Ohio State (2023), features a newspaper on a rocking chair (domestic furniture that is starkly incongruous with the Sung Tieu’s solo show Civic Floor is at the mit List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (ma), through 16 July; her exhibition Infra-Specter is on view institutional metal stools, bolted to gallery walls, that Tieu produced at Amant, New York, through 10 September as exhibition seating). The faceup article describes a linguistic action with psychological and legislative consequences: in January 2023, Ohio Cassie Packard is a writer based in New York Governor Mike DeWine signed a bill legally reclassifying natural gas

There Is Green Gas in Ohio State, 2023, newspaper print, rocking chairs. Photo: New Document. Courtesy Amant, New York

Summer 2023

ArtReview

The Deep End Jessie Homer French’s apparently simple forms camouflage a variety of challenging issues by Martin Herbert

Crowley Lake, California, 2022, oil on canvas, 20 × 60 cm

Summer 2023

Bushwacking in the High Desert, 2021, oil on canvas, 61 × 76 cm

Nun’s Honey, 2021, oil on canvas, 51 × 41 cm

Twin Lakes, Bridgeport, 2022, oil on canvas, 76 × 102 cm

Mojave Stealth Bombers (detail), 2013, oil on canvas, 33 × 123 × 4 cm

Spreading Fire, 2022, oil on wood, 31 × 81 cm

The Deepest Grave, 2022, oil on canvas, 91 × 61 cm

ArtReview

Four years ago, when I first saw Jessie Homer French’s faux-naif exhibiting career (she still describes herself as a ‘regional’ painter), narrative paintings in a miniretrospective at Dublin gallery Mother’s but also had four children. All of which, from a distance, might seem Tankstation, the West Coast-based artist – then in her late seventies – like the starting point for a vintage Joan Didion or Gavin Lambert was a relative unknown, although same-generation Angelenos like novel, and thus might condemn Homer French’s artworks upfront as Ed Ruscha and Billy Al Bengston were friends of hers and admirers nothing more than the hobbyist diversions of a pampered Hollywood of her work. By last year, though, seven of her canvases were hanging wife. But then you see the paintings, with their complicated amalin the overwhelmingly female international exhibition of the Venice gamating of the heartfelt and mysterious, the open and oblique, and Biennale. They included a CinemaScope-dimensioned image of ad- their now-useful – because it makes the work look unusual and fresh – vanced warplanes flying over a Mojave Desert windfarm (Mojave disregard of what the mainstream artworld might have thought conStealth Bombers, 2013), an apparent depiction of a West Coast wild- temporary art should be ‘about’. And you also may note, despite the fire (Burning, 2020) and an oil rig in flames (Oil Platform Fire, 2019). work’s sociability and outward charm, that her overarching subjects So far, told thusly, the storyline conforms to a recent template: the are death and destruction. older woman artist finally recognised Funeral (1978), which she began The complicated amalgamating by the sexist artworld, including, inpainting after her first daughter died, aged six, of complications from cerecreasingly, the fancier end of the comof the heartfelt and mysterious, bral palsy, feels at first almost as if seen mercial scene. (After being latterly nurthe open and oblique, present from the child’s own perspective: a tured by smaller spaces, also including a useful disregard of what dozen hunched, formally attired figLos Angeles venue Various Small Fires ures and a distribution of grey grave– appropriately named after an artist contemporary art should be ‘about’ stones, some with fresh bouquets, dot book by Ruscha – Homer French recently showed at Massimo De Carlo’s Milan gallery.) We’ve seen this a patch of greensward. A priest officiates by a flower-covered mound movie, or something like it. In other regards, though, her story is like that feels to burst, contrarily, with life and liveliness, and you notice that of no one else. that while some of the mourners are dressed in customary black, others For starters, as her paintings’ frequently wide-aspect ratios might are in sunny white. The artist, you’d surmise from these commingled hint at, Homer French lived for many years predominantly in the feelings, has done some coming to terms with death and its circular American film industry. Her husband and de facto manager, Robin relationship to life, to things ongoing. Meanwhile, the image has a French, was a talent agent who handled Marlon Brando, among others, frontality suggestive of Henri Rousseau and American folk artists like and from the late-1970s he was chief of production at Paramount – he Grandma Moses or Vestie Davis, and an even distribution of pictorial and the New York-born Homer French met in 1969, by which time event, but also something of the sophisticated, rhythmic convening of she had done swimsuit modelling as well as starting to paint, and figuration and abstraction you’d expect from Alex Katz, all wrapped they honeymooned a month later on the estate of Elizabeth Taylor around a presumptive core of understated, filtered heartbreak. and Richard Burton. French had a decagonal studio built for her in This would not be the last funeral scene that Homer French their Beverly Hills manse; she painted daily and in 1976 began a local would paint, just as – inevitably – it would not be the last funeral

Father and Son (detail), 2022, oil on canvas, 76 × 102 cm

Summer 2023

she attended. Robin French died in 2021, and a painting from the ‘I don’t like heavy-handed political stuff; I come at it sideways’, following year, The Deepest Grave, depicts a green hillock topped by Homer French said in a recent interview with Los Angeles Magazine. trees and a stone statue of the Virgin Mary; below are five mourners Her 2021 painting 97413 Blue River, Oregon depicts a rural post office standing around a pile of brown earth, and then the underground surrounded by conifers and fronted by fish-filled freshwater. But she is cross-sectioned, with a deep black shaft ending in a laid-out older began painting post offices across America after Donald Trump started male figure, dressed in celebrant white to mirror the statue, about to defunding the postal service to undermine postal voting, and this one reunite with the soil. In another recent cemetery scene presented the has also burned down. Nun’s Honey (2021) features a nun beekeeper same way, City at Rest (2022), 17 figures of varying sizes and ages are collecting honey; needless to say, there are ecological dimensions visible beneath the ground; in Memento Mori (2022) there are 28 (in to keeping bees too (and Homer French has been buying the nun’s the background, more Stealth Bombers and a pair of smokestacks). produce). Another painting, from 2018 and depicting wolves and deer The transparency of the formatting is reminiscent, again, of chil- in a wintry wonderland, initially looks bucolic and Brueghelian; but dren’s perspectives, of books that show young minds how things then you notice snowbound radiation-warning signs scattered about work. This, Homer French suggests, speaking from experience, is and clock the work’s title, in neatly handwritten caps at lower left: how things work in terms of death, Winter Eden, Chernobyl. memory, honouring. And painting – And then there are the many paintGrief is bunkered down in her art, she’s become, it appears, increasingly ings that Homer French has made of but also a recognition that in prolific since her husband passed – is fire, a recent example being the smokeso many ways, for better or worse, perhaps a way through it all. filled Spreading Fire (2022), in which 50 She frequently uses the same percent of a stand of conifers is aflame death is inextricable from life format when painting the natural and the ground is too. Wildfires caused world, as a way of making things visible. Homer French, who now lives by global heating are a fact of life in the artist’s part of the world, in the Coachella Valley near Palm Desert, has been fanatical about fly- and they might be said to microcosm our altered climate. But it’s fishing since the 1970s, and in Twin Lakes, Bridgeport (2022), contextu- notable that Homer French first started painting fires after witnessally huge fish sport temptingly beneath the waterline, as if the artist ing a controlled burn, an act that can be environmentally renewing were a cave painter magicking her prey into existence by picturing as well as destructive; as so often, her work points towards someit, and the composition rises to a serene mountain-range under blue thing about man’s interventions in nature but complicates it, sideskies. If Homer French just made marine paintings like this, they steps rhetoric and particularly resists hopelessness, sees bombers might scan as pleasurable but shallow, but such tranquil moments but also windfarms. There’s grief bunkered down in her art, but are counterweighted by, say, Tilapia Dieoff in the Salton Sea (2022), whose also a recognition that in so many ways, for better and for worse, asymmetric semiabstract composition – clustered whitish fish corpses death is inextricable from life. If that fact can’t be wished away, it in brown water, dense at left and thinning to the right – recalls some of might at least be faced with the equanimity – which shouldn’t be Monet’s Water Lilies, but is underscored by (perhaps) environmentalist mistaken for naivety – that suffuses Jessie Homer French’s art. In the concerns; real-world die-offs of the fish have been linked to lowered controlled burn, one might say, she’s found the perfect analogy for oxygen content in waters due to unstable temperatures and pollution. her practice. ar

Tilapia Dieoff in the Salton Sea, 2022, oil on canvas, 41 × 61 cm

ArtReview

Memento Mori, 2022, oil on canvas, 91 × 61 cm all images Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo

Summer 2023

Factory Bells & Whistles Where will Manchester’s spectacularist new arts venue fit into faded plans for cultural and economic revitalisation? by Greg Thomas

Factory International, a major new arts and performance space in as much as a critical optic on it: ‘Free Your Mind will take audiences on Manchester, opens its doors to the public this summer, on the spot a thrilling journey through The Matrix and into a new realm of possiwhere Granada Studios once stood (home to North West England’s bilities… This eye-opening production will stretch across the buildtelevision broadcaster until the early 2000s). Ellen van Loon of the ing’s ultra-flexible spaces, responding to them and harnessing the Office for Metropolitan Architecture has led on the design, the asym- collective energy of the moment.’ The Factory’s interior, which resemmetrical ribbed metal facade of which is broadly in the deconstruc- bles a giant warehouse and will include vast moveable walls, is built tivist style of the office’s founder, Rem Koolhaas. Factory is both for colossal extravaganzas of this kind (Kusama’s giant inflatable a permanent home and a new twin organisation for Manchester spotted sculptures will fill the space during mif). International Festival (mif), which has run biennially since 2007. In this sense, a largescale ‘pure’ arts venue such as Tate Modern The venue received an initial £78 million capital grant from the uk is a less pertinent comparison than, say, London’s Lightroom. That government, as well as significant top-ups from Arts Council England, recently opened huge four-sided projection chamber is currently Manchester City Council and other bodies. mif and Factory recently showing blown-up David Hockney paintings alongside an audio announced rolling Arts Council funding for 2023–26, equating to soundtrack of the artist expounding on life, love and the perils of a lavish £9,908,150 per year. vanishing-point perspective. The rolling uk tour of the Van Gogh Alive Factory International’s debut will coincide with the 2023 mif, show (2011–), in which an oversized patchwork of screens is satuwhere superstar artists such as Yayoi Kusama will join a lineup of pop rated with postimpressionist markmaking, offers a similarly immersive proposition. So too does Frameless, singers and theatrical performers. The Factory International seems to recent death of Ryuichi Sakamoto makes near Hyde Park, where you can get lost in the prospect of a ‘mixed-reality concert’ giant digitised paintings from across the be selling immersion in spectacle history of Western art. At 180 Strand the devised by the composer and production as much as a critical optic on it basement studio and exhibition space studio Tin Drum particularly enticing. Janelle Monáe, meanwhile, will jet into town for what the Factory is designed to drench the viewer in light in a similar way, though website calls a three-day ‘residency’, allowing her to ‘interact with the curating favours contemporary film and photography – Richard Manchester artists and audiences in new ways’, as well as offering Mosse’s infrared and ultraviolet aerial scenes, for example, as seen in a trio of ‘euphoric’ live shows. his recent show Broken Spectre (2022). But what will Factory International and the revamped mif really In contrast to the sensory baths of much so-called immersive art, do for the city? Will the new space be a Tate Modern-style success, Boyle’s intermedia outing is a product of original creation rather and should it even be judged on the same terms? The work the venue than inventive re-presentation. But Factory does seem to be drawing has so far announced will run a gamut from theatre to pop music to energy from a newly emergent category of arts event – and art venue – contemporary art, with an emphasis on genre-splicing and grand that pays little heed to the niceties of medium boundaries or (for spectacle: one of its inaugural productions, Danny Boyle’s Free Your want of less stuffy terms) the art-historical and intertextual context Mind – opening in autumn 2023 – will combine Michael Asante and in which a particular artist or performer might seek to be viewed. Kenrick Sandy’s hip-hop score and choreography with set design by In their place we find some of the visual tropes of contemporary art, Es Devlin, famed for her largescale lightshows. Inspired by the Matrix and the ambience of a modernist, hangarlike public gallery, brought films (1999–2021), the piece will, according to press announcements, to bear in a kind of son et lumière public spectacle. Giant digitised explore the power of digital illusion in the current cultural moment, paintings or kinetic lightshows look to compete with the effects name-checking the metaverse. budget and, presumably, the wider audience appeal of a Marvel superIn reality, though, the prepublicity for the show, and for the venue hero flick. (That’s where almost £10m per year from Arts Council in which it will take place, seems to be selling immersion in spectacle comes in handy.)

