Recent e-flux Criticism
The Venice Biennale was in the end memorable, wrote Quinn Latimer in the last of our roundups from this year’s edition, for the conflict amidst which it was staged and the “storied lives of all those who made it, curated it, practiced it, protested it, viewed it, voiced it, even funded it.” By reading the work in relation to those lives, much could be learned of the world in which we are living: both its dark and light sides. A satellite exhibition of new video art extended this focus on the conditions of vision—marked in the present by “shadow, fog, and blinding light,” in Cici Peng’s words—to reflect on how we see the world today.
If much of the conversation at Venice focused on spectacular “happenings,” then our recent program suggests that performance is now the prevalent mode of not only our art but our societies. This encompasses the performance of identity, in Alan Gilbert’s take on the buzzy collective CFGNY; the performance of institutional responsibility, in Aoife Rosenmeyer’s report on a Swiss museum’s attempt to recontextualize its colonial-era holdings; the performance of precarity, such that SoiL Thornton can make a drama of their impending eviction (only raising more pertinent questions, for Travis Diehl); the performance of masculinity, as Morgan Quaintance finds in Dandy Day’s reflections on spectacularized violence; the performance of gender, in the unsettling work of Marianna Simnett as interpreted by Isabelle Bucklow. And finally, there is the performance of illness and death, as in the deeply moving exhibition of Jo Spence’s work reviewed by Kenny Fries. That these conditions or commitments are performed does not make them any less real, of course, but in the best case allows us to reappraise the conditions and conventions underpinning them.
That good art complicates our categorical assumptions—while weak art reinforces them—informs Adeline Chia’s review of an exhibition on the subject of “desire in Southeast Asian Art.” While encouraged by the foregrounding of heterogenous (and, in Singapore, taboo) forms of desire, Chia is concerned by the show’s assumption that the expression and satisfaction of desire is always liberatory (one needs only to look around for evidence to the contrary). Writing about a show by Mohamed Ali Ltaief in Tunis, Natasha Marie Llorens reflects on an issue “endemic” to contemporary artistic research: how to tell a violent story without reinstating the very same violence?
The question of what it means to “expose” a subject to scrutiny takes on a different light in the work of Noah Barker. Shown in Mexico City, his new paintings might seem to be inoffensive (indeed, remarkably pretty) abstractions, writes Gaby Cepeda, but they document a historic shift in how we view the world with material consequences. The impact of visual technologies on our lives is also the subject of Hallie Ayres’s review of a show tracing that relationship through the history of moving image. And yet (happily for us all) mediated ways of seeing can also be emancipatory: Elizabeth Wiet sees in Carrie Schneider’s renewed attention to the heroine of La Jetée a means of freeing her from the male gaze.
An exhibition on the sculptor Mrinali Mukherjee and her circle offers a model of how to establish movements and infrastructures outside the patriarchal traditions. Daisy Hildyard admires a curatorial approach that, appropriately to the material, resembles a “constellation novel—a story that does not proceed as a single linear narrative, but as a network or tapestry of stories that pick up on one another.” A revelatory exhibition of the idiosyncratic, surrealist-infused abstractions of Anna Zemánková—as conjured by Jennifer Higgie—provides another reminder of how the most enduring art is made outside the academy, precisely because it is less conscious of (and so unconstrained by) the academic conventions.
Walking around Gallery Weekend Beijing, meanwhile, Crystal Bennes has cause to reflect on whether—and how—a generation of artists emerging through those academies can pick up Li Xianting’s commitment that art must always be a “a form of expression grounded first and foremost in the moral dimension.” At the London iteration of the same “gallery weekend” format, Orit Gat wonders “how much of contemporary visual culture is defined by the attempts of people to sell us things?” And by what means can art escape those logics?
Similar considerations drive a reappraisal of Bruce Conner’s career occasioned by an exhibition of his work as part of a private collection. Nicholas Gamso asks whether how the work’s radical sentiments are colored by incorporation into the systems they once protested. The changed economic conditions are manifest in the reduced budgets—if not ambitions—of the 9th Thessaloniki Biennale, writes Stephanie Bailey, while a new novel by Lisa Robertson rages against the disappearance of bohemia and the consequent narrowing of our cultural horizons, in the review by Peter Hujar’s biographer, John Douglas Millar. At LACMA, Juliana Halpert suspects that the supposed “democratization” of art announced by the new David Geffen Galleries is not merely the latest fig leaf over the transformation of US art museums into leisure centers for the wealthy.
Perhaps worth noting here that Lygia Pape, a survey of whose work was reviewed by Ben Eastham, once made a series of works featuring cockroaches in less-than-subtle protest against both cultural elitism and the Brazilian military dictatorship (she later spent time in jail). But the final word in this roundup of recent coverage must come from Brian Dillon’s piece on A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: when governments launch programs of repression, it is always the “cultural field” that is identified as the “enemy within.” It remains the responsibility of people working in that field to tell the world as they see it.
e-flux Criticism publishes three new reviews each week, delivering rigorous analysis of key exhibitions worldwide. To get these texts directly in your inbox, subscribe to the e-flux Agenda email list. Explore our full archive of contemporary art coverage and commentary at e-flux.com/criticism.