ArtReview

Factory International, Manchester, photographed during construction, 2022. Photos: Pawel Paniczko

Summer 2023

above Luke Jerram, First Breath, 2023 (artist impression by Lee Baxter of installation view on the construction grounds of Factory International, Manchester) facing page Factory International, Manchester, interior view. Photo: Luxigon. Courtesy oma, Rotterdam

ArtReview

If this is what Factory is trying to do, those are the terms on which it ought to be judged. But is this the kind of spectacle Manchester’s art scene wants? Andrew Hunt is a curator and professor of fine art and curating at Manchester Metropolitan University. He runs the art press Slimvolume and has recently opened a small exhibition space, Moon Grove, just south of the city’s ‘cultural corridor’ of galleries and performance venues. For Hunt, “what Manchester really needs is a midsized ica or kunsthalle, something dedicated to showing serious international contemporary art connected to the city’s evolving art scene, culture and communities. That would fill an institutional gap that’s lacking here, between smaller artist-run galleries and studios on one side and museums such as the Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery on the other.” While Hunt senses no bitterness about Factory International’s inauguration among the area’s artistic communities, the huge cheques being written out for the site might reflect what the curator and publisher sees as “Arts Council England’s traditional focus on Manchester as a site for music, live events and sport rather than art”. Then again, can we think about Factory as a purely creative venture of any kind, given that its origins and goals encompass a far wider programme of socioeconomic regeneration? Plans for a new ‘theatre space’ in Manchester were announced as part of then-chancellor George Osborne’s 2014 budget, part of his much-vaunted ‘Northern Powerhouse’ agenda, intended to tool-up a network of northern English cities to compete with London for economic clout. At the heart of the powerhouse plan was a sound concept, what urban geographer Neil Lee calls in a 2017 article ‘the potential economic benefits if the cities of Northern England worked as a larger functional economic area’. But problems developed around mission drift and lack of followthrough. Lee writes of the term ‘Northern Powerhouse’ becoming a general rebrand for ‘government policy in the north’. In 2019 thinktank ippr North found that the north of England had faced underinvestment against multiple metrics during the ‘Powerhouse’ era. If Factory International is not just an arts venue but also one node in a network of new cultural and economic infrastructure that was meant to help the North of England to find its feet economically, then the wider failure of that policy reflects on it too. The project has run well overbudget, with a £25m shortfall announced last year to be made up by Manchester City Council.

Moreover, there is a wider narrative to unpick here about the ways in which regeneration in the form of metropolitan arts venues and festivals has masked ever-increasing wealth disparity across the urban West, and the related hollowing-out of city centres such as Manchester’s through gentrification. This is particularly relevant in the case of Factory International – part of a larger renewal project for the waterside neighbourhood of St John’s, overseen by property developer Allied London; a project that, according to the company’s website, will encompass ‘320 hotel bedrooms, 560,000 sq ft of workspace, 240,000 sq ft of retail and 13 acres of public realm’. In a 2013 paper, Richard Florida, the urban theorist who coined the idea of the ‘creative class’ – that network of bohemian-minded professionals, artists and scenesters whose presence led to increased economic development in certain urban locales – revised aspects of his thesis (first forwarded in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, 2002). ‘On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits,’ Florida’s later assessment states. ‘Its benefits flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers whose higher wages and salaries are more than sufficient to cover more expensive housing in these locations.’ This kind of backtracking – which mirrors academic consensus on the topic – begs the question of why national and regional government remains wedded to bells-and-whistles arts venues and events as a source of cultural revitalisation. All is talk until Factory International opens its doors – and, at the very least, there is every reason to suspect that the sheer scale of what unfolds there could be exciting. For Hunt, though, while there are advantages to the spectacularist approach to contemporary arts curating Factory International has opted for, what’s key is that Manchester keeps nurturing the kind of organic grassroots arts scene that has resulted in recent breakout successes like painter Louise Giovanelli. “This is a need that Factory, inevitably, cannot fulfil, but whose fulfilment it will depend on – ultimately it will need to have a symbiotic relationship with Manchester’s growing artistic community to be successful.” ar Manchester International Festival runs 29 June – 16 July Greg Thomas is a writer based in Glasgow

Summer 2023

Marcel Dzama 马塞尔·扎马, Farewell my love 再见我的爱人,

Pearlescent acrylic ink, watercolor, and graphite on paper 纸本珠光丙烯墨水、水彩及石墨, 31.8 × 31.8 cm © Marcel Dzama 马塞尔·扎马, Courtesy of David Zwirner 鸣谢卓纳画廊

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To political purpose 79

Josh Kline Project for a New American Century Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 19 April – 23 August More than 40 percent of Americans think that, in the next decade, a civil war is not only possible but likely, according to a 2022 poll. Josh Kline’s survey exhibition captures with clarity the inauspicious mood of recent American life. The exhibition’s title references a neoconservative, interventionist think tank supported by former vice president, and architect of the Iraq invasion, Dick Cheney. Assembling over a decade of Kline’s work – not-so-easily divided between pseudodocumentary videos, sculptures and new-media installation – the exhibition is literal, bleak and prescient. Historically bracketed by twinned financial crises – 2008’s bank failures and 2020’s pandemic-induced economic shocks – the show leaves little room for optimism. Yet these genre-eluding installations are not quite dystopian: Kline’s work, in a certain sense, comes across as more rational than sciencefictional, which is perhaps the exhibition’s most disconcerting quality. With the plush crush of mushroom-coloured carpet underfoot, Kline’s sculptural series Civil War (2016–17) offers visitors a near-future vision of middle-class America. Presented in one of the first galleries on the Whitney’s fifth floor (the exhibition continues on the museum’s eighth), it chimes an ominous tone for what’s to come. Piles of cast-concrete rubble, arranged like lunar debris, form small mountains of working-class relics. Cairns of commodities, those signifiers through which the working class demonstrates a sense of upward mobility, become the ruined aftermath of this speculative conflict. The piles consist, for example, of disintegrating symbols of commodity comfort: Shop-Vac pull-along vacuum cleaners, lawnmower parts and a sawhorse. Placed on the stage of domesticity, the kind of carpet to which my parents – a car salesman and nurse – aspired to in our suburban Maryland home, these relics hammer on a foreboding sense of future collapse. Kline offers visitors a diagnosis of frayed social fabric: the hollowing out and decay of mid-income stability.

This vision of civil conflict becomes reframed as prescient after walking through Contagious Unemployment (2016). Inside clear plastic structures shaped like wriggling virus particles (the kind now etched into our post-covid psyches) Kline has placed ‘bankers boxes’, cardboard archive boxes, stuffed with such white-collar office accoutrements as gym shoes, highlighters and family photos. Suspended from the ceiling at torso height, the works glow with the soft light of leds. Kline’s use of the virus visual is coincidental, sure, originally implemented as an allusion to the coming impact of automation on labour, according to the gallery’s wall text. The works have accrued an eerie aura about them in the years since 2020, undoubtedly reminding viewers of the mass layoffs that swept the world during the pandemic’s early days. In Kline’s future, the middle class is, and will continue to be, squashed, phased out, replaced. In the context of America’s New York City, a gentrified metropolis rife with unequal wealth that has disconnected from the country’s heartland, Kline’s work emphasises the idea of class in a refreshing yet challenging – and even contradictory – fashion. What does an exhibition of art about workers’ plight mean at a privately funded museum, an institution funded by those who emerged the most unscathed (if not also the most enriched) from the financial calamities that historically frame Kline’s work? The easy, knee-jerk response could be that the institution swallows the critique whole. The exhibition’s central project is at odds with the privilege of the class that supports it. An inconvenient yet beguiling pairing indeed, especially at an institution once funded by a teargas mogul, an institution that only recently came to an agreement with its union, after 16 months of negotiations. On the other hand, might the Whitney Museum’s board be the ideal audience for this work, entreating it to seriously consider the future prospects of an increasingly shrinking middle-class and rapidly growing underclass? It seems unlikely that

facing page, top Contagious Unemployment (Talk Soon), 2016, cardboard file box, mixed media, plastic, hardware, cables, leds, and power cord, diameter: 66cm. © the artist. Photo: Paolo Saglia. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin

billionaires might yearn for democratic socialism, too. In defiance of Postinternet labels, Kline’s new media-infused exhibition emphasises the very material consequences of what supposedly was a dematerialised era of the cloud and Web 2.0. For instance, Kline’s militarised Teletubbies are a funny, haunting take on the expansion of police surveillance. Po-Po and friends Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect (all 2015) are decked out in riot gear, handguns included. Kline face-swaps these mannequins with the queasy, androgynous facial features of the characters from that bizarre children’s television programme. Embedded in their torsos, little monitors play videos of real-life cops (whose faces are digitally swapped with those of activists) reading lines from the ‘found’ social media feeds of the featured activists, explains the work’s wall text. Kline has used face-swapping technology since at least 2013. Around the time of the exhibition’s opening, a deep-fake Drake song leaked onto the internet; pointing towards the obsolescence of technology often used in Kline’s art, but not the work itself. Climate change, surveillance, ai, demographic shift in America: there are many profound threads to follow when discussing Kline’s survey. And here’s another: like the credits at the end of the film, Kline acknowledges the labour that produced his sculptures, featuring the names of his studio collaborators, mould -makers and cnc specialists, among others, in the gallery labels. Ultimately a history that needs to and will be written about the role of specialised fabricators: mfas with the minds of engineers, progenitors of diy culture, unlikely to be rendered obsolete anytime soon, and who make the work of Kline, and the artists who show alongside him at New York’s 47 Canal, possible. They constitute a new working class that serves the gallery-going public. And, in tandem with their labour, Kline’s science-fictional art thus can become cinematic in scale, like a movie set that feels increasingly, unnervingly real. Owen Duffy

facing page, bottom Productivity Gains (Brandon / Accountant) (detail), 2016, 3d-printed plaster, inkjet ink and cyanoacrylate; cnc-carved urethane foam with shellac-based colour sealer; museum wax; and polyethylene bag, 55 × 69 × 140 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Summer 2023

(la)horde Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin 27 April – 30 July Bondy (2017), the first of four films in this debut institutional show by French multidisciplinary collective (la)horde – who are also codirectors of Ballet National de Marseille – proposes nonperformative and communal forms of movement often dismissed as ‘entertainment’ as valid forms of choreographic expression. Named after the Paris suburb where it was filmed, Bondy splices together iPhone and professionally shot documentary-style footage of community groups – synchronised swimmers, cheerleaders, seniors at a line-dance party – in motion. Most scenes focus on ‘in-between’ moments such as getting in and out of pools, bedroom rehearsals and applying makeup in mirrors. The few staged scenes that deconstruct and reframe movement, however, are highlights: local bikers accelerate down suburban roads and walk behind each other through parks, arms outstretched as if on handlebars, before recreating torso tilts and gear-changing wrist twitches on chairs in a dance studio. (la)horde describe their recontextualisation of popular movement styles – particularly

those on TikTok et al – as ‘postinternet dance’. In The Master’s Tools (2017), performers huddle together in the face of a water cannon, replicating riots that have become familiar viewing across online media. The collective is best known, however, for their engagement with jumpstyle, a genre that rose to prominence during the early 2000s. In Novaciéries (2015), a group of masked jumpstyle dancers rapidly kick downwards in an abandoned steel mill. At times they activate the forklift trucks surrounding them (one shows up in the gallery). Viewing their repetitive movements in an industrial environment imbues them with a newfound robotic quality. Beyond achieving a ‘grungy’ aesthetic, however, the reason for placing jumpstyle in this context is unclear. Jumpstyle was also the key focus of a performance of To Da Bone (2017) during the exhibition’s opening. While the most engaging moments were when the dancers appeared to be in dialogue with their screened counterparts, the piece was disappointing in its repetition

Bondy (still), 2017, hd video, 15 min 53 sec. Courtesy the artists

ArtReview

of a vocabulary from the films, rather than interrogating it in the same way as the bikers’ actions in Bondy. Deploying the same intense facial expressions, casual sportswear and electronic music currently fashionable for gallery-based dance, the performance feels less provocative than it might have a few years back. This didn’t stop the audience from filming and disseminating it across social media, cyclically returning the movement to its native realm. If the dance styles la(horde) tap out end up back online, do audiences really need to go to a gallery to engage with them? Perhaps by passing through this show, they find their way into new internet algorithms to be considered by different audiences. Yet in a digital age where the internet is increasingly celebrated for having its own culture, do forms such as jumpstyle really need a cultural institution’s stamp of approval to be appreciated? Replicating them in this context, without much development or exploration, feels like little more than a slightly surface-level push for relevance, and edgy press imagery. Emily May

Thomas Hirschhorn m.e.s.s.s.y. Dvir Gallery, Brussels 8 April – 1 July Thomas Hirschhorn has deviated little from the modus operandi that established his reputation during the mid-to-late 1990s. His unruly presence has become ubiquitous in biennials, and his name synonymous with pedagogical pavilions and jerry-built altars made from repurposed materials such as cardboard, duct tape and expanding foam. The ingredients of his current show are several thousand empty beer bottles combined with an array of mismatched secondhand furniture, kitsch ornaments and various other household oddments; all ‘locally sourced’ jetsam that could potentially be returned to their points of origin. A sprawling, chaotic installation such as this is unusual nowadays on the commercial gallery circuit, where the typical fare is discrete sculptures and paintings that offer variations on a theme. Here the logic of horror vacui orders the space, with multitudes of brown bottles stacked

upon every surface and crammed inside all available cavities: drawers, cupboards, sinks and kitchen appliances. Domestic effects – including a bed into which preloved teddy bears have been tucked, along with more beer bottles – infuse this environment with narrative connotations; but who or what could live here? A narrow pathway through the sea of empties leads to the rear of the gallery, where a ‘living room’ zone is created by a cluster of chairs and sofa in front of a wall-mounted flatscreen tv: on this occasion, the muted cnn newsfeed cuts from footage of Chinese military exercises in Taiwan to an Elon Musk interview. These ‘real world’ transmissions dominate the mise-en-scène, which suggests the now familiar phenomenon of stockpiling. But since every bottle is empty, it looks more like the aftermath of a prolonged booze-up. The preparatory drawings (moodboards?) for this show – viewable on the artist’s website – include found photos of people burdened with

compulsive hoarding disorder. Someone smothered under the weight of amassed rubbish is a succinct metaphor for the dysfunctionality of late capitalism, but there are other, less doomladen readings of this agglomeration, as alluded to in the text that accompanies the show, written in Hirschhorn’s fervid slogan-peppered manifesto style (‘m.e.s.s.s.y. believes in Karma, which is the only hope – hope as a principle of action’, for example). The impulse towards accumulation is not necessarily pathological and can – like cultural production – constitute a strategy of resistance; a refusal to surrender control. Looking past the narrative interpretations, m.e.s.s.s.y. might thus stand as a monument to the potential of physical labour and creative intent, a testament to that human impulse to assert one’s agency and build something – order out of chaos – from the mountains of detritus piling up around us. Pádraic E. Moore

m.e.s.s.s.y., 2023 (installation view). Photo: Isabelle Arthuis. Courtesy the artist and Dvir, Brussels

Summer 2023

Jonas Lund In the Middle of Nowhere ii Annka Kultys Gallery, London 5 May – 4 June If you believe the current panicking about ai, most human creative work will soon be redundant. Jonas Lund, meanwhile, has a knack for concocting projects that exist where digital technologies and economies intersect with art and the artworld, looping them into absurd shortcircuits. The value of creativity often hangs ambiguously and ironically in much of Lund’s variously internet-, metaverse-, nft- and codebased work. His wrangling of ai to produce the works in In the Middle of Nowhere II (it sequels a first exhibition of the same title staged at Office Impart in Berlin in February) is unnerving, for all its bland corporate demeanour and wry humour. The video The Future of Something (all works 2023) is composed of elements you get the feeling might have been spewed out by various ‘ai’ generators: it’s a collection of short scenes in

which groups of redundant and pissed-off technology workers and influencers gather in self-help sessions to commiserate over their experiences at the hands of algorithms and other ai processes. The video image isn’t great, the rendered cube-workers stuttering and wobbling, their features half-formed, smeary, ghoulish approximations. The voices, though, are freakishly believable, even if the certain moments of phrasing, cadence and glitchy emphasis may reveal their machine origins. It’s hard to guess to what extent Lund has left Chatgpt (or whatever it is) to come up with the scripts. The thread that winds through them is plainly satirical, the group members speaking in therapy-culture talking points, one moment worrying about being replaced by machines or becoming too intimate with

their ‘bot companions’, the next baulking at the suggestion that they date each other on a whim, rather than follow the dating app’s recommendations – “we’re here to discuss our experiences, not question the system”, exclaims one doughfaced group member. The Future of Something’s comic seriousness lies in how it stages public discussion about ai, work and creativity in a way that is itself critical of the debate, by presenting those angsty criticisms of ai in a form made by ai. There’s a certain impish cruelty to Lund’s approach: rubbing our noses in just how effective this new ai imageand-sound creation technology can be as a tool for creating satirical critiques of the supposed dangers of ai. But there’s another level to Lund’s work that isn’t so rhetorical, or so conceptually playbook-obvious, since beyond the topical

In the Middle of Nowhere ii, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy the artist and Annka Kultys Gallery, London

ArtReview

rhetoric, we’re confronted with something that belies our own supposedly impending obsolescence: our own qualitative reactions to this ai-generated ‘content’. No doubt the visual renderings will get better and better. (Take, for example, Runway Research’s gobsmacking recently released ‘Gen-2’ generative ai, promising realistic video generated from text prompts.) No doubt it will soon all look and sound completely convincing. But what The Future of Something does provoke is the sense of the banality of the ideas discussed, the lack, for want of a better term, of any originality, either in what is said by the protagonists, or in the aesthetic values of the video itself. Lund is clearly having fun with this question of artistic quality, since around the gallery – furnished as if it were some tech exec’s office, a steel desk and chair facing off against a tubular coffee table and black leather sofa, potted office palms in the corners – are hung digitally produced tapestry canvases. Once again, these are supposedly produced by image-generating

ai, and again reflect ironically on their setting, featuring mostly animal-headed, businesssuited figures occupying twentieth-century office interiors, in a sepia-tinted, retro-inflected comics style. Those descriptions are probably not far off the abbreviated semantics of the textual prompts that generated the works (say, for Where the Wild Things Rule: ‘elephants in suits, mid-century, Edward Hopper vibe, cartoon art’). But while an easy criticism would be to decry the lack of human involvement in the production of these goofy canvases (in another, fat cats sit in office cubicles or laze around in front of rows of filing cabinets), they’re still more involving, charming and exquisitely made than the video. These are all subjective responses, of course. You could even call it ‘taste’. They’re also responses that only mean anything to another human being, and while Lund may have outsourced much of the legwork to his machines, his artworks still depend on their viewer for validation.

What Lund’s work implies, then, is that much human ‘creative’ work isn’t in fact very interesting or any good anyway. The current hysteria over ai and art tends to get the question the wrong way round. It’s not that generative ai is getting to be as good as human creativity, but that much human creativity produces artworks that are rote, derivative and repetitive (and machine-replaceable) – and that most ‘creatives’ would probably be better off doing something else instead. On another wall hangs ceo Dashboard, four-pc monitors on which we watch, variously: a stock-market readout; an image-generating ai being trained; a vacuous corporate motivation video for tech entrepreneurs; and a text feed that displays a solipsistic brainstorming monologue being used to train an ai assistant. ‘As an aipowered startup advisor, our goal is to help entrepreneurs launch successful ai startups’, it babbles. Redundancy, in Lund’s ambiguous view, can mean people being made unemployed, for sure. But the word also hints that the work may not be worth doing in the first place. J.J. Charlesworth

Where the Wild Things Rule, 2023, tapestry, 140 × 190 cm. Courtesy the artist and Annka Kultys Gallery, London

Summer 2023

Che Lovelace Day Always Comes Corvi-Mora, London 28 April – 17 June The best art is often the product of knowledge and happenstance. This is the case in Che Lovelace’s exhibition of ten paintings depicting scenes from his home country of Trinidad. His subject matter recalls the same elegant bodies found in compatriot Boscoe Holder’s portraits of the island’s workers, musicians and playboys; the lush, fervid landscapes of Peter Doig’s canvases. Yet Lovelace’s style, a trippy combination of cubist angles and realism, outstrips them. In The Breath (2022) a muscular young man lies on his back in swimming trunks. It’s as if the viewer is looking at the subject with their head rested on his thighs, his groin dominating the bottom right of the frame, a nod to sexualised, colonial visions of life in the equatorial tropics (think Charles Warren Stoddard’s thirsty writing on island life or a homoeroticised Paul

Gauguin), but with the fetishistic tension undercut by the sleepy psychedelia of a night sky. With a hand resting on his chest, the man’s dreams are constructed of acrylic splashes of yellow, deep blue, turquoise and a near-fluorescent orange that spill across the almost-metre-andhalf canvas. All of Lovelace’s paintings are made on a grid of four compressed-paper board panels (material intended for book binding), an innovation born of necessity since canvas was expensive and tricky to obtain in Trinidad when Lovelace started painting during the mid-1990s. That the overlapping imagery often doesn’t join up perfectly when the panels are assembled adds to the sense of discombobulation: in Street Dance (2016–22) a frantic carnival scene plays out against a busy semiabstract, geometric townscape. While

The Red House, 2021, acrylic and dry pigment on board panels, 152 × 127 cm. Courtesy the artist

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coming together as part of the whole, each board boasts its own individual palette; something pushed even further in Moonlight Searchers (2022), in which two naked women pick through the undergrowth, the scale shifting across the quadrant; or The Red House (2021), in which each board could just as well be shown independently (showing, clockwise from top left, a red brick house; a hilltop of colourful homes; a topless man with dreads; a young mother, her child sat on a small flight of steps nearby), but which together play out a miniature drama for the viewer (are we witness to an argument or a flirtation?). These formal ploys deconstruct any reductive, one-dimensional view of Lovelace’s home, embodying, both in technique and subject, the many stories and textures of modern Trinidad. Oliver Basciano

mahku Visions masp, São Paulo 24 March – 4 June As an entering rite, the Huni Kuin Artists Movement (mahku) has overpainted the usual red of masp’s long ramps to the lower galleries with a mural of colourful intertwining images and vivid figures drawn from the mythology of the western region of the Brazilian Amazon. It is an opening ploy that echoes the traditional narrative of the kapewë pukeni, the mythical bridge-alligator that allowed the crossing between America and Asia through the Bering Strait. This is just one of several complex myths that inform the themes in this show by 15 members of the indigenous art collective. Many of the works on canvas that follow in the main exhibition gallery are the hallucinogenic results of rituals involving ayahuasca and sacred chanting, in which the images conjured relate to the Huni Kuin’s millennia-old traditional stories. In ayahuasca’s origin myth, ceremonies guided by a boa constrictor allow one to see the past, the present and the future

simultaneously, here represented in mahku’s paintings, drawings and ceramics. In keeping with the Huni Kuin people’s traditional visual systems, most of the canvases are bordered by geometrical snakeskin motifs (as in Yutâ isinipatu [Vision Healing Music, 2022], and Yube Inu Yube Shanu [Origin Myth of the Sacred Beverage Nixi Pae, 2020]), depicting the image as what is seen by the snake and what can be viewed while guided by it – such as food preparation, collective dances, facial painting and intercourse between animals and humans. But it would be incorrect to read these elements as formal framing devices; instead their existence reinforces both the need for the presence of the body in anthropological, political and artistic terms, and the possibility of these visual phenomena happening in such elevated, yet real, states of mind and body. Although the works are collectively made, individual artists for each piece are identified

– from two to five artists per work, with often repeated pairings. This reveals different subjectivities: such as the attention to facial features and emotions in the paintings to which Isaka Huni Kuin contributes; the optical vibrations of pointillist colour in Bane Huni Kuin’s paintings; and the representation of various everyday acts – such as eating, hunting, bathing and dancing – identified by numbers like an index, as in the works by Acelino Huni Kuin. Alongside efforts by other Brazilian institutions to engage with indigenous histories and peoples – such as Pinacoteca de São Paulo and Instituto Moreira Salles – masp presents a show still rarely seen in a museum with international reach. For someone like me, born and raised in the Amazon, Visions presents a respectful amplifier of thus far silenced voices, attentive to the individuality of each artist from the collective and to the hybridity of Brazilian culture. Mateus Nunes

Ibã Huni Kuin, Bane Huni Kuin, Rare Huni Kuin, Ayani Huni Kuin, Ibã Neto Sales Kanixawa, Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (mahku), Yube Inu Yube Shanu, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 135 × 220 cm. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy the artists

Summer 2023

Magali Reus Le Plat Principal Centre d’Art Contemporain –la synagogue de Delme 11 March – 4 June There’s an ear of corn growing inside this streetlamp, an aubergine in the other, some mushrooms in another. Food, production and place meet in unexpected ways in Magali Reus’s exhibition, where the works on view reference fantastical farming and industrialised production, fitting for a show hosted in agricultural, rural France. The three series of works on view include five sculptures of fullsize streetlamps called Candlesticks (2022), each with a different vegetable nestled in its base as if it were a greenhouse; Clementine (2023), a series of sculptures that emulate large jam jars; and eight c-prints titled Landings (2022), each encased in a hand-carved aluminium

frame that makes them more like objects than images. The jam jars – which sport a ginghamprinted metal lid – are an iconic European product. The brand, Bonne Maman, is designed to look nostalgic – with a name that references a grandma and a handwritten-styled typeface that connotes ‘homemade’ – only its products have always been mass-produced by multinational food corporation Andros, which markets its preserves and pastries as the products of an imaginary French farmhouse. In Reus’s treatment, the jars become large sculptures, 45cm in diameter, protruding from the wall. In Clementine (Frank) the familiar jar looks

broken and is filled with pink paint, echoing the way many households reuse the emptied jars. The sculptures look like they’re made of glass, but it’s actually epoxy resin: like the brand they imitate, they repackage an idea about the world and serve it back to us. Like Bonne Maman’s dream farmhouse, Reus’s artworks trade on recognisable objects, but her world feels artificial, and intentionally so. The drive to Delme from Metz passes by French farmland. By which I mean: industrial agriculture. The area, once rich in iron, saw its resources depleted as the region changed hands between France and Germany over the course of centuries. The art centre is located in what

Le Plat Principal, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Annik Wetter. Courtesy the artist and cac – la synagogue de Delme

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was once the local synagogue, bombed by German soldiers during the Second World War and later rebuilt. The remaining Jewish community left this town, whose inhabitants now number 1,000, and in 1993 the synagogue became a venue for contemporary art. This double context – the building and the countryside, the marks history has left on this place – informs Reus’s works and how viewers see them. Like how farming has now moved so far away from the common image of natural small local production; like how the glass in Reus’s streetlamps and jam jars is actually epoxy resin. It’s synthetic but it looks so convincing, and this tension between the natural and artificial, the historical and the present, the image of the place and what it really is, informs the entire show. The photos in the series Landings are of fruit and other items – building materials, sand, small woodchips – collected in a skip. The sides

of some of the frames include a number connoting the distance between where the fruit was grown and where Reus bought it (3,708.9km for the cherries in Landings [3708.9, Statics]; 7,505km for the clementine in Landings [7505, Tunnels]) – the plat principal (main course) is this combination of something that is transported around the world and something throwaway. It’s a meeting of the natural and the industrial, the way quotidian things like an ear of corn can carry histories of production, colonial expansion and environmental concerns. In a world in which you can get a clementine in June that was grown thousands of kilometres away, maybe strawberries can also grow inside streetlamps. What seems natural is often industrial; yet, still, we want to tell ourselves stories about how it’s really natural. Look up to the second floor of the building, which used to be the women’s section of the

gender-segregated synagogue, and you will find a tongue-in-cheek reference to French conceptual artist Daniel Buren’s 1997 exhibition at the cac. Reus covers the arches Buren once painted with his signature 8.7cm stripes with a gingham pattern in the same blue and yellow shades Buren used. This decision – not even officially an artwork – ties it all together: the gingham back to the Bonne Maman jars, the colour scheme to Buren’s artwork, the highlighting of the architecture as a way of drawing attention to the building’s past use. Along with the other works on view – the irreverent oversized sculptures, the quotation of industrial design, the consideration of food manufacturing – it comments on this place itself. A building that is no longer what it used to be, in a region marked by war, in a contemporary world where the industrial is passed as natural. Reus questions why we buy it all. Orit Gat

Landings (3708.9, Statics), 2022, c-print mounted on powder-coated aluminium, hand-waxed steel, welded and powder-coated aluminium, powder-coated aluminium bent wire, 74 × 100 × 7 cm. Courtesy the artist and cac – la synagogue de Delme

Summer 2023

Ndayé Kouagou Direction, Direction? Sundy, London 14 April – 27 May ‘If you were looking for direction / this is definitely not the place / look elsewhere,’ instructs a text printed onto a series of connected aluminium sheets covering all of Sundy’s gallery walls. The same sentence opens A coin is a coin (2022), a short film in which French artist Ndayé Kouagou – standing in a bare photography studio against a white backdrop, clad in a grey couture suit, a babyyellow shirt and a cartoonishly enormous matching necktie – delivers a monologue to camera. Dubbed from start to finish by a thin-sounding female American voice, Kouagou tells a meandering, often elliptical story of how a two-sided coin can be a metaphor for understanding change. He often interrupts himself to cast doubt on things he has said or to apologise, tongue-in-cheek, in passages that can border on incomprehensible: “See how at first it felt like looking elsewhere when you moved from your first coin to the second,

and now it doesn’t anymore?”; “I’m sorry if I got you confused (I promise it was not on purpose, no, not this time)”. Rhetorical echoes of his monologue then occur in the space, printed on clear pvc surfaces covering rectangular sheets of coloured fabric sealed in resin. Some stand alone and others are nailed onto the industrial, but unfailingly clean and partially reflective, aluminium sheet. In fact, Kouagou almost exclusively asks questions with scant concession to coherence, to the demand for answers or to prompt resolution. ‘What?’, ‘From me?’, ‘All your life?’, repeat some of the resin plaques. The entire performance thrives off a jester’s taste for play, knowingly sardonic, a pastiche of a kind of guru-therapist YouTube vlogger – a role Kouagou has similarly inhabited in recent shows at London’s Gathering and Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton. Direction, Direction?’s aesthetic sense of unreality is its strength:

Direction, Direction?, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Sundy, London

ArtReview

Kouagou’s dubbed speech, imperfectly synced and visually discordant, is almost impossible to settle into; the high frame-rate and sharp focus of the camerawork – combined with a plain backdrop, his ever-so-slightly-clumsy movements, and the interplay of soft lighting with a slather of plum-coloured glitter eyeshadow – recall a character awaiting activation in an rpg videogame; meanwhile the trapped air bubbles inside the pvc, which covers wet-looking resin, evoke a thin sheet of ice. But the overarching feeling of unreality and artifice struggles to convert to anything as affecting as absurdity. Kouagou the performer is certainly in control here: his visage, movement and voice relentlessly feign sincerity, a virtue that in a life of online self-fashioning and limitless content consumption is both hard to trust and in unnerving abundance. Kouagou’s work invites you into his maze, then lets you get lost in it. Alexander Leissle

Cathie Pilkington Weird Horses Karsten Schubert London 21 April – 27 May If equestrian sculpture is a genre we most readily associate with a pompous and bloodthirsty imperial past (think Joseph Boehm’s huge 1888 bronze of the mounted Duke of Wellington at London’s Hyde Park Corner), then in Cathie Pilkington’s Weird Horses it’s reborn as something tentative, tender and conceptually fleet of foot. On the Table (all works 2023) is a large two-tier wooden workbench filled with nearlifesize plaster, resin, cloth and straw sculptures of infant foals, their eyes drilled voids, their pale unpainted limbs marked with felt-tipped words (‘stumble’, ‘fallen’), like potsherds labelled during an archaeological dig. None of the sculptures read as complete. Some have missing heads or hooves, or have been assembled from mismatched body parts. Others seem to be mutating into praying mantises, their zigzagging forelegs terminating in sharp cruel spikes. Is this a defence

mechanism? With their plump exposed hindquarters and ingenuous smiles, many of these foals feel disturbingly vulnerable. Then there are the piles of broken limbs on the bench’s lower tier, tangled up with strips of glittery plastic, which echo the sparkly cabaret curtain hung incongruously on a nearby wall, perhaps a reminder of the ambiguous place horses occupy in our cultural imaginary: if the artist’s show nods towards the rearing Classical stallions of the Parthenon frieze, then it also winks at the gentler candyfloss world of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010–19) franchise. It’s unclear whether Pilkington’s bench is site of creation, conservation or hybridisation; if the foals are in the process of being made, repaired or subjected to some brutal, Doctor Moreau-like experiment, which overwrites their original form, and with it their (art historical) meaning. The answer, of course, is none of the above:

they’re not fragments from a lost past, but rather contemporary sculptures that have achieved their intended degree of finish. Nevertheless, Weird Horses is a show haunted by the struggle to birth the new from the old, something fresh and untainted from something exhausted and irreparably compromised. Pilkington’s sequence of 12 small diagrammatic and mutedly luminous paintings, collectively titled Spectrum, depicts equine foetuses in utero. While their bodies have grown to full term, their limbs are arranged in such a way as to make their imminent passage into the outside world hazardous for both mare and foal. The background of each work is marked with thin horizontal or vertical stripes, like a readout from a flatlining monitor. These paintings seem to ask whether Pilkington’s plaster horses can reincarnate the dead genre of equestrian sculpture, or if they’re fated to come into the world stillborn. Tom Morton

Spectrum 8, 2023, felt tip and acrylic on linen board, 61 × 44 cm. © the artist and Perou. Courtesy Karsten Schubert London

Summer 2023

Paulina Olowska Resonance Kurimanzutto, Mexico City 25 March – 20 May A woman with long dark hair and enviable eyebrows lies listlessly at the centre of Paulina Olowska’s Casa No Name (all works 2023), a puzzling, hazy mural. Dark clouds encroach around her, and little is recognisable apart from some architectural ruins that appear in the bottom half of the mural. An actual rock is fixed to the mural, hanging at the woman’s feet: La planta mágica (The Magic Plant) is a piece of carved limestone holding four smaller stones in its crevices. The mural, a highlight of the show, is emblematic of its technical eeriness; nothing is as it appears, the timeline is fuzzy, the visual cues disconnected. The eight murals, for starters, are photographs that were painted by a wall-printing robot directly on Kurimanzutto’s gallery walls, the distinct lines of the printer still visible under the artist’s handmade mists of airbrushed acrylic and her anxious scribbles of charcoal and pastel. At the centre of it all is the ghostly presence of American photographer Deborah Turbeville, who died in 2013. Widely recognised as one of the three major imagemaking forces in fashion – alongside Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin – she is credited with changing not only the way fashion magazines looked, but with raising the level of their artistic ambitions and expanding the grasp they hold on our collective imagination. Here Olowska takes several visual references from Turbeville: inspired by a series shot in Mexico and Poland during the 1980s and 90s, Olowska collaborated with Polish

photographer Jacqueline Sobiszewski to restage the compositions that Turbeville created in Kraków in 1989. Similarly, she recruited Mexican photographer Karla Ximena Cerón and the model and artist Carmen Serratos to recreate some of Turbeville’s compositions in sites around the house she used to own in San Miguel de Allende. Olowska’s versions then became the images in the murals, with the artist’s additions made by hand after the fact. Olowska excels at invoking Turbeville’s undeniable knack for womanly moroseness, a sense of heaviness that is here personified by the weather. In Potocki Palace a woman clutches her coat close to her chest, her gaze downcast, as she traverses the snowy exterior of a princely abode. In the even more haunting The Augustine by the Chestnut a nun’s dark silhouette is framed by winter-torn trees, completely black silhouettes against the light. Both women sit at the centre of the frame, surrounded by Olowska’s colourful yet unnatural alterations, besieged by an inclement environment that almost seems to come from within them, encroaching upon the reality around them. Apparently inspired by details found in Turbeville’s images, ten limestone sculptures, made in collaboration with Mexican mason worker Joel Arrieta’s workshop, are enigmatic if not necessarily evocative. Los pasadores (The Bobby Pins) is a rock with a few bobby-pin shapes engraved in it; La oreja (The Ear) is similarly self-explanatory; while the larger ones recreate

Resonance, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City & New York

ArtReview

elements taken from patrician buildings, such as El Palacio (The Palace) and La serpiente (The Serpent). But Olowska really hits a sweet spot with her weaving of narratives: Mexico’s art scene simply can’t get enough of its enduring romance with modernism, its archiveloving exhibitions, its current flirtations with fashion and, more importantly, its own place in Western art history. Olowska winks at all those things here, by integrating Turbeville’s long-lasting interest in twentieth-century aesthetics; her models frequently seem to inhabit the saddened glamour of the interwar period, dwelling in ruined buildings, be they in Mexico or in Poland. Olowska’s work reminds me that while photography is the preeminent time-composed medium, the images she creates, in their multiplicity, their material time-jumps and their mashup of anachronistic references, achieve an otherworldly timelessness. They embody European postwar melancholy just as they could easily be included in the September issue of Vogue. They appear as in tune with our era of aggressive aggregation – forever in mid-quotation of previous iterations of culture – as they are patently ethereal. They exist, perhaps, in that rarefied realm of work by women creators who always have a foot on the outside, a bit out of step with their revered male contemporaries, no matter how magical, unique and forceful their contributions are. Gaby Cepeda

Opuncia, 2023, oil on canvas, 160 × 260 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City & New York

Summer 2023

In Defense of Symbolic Value: Artistic Procedures in the Resort Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin 27 April – 10 June One of the more interesting – and alarming – recent developments within the infrastructure of contemporary art has been major galleries opening boutique spaces in fancy locales that the non-monied art-viewing public don’t typically access: Monaco, Aspen, St Moritz and others. The shows mounted there, and their constituent works, aren’t exactly hidden from the great unwashed, but most people will only see them online, where the meaning of artworks is increasingly less important than how well they circulate, accrue likes, etc. Such vexed conditions, united under the umbrella term ‘resortization’ by German theorist (and

cofounder of art journal Texte zur Kunst) Isabelle Graw, are the starting point for the nine-artist group show she’s curated here. In an accompanying booklet Graw unpacks her theme at length, but at base the show semaphores deep anxiety about whether artworks – particularly paintings – can sustain and convey ‘symbolic value’ beyond their high prices and mobility as images. For Graw, whose 2018 compilation of essays The Love of Painting was subtitled Genealogy of a Success Medium, painting is emblematic of this commodification but also a repository, for now, of potential ‘defence’: the artists she’s chosen,

in theory, use the form in various critical manners. The most obvious and familiar example might be Kerry James Marshall, whose two History of Painting canvases from 2018 sardonically tabulate, via grids of price tags, the very different auction results for works by white and Black artists ($992k for a Cecily Brown, $10,200 for a Faith Ringgold). Rosemarie Trockel’s American Wall (2023) – a double, Gerhard Richter-ish photorealist portrait of a young Sigmar Polke (albeit painted by Chinese artisans) – meanwhile casts a wide ideational net. Its title refers, we’re told, to how Polke’s generation of German

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (we are not), 2022–23, silkscreen ink on canvas, 244 × 305 cm. Photo: Andy Romer. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Paris & London

ArtReview

artists had to ‘break’ America to achieve market success; but the doubled image of the artist also suggests two-facedness, and it appears Trockel is alluding here to the increasing revisionist, post #MeToo view of Polke as what (fellow exhibitor) Jutta Koether has called a ‘bad dad’ who bullied others and mistreated women. Other artists, at least as presented within this framework, lean into knotty negation: Adam Pendleton’s two monochrome spraypainted canvases, Untitled (we are not), from 2022–23, composed of the works’ repeated subtitle – with the second looking like a photo-negative of the first – offer a dovetailed statement and retraction, reflecting Pendleton’s refusal to be pigeonholed as an artist concerned only with issues of Blackness. Two paintings by Albert Oehlen, u.b.B.18 (2022) and u.b.B.15

(2020) – the ‘u.b.’ stands for unverständliche braune, or ‘incomprehensible brown’ – are deliberately dissatisfying murky abstractions dominated by muddy tones. Graw, in her text, points to Oehlen’s noting that as a painter he sometimes feels like ‘a painting program’. The digital encroachment upon analogue painting that forms one half of ‘resortization’ shows up elsewhere, in Avery Singer’s paintings using collaged digital images and spraypaint and splatters applied, we’re told, ‘robotically’, while Valentina Liernur’s murky portraits – one figure holding a smartphone and the other with one shoulder raised – are essentially painted selfies; cue much textual discourse on the contemporary state of the self-portrait. Many of these artists have been the curator’s hobbyhorses and friends and colleagues for years – half of them feature in

The Love of Painting – and In Defense is not exactly an outsider’s plaint. The show is rather a kind of canny, halfway-romantic jigsaw: it allows Graw to showcase her compatriots, along with a couple of gallery artists (Pendleton, Oehlen), and situate them as oppositional, and it serves as theoretical brand-burnishing, suggesting that curator, artists and gallery are all highminded and troubled by how things have shaken out. The cracks and contradictions aren’t hard to see. Max Hetzler may not have a branch in Monaco (think Marfa instead), but Oehlen also shows with Gagosian, whose venues include Gstaad and a private airport outside Paris. Critique, this show suggests, must operate from a place of visibility or risk being completely ignored, and if you appear compromised as a result, that’s the price of doing business. Martin Herbert

Kerry James Marshall, History of Painting (February 6, 2007), 2018, acrylic on pvc, in artist’s frame, 184 × 154 × 7 cm. Photo: Anna Arca. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London

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Ann Veronica Janssens Grand Bal Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan 6 April – 30 July There is usually no natural illumination in the Navate, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca’s cavernous, 5,000sqm concrete-grey exhibition space. That’s no small hurdle when offering a career survey to Ann Veronica Janssens, whose practice often probes our relationship to natural phenomena, light in particular. Yet, perhaps because of this monochrome setting, Grand Bal works beautifully, the Belgian artist’s understated interventions disproportionately reframing the 1960s architecture. Makeshift skylights, fashioned by uncovering old fire and ventilation openings, bring daylight into the venue for once. When it’s sunny, heavenly beams function as a weightless light sculpture,

a sundial of sorts – stay long enough and you see them flow across the space. The first ‘real’ work we encounter is Drops (2023), a modular intervention consisting of large round mirrors on the floor. The almost enveloping darkness of the entrance makes the mirrors resemble deep pools of shadowy water or even mysterious portals into other worlds. If your knowledge of physics is rudimentary like mine, you will be amazed, peering into them, to find an abundance of light instead of darkness in the reflection, and instantly look up to find its source (the distant skylights!) – your firm belief in your own rational perception of the space instantly dispelled.

Drops, 2023 (installation view, Grand Bal). Photo: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist / siae

ArtReview

Further along, natural phenomena – sound, light, air, water (when it rains) – pour in through the eight hangar doors that punctuate one wall of the space, all left open for the show’s duration. They make up Waves (2023), a site-specific installation: each door is fitted with a double-layered mosquito net, hung from the top and falling to the ground like a curtain. When I visited in mid-April, a breeze intermittently rustled the nets, so that they danced in unison to wind and light, the undulating effect further enhanced by the overlaid nets’ shimmering moiré. From outside, birdsong, car noise and human chatter filtered in. By conferring materiality or focus on things

architecture is designed to isolate us from, Janssens here nudges us to pause, observe and notice the world around us, like fluxing air or the playfulness of light. Janssens’s interest in how we experience and perceive architecture, and the permeability of indoor and outdoor, is a common thread here, perhaps most evidently in Area (2023) and Swings (2000–23). Area extends over a large section of the Navate, forming a wobbly, concrete-brick structure that creates an elevated islandlike platform we are encouraged to walk on top of, especially if we want to access our inner child by swinging on the fantastically long Swings, hanging sturdily from the 30m ceiling high above, and feel the rush of air on our cheeks. The swings’ seats are covered in liquid-crystal film that reacts to body heat by changing colour, so that we leave a trace behind. If only for a moment.

Elsewhere, Janssens’s signature glass works feature prominently, including Untitled (2019–23), a rectangular sculpture of incredibly pristine optical glass, which, while reminiscent of a giant block of ice, puts everything in hyperfocus, like the best possible pair of glasses, and her glass and wood cases (Pink Coco Lopez and Yellow Yellow, both 2010), where the use of dichroic film makes us endlessly search for the source of colour refracted in the glass boxes, shifting from different angles as we walk closer. The artist’s fascination for the science behind things – glass casting, light, our senses – is evidently matched by her love of architecture, and for elevating and amplifying life’s seemingly mundane or overlooked corners. Some of Janssens’s most persuasive works are lesser-known, more personal pieces that offer clues to her own daily life: muhka, Antwerpen (1993–2023), for example, an ongoing

black-and-white photographic series printed on copy paper that captures details of interior and exterior architecture from around the world, highlights her affinity for fragile, temporary or abandoned structures reclaimed by nature. Or the selection of videos playing on several crt monitors, in which the mesmerising Eclipse videos (1999–2017) testify to Janssens’s avocation as avid eclipse-chaser, traversing the globe to witness and document these rare and discomfiting natural events. The show concludes with muhka, Anvers (1997–2023), an unassuming door giving way to a vast square room – the Navate’s adjoining Cubo space – filled with a sea of white artificial fog. As I walked around blindly, my senses were on high alert, claustrophobia kicking in, until I found my way to the beyond – a wall of glass windows and, finally, the newly heightened beauty of daylight. Ana Vukadin

Summer 2023

Karms Thammatat Utopia Now Unit London 12 April – 20 May Everyone and everything is searching, even the flowers. In his solo show, painter Karms Thammatat populates Unit’s shadowy lower space with a host of eerie creatures. Among them, a teenage cyclops, a green dog with metallic spikes for teeth and a vase of flowers with eyes where their pistils should be. Despite their marked differences, most of Thammatat’s characters share a similar trait: distorted, disproportionately large eyes. The green dog’s eyes are so big they sit atop its head; a boy with wings has the whites of his eyes exchanged for a sickly pastel green; and a crouching girl with heart-shaped pupils beams at a translucent flower. Yet there is nothing sweet, childish or goofy in these paintings. The characters’ eyes look as if they have swelled to this size from straining, looking so hard that, inside, they might silently be screaming, ‘Where? Where?! where!’ What they are looking for is hinted at in the show’s title, which hovers between demand, statement and question, but the

conclusion is the same: utopia isn’t here. Thammatat’s characters inhabit scenes that are less paradise than purgatory. The backgrounds are generally bleak and bare – from hazy Renaissance mountainscapes to austere beige interiors. However, there are hints of even worse. In Freedom (Practical) (all works 2023) a boy extends flesh-coloured wings to full span, as if about to take flight, yet the bottom edges of his wings are anchored by six spiked ball weights. He smiles, nonetheless. Other characters, mostly children, share mirthful expressions as they are restrained by shackles, handcuffs or spiked collars. The uneasiness of this juxtaposition is heightened by the Thai artist’s deployment of chiaroscuro, in the style of European Old Masters, while pairing this with cartoon forms that evoke comparisons with artists like Takashi Murakami, who merges anime and nihonga painting in his work. For Thammatat, this tension between high and low forms brings gravity to the bizarre.

Carpe Diem, 2023, oil on linen, 108 × 128 × 5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Unit London

ArtReview

In Carpe Diem an adolescent cyclops reclines in an easy chair, cradling a bottle. Thumb on a tv remote, he stares ahead, lips parted, preoccupied with the screen reflected in the mirror of his glossy black eye. His acceptance of what he lives in, and his efforts to distract himself from it, are more palatable than the expressions of strained glee in the other canvases. With time, these saccharine countenances begin to register as ersatz masks. However, unlike Zeng Fanzhi’s blank-faced characters, whose frozen faces protect against external scrutiny to maintain a charade, Thammatat’s masks mark the thin internal barrier between believing in and doubting pretence. Ultimately, his paintings seem to warn that joy is not found in ideals or extremes. At a time when technology and popular-media warp perfection into an attainable mirage, the search for it might transform us into strange chained beasts. Utopia may not be possible, but hopefully in accepting imperfection we might loosen some of the chains. Salena Barry

Alberta Whittle create dangerously National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 1 April – 7 January The centrepiece of this exhibition by Barbadosborn Scottish artist Alberta Whittle is Lagareh – The Last Born (2022), a 43-minute film originally presented at the Scottish Pavilion as part of the 2022 Venice Biennale. Shot in London, Ayrshire, Sierra Leone, Barbados and Venice, it’s a delirious film-collage that flits between heavily stylised choreographic scenes shot in hd; iPhone footage capturing moments of uk police coercion; meditations on landscape filmed by drone; and a glancing portrait of black queer parents-to-be. Lacing these moments together is a soundtrack of breathy vocals and echoing, metallic mbira notes, as well as a series of evocative textual sequences that culminate in a dirge as the names of victims of racist police violence in the uk are listed in the final scene of the film … Joy Gardner … Sarah Reed … Smiley Culture … Sheku Bayoh … In the face of such horror, Whittle situates love and care at the centre of her artistic project. This is evident in a suite of watercolours

inscribed in a satisfyingly crenulated handpainted script with messages such as ‘Fill your heart with hope’ and ‘Invest in love’, this second phrase also appearing in one of the textual sequences in Lagareh. The tender values of Whittle’s work have been translated into curatorial wall texts that encourage audiences to ‘pause’ in order to ‘immerse’ themselves in the spirit of ‘love, care and hope’ that permeates the exhibition. While I understand the logic and efficacy of Whittle’s radically compassionate approach, the tone of these wall texts is mawkish at points. Thematising access and enclosure, oceanblue-green gate sculptures appear throughout the exhibition. One such work, Entanglement is more than blood (2022), is draped with a filigree tapestry depicting a writhing maze of half-hand, half-snake forms patterned with a diamond motif. Diamonds, like the whaling rope incorporated into the weave of the tapestry, recall processes of colonial extraction. Here,

as elsewhere in the exhibition, Whittle places memory at the heart of her political project. Lettering welded to the tapestry-adorned gate sculpture asks ‘What lies below’? We might take this as a question directed at Britain’s culture of colonial forgetting. But we might also reframe it as a question for Whittle’s artistic method. Create dangerously is an exhibition of lusciously symbolic political art, in contrast to much so-called research-based art grounded in the aggregation and display of information and data. While some might prefer the latter’s apparent facticity and rigour, plumbing the depths of her core themes in such a manner has never been a project Whittle centres in her art. And while I find myself struggling with some of the language used to frame this exhibition, encountering Whittle’s attempt to speak to history, memory and racial trauma in an affectively rich way that prioritises hope and healing over the perpetuation of conflict and pessimism is, nonetheless, an enlightening experience. Paul Pieroni

Lagareh – The Last Born, 2022, video installation, colour and sound, 43 min. Photo: Jaryd Niles-Morris. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Summer 2023

Na Mira Subrosa Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson 24 March – 22 October A final, unrealised artwork holds uniquely seductive energy. For those devoted to the output of a given artist, there is a temptation to construct what may have been left behind only in pieces. This is especially true for a figure like the writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose rape and murder in New York in 1982 happened shortly after the release of her novel Dictée. Cha’s brutal death has undoubtedly cast a shadow over her wide-ranging artistic practice, which included film, text-based installation and performance; however, most people are now familiar with Cha due to the dedicated following Dictée has garnered in the decades since its release, for its experiments with image and text to address the overlaps between language and memory, ancestry and history. Na Mira, like Cha an artist of Korean descent, has been delving into Cha’s archives and creative legacy for a variety of projects over the past few years, including the video installation Night Vision (Red as never been), which was part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial; this exhibition is but the latest iteration of this embodied research. The focal point here is Cha’s White Dust From Mongolia, an unfinished feature film and artist book she began work on during a trip to Korea in 1980. Today it exists only as archival fragments: raw footage, scripts, notes. Mira’s aim in Subrosa isn’t to extend or complete what Cha started

in any literal sense. Partitioning the museum’s gallery into two chambers, the exhibit consists of parallel installations shrouded in darkness: tetraphobia (2022) and Noraebang (2023). In the former, a fragmented grid of looped projections explicitly builds upon Cha’s outlined ideas. The show’s most direct enactment of White Dust… depicts a character from Cha’s script (‘Character #2’) gradually climbing through the rows of empty seats in a deserted movie theatre to arrive at the blank screen, an image Cha had intended as her film’s final scene. Another projection shows a woman facing the camera and reciting words in English and Korean – night, censure, holy, tesseract, cello, among many others – each accompanied by an abrupt hit of the clapperboard she holds in her hands. While the audio from tetraphobia’s recitation sporadically cuts across both sections, the sounds from Noraebang, the Korean term for private karaoke-style singing rooms, are what dominate and set the sonic atmosphere for the show. One video shows Mira on the floor crouched over a small practice amp, devotionally coaxing raw sounds from the speaker using only a latex-tube microphone. Peals of feedback bloom into the gallery, only to be interrupted by stray pop-radio transmissions the mic incidentally picks up from, as the exhibition materials inform, Radio Korea, a Los Angeles-based am

station: Brown Eyed Girl, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Mr. Lonely, all rinsed in static. Another corner-set mirror doubles footage that Mira shot during a trip to Korea to investigate a history of matrilineal shamanism in her own family. The film layers glitched pulses of photographed portraits (human, dog, Mother Teresa) over bouquets of flowers and Korean signage into a frenetic tapestry, which melds with the untethered and slightly disorienting sounds. All performances have an element of ritual to them, whether acknowledged or not: Mira makes that connection explicit, where a delirious personal ceremony for one’s genealogy could stand in for the private and unpolished performances that might take place in a noraebang. Like Cha before her, Mira is interested in how lineages can be refracted through imagemaking, through translation and through the passage of time. In Subrosa, Na Mira isn’t merely casting out echoes of what Cha initiated over four decades ago before her life was cut short. Instead, the show feels like Mira is enacting a few of the many directions one nascent project could have taken, memorialising an unfulfilled potential. Here, using an unfinished film as source material is less a way of merely building upon an existing outline and more a means of communicating with one’s genetic and creative ancestors. Matthew Erickson

tetraphobia (still), 2022, two-channel 16mm film transfer and infrared hd vide0 installation, b/w, sound, black mirror, 20 min 24 sec (loop). Courtesy the artist; Company Gallery, New York; and Parkview / Paul Soto

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Édgar Calel B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone) Sculpture Center, New York 11 May – 7 August The mound of earth that stretches across the gallery floor is shaped according to a meticulous design. Which is a good thing, because it comprises the entirety of Maya Kaqchikel artist Édgar Calel’s first institutional solo show. Piled high, the soil is both foundation and structure. Moreover, studded with flickering candles – offerings to ancestors, as is customary in Kaqchikel Maya spiritual practice, we are told in the press release – and rough-hewn rocks around which the flames dance, B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone) (2023) is imbued with ceremonial sentiment. Scattered traces of agricultural labour – hoes and wooden machetes – complete the tableau’s prayer for a bountiful growing season. As viewers circumambulate the site, a myriad of cleanly carved furrows draws the eye from the edges of the soil inward. The forked paths look like glyphs on the floor. Among

them appear the letters K, I and T written multidirectionally. The word ‘kit’ appears throughout Calel’s work and is often written on vertical surfaces using mud. Kit-kit-kit was a sound his late grandmother made to call birds to her yard, the exhibition materials inform viewers. At Sculpture Center, birdsong recorded in the artist’s Guatemalan hometown, where his grandmother lived, plays in the airy ground-level gallery. These sounds, like the candles in the soil, link the invocation of intergenerational bonds to familiar figures of the natural world. Themes of mortality and change seem central to Calel’s installation, which is not permanent in the sense that Walter De Maria’s similarly sized New York Earth Room (1977) is. Nor are its maintenance rituals – museum staff must light the candles daily – purely

functional and secular. Moreover, the crux of B’alab’äj is not the visual dissonance of wilderness brought indoors but instead the allusion to the work of Maya spiritual guides. Tension exists in displaying the ceremonial imagery of an implied clergy who, following centuries of persecution, first by Spanish conquistadors and then by the Guatemalan state, generally refrain from revealing their identities to those outside their communities. Calel’s exhibition ultimately circumvents the ethnographic tendency to expose and explain by simply delineating a circuit for unguided contemplation. By transposing and placing his authorial stamp on a set of geographically specific spiritual traditions, Calel, for better or worse, shifts the emissarial onus from his community’s shoulders onto his own. Jenny Wu

B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone), 2023 (installation view, Sculpture Center, New York). Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City

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Basma al-Sharif a Philistine Imane Farès, Paris 23 March – 13 July Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif’s latest exhibition aspires to cover a lot of thematic ground, probing global themes including statelessness, postcolonial sexuality and contemporary architectural planning. The first of two bodies of work here, a Philistine (2019–23) forms part of an eponymous series exploring Palestinian identity and the colonially imposed national boundaries of the Middle East. The gallery’s main space has become a reading room replete with 1970s soft furnishings, the walls decorated with photographs taken in the former Yugoslavia: a train at the old Belgrade station, a couple of empty interiors. Aside from showcasing another dimension of al-Sharif’s work and alluding to another geographical region riven asunder by religious divisions, though, the images’ role here is not apparent. Visitors are instructed to sit down and read a fictional text of about two dozen pages, printed in Arabic, English and French, with pornographic line drawings printed on opposing pages. The text cannot be removed from the gallery or reproduced elsewhere, obliging viewers

to read it from cover to cover in order to engage with the work. The writing tells the story of three generations of Palestinian women, taking us from 1935 to an imagined, apparently borderless present day, and is framed as ‘an exercise in etymology, an experiment in multilingual translation, a declaration against the colonial project’. It culminates with the youngest protagonist taking a rail journey from Lebanon to Egypt – an impossible itinerary, given that the state of Israel separates origin from destination – and a multispecies orgy on the banks of the Nile, in which women’s labia are smeared with cowshit, and copulating animals and humans become all but indistinguishable – a ‘fusion of bodies’ that mimics the dissolution of frontiers in the text. The writing is compellingly odd, though you do wonder how it can be interpreted in relation to the artist’s stated aims; removed from the context of the wider body of work that makes up a Philistine, it doesn’t make much sense. Less engaging is Capital (2022), a twochannel video consisting of scrappy phone

footage of luxury housing developments under construction in Italy and Egypt; an excerpt from a radio interview with an unidentified Egyptian politician explaining the societal value of a major building project; and a peculiar little drama in which a woman masturbates to a male Italian voice regaling her with the specifications of a new residential community. The work might suggest a relationship between monolithic political projects, consumer desire and the kind of twentyfirst-century urban planning we see in the video – all subjects deserving of sceptical analysis, and hammered home via footage of empty streets and the cynical tone of the voice entertaining our protagonist. But beyond this, we don’t glean much other than the vague impression that the artist, quite reasonably, isn’t a fan of what he depicts. Nevertheless, the show’s insistence on the fragile boundaries between public and private life, and the repeated motif of cultural and sexual transgression, stick in the mind longer than expected. Digby Warde-Aldam

a Philistine, 2023 (installation views). Photos: Tadzio. Courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris

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Nicole Eisenman What Happened Museum Brandhorst, Munich 24 March – 10 September What Happened begins with Heading Down River on the uss J-Bone of an Ass (2017). This painting, of a mandiblelike vessel sailing dangerously close to sending its all-male crew over a waterfall, is an appropriately scabrous starting-point for this show, with its roughly 100 works drawn from three decades of the American artist’s predominantly painterly practice and embedded social commentary. (That said, Eisenman’s latter-day recognition as a significant sculptor is attested to by the presence of Procession, 2019, a multifigure sculpture staging an ambiguous parade or protest, originally shown at that year’s controversy-shadowed Whitney Biennial and, in the present context, a kind of mysterious backdrop.) The paintings, shown across multiple rooms, are loosely organised into categories: ‘Heads’, ‘Being an Artist’, ‘Coping’, ‘Against the Grain’, ‘Protest & Procession’, ‘In Search of Fun and Danger’ and ‘Screens, Sex & Solitude’. This last focuses on Eisenman’s ongoing, decade-long pictorial engagement with present-day communication gadgets: projectors, laptops, drones, iPhones, etc. That viewers are going to photograph the work, and publish it on social media, seems factored into the artist’s reflexive thinking. Regardless of the familiarity of the canvases for long-term Eisenman watchers, or her general offer of the pleasures of connoisseurship to viewers who can recognise the respective aesthetic epochs and styles of twentieth-century painting upon which she draws, there are a

multitude of individual details in each that captivate and invite analysis. For example, in The Session (2008) it’s the dirty feet of the analysand, the arrangement of books and a phallic vase in the psychiatrist’s office, and the way the Bumble Bee fish cans and the gold ingots are stacked as a precaution against a future apocalypse – plus the cheap patriotic teacups and apathetic expressions of a dreary, prepper bunker-community – in Tea Party (2011). Or the hesitant increase in symbolic concessions to gender diversity within the framework of Jewish ceremonial meals in Seder (2010) represented by the addition of an orange to the Seder plate, which commemorates the often marginalised contributions of women and lgbtq-identified members of the Jewish community. Or the evergreen dominance of economic market hierarchies in Commerce Feeds Creativity (2004), with its bowler-hatted male force-feeding a bound, androgyne female artist. Or The Drawing Class (2011), which burlesques figure-drawing classes by presenting the portrayers in realist detail but the nude model as a rough blob, like a badly drawn figure. That Eisenman possessed this ease in changing styles and precision in motifs between retro-modernist high and popular surreal lowbrow from the outset, and could ally it to a fine knowledge of visual tricks (eg letting the viewers believe they see and know more than those portrayed) and their deliberate use, is evidenced by early largescale works such as Lemonade Stand

Morning Studio, 2016, oil on canvas, 168 × 211 cm. Courtesy The Hort Family Collection

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(1994), which addresses the capitalist initiation rite of children selling lemonade in the usa, and Swimmers in the Lap Lane (1995), which portrays swimmers straying from their lanes. Elsewhere, an installation-style collection of explicit painted and drawn depictions of lesbian (sex) utopias, hopes, empowerment, stereotype reversals and reflections of daily life in the New York artistic-activist queer milieu during the early 1990s, as well as the restaging of the multipart mixed-media wall installation Pagan Guggenheim (1994), sketch out a few perceptible moments in Eisenman’s early, scuffling period of becoming an artist in an era when painting was considered ‘outmoded’. Indeed, Eisenman first gained attention through site-specific wall works, one of which, Self-Portrait with Exploded Whitney, from 1995 and shown at that year’s Whitney Biennial, serves as the starting point for What Happened: The Movie (2023), the video animation shown in Munich, realised jointly with Ryan McNamara, and with a voice cameo by Hardy Hill. This new work, in its satirical sharpness and biting analysis of exclusionist ways of artworld speaking and how the milieu creates hierarchies, sets to rest any suspicion that the artist might be going soft, or suspending her moral conscience, and has a decanonising effect. When you leave the show – particularly if you then tour the institution’s collection – its afterglow can still be felt. Christian Egger

Heading Down River on the uss J-Bone of an Ass, 2017, oil on canvas 323 × 267 cm. Courtesy Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles

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Maiden Voyage Clearing, New York 26 April – 21 May Clearing’s recent move to the Bowery in Manhattan recalls the gallery’s salad days: in 2011, then-artist Olivier Babin cleared out his scrappy Bushwick studio to make room for a show between friends Harold Ancart and Jacob Kassay. The artist-run space would go on to host a series of arcane, offbeat exhibitions approximate to a kind of deinstallation art, featuring work by Aaron Aujla, Kilian Rüthemann and Marc Camille Chaimowicz. Artist interventions resembling the handiwork of eccentric contractors – excavated drywall, unfastened hardware, temporary lighting fixtures and even an interior, windowed wall fabricated to stand in front of existing structural walls – positioned the gallery as a construction site unconcerned with pardoning its dust.

Over two decades later, the dust has settled, but the gallery continues to rebuild itself. With locations in Brussels since 2012 and Los Angeles since 2020, Babin’s at times peripatetic programme has expanded into a major international enterprise admired for its ongoing commitment to emerging artists. Maiden Voyage, the first show in its new 613sqm location, marks a considerable departure from the gallery’s storied Brooklyn outpost, the sprawling former truck depot that it has occupied since 2014. That transition from renegade diy space to polished Bushwick white cube allowed Babin’s artists to grow and experiment at a larger scale, the gallery becoming known for its kunsthalle-like exhibitions featuring monumental installations and videos, such as Zak Kitnick’s cat and dog parade of printed

Maiden Voyage, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy Clearing, New York, Brussels & Los Angeles

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industrial panels in c&d (2016), Calvin Marcus’s graphic narrative formed by side-by-side paintings in were good men (2016) and performance and video works by Meriem Bennani and Lili Reynaud-Dewar. The new Bowery location reins things in. Intimately sized rooms split across three levels now shape the parameters of artistic agency: how do you make a big artist work small while encouraging a young artist to think big? The 24-artist presentation isn’t an exhibition of new work so much as the exhibition of a new space, pondering how the legacy of the gallery will fit into this new mould, the exhibition’s title evoking a first journey into the unknown. Upstairs, simultaneous screenings of Bennani’s Guided Tour of a Spill (caps Interlude) (2021) and

Reynaud-Dewar’s Oops, I think I may have lost my lighter somewhere on the ground… Could someone please be so kind to come here and help me find it? (2019) pay tribute to the old space and its championing of off-centre video art, while suggesting that new media doesn’t need a big space or surrounding installation to leave a mark. The new galleries will still accommodate large canvases and big sculpture, but Babin seems to realise that upending his way of presenting work remains critical for the gallery’s growth – these cosier rooms may push some out of their comfort zone. Nevertheless, as it harks back to past exhibitions, the show resembles a rollcall of gallery artists. Alongside Ancart and Kitnick, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Ryan Foerster, Sebastian Black and Loïc Raguénès represent a now-mature generation of artists, in their late thirties and forties, who first showed with Babin in 2011. Idioms honed across painting and sculpture – see Raguénès’s waves and Black’s colourful

abstractions – may be familiar, but they gesture to a longer history of experimentation encouraged by Babin. Alongside this ‘old guard’, Babin cultivates fresh talent, showing work by younger artists such as Adam Alessi, Matt Copson, Javier Barrios and Daisy Sheff, much of it surrealist figurative painting, running counter to the gallery’s early conceptual programme. Nevertheless, paintings such as Alessi’s piercing blue portrait of an androgynous muse and Barrios’s unnerving image of figures caught in a spider’s web maintain Babin’s commitment to challenging and even unpalatable work. New also doesn’t necessarily mean younger: Peruvian artist Sara Flores, in her early seventies, debuted with a solo show in fall 2022 and here presents a vegetal dye kené canvas (kené being an Indigenous textile design practice of Peruvian women). Laced with subtle imperfections – a misplaced mark or the bleed of dye – her staggeringly meticulous composition resembling a tiled floor surpasses

mere repetition. These inky faults recall the ethos of ageing gracefully, every wrinkle personifying the endearing contours of a life lived without trepidation. The selection – informed in part by ageing artists who have developed more marketfriendly offerings – doesn’t detract from Clearing’s strikingly cohesive programme, with intergenerational parallels appearing between the earthy ornament of artist duo Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel’s cushioned benches and Hugh Hayden’s carved wood rib cages. Beyond formal similarities, one guesses that all these artists are still having fun, the work on view delightfully weird but not overly edgy or trendy. From fake flowers, globs of blown-glass bubble gum and miniature train tracks, pure play pervades this space – a buoyant sense that each of these artists is still emerging, attending a localised patch suited for roaming, pausing and igniting a fire when a youthful vision catches. Alexandra Drexelius

Maiden Voyage, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy Clearing, New York, Brussels & Los Angeles

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Books

Contemporary Art by Natalie Rudd Thames & Hudson, £12.99 (softcover) Styled as an introduction for contemporary-art novices, the premise of this book is that the general public doesn’t ‘get’ contemporary art. And that for contemporary art to be really worth anything, it should. What’s never quite clear is if art’s fundamental incomprehensibility is the fault of artists, the public or those who set themselves up as interfaces between art and the public. This book is not about blame. Although it does hint at the fact that art’s relationship with capitalism, and capitalism’s entanglements with privilege and class, might be a bit of an issue. And at the fact that the artworld is governed by decisions about which artists are given visibility and which are not. The important thing is that Natalie Rudd’s book is a public service to both art and errr… the public. Which, by her logic, when it comes to an art-loving public, may or may not exist in the first place. Indeed, the microscopic font deployed here would suggest that art really is only for the keen

eyed. The book is made up of a mix of breathless thematic surveys, with headings such as ‘Why do artists tell tales?’, and inane individual profiles of (certainly interesting) artists ranging from Sheila Hicks (born during the 1930s) to Zadie Xa (born during the 1980s). Early on, Rudd ventures that ‘contemporary art is the art of our time’. And then undermines that statement by posing the question of when contemporary art ‘starts’. She initially suggests 2000 for the purposes of the book and then says she’ll have to go back further to trace the roots of ideas and influences. Some people, she tells us, suggest that contemporary art began during the 1960s, dumping in such unexplained terms as modernism and minimalism (you have to go to the glossary at the back for explanations). Contemporary art was all about representation, she claims, until at some point during the 1980s it became all about money – her timeline at the back of the book begins with Larry Gagosian

opening his gallery in la in 1980. After money came globalisation, which Rudd suggests means inclusion, even though most artworks introduced in the book were first displayed in Europe or America, where the vast majority of the artists profiled are based too. And then there’s homework to be done. Each chapter has a list of key activities for the reader: enlist a friend to talk to about what you see; support your local art gallery; etc. Which, ironically, gives us the feeling that all the book’s really saying is that contemporary art isn’t for the general public at all, unless it reads and digests books like this one: ‘By learning the rules of the game, we can all join in,’ Rudd writes at one point. Which is basically the opposite to the statement she quotes in her profile of Ugo Rondinone: ‘You don’t have to understand an artwork. You have just to feel it.’ The message then is that whatever contemporary art is, it’s a complex and contradictory thing. Mark Rappolt

Weeb Theory Edited by Jamie Sutcliffe and Petra Szemán Banner Repeater, £12 (softcover) A weeb is a sometime internet-slang insult turned badge of honour, ‘someone with an unhealthy interest in Japanese culture’, as the editors of this ambitious anthology set out. Japanese anime and manga industries, and their attendant fandoms, are starting points here to consider a wider ‘acg (anime-comicsgames) culture’. Launched to complement a group exhibition the editors staged in London in January, the book collects 11 international theorists and artists to explore our current ‘animatic’ condition. Cultural-theorist Deborah Levitt, interviewed here, describes animation as a ‘supermedium that includes computer generated images (cgi), simulations of all kinds, and new forms of immersive media like virtual reality (vr)’, and that defines our current era. In this light, animation permeates everything; whether we like it or not, we are all weebs.

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The book loosely follows a structure of interviews with theorists punctuated by case studies of specific shows or games. Media theorist Thomas Lamarre talks about fandom rewriting social norms; writer Dawn Chan describes the ‘shared witnessing’ of moments playing the game Elden Ring; art historian Cole J. Graham writes on racial cues in manga series Fullmetal Alchemist (2001–10); artist Sahej Rahal considers Hindu nationalism via a 1992 Japanese animation of the Ramayana. At one point, Levitt asks, ‘Are there potentially as many “digital ontologies” as cultural ones?’ Such questions permeate the book, portraying acg as a site of endless transformations yet-to-come. It’s not all positive: in his interview discussing otaku (roughly, ‘nerd’) subcultures, anthropologist Patrick W. Galbraith notes, ‘When there are Nazis among the fandom

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for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, something has gone terribly wrong’. While a remarkable resource emerging from a smallscale exhibition, the foregrounding of artists from the show feels limiting – there are countless artists working within this expanded view of animation needing critical examination. Instead, this book is most useful as a much-needed primer on a growing terrain, with countless nods to other theorists. At times there’s a sense of thirdhand relay, with Western academics explaining esoteric terms while referencing Japanese thinkers; when curator Catherine Harrington cites Toshiya Ueno’s concept of ‘techno-orientalism’ it feels close to a comment on the book itself. But perhaps that is part of the point: the weeb is always afar, always building imagined worlds anew. Chris Fite-Wassilak

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Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action by Nadja Millner-Larsen University of Chicago Press, $35 (softcover) During the mid-1960s, the radical collective Black Mask cohered mainly around a broadsheet of the same name published in Downtown Manhattan. The publication, which emerged in late 1966 after attempting to shut down the Museum of Modern Art permanently, combined aesthetic and political debates with excerpts from Third World liberation-movement texts and miscellaneous inserts, such as letters from incarcerated political leaders. The eclectic construction of the broadsheet is echoed in Nadja Millner-Larsen’s recounting of Black Mask’s subversive relationship to New York’s postwar art scene in this first monograph on the group. Millner-Larsen reproduces examples of Black Mask alongside Abstract Expressionist paintings and images of expanded cinema events and political protests, mapping how the debates laid out in the broadsheet emerged in the ‘real’ world through Black Mask’s commitment to direct action. Black Mask began as a rankled core of Dada-enthusiast artists. Their collective identity was forged through an adoption of tactics from Black liberation groups and a questioning of the relationship, as Millner-Larsen puts it, between revolutionary politics and radical aesthetics. Their politics were made explicit in the invocation of the black mask as a symbol of anonymity in the face of state surveillance. In 1968 the group changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker – and then to just ‘the

Motherfuckers’ – in reference to a poem by Black Arts Movement agitator Amiri Baraka. The name-change also morphed the group’s purview: it exploded in membership, transforming into a largely anonymous collective of impoverished, racially diverse youth seeking counterculture. Though Black Mask and uatwmf are remembered as a vigilante street gang, MillnerLarsen’s historically and materially grounded study specifies the ways in which the group’s commitment to direct action was rooted in an interest in the political and philosophical uses of aesthetics and abstraction, one that was maintained even after their edict to cease artmaking following their name change. Black Mask’s approach to the artistic discourses of the 1960s allows Millner-Larsen to theorise surprising material explanations for received histories of modernism: connecting points of reference as disparate as the art criticism of Michael Fried, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 in Los Angeles and the first English-language translations of Frantz Fanon into sites of possible, if not evocative, resonance. Through this, Millner-Larsen reveals a cracking up of modernism and the postwar artworld, one rooted less in shifts in critical or institutional discourse than in an unsettling of the presumed foundations of these histories. Millner-Larsen insists that Black Mask’s ‘marginality’ is the engine for their politics. The real critical guiding-light in the book, however,

is found in political and cultural radicals like Baraka and Fanon who gave language and shape to the antagonistic practices of the group, as Millner-Larsen illustrates in an entire chapter dedicated to the provocation and problematic that ideas around Blackness presented to the primarily white group. As Black Mask’s participation in the kaleidoscopic world of art-activism during the 1960s is so dense, many of MillnerLarsen’s engagements in theorising these activities verge on tangents, previewing possible roads to be explored that take away from honing in on the intimacies of a group whose incoherence was an integral part of their politics. It is in this incoherence and in Black Mask’s first initial call to close moma that their legacy demands that we reconsider today’s disruptive politics against museums. Contemporary activists have transformed the museum into a platform for underlining global issues: from the gravely serious – like Strike moma’s condemnation of what they’ve identified as moma’s ‘bloodsoaked modernity’ – to the memeified soupthrowing antics of Just Stop Oil. While many arts institutions have taken varied steps to reflect on these kinds of actions, a tight-lipped and internal reckoning has been the consistent response by most. Heeding Black Mask and uatwmf’s call for an antagonistic politics might reveal the true limits of current-day art institutions’ tolerance for insurgent calls for their abolishment and eventual obsolescence. Sinclair Spratley

Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot Self Made Hero, £19.99 (hardcover) Leonora from Chorley (that’s in Lancashire, England), a crazy goth woman with thin limbs and a giant head who looks like she escaped from an episode of The Addams Family, introduces herself on page one of this comic-book biography as both a horse and a hyena. By page two Leonora is in an institution, strapped down to a bed by tiny ropes and stakes, being told to ‘behave’ while a large syringe is poised to administer a massive dose of convulsants and barbiturates. Her father, of whom she said she was more scared than Hitler, had her committed to an asylum in 1940. The battle between freedom and conformity, and the related conflicts between madness and sanity, destruction and construction, dominate this

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tale of an artist who famously claimed that she hadn’t been born, she had been made. And while Carrington’s biography – a flight from the life of a British debutante to France, Max Ernst and the Surrealists; then a flight from Nazi France to Madrid, New York and Mexico City – is the ostensible subject of this book (collaged from interviews with the artist, her inspirations, her fiction and nonfiction writing, as well as the artworks she produced), it’s her creative output that lies at its heart. Indeed, it’s a subject to which the comic-book format (here Mary writes; Bryan draws) is uniquely suited. Alongside Carrington’s own, Bryan’s images mix the visual languages of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Francisco Goya and

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the comic-artist’s earlier work on British magazine 2000 ad, as well as more literary allusions to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and Carrington’s heroes Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift. Mary’s plot places her subject as a breaker of taboos and patriarchies, and a breaker of the barriers between the human and nonhuman worlds – and, more speculatively, as an early proponent of the Anthropocene. More than anything else, Mary and Bryan effectively dramatise the delicate relationship between the breaking of worlds and the breaking of one’s self. If last year’s Venice Biennale presented Carrington as something of a superhero, now she’s got the comic book to match. Nirmala Devi

Crooked Plow: A Novel by Itamar Vieira Júnior, translated by Johnny Lorenz Verso, £10.99 (softcover) The defining moment of Brazilian sisters Bibiana’s and Belonísia’s lives happens in the first few pages of Crooked Plow, Itamar Vieira Júnior’s newly translated awardwinning 2018 novel. The two girls, barely out of their toddling years, have dared each other to open a suitcase stashed under their grandmother’s bed. Carefully, when grandma momentarily leaves their tiny mud home on a plantation in Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia, her ‘voice fading into the distance amid all the clucking and birdsong’, they open the case to discover, among other things, a knife. Curious to experience this shining treasure in all its senses, Bibiana, narrating the first of the novel’s three parts, places the weapon momentarily in her mouth. Her sister follows suit, until, accidentally, they both draw blood. Vieira Júnior describes the panicked trip to the hospital using the kind of vivid imagery that continues throughout the book: ‘overwhelmed by our own suffering, by the smell of clotting blood and the prayers of our stunned parents’, they drive along miles of dirt tracks and wide roads that the pair have never seen before. One sibling is rendered mute by the accident (though which one, we only learn much later on), while the other’s wounds to the tongue are superficial. The latter learns to read the facial expressions of the former, becoming her guide as they grow up: ‘we’d become one’. Arguably, whatever the

tribulations engendered by the accident, the sisters’ fate in life was sealed long before the reader met the pair: Bibiana and Belonísia are just three generations out of slavery but the terms of their Afro-Brazilian family’s work on the plantation, within which they are able to build a small house (but not out of brick, which is forbidden) in exchange for otherwise unpaid labour in the fields, reflects negligible progress. Though Vieira Júnior is never heavy-handed in his symbolism, the silenced sister, as her story evolves, becomes representative of the voiceless poor and Black of Brazil, for whom progress arrives at a glacial speed. Nonetheless these characters aren’t mere victims, but rounded individuals, full of hope, ambition and pride: the sisters’ father is a Jarê healer, making him an influential figure in the Afro-Brazilian religion locally; their mother provides midwifery to the community. Belonísia marries disastrously, but stands up for herself (‘I wasn’t submissive, I wouldn’t forgive’); Bibiana is the more intellectually curious, a trait that inevitably sees her stray from the village and become politicised. She bemoans her father for being ‘complicit in his own exploitation: as the spiritual leader of the community, it was he who made sure the work continued without disruption’. The social-realist literary lens, with its inherent politics, is generally turned to the

urban poor in Brazilian literature (or at least that portion of it which makes it into English translation), be it the memoirs of favelada Carolina Maria de Jesus or the more recent fiction of Paulo Lins (and the film adaptation of his most famous work, City of God, 1997). While Crooked Plow carries in its dna the early books of Jorge Amado, the famed modernist writer who also took Bahia as inspiration, many of Vieira Júnior’s themes are drawn from his day job of 15 years at incra, a government agency dedicated to rural land-reform and the legacy of the quilombos (the settlements established by runaway enslaved people). At one point, Bibiana’s boyfriend notes the slippage of identity in response to the vagaries of Brazilian law: ‘we started calling ourselves Indians. Because we knew there was a law, even if it was regularly violated, that forbade Indians to be expelled from their lands.’ In the final third of the book, the story takes an even darker turn, one that again reflects wider Brazilian history, as the disenfranchised begin to grapple not just with state violence and economic exploitation, but with that of criminal parastates in which the lines between legitimate business and gangs, politician and kingpin, are blurred. This is a saga that tells not just the story of two siblings, but the enduring dysfunction of a nation. Oliver Basciano

Art is Magic by Jeremy Deller Cheerio, £30 (hardcover) ‘I find the act of writing mortifying, in the truest sense’, Jeremy Deller claims in his introduction to this sweeping look back through the highlights of the British artist’s career to date. Nevertheless, he pulls off the feat of lending his idiosyncratic, often self-deprecating perspective to everything from his earliest self-organised exhibition (staged in his family home while his parents were away on holiday in 1993) to representing the uk at the Venice Biennale 20 years later. It helps that Deller has a keen sense of the humour to be found in both the everyday and in the absurd pretensions of the artworld. Mass-produced merchandising (of which Deller produces a lot), including T-shirts, posters and zines, are given equal weighting to the documentation of his institutional exhibitions, the

former being a reflection of his ongoing interest in diy culture and informal creative networks. ‘It goes against a prevailing idea that art is expensive and exclusive,’ he writes. Music is an embodiment of this ethos, and Deller returns repeatedly to the crucial role that it has played throughout his life, firstly as a teenage fan of English artists such as David Bowie and Joy Division, and later as a means of understanding political change in Britain throughout the twentieth century. ‘Popular culture’, he argues, ‘can nudge or drive the course of history.’ Andy Warhol makes a surprise appearance in the book via a hilarious extended anecdote (which Deller vows to finally retire after this ‘one last airing’) detailing an encounter in a hotel room at the London Ritz just a year before Warhol’s death, when Deller was a young artist

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desperate to meet his heroes. Despite his subsequent success he returns repeatedly to his early experiences as an outsider and hanger-on within the artworld. ‘The whole Young British Artists (yba) thing came out of art school, which we didn’t go to’, he says in a conversation with artist and former collaborator Alan Kane. This youthful naivety, which could come across as contradictory or even false, for the most part infuses the book with a warm accessibility and refreshing humility. Billed fittingly as ‘a children’s book for adults’, Deller’s publication makes the case for art to be stripped of the weightier preconceptions that can often silo it within the cultural landscape, reframing it instead through its ‘alchemical power’ to transform reality via what he calls magic. Louise Benson

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from the archives Summer Show Oblivion Artist and writer Eddie Wolfram does the rounds of the London gallery late summer shows to find the next ‘in thing’, in 1966 – and finds delusion and inertia. Sound familiar? Everybody is at it, using pvc and bright acrylic colours; there seems to be no real counter-movement yet to dissipate the endless quantity of undulating ‘wrapper’ art that bulges out of the doors of the London galleries. Mid and late summer, the silly season, when most dealers mount accrocharge shows, is always a good time to take stock and to perhaps see a hint of what might be the new, in thing in the near future. This September, the situation is much as it was last year, more and more sculptors manipulating the ease invested in the new materials and more and more painters not terribly sure of what their role and activity is about or for. The general mood betrays an element of delusion; or at best, that fine art is simply a sort of fun activity on par with pop music and Carnaby Street clobber. The alarming effects of admass, mass-communication system and pop paraphernalia demolish the criteria of values and function that have always applied to art, yet the vast majority of young art protagonists manage to avoid the issue. The Indica Gallery, the newest and therefore probably the most optimistic gallery in London, is at the moment mounting a series of three group exhibitions under the common title of ‘London Indications’. Each exhibition comprises of a selection of works submitted by previously untried artists; I was only able to view ‘stage two’ of this presentation, and with the best will in the world I found it a depressing experience. I saw nothing clearly thought out enough, or well enough made, to persuade me that it contained any significance. The only indication was one of a susceptibility to aesthetic inertia. Aesthetic inertia is a phrase that might also be applied to the work of Gillian Ayres, whose work can be seen at the

Kasmin Gallery, but this is an inertia of a different order. Ayres is not innocent or green; she is an experienced painter with a considerable reputation, and these new works submit that she is not totally sure of her direction. Gone is the rich, extravagant chromatic counterpoint of the previous years where all was staked on the impact of direct sensation. Instead, these new canvases are worked in close muted harmony. The intentions seem to me to be honourable if somewhat contrived. Ayres obviously does not consider painting to be simply a fun activity, and I am sure that in the near future she will evolve a series of marks that do not only impress, but that can also enlighten. Judging by Jim Dine’s latest extravaganzes on view at the Robert Fraser Gallery, he does think that art is a fun activity. Not only fun, but licentious fun. The show consists of a series of works in collage, pencil and water colour with possible phallic connotations, a series of collages made with Eduardo Poalozzi and a series of ‘photo enlargements’ selected from Michael Cooper’s stills. These latter extractions don’t add up to my idea of fun, or sensible aesthetic preoccupation; whereas the collaboration with Poalozzi seemed to do both. Dine is still well able to connive at exasperating the spectator and outraging any plastic dogma that is in danger of becoming cant. This ability secures for him a valid place amongst the really pertinent aestheticmongers. Dine’s work not only possesses a perverse vitality, but also questions the constitution of visual language. In doing so, he demonstrates his concern for its fruitful dispensation. At the other pole of the formal scales, with the same integrity of concern, are Garth Evans at the Rowan Gallery and Waldemar D’Orey at the Axiom. Garth Evans extends the range of his plastic eloquence further into the third dimension, and shows freestanding sculpture, and colour once again has reappeared to play an important part in the total effect. The development of his language has always been steady and assured, never impulsive; but always logical. On the evidence of these pieces, his diligence and concrete resolution seem to pay out the highest dividend. The tightly composed stricture of the all-white reliefs has given way to a new lyricism. He has discarded architectonic calvanism for the sensuality of the curve, clothed in the resilient and reflective light of delicate pastel colour. These works may really be described as beautiful, yet they totally avoid rash sentiment. D’Orey’s juxtaposed luminous-painted steel constructions are even less compromising than Evans’s earlier reliefs. He too, denies himself the luxury of petty indulgence with astute selfawareness. These sculptures are quite literally just oblongs of painted steel arranged in certain structural orders. They are made in such a way that they may be re-arranged within the context of their own members, or inverted should it be desired. To make sculpture possessing such versatility and invoking such observer-participation implies more than a predilection for amusement therapy, it implies a concern for communication. This text is an edited extract from ‘Communication: That’s the Name of the Game’, Originally published 17 September 1966, The Arts Review, Vol xviii No 18

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COLLECTION MÉTIERS D’ART 2022/23